Chronocidal

Yeah, there's a good reason for that, Bandai just bought up a bunch of the CAD designs for Yamato/Arcadia valks, and reproduced them in smaller scale.

Yeah, the comparison of the neck alignment is interesting actually. I don't think either looks bad at all there, they're both far superior to the old original YF-19 from Yamato. I also don't think that photo of he Arcadia VF-19 is doing it many favors, the nose actually looks droopier than it should be. Animation-wise though, I actually think the Bandai gets closer to the art. The Yamato looks closer to the YF-19 in general, but I think a lot of the art in Macross7 is closer to the DX profile. They keep getting so close it's really hard to pick any major benefits between one or the other.

Maybe I need to get another set of the normal super packs and paint them in gray too.. although, honestly, Messer's set in black looks pretty decent out of the box. If only the armor pack didn't come in freaking day-glo orange.

Up for sale at AE now, so I grabbed one. We'll see if they show up on Amazon later, but I'm just happy to see it show up again. https://anime-export.com/index.php?product=99137

Yeah, these look really good. This is why I picked up spare sets of super packs when they went on discount from.. I think Luna Park? It was back when I tested whether they could actually deliver, and ordered a couple of other items they had.

My go-to has been AE lately, but if this one goes international, it might not be worth scrambling.

See, this is the part that I'm not sure if we've ever gotten any truth about, and probably never will. The rumor/excuse at the time was that Bandai had production issues with the paint, and it caused them to cut production. Granted, this was also deep in the midst of the Great Nippon-Yasan Fustercluckening, so any news anyone had was probably at least partially polluted by their customer gaslighting service. What I suspected was going on was that Bandai truly didn't expect any heavy demand for a CF variant from the domestic customers, and never made that many to begin with. That smaller production run might have truthfully been reduced further due to production problems, if the stories are to be believed. What's not really clear though is where the scalping began (you know, beside NY). I actually half expect that some of it came from Japanese collectors who picked them up just to complete their own collection, only to discover they could make a tidy profit on the international market thanks to those silly international military aircraft enthusiasts. I would love nothing more than to see all of the prices of the old 31As tank after this, but I doubt they'll really drop that much. What I think is probably more likely is for this one to wind up discounted at Amazon.

Oh, definitely, but what I think is kind of funny/ironic about this re-release is that I don't think the Kairos had much demand in Japan to begin with, which may or may not have contributed to the low production the first time around. I would be really interested to see how sales go on the re-release. In fact, I hope we see the scalper market absolutely gobble them up, and then dump them on ebay for cheap. I think it was actually both now that I think about it. The crystal covers definitely caused issues, but the Kairos also had a bigger canard that wouldn't fit through some part of the chest armor.. although I might be thinking of the later armor pack? I think that one had a piece that clipped around the canard entirely. Either way, there are too many versions floating around, and since the original question was about the AX super packs, I thought the canards and different chest covers on that one might cause even more problems than just the regular 31 packs.

Oh, they're still trying to make money. Their financial crystal ball is just obsessed with chasing the international dollar, instead of putting out things everyone wants.

That would have required them to actually care enough to make a variant of the packs that fits the Kairos though.

This is a Bandai valk. We're not allowed to modify them in ways Bandai didn't intend. More seriously though, I'm actually pissed that they changed the hips so much from the YF-19. Those were all assembled with screws, and you could easily disassemble them to tweak the tightness. Yeah, that's gone now. They replaced one of the screws with a permanent pin, so good luck adjusting anything. It won't come apart anymore.

The legs? Maybe. The rest is very unlikely. The boosters especially won't work on the different wing/tail design, and the chest armor tends not to match because of the different canard shapes. I just realized this goes on sale in a few hours though. That's fast!

Boy.. I still think the nacelles are really the only part of that that kind of mostly work... Secondary hull isn't too bad, but the saucer is just a giant eye-sore. Whose idea was it to scatter little brown triangles on it like they were intended to be there? All they do is highlight the fugly angled garbage going on. For all the work they put into making the actual edge of the saucer shape work, the rest of it feels like a complete aesthetic failure. I can't look at it without just immediately picking out dozens of little places where I can't understand why they chose the pieces they did, when a very obvious alternative would have looked much better.

Ok, yeah, awesome. In for two more this time around, and maybe I'll be able to get them at retail, or even Amazon.

It's not bad. I had a couple issues with the neck cover, but I still managed it without looking at the instructions (and keeping in mind the warning to raise the head before pulling the torso to extend the spine). It's functionally the same process as the DX YF-19, but mostly much simpler, since it doesn't use all of the tiny folding panels in the upper body, there is no crazy folding panel puzzle in the legs, and there are no barrel things to get in the way. The Yamato version is still the king of enjoyable transformation where the 19 is concerned, but this is getting closer to that, and I didn't need to find a spoon to pry the shoulders away from the legs.