anime52k8

here's how I think the heat shield will work: ok, first you pull the cockpit out entirely. with the cockpit out you can then get at the two halves of the heat shield. the lower half is tucked in the nose and gets pulled up and towards the back of the fighter, and the top half will sit under the cockpit and be pulled strait up. with the heat shield sections pulled all the way up, you slip the canopy back in and fold the heat shield sections back down over it.

the people that consider Yamato products to be actual toy's are the one's in denial. a toy is something you're supposed to PLAY with. Yamato's are models that they build for you. you can put them on your shelf and transform them from time to time but actually playing with them is the last thing I would ever do.

because purple is the color of EVIL!

well, the feet can probably provide a little bit of pitch control. also the added yaw control was probebly needed because of how small the vertical stabilizers are.

well, last time I checked an atlas, Japan wasn't in Europe. considering the context, you can't help but find it a little suggestive. and the look on Michel's face implies something more then just buddies.

they gave up on that a while ago, Yamato's current design philosophy is "Balance between modes" (i.e. every mode is compromised)

well, you posted durring the time I was writing my response so I didn't read it till after I was done, (I took a break while writing to go eat dinner). and I still find it a little iffy. it seems to me that putting both yaw and pitch/role on the foot peddles would be a bad idea, as it makes it possible to accidentally possible to execute a role when you meant to yaw just because your foot slipped. also it seems rather pointless considering that the stick still controls roll. (why do you need two different controls to do the same function)

i find the canopy can be a little finicky but once I get it lifted up all the way, it holds open fine. from what your describing though I think yours is unusually loose.

I really question whether any thought was put into the design of the Galaxy beyond "this looks really cool" I cannot for the life of me figure out how a livable city is fit into the galaxy, what the purpose of the giant glowing disks on the ship are for, and where the heck the Battle galaxy fits.

And yet they have them on modern fighters (F-22, F-35, SU-47, etc. etc.) like them or not they have real world precedence. (also the VF-25 no longer has internal weapons bays) The rate at which they end up supplanting valks always used to strike me as strange too (especially considering that in the real world the trend has been towards aircraft having ever longer service lives). The best justification I can come up with it that with the rise of OTech ® technological leaps and bounds come along much more rapidly, (just look at the engines on valks, the thrust to weight ratios just about double with every new generation of valk.) But because of how complex a variable fighter is, they by their very nature have to be designed already just about at the technological limit of a given airframe. (Unlike a modern aircraft which is designed with the intention that it’s systems/weapons/engines will be upgraded) Well if you go by what the USN is like then the way things are done in the Macross universe aren’t much different, the Navy and the US military as a whole has been moving towards fewer and fewer unique airframes for years. Currently the F-14, the A-6, the EA-6B, and the S-3 either have been or in the process of being replaced by what is essentially F/A-18E/F’s with different equipment and electronics packages. If you look at the Mac+/Mac7 eras you have a wide variety of valks in service. The VF-11 is similar to the modern F-16 or F-18 (relatively cheap light fighter that fills a wide variety of roles.) the VF-14 and later the VF-17 fill a role similar to the F-15 or F-22 (dedicated air/aerospace superiority fighter) then you have the VA-3 filling in the dedicated attack role. Other additional roles are filled by non variable vehicles (such as shuttles, destroids, conventional aircraft etc. etc.) So overall there’s a lot of variation and specialization, though because of changes in technology and specific battlefield needs valks don’t fill modern aircraft roles the 1 to 1. It’s actually been debated on here several times before why there haven’t been any single engine valks and whether a single engine valk would work. the reason why we don’t see them is probably because it’s easier for SK to design cool looking valks that have two engines as opposed to one Additionally, having a single engine would mean that the engine can’t be in the leg and while in some way’s this may be a benefit (if you lose the leg you can still move around). But it also creates a lot of problems. Legs without engines are basically dead weight the valk has to lug around in fighter mode, and it’s already has less thrust since it only has one engine. Most fan attempts to do single engine valks have ended up being either overly complicated or inefficient. I kind of like the way the valks look when they use folding rather than swing wings, personal taste I guess. The SV-51’s wings do seem too straight, and they probably aren’t aerodynamically great, it’s just one of the strange design choices SK made. But the hinge placement really doesn’t seem all that odd to me. On The Su-33 Sea Flanker the more than 2/3 of the wing hinge up, and the SV-51 is based off the Flanker (In fact the Sukhoi was one of the manufactures of the SV-51 in Mac0) It’s unlikely that SK ever actually put much thought into how a Valk is actually controlled. In fact it seem to change from valk to valk. The SDF:M actually seamed the most realistic to me (excluding the YF-21). You had two sticks, a split throttle (as you should on a twin engine plane.) multiple foot pedals, and a myriad of other levers and switches and other controls. Fighter mode it controlled like a fighter, in Gerwalk like a helicopter, and In batroid the pilot performed an amazing juggling act using every control to get the thing to work. The controls on latter valks seemed a little too simplified, but most people seem t believe that flying a valk is a bit like playing a video game. The pilot uses basic control movements to tell the valk what to do, and the valk itself automatically does the movements. It’s also possible considering what we’ve seen that the valk has some form of real time motion capture where the pilots upper body movements are monitored and replicated by the valk. The most believable in my opinion is the YF-21, which is controlled by thought. In that case the pilot just thinks doing the movement with his own body, and the valk moves. One thing that I always found strange though was that while on a real fighter the foot pedals control the ailerons and therefore yaw, in macross the Foot pedals of the valk appear to be directly tied to the feet/engine nozzles of the valk and therefore control Pitch and role. :edit: oh yeah, and as for the head movement thing, there's probably a little thumb stick on one of the controls that can be used to move the head around. (sort of like how you adjust the camera in a flight simulator type video game.)

don't go over panel lines with lacquer paint, don't go over decals with lacquer paint, don't go over ANYTHING but lacquer paint with lacquer paint, not even plastic, go over plastic with lacquer based primer, then go over the primer with the actual paint. that said, I've found that Model master flat clear coat is basically the same as Testors dullcoat (seems like same product, different bottle) and testors dullcoat can be put over enamel paint, assuming the enamel paint is 100% ABSOLUTELY dried and cured first. still, don't go over decals with dullcoat, I've done it and the results aren't pretty. dullcoat is really only good if you need a dull finish on parts with no decals BEFORE you add panel lines/weathering, also it works good for sealing metalizer and other metal finish paints. Go over decals and panel lines with Acrylic clear. (I Just realized, I've never actually seen clear enamel before.)

no, they look like the YF-19's chicken hands, in fact I think they ARE the YF-19's chicken hands. it looks like they'll have the pegs for gripping the gunpod, but they're still rather lame. (Why couldn't they have done nice hands like the one's on the YF-21)

I doubt it will cost this much, the quarter really isn't much longer in cruiser mode than it is tall in attacker mode, so it's not going to be nearly as big as either of the ones you listed, and it's (probably) not going to have lights or sounds (at least I hope it doesn't, light's and sounds are so cheesy). Considering it's in the same line as the 1/60 VF-25's it will probebly be priced in line with them (12,000 to 16,000 yen retail, depending on accessories and gimmicks)

the vanes on the Sniper Pod are stabilizers (probably some type of gyroscopic stabilizer). but the Standard gun pod that all the other use open up for cooling. the housing of the gunpod's barrels splits in half and opens, and in the Macross Chronicles it's explicitly stated that it does this for cooling purposes. true it wouldn't help much for cooling in space, but in an atmosphere it would be useful (then again you wouldn't be using bullets or missiles in space anyways, with no gravity or air resistance the valk would be propelled back as fast as the projectile it fired) as you can see the VA-3's gunpod opens in the same fashion as the VF-25's. considering the similar design and the fact that the VA-3 is primarily an atmospheric Valk, it's fairly safe to assume that the VA-3's gunpod opens for the purpose of cooling. and of course everything in macross is done for aesthetic appeal, but in universe they do have practical reasoning behind them. on the sniper gunpod it's for stabilization, for the VA-3 and VF-25 it's for cooling. on valks like the VF-17/171, it folds in half to make it more compact for storage purposes, and on the VF-1 and VF-11 the rear section extends out to provide a full butt stock in batriod mode while still being compact while stored in fighter mode.

yes it would, you know what else would be cool, it they made a 10cm transforming battle frontier that connected to a 3 foot long Island 1.

very nice, although the belly of the fighter should be Red as well. (sorry but I've been playing AC6 way to much lately) this is kind of an odd request but I was wondering if I could get some if you're images in unflattened PSD form, I had some paint schemes i wanted to try out for fun.

what Vifam7 said, sometimes they only come in chrome (like the hyaku-shiki gundam) other time's chrome versions are the only version's you can find. also a lot of kit's that aren't metallic finish kit's still have fake chrome parts.

if a big Mac does happen, they'll either make it the same height as the quarter, or more likely about 30cm (1/4000 scale)

first I'm going to say i like the skinny legs on the YF-21, even if it makes it unstable. also I would have been fine if they had put all the emphasis on the fighter mode for the VF-11, but to me they didn't. it really looks they've gone the same route as the YF-19 where they went for a "balance" between the three modes, which equates to every mode having something drastically wrong with it. to me, if they get the Fighter mode to look spot on and good, the batroid mode will look good even if it's not anime accurate. this whole "balance"/compromised approach still isn't anime accurate, and it looks bad. +1 from me, I didn't end up getting the YF-19 because of how bad it looked. the batroid mode looks as crazy skinny, but the fighter mode is still stubby and fat. the only good looking mode was GERWALK mode, but that mode didn't lock together well at all.

even that article say's it will be 20cm tall. the 400m part is in reference to the overall length of the quarter pounder IN THE SHOW. also, just so you you all know, at approx. 20cm, the quarter would be 1/2000 scale approx. now, if the battle Frontier is approx. 1500m long in carrier mode, or approx. 1200m tall in attacker mode (assuming it's of the same size as the Macross 7) then it would be about 60cm tall, or about 2 feet tall.

I was about to say the same thing, on the VF-1 the gun pod probably extends so the rear can act as a stock the VF-25 and the VA-3 are the only one who's gun pod opens/extends for the purpose of cooling.

I always wondered about that.

actually, the pic is of The ADFX-01 Morgan you're thinking about theADF-01F Falken the fighter mode is 100% the same as the Morgan in game, hence the slightly wonky batroid mode.

can we put a ban on posting/quoting that image? it's been in at least a half dozen posts between the two threads, everyone's seen it and I think most of us don't want to see it again.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that it hasn't been drastically improved over the original (though I'd say anything is an improvement over the originals) but it still looks rather ugly. the nose and cockpit section in fighter mode is hideously stubby, but it seems like the stubbyness is mostly because of how tall and fat it is because it still looks massively over sized in batroid mode. the whole thing looks WAY too boxy. and the tail fins, ventral fins, canards, arms, hands, and feet all look undersized. also the gunpod looks really skinny. it's definitely a big improvement and I'm sure plenty of people will like it, (lot's of people liked the YF-19), but like the the YF-19, the whole design and appearance of the thing is terribly compromised in all the worst ways possible, so every mode looks inaccurate and ugly. considering what was done with the YF-21, I really was hoping for another home run from Yamato, but it look's like this will be another on item from yamato to add to my list of things to pass on. :edit: I wiped up a quick comparison to the official line art (pics from he M3)