Chronocidal

Much as I'd like to think they're possible, remember folks... the thing that eventually killed the F-14 was the swing wing design, and the heavy maintenance that required. Comparing an F-14 to a VF-1 in terms of moving parts is like comparing a mechanical pencil to an automotive assembly line. The problem in any moving part is the stress involved. The only reason the JSF's VTOL engine works is because you're not moving the entire engine. It's just bending the thrust. Now, if you could find a way to duct a twin engine fighter so that it could achieve a gerwalk-like functionality, sure. I can see that happening. It's essentially what the Harrier did, ducting thrust through multiple nozzles to gain stability. They just weren't independently controlled, which could be very useful in real life, and could probably be done now with computers. The only Valk that doesn't contain the engines within the legs is the YF-21/VF-22. That means that in gerwalk, you have to support that entire leg structure with a mechanism that fits around the engine itself. Without some crazy over technology, that ain't happening. Just for a comparison once, I calculated out the stress on a normal human arm for lifting, oh, say 50 lbs. Your arm's weight is roughly negligible, but lifting 50 lbs on a rough lever arm of 18 inches puts 75 ft-lbs of torque on your elbow. Now.. consider that the lever arm your biceps use is on the order of an inch or so. Your biceps are pulling with a force of roughly 900 lbs. Now try adapting such a structure to something the size of an aircraft, and add the weight of an engine. The wing system of the F-14 wasn't even fighting the weight of the wing directly (the pivot being perpendicular to the main force on the wing, lift), and it STILL required gobs of maintenance. You know how ants can lift so much more than their own weight? What that boils down to is that their structure is small enough, light enough, and strong enough that the stresses are miniscule. The scale works in reverse as you get bigger, and as you start incurring weight penalties from your own mass. Until we discover some ridiculously strong materials, invent structural integrity fields, or gain overtechnology, I don't think anything resembling a valk is happening. The closest you'll probably get is something like the JSF. -------------------------------- However, on the other side of things... you all seem to be forgetting one very important reason that they needed battroid mode in the first place. Sure, you can kind of wave off hand-to-hand combat, since it's not really necessary. But remember Max parading around in the zentraedi costume? Let's face it.. if you ever wanted any miniscule chance of fighting them on their own ships/territory, you would need someone or something that would be able to interact with their technology, on their level. Unless of course, you wanted to have to report to your commanding officer, "I'm sorry sir.. the mission was a complete failure because we couldn't reach the doorknob."

This photo montage is by far the most irrefutable example of the importance of the phrase "REPEAT FOR OTHER SIDE" I have ever seen. It's definitely awesome to look at, but it also shows why I miss old fashioned film cameras at times.. you don't wind up with 20+ pictures of the box. The cost to develop that much film would have rivaled the cost of the subject of those photos.

Personally, I've always been suspicious of the way Bandai designed these things, especially with regards to any armor add-ons to the legs. I mean, think about it.. everything snaps into fighter mode exactly the same way whether you have armor attached or not. I was expecting to have to drop the legs like a VF-1 to allow room for the leg armor... but you don't. Adding the armor just means you use the same attachment points, at a different angle. The legs do get lowered, but there's no real change in the angle of the leg joints, and the hip joints seem like they're attaching at the wrong angle to me. It makes me think two things: 1: By putting the thing in fighter mode with the armor/super packs, you are putting a ton of stress on all the attachment points because they weren't designed correctly to attach at the different angles required by the packs 2: Bandai did a half-assed job designing the way things lock together so there would be some amount of sloppyness in the joints. People have said before that the super and armor packs feel like afterthoughts to the VF-25, and I have to agree. It looks like they decided to slap the leg armors on without any thought at all as to what stresses the new leg position might put on the existing pegs. I don't mean to rant, so my apologies if this comes off as one. I'd thought about getting an armored Ozma as my last DX, but these cracks really confirm my fears about how Bandai handled the armor. The VF-25 already barely fits together unarmored in fighter mode, and the armor makes me think they just hoped the pegs would line up well enough to hold it together, with no regard for the stress on the plastic. Sadly, cramming an armor as complex as this onto the plane and making it all fit correctly might require a level of forethought and precision beyond what the current VF-25 has.

Quoted for out of place truth. Although, personally, I think I'd rather keep my arms intact, and adopt.

Yeah, they can keep those shoulder... things. Seriously, it looks like they said, "What haven't we mounted on a valk yet?... OH! I know! JETSKIS!"

Not gonna bet on it holding the gunpod in fighter, since the arm design doesn't look changed at all from what is seen (hopefully I'm wrong). They did change the shield design, and the surrounding area to work with the head lasers though. Agree about the yellow stripes and the shade of blue though, if they don't fix that it'll be rather disappointing. I got the Fire Valk because I saw it on sale.. if that happens again, I might spring for one of these as well, but I'm probably going to hold out for a Yamato one. Also.. I didn't notice this before, but what's with the screwballed upper intakes above the hips? They look like they stretch the full length of the hip plate, rather than just the small triangle-ended strip on the lineart. Seems the Kai has this too, but I never noticed it till now.

Actually the Jolly Roger markings go clear back to WWII, and possibly before. I've got an F4U Corsair kit or two with the skull and crossbones flag pasted on it's nose.

I hope they aren't seriously removing the guns. I mean, even the VF-22s had those, even though they don't have a place to mount in fighter mode. Considering that rear picture still shows the guns mounted, I would assume they're just removing the fast packs and stand.

Actually, for the SDFM style Valks, their normal deck crew set would probably work just fine. We didn't see too much of it in the show (due to the whole space thing and all) but I don't see any reason the standard (atmospheric) Prometheus deck crew would have to be any different from a modern carrier deck crew. A DYRL set on the other hand... well, as cool as it was to have "AIRCRAFT CARRIERS - IN SPACE!", the launch arms in DYRL made infinitely more sense (steam catapults in zero-g? I lol'd), and there wasn't really any flight deck to populate with crew. I LOVE these kits though... and I'm terribly torn. I really don't want to drop a load of cash to get as many of these as I'd want to make versions of, but that means I have to decide very carefully how to paint up the two I have. I'm fairly certain I'm doing one old-school VF-84 (or possibly VF-142, I love those markings too), but I also want to do a VF-1 Wolfpack... not to mention one standard Hikaru 1J scheme. *sigh* Maybe I'll get two more in a couple months... two just isn't enough.

*gasps* In all my time here... in all the RT vs Macross threads.. in all the canon detail arguments...I don't think I've ever heard such blasphemy!

Mine arrived today as well. Thanks again Graham!

*nods in agreement* Actually.. yeah, it's not quite the same style as the others, but it adds to the variety in a nice way.... The style is vaguely familiar actually... dunno who it reminds me of.... *facapalms* Wait... You might hate me.. but it kinda reminds me of the character designs in Kim Possible. It's the face style I think. I still love it.

Trust me.. I've considered that I'm trying to resist the obsessive compulsive side that wants me to do that.

Every time I see this thread, that's what I think... Course, it's mostly from the "Ooh, I don't have one of those yet" factor. I don't quite know what I was thinking when I did it, but yesterday I unpacked my entire collection and laid them out on the floor. The pile of 1/60 missiles, booster packs, gunpods, and spare hands was rather startling. It filled up an entire shoebox to the top. I probably won't leave them in that box, potential to get scratched paint and all that.. but I'd like to find somewhere to store all the accessories where they're easy to access, rather than having to dig into my hidden pile of Yamato boxes in the closet every time I want to change something. All purchases are on hold at the moment for various real life reasons, but I still have a "to get" list in mind. It just might be a while before I get to them.

If it's anything like the V2 VF-1J, those things are glued together very well. I tried for hours to get my Hikaru's head apart to fix the loose lasers, and the most I did was pry off the visor and lasers, and rub off half the red stripe on top. If anything would come off, it'd be the head lasers, since those seemed to be press-fitted onto the 1J's head, leaving little pins inside when they were off. The faceplate might come off with some prying, but taking the lasers off might give you better access to the seam. It's risky though, those things take a LOT of work to pry off, and while that glue can be brittle in some cases, it usually holds really well.

I kind of don't get what's going on with shipping through San Fran recently.. my last order from AmiAmi spent almost a week in customs, and arrived at the same time as an HLJ order that I placed several days later.

Note, you really don't want to tighten those at all.. you want some play in those connections, because it gives the shoulder mounts a bit more room to move over the stops.

*jaw hits floor and puddle of drool starts to form* Me likey. A lot.

Ok, I've been tinkering to see what causes the nose to get stuck, and it seems to mostly be the neck plate. Basically, to rotate the chest plate up, the head plate has to be pushed back toward the back plate as far as it will go. Not sure if the head has to be in the up position or not yet, but it'll let you see if the nose is getting past that plate. If that neck plate isn't pushed back, it catches on the front of the nose, and the chest can't rotate to let the nose out the front. One other thing that helps too is to make sure the nosecone itself is as far down as it will go.. there is some play in the double hinge connecting it to the cockpit section, and if you rotate it the right way, it will go further towards the gear, and leave you more room to rotate the nose out from under the chest without it scratching. I'm still trying different methods, but so far my best way has just been to lift the head up, raise the shoulder plates and back plate a pit, and push the head plate back as far as I can, until you can lift the front up and over the nose.

I'm still working on learning the tricks to getting that bit of the transformation right myself. I've only done it a few times now (I love the fighter mode on this, and usually just leave it that way), and every time I go from battroid back to fighter, the upper chest plate doesn't like rotating upwards. The trick is in how you get the chest plate to rotate upwards. Align things right, and the chest plate will lift up, and let the nose slip under it easily. I just can never seem to identify exactly what allows it, so I always wind up fiddling with the thing a couple minutes before it actually works right. I think it has something to do with the neck joint, and how it sits against the nose. Try flipping the neck plate up and back, and see if that helps some.

Maybe I lucked out on my order, but I was really surprised how snug they managed to keep my 27 packaging. The VF-27 itself was wrapped in a cardboard sleeve with a separate compartment for the poster that let it just fit diagonally. That sleeve/box was the exact length of the larger shipping box, that was about 16" tall and wide on the end. Course, for me, the space around the 27 was taken up by my Miria VF-22 and Hi-Metal Fire Valk. There wasn't any wasted space at all in there. Did they use a similar box as mine for packing just a solo DX VF-27? Funniest thing about mine.. the outer shipping box they used was an old Italeri shipping box. Nothing like getting a heap of Japanese toys in a box from Italy. On the downside, that could be why no one could find it until I came back with the missed delivery slip.. I was telling them to look for a box full of Japanese characters, and they sent me something all marked up in Italian.

True enough, I wasn't considering Yamato in that comparison, and I should have. I guess what separates them for me is that Bandai has been aiming much more toward the playable side, while Yamato goes more for displayability (or would that be dis-playability? ). Yamato isn't a small company, but compared to Bandai, they're rather insignificant, with much more limited production (I would assume, I could be wrong), so I guess that makes me tend to be more accepting of their prices. Compared to Yamato, the prices do make sense, even it's just because they're roughly evenly inflated. Oh well. I might get one eventually, if only to display on my desk at work. I don't care for the scale, but then again, the smaller size is much more inconspicuous for the workplace.

Well, I have to applaud Bandai for making it look good.. but until they start doing something incredibly revolutionary with these, they just aren't worth the money. This one's better than the Fire Valkyrie, but still way too high priced for what you get. I took a chance on the Fire Valk, and while it's decent enough, it's definitely not worth the $60 I paid for it, and even that was 25% off. That's the same as my Masterpiece Skywarp cost, for something about two-thirds the length, no where near the same material content, and no real noticeable difference in quality... well, except that Bandai can't seem to figure out how to match colors for anything, and they keep insisting on using plastic molded in grey and painted red to match red plastic.. it doesn't work so well. Oh, and Skywarp included a complete stand. To me.. these just look like they should be sold alongside the $15-$20 transformers you find at any other store. Roughly the same size and such, though articulation may be a bit better (although I'd say the limp wrists aren't worth it). I'd love to understand where the extra cost comes from in these... I guess maybe production line size, development time, licensing.. I dunno. I might get some of the more rare Valks when (and if) they come out, I just hope the prices come down.

Well, the VF-25's legs are missing a key mounting point to keep them stable in fighter, so they don't stay up (same as the DX really, but the model is at least capable of getting the legs higher.. there is room for them). What I did was add some extra tabs to the legs and wing glove pieces, and now fighter holds together like a rock. I think there are pictures a few pages back in this thread, but I can repost them if you want to see where I did it.

I'd love M&M versions, but I really don't need another set of M&M valks. I definitely like the VFX version better, but I'd really prefer the white nosecone from the M7 one. And.. the blue and yellow hightlights don't really fit.. oh well, I'd probably buy them up like all the rest.