Dave's Transformers Legacy Rant: Titan Class

Decepticon Nemesis (Ship)

Permalink: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Legacy/Nemesis

So, with the Ark getting a robot mode, it was all but inevitable that
the G1 starship the Decepticons rode in on would get one as well. What
wasn't inevitable was that she would be female.

CAPSULE

$200 price point. Yeah, it's getting up there.

Nemesis: Decent if somewhat odd design, but prone to having parts fall
off due to the use of soft plastic and somewhat iffy quality control. At
least none of the joints on mine broke. If I could be confident that I got
the only bad one to slip past QC, I'd call this recommended, but I really
doubt mine is uniquely fall-apart-y. If this goes on clearance somewhere,
maybe pick it up, but I kinda doubt that'll happen. If you really just want
the ship mode, that's decent, the real problems start when you transform this
Transformer.

RANT

Packaging: The usual big windowless box, in Legacy Evolution trade
dress. The front of the box is in landscape mode, 23.75" (60cm) wide, 14.25"
(36cm) tall, and 6" (15cm) deep. The front is dominated by a sort-of
painting of Nemesis in ship mode in orbit over an alien world, with its moon
in the background. I don't think either orb is supposed to be Earth or
Cybertron, unless the artist was being incredibly lazy about depicting them.
Flanked by jet-mode Thrust, Ramjet, Thundercracker, and tetrajet Skywarp,
while firing its deck guns to the upper left corner of the scene, where the
Ark swoops in from behind the planet. (Note: while the box shows the pointy
animation-style tetrajet, the actual included mini-jet is Siege-style.)
The left side has art of the robot mode, with "NEMESIS" in Cybertronian
script on the upper border, while the right side has the right half of the
Legacy Evolution group art. The top panel has a render of ship mode, a big
Legacy Evolution logo, and the QR code. The bottom has the usual legalese.
The back side has renders of both modes, with the ship mode on the right
in "sit on the table" configuration. The upper center inset shows how the
two fin halves on the rear underside can fold together into a single ventral
tail fin. The upper right shows a fold-down landing ramp under the
thrusters, which ends in an A.I.R. Lock connector...sure, we're well past
Siege, but they're gonna make the Titans backwards compatible with all the
other "play set mode" toys since Siege. The middle inset, labeled EvoFusion,
just shows one of the smaller fins being held as an axe. The lower left
inset shows the four all-black Seeker mini-jets included with the set, and
the lower right inset shows them taking off from another A.I.R. Lock ramp.

DECEPTICON: DECEPTICON NEMESIS
Assortment: F6161
Altmode: Ship (starship)
Transformation Difficulty: 36 steps (plus kinda heavy)
Previous Name Use: No
Previous Mold Use: None
Function: Decepticon Transport Vessel
Special Unit: None
Origin Universe: G1
Signature Weapon: Dual wing blasters - Fires explosive barrages of energy
beams with devastating results
Evo-Fusion: None listed, box shows the fin axes in the inset.

The Nemesis strikes fear into the sparks of anyone bold enough to cross
the Decepticon ship. She despites the Autobots and is poised to take down
any who stand in the way of Decepticon victory.

STR 10 INT 7 SPD 8 FRB 10

One presumes that they're ignoring the convention that FTL capacity goes
with Speed 10.

Packaging: Nemesis is sort of in altmode, but a lot of assembly is
required. Several corrugated cardboard panels are folded over to help the
strings hold things in place. The one at the nose end is a sort of
footlocker that includes a tissue paper bag that holds the axe fins, a gun
tower, and a black sprue holding the four jets and six turrets. The pointy
ship nose itself is wrapped in another corrugated cardboard box, and then a
sleeve of regular cardboard. Under that are secured the larger wing guns.
The ventral fin assembly is held into the upper right by two strings....and
man, this is really just a lot of stuff to cut and remove and kind of a
puzzle. Definitely not set up to let you store the toy later. There's only
four rattan strings total, but a LOT of cardboard I'm gonna need to break
down to get into the dumpster.
Note, the black sprue is more of a charcoal gray, the box renders make
it look a lot darker.

Assembly of Altmode: The instructions sheet has twelve steps for putting
the ship together, including getting stuff off the black sprue. Getting the
ventral fin piece snapped into place took a bit of the old Excessive Force,
and the side ramps where you store the jets are "gravity feed" unless you
have extraordinarily small fingers or long nails.
The slide-on strut that holds the ventral fin doesn't really stay
snapped together strongly, and it has a tendency to pop off during
transformation.
Note, if you transform the front end first, like the instructions show,
you can get a sort of evil Interplanet Janet mode, a robot upper half on a
spaceship lower/rear half.

Altmode: This is indeed the very 80s Decepticon spaceship, full of
curving lines and semi-organic shapes. It's a bit beefier in places than
some of the animation models (like many G1 models, it was only loosely
adhered to from episode to episode). It has a little more detail in terms of
colors, and it picks a more "Decepticon Purple" dominant color instead of the
magenta that sometimes showed up. Still, it hits most of the notable
details, such as dorsal (top) and ventral (bottom) fins that are basically as
big as the actual wings, cross-piece winglets on the main wings, canards, a
command tower with multi-turret gun deck in front of it, and a weird
semi-cylindrical chunk on the underside. It even has extendable ramps
kinda-sorta where the boarding beams were in MtMtE ep 1.
Now...what scale is this? There's teeny little windows molded on the
sides, the size and spacing of which suggest that a robot mode Decepticon
might be only a millimeter or two tall on this scale. That's something like
1:20000 scale...which seems unreasonable, since that'd make the ship about
ten kilometers long. Going with 1:1200 scale (standard naval model scale)
makes the windows more like decorative details, but the ship would only be
650 meters long, which seems like a plausible size for a ship carrying a few
dozen Decepticons, although it makes the control tower something only guys
like Rumble could really fit inside standing up. The teeny Optimus Prime
that came with the Accessory Pack (Centurion) and was meant to go with
Unicron is closer to 1:1000 scale, so 1:1200 is certainly plausible. So I
guess the window rows don't each represent a deck, it's more like three or
four rows to one deck.
A hefty toy, it's 4.7 pounds (2.1kg). From rubbery pointy nose to
thrusters it's 21.25" (54cm) long. From the top of the dorsal fin to the
bottom of the ventral fin is 17" (43cm), while the wingspan is narrower than
the height at only 13.75" (35cm). It is overwhelmingly Decepticon Purple,
with accents in dark gray, pink-purple, and clear red, plus a couple bits of
other colors. Most of the hull is a vibrant purple plastic under normal
light, but under UV light there's three distinct shades (some of which are
kinda discernable under bright normal light). The fins and wings are darker
under UV than the rest of the hull, some some of the more flexible (not
rubbery, just...kinda tupperware-y) plastics are as dark. The underside
bulge is entirely its own shade, but some of this is clearly not intentional,
as there's a couple of pieces that are mirror images in mold but radically
different colors under UV. Purple pickiness aside, a rubbery clear red
plastic is used for the nosecone and the top of the command tower, and is
behind window openings on the main body of the command tower and the gun deck
in front of it. Dark gray plastic is used for the thrusters in back, the
fold out launcher ramps on the sides, the turrets, the teeny jets, a strut on
the back of the command tower, and a bit of visible strut on the underside.
The rubbery bits of the nose and command tower are fully painted over,
mostly in purple (good match to the plastics), with dark gray on the tips of
the tower and light pink-purple on the tip of the nose. The pink-purple
paint is also used on the tips and trailing edges of the canards, details on
the gun deck, strupes on the command tower and the sides of the tail (dorsal
and ventral). Dark gray is also used on the gun deck, some bits on the sides
of the command tower base, little gun-like details on either side of the
nose, random tech greebles on either side of the vertical fins between their
hinges and the hull, and the root of the leading edge of each wing. Those
leading edge bits also have silver rings I think are meant to suggest either
launch bays or torpedo launchers, and little red triangles. Some vents near
the front of the gun deck are rimmed in silver, and there's other det painted
details on the rear gun deck (which, spoiler, forms the chestplate of the
robot mode). There's similar red details on the underside of the nose,
although they're more meant for robot mode where they become the fronts of
the shoulders. On either side of the dorsal tail fin are molded Decepticon
logos that are painted a more blue-purple, on a background of dark purple
paint. The insides of the four thrusters are painted "AllSpark Blue."
There's a lot of movable parts on transformation joints, but the biggest
"supposed to move in this mode" bit is that the ventral tail fin splits apart
so that its root is level with the half-cylinder and the ship can sit on a
flat surface without tilting or needed a display base. The vertical fins on
the wings have soft-ratchet joints that are supposed to help them avoid
flopping over, but one of the four on mine seems to be mismolded or something
because it doesn't have contact between the octagonal shape and the fin. A
small panel on either side about even with the control tower can flip up,
revealing a tiny flight deck with a ramp that can come out. When the ramps
are empty, they simply fall out from gravity easily enough, but once you
attach the teeny jets they require long nails or tweezers or something to get
out (there's a slider tab, but it's only accessible in robot mode). The
ramps can fold up or down once fully extended. There's another ramp between
the lower two thrusters that can fold down to represent an exit for
non-flying Decepticons, although there's not much room behind it, even a
Micro Machine vehicle is too big. I guess it's for the tiny robots that came
with Unicron and the Ark. 15mm scale wargaming soldiers can fit as well,
although I don't currently have any that look appropriate. There's no
fold-out landing gear, but it was probably expected to land thrusters-down
anyway (and how it actually arrived on Earth was more along the lines of a
crash).
Hoo, boy, are there a lot of 5mm and 3mm connection points, even leaving
aside the six 5mm sockets dedicated to the turrets. For those, there's three
in a narrow triangle on the gun deck (one in front, two to the rear), one in
a recessed bit on either side of the hull between the gun deck and the
command tower, and one in a notch under the rubbery bit of the command tower
(technically the command tower is also attached via a 5mm socket too).
There's two more 5mm sockets on the underside of the nose, they're screw
holes but deep enough for some thruster-style Fire Blasts, or to mount extra
weapons. The center of each thruster is also a 5mm socket, it's a pity the
toy didn't come with four engine thrust Fire Blasts. There's a pair of
standard 3mm studs on either side of the front hull just under where the
canard axes attach, plus one on the top and bottom of each wing just inward
of the little vertical winglets (these have little rings raised around the
stud, maybe they're supposed to look like weapon ports or thrusters).
There's three on either side of the upper rear hull on either side of the
dorsal fin root, but these are partly recessed so that the studs point
straight out to the sides. This makes them clearly intended as weapon ports,
and "explosion squibs" like those that came with shield-form Battle Masters
won't really stay on. On the lower rear hull in symmetric positions to the
upper three pairs are downward-pointing recessed 3mm studs, which were
probably intended to go along with the nose 5mm sockets as landing
thrusters.
So, a full complement of Fire Blasts is at least 8 thruster-style ones
(like the tip pieces of the Omega Supreme stacks, if not the entire
triple-stack Jetfire ones), and ten weapon-blast types. With four thrusters
in the back, you really only need four more to run maneuvering jets, and for
landing all eight would be pointed down from the hull.
All of the turret pieces have about the same kind of barrel, which is
narrower than 3mm at the tip and wider than 3mm behind the tip, so they're
really not Fire Blast compatible. The ones that are supposed to go on the
gun deck have round turrets with two barrels, 14mm wide and 22mm long. The
ones that go on the sides and the tower have rectangular turrets and three
barrels, 16mm wide and 21mm long. The gun deck ones can rotate all the way
around, the tower turret can cover the entire front half, but the side
turrets only have about 30 degrees total range. Putting round turrets on the
sides gives more coverage, although they do not turn smoothly due to details
that weren't supposed to come into contact.
The ramps that can come out on the sides end in AIRPort connectors, and
each has two 3mm studs for attaching teeny jets. The ramp in back that folds
down also ends in an AIRPort connector, but there's no other attachment
points there.