Sometimes it might be worth it to follow your own advise. I have said in the past that life is too short to be wasted on bad minis. If I'd only listened to myself...

Since finishing my Space Comrades, I thought about adding more figures to their glorious ranks and my eyes turned to the three largely untouched Starship Troopers boxes on my shelf. I started assembling the Mobile Infantry figures therein.

Now, let's discuss quality for a bit. The comrade minis I did first were definitely not grade A minis. They are very stiff plug-fit miniatures with basically zero variants. While there weren't a whole lot of actual casting flaws, the detail on the figures is very soft. Painting these I passingly thought about hard edge highlighting only to realize it wouldn't work because the figures simply don't have any hard edges. Still, I enjoyed painting them and I think they are fine for what they are. They were never intended to be grade A minis. They compete pretty well in their category, in my opinion faring pretty well against even some of GW's old one-pose wonders.

The mobile infantry on the other hand were clearly intended to be grade A stuff. It really pains me to say this, but I think the actual product falls short of the intentions. In my opinion this seems to result from two things: materials and design. Firstly, the design: The miniatures seem to be composed of unnecessarily many rather fiddly bits. To add insult to injury, the actual fit of the parts is poor in places, especially trying arrange the arms to hold the guns is rather difficult. Even after cutting and filing many shoulder joints were just half gap, really neeeding the shoulder pads to hide the ugliness. In other cases, it was impossible to fit the shoulder pad without cutting half of it off.

Then the material. The crispness of detail is lacking, and I think this is at least partly due to material choice. But that's not what really irks me. The plastic seems a fair bit harder than the polystyrene you see with GW figures or typical plastic kits. Consequently, it also seems relatively immune to "regular" polystyrene cements like my needlenose Revell that worked just fine on the comrades. I have acquired stronger stuff in the form of some MEK glue. This is a much harder solvent and seems to do the trick with the MI when applied in sufficient quantities. Unfortunately it also evaporates at alarming pace and breathing the fumes for a few hours gave me a splitting headache... then I finished assembly wearing a breathing mask which did seem to help a bit.

And I still have about half of them left to assemble. I'm almost thinking superglue might be an option.

Still, let's see how they look after a layer of paint.

P.S. Just started cleaning the bugs, and with them I can see the more durable material may have been a good choice. With the MI, it seems to be more about costs and production logistics than product quality.

maxxon