From Newsgroup: alt.toys.transformers

Dave's Transformers Studio Series Rant: Deluxe wave 30

Windcharger (sportscar, TFtM)
Barricade (police car, TF:TLK)
Airachnid (multirotor aircraft, TFOne)

Permalink: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Studio/Deluxe30

Everyone's from an entirely different continuity and aesthetic family, woo. G1 blocky, Bayformer greebly, TFOne leggy.


CAPSULES

$28 at HasbroPulse.

Windcharger: This would probably be at the high end of recommended
despite some potentially problematic design choices, but almost every joint
and socket was annoyingly stiff, which I doubt is an isolated issue. I still recommend it, but not as enthusiastically.

Barricade: Even if you have no other Barricade toys, skip this one.
It's a too-clever design that doesn't remotely work in the Year Of Tight Joints, the accessories are wonky, and mine shipped missing a fender. If you really need a movieverse Barricade, I'm sure there's plenty of previous versions out there fairly cheap (including previous Studio Series versions). The original 2017 toy was actually pretty good, go find a loose one of that instead. Avoid this one.

Airachnid: A good design on paper (or in renders), but anything that
tries to be spindly and spider-like is going to be at the mercy of joint tightness, something Hasbro is particularly bad at lately. Pretty random whether you'll get a pretty good toy or a frustrating one, so I can't go
above mildly recommended even though it's probably the best TFOne Airachnid we're likely to get.


RANTS

Packaging: Same as 2025 Deluxes, with the blue band nea the bottom being the only significant difference between it and Age of the Primes Deluxes. Scenes are no longer explicitly mentioned on the packaging.


AUTOBOT: WINDCHARGER
Assortment: G1927
Altmode: Sportscar (sort of a tooned-up Trans Am)
Transformation Difficulty: 12 steps
Previous Name Use: G1, Alt, RotF:RtS, CW, PotP
Previous Mold Use: None
Movie: TFtM
Scene: Attack on Autobot City

WINDCHARGER uses his magnetic powers to fight the DECEPTICONS.

Note, his only actual appearance in the movie was when Arcee dragged his inert form into a bunker and laid it next to Wheeljack. One must presume he got off a shot or two before buying the farm.

Packaging: Seven plastic ties hold the robot onto the inner tray, with
two of them on each boot to keep them from unfolding. The gun and magnetic effect piece are in a plastic bag taped to the right flap of the inner tray, they do seem to have ditched tissue for 2026.
There's a small inset on the back showing the magnetic effect attached
to the front of car mode, but no depiction of it attached to the chest in
robot mode.
The right side of the box shows that Windcharger is driving through a battered and smoking Autobot City, likely on his way to become battered and smoking himself.

Understandably, where most recent Studio Series toys have a screenshot
of them from the relevant movie, they just put a slice of the movie poster. Rather than, you know, showing him getting dragged into the corpse pile.

Robot Mode: Yep, there's still Minibots who hadn't gotten the "short Deluxe" treatment yet, although most of them have been managed by now. Most were in some flavor of Generations, but putting this one in Studio Series
means a commitment to getting it as screen-accurate as possible...and this is an animation model that just sort of ignored most of the vehicle parts in
robot mode. As a result, the boots are basically made of folded up vehicle shell, which will make customization difficult as the car roof is the soles
of the feet. There also aren't proper heel spurs because of where the folds happen, so the figure is a little less stable than it could've been. As usually happens lately when there's a contradiction, they went with the animation model for the face, which is a proper face rather than a faceplate and visor. I wouldn't be surprised if we see a Walmart Retro Collection
retool with the toy faceplate, though. So, the face is kind of sitting in a trapezoidal hood. Oh, and while they couldn't completely remove the shoulder wheels, they do rotate the fenders around so the fenders are in the same direction as the animation model. The rear wheels are hidden inside the
boots normally, but if you prefer a more toyetic look you can always leave
them on the outer faces of the boots instead, although this strains some
panels as they can't quite close properly (the gun storage tabs are blocked
by the fender and the soles bend a teeny bit).
Interestingly, I think they might've misinterpreted the cool lighting of his lone movie scene, because where all the toy and animation versions have some sort of gray (neutral or cool) for the head and chest, this toy goes for more of a desaturated light blue. Maybe their monitor settings were off.
4.5" (11.5cm) tall, pretty typical "short Deluxe" Minibot update, mostly in dark red, desaturated light blue, very light gray, and some black and silver. The wheels are made of black plastic. The back panel and window pieces on the heels are made of clear colorless plastic, as is the magnetic effect (they all have clear paint on them). The arms and boots are dark red plastic other than bits already mentioned, although technically there's two kinds. The slightly lighter and glossier plastic is used on car body bits, where the parts hidden in vehicle mode (upper arms, elbows, fists, some
hinges inside the boots) are a slightly darker and duller shade. The
shoulder roots, thighs, upper shins, rear pelvis, and pistol are very light gray plastic. The head, torso front, pelvis front, and hip/waist pieces are desaturated light blue plastic. Think faded blue jeans, but a little more in the green direction.
The shins are painted black, the window bits are painted clear blue,
most of the magnetic effect piece is painted clear yellow. The back plate is painted in a pretty good if glossy match for the desaturated blue plastic except on the side bits which are the side windows. A darker slate blue is pained inside the chest cavity vent and on the pelvis trapezoid detail. The wheel hubs are silver, the facep is light gray, the eyes are bright blue and
a red no-outline Autobot symbol is printed on the belly.
The neck is just a swivel to avoid the weird floating head effect that ball joints tend to have on block-heads like this (warning: the swivel is at the back of the head, so turning too far looks weird in a different way), but they did something pretty clever to compensate. The face is on a hinge, with
a lever that lets you tilt the face up. Like almost all the joints on this toy, this is very stiff. Like, seriously, this toy has very few joints that are actually EASY to move. The waist is a snap-in swivel, I might snap it
out and try to make it a little less difficult to turn. The ball joint shoulders and bicep swivels are reasonable, but the elbow hinges are really stiff and the wrist ball joints barely move except in the hinge-for-transformation direction. I basically have to put the pistol in
the hand and use it as a lever. Pinned hinge and swivel hips where the right and left thirds of the pelvis come along with the leg, pretty high and very stiff knee hinges. Because of how the boots are made, they couldn't put tilt ankles in them, so there's a tilt joint where the upper shin meets the boot.
It also has a transformation hinge that bends in the knee direction, and is easier to move than the actual knee, so it tends to try to bend instead of
the knee, which makes the boot pop apart.
The fists can hold 5mm pegs, there's a 3mm socket on the back of the pelvis for gun storage, and nonstandard rectangular sockets on the chest and the back. No 5mm sockets in the soles of the feet, as that's require holes
in the roof of the car. (Painting the sunroofs black and putting holes
through them wouldn't help in car mode, you'd have blue visible through the holes.)
The pistol is pretty small and has a very short 5mm peg that has to be forced into the fist quite firmly. 1.25" (31mm) long and made of a single piece of light gray plastic, the barrel tapers down and ends in a proper 3mm stud, plus there's a 3mm stud on the side that goes into the pelvis socket
for storage in robot mode. In vehicle mode, it relies on nonstandard slots
on the sides of the main body that go onto tabs which are hidden in robot
mode.
The magnetic effect piece looks like a cross between the concentric
ovals seen in the cartoon and something like lightning lines or webbing, I guess they wanted something a little more modern and dynamic. It's an oval 1.25" (32mm) across and 1" (25mm) tall, with two rectangular pegs on the
back. The fatter one in the center goes into the chest socket, while the thinner off-center one goes either in the backplate socket for storage, or
into a socket in the front end of vehicle mode. There isn't a way to attach
it to the hand, nor does the toy get the hand-replacement flashlight (okay, tractor beam) Windcharger used in The Ultimate Doom part 2.
I've already seen a 3D printed adapter to let the magnetic piece got
onto a fist rather than the chest, I went ahead and used magnets and bits of wire to get the effect instead. I do wonder if they only made it fit on the chest because the only TFWiki picture showing the power in use was one of the times it did emanate in concentric ovals from his chest. (There's also a comics picture of it manifesting as zigzags from his hands.)
https://www.dvandom.com/kitbash/windchargermagnets.JPG for the result of my modification. I did paint over the wires later, but I wanted them visible in this picture.

Transformation: Unsnap the backpack (which may require excessive force), rotate the shoulder fenders 180, shrug the arms up against the torso with the fists folded up, snap the backpack down over the fists. Then unfold the
boots and wrap the car in them. Seriously, everything except the doors and front fenders is made of the folded up boots. It does look like the rear
part doesn't snap down properly, but it's supposed to form a little lip at
the back of the roof. Because the neck is so far back, you can't turn the
head around to keep the face from looking out the bottom of vehicle mode,
there isn't enough room to get the hood down over a backwards-looking face.
In principle, the gun should be able to store against either rear wheel using theoretically identical tabs, but the tab on the driver's side of mine
is too thick and the gun keeps popping back off.
Going back to robot mode is pretty simple, but the backpack piece continues to be a major hassle, I used the pistol to pry it up. The boots
may need a little massaging to make sure the tabs and slots stay together.
You do need to remember to remove the pistol before transforming back,
though.

Vehicle Mode: The original G1 toy was an unlicensed Trans Am, but fed through the same chibification as most of the other Minibot vehicle modes.
The animation model leaned into that, especially the fact that the rear
wheels were noticeably bigger than the front. As a result, it doesn't really look that much like a Trans Am, and they didn't need to work very hard to
avoid trademark issues. It has a louvred rear window, sunroof panels
(molded, not painted), and a sort of air scoop front end that takes the
second generation Trans Am (late 70s/very early 80s) squared front end and
adds a lip around it (which is present on the original G1 toy). Note, the G1 toy had the twin sunroofs painted black, but they're unpainted here,
possibly because the end up as the soles of the feet and they didn't want to waste paint apps on a part where paint was more likely to get scraped.
Without the magnetic effect on the front, it's 3.75" (9.5cm) long,
mostly red with the black rear window louvres and tires, and clear blue windows. The side windows are part of the backpack, while the windshield is pieces attached to the red panels that made up the boots. This is important, they did not make any structural part of the folded up shells out of clear plastic, the windshield is over solid red plastic. The wheels are all black plastic, and the other plastic colors are hidden on the underside (well,
light gray hinges are visible in back). The rear louvres are painted black, and the front grille and headlights are painted silver. Oddly, the bottom
lip of the front end is painted desaturated light blue on the outer thirds,
as if those were supposed to be headlights? The actual molded headlights are the same silver as the rest of the grill. The wheel hubs are also silver,
and a white outline Autobot symbol is printed on the hood. No other paints
or printing.
There are no standard connectors accessible in this mode. There's a rectangular slot in the front end for attaching the off-center tab of the magnetic effect, and tabs inside the rear fenders for storing the pistol. As noted earlier, on mine only the tab shown in the instructions actually works, trying to use the other tab (so the barrel can poke out the back like an exhaust pipe) fails due to excessive thickness. I may try some very careful filing on that. You can technically use the chest socket to put the magnetic effect on the underside, but it's not balanced properly to look like hovering on magnetic fields. More of the start of an assisted leap.

Overall: I wonder if this design was a response to complaints about
loose joints on other toys. "Oh, they want tighter joints? I'll GIVE them tighter joints!" I suppose it's possible I just got a weird extreme case,
but it's so consistent that it feels like they just globally made all the pieces a fraction of a percent bigger at the render stage to ensure tighter fits for everything, and then WIRNIR took over. It's not that the toy has no other faults, but the tight joints and sockets kinda overshadow everything
else in what would otherwise be a clever and good toy.


DECEPTICON: BARRICADE
Assortment: G1928
Altmode: Ford Mustang police car
Transformation Difficulty: 23 steps
Previous Name Use: Like, all the live-action movies, even the ones he
wasn't in; G1, Energon, Studio
Previous Mold Use: None
Movie: The Last Knight
Scene: Reporting In

BARRICADE searches for the Guardian Knights' talisman.

Barricade is sort of the Evil Bumblebee in terms of having so many
toys. He's gotten into toylines for movies he didn't even appear in! This
is probably because cop cars sell, so you tend to get Prowl in animated lines even if he barely or never appears on the show, and Barricade in live-action lines even where he makes no sense (like multiple toys for the Bumblebee movie). At least this time it's for a movie where he appeared and even had a line or two, putting him ahead of Windcharger. (Airachnid had a very similar "reporting in" scene, but then got a little more time in the final fight
scene, I honestly don't remember Barricade doing anything else of note in The Last Knight, but "memorable character moments" are pretty rare in Bayformers movies.)
Does Barricade merit yet another toy, specifically this toy? Nope.
This is not a toy I enjoyed reviewing, not even a little.

Packaging: Some assembly required. The chunk with the roof and doors is wrapped up in a plastic bag along with the wrist blaster, pistols, and what
I'm going to guess right now is the cover of his car stereo but I'll learn
the true purpose of when I look at the instructions. Probably. The robot itself is held onto the tray by five plastic ties, and the one across the
chest goes over a plastic blister shield that protects the paint on the push bars of the chest.
The assembly instructions show the lightbar halves as separate bits
loose in the bag, but they're already attached to the roof. You actually
need to pry them up and rotate them into the robot mode positions.
Otherwise, there's over a dozen steps just to put all the bits together on
the robot, and the car stereo cover is just a forearm accessory in this
mode. (Okay, looking ahead to the end, the stereo cover is actually a piece for mounting the wrist blaster halves on the rear window in car mode, there's no advice for storing them anywhere out of the way in robot mode. For instance, if you want him using both pistols, it's either set the wrist blasters aside entirely or mount them on the stereo cover on the forearm.)
The scene shot is from the scene in an abandoned building where he
reports to Megatron, while the right side of the box is the exterior of that run down building. I don't recall Barricade appearing other than in this one scene, except maybe standing in the background quietly. If he was in the big fight at the end, I have no memory of it (leaving him out of the fight would mean he gets to survive to carry a spear another day, of course, as Bayformer movies tend to end with significant body counts).
As a licensed vehicle mode, it has the lenticular Ford sticker and other indicia of the licensing on the back of the box.

Robot Mode: In case it wasn't clear, I often write these reviews out of order, jumping around as I maybe retransform to check something, etc. This section was the last written before doing the "Overall" bit. I felt I needed to make that clear, because my review of the robot mode may not explain the somewhat uncomplimentary Capsule rating...that's almost entirely due to the transformation.
Okay, so...it's a Barricade, but dark blue, because that's a change they made for The Last Knight (I guess he figured his old altmode was on too many Shoot On Sight lists). While the surplus of transformations hinges mean you can pose it in the standard Bayformer Digitigrade stance, it's more of a traditionally humanoid form in addition to being the usual "car hood upper torso" look for Barricade. The soles of the feet are the rear windows with
the spoiler halves as heels, an arrangement that tends to make me a bit
nervous about paint damage. On top of that, the tips of the toes are narrow tabs for snapping into the back of the roof, so more potential for damage.
So, not a fan of the foot design. I'm also not that enamored of the
shoulders, which have the sort of narrow strut that sticks out from inside
the torso and ends in a ball for the ball and socket joint that I usually see on the cheaper Authentics. The struts have to fit inside the upper arms in vehicle mode, so the upper arms are more hollow than usual. It's not all
bad, I like what they did with the eyes, and the molded spring struts on the shins (despite being interrupted by hinges) are a nice detail. In addition
to the distinctive gun bracer thing the 2017 toy had, there's two other
pistols which may have come from design specs...I honestly don't recall Barricade actually shooting anyone or anything in the movie.
5" (12.5cm) tall at the head in a straight-legged pose, with the hood
bit behind the head rising up maybe another half centimeter. Mostly dark
blue and medium gray with some black and dark silver. Dark blue plastic is used for the head, most of the upper torso, shoulder fenders (of which mine only has one, something I noticed after transformation to vehicle mode), forearm/fist pieces, thighs, calves, and feet. Medium slightly silvery gray forms the torso core, shoulder struts, upper arms, pelvis, hip struts, knees, upper shins, ankles, and all the weapons. Black plastic is used for the
wheels (upper shoulders and outer thighs), a bit of folded hood behind the head, the upper abdomen front, the right forearm accessory (that car stereo panel thing), and the heels. The folded up roof and doors on the back have some clear smoky plastic.
The exposed tech greebles on the centerline of the chest are painted a dark silver, as is the face, as well as panels on the fronts of the thighs.
The face has four eyes, with the inner pair being bright red and the outer
pair being Energon Blue, evoking police emergency light colors. There's a white Decepticon symbol printed on the center of the chest. Pushbars molded into the bumper chest are painted gloss black. The rest of the paint apps
are for vehicle mode, and are visible on the back of the robot.
The neck is a ball joint with the socket in the head and a little bit of tilting range. The waist is a smooth swivel, but the backpack kibble limits its range of motion, especially if you try to store the guns on the hips as they will fall off from even a slight twist of the waist. Ball and socket shoulders and elbows, no wrists. The hips are ball joints, and there's
swivels just above the knees. The knees are a bit weird, in that they're
kinda loose for bending backwards up to about 30 degrees, then have two soft ratchets of 45 degrees each bending the correct way. There's two soft ratcheting hinges in each shin for transformation, and by soft I mean they don't make audible clicks...they're pretty stiff joints. There's sideways hinges about a centimeter above where the legs meet the feet, and those attachments are restricted ball joints that can rotate or bend inwards. All
of these joints are a warning flag, by the way.
The hands can hold 5mm pegs and there's a 3mm socket in the back of the pelvis. Technically the lightbar halves (which are bent into a /\ shape in robot mode) are held on with 5mm pegs and sockets, so you could remove them
and put something else in those sockets. Otherwise, all the attachment
points for accessories are thin tabs. Each pistol has a 6mm by 2mm tab sticking out the side, and in robot mode they're meant to store in slots that are perpendicular to the stress slots on the hip joints. The actual stress slots are the wrong size for this. There's also 6mm by 2mm slots on the
sides of the feet, which is where the guns store in vehicle mode, but you can put the guns there if you don't want them falling off when you turn the figure's waist. The gun bracer attaches 6mm by 2mm tabs as well, but they're inside the curve and can't go into any of the other slots (you can
technically force the pistols into the forearm slots, but they're a little narrower than 2mm and it's awkward). The halves of the bracer connect via
tabs that are more like 6.6mm by 1.4mm because consistency is not something these designers seem to like. That means that the tab and slot on the
forearm accessory are too narrow for the pistols as well. The right forearm accessory attaches via a 1.4mm by 7mm tab, because of course it does. You know, there's enough room in almost all of these spots (everywhere but the bracer halves connecting to each other) to just use 5mm pegs and sockets,
they didn't have to use three different sizes of thin tab. This is a design that has at least a little contempt for anyone who wants to open the box and take the toy out to play with, I think.
While the halves of the wrist blaster are technically identical, you
need to put the top one in place first, because if you put the bottom one in first it's hard to align it correctly to accept the top half. It makes a chunky bangle around the left forearm (and only the left, there's no way to connect it on the right) with six blaster barrels that each end in 3mm studs, one of the few concessions the toy makes towards common design elements.
It's about 23mm in diameter and 30mm long (a little under and a little over
an inch). Unlike the 2017 version, it's not possible to have the left hand hold anything between the barrels.
The two guns are meant to store on the hips in robot mode and the rear fenders in vehicle mode, and they have their sides chosen by how their attachment tabs are pointed. The right-hip gun is sort of a revolver, and
the left-hip gun is just sort of...there.
The revolver looks like a 2020-ish AI was asked to design a pistol for a robot cop. Just a tall stack of barrels with a revolver cylinder somewhere
in the middle, and the top of a pistol grip before turning into a standard
5mm peg. The cylinder doesn't line up with any of the barrels, and since
they don't try to store the gun inside the vehicle mode there's no reason for it to be so flat...it reminds me of some of the cheap weapons given to the
Chap Mei Star Corps figures, except for the big tab sticking out of the left side above the grip. It's 35mm long, and other than the tab on the side is barely wider than the 5mm peg grip. The stack of barrels is 14mm tall.
The left hip gun is just sort of generic tech shapes with a grip and the big tab sticking out the right side. The 5mm peg grip becomes a rectangular peg (about 4.5mm by 2.5mm) for no good reason, unless they were trying to
make it look like a rectangular ammo clip sticking out the bottom. It's just one of those things that makes sure the peg won't go well into any shallow
5mm sockets.

Transformation: SO much excessive force required at joints with almost
no leverage available when folding up the legs! Snapping the boots together for make the back end almost required getting out a vise. And it turns out
the left front fender is outright missing from mine. Not rattling around in the box, just GONE.
I am sorely tempted to just give up on this review at this point, before writing either the robot or vehicle sections (other than a brief note about aligning the wrist blaster halves). This is not a fun toy, this is a device for making fingers hurt.
Anyway, all the weapons store on the outside, there was no attempt to create interior storage for anything. The pistols use thin slots on the rear fenders, and the stereo cover piece goes over the rear window and has a tab
and a slot to let you mount the halves of the wrist blaster there, the same storage location that was used for it in the Deluxe Barricade from the Last Knight line (although that bracelet opened on a hinge rather than being two separate pieces, and had eight barrels rather than six).
When transforming back to robot mode, the legs still cause problems, and the rear fenders are really easy to put under excessive stress to the point they pop off. I double-checked the room to make sure it hadn't done that
while I was transforming and untransforming the arms while trying to figure things out, but if it was ever in the box it's good and lost now.

Vehicle Mode: Unlike most Barricades, which are black and white, this is predominantly dark blue and white, with tinted windows and some black bits.
It is still a licensed cop-mod Saleen-mod Ford. The usual police push bar in front of the grille is augmented by a sort of bulldozer-ish set of teeth
along the bottom, and the spoiler in back has bits along it which remind me
of anti-skateboarding hostile architecture. The very front of the hood has a small gap with tech greebles showing through, I'm not sure if that's supposed to represent battle damage or deliberate removal, although it's sitting where
a Decepticon symbol might go, so maybe he's supposed to have torn that off to be in better disguise? Oh, wait, there's a black plastic fold-out panel that was supposed to covre that, I was too distracted by the various crappy
aspects of the transformation to notice it initially. Interestingly, there's
a molded flat rectangle in front for a license plate (none is printed), but
no molded spot for one in back.
5" (12.5cm) long including the dozer teeth and spoiler, so a little smaller than the 2017 toy, in the aforementioned colors plus a little dark silver, red, and clear blue. The windshield and side window pieces are clear smoky plastic, although the side windows are attached over dark blue plastic
so the only light that gets through is at the small pegs where they're attached. The lightbars are also smoky plastic, with clear paint over that
so they're kinda dark. The front bumper parts, spoiler, and wheels are black plastic. The rest of the vehicle shell is dark blue plastic.
The roof is painted white with a big "867" printed in black. The doors are painted shite with black "POLICE" printed on them. Somewhat annoyingly, the bits of the roof piece that are tabs that go into the side window borders are also painted white, rather than being left unpainted to match the rest of the border. Gloss black paint is used on the centerline of the hood except
the very front bit (which is dark silver) and on the rear window louvre
slats. The right and left thirds of the front bumper are painted dark blue
in an okay match with the plastic. The tiny headlights (which look more like Bayformer multiple eyes) and the lights built into the pushbar are also dark silver. The upper part of the back end is painted gloss black with thin red taillights. Each half of the lightbar is unpainted for a couple millimeters
at the end where they touch, and clear red paint over one half, clear blue
over the other (red on the driver's side by default). So, the middle of the combined lightbar is still clear, they didn't bother painting something
opaque over it.
It rolls okay on the pinned wheels. The only standard connector is the 3mm socket from the back of the pelvis which is now on the underside,
otherwise it's all tabs and slots. The lightbar halves are attached via 5mm pegs, so if you removed them you could mount the AI Revolver on the roof, but the tab at the end of the other pistol makes for a dubious fit.

Overall: If you want a toy of the 2017 Last Knight Barricade, the 2017
toy is SO much better in just about every way. I almost gave it a strongly recommended, which almost never happens with Bayformer toys. This toy is not any kind of recommended. Yeah, the robot mode is okay (if full of
questionable design elements) and the vehicle mode is okay, but for a TRANSFORMERS toy a badly thought out transformation can really ruin things.


DECEPTICON: AIRACHNID
Assortment: G1929
Altmode: Drone-like multirotor aircraft
Transformation Difficulty: 36 steps
Previous Name Use: Prime, TFOne
Previous Mold Use: None
Movie: TF One
Scene: None in particular

AIRACHNID is the Surveillance Officer for SENTINEL PRIME

Well, her scene bit is just an upper body shot without context, but she didn't exactly have any shining moments. Mostly she hung around in the background, and probably mostly existed so that Elita-1 would have another
girl to fight at the end. No real connection to the Prime Airachnid (who always felt like an attempt to do Blackarachnia without having to deal with
any of her backgrounds). She did get a toy in the TFOne line, technically,
as a one-step changer that looked more like a spider and might well have been designed before the animation design was finalized.

Packaging: Seven ties hold the robot to the tray, but there's a huge amount of stuff that's been stuck through to the back and needs to be eased
out through a relatively small hole. A plastic bag with her two small arm cannons is taped to the lower right side.
The screenshot on the back is a pretty generic "she's standing in a
room, smirking at something" picture.
Slightly mistransformed in the package, the main rotor is supposed to be folded up via a hinge in its hub. That wouldn't fit in the box, though, so they have it opened up partially. This may have been a relatively late decision, since the instructions don't mention the need to adjust that bit.

Robot Mode: Even by the standards of this movie, Airachnid has really
long legs. Measuring to her hip joints, her legs make up about two thirds of her total height. She has a total of eight limbs, with four spindly legs attached to the backpack. The upper pair end in blaster barrels (too thin
for Fire Blasts), the bottom pair are just pointy. The lower pair can help stabilize the figure a bit, but the joints aren't tight enough to support
much. If you use the regular robot arms to help stabilize them, though, you can manage a pose where only the backpack legs support the robot, in a way
that the original Airachnid did with her three rotor legs in the cartoon.
Yeah, this is still the year of the tight joints, but the skinny backpack
legs are an exception. The main robot legs are also very spindly,
reminiscent of prosthetic running blades but with stiletto heels added. Her upper body looks like she's wearing a heavy flak jacket with big shoulderpads and forearm armor. I do like the fact that the designers didn't feel the
need to give her big mecha-breasts, she looks feminine but sleek...at least until you hit the massive thighs. She's practically a Pixar Mom in that department. Similarly, while she has molded lips, she doesn't have painted lipstick, in keeping with the movie design. The parts visible in the screenshot on the box are matched pretty well by the actual toy, although I think they might have had her backpack legs just sort of fold into subspace
in the cartoon, I'd need to rewatch her thirty seconds or so of robot mode screen time. The overall impression I get from her design is "agile, but expects to get shot anyway, so plans for that." As for the arachnid aspect,
in addition to the four spindly legs that bring her total count to eight
limbs, her eyes have the "lots of eyes" motif preferred by most arachnids, if not in the arrangement they favor. Each regular humanoid-style eye has a row of four more smaller eyes extending backwards along the swoop of her helmet head under extended almost wing-like crest horn eyebrows.
I did swap the lower legs for reasons discussed below, but as long as I keep her toes pointed outwards a little this actually makes the robot mode
look less toyetic rather than more, as the rivets become more backwards- facing.
5.5" (14cm) tall at the head, the backpack legs can reach up to roughly double that, or spread out to a span of 10" (25.5cm). Mainly medium-dark
gray with some silver, red, and purple accents. All of the plastic is a sort of medium-dark gray, but there's some variations I'll address later, as it's more obvious in vehicle mode. All ten eyes are painted blue-purple. The
face is silver, the barrels of the arm cannons are darker silver, and dark gunmetal paint is used on the ducted fans molded into the shins. There's a pair of red stripes in a chevron-like pattern along the bottom half of the shoulderpads, interrupted in the middle by a groove. As standard for TFOne characters, she has no faction symbol, because the factions haven't arisen
yet (and Sentinel Prime is somehow able to restrain himself from having everyone wear badges based on his own face).
The neck is a ball joint with the socket in the torso rather than the head, there is no waist joint. Ball joint shoulders and elbows, the wrists
can wiggle a little on transformation hinges (you can also use that to fold away the fist and pop out another gun barrel for Moar Dakka, but be careful
to not pop the piece off iuts mushroom peg entirely). Ball joint hips with a tendency to pop off easily, especially since the swivels just above the knees are very stiff. Hinge knees, plus a couple of transformation hinges along
the leg that can be used for some extra range of motion. Everything below mid-shin is immobile spindly bits, she functionally has stiletto heels and stands on four points (toes and heels) rather than on proper feet. The lower pair of arms has somewhat stiff ball joints at the root and hinges at the one-third and two-thirds spots. The upper arms are bot more complicated and have less range of motion...the roots are restricted ball joints, with three hinges all along the first 40% of length. None of them have ball joints or swivels anywhere but the root, which impairs some of the potential range of motion, and the hinges are on the weak side so it's difficult to use them to fully support the figure. The lower legs are stable enough to help the iffy feet, although the design of the figure means the center of mass is likely to be pretty far forwards and legs in back don't so much support as move the center of mass a bit.
The fists can hold 5mm pegs, and there are 5mm sockets on the outer
faces of the forearms that are intended for the blasters. There's a 3mm
socket in the back of the pelvis, useful if you want to pose her more dynamically and not worry about the figure falling over. There's some pegs
and sockets in the lower arms for transformation, but they're 2.3mm in
diameter and not useful for anything else. Lots of other transformation- specific tabs and slots...yeah, I miss when designers tried to use
standardized pegs as much as possible so you'd have incidental attachment points for accessories.
The blasters have short pegs and are meant to go on the forearms, but
they can be hand-held if you want (in theory, but it's a REALLY tight fit on mine). Identical 31mm (1.25") long moderately detailed guns with smooth barrels that have thin iron sights on their 3mm diameter barrels (the sights stop far enough back to secure a Fire Blast without issues). The 5mm pegs
are near but not at the back, and are 3mm long.

Transformation: So, 36 steps. My immediate suspicion is that more than half of the steps involve the fiddly bits that become the rotors and their housing. And yeah, getting that main rear rotor together was a literal
pain. It seemed relatively straightforwards until I realized I needed to
also integrate the lower pair of backpack legs into it as a sort of landing gear, which meant getting three tabs into slots all at once on each side,
which took a LOT of force and resulted in significant finger pain. Not as
bad as Barricade, but still pretty bad. Oh, and the ball joints on the hips and the hip armor pop off very easily and frequently. How easily? Let's
just say I gave up on actually rotating the hip armor and just removed it
then reattached it in the correct position.
While I got it transformed to match the package renders, I can't help
but feel the boots are on the wrong sides. The rivets are on the upper face, which matches the picture on the box, but normally that sort of toyetic
detail is hidden on the underside. They're even labeled R and L to match the sides they're on, so I dunno what the deal is. The pieces are otherwise
pretty symmetric and it's just a snap-in disk swivel, so I'm going to try swapping them. (Too bad swapping the entire leg puts tabs and slots from the thighs on the wrong side, since popping out at the hips is trivially easy.) Okay, swapping accomplished, this looks slightly better.
Going back to robot mode, I only had a hip pop off once and nothing else fell off...it's easier to get the hip pads turned around back to being hip
pads than getting them out for vehicle mode. Some of the tabs are pretty stiff, and it was difficult getting the backpack separated from the head.

Vehicle Mode: Unlike the One-Step version, there is nothing particularly spidery about this. Nor is it really a disguise, not that Cybertronians (outside of specific spy-type jobs) needed to use their altmodes for disguise at this point in history. It's a ducted fan drone aircraft sort of thing,
with a big rotor-in-a-ring in back and too much smaller ones on winglets
formed from the boots slightly ahead of the center of mass. Aerodynamically it's a mess that should have to strain to not fall over, but maybe she's
really supported by antigravity and the fans are just for maneuvering (which they'd be bad at since none of them can tilt). The hip pads form a sort of hollow front end with a bunch of guns under it, if they didn't need to be in that position to stabilize the arms I'd probably fold them back. In addition to the robot mode arm cannons, there's additional barrels that swap in when
the fists are stowed, and the bits on the backs of the calves are now also forwards-facing gun barrels.
7" (18cm) long in total and 6.25" (16cm) wide, with the rear rotor ring being 3.75" (9cm) in diameter. Almost entirely medium-dark gray with some
very dark gunmetal accents and the red stripes from the robot shoulders
visible on the sides. On the one hand, I could just say it's all medium-
dark gray plastic. But there's several distinct shades and the differences
are more apparent in this mode, checking with UV light shows enough asymmetry to suggest this is largely batch variation. There's no new paints visible in this mode (the face is properly hidden, though), and in keeping with the setting she has no faction symbol in this mode either.
The main rotor spins freely, but unevenly thanks to the big hinge for
the hub split. The secondary rotors in the winglets do not move. That's basically it for articulation that isn't just "something came untabbed." The folded up legs that caused so much hassle in transformation form the rear of landing struts, while little nubs on the robot forearms provide support in front.
The 3mm socket from the back of the pelvis is more or less accessible on the underside of the nose end, although resting this mode on the joint
between the main body and the rear rotor assembly is a lot closer to center
of mass and therefore more stable. All six forwards-pointing gun barrels end in 3mm diameter tips. If you have a narrow enough 3mm peg-grip gun you can
add to the weapons facing forwards using the 3mm socket.
I'd say this altmode is interesting, but maybe not worth the effort
unless you really want to troop-build tri-rotor drones for something.

Overall: A complicated design that's executed about as well as possible
on the Deluxe budget, but it suffers badly from Hasbro's ongoing problem with joints being randomly too tight or too loose or popping off too easily. So, something of a crapshoot, but also the only remotely screen-accurate version we're likely to get of the second-most-prominent female character in the
movie. (We didn't get a lot of Elita-1 toys either.)


Dave Van Domelen, now to see about fixing up some of Airachnid's looser joints....


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