But where will you display it?

 

In spppppaaaaacccceeeee.

 

Well there’s the backpack for one. Sorry couldn’t resist. They’re both complex figures but I feel only one of them needed to be.
Takara purists who praise 44 as brilliant and belittle 3Ps seem happy to ignore the fact that Zeta turned a sphere into a humanoid with almost no visible kibble while Takara turned a truck into a humanoid with a 3-day-hikers kit on his back.

 

In general, I think 3P figures are somewhat better at eliminating backpack-itis than TT offerings. I think it largely comes from not having to worry about the same constraints as TT does as far as materials, safety, design and overall QC. On the whole, I find the gamble worth it, but sometimes (I'd say 15% of the time in my experience) you get a 3P figure that's just a bear or otherwise frightening to transform due to the wonky materials.

I expect slightly different things from the figure, depending on the company it comes from as for the most part each company seems to have a very general overarching design philosophy. Zeta, however, is kind of all over the place because of it's oddball origins. I really hope some test samples leak out at some point so we can get a better idea as to whether all that stowing turns it into a Badcube-like puzzleformer headache or something a little less of a pain.

 

I don't see how It has 'moved past' Core Star's engineering when their solution for Unicron is an egg shell.

 

I don’t see anyone saying that.....

 

You know, the more I think about the issue of "engineering", the more I start to wonder about it. I'm not an engineer, but my basic understanding of it is that engineers are generally people that are given a problem to solve. In this case, it's "how do I get a robot to turn into a planet and vice versa"?

All things being equal, you'd be able to judge the relative merits of the final product on its effectiveness. In other words, if two teams of engineers are given the same time, space, materials and parameters, you could get a better feel on which team arguably did it better.

The intrinsic issue is that this is rarely the case. HasTak and 3P are generally not playing in the same arena. HasTak has different resources, restrictions and requirements than Zeta or any other company. So to say that one product is 'worse' than the other engineering wise may very well fail to take into account all the other factors. To engage in hyperbole, it's like having a horse race, except they're on two different tracks of different sizes and terrains, occurring at different parts of the day on different continents. The thrust of any comparison, i.e "horses" kind of gets swallowed up in the details. Comparing the two is kind of not fair.

Just food for thought, I guess.

 

That was probably largely in response to what I said above.

And it comes back to what ProtectronPrime just said. Both teams approached the design of Unicron from different angles, and came up with differing solutions.

In HasTak's case, their primary goal was to create the largest Transformer ever. And then further to that, be as accurate to the onscreen iconography of Unicron as possible given the first constraint. Both constraints, when put together, create a major hurdle and requires compromise. Accuracy to the characters' onscreen appearance means that their rendition required two separate "skins", as Unicron in robot form shares practically no surface detail with Unicron in planet form. They essentially had to unite two giant toys as one. The scale of their toy then creates other constraints. The size of their toy means that the planet panels had to be extra thick to support themselves, and the limbs need to be more monolithic to support the toy's overall weight. Both conditions put together rules out being able to tuck a lot of that shell into the body, as Core Star does. However, in forgoing the ability to fold the planetary shell away, they were able to create a simpler, more manageable toy.

Zeta's approach prioritizes the robot form and the "perfect transformation" aspect above all else. The appearance of the planet mode is entirely sacrificed for this goal, achieving the spheroid shape but none of the proper detail. Their engineering style on the toy is also very "3P brute force" in its approach, with lots of hinges and swing arms to force parts into a useful position. In its significantly smaller stature, Zeta is able to get away with a lot more "questionable" part usage, like being able to form a load-bearing heel spur out of a thin panel folded into a pyramid-shape.

It's down to a matter of tastes which method you find more preferable, but the two companies were not playing the same game, and shouldn't be judged as if the end results are equivocal.

 

Can we please have one page without Takara vs. 3rd party slap fight nonsense?

 

Divine Shooter.

 

I actually wanted that set, but no one had Thunder Manus in stock and there was no plans of ever restocking it, so I just sorta moved on from the idea. So was the combination between Divine shooter and thunder manus really bad compared to the takara one?

 

Don't know about that, because I'm waiting to buy Thunder Manus on sale. But I was commenting on the statement that 3p is better at avoiding backpacks than Hasbro.
That might be true in general, but there are still glaring examples of the opposite.

 

I would be happy with one page actually about unicron.

 

I think you mean core star. Be careful, Hasbro lawyers may shut this thread down! Lol.

It may be hard to stay on target without any imminent news regarding core star's fate. Hopefully we'll have a leak soon from any website giving us a shred of insight here. I figure this thread may have no focus for quite some time.

 

Who dat?

 

I don't know some fella who puts a fight with Galactus & Death Star Vader a lot lol.



Y'know canonically Unicron can beat Galactus hahaha.

 

Sure. Also FT Koot, to reference the 3p "gold standard". I didn't say it was always better so I'm not sure what your point was. No offense meant.

 

Right right. Sorry. So what should we talk about? The release date? Oh, we don't know that, do we? The transformation? Hm, that's already been discussed to death, hasn't it. The potential issues with the color scheme between modes? Oh yeah, we had lots and lots of digibashes mapping that out and we discussed that extensively too. There just isn't one page worth of content to discuss that hasn't already been discussed ad nauseam.

Don't get me wrong - I got pretty sick of the constant updates on Haslab Unicron in this thread and I called it out but I was shut down. I'm eager to hear more on Core Star but I can't think of anything to say that hasn't already been said. I could just be like, "I hope it releases in December like they originally said," or I could be like, "I hope the price isn't too crazy," or "I personally am glad that they're going with the 18" size instead of making it shelf-breakingly huge like Haslab," but all of that is played out.

And yeah, the correct response is probably to just stop posting and let this thread lie until there's some kind of update but people are worked up - the recent news on Haslab has Unicron on everybody's mind. It'll die down eventually, though.

 

It's bs actually