Dave's Exo-Force Deep Jungle Rantlet 8115: Dark Panther See http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Lego/ExoforceDJ for general line comments. CAPSULE Knees would be nice, but it's otherwise a decent quadrupedal mech with a nice little partner drone that doesn't transform in any meaningful way. However, what really sells this one is the Iron Drone rack. Recommended. $19.99 at TRU, $14.96 at Wal-Mart. RANT I am amused that while the bipedal battle machines at this price point have instruction manuals arranged with the staple on a long side (i.e. "upright" printing), the instructions for this quadruped battle machine are printed with the staple on a short side ("prone"). Unit: Dark Panther Type: Multi-Terrain Attack Battle Machine Pilot: Devastator, two Iron Drones Pilot Eye Color: Red Devastator, Black Iron Drones Main Mecha Colors: Black and purple Weapons: Dual shock-talons in each foot, razor spines, flexible ionization cannon, twin plasma blasters, internal sound dampener system Partner: Parasite Drone Armor: 8 inches tenatium Sensors: Upgraded sensor package with enhanced infrared vision Power Source: Magnetized nuclear plasma Unit Designation: 8115 Unit Type: Ground Nickname: None Sticker Code: EXO8A1S Bio note: EXO-FORCE has never faced anything like this before. Annoyed by their past losses to humans, the robots have studied organic life...and improved on it. Programmed with all the reflexes and hunting instincts of the jungle's deadliest predator, the Dark Panther is a sinister blend of hi-tech stealth and cybernetic sinew. It can jump and climb to attack from any height or direction, and its sound dampeners shut down enemy sonic receptors so that no one hears it coming from the shadows. Its mobile primary cannon is protected by an array of armored spines, and it even carries a pair of Iron Drones with rocket flight packs and a transforming mini-robot drone to quadruple the odds of victory. Partner Bio (fanfic): Based on studies of the humble tick, the Parasite Drone's mission is to seek out enemy battle machines and latch onto them as inobtrusively as possible. While attached, they seek to drain their host of information...and when they've sucked up all the data they can find, they will then drain it of energy as well before returning to their primary host. The Dark Panther then puts both information and power to good use. Or evil use, depending on how you look at it.... Build Time: Bag 1 has the three pilots, their jetpacks, and the Parasite Drone (there's a secondary tiny bag inside Bag 1 with the smallest pieces). There's two Bag 2's with the main mech. Sort time for Bag 1 is about 2 minutes, build time for all four units is about 7-8 minutes. Sort time for the two Bag 2's is 5-6 minutes...oddly, this set DOES have one of the new connector pieces that you have to bodge together on another set (a 1x2 thin piece with two clips). Build time is 20 minutes. Dimensions: As with most non-bipedal mechs, the dimensions depend on how you spread the legs out. However, in a non-extreme stance, it's 8" (20cm) long, 6" (16cm) wide, 4.25" (11cm) tall at the head, and 7" (18cm) tall at the top of the back spines. The Parasite Drone attaches to the back of the neck, while the two Iron Drones attack on either side of the middle of the spine. Colors: The structural pieces are mainly black with some gray, and there's lots of purple accent and armor pieces. Yellow is the next most common color, used for the spine tips and claws. The cockpit window (one of the no-frills 2-wide pieces) is smoky clear plastic, and there's some clear yellow accent pieces on the cockpit front and sides. There's five "spine" pieces of the type I first saw on the Storm Lasher. 2-side at the base, narrowing down to a point with the pointy half being made of rubberized plastic. The hard parts of these are purple, the rubbery parts are yellow. There's one on each foreleg and a frill of three of them up the middle of the back. Stickers: Purple and silver with black and yellow accents, pretty minimal stickerage. One on each foot, one on each of the foreleg spines, and the Exo-code sticker on the canopy. Articulation: Kinda oddball. The four hips are Knights Kingdom style ratcheting universal joints, and the ankles are ball joints. But as with Assault Tiger's and Chameleon Hunter's arms, the intermediate joints are just permanently bent connectors...no knee articulation. The ionization cannon is on the front of the spinal frill, and can be elevated to straight up as the frill stows. This is for aiming as well as to let you deploy the Parasite Drone. Weapons: The ionization cannon is a single long barrel tube (like the type Uplink has two of for its main gun) ending in a clear red 1x1 barrel. The twin plasma blasters are clear yellow cones on the front of the cockpit (head) section. The shock talons are little yellow talon pieces, and there are indeed two of them on each foot. The razor spines are, well, the purple and yellow spine pieces. There is not a specific piece for the internal sound dampener. Well, maybe that's what the hump that the Iron Drone struts connect to is. ;) Other Features: While not specified as being able to do so, the cockpit is easily detachable and could be considered a submersible pod or something if you want to give Ha-Ya-To an even harder time. Wouldn't take much to mod it into a flight pod, either. The Iron Drone carrying struts are a nifty idea, making this a sort of jeep...maneuverable, all-terrain, and can carry some troops. Purple 1x2 grating pieces are a real design motif on this guy. One on each Iron Drone, one on the Parasite Drone, *eleven* more on the main Dark Panther. Combines with the Battle Arachnoid to make a scorpion mech, or with Storm Lasher to make a bipedal battle machine. The biped has a slight color asymmetry, since Storm Lasher comes with one black and yellow "spike" piece, while Dark Panther has five purple and yellow spikes. Pilot Figure: One Devastator, and two Iron Drones as gunners. This is the largest crew complement for any set under $30 that I can recall. The Devastator has no weapons, but you can give him the leftover talon from the Parasite Drone to use as an energy dagger. The copper-colored Iron Drones each come with a "bullhorn" blaster and a hoverpack that uses circular saw pieces as hoverfans and plugs into the back of the figure's head (hence black eyes, although the peg isn't quite long enough to fill in the eyes). They peg onto yellow struts on the Dark Panther rather than having cockpits, essentially meant as deployable resources rather than co-pilots or gunners. The skies are really getting crowded for Ha-Ya-To, what with the flight pod on the Arachnoid, the Storm Lasher's flying drone, and these jumppack Iron Drones. Partner: This uses the same octagonal core and "robot arms as legs" as the Storm Lasher's partner does, which makes sense given how the partners of Assault Tiger and Chameleon Hunter share design elements as well. It's probably intended to be another six-legged spider like the Battle Arachnoid, but I like the idea of calling it a tick. The core, legs, "face" and buttcap are black. The talons, the bulk of the torso and the main part of the abdomen are opaque yellow. There's two clear yellow eyes on a hinge piece, and a clear red eye on either side of that on fixed mounts. A single purple grating piece is on top of the head, to tie it into the aesthetic of the main battle machine. Each leg is hinged, the face is hinged, and the abdomen is hinged, giving this little guy a fairly wide range of motion. Like Storm Lasher's partner, it doesn't really DO anything when attached, it simply stows on the Dark Panther as a passenger...or parasite. :) Dave Van Domelen, thinks Dark Panther is vaguely punk.