Chronocidal

See, the funny thing, from Bandai's perspective, I can kind of see how this makes.. "sense." The thought process probably went something like this: - "What's the absolute minimum factory-complete product unit we can send that will cover all of the complaints of broken parts we've received?" - "The only way to do that would be to send the entire plane body, and the spare canopy." - "If it means we don't have to disassemble anything or interact with the assembly line, fine. Ship it." It's basically the minimum amount of effort they can give to get you the replacement for whatever part of the valk broke.

Wow, that's wild. I know Bandai is an absolute pain for refusing to replace individual parts, but I never thought they would go so far as to just send the entire valk. The crazy thing about this is that now you've got, essentially, a giant spare parts bin in case something else breaks. Too bad they didn't send you the engine petals though, or it would have actually been a fair piece to display.

Not a bad price considering the rarity, but yeah, I haven't seen much fanfare about it. Maybe because they were testing the waters for this product line with a fairly unremarkable design? I know it was a headliner for AC4, but I don't recall that game getting nearly as much fanfare as 4A when it dropped. I do keep hoping they'll do more figures at this level though, since the first one wasn't really a design I was interested in. They put out a White Glint though, and I will be all over it immediately.

I'll have to go check whether my previous order is carried over. Slight bummer about the stickers not being included, but I feel lke that will be one of the easiest things to solve, and I'm sure there will be local options, just not free ones. I'm more concerned what the cost is going to be to actually receive the order at all now. Edit: Looks like I actually pre-paid my old order in full in September, so I should be good whenever the new stock comes in.

Oh? That's kind of awesome, but also annoying, since I had already started stripping the leg packs on one of mine. Still though, good to know! I'll probably just stash that set and use the clear parts one one. I had already ordered a third shortly after receiving my first pair, so we'll see if I get notifications about it soon.

This kind of makes me think it was faulty from the start, giving you all the resistance at first, and then over time the mechanism has just failed.

I think the only thing that would stop them from doing just that is purely Bandai's unquenchable fetish for doing things that don't make any sense. I'm not sure which I prefer at this point though, since neither release type seems to be really harder or easier to acquire than the other.

There are absolutely a ton of ways to reconstruct the original UCS Imperial Shuttle that would be much more accurate to the original shape, and just more solid all around. Embedding several layers of ratcheted hinges in the wing pivots would be a great way to start, since they have a much lower profile and would give better support than the old crankshaft design. I've been waiting for them to get around to a redesign of that one for years.

Probably just purely licensing costs. I'd imagine original characters are a lot cheaper to make and get approval for. Though I'd prefer an armored Ozma, I don't know if they could pull that off convincingly.

Yeah, the style of that movie was weird, but I am absolutely on board for some fancy sets recreating it. I would absolutely pick up a new UCS Batwing from that movie as well, since I think it would need to be that size before you could get the style replicated well.

For Hasegawa to focus on the mainly white versions makes sense, when they got around to making the weapons sets they were mostly focused on DYRL designs, which tended to adhere slightly more closely to realistic weapons markings. Not that the black and red markings on the missiles was unrealistic, it just wasn't the type of marking you'd see on a production air-to-air weapon. I'd still like someone to actually detail the seeker tips with a sensor of some type, rather than just giving up and going "I dunno, make 'em blunt."

Several of the HMR releases definitely had missiles painted red that way. I believe all of the Hikaru VF-1J and CF VF-1A versions had the fins and tips painted red. Now, what I have not seen is anyone painting the black stripes on them, outside of one of the stupidly expensive statues released under the Robotech label. And.. actually the scheme is kind of amusing to me, because they are absolutely nothing like any other air-to-air missiles.. however...

... I'm sorry, WHAT.

Late reply, but yep, whatever you changed looks like it did the trick. I think you could reasonably set it at a lower number of seconds, the issue was just that the search time limits were actually preventing you from even exploring the search results that had already been returned. Say I was looking for a specific topic, and searched for a keyword, but it returned multiple pages of topics, and it wasn't on the first page, the time limits were preventing the user from going to the next page of results too quickly. I don't quite know how the search logic of the forum software behaves, but the behavior I was seeing was that it was treating every action on the search results as a new search. I couldn't just move to page 2 of the results it already pulled, it was treating it more like you were just re-performing the search, and returning page 2 instead of page 1.

That's entirely on Bandai for failing to understand the entire point of rotating the gear. They made the wheels so tiny, and the wings so thick, there's no point to even folding them flat. I've had this happen before as well, and it's generally because there's a specific angle that the wheel needs to be at before it will slot into the bay deep enough to not interfere with the door closing. I've had to experiment with finding the proper angle, and I can't remember which direction it is, but it's not exactly vertical. You might need to rotate the strut while pushing it into the bay. Edit: I was able to sneak in a quick look on my way out the door, the trick I've used is to tip the upper half of the tire slightly inboard to get it to settle into a cutout in the metallic details inside the bay.