kajnrig

Hey, just repeating that slightly off-topic question again in case anyone has the answer: I'm working on the 1/72 Hasegawa VF-0 battroid kit and may have bent the front nose spike/boom (pitot tube?). When the VF-0 transforms to battroid mode on the Yamcadia toys, does that spike/boom/tube fold backwards? And if so, does it sit flush with the underbelly of the forward fuselage (as I currently have it), or does it jut out at an angle pointing "down" from the fuselage/"back" towards the wings and backpack (as I assume it should be)? Thanks again.

*sees illustration* Oh Macross, why are you so Japan? (Loving the work. Wish I could get one of these. Keep it up.)

Still showing as on sale when I clicked, too.

Congrats to Lancelot on the nice job. I've got that same Revell kit, which is actually a re-issue of the old Monogram kit from the 70s/80s, hence the raised panel lines. Bad parts fit, raised panels, nasty seam lines, the works. (Although mine doesn't have the winglets... Well, it IS the D variant, so perhaps that explains it.) I've had it sitting on my desk unfinished for years now because I just do not look forward to all the work that has to go into it. Given its age, all the more congratulations on such a nice job. EDIT: Never mind about 1/72 Tamiya Tomcats, I was thinking of Fine Molds.

Yeah, I just glanced at it briefly and saw that 10,440 JPY off. I tend to ballpark 100 JPY = 1 USD.

Hey guys, kind of an off-topic question, but: I'm working on the 1/72 Hasegawa VF-0 battroid kit and may have bent the front nose spike/boom (pitot tube?). When the VF-0 transforms to battroid mode on the Yamcadia toys, does that spike/boom/tube fold backwards? And if so, does it sit flush with the underbelly of the forward fuselage (as I currently have it), or does it jut out at an angle (as I assume it should be)? Thanks!

Arcadia VF-0A now on sale for about $100 off. Good time to hop on that if you want it.

Wow, that AR really puts things into perspective... Why not scale it down a bit to be more wieldy? Or is that sort of the point?

No Macross kits/toys, FYI. Forewarned. Still, they have some things I was gonna get anyway.

Oh, I'd forgotten about that, despite owning two of them. (No FAST packs, though, sadly.) Yes, something like that scaled up and perhaps with slightly better articulation I'd gladly pay a pretty penny for. Otherwise, I'd love to see Kawamori revisit the 19 the same way he revisited the VF-1 in the VF-25. Great review. I've recently started watching your reviews on Youtube, surprise surprsie to see you frequenting this forum. Keep up the work.

Any chance of seeing the 19 in fixed-mode toy/kit form? Because from that picture, neither of them look that appealing. The proportions in battroid mode are all out of whack... (An inherent flaw of the design, perhaps, but still...)

Lol, yeah, I had my Hasegawa Super VF-25/Bandai 1/100 Barbatos preorder fulfilled just a couple hours before the sale started. A shame, but that Barbatos wouldn't have been available when the sale started. It sold out like hotcakes.

I don't understand the lack of enthusiasm. It's an additional 5-17% off of already-discounted items, no? Are you all upset simply because the discount isn't greater? Also, Black Friday isn't a big thing in Japan, or much of the world for that matter. English-language company though this may be, it's still part of a national culture that doesn't indulge in absurd commercialism quite as fervently or voraciously as America does. C'mon.

Black Friday sale is now live. Site won't load, must be overloaded with traffic. EDIT: Seems fine now.

Payment request here, too, at the same time as the 1/100 Gundam Barbatos.

Doesn't he have a relationship with one of the Bridge Bunnies the same way his expy (forget his name) does in Frontier?

Doesn't Macross play fast and loose with canon anyway? Especially with regards to the design of the SDF-1, and which version appears in which sequel? So any retconning isn't really retconning because everything is sort of retconning everything else anyway. Also, Wave Motion Gun =/= Macross Cannon how?

Bold for emphasis, and basically everything there was a good point. Regarding the hand controls, those never go explained I don't think, and I've mixed and matched the ideas that they were pressure-sensitive controls to operate the manipulators or controls to interface with the computer system. Probably a mixture of both, or neither. I said this wasn't something worth thinking too much about, and yet here I am posting the most about it.

I do seem to remember those books being where I saw the brain-helmet idea used, so you might be right. Then again, the 21/27 seemed to imply solely piloting by thought (with the controls for redundancy), so it doesn't completely rule out the idea... But blah, I'm inclined to agree. It makes the pilots seem cooler, at any rate. In G Gundam they use a master-slave system with 1:1 input. But then you get Shining Finger chi blasts and then you just sort of scratch your head and say to yourself, "Sure, why not." Then you go to the UC series thinking that surely they must be more realistic, but there you see Psycho Frames and Newtypes and even Moonlight Butterflies, and Wing has angels and demons and dragon fangs, and X has gimmicky moon microwaves, and finally you just throw up your hands and make peace with it all. But anyway.

The VF-1 controls, if I remember correctly, are a combination of brainwave sensors, traditional stick/pedal combos, that silly by our standards three-mode toggle levers, and eye-tracking software (the first and last of these being implemented by the helmet). It's not so much "unrealistic" as "unexplained." And as someone famous said, sufficiently advanced tech is indistinguishable from magic... or something like that. Move onto Frontier, and it appears there's now a bit of a master-slave system going on, with the VF-25 mimicking the physical movements of the pilot. A similar mechanism is detailed in the anime Full Metal Panic, where those mecha (called Arm Slaves, or "Armored Mobile Master-Slave System") are controlled by a similar system: the pilot can individually configure the scaling of master-to-slave movement. A one-degree bend of the pilot's arm can translate to 30, 60, 90, etc. degrees of corresponding bend in the Arm Slave's arm. This allows for a wide variety of movement without needing a lot of space. But wmkjr's link is also relevant. It's not that Japanese mecha are any less realistic, but rather that they just have and accept a wider diversity and a longer history.

A quick research on "tampography" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pad_printing tl;dr : You paint onto a flat 2D stencil, pick up that paint using a malleable pad, then press that pad onto a 3D surface, thus applying the 2D image onto a 3D surface. Decals are, obviously, different.

Is that what "tampo" means? I've seen it used a couple times around here in regards to toys, but I'm from a modeler background and the term doesn't see much use there.

Maybe it's just me, but I never could tell what color the 0A was in the final episode (or most of the OAV, actually). Sometimes it's bluish, other times it's the same gray-blue as the Yamarcadia release, white like the 0S, etc. I thought it might even be unpainted at one point. The enemy planes get more distinct (and consistent) coloring. But blah. Long story short, traditional animation lets you keep track of a pitched transforming make-believe dogfight better than CGI does. Back to the toys. Actually, while I'm here, what are the new models/variants that were revealed post-Frontier the show? By show's end all I knew of was the mainstay VF-25, VF-27, and the VF-171EX, as well as a supposed YF-25 Prophecy prototype. Now you guys are throwing around names like Durandal and YF-30 and ACTIVE and Tornado... Clearly I haven't been keeping up very much/well.

A lot of that, I imagine, has to do with the transition from traditional to CG animation. The dogfighting in M+ is still the pinnacle of the series, where they have the same sort of high-flying, undercranked acrobatics, but everything contrasts more sharply against everything else, so it's easier to understand what's going on. The fact that the screen isn't so densely-packed with colors and particle/transparency effects doesn't hurt, either. The constant blue filter in Zero made the VF-0s harder to pick out against the backdrop of sky, water, and variably transparent clouds. If it had been animated traditionally, the VF-0 itself would have likely been stark white (with blue shadows and a brown/gray outline) against a dark blue ocean and light blue sky (creating a clear horizon line), and clouds of white and gray, and any transparency is static. The same thing persists into Frontier, even with its more cartoony look. Sometimes you just can't see what's going on because everything is reflecting off of everything else. Yeah it looks pretty, but not necessarily more visually interesting. Ironically.

Wasn't the 19 ADVANCE specifically designed to resemble the YF-19 as much as possible? If so, it wouldn't be at all surprising that they reused the same mold. It's the exact same frame. That being said, it's kind of impossible to do a perfectly anime accurate, transforming YF-19 anyway, not without parts-swapping to the point of redundancy, anyway. You would require two completely different pairs of legs alone.