Chronocidal

Ah, looks like he's going for the classic "billboard disguise" camo pattern.

Ok, that is.. wild. I'm used to seeing transforming planes smuggling a robot under them, but never a car. The car and animal modes look great, and the plane is at least hidden in those, but the aircraft mode just looks really funky with that much junk under it. Still.. not really any worse than what the official releases usually come up with.

Coming to the last bits of my print project before I'm going to call the model "done." Came in at about 200 hours of printing, and what might actually be about 700 grams of plastic, or about 1.5 lbs. It's a hefty model, and I was relieved that my original display stand design from my smaller version was still plenty sturdy to support it when scaled up to match. Big upgrades for this version were mostly the cockpit, and the greeblie panels that I had left blank on my first version, since I didn't have good references. In the end, I just made stuff up that looks decent where I couldn't find decent images. Tonight.. I decided to get adventurous and see if an idea I had held any merit. I'd been thinking of buying/making a vacuform machine to make canopies, but not decided on that yet. I tried something much cheaper. I printed a two-piece mold, heated a segment of a disposable plastic salad bowl in front of a space heater, then jammed it between the halves, and clamped it shut. Took a while to trim, but I was pleasantly surprised to find the material was actually able to be sanded on the edges. I'm kind of blown away it worked at all. What helped was that the material had a much lower melting temperature than the ABS mold (only slightly too hot to hold by hand, even), so I was able to just sit the mold in front of the heater and let the plastic go limp on top of it before clamping it. Material quality is kind of literally garbage, since there are a lot of little scratches and wrinkles I'll never be able to polish out, and I probably need a better heating setup to get it evenly soft, but as a proof of concept it worked great.

FYI, HLJ actually has one more in stock as well, might be a better deal depending on the shipping and currency conversion. https://www.hlj.com/1-60-scale-kanzen-henkei-vf-4a-lightning-iii-hikaru-ichijyo-use-premium-finish-aca82155

I think the issue with the Bandai pic is that they used a focal length that gave the picture almost no foreshortening at all.

What I'd like to know is what all the space ahead of the shoulders is being used for, if anything. Yamato's was absolutely jammed into the belly, and Bandai's looks like there's just a pile of empty space ahead of the shoulders here. Also, I tweaked the arm on the right side. I would happily deal with a wider body if they would beef up the arms enough so that they could be longer and thicker, which would let you collapse the elbows and hands into them to make room. The way the hands are stored right now looks incredibly sloppy.

This, x1000%. That's just the weird nature of the YF-21 in a nutshell. The vast majority of the fighter mode has little to no effect on the battroid, because it's essentially a shell-former. The nose is a free-floating part, and can be any length they want. The arms are dependent on the overall length of the plane, and the legs have to fit under the belly, but Bandai just went off the rails in this case, making the main body huge to fit the legs, and then slapping on pathetically shrimpy arms that don't take advantage of the space they have, when making them longer and bigger would improve every mode. Fortunately comparing all of the images can give a mostly complete picture of how the top view will look. The tails are just.. not in a good place. The underside view shows how everything is packed into the belly, but if they had tried to collapse the hands or make them into fists or something, they would have had a ton of extra room to make the arms bigger, and the whole design is worse off for it. This isn't scientific in the slightest, because I tweaked the trailing edges of the wings in the original art to match better, but this gives a nice overview of why the back-end bugs me so much. I filled in the tails by overlaying the underside view, and lining them up. The proportions of the back end of the plane just feel out of whack. All things considered, this doesn't look terrible in these shots, but I think they're obscuring the problems by not showing the whole plane in view from the top or bottom. The length of the arms just throws so many things off. I'm honestly undecided if I'll grab one. I feel like I'll probably try, but if I can't, I probably won't be terribly heart-broken. Edit: Just as a what-if, imagine if they actually extended the arms, and then made the tails as big as the line-art (and the accurate shape, while we're at it):

Which makes the new YF-19 Empty Set all the more ridiculous, honestly, since its packs are even less material.

I was going to suggest the same, though the length of shaft you can use is limited by the screw mounting the part. I think it should still have plenty of depth for the strength necessary though.

I wouldn't say those other pictures actually look good, this one just looks even worse. The nose has always looked far too short to me, but I would like to see an actual flat scan of that photo, as well as the facing page that looks like it details the transformation.

It's because they are being stupidly faithful to bad animation, and they keep looking at the frames where the pilots actually were microscopic, instead of deciding to use a brain cell and make something that actually makes sense. Funny, that's even one of the better looking stills from that episode, but having that much space in the cockpit, let alone carrying a baby in her lap, is absolutely insane. Her arms don't even look long enough to reach the instrument panel.

I really hope that's just the magazine photo artificially foreshortening the fighter mode, because that looks REALLY squished up front, like bizarrely out of proportion. I kind of want to say the battroid looks a bit better? But it's probably just my reaction to not seeing it splattered with five gallons of tampo. Hips are still Urkel-high, canopy is still entirely the wrong shape, and the upper arms still look like spaghetti. The arms in particular are just painful to look at.. I can't comprehend how they could blow out the backside of the thing to as big as it is, and not use any of that space to give the thing beefier arms. If the Yamato version needed Omega Pants, this one needs Omega Arms.

Maybe if you spend a lot of time pressing down on the shield, it might lead to stress there, but I don't think there's any persistent stress on that joint while in fighter mode. It's just laying in the nook against the back of the lower leg. Maybe if the arm wasn't transformed correctly before trying to close the shoulders? On the other hand though, if you're transforming the legs out of fighter mode by twisting them downward to disengage the latches from the shoulder covers, that could potentially be stressing them pretty badly. The lower arms sink into the recesses in the legs, and trying to force the legs down without the shoulders free might be pulling on the arms at a weird angle. I've never transformed my VF-19s that way though, I always pried the shoulders up before dropping the legs, and made sure to sand down all of the latches that hold onto the shoulder covers to make that process easier, since they were really tightly held down in some cases.

Phew, the big print is done. Almost 200 hours printing, and about 1.5 lbs of plastic. It's a hefty build, and thinning down the parts for the larger print could have saved me some time and material, but I didn't feel like messing with part designs that worked. The big changes were adding the cockpit, and all the little greeblie panels that got left blank on my first one. Now I get to fill and sand all the print artifacts... It came out smooth enough that I might fill in the big gaps with superglue or putty, and then just give a primer coat though. We'll see. Lots more to do for it, but it's a relief to just have all the parts print successfully.

No lie, that seriously looks like you built a shrink ray. Beautiful work!

So, normally this is the place where I go, "I wish I still had this thing I made as a kid." HOWEVER.. Turns out, I've had this thing stashed away all this time in a box of balsa wood gliders. I'd normally call this a cautionary tale about never throwing anything away, but sometimes it's worth holding onto old stuff. It's very different from the actual Firefox design, but was close enough for me not to care when I was probably twelve years old.. in fact, I'm pretty sure I remember building this during the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, because I kept getting interrupted because I had to take notes on the games for a homework assignment. Overall it's about 15 inches long, so not a bad size. I learned early that stealthy aircraft are easy to make out of cardboard, since they're all flat surfaces. I did make one other like this (that I still have anyhow), a Blue Angels F11F-1 Tiger, but it wasn't planned out nearly as well, and just sloppily wrapped with layers of paper and tape to hold together. I started with CAD and game models in about 7th grade, and I can only imagine what it would have been like to grow up with the 3D printing technology we have now.

I always assumed it could mount weapons under the wings, but we never saw it done, and I don't know if there was ever art to depict it. Technically speaking, I don't even remember if there was any art or animation of the YF-19 like that either, but it always gets associated with all of the weapons seen in that one illustration.

Wow, thanks for reminding me this exists! I remember piecing together a pretty large scale pseudo-copy of this as a kid using cardboard and construction paper, based off of a single magazine photo about the movie. Thanks for the reminder.. one more model to add to my "to print" list. My Excalibur update is coming along, I've got one more 24-hour print before all the parts are completed. Then comes the "fun" part, where I sand and polish all of the pieces to get rid of the printing layers and ripples. Or, maybe this time I'll try a sand-able primer? Not sure yet. I'm really bad about actually finishing kits though. I don't exactly know why, but I always get a weird satisfaction from the pure un-painted forms.

More like every pilot Bandai has ever made for any Macross product, regardless. They always make undersized pilots, no matter what scale.

Maybe Bandai won't chicken out, and actually release the MAX-L and VF-17T.

Hopefully they'll do a little more with it this time, instead of just sticking it against a wall where you can't get any good photos. Or maybe a battroid pose? That would be a lot more interesting to compare with the Yamato one. I wouldn't mind HMRs of all of them either, though.

Shouldn't be that long, looks like Kakizaki has a 10-19 release date, while Max is 10-31. Unless you meant that they both regular releases put up for sale at the same time as TWE items, which I wasn't keeping track of. I was actually hoping to get duplicates of these, just so I can get some extra TV missiles, and those particular tinted canopies.. and having a spare Max for a Q-Rau battle pose is always necessary.

Interesting, it looks like there are multiple color variants as well. I might have to pick up another one to check. Not a huge investment, in any case. I just wish they made a standard F-22A, instead of the YF-22 version.

Yeah, no, I just checked my VF-25F. There's one small nub on the pivot that gives absolutely no friction when rotating the chest plate. They didn't make those same changes to the most recent VF-25 Alto. I do think there were three separate ratchet points on the YF-29 Max though. Will have to wait and see whether they did that with the Michael re-release when I get mine.

As a follow-up, it feels wild to exist in a time when I can order a Bandai DX valk from Amazon, and have it on my doorstep in two days. Good news is, this one has none of the fit and finish issues of my first copy from HLJ. The weird news though.. Did I miss a whole bunch of improvements to the VF-25 base transformation? I ran this through a quick fighter-gerwalk-battroid-fighter cycle, and was incredibly surprised and pleased by the fact that the entire chest transformation is ratcheted now. The chest plate has three distinct detents: one for fighter mode, one for battroid mode, and one that holds it in a solid position to rotate the nose into place under the head. I'm a little blown away by this, because I don't recall this even being part of the recently re-issued Alto VF-25. Have they been making stealth improvements to this mold in between release cycles? Because this was by far the easiest time I've ever had transforming a VF-25-based valk.