Chronocidal
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Everything posted by Chronocidal
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So, did they just decide to deliver on the few orders they got, and then disappear into the ether? I was almost considering grabbing one, but I really don't need any more of these.
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Honestly, I would be thrilled to have something that good on my shelf, in spite of all the pain to make it. It really came out better than the source material should have allowed. But yeah, the size is the reason I haven't touched the 1/350 kits. Those are over three feet long. I'm going to try my best at the 1/1000 ones, and maybe get the bigger ones someday when I have a full-blown display room.
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The nostalgia bug got me, and I went to go check up on my own Disasterprise. All in all, I'm fairly sure it was knocked off at least two bookshelves, and was found hanging by the nacelles from my closet shelf after the earthquake last July. Glue around the nacelle pylons is all crackled, and they wobble a decent amount, so the only thing holding them on is the screws. The last retrofit to its current state came after the most recent shelf dropping destroyed the nacelles. I broke the model down, reinforced the interior, screwed the pylons on, and sprayed it with whatever white rattle can I had laying around. Before the rattle canning, I had painted most of the main details by hand, so the paint cleaned up a lot of mess. I built this before I actually cared about seams, so the sanding is kind of all over the place. The best seam is probably where I glued a strip of scrap styrene directly over the spine. A part of me really wants to scrap this one and start over, but I'm overly attached to the kit, since it was a gift from my grandma, and it's still in "good enough" shape that I could probably revive it.. I'm just not sure whether the ship could handle another round of refitting.
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I remember that assembly being a pain, but I also wonder which sort of glue you tried. This is actually one of those cases where I think the good old gunky orange Testors tube did a fair job, because that's all I used when I made mine. What might actually work as an after-the-fact support though... what if you used some kind of hardening putty in the pylon, and jammed a pair of metal support rods into it and let it harden, then filled the slot on the saucer with the same material, and pressed it down onto the rods? The pylon looks rigid enough that you could probably open up that slot towards the front, and that would give you some more room to fit supports into it. If you mounted a support into the leading edge (I'm thinking something like maybe stiff coat-hanger wire), you could potentially bend it so that it slips inside the saucer, and runs along the inside surface supporting it. In theory, you should have a nice through-line from your new hole, all the way into the neck, if you wanted to run a single support all that way. In hindsight though, I think you made the right choice gluing the pylon to the lower hull first. The alternative would mean you have to support the entire saucer when you attached the pylon to the lower hull, and that would make it much more difficult to get a solid connection there, to say nothing of keeping the pylon straight, or managing to keep the gray panels from caving in.
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Ok, you're honestly tempting me to track down a set of those decals to apply to my old clunker. That honestly looks amazing for such a lousy kit.
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See, I feel like that's a stretch, considering all the things they had absolutely no qualms about copying nearly verbatim from the Yamato design. I could be wrong, I really have no idea what sorts of individual features may be covered under a copyright, but that still doesn't excuse Bandai's engineers from not coming up with something that at least copies the function, if not the exact design. There are many, many ways to design a locking tab mechanism. They just didn't use any of them. Otherwise, I need to go remember where I ordered Kakizaki from.. I think that might be the item I'm waiting for to ship my Legioss and extra missile set from Anime Export.
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Don't know if it's referring to what I said. My hot take is that Bandai has a sincere passion for reinventing things using inferior methods. For whatever reason, they can and will refuse to use a tried and proven method of making something work, and substitute their own less-effective version. The leg fins, and arm and leg locking mechanisms (and landing gear doors ) worked much better on the Yamato design. Bandai just decided that they didn't need to imitate success. For some reason. It's like there's some kind of universal balance equation that they have to maintain, and for every improvement they make over a previous iteration, they have to also introduce one new flaw that was never a problem before. Like.. how do you do that? How do you invent new problems to introduce to a design, when everyone forever has gotten it right already? Insert your own Thanos meme here.
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Ok, for being such a disaster of a kit, that's a damn fine job.
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Was a custom that showed up in a Dengeki Hobby magazine long ago. I think it might have also been shown in one of the PSP games, but that might have been a different scheme.
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I mean, the kit in general has all the refined precision of a drunken viking dual wielding lawnmowers. I noticed on my build years back that for all the work I did leveling the warp nacelles, the saucer was what needed leveling, and straightening.
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This is really the main gripe with the leg fins. Yamato's design for them is just superior in every way, because they decided to do the extra work, and include a more complex interlock system where the fin still pulls out, but it locks into the stubs attached permanently to the leg. Bandai didn't bother with a lock, they just decided to let the fin swing freely, and depend on the tension of the sliding tab to hold the root surface of the fin flush against the leg. In Bandai's defense, this mostly works, unless you set the valk on it's belly, or add more than a gentle pressure to bottom of the fin, which will eventually cause the fin's mounting tab to slide out, and let the fin collapse outwards. The fast packs actually solve this entirely, because they have a small nook for the fin to rest in, and hold it stable. One interesting thing that initially threw me off though is that I believe Bandai designed the fins to sit naturally at a shallower angle than I expected. I believe the Yamato's tend to sit at between 30 and 35 degrees off vertical. The Bandai fins are completely floppy at that point, and I kept feeling like I had to adjust them. However, if you push them further out, closer to 50 degrees outward off vertical, they do hit a gentle stop, when the root of the fin matches the surface of the leg, and if you don't keep pushing, they'll stay there. Comparatively speaking, I think they're about as effective as the tail hinges on the VF-0D. Not what I could call sturdy, but stable if you don't touch them. Again, just emphasizing that I don't think Bandai designed this to be played with. With the saturation of the market, I can't really fault them for that.
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If you never plan on using the GBP armor, you're probably pretty safe doing so. Actually.. I mean, if you can just pull them out, there was no reason to fold them in the first place. Just remove them, and have the leg armor peg into the slot. I think the entire folding mechanism is just because we saw it happen once in the show, but even then, they folded the other way in the animation.
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More that the VF-171 CFs had differently colored super packs in the animation. We never got those in any format, though some people did make their own with custom paintjobs. Granted, Maruyama's was still an EX, so the packs were accurate, but yes, he should have come with the missiles too. Also, while there were Shapeways options, we never got the fancy fold crystal missiles they used in the movie.
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I should say to take everything I say with a healthy helping of salt though, really. I'm hyper-critical of what I would consider sub-par engineering, when someone else has demonstrated a better solution. I'm extremely disappointed in Bandai, because time and time again, they seem to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by intentionally ignoring the solutions others have already demonstrated, and then going forward with a less-effective solution of their own. It's just frustrating, and I can't come up with any logical reasoning as to why they would handicap their own designs that way. Does it hold together? Yes. It's just not as clean as the Yamato 1/60 v.2. It works, and it's not going to fall apart on its own. It just looks like Bandai still has issues figuring out how to develop a coherent product line that's meant to fit together seamlessly. They did a great job with the VF-31 line, and the sloppy design involved with these friction tabs is just a huge step back to me. As a small side gripe.. I hate sliding-tab landing gear doors with a furious passion, and wish every manufacturer would abandon the design style. They're terrible in function, they're a pain in the arse to open, and they really just don't look anything like actual landing gear doors. That's one thing the old Yamato designs will always have over everything since those hinges appeared on the Fire Valk: that is how landing gear doors actually work. The hinges are recessed into the walls of the bay on a hooked swing-arm, and swing outwards to clear the edges of the bay.
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So, I will say they are slightly better than the Yamato 1/48 with fast packs. Smooth as they are, the awkward pressure fit of the legs on the friction tabs does a fair bit to hold them in place, just so long as you don't actually try to adjust the arms. Try dropping the legs for a half gerwalk pose though, and the combined weight of the packs and gun will very likely leave your arms dangling free of the pegs. That's no different from the Yamato 1/48 though. The only solution we've seen to that problem is the v.2 1/60, where they locked the arms to the underside of the backplate with a clip around the biceps. What I did notice after my last session trying to shove the fast packs further onto the leg tabs though.. they're physically impossible to push all the way on. Bandai contoured the underside of the wing glove just perfectly to mesh with the upper surface of the leg, so the legs match flush in normal fighter mode just fine. That doesn't work when you attach the fast packs, because the contoured recess for the leg wasn't meant to hold a box. That's why the leg tabs have no latches.. they couldn't have a locking mechanism in place when they didn't design the wing glove to fit the fast packs. As a consequence of this, the arms can't reach all the way up their pegs either, because they actually do lock in decently against the legs, and the legs being pushed down pushes the arms down in turn. After all the steps they seem to have made to accommodate fast packs from the get-go, they still manage to invent ways to fumble their designs in new and interesting ways that no one got wrong before.
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See, I'm kind of on the fence about whether they -need- maintenance or modification. I think what's evident in the design is that Bandai expects you to display it in battroid mode, and never touch it. Done that way, there really are no flaws to be bothered by. We've hit a point where there don't need to be many direct design compromises between fighter and battroid on the VF-1. The proportions just work for both on the whole. What we're seeing is how different brands will still prioritize one mode over another, or treat them as display models, rather than toys. Bandai absolutely made a great battroid display model. I think in their minds, the fact that it becomes a fighter aircraft is just a side detail. They didn't go to extreme lengths to make fighter mode exceptional, it just benefits (or suffers) from the improvements they made for battroid. The smooth pegs are just the bare minimum effort to hold it in fighter mode, rather than developing something to actually lock it solidly together. The biggest failing of the pegs is in fighter mode with the fast packs attached, because you remove the only support for the arms and legs that's not dependent on a vertical friction peg. But of course.. again, this problem disappears in battroid mode. As long as you display it how Bandai wants you to, you'll have no problems. It's not their fault you like the fighter mode more.
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Yeah, I've been tempted to glue the head lasers and ventral fins in place more than once. The fins don't exactly -lock-, but if you press them into the legs fully, and then upwards, they kind of stop in a particular place. The sloppy leg and arm tabs are just a lousy design, and I wish Bandai wouldn't have tried to reinvent things that already worked. Frankly speaking, while fighter mode looks like a great mix of the Yamato 1/48 and 1/60 designs, I don't think Bandai thinks much about people actually keeping it in fighter mode. Most of the issues you mentioned disappear in battroid.
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Don't do it. They won't apply your store credit to shipping, and if you don't order enough TV packs to take up the whole total, they won't let you use the credit at all. I'm going to search out that shipping upcharge tagline to get things moving, but for all that we've been through ordering these packs, they should absolutely send everything for no additional charge. Just think... if they had actually done what people paid them to do, and placed the SSP order during the first wave, we would have all gotten our packs last winter before the current situation started, and wouldn't be in this mess to begin with.
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I've sent in a pair of tickets about changing my shipping method, but apparently they weren't attracted enough to my request about "shipping options." Do I need to literally say "I want to give you more money to ship my overdue order from a year ago"?
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That old kit still does come across as a pretty decent representation of the ship, but sheesh if the ejector pin marks on that one aren't horrible. I don't recall mine having that issue. If the plastic wasn't probably insanely brittle, I would probably like to build one of the transparent versions, rather than the fiber optic kit.
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Ok, for as confounding as the IDEAS process can be, it does produce some amazing sets. https://ideas.lego.com/blogs/a4ae09b6-0d4c-4307-9da8-3ee9f3d368d6/post/1fb8734e-ece8-4196-a490-05bca4ea94e7 I feel like I'm absolutely going to have to get one of these. I'm almost tempted to get two, and kitbash them to make a bigger keyboard. The size is a little deceptive from the picture though, it's got a footprint of a little over one square foot.
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I -might- be tempted to kitbash the parts between the Klan and Ozma versions, and paint it up as that theoretical red VF-25S we saw years back.
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Ok, Calibre needs to step up their packaging for these releases to the same as their "official" releases. That "gear down" package is not a good idea, and is how the gear on my Hikaru-schemed one broke. The more things sticking off of the plane in the package, the more there is to break off. They need to package everything separately. On the other hand, it looks like they at least learned that lesson with the nose pitot tube..
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Awesome. I was hoping those would leak out, and at least give people a chance to build it on their own. I was never all that interested in the power functions to begin with, so that simplifies things.
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You're not wrong, though I suppose I mean that from the perspective of how they'll let IDEAS sets get all the way to the approval process before canning them too. They don't actively deter people from supporting military-based set concepts, they just get booted after letting people get their hopes up, and watching the support totals soar. The other problem though.. yeah, that's something beyond what I'm going to attempt to discuss on this board. Suffice it to say, there is more than one pandemic circulating the globe right now.
