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  2. Talk to Arbit; I think he designed some in 3d print...
  3. Today
  4. Does anyone have the dimensions of the box for the VF-1 strike or super valk fighter? My brother is going to Japan for vacation and he is going to get me some model kits while there including, I hope, the strike battroid. I am guessing no one has dimensions on the strike battroid box as it does not come until October. He goes in October and he wants to plan how big of an empty suitcase he needs to bring. He is getting his own stuff as well.
  5. I would recommend aiming for a nice 1440p monitor that works at a high refresh rate. I'm also seeing better prices on packaged, pre-made PCs than parting out. Just find a brand that is friendly for DIY upgrades. You'll get more bang for your buck and you don't get sucked into the 4k/8k bs. High-refresh 1440p with all of today's graphics tech is fantastic. Also much more affordable. I game on a 150" 4k/1440P projector that runs at 144hz. Even at that size the smoothness and additional bells and whistles I can run at 1440p make the experience much better than 4k freesynced to anything 60-90hz.
  6. Thanks I'm already working on it
  7. I recently built my first PC in over ten years too. Went with 850M mATX as I don't think we need larger systems any more since almost everything is built into the mobo or can be installed on it, namely NVME drives. Going 4K means more pixels which means more power in GPU, minimum is a RTX 5090 these days imo. Recommend going for 1440p which is a nice medium with OLED displays. See my recent post in this thread on what I built. Also, take your time do a ton of research before making your purchase. There is a wealth of Youtube videos that helped me in my decision and build plans. I think I spent over two months researching before I settled on my build parts. EDIT: I found Christopher Flannigan's videos to be easy to watch and learn from for my new build. https://www.youtube.com/@ChristopherFlannigan/videos More edit: Recommend MSI mobos right now, they seem to be leading the pack when it comes to stability and features. Don't cheap out on important no name parts like the PSU and fans. Check out ID Cooling for cooling parts, they're way more affordable than the competition too. Last, skip the RGB crap. RGB does nothing for your system's performance and can add frustration if it doesn't work right. Learned that from my old system and skipping RGB for my new build made it soooo much easier.
  8. the text under the add to cart button is contradictory, stating that you will not be charged until the item is released. on the same page under the item description:
  9. wow looks like a tank. maybe i might get one.
  10. What's your budget? The only boards that seem to still have 5.1 audio are the Asus TUF Gaming B850 line. One way you might be able to get around the lack of 3.5 audio jacks is to use a DAC and pipe the audio that way. I mentioned this way back ☝️but most folks are no longer using 5.1 systems because more folks are using headsets and a good pair of monitors(speakers) do much better than a 5.1 system. Yes, some people like the immersive sound, but in most current markets, folks are just not using multi-speaker sets anymore. 2.1 systems are more than enough. Whether you go with a 5070ti or wait for the Supers is up to you. The Supers, at least according to leaked specs are the same GPUs but with more and higher clocked memory. The Supers will get you farther but there is no real spec bump beyond memory. Nvidia is lowering prices of current GPUs to make room on shelves for the Supers. Rumor has it they might be the same MSRP-ish (we all know MSRP doesn't exists with any GPU). So if you buy now, you might get it for a decent price (i.e. MSRP 😱). If you wait, you will get a slightly better card for roughly the same price...roughly.
  11. @nightmareB4macrossThanks so much. I’ll take the compliment but I have so much to learn. I’d love to develop my own style of painting and I guess I sort of am haphazardly with every kit I complete. Hahaha Very excited to spend the next few weeks on this one. I might do some brush painted lacquers and some areas airbrush…Still undecided Lots of seams but many of them are not visible after completion which will save some time. Also first go at removing a mold line down the center of the canopy. I think it went well. Such a cool process of foggy scratched up surface to fine buff and polish until shiny at the end. I wish this kit had pilots. Oh well…
  12. I was just browsing YT and noticed you reposted this video, for a moment I thought you got hit with a copyright warning. Looking forward to your detailed review of the Tread, maybe even a comparison between Sentinel & the older Toynami Betas.
  13. I ordered directly from Pose+. Had to pay in full up front, but including shipping was only USD 440. but as I'm in Hong Kong and I guess it's gonna be shipping from mainland China, shipping was only about 10 bucks.
  14. Oops I did it again A commenter pointed out I was missing the step with the pegs that go into the legs and then fold in so I did a quick edit and here's the corrected video:
  15. Not quite right; you pay when the item is released and your order is filled.
  16. To get a battroid maintenance area aft of the main hangar, the ship needs to be *ginormous* - there's simply not enough depth. At 472 meters overall, forget there being standing battroids *at all* on the ARMD-L,, the whole hull isn't tall enough. Here I've scaled the ARMD-L up to 200%. The forward grey rectangle is the old hangar, extended lengthwise to 200% to match your estimate of how big the full hangar is. The smaller red rectangle is how much of the hull is left aft of the main hangar where there's enough depth for a Battroid to stand up. It is not very much. Aft of that is another grey rectangle showing how far you could extend the main hangar deck without breaking through the underside. (This is with the hangar deck 7 meters below the flight deck, which seems reasonable to me.) The larger red rectangle shows where the hull is deep enough that there's standing room *under* the main hangar. I went with 22 meter height for the hangar ceiling - if you make this space narrower or less tall, you can extend it forward by a fair amount. That's the only space that works for a "battroid maintenance area" at this size. The more the ship is scaled up from here, the further forward the main hangar can be moved and the red section aft of it extended. Taking into account that the hangar I drew originally was narrower than shown in the anime, I think we're looking at a thousand meters overall for the whole Quarter in order to fit Junya Ishigaki's hangar layout inside of the ARMD-L .
  17. That would certainly add an unexpected dimension to the threat the Xenomorph poses to Weyland-Yutani. I can imagine little else that would strike as much fear into the executives as this slavering unknowable horror from beyond the stars stalks their halls and... audits their corporate tax returns. Miss Yutani would probably dry up and die like she'd taken a hit from the wrong grail. 😆
  18. ooh use my link if you're going to buy through hlj! https://www.hlj.com/?utm_medium=affiliate&utm_source=scorchedearthtoys
  19. An internally consistent argument that does not depend on assumptions, unofficial sources, etc. is obviously the ideal. Observation from the animation is of course very good. The animation model sheets even better. Descriptions from official media are also fine. Authoritative official sources are in general preferred. Based on the animator's model reference produced by Macross Quarter mechanical designer Junya Ishigaki which may be found in his personal artbook ROBO no Ishi as well as the Mechanic Sheet for the Macross Quarter in Macross Chronicle, this appears to be approximately 1/2 of ARMD-L's main hangar. The bow end, based on the design of the back wall there and the lack of the large double airlock to the Super Parts installation are and elevators. The full length of the hangar as drawn is eleven of those segmented wall panels long (plus approximately one VF-25 length from the emergency shutters at the rear), and there are I think five sets shown in this shot, suggesting this is approximately the middle of the hangar facing toward the bow. With thirteen planes fitting neatly into that space, the Macross Quarter's primary hangar should hold approximately 26 VF-25-sized aircraft, not counting the 2+ machine capacity of the Super Pack fitting area and the 7 machine capacity of the Battroid maintenance area at the rear. That puts the interior capacity of the ARMD-L at 35 machines based on the animation and animator's model reference. This does not account for the other maintenance areas that we see VF-25s being stored in in the series and movies. EDIT: (We're not really concerned with the CG model... but rather how the visuals of the series line up with each other. Artistic license is a thing, after all... nobody's expecting perfect veracity.)
  20. Hobby Link opened preorders for Pose+ Legioss. https://www.hlj.com/1-28-scale-pose-metal-genesis-climber-mospeada-afc-01h-legioss-eta-few85548 Full payment in advance tho.
  21. Yes, I know I was rude. That's why I changed my mind and edited it out. Apparently not fast enough. What constitutes proof? Physically building the interior and trying to fit them into the official model? Or will you claim that the model used in the game has the wrong shape? Do you have any conception of how "wrong" the shape would have to be in order to fit this quantity of stuff inside? One of our best interior hangar shots, from Sayonara no Tsubasa. I count three visible portside vertical tails along the left side of the hangar, and three on the right. (Some of the other shots from early in the TV series indicate the hangar is *even bigger*, btw, but there was no nice replicable scene where I could prove it.) An attempt at recreating this layout in 3D. Note that I've erred on the side of smallness throughout - the movie screencap shows that you can see between the fighters all the way down to the far end, which doesn't work for my scene because they're too close together (hangar is narrower than in the movie); and the two pairs of "ass-to-ass" fighters look especially weird like this. But they fit in this box, and the box can't be made too much smaller - certainly not narrower. This is how much the hangar I built sticks out of the hull on the official Macross Quarter model from the video games, scaled to 472 meters overall for the Quarter.. If this model is not accurate, I don't know where we'd find a better one. Note how the the hangar is too wide for the hull the entire way, and too wide for the *flight deck* at the front end. Box in the same position, showing that it pokes through at the back too, and that there's no rear hull to the ARMD-L This hangar does not fit in the ARMD-L, and a 6 meter tall hangar that does fit would be tiny and very narrow at the front end, barely big enough for a single row of fighters. I might be able to squeeze in eight VF-25s. Box is also wider than the whole leg, so it obviously doesn't fit there either. I physically can not fit twelve fighters on one deck anywhere on the Quarter at its official size. There's no volume big enough for that. Have we moved beyond "this is just a fan a theory" yet? I can't make the fighters fit. I invite you to try for yourself, the models are available and Blender is free (even if that's not what I used). Bonus: The VF-25 sitting on the too-small elevator of the ARMD-L. None of the other elevators are any larger. (This is an orthographic picture, so there's no perspective distortion to make the elevator look smaller. And while the model of the VF-25 is not official, it's correctly scaled in all particulars). Where would those hangars be? I showed above, there's no room for a hangar matching what we saw internally anywhere on this ship. No section is large enough to hold it, not at the canon size. The whole ARMD-L is is about as thick as a Queadluun is tall at its thickest point as well - and I think even the legs would have trouble finding standing room for a Queadluun. I certainly don't see anywhere to launch and recover one through. At this point, either the anime depiction is false, and all other visual depictions based on it are false, in order to satisfy the book stat line; or the book statline is false, It's very binary. And discarding the book statline, and reinterpreting the *two* scenes in the anime (Quarter alongside Battle Frontier for the Macross Cannon shot, and Quarter charging Battle Galaxy with a Macross Attack) that rely on the ship being 25% of the *length* of the Battle class is less damaging to the coherency of *everything* than discarding all visual depictions because they don't match the Chronicle statline.
  22. Still waiting on Mixmaster, and I don't have any more brand new figures to write about. I do, however, have a TON of repaints and remolds... Yeah, no Mixmaster, but the other Voyager in the current wave of Studio Series is War for Cybertron Voyager-class Thundercracker. And, I mean, not a lot left to say after Starscream and Skywarp, because Thundercracker's basically the same thing except blue. It's a pretty blue, at least. Same mace weapon, and I dunno if it was always too big or if there's been some mold degradation, but he has a hard time holding it up. On the flip side, he's got a different gun than Starscream and Skywarp. It's the same Neutron Assault Rifle that came with the generic Decepticon Soldier, though, so it's not totally new. Fine with me, though, I kinda wish Skywarp had a less bulky gun than his Thermo Rocket Launcher. Get him if you want to complete the trio, but if you skipped Skywarp and/or Starscream you can probably live without Thundercracker, too. Relevant to yesterday's review of Sideways, another figure on the shelf is Cybertron Deluxe class Excellion. Now, for anyone who actually watched the Unicron Trilogy, you might have wondered how Hot Shot started Armada as a reckless, hot-headed youth who gradually matured over the course of the series, becoming a seasoned warrior and mentor in Energon, only to revert back to a reckless, hot-headed youth in Cybertron. The answer is, as I mentioned yesterday, is because Galaxy Force wasn't created as a sequel to the prior two shows, it was just cludged into a "trilogy" when it was dubbed into English. The guy we know as Hot Shot in Micron Legend and Super Link was called Hot Rod, but in Galaxy Force that guy was called Excellion. While I think there have always been parallels between Hot Shot and G1 Hot Rod, stuff like the chevrons on his shins and the spoiler wings seemed a bit more obvious on Cybertron Hot Shot... but I guess not enough for Takara, who released a more G1 Hot Rod-colored version of Excellion. Hasbro was only too happy to bring this redeco to the West, but I guess their logic was that if Hot Shot was already reformatted into an APC alt mode in his usual blue color then he wouldn't go back to his old sports car mode but changed to red, so they decided he'd be a new, separate character. And for that character, they kept the Japanese name, Excellion. Personally, I'd have liked for him to have been Hot Rod or Rodimus and really hammer that deco and design home, but you can't always get what you want. The point is, Hot Shot was already a decent update of the original toy, so you'd think Excellion would be, too. And for the most part, he is, but there are some deco changes from the original toy. In bot mode, most of the dark gray/black details are a lighter gray, except for his hips which are the same orange as his thighs now, and his hands which are now red. The single chevron on his shin is in two parts now, and his fold-out wing spoiler is orange instead of blue. In alt mode, the vents on his hood and in front of his rear tires are painted a gunmetal color instead of being left unpainted, and there's some gold paint on the rear of the car where the wings fold out. Purists who had the original toy might be fussed by the changes, but I kinda like them, as they make him even more like Hot Rod. Heck, I'd have been cool with them ditching the gray and silver on his chest for orange with flames. As a character who wasn't actually in the cartoon Excellion is far from essential, but the mold's decent enough and I like him as an alternate universe Hot Rod. Where Excellion is a Walmart Exclusive, Studio Series 86 Perceptor can only be found in Targets. I mean, this particular version, since Perceptor was already a mainline Studio Series 86 release. Aside from some extra pack-ins (more on that in a minute), I figured that the only real difference would be tweaked colors. And they are tweaked... the blue and red are just a bit darker, and the blacks on the orignal are are dark gray to better mimic the colors used in the animation. His chest is no longer a translucent part with a silvery paint around the edge, it's solid red plastic with silvery paint. But that's not all. Take a closer look, and you can see that his torso is actually slightly remolded, so he's a little wider in his lats. Spin him around and he's also got a door on his back to hide the gap that his head folds into. Transformation is more or less unaffected, though. But it alt mode, you might see something curious... Perceptor's entire torso is painted red. The two tabs that hold his chest door shut show that the plastic under the paint is actually brown. I guess that's because they put Perceptor's new chest parts on the same sprue as Ramhorn, one of the two packed-in cassette figures and very likely the reason you're replacing Perceptor in the first place. Ramhorn's pretty ok! The little rhino mode is a chonky little guy, and I like that his tape mode has some silver bits that almost past for reels if the weren't so off-centered. Like Steeljaw, his golden weapons are partsformed on and off along with his tail... and a good bit of his back. The other pack-in is Ratbat. Ratbat was previously released as a mainline Siege Micromaster pack, along with a robot bearing the name "Rumble" while being colored like Frenzy. While I liked the shade of purple and the extra colored details on the tape mode of the original version, the two-toned, red-eyed face, the gray that stays on the body and doesn't spread to the wings, and the more magenta main color on the new version are more accurate to the way Ratbat was colored in the 86 movie. Also, Ratbat a new accessory, a set of backpack boosters like the G1 toy had. So, yeah, both of Perceptor's buddies have some partsforming now, and those parts don't really belong on the cassette modes. But, as they both have 5mm pegs (and the gold bits on Ramhorn are on swivels), you can use them as weapons for anyone with the usual 5mm port fists. Just like everyone had to buy Legacy Soundwave just to get Buzzsaw, I think a lot of completionists are going to wind up buying Perceptor just to get Ramhorn. To that end, I appreciate that they included an extra accessory for Ratbat, and that they actually did a little remolded to Perceptor. That remolding on its own probably wouldn't convince me to upgrade, but at least this way I do feel like I upgraded when I was really in it for Ramhorn. Though I haven't see this one in stores yet (I got mine from Pulse), I do believe that two pack containing this Transformers Devastation Ground Soldier is also a Target Exclusive. Ground Soldier is reuse of the Runabout/Runamuck mold, though with a new head and trading a gun in for a sword. For the most part, that's fine... with the backpack on the in-game model I recognized the Ground Soldier as being based on the Battlechargers at the time, and these are definitely one of the colors they used in the game (the other being orange with red windows), but I should point out that their car mode in game had more curves, flared fenders, and a wing on the back. Ground Soldier is packaged with Elite Seeker, who's a repaint of Earthrise Ramjet with new sword accessories. Of all the coneheads, Ramjet is probably the closest to what we get in the game, what with the delta wings and the presence of the vertical stabilizers. Still, I can't help but wish, with this being the fifth color of this mold with no changes to the mold, that they would have made some changes to the wings, since the Seeker in the game does have delta wings but broader with an upward bend at the tips (more like Dirge without the canards), and though the in-game model does have vertical stabilizers like Ramjet (which Dirge and Thrust don't have), they're not sitting on top of big engine nacelles like Ramjet has. In any case, the mix of red, gray, and black make this one of the cooler Seeker designs in my book, and I can always use more nameless grunts, so I think this pack is worth it. Moving on to Amazon's exclusives, we have a pack that's a bit harder to justify. This set has Slugslinger, a bit of a dated Titans Returns mold that replaced the Targetmaster gimmick with a Headmaster one. The white plastic is a light gray, and the blue plastic is much darker (yeah, sorry, I accidentally but the new version on the right instead of the left). Technically, the new deco better matches his brief appearances in "The Rebirth," so points for Sunbow accuracy, I guess. But to me these colors seem more like they belong on Triggerhappy, and the lighter blue is closer to the G1 toy and, arguably, his appearance in the Japanese Headmasters cartoon, so I'm inclined to prefer the original. I'd heard it claimed that the tampographs were altered for the new version, but you can clearly see that they're really not. The only change is that the Decepticon badge on one of his wings has been replaced with the Mayhem Attack Squad insignia. I probably wouldn't have bothered with this set for Slugslinger, but Slugslinger comes packaged with "handsome" Sandstorm... that is, Legacy Sandstorm, but the toy-style masked face has been replaced with a cartoon-style unmasked face. Not much else has changed... the gray plastics used for the small pistol, his hands, and some of his inner workings have been replaced with black plastic, and black hands is more accurate to both his G1 toy and most of his cartoon appearances. Other than than, the orange plastics are just a bit lighter and they didn't paint the vents on his chest. In dune buggy mode, the black plastic instead of the gray for the engine is a change that is less like the chrome engine of the G1 toy and doesn't totally match the control art, but I can't say for sure if it does or doesn't match the cartoon better. I think, if you're not partsforming the otherwise useless cage on, that black subjectively looks better than that random gray. In helicopter mode there's even less difference. I guess what it really boils down to is how badly do you want a cartoon-accurate Sandstorm? I didn't have the G1 toy as a kid, so to me he absolutely needed a cartoon face. The toy-style face was my biggest complaint with the Legacy release. It just sucks that to get that head you have to not only buy another barely-changed copy of Sandstorm, you have to pay for Slugslinger, too. Last but not least, we have the Takara Godzilla Megatron crossover. In robot mode, from the neck down it's just Studio Series Grimlock in a mix and dark and light grays, with a little bit of red in some spots. From the neck up, that's actually a repaint of Studio Series Sludge's head, which kind of works better than I expected it to. It's an almost Alex Milne-esque style for Megatron. I said when I reviewed Hearts of Steel Megatron that I like a black Megatron, and with the lower part of Grimlock's torso picked out in silver and red I think it's really not that bad of a design for a Megatron. I just wished they could have swapped Grimlock's double-barreled rifle for a Fusion Cannon. The disappointment comes when you get him in dino mode, because it's just a dark gray Grimlock. Same stumpy Grimlock arms, same Grimlock head with the missing front teeth. No Godzilla spines. Even with the included blue effect part in his (admittedly well-painted) mouth, I don't think anyone's going to see this on a shelf and think, "oh, that's Godzilla!" So I supposed the question is, how much do are you willing to pay for an actual transforming Godzilla? Because, as is, I can't recommend this figure. Because DNA, maker of third-party upgrade kits, will be releasing a kit later this year that replaces the toes, arms, and head, plus adds spines and a longer tail, to turn this figure into once that actually resembles Godzilla. The kit effectively doubles the price of the figure, though; worth it for a hardcore fan of both Transformers and Godzilla like me, I think, and enough to flip my recommendation from a hard no to a yes if you're willing to spend the money on the upgrade kit.
  23. Yesterday
  24. I have an idea to restore the horror aspect of the Xenomorph:
  25. For people that would’ve like Cat’s Eye, but wished it was about a dog
  26. I am asking all the experts here. I haven't built a pc in 10 years so I am a bit out of the loop. I would like a b850 for my next system. Which one should I choose. I have 1 requirement it has to support a 5.1 speaker system. I am not getting rid of my working Klipsch promedia ultra 5.1. I an considering a 5070 ti (it will be a little more than I wanted to spend.) but the 5070 seems to be a giant step down. and I am waiting for the super version announcement.. I wanted a 9070xt but the prices being so inflated on that card. I am running a 24" 1200p monitor which still works. But I will upgrade to a 32" 4k eventually.
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