Chronocidal

Honestly... while I appreciate the work putting so many markings on, yes, it's overwhelming. On top of this, Bandai's seeming refusal to try and actually understand anything about aircraft usually means that half the markings are going to be nonsense. All it reminds me of is when I was 6 years old, and my dad gave me a set of datasheet decals to put on a model plane as practice. The markings are really too big, and too stark, so I might actually remove a good portion of them... well, assuming they actually stay on anyway. It's like they go overboard to try and win over the aircraft otaku element of Macross fandom, without actually really trying to understand why people appreciate those details.

As much as his more recent movies are well known, I grew up watching An American Tail, and the first (and only, in my opinion) Land Before Time.. will never forget the songs from those. Also, Apollo 13 always makes me cry, and I blame him entirely.

Yeah, sounds pretty much like I was expecting. Always count on Bandai to use 10 pieces to do the work of a single part. I just hope the mechanisms hold up.

Good luck fitting all the Arcadia's spare parts in the Bandai box though. Interesting that they're close enough in size to fit in each other's packaging though. I do wish Yamato/Arcadia would have folded up the wings and tails to save room in their boxes, but you also can't stack styrofoam trays inside each other. Waiting eagerly to get my hands on one of these and fiddle with it, though I might not skip the instructions on this one. Quick question about the canards, can you angle them up or down like the VF-4? The pictures all seem like they're laying a little flat.

Just got a private warehouse confirmation for the one I ordered from HLJ, so it looks like it went through after all. Hope everyone who tried that secure link gets one, I wonder if those orders are being filled with cancelled extras from people who ordered more than one...

Out of stock at NY now, it looks like. Meh.. got one at CDJapan at least, but I'm not really expecting the HLJ order to go through. Haven't suspended my account, but my account page says I ordered an item that no longer exists. Correction about the gear though, they're not quite as plain as the VF-25 ones. They do look like they've got a few extra shocks and details stuck on them, but they're still just a shaft that rotates 90 degrees to deploy, with no sideways or forward-to-back angle.

From what I've been able to see in the pictures so far, it's your typical Bandai lame-excuse-for-landing-gear default. A skinny stick with a tiny tire at the end, and a lump that kind of resembles a shock scissor. They looked just like the VF-25 gear.

Actually, I really wish they wouldn't do this.. it may be nice looking for a while, but doing things in those colors means at least a portion of the belly is going to be painted, and the motion of parts in that region is pretty much going to ensure that the paint doesn't last. The VF-0D has the belly plate molded in dark gray, and that means the underside of the wing glove had to be painted white... the part that the shoulder rubs directly against for transforming. I'm all for making things better colors, but only if it can be done with individual parts of the correct color. Painted sections on transforming toys tend to not last.

The thing that gets me about Bandai is the contrast between all the amazing things they seem to pull off, and the absolute pants-on-head stupid design decisions they make in other places. Case in point.. why couldn't they design a thigh joint that's actually the same color as the rest of the thigh? It just looks stupid having a gray joint in the middle of it. I hope that's the worst it gets on this one, because I'd really like it to be a good design, but after the nonsense in the VF-171's legs, I really don't have very much faith in their ability to design sturdy mechanisms of any sort.

Yeah, there really isn't one. It's even smaller than the Arcadia. Hard to tell if it drops lower between the intakes due to the canon crotch plate though. The bulgy plate does look really conspicuous to me though, since it breaks up the curvature so much. It's mot entirely inaccurate, since some of the lineart even shows that panel bulging, but it's just an ugly feature I think.

Yeah, I have a confirmed order for one, so I'll wait and see. I'll be ok if I only get the one coming from CDJapan, but I'd love to have a backup.

Honestly, it doesnt to me, and this one actually looks even slimmer than the Arcadia, probably thanks to all the tiny folding bits involved in the torso transformation. The profile of the front end actually reminds me more of the Hasegawa kits. The key thing about the gullet is really how and where the profile of the underside crosses the leading edge of the intake. The Arcadia's underside crosses a little below the "bend" in the side of the intake, and at a fairly steep angle, since it curves downward into the groin plate between the thighs. The Bandai one looks not only like it crosses the intake at a higher point, but the angle is shallower, leading me to think there is even less of a belly. The overall profile of the plane is also much more like the Hasegawa, with the forward fuselage being much more flat, and the spine looking more level. I used to complain a lot that the profile of the old Yamato was just terrible, because the nose looke like it was stuck up in the air. I modded my Yamato to drop the nose, and the resulting profile made the nose tip roughly level with the centers of the exhaust, which was essentially what the Yamato VF-19s and Arcadia YF-19 have. But this one might top them all, because instead of just bending the nose down, it actually compresses the entire plane in the vertical direction. The skinny legs help it quite a bit, but the whole plane just looks flatter, and the profile curve from the nose tip, along the body profile curve to the back edge of the wing looks like a very gentle curve all the way to the center of the feet. It really looks very much like the line art from the TIA book to me. My one concern with the gullet is actually the panel that drops... it just seems to bulge out, and doesnt match the curvature of the rest of the underside for some reason. It's pretty minor, but I really wonder why it does that, and I might actually try to thin that panel out to fix it if I can, or make a new panel that doesnt do it.

Looks like they are currently out at HLJ, but expect to get more stock, so I was just able to order one. Hope it comes through, I'd realy like a second one of these.

Or, you know, just use a VR headset with the cockpit, and you don't even need a screen.

Yeah, that's really my biggest concern. It looks great, but my personal experience with Bandai valks has just been much worse than Yamato/Arcadia ones. The reasons for that are mixed, but it's mostly that when a Yamato/Arcadia breaks, I have a pretty good chance of either repairing it, or getting a replacement. On the flipside, the Bandai valks I've gotten with problems? They remain broken or missing pieces, because we can't get replacement parts, and their designs are such that I can't even begin to fix their terrible engineering. It's why I started ordering two of every Bandai valk, so I'd hopefully get one solid one out of the pair. I'm still looking to pick up a second one of these, but I keep missing the narrow purchase windows.

I think he might be referring to the lower triangles, actually. I have an idea of how to make a set of ones that fold down like the Yamato YF-17 instead of Bandai's plastic origami nonsense, but I haven't been able to setup my printer for a while to do any tests, so the idea's been sitting as a doodle.

I will say that just as a personal preference, I don't care about the waist joint at all, and would much rather have a full front gear like the Yamarcadias. But on the flip side of that, Bandai's gear suck anyway, so it's not like I'll be using it.

Looks like they really went crazy with the tiny folding bits to get everything to fit. Looks good overall so far, but I wonder if the nose is going to be stuck up in the air like the old Yammie. Hard to tell from the video, since they don't show much of a side profile (not without a lot of sloppy transformation ). I don't think all of the moving around of the wings will really be necessary, but I imagine they did it to make the steps easier to see for the video. I also found the bending gunpod hilarious. Yeah, that 2 degrees is really gonna fix that droop.

Honestly, I think they severely underscaled the pilots this time around. The old ones didn't look as nice, but they fit much more closely/realistically in the cockpit.

Also, the hi-metals look a lot more attractive now that the 1/60ths have gone up in price so much. The old pricing just made the 1/100ths harder to sell, especially when you consider that a lot of the Yamato 1/60ths could be found on sale for less than it would cost to get a hi-metal version.

Or a simulation run by one of the Rei clones in an alternate universe...

Honestly, you want to reboot the franchise? Make them the same movie. Humanity builds their first spaceship out of the plentiful captured wreckage from ID4, they name whatever fuel the ships ran on protoculture, and start building fighters with captured technology that wind up resembling transforming spaceships instead of cold-war era fighter planes. They try to launch the big ship and get surprised by a race of aliens who are trying to hunt down and eradicate the race from ID4, and capture their fuel source to use for whatever purposes suit the plot.. cue SDFM-style warp-out sequence, and you're well on your way to repeat most of robotech. You could even cut to the chase, have the flower of life seeding happen as the SDF-1 leaves, and skip the masters saga entirely.

I'd love to order a second, just so I have a backup in case one of them explodes when I open the box.

Yeah, I had absolutely no faith in their ability to make it actually stay level. At least with the Arcadia one, the gunpod looks relatively level in flight, due to having some amount of angle of attack... but that droop just makes the gunpod look impotent.

Supposedly, some of the joints in the arms were changed from pins to screws, but I don't have the old one to compare to.