SebastianP

Also, SPOILER TAGS!!!

Meh, the only text in the instructions for a typical Hasegawa VF kit that isn't completely obvious what it means from context is the background blurb with the stat block on the front, and the stuff about where to order replacement parts, which doesn't apply outside Japan anyway. The rest of it is basically just writing out what symbols like "cut this part off", "drill hole here", "apply decal number XX in this spot" and "repeat on the other side" mean, and they're all really really obvious if you've ever built any plastic model from Japan before, or if you just look at the freely available instructions for any other Hasegawa kit online. And as I said earlier, the names for the colors used in the paint guide, but the important part of the color guide is the numbers and those you can basically google with something like "Mr Color 33". I wish they'd just give up and bottle the finished mixes instead of forcing me to buy two bottles I'll never use for anything else, and which don't mix 50/50 so I can't just dump one in the other and have done with it... Or prevail on Kawamori to stick to colors that exist in their color range.

Still no word on the release date for the Super version? (or for that matter the Mecha Colle Elysion, which is my number one must have kit of the year...)

You don't actually have to *buy* a different kit to get a translation guide for the instructions - pretty much all Hasegawa kits except for anime ones come with English instructions, and they're available online from sites like Hobby Search (1999.co.jp/eng/). All the symbols are common between all kit instructions, it's just that with the Anime kits, they don't generally bother with printing out the English explanation or info boxes. Most of the time, the instructions are fairly self-explanatory, as well. Also, the most common problem people have is not knowing what the colors mean. Hasegawa kits *always* use Gunze Sangyo Mr Color in the instructions, and there are paint conversion tables available online from a few different places and to pretty much every other brand. The only irritating parts about that is that Macross kits in particular often need mixed colors - the blue gray used on VF-25 super parts for example does not exist as a bottled paint, it's a mix of something like four parts blue and one part gray if I remember correctly.

Last question first: There are no seamlines worth mentioning on the Bandai VF-25 kits, don't worry about them. Paint? Enamels if you're hand painting. Buy a bottle of naphta for thinning, and a bottle of dish soap to clean your brushes in between colors. Acrylics if you're airbrushing. Buy a bottle of 96% denatured ethanol for cleaning the airbrush, and for thinning certain (nowhere near all) brands of paint. I can't really recommend brands, since I'm stuck without a lot of options myself. Humbrol and Testors make excellent enamel paints, with the latter having glass bottles with screw caps that are just superb. Problem is, my local source went bust. Vallejo, Tamiya and Gunze make good acrylics, but I can only get Vallejo and Gunze once a year, when the local hobby show is on and everyone in northern europe who can pack a van full of kits and accessories shows up to sell them.

The thing about durability is that it's kind of apples vs oranges. Bandai kits are full of joints, and the reason they don't hold fighter mode very well is that they *have* all those joints, and they tend to bend under a little pressure, but they *generally* don't break. If a Bandai kit part breaks, you're kind of SOL, because many of the parts that *are* prone to breaking are made from plastic that normal glue doesn't work on, and superglue is too fragile for them. Hasegawa fighter kits have no joints whatsoever, and won't bend at the slightest pressure - they won't budge at all, until they quit entirely and the part breaks. Unless the part is very thin, or glued on improperly (with paint on the mating surfaces, most commonly), this does tend to take a substantial amount of force though. If a part breaks off on a Hasegawa though, you glue it back on the model with as little cement as you can and paint the seam over. Also note that while Bandai kits can swap the landing gear doors between opened and closed versions, Hasegawa kits you pick one or the other and you're stuck with it. Same with canopies. And building the kits with the landing gear doors closed is usually not the easy option, as the parts need to be modified and backing needs to be supplied to prevent the landing gear doors from collapsing into the gear wells.

Building it is pretty easy. Painting is not required, especially in this case since it's a clear kit and paint would ruin its uniqueness (unless you're painting the inner frame). You can paint the regular ones if you want, but either you're really good and make it look much better, or you're not very good and it'll look worse than unpainted. Decalling or stickering the kit and making whichever option you chose *stay on the model* is where the real difficulty is, since Bandai's decals are pretty poor, and their stickers not much better. Also, any version except the Super VF-25 can be made to hold together in fighter mode pretty well, and they all look excellent in battroid mode. Gerwalk is problematic, but I don't like that anyway so it doesn't affect me much. Super VF-25s have no locking tabs to hold the legs in place in Fighter mode, which means the legs want to drop down under their own weight. There are three solutions: 1 is to glue the legs in place, 2 is to leave the kit standing on its landing gear, which works fine; and 3 is to keep it in Battroid mode. I went with the second option. Finally, *MODEL KITS, NOT TOYS!*. These things are fragile, and will not only get loose in the joints if you play with them too much, you can outright break them from transforming them too many times. My Super VF-25 is stuck in fighter mode because I broke one of the ABS parts in on of its shoulders. Due to the nature of the part and the material, it's completely unfixable. Be really careful with them.

The Macross Elysion may be the only Mecha Colle kit I'm getting of the entire lot, unless they *really* throw us a bone and give us a Battle Frontier and/or Battle Galaxy. The others I can do entirely without, but with the ships I'm pretty sure that Mecha Colle is all we're ever going to get that'll be worth the asking price....

Let's see... Not listed above (I assume you have some of these despite that): Hasegawa 1/72: VF-0 with Ghost (limited edition, long OOP, expensive as hell if you can find it for sale) VF-0 Battroid with Reactive Armor (same as above) VF-1 Super and Strike versions VF-1 Battroid, with Super, Strike and Armored versions VF-11B/C Super Thunderbolt VF-22 Sturmvogel II Bandai 1/72: YF-25 Prophecy VF-27 Lucifer Garage kits 1/72: VF-4 Lightning III (exists in both vinyl and resin, long OOP in both cases) VF-9 Cutlass (*possible* garage kit displayed at Wonderfest, I've only found two pictures of it so I don't know if it was actually for sale at the time) YF-27 prototype: I believe I saw a conversion kit to turn the Bandai VF-27 into the "fake prototype" from Macross: The Ride (it was a decoy sent to the open competition to mask how powerful the actual VF-27 was).

Of course it is, but HLJ doesn't actually post straight machine translations and has a human checking them over, which is why the language sounds natural. Whoever they had doing it for this kit though is apparently not the greatest Macross fan, or he completely missed looking at the original text. Oh well, crap happens. And I agree with Thom - we *need* a New Macross carrier in the same scale. The only New Macross model I've seen in any scale was a limited run resin kit that was more of a size with gaming miniatures, and there's an opportunity to make five distinct versions with only minor retooling. And at least two or three of them would sell big.

Dat commentary... "Destroyed Monster". Or as the HLJ page puts it, "Destroyed version of the Monster." Anyway, I've pre-ordered mine as well. I should get the DYRL version too at some point, it looks awesome, and having them side by side would be really neat. The Hasegawa kits are just that: Model kits. They do not transform, they're for static display only. I know some people have managed to make transformable VFs from the Hasegawa kits, but that basically requires at least two kits (one battroid and one fighter kit) and a ton of scratchbuilding. Also, unlike some of the VF kits where you could use for example the head (I think) from a battroid kit to make a different fighter version, I'm not sure the parts breakdown of the cruiser mode kits support swapping parts with an eventual Storm Attacker kit other than maybe the arms, and possibly not even them.

To be fully accurate, there are three types of polystyrene cement to watch for, and they each have things they're better at than the others. The thick type in the squeeze tubes is almost obsolete by now, but it has its uses for things like welding very strong point connections. Use a toothpick to apply it, *never* the tube itself. The thin type in the glass bottles with the brush applicator is really runny, and evaporates very fast, as it's almost pure solvent. You mainly use this by brushing along the seam between two pieces you've either "spot welded" with thicker cement, or that you're squeezing together with your fingers or clamps. The cement is so thin, no matter how hard you squeeze some will get into the seam and weld it tight. There are different strengths to this stuff, there's a brand called "Tenax" IIRC which is noted for being some of the strongest of the lot. The last type is the medium type that comes in a needle applicator bottle. It is *not* the same as the thin cement, it is nowhere near as runny nor does it evaporate as fast; but it is runny enough to have constant flow out of the bottle so you only have to run the tip of the needle along the edge and the cement will come out of the bottle. I've seen this kind of cement from Revell/Matchbox, Testors, and some others, and unless I run into something really stubborn, it is basically the only thing I ever use, as it is hard to apply too much cement. Make sure that if you get this kind, get a bottle with a *metal* needle, as the cement sometimes dries in the needle itself, and to clear the stoppage, you need to heat the needle with a lighter until the cement in there burns up. Testors used to have bottles with *plastic* applicators, and for obvious reasons clearing a stoppage using the regular method didn't work. I ended up having to cut the whole tube off and use it as a refill for my previous bottle, which had a metal applicator. (That series of events is also why I know that the cement in the brush bottles is much runnier - I tried refilling the needle bottle with brush cement, and it came pouring out like water through drain pipe when I tilted the bottle.)

There are quite a few differences in armament that I can see from these pics, and this is only one angle. Right now, I'm spotting the following changes from the TV to the Movie version: * Small triple turret on the rotating boom section moved to the non-rotating front part * Heavy guided converging beam turrets on the base of the cannon booms moved to shoulder, and replaced with large hatch. * Smaller turrets behind the heavy ones on the cannon booms, and on top of the engine sections and on the shoulders all removed (six total) Anyone care to post similar pics from a ventral angle?

We'll probably see the rest of the VFs eventually, as long as people keep buying the existing ones enough to keep their manufacture profitable. The easiest ones to make that we haven't gotten at this point would be Messiah variants, the crank-winged VF-19s (wasn't there already an M:TR release with different wings, or am I dreaming?), the Messiah variants, and after they've made a Super Messiah, that souped up YF-19 that Isamu uses in Wings of Goodbye with the Messiah super parts. The VF-27 will probably be the next basic VF type though, and hopefully we'll get that nifty YF-27 from Macross The Ride at some point. That thing was almost cooler than the actual Lucifer.

It's not like the Japanese don't already have a history of building carriers with mirrored layouts - the Akagi and Hiryu had their islands on the port side, rather than the normal starboard. It turned out not to be the best idea ever (single propeller aircraft usually want to pull left due to torque, and having the island on the right means the aircraft won't easily fly into it. Having it on the other side means you have to actively avoid crashing into it...), but with spacecraft and torque-neutral fighters (twin engines), it's a different story. While the announcement of this kit is welcome, I'm really really hoping that we're going to get some more Macross ships out of Hasegawa at some point, BTW. The Macross itself has been done over and over, if not in injection molded plastic before - what I really want to see is some "modern" era ships, like the New Macross class carrier (with all its variations); the Uraga and Guantanamo escort carriers, Northampton frigates, and those cruisers from Frontier we never really got a name for (IIRC). Also, if they really do make a New Macross carrier, I'm pretty much certain that someone, somewhere, is going to end up posting photos of their scratchbuilt city section that mates with it.

All VF-25s are two-seaters. It's just that Luca never had a back seater. The Master File book lists a dedicated two-seater (with both crewmen in Ex-Gears), but it's not really canon. I'm holding off on ordering mine for a bit, there's plenty of time and I still have a VF-25G to build. I'd love for there to be a VF-25A release, all the tooling is there they'd just need a slightly different decal sheet. Also holding out for super and armored parts... though those will require at least entirely new leg sprues, and most likely more than that.

Depending on where you buy them, the Hasegawa kits are 1000 to 1200 yen cheaper than the corresponding Bandai kit. (At HLJ, the difference is 1040 yen - the Bandai kits are 3600 yen, the Hasegawas are 2560 yen). To build them right, you're going to need a bit more than 1000 yen worth of paints alone, though, especially if you're doing anything other than Alto's VF-25F, which is the simplest color option there is. (it's all over white with some metallic and black parts, nearly all of the other colors are on the decal sheet). Each of the kits has a substantial list of pros and cons. The Hasegawas a: are stuck in fighter mode permanently; b: require expensive paint and glue; c: are not play-friendly *at all*; and d: only come in a very limited subset of the types available from Bandai, i.e. only plain F/G/S. There are as yet no super, armored or tornado packs for the Hasegawa kits, and the Bandai items won't fit. (I've checked this.) On the plus side, since the kits are stuck in fighter mode only they won't sag, and Hasegawa has seen fit to include underwing ordnance and the hidden back seat, complete with a little Ranka in the VF-25G kit. And Super parts are probably only a matter of time, given that pretty much all the other VFs have gotten a super parts release if such parts existed in the anime. (Only the VF-19 doesn't have any, but I don't think the super parts for that were shown on screen anyway). Also, even if the decals for the Hasegawa kits turn out to be as thick and fragile as the Bandai ones, they're *still* superior, for the three reasons of being solidly colored, much more detailed, and unlikely to be scraped off during transformation... The Bandai kits, being transformable, sag horribly in fighter mode (at least the plain and super versions do; the Tornado and Armored not so much); have decals that start flaking off if you look at them sharply; make a bunch of concessions to snap-fit assembly and transformation that result in terribly crude or off-scale parts (such as the landing gear, the pilot figure and windscreen, not to mention the very ugly joints at the wing root) or even non-existant parts (no back seat, no wing ordnance); are a royal pain in the butt to squeeze into proper fighter shape; and are fragile if you do play with them any(broken shoulder on my Super VF-25S) in a way that can't easily be fixed (styrene cement doesn't work on ABS plastic, and superglue is not recommended.) Also, the series appears to have been discontinued - they still make the existing kits, but nothing new has been added for a couple of years now. On the other hand, all versions of the VF-25 including the prototype, the RVF and the Tornado and Armored packs are available; they *are* transformable and can be displayed in Gerwalk or Battroid mode if that's what you want to do; they don't *require* glue or paint (unless you do something stupid, like break a part); and most of them come with stickers that are at least less fragile than the decals. All in all, if you want a plain VF-25 that will hold together perfectly in fighter mode above all else, and are prepared to spend the time needed to paint and decal it properly, get the Hasegawa kit. It looks *awesome* in fighter mode. If you want *anything* other than a plain VF-25, want to display it in something other than fighter mode, or don't have the patience to paint it, get the Bandai kit, because the Hasegawa version won't give you any of the above...yet. Maybe in the future. (here's hoping we actually get a VF-29 from Hasegawa at some point, given that Bandai has abandoned the 1/72 builders...)

As I see it (I own the kit but it's still in my HLJ private warehouse so I haven't actually eyeballed it) Hasegawa made two mistakes with this kit - 1. They molded it in blue, making painting it a pain in the ass, and 2. They didn't (as far as I can tell) stick a regular gun pod in there, so you can't build it into an A without swiping the gun from an A/S kit. If they'd done those things, I guarantee kit number two would already be waiting as well. Given the amount of work needed to make an A (i.e. all the parts exist, we just need them boxed together) we'll likely see one released this year anyway, even if it's a limited edition. Hopefully we'll see some Super Parts soon as well. I really really really want a better option than the Bandai Super parts...

The above is slightly incorrect - the A/C models share a head, as do the B/D models; the twin gun head is unique to the S. I don't know if that sprue is included with the VF-0S kit, or if you'll have to get it from someone who built their "A/S w/Ghost" as an S. Either way, good luck!

I've received mine, but I've got my hands full at the moment. I really should finish some of my in-progress stuff up before I start on a new kit...

That's not a VF, that's an F-203 Dragon II, the fighter Roy was flying during the Unification War. It's in Episode 33 of the original series, in a flashback to how Claudia met Roy. (I don't remember seeing that scene in the Robotech version of that episode, so it might have been cut.) What I want to know is if that was a scratchbuild, or if not - where the kit came from. (Not that I could afford a resin kit that size anyway...)

Someone needs to tell Hasegawa they need to make a VF-11 Battroid in 1/72 - and then an Armored version.

Google delivers: http://www.modelivery.com/product.detail_995098_en_5293875

I have been using Vallejo and Humbrol Acrylics for airbrushing - while the local hobby shop nominally stocks Tamiya, the previous shipment of paints from Japan to Sweden sank en route, so many of the colors needed for the stuff I build ran out. And no one in the region stocks Gunze anymore - which is a crying shame, because they actually *have* the colors I need for modern jets. And ordering paints privately is either expensive, slooooow, or impossible, due to the regulations on flammable liquids.

That thing looks awesome. I've been brush painting Humbrol for more than twenty years, and it's really not that hard - stir the paint in the tin with a toothpick until you're not getting gobs of pigment on it, then use the toothpick to dribble paint into a disposable mug (you only get a few drops at a time, so it will take several goes to get a decent amount.) Then add a couple of drops (be careful, you really don't need much) of white spirits to the cup, and use your brush to mix the paint. It should be just thick enough to not go transparent when you try brushing the inside of the cup. Depending on the base color of the model, and the color you're painting it, you're going to need between two and four thin coats - the wings and most of the fuselage on my VF-19 have received three coats and they're completely solid, no blotches at all. With just one coat, the white comes through from underneath, making it look awful. Properly thinned humbrol is really very forgiving to work with - you can brush the same area multiple times without getting buildup as long as the paint is still wet, so you can really brush off dust particles and stray hairs; it sticks well to the plastic and has near zero surface tension, so it won't bead; and if it builds up in the corners where it shouldn't, you just touch your brush to where it's pooling and the brush sucks it right up. And you have several minutes before it dries to the point where it stops self-levelling and you start getting brushstrokes. The only bad part is that their white paints turn yellow way too quickly, which I think is due to the oil. Despite being infinitely more frustrating to work with, I've started using acrylics for landing gear, gear bays and intake interiors because of that. (I've even gotten a decent finish on a model car once using just thinned enamel and a wide brush.)