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I'd say you've beaten him to the punch! Terrific review, including the pictures. 👍 Totally! That's why I was so excited about the Netflix shows... It was exactly what we'd always wanted to see, the toys more-or-less accurately depicted onscreen (with a heavy dose of Sunbow inspiration). Visually, the series -- and the toy line that accompanied it -- was a dream come true! 🤩 Unfortunately, the story, music, dialogue, and voice acting was so mediocre, the resulting show was at best, forgettable... and at worst, unwatchable. 😒 You'd think, after decades of anime influence on the US market, American animation producers would've stopped commissioning original stories, and learned how to adapt a successful comic book series. IDW had numerous storylines ripe for adaptation. Just imagine what could've been... You can hardly be blamed for that... Sunbow Productions didn't properly credit the overseas studios any more than Harmony Gold did with Robotech. 🤨 In fact, it's entirely fair to say Sunbow was responsible for the animation, since they were the company that hired Toei, AKOM et.al. 😉

Hi all, was just wondering if anyone had any insight to the Gunsight One (presumably) produced manga by Shoji Kawamori, Haruhiko Mikimoto, and Fujihiko Hosono, among others. A forum search isn't bringing up any results, and my google-fu is proving to be too weak to find references on the net. Came across it on p,246 of Macross Perfect Memory and since my Japanese is actually existent now my interest was way more piqued. Thanks in advance for any details on this proto-Megaroad work.

Next up from Three Zero ATM-09-ST (RSC) No date or price given!

I can sympathize with your furnace woes, as we had a similar issue with ours a few years back also during a particularly cold snap. Fortunately, we learned that our gas fireplace and a couple strategically placed space heaters could ably keep the house toasty while we waited for the day when the repair company had some techs free to send out. I forget what the point of failure was now, but they fixed it. I do believe they replaced a component, although I don't think it was as major as what you're suspecting. I don't remember now. Anyway, I hope they're able to affect a successful repair and get you warm and cozy again. I figured you'd likely go in on Forte as well, and I was waiting for you to review him. In the absence of yours, I wanted to gush a bit about him. Once you've got the furnace fixed, I look forward to your far more polished review, as I'm sure does everyone else. We're of a similar mind, you and me. I might swoosh a plane, be it a transforming toy or a LEGO set (or MOC), but I don't really play with my toys insofar as mock battles or anything. I barely did that as a kid, let alone as an adult. I do find, as time passes ever more swiftly, that I'm far less inclined to even want to transform my toys anymore, as I'm less patient, more easily frustrated, and more apt to break stuff. So, I just leave a lot of my stuff alone unless I just get an itch to want to take a crack at it after so much time has passed. Fortunately, Youtube is our friend in that regard, and one can find a transformation guide or a review on just about everything to ease the process and alleviate the propensity towards breakage. From your POV, I can understand liking non-transformable Transformers if only for their more 'accurate' aesthetics and pose-ability minus the concessions and fuss of transformation. I fear I did just what you advised I don't do. I was under the impression, mistaken obviously, that Sunbow was responsible for the animation rather than a handful of subcontracted animation studios. Guess I should have read the credits a little more assiduously. I shall take that lesson into mind from now on when I levy criticism of the old toon. I don't hate the toon, and whatever opinion folks may have of Floro Dery, I understand why he did what he did with the designs insofar as simplifying them for animation, but he also 'fixed' characters like the van brothers whose Diaclone toys just didn't fit with the rest of the bots. I like to imagine what if CG had been far more advanced at the time, the old Sunbow toon a judicious mix of cell-animation and CG, and the highly detailed character models and their transformations were far more consistently depicted in the animation. It would, in the end, have been a completely different show animation-wise, and perhaps we wouldn't be fussing over "toon-accuracy" as a difference between toys with surface details and those with flat, nigh-featureless surfaces. It's fun to think about.

It's more than that. It's that the setting itself is designed in such a way that Destroids are not, and never will be, relevant. They are land warfare weapons in a setting where there's not really any land warfare going on. If you have to radically change the rules of your entire setting in order to make something viable in context, you're better off just making a new setting. You've demonstrated that you understand this principle through your example of Muv-Luv and how that setting explains the absence of fighter jets as a central part of its premise. What's your pitching here is essentially the same thing as reintroducing fighter jets to that setting. If they were practical, sure. The main problem with this logic being that advancing a useless weapon offers no real benefit. Yeah I can absolutely make a better sword out of unobtanium, but it doesn't do me any good if the enemy will shoot me dead from a kilometer away. The Destroids all have essentially the same problem. No matter how much you improve their systems, it won't make them useful because the problem isn't their performance. It's that they are designed for a type of combat which is fundamentally obsolete in the setting. Macross Galaxy actually tried modernizing Destroids using VF tech in Macross the Ride and the end result was that it didn't really help. Those improved destroids fared no better because they were ultimately stuck hanging around on the hull of a ship in purely defensive roles waiting for the enemy to come into range. They had no way to take the fight to the enemy, meaning they offered no material advantage over just having beam CIWS systems and missile phalanxes that could do the same job for less money and without the need to put a human operator at risk. Which does them no good because, again, they can't go on the offensive. That would actually offer no benefit at all. Because, as a ground weapon, they're pretty well below the minimum altitude for radar. They have no need of active stealth. (Putting aside the fact that even on a Valkyrie active stealth is basically ineffective in Battroid mode, since it depends on the passive stealthiness of the fighter mode, so it wouldn't really work on a destroid anyway.) There really isn't much in the way of "BS fold magic" going on outside of the YF-29. It's all pretty well within the realm of science. I'm not sure what the benefit of staying still extra hard would be when the fundamental problem is that they literally can't get into the same ZIP code with the enemy 99% of the time. But what are they shooting at? In this setting, a ground-based weapon is fundamentally sitting out of the fight because the fight is going on in deep space or in orbit. It's not shoot and scoot if you're never close enough to the enemy to do any shooting. Considering the orbital bombardment is carried out on the strategic scale, you can't even say you're providing the gunners a moving target. Macross doesn't usually go in for genocide, so you've already thematically left the ballpark right at the start. Might as well just make that a new setting for a different franchise.

Starting to get excited.

I didn't want to go down the technical lore and realism rabbit hole that I kind of knew was coming, so I kept my comment to the rule of cool lol. Yall have valid points but aren't putting it together to see the bigger picture. I thought this through ever since wanting to see more out of them. It's very simple, plot dictates their place in the story as pointed out, then the solution is simply demand a plot that gives them a place to shine. If spacecraft and aircraft are too powerful, knock them down a peg. Make their armor too weak for new enemies. Make them easy targets in the type of fighting involved. Make them too costly for the volume of enemies they are up against. Make terrestial battles important. For all of these things, the scaling is relative. Since tech has gone so far for valkyries, tech can advance just as much for destroids, in ways that are to their advantage. There are tons of specific ways to go about all this. The easy example, look at how muv-luv did away with combat aircraft in their universe. The enemy simply has overwhelmingly powerful anti air lasers. Mechs are reduced to walking and low hover, or terrain shielded mad dashes. Track and wheeled vehicles and mecha can totally shine in such a setting, where flying machines were previously all powerful. If valks are that costly to make, and have only advanced to become that much more costly, then cheap manufacturing of relatively lower tech machines could easily have advanced by just as much. On the flip side, they could have the same tech as valkyries, applied to their advantage. If power plant is not used for high speed thrust, then it can be diverted to having bs amounts of barrier, or that much more power for beam weapons. Being on the ground with active fold stealth could make them even more stealthy than aircraft, despite being a tank. With all the bs fold magic that has been introduced in universe, the could recieve the same level of benefits, instead of fold travel, they could have ridiculous powers like using fold tech to dimensionally anchor themselves and resist a certain degree of dimension bombing. So long as they aren't depicted to fly remotely as fast as a valk, they can be explained away with low cost and higher offensive and defensive power. There are plenty of other ways to frame their tactical relevance with all that setup. Like how konig monsters need to land to have a stable firing platform, destroids could just be in tank mode and be stable and fire at the same time, with comparable fire power, while laying low. Ground based shoot and scoot artillery is a real world advantage, in warefare where anti air weapons are a threat to aircraft. The scaling just has to be tweaked to fit that since this is fiction with every advancing tech and life forms. Let's say there were creatures more durable than Vajra, and the existing science magic bombing and beaming isn't effective on destroying their planet. A fight has to be taken to the the core of the hive. Gravity is immense enough to hamper flight, and people have to use exosuits to stand hp. Psychic and electronic fold interference that is on a similar in scale to Var syndrome makes controlling an aircraft on the frontline very difficult, without being an ace pilot powered by the music of love polygons. Defeating the creatures requires destroying their underground hive with an experimental science device that require engineers on site to install. The stage is set to need a massive mechanized terrestrial infantry force, hard push their way through a whole monster planet. The only way that works, is by armor pushing in, conquering territory, while defending logistic bases along the way, until probing for a point of entry and reaching the heart of the swarm. Destroids need to handle everything from atmospheric entry, landing spearhead, occupation, base defense, artillery, infantry maneuver, kaiju brawls, troop and vip transport, and idol concert security, with limited pretty boy air support. The best a valkyrie can do in that scenario is be a cog in combined arms tactics. Destroid pilots can easily even be the main characters, because the series is called "macross", and not "valkyrie", so all that is needed is an oversized LCAC type ship cameo and transform every now and then lol.

Mezco 5 Points 1989 Joker Goon x2.

Bandai - Dragon Ball Super - Dragon Stars Series - Super Saiyan Blue Goku Action Figure x 3

Fair enough; I'm old enough to remember hating on "Action Masters" for that very reason. The older I get, however, the less I enjoy playing with toys. The primary purpose of my action figures is to represent fictional characters in photographs and displays, and toys that don't transform generally fulfill their purpose as character merchandise more effectively. Now, don't confuse Sunbow (the US production company) with Toei (the Japanese animation studio, and their sub-contractors), AKOM (the Korean animation studio, and their sub-contractors), or TMS (for Transformers: The Movie). "Sunbow" refers to the Floro Dery designs, model sheets, scale charts and such, which were internally consistent (if somewhat inadequate). The "toon" that resulted was rife with inconsistencies and errors, but you can't lay that at Sunbow's feet. We don't hold Shoji Kawamori, Haruhiko Mikimoto, or Big West responsible for the poor, off-model animation of SDFM, after all... Like you, in fact, I often get a chuckle over the oxymoronic expression "cartoon-accurate." 😝

One thing to keep in mind is the requirements of the plot. Destroids aren't the reason why a lot of people tune in to Macross, and they are more or less superfluous to the plot—in the sense that above and beyond being the thing that gets shot at to demonstrate the power of the antagonists, they don't have much of a role. So, even if we presume that the defensive capabilities of a Destroid's armour is exactly the same as (or even greater than!) that of the Energy Conversion Armour on a Battroid-mode VF (along the lines of Seto's desription above), the Destroid is still going to be easily blown away due to its role in the story. That said, one of the "boss" enemies in the Macross M3 game is a PPB equipped Destroid Monster (if memory serves). That suggests there is the possibility of a low-cost upgrade to Destroids that significantly increases their defensive capabilities (low-cost in the sense that PPB projectors and an upgraded reactor would require less resources than replacing the entire surface with SWAG armour and a much, much higher output reactor.)

Well, that sucks. However, take the good from it: adding electricals to models is notoriously difficult, and the wiring harness you built worked as intended. The next time you attempt it, I'm sure you'll get exactly the results you want!

I have Forte on my desk, but I'm still dealing with furnace issues and I haven't really had the energy for other stuff right now (I mean that literally, as my furnace decided to quit at 1:00am yesterday with temps in the negatives. I tried to get it running (and keep it running), but gave up around 4:30am and wound up laying on the couch in the living room with fireplace going. The tech who "fixed" it by cleaning the lines and the condensate trap came back and replaced the pressure switch, which also didn't fix it, and when I called him Friday he seemed stumped, said he'd come by again later that day, and then ghosted me. I have a different HVAC company coming tomorrow (so I'm staying in the living room with the fire again tonight since we're going negative again), but after learning way more about gas furnaces than I cared to I'm betting it's the inducer motor. Anyway, the TLDR is that I should be reviewing Forte sometime this week.

With Kenichi: Mightiest Disciple getting a new Manga series this year I've gone back and am binging the anime. I have to say that it is so nice to watch a series that's 50 episodes long and they can flesh out the characters and storylines versus the current trend of seasonal animes with 12 episodes and done.

Admittedly, they look good. However, I retain a rather vehement prejudice against Transformers that don't transform, as, in my mind, it's rather like a pitcher who, for whatever reason, can't throw, to employ a simple analogy. I remind myself that it's a big fandom with many niches to fill, and if they bring you joy, then mission accomplished (and to hell with my bias). I do get a chuckle over your "Sunbow accuracy" statement, however, when the toon is notorious for its blatant and constant inconsistencies. For off-brand transforming toys, those don't look half bad. I see a lot of limb recycling, not unlike a certain company in Rhode Island is wont to do ad nauseum. I was waiting to see if anyone else was going to post a review, but since I haven't seen anyone post any pics here, I'll do the honors. I'm not a practiced reviewer like @mikeszekely, so I beg some forbearance, if you please. I love cassette bots; they're essentially wafers, but I've always been captivated by the ingenuity of turning those little rectangles into robotic dudes, animals, and vehicles, some even combining to form mini-gestalts. While they filled a minimal minion role to the larger cassette player bots, there has always been an inherently cool factor that Takara took the time and effort to make those cassettes transform as well as the larger bots when they didn't have to, at least not to the degree that they did. After all, they could have just formed guns, or some sort of computer gear for them, but no, they turned into articulated animals and robots, even if the articulation was minimal. The point was made, though, and the Sunbow toon utilized those designs to great effect, giving them unforgettable scenes, personalities, and dialogue to really make an impression. One of the more under-utilized was Ramhorn, an Autobot cassette that transforms into a rhinoceros (not sure if they were going for a particular species thereof). However, I've long had a soft spot for the red rhino and I was quite pleased when MMC announced their upscaled take a number of years ago. the wait is over, and without further ado, here's RMX-13 Forte: Cassette mode. As with all of MMC's RMX versions, they reimagined Forte, or Ramhorn as I'll call him henceforth, as a full-sized cassette, which offers more real-estate in which they can work their engineering magic to far greater effect than the old mico-cassettes of the 80s toys. notably, Ramhorn is completely bare of any cassette livery, unlike the G1 toys, and in one respect, it looks nice for his rhino mode, but IMHO, there just seems to be something lost in not having that deco. Anyway, he's neither the best nor the worst cassette mode I've seen, although the obvious head in the center and the legs on the upper surface spoil the illusion somewhat. The backside shares a similar fate as the front, especially with his golden weapons immediately catching the eye. Still, it's a close facsimile, and rather impressive considering the rhinoceros that unfolds out of this wafer. The bot mode: I kinda wish they'd given his toenails a light greyish paintjob to pick them out, but they didn't. Still, I think, overall, he's phenomenal. He's my second favorite of their cassettes next to Jaguar (Ravage), perhaps only due to Ravage being my favorite of all the cassettes. Articulation wise, his head is on a ball joint with little clearance which can rotate minimally left to right (you can see the extent in the next pic), up and down, and rotate longitudinally 360 degrees if you want to reenact that iconic scene from The Exorcist with him. His neck can also rotate up and down approx 10 degrees of arc, not much but better than nothing. His mouth can open and close. His ears are on ball joints as well and can be rotated independently. His hips and shoulders are on stiff double hinges which allow for some nice height adjustments of the legs when posing. It's an excellent addition, as they could have just put them on ball joints with minimal clearance, but they put in the extra effort, and it makes posing him that much more of a treat. The shoulders can rotate through about 30 degrees of arc fore and aft in-line before the edges of the body stop them. More forward movement can be achieved if the legs are spread, although it looks awkward. All four legs can do the full Van Damme, to borrow a reference. I've never seen a pic of a real rhino doing the splits, but if that's your fancy, this guy can do it. The front and aft forelegs can also rotate through a 90+ arc on nicely tensioned rivet joints. The feet are mounted on ball pegs which offer a great range of movement fore, aft, as well as tilt. There's a tension hinge just behind his shoulder humps that allows his entire rear end to rotate back and up in a nice arc for a slightly more aggressive stance. It also helps to elongate the body somewhat so he doesn't look as scrunched in profile. The above pic shows the extent of head rotation to the side. I wish that ball joint could extend out of the neck a little for addition rotation, but it's fine. MMC did a nice job of trying to fill, or at least obscure, the hollow space between his side panels. You can still see through the gaps but given the nature of his alt mode and transformation, it's forgivable, especially for how well the final rhino mode turned out. I forgot to mention that the tail can be raised and lowered. although it has no side-to-side movement. His weapon packs are also mounted on hinges, and the lower two pics illustrate the full extremities of their ranges, a nice feature that, once again, MMC didn't have to do but it's appreciated. Here he is with two other third party Ramhorns: Fans Toys's version in the middle with KFC's most recent take on the right. Until I had MMC's in-hand, I felt that KFC's was the definitive version of this guy, and really, at if we're only looking at micro-cassette scale, he is, IMHO. I had high hopes for the Fans Toys' version, but it left me feeling a little disappointed. Regardless, it's ultimately an unfair comparison given the amount of real-estate MMC had to work with compared to the micro-cassette scaled figures. I just thought it'd make for an interesting pic. Here he is with MMC's other quadruped cassette bots: Considering that Jaguar was their first model in this series and released nine years ago, I think he still holds up marvelously well compared to his more recent Autobot compatriots. That said, I think Forte (Ramhorn) looks excellent next to Tempo (Steeljaw), and Jaguar (Ravage). These figures exemplify the term "masterpiece" in terms of their engineering and aesthetics. For now, MMC own this market exclusively, and I hope they continue to expend the roster of cassettes. I, for one, would love to see their takes on Ratbat (of which I believe a prototype has been shown), Sugfest, Overkill, Squawk Talk and Beast Box, Grand Slam and Raindance, Dile and Zaur, Graphy and Noise. Except for the drone, which sucks comparatively, I'll take all the cassettes MMC is willing to make, and I hope they do continue. This concludes my look at MMC's RMX-13 Forte. Without any reservations, I highly recommend him.

The ads keep getting better. Hopefully a good sign. Even better is it comes out when I'll be visiting back home with a really great Imax theater nearby.

@505thAirborne Cool $25 plus shipping and handling! Just kidding!! PM your address and I'll get them out.

Steven can keep trying to outdo himself but he'll never make an alien encounter film as good as his own Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Really? The official writeup of the Destroid Works is very blunt that it's literally just a Cheyenne II that's been stripped of its military hardware and given a coat of hi-viz orange paint. The Cheyenne II is a barely-there presence in Macross Frontier and Macross Delta because Destroids in general are pretty useless in a post-First Space War world. Destroids as a whole were designed around the idea of fighting a land war in a conventional alien invasion scenario. Something that just does not happen in Macross. They're land warfare weapons in a space war setting. Making it transform would defeat the other key attribute of a Destroid... being cheaper than a Valkyrie so that they can be fielded in larger numbers. Not that a transforming tank would be any less useless in a space war than a regular non-transforming ground-bound robot. The main reason the Frontier fleet uses them is because they wanted mobile AA defenses they could deploy inside the dome. Outside the dome is protected by more cost-effective static beam CIWS and missile phalanx systems. So... that's not quite how it works. Let me explain. It's not as simple as just "Destroids don't need to split power so they should be a lot tougher." You're assuming that all things are equal, and they're not. Valkyries are aircraft as much as they are giant robots. Their armor has to be kept thin and lightweight in order to preserve their flight performance and leave room for the internally carried fuel and other vital stores and systems. As such, they have to rely on more advanced and expensive composite armor reinforced by energy conversion armor driven by their pair of high-output thermonuclear reactors to achieve the required defensive performance. Those reactors HAVE to be high-output in order to meet the needs of the various other energy-hungry systems on a Valkyrie too, like thrust generation and active stealth, which makes them incredibly expensive. Destroids are walking AFVs and artillery built for land and surface warfare. They don't need to fly, and that means they don't need to make the same design compromises that the Valkyries did. They can achieve the required defensive performance by just having thicker composite armor. Not needing to provide plasma for thrust production or feed energy-intensive systems like active stealth and energy conversion armor means they can get by with a single, much cheaper and lower-output reactor instead of a pair of expensive high-end thermonuclear reaction turbine engines. At the end of the day, this makes them much cheaper than a Valkyrie. The early Destroids were about 1/20th the cost of a VF-1 back before the First Space War. Of course, this also means they don't have tons of extra power to throw around because their systems are tailored to their needs not the far greater needs of a Valkyrie. Because Destroids are inherently groundbound in a world where most combat is in the aerospace domain, keeping Destroids as cheap as possible is the only thing keeping them going as a supplement to even less expensive conventional anti-aircraft defenses like beam CIWS guns and missile phalanxes. If you were to give a destroid all the same tech as a Valkyrie, you'd have just made a Valkyrie mode-locked in Battroid mode and gotten rid of most of the cost advantage.

GALACTICA SITREP, first off, thank you everyone for the suggestion & replies, I appreciate it. My buddy who also knows how to add lighting to model kits stopped by, we got the engine section off and checked the wires/connections, everything looked good, but it comes back to the LED's I chose to use, they just weren't quality lights. We tried an LED strip I had not used yet and it failed to light up. So the wires were good, but the lights were duds. In the end, this Battlestar will be a highly detailed, aged & weathered display. As a backup plan, I'm looking into glow-in-the-dark paints, maybe go for the SDF-1 PF effect. @Thom I absolutely appreciate the offer on the guns & I'll take them!! @derex3592 The USS TEXAS is looking great!! @Papa Rat Those kits & your painting skills are top notch!!