tetsujin

Hey, I'm going again this year, and as with last year I'll be running the Mecha Modeling Workshop, so if anybody wants to learn a bit about building and painting models, come to the workshop and build something! It's scheduled on Saturday from 4-9. Usually it's done with Gundam kits, but I'm thinking of bringing some Nichimo Macross kits this time to mix it up a bit. It's $15 to participate in the workshop, that pays for your model kit, and various tools and supplies you can take home with you (brushes, paints, etc.) You can see more information on past workshops here: Mecha Modeling Workshop page (Incidentally, for those who were there last year, I ran the Macross panel... it was a real disgrace. I should have called it off as soon as it was clear I couldn't spend the time on it that it deserved. Most of my preparation time last year went into the workshop. All the other panels and such that I did were just disastrous. I won't make that mistake again!)

You must not have seen many movies. I honestly don't see how the OT got put on a pedestal like it has been because it really is the same old crap. But everyone knows how I feel about that. The original trilogy is definitely overrated (considering the near-godlike status it has achieved in terms of movie fandom), but at the end of the day they're enjoyable movies. The prequels are just so stilted, and so full of pointless appearances by characters from the old movies that I really can't say the same. What does the young Obi-Wan Kenobi have to do with the old one? Who cares where Boba Fett came from, or the exact details of how the emperor came to power? Star Wars geeks might, for the sake of trivia. The prequels are all about filling in blanks from the original trilogy - blanks which, often as not, just aren't worth filling. At best it makes for good fodder for the trilogy addicts, at worst it's providing a backstory context which has no value. But, yeah, there are worse movies out there than the prequels. The prequels have very little going for them apart from the action - poor performances, lame dialogue, annoying characters, etc... but the action is reasonably good. There have been plenty of movies with all of the above, only not as good.

Well, they sorta acknowledge this at the end where Misa admits that it was simply a "pop song" about love. Nobody ever claimed that they had discovered a masterpiece by the Protoculture's Mozart. Also, if you had never heard any music before. . . and had no concept of any culture, I would think that any music would be shocking. Possibly even Ashly Simpson. Actually I think this ties in nicely with my perspective on the whole "Minmay effect". (And I'm not claiming this is especially insightful, I mean it's right there...) Basically, the reason she's so effective against the Zentradi is specifically because she's a pop star, a sexy young girl (in this case, playing to a crowd of violent adult male virgins) who performs accessible material according to a tried and proven formula. It's not so much about the power of culture over those without it as it is about the power of a very potent form of culture, engineered by years of experimentation - a popular product that's been very well advertised and tailor-fitted to what's been proven to be popular. I don't think that's really a theme in the anime but it's a way of describing what happened in the anime that makes a lot of sense to me. So someone like Britney Spears would be a good analogy IMO, except Spears is less of the Japanese cute/lolicon appeal.

Yeah, so if I spend 200 hours building a Regult, do you suppose I'll have it done before Yamato makes one?

Do you have any confirmed data to back that up? That info comes from the Animeigo liner notes. Five times a typical human height of 1.8m -> 9m. But I don't see a problem with fitting a 10m pilot into a pod without making it taller than the Destroid Monster, either. Maybe won't be as spacious as the pilot might like, but Zentradi don't need to be comfortable.. I am aware, of course, that Macross (especially the animation itself) is full of consistency errors with regard to these matters of scale. The shot of the massive Regult being carried by three battroids, for instance, is the exception, not the rule. Coming up with any "scale" representation of these mecha is a compromise. My recommendation is to first keep the Regult within the same ballpark size as the Battroid. Not necessarily sticking to the exact 15.12m figure - but close. Maybe 17-18m would be a good size. (I've personally created a mockup with my Nichimo Regult - and I'm satisfied that if the seat of the pod is dropped down and the pod itself expanded only slightly, a 9m pilot can fit inside.) Come up with a compromise that allows the pilot to fit inside, keeps the legs long enough to retain the look of the pod, and still doesn't completely blow away the typical anime image of the Regult being bigger than a battroid without completely dwarfing it.

Zentradi soldiers are normally around 9m, not 10m... So right there you have the Regult pod height down to 21m as opposed to almost 24m. I can certainly see how the 15m dimension would be a problem, but going so much larger is a bit hard to accept. For the purposes of display with Battroids and whatnot, the Regult can't completely dwarf the Battroid. A seated human pilot is less than 1.5m tall - so in Zentradi scale the pod itself is constrained to be 7.5m or larger. The space of the legs under the pod is about equal to the size of the pod itself, so there's your 15m. I've gone over that drawing before in the past, trying to massage the numbers and figures to make the pod be 15m. (Sort of anti-scientific but that's the fanboy impulse. ) But if you look at the guy's back in that drawing, it isn't long enough, proportionally. It's hard to be precise about it because the drawing is so sketchy. I figure his chair must sink lower than the bottom outer edge of the pod, toward the area where the legs attach. So in the scaling diagram the standing pilot should be taller relative to the pod. Most existing Regult kits make that lower/outer edge of the pod rather high up, so there's a bunch of empty space between the top of the legs and the bottom of the pod. There's no reason for that space to be there, and filling it in a little could camouflage a little downward bucket-seat expansion in the middle of the pod. Works in theory, anyway. But if you could massage the numbers to be under 20m at least (27cm at 1:72 scale) I think that'd be a good thing, to keep it from completely dwarfing the Battroid. My personal opinion.

My Stargate ultimate edition did this... practically shattered the center. I did it ghetto style and used scotch tape to piece the whole thing back together. Still plays, but I think I'll get another copy soon I'd use a thin superglue, personally. Be careful if you try that! Superglue can craze the surface of clear plastics...

Got a few seam lines (on the wing-guns, etc.) and visible sticker borders... looks alright otherwise.

"Gundam" is pronounced "Gandam" (at least using the "a" sound as it is used in Japanese and various European languages). So yeah, they named it that to cash in on Gundam. I'd heard of the "Space Gandam" knockoffs, but I had no idea there was an anime. I'd love to see it.

actually this is not the finished model he mentions "i know there are still many details in this model i need to attend, also there are many decals that have not been aplied yet. at leats the main structural build-up is finished." He should have puttied and painted before putting any decals on... I mean, it's impressive that he could do all that in 11 hours, but it's a waste that that's all he's putting into it.

Interesting choice of words to criticise Gundam's plot device on a Macross forum.

I really can't deal with the Yuuna character. He looks too much like Beck from Big-O (only Beck was actually entertaining) - and Yuuna is a character in sort of the same vein as Azrael: just constantly, week after week, "Ooh, I'm so evil!" except that Yuuna is more of a manipulative worm rather than a genocidal maniac. I never saw him as a hard-nosed politician, more like a power-hungry gold-digger. Seeing him squirm in 14 was hardly surprising, that's what always happens when the manipulative weasel gets out-classed - but it wasn't terribly rewarding either. I was supposed to hate him because he's a dick, and I do - but I hate seeing him on-screen enough that seeing his plans foiled wasn't very fun, either. Besides which, I'm extremely disappointed in Cagalli after that whole deal. She didn't redeem herself at all, Kira had to bail her out.

NES Macross is not a game to be playing on the GBA. The GBA doesn't have the resolution for it, and when the game is scaled down to such a small LCD screen the small size and slight latency in the pixels makes it almost impossible to see enemy shots. That, in my experience, makes it really un-fun.

I think it's a fun game. It's a very old-style game, having basically two screens and very simple motion and minimal animation... but I enjoy it because it's Macross, it works the transformation into the game in a sensible way (unlike Mac Plus arcade or Valk Scramble) and I like that it features the regular weapons (gunpod and missiles) rather than the outlandish stuff that shows up in most scrolling shooters, including other Macross games. Of course it's not the deepest game... The only real depth is the ability to get good enough at the game to beat the tougher levels. It's not a staggeringly great game, but it is fun. If you look at the super-old Famicom/NES games a lot of them are sort of at the same level... simple, utterly linear or single-screen games with minimal animation and simple-looking sprites. A lot of these were arcade ports, and I think because that was the prevailing game style a lot of non-arcade games followed that formula, too. Later on in the console's lifetime (like '87-'89) they got to the point where sprites tended to look pretty good. The graphics technology was the same (mappers notwithstanding), but they did more with the sprites by drawing in shading on the sprites (tough to do with low-color palettes). But old games like Kung Fu or Legend of Kage, these were right on the same level as Famicom Macross.

I think most every design in Macross has its own unique missile designs... so making one missile set for all kits wouldn't work out so great.

Your link doesn't work.

Bah! Amateurs... It's the MG. The forearms are a dead giveaway, as are the plates around the cockpit.

I know an adaptation has to be a compromise. I said so. And in X-Men, for instance, I think discarding the costumes was a good idea for exactly the reasons you cited. It's just that as it is she looks so generic. It's way too soon to know how this thing is going to turn out, of course, but with nothing else to go on, I just find myself wishing there were some kind of stronger tie to the old material. Why? Because until the movie somehow makes itself distinguished, the tie with the original Aeon Flux material is all that separates it from the sea of crap that follows a similar formula. That said, I do believe it would be possible for someone to have Aeon Flux hair, or Aeon Flux-esque hair, and not look stupid. I know that doesn't necessarily mean it's the right decision for the film. See paragraph one.

I love the animation and I'd love for them to do this as theatrical animation... I love well-done animation, and I'd love to see more of it. But that's not happening. Too bad. As for the rack... If they're going live-action it's got to be a compromise. I'd rather have her look real than have her padded up like Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft. Boobs don't have to be huge to look good. But she's gotta have the trademark hair, IMO. On the other hand, it's an adaptation. Photos aren't going to tell me much about how well the good points of the original have been carried over. The hair, the oufit, those things aren't going to make or break the movie. What I love about the original is that it's fun, a little kinky, and always weird. I like how the old material is sometimes a bit cryptic (like the repetition in "Tide") and I like Aeon's knack for self-defeat. Some of the TV-safe fanservice on the original and the TV-series is almost embarassingly cheap, (Like all the "oh, my god, she's totally bisexual and doing it with that girl sometimes!" stuff.) but it's still fun. The problem is, "sexy girl with guns" has been done to death in the movies. It's cheap as hell, it's outright devalued. Some films get extra points for being clever, not taking themselves too seriously, or whatever. What's this movie going to do, or have, that'll set it apart and make it worthwhile? What's it going to have for people like me, who love the original and want to see some of that reflected in the movie? That's what counts. Some variation of the Aeon clone story from the TV show might be good for the basis of a movie... that was a very 'accessible' story with lots of dialogue, but it was still very much Aeon Flux IMO. You have weirdos like Scafandra and the border crossing scenario, and Aeon even dies at the end. If they did something like Sybil's spinal gap that would make for interesting (if inevitably cheesy) CGI as well.

I'm glad this came up... It never would have even occurred to me. Is this a problem that's often encountered with normal airplane modeling, or do regular aircraft models normally not have payloads as heavy as the micro-missile boxes on wings as small as a VF-1's? Another thing that might work is metal strips. If you cut channels and aligned the strips so their flat face was facing forward, it'd take a lot to make those strips bend without buckling... so if you don't give them room to buckle, it should be quite secure. As long as you plug it up with something secure, that is... On the other hand, there's not a whole lot of vertical space in the wing, and slicing most of the way through the wing is bound to weaken it significantly... The reason I suggest this is because it's probably easier to cut grooves for strips (like with a saw) than to cut grooves for rods. It's just an idea. I've not done this before. As for stiffness, is stiffness best, or springiness? I don't know how steel and brass compare in that regard.

It's a very old kit. Imai produced it in 82 or 83, then Bandai acquired the rights to the molds from Imai later. I have a similar kit but I never did much work with it. At this point I'll probably never do anything with it because it's so old and, transformation or not, the Hasegawa kits are better... I imagine it's a complicated kit to work with, because of the lack of modularity and all the moving parts. What I would do is re-joint things where I can, using option parts and such to make it more modular without sacrificing the posability. I can't really help you with any specific advice for this kit, however... sorry.

Regardless, presently the "gay" = "homosexual" definition is much more common in actual use, at least in the US. Certainly when I was in school, the older definition was treated as the exception and not the rule. And you're not going to tell me that a phrase like "that thing looks so gay" is meant to imply that it looks happy. Besides, Wikipedia's entry on "gay" contradicts what you've just said, dating the tie with homosexuality back to the 19th century, with more substantial examples in the early 20th. I'd like it if the term weren't used as an insult based on its association with homosexuality. But I also think that it's important to not overreact when that happens. People might think you're queer or something. But mostly the angrier you get, the more people will be inclined to rebel against your request rather than honor it. That Zaku picture is a riot. I love the Scopedog, but I can't justify that kind of money for a Scopedog toy. A really excellent Scopedog model kit, maybe, but not a toy. (I'm mostly into kits... though I do enjoy the occasional well-produced toy.) I also want more accessories. The Scopedog is just a little plain-looking when scaled up that big.

How do you feel about dry transfers? http://www.archertransfers.com has some great stuff.

I like the colors but those color boundaries need some work. The seam lines are a problem, too, especially with that gold.

I recognized the hip part that you used to mount the arms. Very clever!