Crest CR-LH99XS and AC Cherry Bomb

When I first started buying Kotobukiya’s Armored Core kits, my intention was to come up with relatively easy builds that would be unique enough to be distinctive.  Most of the configurations I’m building are based on ideas I’ve developed in the game: I don’t necessarily feel my model projects should be limited to what works well in the game but I do enjoy using the game to experiment with different ideas, and I also enjoy the idea of building models of designs that I actually use in the games.

AC “Cherry Bomb” originally started as AC “Cherry Breaker” – the concept was for a fast, overboosting AC armed with a parrying blade (high-damage melee ramrod weapon – it’s hard to hit with it and you have a limited number of times you can use it…)  However, I found that by replacing the parrying blade with a linear rifle, I had a configuration that worked very well for me in arena battles against the computer: a configuration based on speed and precision with a single weapon.  Gradually I’ve abandoned the “Cherry Breaker” concept in favor of “Cherry Bomb”.

In terms of parts for the core, I started with the Crest C84 overboost core, and wanted to add a scratch-built part to make my build distinctive.  I wanted the legs and arms to be Crest parts (to make Cherry Bomb mostly a Crest AC) and the only lightweight Crest legs that have been kitted so far, the LH95’s, aren’t really my style anyway.  So looking at the parts in the game I chose the CR-LH99’s.  The ’99s are light enough to be useful on a highly mobile AC, pretty cool looking, but also simple enough structurally to make them easy to scratch build.  The LH99 legs are also used in AC Aiming Hawk, one of the enemy machines that appears in AC Nexus and Last Raven.

So anyway, I’ve begun work on LH99 parts to build “Cherry Bomb”.  I used the Kotobukiya one-coin figure of AC Aiming Hawk as a reference – scaled up by a factor of 2.2 (the initial plans I drew up were scaled up by a factor of only 2 – I felt they were too small compared to the other model parts so I scaled ’em up a bit more) – and created plans for the parts.

At this point I have made a fair bit of progress on the foot as well as the lower leg.  There’s still lots to do with the knee, upper leg, and (perhaps most difficult) the hips. As simple as the structure of the leg is, however, the process of building it is still almost frustratingly slow. Compared to the work I’m doing on the Zaku Kai, I think this work is more improvisational. There’s less preparation involved beforehand, more reliance on my ability to minimize or avoid problems when dealing with the actual parts.  Still, the process of building the parts seems frustratingly slow. Parts seem to have unlimited depth: there’s always one more thing that needs to be done. It’s a good start, though…