Anasazi37

We also love getting the last word

Arcadia is reopening POs for the premium finish

Was that the Roy displayed with the Scout?

Odds are very low. To my knowledge, they haven't reissued anything so far and whether or not the line will continue is an open question. They have done non-canon variants of previous releases, like the Roy VF-4 and the Messer VF-1S, so maybe they'd go back and reissue some stuff because they already have the molds, but I'm not holding my breath. We're all waiting to see what, if anything, Bandai displays at their annual fall Tamashii Nations event in early November. The last HMRs displayed at a Tamashii event were a Regult Scout paired with a Roy 1S. No release date was mentioned. Prior to that, we saw the standard VF-4 (Hikaru) and blue/red Max/Milia variants displayed. Hikaru was released, Max and Milia were not (so far). I'm pretty sure that the VF-1D release came out of nowhere.

I assume he has five of each: one to display in each mode, a MISB backup in storage, and a MISB backup for that backup. The ones in storage are probably encased in carbonite.

And those are probably just @tekering's extras....

Yeah, that's where I was thinking they could go without being a distraction. Good to see that two full rows fit in that space. I'll be adding basic kill markings to the next version of my set, but could also make them available as a separate set with more options.

Best place to check for updates is this page, under the "Notifications on International Mail" section: https://www.post.japanpost.jp/index_en.html Latest update is from 10 Sep. Nothing mentioned about the US. The master status list for all countries is here: https://www.post.japanpost.jp/int/information/overview_en.html I doubt that there will be any change in status for the US until there are more commercial flights coming here from Japan (EMS and SAL hitch rides on those flights). All the usual online stores will probably post the news before we see an official update on the English language JP site. It seems to lag behind the Japanese language site by a day or two.

That's exactly why I posted the picture. I noticed Roy in the cockpit, ready for atmospheric flight. Bandai could easily solve the problem by including an extra Roy wearing his space flight helmet, but no....

Good point! I missed that additional party foul. No air intakes necessary in space.

Agreed, it's not just about UV light. If you have the means, ability, and interest to mitigate it as one of causes, it will help to reduce the odds of yellowing, but there's the nature of the plastic itself and also the atmosphere to contend with, as you say. Oxygen, humidity, temperature, etc. Altitude also has an effect. I live at 6300 feet in a desert, so there's less oxygen and humidity up here, but also less atmosphere, meaning more natural UV gets through. Right now all of my Macross stuff is displayed on open shelves in a room that doesn't get direct sunlight, plus I keep the curtains closed. Good enough for me. I might upgrade to glass cases at some point because dusting my collection is really annoying.

Okay, that's both disturbing and funny. Based on your previous post, it sounds like you have a UV radiometer/light meter with the following specs: The display is in µW/cm2 (microwatts per square centimeter) UV AB Measurement Range: 0 to 2999 µW/cm2; It only measures UV AB light power output, but not the wavelength. Spectral Detection Range: 240 to 370 nm; Peak point: 352 nm. It does not measure UVC. Measurement accuracy: ±4% ±1 digits; Resolution:1.0 µW/cm2 Unless a bulb manufacturer gives you information about the amount of UV light the bulb is sending out, you'll have to make a direct measurement. The specs for the meter claim that it's accurate to within 4%, so you could take the reading you get and create a range for your bulb, with your reading minus 4% on the low end and your reading plus 4% on the high end. And you're getting a more general estimate for all of UVA/B, what is sometimes called an integrated value or a band pass value. The sensor gathers in light across a broader range of wavelengths and then averages all of that to produce a single value, so any specific behavior of UV light at specific wavelengths is lost. That's why lab-grade spectrometers cost so much. Not only are they calibrated, but they also make multiple measurements over smaller chunks of the range, sometimes hundreds or thousands of them, which can then be used to create a continuous line that looks something like this, which I randomly grabbed from the results of a Google Image Search: So, back to your question about how much UV light is too much and can you convert the output from your UV meter into something useful. I would argue that µW/cm2 is a useful measurement because it's absolute and describes how much energy is hitting a surface, which is exactly what you want to know. The technical term for it is irradiance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irradiance Irradiance is widely used in the scientific and engineering communities, so you're on solid ground there. So, I think it's more about taking values used by communities who worry about UV light damaging stuff and converting them to irradiance, but let's put a pin and that in see what they actually do. It does seem like the cultural heritage preservation crowd, i.e., museums, has thought about this quite a bit. I found what looks to be a pretty useful resource from the Canadian Conservation Institute (likely far more credible than a random reply on a message board): https://www.canada.ca/content/dam/cci-icc/documents/services/conservation-preservation-publications/canadian-conservation-institute-notes/2-2-eng.pdf It opens by saying that no one outside of the museum world thinks about UV in relative terms, which is what that µW/lumen measurement is: a ratio between light you can't see and light you can. Hence my previous comment about how you can't take a visible spectrum, lumens-only measurement and convert it to one that is relevant for UV, however if you have instruments that can measure both (I forgot you had both), you can create your own µW/lumen measurement. There's an entire section in the article on absolute UV values, which was nice to see. Probably a hat tip to radiometry nerds like me. Based on that article, it does seem like 10-75µW/lumen is the acceptable range, even if the approach is wacky. What matters is that museums have been using this approach for a long time and the numbers hold up, so make use of the numbers. Let's do some math: 1 Lux = 1 lumen/m2 1 m2 = 10000 cm2 Visible light meter reads 4600 lux UV meter reads 12 µW/cm2 The equation given in the paper looks like this: UVab = (L x UVr) / 1000, where UVab is reported as mW/m2, but those aren't the units we want. So, this is what you do: µW/cm2 = (lumen/m2 * μW/lumen) / 10000 So, you end up with 12 = (4600 * UVr) / 10000, where UVr = 26.09 µW/lumen A value of 26 is in the acceptable range, so my best guesstimate is that your bulbs are fine.

You could definitely do that. The female figure is a bit more slender, but if you painted it as Hikaru, I don't know if anyone would notice the difference unless you pointed it out. He is shorter and skinnier than Roy, after all. I just couldn't bring myself to do that to him, plus having a second set as backup in case I somehow screw up the first one seemed like a good idea. I'll probably pick up a third set in case I need to make my own space flight Max and Milia pilots, because I'm holding out hope that Bandai will release their 1Js at some point and include or at least offer Super Parts for them, but I'm assuming they'll make a bad non-canon design choice and only give us atmospheric flight pilots (even though a space flight pilot comes with the Max 1A TV). For as small as the figures are, the level of detail on the 3D printing is really nice. As @Xigfrid says on the site, you might have to do a little sanding here and there, but otherwise they're ready to paint. I don't normally paint miniatures and yes, it's a major pain in the backside. I remember doing it, and not enjoying it, when I was making 1/48 and 1/60 Yamato customs for folks here. I'll probably start on my Roy and Hikaru figures next month so I can have them ready for the release at the end of November. They will take time and I'm sure I'll make a bunch of mistakes that I'll have to fix.

Bandai just put a Roy on display in Akihabara with the Super Parts *and* atmospheric-flight-helmet-Roy in the cockpit. How very non-canon of them. I've already picked up two of @Xigfrid's DX pilot sets on Shapeways so I can have both Roy and Hikaru in space flight helmets: https://www.shapeways.com/product/G8D52LFAX/pilots-set-for-vf-1j-dx?optionId=91611789&li=shops

Keep in mind that lumen, as a unit of measurement, is for the visible portion of the spectrum (roughly 400-700 nanometers). UV is outside of that range (100-400 nanometers). In other words, the radiometer is measuring transmitted light in one part of the spectrum and you have a manufacturer's estimate for light transmitted by a bulb in another part. The values don't overlap, so you can't combine them in this way. Not that I ever thought I'd be posting a picture of the electromagnetic spectrum in this forum, but the following shows you why it won't work (UV is to the left of Visible) This is a crude analogy, but it's like you have an estimate of engine performance in one set of units that is specific to driving between 40 and 70 mph, but what you really want is an estimate for between 10 and 40 mph in another set of units, so you're doing the unit conversion and trying to use the estimate you have, but the engine is highly likely to perform differently in the other range and, more importantly, you have no actual data in that range. To do the math you want to do, you'd need a lumen number specific to UV...which doesn't exist...because lumen is for the visible portion of the spectrum...so you really need a UV radiometer. On top of everything else, lumen isn't an absolute measurement, like the radiance measured by a radiometer. How the human eye sees that light is accounted for in the value using a subjective model (luminosity function), so scientists don't like it, but it seems to make sense to consumers. The wavelength limitation and subjectivity of lumen is mentioned in the first few sentences of its Wikipedia article, although if you're not familiar with radiometry, it's super-easy to miss the significance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumen_(unit)

You forgot to add "launch container into space"

This showed up yesterday

The yellowing on the landing gear doors (and the missiles) is a known issue on the v1 TRU-exclusive VF-1A CF. I didn't know about the issue until I pulled mine out of its box for the first time earlier this year. I bought it in early 2002 and it was in dark, temperature-controlled storage the entire time. Only the doors and the missiles were yellow--that exact sickly shade of yellow--and there was an awful smell. I think the plastic outgassed over the years and changed color during the process. UV might accelerate that process. I ended up re-boxing my TRU and picking up the non-exclusive CF that was released a few months later. Everything is bright white on that one.

My brain hurts reading through the last few posts. I spent way too much time in grad school thinking about this kind of stuff. It's been a heck of a day and I'm likely not firing on all cylinders at the moment, but I'll take a swing at adding what I hope is some useful information to the discussion. The first thing to do is break down what you're actually measuring with the light meter. If it's reporting microwatts per square centimeter, you're getting an absolute reading for the amount of energy emitted by the light source, within a specific wavelength range (presumably UV), over a standard surface area. This kind of measurement is used a lot for imaging satellites and all kinds of other passive sensing systems that record emitted energy. It's usually a bit more complicated with those, where the standard measurement is watts per meter squared per micrometer per steradian (energy per area per wavelength per solid angle--think of a light cone sent out by a flashlight). Lumen as a unit of measurement is different. It is linked to a human visual model, i.e., what our eyes can see, and values are weighted accordingly, so it's relative instead of absolute. Since we can't see UV, how valid the lumen numbers are for any given bulb in the context of UV is a really good question. There's likely a lot of variability by bulb manufacturer when it comes to UV and the lumen values are likely more accurate for the limited portion of the spectrum that we can see. Makes having a light meter important so you can figure out how much UV you're actually dealing with--regardless of what's printed on the box. And affordable light meters are error-prone. To fix that you'd have to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a spectrometer, so like @DewPoint suggests, roll with the error because it's generally not too bad.

You mean Pledge Revive It Floor Gloss? http://www.finescale.com/how-to/tips/2018/05/reader-tips-pledge-future-gloss-has-a-new-name I'd lost track of how many times the name has changed over the years. As far as I can tell, the formula is still pretty much the same. Works well as a glossy base coat on my custom toy and model projects. Also makes canopies super-shiny.

Definitely food for thought, @sharky, and great points by both @sqidd and @kkx. Before I'd use something other than a proven product on an expensive and hard-to-replace toy, I'd need to do a bunch of testing on junk toys made of the same materials to make sure the pure polyurethane wouldn't damage anything. I'm very cautious after a horrible incident involving Pine Sol and a 1/48 Yamato VF-1S Roy that I was trying to strip paint off of. Given how much the polyurethane probably costs, the time required to get it, the time and cost of getting the right kind of bottle with the right kind of applicator, the time required to do the testing, and how often I might actually use a joint fixer, $9 plus shipping for KiKi is a pretty good deal. I could see investing the time and money in making my own if I wanted to create a competing product or I had a very large number of toys with very loose joints....

Painfully funny. I hope it doesn't turn out that way, but the current SSP situation isn't reassuring. You have a point. That entire night was a blur. I think it opened at MSRP. I was in the first round, along with a few others here. Since Nin-Nin invoiced me in USD, it's hard to be 100% sure about the exact amount in JPY, but it definitely wasn't above MSRP since I was charged $170 and ¥18K would be consistent with the exchange rate that day. Will any of us in the early rounds actually get our Roys? Edit: I just checked the PDF version of my invoice from Nin-Nin and see a 10% discount applied, but it doesn't show up in the web version. Might mean that my chances of actually getting Roy are decreased by a similar amount....

Nin-Nin's first PO round for Roy was slightly below MSRP, then they released more for PO over several additional rounds at steadily increasing prices. I think it topped out at $350 by the end of that first night, so at least they haven't gone higher than 200%. I'm assuming, as many here are assuming, that a lucky few might snag Roy after release at close to retail, but otherwise the price is going to quickly reach Hikaru 1J levels....

It's good to meet a fellow senior management Sith Lord