Monkey Fracas fucked around with this message at 23:20 on Mar 23, 2023

Waffleman_ fucked around with this message at 02:52 on Mar 24, 2023

Warmachine fucked around with this message at 14:25 on Mar 24, 2023

• Seems about Bandai quality; the white is a wonderful glossy finish, the clear is nice and clear, and the grey does the job and marks up like any dark plastic. The white in the Hasegawas doesn't seem as nice, but I've not got round to actually working with that yet.
  
• There's no coloured plastic beyond a few joints and intakes in grey and the cockpit in black. Everything else is stickers and oh boy...
  
• Whilst only a few parts are undergated, the way the kit builds up mean that only a couple of places need sanding - mainly on the fuselage/legs.
  
• Panel lines are nice and deep and plentiful, it's faithful to the design as far as I can remember and nothing needed rescribing. On cleaning up, everything was deep enough that I didn't need to re-line anything which is rare but might be a symptom of having used really lovely, cheap, and loosely spun cotton buds until recently.
  
• It's PS, so no cracking due to the panel fluid solvent heat effects or anything, though I was careful to avoid too much pooling just in case.

• Unlike the recent Hasegawa Regults, where you can just about manage without (except for the tiny red sensor gems), and definitely unlike Bandai kits, you're going to need glue for this kit.
  
• Fortunately, there's a lot of internal surface to spread glue over without it gunking up the seams and needing sanding off afterwards.
  
  • I did use some nylon peg clamps on the legs as the two main parts per leg are quite long, but it probably wasn't strictly necessary - just saved me a couple of minutes holding them in hands whilst waiting for the initial drying.
• You have options for the head on the underside of the body (VF-1A or VF-1S; I did the -1A this time) and whether the landing gear is lowered or retracted.
  
  • However, you can't hot swap between the different designs without some magnet fuckery as the pegs are too loose to work by pure friction alone. There's enough material on the inside of the build that there should be no problem finding good places to hide them, but it would be extra effort.
    
• Something aircraft modellers seem (* based on my youtube recommendations going down a rabbithole *) to spend enormous amounts of effort on is lining canopies and masking them correctly. Plamax make this almost completely painless.
  
  • They've used a three part canopy - two clear parts split by the central frame spar (on the rear clear part), and a black plastic part they slip into for the enveloping frame. The central spar is moulded with enough of a relief that it's easy to just run a brush (or black sharpie) over it sideways and not have to worry about it ever again, which is probably one of the things that didn't just scale down from the 1/20s they did previously. There's also a sticker for it, which fits well enough.
    
  • I glanced in the box for the Hasegawa 1/72, and that is going to be painful in comparison. One piece, the central frame spar is raised slightly, but by a much lesser degree that'll be harder to paint (or sharpie) and will likely require some masking fun.

• You get marking for DYRL, with unit 011 (SSgt/VF-1A, start of film) and 001 (2ndLt/VF-1S, end of film) variants in Hikaru's red colour scheme variant.
  • The reds are semi-transparent, so you can just about make panel lining out beneath them even without cutting them, which is kind of neat for how vibrant the colour is.
• You also get an option of sort-of TV version markings, i.e. the red stips without black for the body.
  
• You get both 'full' decals (such as black stripes with the UN Spacy roundel on it, the black part of the rear vertical stabilisers with the skull squadron log on it) and logo-only versions if you want to paint the larger areas of solid colour, but no spares.
  
  • The logo-only versions are probably also more appropriate for doing the TV colour scheme.
• There's two full sheets of the things, with everything from the big red and black ones to small caution text for the landing gear (just about legible under magnification) and indicator lights.
  

• They're hard to place and carry tonnes of static (even spraying some soapy water doesn't net you much time to adjust them) and you're at high risk of airbubbles beneath them;
  
• Some are too big to handle comfortably (the rear stabilisers on the top and bottom are WRAP-AROUND stickers, and the small tabs on them don't stay down - definitely paint those bits instead if you can);
  
• Aligning them is difficult as not ever sticker fits perfectly along a panel line or other easily referenceable feature, though some do fit into recesses. For these oddities, panel lines are often nearrby just not perfectly in place so if painting you can probably cheat by masking to the lines instead, even if if it ends up ever so slightly different looking.
  

• Has a pilot figure, unlike Hasegawa 1/72 kits. Two parts and very easy to put together, but you need to insert it before the dash as the legs don't fit in otherwise. Unless you cut the feet off...
  
  • The figure's got good detail despite the scale and I was able to easily mark up the black edging on the helmet and shoulders after painting them red/yellow, stick a dab of blue on the visor, and so forth. Though magnifiers help a lot.
• For mounting missiles (not included) on the wings, there are indicators but no holes so that will get interesting. Looking at the manual for the Hasegawa missile packs it seems to be the same deal - I suspect you might be able to use the Hase missile packs if you want and are very careful with a pin vise.
  
• The manual is super high quality, glossy magazine paper with some beautiful colour spreads, but does skimp a bit on the details during build compared to bandai and the only meaningful english is the blurb about the unit on the box. The first print versions of the manual have a small error which is corrected on the PDF on the goodsmile/plamax website - test fit the landing gear before gluing them together, you should figure it out.

Warmachine fucked around with this message at 05:08 on Mar 26, 2023