pengbuzz

16 hours ago, Thom said:

@pengbuzz that Street Hawk cycle is looking great! As to the wheel, is there any way to make a resin copy of one of the other wheels? Or, if not that, buying another toy with similar wheels and just taking all you need from that one.

No, I have no casting materials. I still have more work to do on the wheels; this is just "first colors" to see how it would look. I'd rather not bu anything else when the work I'm doing is just incomplete.

I wish they would sell Blazing Sword/ Ten Kings word separately; I could use

3 hours ago, nightmareB4macross said:

Wish I had the wheel for you. Why not just scratch build it?

Thanks for heads up on the mechanisms for the vertical stabilizers. I was just wrapping that up today. Installing the hinges tomorrow.

No problem!

And the reason I don't scratch build it: my hands don't work so well anymore. It's too small for me to make now.

My apologies; I didn't mean to derail your build here, NB4M! Really looking forward to where you take this one!!:)

10 hours ago, nightmareB4macross said:

You guys are killing out here with all these amazing builds.

The PlaMax VF-1J Battroid kit looks really good.

Here’s the progress thus far on my old school retake 1/55.  

Looking really nice so far!! One word of caution on those ailerons though: I tried doing my own years ago, and they kept interfering with one another when I tried folding them! O.o Keep that in mind; you may need a sliding joint kind of like the ones the Yammies/ Arcadias have for theirs.

------------------------

On another note: does anyone have a spare wheel from a 1/72 Tamiya air crew truck? It looks like this:

The one on the other side is missing, and nothing I have will fit. It's also too small for me to try to make on my own!

9 hours ago, Big s said:

If you wanted to fix it it could just take a quick bit of masking and some red paint, or you could do some battle damage since Hikaru gets shot down a lot

Misa and Minmei don't count.

1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Eh... I'm not sure there was necessarily a right thing for the franchise.

It was definitely the right thing for George Lucas, though.  He made a mint on that sale and by all reports is now the largest individual shareholder in the Walt Disney Corporation.

 

 

The setting isn't the problem... it's one of the problems, plural.

The main reason the setting is a problem is, as you said, "the heavy reliance on the whole Jedi thing".

Despite there being at most ten thousand active Force users at a time in a galaxy said to have a population of ONE HUNDRED QUADRILLION - that's one Force user per 100 billion people or one Force user for every thirteen planets with a population the size of Earth's - the Force users still somehow manage to end up at the center of every noteworthy event throughout the franchise.

The writers clearly have no sense of scale, but at the same time having a high midichlorian count seems to come with nasty side effects like Main Character Syndrome and being locked into a rigid, self-enforced, and nuance-less Good vs. Evil dualistic morality system.  The setting limits Force users to one of two diametrically opposed moral positions: the noble and selfless hero or the cackling Saturday morning cartoon villain.  They can't deviate from either extreme without charting a course towards the opposite one.  If a user of the Light Side shows self-interest or "negative" but normal emotions they're on the fast track towards baby-eating and if a Dark Side user decides to Pet The Dog that can only be them charting a course towards redemption.

If makes so many Force users flat characters, and flat characters are boring.  The kids'll give 'em a pass because they're here for the exciting action set pieces but anyone older'll start to get frustrated with the lack of any real character development or variety if there's more than one in play.  That lack of character development drives simplistic stories that get boring and repetitive quickly.  The Acolyte is going to get hit with this HARD because it's a Jedi-centric story even more than the usual.

Eh... in my opinion as an outsider/casual, the problem is not in the writing but in the concept being developed.

Obi-Wan Kenobi, The Book of Boba Fett, Ahsoka, Solo: a Star Wars Story, and now The Acolyte are all made with one clear focus: to pander to hardcore Star Wars fans.

Y'see, casual viewers do not give a damn about backstory dumps or what Minor Character A was doing before or after their limited role in the main movies.  That's material for the hardcore fans.  These were all stories that, from the perspective of general audiences, did not need to be told.  In many cases, telling those stories is counterproductive at best or simply a waste of time because the story has nothing to say and nothing meaningful to contribute to the setting.  They're doing it because they're desperate to find something the fans will accept after the underwhelming response to Solo, The Last Jedi, and The Rise of Skywalker.  It's the same reason The Mandalorian's getting a movie despite the story very definitely having ended at season three.

The writers can only do so much to make a series or movie watchable.  If their work is freighted with a list of Must Haves from the studio, the producers, the director, etc., then it's not always possible to make those additions to the narrative feel unforced or make the narrative flow smoothly.  Of course, if the direction is lacking or the actors are phoning it in then it doesn't matter how good or bad the script is.

That's one problem I've always had with "the force"; Yoda said "Life creates it, makes it grow", yet as far as I know, life is life. It's more than humans or even sentient beings; it's animals, plants, etc. that are neither good nor evil but just are.

So I guess my point is: why would the Force be dichotimized to that degree (writer's notwithstanding)?

My take on it would be that the "Force" amplifies what is already there, and that power corrupts. If you're an a-hole, you're going to become an even bigger one if you don't watch it. Of course there is good and evil, but while emotions can lead to bad things, love shouldn't be a path to the dark side.

Just my two cents on this for what it's worth, Seto. I may be oversimplifying things or missing certain issues, so please take what I say with a block of salt and a belt sander. :p

UPDATE:

A couple of pics for now (heading off to bed after some pain-induced insomnia) of Street Hawk in progress:

Ended up using a 1/12 Maisto Honda CRF450R as the basis for this build (closest I could find in this scale)-

Unfortunately, the forks broke on me, so I cobbled together a replacement set using an old radio antenna:

Converting the wheels from "wire" to "mag" was also a royal pain:

Stay tuned, more to come....

5 hours ago, Big s said:

They did stretch it out. The lense part is probably more of what they meant though. The artwork has always been a bit rubbery and the design team mostly just added a couple details and cleaned things up. As far as head height, that may just be the design team having a bit of artistic difference after a couple years rather than an intentional change like some of the panel lines on the fuselage or square hands for realism as opposed to a more substantial change like the VT-1D as opposed to the VF-1D. But I’m really no expert, just someone that tries to interpret ever changing line art from the age of rubber robots 

*imagines Battroid happily bouncing down the street*

On 3/23/2024 at 6:45 AM, Black Valkyrie said:

 

 

 

Wow.... nice graphics for PlayStation 3....

1 hour ago, Old_Nash_II said:

https://variety.com/2024/film/news/roger-corman-dead-producer-independent-b-movie-1235999591/

Thanks for iconic móveis like Battle Beyond Stars, Deathrace 2000 and the first (non Released in oficial market) Fantastic Four movie

😭

15 hours ago, MKT said:

https://twitter.com/nue_post/status/1788215905643798763

A lovely surprise to have climbing out of a battlesuit.

2 hours ago, Thom said:

Tron..?

Nope:

1 hour ago, MechTech said:

Awe, and here I thought you made some cool wall-mounted stand or something - that's cheating😁 - MT

Sorry MT; I'm not that good!

Meantime, my next project is underway; can anyone guess from the pic? -

On 5/7/2024 at 9:58 AM, Thom said:

I see you actually got it to fly. No stand!

10 hours ago, MechTech said:

Oooh, yeah, no stand! I was in such a hurry, but I knew something looked different! - MT

28 minutes ago, Thom said:

All eyes were on Airwolf!

See, I knew you guys couldn't stand it!!! (yuk yuk yuk)

*runs for dear life*

Seriously though, it's amazing what 5 minutes with Photoshop can do!

On 5/6/2024 at 10:04 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

I agree completely... but enough fans are into that kind of thing that it does demonstrably sell, though better practice would be to keep it to secondary media like novels and comics. 🤔

Two words: blue milk.

4 hours ago, MechTech said:

@pengbuzz AWESOME BUILD -AND- ORIGINAL stand to go with it!!! Bringing some nostalgia back to life! - MT

On 5/4/2024 at 9:11 PM, Thom said:

Great job @pengbuzz! Congrats on the finish. She looks read for a tussle with Red Wolf!

Thanks guys! It was a monster, but it got done at last!

BTW: can anyone find something missing in that pic?

On 5/2/2024 at 9:07 PM, Hikuro said:

I'm curious where he's gonna be taking this.....I assumed he was dead after his merging with CLU in Legacy wiping out his variant of the grid. I'm also wondering how he's been doing health wise having to battle cancer and covid at the exact same time and how he's recovered. 

It makes me wonder, with his being a user and all, if he knew things that would allow him to survive where programs would not on the grid?

1 hour ago, itsJess said:

Hello, I've been searching for quite some time for instructions for the old Robotech Defenders Zoltek kit. Anyone able to provide scans? 

I've been scouring the internet for the instructions for you; aside from ones that you can buy on eBay, I found a pic of some of them on worthpoint:

https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/robotech-defenders-zoltek-model-22173203

I also found a video of the same model kit with a few shots of the instructions @6:39 - 7:15 in the video:

I checked scalemates and other sites, but nothing really. I recall "Zoltek" was actually the Dougram suit from Fang of the Sun Dougram.

Sorry, that's the best I can do.

4 hours ago, MKT said:

Sentinel Prime is not pleased..

O.o watercolor?

Calling this one done:

Lion-O looks like someone peed in his CheeriO's...

18 hours ago, jvmacross said:

No Harmony Gold license?

It's too bad that they did not paint to match the colors of the Macross OP's elevator....

Yeah, it is a bit darker than what they did the deck in; probably a couple of sludge washes would help.

5 hours ago, sketchley said:

It's a common problem with machine translation.  The workaround is—in the translation site of your choice*: 1) translate individual sentences, and if that doesn't work, 2) break the sentences into sections (e.g. break at a comma [,]).

It's super annoying, but that's the way it is...

some things will never change....

2 hours ago, Big s said:

With a transporter, you just get your stuff and leave the cash on the counter.

just made me think that the transporter tech is probably gonna lead to a lot of theft. And the anti burglary systems would be absolutely horrific by scrambling the particles in an anti transporter field leaving you as a mess of meat and goo out in the back alley

More like just holding you in a pattern buffer tank until the authorities can arrive, then materialize you in the back of the police cruiser.