J.T. Silversmith

I think some of us are forgetting the macross crossover figure was also Macross 7 25th Anniversary figure as well as the transformers 40th anniversary.  Is Basara the face of Macross, I would say No, But is Basara the face of Macross 7?  It is either him or Mylene depending on your preference, and as others have said Basara is pretty popular in japan. (Now that I think about it, how many toys have been made of the Fire Valkyrie?  there have been many toys and transforming model kits, lots of versions.  How many transforming versions of Mylene's Vf-11 custom are there? To my knowledge ZERO.)   I can see the logic of the choices behind Basara Prime, but I am still not convinced of the execution of the concept.  I have not seen clear enough pictures of his various modes to see if there is anything I like in there.  I suspect the bottom of the jet mode will be much worse looking than I would like, and I still have not seen enough of his robot mode to understand what it is going on.

By looking where the new toy differs from the original I can see what I think are some indications of what they were trying to do.  This is what I have come up with so far.

Mike I have been enjoying the reviews you post here on Macross world.

I an really enjoying this set, and I have had no QC issues with mine. I have appreciated the improved cartoon accuracy of the Haslab version as well as the improved stability and articulation in all modes. I have not found the Sword to be to be that awkward to play with. if you have him hold it two handed, I tabbed the sword handle in his right hand, and just have the left hand wrapped around the handle. He is holding it with his right elbow bent at 90 degrees, and the left arm pushing  down the handle to hold the sword at the angle I want.  He was easy to balance without using the stand, and easily held the pose for hours.  I am feeling the opposite, he handles his sword really well for how huge it is!

I am the least satisfied with Blue Bolts, I like the idea of it transforming to a robot, bit the execution of that idea falls short in my opinion.  You can re-arrange the parts to make different weapon configurations, but none of them are held together solidly enough to be fun to play with.  The most solid one is the the way it is mounted on Omega Prime, or the vehicle mode, but to put it on Ultra Magnus's robot mode you have to disconnect the two tabs that keep it stable.  Trying to tab the white shoulder hinge into the holes in his forearms is a pain to get it in the hole, the minute you put pressure on the gun part to attach it, the white hinge collapses into the blue shoulder part, because there is not solid stop to prevent it. the hinge piece is hard to get back out because the only grip you can get on it is the groove cut in the end of the post that i have to use my fingernail to get out.

I have spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the "Fan-mode" for using all of the fire truck parts as additional armor for Omega Prime.

Mine arrived about three hours ago!

I got my Email from Hasbro Pulse as well, mine is on its way!

Yeah this kit looks really neat, I had some problems with the way the animated Prime looked and was not going to get him, and then I saw these pictures! I immediately pre-orderded the upgrade kit and then orderded Animated Optimus.  I am glad to see it is as nice a quality as I could want.  MY copy showed up yesterday, and is now wrapped and under the tree.  Tomorrow will be fun! Merry Christmas!

Me and my son just built Cole's Titan Dragon Mech, and have really been enjoying it.  It is just so well built, It has really useful articulation.  It is really stable in a pose, it does everything that I think a mech should do.  Yesterday when we were looking at it my son noticed that the eyes have light piping!  I had not seen anyone else mention it yet.  There is a clear white 1x1 tile on the back of the head to let the light pass through to the clear orange eyes.  Has anyone heard of any other Lego set with light piping?  I wanted to share a tiny little detail on this awesome set that might get missed!

This is under normal light.

This is with my finger blocking the light.

This is with a flashlight to show it off.  I thought it was a cool extra  that could be missed.

Here are some pictures I took  with Fire Convoy, God Fire Convoy, Gigatron Magmatron, and Jetfire.  as well as the Scale guide from TF wiki.

By the Scale guide Gigatron should be bigger than Super Fire Convoy and smaller than God Fire Convoy.  So if he is Jetfire size that would be about correct.  The Haslab Set is a little larger than the original figures.  It is theoretically possible that a Commander class could be big enough. But i don't know if the number of moving parts for a 10 changer pushes it into another class.  In my opinion the transformations are relatively simple, even though there are many modes they are all using basically the same parts.  Basically reproducing the original toy, there are no need for faux parts or tiny fiddly swingarms, so it might be possible.

I did include the list of heights for Overlord and the others in my picture on the rightmost side with the various meter measurements but it is too small to read unless you know what to look for.

Also that picture is a little deceptive to read.  I was going to include that picture on the left of my picture, but despite being a scale guide those pictures are not to the correct scale to each other! The little lines on the left are the actual measurements, and you are supposed to scale the characters to the measurements, not take measurements from the drawing.  Lander (Landmine) is the size Ginrai should be in the picture, and he should be smaller at 8 Meters.

There is a similar problem with God Ginrai in the tiny picture.  He is considerably smaller than he should be. In the other pictures he is clearly intended to be 20 meters tall, and able to look Overlord in the eye.  But in the scale guide they show him 20 meters at the top of his wing, rather than 20 at the top of his head as they indicated in every other source. I corrected all of the scale oddities in my version.

I couldn't find a good scale guide for all of the masterforce Autobots, so I had to make one.  The Robot mode scales are as correct as I can get. I have no reference for Vehicle mode sizes so they are not.  The reason I wanted to refer to the scale guide is that Ginrai's relative size to the other Godmasters is interesting. They all seem to be the same approximate height.  So the Size difference between Ginrai and the rest of his troops is much less than  the difference between G 1 Optimus Prime and his fellows.

Nice, that is good to know.  I measured my God Ginrai and he is 11.5 inches tall or 29.2 centimeters.  So I would have to guess with his legs a little straighter at his full height MPG Super Ginrai right around 30 cm tall. I am working on creating a nice version of the Masterforce Scale guide that I will post when I finish.  On the Scale Guide Ginrai Lightfoot Ranger and RoadKing are all the same height. I think 10M

It is probably the same size as the original God Ginrai toy

From the Figure King article it only shows Super Ginrai with the G1 trailer in Robot Mode, so here are some reconstructed comparisons with Ginrai's trailer. It looks to me that Super Ginrai is a tiny bit taller than Star Convoy.

I was analyzing some pictures to get a feel for how big MP-60 Ginrai is to the original toy, and wanted to share the pictures I was working from.

So my local Walmart finally had Legacy Evolution Dreadwing.  I really enjoyed the Character in Transformers Prime, and with some painting ans modifications I was pretty happy with the toy,  so I thought i would give the new version a try.  I did need to trim out some of the plastic on one of the hinges in the nosecone to get the torso to transform correctly.  The original toy had a stupid gun ruined by a spring activated light up feature.  The new  toy has a terrible sword ruined by a folding gimmick, clear red plastic and a weird ridge that forces you to only hold it in his left hand.   So I thought, I should use the sword from the original guy and the gun from the new one.  This is what his Gun looks like in the Cartoon.

Note that he stores his sword on the gun. I wanted to try to replicate that look with the new gun and old sword, and I found a way by using a Lego piece as a connector. The second picture is the new gun and sword with the new toy.  The third picture is the original sword with the new gun.  The fourth picture is the Lego part I used, with no modification required.

I used Google image translate to translate the pictures on Ginrai from the Figure O magazine.

I am a little bummed that Ginrai will not be able to look MP-10 in the eye, but if i think of it as more of a Missing Link Super Ginrai it helps.  Also since I bought the Re issue G-1 toy it has started started developing the very bad habit of breaking every time i transform it, a new version cannot come soon enough.  Appearance wise this guy works for me, I like the mix of toon and toy detail.  I am excited for this guy!

This is what TFW2005 said about the group responsible for Nightbirds car mode.

"The official render of the alt-mode belonging to Nightbird from Transformers: Rise Of The Beasts is unveiled by Pandem Rocketbunny who worked on the customization of the Nissan Skyline R33 GT-R.  Pandem Rocketbunny is a vehicle customization company established in Japan. The company is most famous for its Pandem Aerokits. Founder and CEO Kei Miura was directly involved with the design of Nightbird."

So that is who you should blame Peter, it is clearly his fault.

Yeah, i think a lot of the cars are overdone and too "MichaelBay", and that makes me nervous.  I hope it is just because they are all going offroading, but it does not instill confidence.

It looks to me like it is a 1x2 flat tile.  It is clipped onto the bottom of the gunpod with a claw piece much the same way as the hand is holding it.  You are seeing the bottom of the tile, so it looks like an open box.  The claw sits between the cone and  a rectangular brick.

Some of the holes for the hands and feet to connect to were off center, I remember specifically Nosecone has a hole in the bottom of each foot, rather than the single hole that Strafe, Lightspeed and Afterburner had in their feet. In the photo above, you can see the two holes on the little orange block in Computron's ankle. The bottom where the foot piece connects is the same, two holes side by side, so the foot piece can't connect centered.

No Idea why he is that way, and the other three are different.

I have been working on my own custom Lego Valkyrie that I call the VA4-Peregrine. I have been considering putting it up on the lego Cuusoo site. One benefit of an original design is that you don't need to worry about licensing. I have a gallery on deviant art if anyone is interested. http://jtsilversmith.deviantart.com/gallery/45823764

I built a Lego version of an original design I called the VA-4 Peregrine. It is a VTOL Attacker designed and tested at the New Edwards Test Center on Eden. I intended it to be a contemporary of the VF-11 and the VA-3. I have a gallery on Deviant Art that has lots of pictures if you are interested. http://jtsilversmith.deviantart.com/gallery/45823764 Tell me what you think.

I think it is this picture that makes me believe in a Hotrod + Rodimus Prime toy. You can very clearly see there are long exhaust pipes on the back of his leg and a full tire with a tread inside his lower leg. A pure Rodimus has zero need for that. The only reason would be to make it more like the Hotrod toy, that you wouldn't do if it is just Rodimus. The gun has two seperate handles, and it looks like it can split in half to make two smaller guns. There is also a picture that shows a long window, that runs the entire length of his upper body. The window in the RV mode is the same length as the RV hood, and that is only half the length of his chest. There is no way that long a window could be for the RV mode, so it must be for Hotrod!

I tweaked the levels of the photos a bit, but I didn't really change the color at all, mostly I cleaned out the green, but in the Arcee picture there are still bits of red fuzziness that should probably be grey, but other than that the colors should be accurate. Did any one else notice the two different paintjobs on Optimus's truck mode? The picture from the slideshow is a plain red truck, the one on the sign announcing the panel times has stripes and blue panels on the sleeper. I wonder which one is more correct. Also the cow horns on Cliffjumper's hood made me laugh, and I really liked Ratchets combination of eyebrows and traditional head crest. These look fun.

All right, that is quite awesome, even if most of those ships are a little to old for me to really love them. That was a riot.

len_d69, that is a nice paintjob on voyager Prime, that mold is fun. Still I have to say I do like the new leader one better. With a bit of touch ups, a wash and some drybrushing it just looks soooo nice.