Rated X wrote:Thats some serious sugarcoating you did there. Lets be real. Whether the mold is Jetfire or a seeker, thats a fake cockpit/nosecone created on behalf of lazy Hasbro engineering. How hard could it have been to make his chest the actual cockpit instead of a fake ? They pulled it off quite nicely on Armada Starscream.
First of all, Takara does the engineering. Hasbro gives them the desired designs and the budget and parameters with which to make them happen without breaking the bank (e.g., keeping profit margins high and investors happy). Secondly, the faux cockpit is because this is a retool of the Jetfire mold. It didn't have a faux cockpit, but a secondary smaller cockpit, in its design. That's a result of him being designed with the cartoon model in mind for his robot mode. The cartoon model alt mode, heavily (and notoriously) redesigned from the original toy's alt mode, includes the secondary cockpit on the underside of the fuselage (you can only see it in some rare undercarriage and transformation shots), just like this new toy, though the alt mode more resembles the original toy otherwise. To redesign the transformation scheme for the seekers to instead use the main cockpit for their chest would probably have meant completely redesigning the entire mold altogether, instead of strategically reshelling the mold and maintaining the core engineering and design. It was a cost saving measure, and one that meant the difference between having Leader class Seekers or nothing at all at that price point. Heck, Hasbro might not have even put out Leader class Jetfire had they not been assured future returns with the Seeker retool and repaints.
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