LePoseur

While this is slightly questionable as far as truthfulness goes, I seriously doubt it's a scam. Those valks are set to hit stores this week and the auction doesn't end until four days from now... leaving the seller plenty of time to recieve his shipment and get them mailed out on time. The only problem I have is with the "in hand" comment, which is, as of this moment, most likely false reguardless of it's inability to affect the shipping time of the completed auction. Labeled pre-order would be more in line.

Hey, don't go injecting realism into my 60 foot mecha fantasies! My imaginary mecha can be just as realisticly nimble as yours are realisticly lumbering.

This is mostly hearsay from back in the day, but under the legal cloud that ensued, I doubt we'll ever get a real answer. As far I know, when Battletech was originally made and went to press the creators didn't hold any rights to the designs they used. Maybe originally thinking, "Who's gonna notice us?" or the Tommy Yune-like, "Foreign copyrights don't apply to us!" Once it became apparent that Battletech was going to reach the size where it couldn't blatently flaunt the law (ie the game gets popular + Harmony Gold releases Robotech on TV) they scrambled to aquire the rights, which led to some (rumored) deal with Revel. Remember, this was back in the days when, in all honesty, Japanese animation was so far underground that most people would have really not noticed the designs were stolen. In a side note, the origianl battletech book I had obviously had no artist on the team (at least not one worth their salt) as the mechs were always drawn in their line-art pose (be it mirrored or however slightly adjusted). Infact, although I posses the book no longer, I remember a "picture" of a swamp battle between a line-art Macross mecha and some elementy school kid's robot arm. Although I played it, I've always looked down on battletech for this. I mean, not so much for stealing the designs, but, if any of them were anime fans (and someone would have had to have been to get the line-art) why did they end up turning otherwise nimble mecha into slow-ass lumbering mechs? And who was the idiot that couldn't line up game stat weapons with the line art? Questions, questions...

Well.... Since, like Weasledancer I already made my own... and I'll still buy this one for the improvements... what to do, what to do? Looks like I'll have to pick up another Max if I can find one on sale and make a 1S for him... ...or go the easy route and drop a recast TV Hikaru pilot from the upcoming 1J and make a TV 1S. hmm... I will have to add another set of fast packs to the ones I preordered though... Sucks about the panel lines and the hands... but they could make me happier by casting Hikaru in the rubbery material that they used for the Low-vis. That would at least be something... THen again, don't really know how that stuff will age either...

1/72: 5 1/60: 18 1/48: 6

Other Anime MIA? I'll be sad to see it go, but understand if its omission was intentional. Glad the forums are back though. Shawn, have I told you recently that you're the best?