Chronocidal

But even that's a best-case scenario where any of them got developed. We wound up with cardboard cut-out characters constructed via keyword search of TVTropes pages. It's like they checked off a series of pop-idol fetish boxes, patted themselves on the back for a job well done, and counted on the audience to imagine the characters for themselves based on what they wanted.

While managing to remove almost all of the character development.

Has anyone ever explained the shark gill pattern above the intakes? I'm just.. tired of those being there. What are they?

I think it's worth it, just to save on the hassle, honestly. You might still run into someone selling the PF Roy version down the road who'd take the trade, if you don't want to keep it. The PF-0D is a real rarity for the series, so I can't imagine demand will really decrease unless they do a second issue.

I've gotten a bunch of the models from Frontier onward, but from a certain perspective, I've been very thankful at how terrible Bandai's stickers and decals are, since they completely alleviate me of any desire whatsoever to make the kits in the schemes shown in the animation. If they make a kit of this, I'll probably paint it in Ace Combat markings, since it looks like it would fit right in alongside the Falken and Wyvern.

Same, I might grab one, maybe two, provided the price is right, since I missed them the first time around.

Also a triangle that struggles to meet the geometric definition.

This concept utterly baffles me, on so many levels. But hey.. I guess if they keep making them, someone has to want them?

It's not designed to fit, and I think you have to force the canards further than they're meant to go to accomplish it, owing to the narrower body of the updated Arcadia VF-0 mold. I think some people have done it, but I've never wanted to risk stressing the parts.

I never really had a problem with the old Yamato releases (outside of their early structural problems, anyhow). I even prefer the design to a point, even if the newer one is more accurate. More printed markings on the old one, and I kind of hate the newer style landing gear doors they use with a passion. Plus, I seriously doubt you're ever going to convince Arcadia to update the ghosts to properly integrate, so you're kind of stuck hanging onto the Yamatos if you want those.

Yeah, it's just whatever selection of theaters has a particular partnership with this limited release group. The nearest one to me is a couple hundred miles away, which just isn't feasible for a one-night event.

Fingers crossed they don't bork up the presentation like they did with Macross Plus. Hope you all enjoy it, I'm just too far out of reach of any theater showing them to make it actually practical.

My plan as well.. eventually. I'm going to at least wait a little while to let my account recover from other more recent purchases. Probably aim for mid-summer, just to give the initial popularity wave time to pass.

Booster tips are just the new cones that came with the SLS set recently, but I swapped out the domed tips they used for an angled half cone, and a single flat round tile on top. I think it's the same dome used for many of the R5-style heads in some of the Star Wars sets. Good luck with your own build, whenever you happen to get around to it. Maybe by that point I'll have a full pad built.

The only guarantee is that whatever decision they make, it won't make sense to anyone but Bandai. Seriously, I just picture this as Bandai's executives when someone comes to them with a problem to solve: "What, fix our backwards modexes before release? No.. that would make too much sense.. I KNOW! WE'LL MAKE ALL THE OTHER ONES BACKWARDS TO MATCH!" "And we can even include extra stickers for people who want them all to be wrong!" "BRILLIANT!!!"

So, my total is going to be a bad estimate, because I didn't shop around for the best deals, focusing more on getting less total orders. I also didn't order only the parts I needed for the shuttle, because I added spares of a lot of the elements, as long as I was ordering. All told, not counting the pad (which I had most of the parts for already and just ordered a few spare gray bricks and the baseplate), the shuttle, tank, and boosters came to what I'm going to estimate as about $450, for a little over 2000 parts. What's irritating though is that that's not including the tax and shipping, which easily added another $100 over the course of all of the orders. The orbiter was the cheapest portion, at about $85 before shipping, for about 600 pieces. Even without the full stack, I'd recommend that as a casual purchase, because it honestly makes for a decent display on its own. Bottom line really just comes down to buying sets this way being a lot more expensive than if you can get them naturally through LEGO. I also probably could have saved even more if I had gone through the effort of hunting down the individual parts on the LEGO store website, but I paid a little extra for the convenience of managing the parts lists on Bricklink. It's definitely not a cheap hobby.. but I also had planned to splurge on this for a while. It also helps there haven't been any Macross releases for a long time, so my toy budget has been burning a hole in my pocket. Anyhow.. since I can never leave well enough alone, I decided to go all out and see if an even more accurate tail design was possible. What I came up with isn't exactly sturdy, but it works, and is probably the most insane pile of multi-directional SNOT assembly I've ever attempted. I think there are literally studs facing every possible direction within the layers of corner brackets I used to fill in the shape. I'd still love to get a few more black elements to mark out the bottom of the rudder, but there are larger bricks in the way holding things together. Anywho, I'm looking forward to those Lightyear sets, especially if they make one of the ship seen in the initial trailer. Edit: Also did a quick test layout of what the pad display would look like if I extended it some. I basically doubled up the baseplate of the current one, to make it 32x32 studs, but to be the same proportion as the real one, it needs about another 8 studs of extension on the back end. Unfortunately, unless I'm making the whole crawler, that back area is just wasted space with very few details like camera mounts, and it gets a little unwieldly for a shelf. I think building the front half with the walkways and fences around the main engines works pretty well though, and keeps the shuttle roughly centered on the display.

Beautiful! I do wish they'd get some more variety of cones and compound slopes for those complex curves, but that's a really good shape for it! Also.. ugh, canopies.. Probably the last update on the shuttle, though I might take some better photos later. The parts I needed for the pad base came in, and I would be lying if I wasn't tempted to actually try and finish the crawler next. Made quite a few small tweaks to the design, so I'll probably post a few photos to the Rebrickable page as soon as I get a better background. Rebuilding the nose structure and tail were the biggest changes, but I also modified the boosters on both ends. The normal cones actually felt too pointy for the tips, so I used a more stunted tip to get a closer length overall, while I felt the 3x3 cones actually give a more natural nozzle shape. Ideally, both the barrel and nozzle piece should be wider diameter, but we kind of get what we get.

Ahh, darnit.. you actually got me excited for a second that they were going to be making things from another "Mega Force" franchise. Still, cool to see them making kits of some of these obscure vehicles! Think we can get them to make a mass-produced Gunstar?

I think for certain things like the logos and smaller bits you'd be right, but part of what made the 1/72 kit decals so obnoxiously bad was that they were essentially wallpaper decals, with the panel lines drawn on. Like.. hope you wanted to panel line the whole valk, or you're SOL there, because massive amounts of the markings are included in those giant panels, and the only other option is to paint those entire fancy exhibition schemes by hand. You could maybe cut those wallpaper decals into swiss cheese, and place the individual bits and pieces, but it's going to be a massive amount of work.

Also keep in mind that doing that would pretty much require redrawing the entire decal sheet to not look like utter garbage, because Bandai's Macross decals are a legendary disaster.

It's not about not accepting a long one, it's that it will not recognize a long password as sufficient without numbers and symbols included.

Yeah, had to open from the password reset email. I will admit, I think the requirements are too specific, and I really hate the whole "must use numbers and special characters" bit when I prefer just using really long passwords that I can easily remember, but I have no idea if you can even enable that for the boards.

I'm going to be the weirdo that prefers my original VHS copy, the one that had all of the extra scenes that my DVD copy doesnt. I don't usually mind upgraded effects too much, but I think showing so much of V-Ger actually detracts from the impact it has on screen, kind of like the difference between the original and redone versions of the wampa in ESB. It feels so much more impressive when you can't actually see the whole thing on screen at once.

"Distracting" is not a strong enough word. I don't care if it's a "style" choice by the animators, it looks like garbage. All I can think of is to ask "What is this weird phantom house they have sitting in front of their light source?" It's not like they decided that actual shading takes too much work, because pretty much everything else looks perfectly normal aside from that stupid filter.