Chronocidal
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Your most recent Macross or toy purchase! General thread.
Chronocidal replied to Gakken85's topic in Hall Of The Super Topics
I definitely follow this strategy for certain releases, especially if I intend to modify anything about them. One to keep mint, one to mess with and zoom about, and one to modify. That way, if I mess up anything on the modification, I don't feel bad about disassembling the second copy to assist in coming up with a fix. For Bandai releases in particular though, my experiences with the 171 drove me to purchase doubles. I figure out of the pair, I should at least be able to put together a single functional valk. That's been borne out in practice too, since it seems like one out of every pair has some flaw, or missing piece, or misprinted tampo, or something. Those "duds" are the ones I transform and play around with; since they're already flawed, I don't worry about messing them up further. -
So, I almost had the same thing happen, or thought I did at first. When I went to put the first leg panel on mine, it wouldn't go, and I realized the mounting block was backwards. Fortunately, the blocks had just been flipped, and I just had to swap them back. It does illustrate the issue though. The simple fact that they can actually be attached backwards means that someone didn't think through the potential for this sort of screwup, and should have made them only snap on one direction.
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Your most recent Macross or toy purchase! General thread.
Chronocidal replied to Gakken85's topic in Hall Of The Super Topics
If you don't mind a different display angle, and the shelves are high enough, I've had some good success standing a large assortment of valks on their feet in fighter mode. It just takes a little experimentation with the angles of the feet and ankles to make sure they balance well, but they're usually pretty sturdy for me, even on carpet. -
So, that video highlighted something I suspected.. those little probe details around the domes are actually assembled incorrectly, compared with how the designer video shows them. They're supposed to be pressed together. What'd be even better is if they were capped by a slope to blend the front edges in, and I have some ideas about that. I think aside from the nose shape (too thick and not wide enough) and the wonky dome details, this one really nails the look. The hull details are almost a part-for-part match of the Bandai kit, and I actually really like how well those wheel structures work for the trailing ends of the engines. Looks like they were even able to put the vanes inside the back ends of them.
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Forget the stands, I just want them to release the TV style fast packs. I need about eight sets to outfit all my plain CFs and Hikaru 1Js (and 4 more to replace all the miscolored M&M packs )
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Same here.. think it's time to make up a shipment from HLJ soon, I was waiting for this before requesting my PF Milia and Wave VF-4 kits. That's gonna be a big expensive box.
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HG hasn't been able to lift a finger for people buying from shops in Japan, but they pitched a fit when BBTS tried selling the Bandai Frontier valks. They got pulled off sale pretty quick.
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Those gear really wouldn't work in real life without some sort of over-technology suspension joints. The entire shock of landing would need to be absorbed by a torsion joint that's the same diameter as the strut itself. Not to mention, any sort of hard landing would be sending the entire door and strut assembly colliding with the micro missile magazines in the leg. Paint looks great though, love it in VX-9 markings!
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That is an interesting take on the English subtitles. You think Big West might be sowing the seeds of HG's downfall by spreading official Macross material to the world to establish a precedent, and possibly brand recognition apart from HG, even before their licenses run out? I don't know whether that would have any legal effect, but it's going to make HG look even worse if more and more new material starts leaking out of Japan, while they sit twiddling their thumbs and re-releasing Robotech for the umpteenth time.
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Bleh.. I think I'll pick one up just for the base model and parts to use, but it needs some heavy modification. The domes don't look as bad as I thought they would, but I know there are a multitude of other ways to build the engine struts that wouldn't look so ugly as those.. the probes laying alongside the domes are particularly obnoxious to me. They're too big, at the wrong angle, too far apart, and need an end cap to join them. The nose section is kinda okay-ish, but it doesn't look wide enough, and the random plates sticking up for the markings just look sloppy. Aside from those issues though, I think they actually stepped up the detail on the main fuselage quite nicely. Just at a glance at the Fine Molds kit in that pic above, it looks like they've done a ton of work to get the overall shape and greeblie pattern looking accurate to the studio models. Much more so than the cockpit or domes, anyway.
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I want to say, legally, probably not. But unless you have a law degree to defend yourself in court with, I don't think that's going to stop them.
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I've also gotten a couple teasers in my email that we'll be getting a new UCS Y-Wing this year around May 4th. Will be waiting to see the actual details, but it's clear from the teaser that they are still using the dumb blocky printed canopy for it, and the layered plates visible on the nose section really aren't impressing me much. I might grab one as a base to rebuild into something better, since I don't have a Y-Wing yet. Edit: Oh, and they're using a cluster of 3x3 corner dome pieces instead of a single bubble dome for the engine pods. I'm thinking that's going to look lousy in profile, those things are nowhere near the right curvature.
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They've been slowly photoshopping out the error in all their original images with the reversed colors. If you go back through the thread, the early pics sourced from Bandai sites have all been corrected.
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Honestly.. they kind of did. They did such a thorough job of wiping out the Resistance, it's like they only took two movies to wind up right back at where they were at the end of Episode III. I almost wish they would just do another ~20 year timeskip. Maybe by then the First Order will have had time to mature as a whole, and actually live up to the reputation they're supposed to have as bad guys.
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After the hot mess of TWE releases for the Frontier valks (looking at you, YF-29 packs <_<), I've taken to ordering at least one copy of every exclusive I can. Whether I decide down the road I want them or not, it saves a ton of stress and excess expense to acquire them on the secondary market after the original orders close.
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See, it's an ingenious place to store it.. or it would be, if it didn't need another separate shield for gerwalk. That's the thing that just kills it for me. Instead of using a single neck cover for both fighter and gerwalk like every other YF-19 ever, this one includes a bonus shield that never leaves the jet, but isn't any good for gerwalk at all, so it's just hanging off the shield in two of the three modes, looking like extra bulk. Now, if they made it easily detachable so they didn't need the extra copy of the shield for gerwalk? That would make perfect sense, and work beautifully!.... but it doesn't do that. Don't get me wrong, it's still a neat way to keep the shield stored on the jet in battroid, but to me, the entire point of doing that is so you don't have to carry around extra parts for the other modes. Any benefit that would have gets nullified by the fact that you still need to keep track of the stand-alone neck shield for gerwalk mode. If they'd just made a single neck shield able to stow behind the arm shield in battroid mode, that would have made a lot more sense, and even saved on molding and material costs.
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Hmhm, wonder if all these promo shots were taken on a hastily modded Advance model then. Either way, I got extras of this one specifically so I have a spare to mod the heck out of. I can't tell for sure if they ditched the derpy extra neck shield attached to the arm shield, but I want that useless hunk of plastic gone. There's no reason for it. For all the amazing ingenuity Bandai put into this design, it's like their engineers alternated wearing their pants on their legs and head as they made design decisions.
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The VF-17T was actually my most-wanted potential valk that Yamato never got around to doing. Could've been a nice gateway to doing the rest of Sound Force too, but I'm just a huge sucker for red-orange/white trainer schemes on everything. What I'm most anxious to see now are the assorted mounting pylons for all those weapons, and whether they use a similar style of plugs to the Arcadia missiles. The missiles themselves definitely do not look they have the pylons molded on like most of Bandai's weapon designs, so I'm thinking we might be getting a pile of ready-made Bandai-mount pylons to stick all manner of custom missiles. on. Also, random thing.. I don't think they actually have the mounting points for the fold booster even implemented yet. The rear mounts are clipped over the rear of the shield, but the front legs look like they're just sitting above the shield, not even attached at all. The fact that Bandai went in and photoshopped the right colors for the lower fins onto all their existing product photos does amuse me though. I wonder if that was due to local outcry from Japanese customers? If so, I wonder if someone in Japan could convince them to ditch all the fugly text they added, and go with the markings Hasegawa has used for a decade now. I've already resigned myself to the fact that I'm going to have to do a lot of alterations to the markings though.. seeing if I can strip letters and leave the underlying paint intact. At least removing the "Sinsei Industries" text and narrowing the black on the spine behind the cockpit will just leave bare plastic, but I might have to disassemble and re-paint the wings and tails to get rid of the extra markings there.
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Just grab some Hasegawa decals honestly.. Even the 1/48th versions will be smaller text than Bandai's monstrous markings. I'm going to keep one mint probably, but I'm already planning some fairly extensive paint and marking mods to apply.
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Odd, I've had no trouble ordering from them in the recent past, though they did go through an oddball period where a bunch of out of stock items showed up in inventory. I was actually rather sad that the Premium Roy VF-1S I tried to order didn't actually exist.
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Yeah, be patient with HLJ's ordering confirmations, they take a while to come through on Bandai release nights. Grats to all with success, and hope anyone who's struck out so far can still get one through, even if it's around release time.
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Hold the phone.. AmiAmi let me grab one now? Ok, three it is then! The only bad side to AmiAmi is that people have had bad experiences with them on the customer service side with defective merchandise.
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Yeah, CDJ had me worried and multi-clicking things.. I didn't take the chance adding my points. I didn't want to give that poor site any more numbers to crunch. NY's down again for maintenance, if it goes up again, I might try for a third.
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Holy cow CDJapan had me with my heart in my throat.. it took 10 minutes to get from cart to purchase confirmation page
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Come on CDJ... you're killing me here..