Dave's Exo-Force Deep Jungle Rantlet 8118: Hybrid Rescue Tank Permalink: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Lego/8118 See http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Lego/ExoforceDJ for general line comments. Due to poor sales of the bigger ($50+) sets in the previous years of Exo-Force, the line has been cancelled, and it looks like this is the biggest set we'll get for Deep Jungle. That was enough to motivate me to buy it. CAPSULE Decent size, nice features and design. It's not a mech, but it's pretty good despite that. Recommended. $29.99 at Target. RANT I like that this box is taped closed on the side rather than glued. I've never liked Lego's box-sealing style. There's no errata sheet this time to compensate for designers using pieces that ended up not getting produced. There's the usual sticker sheet, a two-book set of instructions. Book 1 covers bag 1 (characters and partner mech) and the two #2 bags (detachable flying craft). Book 2 covers the body of the tank, which consists of four bags labeled 3 and several loose pieces (the huge rear wheel, the tank treads, and four long struts). I think they should have split the book 2 stuff into two different sets of bag, though... there's so many pieces in bags labeled 3 that the point of separating them out into numbered bags is nearly lost. Unit: Hybrid Rescue Tank Type: Land/Air Hybrid EXO-FORE Battle Tank Pilots: Ryo, Sensei Keiken Pilot Hair Color: Purple, Gray Main Mecha Colors: Blue, white, gray Weapons: Rotating rail blaster, mobile cutting lasers, quad-plasma cannons, double homing missiles, and more (yes, the official listing just ends with "and more"). Partner: Download Partner Code: NA311 Armor: 18 inches zaylium armor Sensors: Next-generation sensor package: night vision, telescopic zoom, infrared vision, 360-degree vision, mobile targeting array Power Source: Twin Magnetized Oroniate Generators Unit Designation: AT.20 Unit Type: All-Terrain Nickname: Dokukiri (Poison Mist) Sticker Code: EXO5XRZ8 Bio Note: Ryo has been an inventor and engineer for most of his young life, and a good one, too. But he's never seen anything like the Hybrid Rescue Tank that Sensei Keiken built for him. Using cutting-edge Golden City technology and a unique tread/wheel traction system, it can roll over - or through - anything the robots or jungle can throw in its path. Its multi-barreled rotating blaster fires high-velocity bursts that can shred the armor of the toughest robot battle machines, and if that's not enough, it's got an arsenal of additional weapons and a transforming mini-robot drone to up the ante. Best of all, the top turret can detach and convert into a flying vehicle for scouting and recon missions. When the EXO-FORCE team rescues Sensei Keiken, Ryo's planning to thank him by letting him drive the tank...at least for a couple of minutes, anyway. Nobody touches Ryo's toys but Ryo, after all. Partner Bio (fanfic): Nothing will ever replace Uplink in Ryo's affections, but that doesn't mean he stops trying to make new friends. Literally. Download is his latest attempt, a flying spy drone that can shift into a faster, more agile aerial form when speed is key. Twin sensor domes behind Download's head can either flood the area with penetrating radar, or passively collect information without giving away its position. As with all of the supposedly mindless drones Ryo has built, Download has demonstrated a fair amount of personality. Download's particular defining trait is his love of transmitting information. It'll collect seemingly useless data, just to be able to tell someone about it. Ha-Ya-To jokes that Download's like a gossipy old woman...but not where Download can hear it. Build Time: Three sets of bags. Bag 1: Sorting time 1 minute, build time a little under three minutes. Bags 2: Sorting time 4 minutes (mostly on the bag of tiny bits), build time 16 minutes. Bags 3: Sorting time 7 minutes (man, there's a lot of rod pieces), build time 35 minutes. Overall: Sorting time 12 minutes, build time 54 minutes. Design: Before going into the usual categories, I need to lay out how this thing works. All put together, it's a sort of reverse halftrack with triangular treads in front and a single huge tire in the back. It has a turret that detaches to become a flying vehicle, and a Partner mech that attaches to the turret/jet on top. I'm going to call the bottom part the Base, the top part the Jet, and the whole thing the Hybrid. Just so I don't have to keep repeating myself. :) The Base has a cockpit at the front left, with a six-barrelled cannon on the front right. It follows a generally "hammerhead" or "reverse trike" pattern, and has a couple of small guns at the root of the turret, so it still has weapons up there when the Jet is gone. There's also articulated weapon pods on the flanks. As a turret, the Jet is sort of lozenge-shaped, with four cannons clusted together in pairs, plus a missile pod on either side. The front sides fold back into wings, the cannons on them folding back forward so that there's still four guns pointed forward, just more spread out. The missile pods can be repositioned to suit. There's a sticker that I think is supposed to be a VTOL intake on top behind the cockpit. Download plugs into blocks just ahead of the VTOL intake. Dimensions: The Hybrid and Base are both 11" (28cm) long and 6" (15cm) wide. The Base is 5.5" (14cm) tall, the Hybrid is 7" (18cm) tall. When folded up for Hybrid mode, the Jet is 9" (23cm) long, 5.5" (14cm) wide and 2.5" (6cm) tall (add a little bit if Download is on top). With the wings spread for flight mode, the Jet is 7.5" (19cm) long, 11.5" (29cm) wide, and the height doesn't change. The tread chunks on the Base are isoceles triangles 5" (12cm) at the base and 2.5" (6cm) tall, with tread bands 2cm wide. The rear wheel is a big balloony thing 3.75" (9.5cm) in diameter and 1.75" (4.5cm) thick. Colors: The main skeleton of the Base is dark gray with blue rods. The other structural pieces are mainly white, with blue curved armor pieces all over the place, and other gray skeletal pieces. The cockpits are smoky clear plastic, most of the weapon muzzles are clear yellow-green, but the homing rocket tips on the Jet and the flank pod cannon muzzles on the Base are clear red. All the cannon barrels are black, as are the wheel and tread hubs. There's a few gray vent pieces here and there, and yellow-green vents on the Jet's wings. Stickers: Predominantly blue and ghost gray with black and silver bits, plus some green glowy effects. Ther's a sort of dazzle camo pattern on several of them. As usual, the drone has its own set of stickers and labels for its "launch pad" area (no stickers on the drone itself): SPY DRONE Encrypted Transmitter Info-X Pull to jettison recording box NA311 ...plus a sort of schematic view of the drone. Other sticker text bits include "3H Support System" (fandom in joke?), "WARNING: PLASMA CORE ENGINE", "DANGER EXTREME HEAT", "3PG PLASMA POWERED PARTICLE GATLING" and the Japanese character translated as Dokukiri/Poison Mist. There's headlights on the Base's cockpit section, heh. Articulation: The treads and wheel roll. A geared system lets you turn a cog on the side and rotate the turret. There's four weapons out on ball-jointed short stalks. The Jet's wings can ratchet back and forth, as can the cannons attached to them. Both cockpits open. Weapons: The "rotating rail blaster" is a six-barrelled gatling cannon that gives the Base a sort of WWI tank feel. According to the stickers, it's a Plasma Powered Particle Gatling, though. I'm thinking the mobile cutting lasers are the pod-mounted red-tipped weapons on the flanks of the Base. The quad-plasma cannons would be the four long-barrelled weapons on the Jet, and the homing missiles the pod-mounted rockets on the Jet. That leaves two plasma cannons on the root of the Base's turret and Download's weapon as the "and more" from the stats. There's numerous stickers showing what are probably searchlights or running lights of some sort. A nice unifying design feature can be found on the cannons on the root of the Base's turret and on the core part of the Jet. The barrels are held on by two clip pieces, with a gray angled vent behind that. So it's like a recoil venting system. Other Features: The gatling cannon is geared to the right tread, and spins as you roll the toy forward. This is a Nifty Thing. The treads themselves are a bit stiff, but they may just need some breaking in. Not really a feature so much as a bug, but the single-stick nature of the connection between Jet and Base makes the Hybrid a touch wobbly. Pilot Figures: Keiken has all white except for yellow head and hands, and long gray hair. Black and gray details on the chest, and a red "Light" symbol badge. Like all Exo-Force humans, he has two faces: a serious face and an angry face in his case. A red scar runs down the left side of his face, and he has a gray mustache and pointy beard. Ryo has orange torso, arms and legs, black hands, dark gray pelvis, yellow yead and purple hair. His chest patterning is silver and gray armor, with white camo pattern on his abdomen. He's still wearing that headband, and has not picked up any scars. Partner: Download is another "robot on a stick", with a long rod hanging out the back like a tail. He has winglets on his legs that turn into tailfins in altmode. Like all the other drones, he's built around an X-shaped cog piece in black plastic and uses light gray T-bar pieces for shoulder joints. He has a clear red eye, black claws, and yellow-green ball pieces behind his head in a sort of dumbbell shape. All the other pieces are white. Stands 2" (5cm) tall in robot mode, and holds one of those "megaphone" blasters. Hinge shoulders and hips, swivel wrists. The head doesn't really move. To transform to vehicle mode, lift the legs up to the sides, fold the arms down to the sides and point them forward, and plug the blaster into the tip of the rod that sticks out the belly. Simplistic, yeah. But it also results in a fairly good altmode. The jet mode has a wingspan of 2.25" (5.5cm) and a total length of 3" (7.5cm). Dave Van Domelen, will need to put away some other toys to make room for this bad boy.