Chronocidal

This is, I think, the point where thinking diverges wildly, for various reasons. From my personal perspective, I thought we already had this in MP-3/MP-11, and believe a mix of those designs that moved the hip skirts to the legs would have been pretty ideal. But that's because my standards for "good looking bot mode" are vastly different than what seems to be the status quo. I thought the bot mode was functional, posable, playable, and all the things that I would want a bot mode to be, because it achieved what I thought the MP line was after: realistic vehicles that transformed into robot characters. MP-3 looked enough like I remembered the old G1 robot that I was satisfied, and it was a huge upgrade from my old G2 Ramjet, which was essentially my only comparison. Fans of the character Starscream, and how he looks in the cartoons, didn't like a lot of things that never even occurred to me, and would never have bothered me at all if they weren't directly pointed out. Frankly, most of them still don't bother me. I feel like what I'm looking at is a sliding scale of accuracy to both the jet and robot. Theoretically we could have both, but realistically speaking, I think a fair target is for the jet and robot to be equally compromised, each sharing in the burden of making the figure physically possible. Overall? I think MP-3 was weighted more toward the jet. I didn't mind that, but I think MP-11 was a better balance, and while the underside lost that smooth profile, the changes to the legs did look better on the robot. With careful tweaking, I think it would probably be possible to resolve some of the other niggling issues with the robot, like the head being too high. MP-52 threw that scale fully to the bot side, and said "We don't care how ugly the jet is, we're making a figure that looks like the cartoon, because we know most of you don't give two shakes about the jet." Unfortunately for the F-15 enthusiasts among us, they actually weren't really wrong about that. Maybe someday they'll pull some magic out of their hat, and make those little changes that would have given the MP-11 the better robot without having to sacrifice some of the innovations that gave it such a good jet (the rotating chest intakes especially). We'll have to wait and see.

Cost wise... a 31A and armor bundle might still be cheaper than a naked 31A at this point.

I'm... not sure I care at this point. Still got the ugly jagged back end mount over the pod, and now that giant stinger, and those new wing/tail hinges look like a sloppy pile of yuck. I don't think the giant sawtooth cuts help the wing design. Think I'm just burned out on Delta at this point. Maybe I'll wait and see, and pick up one or two if the demand doesn't go crazy. Actually.. I think I might just be bored with the base 31 design. It's not the most creative, the arms always feel whimpy, and the landing gear look like a quarter-baked idea. I love the 31A, and the basic design is nice enough, but this doesn't feel like much of an upgrade to me.

Yeah, I'm thinking Bandai just doesn't give two shakes whether they match the small details.

I think the fuselage may be a little thick for the size, but that doesn't surprise me much, since they had to cram so many mechanisms into it. The most telling thing for me about this Starscream is that every review, and every comment on those reviews I see is heaping almost unanimous praise on it for being "so much cleaner" and "a perfect representation," "better in every way than MP-3/MP-11." That's pretty much just proves two things to me.. First, Hastak knows what their audience wants, and second, I'm clearly not part of that audience. Oh well, maybe that just means now is a good time to go hunt down a secondhand MP-3.

I don't know why this popped up in my recommended vids on youtube, but I want this in an official dub now.

I'm still in that spot where I want the arms longer and beefier on the 21.. there is just so much room at the back end, and they could easily extend them, and thicken them up so they don't look so whimpy.. and stretch the wings further back too for that matter, since they don't even interact with anything else.

Yeah, the armor packs are.. just crazy. The colors make no sense though, especially considering the ones they used on the printed movie cover..

Yeah, the incompletion is annoying, but that's part of why I wound up grabbing two of the armor pack sets. Worst case, I can just put them on Arad and Chuck, and call it a day. I'm not even sure if Chuck's armor pack was repainted compared with Arad's. The orange always felt like a better color match for him anyhow. Bandai really just needs to re-release the super packs for all of them, and include the sound booster. Including it with a third re-release of Hayate's plane is just ludicrous.

The only experience I have with the Mecha Colle series is one of the Sv-262Ba kits I picked up, which went together very easily, but the decals are (as expected) a screen-printed mess of stickers that I'm going to ignore. From my measurements, that one is very close to 1/200 scale. I also grabbed a few of the VF-171s they made, and just plan to decorate them by hand. These TomyTec kits from Macross Delta though are all 1/144 (same as the small-scale Star Wars fighters), and the VF-31s all come out to about 5.5 inches long. These kits are completely pre-printed with all of the paint and markings. That's part of my reason for not wanting to mess with gluing them, since I would have had to scrape away paint on the contacting surfaces. Fortunately the fit is good enough to not need any sanding or puttying, or it would ruin the printing. As a side note, I grabbed a pair of the Ace Combat Morgan kits from the HLJ sale, which are also in 1/144 scale. Those are each almost 7 inches long.. that plane is just huge.

What's actually more interesting to me from that angle is how many joints and individual panels are visible. The way the upper spine looks like it's designed to collapse in on itself is pretty fascinating, whether I like the look or not.

I think the key difference for me tends to be the line between "visible underneath" and "visible from the side" (or even, visible from everywhere, in some cases). If you can see parts of the robot from directly underneath, that's really not a surprise. Very few transformers of any type can hide everything if you look at them from underneath. It's the fact that this plane has another plane's worth of thickness underneath dragging on the ground that puts me off the design, I'm glad people enjoy it, and the bot is fantastic, but the chunk of robot dragging underneath just kills it for me.

You know.. zooming in on that pin makes me curious. Don't the teeth on those spring pins usually mesh? That one looks like it might have been oversprung, or twisted, and the teeth colliding meant the pin was forced to a larger diameter than intended.

Not sure what platform he's on, but my guess would be the forum update caused some shenanigans. I know the forum has not been able to load properly on my phone for quite a while, but that's my own fault for owning an old phone. Decided to keep going on my small scale marathon, and build up the Tomytec Delta kits I bought ages ago. Nice little kits, and some really fine detail for such tiny models, but not without a few little drawbacks I decided to forego any glue on these, mostly just because I need to buy more thin glue before I can attempt gluing anything this small. For the most part, they stay together without it. What I did with a few key parts on the 31s was to add a layer of cellophane tape around tabs or pegs to get enough friction, and that was enough to hold any loose parts in place. Hayate's and Mirage's came out pretty well, though the paint work was a little sloppy on both. Hayate's had one of the blue stripes on the side of the nose quite blurred, while Mirage's had issues with paint colors, and there are at least three or four distinct shades of pink, red, magenta, maroon, or whatever else you want to call it on her plane. The 31A is just beautiful as always, though the fit around the nose isn't quite as good as the other 31s. Unfortunately, the 262 is not at all capable of staying together without glue. The parts just don't have anything substantial to stick together without actual glue, so that one will have to wait until I get some thin cement. Detailing on all of these is absolutely exquisite, but I think the biggest drawback to these little kits is that the stands are... insufficient. The bases are so tiny as to be questionable whether they would hold up against a stiff breeze, and the choice to mold the mounts in clear plastic doesn't help, since the tiny ball-jointed pegs tend to cause stress fractures in the sockets, and leave them too limp to even support kits of this miniscule size. The off-center mounts on the 31s don't help either, leaving them prone to tipping back until the noise is straight up. This is definitely making me look forward to putting together the Hasegawa 31A I picked up, just need to ship it from HLJ once I get another pile of stuff ready to go. I did cave and pick up a couple of the Ace Combat models on sale, so I might put up some pics/details about those once I get the parts trimmed and fitted.

Clearly, since if he'd landed, he'd be a meteorite.

I want to say it's kind of fortunate that the breakpoint is mostly hidden? If you can disassemble the joint, it's not a complex mechanism, and you might be able to just mount a metal clip of some type in there to hold that bar.

Yeah, the vocal mixes aren't the greatest, or at least don't match what they're trying to do with the 3D bits. They turned Mylene into a dancer rather than a bass player, and it messes with the band setup somewhat. That being said, I never felt Mylene's singer was a good pairing with Basara's. Their singing styles felt too different, and he just overpowers her in almost everything they do together. I know Chie Kaijura can absolutely sing from her solo pieces, but Fukuyama is just crazy powerful, and her more subtle harmonies get lost in the blast. This is one very strange case where I actually like the Fire Bomber American voice mix better. That Mylene had a deeper voice, as I recall, and her harmonies came out much stronger.

They definitely all had them throughout the series. The comments are more that Bandai has just ignored that they exist, and never released them.

Has Bandai even hinted at any new Delta merchandise in the past year? Ignoring the (third) re-release of Hayate, of course. Really feels like they just straight up abandoned that line (and the HMR, even) to focus on the VF-1. I'd straight up take a 1/72 31A transforming kit and call it a win at this point, because it seems like kits are all we're going to get.

Really a beautiful job, I love how cleanly this kit goes together, and it is definitely quite swooshable. I'm still in the assembly stage of mine, and needed some spare parts after the clear warp grilles and deflector cracked, but I also made a few structural tweaks to the nacelles to get rid of as much sag as possible.

That just makes me even more sad that the Airwolf one wasn't real. I think I need this, the Airwolf, and an A-Team van..

I'll be in for more 31As, but the armor is just a heavy mess of too much junk. Random goofy question by the way.. how many super pack releases do we even have? I know I've got Hayate, Mirage and Messer.. did we ever get Arad's set? I'm pretty sure we never got Chuck's, but I honestly can't remember Arad's, since at that point they started including the reaction missiles with the base valks.

So here's another unique item I picked up, kind of a crossover between hobbies. This little 3D printing group has licensed several of the designs for Star Citizen, and is making some official kits of the ships. Not what I would call "cheap," but I think they're competitively priced for what you would see with resin garage kits. They've gone all-in on the sort of in-universe marketing typical of the game, and packaged this more like a collectible, with custom foam layers to support each of the major printed part groups. Maybe overkill, but I received the kit shipped from the UK in perfect shape, so I'm not going to question it. I'd love to know what printer they are using for these, because while I can see some of the typical layering artifacts on some of the smaller parts, they are very subtle, and the model has some of the finest printed detail I've ever seen. Yes, that's a 1/100 ejection seat with an attached ejection handle. The kit came with a stack of tiny magnets and alternate parts to allow you to swap the wings and landing gear between flight and ground displays. The only work I've done so far was some minor print support cleanup, and gluing the magnets in place. Really looking forward to detailing this one up. Only disappointing thing I can say is that the printed resin canopy is fragile. I managed to snap the rear portion in half very easily with minor pressure trying to get it to seat properly. Fortunately the printers were quite happy to send me a free replacement, but I may actually try to make my own from another material. It's impressive that they were able to print something as transparent as this one is, but the material is far too brittle to hold up to any polishing, and I think the shape is angular enough to make a fair replacement with either clear styrene or something like clear bubble packaging. I'm really hoping they'll make more of these. This is probably my second favorite ship in the game, after another of the light fighters called the Gladius, which looks straight out of the classic Wing Commander games. I'm going to see if I can't request that one, and possibly offer my help in producing these kits.

I know some folks like the pope hat, but I never think it compares to how intimidating the Hs anubis head is. Really really want the Ba version released. That custom looks like it has a hybrid Hs/Ba wing design, so I'm thinking he clipped off and filled in the stock wings to make that design. I'm starting to wonder how difficult it would be to make a custom replacement set. The other big question I have is whether anyone has found a paint that matches the gold on Keith's to touch up the inevitable flaking from transformation. It's got more of a copper tone than most gold paints I've tried.

See, I would too, but honestly, I think the 262 has one of the best battroid modes in the franchise. The design really stands out against all of the others, partly for the head design, and partly for the overall proportions. The beefy legs remind me a little of the VF-17, and it looks like a bruiser, especially with the sword and shield. If we ever get a Mirage 262, I'll definitely buy at least two, plus a few of the other Windermere knights' fighters, especially if we get the Elvis versions.