Chronocidal

I'm assuming the TFA version uses the same model as the later ESB version, with the extra landing pads? If and when that version gets made, they could just release it with both antenna options, and extra figures to do either an ESB or TFA version (or a broken version for ROTJ ). But remember.. this IS Bandai we're talking about. They love to only include enough pieces to make one specific version of anything. Given the leap in quality between the 1/48th Fine Molds X-Wing and the Bandai, and the fact that the Revell re-boxing of the Fine Molds is nearly that much anyway, I think I might just spring for the Bandai one when it comes out.

Moved this to another post since it does probably deserve a little careful thought in the near future. I think I may have misread that rule a little in my first read-through, but what I believe it is saying is that recasts specifically are not allowed in any way, shape, or form. The second part, addressing "any user-generated artwork or original custom items or parts," is more a liability statement, and not meant to apply to the discussion of custom made parts. What I do think though is that the landscape is changing. Things like 3D printing and Shapeways have changed the industry in some very important ways, and we're getting to the point where people may not be recasting things, but I could probably print myself an entire valk. A lot of our collections are holding together because of third-party reproductions and replacements for original parts. Does there need to be a line drawn between recasts and reverse engineered reproduction parts? As 3D printed replacements get higher quality and lower cost, it's going to get harder and harder to tell the difference.

I can say I've experienced both the positive and negative sides of this first hand, but being entirely in the digital domain makes things a little different. During college, I worked in the Microsoft Flight Simulator add-on market as a way to make a bit of spending money. The add-on market for MS Flight Sim is an oddball venue, since it basically operates on notion that the average sim enthusiast is not going to be capable of buying the vast majority of aircraft he would want to simulate, and it won't have any effect at all on ability of aircraft manufacturers to sell their product. (Car simulations are more tricky, and usually require massive licensing deals, because manufacturers do not want their products badly represented to the consumer.) Now, being entirely digital, piracy isn't really an "if" so much as a "when," and you kind of have to go in knowing that. Certain add-on groups do take the time to distribute license keys, installers, and other such packages, but once extracted, there's really not much to keep people from redistributing the contents of an aircraft add-on. I worked on one particular project for several years, and poured my heart and soul into a simulation of a particular aircraft. Once it hit the market, I made a decent amount of income from that, and I was fairly happy. Note, in the end I was getting paid pennies on the hour, but it was more a hobby and labor of love than anything else, so I was just happy to make something back from what I was already doing as a recreational activity. Two things happened some time after the release of the original aircraft. First, as was expected, it popped up on torrent sites. But oh well, it happened, sales dropped off, and I was a little disappointed, but I was graduating at that point, so it wasn't going to be something I got all mopey about. Second, other developers started imitating what I'd made. Now, what's funny is that the part that was imitated may have even been an outright copy. When I'd made this aircraft, I went to great lengths developing a layered and animated afterburner animation effect for the plane. The files involved were nothing but a couple of bitmap graphics, and a text file describing the layers of textures, and could have easily been copied over directly to another aircraft. What still to this day gives me a warm fuzzy feeling, and has me grinning from ear to ear, is that that animated burner effect style is now used everywhere. As soon as my plane hit the market, people began adapting the effect script, using it on other planes, and generally copying the style I had developed. Piracy or not, I can't be upset at the thought that I produced something that actually raised the bar for the developer community as a whole. That's all digital though. Copying a file is literally no effort, a few button clicks. Copying a physical product is a little different, and if you aren't doing a cheap recast of a product, requires some serious investment to either make or acquire the molds to reproduce something. For stuff like Bandai's exclusives? Let the bootlegs roll. Bandai seems to get some kind of perverse pleasure out of teasing their customers with reissues of Ozma's VF-25S, while for all intents and purposes, the molds for the armor packs may as well be destroyed for all they care about reissuing them. Bandai has their reasons, I'm sure, but if they are going to continue to ignore demand, the market will adjust to fill that gap. I think where I mentally draw the line in general though is how the bootlegs were made. The way I see it, there are three possible sources. Note, just for the sake of simplicity, I'm ignoring whether the products are being made with permission of the original copyright owner. 1. The original molding, if purchased (which may even be the situation with some old Yamato molds), feels to me like the product should be entirely legal to produce 2. Molds made from recasts of the original product, or possibly stolen molds, both which I would chalk up as illegal 3. Molds made from reverse engineering the original product, possibly with improvements, which I'd also consider legal (and which currently sustains a multitude of VF-1 shoulders) Bottom line.. I know the concept of "abandonware" may be out of date, but to me, a lot of physical products should fall under this sort of category. If the original production company is either gone, or shows no interest in ever producing a product again, it should be fair for someone with an interest in the product to step up and fill the gap left. This definitely doesn't apply to products currently in production. Arcadia clearly has the molds and intent to produce more VF-1s, so they don't fall under this category yet. It won't stop people from making them, or buying them, but I'd rather support an official release if it has the possibility of happening.

Well shoot... I guess if I can pay that much for the LEGO one years back, I can probably convince myself to get one of these. My stomach is doing somersaults at the thought of how much it'll actually cost to import though. I'd honestly be perfectly happy with one without the lights, but given their one-shot treatment of the 1/48th X-Wing, I'm not betting it'll happen.

That may very well be the same color. That doesn't mean it's correct for the destroid, though.

Oh, they've all been done relatively recently. Zero got a release after Frontier that adds in Sheryl's earrings, and SDFM, Plus, and 7 have all gotten bluray releases in the past few years. Will you ever see a single massive collection? I don't know about anyone else, but I would have to pause at dropping two or three grand on any set of shows and movies.

I don't know about "wrong" per se, but the massive mess of folding joints in holding the wings on doesn't put the wings in the proper place relative to the arms, if I recall. After building several of the 1/72 models and seeing how much simpler the design can be accomplished, I wish they would have copied it for the DX. they even included locks for the shoulders into the torso in both gerwalk and battroid, which the DX just doesn't even attempt.

I'm calling scale shenanigans on the "bomber." That thing in actual minifigure scale would be huge. Re-watching the trailer, those things are easily the size of a small corvette or something. There's a shot of a tie fighter passing behind one at close range that's good for scale. But yeah. I think they're ditching the idea of fighter-bombers, and actually playing with the idea of huge lumbering weapons platforms, more like B-17s and B-29s in WWII. I guess it's not a bad idea in and of itself, but against things like star destroyers, anything that big and slow, no matter how well armed or armored, is just a big fat target. And the stupid thing is still ducking fugly as hell.

I think the tail angle is mostly just for cool factor, but it can also play a part in directing airflow to prevent turbulent vortex generation I would imagine. In the 31's case, it just looks better than canted out, or vertical, and flows nicely with the design. For the modded VF-31 with the tails moved inboard, I don't think you'd see much of a difference in terms of airflow. They might even work better, being moved away from the potential turbulence from the wing design, but I don't have the experience with that sort of thing to guess how it would make things work or not. The Falken though (the red one, it's the endgame superfighter design from Ace Combat 5).. see, it looks cool, but I also want to say that the way those tails are mounted is pure aerodynamic nonsense. Placing them that close to the engine nacelles would negate a great deal of their effectiveness as a control surface, because the air flowing around the nacelles might tend to flow around the outsides of the tails, and never flow along the inner surface, meaning you may as well just mount the top half of the tails to the tops of the nacelles, and get the same effect. In a fluid dynamic sense, I guess you could call air "sticky" to a point? Been a while since I took those classes, but there's a thing called "interference drag" which occurs when you have sharp corners between surfaces. Think of how ambient lighting will cast very faint shadows in the corners of a room, and that's where airflow will experience extra drag where the air has to flow around multiple surfaces that intersect. The little crevice between the Falken's engine nacelles and tails is probably going to turn into a big draggy bucket of turbulent air. In some cases though, you can use interference drag to your advantage. With careful design and direction of the airflow, you can actually achieve interference thrust. This is one reason why you see so many airliners being upgraded with winglets. The overall impact to the airflow actually generates a negative drag coefficient, and you wind up improving fuel economy for the aircraft.

Mind taking a close-up of the arm shield? I'm curious to see if Bandai made mounting points for the reaction missiles, or if we're going to be forced to buy a second set with hardpoints.

Thanks for mentioning those, I just looked the CG-04 series up, and read through the entire thread about the Oversized Seekers on TFW. I'm half tempted to pick up the oversized Greenscream, but not sure I want one that big, since these are much closer to 1/48 scale. Will admit, I don't care for how the MP-11 mold bulked up the lower legs compared with the MP-03, since it breaks the cleaner lines of the back end of the plane, but it does help the bot mode a lot. The add-on packs with the tanks and missiles actually looks like it would cover that somewhat anyway, and I'm actually thinking it would be easy to mod some actual 1/48 F-15 weapons to fit. Urg, I don't need one more series of transforming jets to buy, I'd been doing fine with just Macross. Edit: Went ahead and grabbed one off Ebay, but sadly the flash sale code was expired. Still slightly cheaper than TF Direct though. I've had the Walmart Skywarp for a few years, and still enjoy fiddling with it, but I've wanted an actual Starscream ever since Christmas of 93, when my parents couldn't find one, and got me a Ramjet instead (the G2 one in Skywarp-ish colors even.. ).

Yeesh. Do you have to get NY to fix it, or can you just show them your email receipts with purchase and shipping payment to prove you already paid them?

You know.. it only just now kinda hit me. Rick is short for Richard. Lots of people named Richard also go by Dick. Food for thought.

I actually pulled the canards on my Messer clean off while trying to angle them correctly, and I almost prefer the plane without them at all. I've left them off of my 1/72 kit so far as well. It certainly makes them easier to pick up without knocking things out of alignment. As far as real-world forward swept wings go, I want to say that the majority of them do have some inboard portion of wing that's swept to the rear, so it's not an uncommon feature having a compound wing with a forward swept portion. Just having the outboard portion smaller might not have any serious effects on the overall benefits of a forward swept design. What's interesting about the 31 is that the tails are mounted right at the mid-span. Their position is going to be right at the conflux of airflow both outward from the fuselage, and inward from the wingtips. I can't say for sure what real-world effects that might have, but I want to guess it might cause quite a lot of turbulence over the tails. Granted though, these are pure science fiction designs, and the 31 is already described as having some complex active airflow control systems, so really, real world effects probably wouldn't matter anyway. The X-02 though is an even more outlandish case really. While the entire switchblade swing wing concept looks cool, the idea of physically opening the leading edge of your wing during flight to form a pocket for the outer portion to fold into is right up there with the YF-19's high speed mode that lets two physical objects pass directly through each other.

Just out of curiosity, do your parts on the legs mount at different angles than the original super packs? I only ask because the profile shot from a couple pages ago looks like everything is sitting at a slightly different angle, with the legs bending downwards a little. The whole thing looks absolutely amazing though. One of these days I'm going to have to bite the bullet and get a stereo lithography printer and really go to town on making custom parts. I do wish the material Shapeways uses was more friendly to finishing though, that stuff is really hard to sand.

Heh.. the fact that they're adding it to every order no matter when it was made makes me wonder if they didn't order enough to begin with, and the extra charge is to help cover proxy fees for acquiring enough to fill all their orders.

I think some of what people are put off by falls into the "you should know this already" category, since they've been selling Bandai's exclusive super packs for a long time, and never seemed to have trouble before. If the extra money had been asked for up front, no one would have blinked an eye. It's just the "Sorry, we were wrong, and need more money to get you the thing you already paid for" factor. The problem may lie with Bandai reporting incorrect weights or volume for them, or maybe there's just more metal in these than was expected. Could even be market fluctuations devaluing the amount already paid. Actually that makes me wonder. For people who got asked to pay extra, how many of them paid their original order ahead of time? Did anyone who paid right at the deadline get asked for more? Either way though, I'll happily deal with that so I don't need to worry about the extra fuss of proxy buyers or group ordering schemes. They work great in a pinch, but I remember the early orders for the VF-25 armor packs, and the work Nanoplasm put in to organize all those bulk purchases. If NY can save folks the headache of having to do the cat herding necessary for a group order, I don't mind a few extra bucks when they underestimate the shipping costs. At the moment, I'm just curious to see how long they take to get here, and whether the arm panels will pivot correctly so I can mount some reaction missiles on them in the future.

I'm going with sea turtles.

Apparently I wasn't so far off trying this as I thought!

I'm torn over what I want to see them do with her character this time. On the one hand, I want them to give her some redemption for having all the willpower of a soggy paper bag in the first movie's ending, but on the other, I don't want to remember that stupid scene at all, and wish it could be written out and turned into something more believable.

Saw it last week, and I think I enjoyed it even more than the first, but for different reasons. The first one felt like a better movie, but this one definitely had me laughing harder. The physical humor throughout was just pure looney tunes slapstick, which I loved, but I can see how that would turn some folks off. I'm really looking forward to re-watching it and being able to pause/rewind to catch all of the dialogue and gags, they were just relentless, and I can't even remember half of them a week later.

One of the big tricks to the new trainer deal, be it the T-50 or otherwise, is that it's going to get sucked into the F-35 development tornado as well. The Air Force intends it to be the training platform for the F-35, so it will likely be getting very similar avionics and hardware in the cockpit, including the touch screen display, and helmet-mounted HUD. I seriously wish Northop hadn't already bowed out of the running. Their trainer prototype looked to be entirely what I've been wishing for all along: just make an updated T-38.

I wouldn't necessarily agree that the YF-30 was their first try since it's so different (and was similarly well done I think), but they did seem to pretty much nail the design itself (for better or for worse, considering the "landing gear"). The execution of certain parts is still a little lackluster I think, but the overall design may be the best "first try" for any Macross design so far. We're getting to the point where everything is designed in computers though, and you can get a nearly direct translation from screen to model/toy (if the engineers are willing to put forth any reasonable effort), so the problems with anime magic are kind of disappearing. Now it's just a matter of how faithfully the physical version reflects the animated one. What gets ugly is when the on-screen stuff is designed with no regard for whether a physical copy is even feasible, much less durable. I don't know if official art exists for all the internal mechanisms of the 262, but the DX is an absolute monstrosity of itty-bitty hinges and pivots, all of variable tension, that are all supposed to move together and line up somehow. It's a beautiful design, and I love it, but the engineering behind the 1/72 model is several orders of magnitude simpler, and just as effective. Bandai's DX engineers just have an uncontrollable fetish for making everything with three or four times the number of pieces necessary to accomplish the design goal.

Pretty sad that they had alllll that unused surface down the front panel of the leg to secure the wing panels to, and they decided to go with a single tab on the one part of the entire wing that needs to move for the drones to mount. The models didn't even use a tab on the wing, they had locking pins up and down the full length of the shin. The hinges also have an extra notch to pull the wingtips inwards past vertical so you can mount the drones while on the landing gear. Course, the models are also pretty fragile, and the long panels holding the wings are especially prone to stress fractures, so they're both pretty mixed bags.

Pretty sure those are the reaction missiles for the Arcadia YF-19, repainted, and mounted with a custom adapter. The missile style definitely isn't the Frontier-era type, but the size is pretty much dead on, unlike the itty-bitty ones with the VF-25 armor packs, or the ginormous honking things packed with the 171 packs. I'm really curious if Bandai's even going to address those at some point. Their resistance to release add-ons for all these missile-less valks is getting incredibly irritating.