Model kits

Design Series - The GM's of 0080 2021-03-27

For my very first Design Series post, I want to go over something that’s been on my mind a lot lately - namely, the GM variants found in the 1989 OVA Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket. I built two of these GM’s as model kits in the past year, and currently have another in the backlog. This seems like the perfect time to cover them all in one fell swoop.

Caveats and Context

There are plenty of other GM variants from across the Universal Century timeline, but I am going to focus on the ones from War in the Pocket.
These mobile suits don’t just happen to appear in the same OVA: they are also part of a single throughline of technological progression, each one building off of another. That makes this post much easier to write.

Design Series Posts 2021-03-25

Lately I’ve been in the habit of writing about the in-universe technical details of the model kits I build. I find it to be good fun to nerd out about this stuff, but sometimes it is tough to determine how far to go with it. For instance, say I’m building a model of Mobile Suit D, which happens to be based on Mobile Suit C, which was based on MS B ,etc. Subsequently, MS D was the basis for MS E, F, and G. How much do I talk about these other units? How much is enough to provide proper context about Mobile Suit D? How much is too much?

Gunpla Build - Gundam Heavyarms (Part 3) 2021-03-20

These final sections of the Heavyarms were the easiest to build. For one reason or another there simply wasn’t a lot of painting or detailing to do.

Shoulders

Like the chest, and the legs, the shoulders are filled with ordinance. This time though, there wasn’t any need for painting. I applied some gunmetal weathering compound, and that was that:

Gunpla Build - Gundam Heavyarms (Part 2) 2021-03-18

Onward and upward (literally)!

Upper Torso

I got out of the habit of posting photos of loose pieces, but allow me an exception here. The Upper Torso uses a quite a lot of pieces, and I felt compelled to share:

Like with Sandrock, Heavyarms uses a lot of parts layering (and a little help from some clever use of decals) to create a level of detail you don’t often see in a High Grade.

Gunpla Build - Gundam Heavyarms (Part 1) 2021-03-13

Since the High Grade Heavyarms is the same(ish) price as the Sandrock - and that they are both from the same series - I assumed they would have similar part counts. That does not seem to be the case.

Here are the runners for Sandrock:

And here are the ones for Heavyarms:

Granted, the runners are different shapes, but it still feels like Heavyarms has more going on. For example, its “A” Runner (the one in the center) is the full size of the box.

Gunpla Build - Gundam Heavyarms 2021-03-04

From 2018 - 2019, Bandai released three new model kits of mobile suits from Gundam Wing. These included the Leo, the Maganac, and the Gundam Sandrock. All three models were very well received due to their excellent detail and articulation. Sandrock in particular got the Gunpla community very excited to see what Bandai would do with the rest of the show’s five Gundams.

In October 2020, roughly a year later, we finally get to another with the release HGAC Gundam Heavyarms:

Let’s see if Bandai was able to work some magic again.