Chronocidal

Curse you HLJ, I'm almost considering giving up on the M&M VF-22s and VF-11C for now, and getting the YF-21 and VF-11B. I wish I could count on sales like this later... I already spent this month's toy allowance on a cheap YF-19 on ebay, and 2 Fine Molds 1/48 X-Wings, all of which I should be getting in the next few days. I blame the YF-19... as much as I want to hold out for the 22s... Ahhh, screw it. I just got paid, and these might not ship till after Christmas anyway due to the restock.. I'll just call this my monthly valk purchase for January. I waited 3 years to get a YF-19, I can wait a while to get the 22s too. Maybe by then, they'll get this kind of sale too. What I want to know is why the frack they aren't discounting their VF-0s yet?? The SV-51s were frankly superior in every way to the VF-0 releases, and those things are going for almost half off. If they would mark those down, I might actually consider buying one, problem shoulders and all.

Sheesh.. here I am trying to convince myself to sit down and watch MF again on bluray, and you have me wanting to watch 7 again I might have to catch up and join in at some point.. been a while since I've seen M7, and forgotten most of it by now.

Actually, with what I know now, I'd like to redo that tab system better. It's a good secure attachment point, but I did a half-assed job of cutting the holes, and should have measured to make the tabs/slots more precise. And I'm sure with enough tweaking, there'd be a way to push those legs higher... or maybe the solution would be to just extend the backplate a bit so it matches up with the legs. If I could find a good sale, I'd probably buy at least 3 more of these, probably 2 alto and 1 ozma (RVF never did it for me really). I would buy them now, but I've bought 8 Yammies in the past 3 months (), and I need to stop for a while to recover (and build up anticipation for the M&M VF-22s ) The shipping from HLJ just kills me.. I wish I'd gotten more than one kit in that HLJ VF-25G sale, because when everything got screwed up from stock problems, they shipped the dumb thing alone, and I wound up paying more for shipping than the kit cost me. I do plan on painting mine eventually (possibly by hand, I've done it before) though I probably won't do a canon Michael scheme.. I might tweak it a little into a 2059 Max version. Shoot, if Chuck Yeager can keep flying 50 years after he started, I'm sure Max can. A VF-1J variation scheme would be a lot easier to mask and spray too, so I could do all the main markings with paint, and use spare Hasegawa decals for the kite logos (screw continuity ). I don't mind leaving one version half-assed as long as I have a spare or two to really finish nicely. My first one was kind of an experiment that I wasn't worried about screwing up.. now that I know what I'm doing, I'd love to do more.

So I was browsing my old posts a while back looking for something, and came across this picture from 2004 (forget what I posted it in originally, but the topic is long gone). Anyway, I'd love to get a closeup of the buno on that plane, and see if it's meant to be the same one... This one looks very close to the JSI. I'd need to find my original Flying Fighter poster to check, but the only differences I see off hand are the gun vents... doesn't mean there aren't other differences. I imagine the front gear doors are still wrong, unless that sensor bump on the door came along with the others under the wing glove. There's also no way to tell which chin sensor is on this plane either, but I think the single TCS chin pod was in use by this time.

I kinda wondered if you might've glued it. Looks really good that way. I think the shading hides the gap ahead of the legs, I can't get rid of that on mine either. It's much better than default with the new tabs, but I'd like to make another someday, and see how far I can really get the legs to mesh with the backplate. For now, mine's just in "just out of the box" mode, no painting or gluing anything. In the end, I might skip the decals altogether (except for logos and such) and try to handpaint the stripes and such. I'm worried what effect the overall paint will have on the fit though.. right now, the fit of everything is nearly perfect, it just takes a good squeeze around the hip gun area, and everything fits beautifully. I just wish Bandai had put a bit of thought into the colors of some pieces.. the big blue hinges in the white underside look stupid.

Looks really good to me. What'd you do to get the legs to stay up that high? The legs on my VF-25G stay up solidly thanks to the tabs I added (funnily enough in roughly the same place Bandai added tabs to the VF-27 ), but the little vents on the back of the thighs don't pop up quite that high, and there's a noticeable gap ahead of them. Did you file down the pieces to allow the legs to move higher?

Shoot, $70 for a professional costume? If I looked anything like Grace (and were a girl), I'd probably pick one up myself. What's really weird about that is that I have a sister named Grace... and even though she has no interest in anime, she might like that outfit for the style alone. She could pull it off too. Even has the glasses. As for the price... while it might be a simple outfit to make yourself, it'd probably cost that much or more to do it at home.

Good grief.. I ordered two 1/48 Fine Molds X-wing kits from HLJ back in august... I just got the shipping notice.

omgomgomgomgomg....win. If anyone can offer these for a good price, I'll probably pick up an entire squadron's worth... well, maybe. But at least a few. I've got a huge stash of 1/72 F-14 markings, and only one F-14 in 1/72. C'mon Overdrive/HLJ, make it happen.

Not really, you have to lower the legs and pull the arms part of the way out to gerwalk before you can get a good look at the problem hinge.

I'm pretty sure this is partly why the early Roy and Hikaru 1A releases have been on sale at HLJ (Overdrive too). Even over a year after the release, these two seem to come standard with broken shoulders. They're probably trying to run out their stock of the first run before a re-release hits. It does seem to be a time related issue though, rather than careless transformations.. I remember that early buyers mostly had good shoulders out of the box, and they cracked over time. Since that time, the unsold ones have been slowly cracking in their boxes. My Super 1A came the same way, shoulder entirely split.

On a lighter note.. I'm tempted to set up a streetcorner booth selling Hasegawa VF-1 kits on Christmas Eve. And I actually really want to learn Silent Night in Japanese... of all the tear-jerker bits in SDFM, that one always gets to me the most.

The shoulder tab scratching is going to happen no matter what you do really.. it's a key attachment point for the chestplate. What I did was file down the tabs on the inside of the chest plate some. They were rather jagged, which probably wasn't helping the scratching, and they were big enough that detaching the chest plate was tricky. The way the back boosters mount though... I have a mini-rant I need to post about this system. Yes, it's sturdy, but the way it's mounted scares me. It looks like it's seriously compromising the tail structure, not to mention scratching the tail paint on my Roy. I'll post pictures of this later, but I'm actually afraid the booster system is eventually going to lead to the tails snapping in half. I might be overly concerned.. but those tails should NOT be bending as much as they are.

*sigh* Once upon a time, I told myself I wouldn't get a 1/60 YF-19, cuz I thought it was ugly... Some time in the past couple weeks, I realized I might never get anything better, and decided to get one if I ever saw a really good deal. Today I saw a really good deal. I looked at HLJ earlier and paled at the $200 +shipping (Overdrive's been out of the original YF-19, and I like it better than the repaints).. Then I decided to check Ebay, and happened on one with about 30 min left for $130, with free shipping. It went up to $150 before it ended, but considering HLJ would approach $250 before I got it.... yeah, good deal. All told, got it for almost the exact same price as each of my M&M VF-1s. *does happy dance* Now I just have to resist the urge to get a YF-21 and VF-11B so I can focus on the VF-22s and VF-11C.

The feet look like they might actually have internal details this time as well... the connection between the toes looks like it's a round-ish nozzle shape. I'm not gonna get my hopes too far up, but so far this is looking leaps and bounds ahead of the DX VF-25. It might be the effect of not being painted shiny yet (the dull finish looks good, I wish I could get one in those colors ), but already this is making the 25 look incredibly sloppy by comparison. Reminds me a bit of the changes between the 1/72 and 1/60 YF-19... ok, maybe not that big a change. But the crispness of the detail here doesn't even look like it was made by the same company as the 25, let alone the same design team.

See, that I wouldn't get though... one run of such an icon? Heck, the whole arm mounted removable cockpit was made specifically with the orange VF-1D in mind, I can't imagine they'd stop producing it so soon... Anyone have any inside info on this? Maybe a tidbit from the Yamato site about it? I mean, HLJ lists it as backordered, not discontinued, so it seems they're expecting more.

Gah, being the first of a new month (almost) I was gonna go order my VF-1D from overdrive, but they're sold out. Anyone know how long they usually take to restock? Or if they even will? I can't imagine something that popular lasting only one run, but you never know... Edit: Sheesh, HLJ is backordered too.. oh well, hope they restock by Christmas so I can get myself a present.

That red looks better and better on the Milia every time I see it... I wish they'd used that color on the VF-1J actually; the color of mine looks more like a red wine color than actual red. It's just reaaalllly dark to me.

Better yet, the rear landing gear don't look like complete crap! More than that though, the actual physical detail looks about an order of magnitude sharper and more refined than on the VF-25. The details on the VF-25 always looked.. blurry to me. The contrast looks almost like the difference btween the v.1 1/60 and the v.2, it just looks.. sharp. Now, they need to take the lessons learned, and re-apply them to the VF-25. I might even consider buying one then, but it'll take a lot of improvements to make me prefer the DX over the kits.

I thought that was what MW was all about... I dunno about intentionally, but I know plenty of people have had multiple valks go to pieces on them. And I can imagine some people collect the broken ones cheaply, intending to fix them up. In any case though, it doesn't require broken planes to make. It's easy enough to remove the arms from the v.2 1/60s, or barring that, just dress them up in bandages. I don't remember which Valks tended to lose their legs.. but I have this picture in my head of a v.1 1/60 walking around with a crutch.

And here I thought he used sheepskin, and glued it together with his own blood.

Agree x10^23. <mortalkombatvoice>FAILTALITY</mortalkombatvoice> What you've suggested is like having Uwe Boll take Hamlet, and rewrite it to make a sequel to Dawn of the Dead, starring Ashton Kutcher and Miley Cyrus. Let's just put it this way. Macross without Kawamori is NOT MACROSS. If they want to make a robotech movie, fine. But the way your suggesting leaves the original creator's intent ENTIRELY out of the picture, and substitutes things from people who would want to make it their own, not make an accurate recreation. It's the same reason Willy Wonka wanted a kid to take over the factory.. anyone else would want to do it their own way. But again, this has gone way beyond the scope of talking about toys.

On a more humorous note, I may have found a new sig. Reminds me of a warning image from an old board I frequented (note, this wasn't meant for the same situation as here.. it was more when people were starting flame wars, so if it feels inappropriate here, I'll remove it). But anyway, yah, perfect transformation usually in my mind means "you don't need to take it apart and put it back together again to make it transform." Note, there are many ways for this to happen, but the VF-1 tends to stick with one of a couple tried and true methods. For a very different take on the sequence, there's one that even includes side covers as part of the arm mechanism in a recent post in one of the model sections. It was a very different take on the transformation, but no less effective than the standard Yamato VF-1.

Funnily enough, after seeing so many attempted Lego valks, that may be one of the few methods that would actually work for a perfect transformation Lego VF-1.

Just fyi, they have done this FREQUENTLY, and it's not so much a company as it is a designer for the anime, in this case Kawamori. There are a lot more designs for variable fighters than I think you're aware of. They're not going to redesign the originals (that would just be stupid considering the history they have established), but they've been adding new designs for over two decades now. Honestly, the only "Tomcat" style valks to me are the VF-0 and VF-1, and the VF-1 is even iffy to me, since it's so small (reminds me more of the F-18 in terms of proportions). The rest are very different in what they look like. The SV-51 is a clear descendant of Russian planes like the Su-27/35. The VF-17/VF-171 comes from the F-117. YF-19 takes elements from a mixing of foward swept wing planes, most notably the Su-47 and X-29. The YF-21/VF-22 is an obvious tribute to the YF-23. VA-3 Invader is a tweaked A-6 Intruder. VA-14 Vampire is a modified SR-71. I could go on. Suffice to say, they've already done what you're suggesting, and they've done it a lot. Whether toys are made of any of these is an entirely separate issue from them being designed in the first place. A lot of these designs have been drawn up, but until it gets featured in some new show, there's no reason to make a toy. At that point, you wind up with merchandise for it's own sake (ie, transformers) that might at some point get a series, not something that came from an established anime series, which is what Valkyries are. If this is what you meant by making valks more like transformers, I see your point now, but it's not going to happen. Transformers are "hey, lets make a robot of this because it'll look cool, and we can write a story for it later." Macross is more "hey, lets write this story, and it'll feature people flying these transforming planes." Where transformers will change design over time (Starscream has been MANY different aircraft designs at various points), Valkyries don't, because they have an established history. The VF-1 will ALWAYS be the way we see in the lineart. The only way that will change is if someone decides to reboot the series at some point, or like I said before, if Hollywood gets their grubby hands on it.