Chronocidal

I would say Bandai did prep the HMR VF-0s to use the ghost boosters and weapons.. but considering they just copied the Arcadia mold that never made use of the features, I don't know if I can give them credit.

It's really kind of funny to me that I think the side profile is actually the least of this figure's issues. It really doesn't look bad from that angle, but the proportions fall apart when you turn it, and see how far forward everything is, while the back end just keeps going for miles.

Decided to go back and actually build a cockpit tub for my old Excalibur model (and scale the whole thing up to 1/72 in the process), and been testing the limits of an FDM printer. Now if only there was a way to print transparent parts. Depending on how melting properties compare, I might just try printing a two piece mold, and pressing a heated piece of bubble packaging between them to make one.

Not the Grissom, but they do have the XL Pegasus back in stock, if you're just after an Oberth.

Interesting they went with the custom Walkure schemes and not the ones in the show, but maybe they're just alternates? And half of them seem to be Kairos-based, which I can't call a bad thing. They actually don't look bad, I might have to grab a couple... I just hope the tops of the fighters aren't screwed up with all the attachment ports for the little animal bits they've started including with these.

Yeah, they are really not very big. They scaled the YF-19 to 1/100 by fighter mode, without taking into account how short that makes it in battroid, and it's tiny compared with the YF-29 version. Still, it's a good size. I still want an HMR pair of those two, but I'll definitely enjoy having a small YF-21 for my desk.

Well now.. let's hope the scale is close enough that people can use that to convert the old transforming 1/72 VF-25 kits.

I don't even care about the one-off small accessory packs. At this point? I just want them to release a mega-bundle of ALL the extra armaments they've ever produced, just so we can stick something on 90% of their releases that have hardpoints with no purpose. Bandai mostly seems to have absolutely zero interest in making anything even remotely non-canon though, so despite all of the weapons options seen in the Master Files and other sources, I don't think we're ever going to see Bandai make any of it. The best bet probably will wind up being if they actually produce an add-on set with weapons for the new YF-19, because that set is missing a ton of content. They didn't even pack in the fast packs.

Side note about the wing mechanism... I tried to take the thing apart to un-knacker the wing alignment. In a word: Don't. Jazwares apparently went to the Bandai school of assembly overkill. Five of the seven main screws came out with no problem, but the remaining two were stripped smooth, had glue poured into their sockets, and covers jammed over them into a solid block of molten plastic. I tried to drill one out, and without drilling into the screw, there's nothing that's going to get it undone. So, the wings are just cockeyed. Also, they really do not want to come out of the sockets, so once you put the thing together, it's unlikely you're going to get it apart without damaging it.

Definitely, just from the perspective of not messing with the original in case you want to later sell it. In my case, I had a spare charger pod from the Hayate 31 with the speaker pod, so it was an easy swap. My only real issue with the thermometer is that it sticks so far out in fighter mode. My typical display method for most valks is to just open the feet and display them standing vertically (uses the least shelf space), but the probe out the back prevents that from working.

Yeah, I did consider the XL Lower Decks Titan. I find it kind of hilarious that painting the normally transparent pieces solid to match the cartoon style actually winds up hiding how bad some of the transparent pieces look.

Got a surprise from Amazon, and my pair of Imperial shuttles arrived today. Really nice overall, though a little oddly over-engineered. That may seem like a funny thing to say, but I think they might have benefited from a few features being simplified. Mainly, I was surprised to see the wings are geared to rotate together. That's a nifty feature.. but it kind of falls flat when the wings aren't actually aligned. They aren't terribly off, but it's definitely noticeable. I imagine it's just a gearing problem, but both of mine are misaligned in exactly the same way, so I have to assume they just didn't tune the design correctly. The other odd thing is that they spring-loaded the boarding ramp. It pulls down, and locks, then retracts with a button push. Maybe they just couldn't work a locking mechanism in otherwise? I will give them props on the main gear though, since those fold out and lock in place nicely, which is a big improvement over the sloppy gear on the Falcon. Really like the detailing in the engines, since they went beyond what the old Action Fleet version did. Instead of a big blue panel, they actually modeled a pair of capsule-shaped nozzles into the back end. I'd still love to get a Bandai kit of this ship, but this one is a much more manageable size than the old MPC one, pretty much ideal. Going off of the "popular" stated length of 58 feet, that would make this about 1/87 scale (basically HMR-scaled, funny enough). I think the upper fin might be a little undersized, just to get it into the packaging, but it looks the part well enough. Proportionally, it matches up very well with the X-Wing tabletop game miniature, so it's possible they used it as the pattern.

I've been watching the release announcements, and did manage to pick up a few of the pieces that I missed originally. Mostly a couple of the XL shuttles, Stargate ships, and BSG releases. They're nice collectibles, but I just had too many gripes with most of the XL starships to pick them up, and the ones that were good would have felt silly unaccompanied by something to match them (ie, the Reliant was beautiful, but they managed to screw up the Enterprise Refit in so many unbelievable ways that I couldn't bring myself to buy it). I never understood how they managed to make the panel detailing on so many of the ships look like they were run over by tractor tires (the XL Akira and Prometheus, in particular). Part of me would like to still get the "All Good Things" Enterprise D, but they half-assed the phaser cannon, and it made the whole thing look cheap. The smaller ships they released always seemed to come out much better by comparison, like the BSG fighters, and I picked up an XL Runabout and Delta Flyer, and really have no complaints on those. The one I did make a point to grab was the XL Discovery Enterprise, mostly because of the size. It's close enough to the length of the Polar Lights 1/1000 TOS Enterprise that I'm comfortable calling it 1/1000, because screw whatever noise the higher ups are smoking with the new scaling.

Know what would have been an amazing upgrade for this re-release? Hardpoints.

That is just stupidly unfair how good that looks compared with the YF-19 release.

Honestly? I would take that in a heartbeat. For all the difficulties in handling it and transforming it, the Draken looks amazing.

You both might be right, but the thing that's throwing me is just how beefy the arms look, even for in fighter mode. They don't really look any different, just like they're straightened out and plugged in behind the shoulder mounts. The diagram is not really helpful, since it doesn't really indicate which parts are shared between modes, and it doesn't show the shoulder/intake plugs at all when going to fighter, only that you remove them for the high speed mode.. which is dumb, because those parts weren't even something that were discarded for that. Edit: Yeah, I don't think it comes with more than one set of arms. There are more pics in the model forum thread, and this lists the extra accessories. This one really does make the YF-19 look half-assed by comparison.

The insane part? Despite being a partsformer, it still uses the same arms in all modes, and they don't suck. Seriously, Bandai.. the arms on your DX SUCK. They should be SO MUCH BIGGER. I don't want to rant, but it's almost insulting to see how good that 1/100 looks compared to the DX. They didn't screw with the details, they didn't ignore the lineart, they didn't do their usual Bandai "we know better" shenanigans with the design, it just looks like it should have always looked. It's like we're back in the v.1 DX VF-25 phase again. Kind of sad.. that one actually sort of puts the YF-19 fighter mode to shame by comparison.

I do like what was done well with the 31AX, but I still prefer the overall look of the standard Siegfried and Kairos. The thick wing roots bug me a little, but mostly I think the redesign of the canopy screws up the nose profile something awful. That weird single-piece canopy never sits flush all the way, and gives the nose this weird curvature that bugs me. And there's still no excuse for the thermometer pod.

Just got the purchase notice from HLJ for my pair of CF-171 kits, so those should be ready to ship out soon.

Boy, silly me, thinking they would put photos of the finished product on the box art. Those are still the same pre-production photo(shop)s. I think my favorite part is that half of the "feature" callouts on the back of the box point to details that do not exist on the toy.

That was amazing and hilarious all at once. Gotta love that what I thought parts of it were referencing turned out to be literally true in the end.

Fortunately scaling up tends to work better than scaling down, since you tend to lose a lot of detail when shrinking a model. This Arwing was designed to be printed twice as big, and the original was done on an SLA printer, so it had much finer detail. I had to make quite a few adjustments to support some of the finer details to keep them from getting warped or marred by the extruder. The wings had do be thickened up significantly before the edges just completely disappeared in my slicer, because they were thinner than the printer could register. Still, the lines on most of it are so fine, I might just see if I can get away with a good primer, and not sand the whole thing down. The wingtips are far too thin to sand that much, and a lot of the points and edges would disappear. I took a little time yesterday to design and print a stand for it though, and this is the kind of thing I will always love my printer for. I love making custom display bases for kits.

It's not just you. From a top-down perspective? The best summary of what they've done is like they've taken the YF-21's planform, and hiked its pants up to its armpits. Everything ahead of the midbody is compressed forwards, with the back end becoming overly chonky. The nose is definitely shorter, because it doesn't look like they're using any sort of trick like Yamato did to shorten the nose for battroid. The arms are also wayyyy undersized. The biceps look incredibly wimpy, and the lower arms could have been made much beefier with all of the room in the back end.. but they just didn't. I'm still going to try and grab at least one, because of course I am, but the overall impression I get from this? It's not like they improved battroid at the cost of fighter mode (or the nonexistent gerwalk that we still haven't seen), it feels more to me like they decided "Screw it, make all the modes equally bad." The only improvement they made is to the legs. Between the skinny, undersized arms, the redonkulous backside, Liefeld-level torso chonk, and lopsided aircraft stretching, I don't think any mode actually looks better than the Yamato.

Figures that I'd get charged for mine at HLJ literally single-digit hours after I shipped my private warehouse. Oh well, not in a rush. I'm going to wait until the Fire Valk and my 171 kits come in and ship that as a bundle.