From Newsgroup: alt.toys.transformers

Dave's Transformers Studio Series Rant: Voyager Wave 30

Thundercracker (F-15 fighter jet)

Permalink: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Studio/VThundercracker86

I guess either they decided they'd squeezed as many uses as they could
out of the Earthrise Seeker design, or it was starting to get hard to produce that mold at the current budget. I'm sure someone has done the stats on how many times each of the original Seeker Trio got to be the first out the door for a new mold, but the honor does get around, it's not always Starscream.
Seekers are one of the ways Hasbro keeps overall development costs down, thanks to fans willing to buy color runs based on an animation error or just loosely inspired by a character who appeared for five seconds in one
episode. Not even counting the conehead variants, TFWiki lists 10
U.S. releases of the Earthrise Seeker mold (and two cancelled redecos) and 18 Japanese releases (albeit some were low-run store exclusives). So, that and all the redecos an retools of Sideswipe helped them justify molds that only
got one redeco or none at all. (There have been a few new Seeker molds since Earthrise, but they've been movieverse and not as easily reused...and the Bumblebee movie Seeker mold sucks.)
So, time for a new neo-G1 Seeker mold, and Skywarp will use it in the
next wave. It sold out for preorder on Pulse before I even saw it was available, and frankly I'm inclined to wait for it to hit shelves and decide then...with Voyagers being $43 now I'm not going to automatically grab All
The Seekers unless the mold is really good, something I will be determining
for myself here. TFWiki reports that all the different heads molded to distinguish the various Seekers accidentally got mixed up, so any given Thundercracker might have a Skywarp head or a Starscream head or whatever.


CAPSULE

$43 on HasbroPulse.

Thundercracker: A pretty good design in both modes, and the
transformation is reasonably forgiving aside from the excessive force I had
to apply to some of the tabs and slots. While I'm increasingly reluctant to pay Voyager prices for redecos/retools, this is a decent start to the inevitable flood of those. Recommended (or wait for your preferred deco to come out).


RANT

Packaging: Same window box as other recent Studio Voyagers. The package art on mine matches the face I got, so I probably have the "correct" Thundercracker head. The bit of backdrop on the right side appears to be the interior of the Autobot shuttle during the early scene that has given us several dead variants of Autobot molds. The screengrab on the back has Thundercracker objecting to the proposal he be thrown out of Astrotrain, flanked by a horrified Skywarp and with battered Insecticons in the
foreground.


DECEPTICON: THUNDERCRACKER
Assortment: G2192
Altmode: F-15 Eagle
Transformation Difficulty: 27 steps
Previous Name Use: Yes
Previous Mold Use: None
Movie: TFtM
Scene: Lightening the Load

THUNDERCRACKER prepares for battle alongside DECEPTICON leader,
MEGATRON.

Yeah, they did not pick a "preparing for battle" scene for the box
back.

Packaging: Six plastic ties hold the robot to the inner tray. The bag taped to the lower right of the tray has the arm guns, the tail pieces, and
the wing tips. Why are the wingtips separate pieces? Maybe to make it
easier to do some of the planned retools. The instructions include two ways
to assemble the robot, depending on whether you'd prefer a toy-accurate look (tail sections on the boots) or more animation-style (hide the tail sections
on the back of the wings).

Robot Mode: So, tail piece options aside, this is very much the animated design, as has been the norm for the TFtM Studio Series toys. I suppose if Walmart's Retro line ever wanted to branch into Voyagers, they could do a
dark blue version with maybe a few mold tweaks as the toy-style (the previous TF Retro Thundercracker from Walmart was in movie colors, but that was before they started doing the toy-style tooling of modern molds as opposed to redone G1 molds). As has been the tendency for the TFtM homage toys, the colors mostly stick to simplified animation models (although ToyHax will be happy to sell you a bunch of stickers to add more details) while the actual mold is somewhat more detailed than that. Also, as usually tends to happen with
neo-G1 Seekers, the air intake scoops flanking the head have flat sides and back rather than being curved forwards as in the animation model,
prioritizing how they'll look in vehicle mode. They're actually tall
isoceles triangles from the side, not right triangles as they initially feel like when viewed from the front. I mentioned the various faces earlier, the expression on this one is fairly neutral with the mouth open, with perhaps a hint of a smile going on. It's not the dull surprise from the screenshot on the box back. Oh, and to save time, pretty much none of the paints that are supposed to match plastic colors actually do so. The light gray paint is too dark, the light blue and almost-black paints are too light.
Just over 6" (15cm) tall at the head, or 6.5" (16.5cm) tall at the shoulder scoops, in the animation colors of light blue, light gray, and "very dark gray for black" with some bits of red and amber. Light blue plastic is used for the entire back including the wings, the air intake scoops flanking the head, the torso center except for the cockpit canopy, the front plates of the rest of the torso, shoulders, biceps, hips, thighs, most of the boots,
and the tail parts. There does seem to be a split between two different
kinds of blue plastic, with a more flexible variety used for a few joints,
but they all look the same under UV light. Very dark gray plastic is used
for most of the head, the forearms, fists, feet, knee joints, and some hinges inside the torso. Very light ghost gray plastic makes up just the torso
sides, inner shoulder joint parts, and pelvis. I'm guessing there's just
clear colorless plastic here with various clear or semi-clear paints, and
it's used for the eye lightpiping, canopy window, and for some reason the arm guns. Are they planning on a Seeker with clear cannons, or did the sprues
just work out most efficiently that way?
Most of the paint just goes towards letting them make parts out of the "wrong" plastic color for long term efficiency reasons or something. Light gray paint covers the right and left torso fronts except down at the bottom,
as well as the air intakes, the face, and rectangles on top of the toes. Annoyingly, there's some mold flash on one of the air intakes of mine, so if
I want to scrape it off I'll also have to repaint over it. The eyes are painted gloss red, thick enough that for the lightpiping to work you need really bright light (a red laser works great), while the cockpit canopy is painted clear amber with light blue opaque bits at the hinge and the frame.
The same gloss light blue covers the arm cannons except for the attachment
pegs (the studs at the tips are painted over). Matte dark gray paint is used on the shin trapezoids and the vertical stabilizer parts of the tail pieces, while gloss sky blue paint is used on the vents on the undersides of the kneepads. The wings have thick red stripes paired with thin white stripes along the leading edge and bending towards the back at the ends, plus no-outline upside down Decepticon symbols.
The neck is a ball joint with the socket in the head and some wiggle
room, plus the neck shaft is on a hinged transformation panel which gives the head a little more forwards/backwards range. The waist is a smooth swivel
but can only turn about 30 degrees either way...the thighs hit part of the backpack first, just before the briefs part does unless you lift the legs out of the way, then the briefs hit. Pinned hinge and swivel shoulders, bicep swivels, hinge elbows. Technically the wrists are ball jointed, but they can only swivel and the extra range is purely for transformation. Pinned hinge
and swivel hips, upper thigh swivels, hinge knees, instep hinges. The toes
are on transformation hinges, but more likely to pop off entirely than be useful for supporting dynamic stances. The wings are pegged in place. The front of the briefs is hinged to swing up and get out of the way of the legs
as necessary, and panels on the sides are also hinged to let the legs spread out to the sides (they also need to fold all the way up to make room for the forearms during transformation).
The fists can hold 5mm pegs, there's 5mm sockets on the outer faces of
the biceps (not the shoulderpads, for once), there's two 5mm sockets on the back of each wing (one on each is meant for the tail pieces if you're going animation style, the other for storing the guns in vehicle mode), and a 5mm socket on the outer face of each ankle (for storing the tail pieces in toy style, as well as where they go in vehicle mode). There's no connectors on
the undersides of the feet, nor is there a 3mm socket anywhere for flight
base purposes. (The back of the pelvis is open but also kinda blocked by backpack, so even if they put in a joint cover with a socket it wouldn't be that useful.)
Now, the guns are a bit weird in that they're made of clear colorless plastic and then painted over almost entirely in gloss light blue paint (only the connector pegs are unpainted). They're identical, 3" (7.5cm) long with
5mm pegs near the back end. Both the barrel tips and the "butt" end have extremely short (about 1mm long) 3mm diameter studs, so you can kind of put a Fire Blast on either end but don't count on it staying put. The studs being painted doesn't really help with getting a solid fit either. They are the standard "Null Ray" shape even though technically only Starscream has Null Rays. They're incendiary guns in the case of the original toy, or generic pewpew blasters in the cartoon. The pegs are too short to let him hold them solidly in his hands, but you can kinda get them to stay in about as well as
a Fire Blast will stay on the barrel tips.

Transformation: Okay, so there's only so many ways to turn a reasonably animation-accurate robot into an F-15 (or close enough) without deliberately making something different and bad just for the sake of being different, but this does feel at least somewhat different from all the other F-15 Seekers of recent years (counting Earthrise, the Kingdom Core class, various Authentics and other side lines). It was also reasonably forgiving, while I found a couple of ways to actually get the order wrong (notably, you shouldn't put
the tail pieces in their final position until the wings are in theirs, or
it's harder to mesh the connecting bits), I did a bunch of stuff in an order *different* from the instructions without it causing problems. A lot of transformation designs punish you for deviating even a little from the instructions order, and it's nice when you can safely puzzle things out
without having to back up a half dozen steps because you completed the legs before the torso or whatever.
There's a few bits that can cause problems. The mecha-boobs pieces are attached to the tops of the torso via hinges, but they're not meant to
actually bend, so don't force them! They at most give a tiny amount of
wiggle room. And when collapsing the thighs down into the boots, you need to push in kinda hard to snap them into place, or there won't be enough room to close the backs of the boots. One of the back panels tabs onto the backs of the boots to fill in the top of the jet mode, but on mine it doesn't like to stay pushed in all the way.
Going back to robot mode, I found an easy trick to getting the thighs unsnapped from inside the boots: bend the knees and put your finger between
the kneepad and the thigh, then squeeze the thigh down like a nutcracker, the shin bone will pop out before your finger gets hurt. Probably. It's
perfectly safe on mine, honest. Be careful folding the toes down, they snap
in place but if you force the snap too hard they'll just pop off entirely.
The only other bit that caused me issues was the bottom of the abdomen, which has to be pushed in pretty hard to make sure it catches on the tab that's supposed to keep it from coming loose.
Anyway, other than the toes, nothing came off that wasn't supposed to
come off during the transformation process, which these days I'll count as a win.

Vehicle Mode: So, it's an F-15 within the limits of not being licensed, and it's a single-seater variant. Classic swept-back wings, twin vertical stabilizers flanking dual thrusters, and the usual amount of robot parts just sort of hanging out on the underside. There is a nosewheel (that I could
just barely get out with my fingernails), but the back end just rests on the robot toes. The tips of the toes, in my case, which makes me wonder if I am consistently mistransforming the thigh-collapse and it should bend so that
the toes are flat on the desktop. The instructions aren't particularly clear on that bit.
9" (23cm) long, compared to a 19.4m-long F-15, which would make it
around 1:85 scale based on length. The wingspan is just under 6" (15cm), making it properly proportional (the real thing has a wingspan of 13m). As befits an animation Thundercracker, it's mostly light blue with some ghost gray, amber cockpit canopy, and some black bits. The only completely new
parts to this mode are the nosecone (light blue plastic) and the nosewheel (very dark gray almost black plastic). A couple of bits on top of the
fuselage are actually painted dark gray on blue plastic, I think they're supposed to evoke the black wing hinge pieces on the G1 toy, which I suppose could've made it into a "blink and you miss it" frame or two of the movie. Aside from being painted almost-black, the vertical stabilizers are left undetails (no red and white stripes), which is consistent with the animation model rather than the G1 toy. I don't even have to look to state with confidence that sticker kits are available for those who want to add those stripes back on, though.
The cockpit canopy opens and there's a tiny seat inside. To fit
properly, a pilot would need to be 15-17mm tall, so 1:85 scale would mean a pretty short pilot at only about 1.5m tall max...I know fighter pilots tend
to be short, but that might be a bit much. Then again, I'm estimating
standing height based on a seat shape, so I might be underestimating by a few millimeters. The only other intentional articulation is the nose wheel.
The underwing 5mm sockets remain accessible, although the ones closer to the root are kinda tight against the fuselage. The bicep sockets are used to keep the robo-boobs in place and the fists are folded away. However, in the big gap in the torso where the nose of the jet was folded up you can now
access a 3mm socket. It's ahead of the center of mass, but not by too much, and is clearly meant for use with flight stands.

Overall: While transformation requires excessive force in a few places (and that might just be some copies rather than all), it's a decent design
for a new Seeker, and it should hold up for the number of redecos it will no doubt be getting.


Dave Van Domelen, supposes it's time to start putting away some of the Earthrise Seekers.
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