Chronocidal

Man, they're killing me here.. I've got a cannon full of money ready to fire into their lap, and they keep stalling.. Still.. I'll forgive them for the moment, since they just announced a line of Star Citizen ship models, and I'm going to be drooling over those until I have a small fleet of them on my shelves.

Holy crap, it actually looks like an aircraft! Underside will be where all of the garbage is kept, obviously, and you can tell it's still a a pretty chunky block underneath, but still better than I expected them to pull off. If we even get the opportunity to pick one up, I might do it, just for the luls.

See, the funny thing, from Bandai's perspective, I can kind of see how this makes.. "sense." The thought process probably went something like this: - "What's the absolute minimum factory-complete product unit we can send that will cover all of the complaints of broken parts we've received?" - "The only way to do that would be to send the entire plane body, and the spare canopy." - "If it means we don't have to disassemble anything or interact with the assembly line, fine. Ship it." It's basically the minimum amount of effort they can give to get you the replacement for whatever part of the valk broke.

Wow, that's wild. I know Bandai is an absolute pain for refusing to replace individual parts, but I never thought they would go so far as to just send the entire valk. The crazy thing about this is that now you've got, essentially, a giant spare parts bin in case something else breaks. Too bad they didn't send you the engine petals though, or it would have actually been a fair piece to display.

Not a bad price considering the rarity, but yeah, I haven't seen much fanfare about it. Maybe because they were testing the waters for this product line with a fairly unremarkable design? I know it was a headliner for AC4, but I don't recall that game getting nearly as much fanfare as 4A when it dropped. I do keep hoping they'll do more figures at this level though, since the first one wasn't really a design I was interested in. They put out a White Glint though, and I will be all over it immediately.

I'll have to go check whether my previous order is carried over. Slight bummer about the stickers not being included, but I feel lke that will be one of the easiest things to solve, and I'm sure there will be local options, just not free ones. I'm more concerned what the cost is going to be to actually receive the order at all now. Edit: Looks like I actually pre-paid my old order in full in September, so I should be good whenever the new stock comes in.

Oh? That's kind of awesome, but also annoying, since I had already started stripping the leg packs on one of mine. Still though, good to know! I'll probably just stash that set and use the clear parts one one. I had already ordered a third shortly after receiving my first pair, so we'll see if I get notifications about it soon.

This kind of makes me think it was faulty from the start, giving you all the resistance at first, and then over time the mechanism has just failed.

I think the only thing that would stop them from doing just that is purely Bandai's unquenchable fetish for doing things that don't make any sense. I'm not sure which I prefer at this point though, since neither release type seems to be really harder or easier to acquire than the other.

There are absolutely a ton of ways to reconstruct the original UCS Imperial Shuttle that would be much more accurate to the original shape, and just more solid all around. Embedding several layers of ratcheted hinges in the wing pivots would be a great way to start, since they have a much lower profile and would give better support than the old crankshaft design. I've been waiting for them to get around to a redesign of that one for years.

Probably just purely licensing costs. I'd imagine original characters are a lot cheaper to make and get approval for. Though I'd prefer an armored Ozma, I don't know if they could pull that off convincingly.

Yeah, the style of that movie was weird, but I am absolutely on board for some fancy sets recreating it. I would absolutely pick up a new UCS Batwing from that movie as well, since I think it would need to be that size before you could get the style replicated well.

For Hasegawa to focus on the mainly white versions makes sense, when they got around to making the weapons sets they were mostly focused on DYRL designs, which tended to adhere slightly more closely to realistic weapons markings. Not that the black and red markings on the missiles was unrealistic, it just wasn't the type of marking you'd see on a production air-to-air weapon. I'd still like someone to actually detail the seeker tips with a sensor of some type, rather than just giving up and going "I dunno, make 'em blunt."

Several of the HMR releases definitely had missiles painted red that way. I believe all of the Hikaru VF-1J and CF VF-1A versions had the fins and tips painted red. Now, what I have not seen is anyone painting the black stripes on them, outside of one of the stupidly expensive statues released under the Robotech label. And.. actually the scheme is kind of amusing to me, because they are absolutely nothing like any other air-to-air missiles.. however...

... I'm sorry, WHAT.

Late reply, but yep, whatever you changed looks like it did the trick. I think you could reasonably set it at a lower number of seconds, the issue was just that the search time limits were actually preventing you from even exploring the search results that had already been returned. Say I was looking for a specific topic, and searched for a keyword, but it returned multiple pages of topics, and it wasn't on the first page, the time limits were preventing the user from going to the next page of results too quickly. I don't quite know how the search logic of the forum software behaves, but the behavior I was seeing was that it was treating every action on the search results as a new search. I couldn't just move to page 2 of the results it already pulled, it was treating it more like you were just re-performing the search, and returning page 2 instead of page 1.

That's entirely on Bandai for failing to understand the entire point of rotating the gear. They made the wheels so tiny, and the wings so thick, there's no point to even folding them flat. I've had this happen before as well, and it's generally because there's a specific angle that the wheel needs to be at before it will slot into the bay deep enough to not interfere with the door closing. I've had to experiment with finding the proper angle, and I can't remember which direction it is, but it's not exactly vertical. You might need to rotate the strut while pushing it into the bay. Edit: I was able to sneak in a quick look on my way out the door, the trick I've used is to tip the upper half of the tire slightly inboard to get it to settle into a cutout in the metallic details inside the bay.

If that center panel isn't sitting flush, there's probably something under it propping it up. There are a couple of folding panels and a battroid support under there, so make sure they're all collapsed correctly.

I'm almost tempted to pick up a third, that's about $15 lower now than I paid for my copy from HLJ at release.

The thrusters aren't the problem, the backpack flap hinge is just mis-molded to the point that it doesn't even touch them. The hinge just doesn't rotate far enough to give the arms clearance. Only real way to fix it would be to modify that flap by sanding away the edge so it rotates further. If you raise the backpack, the arms can sit higher on the pegs.. but they don't stay there. They just squeeze off of them, due to the conflicting materials. The plastic just has no friction against the polished metal. If the backpack flap wasn't a problem, it might be worth roughing up those tabs with a file to see if you could get them to stick a little better. I really wish the arms didn't bother me as much as they do, but the worst part is always trying to mount the gunpod. The arms themselves I can overlook from some angles, but as soon as you add the gunpod it's like a giant neon sign pointing out exactly how badly out of alignment they are for fighter mode. The full length of the gunpod is planted firmly on the ground, front and back, when you set it on the gear, and that's frankly the only way to even get the arms to stay up in the first place. Otherwise they just dangle. Bonus points for making the gunpod look like it's going to blow out the underside of the nosecone, because it constantly tilts from the droopy arms. It just drives me absolutely bats that people can design these sorts of things, and just completely miss such obvious issues. Like, these problems were visible from the earliest promotional test shots. Why did no one do something about it? Edit: To make the problem very clear.. this isn't the arms drooping from gravity. They are being pushed downward, and standing the thing upright on its feet doesn't make any difference. This is just where the arms sit. If it wasn't for the ground pushing the gunpod up when you set it on the landing gear, the wheels wouldn't reach the ground. If I actually press the arms up, yeah, the gunpod actually looks like it's almost firing forward, but it won't stay that way without constant pressure. Bottom line.. yeah, I really want to like this figure more than I do. Would be great if we could get this paintjob and posability on a Yamato or Bandai.. but at the same time, for as easily as all of this panel lining rubs off, I'm glad neither Yamato nor Bandai decided to go that route. As it is.. just treat it as a battroid figure, and you're probably fine, so long as you don't handle it too much (and don't look at the elbows).

I was thinking that this arrangement makes literal anti-sense, since the Fire Valk already has shoulders with round holes in them, but looking closer, it appears they didn't think that far ahead, and had to re-locate those mounting holes for the speaker fins. But still.. why would they think we need two sets? Did they not believe a peg the same size as a missile hardpoint would be sufficient to hold the fins on the shoulders? I'm not exactly complaining, since fortunately the different colors of plastic indicate they are actually separate parts, but it just feels silly.

I generally don't care for the giant combiner groups, but man if I'm not tempted to just grab that one. One of the best looking chopper transformers I've seen, and I'm a sucker for the type of plastic origami going on there.

Just saw the new Slave I, might have to pick that one up since holy crap does it make the old UCS one look even more like garbage than it already did. Just wow. I hope the pieces exist in the proper colors to rebuild it in the OT scheme. Might grab that and the Tie Interceptor this year.. maybe two Interceptors actually, so I can rebuild one as the standard model.

Well then, that's a weird choice.. were they just incapable of making those shoulder fins rotate like the Yamato? I'm not sure I'm actually "concerned" about not being able to remove them though. This just makes me think that these will be coming with extra shoulders that make customization that much easier.

Got my Roy this past week, transformed it once to fighter to confirm the arm sliders weren't frozen, and then haven't really touched it since. Probably for the better, so the panel lining doesn't rub off like my Rick's. I don't know. These just feel like an oddball. They've got a couple of really questionable design choices that manage to goof up all modes roughly equally, I suppose? And sadly, the arm design is at the center of all of it. The forearms being so thick pretty well kills the profile in fighter mode (especially when the arms sag off the pegs, leaving the rear gear propped off of the ground by the gunpod ). Then the screwy elbow design just looks terrible if you look at it for more than five seconds. It just makes me sad at how easy it would be for them to fix it. Also yeah, same exact issue as above. The arms will not seat on those stubs. The backpack flap pushes them down, because it doesn't collapse far enough against the thrusters. So they just dangle even lower than their intended position. Also, unfortunately in my case, this is probably the worst fitting nosecone I've seen on any VF-1 since they started making them fold. Can't figure this one out, it's like the nosecone tip got shrunk in the wash or something, it's too small for the rest of the nose, and doesn't sit flush, so there's an angled gap all the way around. On the plus side, the paint is immaculate on this one, and I appreciate the extra pivot they added to tilt the head lasers in and out. I don't know if I exactly regret buying both of these, and I can appreciate someone finally making a release that's more battroid-focused, but the sad part is that some of those compromises weren't even necessary in the first place. They just made some poor choices in general. These are probably just going to remain in battroid forever. Though.. now I'm actually kind of wondering how hard it would be to make a set of custom arms without the elbow and droop problems. Could even work in a set of perfect transformation hands, since they didn't seem interested in those. Would be really funny if you could just pull off the arms below the shoulder, and replace the whole assembly with a set of Yamatos.