X-Bomber the GameIntroduction »Welcome to the home of X-Bomber the Game: a vertical-scrolling spaceshooter for Windows, based on the Japanese sci-fi TV series: Star Fleet
It features lots of arcade action, weapons and explosions.
News » .jpg) I gave up completely on work at about lunchtime today - what an absolute farce.
I spent the rest of the day scanning and photomerging the Starlog December 1980 poster.
The "geometric distortion correction" option is very useful for this, because, due to the image overlapping the edge of the scanner, it isn't 100% flat on the plate.
I got a slightly disjointed result the first time, without that option enabled.
The V750 has a way of developing some little discoloured rings on the underside of the scanner plate.
They come from lubricants off-gassing under the heat of the fluorescent light.
It has a visible effect when scanning documents with large, dark areas.
It had a minor impact on this scan originally but Photoshop fixed the problems with its healing brush.
I need to find somewhere non-dusty and remove the glass to clean the underside of it someday.
After that, I got a bit further playing Overload, which is quite a blast for anyone that enjoyed any of the Descent series of games. My little care package has arrived from FROMJAPAN.
So, I should be able to start scanning the poster from the 1980-12 instalment, which is the white-on-black Dai-X cutaway.
This instalment doesn't contain anything else about Star Fleet: just like the 1980-11 one didn't (in fact it doesn't even mention anything about X Bomber on the cover).
It does cover a lot of stuff, however: Buck Rogers, Battle Beyond the Stars, Gundam, Space Battleship Yamato, Flash Gordon, and a whole range of other things.
I chose the cheapest shipping option that wasn't "surface".
In this case, it was "small packet airmail" and it wasn't tracked but I also wasn't expecting it to arrive within a week.
The people at FROMJAPAN have really packaged these magazines up well. They always do a great job of preserving the integrity of my scanning operations. 😀
The other thing is that I paid almost nothing for these two Starlog magazines.
The cost was really, really minimal and yet each one is beautifully packed and in absolutely pristine.
These magazines are 45 years old and yet it looks as though nobody's ever even opened them.
There really is something to be said for Japanese culture and how meticulous and exacting the people are.  The server bill is paid up for the next two years and the xbomber.com domain has been renewed.
I spotted that the site's search wasn't always returning the results that I was expecting.
I found that the indexing process was running aground part way through and that has been fixed.
Also, the HTML of the site has been fixed in a few areas.
I started scanning the Star Fleet material from the Figure King magazine 296, which has a huge amount in it about Star Fleet.
It has about 50 or 60 pages, which is about half the magazine, given over to nothing but Star Fleet.
Scanning the whole lot goes a bit beyond fair use and will probably take quite a while, but I'll try and scan the whole lot gradually, to save people having to get a copy on the secondary market. The site has been tweaked to serve some images as their original files and scale them down in the browser, rather than using SLIR to downsize them.
This makes the graphics look sharper on displays where the contents are scaled to above 100%.
I've seen that a lot of sites do this now, probably for a number of reasons:
more devices using display scaling, use of flat/metro-style 'graphics' with small file sizes and the increased range of web graphics formats like webp and avif.
The site now thumbnails WebP and AVIF image formats in its content folders.
It also presents the thumbnails in a cropped format in the images tables, so that they now look indistinguishable from images in 'real' JPG, PNG and GIF formats.
It does this with a method parallel to SLIR that I cooked up using PHP's GD library, which is actually remarkably simple to get going.
I took quite a lot of inspiration from Nathan Campos' Photo Viewer script, which is a really nice utility.
One problem with running a site that is hand-coded is that, while internet 'standards' move more quickly now, there are very few independent sites left that are actively maintained and developed ...
There are even fewer that aren't based on generalised platforms like Wordpress.
It means that fewer tools are available to streamline site development and fewer places where you can even go for a consult.
Anyway, with SLIR starting to show its age, it's nice to have a working parallel method of image resize for the site that can easily be expanded to handle JPG, PNG and GIF formats.  I was slow in getting these added, but these are very specific for AI illustrations.
These characters really look as though they came out of Star Fleet with them having all the right insignia on their uniforms etc.
I'm sure that getting these results took a lot of work.  Thanks (😂 no, not really) to google translate ...
I think this sets the record straight about what happened to the materiel from the show:
- Many of the puppets were preserved.
- Many of the ships and Dai-X were modified, and in some cases lost, in the 1983 "Space Special Effects Exhibition".
Note what it says in this article from 2013...
"The latex around their mouths is starting to show signs of wear, but they will surely be meticulously restored and one day they will be able to be reunite with their fans."  Sigeta Osamu is a retired manga artist, whose profile I found on nitter.
As you see below, he has an ingenious Lego build of X-Bomber / Dai-X.
I like the white colour scheme. It's very elegant, just like all the folding wings on Mainbody.
The really clever thing is that the combined Dai-X can also transform an X-Bomber.
Mainbody's wings that wrap across the chest, form the upper wings of the X-Bomber ship, while the arms form the lower wings.
Meanwhile, Braincom forms a conning tower at the back of the ship.
He also has a very stylish scratch-built model of Dai-X.
I like how the separated ships look more streamlined than the Mainbody and Legtrax that we see in the show.
At the same time, you can see how Legtrax's legs have been made to work properly with the transformation sequence, and the tank tracks/wheels feature on the underside of Legtrax, rather than just appearing and disappearing on demand, as they do in the show.
Also, the guns on the right arm are a more convincing size than the ones in the show. .jpg) I scanned two further double-pages from the Uchusen 140 Yearbook...
There is a nice collection of promotional images of the original larger toys, that gives a nice overview of the main versions of Dai-X that were sold.
The other double-page has some illustrations by Takeshi Okano, who already features on the site, but there are a number of illustrations there that I hadn't seen before, including Captain Halley and Makara.
The remaining X Bomber material in the magazine is a series guide with illustrations of all the characters and vehicles.
It also seems to contain some information on what happened to some of the models after the show, which has been a subject of historical revision, particularly since the 2022 Expo.
The scanning takes quite a while because of the size of the magazine. It requires at least 6 scans for each whole double-page output.
You need 4 to ensure that you capture the top and bottom of each page, and you also need two further ones to capture the mid-section between the pages, so that photoshop has a good area of overlap in order to perform its photomerge.
You also get a certain amount of skew due to the magazine binding not opening completely straight/level.
I found that the best way to fix this was to use the skew tool to straighten the sides and then use the warp tool to 'jack up' one page against the other.
The results seem to have come out fine.
At the same time, our friends at deadnet.se are having more trouble with the now-familiar DDoS-ers ('whoever they are').
I would advise people to support whatever independent sites and forums they know of that are left, even if it just means by visiting them, otherwise we might end up with a dead internet..jpg) Here are some images that I pulled from FromJapan of a nice metal Dai-X figure, made by the Mark company, who also produced the small model kits and many other X Bomber items back in the day.
These have a shiny finish and are about 7.5cm in height. .jpg) Here's a cute vinyl Dai-X that doesn't show up very often and was made around 2002, probably triggered by the DVD release in Japan in the same year.
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Late to the Moderoid / Good Smile Dai-X, and then the Imperial Master stopped by - it's been a surreal day!
Late to the Moderoid / Good Smile Dai-X, and then the Imperial Master stopped by - it's been a surreal day!
Late to the Moderoid / Good Smile Dai-X, and then the Imperial Master stopped by - it's been a surreal day!
Late to the Moderoid / Good Smile Dai-X, and then the Imperial Master stopped by - it's been a surreal day!
Late to the Moderoid / Good Smile Dai-X, and then the Imperial Master stopped by - it's been a surreal day!
Merry Festivities and Fixes!
Merry Festivities and Fixes!
An actual Star Fleet video from me, it's been a minute!
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