I was at Partizan recently. Its a twice-yearly wargamers event, tending towards historical games. Its worth a visit if you're passing, and its just down the road from an aircraft museum, which is awesome. I found Partizan to be rather busy this year, and regrettably I didn't find anything I was looking for. I did however find this for a tenner.
The Tieren hails from Gundam 00, the last Gundam I remember watching before dropping out of anime for a while. Manufactured by a China + Russia + etc. superstate called the Human Reform League, the Tieren Ground Type is 00's tribute to the Zaku II. For reasons so obvious I hope I shouldn't have to list them. That said, its definitely a machine with its own character. The Tieren has a lot of tank in its DNA, like the vision slits around the collar, and maybe a bit of Armored Core or Front Mission. It looks more like a brick shithouse than Zaku-alikes usually do, and honestly would not look that out of place in my guard forces. It's very utilitarian, with almost no head to speak of, and is in some ways the antithesis of baseline mobile suit design. This really isn't designed for agility in space. Or indeed being cool. It makes the 08th MS Team look like a bunch of posers. Sadly, building this not-long after the Asshimar did it no favours.
Dating from 2007, this kit is contemporary to the series it comes from, and that leads to a common problem that you may have noticed. If you've got a UC release after the fact, you'll find a certain degree of extra effort put in. Some silliness with thrusters perhaps, but that’s the source material. Kits for that year's anime, can be a bit more obnoxious with their stickers, especially older ones. The Tieren is mainly sensible military tones, except for some orange sections on the chest and some white trim. Guess which bits are stickers. Guys, you are just making things difficult for yourselves, and you've been doing this long enough to know better. I skipped the stickers completely, breaking out the paint again. I'm just gonna come out and say it, doing those orange bits in grey just looks better, even with my brushwork. This faintly annoying situation seems to be a consequence of the runner design, which is optimised for reuse with the Tieren's garish variants, but I suppose it is rather forward thinking. In other news, sprue A did feature an uncharacteristic amount of plastic flash for a Bandai release, i.e. some. I must have got unlucky.
Then again, maybe its not that great of a kit in the first place; its a low priority release from 2007. There's a fair number of hollow parts, mould lines and seams. Nothing I can't ignore or work around, but its not often you get seam splitting the top of the head. That's a shame because otherwise there's some interesting elements here. The arms for example are on the biggest forwards butterfly joint I've ever seen, the body being a large drum around which the shoulders rotate. Its legs go together in an interesting way, and Megatron style arm cannons aren't too common in gunpla. The tiny monoeye is sculpted and posable, while the shields are on jointed mounts. Posability tends towards the acceptable for such proportions, but really isn't great, and suffers for a party trick that highlights the limitations. You can arrange things so the gun rests on the leg shield, the instructions encouraging this, but you have to swap to the other arm, cheat a bit, and generally it looks awkward. I didn't bother photographing it. Maybe the 1/100 scale version can do this better, but I won't be leaving it posed like that. Pose it like a battlemech, and you won't have complaints. There is also spare hand, and provisions for a flight stand, although I’ve neglected to find mine. I would show you the melee weapon too, except I can't seperate the hands to put it in. That's probably the ink wash I did, gumming things up, but I didn't try it beforehand, so who knows? Never had that happen before, and I'm not inclined to try forcing them open.
As you can probably tell, I've been a bit back and forth with the Tieren Ground Type. Its design lines up nicely with my current tastes, but the execution is lacking. Its like somebody wanted to make the mobile suit equivalent to a soviet-era shitbox, and Bandai ended up producing a kit that started to have the build quality of a soviet-era shitbox. People tell me that this is the norm for 00 era kits. Clearly I got out in time. Its not terrible, and the vibe does carry it, but a remake wouldn't hurt. A frustrating kit.
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