Chronocidal

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.

Ya know, I think part of the problem you've got with the fin-tab is that it's not tapered front to back like the kit one. It looks like it's actually pushing the fin out further than it should be sitting. You did a pretty good job duplicating the part though, that sanding and filing must have been a pain. I think the only things hurting the fit now are that the surface that's against the leg isn't quite level (you'd have to sand parallel to the edge to flatten it against the leg) and the tapering. Without going for the whole putty/repaint option, I wonder if it would be easier to just fill in the slot on the leg, then sand the fin piece down flat to fit against, and glue it straight to the leg? Anyway, still looking beautiful, especially the wing streaks. Personal opinion, I'd go ahead and go all the way to full battroid sweep to see how far the streaks might extend, just because it looks like those rear panels along the trailing edges of the wing gloves look like they could be flexible to seal against the wing when it's swept back. And it probably couldn't hurt to imagine a few hidden panel lines on the undersides of those plates, which would leave even more streaks.

Had to go back a ways, but I knew I remembered seeing a decent side-view pretty early on. Kinda sloppy due to being the early prototype, and angled a bit more than usual due to the fast packs, but looks plenty slick to me.

Yeah, I'll probably wind up getting one of these, but as much as I do want to support Arcadia's new releases, I probably will wait to see if this one goes on sale at HLJ. I already have a first release DYRL Roy, so as much as I want a couple of the stands, I'm going to put anything I already have on the back burner for now. Right now, my Macross fund is being exclusively devoted to valks flown by Isamu. If my wallet is still breathing after those hit, I'll probably start eyeing anything with that new stand included (or, better yet, a bunch of the stands themselves if they start selling them separately).

If they want to bring back what made the older Battlefront games great, they need to ditch Origin, throw out the idea of DLC entirely (unless you're adding new game modes, or massive content updates), release an SDK, and open the game up to locally hosted servers. I still play Battlefront II from time to time, but absolutely none of the time I spend playing is done on stock maps, because the quality of the work done by the modding community blows the original stock material away completely. Give the people a good engine with room for expansion, and you could probably save money on development by allowing the gamers to build on it themselves. You know.. those people who work for free, and don't have to deal with deadlines.

Sheesh.. way late reply due to not looking all day... I think the DN and BoP picked up sales later on, as people realized they were easier to repaint, due to the lighter plastic. Really, I think the only reason those were made was to give people a pseudo-supernova scheme without actually having to spend the time to rework the tampo printing process. Laziest (non-canon) repaint in history by far. I really want to see an actual supernova version this time. A palette swapped version that winds up painting a bunch of thrusters, anti-glare panels, and vents bright orange doesn't cut it.

Keeps looking better and better with every new pic that comes out. Going to try really hard to stick to two for this first release, but I'll probably follow my pattern with the VF-19 releases, and get two of each repaint (wallet and common sense permitting). I don't have any worries about this one being as streamlined as the VF-19s, I'm pretty sure some of the earlier pics showed a side profile view. And I kind of agree about the intakes' brick-ness, but I don't think that's really any different from the VF-19 intakes either. It just doesn't have those leading edge extensions to hide underneath anymore. Think I can see what David means about the canopy being more peaked, it definitely looks higher than the old YF-19, and higher than something like the Hasegawa kits have. At the same time though (looking at Graham's old 1/60 YF-19 lineart comparison review), I think this one's closer to the TIAS book lineart and Bandai lineart. The Hasegawa has always had a really slim profile, and the rear canopy is nearly flat. One thing I do hope they tweak though.. they still can't seem to get that black area behind the canopy the right size. The old 1/60 had it too high and tapered, this one has the angles right, but it's too low on the fuselage. Should be level with the canards, along the same angle they have it now. But.. that's just getting stupidly nit-picky now. Wouldn't be hard to scratch off a little of that stripe in any case, but it's not that big a deal. What's impressive though I think.. that rear view of battroid looks almost dead-on with the lineart. Still a bit longer in the torso, but that's to be expected, and it's just as close to the art as the VF-19. I can't wait for 2014.

Given the ~6 month wait for every other web shop exclusive, you're probably looking at late 2013 to early 2014.

Ah. I wondered what that crease in her thigh was.

You know, something I still can't wrap my head around about the JJ-prise.. Did anyone actually ever figure out how big it is? Like, not how big it's supposed to be according to the people who said so, but how big it is based on the design? I mean.. So ok. I think they literally said it's supposed to be bigger than the Ent-E. Did the artists just have no sense of scale, or did they seriously design it with 40 ft tall bay windows all over the hull? Because despite the ship being 3-4x bigger than the original, the windows are still in the same places, and still the same relative sizes. It's like they copied all the nice hull details of the old refit design purely for aesthetics without it ever occurring to them that most of those details actually reflected the internal structure of the ship. This has been kind of lost on the newer designs like the Ent-E, but up through the Ent-D, the aztec panels on the saucer pretty much showed the layout of the internal bulkheads and living spaces. I guess maybe that's a bit off the subject though, sorry I guess a better thing to ask here.. What does that kit reflect in terms of size? I don't know if there is any internal detail, but maybe what surprised me about the new design was that I didn't see that many windows anywhere.