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I got tired of waiting for Eaglemoss to re-stock its prime timeline Star Fleet ships (2/3rds of which have been out of stock since last year).
So I eventually resorted to the 'secondary market'/eBay, and here is the first arrival.

I already had the Equinox but its paint finish wasn't great.  
For that, you can get them where the models are unopened but they don't come with the magazines, which is ideal in that case, and that way, they're very reasonable.

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. :)

Doctor, would you care to assist me in performing surgery on a... photon torpedo?

I almost dismantled the entire machine before I found the single tiny screw that allowed you to push the hard disk caddy in the optical drive bay out through the side of the chassis.

It had a 1TB WD Blue in a caddy in the optical drive bay. I asked the manufacturer to do it that way, years ago. But that drive was for File History and it ran full.
Plus, the machine was running slow because the main hard disk, which was a Seagate hybrid was starting to die, according to its SMART data.
So it got a 2TB WD Blue mechanical and a WD Blue 3D nand SSD, which seems remarkably fast.
Anyway, it's all back together now and it is running.

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.

Edit: Matsukami noticed that this illustration is based on the Natsucom model that appears on the site.
Models > NAtsucom

Work on X-Bomber the Game ground to a halt over the last several weeks, but now that I have the first full week's holiday since November, I should be able to revisit it.
In the meantime, here's a playthrough video of level 2; the asteroid field.
The WingBlade lock-on-lightning weapon for Dai-X gets some use near the end.

It's a Dai-X-centric Star Fleet Saturday this week...
I found these drawings by ESAkings and Guredius a couple of months ago.

Like I might've mentioned a while back, there seemed to be a lot of Japanese artists working on Star Fleet illustrations all-of-a-sudden.

I got my Lower Decks type II phaser!
Actually, that's a complete fib.  This is the phaser released for Star Trek: Insurrection when I was 12 but it's clearly meant to be the same one as this, that they use in ST:LD.
I think, this came from Beatties, which was a great hobby shop in Newcastle.  It mustn't have been long before they closed.

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