Chronocidal

Yeah, unfortunately, no part of that art makes even the slightest lick of sense.

Yeah, I'm just holding off shipping anything until another option exists. Thanks for the info though, good to hear the details confirmed.

For all they get transformed, I wound up picking up a few of the 1/72 kits. Can leave the posable ones in battroid, and display the fighters in flight without any worries about the legs dropping off. I'll definitely spring for a Millia if they make it, but we'll see how the first one sells. If it starts getting dumped into the bargain bin, I'll probably grab one on amazon in case it just turns into a one-and-done.

As fun as it is to paint them as the villain for all sorts of reasons, I think it just all comes down to them doing everything in their power to min-max their profit margins. If they can make a quick-turn reboxing of the 171 with minimal new parts molding, and pass it off as the companion to their Fire Valk? You bet they're going to do everything they can to minimize the effort and expense involved. I frankly would have rather had straight repaints of the 171, but it is what it is, and if Bandai can be trusted to do one thing, it's that they'll never backtrack or admit their mistakes or bad decisions, no matter how obvious or stupid.

The tampo stripes are definitely mis-aligned on purpose, although it looks like the two halves that should line up aren't quite aligned anyhow? I think that's a separate issue though. Judging by the translation, and my experience with my bum hip, I think Bandai borked the casting on the right hip. It didn't work correctly, the joint is far too stiff compared with the left, and the parts do not like to line up. The lower part tinted pale blue is causing issues. Though.. it's hard to tell if he knows what he's talking about. I think the "scratch" he's pointing to is an intentional detail on both sides, so I'm not sure what he's actually trying to indicate. Also, to refresh my memory, I checked on my first HMR Fire Valk, and opened the second one I got. The second one seems to have none of the hip issues my first one did, so it's inconsistent at least.

Gotcha, yeah, that's definitely a problem spot. The hips really just do not fit well, unfortunately. Interestingly, it's the same hip as the one that broke on my Fire Valk. Going to have to just chalk it up to Bandai borking the production on these somehow.

That's not a tampo problem, that's a transformation problem. He didn't align the panels so the stripes actually match.

They do have different shoulders, but it's not really a significant enough difference for me to care, and it saves me from having to paint them to match if I make my own. I still might need to repaint the yellow part though. As for the others.. just because we think it makes sense for Bandai to make something doesn't mean they ever will. (Insert screaming about the Tomahawk here.) The Kai/P and F/S models have some significant changes. If Bandai doesn't think it's worth making, they won't do it. As much as I want to buy a ton, I'm keeping my expectations at the bare minimum. Funny enough though.. yeah, those stripes aren't supposed to line up at all. They didn't on the Yamato, or in the animation. The hip parts being an issue isn't new though. I had issues with my Fire Valk's hips, and one of the internal die-cast connectors for the hip actually broke. It still stays on, because it's held on by more than just that part, but making those hip segments out of metal may not have been the best idea.

You forgot the third option... You could also track down the old Bandai 1/65, because it's probably much cheaper. I don't know if I can call the DX a "realistic" approach though, the weird shrinking/resizing/rearranging of the components just makes the entire torso look like it has no substance to even connect the legs to. I think that's more impactful than the skinny legs, really, since I feel like they managed to make the legs look decent on the 171. Reducing down the nose to the older style stub really feels like it breaks the design of everything below the chest, and the legs are just dangling, attached to nothing at all, because the nose section isn't there to give them something to connect to. It's just weird trying to blend the two.

Basically, you're up against a wall of trying to reconcile the fact that the two look nothing alike in their respective series. They can draft up any harebrained lore explanation they like, it doesn't change what we see on screen with our own eyes. Reality is just that the aesthetics of the two series are incompatible. Writing it into the story doesn't change that for the viewers. If Bandai really was intent on retconning the size of the original, they shouldn't have renamed it in the first place, because it drew a dividing line between the designs, marking them as distinct craft. Trying to backpedal on that retcon now is a losing battle, and one of the major issues is just that the blended aesthetic is so schizophrenic. Doing a selective resize of the components to try and pass the 171 off as an original VF-17 just gives us a misshapen caricature like the doodle in the previous page, because the separate components are now all out of proportion with each other, and it fails miserably at actually giving the same aesthetic as the original in M7.

I'm not talking of a skeleton in the physical sense, since no, these toys don't have those, and they don't share many physically molded or machined parts, because the individual connections and shapes are different. I'm talking about the idea that if you took an x-ray of the figure, and drew a connecting stick figure diagram of all of the major transformation and mobility joints inside the valk, you would have very similar results for both. The "skin" of the valk is where all of the unique features would lie, and that's where all of the parts you're talking about would attach. This is really rough, but for a better diagram, I'd need to draw all of the essential connecting joints of one of the actual figures, because animation is funky, but imagine this skeleton connecting all of the major transforming components. You draw connecting lines between linked parts to come up with something that just shows the relations between them, and where they connect. Maybe a better way to explain it is actually comparing it to how skeletons work for game character animations. You have an invisible skeleton that exists to link the essential moving parts of a character, and that skeleton may not change, while the actual characters can be wildly different. Long video here, but it shows a pretty clear example of what I'm talking about. The YF-19 and VF-19 are similar enough to share that same basic connecting skeleton stick figure. They're basically the same aircraft with different exterior panels. You can't really do that with the VF-17 and VF-171, since the proportions and transformation are so different. Some of that comes down to the exterior body panels and details of the 17 just being much bulkier, but it also means the locations of the key transformation joints have to be adjusted significantly to accommodate those bigger components. Bandai also added extra joints and steps to the transformation compared with the Yamato VF-17, so the skeleton of that transformation stick figure is a lot more complicated. Anyhow, sorry to drag the thread off on this weird tangent, but it's actually kind of fascinating to see the differences between the 17 and 171 when you dig into the structural relationships, and how the two toys were approached so differently.

So it was pretty deeply buried in this thread, but I found it. Unfortunately I managed to schnooker myself into thinking the image I had saved of the tails being correct was something that actually happened.. no, I actually photoshopped that myself as a "what if" to see how much of a difference it made.

Something that makes the Fire Valk Optimus look absolutely sensible by comparison? Though to be fair to the design, I don't think it's going to work until it's painted. The colors are really the only thing that will make that recognizable as anything remotely Evangelion-related.

Oh, I have a lot more intensive mods for this than just the fins planned. They're just generally in the way, and look out of place at the location they're mounted. If I can pull it off, I'll probably make it some new wings, and see if I can finally get my Master File VF-19F. At the very least I'm going to be stripping and repainting the red. Fortunately, Bandai (for some inexplicable reason) couldn't figure out how to make the fins turn, so they just slapped a spare set of shoulders in the package that I can happily chop the fins off of, and still keep the stock ones as a spare set. Like.. the fact they chose to do that is baffling on multiple levels, but I at least appreciate the convenience.

Forgive me for cracking up a little at this... They finally give us white gear, and it's on the one valk that canonically has them painted a different color

Yeah, that might have been me explaining the knees, but my point here was something a little different. If you look at the original battroid art, the YF-19 and VF-19 absolutely share the same proportions. They're fundamentally the same skeleton with different body panels. If they were cars, they'd be the same chassis with different body kits. From the toy manufacturing side, what I'm talking about is the internal skeleton that the valks transform on, independently of what any exterior panel is molded to look like. Whatever the exterior looks like, you can probably draw a very similar stick figure between every one of the major transformation joints, and the mechanisms involved will be mostly identical, with the same measurements between them. The big differences come from the way Bandai and Yamato/Arcadia approached their own designs. The Yamato and Arcadia YF-19 and VF-19 both compromised the length of the legs to make the battroids stockier, so they both have to extend the legs for fighter mode, leaving those knee gaps. But the fundamental proportions of the designs, the "skeletons," are the same between them. On the Bandai side, they made the conscious decision to model their YF-19 (and the VF-19 Advance) on the updated animation style without any mass shifting. The legs are proportionally longer and skinnier, so they were able to avoid the knee gap. Some people didn't like the changes, but it helped Bandai pull of a very slick fighter mode. While we don't have the DX Fire Valk yet, we can make some general assumptions, and it's very likely that it will share the same "skeleton" proportions with the DX YF-19. Once you figure out a working set of those measurements and mechanisms, it helps a ton to be able to re-use them, which is why they're doing the same for the VF-17 now, rather than re-designing it to match the original animation. It's just a lot less work. Far as the animation goes though... eh. On the off chance that we did get a modern animated version of the VF-17, I feel like it would be cutting way too many corners to just tweak the model like Bandai has done here. It's practically unrecognizable as the same valk. For the VF-19 and YF-19 though? The YF-19 was drawn in the M7 style, almost literally. Macross Plus and Macross 7 came out concurrently in 1994. The animation styles of the two were a little different, but the line art was all drawn around the same time, and is very similar. Also, something to keep in mind with the animation... Bandai can write whatever lore it wants about how the VF-171 is supposed to use the same components as the VF-17. Truth is though, trying to reconcile those designs between the two shows is just flat out impossible. The sizes of the valks in M7 were insane, and no amount of lore manipulation can make that make a lick of sense. Like, just for comparison. The 171 looks like its wings/waterline are about 6 feet off the ground. The VF-17 was animated to look absolutely gargantuan by comparison. The only way we know what size the valks in M7 were supposed to be is Kawamori's official notes, because M7's art scaling was not at all grounded in realistic sizes for any of the fighters. It really didn't try to make anything look as realistic as the other series did.

Boy I hope I can twist those fins off without destroying the shoulders, since at least one of mine is getting the Skull-1 treatment. Can always cut them, of course, but would be nice if they just detach.

I think the topic here is much more about the proportions of the jet itself than the individual parts. For all of the changes between them, the YF-19 and VF-19 are still fundamentally the same aircraft design, with the same layout and overall proportions of components relative to each other. That really can't be said about the 17 and 171, because their proportions are really nothing alike in battroid mode. Obviously moving to CG animation changed the magical proportion shifts present in Macross 7, but that didn't stop Yamato from making a massively chonky brute of a VF-17, and getting it to transform into a solid fighter mode. Bandai made an accurate VF-171, sure. But it looks nothing like what the VF-17 ever has, in any medium. They may as well be trying to upsell an F-18C as a Super Hornet. The designs are at least that different.

See, the parts I'm thinking of are the irritating little aesthetic choices that actually have absolutely no impact on the transformation whatsoever. They're just shapes and details that Bandai looked at and decided, "No, we're doing something different." So.. as a fair warning, I'll spoiler it for folks who don't care to hear my rantings about little details. Just the TLDR though.. Bandai changed little aesthetic details that don't impact the transformation. Are these nit-picks? Absolutely. But there is no valid reason for why those details were changed in the first place. It's just Bandai deciding they know better, and I'm so tired of that attitude. As for the tampo, while I think it's obnoxious, for what it's worth, I can appreciate these markings more than the slop they threw on the YF-19 (at least these are symmetrical), but I still think they went overboard. What's sad? The worst part isn't even the added markings. The dingbats went and printed the UN emblem on the left wing cock-eyed. It is absolutely misaligned on every single picture I've seen of the YF-21, and that is just a bizarre level of incompetence on a product at this price point. I'm VERY tempted to just strip those off and put fresh decals on to fix it, since I think they're about the same size as the Yamato 1/60 VF-1 fast pack markings.

They're probably fine for main city areas and delivery hubs, but I'm in an oddly remote area that has absolutely no support from DHL directly. Anything I get from them doesn't even come from them, it gets delivered to Bakersfield, and then shipped through a secondary third-party delivery service that neither communicates with nor associates in any way with the official DHL customer account system. I am just completely SOL trying to track down any delivery dates or requests for any re-delivery or hold requests. FedEx and UPS? Absolutely fine. DHL? Just a giant pile of nope out here.

All aspects of the transformation and proportions aside, I feel like they absolutely went off the rails though. While they're not what most people would call "significant" departures, there is a rather large pile of details on the original design that they just completely ignored, or purposefully redesigned for no explicable reason. The worst part of this is that some of these were correct on early prototype pics, and Bandai later changed them specifically to be contrary to every piece of reference material, animated, drawn, rendered, or otherwise. They just looked that the art, flipped it off, and did their own thing.

Which, funny enough, I think I would have been more on-board with? They could have marketed it under the Macross 30 game license, since it included a bunch of alternate color 171s I would have loved. On that note though, this might give us the red Millia 17S I always wanted, but Yamato never did. I'll definitely bite on that one, if it happens. All things considered though, I might still grab one or two of these down the road. They won't replace the Yammies, but I'll be very curious to see how it sells, and whether it winds up in the Amazon bargain bin (where it really belongs). They'll stay in fighter forever, but I can't say the design is terrible in that mode anyhow. At the very least it'll be a nice source of spare parts to repair more of my 171 junk pile.

So.. on the small plus side of things.. they can remold all of the explodium parts in the proper powder blue rather than that obsidian garbage, so at least in theory they'll be less prone to shatter. (The splotchy color makes me think this is just a repainted 171 though.) Also funny that they didn't bother to mount the gun in fighter mode. Cuz.. you know. It's the wrong one. The least they could do is to mold a new one and just pretend they care.

So, the issue is purely Bandai's terrible design choices for the leg, and their inability to write proper instructions. I wrote a detailed guide to everything they did wrong in the old 171 thread, and listed some steps to hopefully help prevent the legs from exploding, but there is nothing that will fix the issues with the knee without a fundamental redesign of the knee mechanism.

"Holding up" doesn't do anything to fix the fundamental flaws in the engineering of this design. The legs are still one misguided transformation away from shattering, unless they've completely redesigned the mechanism, and I saw no change with that in the renewal.