Chronocidal

I haven't tried Sketchup, so I can't really compare the two, but I can vouch for 3DS Max's capability, since it's what I've used for about ten years now. Thing is, it's horrendously expensive for the average hobbyist (which is why it's probably one of the most pirated programs in existence, and a good part of why Gmax exists ). I tend to horribly under-use the features of 3DS Max, simply because I only use it for polygon models, mostly built with spline cages. But since that's basically what STL files are to begin with, it works just fine.

Oh, well there's actually two kinds of droop. The first one, mentioned above, is part of the design. The wing packs do have a downward angle to them. The second type is from the weight of the packs, and could potentially cause the engines to tilt downward if the hinges are loose.

Well, you could look at it in the reverse direction.. instead of sanding down B13, sand down the underside of the backpack plate that rubs against it. It'll lose a little bit of friction from that surface, but there should be plenty of other rubbing surface on the sides of the plate, or even the hinge pins, where you can beef things up with nail polish or glue to tighten the joint back up. You might lose paint on the sides of B13, but you'll never see that in fighter, and you'll never be looking at the sides of that tab in battroid. Similarly, you can do a lot to reduce scraping on the shoulder tabs (the ones with the orange lights) by filing down the ridges on the underside of the upper surface of the chest plate (inside the slot where those tabs slide in). There's enough holding the VF-1 together that you don't really need those to latch together extremely tightly, though I wouldn't remove the ridges entirely.

I half wonder why they don't just build back up assembly lines for the T-38, and keep making it. The financial side of things can get tricky though, so who knows. If they had to reverse engineer everything to make the tooling for more of them, that might wind up being more costly than designing a new aircraft from scratch with current manufacturing techniques in mind. Though, even if they have to start over, it seems like they could save some time and effort by using the same base design.

I don't understand a single thing about that paintscheme. Not only are half the pieces entirely the wrong color, they didn't even bother to make the TV style arm packs. Not to mention, I will never ever be able to understand why so many people put the dual reaction missile mount on the outer hardpoint...

Yeah, I felt the need to double dip on them all too, but I wish I'd gotten a spare F in hindsight, just to have one to customize into a Max 19S.

Actually, those aren't even necessary for the wings to stay on. They only act as locator pins to help hold on the wings when the larger pins are removed. The wing doesn't actually rotate around those, it rotates around the base where those little nubs are mounted.

We probably won't see separate packs at all, just because of the number of unique parts the packs will require. You'd be buying almost half the jet again anyway.

Woo! As ridiculous as this might be.. I almost feel like I should buy four of the strike pack kits, and make a 1/48 skull squad display. Definitely will buy at least one or two though, I can't wait to see how much detail they cram into the packs.

Wow, that is a good one! Good luck, hope someone here who's wanted one gets it.

Well, the few frames of the splatter cam view in the trailer have me wary, but at least it wasn't the main focus. Most of the combat looked like it was fairly standard legacy AC style. Let's just hope the free-to-play mechanic doesn't kill it.

I do apologize for that. I do think it's amusing that they're actually going much more with the Hasegawa style for that marking so far.. the line art shows it tapering, more like the Yamato one. I think the straight one flows with the design better, but it might not be entirely accurate.

I think my only nitpick about the paint is that the band of black on the upper neck looks a little wide (dipping below the canards) but that might be an effect of the quick prototype paint job too. It's probably not something I'd even bother to fix, but it looks funny to me with the canards being stuck in the middle of the black instead of at the bottom edge.

Yamato already has, as has Arcadia. The VF-1 has it's markings printed right across the upper and lower half of the nose section.

Heh.. yeah, the size of the box those parts came in had me thinking I got the wrong item. It was tiny. I kind of hope someday I'll find a set of Alto's packs relatively cheaply. I don't mind the way the 30th packs look, but I think the entire design would look better without the darker color for the pods on the tips. Plus, due to Bandai's ridiculous molding scheme, half the pods are molded in white and painted over anyway, which just leads to them turning white if they get scratched. For all the effort the model division puts into making molds that produce parts in the proper colors, it's like the toy division can't even comprehend the concept. Though.. to be fair, they didn't exactly design any of the Frontier valks (or their paint schemes) with much thought for how the toys or models would work to begin with,

Fair enough. I don't pay enough attention to bandai's other models anyway.

That's rather sad to hear. Still looks beautiful though. Really, I've gotten to where I really prefer painting on as many markings as I possibly can, especially big blocky ones like those, or things like on X-Wings. it just comes out looking so much better in the long run, and makes weathering much easier to do.

An online exclusive model? Well then. I guess that says one of two things.. Either they want to make it really exclusive and fancy, and make them collectors items (which for a mass-produced model kit is just plain stupid and nonsensical), or they're fully aware of how much the first release is hated by so many people, and they're squeezing all they can out of the molds before giving up, only making enough to satisfy the people who will actually want them. Funny, have they even announced a Hikaru 1J yet? Actually, no, I guess this sort of makes sense.. I don't think M&M stuff is that popular in Japan, and they will need custom colored packs anyway... Which begs the question.. Why are Millia's packs the wrong freakin' color entirely??

Canard/Delta's have been around a while Seems like it's always the go-to format for advanced concept designs, too. To be honest, I don't care for how this design looks.. but I would have loved to see it made, if only to extend the service life of the F-106. Someone also did a computer mashup of what that FSX concept could have looked like (mostly by photo-hacking a Gripen).

So, does this mean they're going back to the midget-scale X-Wing design from the 70s? Much as I can appreciate them releasing smaller ships, I'd much rather see them just do something along the lines of a revised/re-scaled Action Fleet, with mini-figures (say 1/32 scale) and accurate proportions. I don't even collect the figures (unless they're included with a vehicle), but good vechicle designs always make me reconsider how much space I have in my closet. I picked up several of the large scale X-Wings, an A-Wing, and B-Wing, but never liked how stumpy they made the Y-Wing. The X-Wings are all taken apart and awaiting some rebuilding, so they take up much less room, but the B-Wing is just huge and amazing.

I dunno. Generally speaking, for flight sim people who like to be able to outmaneuver and actually gun down their targets manually, CRA was anything but "intense and epic," unless you mean in terms of failures. Basically, doing a pilot's job for them that way comes off more as insulting to the people who know how to do it the hard (normal) way. I personally just saw it as a cheesetastic attention grabber to cater to fans of all the blood and gore splatter games that people seem to love so much, in a genre where it never will belong in the first place. If they'd kept it optional, it wouldn't have been a big deal, but they went out of their way to force players to use it, and I think it alienated a good portion of their normal fanbase, which, being flight sim/aircraft enthusiasts, doesn't get much smaller and niche-ier. I hope they have the sense to go back to what made the previous games so much more fun, but this entire free-to-play thing worries me greatly. I can think of a couple ways it'll likely go.. either they'll try to attract an even larger audience than AH had, and further alienate what's left of the fanbase, or they'll go back to what the series used to be, and they won't make enough profit from the relatively small community to make a profit on the inevitable pay-per-plane scheme it'll have to run on. I think it's possible to balance it, but I just don't know. I want to be cautiously optimistic, but my experience with assorted free-to-play games has me extremely skeptical, both about the game, and the community that will grow up around it.

I can't honestly believe BBTS has the audacity to STILL have the freaking YF-29 even listed. I kept my preorder for easily 6 months past the release and they never said a word. I finally cancelled it when I bought one from someone here.

Having the crotch plate be the same shape on both sides is the entire problem. You can't do that, and still have it fit nicely in fighter mode. To make the plate fit, it has to be a clamshell shape that fits around the backplate underneath, and fits around the landing gear area in battroid.

Thing is, that flip-over plate was one of the biggest problems with the original YF-19. It didn't fit well, it didn't stay folded correctly, and it did nothing to help hold the valk together in fighter mode. Because it had to flip over, it was a big solid brick that didn't fit anywhere. Judging by the shape of it, I'm pretty sure they gave up on making that particular part of the transformation canon, and went with what works so well mechanically about the way the VF-19's crotch plate works. Since it doesn't need to flip over, the backside can be hollow, and everything has much more room. I honestly could care less if they get that part of the transformation accurately. The VF-19's version is just a much more useful and practical design.

I'd probably buy any of them. Only thing though, the crotch plate should be white on all of them I think. Due to where it rests in fighter mode, it'd be an odd patch of misplaced color on the lighter underside of those schemes.