Chronocidal

See, it's making me wish this was made by any company other than EA, and Star Wars was still owned by Lucas. There's some great stuff to work with here, but we all know that modding is a forbidden art as long as the game is focused on online play, and there's no way in hell the dedicated fans will get the chance to make any kind of custom content for this game that would help it rise to the level of its predecessors. I'll be honest, I'm looking forward to the fan remake of the original X-Wing more than this, because it will be made with respect for the original, and focused on telling a compelling single player story. I will readily admit though, I'm considering buying it, because hey, it's a VR game I can probably enjoy with my sim hardware, and I have to take what I can get in that genre. I have zero expectations because of the publisher, and I will likely throw the online modes in the trash, but if I can set up quick melee skirmishes against waves of ships in single player? That's really all I've wanted for a while. I just want to pew-pew in an X-Wing in VR.

I just got the notification that Anime Export now has my order ready to ship. Going to wait until my Kakizaki order comes in, and hope by that point shipping will be up and running more normally., Until then, I get to enjoy vicariously through everyone, so here's hoping it's a solid release!

Thanks for the heads-up about missiles being in stock at AE, my notification got filed in the junk folder. I'm going to hold off shipping them until both my Legioss and Kakizaki are ready to go though, which should theoretically be some time in August.

I would file wings unable to carry missiles as "inaccurate to the source material" because VF-1s have hardpoints in the wings. This is not a thing that changes from scene to scene, because the VF-1 is a standardized design. Missile load-outs change, the ability to mount them does not. Honestly I would absolutely love to see the complaints they received that convinced them that people don't want hardpoints on all the wings in the first place. Bandai just love interpreting how a scene is drawn as law, whether it makes any sense in reality or not. Their logic is really just all over the map, and there's no accounting for it. Deciding to give the 1/48 weapons shorter pylons than the HMR weapons? Deciding that printing a numeric modex backwards is acceptable for aesthetic purposes? Yeah, that's Bandai alright. At the end of the day, yeah, it's all silly to get riled up about. It's just irritating to see Bandai charge ahead full steam inventing things for people to complain about. They manage to get things wrong that no one else would even bother to question, because the answer is so stupid obvious, it's taken as fact. I'm waiting for them to issue a valk with square tires, and claim it was due to complaints about them rolling off of shelves.

Yeah, I've been fed up with their "animation only" approach to things for years. Drives me nuts. I'd love to mount missiles to my VF-1Ds, but NOPE. I just resolved to make my own set out of some plastic tubing. Easier than repainting spare wings into the VF-1D colors, anyhow.

It's a really -small- BoP, only about 4 inches long, but Polar Lights has done a really nice job of molding it to where a lot of the seams are hidden in the construction. Not quite Bandai level of engineering, but they're getting pretty good. Edit: Think I call this a success. I'd still like to get the edges of the inserts a little closer to the edge of the mounting area on the wing, but at this scale I'm thinking it's close enough.

Looking good, will be fun to see how you detail up the ground around him. The moddening continues, and I've started chopping up the wing mounts on this tiny Bird of Prey. I think I wound up filing away a bit more of the insert than I intended, so I'll either mount the wings slightly higher than the stock mounts, or I can probably just fill in the gap, since it's all so small. I went back and forth a couple of times on whether it would be easier to make the parts from scratch, but in the end I decided that I wanted to at least use the stock ridged sections, to avoid having to re-create the curvature and ribbing of that part. In the end, the whole thing still snaps together using the original tabs, so I'm pretty happy with the result.

Waiting for the SDK so modders can build the mods we're all dying to add. I'm fully expecting EA/Disney to absolutely crap all over the fans making Star Wars mods, but that's not going to stop all the other franchises people have been begging to see in a space sim for literally decades. I fully believe it's only a matter of time before people builds full-scale playable models of everything from every Enterprise, to the Galactica.

Eh, I grew up making the old MPC Star Wars kits, modding for accuracy is just a way of life.

Quarter-assed at best, really. And frankly, I give them more flak for using an odd number like 5, than just going 4v4 or 6v6. There's a reason actual squadrons pair each other up with wingmen That's just nonsense, to say nothing of the fact that a "squadon" tends to mean around a dozen ships, like in ANH. I'm.. I don't even want to call it optimistic, I want to say I'm cautiously interested. This is EA we're talking about, and the info on the trailer basically indicates that this is probably going to be the Star Wars equivalent of WarThunder, which is essentially a massively grindy online pvp game full of cash grabs, that depends on you spending hundreds of hours in matches to upgrade your planes so they can survive (or spend money for shortcuts). I'll give credit where it's due, it's not a terrible game, and it's really a very good VR-enabled sim with a broad selection of vintage aircraft, but the grindy pvp and leveling mechanics, to me, ruin what a flight sim should be: knowing your machine better than the other guy. That all gets shot to hell when you add grindy progression trees and lootbox mechanics to give people with extra time or money an edge. I will still be interested to see the single player campaign, and learn if its any good, but I don't expect much from the online play. The idea of playing out an original trilogy combat campaign in VR (on both sides possibly?) does sound really good.

Continuing my little 1/1000 Trek kit spree (I've got two of the Bird of Prey/Oberth kits, a Romulan TOS, a Reliant, and Defiant waiting in the wings), I'm putting the final touches on the D7 before I prep it for painting. Main thing I wanted to mod on this kit was to reinforce the neck joint, and also make it removable so the kit is easier to store. I found a couple of tightly fitting lengths of square styrene tube, and made a long friction-fit mount, so now the front just plugs in seamlessly to the back half of the ship. Next up, I'm starting work on both the TOS and Refit Enterprises. Where the TOS kit feels rock solid when just snapped together, the Refit is somehow a wobbly mess that's going to need a lot of glue. The saucer especially rocks around a lot. First order of business though was making sure the nacelles will be straight, because that's just the curse of the Refit. The default snap system was actually pretty sturdy, with the nacelle pylons locking deeply into the secondary hull. Unfortunately, after snapping the whole thing together, I realized that the mounts were actually putting forward pressure at the base of the pylons, and that pressure was translating to pulling the rears of the nacelles outward, and down. After some messing with fitting the various parts, and a gamble with some CA glue, I instead mounted the pylons on the upper spinal panel for the hull, which gave me a level mounting (so long as I didn't attach it to the rest of the ship). If anyone is familiar with the kit, I cut away the lower tabs on the pylon supports, so I can slip the parts in from the top, instead of sideways before the hull is put together. The second mod I found I needed was that the tabs meant to go into the slots in those supports were still putting forward pressure on the pylons when I snapped everything together. So, I needed to shift those tabs to the rear. This was all rough guesswork that I was shaping on the fly, but it worked out that I needed to shift the tabs rearward about half their thickness. So, I glued thin sheet styrene about half the thickness of the tabs to the back of each tab, and then filed the front of them down until they fit in the slots. The stair-stepped shift turned out about as well as I could have hoped. The saucer will still need to be glued and probably reinforced, but the nacelles are looking good enough for my tastes. Next on the mod list is going to involve sawing into a pair of the 1/1000 Bird of Prey kits to fix a boneheaded mistake they made with the wing mechanism. Not going to attempt a working hinge at this scale, but I'm going to make one in each position, and sacrifice one of the spare sets of wing mounts to build one that fixes.. well, this. In looking over my old mid-90s BoP kit, I noticed that it doesn't do this. The wing mounts look the same, and the large flat area at the root is covered by both the cruise and attack position parts. The wings are also completely flat in cruise mode, which I don't honestly care for. Then I started watching build-ups of newer issues of that AMT kit, and this is what I start seeing. Yes, they raised the wings to a higher angle, more like what was seen in the shot from Star Trek IV where they're hovering over the whaling vessel. But in the process, they took a shortcut with the new parts, and made them by just cutting off the longer ends of the attack mode mounts, leaving the wing hinges the wrong shape. So, since I bought two of the little kits with the BoP and Oberth, I'm going to be building one in attack mode, and the other I'm going to be frankensteining myself a set of properly-shaped hinges, by slicing up the spare wing hinges until I get a set that's shaped properly. Don't know what I'll do with the two Oberth-class ships yet, but I have half a mind (hah) to slice one up and mount it to a rock for a USS Pegasus display.

I'm assuming that explanation basically means that some part of the figure remains the same, and all the rest of the parts swap out? The red band on the shoulder looks like the only feature both figures have. Maybe the figure comes with one bust that has detachable armor, and then you get interchangeable sets of lower torso, legs, arms, and head? No part of those limbs looks even remotely like you could remove the armor; the elbow and knees joints are visible, and entirely different colors.

If you search back through this thread, I've got a post a long ways back from when the 262 kits were new, and it goes into some of the structural issues I found with the kit. I never had trouble with the ankles myself, but the large wing pivots behind the cockpit were a major concern. The paper-thin cover plates over the hinges tend to just snap when attaching them, and the large section of the wing mechanism that attaches to those hinges has a tendency to develop stress fractures along the narrowest section. I think the kit is pretty sturdy overall (for a model, anyway), and I've transformed mine multiple times, but I think that larger wing section needs reinforcement. Fortunately, the panel is shaped in a way that allows gluing some styrene sheet to the back of it for strengthening, without interfering with the transformation. It just beefs up the structure.

With NY, that's not unheard of, really. They love taking their time getting around to fulfilling paid orders. Right now though, the situation is anything but normal. Basically, they're dealing with a backlog of stalled orders due to the virus situation. It will also depend on which shipping method you chose, and if you picked one of the methods currently under restriction, you might just have to sit and wait. They have been listening to requests to change shipping methods, but the only option there seems to be paying them highway robbery-level amounts to switch to UPS. It is what it is. I don't doubt you'll get your item, but you're going to have to be extremely patient, because it may be months.

I forget, is this usually where the Diamond Select ships wind up getting discussed? Feel like there isn't enough conversation to really start a separate thread, but I discovered something interesting from a new purchase. Managed to pick up one of the Art Asylum Enterprise-A models, from the 2003 run, which I think was the initial release, before Diamond Select bought out the license and molds. The quality blows any of the Diamond Select releases completely out of the water, to the point where the DS versions feel like bootlegs. Paint and tampo are immaculate, and there is zero light bleed. Anywho, I'm sorely tempted to go grab one of those larger Mk II Vipers. Really have always loved the updated design.

That may only apply in certain cases though, unfortunately. I've been able to make some great parts, but half the time, the printing process and part prep takes more time than building one from scratch. He goes into the process a bit too, sometimes the extra work to get a good print means a lot of troubleshooting, and some restarts It's definitely amazing for making nearly finished parts though, and printing panel lines is a lot more reliable than scribing everything for me. I think he could save himself some work printing in a better orientation though. I've had a lot of success printing with parts arranged vertically, with some minor supports added that I can cut/break away. Wings print -much- better if you place the root against the bed. Might just be the printer I use though, I never can get good results printing large flat parts.

I have one of those on the way too, along with the Klingon Vor'cha, basically found a bunch of garage sale fodder for cheap. Now, for the Enterprise-D, I know the Diamond Select one is better modeled and detailed in pretty much every way. That doesn't stop me from considering pulling the electronic guts out, and rigging up the original four-button chip inside the Diamond Select one. I don't -mind- the cycling voice clips exactly, but sometimes you just want to fire a volley of torpedoes.

You know, I know nostalgia goggles can be powerful, but seriously, why can't anyone come up with toys -this- cool anymore? About 15 inches long, four individually activated sounds with lights, and the original price tag is still on the box ($24.96 at Walmart). $20 on ebay. Eat your hearts out, Diamond Select and Eaglemoss.

So this is fun.. after a little bit of trial and error with CAD software, and some photos of the Bird of Prey parts, I think I've figured out where the actual pivot point for the wings is.. and it's almost exterior to the hull. I think if I fudge the location a little, I can still get a good hinge completely hidden inside though. I think if I mount the hinge pin to the wing, and press it into a cutout in the hull baffles, the pin should be able to lay directly against the inner wall of the hull. Then I just have to tune the friction of the joint with the layers of the wing mechanism. Going to take a lot of sheet plastic, since my numbers are working out to 23 layers for the hull section, and 22 for each wing. Also, a lot of hand cutting and shaping. I may print a proof of concept to test the fit, but I'm not sure the layered prints would have the strength necessary for that kind of hinge (though the kit is pretty light). I might yet have to look into getting a laser cutter, because I keep finding things I'd like to use one for. Edit: Or, I could find someone that already did it with a sliding hinge instead. According to the notes I'm finding, that wing kit might actually have been made (or produced from someone else's designs) by Cobywan, one of the members here, but I haven't seen him around in a long while. His last post looks like it was in 2015.

I have that one packed away too, think that one is supposed to be 1/350? I'm half-tempted to ditch the wing joint setup, cut myself a set of custom baffles out of sheet styrene, and implement a working wing joint. The layered baffles on that kit are probably the mushiest detail on the entire thing, I've never liked the look of them. I've got a crazy smattering of unfinished and even incomplete Trek kits, since I grabbed a bunch of cheap partial kits off of ebay years ago for kitbashing. Think I have most of two AMT Reliants, most of two Enterprise-D kits (one with the fiber optic setup), and an Enterprise-B that I haven't started. One other thing I wound up doing last week was actually purchasing a few of the old Playmates toys, I think two of the Enterprise-D, two Vor'cha, and one Romulan warbird, all for something like $20 a piece (not sure whether they all work). I might keep the best ones in one piece, but I'm also considering cannibalizing the electronics to place them into an actual model kit. As much as I love the Diamond Select ships, I've never been a fan of cycling through movie sound clips, and always wanted an updated version of the old Playmates setup of four buttons, each giving a different specific sound. Depending on whether or not we get a re-release of the DS Enterprise D, I might even pull apart my early release (the one they forgot the neck windows on), and do some electronic kitbashing to throw the Playmates sound board into it, and then repaint the entire thing with the full aztec pattern. The paint job on that particular one was pretty sloppy, so I don't feel all that bad redoing it.

I'm honestly tempted to pick up the newer kit of all the small Enterprises with the massive decals now. I already have all of the individual ships (minus the NX-01) from two previous kits, and none have anything even remotely like the new decal sets. The TV, Motion Picture, and TNG set was actually a hilarious mis-pricing at a local shop of the version of the kit that included a giant clear acrylic disc that you could insert the models into for a flight display. Think it was like $3.00? But I would love a chance to rebuild all of them in matching scale. Aside from that, I find myself going on a Trek kick as well, and dug out my little Polar Lights 1/1000 TOS, TMP, Reliant, and D7 kits. Really wish they would come out with a 1/1000 K'Tinga to match the TMP Refit though, the 1/350 set is just too big for my current display space. Started with the D7, and it's a nice simple little snap kit. Not a bad fit, but I'm gluing everything, and planning to paint it close as possible to the original film model (been watching build-ups of larger-scale resin kits as a primer). I -might- base it on the updated model built for DS9's Tribble episode, but that one tried to bridge the gap between the D7 and the TMP K'Tinga, so while the shape is the same, they added a multitude of panel lines this kit doesn't have. All the smaller assemblies are pretty much done, but I'm debating adding a stronger plug-in strut for the neck so I can detach it for easier storage/packing when not on display. Other than that, it's all gone together fast and clean. I've made replacement insert panels out of thinner sheet styrene for the leading edges of the wings, since the two options in the kit are either a ribbed vent pattern (which wasn't on the original model) or a flush filler that just leaves a flat surface. Think my biggest concern is going to be blending the seams on the nacelle struts. They're probably the only troublesome joint on the kit, due to the dual layers of pylon having to merge with the dual layers of wing. Not a terrible seam to fill, but getting all the sharp corners shaped correctly is going to take some filler, and the top of the wing will need filling to smooth out some sink-holes where the slots for the pylon mounting tabs are. All in all not a bad little kit though, I like the 1/1000 scale for ease of display, and the ship is pretty sturdy, easy to take apart and put back together, which will make painting the sub-assemblies easier. Will probably start building up the TOS Enterprise next, it's ready to start gluing.

You wouldn't have to pay anything, just by nature of the licensing. DCS World itself is free, and comes with a couple of old stock aircraft that I think are based on the old LOMAC (Lock On: Modern Air Combat) sim. They're very low fidelity models, without clickable cockpits, and such. Any free mods would probably be of a similar quality level, just by nature of the limited tools available to the developers. I really haven't researched the details yet of what would be involved though, and chances are, if the limitations on free mods to DCS are too stringent, you'd probably be better off sticking with MS Flight Sim.

HAH.. only thing missing there is that Shooting Stars theme Agreed about the changes in Empire, it really came off the best of the bunch I think, in terms of the Special Editions. Biggest change I think was the redone holographic Emperor. I'm not a huge fan of it, since it didn't match the ROTJ emperor's look, but the dialogue differences weren't anything bad, as I recall. Other main ones I remember were the wampa scene (meh), Vader's line about his shuttle, and Luke's joke to R2-D2 about him being lucky he doesn't taste very good after getting spat out by the swamp creature. Mostly just dumb, but nothing really offensive to see. On the flip-side of that, I think the changes made to the Cloud City sequences with all the added exterior shots, lighting, and windows really did add something to those scenes.

Given the history with the old MPC Star Wars kits, I'd guess the inaccuracies are because the kit was based on the filming model, without any input from the prop and set designers. Still, they really did nail the exterior. Would love to see them reissue this kit like they did the old BSG Viper. Agreed on all points for "They Shall Not Grow Old" as well, managed to watch most of that on a cross-country flight last year.

I was due for a PC upgrade this year (old system is nearing 10 years old), so I decided to take the plunge, and I'm finally getting the pieces in motion to put together a basic VR-based cockpit. Will be starting out simple, with just a wooden framework to mount my stick, throttle, and pedals, and maybe a few major things like gear and hook levers. I'll probably slowly fill out the panels with controls over time, but right now, VR is the most practical and cost-effective display option for me, because I don't have the space or funds for a multi-projector setup. VR tech is getting fancier all the time though, so maybe in a few years we'll finally hit a point with true mixed reality, where you can sit in a physical cockpit, with real-time replacement of the exterior around it. If I ever get a handle of making DCS mods myself, I might very well throw together a simple VF-1 or VF-19 simulation module. The options for free mods are limited though, since the more involved functions of the sim require purchasing a development kit.