Gunpla, Gunpla Everywhere

So bit of an odd one this, but it would appear that one intrepid band of Gundam fans are working to create a ruleset for recreating battles between your favourite mecha, using 1/100 and 1/144 scale Gunpla kits in place of miniatures. From the looks of things they are working with Bandai to make it an officially licences project, with the intention of funding via Kickstarter. And I must say I find this very interesting.

Anyway, they’ve posted the first draft of the rules so if this sounds like it catches your fancy I would suggest checking out their website. Personally I’m looking at my 08th MS Team, and hoping they eventually provide rules for settings outside the Universal Century so the Astray series can hit the field 😉

https://www.gunplatop.com/?fbclid=IwAR1MO36PSgzGJpuwN8titUrJoIkhLtmwIgIQEXZpsvZBHRQuND6Mj0DKu1I

As mentioned some better shots of the completed Leo.

I have to say this kit blew me away for almost the exact opposite  reasons I was so impressed by the RG RX-78-2 kit; The parts count is low (literally 2 main sprues and a sprue of rubber joint gaps), the build simple but logical, and the end mech is  a perfect “troop  builder” that that perfectly capture the blank, impersonal, tank-like nature of the suit as  depicted in Gundam Wing.

Not bad for less than a tenner 😉

Right, so that’s the main suit complete, and that took  less than 90 minutes. Still got the weapons to go, but I am incredibly impressed with how this kit went together. The layout of the sprues was logical & well thought out, and made getting pieces clipped out in batches very intuitive.

I’ll look to get the equipment built next followed by some better pictures once I get the light box setup, hopefully showing off the dynamism of this kit.

Later folks 😉

So thought I’d set a challenge for myself and try to build this kit over the course of Hobby Night Live. As it stands the legs are don, and despite a comparatively small part count they do have an impressive bend in the knee…

So for the next build I figure after the complexity of a Real Grade kit,  something a little less taxing is in order, and this new kit of the Leo from Gundam Wing looks just the ticket.

One of the most recent crop of Gunpla kits, this represents several firsts: The fist time Gundam Wings main antagonist “grunt” mobile suit –  the Leo – gets a kit of its own (most surprising 23 years after the show first aired) and it’s the first kit in the “Gunpla Evolution Project” re-design. What this means is that whereas on most Gundam kits parts for one section of a build can be found either on different sprues or on vastly different parts of one sprue, here Bandai have gone back to the drawing board and reworked how they tool things.

Here, take a look at this picture of the sprue containing the main armour plates for the body, limbs & head:

What they have done is redesign the layout so that all the parts for each component are on separate runners on the sprue, arranged in a logical fashion – Legs at the bottom, side by side, arms on the outside, torso at the top with miscellaneous elements (the shield for example) on a runner above that. and this is echoed on the other sprues in  the kit as well. What this should mean is that when you start work on a component you won;t need to keep jumping around a sprue, and in theory could cut all the pieces off of one runner instead of doing it as you go, knowing that all the pieces you have cut are needed for the element you are working on.

This also shows signs of increased efficiency on the part of Bandai – The Leo kit comes in a box a good third shallower than the 1/144 Hg kits I’m used to building, and the sprues seem to have far less “dead space” around them. It probably also helps that the Leo is a “grunt” kit, which most folks will  probably use as a troop builder so they ant to keep construction relatively streamlined and simple.

I guess we will see eitherway 🙂