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In 2014 Evolution Toys released a combining die-cast action figure of Dai-X with magnetic joints as part of their Dynamite Action line.

Twitter user; Diaclonexxx found a novel way of assembling it.

Meanwhile Unyao made a nice project out of repainting and weathering it.

Well, now that I have Windows set up again with scanner drivers and a new, spangly Photoshop, I can scan things and do stuff with them.

I was digging again through my mountains of old drawings and found these.
The first one was clearly based on the fusion cannon from Descent.
The second one reminds me of the rifle from Blade: Trinity but is meant to be a rotary weapon.

I had a replay of Operation: Matriarchy with the enhancement add-on applied.
It made a very strong, positive impression on the earlier stages of the game but, later on, the alien environments had had their lightmaps and colours changed, which took away some of their mood and wow-factor.

I uploaded quite a lot of new screenshots here for comparison:
http://xbomber.co.uk/?dir=Other%2FGames+-+Operation+Matriarchy

For Go Nagai's birthday (6th September), Young Jump magazine published a big, double page illustration by artists Shueisha and Kodansha containing, as you can see, the X-Bomber.

I figure we've all seen the cute X Bomber eraser sets, including these smaller ones.
What I hadn't seen until a while ago on Rinkya was a whole retail pack of 12, ideal for any Japanese toy shop in 1980.

I got my care package from Japan...

These Japanese DVDs of Zentrix (a very loveable Chinese CGI anime) are very hard to get.  I have seen complete sets of 6 for sale occasionally but the cost was always unbelievable.
Oddly, volume 2 came up for sale in two places at once, and since I wasn't sure about the condition and details of the listing, and because the price was reasonable, I bought both.
The red one is a new, sealed retail copy and the black is a rental copy.
In the end, it's good that I did get both because the rental had a lot of minor abrasions on the disc and my optical drives did not get on well reading it.

I was keen to get volume 2 since it has everyone's favourite character Akina on the cover; the feisty brunette in the blue jumpsuit.

I also bought a great poster with all the vehicles from Gerry Anderson's Firestorm, which I'm going to have framed.

So, I ran screengrabs on the DVD and its menus and scanned the cover:
http://xbomber.co.uk/?dir=Other%2FTV+Shows+-+Zentrix%2FJapanese+-+More+images

http://xbomber.co.uk/?dir=Other%2FTV+Shows+-+Zentrix%2FJapanese+-+Disc+2

I came across these impressive illustrations by Yoroshi Furuta some time ago, but on pixiv, recently, I was able to find much higher resolution versions, which now feature on xbomber.co.uk's Star Fleet Fan Artwork section.

I like how the first image; "Confrontation" contains the Dai-X that we see in the show (along with just about everything else that you see in the series).
In the second one, the Dai-X is based on the Takatoku Dai-X toy that featured a 5-tube rocket launcher on the side of each leg.

Here's some fan artwork from Japanese artist; PLC.
Subject matter requires no description. :)

I haven't accomplished much with X-Bomber this week.
My laptop is not very healthy but is still hanging in.
I ordered an SSD and a 2TB disk to replace its OS and File History drives, which are failing and full, respectively.

I finally got the game running well on the latest Fusion runtime.
They introduced something back in 2017 that stops the engine from destroying objects that travel too far away from the action.
That way, the number of objects would build up-and-up-and-up and the game slowed to a crawl.
I found the obscure option that fixes that and the game runs nicely.  This video of level 3 is compiled with the new runtime...

It is Star Fleet and it is nearly Saturday ...

Here's a fun thing that I found on pixiv, which is an image site that's quite widely used in Japan.

This is a really fine image by an artist called Aru of something from the show that doesn't inspire that many drawings; the Alliance astrofighter.

The artist made the observation that, in the show, this thing fires its weapons from the fuselage, rather than from the gun pod thing on the underside.

This may be raking up too much detail but in certain episodes, such as the one with Princess Keeli's planet, they are seen to fire a red or yellow 'ground attack' laser from the weapons pod underneath.
Whenever they fire a laser torpedo stream, it originates from the fuselage and the show is quite consistent on this.
That seemed to indicate to me that the main weapon was intended to be in the nose, as shown, and the pod underneath contained additional armament, which was less-frequently used.

I have meant to go back and 'adjust' the astrofighters in X-Bomber the Game accordingly but I would need to think a bit more about how to make that work with all the available astrofighter variants in the game.

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