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  2. If I separate the fuselage, I could print one large enough to fit a 3.75" figure. 🤔 At about 1:22, this would roughly scale with the MEGO figures, the upcoming Factory Entertainment BSG Viper, and the vast majority of my Star Wars vehicles... ...oh, and my Max Factory gerwalk, too. 😁 For starters, though, we're just accurizing the vintage 1:35 Monogram kit.
  3. Nin-nin with 23% off? oops out of stock! Here is a link to the series on Mandarake it hasn't shown up their yet but if I see it ill post a link directly! 😉
  4. I love that it says "in outer space" as if "in space" wasn't sufficient. Feels so 80s. I'll have to hunt one down!
  5. Sorry just edited when you posted! Hope you still get the FATTY since it's even rare on Mandarake! 🤔
  6. We haven't seen fighter yet right? Does the drone talk mean it doesn't have a cockpit?
  7. No! They're still ghosting me. It's the Fatty plus the Toyrise turbo custom. I'm working three jobs right now though so all toys just collecting dust any way.
  8. DNA clearly has a hit on their hands with their kit for Godzilla Megatron. Can they keep the streak going? The next kit we're going to look at is DK-75, their upgrade kit for Age of the Primes Prima. This kit comes with a new head, a cape, a shield, a sword, and some bits that plug onto the shield. Full disclosure, the new head is what sold me on the kit. It always struck me as a bit incongruent that, from the neck down, Prima seemed to be a G1-ified take on the Covenant of Primus' knight-like design, but they gave him a head with goofy ears based on the gladiator robot from "The Five Faces of Darkness, Part 4" that was retroactively determined to be Prima. Just my personal option, but I find this decision to be extra unfortunate, as that's the episode that establishes the Quintesson origin for the Transformers, an origin that's been largely rejected in favor of Marvel's Primus origin. This new DNA head has wings instead of ears and a face/helmet that's a little bit Covenant, but also a little bit Optimus. I rather like how it looks. To swap the heads, you have to pop the stock head off the ball joint, and then just pop the new one on. As for the cape, lift the top of Prima's backpack (the alt mode bumper) and you'll see a hole between the two blue orbs. On the plastic parts at the top of the cape you'll find a cutout with a tab that's rounded at one end. This tab, in theory, goes into the hole on the backpack, with the sides of the part kind of clip around the sides of the bumper. In practice, the tab doesn't really do much of anything, and it's the friction from the sides clipping on that holds the cape on. The cape itself is made of cloth, with a wire sewn into the edges so you can pose it. On the back of the shield you'll find a pair of H-shaped sockets. All those little bits have S-shaped tabs on them. For the most part, you'll want to take the bit with the handle on it and plug it into the socket near the top of the shield, and the bit that's smooth on the other sides and plug it into the bottom of the shield. The sword, which is bigger and has a Matrix designed sculpted into it rather than being compatible with Prima's Matrix, still has a 5mm handle and he can hold it just fine. The handled bit we put on the shield allows him to hold it in his other hand. If you prefer, though, the handle is hinged and can fold over. Folding the handle in causes a 5mm peg to fold out, and that peg allows the shield to be plugged into the 5mm ports on Prima's forearms. As an added gimmick, you can slide the sword point-first through the smooth connector on the bottom of the shield up through the handled connector at the top. the translucent blue edges of the shield have hinges and can extend outward a bit. By holding the sword's handle, the combined sword/shield becomes a battle axe. Up to this point the kit seems pretty good, right? Bigger sword, cool shield, nice cape, and (IMHO) a better head sculpt. Unfortunately, the rest of this review is going to be how things start falling apart. Prima's stock sword had a peg on it that allowed it to plug into 5mm ports on the sides of the bumper on top of his backpack. But, the cape is covering those ports, and the new sword doesn't have any peg on it anyway. So how's Prima supposed to store his gear when he's not using it? Well, for starters, you have to take the shield bit with the handle off, then replace it with either of the other two bits (they're identical) that has the H-shaped tab on both sides. That'll allow you to plug it into the H-shaped socket on the back of the cap part. Which... OK, I'm cool with storing the shield on his back, but why didn't DNA simply use a 5mm port on the cape part instead of the H-shaped socket? Then you could have stored the shield with the same 5mm peg that mounts the shield to his arm, and no extra partsforming step to swap the connectors would have been neccessary. But then there's the matter of storing the sword itself. On paper, it seems like you'd want to just slide the sword through the bits on the back of the shield, just like you did for axe mode, except reversed so that the point of the blade goes down through the top first. But again we've got a little problem. The blade flares out where those silver edges are on the sides. This prevents the blade from sliding all the way into the connectors, leaving it sticking way too high on his back. OK, but a lot of Transformers toys don't bother with bot-mode accessory storage anyway. So maybe we just make Prima hold his gear. But a Transformer still needs to transform, right? Well, for the most part, you transform Prima exactly the same way. But once you set him down, you run into your next issue... ground clearance. As you can see, Prima's new face is touching the ground, but his front wheels are not. Seems DNA made a cool new head that should have been a bit flatter. Robot mode accessory storage isn't always a thing, but I feel like we've gotten to a point where alt mode storage definitely is. So how do we store his new accessories? Well, the plastic part of the cape splits into two pieces. This allows you to remove the cloth cape. Now, move the shoulders out of the way a bit, and plug the big tab into hole on the front of Prima's bumper. Just like in bot mode, the sides kind clip over the the edges of the bumper, and that's what really holds it in place. But that means that the shoulders do NOT tuck all the way back in. As for the other plastic part, it plugs onto the two little pegs to form sort of a new grill and bumper, which looks ok, I suppose. Meanwhile, the sword slides into the shield like you do when you store the whole thing on Prima's back... except we're back to using the handled connector. Because the 5mm peg on that connector plugs into the 5mm port on the side of the vehicle that's made from Prima's forearm. And that's it! There's nowhere to store the extra shield connector, and there's nowhere to store the actual cape. This seems to be a case of solidly landing in the middle. I think the new head and cape do very much improve the robot mode, and sword and shield aren't bad. But robot mode storage doesn't feel like it was thought out all the way. Accessory storage in alt mode is worse, as it leaves off the cape. In that case, you might as well leave off the entire cape, not just the cloth part. But you probably shouldn't use alt mode at all with this kit since the new head doesn't have enough clearance under the vehicle, anyway. So, if you like the bot mode improvements and plan to leave Prima in a permanent bot-mode display you might find some value here. But otherwise I can't recommend this kit.
  9. Edit* seems yes! Did you get you're FATTY situation resolved with the massive shipping cost?
  10. My understanding is that these are meant to be drones, based on some of the bits of interviews from the designers that have come out.
  11. I pick up just about every transformable bike I can get my hands on, and very much agree with the love for the Yamato Motoslave. As for the Garland, I'm pretty happy with the Arcadia ones, and pretty underwhelmed (verging on disappointed) by the Pose+ Tri-Charger. Based on my experience with the Tri-Charger, I think that the Garland would end up more fragile, pretty much at Yamato level (Yamato's Garlands, not Motoslaves), and would probably be priced at double what Arcadia is charging. As for the Tri-Charger design, my understanding is that Aramaki had nothing to do with it, and it was, in the end, Ammonite. That said, I also understand Ammonite to have been formed, at least in part, by people who had been working on Robotech II: The Sentinels. Thus, alien mecha, alien vehicles, and human vehicles were also salvaged and slightly redesigned from the Robotech designs. You can see shades of the Inorganics, Invid ships, the GMU, and, most importantly (to me) the Tri-Charger seems likely to have been a reworking of the Proto-Cyclone from Sentinels. My point being, since the Tri-Charger is a reworking of a design meant to be a proto version of what was an Aramaki design... It sits on my shelf along with the Yamato Garlands and Motoslaves and CMs Ride Armors (along with the original Sega Tri-Charger) as a sort of honorary Aramaki cousin.
  12. Today
  13. I wonder if the new ToyR!se round mover release is out? I forgot to PO it
  14. https://www.instagram.com/plasticcretins/?hl=en Plastic Cretins. I think they're on MWF. This was 6+ years ago tho.
  15. Probably very few, if any at all. The farthest-flung emigrant fleets and planets are said to be literal years away from Earth by space fold due to a combination of distance, system limitations, and route conditions. By the same token, the military component of an emigrant fleet has always at least nominally been under the authority of the emigrant fleet's civilian government and most if not all of it was always meant to stay with the emigrant government as the foundation of its local New UN Forces. The military reforms imposed after the Second Unification War cemented that local control over an emigrant fleet's attached New UN Forces. IINM the only known case of an emigrant fleet ship ending up back in service of the central New UN Forces that we know of is one or more of the Macross-class SDFNs that were used to scout ahead of early emigrant fleets. The SDFN-04 General Bruno J. Global ended up back in Earth NUNS hands and was later used as flagship of the 117th Research Fleet for their voyage into Vajra space.
  16. be careful picking up games you find in the trash. you might get raided by the police.
  17. @tekering The Thunderfighter is such an awesome looking plane! What scale are you doing it in?
  18. One Scopedog arrived today, the other got stuck in Dubai....🥶
  19. Between the forward swept wings plus the head placement on top in fighter mode with the head laser/fin sticking out and the guns on a hinge like a mission pack, it kind of reminds me of a VF-31. Not totally sold on this line yet but looking forward to seeing the reviews after they're released.
  20. Big s

    Hi-Metal R

    Yeah, Macross is hot right now and especially the non og stuff after they got added to Hulu. But for some reason they’re pumping out Votoms like crazy. Don’t get me wrong, I love Votoms, but it doesn’t have the worldwide popularity that Macross has.
  21. That's an impressive repository of interesting material!!! Thanks Chavakaiser!!!
  22. M'Kyuun

    Hi-Metal R

    I'm not as crazy about the Kai as other VF-19 variants either, mostly due to the red and yellow color scheme. The face is an odd design choice, but I can live with it. Back when Yamato released all their VF-19 toy, I went in on the blue and yellow Blazer. I would've preferred the blue and white one, but I don't remember why I didn't get it instead. Anyway, I passed on their Kai, although I thought, and still think, the mold was gorgeous. Fast forward to present, I went in on the HMR Kai as it just seemed like a good take, the smaller scale and lower price appealing, and my desire to own a decent modern toy of it greater than my old bias. No regrets; it's well done, looks beautiful across modes, is easy to handle, and it scratches the itch to own the hero valk from M7. I hope they eventually give us a proper VF-17 and not a downscaled version of their craptastic 1/60 VF-171 retool. Honestly, in my limited experience, the HMR line is so well executed, I have to wonder why the offerings in the line are so few and the variety of valk designs so sparse. They should be milking it for all it's worth, cranking out as many designs as possible with all the recolors and variants thereof for max profitability while giving the fans maximum Macross mecha love for their collections.
  23. Neat. Some interesting options there
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