Remember when I first started doing build logs back in 2010 and in the middle of the Delta Plus I kind of just… stopped?
Yeah. Sorry about that.
Somehow I just lost my drive and completely burned myself out. I was trying to paint the Delta Plus in the colors of Amuro’s Zeta Plus but it just wasn’t doing it for me. With just the torso, head, and shoulders built I returned it to its cardboard prison for a year and a half. Amusingly, you know what got me to pick it back up? Watching it get destroyed in Unicorn episode 5. Yeah, it took the thing NEVER SHOWING UP AGAIN for me to want to build it. How about that.
What makes the Delta Plus so cool is how it was based on real life mechanical design stuff for Gundam. When designs for the Zeta Gundam were being proposed, the one Mamoru Nagano made was basically the Hyaku Shiki, but the transformation system didn’t work, so it was reworked into the Hyaku Shiki. This carried over into the Gundam universe, and the Delta Plus is basically a revisiting of that concept. So there’s your little history lesson.
The Delta Plus is basically the Hyaku Shiki with a Katoki twist. It looks like it came out of Sentinel, and I think that was the goal. Most people hate the long legs on Katoki’s designs, but here they work EXTREMELY well. The only time they ever bothered me was on the Geara Zulu, and I’ll never get why.
The articulation is nothing to write home about, just traditional stick joints for the shoulders and ball joints for the hips. Moving along…
The weapon assortment, too, is pretty basic. Beam saber (with blue blades!), gigantic Hyaku Shiki-style rifle, and a shield with missiles (I think). The shield is really cool. I always love it when mobile suit designers realize, “hey, these things are robots, why not make them guard AND shoot?”.
And now, for the transformation…
I hope you like partsforming.
1/144 kits use a lot of parts swapping to achieve an accurate look for transformation, and I think it’s a good thing… but DAMN LOOK AT ALL THIS STUFF. It may not seem so bad, but you more or less have to take the entire thing apart in order to transform it. When it’s fully transformed, you’re left with what’s basically half of a mobile suit.
That being said, I love the look of the Delta Plus’s Waverider mode. It’s just so cool! It really keeps the Sentinel aesthetic going, and reminds me of the Zeta Plus variants from the Hobby Japan magazines. It’s very stable, thanks to the swapped parts, but as cool as it looks , the process is so tedious I think I’ll just keep it in mobile suit mode.
While I do like this kit, it doesn’t really offer anything special besides transforming. The joint system is old and it doesn’t do much with the articulation, yet for some reason I just like it for its appearance. I don’t know why, but I just don’t like the look of the MG. Either way, it’s a totally worthy addition to any Federation shelf, and if you’re up to the task, drop in to FPNYC to look for yours.
