HardlyNever

3 hours ago, TrickyCustomer said:

When my sv262 "finally arrives" (NY didn't process it and ship it for a whole week for starters!) i will see what the transformation difficulty is like. I have very little experience in transforming valks, only three to be precise. I will be able to say as a novice "transformer" just how tough it really is compared to the vf-31a i am eagerly awaiting.

I just got mine yesterday, pretty similar experience (I've only done 4-5 different valk types).  This one is definitely tough, it honestly took me almost an hour to go from fighter to gerwalk.  Had to look at several videos, haven't even done battroid yet.  The good news is, I think you can skip the hardest part of gerwalk (connecting two pegs into a bracket) if you only want to go to battroid.

The vf-31 looks significantly easier, but I won't get to try that until the Arad version is out.

26 minutes ago, SuperSenpai said:

I can't get past that... appendage.  

That's what she said? (couldn't resist)

It does seem odd they aren't taking advantage of the removable nose cone, though.

7 hours ago, Slave IV said:

Do you own a 3D printer? If not, that's part of the problem. We need to support the things we want to succeed. 

As for the hard point issue...non existent in any of my Arcadia Valks. They all work fine with no stress marks. 

Damn... I didn't know I was the one holding this whole thing back...  Let me go buy 5 and kickstart this whole thing so we can all be 3D printing this stuff next year... Get serious, man (but I am considering buying a 3D printer for our workplace).  Maybe I'll buy an oculus rift, and a vive while I'm at it, because me not buying that is definitely holding back VR. 

Back to the hardpoints, is this simply a bad QC issue?  Not to beat a dead horse, but me and 3-4 other people had part of their backpack break on the super Focker release, and no one was calling the mold dead then, it was just bad luck.  This looks to be a similar situation to my eye, only this is getting more attention because the people speaking up are being more vocal about it.

Right, I guess what I'm saying is, we were "supposed" to be at this point already, if you were to believe some of the proponents of 3D printing.  It was supposed to be super cheap, super accessible, and nearly ubiquitous at this point.  I know we can (and in some cases do) make replacement parts, but the cost is still pretty high, and thus limited either to a really common problem (like the v2 shoulder), or someone who already has access to the rather expensive tech.

There really isn't an answer, I guess we just have to lump it in with flying cars and jetpacks.  It just seems like 3D printing was going to become more accessible a lot faster, but I guess not.

25 minutes ago, Sanity is Optional said:

3D printing will never surpass injection-molding when it comes to cost at production volumes.

What 3D printing will do is let you create parts which are more complex, or create parts in smaller batches without forking out hundreds of thousands of dollars in up-front mold costs.

3D printing has a higher cost per unit, due to the increased complexity of the manufacturing machinery and longer time to produce. Injection molding has a staggering up-front cost in the molds, but the actual process is quite simple and quick.

To give you an idea of the up-front costs, I quoted out injection molding 3 relatively simple parts (largest was under 18"x6"x6") as part of my job, the mold costs were $57,000. I imagine the cost of a set of molds for a 1/60 Valkyrie are hundreds of thousands.

[edit] The true place of 3D printing is in prototyping the parts which will later be injection molded. Tossing $57k of molds isn't something anyone wants to do, so you 3D print the parts and check fit and function, doing your iterative design with 3D prints before finalizing the design and buying molds.

Yeah, that's what I figured, 3D printing will probably never realistically match mass producing from molds once you hit a certain production number.  Thanks for the insight.  Kinda shows that the "experts" that predicted we'd be 3D printing everything we own by now didn't really know what they were talking about.

That said, I'm still surprised we can't 3d print our own replacement hard points or even wings.  I guess the v2 shoulder breaking was such a common occurrence that it was worth someone going through the trouble and scuplting(?) one (digitally, ofc).  I'm a bit surprised no one has 3D scanned all the major parts of the v2 by now, though. 

Not to derail the thread too much, but since we're on the subject of rising cost: wasn't 3D printing supposed to "save" us from all this?  Shouldn't this hobby, as we know it, be radically different?  Shouldn't we be buying blueprints/designs and 3D printing and assembling all this stuff ourselves by now?  What happened?

I know there are people 3D printing home-made kits and designs, but those tend to be very high in cost.  It's also nice to have 3D printing to replace broken parts here and there (like v2 shoulders), but we were supposed to be 3D printing cars by now (by some estimates).  3D printing has been the "hot new thing" for 15-20 years now, and it still hasn't radically changed what should have been one of the very first industries it killed (plastic toy manufacturing).

It seems like it still can't keep up with the economy of scale of mass producing specific molds and having (relatively) cheap labor put everything together.  Is there something else going on?

Also, to keep it a little more on topic, why can't we just 3d print replacement hard points?  Or replacement wings even?  It was supposed to be so cheap and easy by now.

7 minutes ago, locidm said:

I guess I haven't thought about it this way before, so do the Zentradi just keep manufacturing new soldiers? They obviously don't reproduce naturally. If they don't manufacture more over time they'll just die off one by one either naturally or through battles. I have a hard time picturing Zentradis taking care of Zentradi babies. It doesn't work without culture. So in my mind Zentradis are likely manufactured as adults ready for battle.

 

11 hours ago, jenius said:

Are the Zentraedi (before Micron tampering) also "born" as adults? 

 

When Milia "weaponizes" their child, the shock of seeing an infant causes the Zentradi to run.  I imagine they are all made as adults, or if there are Zentran children, it would be a very specialized/isolated part of their "culture" that raises them.  I think them just creating full grown Zentraedi makes more sense.

1 hour ago, VF-Zer0S said:

I remember them being mostly clones no? 

I think they are more "test tube babies," rather than true clones, as you see a lot of diversity, even among the rank and file (different faces, skin color, hair color, etc.).

10 minutes ago, easnoddy said:

Doesn't look like much difference on the ARMD's except the glow paint.  But I suck at painting and the red lines on the cannon booms are the main thing I'm glad are painted.  That and it's already paid for.

I believe some of those red lines are available as stickers in the regular release. 

I do think people are under-valuing how much some of those tiny paint apps really make the mold pop.  And that kinda stuff is pretty time consuming, at least for novice modelers/customizers.  I'm panel-lining one of my HMR valks, and that is going to end up taking well over two hours (but I'm new at it, and still pretty bad).  Overall, I'm pretty happy with how it is looking, maybe not $150 happy, but it is kind of hard to tell without actually getting it in hand.  But right now, I'm feeling confident about going with the PF version, and I skipped the PF versions of all the valks.

People complain about the paint job, but I think it is looking pretty good in toy-form.  

I wonder why they aren't showing it with reaction missiles.  This release does come with the missiles, doesn't it?

7 minutes ago, no3Ljm said:

Well, he did start the bidding with 1 yen so I'm sure there's no hidden minimum price whatsoever. And it's the seller's right if he wants to start the bid lower. The lower the starting bid the more bidders will join. There's no restriction nor guidelines on how much a seller want to start the price. Remember there's some people who wants to sell the Valk with astronomical prices. More than what's out there if I might add. Or probably he just doesn't mind how much it would sell in the end.

 

Just want to add that the same seller also have Arcadia YF-19 on bidding. Right now, it's Y13500. Bid ends at Mar 6, 10:48pm (JST). That's in 5 hours.

 

 

Well, it will be interesting to see how much it goes for.

And I saw that yf-19.  I was even tempted for a bit, but the looming PF sdf-1 release is just a budget-blower.  I'm also hoping that yf-19 advance (with all the ordnance) from Bandai that got teased gets released, so I'm going to have to pass. 

What am I missing here?

https://page.auctions.yahoo.co.jp/jp/auction/c656825302

I know the sv-262 is tanking in price (I just picked one up well below MSRP), but this low?  Is there some sort of hidden minimum price I'm not aware of(I've only used buyee once before)?  Is there something wrong with this particular one that I'm missing?

This is super dirt cheap.  I might grab a second one if it goes anywhere near this price, but it might hit close to "real" market value in the last few hours.

Edit: This seller seems to be doing a number of auctions starting at 1 yen, and they are staying pretty low.  I wonder if there is a hidden minimum set on these.

Seems like the ve-1 is cursed.  Mine's been stuck in New York for a week now.  I know they've had some bad whether up there, but I don't think it was that bad...

Looks like these are starting to find their way to bargain bins.  I grabbed one from Mandarake for $175 shipped.  The transformation looks interesting, so I thought I'd give it a try, not sure if I'm even going to keep it in the collection.  We'll see how it looks on the shelf.

The Lil'Drakkens are still too high for me.

5 minutes ago, Sandman said:

A little too rich for my blood. No offense to you as you are justified selling at market price. I'm just annoyed that I can't easily secure one at retail price and don't feel like I should have to pay the crazy mark up because I couldn't win a lottery. It's really souring me on the hobby right now. Imagine if they did that for frontier with the yf-29. That would have sucked.

A year ago I probably would have just paid the mark up (i paid $300 for the focker yf-29 back when it first came out - way overpriced for even now) but since then my disposable income has been greatly swallowed up by my kid's needs. Also, the USD to CAD exchange is so bad that it's not worth ordering from US sellers. So I can't justify doing this anymore. If I can't even complete delta squad I will probably use this as an excuse to quit collecting. After at least 8 years of these crazy per-order nights and now this lottery scheme, I'm tired. I hate having to plan my life around pre-order nights. I'm so busy I can't even remember what day a preorder night is or even that there was a preorder. 

The situation with the Kai really bums me out. I know it's just a toy but it has negatively affected me in regards to how I feel about this hobby. Last night I realized I probably won't ever own a kai unless I pay close to ($450-500 CAD) with it only getting worse the longer I wait. I find that I'm coming to the forum less and less these days because subconsciously I don't want to be reminded about missing out on the kai. Anyway sorry about the rant. Just need to vent I guess. Feels kind of good to get it off my chest.

If the hobby is more of a bother or concern than it is fun, then yeah, you should probably move on.  No sense in spending hundreds of dollars for something that is causing more stress than joy.

That said, have you considered just scaling down?  Do you really need to own every variant of every valk?  I just pre-ordered the vf-31S, but I know it will be my only one.  I probably wouldn't have even gotten that if it wasn't for that ridiculous (awesome) armor from the movie.  You can definitely still have fun with the hobby if you can scale back the completionist tendencies.

But I know everyone collects for different reasons, so that might not be something that appeals to you.

6 minutes ago, spacemanoeuvres said:

I kind of want another one too but I don’t even know wher I would put it lol. 

90% of my collection is sitting in boxes unopened 

There is a thread for that. 

Well that was "fun."  Got one at AmiAmi, was disappointed in the HLJ price.  Time for bed, good luck to anyone still trying!

Looks like NY just got essentially DDoS'd.

The pilots without the helmet look passable.  They got something horribly wrong with the helmets, though.  I'm guessing you remove the hair and just put the helmet on?  That's a terrible way to do that.

Minmay just looks bad.  If they hit the bargain bin, I might grab them.

I have tomorrow off, and will have multiple store tabs open.  This is only my second "pre-order madness" but that last one really wasn't that bad (vf-2ss).  I know that isn't a DX Chogokin, so it isn't the same, but people predicted insta-sold outs for that, too.  It didn't really play out that way.  Maybe Bandai is improving their preorder model.

Either way, I'm down to give it a shot tonight.  I have a sinking feeling this won't be that rough, though, and basically everyone that wants to preorder will be able to snag one somewhere.

My body is ready.  Even my wallet is ready.  But I'm still not looking forward to the preorder madness.

I just played through that game on PC about 6 months ago on PCSX2.  I used japanese bios, but I've successfully loaded it with standard/US bios, as well.  I ran it on 2x resolution, but it didn't help that much.

It worked almost flawlessly, had a few crashes here and there.  I used an xbox one controller, but I'm pretty sure you could use a ps4 controller, if you have one.  Any usb controller should work (you just have to set it up on PCSX2).

The game is great, easily the best Macross game I've played.  

I should note, I didn't try to use the actual disc, I just used a download of the game (it's less than 1gb big, if I recall).

2 minutes ago, SuperDimensionalDave said:

Wow that looks so good you could convince me it wasn't real and was a photoshopped image. Amazing work!  If Arcadia sees this they may cancel their release of the "Premium Format" Macross out of shame. Oh wait the price tag on that is how much and it's pre-sold out?  Oh yes they still would. But this is what the "premium" should look like for the price tag they've slapped on it imho. 

Eh, as good as that looks (and it does look good), that isn't what I'd want my PF to look like.  I'm not a huge fan of the cell-shaded look.  I think the SDF-1 pulls it off, mainly because it is sort of a dull gray, but I'd still rather have what Arcadia is doing versus a "cell-shaded" sdf-1.

Got the HMR stuff off the shelf:

They ended up taking over the room for a bit:

2 minutes ago, kajnrig said:

Don't you folks ever get tired of the same old VF-1? Gets kind of boring when all you ever see are head variants, paint jobs, and the same three armament packs.

I'd love if they did some super custom VF-1, keeping the same transformation maybe but redesigning the wings, limbs, etc. Maybe with a unique Super pack to go with it, some outlandish thing with giant gatling guns on the arms a la the Armored VF-31 and new drones/missiles/lasers that attach to the underwing pylons or something...

Not sure if trolling, or actually don't know about:

http://www.macross2.net/m3/macrossga/sdp-1.htm

But that will probably never see any sort of "official" release.  But yeah, I do get a little tired of the same vf-1, that's why I want the "rare" ones like the ve-1, vt-1, and vf-1d from Arcadia .  I'm also not crazy about the idea of paying $300+ for each of those, though.