Takara usually does a good job with their Masterpiece toys, often better than the Hasbro releases of the same toy.

That Skybase looks vaguely reminiscent of the White Base from Mobile Suit Gundam. I wonder if it inspired the toy.

Funny, I was thinking the opposite, that not having a cartoon to compare to would make it easier.  The main challenge with transforming toys is having an alt mode that looks fairly realistic (at least, for those toys where the alt mode is some real life object or vehicle) while having good proportions and articulation in bot mode.  The G1 toys started with alt mode as the base and worked out a bot mode from there, but the end result was that a lot of the bot modes looked stiff and not particularly well-proportioned.  This is why the bot modes in the G1 cartoon look so different from the toys.  Since the animators did not have to draw anything that would actually work as a real transformable toy, they just drew robot figures that looked cool and used anime magic to hide the fact that the robots could never really transform into their alt modes.

The MP toys took the approach of wanting to have the bot modes appear fairly close to their cartoon proportions, while maintaining a fairly realistic alt mode as well.  But since the cartoons were never actually feasible as designs, the toy designers had to resort to a lot of "hacks" to make the transformation work.  For example, Masterpiece Optimus Prime actually has TWO grills, one for each mode.  When you transform MP Optimus, you hide one grill and reveal the other.  Megatron is another great example.  The grip of his pistol mode forms his legs in robot mode, but there's no way you can achieve the girth that his cartoon legs have from a realistically proportioned Walther P-38.  So you have to have real skinny legs like the G1 and MP Megatron.  Or, if you did what X-Transbots did on their Apollyon toy, you compromise by having a pistol grip that is slightly thicker than the real gun, and you add lots of kibble to the sides that will extend out and make the legs appear wider than they really are.



If you don't have a cartoon with an unrealistic bot mode to conform to, then I would think all you would need to do is just slightly update the designs so that there are a few more articulation points, and adjust the proportions for bot mode a bit to make them more "heroic" looking.  And you probably wouldn't have to worry too much about how those adjustments affect the alt mode, since most of those old Diaclone toys have made-up vehicle modes anyway, so who is to say what's more realistic?

Do you have ANY idea what a Big Powered sells for on ebay right now?? It's one of the few Diaclone pieces I could never obtain affordably. I've never known anyone who owned one until now. Considering that they were never sold in the US, I wonder how your cousin got it.

You'd be surprised. He's one of the rarer Diaclone items out there. Even the parts sell for a ton

I can see how, if all you knew were Transformers, these guys' transformations would have been confusing since they didn't turn into anything realistic-looking.

FYI -- Diattacker was the first modern transforming robot toy. All the toys before it (including Big Powered) were combiners.