PointBlankSniper

Assuming you display the two units, doesn't that point towards the styrofoam? If they are out of the box, they wouldnt be in contact with the stuff. But unopened and then stashed at mandarake makes them perfect candidates for yellowing. Can't deny that mandarake stuff, whether its the store or previous owners, may have some nasty fumes though. Last year, I got a gunpla from them with a heavy musty(?) smell and extremely murky yellow factory sealed bags for the runners. The runners inside smelled as bad as outside. I cut, sanded, and then washed the kit with baking soda, vinegar, various soap, isopropanol, etc, and it still smells to this day after building it... fortunately the parts aren't yellowed though

I have seen a 30 displayed in a basement shop of a concrete commercial building in asia within the past month. Take those conditions as you will. The thing was significantly unevenly yellowed, even though it was only moderately yellowed overall. I would probably have for the price had I not noticed, or gone on to try to nab one elsewhere, if not for seeing one in person looking like that. Eversince seeing theories of styrofoam speeding up yellowing, I've been more worried about unopened white valks with foam packaging than lightly used ones. The 262 is probably the only one I have no such worries for, since it's so dark.

If they ever give the 262 another chance, I'd like for them to give it some renewal treatment and put the sword in a hatch in the shins, even if a folding hinged sword looks kinda fugly.

Kind of appalling how bad the ground clearance looks even with fake gunpods... they could have shaven a hair's thickness out of every piece under the belly, and given the same back to the length of the landing gears, and it wouldn't have affected the proportions of anything except avoid the ground scraping. In fact, I think the same idea could have been applied to avoid having fake gunpods in the first place. It almost seems like someone was just hellbent on making something perfectly scrape the floor by just a little, even if parts forming was requried...

Fold booster front and back struts seem like news though. The not so perfect transformation between landing gears and fast pack gunpods has been irking me, and seeing it super extra+ confirmed in new big text is even more oof lol

bandai pls matte teal 😭

Nice job! It even has a real cockpit!

I should elaborate that I was gambling for lowest cost. and that is after exchange rates, shipping, and import fees. not being in burgerland makes amazon not such a reasonable deal lol At this point, if I don't manage to get it from hobby search, it's probably most affordable for me to go with mandarake, or just wait some months and hope for a chance to nab the one odd units some of my local hobby stores may stock up with lol

I'm waiting for someone to cancel their lottery T_T I shouldn't have gambled and just picked up the last one hobby-genki had

I am now conivinced the fast packs and stand mount are designed the way they are so it can look flatter than the bare plane if you give it a black background 🙃

but the whole conspiracy involves them becoming the entirety of the scalping scene themselves and absorbing all of the middlemen. thats literally peak money. blocking domestic retailers to foreigner sales literally doesnt alter their production commitments. it just gives their official channels more tabs to keep on the flow of goods, on top of empowering domestic based scalpers, while starving their local retailers out of business. the only way this circles back to a profiting scheme is if all the jp scalpers are literally their own staff undercover as independent sellers and mainstream distro are their competition. but thats absurd, which is why its just a funni conspiracy theory. we all know its just the usual and bandai execs just has their heads in their bum just look at the gundam metaverse as the prime example. we also know they are spooling up the new factory beside the old one. they really arent playing the smallproduction game. some pbandai items even have obvious long production runs, you can tell by consecutive monts of order batches, and then frequent rereleases. if they were really into risk reduction with tiny batches, they would first be making kits and toys of existing designs with massive fan demand, rather than causing incomplete product lines while churning out unwanted new media or ip and then shutting them down early like clockwork if my party hat gets taken, i'll have to be another grump on the doubt wagon grumbling about whether bandai has the ability to plan a satisfactory product like everyone else here lol

my conspiracy theory is that they are grooming the masses to accept scalpers and it has worked very well. just look at gunpla. even the mass produced ones are scalped, and people willingly pay. they started out with pbandai stuff, and now they are big enough to cause global gunpla shortage. bandai 's mandate of region blocking jp retailers from selling gunpla globally in the name of stopping scalpers from restocking, only serves to open up the scalper market where there isnt official distro, or distro to retail chain is already the scalpers this serves bandai no benefit, at the cost of customer ire, unless... lets say they own all of the distro to storefront chain, like how they bought out bluefin, and it goes all the way to joe shmo of ebay anyway, someone hand me my foil hat 🤪

bruh. the fast pack needs fake gunspods for ground clearance... even though the hollow ones look nigh identical to the real gunpods on the outside... and the reason was that longer landing gears would be structurally unstable 🫠

i think they just need an even bulkier belly plate that wraps over the space of the shown fast pack with guns attatched. 🙃 i assume the last piece they cant skip if lazy would just be the face. counting on bandai to release something out of ease of retooling or simply recoloring is umm... if theres history of the design not selling great, i'll have to lower my hopes for gamlin's 22

in my hopium fueled wait for this to lead to gamlin's vf-22, i just saw footage of the macross 30 game where milia's unit had fast pack on with external guns. i thought the 22 had internal guns stored by animation magic. now im confused. someone pls explain. lazy game assets or it has fast packs anyway? while im at it, how likely does it look like there will be a dx 22 atm? i just prefer the black scheme and visor face over the camera head and ever growing roster of 50 shades of blue dx valks. if its a stupid endeavor to wait for it, i'll try to like the 21 more and consider hopping on this lukewarm hype train lol. tbh, its not my kind of design, but its growing on me for dual weilding and being so mechanically different from other valks.

think the tiny sessions was the big announcement lol

Thanks for the pics. I tried rolling a super ghost plugged in the hardpoint on one wing upwards as far as they can go, and then outwards with the wingtip the same way, so everything is angled almost like how the lil drakens go on the siegfried. I looks like there is a very slim chance it may fit like that, but the weight of everything will probably press on the booster if it does work, since the joints don't hold in any way at that angle.

The AX super parts booster can definitely fit on underwing hardpoints. There are images and videos of people that have been throwing them on super siegfrieds to make double booster wing sandwiches. To be clear, I have also tested the super ghosts on both under wing hardpoints as well. With some amount of wing folding gymnastics from the super ghosts, the whole valk remains on the default stand just fine. Mounting on he outer wing will inevitably cause droop though. In both cases, it doesn't seem to me that there is enough room to even partially fold the wings far enough reveal the hidden hardpoint, so even the ability to droop is limited lol. Maybe I somehow haven't contorted those joints to their maximum potential, but I don't think that is the case. That last point you said is mainly what I'm asking about. Despite boosters being large, from what I can see from images, it is still significantly narrower the body of the super ghosts, so im hoping maybe theres a tiny chance it would leave enough wiggle room to half open the wings just enough to deploy the hidden hardpoints at an off angle. Mulling on it some more, I realize there are also the super pack arm shields to consider, but thats a matter for after finding out if the big booster can fit lol.

Random question: Is there any configuration that the super pack can fit together with the super ghosts mounted, most importantly in fighter mode, through any arrangement with the hardpoints or wing folding contortions? I'm unrealistically hoping the main boosters could somehow squeeze under the half folded wings. I don't have any super packss, but have the super ghosts. With them mounted under the wings, it does't seem like the wings can fold open to reveal the mid wing hard points to make that an option. At some point, I'm gonna realize bandai won't make mirage's super pack, and then maybe grab a hayate's set to slap on her AX, so i can at least have a tri-colored franken plane like a few of the ultramans did lol

Despite a similar shape, the outer wings on the AX are significantly larger than the 31A's, giving it a massive dogtooth profile that far more resembles the the 262Hs than the 31A. Now that I think about it, even the thermometer might be partly an effort to carry over that long tail silhouette from the single engine + vertical stabilizer design. They did shove Bogue into Delta flight to give him an AX after all.

Ignoring the exact details of story for a moment, it seems like even the wings come from the Hs Draken. As are the super ghosts from the Lil Draken. Like how tornado pack combines the elements of 27 onto the 25, it feels like AX does the same for the 31s and Drakens. Combining designs seems like how these elements come to be, regardless of lore. Following that train of thought, the thermometer might be a throwback to the tornado pack's 3rd leg tail stand thing lmao Speaking of which, we have the 303 with its high maneuver quad engine mode, which is an integrated version of the X-wing silhouette from the AX equipped with super ghosts... making it the equivalent of how the 29 is to the tornado pack lol

imo the long sniper rifle fits the theme of all the long cannons and pods the pack comes with as well, and makes it extra non standard from other 25s as well. btw, anyone know how the new paint job/matte coat for this stacks up beside Max's Durandal? Just curious to see how close or different they actually are when beside each other.

I see arm looking things in the big yellow "exchanging parts" box of the point 1 image. the ones for fighter and high maneuver mode look significantly flattened, thinned, and shrunken compared to the ones for gerwalk and battroid. It's pretty obvious how squashed it is in fighter mode out of all the completed formms in the point 2 image too...

only older kits and their very regular reprints, or candy toy kits that aren't made at their japan plant, still use ABS. in terms of new designs, they started phasing that stuff out like 10 years ago, iirc starting with the MG Nu Ver Ka as the flagship to kickstart that project since then, they've been honing their rubbery PS mix for use as inner frames throughout the IBO line. starting with the WfM line, they've also managed to do away with polycaps, so they don't even have PE in their latest kits anymore. they are just pure PS kits now next on their schedule i believe is to replace PS with Limex for everything produced in their new factory being built beside the current one, and is coming online next year. iirc, Limex is some sort of PS, or something similar, with about 30% limestone mixed in. part of the reason is obviously to reduce plastic to get that good environmentalism karma. the other part is supposedly for resource sustainability and cost. the explanation is that the oils that the plastic is made from is finite, but limestone is extremmely abundant. it's basically padding plastic volume with chalk the recently released gunpla-kun model kit is a test run using that material. the general consensus from reviewers seems to be that Limex has slightly different material properties and quirks from PS, but all the usual modelling tools and techniques still work on it. in terms of yellowing, i guess you replace 30% of the averge kit's yellowing properties with that of chalk lol

I always wanted a 171, but not like this... bandai is just intentionally messing with people again Where is the teal, and why you skip Ozma's 25??? 😭