Phil's Combiner Wars Skydive & Air Raid Review

[Philip Ayres]

Skydive

Confession time: I can never remember which Aerialbot is which! Skydive is the grey one with black wings who TFWiki tells me is a F-16 Falcon Jet. He comes packaged in robot mode complete with a trading card. He's an Aerialbot so, like the rest of his team, there's yellow highlights on the card, and he's numbered 2.

The robot mode is nice and chunky, taking the 1986 Scramble City body part design and tweaking it to give Skydive pointer Shoulders and an almost upside down pot shaped head while putting all the colours where they ought to be. You can tell it's meant to be Skydive. His articulation is good: ball jointed head & shoulders, bicep rotation, bending elbows, rotating waist, ball jointed hips and bending knees. He come with a double barrelled gun for him to hold, similar to the weapon with the original toy, and a larger weapon with two warhead mounted on the end. Each can be held in either hand.

Transformation: remove the weapon. Fold down the front of the legs. Lock the legs together, unpeg the back of the knees and fold down the upper legs into the lower legs: the knee is pinned to a bar which is in turn pinned half way up the leg. So the knee is positioned at the top of the leg for robot mode and inside the bottom for vehicle mode. Get used to it, it's on all four Aerialbots and two of the Stunticons. The only thing to be careful of is that the knees tab in right when reversing the transformation. Personally I think it's Overcomplicated solution to a simple problem when a sliding joint, like Dragstrip has, will suffice. Fold the arms straight along the sides of the plane. Pull each wing back and swing them, and the connected shoulder and arm, back down the body: a similar idea to the legs here: the shoulder is mounted on a bar which is in turn attached half way down the body. Peg the inside of the wrist against the sides of the back of the jet. Fold down the tail fins and wings. Fold the nose forward, off the robot's back/top of the plane, and into the correct position for a jet.

I am not a plane man, but TFWiki tells me this new version is "a cross between an F-16 and an F-18". I can see the resemblance, but he now has two tail fins rather than one. Other editions include a pair of gold painted missiles underneath each wing. Also under each wing, and on top of the body of the jet, are 5mm peg holes which you can use to mount his weapons. Since there's three peg holes and just two weapons there's plenty of configurations available to you. Unlike Firefly and Silverbolt, Skydive has no landing gear and relies on the robot parts on the undercarriage to rest on.

Skydive can also function as a limb for Superion or any other Combiner Wars combined robot:

Arm mode: take the robot, fold the head back 90 degrees raising the combiner peg. Fold the arms so the shoulders are above the head, with the arms pointing backwards, folded down his back and the hands hanging onto the tabs there. Peg the legs together to form the lower arm. Bend the barrels of his larger dual cannon down, fold out the fingers and peg into the base of his feet.

Decent arm providing the Combiner wars standard of a turning and raising shoulder, a bicep from the robot hip, double bending elbow and rotating wrist.

Leg Mode: Take the jet mode, fold the nose cone onto his back, as per robot mode, and insert his large dual cannon into the rear of the jet as a foot.

Solid lower leg which provides a thigh swivel, bending knee and rotating ankle.

Skydive's a solid, if unspectacular, toy in all of it's modes. Get used to it because he forms the basis for another Aerialbot too!

Skydive was sold in Combiner Wars Deluxe wave 1 alongside his team mates Alpha Bravo & Firefly and the Stunticon Dragstrip. This wave was first seen in the far east in the middle of December 2014 and shortly afterwards, to much surprise, became the first generally distributed Generations deluxe wave in the UK for many years. The wave was then found in the USA at around the end of the same year.

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Air Raid

The original 1986 Air Raid is an F-15 Eagle, the same as the original Decepticon jets and indeed the jet mode bears the same colour, black, as one of those Decepticons, Skywarp. This new version is a quite similar looking F-14 Tomcat. What's interesting is that the official images of the Aerialbots make it quite obvious that Skydive & Air Raid share a great many parts:

	Skydive	Air Raid
Leg Front	Grey	White
Upper Legs	Black	White
Waist	Black	White
Connector	Black	White
Gun	Black	White
Tailfins	Black	Black
Nosecone	Black	Black

More comments when the toy is released, but it very much looks like he has functional swing wings.

Air Raid is numbered 1 in the Aerialbot set and sold in the second wave of combiner toys. He is the lone Aerialbot in this wave and comes packed with the three Stunticons who do not feature in wave 1: Breakdown, Deadend and Offroad. This wave is due to be released in mid/late January 2015.

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Future Repaints

The obvious candidates for recolouring these two toys are G2 Skydive, in silver, and G2 Air Raid, in blue, coincidentally the colours of another early Decepticon jet, Thundercracker.

It therefore makes sense to me that Starscream, Sunstorm and Acid Storm would make good repaints for Air Raid.

The swing wing F-14 design also automatically lends itself to doing Jetfire

[The Doctor]

Skydive is my favourite CW toy so far. Feels very solid and the colours work well together. Getting the wings in position for plane mode utterly befuddled me though. Had to look up youtube videos to see how the wings were meant to move. I predict many broken Skydives at car boot sales. The natural urge is to push down rather than wiggle.

-Ralph

[Philip Ayres]

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Air Raid

Air Raid & Sky Dive would appear to be the first examples of Combiner Wars' policy of remoulding where possible to produce a new toy. When you think about it, this makes a lot of sense: within the teams there are similar vehicle modes and similar vehicles crop up across some of the more mixed teams.

In robot mode air Raid and Sky dive don't look too similar until you look closely: it appears that the legs and the gun are the same shape and that's it. Everything upwards of the waist is new. Whereas Sky Dive was a mixture of grey lower limbs, black upper limbs, combiner connector & head and a had a red body Air Raid is all white, bar his body. Compared to the original 1986 Air Raid this looks a decent upgrade to the original. Articulation wise he's identical to Combiner Wars Sky Dive.

Transformation to jet mode starts off the same: open the legs and fold the upper legs in. From here on it gets different. Straighten the arms to the sides of the toy and fold the shoulders down, tabbing the arms into the sides of the plane. Fold the side tail fins and wings out. Fold the wings back.

The original 1986 Air Raid is an F-15 Eagle, the same as the original Decepticon jets and indeed the jet mode bears the same colour, black, as one of those Decepticons, Skywarp. This new version is a quite similar looking F-14 Tomcat. Despite looking completely different in this mode from Skydive incredibly they do share some jet mode parts: the nose cones and upright tail fins are identical. There's hints to a common origin elsewhere in the design, the way the tail fins fold down and a 5mm peg hole on the vehicle's back for their large weapon, a feature absent on Firefly. Like the other two Combiner Wars Aerialbot jets he has a 5mm peg hole under each wing to mount weapons in.

His weapons set is identically moulded to Skydives: the vehicle mode cannon/hand/foot even looks the same, bar a small joint in the thumb which is now white where it was black as is the dual barrelled hand gun. It does mean, with some swapping, that you can now give both jets paired weapons. Here's a summary of the shared parts

	Skydive	Air Raid
Leg Front	Grey	White
Upper Legs	Black	White
Waist	Black	White
Connector	Black	White
Dual Gun	Black	White
Thumb Joint	Black	White
Tailfins	Black	Black
Nosecone	Black	Black
Vehicle Gun	Black	Black

Transformation instructions to limb mode is identical between the two figures. It's almost tempting to use them both as the same limb so there can be a dual cannon mounted on each shoulder, like Powermaster Optimus, or each leg, similar to Fortress Maximus.

TOP remould, love him. I've got the first three waves of Combiner Wars toys now. They may have come first but to me the Aerialbots are still the strongest toys in the set and feel like they're punching considerably above their weight.

Air Raid is numbered 1 in the Aerialbot set and sold in the second wave of combiner toys. He is the lone Aerialbot in this wave and comes packed with the three Stunticons who do not feature in wave 1: Breakdown, Deadend and Offroad. This wave is was released in early February 2015.

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Future Repaints

The obvious candidates for recolouring these two toys are G2 Skydive, in silver, and G2 Air Raid, in blue, coincidentally the colours of another early Decepticon jet, Thundercracker.

It therefore makes sense to me that Starscream, Sunstorm and Acid Storm would make good repaints for Air Raid. Thundercracker and Skywarp might be a harder sell given their similarity to the G1 and Combiner Wars versions but could be done if the body parts were changed too. Alternately another wing mould to precisely mimic the F15 would be good.

The swing wing F-14 design also automatically lends itself to doing Jetfire or his downsized Cyberjet version Hooligan.

[Shockprowl]

I grabbed a Skydive the other day from a local Asdas. One of the very few CW toys I've seen in the shops. He's the only Aerialbot I plan to own, and I only got him 'cos I saw him there. He was my one and only Aerialbot as a child and Prowl-in-the-Sky has great nostalgia factor for me.

I echo what's been said already. He's a great solid figure. Jet mode is very messy on the underside, but robot mode is fab with a nice weapon and wonderful head/face sculpt.

I think I'll explain his presence in my little Jetfire lead 'Earth Force' team of Genetations Autobots by having Alpha Bravo replace him in the Aerialbots, who are now on Cybertron, and he's stayed on Earth to be Jetfire's protege.

[Philip Ayres]

42 year old Phil's final act is a little review catchup:

Generation 2 Skydive

After lying fallow since the first two waves of the line the Skydive/Air Raid mould gets a large amount of usage early in 2016. The first time we see them again is in the Generation 2 Superion set which was hinted at in May 2015, revealed at SDCC 2015 pre show breakfast and finally on sale very late in December 2015/early January 2016.

As the name suggests, this is the the G2 Skydive colours mapped onto the Combiner Wars Skydive mould and it looks great.

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Generation 2 Air Raid

Similarly G2 Air Raid's colours are then used on the Combiner Wars Air Raid toy.

As ever I'm reminded that while 1986 Air Raid looks like Skywarp, G2 Air Raid's colours remind me of Thundercracker!

The Superion Boxset was available through online retailers such as Amazon.

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Botcon 2015 Cicadon

Reusing Sky Dive as a vehicle version of Cicadon kind of makes sense as both are flyers though the red colouring chosen doesn't match how people remember the toy and is purely from his few seconds on-screen during the Beast Wars story Agenda. Nevertheless a red jet is always welcome and he looks very nice even if, unlike some of his team mates, he doesn't have a new head.

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Botcon 2015 Terrorsaur

The reveal of the Botcon 2015 Giftset artwork set a precedent for what was to follow at the show by unintentionally revealing a toy before it was intended when it showed a small jet Terrorsaur in the top left of the drawing. Botcon then, a month before the convention, revealed their attendee figure before the show for the first time revealing that Terrorsaur was a red repaint of Air Raid with a new head.

Just like Cicadon above this toy looks good in red and makes a great companion piece for the above set. There's a superb orange pant job on the nose which makes you think of Terrorsaur's beak.

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Unite Warriors Ghost Starscream

As you might be able to see from the above, I think that the Air Raid version of this toy makes a better Decepticon jet than Sky Dive. So when Grand Galvatron was revealed it was a little bit of a surprise to see Starscream from Sky Dive, even with a new head.

Even more surprising is it's a clear Starscream, as a version of the character post his movie elimination at the hands of Galvatron! Now I'm a sucker for clear repaints but with Transformers they have a habit of not lasting too well with repeated stress on the joints causing cracks. However the plastic used on this toy feels different to that on other clear repaints with a slightly rubber feel to it. Almost the entire toy is cast in clear plastic, bar the dual gun, upper legs & arms, which are solid grey, and the waist which is red. It's not obvious what colour the head is here because it's painted, but my guess is it too is red, matching the waist, because all the other versions of this toy have had matching heads and waist. The combiner connector, which will get some punishment, is also wisely solid plastic and moulded in yellow meaning in robot mode it does a great job of impersonating Starscream's cockpit which is also usually on his chest.

Takara Tomy have done a great job on the entire Grand Galvatron set but Starscream is one of the real standouts as you can see in this gallery.

Grand Galvatron is Unite Warriors set UW-07 and was released as a TakaraTomyMall exclusive in late April 2016.

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Unite Warriors Curse Armada Thrust

Various identities for the two jets were bandied around after Grand Galvatron's silhouette tease but Armada Thrust wasn't one of them. Just like Starscream and his repaints are better suited for Air Raid, Thrust's original jet shape lends itself more to Sky Dive. However a cracking deco mixing two shades of grey with green makes up for that with the green combiner peg aping the central green stripe on Thrust's chest and a paint app on the left hand side of his chest matching the original. The job is completed with a brand new head, reminiscent of the original but also resembling Revenge of the Fallen Dirge.

I think Thrust will be overshadowed for many people by the others in this set but he really is a crackingly good toy as This Gallery shows.

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Future Repaints

I've already remarked on the resemblance between the Air Raids in jet mode and Thundercracker & Skywarp: I'd like to see these two done properly from that mould with the right colours on the robot too. It therefore makes sense to me that Starscream, Sunstorm and Acid Storm would also make good repaints for Air Raid. Thundercracker and Skywarp might be a harder sell given their similarity to the G1 and Combiner Wars versions but could be done if the body parts were changed too. Alternately another wing mould to precisely mimic the F15 would be good.

The swing wing F-14 design also automatically lends itself to doing Jetfire or his downsized Cyberjet version Hooligan.

The Armada Thrust head could be reused on one of Thrust's repainted in red or blue, in the Armada line, or in yellow and white as Universe Sunstorm or reused to form Revenge of the Fallen Dirge or his repaint Hunt For The Decepticons Jetblade.

[The Doctor]

Botcon set is 2016 not 2015!

-Ralph

[Philip Ayres]

Ta!

[Philip Ayres]

[Bogatan]

I think I want Grand Galvatron.

[Philip Ayres]

You do.

And so does Ralph.

But neither of you can have mine!

[The Doctor]

*digs tunnel to Swindon*

-Ralph

[Philip Ayres]

<sends Nosecone and Twin Twist into tunnel to repel invaders>

[Philip Ayres]

Combiner Wars Strafe

No toy better illustrates the difference in priority between Hasbro and Takara's Combiner Wars Computron sets than Strafe. There's a hint of it with the toy orange of Combiner Wars Afterbreaker vs the cartoon red of Unite Warriors Afterburner but with the new versions of Lightspeed & Nosecone it's more an argument of which toy better represents the character as a whole. However with Strafe Hasbro and Takara have chosen two totally different toys to remould to represent the different versions of the character.

Hasbro have started with the Air Raid Aerialbot limb, and it is the Air Raid version as certain detail on the robot chest & jet underside confirms even before we look at the pictures of a toy prototype leaked during January 2016 which clearly show Air Raid's black with new parts attached. We loose the nose and the wings which are replaced with new wings, large red ones at the rear and smaller off white ones at the front. The nose isn't quite as flat as the original toy and a little liberty has been taken modifying the black patch occupied by the rubsign on the original Technobot Strafe into an angular cockpit. Forward of the cockpit we have the twin orange guns, sadly fixed in place on this new version. He retains the peg hole in the middle of the plane's back and, somewhat oddly given he's got no extra weapons, also gains one under each wing. There's also a 5mm peg hole just behind the cockpit and in vehicle mode this can be used to mount Scrounge on him, almost as a AWACS disc (my thanks to my plane expert, The Kaptain, Karl Thurgood for pointing this one out!). Where Afterbreaker's vehicle mode was a bit of a poor effort, Strafe's is superb work.

Robot mode transformation is just as per Air Raid and, with the plane parts folded back, the robot modes are very, very similar. Most of the robot is an off white with the lower portion of the upper arms, crotch & combiner peg orange and the chest sides painted burgundy red. The big surprise here is a new head, with a visor and open face, which looks great. The head is painted white, with a red painted face, but the evidence of some slightly paint blemishes is that all the new pieces are on a red plastic sprue, the colour of the rear wings, which has been painted and then the toy assembled. Alas the robot has no weapons: like Titans Return Brainstorm he could really do with his guns being removable from his jet nose.

His limb mode is again nearly identical to Air Raid. The nose, cockpit and 5mm peg form kibble on the shoulder which can be further added to by adding Scrounge's saucer mode if I was brave enough to ever push his head down again, with the Cybaxx shuttle attached. The only problem with the arm mode is that the holes on the painted small wings are a little small for the tabs on the sides of the arms to fit into. Blame is firmly on the new wings: the tabs probably fitted snugly in the unpainted part but don't with the extra layer of paint added.

Bar the lack of removable guns, or any guns at all, and the slight problem with the tabs in arm mode this is a very very good toy. Air Raid was always my favourite of the Combiner Wars Aerialbot limbs and they've done a fantastic job modifying him to Strafe here.

[blueshift]

I liked Strafe but it was odd how half his legs were made from bendy plastic. Are the original Aerialbots like that?

[Philip Ayres]

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Combiner Wars Fellbat

Really the limbs in the Liokaiser Giftset are a complete game of two halves. I couldn't care less about two the new Brawns used as legs but new Decepticon Jet limbs? Oh yeah. Like Unite Warriors Grand Galvatron the Liokaiser giftset repaints both the Skydive & Air Raid versions of this mould and generally they're really good fits for the characters they're being asked to be.

I presume Fellbat has been renamed from his original toy Hellbat due to sensitivities about the name. Nevertheless they've done an excellent job here replicating the dark blue jet with grey wings. A lovely touch find the missiles moulded under the wings painted red.

The robot mode looks pretty great too with a lot more grey being revealed. I love the new head, an interpretation of the cartoon Hellbat head which looks like a stylised Optimus Prime head with pull out fins from the side.

Fabulous toy, love it.

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Combiner Wars Guyhawk

Gaihawk & Hellbat are a bit special to UK fans as we didn't get versions of them in Rescue Force, our Autobot repaint of Breast Force. To this day nobody is 100% sure why but evidence from the UK release of Brainmaster Cars and Yellow Constructicons plus the exclusivity of G2 Superion and the non release of G2 Bruticus suggests someone at Hasbro UK had gone off combiners big time.

Gaihawk looks quite similar to the original F15 Decepticon jet so it's only appropriate he should use the Combiner Wars F14 Swing Wing version that looks like it was made to be turned into Starscream, Thundercracker & Skywarp. The shocking pink with silver wing is particularly lurid but then Gaihawk never was a subtle toy. Black and yellow highlights are revealed in a robot mode topped with a rather egg shaped head that is the only Liokaiser Destron team member to not feature fold out pieces.

The colours are just insane on this toy but I love it, there hasn't been a bad repaint of CW Air Raid yet. My only problem is that both the slots and tabs for holding the arms onto the wings in arms mode are painted making them impossible to fit together properly in that mode.

More Combiner Wars Decepticon Jet limbs please!

[Philip Ayres]

Transformer Subscription Service 4.0 Windsweeper

Take the Windsweeper colours and do the Skydive mould in them. Job done. Extra Decepticon Combiner Wars jet. Throw in a bio note making reference to the frequently held belief that Windsweeper should be an Autobot Triggerbot, and pack with a Matrix, nicked from the Reveal The Shield Battle in Space set, for the combined mode and you're laughing.

[Philip Ayres]

Transformer Subscription Service 5.0 Fractyl

Botcon 2016 Terrorsaur in green, with gold camo, as Beast Wars Terrorsaur's Botcon 1997 repaint Fractyl. Boom, job done and Subs Service v5 starts, as Botcon 2016 included, with a homage to a previous Botcon product. Lacking a spare Beast Wars Voyager core, Fractyl & Terrorsaur join the other beast Combiner Wars Limbs, Tigatron & Unit-3, as limbs on my Unite Warriors Grand Scourge combiner.

Transformer Subscription Service 5.0 Starscream

I'm not a Botcon attendee and, before they started doing combiners, didn't have much truck with the Transformers Figure Subscription Service so my direct experience of the Heroic Decepticons/Evil Autobots Shattered Glass concept has been minimal. I thought it was a good idea for a one off for BotCon 2008 but Fun Publications was unable to leave it alone and kept producing more and more Shattered Glass toys, frequently including toys that many fans felt should have had the standard Autobot & Decepticon symbols on, notably Action Master Thundercracker. Since there's a lot of homaging to past Botcon & Club exclusives in the final year of the convention and Subs Service, I'm not 100% surprised to see a Shattered Glass toy in TFSS 5.0. But this one I have multiple problems with.

All along I've thought that the F-16 Air Raid version of the mould would make a better Decepticon Strike Plane than Skydive, but it was Skydive used to create the clear [url=http://toys.tfw2005.com/?p=45851>Unite Warriors Ghost Starscream[/url]. Given that exists it's only logically that it should get repainted as at least the real Starscream, and probably his 1984 repaints Thundercracker & Skywarp. But no, for whatever reason FunPub decide to resurrect their 2008 Shattered Glass Starscream colours which in turn play on the relationship between Starscream and Jetfire in the cartoon by giving Starscream Jetfire's colours. So I'm feeling deprived of my Skydive in solid Starscream colours, who I'm probably not going to see now thanks to the existence of Power of the Primes Starscream, a Voyager Combiner Core. I still have hopes of Thundercracker and Skywarp CW Skydives to complete that combiner, but that's a different matter!

But it's now that the choice of mould for Unite Warriors Starscream comes back to haunt us! See if the Starscream there had been Air Raid, then the TFSS Starscream would also have been Air Raid. And then slapping the Shattered Glass colours on that would have given us, faction symbols aside, a more than passable CW Jetfire complete with swing wings!

I've got some problems with the deco on the jet too: large areas on unpainted white plastic push the knock off button to me, not helped by the grey cockpit being almost indistinguishable at first glance. The red dual cannon .... doesn't really work and I'm not sure about the clear red hand either: it's unique so won't really go with anything else but I could see it as a sort of powered up fist in combined mode.





The robot mode works better than the jet mode, with more red, plastic & paint, and black, just paint, but there's still a lot of white.





With either a different deco or a different mould this could have been a great toy. A bit of a miss from the TFSS means they go out on a bit of a damp squib.

[Philip Ayres]

Generations Power of the Primes Dreadwind

Hasbro seemingly went out of the way in the early days of Power of the Primes to conceal that there was a combining gimmick in the line. Unfortunately the San Diego Comicon 2017 Collector's Preview Breakfast where the new versions of Darkwing & Dreadwind were revealed immediately made it clear they were obvious retools of Skydive & Air Raid, himself a Skydive retool! However a closer look when in hand reveals an even more interesting story.

Obviously his head and shoulders are new, as is his body, surrounding the combiner connector. The top half of the connector is new, to accommodate a fold out flap with a 5mm port underneath, and the bottom half of the combiner connector is different too: same basic shape as always but the detail at the bottom has changed from a slatted rectangle to an inverted trapezium. Upper arms look the same, but there's an added shallow tab on the side. Lower arms look very similar but there's now an odd shaped indent on the front and the slot on the side is now a 5mm peg hole. Looking on the back of the lower arm the internal construction of the piece has altered slightly. Most of the waist downwards looks the same but there's some new moulding connected to a bar, same green plastic as the shoulders, which is in turn connected to a piece of plastic which the wings are hinger onto. So there's lots of pieces here which are the same, a few new ones and some which are either close copies of the original or genuinely retooled.

The head and the shoulders are the defining feature of Dreadwind's robot mode and they've got these dead on. The pipes on the shoulders have a 5mm internal diameter enabling you to mount weapons on them. The front of his new combiner connector folds down revealing another 5mm peg hole and that's used to attach his Prime Armour. Dreadwind's Prime Armour is a different shape to the Dinobot one used with Swoop & Slug and different again to Jazz. The main body is purple, the cover/gun is the same green as the shoulders and the thumbs & peg are the same off white as most of the body. Gone is the dual cannon, now very familiar to owners of this mould but unfortunately it's replaced by only one gun. His original had two so the absence here is odd especially when his wave 2 team-mate Blackwing has 2.

Identical articulation to Skydive.

Transformation: Broadly similar to Skydive: Fold the jet nose off the back over the head. Shorten the legs using the internal hinge transformation common to many Combiner Wars toys. Straighten the arms to the sides and then swing them down on a hinge between shoulder & body so the shoulders sit near the middle of the chest. Then comes the new bit: fold the wings out to the sides and pull out to the sides, up and back in so they're over the shoulders: a tab on the back of the shoulders recesses into a slot on the base of the wing. Fold the tail wings down.

What you get looks very, VERY similar to Combiner Wars Skydive. All the wing bases do is move the wings maybe 5mm further out on each side and add a Titanmaster footpeg to each side of the jet. You'll notice the new shoulders under the wings and that will be that. The wings themselves are the same as before, changing them would have justified changing their attachment to the body but when you use the same wings was it really worth doing? This more feel like Hasbro has gone to a lot of trouble to produce something very similar to what they had before in this mode and Dreadwind's wings were behind his shoulders anyway in robot mode and from Dreadwind alone the reason for the new location for the wings and their new transformation isn't obvious. However Dreadwind was shown combined with Blackwing at SDCC 2017. There's no hint of this on the instructions for Dreadwind, but the picture on the internet suggest Dreadwind's wings should be next top the back of the jet for that mode. Oddly the only thing that is new in this mode, the tail wings, will escape people's notice!

The one gun is annoying again in this mode. You'd like two so one could go under each wing. You'd also like the back of the gun to be a 5mm peg so you could put one in each shoulder pipe. His Prime Armour mounts on the jet's back here using the existing 5mm peg hole to imitate Dreadwind's original Powermaster function if you have a Primemaster to use with him. Yes it looks like an unsightly big box on his back but turning the armour block round so it faces backwards with the peg at the front makes it look like the sound boxes found on Generation 2 Starscream & Ramjet

As per Skydive he can also form the arm or leg of Combiner Wars or Power of the Primes combiner.

Arm Mode: as before, but with the wings folded round the rear of the jet/robot legs. Unfortunately the robot arms have nowhere to lock onto any more and just sort of hang there.

Leg Mode: again as before, but with the wings by the rear of jet/robot legs folded forward next to the tail wings & tail fins.

Dreadwind doesn't have a defined combiner, like the Dinobots and Terrorcons do, but the theory is he & Blackwing are meant to combine with Starscream and two as yet unrevealed limbs.

I liked the Skydive limb and, if anything, Dreadwind is an improvement on it. They've captured the Powermaster well with limited changes.

[Bogatan]

The first thing that struck me about the wings is that it does make Ramjet and Dirge possible and as you say the the hfg already works for G2 Ramjet. That seems far more likely the reason than just to make Dreadwind and Darkwing combine.

Annoyingly the blue pieces that connect the wings to the body on mine have been swapped meaning the wings cant fit in to place in any of the 3 modes. Well jet mode can be forced, but it isn't a clean fit. It doesnt really matter in the other two modes.

I really like the arm mode.

[Toph]

Arm Mode: as before, but with the wings folded round the rear of the jet/robot legs. Unfortunately the robot arms have nowhere to lock onto any more and just sort of hang there.

Turn the arms around backwards. There are tabs on the shoulders that go into slots on the torso. It's easy to miss, but by far more secure than any previous version of this mold that's come before.

[Philip Ayres]

I see what you mean now I look. The tabs are on the off white upper arm, just bellow the bicep swivel, rather than the shoulder though!

[Philip Ayres]

Generations Power of the Primes Blackwing

When Blackwing, a new version of Powermaster Darkwing was revealed at the San Diego Comicon 2017 Collector's Preview Breakfast it was clear he was an obvious retool of Combiner Wars Air Raid. But like his brother Generations Power of the Primes Dreadwind, a Skydive retool, the story when in hand isn't as simple as it first looked.....

Large amounts of the toy are the same: everything from the waist downwards is constituting the grey used on the waist, tail wings and lower leg halves, the harder cyan plastic used for the hips, upper legs & inner leg strut, the rubbery cyan plastic used for the tail find and blue plastic used for the knees. Elsewhere on the toy the blue plastic recurs on the lower arms, unchanged unlike his brother, while the rubbery cyan gets painted grey on the jet nose. Everything else is not found on Air Raid despite parts looking quite similar in jet mode. What's interesting is Blackwing seems to share a sprue with Dreadwind which wasn't present on either Skydive or Air Raid: this is moulded in the same blue plastic as the lower arms & knees and consists of the lower part of the combiner connector, marked with an upside down trapezium, and the fingers, thumbs & hinge of the Prime Armour. The top of the combiner connector is new, in a contrasting grey, but it's obscured from the front by a blue fold down panel which, with the rest of the new blue body, does a good job of impersonating the original Darkwing body from the front. The head is a spot on replica of the original, moulded in grey with a lovely painted purple visor. The wings on his back look the same as Air Raid's but aren't: although the same general shape they're missing all the detail of the original's wings. The appear to be purple but a small tab sticking out the bottom reveals them to be moulded in blue plastic, so probably on the same sprue as the body & chest panel. The base of the wings, in grey like most of the robot's black is a new piece. The wings can no longer fold back like they could on Air Raid which is a shame because if the could he'd have looked more like Darkwing in robot mode. Instead they now rotate at their base for reasons that will become apparent. Blackwing comes with two small guns that vaguely resemble the original's but aren't anywhere near big enough.

The robot mode isn't a bad go: if you said "Make Darkwing from an Combiner Wars Aerialbot" this is about what you'd imagine it would look like in robot mode.

Transformation: almost the same as Air-Raid, but the head needs to be reversed first. Where the jet nose was previously pointing up on the robot's back and needed folding up & forward, it now points down and is just folded up on a hinge that looks far too thin! Two nabs on the back of the nose notch into the body to secure it.

The jet mode is very very similar to Air Raid's. In fact looking at it you wonder what the point is with the parts that have been changed and remoulded! He now has a Titanmasater foot peg on either side of the body and the 5mm hole on the top of the jet is still there which, like Dreadwind, allows the Prime Armour to be mounted like a G2 Decepticon jet voice box. Gone are the 5mm holes under each wing so to mount the guns in this mode you'll need to use the 5mm holes on the side of each arm, inherited from the original Air Raid forearms.

The point of the new parts becomes clear now: they're needed for the combined Dreadwing jet mode, a signature feature of the original Dreadwind and Darkwing toys. The nose & top of the jet, anything that was on the back of the robot, all folds back at what was the robot's waist bringing the robot head with it, attached to the back of the jet by a thin strut and not to the combiner connector. The wings then rotate 180° at their base: they're attached by ball joints but seem to pop off really easily on my copy. I notice the grey plastic the socket pieces are made of looks a flatter, less glossy, grey than the rest of the toy and feels a bit rubbery. A strut with a 5mm peg on it folds out the robot's back into the space previously occupied by the head on the top of the combiner connector. Fold the back of the jet back down into place, with the nose folded onto it's back, like in robot mode, and the robot head folded back into the base of the nose. Take the Dreadwind jet, with it's wings moved so they're alongside the rear of the jet, and plug the post on the front of Dreading into the hole on the back of Blackwing.

Yup, that's it, one 5mm post securing the two halves of the combined Dreadwing jet together. The connection is poor, as both halves turn in relation to the other and it easily falls apart. The wings from Blackwing have tabs sticking up from them in this more which looks like they should lock into something but I have no idea what! The don't slip under Dreadwind's wings and there's no tab holes there for them to fit into! It looks sort of like the original Dreadwing, albeit with Blackwing's head obviously on display. It's a very odd thing, they've gone to a lot of effort to make it possible to combine the jets and then just given up at the last minute. Whereas the changes to Dreadwind are minimal, though the wings would have been better kept behind the shoulders in robot mode, Blackwing's changes destabilise the mould a bit by having wings that pop off and don't fold away in robot, arm or leg mode. I can see why they did what they did but that combined mode needed to connect together much more solidly to work and if it didn't do that then they were almost better off not bothering: both Dreadwind and Blackwing would have been better toys with just the robot mode changes.

Blackwing is one per case of 8 in Power of the Primes deluxe wave 2: he is due to return in Wave 4.

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Future Repaints

If there is any justice in the world then Dreadwind and Blackwing should be repainted into Buster & Hydra.

[Philip Ayres]

Following comments elsewhere, I went back and looked at the instructions: I had been transforming Blackwing wrong for both limb modes.

Arm Mode: The shoulders need to be folded up onto the top of the body, with the arms pointing out to the sides and then bent at the elbow so the lower arms are along the side of the body allowing the unused tabs on the wings to attach to slots in the forearms.

Leg mode: From plane mode fold the jet nose and back, not just the nose, back onto the tail fins. Fold the nose and first portion of the back forward so the tabs on the underside of the air intakes tab onto the slots on the rear of the body. The wings can be then swung in and then folded straight up the back similar to how they were on the previous Air Raid leg mode. The wing base ball joints do tend to pop out when you do this though!

[Toph]

Yeah it took me a minute on Blackwing's arm mode, too. I only figured it out because I was hellbent on figuring out hot the tabs on the wings work.

I'm not sure I like it. It feels a little silly, though I greatly appreciate the effort to make the arm profile so drastically different than the other two hundred arms this mold makes.

[The Doctor]

I was disappointed by how cheap and rubbery this toy felt in hand...and then I saw the combined jet mode and was...astonished!!!

-Ralph