Pontus

Thinking of placing a pre-order for M&Ms at BBTS; What are the current tariff charges looking like? I tried googling and couldn't make sense of it.

I respectfully disagree. With great balance in the mode, a backpack that folds up nicely with an antenna, a gunpod strap, crystal clear canopy with good interior/pilot detail, the flaps on the legs that allow the feet to articulate, perfect scale SDMF fixed pose hands, not to mention the head that drops down perfectly underneath, I would submit that this is by far the best in gerwalk in which mine stays on my shelf at work here. THAT HEAD DROP THO! It's beautiful! All that batroid has but with the wings out and canopy cleared. I hate gerwalk in almost every later valk, but I will always have a soft spot for VF-1 Gerwalk. And this one nails it!😍

They have VF-1S in stock currently. They offered a full refund but not a replacement? Or are you talking about a different model they don't have in stock?

That's actually exactly what I was thinking, but perhaps with some extension and extra optics. Of course @Bolt is right, the glaug itself seems like a much more natural choice, and I do have a 1/72 model kit. I guess I just thought of it as a more laid back, high rank officer vehicle that was all about big firepower and not as maneuverable. Regults seem more suited for articulation and crouching that a sniper would need.

Glad I'm not alone in this thinking. I specifically avoided the HMR Regults and Glaug because I didn't feel that they matched scale with the valks very well. I bought 1/72 model kits but was excited to see the KC toy. Although, now that I'm collecting everything in 1/60 scale, I guess I'll never have properly scaled regults... unless I or someone else ever 3D prints them. Speaking of Regult model kits, I was planning on building mine as a non-canon custom sniper model. It seems like something that should probably exist considering there's a scout model (and now that I say that, I think I need a spec ops scout to go with it as a pair!). Has anyone already built something like this? I was thinking of doing some sort of stealth/starfield camo and/or sticking with the regult color scheme except with a shift to black and purple.

They've been using the same style elbows on all of their figures and this doesn't look any different. Every elbow in these toy pics looks like it lines up in a different place on the arm too. I know we're all hating on KC right now which is fair, but this just seems like it's not only a moot point in regards to toy function not to mention a clear design element based on the actual art. I mean, in the mecha manual pic I posted, it clearly shows every. single. armor. with elbows like that (and even some of your pics trying to prove otherwise). I just don't understand where this is coming from, but I'll digress now.

Not to be rude, but... why does it matter? This is just the stock pose and how it's packaged. They got the shape right and it's clearly on a swivel peg (like a revoltech joint) so you can rotate it however you like just like valkyrie arms that came built and packaged the exact same way, but nobody complained about this on their HMR valks:

Everyone keeps mentioning the side elbow guards and saying how silly it looks (and I don't disagree), but that's exactly how they're depicted in the animation. All the line art depicts it. It's in every zentran/meltran armor in both the show and movie. It's like a major, common design element of not only personnel armor, but also the valkyries.

BBTS preorder is up now too if you don't want to deal with international shipping costs and want US based service/returns. Looks like the privilege will cost an extra hundo tho, so not great.

CVT is a great idea, and like anything, it has to be built right. My only problem with them is that they're often programmed counter to it's design philosophy; It's supposed to allow your engine to run smoothly at it's peak efficiency without major changes in RPM for the given conditions, but it's often programmed to meet human expectations by making it sound like it's shifting which is not ideal for a CVT to be jumping the belt back and forth across the cones. As a manual loving car guy, I actually loved my Ford CMax which had a smoothly programmed CVT in it. I leased it tho and would NEVER own one, although I know plenty of people at my workplace who've had theirs for years now. Chevy did what is imho the best hybrid implementation on the Volt; You need to make the engine a generator and drive the car on electric alone, not as a assist stuck between the engine and wheels. I always hated how the CMax would turn the COLD engine on when it needed power and rev it to the max to get it. But, if you kept the battery charged up, it hardly ever used it in city driving. I had the person at the service desk AT THE DEALER chastise me for not changing my oil at 4k mi. I'm like the engine never runs. Once a year is fine and even at that I was changing it MORE often than recommended. Funny story with that car... My wife, I, and our 1yr old toddler just starting to walk were going up north to spend time at Lake Wazee and decided to take the "back roads." The car handled the roads like a champ, and I was always impressed with it's handling. Within a few miles of the lake, my options were to get on the highway and take the normal route in, but I saw all these smaller roads leading into the area and decided to cross the highway keeping on the road I was already going down. THEN IT STARTED TO POUR RAIN! Seemed like a nicely paved road at first, but then the lines went away. Ok, but still a nice paved road. Then the road started to narrow until the point where I didn't feel safe attempting to turn back because I was obviously going to get stuck if one tire went off the pavement in this low slung car with like 3" of clearance. It was still paved tho, so we kept going. Then the pavement slowly faded into hard packed tarred gravel. Then hard gravel... then sandy, muddy gravel... and before I know it, I'm doing my absolute damnedest to keep my speed up and my car out of and on top of the muddy, sandy ruts with the traction control constantly cutting power until I found a panicked moment to jam my finger at the traction button. I made it through a mile of this, down a muddy valley and finally up a sandy hill to crest back onto the safety of a paved road again. PHEW! Then around the next corner... mother nature said NO! Road was flooded out about 3' deep. F*&^!!! Now I have to drive BACK THROUGH all that mud again! And it ain't getting dryer cuz it's still pouring down rain! And I have no idea where to tell a tow truck to get me even if they WOULD. But by some miracle we made it. Then my kid went to get out of the car at the lake and promptly landed flat on her face on the pavement. Poor kid had a scratched up face, but she was ok. Then the sun came out, we enjoyed the rest of the day, and TOOK THE HIGHWAY HOME!!! Afterwards the car's suspension started making a clunk sound of a broken front sway bar link, so I took it to the dealer fully expecting them to say that it wasn't covered under warranty because I obviously took it off roading, but to my surprise, they covered it!

Good to see some love for the ol' 262. I've got one of mine set up at work along with a 3Zero VF-1J. In battroid mode, I hate having the wings all up in the air like it's about to go gliding, but it looks a heck of a lot better down low like sortuva mechanical cape... and the big gun sticking up there seems very Macross imho.

I hope that the statement, "the items will be shipped with the Alus Edition UHD Blu-rays" means that the discs are coming soon. This has been dragging on for a while now. I know there was some extra stuff going on, but these were originally promised by last December.

I thought I read somewhere that the styrofoam these were packed in was the cause of yellowing. If that's the case, then keeping them in the boxes may have been the problem.

@Sildani, I'll bite on that one. For such a low budget, you might be better off going with one of the windows based gaming handhelds. I recently went with a Steamdeck because it's purpose built with a dedicated linux gaming OS that's easier on power than Windows, but there's no support for Tarkov, so that wouldn't work for you. But there's plenty of great options out there like the MSI Claw, Asus Rogue, Lenovo Legion (which actually has both SteamOS dedicated support and Windows, so you could dual boot), etc. These are all within your budget iirc. Old school/serious PC gamers may write these off, but the tech is seriously capable now (other than battery life, get an external one), and they all have docking options, bluetooth controllers, and double as a standard PC. Will they do 4k with ray tracing at 120hz? Not even close, but I think most of the latest models can meet your stated expectations not to mention being portable. Some can even connect to external GPUs, although that's not really all that practical... yet. Asus makes a good go of that but it's expensive. USB C vsn5 works but isn't quite up to the task, and the only one that has a PCI connection is the older Asus model. Just my 2¢.

But seriously (well, half), these things have shoulder mounted missiles, cannons front and back... and freakin' valks have hands for no apparent tactical reason other than holding a ridiculous, handheld gun that makes zero sense (if design was considered BEFORE they knew they'd be tackling space giants). At least Spartans have big, heavy duty hands for both load handling and non explosive, close range tactical use on a SPACE ship where you don't exactly wanna be firing inside your own ship. In that regard these things make perfect sense.