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Taking cues from Bandai's DX

@Papa RatLooks like there's an IPMS event in Albany, Oregon in September. Just finished my Hikaru Special and bringing it to an IPMS show in Fremont CA this Sat. Also if anybody didn't know, Macross is the theme for this year's SCGMC. I also got a Monster on the bench @Cheese3, but first I gotta wrap up my Kakizaki Special!

A VF-25 can get through the *front* gate, if folded up with the fins down. The rear landing strip is too narrow, even if the opening is as wide as the front one. To make both ends work, I need to go up to 150% of the modeled size, and at that point, I feel like I might as well make the nice bridge from the line art fit as well, and go up to 200%. And 40 fighters is just the maximum I think is feasible at this size, which is nice because it makes the size of Operation Stargazer feasible. Guantanamo, being scaled up similarly, will have other benefits over the Gefion - you can launch a König Monster out of the front maw; and the Gefion has no place to launch space-type Ghosts without landing gear out of, while the Guantanamo has plenty. Hmm. I would like to know what the other instances are if you can point me in a rough direction. Guantanamos are in the background everywhere, but they're pretty much always the "Maiduru" model. And if you're talking about Macross 7 or Macross Plus, I'm willing to call "animation error" or "model superseded" on those. It's still never plot relevant what size the ship is, though. Scaling this ship up by the same factor as the Northampton does not meaningfully change what we know about it. The model is definitely larger than the official size says - there are similar issues with hangar bay opening widths as there are for Gefion, with wings clipping the sides of the walls at "official" scale. Not to mention the ginormous size of the ship from its establishing shot. This is our first overall shot of the Elysion. Note the fighters on the deck. Since we know their size, we can estimate fairly accurately the length of the Aether. It has to be pretty substantial. I didn't do the math myself, someone on reddit did a long time ago, but it worked out to around 900 meters give or take. This was supported by this shot, which has the fighters in the same parked configuration. The flight deck here is somewhere around 200 meters wide at the widest point. In episode 12, we have this interior hangar shot, showing fighters arranged in a configuration that's around 60 meters wide. There are 15 fighters shown in this sequence (five on the right, as there's a gap; four in the middle, and the six you can see on the left), we don't know how far the line extends backwards. At the official size of the ship, the hull is not wide enough for this below decks - if Elysion is 900 meters overall, then Aether's hull is around 40 meters wide at best. If the ship is the size indicated by the first two shots, then there's enough space for this to be only half the complement. So, the first half of the show has a bunch of this stuff where it's obvious that this is not a small vessel... and then the script sends everyone off so that only Delta is on hand most of the time. Also, at the "official" size, only *one* of the ten obvious flight deck access points for VFs are actually large enough for a VF-31 - the centerline tunnel from under the upper deck. The side tunnels are too narrow and the wings will clip; and both the four deck edge elevators and the three elevators up to the upper deck are too small. Also, forget the "tour bus" shuttle, it won't fit anywhere. Could the role the script gives to the Elysion have been handed to a smaller ship? Very likely. Was the Elysion intended to be small? No. There's enough evidence to the contrary in the first half of the show to put paid to that idea. (I don't know when the Burj Kalifa statement was made, but most of the evidence prior to the halfway point of the show suggests the larger size. I think there's an outlier in the form of the space episode, it's almost five in the morning and I'm not going digging). Yeah. As I said, the New Macross class ships are some of the ones that don't really benefit from being scaled up other than keeping the animations the same. (Edit: Though.... the Diamond Force launch sequence suggests the bridge block of the Battle 7 is a fair bit larger than the overall views of the ship supports, if the ship is 1600 meters overall. The hatches and launch arms for that sequence are not small, and the best attempt I've seen at replicating the Battle 7 in 3D, has those hatches at around half the required size. It is not an official model so it won't count for anything, though. And swapping the base design to the Battle 25 version, which has a much bigger bridge block to begin with, and trading the turrets for launch bays? That would solve it even at the 1-mile scale). The opening sequence goes "Miria is racing, Max and new daughter are playing pool in a building overlooking the race, Max gets an alert on his watch, Milia gets one in her helmet, leaves the race to join Max on the highway, cut to Max and Milia in their fighters with the daughter waving at them from the control booth, and the fighters pulling out of the Megaroad's side pod." My inference was that this was all on the ship, but since the ship is over a terrestrial planet, maybe they took a shuttle up so they could scramble their fighters....? Meh. Also, given that the Chronicle changed the number of colonists aboard the Megaroad from 80,000 to 25,000 according to Macross Mecha Manual, I'll withdraw my other reason for changing the size of it (namely, the sheer amount of space the colonists' living quarters will take up. Half the population of the original Macross in a volume that is already *ginormously* bigger is much more plausible.) The TV macross has next to nothing in common with the DYRL macross except for the transformation sequence itself, none of the components themselves are shared. If that's a rebuild, they tore her down to atoms and reconstituted them... But since DYRL macross never interacts with anything that my scale change has affected, it can stay at its official size.

GQuuuuuuX's tenth episode is probably the best episode to date, and certainly does the most to actually move the needle on the show's story. It finally gets the main characters involved in the actual plot, brings the Zeon civil war arc into the foreground, and features the first actual battle of any consequential length in the series thus far. That said, even with all that it's still not very good. The writers are clearly, clearly rushing to tie up as many plot threads as they can as fast as they can. It definitely seems like this series is ending in the next two or so episodes. There is so much happening here, and none of it is really delivered as well as it could and indeed should have been. They could've done this justice with another 13-26 episodes. As it is, what's left on the table in terms of unexplored character arcs and subplots is vastly more interesting than a lot of what's going on in the main story. Particularly Challia Bull's trip to Jupiter, which he implies broke him, sent him to the depths of utter despair, and then made him the man he is. There's like, three or four episodes worth of stuff going on here all packed as densely as possible. As a result, none of it feels as impactful or meaningful as it should.

Agreed.

6/13.

GI Joe Classified Retro Dr. Mindbender.

Brandon Routh is back

Also on the table

Thanks for the info, Mike. SDCC is still over a month away, and with all the reviewer reveals, I would have thought they'd do the official SS86 Megs reveal sooner rather than later, if for no other reason, to take advantage of the momentum. Moreover, I'd guess they'd have something bigger to show off at the Con. Anyway, I wish they would project these things to allay conjecture and help fans to plan for PO days. I got Venom, Micronus Prime, and Alpha Trion through Hasbro Pulse (gotta make that Premium fee pay for itself). I was at the doctor's office trying to do it by phone and I was having a heck of a time trying to use Paypal, my usual payment method. I ended up just using my card and finally got the order to go through. I fully expected Venom or AT to be sold out quickly, but having just checked the site, all three of the figs I POed this morning are still available. Had I known that that would be the case, I would've waited until I got home, but you never know with these things. Anyway, when they finally put SS86 Megatron up for PO, I fully expect it to sell out very quickly, so I'm hoping it falls on a day when I have nothing scheduled. Digits crossed.

I get the feeling that this show may end up only the 12 episodes. Things seem a bit rushed in the last couple episodes.

Definitely an oddball, wonder if they’ll do the recolor as well looks like the preorder is up tomorrow at the p Bandai USA store

I think I’d put the acolyte at the bottom then obi then boba and Ahsoka as a tie then it gets tough for me because Andor had a flawed start but got better then the second season felt a bit jumbled, Skeleton crew was kinda diminished by its ending and Mando got trashy in its last season, but those three I think overall were the best of the starwars shows.

What it sounds like? They weren't happy with the tab being inserted into a crevice that was painted black, because it could remove the black paint... So they just added two more gaping holes, with nothing to hide them. Makes me really glad I didn't care about this release.

My read of your earlier images is that the Gefion's actually about the right size. The game itself, of course, plays fast and loose with scale on all large objects for the same of gameplay and visual appeal as noted previously, but even corrected for scale you showed that the Gefion's scale in-game is not THAT far off. A VF-25 can still get through the gate. It doesn't need to be big enough to hold 40 fighters either, it's meant to be an extremely small ship that can only hold a couple fighters, so IMO it's pretty darn close as it is. Making it big and capacious enough to rival a Guantanamo for capacity with even more firepower both defeats its purpose in the story and the purpose of the Guantanamo. Consider that Macross Frontier is not the only series to show the Guantanamo-class launching fighters. It's much easier to assume that the texture used on the low-detail model for distance shots is simply inaccurate, or that the larger hangar gates have been closed with an armored door similar to what we briefly see in Macross Delta. Eh... it does and it doesn't. Macross Chronicle doesn't give an exact number, but multiple sources including Chronicle say it's roughly the same size as the Northampton-class stealth frigate, and/or that it's a derivative of the Northampton-class stealth frigate. The Macross Elysion-type is probably the one ship in Macross where I am not happy with the official size. It feels like it was made to be MUCH smaller than it allegedly is. Especially since its fighter complement, in total, is only like 20 planes despite having two carriers attached to it. It feels like it was made to be the same size as the Macross Quarter officially is, not double that. Looking back at it, I don't think they ever really present the Acshio district as being far away from everything. It's abandoned because it's rundown as all get-out, but anytime Mylene has to get there she gets there within just a few minutes and it's basically walking distance from the parks that Basara's constantly performing in. Half the time, people don't even bother to drive and just walk there which makes sense given that at one point IIRC we see Mylene has to drive her car down a staircase to get there. It's basically just the Jeniuses who seem to take cars into that area. I don't think that racetrack is actually meant to be inside a Megaroad-class ship. Look at the sky in the OP, the Megaroad-class didn't have a seamless holographic skybox like the New Macross-class does and there's no sign of the structural members that you should be able to see from the ground. I think that's just meant to be a jump cut to elsewhere (and elsewhen?). That's incorrect on several levels. Officially, Macross runs on broad strokes continuity and there is no "canon". No one version of any given story is "true". The creators play Multiple Choice Past whenever they do a new series leading to some interesting mixing and matching, most blatantly in Macross Delta which devoted the better part of an episode to a history lesson that freely mixed bits from the TV and movie versions of previous titles. The official setting treats both versions as equally valid, and generally regards the DYRL? designs as postwar improvements to the TV series designs. The DYRL? VF-1 being a later production block of VF-1, the DYRL? Macross being a post-war repair/remodel of the ship and the design of the later mass production type using parts diverted from shipyards, etc. If you look in Ernest Johnson's office in Macross Delta, he's a got a TV Macross model for decoration, so it clearly does exist.

I got that same email and thought it was funny how they highlighted the "may now contact customer support to request shipment" part. It's hard to read on my phone and I thought it was some spoiler they were trying to hide.

That's what I thought. I actually did try to use a brown wash after the flat coat and it was messy. I had to rub it off rather well to remove what happened. I don't know any other way to do something like that. As you can see her standing next to the bottle of Tamiya cement, she's real tiny, like not even 6 inches tall. I painted her eyes and gold jewelry using optivisors and I added the glints of light in her eyes with a toothpick at the end. I can't really notice any such flaws on model kits until I get up real close to take photos. Then I notice the specks of dust, imperfections on paint lines, etc. Just wash the crap out of the resin with degreasing detergent. Soak the parts for days. Scrub with a toothbrush and pumice powder if there aren't delicate parts that can break (like strands of hair and such). Lately I've begun giving the parts a temporary soak in lacquer thinner too as I am sick of paint lifting off. It happened a few times with this Nadia figure I've finished. Like everything seems to be going well and then I lift up masking and it yanks the primer and paint off, down to the bare resin. Ever seen what happens to Thunder at the end of Big Trouble in Little China? I feel like that when it happens.

So far, the only series I did not like was Acolyte with Boba as a close second. I really found myself enjoying Mando, Ahsoka, Skelton Crew and Obi-Wan, in that order. Ahsoka left off at a good cliffhanger an I have good hopes that they'll stick season two as well.

A little of George Reeves in the face there.

You could use Mandarake when it's available again! Just mark it to get notified! https://order.mandarake.co.jp/order/detailPage/item?itemCode=1299652743&ref=list&keyword=dx chogokin macross&lang=en

Love the paint scheme. One of my favorites.

I would pull the "animation error" card on the "Maizuru" model instead of the "Maiduru" model, yeah. We never see it very often (I can only remember the scene from Frontier 1, and Itsuwari no Utahime), whereas the Maiduru model shows up all the time. But here's the thing. The one thing I actually care about really is "make the Gefion work as a carrier without changing its model". It is a very very nice model, it is just too small. But it doesn't need to be *four times* the size to work - the hangar pods are wide and tall enough to work at just *twice* the size, if I throw out the "battroid walks in the back door" screenshot as an animation error. There's enough clearance - barely - to move fighters from the pods into the hull; and the hull would have enough volume to hold around 40 fighters. And now that we have a modern carrier version of the Northampton, we toss out the Stargazer animation, and declare "Stargazer was a Gefion-type all along". The script, aside from the VFX callouts, will work. From there, let's look at what scaling each ship up by the same factor does for us: Starting with the Maiduru model, the largest hangar access ports will now be large enough to squeeze a VF through, and the small ones are big enough for a Ghost. We're tossing the Maizuru model as an animation error, it is not plot relevant that the Guantanamo-class is a specific size beyond it being able to launch fighters. The Stealth Cruiser does not have a stated size in the first place, our estimates are based on the size of the Northamptons it shares the scene with anyway. Scaling it up to twice the size just means it's 2 x unknown. The Quarter, I've complained about for years and years is too small to do what we see it doing in the show. The ARMD-L is too thin for a hangar, the elevators on the model are too small for the fighters, and at one point we see it flying in formation with *dozens* of SMS VF-25As who which had to come from somewhere, and there is no room inside that ship for them. Scaling it up to twice the size solves nearly everything. I would not bet 100% on the hangar capacity, but it's a lot less implausible at least. The Elysion, as mentioned a few times already, looks like it was modeled by a VFX artist at one size, and then some time after episode 2 aired, someone outside the VFX department declared it was the height of Burj Kalifa and then the model was resized without any further work being done, resulting in a bunch of weirdness. Like the VF-31 not being able to fit through the hangar access ports between the main flight deck and the upper flight deck. Scaling it up to twice its "canon" size would basically restore it to where it was originally, and allow VFs to use the facilities, as it were. The Uraga... doesn't need a resize, that one was well thought through at its canon size, and it's almost a shame to change it. If I can't write off the size discrepancy as an animation error, well at least it now has an easier time handling large battroids like Queadluun-Rau/Rhea, or the VB-6 König Monster. The New Macross Class... also doesn't need a resize, other than for matching the animation. But at least scaling them up will also scale the cities up, and give four times more area and eight times the volume to play around with. And if we play a little with the "new design iterations supersede old versions of the same design", then City 7 is now Island-One sized, but double the canon, which means that scenes like Basara living in a slum miles from the city are more plausible, because there are actual miles to drive! If we want to go even further and bring up ships which never share a scene with any of the above? DYRL Macross would benefit greatly from being twice the size because there'd be room for a cityscape inside the ship, and I think I measured at one point that the ARMDs at their canon size would have trouble with the launch scene from the opening sequence because the ports are too small. I'll have to revisit that sometime. I don't remember if the DYRL Macross ever punched anything in the face that would need to be rescaled, but I'm willing to call "animation error" to avoid this becoming a problem. Megaroad-01 at double the size might actually have room for that racetrack from the M3 intro. TV Macross would not work, though, because Daedalus and Prometheus are already ridiculously large for surface ships. But TV Macross is technically not canon anyway because it was superseded by the DYRL version. Macross The First Macross would not work either, for the same reason as above. Edit: Illustration of what 2x size will do for certain ships Above: the Macross Chronicle sizes for everything. Notice the ludicrous size of VB-6 relative to the Quarter, and how the VF-25 does not fit the hangar pod on Gefion. VB-6 and VF-25 scaled down to 50%, which is the same as scaling up the ships to 200% except I don't have to move them around to maintain the formation. Notice how the VB-6 fits the elevator now (it completely fits if you fold the wingtips up), and how the VF-25 will fit on the landing side of the ship too.

Is there a way to order this from the US?