Chronocidal

Fortunately, it does look like Bandai is aware of this, and has been putting all of their newer releases in plastic shells. Both YF-29 bundles, all of the VF-1 releases, and the new VF-25 releases have been in plastic, so I think we're past the era where we see them packed in styrofoam. I'm going to miss how sturdy the styrofoam made those boxes, since they tend to stack much better than the plastic shell ones. It's a small price to pay for keeping them from yellowing though.

I'd love to see them update all of those molds to current standard, and if we ever get a VF-17T, I really hope they do the white and orange trainer scheme we saw parked in Macross Plus. I've wanted one of those forever. I'm not sure what you mean about the LERX joint on the 19s though. Better articulation might be nice, but if you're referring to the articulation on the Bandai YF-19, I'm not sure if that would work with the larger LERX panels on the VF-19s, just because they're so much bigger. I went looking at the lineart, and those triangular panels wind up much smaller than they should be in the back view, and are completely omitted in the front view. Also, my only experience with the DX YF-19 was to have the hip panels repeatedly pop off because the pivots were too stiff and the little plastic ball joints were far too weak in comparison (very reminiscent of how the VF-25 hip gun panels tend to pop off, rather than move). The DX YF-19 is fresh in my mind, since I was messing with my Yamato VF-19s yesterday, and got the bright idea to do a comparison, and transform it from fighter to battroid and back. Yeah, that was a mistake. There's a reason the Yamato/Arcadia ones are what I transform on a regular basis. It took me two hours to cycle that stupid thing from fighter to battroid and back, because the process involved completely disassembling the hip joints (typical Bandai construction with a 6-piece metal and plastic socket held together by four separate screws) to make the legs move enough to transform. Yeeeeesh.

Good to know, and yeah, I'm not overly concerned about this. Provided you could get the lower arm apart, it probably wouldn't be hard to replace with a printed copy. Mine is such a clean break, I'll probably be able to just drill into the parts and add a segment of paperclip, and glue it back together. Given the option, I'd probably redesign the part with a fillet in that hard corner where it snapped though. I'm surprised it didn't have that to begin with.

I think the issue is that they just didn't sell well at all the first time around. They stopped production on them quickly, because no one bought them when they were new. Arcadia would probably have to charge the price they go for on ebay before they could actually turn a profit making another run.

So this is interesting, and a little weird to discover. Apparently my first release Fire Valk has had its left upper-arm joint shear off in the box over the past few years. Bizarrely clean break, too, I'm thinking it was just a flow point in the plastic. The other arm has a stress mark here, so maybe I pulled something out of whack when I originally transformed it? I checked all my other VF-19s, and none have a break or stress mark forming at that point. There's actually enough flat surface area at the break that I could probably drill and pin this together to fix it pretty well, but it actually kind of stays together on its own. The friction of the pin is enough to keep the joint together, and though the pivot is floppy, it's held in place fine by the shoulder cover in battroid and gerwalk, and doesn't matter in fighter at all. Just something to be aware of, since there's a new release coming, and I think all of the VF-19s and the Arcadia YF-19 share these same parts.

That would be a little redundant, since Bandai already included the arm cannon pack with the first release of their DX YF-19. It's not included in the most recent re-release, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if they offer an add-on pack with the missiles, fast packs, arm cannon, and fold booster in the future. They cut out a ton of content for the repop, and I think a lot of people are going to want the fast packs and missiles, as well as that cannon.

Anime Export still showing that they have stock, so long as you didn't already order one.

There was never any change that I know of, and while I don't recall any complete explosions, I do remember one or two cases where either Alto's, Luca's, or the Maruyama release had a knee twist joint go floppy, which is the precursor to these failures. It just indicates that the friction pin/plate is loose in that plastic shaft, either due to wear or structural failure. After the legs started falling off, I think people started being more careful with them. There really did seem to be something amiss with the CF production, in terms of materials and assembly, because there was such an overwhelming amount of failures, but I do recall seeing the same sort of cracking along a plastic flow-line start on the knee of my Luca copy a couple of years after the CF mess. Left it in fighter mode forever after.

Wow, managed to nap through the whole thing, but AmiAmi and AE still up.. threw an order at AE since I can ship it with other stuff later. I'm thinking the low demand is more a product of the 171's bad history though.

There's really nothing to fix. I kept all of the parts, but there's no way to replace the knee without destroying the lower leg. I wasn't kidding when I said Bandai made a glue sandwich out of it. Best you're going to get is a solid knee for permanent fighter mode. Maybe someday I'll do surgery and break open the lower leg to replace the broken bits, but I just don't care that much anymore. I parted out the busted one to cobble together two good copies out of four broken ones I got cheaply.

Found my original post describing the leg issues. It's a combination of bad design, bad materials, and bad instructions. Not easy to sort out, and close to impossible to fix without a completely new leg design. As a side note, I did see someone in one of the older threads (Duymon I think) state that out of 12 VF-171 CFs they bought, 4 of them had at least one knee that exploded. One-in-three odds is absolutely insane. To think, the entire thing would have been rectified if Bandai would have just done what Yamato did on the VF-17, and give the knee a simple stupid twist joint. The ENTIRE problem is due to their stupid unnecessary interlocking pivot.

I know it did from me The exploding knee joint issue was something much less common than the triangles being broke, but it's far more catastrophic, because there's really nothing to do except try to glue everything back together to be in fighter mode forever (provided you can even collect all the pieces). I've posted comments about what causes this issue in the previous VF-171 threads, with some pretty extensive examinations of what exactly causes it, but fixing the issue would require a complete redesign of the knee joint. That in itself wouldn't even be hard to do, if Bandai had not glued, screwed, and then glued again, turning the entire lower leg into a sandwich that you will very likely destroy before you ever make any progress trying to disassemble it. The short version is that Bandai made the knee rotation joint a hollow plastic tube with a metal friction pin in the center of it, and the shiny metallic plastic they used has the rough physical properties of obsidian. It shatters into shards along flow lines. BE VERY VERY CAREFUL ROTATING THE LEGS IN ANY WAY. There is a longer description for how to "safely" transform the legs in my previous posts, and I'll look for them in a moment, but the reality is that it's never really safe to transform them, because the joint Bandai designed is just incomprehensibly terrible in execution, and desperately needs to be replaced with something that doesn't suck. I would be absolutely thrilled to see them fix that garbage design in this release, but I also have absolutely zero expectation for them ever to do that.

Took a little time today, and slapped my copy of this kit together.. yeah, it's probably going to stay in battroid forever. It's not the worst fighter mode I've seen, but it's not great. Reminds me a little of the original 1/72 Yamato toys. The toes are about twice as big as the need to be, and the heels are about three times as big as they should be, while the legs are massive chunks, and they don't even try to make an excuse for why there are no arms in fighter mode at all. The way they curved the backs of the lower legs also throws the tail hinges off-angle at a weird slant, and kind of ruins what would otherwise be a mostly alright profile. It's kind of all over the place. I did find it kind of cute that they included slots to mount a fold booster. Not a bad little build though. Decided to challenge myself and go without the instructions, and it came out alright. The knee hinges were the only tricky part, since they can go together a few different ways. One odd thing is that Bandai went very "minimum effort" on this one.. there's a whole lot of asymmetrical assembly, because they just didn't feel like making dedicated left and right versions of a lot of parts. The arms, wings, feet, and most of the leg joints are identical for left and right, most of which feels pretty justified, but even the rear landing gear are identical, with pegs for tires on both sides, so you have to clip one off (not that there's any actual reason to use them, of course, and Bandai seems to be fully aware of this). All in all, a pretty nice little posable Battroid kit. Don't fool yourself by thinking you can make a decent fighter with it though. Gerwalk is okay, but it's still clunky and awkward because it's the YF-19.

The 171EX never seemed to have too many issues, but for whatever reason, the teal CF variants tended to explode catastrophically. No, I'm not even exaggerating. Yes, all of those parts are from one disintegrated knee joint. Between this, the constant issues with shoulder triangles cracking/shattering, and what I'm going to call the general engineering incompetence involved in the design, it's amazing the EX didn't explode just as often. I remember hearing that both this and the Yamato VF-17 were designed by the same CAD design team, but it is insane to wrap my head around that idea. While the 171 tended to break apart like a frag grenade, you could pretty much use the VF-17 to bludgeon someone.

I've been generally assuming that's what they did. As soon as Yamato released the kit versions, it was really easy to get a full picture of all the individual parts.

I don't remember for sure, and mine are buried in storage at the moment, but did the VF-2SS have the same sort of cardboard, just from the larger box size and heavier contents?

The majority of that's probably in the wings, and all the extra folding bits. Would be interesting to see how much a VF-1 weighs in at, though, if you have one handy.

You're also not going to get a set of fast packs molded in red, so there are other side benefits. Assuming they're actually molded, of course. Even if the figure itself is mostly garbage, I'm betting a fair bit could be salvaged for use with one of the Yamato kits. I might have to hunt down some Autobot logos to fit him though.

I don't think it's a stretch to say they absolutely could have chosen a different way to design it. They just chose not to. Bandai has done their own (often inferior) take on many things Yamato or Arcadia already did, and for better or worse, Bandai is going to be Bandai. They're going to make bad decisions, and they're going to defend them to the death. The problems with the approach they took are pretty evident though. The overall proportions of the VF-0s are great, just like the Arcadia ones, but that left them with incredibly tight tolerances to fit within when shrunken down, and it inflated the sizes of some of the parts that were already very small in 1/60. It also resulted in them copying some of the mistakes Arcadia made. Notably: - The landing gear doors are a royal pain in the backside to open. They left Arcadia's opening door design in, rather than attaching them to the gear, probably because it was less work to not have to design gear door plugs. They didn't do this with the VF-4, and while I can appreciate the effort to have less spare parts to keep track of, now you have to keep a tool handy to open the doors anyway, and those tiny door hinges feel like they are just destined to break. - The folding panels that seal around the head in fighter mode were already fragile and prone to pop off on the 1/60. The hinges here got scaled up so that the pivots are roughly the same size as the 1/60 ones. They work, but they were already fiddly in the larger scale, and now they're half the size. - The tailhook colliding with the gunpod was an issue in the first release Arcadia VF-0D, and they fixed that by the VF-0S release, and the later PF VF-0D. Bandai didn't get the memo, and brought that "feature" to both the HMR VF-0D and VF-0S. - The VF-0D in particular suffers a bit visually from the fact that the design has a lot of compact hinges for all of the folding parts. Those had to get scaled down significantly for the HMR, but not enough to make them really look good, in my opinion. Those are chunky hinges in the wings, and I don't know if there's really anything you can do about that. Frankly, if they're including battroid-specific wings, I think I would have preferred non-folding tips on the hardpointed wings, because they just would have looked better. I'm not going to say that I don't love having these little VF-0s around, because they're nicely done, but they're absolutely more fragile-feeling than the other HMRs, and feel more like a model kit in weight. The plastic is thinner, and there's much less metal than the VF-1, most notably because they didn't redesign the feet so they could be die-cast. I can understand why they didn't; the VF-0's feet are just more detailed, inside and out. But reworking them to be metal would have been a big improvement.

You don't see that fiddly-ness on the VF-1 because it was designed to be in that scale. With the VF-0s though, every detail is pointing to them being re-scaled copies of the Arcadia 1/60 molds, with all of the material limitations that process brings with it. They were never designed to function at that scale, it was just very convenient for Bandai that they happen to work well enough to sell.

Yeah, no, Bandai has repeatedly demonstrated that they are incapable of making a solid VF-1-style transformation into fighter mode. They do not understand how the arms and legs and backpack have to fit together, and everything feels slightly out of line, and far too fiddly. The DX is the best at it, but even that feels like things don't quite fit as they should at times (mostly due to the stupid pegs used). It's honestly bizarre. It's like they are completely incapable of using the same types of engineering tolerances they have on every other franchise when it comes to something like the VF-1. Even their model was a disaster of misaligned and ill-fitting parts when it came to the arms, legs and backpack. Edit - I realized belatedly that you're probably talking about the sliding clips for the shoulders, rather than the rotation hinges Yamato used. Those generally work mostly okay for me, but the stiffness of the shoulder joints is unfortunately far stronger than the clip holding them on, and they tend to pop off of their rails more often than not. I've also noticed that the position of those clips actually limits how far back the wings can sweep in fighter mode, which isn't really a problem, just an interesting difference.

Yeah, I think that chest look might be pretty easy to mitigate by filing down the ridges on the inside of the chest that lock into the shoulder tabs. They look like they're quite a bit oversized. I did the same thing with my M&Ms back in the day to keep those ridges from scraping off the white paint on the shoulders, and it never stopped those from holding together fine, but these KOs might be a different story there. That video though.. I would love to know what's making the thing sit so cock-eyed in the last few seconds. it doesn't look like anything in particular is wrong, it's just somehow sitting on that mirror at an angle.

Honestly, for all of the benefits of being able to get all the other franchises internationally, it still feels like a loss to still have to import anything SDF/DYRL-related.

I can't even say the triangles (upper or lower) were the biggest issue with the CF-171. That entire production batch was laced with explodium, especially the silver parts.

Oh wtf.. Bandai, stop crapping all over our existing art with your nonsense tampo, please.