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Chronocidal

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Everything posted by Chronocidal

  1. I'd be interested to see how those trays fit an HMR valk. And maybe some high-res scans of the boxes for some editing.
  2. Make sure to read the whole context and comments attached. The patch changed entirely, and makes sense, if you look at the dates/locations. Like so much of the internet, the original post is un-researched, inaccurate, and incomplete, but completely overwhelms the corrections following it.
  3. Welp, should have gone with my original hope that it would be available on release. Lesson learned for the future, I guess, but I've long ago lost my reservations about overpaying for peace of mind. Rather disappointing to see HLJ put it back up after cancelling a bunch of pre-orders though. Would have been nice to offer them to those they had to cancel on.
  4. Given the horrendous "I'm passing a cluster kidney stone!" facial expressions on most of the characters half the time, I thought they've just been there the whole time. Appropriate really, considering how the entire franchise seems to lodged in some demon's urinary tract.
  5. Interesting thing, they actually did have a Blue Angel out here performing some assorted maneuvers and flyovers, as well as some oddball situations with other aircraft that we don't usually see out here. Scuttlebutt was that they were actually using the aircraft as physical footage to overlay CGI on top of, or composite shots of other aircraft over.
  6. If they did that, you wouldn't be able to do facial expressions on camera. I do wish we could get over the whole "my helmet needs lights for my face" bit, though. It does, probably because of copy-pasta. You can make one aircraft look good, but too many together, and you start to see how the effects are too similar to be coincidental. At the very least, it's a composite shot of four separate runs by a solo hornet, but the vapor cones looked suspicious altogether. On that note though, I'm slightly sad to see them sticking to the "too close to be real" maneuvering. I guess the original got away with it, but even then jet wash was a real problem. I don't think there's any way four individual hornets would be flying in that close of a formation at low level in a canyon. They'd be eating each others' exhaust, not to mention turbulence and ground effect.
  7. Dangit.. now I'm picturing the entire thing done up MST3K style with entirely meme-based dialogue.
  8. To be fair, it was probably cheaper and less labor intensive than applying that sort of heavy makeup across the entire cast, or constructing properly scaled sets. Doesn't mean it's not using the uncanny valley as a Tony Hawk level.
  9. So, I have a theory about the Tomcat... Are they making Maverick out to be a fictional Snort Snodgrass stand-in, and giving us a universe where the government signed off on his application to maintain an F-14 for personal use at air shows? I can totally get behind that. Trailer looks like fun, and due to location, I'm actually curious if there will be any site-sponsored pre-showings of the film out here. Should be a fun year.
  10. What always baffled me was that the Diamond Select TWOK issue 1701 painted the deflector black. That particular one definitely kept the pearly sheen in the plastic and paint, but that thing had all sorts of weird lighting issues. Funny enough, the black deflector dish actually worked fairly well to give it a dim glow, not unlike the initial power-up sequence in TMP. It was just that, because the plastic was so bright and transparent, the entire front half of the engineering hull glowed, as well as most of the saucer. The black deflector was probably the dimmest part of the whole ship.
  11. The ship is 1/48, and looks pretty huge from the product photo showing someone holding it, but it comes with its own figure. I honestly never realized how big the ship is. I actually think I'm going to keep the smaller Bandai release as well, since it'll be easier to find display space for.
  12. I think 1/87 is HO railroad scale? What's funny is I think the HMRs generally skew closer to that than 1/100 anyway.
  13. I think one of the sadder parts of the typical Pre-order MadnessTM is that I've grown trigger happy. I jumped on the AmiAmi order without shopping around at all, because I didn't know how long I had to put an order in. I'm not sad about the lost $10 or so I could have saved at another shop. I'm sad that I've reached a point where I feel like it doesn't matter, and I'm happy to pay a little more to make sure I get the item. On the plus side, I think all of the other pre-orders I have for this coming winter were already paid for, so aside from the usual Christmas shopping, December should be wide open.
  14. Same, though I'm really happy how utterly easy it was to order. No spinny loading icons, no login queues, no worry that the shop won't be able to deliver.
  15. I have no doubt this will be hilariously entertaining to watch, but I think films like this should come with a "writer recommended" list of illicit medications and hallucinogens to make sure the viewer experience matches what the writers saw in their heads when they conceived of it.
  16. I have a hard time arguing for one over the other at this point.. they seem to be circling opposite sides of the same drain. I'll say this much.. Star Wars kits are much easier to do a nice job on than Star Trek ones. You can get by with simple details, but Trek kits are just insanely labor intensive to detail properly. I think we've derailed this into entirely different hobbies at this point though. Are there any upcoming releases in the Eaglemoss line?
  17. How hard is that A-6 to find/purchase? Would be nice to stick alongside the VF-84 F-4.
  18. Thanks for the links, I went with AmiAmi before seeing the other links, but it's not a huge price difference. Honestly, I think the price is on point for something of that size and detail, and I don't mind having a second bigger version of that design. I think the fancier interior and gear detail sold me on it, aside from the better overall weathered look, and what I assume are working lights. If only Arcadia's PF releases looked this polished.
  19. I went to a lot of trouble muting the lights and diffusing them on that kit.. I think I used several layers of wax paper and some blue cellophane behind the deflector to get it down to a soft blue glow, but it really needs a light frosting or etching of some sort to turn it not transparent.
  20. You mean Back to the Days of Future Voyages Home? I do give the general SW universe some credit for never actually going down the time travel/multiverse hole, but at the same time, I'm thinking a multiverse angle for the EU is sounding better and better all the time.
  21. Ugh.. yeah, I need to do that upgrade as well to my Bandai Refit. I did a cheap fix by adding some tape over the clear portions to filter the light some, and added clear blue cellophane to color the nacelles and deflector better, but the bulbs are just too powerful, and too yellow.
  22. So.. assuming that's the Bandai (because the Art Asylum/Diamond Select one is nowhere near that detailed underneath), that's a mashup of the First Contact, and Nemesis versions. The neck area is from First Contact, as is the underside torpedo launcher/Captains Yacht area, which you can tell is from FC because it looks nothing like the yacht. The entire quantum launcher underneath was remodeled in Insurrection to make the yacht look more like a ship. But while the rest of the ship screams "First Contact," the topside torpedo launcher behind the bridge was a Nemesis addition. I'd have to see more of the ship to see if more of the Nemesis mods are in place. As far as the pylon replacement goes, there was a rather large reason for it, because the Nemesis upgrade included a new set of phaser strips both top and bottom along the aft edge of them, giving the ship roughly the same phaser coverage as the Galaxy class. The Nemesis refit saw a substantial weapons upgrade across the entire ship, including one forward-facing launcher at the front of the bridge terracing, a dual launcher behind the bridge, one embedded in the spine just above the rear-most shuttlebay, and I think one directly under the bay deck. The original design only had the quantum launcher, a dual launcher directly under the deflector, and I believe there was one dual rear-facing one on the very bottom of the hull, where the Galaxy class had the tractor beam emitter. I need to check my references for whether that was always a launcher though, since I'm not 100% sure the under-bay tube was a Nemesis add-on. Far as the saucer separation goes though, I think they gave up on that fairly early, despite the design work that showed how it would function. Regardless of whether that separation joint exists, the lower engineering hull never had any impulse engines to move under its own power. I would assume the saucer separation is still possible, but it would probably be restored to a pure emergency ejection procedure like in the original series. Edit: After reading that design analysis, I noticed they pointed out the modifications in that one drawing, but then not all of the modifications pointed out were actually seen in the movie, specifically that forward launcher on the saucer. The final notes about a "final" version of the ship, intended to be seen after the post-Nemesis rebuild, included an interesting note though, saying that the revised design at that point would have been changed to adopt a more traditional "aztec" pattern for the hull. I never minded the look of the patterns used on the Ent-E, but as shown by that pic above, there is generally no rhyme or reason to the pattern that we can discern, and it winds up meaning that there's no real "canon" pattern for anyone to follow, and no real consistent scale for the paneling, meaning half of the attempts to replicate the pattern wind up looking like random patches of masking tape scattered all over the hull. When I made my Bridge Commander model, I made a template, and then tiled it over the hull to keep from having to draw every single panel, but the panels were much smaller than most models I've seen. I sized them to match the studio model from First Contact, which were pretty tiny.
  23. I think I'd rather have a high quality replica of the Ent-E, honestly. I spent so many years building a replica of that one for Bridge Commander, that design is very close to my heart. Unfortunately, the Diamond Select/Art Asylum versions of that particular ship are.. ehhhhh... very average. They look good at a distance, but I've grown familiar enough with the design to know exactly how many corners they cut on the detailing.
  24. If I had known about it at the time, I would have grabbed that in an instant. The Diamond Select versions aren't terrible, but the quality and paintwork can be really iffy. They're a big step up from the old Playmates version, but I'd still call them "toys."
  25. I just file this under the "Bandai still doesn't understand aircraft" heading. Lettering is always too thick, too dark, too bold, too whatever else. They've never given two shakes that you can just do a google image search for "aircraft" and find millions of references that contradict what they consider "correct." They're Bandai, after all. They know they know better, despite all outside evidence to the contrary.
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