PointBlankSniper

I got sick of waiting for bandai 1/72. realizing it's a dead line is why i started collecting dx. i've been burned by bandai whle trying to complete collections of no grade 1/100, MG, SD, gachapon figures, and some converge figure lines, to trust them with ever completing anything. one of each unique valk design in premium toy form seems like a better deal than a large collection of incomplete ktis to me. it probably costs less overall too. in a world where even the entirety of the master grade line is finally speculated to be getting slowly killed off, asking for bandai to restart an obscure 1/72 line sounds wild. the new macross hg line pretty much seals the possibility of bandai doing 1/72 again. the only thing that is everlasting with bandai is the hg line itself, and the absolute incompleteness of all the series within it, as well as killing off other product lines. if you live long enough, maybe they will throw you a bone by releasing one of many missing units through p-bandai in a decade or two... with bandai namco also sticking their hand in the armored core pie now, it looks like they are just hoarding mecha IP. i imagine their product lines will get even more diluted if the start releasing AC stuff, whlie also gating anyone else from trying to make kits of anything without hefty licensing fees lol

my bad. haven't heard from them since the fire. thought they've been severly incapacitated and hadn't put anything together all this time

ngl, everytime I touch my AX, I am mildly worried I might somehow poke an eye, or slip and get an artery stabbed in my thigh... if not the family jewels... probably doesnt help that the one I have is Mirage's, with that somewhat hatchet shaped head antenna. but it's one of the pretties mech heads ever, so i have to suck up those intrusive worries lol

A new Aquarion was announced in the past couple months. it could be that satellite is busy with that. perhaps kawamori is divided for that project, or possibly even totally devoted over there and is hands off with this Macross. honestly killed my hope for a new Macross when I heard about that Aquarion, so this Sunrise project is even more out of left field to me than those out of the loop lol G Reco can probably be fully blamed on Tomino, the OG gundam director. Sunrise probably just let him do w/e he wanted out of respect, so it ended up being that retro style of trippy and deranged story writing. The other gundams since then are not like that. Most of them are mediocre to bad, but in a modern uninspired, low effort sort of way. Since we lost KyoAni, your preference may get monkey pawed lol. The sequel to second raid, invisible victory, was picked up by xebec. which was pretty decent imo, although not their best work. allegedly, when production I.G., their original overlords, folded them for being unprofitable, Sunrise scooped them up. They should now be the studio under the name of Sunrise Beyond. After doing the Gundam Build Diver series, their latest work was Kyoukai Senki. The rock bottom that I have been alluding to, that Sunrise had the gall to put their stamp of approval on as mentioned in my previous posts. Here's to hoping they don't have a hand in this Macross, or seriously get their act together and return to form

i always thought that was the canon universal "gray" they used for the series based on the gunpod. i think the superpacks were supposed to look like that despite previous dx releases. and i thought that nobody cared how ugly and out of place it was for it to be slapped on all the totally unrelated color schemes lol

besides massive up-armor, and overloaded for missile spam being the hallmark of macross, which gundam doesn't even hold a candle to, yall aware kawamori designed the premier hulking and nuke launching gundam that is gp02 right? it was actually macross that was put into gundam, and the man did it himself

ngl, been thinking beam drones deployed from hardpoints seemed like a long overdue idea. other than the beam part, we already have things like x-61A gremlins and sparrowhawk irl. guiding them by idol dance seems like the most logical way to keep themes cohesive lol

from my experience, i'd say that is a testament to the work of japan post, and then your local customs and national post. the other couriers on the other hand, often seem to treat packages with absolute spite. i generally feel safer doing months long surface shipping for cheaper, than go with those express courier guys lol as for the packaging though, it does look like hobby-genki cheaped out on stuffing material. some people collect even mint condition p-bandai brown boxes, or plan to resell items in that condition themselves. so japanese sellers will even enlarge the box by a couple sizes just put in stuffing material to protect those brown boxes. they don't care that you are charged an arm and a leg for the massive size increase that serves no one but couriers' bank accoutns. you should know this from how amiami and mandarake packaging and surprise shipping cost works lol. hobby-genki seem to be foreigners operating in japan though, so i guess it's not in their operating culture to care about box damage but rather save money and effort for everyone from minimal package size

basically just the first season, as it was designed to be. the rest of them lost the premise and went on to invent strange things and pad themselves out with low effort filler writing. so rare to find someone reasonable about it though. usually its just blind rage on all build series for not being big bois and genocide, even if it means throwing the concept of homage into the fire. or the polar opposite, which are the folks that lap up everything with gundam in the title lol

now that i've done my pooping on the sunrise parade, i'd like to get in on the wishful posting too with the show seemingly coming rather soon, I hope bandai does not forget the ongoing unfinished DX lineup in favor of the next shiny new collection that they would also eventually not complete... hopefully there aren't so many color variants of the same valk for unimportant team members to drag out release schedules into overlapping with the next new thing... like fate of the vivasat. kind of hoping they will bring it back for this series, to make sense of it not being merchandized yet. also, more nightmares would be nice, so maybe i could finally get one. admittedly though, nightmares as main grunts again is kind of boring as for plot, hopefully they follow up with all the lady M, epsilon, heimdall and even Alto teasing. all this open endedness about entities kind of cheapens the investment in the franchise continuity. some eerie deep space first encounter vibes and space monsters like 7 and frontier would be nice too. the recton movies needs to be dropped too. if there's any, they should be sequels i don't care much for the idol schtick, but presumbly music will come of it. vtuber themed or not, if they play this aspect right, i forsee that it will ironically be vtubers that blow the series up in the mainstream. karaoke streams are the bread and butter a lot of them. the show having a whole setlist of its own will be like weaponizing music to endlessly brainwash the masses with free marketing while the show is still airing and relevant, just like in the show lmao

admittedly, i havent watched plus outside of tons of clips and digests, so she wasn't on my mind, nor do i have a grasp of how alike the modern profession she was depicted to be. but from the look of things, i guess that the gimmick has already been done. ngl, zettai live also gave a pretty accurate analogy of how AI neural networks/machine learning and prompt engineering worked and behaved, before stable diffusion and the like was let loose on the public to blow all our minds. i'm fairly certain sunrise is actually more guilty of scissoring and the like than satellite... purposefully thought out action scenes are also not the norm as i've pointed towards kyoukai senki just above. while that may be the rock bottom of recent years, the progression in that direction was there since after the original build fighters. from the subsequent build fighter season, the rest of the build series, and even IBO, all the fights, as well as the story, were unimpactful or made of absolutely incoherent nonsense. aside from the random flagship OVAs, they didn't seem to put effort in anything, it's only the current WfM that has gone back to putting some effort in animation. and even that was marred by opening the first ep of both seasons with heinous CG as i've pointed out as for subbing in mechs to reuse scenes, that was like the entirety of gundam seed destiny. anyone that remembers it probably has ptsd my point is, this isn't at all better than asking for these improvements from sattelite instead lol until there is visual confirmation that they are burning trainloads of budget on this project like it's jet fuel, we should probably keep our expectations in check lol

majority of the time for sunrise shows, the mechs are split between low detail and barely shaded 3D with stiff animation, or malformed 2D napkin doodles. fight scenes often have no coherent sense of direction, motion, positioning, or much of an logic either. they certainly can animate detailed physics like gundam unicorn, but they won't do it... even the current gundam witch from mercury opens with some garishly CG shots with no antialiasing and strange lighting, despite it overall looking already much higher effort than usual. imo they generally are no better than satellite at best, but is worse on average. i would look at kyoukai senki as the baseline of modern quality they find acceptable to produce 🤢, even if that wasn't theot the main studio proper the hope is that im dead wrong, but gotta be cautiously cautious on this one, rather than optimistic in any way. if that is the iron rule, the next logical progression would probably be a vtuber/vsinger. expect lots of minecraft 🤪 episodes i guess...

i tried reading it earlier, with my limited understandinig of japanese grammar and prepositions, combined with machine translating short bits of vocabulary individually, that tweet still read the same. the two lines still cryptically talking past each other and seemed semi contradictory now that i've had a sleep and enough brain power to have another look at it, it seems to me that the bracketed sentence is a borderline run-on sentence, and there might be some machine mistranslation from "my" to "I" so how i think this tweet should read: "seems bandai isn't gonna make yf-21, so there is none other than the yamato. i gotta treasure it. (now that person K from company B has directly heard MY understanding of the matter, perhaps they would get around to releasing it?)" so if i'm correct, the whole tweet reads like a doomer speculation that leads into wishful coersion

i've been on the fence about the draken, but would really like 262Ba in Mirage's colors, with a redesigned fully foldable sword and storage compartment for it in the shins, even if it needs to look a little ugly anyway, here's a random guy's perfect transformation lego rendition of the 303 while we impatiently huff that hopium go to the tweet and see his self replies for more images in each of the 4 modes

all those stores you just mentioned are outright massive corporations, i'd add hobby search among them as the best known ones. hobby-genki on the other hand, give the impression that they are a couple dudes operating out of a garage as a side gig. not that they are actually that small, considering they probably have the most generous warehouse and shipping arrangement policies lol. basically, they don't seem to be able to keep up with their volume of business, and need checking in on if you notice releases have come and gone without updates on your orders for a long while. the upside is, they seem to have the most pleasant customer service. one time, they were even kind enough to voluntarily bring up waiving my shipping fee because my order had fallen between the cracks and gone untended to for very long. i've only used them a couple times, but i consider them my first choice for limited release items now, whenever there is something the larger stores don't deal in or have limited allotment.

wouldn't mind if it didn't come with any accessories besides what is on display here, if that meant those things would then be sold separately. just imagine all missile packs you could buy. even better if the same happened with the advanced and its pack. its my dream to have all the weapons, most importantly the arm cannon, with an advanced pack, all together on just either one of the versions of the 19. its bandai though, so its definitely never gonna happen. even if they did it, the way they announce things would ruin any ability to plan to collect the pieces a la carte like that ☹️

Mine is kind of like that, but not as severe, so I didn't complain about it before. I just kind of gently torque the panel with the hinge stem's flex in mind, while pressing it down the last bit of the way, until it kind of just gets blocked and binds against the opposite other door panel. Then it stays closed in a very slightly slanted and bulging by less than a hair kind of way, but its close enough if you don't let ocd take over kind of way. My superpack missile door panels that I mentioned before though, is almost as bad as what you have here, and I haven't managed to fix it.

I had tried chilling it and then warming it with no results before my first post, maybe because it wasn't extreme enough. At some point, I got the barrel out all the way after I decided to go ham and wrap my shirt over it for grip. Not the best idea since being unable to see or feel the piece warping under such violent motion is probably risky. Seems even half a second of direct skin contact is enough moisture that I lose the grip needed to extend and retract it. Even though there's not really a fix, it's kind of a relief to know others have the issue and it seems it could be coexisted with as long as caution is taken lol With that out of the way, my unit only has couple tiny issues that don't bug me too much. One of my super pack missile doors don't seem to open all the way, but it's not too bad. Don't know if there's injection flash on the joint, or the piece is just warped. I've already accidentally popped out the missle array and the doors on another side, so I know how it assembles and might be able to fix it when I'm not lazy. The other issue is that the fuselage doesn't seem to lock in to anything in battroid mode. I've got the cockpit pointed at the underside of the collar plate, but the two just wiggle from each other and I'm not sure if that is supposed to be normal. The whole upper torso feels vaguely held in its form simply by the fact that the nose cone is trapped behind the chest emblem piece. Maybe I'll have to come around and watch a video to make sure I've got it right And also, the hand peg or the slit on the gun's grip is already coming loose... I have yet to find out if those two just never interfaced well, or mounting and removing the gun from various positions and holding the knife once each has already chewed up the parts.

I'd be first in line to try it, but I can't exend my barrel out in the first place lol. Unless you mean the radiator also pops out and I can slip the barrel itself out the back. If you mean the inner shoulder/ collar joint, mine came severely misaligned too. Mine did also come with the intake underneath that part refusing to plug in to the upper body, and I just blamed all the misalignment on that. I've since gotten the intake to seemingly clip in and stay flush after rotating it into a steeper cant during transformation. Haven't put it back into fighter though, so I don't know if transforming fixed it. The wings did also take some careful violence to get flapping.

Hi all. Lurker here. Just got my Durandal in and been trying to go through the initial break in transformations. On to the point. The telescoping barrel on the right side of the back swivel turret gets stuck part way inside the also telescoping radiator shroud. Anywhere past halfway and it starts to get very sticky already. Stopping from that point on is enough to get it jammed very tight and possibly require dangerous amounts of pushing to get it to retract. I've already scuffed up my fingers trying wear it in by pumping it in and out like an idiot, but probably isn't happening with how durable the plastic is. If it's not my hand that breaks, sooner or later the barrel or the turret's dinky support arm will. At it's farthest, I've pulled it out close to the point where the engraved details at the base of the barrel are still just barely hidden. But retracting it back from that spot took nearly an hour of pure violence... Anyway, does anyone have tricks to loosen it up, or know how to disassemble the turret so the internals could be cleaned up?