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That EXM-000 looks very cool, it definitely has a different vibe than the rest of the line.

Gotta admit, that looks all kinds of FUN AND PLAYABLE WITHABLE! If they release the OG schemes, I'd bite on all 3!

@wm cheng - Well......soooort of....LOL. Honestly, this builds paint job took some crazy weird turns. My original flat gray paint job looked amazing, then the Tamiya spray can gloss darkened things up and I guess somehow reacted oddly with the Mission Models acrylic paint because from then on it never EVER lost this almost sticky tacky feeling. I resprayed Alclad gloss over my decals through the airbrush but even that didn't get rid of it completely, so I went back over the whole model again with light thinned down coats of the same paint and then sealed everything in Alclad Flat clear through the airbrush. It's pretty much normal feeling now....mostly...LOL

Thank you! Shame they aren't Hasegawa! (or another manufacturer...)

Those Macross F ships are GKs. This was the table immediately to the left of Hasegawa's table, so coincidentally it was just the next segment in the sequence. When I was compiling this for the video, I thought that maybe it might confuse people, thinking that these were Hasegawa kits. I just decided to roll with it. The other ships I could't recognize what they were from.

Hey that looks amazingly weathered @Papa Rat - congrats! Hey @derex3592 that B-52 turned out amazing! Did the flat coat over top bring back the lightness after that gloss coat darkened everything?

Well, the new HVAC company seemed a lot more thorough. He put cameras in the different pipes and junk, took a bunch of pictures, checked the inducer with a multimeter, etc. He found that the inducer is running at a higher amperage than it should be, and there was a bunch of water in places where water shouldn't be (including in the inducer). So he took the inducer out and apart, cleaned the water and the lines again, the put it all back together. Lo and behold, the furnace has now gone almost 30 hours without a fault (though the fact that it's gone from negative temperatures to almost 55 (or around 12.5 for those of you who value base ten more than precision). It's not all sunshine and rainbows, though... the tech can't figure out how the water got in there in the first place. So we've decided to replace the inducer and the collection box, which means I have to wait for the parts to come in and for him to come back and install them, while kinda hoping that more water doesn't build up and cause issues in the meantime. And even at that, with some corrosion in the heat exchanger and the fact that the furnace is about 14 years old, it was also suggested to me that I might want to start budgeting for a whole new furnace in the next five years. Still... I was able to enjoy my first night in my actual bed in two days, and my first morning waking up to an alarm clock instead of an uncomfortably low temperature in the house in two or three weeks. So, feeling a bit refreshed, I can finally give you my thoughts on MMC's Ocular Max REmix Forte, their take on Ramhorn. Can we just take a minute and marvel at MMC's ability to take a flat rectangle and turn it into a three-dimensional shape for a minute? The engineering makes Jaguar (Ravage) seem almost primitive... like, in Jaguar's case, you could think of the cat's spine as a line from the top of one side of the tape to the bottom, and everything sort of folds along that spine. Forte, a bit like Tempo (Steeljaw) here, has a spine that runs like an imaginary line through the tape from one face to the other, and the cassette has the fold around that imaginary line. But the process seemed to feel a bit more refined than Tempo. And, again, it's really amazing that they got this form out of a flat rectangle. He's got a humped back and a low chest that tapers back to a thinner waist, and his head is at the end of an actual neck. The silhouette is less rectangular than either the cartoon or the G1 toy... it's almost organic. And he does all this while maintaining a shoulder-to-shoulder width that's probably triple his alt mode thickness. Speaking of alt modes... like all the non-humanoid cassettes MMC has done, Forte's missile launchers are permanently attached to his body and are incorporated in the transformation. So I guess the only real accessory here is the box he came in... a clear cassette case, with a wrap-around box that has the instructions attached and collector's card tucked into. Getting back to the rhino mode, Forte's neck has two black hinges that attach it to his body. These hinges allow for a slight side-to-side movement. Meanwhile the head is attached to the neck via a ball joint. That joint gives a little more side-to-side range, plus a little up/down tilt and a swivel. His mouth can open, and his ears are on little ball joints, too, so you can swivel them or tilt them a bit. The middle of his torso can move to give him a slight ab crunch or back arch. His shoulders and hips have swivels for forward/backward movement and hinges for lateral movement. The knees and elbows are hinged to cover about 90 degrees forward or backward. His feet are on hinged ball joints for more than enough up/down tilt and ankle pivots. Finally, the base of his tail has a hinge for some up/down movement. And I know I kept alluding to it, but yes, that rhinoceros really does turn into a cassette tape. As always, MMC eschews that microcassette size favored by G1/MP/Robot Parasides/X-Transbots for a standard cassette size. This of course means there's no Blaster toy that these guys will fit into, but frankly I think the microcassette figures transformed into robots/cats/rhinos that were too small. For an MP display, I think this size works better. Also, likely to keep the rhino mode more cartoon-accurate, the cassette mode has no labels. I would have liked to think that Toyhax would be on it, but I just checked, and while they did labels for all of MMC's versions of Soundwave's tapes they have done any of Blaster's. I think that some of you will find the barren cassette modes a little disappointing, but without a robot with a chest I can store the tapes in I don't see myself transforming them very often anyway. No robot chest, but Forte does of course fit in his case. As will the last several OX tapes, the instructions aren't liner notes that fit inside the case with the cassette, which is a bummer. Rather, the instructions are like a fold-out cover on a box that wraps around the case. Not my preferred way of doing it, but I wonder if there are tighter tolerances involved. Gonna be honest here... I was never really into Blaster's tapes as much as Soundwave's. What's more, I feel like MMC's Ravage, Rumble, and Frenzy came out at a time when I was very much invested in building up a Masterpiece Collection, and I was willing to give up the ability to fit in Soundwave's chest for better-looking, better articulated versions that (to me) scaled better. Fast forward to the present, where it's looking increasingly likely that Hasbro really is going to give me (mostly) cartoonish versions of the entire G1 cast and my MP collection is starting to look like a waste of space. Couple that with the fact that Ramhorn is, for whatever reason, one of my least-favorite of the cassette bots. So I've actually had Forte sitting on my desk for awhile, unopened, as my purchase felt more like an obligation than a general desire to have the figure. But after messing with him I'm really glad I did! The engineering to get from a cassette to a reasonably-shaped, reasonably-proportioned rhino with reasonable articulation feels like witchcraft. And while I don't see myself transforming him often, he's fun to put into poses and does look good displayed with your MP Blaster of choice (I've still got KFC's, little disappointed I slept on Deformation Space's). If you've been enjoying MMC's line of OX REmix cassettes then you should enjoy Forte too, as he might very well be their best one yet. Now if I could just get MMC to release their Ratbat that they announced back in October... of 2023. (Side note, kinda bummed now that I never got the condors. Unlike Ravage and Rumble/Frenzy, I thought the MP ones were an ok size and the REmix ones too big, but now it feels like a shame that I have that hole in the collection.)

As opposed to Quamzin (Khyron in RT), the pilot of that junkyard special. After his stunts in the Zentran fleets, he's lucky that's only dirt and not dog poo... BTW: if that's your model, nice job! 👍

Have to admit, I skip-jumped through this episode. If it looked like something was getting interesting, I would let it play and see what happened. There was a good story in there somewhere, but it got lost (as usual) under high school-prank style attempts at humor. They need to dump the attempts at forced humor and just tell the story.

Preorders go up tomorrow. Target TBD. 3/4. Amazon 3/18. Amazon 3/25. 3/25.

@Papa Rat Damn! She's gorgeous! Over here the BUFF is finished up! Academy 1/144 B-52H. Decent enough kit overall...

My idea with the ISC was not for itself to block anything. It was to allow for the hull and frame to disperse impacts over time. Ballistic penetration is generally determined by sheer projectile speed, so if you can cheat the time component of the vector, it can turn a lethal AP round into a paint chip. Same with blunt force damage. If you can disperse a force over time, any impacts and torquing can also be dulled. From the opposing persepective, shooting and punching an ISC equpped robot would be like hitting something that is harder and has more mass than it should, because it's less willing to move in a given moment in time. it becomes something close to a stoppable force, meeting a nearly immovable object. The inverted use case is to absorb self inflicted destructive amounts of forces. A punch so strong, it should have flattened the fist, would no longer even pose noticable structural harm, giving time to dissapate. This idea was meant to be used in conjunction with the wheeled dancing and buster sword. My ideas were envisioned as a full package. While on wheels, the machine would be already constantly skating in combat, with built inertia and ready to steer sharply or build rotation for a massive melee strike, while ISC can explain away any sudden and normally self destructive amounts of torquing and directional changes. This gives the whole thing enough scifi magic excuse for explosive speed with a giant metal slab of a weapon. I know is said boarding crews, but what I really had in mind were vajra style giant space monsters trying to bore into a ship's hull and eat the fleshy little people inside. A classic scifi trope, and a perfect excuse for terrestrial/pedal robots to have big sword in space. Just rollerblading and fly swatting on a big boat, because its more ammo and energy efficient and less danger of friendly fire and ship damage than missiles and gun lol. Just picture, in the silence of space, a hulking metal figure skater magnetically trailing around the hull of a ship, lifting it's partner, a giant metal slab with a hilt. It leans into a wide curve, then abruptly breaks into a spin, and tucks to build rotation. Like a top, it spins its way up beside a giant space mosquito. The pinpoint barrier along the edge of the blade lights up just before the moment of the home run splat. Cue music and title drop: Macross Freighter. A story about an intergalactic courier, delivering hot food and fresh groceries between fleets, while fending off space pirates and giant buggos. Through PMC back channels, the company is stocked with surplus advanced military robo tanks, but retrofitted them into glorified high vis forklifts. Our MC is one such certified forklift driver, but he is often forced into double duty as deck security when emergencies arise.

I totally agree. Where as this hunk of junk is more rough for wear, can’t be bothered and has never touched water or soap. Hahaha

I would think that like any ace in service, their machines would get better maintenance and overall care.

I guess Scopedog's don't have any internal heating! ......Brrrr 🥶

I was about to put one for sale if you're interested

Some other odd upcoming kits ranging from cool to silly, but at least their names won’t be forbidden. The last one made me laugh. A little robot pilots a slightly slightly bigger robot

Seems the head is 1/100. There’s a post about it from a couple days ago in the wave section that I missed.

Jees, I'm just one away, from being able to replicate this display with DX Hikaru VF-1S D.Y.R.L.! 🤔

Really cool, I guess they were having a discussion on the hasegawa thread about this

I totally get that. I sorta have a feeling that the movie Meltrandi actually take care of their stuff. Not so much the boys, but she gets her wounds patched up and possibly even gets her ride back together and custom painted for the finale, and even gets her boyfriend a ride and custom paints that one as well. Not only that, but gets him a tailored outfit to fit him and in his favorite colors. The ladies just seemed to have a different aesthetic than the bros who n the film. Not so sure about the tv version though.

Maybe they were just trying to replicate the old 1/60v2 VF-1J transformation process display in the Macross Museum with the DX this time?

They wouldn't have had a problem getting rid of extra stock, if it was a DX VF-1A Cannon Fodder! 😉 But no lets make a third release of Ichijo Hikaru and see if it sells!?

Ooooouch! Fun nostalgia purchases though.

Picked up these from Anime-Export. Each was $63.44 for a total of $126.88. Shipping via DHL (2-day; was the only option I saw) was stupid ridiculous: $102.52 Picked up: This was my first taste of the tariffs. Not a fan.