Dave's Transformers Siege Rant: Battle Masters wave 2 Pteraxadon (axe) Aimless (ranged weapon) Permalink: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Gen/Battle2 Only two in this wave, and one of them is an entirely new character. Aimless is a retool of Blowpipe, sort of. Only the torso/head piece is reused, though. I'll review it as a new figure. http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Gen/Battle1 - Blowpipe mold CAPSULES $5-6 price point. Pteraxadon: Decent beast and weapon modes, better Fire Blast than I expected. Recommended. Aimless: Roughly equal to Blowpipe, but I don't care for its Fire Blasts as much. Recommended, but a half-step below Blowpipe. RANTS Packaging: Same as wave 1 Battle Masters. AUTOBOT: PTERAXADON Assortment: WFC-S16 Altmode: Binary Edgewing Scythe Transformation Difficulty: 5 steps Previous Name Use: None Previous Mold Use: None Fireblast: Blue strike piece Function: Battle Master Division: Air Command Unit: Artillery Rank: Private Pteraxadon is entirely new. While there were axe-mode Mini-Cons in RiD15, this is not one of them. Packaging: The figure is held in by the blister halves, in a form that's neither beast nor weapon mode. The cosell has Prowl wielding the axe mode. The sigil is low-ranking Autobot with the missile launch top of a Battle Master. Beast Mode: A robot pterasaur with design elements that echo Laserbeak or Buzzsaw on top of the general Dinobot vibe (the jet-like tail section, mainly). The wings are somewhat skinny, which is odd, since they could have wider membranes without preventing the axe mode from working (thin enough that a pickaxe mode is plausible). The axe haft forms a sort of spinal mount cannon, but the muzzle is blocked by the head crest when the figure is in flight pose. The maximum wingspan is 4" (10cm), and in a flying pose the beak to tail length is 2.75" (7cm). The main colors are black and a slightly desaturated kelly green, with red and metallic blue painted accents. The core body piece is green plastic, while the rest (head, wings, feet, spinal cannon) are black plastic. There's metallic blue paint on the "membrane" riveted panels on the tops of the wings. The eyes and details in the crest are painted red. No Autobot symbol, but there's just enough flat space on the jet-type tail parts for a small Reprolabel on each side. The wings are snapped in place (and can tend to come out if you're not careful), with a soft-ratcheting hinge with three stable positions (furled, extended, and in between). The neck is a single up and down hinge, each tiny leg has its own hinge at the hip. The leading edge of each wing has the tab and flanking 3mm studs needed for a melee Fire Blast. If the head is lifted up for a flying pose, a 5mm peg is revealed under the base of the neck, possibly so that he can roost on a bigger figure (when fully folded down for axe mode, the peg is visible, but doesn't project out past other details enough for this to count as a "stow on the back" sort of peg, oddly). Transformation: Furl the wings, pull out the haft, fold the legs back to flank the haft, and tuck the head down into the chest. Altmode: It is a somewhat short-hafted axe, but it should work with the 5mm grip extender available on Shapeways from Octavirate Forge (https://www.shapeways.com/product/9PGJ5VYE9/5mm-grip-extender) if you want something more hefty. Or hafty. 2.75" (7cm) long and 2" (5cm) wide with no Fire Blast attached. No new colors, although most of the red is now hidden. The haft is a 5mm rod, with a 3mm stud at the tip. The default position of the axe blades puts the melee connectors parallel to each other. If you pull the wings all the way up, it's more of a pickaxe, but the Fire Blast connections are not particularly useful now. Undocumented feature: I think the axe is also meant to be held as a gun, via that peg on the neck. This makes the 3mm stud on the bottom of the haft more sensible, since the haft is now being used as a gun barrel (something it has trouble doing in beast mode, as mentioned). The main downside of this mode is that the hollow and manufacturing-stamped side of the weapon faces up. Fire Blast: I was a bit worried when I saw pictures of this, because it's clearly made to wrap around an axe blade, and I didn't think it would fit as well on other things. And this fear was somewhat justified, as it won't fit onto Lionizer's sword mode, although it does fit on the blade if it's removed and held separately. It uses the same "tab and two studs" connection as Lionizer's Fire blast, and the blast effects mostly flare out on the sides rather than along the axis of the connection, so as long as a figure has the tab connection on a thin enough piece, it can connect. (And Lionizer's will fit on Pteraxadon, so you can have a whoosh on the back end and the blast on the front end.) However, what makes this more useful than I expected is that there's a single 3mm socket on the other facing, so not only can it be used as a standalone "got hit" blast effect (something kinda lacking until now), it can also be used to attach the axe to its target as if it flew there on its own or got thrown. A single piece of flexible clear blue plastic blasting in a rough X shape with two layers of blast fringes, 2.25" (5.5cm) on its longest axis, and 1.25" (3cm) on its shortest. Connecting it to an axe blade requires some care, since you might pop the blade off entirely while trying to get the pegs into the sockets. If you fold the haft down in Pterasaur mode, Pteraxadon can wear the blast as a sort of tail poof. Overall: Pretty good concept and execution, and the Fire Blast isn't as specialized as I'd feared. A bit of a tendency to pop apart, though. DECEPTICON: AIMLESS Assortment: WFC-S17 Altmode: Manifold Ion Particle Blaster Transformation Difficulty: 5 steps Previous Name Use: G1, Gen(TR) Previous Mold Use: Gen(WfC) Fireblast: Two squiggly red bolts Function: Battle Master Division: Air Command Unit: Artillery Rank: Raider Aimless gets to be both a Titan Master and a Battle Master. Packaging: Held in by the blister halves, with the weapon barrels separate from the figure. Cosell shows Starscream holding the gun mode. The Symbol is the winged Decepticon one with a low rank bottom and a missile core. Robot Mode: The new parts are based on G1 Aimless, but the torso/head and pelvis pieces are still Blowpipe's, so the shape is inconsistent with G1. Basically, the parts that were gray on Blowpipe are a bright blue on Aimless (very different from Blowpipe's blue), and the new pieces are all light gray (slightly different from Blowpipe's gray). If you tried swapping parts to make an all-blue Battle Master, it wouldn't look unified, but the grays are close enough to do okay for an all-gray one. As with the other gun-mode Battle Masters, the gun can be detached from the back and the 3mm peg on it inserted into a socket on the robot's forearm. The new gun has a 3mm socket rather than 5mm, so the mobile turret mode I found for Blowpipe won't work here. Blowpipe and Aimless can sort of connect together back to back, but no Double Targetmaster combined gun trick using the 3mm pegs. I guess you can connect the two guns using Aimless's chest peg and the socket on Blowpipe's barrel section, and some figures may even be able to hold it. 2.25" (5.5cm) tall in bright blue and light gray. The torso and pelvis pieces are bright blue, the rest is light cool gray. The face is painted orange with a yellow visor. The centerline of the torso is painted dark blue, which stands out a lot better than the medium gray on Blowpipe. There's a tiny Decepticon symbol badge on the left pec. Shoulders and hips are ball joints, and the forearms have 3mm sockets just like on Blowpipe. The gunpack can be detached and held on either forearm. The chest has a bit 5mm peg as on Blowpipe, with the Armada-style hole down the middle. The gunpack is double-barrelled but otherwise doesn't look a lot like G1 Aimless's gun mode. 2" (5cm) long on its own, with a 3mm peg on the underside, 3mm stud barrel tips, and a 3mm socked on the underside as mentioned earlier. Transformation: Same as Blowpipe's. Altmode: A standard Targetmaster-style chunky double-barrelled blaster, with the soles of the feet having a trio of short range missile warhead tips molded into each one, and some trapezoidal doors that I guess open up to release micromissile swarms. Gray dominates the look, with most of the blue parts tucked on the underside. 2.75" (7cm) long, with pretty much all the robot mode paint on the underside where you're not supposed to look, and no new paint. 5mm main grip, 3mm secondary grip ahead of it, 3mm studs on the barrel tips. Here's the possibly intentional Double Battle Master gun for Aimless and Blowpipe: http://www.dvandom.com/images/doublebattlemaster.JPG Fire Blasts: Rubbery clear red plastic pieces 3.3cm (about 1.25") long, designed to look like energy strands briefly separating before coming back together, as if barely focused by magnetic fields. They're not identical, nor are they mirror images, but they're very similar to each other. They don't really work as rocket thrusts or as impact points, they're strictly shooty bits. While Blowpipe can do that "Care Bear Stare" trick with his, putting the thin tip of one of these into Aimless's chest peg's hole doesn't really look like much of anything. There's no real storage for them in robot mode, although they kinda look like jet thrust if you place them on the barrel tips in robot mode, I guess. Not as well as Firedrive's do. Overall: A solid Targetmaster update, and if I'm not thrilled with the Fire Blast, it does at least provide some more options. (I really wish Fire Blasts came with more toys.) Dave Van Domelen, now to decide what Transformers will be sitting out in the middle of being reviewed when his parents come to visit in a few days.