Air Elijah

Well, I finally got a 1/48. Got the Max 1A. Oh my.... I'm almost ready to throw my 1/60 in the trash. They suck so much in comparison. Now, everything is good excpet that I can't work out the back pack. With the bump on top of the hinge piece it won't go into a horizontal position. I can understand it being there to prevent it going past horizontal but mine doesn't even get to horizontal. It's about 5-10 degrees below..... Can some one give a detailed explanation and post pics of what the correct position should be? To me it seems that the back pack leans back too much, and even though the clip is there to hold the top up it pulls the panel open slightly on the back between the shoulders. With FAST packs I fear it would not hold up well at all.....

I don't really model these days, just collect Nike sneakers and Macross stuff (well, the sneakers are winning these days). I used to model cars though and make dioramas for them. Here are three of my favourites: Here is my Ferrari 456M. I just went for a simplistic setting for this one. Bit of a rush job. If you look closely there is a finger print on the left wheel arch. I didn't notice it until after I added the clear coat over the top... BMW Z4. The difficult thing with this one was just painting the back ground on the diorama to give that added sense of depth. I think it came out ok. Lastly, my Porshe 911 type 993. As you can see I like silver paint jobs. Hard work to make them realistic but worth it in the end.

One thing about the 1/48 in all modes is that the cockpit area is too fat. I wonder if they made it fatter so they didn't have to do anything funky to bring the legs in towards the centre more. I wish they had made the cockpit thinner and the intakes taller. I can handle the low hanging arms as I understand it's hard to get the bars in there for tranformation. Correct taller intakes would have helped hide the arm problem better. The bottom of the intakes really needed to come down a lot more realtive to the bottom of the lower legs in fighter mode.

From different universes? For me an army is pretty big and has lots of people/mecha that are mostly the same. If I had enough money I'd love to buy a whole mess of VF-1 toys and make a huge diorama, either a city battle scape or a hangar or both! If I did a hangar scene it'd be like preparing for the showdown with the main fleet, TV again. I'd have Hikaru's Super VF-1S , Max and Millia's Super VF-1J's, and 20 or more cannon fodders, a whole squadron, plus an Elint. Ahh....it's nice to dream.

Insurance is fine. Tracking number I don't really care for. Whatever the case it looks to be too expensive getting them shipped. Thanks heaps for the help. Sorry I can't give you another sale.

Hey, thanks. What about non-EMS? I'm not fussed on speed.

Thanks. That hits the spot. With $128 from Twin Moons and probably $40 for shipping to Austrlia I'd bee looking at $168 which is about $250 Australian. I can pick one up for $230 so I think I might just do that.

Not liking that design at all really.....

You got a link for Twin Moons? Where is the dude that runs it...? You here? I see VA has them for $135 but is that cheap? By the time I got it shipped to Australia that'd be way more than what I'd pay today at this store.

Hey all, I have the chance to pick up a 1/48 Max VF-1A today. The retail price here is normally stupid but today I can get one for 30% off so it should be reasonable. I just want to check though th following: 1. What exactly is a reasonable price for one of these outside of Japan? Say if you were purchasing in the USA? 2. What's the cheapest you can find a VF-1S Roy these days? That's what I REALLY want but I'd take this one for starters. 3. What were the problems with the Max? Thanks.

I like it. It looks more in scale with the 1/48.

Over on Niketalk.com we generally see Nike's upcoming shoes months in advance due to catalogues and samples making the rounds to stores. There are also a handful of people with connections at Jordan Brand that drop info on the upcoming Jordans well before samples are seen. It doesn't hurt business and actually builds hype I think. It probably also gives valuable feedback on what fans think of their plans. It's weird that Yamato and other companies are so secretive. They would probably have fewer complaints from people if they were less secretive and listened to feedback on products well before release. The Japanese tend to be a bit different though...

Yeah, I was wondering if we had something new. The desert stuff we used in Afghanistan and Iraq was a new colour of the old AusCam right? Same shapes just different colours? Btw, I seem to remember from my days in the army hearing that AusCam was developed by feeding a bunch of photos of Australian bushland into a computer program and having it come up with a pattern that best matched them all. It sounds a bit fanciful to me. From my experience if you do that kind of image processing you mainly come out with a single colour that is the average of all the input. Useless. I'd like to know what the reality is there. Maybe the software looked for spikes in the colour data representing the most commonly repeated colours and their percentages. Again though, feeding a bunch of random photos in you'd expect the distribution to be pretty random and not have spikes. Anyway, the camo is reasonably effective, more so in a forest environment. I guess that's why they came up with a desert version. Much of the soil in semi-arid Northern Australia is quite pale. I remember one embarrassing moment on exercise. I was lead scout for my platoon and we were patrolling into an area to meetup with the rest of our company. I knew we were eventually going to bump into them but I came within 5 metres of a guy from another platoon who was just kneeling down before I saw him. If it was the enemy I'd have been dead, pretend like anyway. Gotta remember to check the foreground and not just the background and middle ground when scanning.... Luckily I was not required to signal or anything when we met up with them. I just pretended like I wasn't surprised and knew all along he was there and kept walking. Excuse my rambling.

He was able to pilot it by................the CONTROLS!!!

Man, if it wasn't bad enough that they lost the war, they had to learn to read backwards? It's bad enough having to learn horizontal and vertical. Maybe this is why the Japanese are good at drawing and design - the ability to understand visual items arranged in multiple dimensions and directions!

Psi is a letter in the greek alphabet. Courtesy of Little Greek 101.

You have a picture of the Australian one you are talking about David Hingten?

Haha, I was just scouring ebay and came across this. That is just wack! Who sculpted that thing?!?!?! Oh my! Completed auction

Haha. Nah. Btw, did someone say repro decals!!! Oooooh!!!

Thanks guys. I have a set in pretty good condition. Box is a little worn but not torn. All the pieces are there but I think decals are applied to the Tomahawk pieces. Can't remember. All the other decals are fine. I paid about $50 for it quite a while back, almost 10 years. Can't believe it was that long ago. Dunno whether to hold or sell. Thanks again.

Hi all, I was wondering what the market value of the vintage Takatoku Destroid Conversion kit is? I'm after a range encompassing mint to average. Thanks.

how cool would it be if all the future valks came with a standing figure that could pose next to them. Wouldn't need to be articulated. Graham?

Bandai valks probably don't do well with Yamato's around.

So cleeeeean! So freshhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

Dope!