Chronocidal
-
Posts
10759 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Events
Gallery
Everything posted by Chronocidal
-
Kids Logic prototype, Macross Valkyrie VF-1 J&S Bust Figure
Chronocidal replied to kyekye's topic in Toys
Yeah, that caught my eye too. The head units themselves look decent, but everything below that needs an overhaul. For a franchise that goes to such great lengths to mimic real world aircraft, it always just leaves me dumbfounded how much of a disconnect there is on items like these. There's more than enough source material to reference... -
So, one thing that might help the shoulder joints sticking out is if the wings are made bigger/longer. The larger those folding panels get, the less of the shoulder mechanism you'll see. As a side note though, I realized something about the design.. if the left wing is supposed to fold up to place the UN logo on the left breastplate... the logo has to be printed backwards on the underside of the wing. Also, as far as that F-14/VF-1-ish boat-tail/flap between the legs, I realized that that panel should actually be part of the shoulder mount for the left arm, and the panel visible from above in fighter mode should fold down to form the armpit. It should just be a cosmetic change to the that piece, but it also might mean you can't make the panels on both sides identical, so it's a trade-off between detail and simplicity. In terms of the nose length in battroid though, I just realized that the original design doesn't extend the nose at all, while I think this one pops the nose cone forward to make a latching mechanism for the wingtips. As an alternative to the pegs on the wingtips and the extending nosecone, what if you actually placed fold out tabs on the nosecone that the wingtips would hook onto? Or possibly even more magnets? Edit: One other little observation, when comparing with the line-art. In gerwalk mode, the drawings show the shoulders sitting under the wings, while the prototype print has the entire crossbar that connects the arms sitting behind them. It all works out for fighter and battroid, but that makes me think that maybe the pivot point for the shoulders is a little too far back, meaning the entire valk may be a bit to short, proportionally. I'm not sure how to fix that sort of thing exactly, at least not without significantly re-scaling most of the components.
-
Wow, that's actually a first, I've never heard of them actually servicing a request for replacement anything, not without shipping the entire product back. Makes me wonder if they've had a huge issue with this part mix-up in Japan, and had to make extra batches of the leg armors to fix all the screw-ups.
-
Agreed on the cockpit size, and it's not so much that the cockpit needs to be smaller, so much as the rest of the plane looks like it needs to be bigger. Sadly, that would increase the materials and price overall, and possibly make it out of the official scale, but maybe just stretching the cockpit forward some would have the same overall effect. You might even be able to shrink the forward nose a bit while keeping the section with the head the same size. One other thing to consider, have you thought about extending the tail-flap that protrudes between the engines? I'm not sure where that piece would wind up in battroid, and it may need to be attached to the large connecting bar for the shoulders, but it's a fairly prominent feature on the design, if you have room to work it in. Just FYI, the only reference I have for the VF-9 is the little 1/200 scale Yamato miniature from years back, so the proportions there are probably not great for a transforming version.
-
Agreed, even if you just fix the little things you mentioned earlier, it's a huge accomplishment. So, I think if you are planning to tweak the entire design, I'd still only go with a few specific tweaks. Here's an example of what I was thinking of earlier. What I've done here is scale down the nose section a little, and move it slightly farther forward, while extending the trailing edge of the wing a little, all the way to the legs. I think the nose section can stay the same size, but the rest of the aircraft looks better if it gets bigger in proportion. The scaling on the cockpit looks great already, so I would hate to mess with that. I think that helps the overall proportions a great deal though, and makes it look sleeker overall. Unfortunately, without making a full model with these changes, I have no idea how this would affect the transformation. The nose looks like it could move around a little without too much trouble, but all the connections in battroid mode may take adjusting to work. The other tweak I think I would make would be to reduce the length of the lower intake lips. They don't look bad, but it might increase the range of motion in the legs if the lips didn't jut forward so far.
-
Kids Logic prototype, Macross Valkyrie VF-1 J&S Bust Figure
Chronocidal replied to kyekye's topic in Toys
Eh.. not my cup of tea to begin with, but they need to stop making up panel lines and extra details that didn't exist on the original designs. -
Wow, first-print issues aside, that looks incredible! Might be a bit small, but it looks in good scale with the VF-1, and the articulation looks awesome. Just a thought, but maybe something that would help the overall scale, the nose looks a bit oversized for the airframe. It's hard to tell how it would affect the transformation, since it works so well already, but I wonder if stretching the neck and enlarging the rest of the aircraft would make the design a little easier to work with. It's hard to tell without the wings attached, but moving the cockpit a little farther forward might do it without any other changes. However you improve it, I can't wait to see what you pull off. I want one of these for my own shelf.
-
Honestly, the original Dumbo was freaky enough already. Anyone remember the Pink Elephant sequence? I'm half convinced Burton signed on just for the opportunity to do a modern take on that scene.
-
All I can think with this is how many other products they could be producing that would actually have some kind of pre-existing demand. Meanwhile, they dedicate all this time to intricately painting and detailing a product that's going to sit in bargain bins for years.
-
Now that we've got premium M&Ms, I really just want a premium TV super VF-1S to go with them, and maybe a premium Hikaru 1J release with super packs. It'd be cool seeing a premium GBP-1, but I'm not a huge fan of it personally, and would rather see a separate premium 1J release.
-
All Things Videogame Related: EXTREME VS!!
Chronocidal replied to Keith's topic in Anime or Science Fiction
I WILL play this game. FINALLY.- 6891 replies
-
- 1
-
-
- Video games
- PS3
- (and 12 more)
-
I'm still waiting for Bandai to get with it, and sell TV-style fast pack sets for all their VF-1s.. they've got enough of them. As a side note though, a good number of the HMR VF-1s need some work on their nose striping. The M&Ms have the stripes properly done, but all the others cut off just behind the upper lip of the intake. Those stripes should go all the way back to where the nose section ends, like what you can clearly see on Max's valk in that screenshot.
-
I'd say the one good thing about the whole mess is that the calf armor is a pretty simple block of plastic. Depending on the tolerances, it might be easy to get a Shapeways replacement made.
-
Solo: A Star Wars Story, in theaters May 25, 2018
Chronocidal replied to Dobber's topic in Anime or Science Fiction
So, an interesting comparison to make here would be actually looking at the wide variety of quality that came out of the EU novels. There were a few good one-shot stories, but the core of what many people considered "quality" stories came from a few authors who generally communicated well with each other, and worked together to make sure characters felt consistent across their separate entries. Criticisms of the individual novels and character portrayals aside, Zahn, Stackpole, and Allston tended to keep tabs on each other's characters so they could dangle plot threads that spanned between their separate books, and that sort style is what makes certain other books feel so jarring in comparison (ie the entire Callista storyline, or the Jedi Academy books). The funny thing that happened though was that some of the books got so bad that some of the authors did (not so) sneaky fix-it stories that retold events from other angles to make more sense. It didn't fix all the flaws, but it tied things together a bit better, and made some of the questionable character and story decisions maybe a bit more tolerable. The scary thing is that Disney is doing that preemptively now, and in alternative media formats. Instead of focusing on telling a coherent story in the prime format (movies), they're releasing books that are nearly required reading to make the movies tie together, and explain all the missing pieces that they decided to leave out. I think part of the reason the EU books worked in the first place was because the characters and events of the original trilogy left people wanting more over time. The situation now though is that everything is being thrown out at the fans at once. Instead of devoting time and effort into making a cohesive story with compelling characters that people will want to learn more about, it's just assumed that everyone will want to know everything about everyone, and people are bombarded from all angles with side stories and additional information before they even have a chance to ask for it, let alone develop a desire for all the extraneous information. It's just oversaturation. The whole process is stacking a pile of carts in front of a horse, and hoping the horse has the strength to push them all. You have to give time for the fanbase to develop a desire for all that information you're throwing out at them. Otherwise, it's like browsing for a specific item online, and being so overwhelmed by pop-up ads for things you don't care about, you give up, and decide you didn't need that thing anyway. -
I think the bigger flaws get more obvious on repeated viewings, while the first time you see it, the tension over what's going to happen next is a fairly good distraction. While I think the slow pace is a literal consequence of the main plot being a slow speed chase to run the Resistance out of fuel, it does pick up rather quickly (if jerkily so) once they arrive on Snoke's ship. To me, that's the turning point where the movie starts getting decently fun to watch, because you can kind of handwave the string of terrible decisions that led the plot to this point, and pretend something that makes sense happened instead. Your second point though is a larger issue that spans the entire new trilogy. The New Republic dies in a spectacular CGI washout, and no one responds?? We never got a great scope of the galaxy in the original trilogy, but the prequels made every effort to make up for that, showing us hundreds, possibly thousands of representatives in the senate, showing just how big the universe really is. Now you're telling me that the New Republic was so incredibly inept at ruling that every single New Republic military asset was destroyed in the single attack from the First Order? Was the New Republic just that ineffective that no one cares that the seat of government over the galaxy at large disappeared in a puff of smoke? TLJ just kind of continues that narrow view of everything. Now we have the single cruiser supporting the Resistance being pursued (badly) by what looks like the entirety of the First Order. It may not be, but if they had more ships, why not divert something to blockade the single ship they can't seem to catch up with? Is the rest of the First Order busy conquering the rest of the galaxy now that the New Republic is gone? But the opening crawl would seem to imply that the First Order already took over, in the single digit number of days since the end of TFA. The overall impression I have at this point is that the galaxy at large doesn't even care about the First Order or the New Republic, and are content to just spend their days gambling in luxury, profiting off of the two whiny kids down the street who keep buying bigger and better guns to shoot at each other with.
-
So, I've personally been waiting patiently to see if NY will ever deliver the pair I ordered on the first day of preorders. After all the non-answers NY has given for people requesting updates, I've actually decided to wait it out until they cave in one way or another. I see this happening one of two ways. Either they ship me my order, or they tell me they can't do it. If they ship it, great, but if they can't? I'm not going to give them the satisfaction of cancelling on me for anything other than their own failure to deliver. I'm in no rush. If it turns out they can't fulfill the order, I'm letting them come to me to apologize. Maybe I'm too hopeful, but right now, I see this as the most likely route to a full refund, only because I doubt they would have the gall to offer me store credit in apology for their own failure. After all, what good is store credit if the store can't be trusted to deliver?
-
This just begs the question of how all the people with half a brain wound up under the command of someone with all the tactical capability of a bran muffin. I honestly felt really bad for the commander of that dreadnaught. I know that look of frustration well.. it was like a more dire version of the expression I see all around me when our IT department manages to break our network again. That feeling of "just for once, I'd like to expect the worst, and be wrong."
-
I hope they don't cheap out on the assembly or packaging this time, and go with the full set of trays the other Calibre releases get. The packaging on my Hikaru 1J version left the nose gear all broken apart because they packed it with the extended gear mounted, instead of retracted like all the other versions (no broken pieces thankfully, but the gear had to be glued together again), and the QC was nowhere near the other releases I have from Calibre. Gappy assembly, chipped paint, bent-upward wings, and parts without enough glue. It's not terrible exactly, and still displays nicely, but it's a large step down from the quality level of my VF-1 and VF-142 F-14As. Makes me curious if the Robotech releases are using a different factory.
-
Solo: A Star Wars Story, in theaters May 25, 2018
Chronocidal replied to Dobber's topic in Anime or Science Fiction
For me, the new movies have actually put me at the exact same point though, from an entirely different direction. Even without knowing the ending, TLJ made me actually dislike so many of the characters that I kind of don't care what happens to them. But in both cases here, we already know the end point. With Solo, you know exactly how the movie ends. With Episode IX, you can also assume that the good guys win, in one way or another. When you have a stationary end point, everything depends on the journey being entertaining, memorable, and enjoyable. Now, I haven't seen Solo, but in TLJ's case? I'm feeling like Poe's frustration about the ship running on fumes with no clear plan is getting dangerously close to tearing down what's left of the fourth wall. -
What I had to do was trim down the blocky tabs on the boosters and make them square again, give them hard edges. Mine looked like they'd been melted.
-
That was the Yamato one, I believe. The Bandai problem was that the process for actually attaching the leg fast packs was multi-step, and you kind of had to slip the pieces in during transformation, or the legs didn't fit right. Also, the booster packs on the wings had a very common issue where the locking tabs got mis-molded, and had to be reshaped before they would keep the packs locked on.
-
Those are covers for an invisible screw that you can't actually access after assembly is complete. I think they go inside one of the large hinges in the main central hull. Also, there's no real reason to screw on the bridge, the fit is plenty tight to just press it into place.
-
Yuuuuuup. Though, the whole foot is actually too thick. It looks mostly fine in battroid, but the center of the foot is too high, and it throws the whole thing off. Also, those are older photos, from before Bandai went and photoshopped the correct colors on the lower leg fins.
-
Honestly, the only really sturdy points of contact for the F-14 that I like are either mounted inside the sparrow alley down the center of the belly, or inside the exhausts. Provided the fin recesses are deep enough, you could even make a stand that replaces the missiles themselves.
-
The most recent releases come with a different type of stand like the ones shown in promo photos of the Robotech-branded releases. They're a common type of F-14 stand (I think I've seen them referred to as "Witty Wings" stands?) but I'm also hesitant to use those because of how they support the plane. They clip around the back portion of the speedbrake area, which on most 1/72 diecast F-14s should be fine, but the Calibre releases have that section made of plastic to allow for the opening speedbrakes. I'm not a fan of supporting the entire plane that way for long periods, so I've mostly just stuck to displaying mine on the landing gear.
