Bandai VF-171 Macross Delta Mecha Collection

[Urashiman]

Hello everyone,

Time for a short review on the Bandai VF-171 Nightmare Plus kit from Bandai. This is a non-scale mini snap kit. I haven't seen many people talking about this thing here, so I'd like to give my impressions on the mini kit.

List price at HLJ is 500¥, I got it for 425¥ when I ordered it. The box size is 8.5cm x 15.1cm x 3.8cm. The model, when build, is 8.5cm in lenght and has a wingspan of 7.5cm.

The manual is printed into the box, but easily readible. The plastic casting was in a plastic bag as usual.

For the size of the kit, the detail is nice and fine. There aren't much parts in this kits, but that is okay. Some of the parts are really small, which I will show in another picture.

The decals are precutted self adhering stickers like in the 1/100 scale Macross Frontier model kits. As you can see the sickers are really small, so handling them might be tricky.

Sorry for the bad quality pic, but here you can see that the main body is snapping together nicely, leaving no gap. My experience from other Bandai kits (1/100 VF-25, 1/100 VF-2SS, 1/144 VF-17, VF-11 MAXL, VF-11B/C, VF-19 KAI, Gundam RX-78 and Gundam RX-78-2) is, that there will be some gaps here and there which will require glueing or filling paste.

There is a relatively large gap infront of the nose. Using glue can fix this easily.

Here is one of the extremely small parts, just to give an example.

Done - Build time with taking pictures inbetween is ~15 minutes. I didn't attach the stickers yet as I want to airbrush that thing properly. The calculated scale for this small kit is 1/184.

Conclusion:

A nice little addition to my Macross Mecha collection. There isn't much love for the VF-171 in form of model kits, so this small kit makes me happy that I can have it in my shelf. If needed this kit could be painted in Macross Frontier colors. As far as I know there wasn't much change on the VF-171 design between Frontier and Delta. The kit isn't having much gaps that need filling. For the size the details are good, better than on the old Macross 7 1/144 kits. If you have sausage fingers like me, you will probably have trouble to handle the small parts, but nothing that tweezers couldn't handle.

I hope this will help to get an impression on this little gem. If you have any question regarding this kit, please let me know.

[kajnrig]

Nice review. I've a few of these lying around the house, in various states of doneness.

One thing to add: The NUNS logo on sticker 3 is backwards; they simply mirrored the stickers during the design phase. Here's my "decal" version of the stickers (to be printed on decal paper), with the orientation corrected.

[Urashiman]

16 hours ago, kajnrig said:

Nice review. I've a few of these lying around the house, in various states of doneness.

One thing to add: The NUNS logo on sticker 3 is backwards; they simply mirrored the stickers during the design phase. Here's my "decal" version of the stickers (to be printed on decal paper), with the orientation corrected.

Awesome - the decal sheet looks nice. I am going to use this if you don't mind.

[electric indigo]

I wanted to paint one of these in Frontier colors, then realized how many white pinstripes I'd have to paint, ans decided that it wasn't worth the effort.

The mecha collection models are well done kits, but I wish there was a 1/72 option for the 171.

[kajnrig]

^Same. I keep hoping one day Hasegawa will announce a kit... or even Wave, at this point and with what they managed to accomplish with the VF-4.

Have at it, @Urashiman, that's what I made it for. (edit: Oh, you'll need to be able to print white for the white stripes, etc. You can probably get them done by a third party like Samueldecal.) I'm just disappointed I still haven't turned them into vector art yet for easy scaling.

Edited May 16, 2018 by kajnrig