Inagi Mechanical City

The Inagi Scopedog is also the site of the Mechanical City shop with two mecha statues from Gundam outside, underscoring its name. But, before we go inside the shop, at the foot of the Scopedog was this board. 

 

One side of the board had info on the show, and the upcoming new movie. All very exciting for us fans of VOTOMS. The other-side had a poster with a link that led us to a secondhand store.

More on that later.

 

The Scopedog statue is life sized, these Gundam mecha are not, as they're meant to stand around 18 meters tall, while the Scopedog is 3.5 meters.

Gundam was created by Yoshiyuki Tomino, while VOTOMS was the work of Ryosuke Takahashi.

 

 

The connection between the two shows is Kunio Okawara. He designed the mecha for both shows Below, close-ups of the Zaku and Gundam.

 

The Mechanical City shop sells T-shirts, other mecha related merchandise, and coffee. The place is  a veritable cornucopia of mecha memorabilia.

 

 

The walls and tables are full, chock-a-block with posters and artwork from VOTOMS, Gundam, and other mecha shows.

 

 

 And at the back of the coffee shop area, are more posters, artwork, and mecha toys.

 

 

Anyway, as we sat drinking our coffee, Susan discovered a link in the picture of the board I mentioned above, which led us to where a secondhand store sold mecha, and other stuff. Other stuff ranging from cameras to audio and everything in-between.

This is where I scored my Yamato 1/12th Strong Bacchus Scopedog. 

 

Yeah that's me, close-up of the struggle to carry my stash.

That's all for now. Another post to come showing close-ups of all the shiny later. Catch you on the bounce.

Inagi Scopedog

The Scopedog statue from Armored Trooper VOTOMS (Japanese: 装甲騎兵ボトムズ; Romanji: Sōkō Kihei Botomuzu), stands outside the JR East, Inagi Nagasuma Eki (East Japan Railway Company Station).

I took a lot of photos, and when I say I took some photos, I mean I took a whole bunch.

 

I started by walking around the monument.

Then I moved in close to capture the details.

Lots of gribbly details for super detailing a model.

If anyone wants higher resolution pics, let me know.  

The Scopedog is the quintessential 'real robot' of mecha anime. Justifying the existence of humanoid tanks assumes that they can be made to move like humans. Trading off a tanks height for the ability to change posture and maximize use of terrain for cover.

Those assumptions are doing a lot of work to justify their existence.   

If, and the word 'if' is important, one can accept the existence of mecha on the battlefield, then arguably the Scopedog is the largest one could realistically see. The size of the suits will give infantry enough armour to protect them from blast damage, and allow them to carry point defence systems against RPGs and UAVs,.

I argue that mecha suits will allow infantry to survive future battlefields.

I call this sort of mecha, combat armour. Unlike power armour, which is worn, combat armour is driven, or ridden by the operator. Another way to think about them is to see them as Mobile Infantry from Starship Troopers.

Anyway, that's all for now. Catch you on the bounce. 

Back from Japan

Me resisting temptation after Susan found this hobby shop.

Susan took me to a physics conference in Japan, where she was presenting a paper, afterwards we traveled around the country. We had a fab time, and we both came back with goodies. We were lucky to find a bunch of stuff in Tokyo.  

 

Most of our stash of goodies are in per the picture above, except for a couple of 1/60th scale Zwerg kits I picked up too. They were cheaper than the 1/48th toy Zwergs I found.

 

Susan picked up a Dirty Pair Yuri figurine, and a 1/24th Brutishdog, piloted by Fiyana a character from Armored Trooper VOTOMS. 

I found a lot of other tempting items, but not being made of money, and not wanting to expand into other sizes of Scopedogs, I passed on this tempting bad boy.

However, I found a 1/12th scale Strong Bacchus Scopedog at a price that was a steal, which turned out to be so because it had a broken ankle, but I can fix that.

Here with my old secondhand Scopedog I acquired years ago.

I  also picked up a couple of T-shirts along the way too.

That's all for now. Catch you on the bounce.

Small Stumble

Just when I thought I was crossing the finishing line, I stumbled when I was marking out where to drill the holes for the secondary guns. Doh!

What with other stuff in life, friends and family deaths, knocking me back, it wasn't until this weekend I had the urge to work on the model.

As you can see, thanks to Keith Falk, I've changed the tread castings out. 

I've reworked the nose, just waiting for it to harden properly before I file it to shape.

It looks a bit tatty, but you can see the extra bulk I added to enlarge the rear half of the casement ready for the secondary battery barrels.

Ho hum, despite all the hassle, I've really enjoyed working on this project. Below is a picture of my models pasted with the shots I have of the Martian Metal original.

The angle-dangle skews the shape of the original Ogre, but it's the best I've got.

Catch you all on the bounce. 

Heavy Gear Hunter Prop

A couple more new pictures of the full sized Hunter prop appeared on Facebook. Low res, but, myself, Susan, and Jason Frazier we managed to clean and upscale the images with Photoshop and upscalers.

The first new picture.

And the second new picture, taken from a different angle, was burnt out and this is the best I could do to punch it up.

Then, as an experiment, I took the old triple montage shot from before, and split it into three separate pictures. 

Tweaking each shot to bring out the details.

Then Jason Frazier sent me one of the pictures that he had improved using AI, seen below, which extended the dynamic range of the shot.

 

And finally, I ran this last one through an upscaler, which made it much better than it looked before. 

So, I hope all the Heavy Gear fans enjoy these.

TravCon 2026 Part 4

Susan and I played together in the second of two games run by Tom Mouat. I felt super fortunate to be chosen to play with Tom again as his games are always fun.

The scenario was called, Scout Base 947, run using Mongoose Traveller 1st Edition (with Home-Brew Combat Resolution), which just to reiterate were a great set of house rules. Recommended.

 

The briefing started with, "It'll never happen,"they said, but it did. About to strike out on their own after surviving a Scout career, in their slightly weird, non-standard 100ton Scout, their Reserve status was re-activated to do a survey of the systems in the Rim Edge Sector. 

It wasn't too bad though, apart from having to carry a 6 ton mission pod, and an uptight ass as a mission specialist, to do the actual surveys. It was all going pretty well, actually, with just one more long jump to the Scout base, refuel and get paid!

I played the uptight mission specialist.

We landed at the scout base, found it abandoned, and then super freaky shennanigans started. We made it off planet with everyone still alive to get paid, and I achieved my character's objectives without giving the game away.

Sunday was the final day.

I played Gee Cows to the Rescue! again, but with a different character, and stayed schtum about what I knew, but acted all excited by reminding the skipper about the battledress floating in space we found. 

It was worth a lorra, lorra money.

 

Then there was the lunchtime session, wrapping up with Mongoose's presentation, and followed by the presentation. of the three BITS awards. Referees can nominate players for the following awards.   

The Starburst for Extreme Heroism reflects the most heroic (if not necessarily wise) action taken by a character during the convention.

Kezia Herbert won the SEH Award for rolling a critical roll with a bane (3D6 remove highest) with a triple six.

The Derrick Jones award for the best role-player/role-playing moment in a game, named in honour of the man who died last year for inspiring people with his role-playing, and sharp wit.

Sarah Lilly won for playing a lovestruck character so well she was given a restraining order.

 

The PFI Award represents “Ping! F*** It!” – the catchphrase when a small, but critical component from the weapon goes “ping” and disappears down the back of the sofa. Nominations can cover almost any category of unusual death, demise or cock-up, or when something has gone catastrophically and hilariously wrong.

I managed to get my team the PFI award for the shenanigans I got us into playing Alex Treacher's The Extraction. This was the summary of what happened.

We were both totally whacked after the drive back home, and we slept like a log that night.

Thank you to Andy and Richard for all their stirling work, and to Kezia and Alex for encouraging us to attend. And, to everyone I played in a game with, or ran a game I played in, thank you. I had so much fun.

Much needed fun, as life has thrown me some unsettling curveballs of late.