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 »  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. I managed to ditch the Apache autoindexing on my home server for the 'large file area' (which really needs a better name).
It was fine, but what I really wanted was to get the media subsystem from xbomber.co.uk running on the server.
I tried to get SLIR running on it as well but I ran into trouble with that.
It feels a bit like there might be something funny about PHP's GD extension in my XAMPP installation, but that needs more investigation.
It doesn't matter at the moment because that server is only being used for file listings and videos, rather than images.
I had a cut-down version of xbomber.co.uk's code that runs from the filesystem and PHP and has no database dependency that was used for another project long ago.
It was much easier (infact it was surprisingly easy) to adapt it to run on the home server.
I managed to make some optimisations while I was busy with it.
The PHP is a bit less convoluted in places, which is something that can be implemented into the main site when I have a moment. I remember picking this up at around the same time as the Tokyo exhibition was on in 2022.
This magazine dates back to 2013 but the copy that I got from FronJapan is in really terrific condition.
I wasn't too sure what to expect in here: other than it had some Star Fleet material.
I scanned the cover and the poster, which is inside the front cover.
Later on in the magazine, there are some more interesting features about Star Fleet ...
There are some good photographs of the toys that date back to when the show was on the air in Japan.
There are some really good reproductions of Japanese fan artwork based on the show.
There are some really good stills from the series, as well as some photographs of what happened to the Dai-X and X-Bomber models after the show.
There are some photographs of their modified appearance on the site already, but these photos in the magazine are different.
I will try and get those scanned sooner than next week, but given that I'm travelling around a bit, it may well have to wait until then.
This magazine is unusually tall and so I decided just to photomerge each page to give Photoshop more data to work from.  I scanned the cover and Star Fleet bits from the Starlog magazine that I found in my office the other day.
I have another copy of this one, plus the December one at FromJapan.
I'm going to use up my 60 days of storage before I ship them across to here.
I decided to scan and photomerge the 4-page-size poster from the instalment that I have.
It was never a high priority because we already had a fantastic scan of it from Vanessa, who was a terrific forum member of ours.
This new scan is made up of about 8 different scans, photomerged in various stages and has turned out quite well.
When the December 1980 instalment arrives, I'll do the same thing with that one.
I noticed an interesting image from Star Fleet on page 24 of this one. This copy opens at a jaunty angle, so getting a straight scan of the double-page spread on which it features has proven a little difficult today, but I will upload it when it is ready.  There we go, that didn't take too long, doing it the current way ...
I saw on ebay.fr that there are quite a few volume 4s for sale in much better condition than the one I found years ago.
Looking around my office, I found that I already have one of the Starlog magazines that I just bought on FromJapan.
Aside from the poster with the characters, there is basically nothing about Star Fleet in that instalment.
There is a small image from the show in a list of sci-fi and effects shows that were airing at the time.
I also found some magazines featuring info about Star Fleet, from around the time when the exhibition appeared in Tokyo.
I'll try and get something done with scanning what there is in the Starlog magazine on Friday.
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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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