Dave's TF Kingdom Rant: Autobot Ark with Mainframe

[Dave Van Domelen]

Dave's Transformers Kingdom Rant: Titan Class

Autobot Ark (the Ark, no separate robot name)

Permalink: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Gen/TheArk

Hey, this one actually mostly showed up in the Netflix cartoon. Well,
the Mainframe figure didn't.


CAPSULE

$160-180 price range, was on shelves for about a day around here. Still
available on Hasbro Pulse for $170 at the time of writing.

Autobot Ark: The main flaws are missed opportunities (and a few panels
that pop off way to easily), but it's a decent design of a brand new Titan,
plus a very clever update of Actionmaster Mainframe. Recommended.


RANT

Packaging: Big Titan size box, in landscape mode on both main sides,
windowless as usual for Titans. 24" (61cm) wide, 14.5" (37cm) tall, 6"
(15cm) thick. The front follows the usual Kingdom pattern of having art of
both modes and the Ark in the background, since the Ark is the altmode. A
bit more lava running over the ship mode. The robot is in a dynamic pose,
holding Megatron (Siege version) in his hand while pterosaurs fly in the
background. There's some rock flying about behind Ark's lead foot that looks
almost like it's a Transformer coming apart. The main art wraps around the
left side, and the right side has the usual "movie poster" art. The art also
wraps around to the top, where Airazor is firing on the Decepticon ship as
Starscream flies around it and Blackarachnia falls out of a hole in the
bottom of the ship. I suppose the art technically wraps a little onto the
bottom, but the bottom is mostly black with a little legalese.
The back shows renders of the Ark in both modes, Mainframe in all three
modes (technically one is just "a chunk of the Ark"), an inset of the exit
ramp in the back of the ship more, and another inset with the other
accessories.
The instructions are the Maximal green used on Maximals and Autobots
alike in Kingdom. They're missing a few accessory points (the "bridge" mode
of Mainframe is really only a callout on the box back, and there's no mention
anywhere of the Fire Blasts), likely a combination of iffy editing and last
minute additions to the toy.


AUTOBOT: AUTOBOT ARK
Assortment: F1152
Altmode: The Ark (Spaceship)
Transformation Difficulty: 26 steps
Previous Name Use: None (Titanium had Autobot Starship Ark)
Previous Mold Use: None

Packaging: Packaged in ship mode, with cardboard spacers. In the small
spacer to the starboard are dark blue versions of the Jetfire Fire Blasts.
Well, in theory. They're loose in there, so the smaller pieces ended up
randomly placed in the box for me. (There's no indication of Fire Blasts on
the box, so probably a last minute addition.) The port side spacer has the
instructions, Fate card, and tiny Optimus. The ship is too wide to fit in
the standard Titan box, so the "wingtips" are held inside the front spacer by
two plastic ties each. Three bit rubber bands keep the ship together.
The golden disks and spy eye are stored inside the Mainframe chunk.
I got the Autobot Ark card (probably not randomized) with the "AUTOBOTS
AWAKEN IN 1984" fate.

Vehicle Mode: Despite the rubber bands, the vehicle comes out of the box
kinda falling apart. In addition to adding on the wingtips, you also need to
fold out the conning tower to complete the vehicle mode. The instructions do
cover these steps, though, as has become normal for "can't package it all the
way in either mode" Transformers.
Anyway, it looks like the Ark. If you don't know what that is, you're
definitely not in the target audience for this rather expensive toy. But if
you're reading this review out of curiosity anyway, it's roughly a triangular
spaceship with rounded bits in the front half and a squared off nose. It has
both a cockpit near the front with windows (and you can see the bridge
inside) and a conning tower near the back because apparently the designer
liked Space Battleship Yamato or something. Four huge thrusters dominate the
back end, and suggest that almost the entire rear half of the ship may be
engines. (The thrusters can kindasorta hold 5mm pegs, but the grip is so
poor that only the shortest of each trio of Fire Blast pieces will reliably
stay in place.) It's covered in small two-barrel turrets that are molded
onto the shell and don't actually turn, which is a shame. Ten on the top
side, six more on the underside...none of which can hold the Fire Blasts
included very well (the narrower ones can be crammed onto the too-thick
barrels).
Okay, time to get out the tape measure. It's 16.5" (42cm) long, 16"
(41cm) wide, and when resting on its landing legs the top of the conning
tower is about 7.75" (19.5cm) off the table. It is almost entirely golden
yellow, although there's two shades of that plastic, with some gray and
metallic black. The thrusters, the panel in the top center, the ramp and the
landing legs are dark gray plastic. The cockpit windows are clear amber
plastic. The nose, conning tower, and a bit of the underside on either side
of the nose are a lighter and slightly more flexible golden yellow plastic
(mostly obvious under UV), and everything else is rigid golden yellow
plastic.
The thrusters are metallic black (super dark gunmetal) with bright blue
airbrushed inside to suggest engine energy. All the turrets are also
metallic black. A faux-airbrushed effect of dark gunmetal is applied along
the leading edge to imply re-entry scorchmarks. A few bits on the front half
are painted metallic blue, and several details on top are canary yellow. Big
Autobot symbols (1.75"/3.5cm) are printed in red on the rear half. The side
edges even with the gray panel in the middle are painted dark gray in a
pretty good match to the plastic. Some tech greeble panels flanking the
front landing leg are painted gloss/metallic black.
Like so many Kingdom toys, it's not really designed for Fire Blasts,
although it does have a few 3mm studs. They're all in the middle band, two
each on the gray-painted parts and one each near the center. They're
well-placed for small explosion squibs, less so for any of the Fire Blast
pieces that come with the toy. As noted above, the thrusters sort of hold
5mm pegs, but poorly, and some of the turret barrels can take a 3mm socket
Fire Blast if you cram it on hard enough.
Pressing a button in back drops a ramp 2" (5cm) wide, and a Micromaster
sized vehicle can drive up it and be stored inside when the ramp is raised.
It's a little too small for most Core Class, though. The only other
"articulation" is the landing legs, which fold down in a tripod arrangement
and are quite stable.

Important note if you want to just open up the cockpit area to get
Mainframe out or put it back in, there's a couple of leading edge panels
(roughly even with the front cockpit window) that WILL snap off unless you
ease them out by a few millimeters, which is all the farther they will go.

Transformation: The instructions show removing Mainframe early in the
process, but you can leave it in without changing things. However, a panel
that folds up in the process blocks the bridge windows, so you can't look
inside the bridge in robot mode.
As noted above, you need to just tilt a couple of panels out to get
things started (an I needed a knife to open them up, as they're very firmly
in place), but expect them to pop off anyway at various points in
transformation...and when going back to vehicle mode you might as well remove
them before you start because they will NOT stay on through the serious
workout required to get all the joints in the right places.
For the most part, though, going back to vehicle mode is fairly
straightforwards, the hard part is just getting everything to line up
properly when so many of the joints are super strong and several others pop
off or fail to hold. The front half becomes torso and arms, the rear half
becomes the legs. You need to rotate the arms a little bit as you swing them
in or out to clear some obstructions, but for the most part going to robot
mode is just tiring. Going back to ship mode I had to spend a LOT of time
wrenching the shoulders into the right places, and then hugging the whole
thing at the end to shove the panels into the right spots. Yeah,
panel-massaging is not a fun thing when the toy is the size of a throw pillow
(but a lot heavier).

Robot Mode: This is the first time the Ark has had its own distinct
robot mode (the TF:Animated Ark was Omega Supreme), although it does owe a
bit to the Last Autobot in #80 of the Marvel comic, in that the head is based
on the Autobot symbol. In the Netflix cartoon, that the Ark has a robot mode
comes as a surprise to basically everyone...it was a bit of an emergent
property rather than the ship having always been a Titan. The thrusters are
on the shins, giving a sort of Blaster's Speakers effect. The head is
positioned between two big collar pieces, and interestingly they molded some
trapezius muscle details onto the neck.
19.5" (49.5cm) tall at the head, with a collar that makes it to 20"
(50.5cm). Not the biggest Titan, but respectable. More gray enters the mix,
as well as silver and black. There's two shades of gray plastic, but they're
pretty similar, mostly different under UV (the slightly lighter gray plastic
glows blue, the other gray doesn't glow at all). The darker gray is used for
the palms of the hands, the outer "sandwich" pieces of the hips, the
thrusters on the shins, the toes, and the ramp pieces which are on the
insteps. It's also used for the backs of the boots, which are made up of two
panels that cleverly fold up during transformation. The blue-glow plastic is
used on the shoulder roots, abdomen front, inner torso core, hip ratchets,
and inner thighs (the outer thighs are golden yellow armor bits). And then
there's the upper arms, which seem to be made of three new gray plastics in
no discernable pattern, so probably not supposed to be different but
different batches aren't quite the same and this was assembled out of
different runs? There's milky white plastic used on the underside of the
pelvis, a locking socket for tabs on the boots for helping hold ship mode
together. The cockpit windows are now on the chest, and that clear yellow
plastic is also used on the head's lightpiping. The lighter yellow plastic
mentioned in ship mode is on the kneecaps and backpack now, everything else
visible is regular golden yellow plastic. (The gray landing legs are on the
inner faces of the boots plus one hidden under the backpack.)
Ship chunks form big shoulderpads, but the "actual" shoulders under that
are painted black with big white Autobot symbols printed on them. Another
bit of newly exposed detail on the shoulders (girder-like) is painted silver,
as are circles on the inner faces of the forearms. The face is gunmetal with
dark gray paint on the forehead and eyebrows (which kinda mutes the whole
"his face is the Autobot symbol" effect), with the chin unpainted. The mouth
slit is metallic blue. There's also some more metallic blue on the tops of
the forearms. Some details on the trapezium bits are painted canary yellow.
No paint on the pelvis, although it also kinda looks like an Autobot symbol
with the middle bit removed. The hip fronts are painted silver, and there's
a little bit of black on the backs of the boots, a bit that's not really
visible in vehicle mode. Oh, and the back of the abdomen is golden yellow
plastic but with gray paint on most of it.
The neck is a smooth swivel, and then it's the march of the super heavy
ratchet joints. Ratcheting waist, ratcheting universal shoulders, ratcheting
biceps swivels, ratcheting elbows, ratcheting wrist swivels, smooth hinges
for thumb and mitten fingers (and yes, there's an add-on kit that has all the
finger and thumb joints), *insanely* stiff hip swivels and hinges (a
Trypticon style hip breakage seems like it might happen in any that aren't
assembled perfectly), ratcheting upper thigh swivel (restricted in range by
the thigh armor), ratcheting hinge knees. The only ankle articulation is a
somewhat loose "stay flat" hinge on the instep, and it can really only
compensate for one outward click of the hip. Titans are not meant to pose
dynamically, although you can get a few poses that aren't just variations on
"standing there" on a flat surface. I will note that the hands can hold
figures reasonably well, although the Megatron on the box art is not to
scale. Core Class Megatron is also about twice as big as the one shown on
the box, but is close enough for display.
The six 3mm studs all end up on the forearms. There's some rectangular
holes on the potbelly that will hold the Fire Blasts and make it look like
belly cannons firing or something. There's no 3mm socket on the pelvis but
it would be HILARIOUS if they'd included one. There's thrusters molded on
the undersides of the toes, but they do not hold 5mm pegs inside. There's
really no other standard connectors, even the screw holes are much bigger
than 5mm.

Accessories: Most of them are really Mainframe's accessories, so I'll
include them below. Otherwise, there's a dark blue version of the Jetfire
Fire Blasts. I suppose Mainframe itself counts as an accessory.

Overall: I can't help but feel that if this had come out five years ago,
there'd be loads of extra panels to open in ship mode that show interior
bits, not just the bridge, and it'd have come with a full crew. But compared
to Scorponok, it does pretty well, especially since they had to figure it out
from scratch rather than updating a G1 design. And making Mainframe sort of
a Brain Master was a nice touch.


AUTOBOT: AUTOBOT MAINFRAME
Altmodes: Teletraan-1 terminal, Ark component
Transformation Difficulty: 20 steps (terminal), 17 steps (Ark component)
Previous Name Use: None (G1 was just Mainframe)
Previous Mold Use: None

Packaging: Inside the Ark, no specific extra rybber bands or anything.
The bridge "hologram tank" is pegged into place.

Bridge Mode: AKA Chunk Mode, this is what it comes in. Really, it's
just the robot folded up to fit inside the Ark, with a tiny bridge scene
tacked on top. I'll cover things like plastics and the rest of the paints in
the other modes, and focus on just the bridge piece. It has a command
station flanked by two Teletraan-1 consoles (so, something of a fractal
altmode there). In front of that is a holo-display tank with a clear yellow
sphere representing the display. The holder for it has twelve spurs attached
to a ring, all painted metallic black on top. Around the holo-tank and faced
away from it are three bridge control stations. When inserted into the Ark's
vehicle mode, the bridge is visible through the cockpit windows.
The bridge plate itself is 2.5" (6cm) long, 2" (5cm) wide, and about a
centimeter tall. The entire chunk is 3.5" (9cm) long, 3" (7.5cm) wide, and
4" (10cm) tall. The plate is golden yellow plastic.
On the front end under the bridge (more or less) is the spy-eye, which
is attached to a 5mm peg. The golden disks are under the bridge plate.
Note, since it doesn't really look like much of anything on its own, you
can mess around with arm and leg placement to get something that makes for a
more stable mini-playset, since the default configuration won't sit on the
table with the bridge itself horizontal.

Accessories: Teletraan-1's spy eye, a red version of the tiny Optimus
Prime that came with the Earthrise Accessory Pack, a "holotank" for the
bridge, and a pair of golden disks.
The Spy-Eye is folded up to fit in its storage spot, with gray plastic
(the kind that glows blue under UV) for its "wings" and golden yellow for the
body. Most of the body is painted silver, except for the pointy antenna on
top and the thruster on bottom. The socket is on the back. The wings are
hinged to fold up and down. 2" (5cm) wingspan, 29mm (a little over an inch)
long. It can be left in its storage spot in both of the other modes.
Tiny Optimus Prime is made of clear yellow plastic and painted mostly
dark red, otherwise the same as the Accessory Pack version (10mm tall not
counting the base). The only indication of what it's for is on the box back,
which shows that on top of Mainframe's "chunk mode" is a bridge scene for the
Ark, and there's six places to put microfigures, and they're quite secure. I
transformed the Ark back and forth with Tiny Optimus on the bridge and he
didn't fall out.
http://www.dvandom.com/images/MainframeBridge.JPG shows it at the bridge
command station.
So far, the only other microfigures come with clear Galvatron, which is
a big nope for me. I suspect there will be third party ones, if there aren't
already. (Even if I wanted to put two Optimuses on the bridge, I already
modified my Accessory Pack one to have a Lego connector.)
In the center of the bridge is a 5mm socket into which a sort of light
bulb piece is placed. I think it's supposed to be a holographic display tank
thing. It's a simple piece of clear yellow plastic, and it glows fiercely
under UV.
The Golden Disks store under two folding panels on Mainframe, although
both panels are open for his console mode, which tends to lead to the disk on
top falling out. They're both 1.75" (4.3cm) in diameter and painted gold.
Both have one side molded as the Sounds of Earth album (albeit with only
about half the LP's available space grooved). One has the Vok disk on the
other side, the other sort of has the Voyager disk. It's been simplified a
bit, and the naked humans have been very deliberately edited out. It's
clearly not a space or resolution issue, given the other details that were
retained.

Transformations: Going to robot mode is pretty straightforwards, as the
bridge chunk is mostly just the robot bent over with the backpack lifted up
over the head. You do need to rotate the waist and the ankles, and the
Spy-Eye is likely to pop off when pulling the backpack down if you're not
really careful.
There's a lot more panel folding involved in Teletraan-1 mode, and if
you try folding the "keyboard" panels up too early they're gonna pop off
(actually, they pop off during any transformation I eventually discovered).
Still, I was able to figure out everything except the exact positions of the
arms without referring to the instructions (and I made it work with the arms
in the wrong orientation, so it's forgiving).

Robot Mode: The torso and head look like G1 Mainframe, the limbs are a
bit too tied to the altmode to be all that close (the thighs I guess are
kinda like G1, but modernized). Obviously, the colors are completely wrong,
being the same colors as the Ark rather than the red, blue and gray of G1.
Oh, and the G1 version didn't have an entire Ark bridge hanging off his back
as a cape. Still, if Mainframe was ever going to get another toy, this is as
good as it was gonna be. I rather doubt we'll get a Push-Button Modulator,
though.
6.5" (16.5cm) tall, which these days puts it in Voyager territory.
Mostly golden yellow with some gray and a scattering of other colors. All of
the gray plastic is the type that glows blue under UV, and it's used on the
collar area, upper arms, fists, pelvis, hip joints, ankle joints, and a strut
holding the backpack. The lighter golden yellow plastic is found on the
shoulders, forearm armor panels, thighs, knees, and some panels folded inside
the boots. The visor has clear yellow plastic lightpiping. The rest of the
figure is the other golden yellow plastic.
There's gray paint on the abdomen, torso sides, face, helmet forehead
bit, and lower shins. The center of the chest is silver with canary yellow
on the dish detail and a button next to it, and more silver on the lower
sternum. There's light blue printed on black tech-display sorts of bits on
the knees and the tops of the forearms. A white Autobot symbol is printed on
the silver part of the chest. Panels on the outer faces of the boots are
painted metallic black.
The neck is a swivel, as is the waist, but the cape keeps the waist from
turning more than a few degrees (the waist is mostly a transformation
joint). Universal shoulders, bicep swivels, hinge elbows. The wrists have
transformation hinges, and if you stow them the hand sockets become wrist
sockets for attaching weapons or tools (not included, although the included
Fire Blasts can be used to make his forearms look like cannons). Universal
joint hips, upper thigh swivels, hinge knees. In addition to the instep
hinges, the ankles rotate for transformation, although this gives a little
range of useful motion in robot mode too (full rotation requires unsnapping
the panels on the boots).
The hands can hold 5mm pegs (and can hold the Fire Blasts like energy
swords), plus there's a 5mm socket on each forearm armor plate, the bridge
socket on the back (if you remove the holo-tank), and two on the underside of
each foot (toe and heel). There's a 3mm socket in the back of the pelvis but
it's totally blocked by the bridge-cape.

Teletraan-1 Mode: It's a big ol' wall of Zeerust, an 80s view of what a
futuristic computer might look like, even as "wall panel computers" were
already fading into the past. All it's missing is the "uniform grid of
unmarked squares" keyboard that sometimes showed up in the cartoon. Well,
there's a few 3 by 4 button grids. But plenty of meaningless greebles in
between the screens. (From behind it looks like a headless robot holding up
a fake wall in an attempt to hide.)
6" (15cm) tall, 6" (15cm) wide, and with a control panel shelf at 2.5"
(6.5cm) up. So, pretty comfortable for Core and smaller Deluxe to use and
interact with. Other than a few visible hinges, it's all golden yellow
plastic in front, a few bits being the lighter shade. The shin paint and
printing are still visible in this mode, but all the other deco is various
large and small monitor screens. All screens have black backgrounds with
light blue lines.
The left-hand panel has a main screen with an Earth map (Mercator plus
an Antarctica inset) and various meters, a small screenlet below it with just
a grid line (maybe it's where Teletraan-1's voice trace goes when speaking).
In the lower right of the left panel is just a series of horizontal bars,
like a graphic equalizer or something. And the lower left has a small screen
with a gridline image of the Matrix.
The right-hand panel has a large screen at the top showing Vector Sigma
and the Key thereto (Vector Sigma is light blue with black lines, unlike most
other stuff here). Another "might be a talky visualizer" under that, then
three displays of generic "level of something" stuff.
The top of the center panel has four small wide but short screens in a
diamond formation. The bottom one is another graphic equalizer sort of
thing, the right side is a graph of what look to be plus and minus cube root
or something, the top is a heartbeat sort of graph, and the left is a
flickering oscilloscope sine wave trace. The main screen in the center shows
a blueprint of the Ark in vehicle mode with callouts of some details (a
turret, a thruster, etc) and the robot head. There's a black on blue Autobot
symbol in the lower right of the screen.
The forearm 5mm sockets are on the top edge of the front, while the
fists have their sockets pointing out to the sides at the top. The 3mm
socket is accessible now, and actually sort of useful if you're concerned
about the thing falling over (the center of mass is really close to the line
connecting the rear corners). The spy-eye is easily removable from behind
the top center, which is nice. The disks don't stay in very well without a
lid, though, this is less nice. There are little raised bits on the console
that will let you display the disks in front, if you want.

Overall: I wouldn't be shocked if Generations Selects gives us a G1
color scheme release of just Mainframe, and I'd definitely snap that up.
Especially if it came with bridge crew figures. Sure, it turns into a block
and a wall, but that's interesting to see once in a while. Makes a nice
"brainmaster" accessory to the Ark, but would be fine on its own.


Set Overall: There were a few missed opportunities, mostly I expect due
to budget constraints (I'd have preferred a few more bridge figures instead
of nearly useless Fire Blasts, though). Anyway, if you're in the market for
Titan class in the first place, this is a decent toy, and does have the
distinction of not just being an update of a G1 toy.


Dave Van Domelen, acquired something like half a dozen Transformers
during the writing of this review, refilling the To Be Reviewed shelf.