-
Johnnel posted an update in the group
What are you building? 9 years, 7 months ago My next Project 🙂
1/144 RX-0 Unicorn Banshee (Dark Clear Color)
Cool clear parts, the NT-D parts are clear orange and have glitters.
Johnnel posted an update in the group 
What are you building? 9 years, 7 months ago
My next Project 🙂
1/144 RX-0 Unicorn Banshee (Dark Clear Color)
Cool clear parts, the NT-D parts are clear orange and have glitters.
I guess you love your Gentei stuff, don’t you? 🙂
Cant wait to build it 🙂
I wish I could have access to these exclusives, but my “regular” Banshee DM is waiting for restock in my private warehouse as compensation 😛
I saw someone selling it in ebay but they are expensive 🙁
Most people on ebay don’t even ship to NZ anyway 🙁
If it says “Worldwide” all you have to do is ask for shipping costs. 99% of people shipping worldwide will be kind enough to dig a bit for those shipping costs for you. Have you checked genteikits.com?
No I haven’t but I just checked it out. Thank you good sir, you may have just located a solution to my broken Buster Gundam’s cannon-arm-holder-thingy while giving me access to kits I wouldn’t even dream of. Cheers 😀
Their prices are out of this world too. 😀
is any of that kit under gated?
It wouldn’t be seeing that the Banshee DM didn’t have it on its original mold, and this is just a straight recolour.
to bad to know that 🙁
No sir, there are none undergated kits for this kind of model.
Even the titanium finish are not undergated but good thing is that nub marks cannot be seen due to its dark color 🙂
The only plated kit I’ve seen undergated so far was the old MG Hyaku-Shiki. I wish they continued with that for future releases…
They did continue that. For instance the Akatsuki from Seed Destiny is under-gated, HG Delta Gundam is under-gated, and of course the HGUC Hyaku Shiki. Even the 1:100 Astray was under-gated in anticipation of a Gold Frame version.
The thing is, these are all kits that were planned from the beginning to feature chrome plating. When you’re dealing with a Titanium Finish version or something, those are plated versions of kits that weren’t designed for plating. It’s easy enough to chrome up parts, but it’s prohibitively expensive to alter an existing mold to give it under-gates.
Under-gating actually complicates assembly a bit – that’s probably part of why it’s not on every kit. You have to cut gates off the mating surfaces of the model, and if you cut too much or not enough it creates a gap between the parts. I hate dealing with it personally.
A good thing is that I know that they did undergate the rest of the “sparkle brigade” as I’ve been thinking on getting a 1/100 Akatsuki. They didn’t undergate a gold 1/100 Sumo, however it was one of the cheaper kits compared to the ones we got now. And one of the first plated ones too. Even though, the gate marks were very well hidden on that one. Special edition titaniums, like the Sinanju, Banshee, Sazabi, etc. and some of the exclusives were done by the normal kits before that so it does make sense they didn’t undergate them. And tetsujin, to tell you the truth, I don’t mind dealing with undergated stuff and problems those bring, like you’ve said. What bothers me however is the fact that I feel I’m cheating whenever I do a kit that needs only 30% parts painted. 🙂
I don’t feel like I’m cheating. I just strip the chrome plating off and paint the kit. 🙂 It’s the only way to fix the seams…
Actually I bought the plated version of the Albion instead of the normal version specifically so I could strip the chrome off it – because the plastic underneath is translucent. Perfect for creating lit windows.
It’s possible that they didn’t undergate the Sumo because the color scheme may not have been established when they were designing the kit. The Sumo was originally designed to be the lead of the show, so it would have been white.
Geez, everyone knows everything about Turn A and here I thought it was a long forgotten anime. Do you have any photos of the Albion? I’m quite curious how that turned out. I wanted to do a complete EX battleship “fleet” of all of them, starting with the White Base of course.
Nah, haven’t even stripped the chrome off the Albion yet… There’s always other projects distracting me. 🙂
I first got into Gundam back in 2000, and at the time I didn’t pay any attention to Turn-A because of the bad reputation it’d already earned with fans… But when I finally watched it, I really enjoyed it. I think the show’s become a lot more popular as the shock of it has worn off.
I liked the steampunky feel to it. But anyway, how you feel about those EX kits? What would be the size of the completed ship compared to something like a GunPla or something like that?
Are you familiar with dalong.net? He’s got some comparison photos that may give you an idea of how big the kits are.
I’m kind of picky about the design of kits, so whenever I look at the EX Albion I can’t help but feel like it doesn’t quite pull off the funky proportions of the original design. Given the scale of the kit there are a number of details that are way too crude (huge panel lines, thick sensor structures around the bridge, etc.), and there’s a fair number of details that are flat-out wrong when you compare them to the line art (like the entry hatches on the sides of the MS hangar decks are too big, some of the detail around the front hatch of the hangar deck is also wrong)
Of course, that hatch thing, for instance, it’s kind of understandable. They sized the ship according to official specs, and wanted that side-hatch to be big enough for a MS to enter (as it should be) – which I think necessitated making it larger. I still feel like there’s room for improvement, though.
I think the “scale-appropriateness” of the kit’s detailing is a far bigger issue. This thing’s at 1:1700 scale… A half-millimeter panel line may not seem like a big deal, but scale it up and that’s a three-foot wide trench down the side of the hull. The whole thing ought to be a lot smoother, otherwise it’ll probably look a bit cheap when built up.
As you might imagine, all this stuff is another reason why I haven’t built the Albion yet. 🙂 It just takes me a while to figure out how important these issues are to me, if I want to attack them, and if so, how…
The kit’s got some issues. But I like it. I’m glad I bought it. The Argama, too. (Haven’t even assembled the Argama…) The prices are maybe a bit steep for what they are, but otherwise they’re decent.
Dalong? I am now! So Albion would be about two lenghts of a cigarette box. With the rest of the ships with more or less the same size. And yeah, you’re right about the panel lines. To tell you the truth, with this scale, 1/1700, the panelline issue is quite obvious but I haven’t used the same perspective on the other kits from Gundam line. Especially 1/144 kits. They’re mostly around 18-22 meters tall and that would mean some panel lines, in other words, space between individual panels is pretty much close to 30cm each. So making them as thin as they can be is a must. However, that would make them nearly unnoticable. The right panel line width shouldn’t be more than 0.1 tops whish is pretty hard to pull out. 1/100 panel lines are a lot easier as the thickness would be proportionally larger. 1/1700 stuff shouldn’t have any panel lines at all as they just wouldn’t be visible in that scale.
Yeah, the whole “panel lines in scale” debate kind of touches all areas of modeling. Even on something like an aircraft (like 1:72 to 1:48 scale) seam lines should be visible perhaps, but not present as surface details. But most modelers accept it as a compromise – having the panel lines molded in makes it easier to paint them, so even though it’s not actually realistic in scale people tend to prefer some kind of panel lines in relief.
I was watching an episode of Plamo Tsukurou recently (SP-16, a build-up of the 1:700 Japanese warship Kongo, with the addition of a dry-dock diorama) where the modeler created panel boundaries on the model by masking off certain areas of the hull and laying on some primer to create a different thickness in the paint coat. Even that might be out of scale at 1:700, not sure. But that’s one way to go. Star Trek modelers have something similar: “Aztecing” where the surface of the hull is split into a bunch of panels which are painted slightly differently from their neighbors. I think it’s one of the most challenging things about Star Trek modeling, actually.. 🙂 Though lighting is probably a close second.
I think modelers always have to deal with this issue of “real” realism, like what a subject would actually look like if scaled down, versus “perceived” realism – what we think the subject should look like when scaled down. The two aren’t always the same, and sometimes it really is better to go for the unrealistic effect that just looks better…
http://www.swannysmodels.com/Alclad.html there are some photos about what you’re talking about on this link. Though it isn’t a weathering or even a panel lining tutiroal it touches panel lines and what you talked about Star Trek things with certain panels being done in a slightly different shade of color. There’s an interesting thing about brush directions that leave the same effect that you can see on a football field. Airbrushing over it will give excelent results, using the same paint. Of course, preshading helps too. 🙂 I’ve done preshading before but never did any of the other techniques which I think I’ll try somewhere in the future.
Quick! Build it!
I’ll Post the build this on next Monday. Been very in holidays 🙂
Ooh! I’m very interested in seeing this when it’s finished. Great looking buy @Johnnel!
Thanks man 🙂 I’ll post it ASAP
Yo Jo! You done yet?! 😀 We’re kinda waiting here to see the Banshee all done. 😀 I’m all out of popcorn and I don’t want to start biting my nails!
haha sorry man been very busy these past few days due to 4 days holiday here in SG 🙂