Chronocidal

As fun as the whole Itano circus setup is, I've never found the GBP set attractive at all. To me, it just covers up all of the features of the VF-1 that I like, including keeping it from transforming at all. It's a cool concept, but I just think it's an incomplete idea that the later VF-25 armor surpassed on every level.

Good luck folks, I'm glad I'm not all that interested in the armor. I might grab one if I see an open order, but I'm not going to stress over it.

I remember discussing the differences between the music in Frontier and Delta before, and what it basically boiled down to was that Delta's music was mass-produced idol pop that got thrown into a mecha anime because they wanted to promote said idol pop music. Nothing more, nothing less. The songs were by and large interchangeable so long as they fit the tone of the scene. Comparing that to a soundtrack composed by Yoko Kanno, with several songs written on a scene-by-scene basis to fit the story, is a terribly unfair curbstomp of a competition. Maybe it's a byproduct of the actual love triangle in the series being fought between two competing vocalists with distinct styles, or maybe it's the fact that a good chunk of their songs were essentially vocalized character development. Delta never had that level of story/character/music integration. I can't say it's even my favorite song in the whole Frontier franchise, but there's something very poignant about the fact that Sheryl wrote the lyrics to "Sayonara no Tsubasa1" on the wall of a prison cell, in her own blood. The songs in Frontier were as much a part of the characters as they were a part of the story, and to its detriment, Delta never managed to mimic that to any memorable extent. While Macross 7 will always be goofy rock and roll giant robot anime to me, it says something that its music is still far more memorable than anything in Delta. I think they did a disservice to the series by not giving the individual singers much of a chance to spotlight separate styles or talents, and it all just kind of blended together in a big pile of pop idol mush. 1- I don't know for certain if it was that song, or something else, but that's what I've always assumed she was writing.

I think the shape and angle of the cockpit would require a custom design, but I could probably kitbash a seat and instrument panel from other kits. I'm not worried about a cockpit though, since I don't really have a viable method to make a transparent canopy piece. Might be able to use the printed canopy as a vacuum-molding buck, but I think I would rather reserve that kind of upgrade for some future theoretical 1/48 scale version.

Hah.. I remember the same experience actually, seeing the early ads for the first gen Macross Plus toys in high school during some computer lab class. In hindsight.. I'm perfectly fine with the way things turned out on that end. My friends and I all agreed that early YF-19 looked more like a bloated goose than an aircraft. I'm happy to have waited long enough for the toys to become refined to their current point, and to have reached a point in my life where I can afford them.

Boy, I can't even call this "done" yet, but does it ever feel like an achievement. Twenty-one pieces all told, with a total of about 112 hours in print time. I definitely over-engineered the interlocking tabs, and failed to account for how difficult it was going to be to remove the support structures from inside some of the parts, so I just broke out the smaller middle teeth from the wing section. It didn't have any affect on how sturdily it goes together, with absolutely no need for glue. Length looks to be almost ten inches even, which puts the scale at something like 1/125 or so based on the game's quoted length of 32 meters, but I think that's always felt a little inflated, and I think a 1/100 pilot would fit inside the cockpit if I made one. One project at a time, though. I still have some potential detail parts to make for this that would go in the recessed panels scattered around the ship, but I'm not sure I made the spaces deep enough to be useful for that. I did sand and polish up the canopy, so I know the plastic will shine up nicely if I decide to do that. For the moment, I'm just having fun making spaceship noises and swooshing it around the room. Fortunately, with the way it's built, I can probably assemble the components after painting. That will make it a lot easier to pull this off.

Oh, nah, I'm fully aware of Bandai's other lines that do get exported, but I just mean the HMRs in particular seem to be how they approach their more niche franchise licenses that don't get much publicity (if any) outside of Japan. Macross started that line, but it seems like the only franchise involved with that much popularity on the international market. I don't recall there being much discussion of there being issues with ordering the non-Macross HMR releases, and even some of the Macross ones haven't been all that hard to acquire, but I have to wonder if they all come from the same factory line, with similar production run sizes, and the only reason that the more popular Macross ones had any scarcity was because of the foreign market appeal (and the associated scalpers). Is that a big assumption? Maybe.\ I'm holding exactly zero expectations that this turn of events will have any effect whatsoever on Bandai's artificial scarcity policy. I don't blame them completely for the situation, since their general releases are just well-known scalper bait, and I don't know how you fix that without just flat out making every single release a web-shop only item, or force every retailer to require a pre-order deposit. I just can't see any realistic solution for that, outside of Bandai actually loosening their belts and being willing to expand their production lines, and take on a little more risk that there might be a product that remains on a shelf for more then a few months.

With how thick that band of gray looks around the visor, I think this is pretty likely what's happening here. That looks a lot bulkier than a simple paint application.

While I can definitely imagine KC squirming uncomfortably here, part of me has a single response: good. I can empathize with them, but having some competition in the Macross/Robotech merchandise market also has the potential to drive some improvement all around. Will it happen? I still think it's not too likely, but I'd love to see KC do some fine-tuning of their designs. On the other hand, the non-Macross HMR situation just reinforces why I don't think Bandai's going to give a rat's backside about the foreign markets. Their production lines are so laser focused on the Japanese audience, I don't believe they would ever try to adjust their output to meet international demand.

We do have a few folks here who have used printed models as masters for recasts I know; Xigfrid and his Ghost X-9 and VF-9 models come to mind, which I think were all prototyped on a printer. With enough elbow grease (and a little bit of filler putty) I can definitely get these parts smooth enough to recast, but that's partly because these pieces are so simple, and have no raised details. It's actually part of why I like working in ABS, it polishes up very nicely. I haven't done much sanding yet, but I test-sanded one of my scrap tail prototypes a while back, and just today sanded and polished the canopy piece to a fairly high gloss.

Yeah, I've never understood how HG ever managed to market anything from DYRL at all. Their rights came from someone completely uninvolved in the movie, as I would understand. Things do get fuzzy when you start delving into shared character and mecha designs though, and there's obviously a ton of overlap. I always assumed HG just claimed merchandising rights to DYRL because they had a "legitimate" stake in the designs used. From what I'd come to understand, Tatsunoko would have no power to grant HG any rights to DYRL at all... of course, they didn't have the rights to grant HG most of anything else they claimed ownership of either, but that never stopped them. Maybe they just decided that they'd test the waters with their Toynami 1/100s, and see if anyone was paying attention.

Oh, that possibility absolutely crossed my mind, but I also know that I'm entirely not the person to do it. Ideally, what should happen with this model? It should be printed by someone with a liquid resin printer, and then polished up and recast. A liquid printer would produce a much higher quality master than mine can. I would even theoretically say a Shapeways print would be preferable, but something this big would probably be ungodly expensive... and I would not want to work with the materials Shapeways use, because they are utter hell to sand. As far as this one goes, I'm absolutely building it up and making a desk model of it, because I've wanted a model of this ship for roughly twenty five years. Right now, I'm just getting antsy to get the whole thing together and zoom it around the office a while. Edit: Checked whether Shapeways would even be able to print it, and looks like one this size would be between about $300 and $600, depending on material and smoothness options.

Yeah, that's my exact concern, and I really hope for their sake that they have a locked-in contract with HG for a few years still. They do have the figures as a backup, and maybe those would be enough to sustain them, but having Arcadia VF-1s around would very likely wreck their sales something awful. Although.. I'm going to admit, mold and transformation issues aside, I think the KC VF-1s really do look good from the paint work they do.

In terms of marketing in the US, I don't think it's quite that unlikely for Arcadia. Let's face it, they're hitting also-ran status behind Bandai, because they're really only left with the licenses Bandai doesn't seem to want now (and they're even in direct competition with the YF-19 somehow). As long as Bandai is content giving the finger to the rest of the world with their limited production, I think Arcadia might be in a good position to take advantage of the new market, and look for distribution deals outside of Japan. Will they be able to do it? No idea, because I don't know what that would take. I'm only looking at this from the perspective that it's very likely that Bandai will completely ignore the wider market, and Arcadia has a potential chance to fill that demand outside of Japan in a way that Toynami and Kitzconcept aren't prepared to do. In terms of Frontier and Delta though.. Unless Bandai starts caring a ton about the foreign market, I don't think we're getting anything more than model kits, flat out. Frontier is old news, so I think the chances of getting a DX VF-25 re-run from Bandai are almost nil, and I can't see them repopping the early Delta merchandise either. I think it will take a new company getting a license for Frontier and Delta before we get any international marketing of toys from those series. That doesn't have any bearing on the shows and music, but I really don't see the US getting any major merchandise deals unless someone like Arcadia decides to partner with someone like Hasbro to get their stuff on the shelves outside of Japan. That being said.. I think I'd straight up die laughing if this new deal also somehow winds up giving us a brand new VF-1 Jetfire release. I don't think it's even remotely likely, but I'd still love to see it.

Oh, they're all fun to think about doing, but I'm probably not attempting another project at this scale without some proper CAD software that can do variable features. Cutting panel lines in this model was incredibly annoying, because they're physically cut into the solid model, and can't be adjusted if I ever wanted to make a bigger version, and needed to shrink them. I did make a point to save the model at multiple points so I can just re-cut the panel lines at another size if I really want to, but some actual proper CAD software (that is, not 3D Studio Max ) would have better tools to draw panel line paths, and just dynamically change their depth and profile on the fly.

Whether they did or not, I think it's pretty clear that Big West acknowledging Harmony Gold's distribution deal in the US means that anyone who wants to sell stuff here is going to have to go through HG, and give them a cut, like I always assumed they demanded, but BW forbid. However, even if companies like Arcadia and Bandai decide that the expanded market is worth pursuing, I have to wonder where that leaves companies like Kids Logic, Kitzconcept, or even Toynami. I'd expect HG has existing contracts with those manufacturers that they would probably have to break, or let expire, before they started steamrolling over them with higher quality products from Japan.

Definitely, though part of me likes the idea of keeping the first print in a "stock" state, as a reminder of how it came out of the printer, kind of like a first molding proof. I'll admit, there's also something fascinating to me about the raw textured surface. As little as I want to make another full print, I probably will somewhere down the road, just to paint up multiple versions. I still need to experiment with paintschemes and markings, after all, and if I do the canon scheme from Wing Commander III, it's actually a Heater-Ferris scheme derivative, so that's going to be all kinds of fun to mask and spray.

It's funny, I'm hitting this point where I legitimately wonder whether building this design out of sheet styrene would be less work than printing it. Main nose section is out, as well as the canopy, so I'm just waiting on the last two major components to put the whole ship together now, which should take about 9 hours each. I'm debating whether I actually want to sand the print smooth, or just slap some paint and markings on it and call it done.

I'm actually hoping that the same thing happens with Macross as did with the Bandai Star Wars kits, because all that situation proved was that the customers' money speaks louder than the licensing lawyers. Basically, yes, Disney tried to embargo the Bandai kits from being sold in the US. My suspicion would be that Revell got on their case because they knew they didn't have a chance in hell of competing with Bandai's level of quality. Well, that lasted all of maybe a few months before I began seeing Bandai kits popping up under hilarious pseudonyms on Amazon through foreign sellers at close to retail price. They stopped the sale through places like HLJ, but they just could not stop the flow of private sellers on Ebay and Amazon, and eventually they just seem to have given up trying, because last I checked they're back to being sold with English instructions, and distributed through Bluefin. Supply through Amazon fluctuates, so maybe there's still no official distribution going on, but I know two of the B-Wing kits I got were San Diego Comicon exclusives, so certain releases were definitely sold here directly.

Trying to tell from the picture, but they're not on one of the box pics.. do they flip out from under the hood?

Progress continues, and after two false starts and about 22 hours.. The first two prints failed within about an hour of starting, so no massive losses on that end, thankfully. It took me a couple of revisions to get the support structure laid out in a way that would stay solid. Only major flaw I see is where there's a random band of what I can only assume was a bad segment of plastic in the spool, where it just left a few bubbles on one surface, and a lighter strip across the wing. Will be easy to fill in and sand smooth. I wound up making a couple of little mistakes in the cleanup, but as it turns out, they were things I didn't need anyway. I over-built the model significantly, and some of the interlocking tabs I built in were not necessary. The one long tube on the back of the wing was meant to support the tail, but the other side doesn't need it at all. Back edge is naturally a bit rough from printing downward, but I intended that. I learned a while back to add a thin tab of plastic to support any sharp edge I wanted to preserve, and I just clipped them off, and sanded the edge smooth. Still will need a little filler and finer sanding in some spots where the layers flaked away, but nothing bad at all. Far as fit goes, I'm just grinning until my face hurts. Everything just slots together like a finely cut jigsaw puzzle. Was actually funny, the ruffled nature of the plastic print gave a slight "wheeee" sound as it slid together... and I almost couldn't pull it back apart. I had to sand things down slightly just so I wouldn't break it from repeated test fittings. I've got four main components left, and I'm expecting three to take between 10 and 15 hours each, with the final part being probably an hour or so for the canopy. All told, the parts shown here have taken about 60 hours to print, not counting restarts and failures. Next up is looking like the nose. Keeping fingers crossed, but that's a more straight-forward blocky shape again, so hopefully less trouble staying stable on the print bed.

Ok, yeah, that's pretty awesome to see. Thanks for the link!

Him holding a miniature version of himself amuses me for some reason. Just out of curiosity, is the large gray gun barrel actually folded up inside him, or a separate part? I don't see how it would fit, but I don't see it in the pic with the accessories either.

I wasn't joking when I said the F-35 is the Star Citizen of aviation. The services all IOC'd at what they considered the minimum of functionality, with the goal that all the promised features will eventually come online... as well as a smattering of features never originally promised, but that have become absolutely necessary during the development process. This is the double-edged sword of software-based development. It's almost infinitely flexible to adapt to changing requirements, but it's also never really feature complete.

Making a new plane entirely would decouple it from the 8th-dimensional gordian pretzel that is the current F-35 program. A brand new single-service/single-country/single-purpose aircraft has a very good chance of getting completed far faster than trying pile one more layer onto the existing F-35 pile.