Dave's Star Wars Crossovers Rant: Standard Wave 5 Shock Trooper (V-Wing) Plo Koon (Delta-7 Starfighter, remold of the Wave C1.5 Anakin) Luke Skywalker (X-Wing, reship, possibly minor redeco) Clone Pilot (V-19 Torrent, reship) Permalink: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/SW/StandardC5 http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/SW/Standard5 - original Delta-7 mold http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/SW/Standard1 - X-Wing http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/SW/StandardC4 - V-19 CAPSULES Shock Trooper: Nice bit-player vehicle mode, simplistic transformation, a robot mode hamstrung by some stupid design choices. Could have been a lot better, but as it stands only mildly recommended. $16.79 at Target. RANTS Packaging: Same as Wave C2, with the four in this wave shown on back (http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/SW/StandardC2). Same slightly outdated catalog as in wave C4. SHOCK TROOPER + Converts from V-wing mode to mech mode! + 2 launching projectiles! Shock troopers sweep into combat in their V-wing starfighters against the massive droid army. The shock troopers fight valiantly but as wave after wave of droids storm onto the field, the troopers unleash their secret weapon: they morph their starfighters into enormous mech warriors that overpower the droid army! Packaging: Three rubber bands with the usual H-shaped pieces holding them together hold the vehicle mode into the tray. The missiles are held by a single small rubber band connected under the tray. The photo on the package is not only mistransformed (the shoulders come up a lot higher), but I think they must have disassembled the toy and reassembled it differently to get the feet on the opposite sides. Vehicle Mode: V-wings are a design that pretty much only appeared in passing in the movies (specifically, late in Ep III), and look like a sort of transitional design between the Delta-7 and TIE-fighters, but in a different way than the Eta-series starfighters. Because it's less iconic and has a lot of fiddly positionable bits, you need to check the instructions to make sure you actually have it in the correct form. http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Alpha-3_Nimbus-class_V-wing_starfighter for more on the type. The "real" vehicle is 7.9 meters long, so at 7.25" (18.5cm) long this is about 1:42 scale. Mostly light ghost gray plastic. The ion thrusters are dark gray, slightly metallic, the cockpit is smoky clear plastic. Dark rust red plastic is found on the chunk behind the cockpit, the astromech droid and the central chunks of the foil units. The foils themselves are a soft light warm gray plastic, as is the front landing strut and a couple of stabilizer fins flanking the engines. Part of the foil roots and the missiles are a slightly darker warm gray plastic, as is the fuselage center chunk. There's some white plastic visible, but it's all meant for robot mode. There's various dark rust red and medium gray paint details tying the thing together. The cockpit frame is taupe. Light ghost gray paint covers most of the foils, whereas black paint is used on the solar panel details on the foils. There's some brighter red stripes along the sides of the fuselage front, and a black and white Republic logo behind the droid. The droid has silver details on it. The places where the foils attach on the side are painted light ghost gray, I think, but either with a pinkish shade on purpose or the red plastic is showing through. There's no paint inside the cockpit, although the fact it's a different color plastic than the surrounding vehicle does help set it off. Like a lot of Star Wars vehicles, it has a landing configuration and a flight configuration, with the latter being set up so that it can't really rest flat on a table. The toy is packaged in the more compact landing configuration, but with the front landing strut up. The rear landing skids are integrated into the side panels. To get into attack mode, the panels scissors open into a vertical line. Of course, the result looks like a T from the side or an H from the front, but the B-wing didn't look like a B, so there's precedent for the letter designation being non-descriptive. :) Unfortunately, the foil chunks don't lock down to the sides of the fuselage, so when opening the foils the whole arrangement comes away. In addition to the landing struts and movable side foils, there's a few more bits of articulation. The astromech turns, the tail foils can fold down on octagonal ratchet-pegs, and the cockpit opens up. There's room for a 33mm pilot figure inside, should you have any left over from the older toys. The ion drive nozzles (yes, twin ion engines) can be rotated, but this is for transformation, not something the V-wing is supposed to be able to do. Rather than having four independent missiles for the four blaster barrels, there's two tuning-fork-shaped missiles. While loaded, they look like independent barrels, the connection is hidden inside the launcher. And thus continues the long-standing tradition of SWTFs firing their blasters as missiles. :) Stability is iffy. The fuselage holds together pretty well, but the foil chunks only rest against slots on the sides, they don't peg on. So, as mentioned earlier, moving the foils tends to mess things up in general. Also, the launch buttons for the missiles are on the best places for gripping the toy to keep it from falling apart, so you're likely to shoot yourself while trying to keep the V-wing from falling apart. Oops. Unfortunately, I already lost a missile because I fired it over my shoulder and into a pile of clutter. So it's probably gone until next time I move, if then. This, by the way, is why making blaster barrels into missiles annoys me...too easy to lose an important detail of the toy because someone placed a launch button without thinking of how the toy would be handled. Transformation: Pretty simple. The fuselage front splits into legs, with side panels flipping aside and the foremost parts swiveling. The foil chunks are the arms, all folded up, and pulling back on the thrusters brings the head up. There's a couple of bits that need to be pulled up to allow the arms to rise up at the shoulders. Also, the cockpit chunk pulls out a bit to give the waist a little more leeway, although trying to turn the waist more than a little will pop the piece off entirely. It can't be put back on upside down to allow more clearance, though. The tail fins are supposed to unclip from the body and peg onto the upper arms, but it really doesn't improve the looks, and the pegs are a little too big on mine anyway. They look better on the backpack. Also, the exhaust nozzles are supposed to point up from the back, but look better pointed down as a jetpack. You can leave the legs connected and just pull out the hip panels to give him a sort of Beast Machines Jetstorm hover mode. He can even bend at the knees in this mode. Mech Mode: 6.25" (16cm) tall. The proportions are okay, although the upper arms are a bit skinny (probably why they want the tail fin piecs stuck on 'em) and the head a touch small. The hands are reminiscent of those on the Shriek armor (http://dcanimated.wikia.com/wiki/Shriek) but with the fingers on the palms rather than at the edges of the oversized gauntlets, two big fingers and a thumb. The hands can actually hold things, there's a disc on the palm that fills the area under the curled fingers, but it can push in about 3mm against a spring, so the missiles can be stuck between the fingers and the palm disc and be held pretty steadily. The missiles point out a bit below the line of the forearm, so while they kinda look like claw weapons, they're misaligned claws. The head, collar area, upper arms, thighs, knees and ankles are bright white plastic with a strong UV glow. The palm discs are medium gray plastic. The chest plate is light ghost gray plastic, everything else is obvious vehicle bits (the chest plate is visible from underneath in vehicle mode). The brighter red paint stripes on the sides of the fuselage become boot stripes here, and the same color is applied to the chest front, details on the thighs, arms and head. The fingers and thumbs are painted black, as are the visor and some other helmet details. Darker gray paint is used for the torso breathing apparatus details, and the groin is painted white. The head and waist turn, but the waist is mostly blocked. The shoulders are royally messed up in service to transformation. There's a vertical hinge at the root, and another vertical hinge that only lets the arms lift higher, not drop down without sucking against the torso and looking misconnected. There's a hinge below the upper arm swivel that doesn't really do anything useful in this mode, and then another hinge for an elbow. The upper arm swivel is a peg that pops out relatively easily but is very hard to get back in since all the hinges above it will collapse down. The main shoulder joints are inexplicably designed to be unable to swing down, even though this doesn't make the vehicle mode any more stable...I may have to take the arms apart and fix this with my Dremel. The arms can get in a decent range of interesting poses, but they can't do a lot of simple and expected ones. A single ball joint to replace the second vertical hinge would have worked SO much better. The hips are universal joints, the knees are ratcheting hinges (with only two stable positions), and there's a ratcheting swivel just below the knee. The ankles are smooth hinges. Overall: Making the arm joints more useful and adding pegs to keep them together in vehicle mode would have made this toy a LOT better. Also, making the missile launch buttons less accessible would have been nice...if I ever find the other missile, I may just remove the springs and glue the missiles in place. Also, the toy is much nicer in robot mode if you ignore the instructions and just put the kibble in whatever positions you like. Dave Van Domelen, actually wishes SWTF missiles were bright orange, and not a color that blends in with the carpet.