Trying to recreate my favorite tabletop character, a tiefling celestial bladelock. Probably gonna have to multiclass into cleric or druid for the heals and his backstory obviously can't be done, but he's a much better melee fighter than the tabletop version ever was.
I can only speak about Kotobukiya's kits, haven't touched Tomy's. The engineering precision isn't up to Bandai's lofty standards. You'll run into plenty of jank, such as pieces barely fitting together, requiring uncomfortable amounts of force and large gates in unfortunate locations. For example, the Geno Saurer here had large gates on the inside of a curve on the forearm armor pieces, the purple ribs along the spine are held in place by a handful of tiny pegs and material tension, and I had a hard time getting some of the polycaps in their sockets. The manuals throw a lot of info at you at once - each segment of the tail consists of nearly 20 pieces and the assembly instruction was a single panel per segment. Plastic cement is recommended, if not downright necessary in places. Some kits that come with prominent pieces painted on the runner, such as the Shadow Fox and its gold, will require painting, since nothing is undergated.
That said, they're well worth the effort in my opinion. They certainly take more time and care than your average MG, but the end result will absolutely stand out in almost any display. Or maybe I'm biased, since I got into the hobby with a HMM kit
The König Wolf is one of my favorite Zoids designs. The HMM kit might be hard to find without getting ripped off, it was just released last week and Hobby Link Japan sold out immediately. And the kit doesn't include the dual sniper rifle, that's sold separately.
They were asked to make a 100,000$ gaming PC. Even with bleeding edge components and storage out the ass, you're still 90 grand short. So a one-off, ridiculously over-the-top case is as good a place as any to put the rest of the money.
Definitely a mission to keep an eye on, but when Orion drive?
It's an absolute masterpiece. The only real downside to the kit, as you said, is the funnels. A lot of small, undergated pieces and you're building the same thing six times over. For anyone who's planning to build this kit, flip to the end of the manual and build the funnels first. Get the annoying bit out of the way first, the rest of the build is wonderful.
Don't know how much of a stickler for accuracy you are, how do you feel about the kit being out of scale? Canonically, the Hi-Nu is a little shorter than the Nu Gundam, but the RG kits are the same height.
Your personal hatred is blinding you, OP.
Hate to disappoint, but it's far more than you could possibly imagine. You could dump the equivalent mass of the entire human civilization, every single person and everything we've ever made, on the Moon and it wouldn't have a noticeable effect.
Sure. Why shouldn't gay guys and women have eye candy as well?
Because NASA, with nearly 30 billion in funding and using technology designed half a century ago, took 11 years to build a Shuttle cosplaying as a Saturn V. They were legally mandated to. That's not a dig at NASA, it's a dig at the morons who hold their purse strings.
In roughly the same timeframe, SpaceX developed two brand new engines, both of which have amazing performance in their weight class. They developed a reusable medium lift rocket that's now one of the most reliable launch vehicles ever. Now they're working on a fully reusable super heavy launcher that's capable of interplanetary missions. And they did all that without NASA's budget.
Private launch companies, of which SpaceX is only one, allow for faster development, faster innovation and cheaper launches. They're actually saving taxpayers money. And the amounts that NASA does pay them don't just vanish into the CEOs' pockets the moment the payment clears. It goes to engineers, maintenance workers, construction workers, caterers, everyone employed by these companies and their suppliers.
And the gravitational pull of all the other planets. I'm sure Jupiter is totally cool with us trying to precisely align and balance a satellite swarm on the point of a needle.
There's truth to this. I recall an old saying, went something like "Chicks dig giant robots."