Nice

 

he looks better and better, glad i pre-orderd it   always liked the railracer trains and never had a raiden figure sooo win win

 

Again, can't really say for certain until we start getting these things in hand.

But comparing the Shouki designs, for instance, TT's has fairly solid looking blocks for limbs, while the 3P has a lot of panel folding going on. Panel alignment tends to be a fairly frustrating transformation experience.

In this particular instance, it doesn't appear that TT had to jump through too many hoops to get a more proportionate robot mode. Helps in this case that G1 Shouki was super stumpy, so the more elongated alt-mode just translates to a taller robot mode.

 

Undoubtedly, the challenge think becomes the limbs if they stick to the 1 and a half inch width in train mode. That's like mp45 chest width I think. Will probably see something with the chest expanding and some of the train filling in the torso. Looking at the Moon studio legs things are pretty much "there", and isn't too much to manipulate to fill out the not mode.

 

The biggest disparity will be between Getsuei and Yukikaze. A bullet train is a lot longer in proportion than a commuter train, and that's probably why the silhoutte teaser shows Raiden's legs looking so different. I'm actually wondering if Kaen has to transform asymmetrically for combined mode, to provide more length to the right leg. I can envision a design where the combiner hips are actually Kaen's waist joint and a mid-torso swivel, with the left thigh being Kaen's arms, and the right thigh being his legs, in order to achieve that result.

 

Very nice. It seems like he might have metal ankle joints.

Not sure if you've seen but there are now transformation videos, both stop-motion and step-by-step, of the Moon Studio legs. If you search through earlier pages of this thread, I uploaded some analysis images of where things go.

There are some things which really bug me about the Moon Studio transformations. I hope we see a Takara prototype being transformed in the coming weeks or months.

If you flip the side panels of Shouki's chest down, it becomes more or less the width of the train.


The Moon Studio bots don't have to do much for their robot mode torsos and arms. Their legs though have some potentially annoying transformation.

 

Well, if the combiner ends having this kind of articulation, i'm not even mad about size:




(UM 3P , around 27,5 cm )

 

This also makes me wonder if their robot modes will also be very varying. Only so much of "the Lockdown effect" where a smaller alt mode becomes a taller robot is possible.

 

ok... 3rd news update of diorama pics.

 

Looks CHUG pass...... 
Kind of surprised, figure they would hold off on the Shouki pics and start the Skids/ Reboost pre release pics. Still nice to wake up to, wouldn't mind seeing other figures in these displays at this point.

 

Man, he looks legit majestic with that cape (uuuuh CHUG backpack) in the first pic!

Is he facing off against Soundwave in the second shot? They go well together, detail level wise.

 

SoundBlaster

So the figure has not abdominal articulation, right?

Edit:
No, he has waist swivel

 

It is kind of cool they turned the "wings" into something in bot mode. Little gun arms sticking out, reminds me of the side rsil guns on the Freedom Gundam.

 

They double as Raiden's weird wings.

 

I believe AJP pre-orders get locked in on the 7th.

 

Yeah and the 'inner' wings with the sorta hooks on the end are his combiner mode arm connectors. So all that junk has cool multiple uses.

 

Unlike Saber from MP-24 Star Saber.

 

Still contemplating if I should cancel my pre-order or not with Amazon Japan... I like Shouki as an individual, but I'm not convinced about Raiden. I still think that they shouldn't have stuck to the HO train scale. What to do... I need to decide today.