Sabrblade wrote:ZeldaTheSwordsman wrote:When people start just blasting something, and making strong negative claims about it (such as "This looks like a knock-off!")? That kind of thing sets me off.
Even if it's something that people were genuinely excited for but turned out to honestly and legitimately resemble a knockoff?
I don't agree that it
does resemble a knockoff. And I'm going to argue why I don't:
1. First off, it has a full articulation scheme that the average knockoff (that hasn't been cloned from an existing mold) can only dream of.
Also too much paint for a non-cloned KO.
2. People claim "the plastic looks practically translucent". I disagree - I think that's an optical illusion. I've dealt with plastic like that in the past, and based on that experience... if Maverick's plastic really was that way, there wouldn't be as much light reflecting off it in the photos. The shadows would also be paler and possibly even
tinted. So
I'm going to give the figure the benefit of the doubt on this until we see actual in-situ photographs of it.
3. With regard to the hollow undersides of the forearms? Almost every figure with foldaway hands made in the past.. what, twenty years? has hollows in the arms for those hands to fold away into, and few have had covers for those hollows (and most of those that do, it's a case of the arm opening up sideways). Slide-retracting hands could have prevented the hollows, but I don't think we've seen
those since 2007 Leader Optimus. And the hollows might be needed for transformation.
4. Speaking of transformation, this is obviously a figure that had to bend over backward to get the jet mode as close to perfect as physically possible.
Hence the invisible knees - they couldn't leave a visible trace of them in vehicle mode. And I think that, contrary to what someone said, those knees
prove that the current design team produced this figure: Telescoping legs could have gotten around that by having the knees collapse into the engines, but with the exception of Combiner Wars Drag Strip the current design team avoids telescoping legs like they were radioactive.
Hence the thin fronts of the feet - they have to fold up into the legs (you can even see the seam where the legs open up to admit them). I do think that they may have done better to have
Cybertron Thundercracker style feet (where the engine nozzles rotate away to reveal feet you have to unfold), but perhaps they were trying for feet that look like the traditional Seeker foot.
Hence the upper arms being thin - they have be able to compress out of sight.
Hence some of the overall hollowness - the average fighter jet doesn't have a lot of mass on the undercarriage between the engines - there's usually a big hollow channel there. Which is something very few Transformers molds can even come close to. I can think of three molds that come close: Cybertron Thundercracker (tries to do it, but has to put the arms there so it falls short), G1 Jetfire/the Macross Valkyrie (but it uses engineering that the modern team avoids, plus it has some compromises elsewhere), and the G1 Seeker mold (which... yeah.) I guess it goes to show the extent to which most Transformers fighter jets rely on fudging the undercarriage to some degree or other.
It obviously took a lot of design effort to achieve that near-perfect jet mode, which is another reason I disagree with saying it looks like a knock-off; knock-offs don't take that kind of trouble. There
are some limits that it imposed on the robot mode aesthetic and proportions, but I can appreciate what those sacrifices gained. Different design sensibilities might have mitigated some of them, as might a larger size class. But on the other hand, a larger size class would have meant adding the damn licensing markup to a larger base price, so that turns it into a "pick your poison" situation.
Someone said that that apparent stricture of having to get the vehicle mode close to perfect was similar to the Star Wars Transformers line of old, and it
definitely has a similar effect on proportions (although not as extreme). However, unlike with those figures, Maverick has a complete and uncompromised articulation scheme.
Posted: Tue Jul 14, 2020 2:43 pm
Are you purposely antagonistic, or are you just a d**k? Over the past few days, I've read numerous posts from you that seem hostile towards other members.
