DX Chogokin VF-17S

[MacrossJunkie]

3 hours ago, Mommar said:

As I recall the locking mechanism was highly particular.  But when it's in place those damn things won't budge, even when you want to transform it.

On the other hand, Yamato's pall jointed ankles are the biggest flaw with both the 17 and 19.  I don't recall what the fix was.

That's the main issue I had with the old Yamato 17 and 19. The ankles had a hard time holding up the weight of the toy in battroid and occasionally I would find they toppled over on their own even in a very neutral stance. I've had to resort to propping them up against a wall so I don't find them collapsed later.

[Chronocidal]

3 hours ago, Mommar said:

As I recall the locking mechanism was highly particular.  But when it's in place those damn things won't budge, even when you want to transform it.

On the other hand, Yamato's pall jointed ankles are the biggest flaw with both the 17 and 19.  I don't recall what the fix was.

Yeah, I had varying levels of leg lock on the couple I got, and it was never consistent.  The tabs were pretty shallow, and it wasn't hard to knock the legs loose on any of mine.  For all its failures, that is one thing I don't think the 171 ever had issues with.

I can't say I ever had the issues with the Yamato 17s' feet that I did with the VF-19s', but I also had even less desire to display a 17 in gerwalk than I did the 19s.  Mine seemed to hold up well-enough in battroid, but I never displayed them that way for more than a few minutes at a time.  I'm probably a bad judge of 17-related stuff in general, I was just happy to get a solid fighter mode to display.

9 hours ago, ArchieNov said:

I was never happy with my Yamato VF-17S. I thought it was a bad toy, especially when compared to their VF-19S. (e.g. weird gap in the back plate in battroid, legs are too heavy to lock in place in fighter, battroid proportions were also kinda bad, etc). Was intially hoping that Bandai's version would be better, but it has its own set of bad issues. Sadly, I haven't seen any good VF-17 yet, or at least owned any.

Now what if by some weird chance, Bandai includes a set of swappable bulkier legs that are only used for battroid mode and make it into an optional partsformer. Would that make people happy? I know there are perfect transformation purists here that would hate that path, but I would be okay with it.

Yeah, fair, I guess I was never a big enough fan of the 17 for the issues with the Yamato one to bother me?  I thought it looked good enough, but it did have the same kind of weird backpack issue that the DX YF-21 has.  It was always one of those designs so firmly planted in the "impossible anime magic" category that it was never going to really look like the animation.

What I guess is kind of funny to consider.. have you looked at the old Bandai 1/65 versions?  They were far more limited in articulation and features, but I'm starting to think they got some things right that neither of the more modern takes have figured out.  

[Graham]

Yeah, the old Bandai 1/65 toys are still my  favorite versions of the VF-17D & VF-17S and in fact one of my all-time favorite Macross toys.

A few relatively simple improvements to the 1/65 would make them so much better.

I'd like to see the 1/65 VF-17 redesigned with the following changes:

• Improved hand sculpt, perhaps with different swapable fixed pose hands.
• Improved gunpod sculpt.
• Modify the knee joints so that the knees bend both forward and back (a modification that many owners do themselves anyway).
• Improved front and rear landing gears and landing gear doors, to make them more lineart accurate.
• Add ratcheted ball joints to the hips to allow the toy to do an A stance.
• Perhaps add an opening canopy and pilot figure.

 

[jenius]

I haven't handled mine in forever but I think they could have done the leg gun with a folding gun on the 1/65... Scale it 1/60 and give us two guns, one that fits and one that looks good.