Chronocidal
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See, I get this weird feeling that we're about to see a Star Wars-branded Time Crash. I don't know how much water any of the rumors hold, but the idea that we're going to see Wedge again, along with that massive fleet that seems to be sourced from every property in the entire franchise, makes me wonder if we're going to see them pulling heroes from across the entire timeline to come together for a final battle. At the very least, they seem to be pulling designs from all over the place in that fleet shot. I'm seeing designs I haven't seen since the X-Wing games, since I'm pretty sure there are a few Corellian gunships, and what looks like a classic escort carrier design, and even some Ssi-Ruuk-looking ships in the mix there, along with the Nebulon-B, Ghost, Hammerhead, and even something that at first glance looks like a vintage V-Wing. Definitely a Home One-looking Mon-Cal in background of the upper right as well, besides the obvious classic corvettes. That shot alone has me interested in seeing it, honestly. It's obviously a shot of nostalgia, while trying to out-do all the other movies in sheer scale, but that doesn't mean it won't be a spectacular battle to watch. Note- Far as all the ISD-1s go, I wouldn't be surprised if they just didn't feel the need to make a new model, and just went with the digital one from Rogue One. I'm hoping we'll see some better variety, but it could also be related plot-wise to how long Palpy's been keeping this fleet hidden. -
I actually never minded the old HM VF-19 mold, in fact I even slightly preferred the proportions to the Yamato VF-19 mold, since I always thought the Yamato's nose felt too short, or the leading edge extension too long. The design is actually very similar between the two as well, especially the hip mechanism. It was just everything else that was lousy about the design, from the fiddly bits like the plug-in hand covers, to the complete lack of landing gear or gunpod mount. I think with a little work, they could easily upgrade that mold to be something more enjoyable. They just need to bring it up to the standards of the other HMR releases, and I could see myself grabbing a few easily.
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Arcadia 1/60 Perfect Transformation VF-0D for 2015
Chronocidal replied to Dark_Ghost's topic in Toys
We really won't know that until someone transforms theirs, and scrapes off the weathering. Really, for me, this comes down to "I don't want a weathered one, I just want it the right colors." Same exact issue I have with the FB2012 VF-4. I admit, I'm an oddball about this, but I just flat out do not want a weathered edition. I would honestly be willing to just plunk down the asking price for the weathered editions if I could get them in the standard PF format,. Arcadia just doesn't seem interested in offering that, and I'm not going to buy a weathered one just to ruin the value by cleaning it off myself, so in the end, it's just money saved for me. -
Yeah, Palpy 2.0 honestly never bothered me in the EU, since they made such a big deal with the clones, and given the later additions from the prequels, I figured the entire "learn to cheat death" bit was obvious foreshadowing. I honestly blame TLJ for the asspullishness of this reveal, because if Snoke hadn't wound up being such a pile of irrelevant nonsense, we might actually have gotten a good lead-up to it. I do have to wonder about what the situation with the huge fleet battle is though. They're obviously looking at Endor and going "Hold my beer" with the implied scale, but what exactly is even going on? What sort of time-spatial shenanigans is providing for a giant fleet of ships appearing in some sort of atmospheric bubble, and what's with the giant crystal doohickey? Are we going to get another midichlorians moment when they reveal that the giant crystal is actually the physical representation of the dark side in its entirety, and get a Yukikaze ending when Rey and Kylo fly the Falcon into the heart of it while the atmosphere bubble collapses around it, and everyone is ejected back out into normal space while the crystal collapses, and the Force rebalances itself? I really don't have any major qualms about seeing it in theaters, because yeah, it's a tradition, and I want to at least see it for myself for the talking points. I'm just really not expecting anything that will fix anything from the past two movies, let alone even connect with the OT. TFA and TLJ both had their own enjoyable moments if you ignored the overarching (lack of coherent) story, so I don't doubt this will have some good parts.
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The sad part is, the battles were among the most egregiously rotten parts of TLJ, so you can't even really enjoy the shoot-em-up bits of that mess.
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- joonas suotamo
- mark hamill
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So, interesting ideas, but I'm feeling like the horses thing is just them going "How can we one-up the Battle of Endor?" "I know! Let's have it in an atmosphere somehow this time, so we can have people fighting on the outside of the ships!" "Brilliant! We can have them storm the command towers on horseback!" I'm cautiously interested to see where they take it, but I think I'm done treating this as actual Star Wars. I'm calling the new trilogy the sequel to Turkish Star Wars.
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- macross zero ivanov
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Don't think this is inappropriate for this thread, but I keep forgetting to request the general 3D printer topic get moved into this forum. So, I will say that unless you really want large solid models, a small print volume will make for a much more compact workspace, and be more affordable to experiment with. Entry level printers are dropping in price to the point where it's probably worth buying a smaller one to start, and only upgrading to something bigger once your projects surpass the capabilities of that printer. Far as filaments go, I have not heard of PolySmooth, but most modern FDM printers tend to use either ABS plastic, which is a styrene derivative that a lot of toys (including all the assorted valks discussed on this site) are made from, and PLA, which is a a sort of polyester. While I have printed a couple of projects in PLA, I try to stick to ABS for the material properties, and reasonable compatibility with standard model kit styrene (similar hardness, flexibility, painting and finishing properties). Resin printers will definitely give you a smoother finished part, and you won't have the sorts of wavy surface artifacts that FDM printers leave from vibrations in the printing mechanism, but I have heard they also are not as good for making a finished model, and the liquid resin seems like it can get expensive, and difficult to manage. I do not believe the SLA resin is as sturdy a material as PLA or ABS, and while resin prints will absolutely be good for casting molds for resin reproduction, I have heard the material itself can deteriorate over time. As far as breaking down large models into assemblies goes though, I would absolutely recommend doing that, because it just makes sense. Printing a model in one solid chunk can be fun because you wind up with a finished product, but it also severely limits how well the model can be finished. FDM prints will require clean-up work of the parts, and lots of sanding to remove the layers and uneven surface artifacts, which gets very difficult to do when the model is in a single solid chunk. My Excalibur print shown a while earlier in the thread has this problem, but I never intended the single-piece print to be the final product. It was more a test of the printer's capabilities, before I broke out the individual sub-assemblies, and printed them individually as a full-blown kit. The work to break down a model before printing is definitely substantial, but in the end it will save you material, since you can design the model to be hollow, and make any finishing work like sanding and painting several orders of magnitude easier.
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Ok, see, that's also a decent improvement over the Bandai paintscheme. Extending the stripes all the way forward just looks so much better. Why couldn't they just do that?
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If you are interested in building fairly complex models, I would look into Gmax. It is the same base interface as 3D Studio Max, but with a smaller feature set targeted at game design, and perfectly capable of making very detailed and complex printable models. The export process may have an extra step or two to generate usable files, but it is well worth the effort to learn.
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The big question is whether Bandai will bother to make the versions that historically don't really sell well. It's not a panic, but people will pine for their favorite designs, regardless of how financially feasible Bandai thinks they are. Personally, I'd love a VT-1 in this line. Will I see it done? I'm not counting on it, because while the VT-1 isn't necessarily a shelf-warmer, it just doesn't seem popular, and the HMR version was one of the few releases to reach the clearance sales. Maybe being in the larger scale will change that, maybe not, but I'm not going to get my guts in a knot waiting for it.
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Would say that's pretty common across most of the HMR VF-1s I've messed with. They just aren't very careful about cutting the parts clean, and the back of the leg is just one of the biggest and most visible places where that sloppiness gets put on display.
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Honestly, I'd just do both. Diversify your shops so you're less likely to get stuck by a single source. I'm not going to be optimistic about getting these on time regardless, because Bandai set themselves up to fail, but that doesn't mean I'm not going to start sending NY weekly polite reminders about my order, and asking for status updates. Not going to cancel again, but I will gladly overflow their inbox with reminders that people who ordered early do not appreciate being shoved to the end of the line because they made a larger order.
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To be entirely fair to NY, I don't believe they actually cancelled anyone's orders. They made us wait an exceedingly long time for them, and they could never bother to give their customers the time of day in regards to when they might deliver, but they did deliver. When supply seemed to dry up, and prices started climbing, I voluntarily cancelled one of my pair, in the hopes that I would at least get a single, and I learned the hard way what their "store credit" limitations are. Long story short, I'm never doing that again, because it was far more trouble than it was worth, and the hoops I had to jump through to actually spend that store credit were obnoxious. Lesson learned? If you don't want to deal with NY playing Three Card Monty with your order priority, don't order more than one item at a time. Doing that seems to put you at the very bottom of their queue, regardless of when you ordered.
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Oh, sure, I'd order there again, but I'm not going to order more than one for any individual order. I'll call it an experiment.. put in 6 separate orders for a single 31A, and then take bets on which order number gets addressed first. We can hold a pool, winner gets the last one shipped out! I'm sure it'll happen.. someday.
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Little off the subject, but I feel like it applies here. Apparently one of the newer episodes of Family Guy pokes fun at the Disneyfication of everything, and deals with the normal characters commenting on several theoretical treatments to redesign the show. The context is mostly irrelevant though. What did come out of this is one of the most self-aware comments I've ever heard about the show, when one of the characters asks something to the tune of, "Who is this written for?" The reply they get back is something like "We targeted this at teenagers born in the 1980s." I'm starting to wonder if we're seeing this sort of thing on a larger scale. I feel like a lot of the heads of many franchises are pandering desperately to audiences that don't actually exist outside of their own imaginations.
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Don't think you can make that assumption in many countries, no matter how modern. A large portion of online shops selling Macross merchandise to foreign customers don't seem interested in giving you the time of day if there's a problem with your order, regardless of who is at fault. Technically speaking, I'd say a good number of online shops should naturally fall under that "smaller operations with questionable customer service" category. If you can walk or drive to a physical location, that's a different story, but if you're paying for shipping internationally, and you don't spring for the shipping insurance? That sounds like you really don't care that much about the item. Insurance on proxy buyers is another level to that though. Just because you get matched to a seller via a proxy service does not mean that they can guarantee the seller will follow through with the sale. Asking the proxy service to accept responsibility for flaky sellers is asking them to accept a lot of risk, and it only makes sense for them to charge a fee for this. The insurance charge is probably calculated as some statistical average cost of recompense, based on the percentage of sellers who fail to deliver, and the average cost of the item they have to refund.
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Thanks for the summary, I didn't really feel like listening to either rant, since honestly, it just starts to feel like screaming into an echo chamber, and people are going to argue just for the sake of arguing. People are running out of new material to get enraged at, and all the good or bad points fall by the wayside, because everything is just so loud that you have to tune it out sometimes. I think we've hit this weird feedback loop where a lot of people will be really disappointed if TROS is actually any good at all. My expectations are practically nil, but at the same time, I might still find myself in a theater to see it first-hand with my brother, since it's a tradition. Heck, I'm honestly curious if they'll restore the old 20th Century Fanfare intro, and will consider it worth the ticket to see that again. I'm not expecting anything, but I've also mostly stopped caring. There are far more important things to spend my days focusing on, and there's more than enough superior EU material to keep me entertained, so I'm just treating these new movies like I treated the NJO books, and any Star Trek past Insurrection: I'm fully aware they exist, I just don't care, and will stick to the material I enjoy.
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- joonas suotamo
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And then a 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8, just for good measure.
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Arcadia 1/60 VF-4A ‘Flashback 2012’ Premium Finish & Regular Release
Chronocidal replied to no3Ljm's topic in Toys
To be fair to Arcadia though.. it would not surprise me if the reason this seems to be PF-only is because they can't sell it for anything less if they want to make up for purchasing the FB2012 license. Really though, yeah, they don't really have a great track record with their original releases. The fogged windows isn't a big deal, but it's sloppy. The problems with the VF-0s and SV-51 now are more what concerns me. If they can't manage the QC to ensure a solid release of a non-PF item, why should I trust them to do better with the PF ones? Is all of the extra cost being funneled into hiring competent assembly and QC workers? You don't move a surgeon up to doing brain surgery because they're having trouble with hip replacements. Bleh, I don't want to take this out of perspective, since we're still talking about toy transforming fighter jets. But Arcadia does have a spotty record. I mostly just don't see the extra paint as a justification for the higher price, when I'd be perfectly happy without the extra paint, even at the same price, but I'm weird like that. -
Arcadia 1/60 VF-4A ‘Flashback 2012’ Premium Finish & Regular Release
Chronocidal replied to no3Ljm's topic in Toys
That's all well and good if you don't intend to ever transform or pose them, or plan to clear-coat them to hell and back to prevent any smudging. A PF with all the fancy markings tampo printed is one thing. Hand-painted weathering? No thanks. I'd just rather be able to pay a couple hundred dollars less, and save myself the headache of having to either never touch the thing, or accept the fact that I'm going to be touching up the detailing every time I handle it. I honestly don't even want a regular PF of this. All I literally want is a white VF-4 in Flashback 2012 markings that I don't have to paint myself. -
Arcadia 1/60 VF-4A ‘Flashback 2012’ Premium Finish & Regular Release
Chronocidal replied to no3Ljm's topic in Toys
This is why I'm skipping the premium VF-0D as well. I'll be happy to grab a regular release, but I'm just not interested in their factory weathering. The real question is whether there's going to be a regular release though. I wonder if Arcadia is just hitting the point where they can't afford to make things for less than this price point, and they decided to at least try to add some value to make up for it. Can anyone say whether there's been any demand locally in Japan for a non-PF version of this? I'd much rather get one I don't have to handle with gloves to keep from smudging the (unwanted) panel lines. I'd also rather not pay extra for extra paint work that I'm going to wind up removing. -
Honestly, the multiverse factor here is even weirder than that. FPJ played the role Hamill originated in the Wing Commander games when Hollywood shat all over that other science fiction franchise.
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Also reminds me a little of the entire arc with the Tenth Doctor and the Master, dealing with the drums driving him mad. In other news, I would absolutely watch this as a sequel.
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Pretty sure there was an old Playmates one too, but good luck hunting that down. Honestly though, I miss the multi-button setups those used for playing specific sound effects. As much as I love having a "KHAAAAANN!!!" button I can just press, rotating through a series of voice and sound clips has always felt like an incredibly dumb feature. Lack of quality aside, I'd actually love to see Diamond Select tackle that one.