tetsujin

According to HLJ's listing for the kit, it can't.

Yeah you know it's good to be not dead. I'm working on making it a more regular thing

It's not really a thing that I do generally, but I guess I have a few "notes": So one thing I encountered on this build is a bit of "wobble" in the shoulder polycaps. So if you try to rotate the arm forward or backward round its shoulder peg, you get a little bit of travel with no friction, this is due to the shoulder polycap not really being secured inside the shoulder joint. It's just a little hexagon-shaped polycap inside a hexagon-shaped hollow between the two halves of the shoulder joint "cylinder". But there's a little bit of wiggle room there, so the arm can wiggle. I didn't identify this until I'd already glued the shoulder joints together, so I addressed it by drilling a hole into the area around that polycap, dropping some super glue in and then closing the hole up again. There were a few joints that are looser than I'd like - the prime example being the ball joint that connects the knee joint to the hip (perhaps not coincidentally, the same joint I had to reinforce because of the stress fracture that was starting to form..) If I suspended the robot in mid air and tried to swing its leg out to the side a bit (a lot of that kind of range comes from that knee-hip ball joint) - if I let go of the leg it would flop back toward the kit's centerline again, so I wanted to tighten the joint. I did that by adding layers of super glue to the ball. Working the joint around in its tightened state put more stress on it, which probably contributed to that fracture. It got to the point where the ball joint had a bit of wiggle due to the fracture, so it was clearly going to tear itself apart if left unresolved. I haven't done much with putting the kit on a stand for "aerial" poses like that, so I don't really know if there are other issues like that. I guess one other thing that sort of bugs me is that the upper arm doesn't rotate, instead you get rotation in the middle of the elbow joint. Not a huge problem but it's a bit awkward. Generally speaking one trend I'm seeing with Hasegawa's more recent robot kits (like Queadluun Rau and YF-19) compared to the older ones is things are less modular if you close seams. More "trapped assemblies". The VF-1 battroid could be broken down pretty easily for painting, on the YF-19 you can't go as far with that, not if you want to erase those seams. I thought about reworking the elbow joints so they wouldn't be trapped in the forearms, ultimately decided against it. There's similarly going to be a certain amount of the knee joint that gets trapped by the lower leg - I'm just gonna have to put my big boy pants on and mask it, I guess. I don't remember all the details of how/why different bits of my first VF-1 battroid build broke down, but I remember the shoulder peg on that build broke, I had to drill through it to pin it back into place. Apart from that I had a broken wing pin (I actually resin-cast a wire-reinforced replacement) and the plastic containing the polycaps for the upper leg scissor-joint broke. I had been hoping to get the kit to the primer stage this past weekend, and then have it ready for a show this coming weekend, but that train has sailed. I still haven't glued/puttied the whole of the torso and legs (other than the wings). The whole prospect of taking it through all the painting stages in 1 week was a bit iffy for me anyway, I was already afraid I'd wind up rushing it. Kinda stinks though, I'm tired of not having kits to show at model shows and such.

Hasegawa's VF-1 Battroid kit made a big impression on me when it came out and remains one of my all-time favorite kits. I wasn't sure initially if I felt the same way about their new YF-19, but I got it, I've been building it up, and it's been a lot of fun. The Alpha and the Amiga (Sorry I guess this is in the wrong forum. Been a while since I been active on MWF)

I heard back from Hasegawa USA (or Hobbico, I guess they're the US distributor) and they say they will be able to get me the decals. So, fingers crossed, hoping this works!

I popped them an e-mail (and HLJ as well - they don't do parts orders any more but I figure it's worth a shot) so hopefully something will come of it. Flood claimed a bunch of hobby magazines (basically all my Fine Scale Modelers were wrecked - plus a bunch of Hobby Japan and Dengeki got soaked too but I'm more determined to try to save those) and my prized stash of metric graph paper that I use for drawing plans, plus some old comic books. One Hase VF-25 basically lost its decal sheet while the other seems to have actually come through intact. (I've been trying to recover as much of that lost VF-25 decal sheet as I can, picking decals of other surfaces they settled on in the kit box, putting them back on the decal paper, but some of them are in tatters...) I haven't really looked at the Hase VF-1 that got soaked but I think its decal sheet is toast, too. And lots of kit boxes wrecked - not a serious loss but it does leave various kits without a storage solution. Some equipment got soaked, too - like my computer's UPS, some old camcorders and some vintage gear (a C-64 and a VT-100) my old PC was basically underwater and my current PC may taken on a bit of water before I removed it (not sure - power was already off at the time - but I haven't actually tried powering it up again yet) - plus various project-related electronics and components like my Arduinos, various LCD displays, and my Raspberry Pi Zeros all got soaked. Not sure how much of that stuff is wrecked. But the real concern honestly is the room itself. I've got to get some pros in there with a big dehumidifier and heater to dry out the room and hopefully prevent mold. (But first I've got to clean up the place, clear out as much floor space as I can - room was a bit of a nightmare even before it got flooded, honestly...)

Well the answer I want is one that solves my problem, but the answer I need is the truth of the situation. Thanks.

Hi, my workspace recently flooded and destroyed a bunch of stuff - among other things, the decals from both of my Hasegawa VF-25's. Is there a good way to get replacement decal sheets for the kit? Originals, preferably, rather than third-party Alps decals or something... Alternately, since the kit comes with decals for Ozma's and Alto's fighters - if I buy additional kits, how far is the decal sheet from being able to cover a second model? I know there's some simple stuff that's not repeated, like some black stripes, and some other stuff like SMS markings and warning markings... (I'd actually wanted to use these decal sheets to supplement my Bandai builds, too... whole situation kind of sucks... It got some of my other Hase Macross kits, too.)

It's not as though the two options are mutually exclusive. Because people don't agree, and are willing to openly and frankly discuss their opinions, does not mean they don't get along.

Multi-stage injection doesn't do anything for this problem - after the first stage of injection, the later stages would still have to be arranged in such a way that the mold halves could neatly encase the later-stage part, and separate from it when injection was done. Unless they were going to make a pilot figure with moving joints (which would allow them to mold the figure in a different pose than it's supposed to be displayed in) it wouldn't help. Multi-part molds (slide-molds) also don't help much, for various reasons. Again, there's the issue with the helmet - it tilts down and has that forehead visor - which means you need to mold the front of the helmet either straight-on or from a low angle to mold the face mask. But if you mold the head together with the rest of the body, then that same angle has to be used for the chest, the arms, the legs - about the best you could do would be to have a center slide-mold that slides in between the pilot's legs and arms and provides detail on his chest and helmet, and then another mold part coming from each side to mold his arms and legs. You would wind up with more mold parting lines and degraded details on the inner surfaces of the arms and legs... The Minmay figure would have similar issues, but you'd need to consider the back of the figure as well (since she's not going to be sitting in a cockpit which conveniently covers that up) Getting the gap between the right arm and the body would be pretty tough, especially if the left arm were to be extended forward... Slide-molds are also more expensive. Bandai would be spending more money to produce a lower-quality figure. Just doesn't make sense.

Never said they did. Nevertheless, other companies (and other divisions of Bandai, for that matter) have been making Valkyrie-related products. So I think it's ridiculous to claim that comparing with these other products is inappropriate. Just, like I said, you have to keep some perspective. Like exposed hinges and proportional compromise come with the territory of a transforming kit - so when comparing Bandai's Valk to the Hasegawas or something, you've got to cut 'em some slack. But it's still a valid comparison, as long as one doesn't unrealistically apply expectations from one product on the other. Likewise, the Yamato isn't a model kit... (Well, you know, except for the unpainted, unassembled Yamatos that were sold as model kits...) But model kit or not, the Yamato had to solve the same set of problems for their Valk design that Bandai did - the two took different paths obviously, and there's actually a great deal to be learned from a comparison like that - the strengths and weaknesses of the different approaches. Comparing to the 30 year old Imai variable just seems silly to me. When a new MG Gundam comes out nobody bothers comparing it to the original 1:100 Gundam, because hardly anybody bothers with that old kit any more, and it's generally assumed that a new product will be better in every way. Which was my point exactly.......you can build a bandai kit with a pair of snippers and nothing else. Yeah, you could even chew the parts off the runners with your teeth and slam your forehead down on the table to press parts together, if you wanted... More seriously: My point doesn't invalidate yours. I just thought it was pretty funny that you pointed out that you don't need to sand the inside of an intake on the Bandai kit given that it hasn't got intakes. That's like saying "You'll never have to clean your fingernails again! I've cut off your hands." It just would have been a much more impressive example of Bandai's ability to simplify model kits, if it had been an example that didn't involve them eliminating the part they were supposedly simplifying. Dude, I didn't say you were gushing. Some of this happened on other sites - the Gundam crowd tends to have a very distorted view of Bandai's merits versus those of its competitors... I vent about it here because it's a more sympathetic crowd. I say things not-negative about the kit, too, actually. I think Battroid mode is pretty good. Amazingly enough, there are even aspects of Bandai's battroid that I like better than Hasegawa's - which surprises me, frankly, because Hasegawa's Battroid is IMO just about the best mecha kit ever. And while I didn't like the battroid proportions at first, they have grown on me: I've found that one thing I enjoy about transforming kits is that, because the proportions have to work for transformation, the resulting kit is a more "honest" representation of how the machine could really look...

Most injection molds are just two parts, which means parts can't have under-cuts relative to the direction of mold separation. Minmay has to be molded from the front, so they can have some detail on her face and hair... But her arms have to be molded from the side, so she can have elbows, and detail on her hands and clothes. Likewise, the pilot figure's body has to be molded from the front to put detail on the chest, but the arms have to be molded from the sides so they can put the controls in his hands and properly detail his hands. Then there's the helmet - the body has to be molded from kind of a high angle to get both the chest detail and his legs and feet, but the helmet has to be molded from a lower angle in order to get the facemask under the visor. They could mold these as one-piece figures by altering the poses - for instance making the pilot rest his hands on his legs instead of having them on the controls, make Minmay hold the mic closer to her face and put her left arm down by her side or up in the air instead of allowing it to be straight forward... These are the sorts of compromises you'd typically see on a MG Gundam pilot figure. Splitting up the figure allowed them to make the figure better - and that's something I always appreciate. And seriously, it's like two drops of glue!

Nonsense. I mean, if Bandai were unable to surpass a 30 year old transforming glue-kit, that would be monumentally embarassing. I think there are better transforming Valks out there, but this kit doesn't need to be put in an exclusive league where it only has to compete with an early-'80s kit in order to look good by comparison. No comparison is going to be perfect, or perfectly fair, but everything's fair game for comparison, at least as long as one maintains a realistic perspective on what conditions are different, and why. So Hi-Metals, Yamatos, Hasegawas, etc. are all fair game Let's not forget one of the primary reasons you will never have to deal with smoothing out the intakes on the Bandai VF-1... The Bandai VF-1 doesn't have intakes. I think probably a lot of the Yamato fans feel like I (as a Hasegawa fan) feel: It is pretty frustrating to see people gush over the Bandai VF-1, act like there were no modern VF-1 kits or modern transforming Valks on the market until Bandai swooped in to save the day, or go on about how gorgeous the kit is and how amazing Bandai's engineering is. To me, the level of love the kit's receiving from its fans seems more than a little undeserved - and I swear, some of these folks must be showering the kit with love just because it came from Bandai... I can find no other explanation. I can appreciate Bandai's VF-1 for what it is, and the things I think it does well - I just am not inclined to overlook the kit's shortcomings.

Oh dear. How dreadful. These are 1:72 scale figures - a snap-fit peg the size of the figure's arm probably wouldn't be durable enough to survive assembly anyway. The only other option is to mold the figure all in one piece - which usually results in things like pilots with their hands in their lap instead of on the controls. Given that you need to paint those figures, they probably figure anyone who can't handle it wouldn't bother anyway.

well, for starters; a nose cavity plug system that doesn't require a removable part, a gunpod underbelly attachment method that doesn't require a removable part, and a GERWALK leg design at least as functional and effective the Yammie 1/60v.II. To suggest that everything Bandai apparently got wrong would have been better if they'd truly brought their A-game... It gives them too much credit I think. I mean, of all the MGs, how many even transform? Of those, how many transformations are on par with the Valkyrie? Zeta's about the only one IMO - the only one where the transformation makes the design really sensitive to proportional changes - and even then, Zeta's waverider mode isn't nearly as coherent as the Valkyrie's fighter mode.