Dave's Power Core Combienrs Rant: Combiner Wave 4 Grimstone (styracosaur) with Dinobots Steamhammer (bulldozer) with Constructicons Permalink: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/PCC/Combiner4 Line-Wide Comments: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/PCC/Core (also includes the "key" for my mods to techspec numbers in combined mode) Grimstone is notable as both the first non-vehicle PCC and also the first canonical Dinobot combiner team (Energon Grimlock/Swoop is a Duocon type, PCCs are closer to real combiners than that toy). Both of these guys have problems with nomenclature, which I will expand upon in the relevant entries. CAPSULES Grimstone with Dinobots: Different from other PCC sets, mostly in good ways, and it looks good. Many have issues with loose joints on the core figure, and one of the legs has a really long foot (which causes some issues), but on balance it's worth getting. Recommended. $15 at Walmart. Steamhammer with Constructicons: While Grimstone balances some really good and kinda bad, Steamhammer is simply all around competent if not exciting. Like Grimstone it has some interesting and seldom or never used altmodes, and the combined mode is impressive if a bit skinny. Recommended. $15 at Walmart. RANTS Packaging: Same as previous waves. Co-sells are for the other Combiner in the wave, plus Commander packs Heavytread with Groundspike and Skyhammer with Airlift. AUTOBOT: GRIMSTONE Altmode: "Triceratops" Previous Name Use: None Previous Mold Use: None Drones: Spinosaurus, Pachycephalosaurs, Parasaurolophus, Ankylosaurus Function: Super Warrior Motto: "Might might not make right, but it makes it a lot easier." GRIMSTONE has always dreamed of power and the privilege it brings. Despite his hunger for power, however, he has always considered the needs of others before himself. He believes it is the responsibility of the powerful to protect those less fortunate - a believe he intends to aggressively enforce now that he has his own power core team. STR 9 INT 6 SPD 3 END 10 RNK 8 COUR 9 FRB 5 SKL 5 Avg 6.875 A couple of significant name issues here. The packaging calls Grimstone a Triceratops when he's clearly a Styracosaur. The Spinosaurus Drone is obviously a Dimetrodon. Seriously, these are both "any five year old boy knows that" things. Speaking of five year olds, it's notable that all five of the prehistoric beasts represented by this team were already in the dinosaur books when I was 5. None of those trendy new velociraptors or giganotosaurs. Fanon mods for Power-Up Mode: +1 STR, -2 SPD, +1 FRB (three of the dinos are packing heat). Packaging: Two strings on Grimstone, one of which holds down a small shell piece over his chest. One string on each drone. "Spinosaurus" Drone has its tail folded up to fit in the box. The packaging and instructions disagree on which side the limbs go on (making me wonder if something simply got mirror-flopped). Heavy Tread is used for the alternate core example. Robot Mode: While he's got a bit of a thunderthighs thing going on, this is a pretty well-proportioned robot mode with a color balance that just screams G1 Dinobots. Unfortunately, he also has fairly tiny feet and a lot of backpack and shoulder kibble. His frill halves form a sort of short cloak around his shoulders, while his beast tail and forelegs are folded up pretty compactly on the back. While this looks pretty good just standing there, the result is shoulders that can barely move. His chest reminds me of a G1 Pretender inner robot, with big gaps for the shoulders to come together across the chest, and the beast head doesn't cover this up at all. In fact, it's pointed snout up, so it looks more like a beer gut with stubby horns. 4" (10.5cm) tall at the head, little cannons on the shoulders point up a bit higher depending on how the shoulderpads are posed. Like a G1 dinobot, the torso is mainly red and gold, with the limbs being gray and black. There's no actual chrome, but some reasonably shiny gold and silver paint. The torso and the heel spurs are bright red plastic. Medium gray plastic is used for the upper and lower arms, the upper thigh and most of the boots. Pretty much all of the joints are black plastic, as are the head, cannons, shoulderpads and beast-head chest. The PCC pegs are mostly hidden in this mode, but are the usual blue. Silver is probably the dominant paint color, found on the face, the shoulderpads, the thigh fronts and the barrels of the shoulder guns. Gold is used on the head-chest and on the tips of the shoulderpad frills. The stubby horns on the beast head are orange, as are details on the hips. There's a red border at the top of each shoulderpad, and half of an Autobot symbol on the back of each hand. Both the robot eyes and the beast eyes are medium blue. The head turns, the waist does not. The shoulders are kinda weird, being restricted ball joints stuck into the *middle* of the upper arm, with the ball part being on the end of a hinged strut If not for the frills on the shoulders, the extra hinge would probably make up for the odd positioning of the joint, but as it stands it's hard to move the arm around at this joint. The elbows are double joints, a hinge at the top and a ball joint at the bottom, making up for the lack of an upper arm swivel. There's no wrist joint, and the hand peg holes do not go through, so he can't hold anything that needs to sit more than a few millimeters into the hole. I'm tempted to drill out the bottom anyway, which would allow weapons to be mounted on the flanks in beast mode. The hips are universal joints and very stiff, as befits something intended for the combiner mode. There's a swivel above each knee, and the knees are single hinges. There's two more hinges at the joint, but they're only used for beast or torso modes. The heel spurs are hinged, but as mentioned are a bit loose. I had some serious stability issues with this mode. The ball joint part of each elbow joint was so floppy that it took several layers of superglue to stiffen them up to an acceptable level. And the heel spurs aren't all that strong, you have to make sure the PCC pegs are crammed in all the way to support a tiny lip on the heel pieces, or the figure will fall over backwards. Transformation: The beast head swings up over the robot head, which just sits there. The arms fold together across the front to form the frill and back of the beast mode, and it's a little tricky getting some pegs on the sides of the head into tabs in the frill. Swinging the arms together brings out the beast legs (getting it back the other way for robot mode can be tricky), and after that it's really just a matter of positioning the legs properly. Oddly, there's a swivel joint on the strut that connects the beast head to the body. It's odd because it's totally pointless. The nose end points the same way in robot mode, beast mode and torso mode. The ONLY practical use I could find was to give a more bestial alternate head in combiner mode. If you spin the head around on that joint in robot mode, the nose horn becomes a codpiece, so I kinda doubt that was intended. Beast Mode: It's called a Triceratops in the instructions, but the tiny horns over the eyes practically blend into the frill, which itself is far closer to Styracosaur's than to either Triceratops or Torosaurus (dinogeek note: new evidence strongly suggests that Triceratops is simply the teenaged form of the Torosaurus, and a Brontosaur/Apatosaur naming fight may be brewing). Of course, the big chunk at the end of the tail including a Mini-Con hardpoint doesn't look like any ceratopsian, but hey...the small cannons flanking the head aren't really standard issue for dinos either. Unfortunately, this mode also shares the original Cheetor mold's problem of having rear legs that are too long and therefore stick back weirdly. You can take advantage of the extra jointing in the rear legs to mitigate that a little bit, but at the cost of having the PCC pegs on them sticking straight back from the ankles (remember, the backwards knees of many animals are actually ankles, with the true knees hidden up in the thigh muscles). 4.5" (11.5cm) long from snout to tail tip. Adult Styracosaurs were about 18ft (5.5m) long, making this toy about 1:48 scale. The color balance shifts away from red and towards gray and silver. The gray plastic ends up on the back, tail, most of the forelegs and the upper and lower thirds of the rear legs. The red plastic is almost entirely on the belly, with the robot heels folded up. The head and frill are black, but almost entirely painted, and the middle third of the rear legs is black plastic as well. The robot head isn't stowed, it just sort of sits under the beast head trying to be inconspicuous. The paint on the frill comes together to make it look like he's wearing a red headband to hold the frill back, and the halves of Autobot symbols on the hands come together as an autobrand on the butt. The head doesn't really have useful articulation, any motion causes it to separate from the frill. The tail can lower a bit, but can't be lifted enough to really clear the Mini-Con hardpoint for serious use. The front hips are restricted ball joints and the front true ankles are hinges. The rear hips are universal joints, although only the swivels really make sense. The true ankles are double hinges with a third hinge in the middle for the PCC connectors there. The little cannons flanking the head can be swung up on angled joints, letting you slightly change the firing angle. Stability is iffy. The frill and back don't connect to the robot torso very well, and while the pegs holding them together are reasonably strong, they're not really meant to work when the whole assembly lifts away form the body and odd torques are applied. Torso Mode: The robot legs fold up with the PCC pegs coming out from the crooks behind the knees and the heel spurs becoming red stripes on the thigh fronts. It relies on joint strength to hold the new thighs together, but it holds pretty well. There's no need to make the hips wider, since the robot mode has thunder thighs to begin with. The robot arms swing across the chest into their beast configuration, so the chest and abdomen are made up of the crest and back of the beast mode. The beast forelegs clip onto some pegs and the PCC pegs for the combiner arms fold out. The tail ends up on the back, providing a place to store a Mini-Con. There is no chest hardpoint. The combiner head is the beast head rotated back up in front of the robot head (which doesn't stow) and slid open to reveal a new face. No new plastic is really revealed in this mode, and the only paint specific to it is the blue of the eyes. The Autobot symbol ends up on his crotch. The head has been described as "robo Pope", but it's more of a bishop's mitre than a papal hat. The looseness of the robot arm joints doesn't really cause problems in this mode, as the arms are pegged together fairly securely. However, I found the new kneed joints to be REALLY loose, and had to resort to the superglue trick to tighten them up. Torso mode is definitely closer to the beast mode than to the robot mode. If the back/frill piece held together more firmly, transformation between those two modes would be really quick. As it stands, though, I had to spend a fair amount of time repegging all the robot arm bits after transforming. Drones: On the plus side, we have a pretty wide selection of species, that have either been seen rarely in Transformers, or not at all. Heck, all three true dinosaurs are herbivores, only the synapsid Dimentrodon was a predator. (Mind you, there are herbivores that are very nasty in a fight even today, like the infamous Cape Buffalo.) Unlike most drone sets, we have a very unified color scheme here, with pretty much everyone sharing the same set of colors as Grimstone (Ankylosaur and Pachycephalosaur are missing the orange, none of them have actual black plastic). Also, one could argue that all four drones have some sort of action feature related to their transformation. :) It's also notable, at least to people of my age group, that these are all species (along with Grimstone) that were in the popular kids' dinosaur books of the early 70s. None of these newfangled raptors or Titanosaurs or Giganotosaurs, no sir. Every one of these species was in the first dinosaur book I ever read, back in kindergarten in 1975. Spinosaurus Drone: Or, as it's actually molded, a Dimetrodon Drone. Granted, both animals have a fin on back (probably...there's a credible alternative theory that the spines in the Spinosaur skeleton supported a hump rather than a sail). But this is pretty obviously a Dimetrodon (and not even one of the other sailed synapsids like Edaphosaurus), and therefore the only predator of the lot. 4.75" (12cm) long and 2" (5cm) tall at the top of the sail, it's mainly gray in the body with red throat and tail, and gold sail. The tip of the tail is a Mini-Con hardpoint, and the front of the body bristles with molded weapon barrels (all stubby and unpainted). The throat, tail and several internal struts are bright red plastic. The top of the head and the sail are unknown plastic, since they're totally dipped in paint. The rest is the same warm medium gray as found on Grimstone. The top of the head and the rear feet are painted silver. The sail is gold with orange along the top part, and there's some orange on the front hips. The eyes are blue and there's a black Autobot symbol printed on the left side near the front of the sail. The top of the head is hinged, as is the tail at its root. None of the legs are jointed, but if you pull back on the forelegs you get a sort of action feature as the head moves forward for limb mode. As an arm, the dino head becomes the hand, and a short cannon barrel is revealed on the forearm area. The tail is meant to fold against the sail in this mode, and it does stick out just enough past the sail so that its hardpoint can be used in combiner mode. The jaw hinge becomes a hand hinge, and that's pretty much all the articulation you get other than what's provided by the commander's shoulder peg. Pachycephalosaurus Drone: Definitely one of the biggest drones, it's 5.5" (14cm) from snout to tail tip, with the top of its head rising 3" (8cm) above the surface, making it bigger than a lot of Scouts. This is the second time Transformers has had a Pachycephalosaur mold, the first being a Beast Wars Dinobot retool used first in BW Neo and later for one of the Dinobot redeco sets in America. Mostly gray and red with some silver and gold, its hardpoint is on the spine just ahead of where the rear legs connect. There's guns molded on the shoulders, and a pretty big gap in the neck. The forelimbs and much of the inner core are made of bright red plastic, with the rest being medium gray plastic. The feet and some hip details are painted gold, as is the lower jaw. The bony skull dome (the pachycephalo) and the guns are painted silver. The eyes are blue and there's a black Autobot symbol on the front of the head dome. The forelegs move up and down as a single piece (and can pop out if you're not careful), but the mouth doesn't open. There's a sort of accidental action feature resulting from how you have to manually pre- transform the toy before attaching it as a leg. If you lift the tail, the head ducks down and clicks into place. Press down on the tail and the head springs up in a headbutting action. To become a leg, first lift the tail and rock the figure back so that the tail becomes a heel spur. Then insert a PCC peg into the relevant slot, which pushes the forelegs down to make them the middle toes. The middle toes are purely decorative, though, with all of the front support coming from details on the beast ankles. Unfortunately, as a leg it makes for a VERY long foot with an excessive heel spur. Officially, the tail goes out the back, but it doesn't look too bad if you reverse it so that the tail is a pointy toe. In fact, the excessively pointy toe goes well with the combiner's fancy helmet. This does point the shoulder guns backwards, though. Interesting side effect of this drone's bulk...combined Grimstone can stand up on just this leg so long as only the arm on the same side is attached. And if you fiddle with it some, both arms can be attached. :) Parasaurolophus Drone: The other bipedal drone, it wears a big gun backpack and has a chest puffed out excessively to make room for the PCC port. There's hardpoints on either side of the backpack, and a rod connecting the two sides in back that's...4mm in diameter. Missed a march there, if they'd made the rod 3mm thick then Para could've carried borrowed weapons of both attachment types. 4" (11cm) from snout to tail tip, standing 3.5" (9cm) tall. The forelimbs, PCC port and some internal struts are bright red plastic, the rest is gray. The gun pack is painted mostly matte black with gold barrel tips, the hardpoint is left unpainted. The lower hind legs and tail are painted silver, the eyes are blue and the top of the crest is orange. There's a black Autobot symbol on the forehead. The forelimbs are on restricted ball joints, and the tail is hinged as part of transformation. If you lift the tail, the upper body rises up for a sort of "rearing back" action, calling this an action feature is admittedly a bit of a stretch. Pull the tail all the way up and the hind legs swing out to become claws for arm mode. The tail looks like it could lock under the bar between the guns to keep it in arm mode without being attached, but it doesn't quite hold. As an arm, it ends in a big claw with two opposed "finger". It's actually about the same length as the Dimetrodon arm, just beefier. The gun pack doesn't point in any useful direction. Ankylosaurus Drone: Again, this species was first seen in BW Neo and later in an American redeco. In addition to the shoulder mounted guns, it takes liberties with the core dinosaur by putting a symmetrically spiked ball on the tail. The hardpoint is in the center of the back armor. 5" (12.5cm) long, and almost entirely gray plastic. The PCC socket and one of the internal struts are made of bright red plastic. The head, tail mace and a vent on the back are painted silver. Most of the back armor is gold, as is a panel on the top of the head. The guns are painted matte black, and there's a black Autobot symbol printed on the rear right hip. The eyes are, of course, blue. The head can pivot up and the tail is hinged to swing down for transformation, but it can't swing above its resting position. If you swing the rear legs forward, the back armor rises up, making this drone a sort of shielded gun emplacement. It doesn't stay locked in this mode without a peg in the socket, though. For leg mode, swing the tail all the way down and swing the head all the way up, then pull down the rear beast legs. The result is a boot with a big shin guard. The guns end up pointing down, so not too useful. Combiner Mode: The consistent use of G1 Dinobot colors (plus orange) on everything does result in a pretty unified combiner look. He's definitely got bulkier boots than most combiners, but he's still top-heavy enough that the loose knee joints on mine are a serious problem. Fortunately, working superglue into the joints made them sufficiently stiff that mine no longer pitches over backwards at the slightest provocation. 7" (18cm) tall at the top of his mitre, 7.25" (19cm) wide at the shoulders, and a somewhat display-hostile 4.5" (12cm) deep at the Pachy foot. The Pachy foot makes for somewhat awkward posing, as it's designed to have the tail tip rest on the table, with the red toe claws providing mere decoration. But it's tempting to try to stand it more on the toes, which is not only less stable for standing, but it also tends to lead to popping the leg off at the knee while seeking some sort of stability. The shrugging joints on the shoulders are too loose to hold the Parasaur arm up to the side, but the Dimetrodon arm will stay raised. If you want a more bestial combiner, the beast head can be used as a combiner head. It looks a little bare without the frill, though, and the head doesn't really turn significantly. The commander head is just as well hidden, though. Overall: Bulky and imposing as a combiner, but suffering from some loose joints (I've talked to others, I'm not alone in having this problem). Still, if you've always wanted a G1 Dinobot combiner, this may scratch that itch. And even if you're a younger fan, it's pretty cool, if unstable. And unlike almost every other combiner team, it's color-coordinated (even Crankcase is only kinda coordinated). For now, it's not very good for limb swapping experiments, since nothing else has beast limbs, but that's okay. Drone Fan Names: The obvious way to go here is to use the relevant Beast Wars Neo names. Sling for the Dimetrodon, Bazooka for the Ankylosaur and Hardhead for the Pachy. We've never had a Parasaur before, but in the spirit of the BW Neo names and given that the crest was likely used as a signal trumpet, I'll call it Blowhard. DECEPTICON: STEAMHAMMER Altmode: Bulldozer Previous Name Use: Energon, Cybertron Previous Mold Use: None Drones: Drill, Plow, Front End Loader, Steamroller Function: Demolition Motto: "I'll show ya some REAL devastation!" STEAMHAMMER knows there's another DECEPTICON team out there with the same name as his. He doesn't care. The strength granted him through the Power Core process is more than enough to destroy anyone who dares to challenge him. STR 10 INT 4 SPD 4 END 10 RNK 7 COUR 8 FRB 5 SKL 7 Avg 6.875 Fanon mods for Power-Up Mode: -2 SPD (nothing shooty and he's already maxed out on STR and END). Heh, love it. Maybe this is movie continuity, maybe it ain't, but there's another Constructicon team out there. Heck, if this is AEC continuity, then the other Constructicon team is led by another Steamhammer. But this guy just doesn't care. Also, this is notable for having several vehicles not seen in any previous Constructicon set. We've never seen the mobile auger vehicle in any Transformer, and the only steam roller was a Japanese-only remold of Scrap-Bot. If Plow Drone gets redecoed as an Autobot, it'll have to be Sentinel. :) Packaging: For thickness reasons, Steamhammer has his shovel up above his head...its proper configuration makes him too thick to fit in the box. He's held in by one rattan string. Each of the drones gets one string. The Front End Loader Drone has the end of its conveyor belt bent up as for limb mode. The instructions refer to the core as "Mudslinger Commander Power-Up Mode", probably a cut and paste error. The alternate core pic uses Skyhammer as the central bot. Robot Mode: This guy would feel right at home standing next to Dirt Boss. It's not just the green/gray/black color scheme, it's also the fact that he's short and has big melee weapons on his forearms. The official robot mode gives him wide wings using the front halves of his vehicle mode treads, and while they're on a bunch of joints it's really not possible to tuck them away discreetly. Or turn them into shoulder cannons, really, as the gun barrels point the wrong way. (To get them to point mostly forward over the shoulders requires blocking the joint so that they end up pointing more down than forward, and having them point forward in an underarm position just looks bad.) About the best I could manage puts them right above the shoulders, extending them to make him look kinda like Armada Megatron in silhouette. He also has very bulky forearms, with the cab halves hanging off the backs of the elbows. There's some odd "Fisher Price Dog" ears on top of the head, necessary to pull it out when transforming to robot mode. 3.5" (9cm) tall at the head. With the backpack in official position, it increases total height to 4.5" (11.5cm) and has a wingspan of 4.75" (12cm). There's actually three nearly identical shades of Constructicon Green involved here: two plastic colors and a paint. There's also two silvery gray plastics, although they're a little more obviously different in shade. The lone accessible Mini-Con hardpoint is on the left elbow and pretty useless. The first kind of green plastic has a very strong UV glow. It's used on the upper arms, thighs, upper shins, and the roots of the PCC pegs on the heels. The other green plastic doesn't glow at all, and is used on the head and forearms, and it looks a little less yellowy under room lighting. The lighter silvery gray is found on the upward-curved claws attached to the underarms, and some hinges in the backpack. The darker gray plastic is only found on the backpack/dozer blade. The "wing" pieces, boots (other than the PCC part), pelvis, torso and the panels where the shoulders connect are black plastic. The PCC pegs themselves are the usual color. A chartreuse paint is used extensively on the chest, plus some details on the sides of the boots. Silver is found on the face, the collar area and some piping around the center chest. The eyes are red, and there's a black Decepticon symbol on the backpack dozer blade. The head turns, the waist does not, and the wings are on a bunch of hinges and swivels. The shoulders are ball joints, there's upper arm swivels and hinge elbows. The claws can swing back out of the way of the hands enough for a one-handed weapon to fit in easily, but a two-handed staff weapon can't get past the claws. The big chunks on the elbows restrict motion as well. The hips are ball joints, the knees are hinges, and there's swivels above and below the knees (the lower ones being needed for transformation). The toes snap between open and closed, but the PCC pegs deliberately used as heel spurs have a smoother range of motion. The pegs let the toy stand despite having a MASSIVE backpack. Transformation: Very involved for something this small. The arms swing together in front of the torso, the legs swing up to flank them, the head drops down. A lot of pegging is involved in this. Then those wing strut things swing around and peg over the robot knees, completing the treads on the sides. In going back to robot mode, the only real problem is that these clips on the sides of the thighs hold onto the belt area more strongly than the thighs themselves hold together, so you might snap the leg in two (it's reversible) before disconnecting the clip. Vehicle Mode: It's a bulldozer, with a really big and wide blade and a rather narrow body, plus the requisite grading claws at the back. The tiny cab and its little ladder suggest that it's about 1:200 scale or thereabout, with its 4" (10cm) long toy length thereby translating into a scale size of about 20 meters (70 feet). The leg PCC pegs stick out the back of the treads, but the arm pegs are hidden behind the dozer blade. There's a Mini-Con hardpoint on top of the cab. Color-wise, the front end is dominated by the medium silver-gray shovel blade, the sides are mostly black, and the middle is mostly green. Lighter silvery gray is found on the rear claws and some of the shovel connections. The cab and center bit are green plastic, but the front third of the central body is black plastic painted green. The treads, flanks and front connection to the shovel are black plastic, and some green from the robot legs is covered up by those awkward tread chunks. Some of the tread "armor" is painted green, but they didn't continue it onto the front pieces of the treads, so it looks a bit odd. The front window of the cab is black, but the sides are unpainted. There's silver "wear pattern" paint on the front edge of the dozer blade, and a black Decepticon symbol at the top left of the blade. The claws in the back can't lift up much, but can be depressed into soft surfaces if you want to have Steamhammer work on your zen rock garden. The blade can be elevated, but it makes the treads warp a bit. Other than the rear claws dropping down easily, the stability and solidity of this mode are very good. Torso Mode: Going from robot mode it's pretty clever how the legs work. The legs swing out to the sides and clips on the sides of the thighs lock onto the belt. The robot's thigh swivels become the torso mode's hip swivels, and the knees become "out to the side" joints for the legs. And now the swivels below the robot knees show they're more than transformation joints, as they're the thigh swivels for combiner mode. The lack of a waist is still there in this more, though. A black plastic flap folds down to cover the pelvis. The shovel scoop flips up and covers the entire upper body of the robot, with the arms folding to the back and the claws hooking onto tabs on the new shoulders. Those awkward tread pieces still just hang off the shoulders, but folded back a bit in this mode, at least. The new head only turns a tiny bit to either side, but its antennae can fold back for storage. The new head is Constructicon Green plastic (non-glow) with a red triangular visor painted on, silver neck cannons or something, and silvery gray plastic antennae. The collar area is painted a good match for the green plastic and there's red paint on some vent details by the shoulders. The big news is, though, that he has a fold-down hardpoint (silvery gray plastic) on his chest for armor-mode Mini-Cons, they finally got the point that these might be a good idea for the Combiner figures. Stability is very good. The claw clips feel weak, but they're quite strong in the direction that they're most likely to be pulled during play. It's definitely closer to robot mode, unlike Grimstone, but while transformation from torso mode to vehicle mode was very involved, it wasn't frustrating. The thigh-snap issue also applies when going from torso mode to robot mode, but not from torso to vehicle. Drones: Like Grimstone, Steamhammer gets rarely or never seen things for his drones, which helps distinguish him from the other Constructicon teams. But next to the dinodrones, these guys look positively tiny! On the other hand, they do all have cabs about the same size as each other and as Steamhammer, so this is one of those rare teams where all the vehicle modes are about the same scale (give or take a bit). Well, kinda. The steam roller and plow are probably 50% or so bigger than they'd be if they were in scale with the rest. Drill Drone: This is a construction drill auger or "pile drill" as seen here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Auger_Foundation_Pile_Drill_Rig.jpg (albeit with a shorter shaft). It's made for making holes down to the bedrock for foundation beams, although this particular toy has the auger on a hinge that lets it drill holes in Autobots. There's a Mini-Con hardpoint behind the cab on the left side of the vehicle, while the auger strut is on the right side. The PCC socket is at the rear. Mostly a faintly purplish cool light gray with black treads and a warm gray auger, the main body is 2" (5cm) long with the auger piece being 2.75" 7cm) long. If pointed forward, the entire length becomes 3.5" (9cm). The auger itself, its strut and the thumb of arm mode are warm gray plastic. The hand, the wheels hidden in the treads, the PCC socket and the internal struts are black plastic. Everything else is that purplish cool gray plastic. The treads, side vents and cab windows are painted gloss black, and there's a black Decepticon symbol printed on top of the cab. Some details on the rear sides are painted a brownish yellow (a bit sloppily). The only articulation is where the auger is connected to its strut, which is a hinge with a range from straight up and down to an elevation of about twenty degrees above horizontal. The highest up the auger can reach is 2.25" (6cm), good for drilling Legends in the face. There is a hinge at the "shoulder" of the assembly, but it can only be moved when in arm mode. The wheels spin pretty well. Transformation has the treads swing down on a scissors joint. There's a thumb jointed at the center of the palm, so you can swing it to either side so that the drone works as right or left arm. It's not really meant to firmly grasp things. The wrist is also hinged, and you can move the auger around to taste. It's possible to press the auger bit against the elbow area to keep the drone in arm mode even when not attached to a PCC peg. It does look pretty good as an arm, in any case. Plow Drone: Your basic municipal snowplow and salt spreader truck, a more practical mode than Sentinel Prime's pickup with a plow. The body is a sort of dirty white, the rear bed a dark "Michigan State" green, the cab black and the blade gray. There's a Mini-Con hardpoint on top at the front of the dumper bed, and the PCC socket is in back. 3" (7.5cm) long, a third of that length being from the plow and its supports. The wheels, the PCC socket and internal struts, and bars on the underside that form most of the sole are black plastic. The blade (including the top strut) is silvery medium gray plastic. Everything else is a sort of grungy white plastic. The cab is painted gloss black with an orange bit on top that's probably meant to be emergency vehicle flashing lights. The bed is painted dark green except for the hardpoint sticking out the top. Rather than silver wear marks, the plow blade has black scraping marks, presumably meant to evoke how plows sometimes pick up a big of asphalt with the snow. A black Decepticon symbol is printed on the left front fender. There's no meaningful articulation. The plot can be lifted up on a transformation hinge, but after more than a couple degrees the foot sole bars start to drag on the table. The bed does not lift, the movement it does for transformation actually tips the wrong way for a dumptruck. The wheels are large and roll well. You can sort of make this a let by just jamming a PCC peg into the socket, but this won't move the foot all the way into position, and it will tend to sag a little when weight is placed on it. Rather, fold the plow up 90 degrees first, then all the PCC mechanisms have to do is raise the dumper bed up as a kneecap and drop the decorative heel spurs. And by "decorative" I mean that they don't touch the ground when the figure stands with flat feet, they're about a millimeter off the table. Front End Loader Drone: A "front end loader" is actually more like G1 Scrapper's altmode. This is more like a baby brother to the bucket wheel excavator (like Armada Buzzsaw), with a single bucket shovel at the front to feed the conveyor belt. The belt runs down the centerline and ends in a little bit that can be folded up out of the way so it doesn't interfere with connecting the arm to a Commander figure's torso mode. The Mini-Con hardpoint is on top of the cab, to the right of the belt. 3.5" (9cm) long and predominantly a lightly burnt orange. The conveyor belt pieces, the little wheels inside the treads, the thumb piece, one of the scissor strut pieces inside the arm mode and the outer border of the PCC socket are black plastic. The front shovel, the "dustpan" feeding the conveyor and most of the internal structure of the arm are medium gray plastic. The rest is a sort of burnt orange. The treads are painted black with white fenders (no paint on the front or back bits of the fenders, though), the cab windows are bright blue and the engine vent on the left rear is silver. There's also a bit of black on the front end of the conveyor belt where it's molded onto the dustpan piece. The round motor housing on the rear right has a silver Decepticon symbol printed in the middle of it. The shovel piece raises up and down at its root, but it can't bend at its "elbow" in order to actually shovel things into the conveyor belt. The wheels roll well. In arm mode, there's a switchable thumb like the one on Drill Drone, but no wrist. Fingertips molded on the underside of the dustpan do let the hand tightly grip something about the size of my index finger, though. Transformation is pretty much the same as Drill Drone, but that little piece of conveyor belt at the top can be flipped under the lip of the main conveyor belt piece to lock the toy in arm mode. It makes for a decent looking, if overly long, arm. Steamroller Drone: Well, I kinda doubt it's steam powered, being a modern pavement roller, but it's not as much of a misnomer as the "front end loader" (or the "Spinosaurus"). At first glance you'd think the roller is on front, but if you peek in at the cab you'll see the chairs facing the other way, so the roller is the rear wheel of this vehicle. There's a scraper array on the roller that forms the actual support of the foot mode, and unfortunately the heel part of it drags on the ground a little. The PCC socket is at the front of the vehicle, and the hardpoint is where a hood ornament might be if steamrollers had such things. It doesn't have an enclosed cab, rather just a sunshield roof over an open cab. Mind you, even if used in cold weather, these things drive over boiling hot asphalt, so shade is about all the protection you need and breeze is your best defense. :) 2.5" (6.5cm) long, mainly yellow and black. The front wheels, roller, PCC socket outside and the roof are black plastic. The scraper array and most of the internal struts are medium gray. Everything else is school bus yellow. The wheel hubs are painted yellow, but it doesn't coat very well. There's red stripes on the front fenders, silver on vents at the front of the roller housing, and silver wear marks faintly brushed onto the roller itself. A black Decepticon symbol is printed on the right hood. There's pretty much no ground clearance, and it scrapes along as it rolls. It's not just the heel pieces (which I'm reluctant to shave down lest it hurt combiner stability), there's details on the underside of the main body that touch the ground too. Transformation is fully automatic, involving the roof flipping down to become the toes and the hood/wheels piece folding up a bit to look more like a kneecap. The toe doesn't quite touch the ground, but it's held in place well enough to provide actual support if the knee is bent a little. A sort of grating detail is revealed at the top to fill in the knee area, so it's not just hollow behind the hood. Combiner Mode: This is very reminiscent of SixBuilder, both in the color balance and the "stuff hanging off the shoulders" appearance. It's also a bit spindly-looking standing next to other combiners, with so much of the mass in the shoulders and collar armor. Oddly, while both arms work about the same way, including the movable thumbs, the front end loader arm is a lot longer than the drill arm. 6.75" (17cm) tall at the head, 7.25" (19cm) if you count the tread pieces sticking up behind the shoulders. Depending on how you position the bits, the shoulderspan ranges from 8.5" (22cm) to 9.5" (24cm). There's very little sticking out the front or back, though, unlike Grimstone's combiner mode. His shrugging joints are soft-ratcheting and will stay up, but the tread pieces are on them so they tilt inward and look a bit weird. The various leg joints are a touch loose, but not bad enough to cause the figure to fall over on its own. At first look, the steamroller foot wouldn't offer much support, but it's better than it seems, so long as you can keep it flat. Neither hand grips tightly, the movable thumbs are mostly so you can swap sides and not have backwards hands. A worthy successor to the construction vehicle combiner legacy, all in all. Overall: A little oddly proportioned, and not a lot is terribly exciting, but it's a solid toy with some interesting vehicle modes. It's not going to make anyone squee with glee, but I doubt anyone is going to be disappointed by buying it, either. Drone Fan Names: While the vehicle mode doesn't match at all, the Micromaster name "Roller Force" is perfect for Steamroller Drone. Sticking to Decepticon Micromasters, I'll go with Sledge for the Plow Drone, Ground Hog for the Front End Loader Drone (it shovels ground into its maw), and Powerpunch for the Drill Drone (a hole-puncher). Dave Van Domelen, thinks he'll take a quick break from Transformers to review the Legends of Nara Metomorphs next.