Kremmen

Four - there's a large-scale Yamato toy upcoming. But really ANY amount of attention paid to that mess is too much. ;p Oh, man, come on! It's 1/5000 - it's tiny! It's a tolerable kit, it's a placeholder for something better. Justiciar had every right to feel a little affronted by that. That said, there are some quite ordinary SDF-1 meshes around so I understand where your concern comes from. You just could have put it a bit better. Ahiachris, no idea of your circumstances, but this thing would have about the same footprint as your PC keyboard. How CAN that be too big? For me, it's considerably too small. I'd like 1/1200, but I'll take what I can get...

Oh please, please, please let it be a fighter-only non-transforming non-toy. I'd buy it then.

You'd lose me with a hybrid version too I'm afraid. Yes, the 'real' version (TV) was meant to dock with ARMD platforms, but it never did, making such a spectacle a "what-if" only, as seen in the in-universe "war movie" version, DYRL. (NOBODY mention the newer series showing the DYRL version please! Big West can't have it both ways, nyar.) Fact is, the DYRL has been done to death, it's, seriously, as ugly as sin, and there's new large-scale DYRL product on the way anyway. By god it's nice to see that modelmakers take the opposite line to the consensus on the Yamato...go us!!

Interested for TV. Not interested for DYRL.

QFT, and seconded. It's great to have someone with such hardcore skills being so accessible. Thanks!!

That's interesting. The local PE car body putties I've used tend to set very hard, unless you screw around with the catalyst or thin it with acetone. One of the reasons I hate working with the stuff - too hard, and brittle to boot. And yeah, that toxic stench, gah!! If you're after cheap and flexible, you indeed might want to try the water based approach. Doesn't have the fast cure time of Bondo, however: you've really got to leave it overnight for a moderate thickness, and longer for substantial thicknesses. It's just your basic hardware store wood putty - the local brand is Wattyl Woodstop, but there must be North American equivalents. It doesn't come with microballoons, it's just an ordinary water-based acrylic timber putty. Hardly any stench, non-toxic, sands well, softens again with water so you can remove it easily if necessary. I mix in the waterballoons to make it a closer match for the density of my Renshape, or just to thicken it up for sculpting a fillet or whatever (it's pretty gloopy out of the can). RC aeromodellers have been using this technique forever, BTW - you actually can buy premixed "balsa putty" versions at any LHS that carries a decent RC range. Oh - same thing works well with industrial epoxy putties if you want to bulk them out and reduce their hardness a bit. Far cheaper than Milliput, and not much less fine. Certainly not as nice as Aves, admittedly. Cheers, Martyn

Nope, that'd be my fear too, except it already happened to me and I did miss out on this one, unless John's moulds hold up for an extended run. :( My answer for the pop quiz was going to be that the chin gun ball mounts are phonies! And that the cockpit is insanely cramped, as always with SF stuff (I swear, the Ministry of Crap Design MUST have a hand in this - EVERY fighter-sized cockpit in the whole of SF ignores basic ergonomics). So I guess I was on the right trail. Edit: forgot to ask - John, how does the Bondo compare to the Renshape in density? The stuff I'm using, I have to use a water-based acrylic putty cut with microballoons to get the density down a bit to match. I'm guessing with your stuff it must be the other way around? Also, my god, gorgeous, whole new standards being set, yadda yadda yadda...

Cheers John, I'll wait and see then. MechTech, that is a horribly painful method compared to Renshape or similar. When you were a kid, did you carve stuff out of balsa, but were never happy because it was always impossible to get rid of the grain? Well, this is like carving and sanding medium-density balsa but with zero grain and a nice smooth surface. If you want I can send you some bits and pieces of 1" board I have lying around, just offcuts but enough to get an idea of what the stuff is like. It's not the seriously high-density stuff Capt. is using, but it might still change your world.

I couldn't disagree more, at least with the parts of your post I actually understood. ;p Help me out here; what is it about the idea of a scaled-up 1/72 YF-19 that doesn't cause you to salivate like it does me? Based on everybody's raving over it I tested that theory by buying an Angel Birds VF1 while they were on sale a couple of months ago. It. Is. Horrible. It was a given that that paint scheme would be; that's why it was on sale. But I was honestly expecting at least model-like detail and a good cockpit, combined with tolerable "compromise" proportions vis-a-vis the toy format. You do get OK proportions but that's it - clumsy cockpit, bad canopy sculpt, bad canopy thickness/appearance, bad landing gear, squared-off surfaces everywhere, poor surface detail...it's good for an actual child's toy, it's not all that good for an expensive adult collectible. You get a much improved basic sculpt over the ooooold toys, but it's not close to anything we could expect from Hasegawa. Just have a good look at a Tanmen some time. Now you're talking! Give me some bigarse Destroids over any number of Battroids. And I'll never understand the lack of love for the bad guys. A 1/48 Monster would just about fill a 1M3 space, however, and isn't a conceivable project for any company, ever. Dammit.

I know this isn't the place for it but my post in the interest thread didn't get a response. Second (and last) try: John, can I still get in? At least, if any places open up in the queue, please keep me in mind. I've been waiting KEENLY for this for months but chose the wrong time to change over to broadband - meant several weeks without a phone line at all (third world telecommunications out here). I didn't anticipate such a brief opening period. All my fault, and I understand your approach to QA, but seriously, your seconds would be better than most people's A1 stuff. I'd be more than happy to take a casting with a few bubbles or silicone tears showing. (I'm currently puttying up details on a Randy Cooper Star Destroyer...trust me, a few flaws aren't a problem for me!!) And Glaug is one of my grails. OK, don't want to be a pain. I'll shut up about this now.

Lee's thread is under the Studio Scale section with the title "A Storm is Coming" (the ship is supposedly named the Quantum Storm apparently). Yeah, I have the little Hoth base dio kit - the Transport from that is sitting on my scanner right now. It's a surprisingly nice little piece though it's kinda half and half - good overall dimensions and shape, OK detail on the main hull parts, TERRIBLE detail everywhere else. A lot like the dio kit overall: good speeders, good X-wings, worst Y-wings EVER. Strange thing, obviously a mix of different pattern-makers at work! You could still do a dio base for a studio-scale transport...just not a very huge one. I'm sort of tempted actually. The other guys will probably do the panavise stand that's becoming de rigeur in the studio-scale community. Hmmm....

Replica Props Forum. Good place for studio-scale modelling and, er...replica props. Like your Max. If you didn't point out the black line I might not have noticed! What scale are these guys?

I've read that dusts which are even visible are still too coarse to get into the alveoli of your lungs, which is reassuring, but it's still wise to wear a mask. I have a beard, and have trouble finding masks that cope with it at all well. It's not even a big beard, but it's tough! Thankfully the MSDS's for urethane board aren't particularly scary. I'll die of solvent inhalation before anything else gets me...

Thanks. Go check out Lee (Ralphee) and Allan's (Imaginager) builds at RPF, they're into the detailing stage now and their builds are amazing. I'll never make mine look that good, but after seeing their work I really wanted one of these, and it would be a crime not to use the stack of renshape (or similar) offcuts my signwriting friend gave me. I'll go back to that Viper and the Heavy Viper I was doing last year after this and redo them with the same stuff. It's way better than the old low-density urethane I was using. Got a 1/12 Krote hull and turret that I'll redo as well. Re your question, it depends on how big a Transport really is. I suspect 1/96 is more likely but I could be wrong. It's about 2'6" long.

Well, this isn't my workbench (it's in too shameful a state to show) but you get the idea. Having been inspired by Lee and Allan over on the RPF, this is a start on a Rebel Transport. I'll post a proper thread there once I have a bit more to show. My friend has access to a nice signwriting vacformer and can hopefully take the pulls off this for me, if not I'll need to build a new vacformer myself, which is probably a better way to go anyway, I could use it. Hoping to get to that stage in the next week or so.

I was kinda hoping you were right, an easily cut and worked epoxy-based product would be interesting. Heh. I'm working with high-density urethane foam at the moment. Got it on the brain...in among the roots of my hair...in my socks...all over the floor...EVERYWHERE! It may or may not be Renshape, I got it free so I don't know what brand or density it is. It's not as HD as Capt's type, for sure.

Epoxy based? I thought it was high-density urethane foam??

Awesome! Been waiting months for this! I AM SO IN!!!! (Yes I did read the thread. Second freaking Moscato kit in a row - missed the Comanchero too. I've been checking only one or two of the fora from my work account as my home account was down for four weeks. So angry at fate/myself right now I can barely type coherently. Arrrgh!!!!) Some of you sods drop out please!!! ;p Or - John, I'm fine and have dealt with castings MUCH rougher than anything you're likely to turn out even after a mould's use-by date. I'll sign a waiver that I won't complain. I'll go public with praise of it. I'll do anything. Glaug is a grail for me. Plllleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaassssseeee..............

LOL!

Uuurrrhh...ok, just not understanding some of this I'm afraid. * Any capital ship will have plenty of point-defense installations. I didn't mention huge guns, I mentioned missile launchers. Point-defense missiles at the very least. * No, fighters don't obsolete naval gunnery in all circumstances: they can't perform the kind of surface bombardment that a capital ship can, nor take out an opposing capital ship defended by superior numbers of enemy fighters, etc. * This thing COULD mount a million guns quite readily. Whether it could crew or power them is moot, but it has the space. My point is that the quoted figures would be inadequate for a much smaller ship - you're talking about one weapon per five square miles of surface (yes, I made that figure up, but you get the gist). The average middle-eastern village has a greater density of fire. * The Executor model was built to represent a ship 11 miles long, and filmed with that in mind. She is fairly consistently represented in the films at that scale. She's actually a fair bit less than 19km. Like I said - 11 miles is 17.6km. * Executor can't be both 19km long and 8km wide. * Star dragon, what exactly are you arguing against? You're saying the ship is still too big? BTW a flagship isn't the same as the lead ship of a class. A flagship can be any vessel, it is distinguished by carrying an admiral's flag, i.e. being the ship on which he is based.

Nerd. ;p hehe Like someone else said I've never been really a fan of that retcon either. I wish they'd just said Admiral Ackbar was using Rebel slang - LF DOES try to please everybody by "acknowledging" previous information, which is futile. BTW, she is not 8km wide, that doesn't match the proportions of the model. At 19km long the beam dimension works out closer to 6.4km. And to get even nerdier: 19km is actually TOO long. She was intended to be 11 miles long, which is about 17.6km. One of my friends was largely responsible for getting Lucasfilm to amend the late-80's scaling error which derived from the West End Games stuff. Unfortunately they've backslid in more recent material and are now using some third, incorrect length number. LF continuity screwups are like a Hydra. This Macross ship is shaping up, however even at sub-Death Star proportions there's still a problem with its weaponry. It is WAY under-armed for that kind of size! The thing has the surface area of a major city; it should have tens of thousands of missile launchers and entire air forces' worth of fighters.

How on Earth did you arrive at that? No, the question was 'aren't the Destroids selling well', so my response was 'compared to the Valkyries?', i.e. "no, at least not by comparison to the Valkyries'. Not necessarily, it depends on how much of the tooling might be shared between the Phalanx, Tomahawk and Defender. If the answer to that is "none", then your argument holds up. But anyway, the Spartan is most people's least favourite Destroid, isn't it? Agreed.

Does the Phalanx share the legs of the Tomahawk or Defender? If it does, then it would be quite possible we wouldn't be getting it at all *but for that*. That's half the tooling cost already paid for.

Stunning SDF-1. There's not really all that much variance from the line art that isn't made more or less necessary by clunky interfaces between different sections of the ship in the line art - I've struggled with those areas on my own NURBS model, which will never be nearly this good. I suck with all poly mesh progs I've tried but I wish I didn't right now, I can only chamfer where meshmoothing would be a much nicer approach. There's really almost no such thing as a truly planar surface on the SDF-1, except maybe the forward hull/guns. You really get the design. Beautiful! Any progress on this lately?

Compared to Valkyries? Three guesses. There's not enough love for Destroids. I just landed my olive-drab Tomahawk. First non-model-kit Macross item that I've actually purchased new as opposed to scrounging at garage sales etc. It's on my bedroom bookshelf right now - it will eventually get torn down as reference for a 1/35 version but in the meantime, it looks very nice. I like it. I'll get a Phalanx too. Hope they do the blue version.