David Hingtgen

FYI, I deleted your "welcome" thread. Why? 1. It was the most self-praising, arrogant, pompous thing I've read here in months. It reminded me immediately of AGENTONE. (That last sentence is for MW members for comparison) 2. What the heck was up with the post you made in the VF-0A thread? You come here and mock my photography skills first thing? The lighting and how the toy's colors appear? A. I think most people think the latest full-screen pics of the VF-0A and Ghost are quite good, clear shots of them. B. IT'S NOT MY PIC! I just posted it. Kinda like how most every "Japanese toy" forum on the planet is currently doing--people scour the web for pics, and post them/link when they find them so we can all see them. I'm going to assume you knew it wasn't my pic and were just joshing the photographer or something, because if you didn't I don't even know what to say, but even if you did, you made an *incredibly* stupid post. 3. Combined with what EXO had already closed of yours based on other member's requests, I found it easier to just delete that thread---EXO had already dealt with some of your stuff, but you made one of the dumbest, most pointless posts I've seen on here in years. Directed towards me. So I upgraded it from "closed" to "deleted". In the future I'll probably keep posts like that closed but viewable so everyone can see what/why I did what I did. Most people here know that "personal attacks on another MW member" will result in immediate warnings/moderation from me---and personal attacks on me--well, you figure it out. PS---99.9% of mod actions go unexplained. I'm one of the few here that will respond to a "why'd this happen" request. I'm answering this mainly because you're blaming EXO for something he didn't do.

Maybe it's your sig?

I was thinking that too, I just wasn't going to say it. The greatest gift is sharing...

I always thought they were blasted off the same way the YF-19 and -21 lose their FAST packs earlier when they fight each other (they each lose a major piece at the same time)---and I'd have to frame-by-frame, but I thought one arm was gone already at the start of the scene, then the Ghost blasts off the other three limbs, then Guld transforms and rams it with what's left of the YF-21. Regardless of how it happens, the point is that the YF-21 can still transform into fighter mode and fight having lost most of its battroid mode (including the entire belly-plate assembly)---which is pretty cool. If any other valk loses its arms and legs--there's not much left.

FYI, I know a guy who does steerable/rotating metal landing gear at 1/400 scale for airliners. Like, .1mm tubes and such... Builds the axles from scratch from needles I think. For solid metal diecast planes. And I think he's done a few 1/200. The 1/200 airliners weigh far more than any Yamato ever would. Actually, a 1/400 747 weighs more than a Yamato 1/48 I think. Haven't seen one collapse yet. The parts are nearly microscopic, but diecast is frankly very weak---actual aluminum or steel tubing is far stronger. (Diecast is mostly zinc with a dash of magnesium, aluminum and copper---little better than pot metal) Also, just follow real planes--you don't arbitrarily slice the strut in half and try to make two tubes of similar diameter slide into each other---the lower, smaller oleo strut goes into the thicker main strut. There's supposed to be an obvious size difference, so that the main strut (tubular) can have much thicker side walls---otherwise real planes would be collapsing their thin-wall tubular gear struts all the time. Ok, here's an F-14's nosegear kneeling sequence. See how the thinner oleo (lower, shiny silver right above the tires) strut fits into the much thicker main (white, lots of tubing and framing etc) strut? This also shows how the catapult launch bar works--it's far too short to reach the ground when the gear is extended (even if the bar was rotated down)--it can only reach the ground when the strut is fully compressed---Yamato makes the bars far too large, so that they can reach the ground it's not compressed--which is wrong--it shouldn't be able to, and Kawamori doesn't draw it that way--he copies the F-14/18 etc exactly, in that the gear must compress down for the bar to reach the ground. Also, here's an F-14 main gear retracted, with the wheels rotated. The wheels simply twist 90 degrees. It's exactly as if the main gear had steering like the nosegear does----and they turned perfectly to the side, then the gear came up. Tthe wheels lay flat in the bay, and the bay can be much more shallow. Otherwise it'd have to be tall enough to accomodate the round shape of the whole tire and wheel, rather than simply be tall enough to accomodate the tire's tread-width. (The F-14's not the best example, as it has "fat" tires---most planes have a more obvious difference---I'll try to find an F-16 nosegear, that one's really obvious how much space it saves) Kawamori has all his valks save the VF-17 do this. Also, the strut's hinge point must be deeper in the well if you *don't* do this, or you have to have the strut retract up beyond the horizontal, maybe 10 degrees above horizontal, to make room for the lower part of the non-turned wheel--which again makes the wheel bay taller to accomodate the slightly more vertical strut. (The 1/60 has more of a "stuts retract futher than horizontal" solution, while the 1/48 does more of the "strut hinge is deep inside the well, making the stut deeper in the well").

Box photos are almost always hand-painted prototypes, rather than the real thing. It allows them to get the packaging ready earlier, and makes the product look better---as a hand-painted one usually has more details etc. than a mass-produced one.

It's not so much length as depth. We need rotating gear more than extending/compressing gear. That'd cut the depth required for wheel wells in half. But it's equally easy to implement---it's how most real fighters do it, and how Kawamori designs every valk (excluding the VF-17) to do. What you drew would certainly help most nosegears though, and would also allow another issue I have with recent valks--GIGANTIC catapult launch bars on the nose. Real planes kneel down so the launch bar can reach----the launch bar isn't big enough to reach down to the catapult in normal conditions. Yamato toys can't kneel, so the launch bar is like 3x as big as it should be, to reach the ground. Yamato frankly has greatly advanced most parts of the valks, yet still has the landing gear of a 1955 tin toy! If they would spend 1/10 the money on the gear that they do on working airbrakes etc, they could have much better gear that'd fit in much much smaller wells, allowing better fighter and battroid modes. A lot of it comes down to "we have to make this area bigger to accomodate the gigantic wheel bay inside". Or "the wheel bay takes up so much room inside the leg/nose, this part has to be way smaller to get out of the way". If they had rotating gear (simple and easy to do) they could make the wells half as deep. And if they had compressing gear (like Gatillero drew) they could also be half as long. I bet a wheel bay for the nose gear only 1/4 as big could have helped the YF-19's belly a lot. The alternative is removable gear. Either way, it leads to much smaller gear bays. You either have to have rotating wheels/compressing struts, or removable gear. Yamato's "simple working gear" leads to gigantic wheel bays that interfere with everything around them. Real plane manufacturers have spent decades coming up with ways to make landing gear fit into as small a space as possible--and most of them are very simple to implement, and have even been found in small diecast model jets, etc. PS--you did a twist-and-lock? Incorporating a 90-degree turn of the wheels? That's exactly what nearly every valk could use for the main gear. PPS--I am so going to scan my WAPJ F-14 schematic showing the gear rotation. Only drawing I've ever found that actually shows it--despite it occuring on so many planes. Such a simple concept, but hard to explain (since wheels and tires rotate anyways, it's hard to explain how they rotate the OTHER way)

The Dstance does all of that. Arms and legs can be removed for "Guld's final 30 secs", but they do not need to be for transformation. The only thing that needs to be swapped is the gear, if you want the gear down in fighter mode. Showing yet again, just how good a valk you can make if you sacrifice working retractable gear.

I never figured out why the head is "double layered/folded"--no others do it, it's totally contradictory to the lineart, and it doesn't seem to improve anything. My only guess is "artistic style to alter the length of the forward fuselage". The most obvious clue its there in fighter mode is the extreme distance between the canopy and the large yellow blade antenna.

No, but it's the best YF-21 ever by a factor of ten and is what we all want Yamato to copy, as it's far better than anything else and frankly IMHO better than Yamato could do themselves. I wonder what a D'Stance YF-19 would have been like... If they do a YF-21 like that, and make a revised VF-11 with tailfins that actually *fold the right way*, we'd have *good* versions of all M+ valks finally. *the reason the Yamato VF-11's tailfins are so small are because Yamato got the folding backwards and at the wrong place---Kawamori drew them going the other way and pivoting at the other end---you can get WAY bigger fins to fit in the legs if you actually do it how he designed it. The fins are actually shaped to fit inside the leg quite nicely---if you fold them the right way. As Yamato did it, they had to make them like 1/3 as big as they shold be, as they effectively ended up "upside down" inside the leg compared to Kawamori's design, so they didn't fit at all without being severely shrunken.

We need lots of pics, especially the shoulder/arm transformation. That's the #1 place where it blows away all other YF-21's.

Shoulders! THAT is what I need to know about. The D'Stance clearly attempts to follow Kawamori's drawing for the shoulder/wingroot LE area---and is the only one to come close. Namely the "ball" of the shoulder in battroid, and how it rotates away inside the fuselage in fighter mode. As for plans for it---I'd recommend sending it to Graham, so he can send it to Yamato, and eventually we could ALL own one, in a way.

If your webcache gets full from sheer number of picture files (not space limits) it'll start forcing you to save everything as a BMP. You may have a 5-gig webcache, but they tend to get "full" long before that due to sheer number of small pic files---there's so many 1K and 2K thumbnails and buttons, that once you hit X number of *files* of the same type, it'll stop allowing any more.

Or super-glued together for the show...

I'm on dialup, and I make sure every pic is as few KB as possible. (for my own sanity to upload them) What's not a JPG?

800x1000 of Gerwalk goodness:

Here's the VF-0 that was at Chara Hobby---note the price is 17,640Y. Which is slightly higher than Roy's at 16,800Y. Still, I don't think that's enough to add in a Ghost and the new weapons, even if they remove the leg armor and original missiles.

Checking around, while it has the number of a Cannon Fodder (321) it has the colors of what Hasegawa says Shin's (311) should be. I don't agree with those being Shin's colors, but they sure look a lot better than what Kawamori says. As they should--they're exactly your standard F-15/F-18 scheme. They are de facto "fighter plane greys". Either way, it's got the colors I want---and REALLY hope Yamato goes with *exactly* those colors. Any change would throw off the low-vis look IMHO.

Could always be mis-transformation. 90% of all YF-19 photos I see of the original Yamato had the chest wrong--it was quite possible to achieve a level nosecone, and no gap above it. Yet all the "official" photos either have a huge gap, or the nosecone angled up to close the gap. I wouldn't be surprised if the new one on display also has the chest too high (sure looks like it) and they forgot to put the shoulder flaps down. Anyone who's followed the MP Starscream knows it took them about 3 photo shoots to realize that the intakes have hinges for a reason. (and they still get the pelvis wrong half the time)

Yeah, it seems strange that just about every other transforming -19 ever (even the bad ones) has had the little flaps that fold down from the outer edge of the shoulder, but the Yamatos don't.

That's 1000x better than what Yamato's pics have been showing us so far. It's two-tone grey, but the two shades are very close--just like your standard USAF/USN Compass Ghost scheme. You can barely tell the nosecone and flaps don't match the rest of the plane---that's the effect you want. That's the most low-vis of any valk Yamato's ever done. I was so NOT going to buy this based on the pics we had earlier, but will so buy this if that's the actual colors they use. I'm wondering if there'll be two releases---the high contrast "what Kawamori says" version without Ghost, and this version, with Ghost.

Found another YF-19 battroid pic, and a good Ghost pic.

Be nice to the mods, we go out pic-hunting at websites we can't read the language of for you:

And it's even worse if you know anything about ships, too...

I'd buy them. IMHO the best improvement of the 48 over the 60 is the backpack--how it fits in fighter mode. If the 60 had the 48th's slimmer, lower backpack (fitting between the legs, not hovering over them with a big gap under it) it'd look so much better. How to sell them? Price! When they're half as much (or less) you can buy a lot more. I'd have my first Max VF-1J. (I only ever have enough money for Milia and Roy--Max is third).