kajnrig

Yeah, GMC have never done me wrong either (and in this case, if something did go wrong it's almost assuredly on the UPS side of things), but what a way to start off the new year, eh?  Thanks for the reassurance; I'll give it another day, and if there's still no update, I'll contact GMC tomorrow.

Shoulda knocked on wood, I guess.

https://www.gundammodelcenter.com/MECHCORE-MASX-0033-EXS-EX-S

So I said last post about buying this kit, and it's supposed to be here today but hasn't updated tracking since the 4th. 

This is my first time having this happen to me, but I know some of you have horror stories to tell. Should I contact UPS, or the store? Should I be looking for a refund? a replacement? If the store fights back, who do I file a charge back claim with, PayPal or my CC?

Thanks, everyone.

The engineering on these kits are actually pretty awful, they just make up for it (arguably) with sheer numbers. Of parts, that is. I've been working on the Rodams 1/72 "GP03" and "GP04," and have their Dendrobium equivalent in the wings, and I honestly wonder sometimes if I made a mistake, because putting them together - just snapping them together off the runners, no painting yet, no wiring yet - is like 75% frustrated fixing of parts and alignment, bad molding, etc., and 25% appreciating how parts come together or mechanical interactions work. These kits may go all in on color separation, but when they can't get pegs to align properly with sockets, you almost gotta ask yourself what the point is.

...eh I mean I say all that and yet EVEN THEN you check my credit card account and you'll notice a purchase just a couple days ago for the Mechanicore Ex-S Gundam, so... frakkin' picking our own poison, I guess, eh?

18 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

More to the point: with all the rolling and whatnot that plane was doing in the footage, it would stall out and enter a flat spin (the thing that took down Maverick's plane in Top Gun).

With the engines in the B and D, I think they rectified that issue, or at least that's the impression I get from all the reading on it.. Yay/nay?

15 hours ago, anime52k8 said:

Well I just got Kaiyodo's Euro-II Heurtebise Revoltech and seriously, frakk Kaiyodo and frakk their Revoltech line. I was was expecting this thing to be kinda sub-par, but I was not expecting for multiple parts to break the first time I tried to put it together out of the box. ugh.

Oh hello, me with the transforming VF-1J from several years ago.

Yeah, Revoltech are either solid as a brick or complete shambles in my experience. It's why I've never seriously collected any of them. Sometimes they just get too ambitious and put too much trust in those poor ratcheting joints of theirs.

1 hour ago, moose said:

Is there a popular forum like macross world for gundam were maybe they want to make a mark up but they dont want to pay ebay and yahoo fees and we can buy directly from someone who ones one. 

Unfortunately I'm pretty sure most of the dedicated forums have died off. The closest thing now is r/Gunpla, though obviously it doesn't cater specifically to the figure collection side of things.

I'm seeing you guys share links with prices of ~$3k or more. What's the retail price of this thing again, somewhere around 100,000 JPY/$1000?

Seems like you had lots of fun posing it.  More so than the Altron, anyway.

Reminds me of

There were also rumors of manufacturing problems that plagued N31, ie 7900 XTX and XT, that resulted in an average miss of ~700MHz in core clock frequency. Coupled with similar rumors of low initial stock and AMD re-taping N31, but also the seen performances of GPUs hitting 2.5-3.0GHz, I'm going to take a guess that they had to discard a lot of the most faulty silicon and rely on the "binned" dies from the faulty lot for the launch batch of cards, which might be adding to bugs and glitches (the power spikes, inconsistent scaling, etc.).

That's just speculation, of course. Here's hoping it is mainly driver issues and can be improved in due time.

10 hours ago, Knight26 said:

*twiddles thumbs and whistles*  Not saying I know people on the program who have said things, but...  Not saying that I don't.

As long as you don't leak CLASSIFIED SCHEMATICS LIKE A PSYCHOTIC WAR THUNDER FAN we're good.

5 hours ago, technoblue said:

I think I’m going to wait to see what AMD’s board partners bring to the table for the 7000 series, but the reviews do seem hopeful. I just wish there was more representation in the sub $600US pricing block.

Yeah, I hope AMD brings price-performance value back to the mid- and lower-range sections. Their price drops during the tail end of this year have been great, and in line with how prices "should" behave in a regular market, but all the same it would be nice to have cards not priced sky-high for a market red hot with crypto demand to begin with. Nvidia are currently still milking those crypto prices, which I really hope backfires on them so they can get back to some semblance of reason.

Reviews for the RX 7900 XT and XTX are out. Generally, XTX performs slightly better than 4080, and XT performs slightly worse. In heavily raytraced games, XTX performs around 3090 Ti level.

There seem to be some odd game-specific quirks. Some games have even the XT outperforming the RTX 4090 (that's nine-zero). Others have the XTX scaling negatively with resolution. Some graphs had it at or below 6900 XT performance. Not sure if it's just a driver optimization issue or what, but odd outliers aside, drivers do seem alright overall.

AV1 codec seems good. Production capability still lags behind Nvidia, though seemingly less so than in the past.

All in all, seems like a decent launch.

8 hours ago, Chronocidal said:

Man, and I thought For Answer was a bad future.. I'm guessing that's a coronal ejection wrecking the planet?  I'm amazed there's anything left to fight over.  

You're not wrong, you're just not talking about the right planet.

From the Steam page:

ABOUT THIS GAME

Dynamic, Fast-Paced Mech Action

Based on the knowledge gained during joint development of their recent titles, Bandai Namco Entertainment and FromSoftware seek to deliver a new action game. By combining FromSoftware’s longstanding expertise in mech games and their signature robust gameplay, ARMORED CORE VI FIRES OF RUBICON will be a new action experience.

In ARMORED CORE VI FIRES OF RUBICON, players will assemble and pilot their own mech with 3D maneuverability to move freely through three dimensional fast-paced missions. Take on difficult challenges and overwhelm your enemies with dynamic movements that make full use of ranged and melee combat. Players can enjoy a variety of actions that can only be truly realized with mechs.

Story Overview

A mysterious new substance was discovered on the remote planet, Rubicon 3. As an energy source, this substance was expected to dramatically advance humanity’s technological and communications capabilities. Instead, this substance caused a catastrophe that engulfed the planet and the surrounding stars in flames and storms, forming a Burning Star System.

Almost half a century later, the same substance resurfaced on Rubicon 3, a planet now contaminated and sealed off by the catastrophe.

Extra-terrestrial corporations and resistance groups fight over control of the substance. The player infiltrates Rubicon as an independent mercenary and finds themself in a struggle over the substance with the corporations and other factions.

Development Team

Hidetaka Miyazaki will be involved as the Initial Game Director. Based on the initial development, Masaru Yamamura has taken over as Director.

On 12/6/2022 at 8:57 AM, Urashiman said:

post pictures of your build please

Ask and ye shall receive. Behold, in all its yellow stripy glory:

That tail sticker is already dangling by a thread after 5 days of sitting in the box. Yikes.

Unfortunately, I think that's it for now from me. This was supposed to be just a quick test fit for now so I could get a sense of how the kit builds before getting back to another project that's consuming my time - the 1/72 "Rodams RAS-40" GP04 (major pain in the butt, highly NOT recommended, best to do your LED wiring if you absolutely must have it). After seeing it wouldn't hold together on its own, I made what I now realize is the mistake of deciding to sticker the kit as I go. Now I'm gonna have to carefully remove said stickers and basically start the build over, for real this time.

Oh well. Lesson learned.  Into the box it goes for now.

I will say, with regards to the kit, I like the overall shapes of everything. I'm still a bit too used to the Hasegawa shape - a bit fuller overall - but the slimmer look isn't bad. I dare say, though, the tail fins are maybe too vertical and could stand to be canted a bit more.

Anyway, that's enough rambling from me. Hope everyone else is having fun with this kit.

On 12/3/2022 at 9:20 AM, Anasazi37 said:

I prefer paint and decals as well, but if you're stuck with stickers, this method might be worth considering. You could also use a small brush and just lightly apply the cleaner. That way you're not blasting the entire part with liquid. I've never tried this approach, but I can see how it might work decently well. Rubbing alcohol might work, too. Neither one should be used on a painted surface, though.

On 12/4/2022 at 12:19 AM, sketchley said:

That's similar to the technique used by Japanese modellers to put stickers on:

• using tweezers, touch the sticky side on water (to pick up a couple of small droplets)
• place the sticker in the right place
• roll out (and suck up) the excess water with a Q-tip, releasing the tweezers in the process when the sticker is sufficiently affixed.

Thanks very much for the advice. I didn't have any window cleaner on hand, but in looking more into it, I saw other people swearing by soapy water as well, which I did have on hand. And wouldn't you know it? It DOES work, pretty well too! But at that point, I'm basically working with waterslides again, to which I must throw my hands up once more and question why they didn't just go that route in the first place then. 

One thing I forgot to consider was panel lining; I was too busy thinking about a "straight build." I should've panel-lined first before applying the stickers. Some of the stickers take panel lines into account, but others don't. Bahgrumblegrumblegrumble. Oh well. It's my fault for not thinking things through thoroughly enough. It'll look fine. Definitely gonna take off those red stabilizer stickers, though. Ugh. Maybe just throw some red marker on that area; it certainly wouldn't look worse than they do. (Unless you have similarly remarkable advice on how to get stickers to fully wrap around complex surfaces...? A "decal solvent for stickers," perhaps? )

On 12/3/2022 at 1:03 PM, Bolt said:

Why doesn't Bandai just do a snap fit HG style VF ?? They own that sh+t !

Yeah, I feel like a new 1/100 VF-1 done in the same spirit and style as their recently-announced YF-19 and YF-29 kits would be really nice. Their 1/72 kit is snapfit, sure, but also all I hear about it from people who got their hands on it back in the day is how much of a mess it is. A parts-forming 1/100 kit would save so much design work for them and save so much frustration for us.

...actually, now that I think about it, that basically describes exactly the Wave 1/100 kits, and now I'm kicking myself for never getting any of those when they were still being made...

On 12/3/2022 at 3:41 PM, Thom said:

That video of the guy just slipping it all together may be a liiiiitle misleading.

That must've been it. Damn you, promotional videos! How dare you not reflect reality!

In other news, not sure if this was already mentioned or not, but the NTSB recently released an initial report on the Dallas airshow midair collision. I'll be honest, I didn't look too deeply into the initial incident, and seeing raw footage of it like you'll do here was a bit... jarring. Forewarned.

Yeah, definitely would recommend the old standby, paint and decals. Don't do like I do and trick yourself into thinking, "Oh, let's just try following the manual to a tee. They did such a good job on the molding and details and everything. There's NO WAY they would do that and then not pay the same attention to detail to the stickers."

The stickers suck. I'll leave you to guess how much time I've spent on a single step applying a grand total of four stickers.

46 minutes ago, Chronocidal said:

Yeah, I don't think they actually have any idea what their target market for these kits is.  Trying to mimic the easy builds of Bandai kits with stickers and color-molded parts, but then they require cement.   

The 1/20 kits at least had sheer size to run on. But these strike a really weird balance between the traditional engineering/design methods of Hasegawa and the brainlessly easy methods of Bandai that's... not bad per se, just a bit confusing.

But seriously, though, frakk those stickers. My advice: Avoid them if at all possible, otherwise cut them into component pieces that will be significantly easier to work with. They're thin and tear at the slightest provocation, the printing sucks and scrapes off at the slightest provocation, AND they're slightly magnetic and/or get a slight electric charge from peeling off the sticker sheet or SOMETHING because they'll bend toward the plastic once you get within an inch or so... Trying to lay them down neatly is the absolute worst.

So I've started putting together the cockpit, and... this is supposed to be a snapfit kit, right? Because it really doesn't feel like it. So far, the seat, pilot, instrument panel, and cockpit fuselage (two parts apiece) don't so much snap fit as precisely but loosely align.

Now, it's no problem for me to glue and cement things, but I was just under the impression that this is supposed to be snapfit.

EDIT:

Yeah, not sure where I got the impression it'd be snapfit, but I'm done with the nose cone now and it most definitely will require glue to hold things together. It was a hell of a time trying to hold it in my hand without it turning into a hand grenade. Masking tape, here we come.  

6 hours ago, Shawn said:

I assume this is where the Fast Packs will attach in future releases so they don't have to re-tool the piece 

 

Since it's based on the 1/20, that is indeed the case.

I'm too used to the Hasegawa battroid that this new one looks super awkward... Not that that's going to stop me from buying multiples.  I wonder if it's a static pose kit, though... And I like the sculpt of the pilot figure. Hopefully the final product matches that prototype.

You can't kill a pan, silly.

So what's Peripheral about? I'm slightly of similar opinion about 1899, though I'm only half an hour into the first episode and kept getting distracted by family during that time, so my opinion might change on it.

3 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

At this point, Heero Yuy needs to fly in with Wing Zero and just start wasting everything and everyone in sight (for the sake of the franchise).

Pah. Don't pretend that Heero Yuy and Gundam Wing don't indulge in the exact same type of wild, nonsensical plot swings.  It's all about that dRaAaAaAaAmAaAaAa!!! *jazz fingers*

At this point I'm just glad to finally get a release date--well, year, anyway.

So with this announcement, that leaves

A, J, L, N, P, Q, X, Y, Z

still left to go. 9 packs, probably 4-5 releases left. Pretty impressive that they've remained so dedicated to this line, honestly. It'll surely make for one heck of a display piece to have all of these laid out together.