Solomon Mecha Studio, Now Axis Model Works: The Kits and the Drama

There is a model studio out there that, depending on who you ask, is either the most exciting thing to happen to Chinese mecha kits or the most aggravating company in the hobby. Same studio. Same week, sometimes. It makes large, heavily detailed 1/100 recreations of Gundam mobile suits, unlicensed, that some builders rate alongside Bandai's Perfect Grade line, and it has also been accused of cancelling preorders so prices could climb. That studio is Solomon Mecha Studio, and partway through its short life it changed its name to Axis Model Works. This is the story of the brand, what it builds, and why the people who own its kits and the people who tried to buy them tend to have very different opinions.

Wait, who is Solomon Mecha Studio (and why is it now called Axis Model Works)?

Solomon is a Chinese third-party studio that showed up around early 2024. Its products are unlicensed recreations of Bandai Gundam designs, not original IP. Around the middle of 2025 it rebranded to Axis Model Works. Same outfit, same product DNA, new name on the box. If you see a GP02 with "Solomon" on the package and a Kshatriya with "Axis Model Works" on the package, you are looking at two releases from one company. Overseas listings have started tagging them together precisely because buyers kept asking.

Here is the part that makes the naming fun. Both names are Zeon Easter eggs. In Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory, the Zeon ace Anavel Gato is nicknamed the "Nightmare of Solomon," after the battle at the old Zeon fortress of that name. Axis, meanwhile, is the asteroid base the Zeon remnants retreated to, the one that later becomes Char Aznable's whole deal. So this is a studio that named itself after a Zeon legend, then renamed itself after a Zeon stronghold. Every machine it has produced so far is a Zeon or Neo Zeon suit. Whether that is a deliberate theme or just a team building what it likes, the pattern is consistent.

The GP02 Physalis that put them on the map

The debut kit was the RX-78GP02A Physalis, the nuclear-armed prototype Gundam from 0083. In China it is usually listed as 酸浆果 ("physalis fruit"), a straight translation of the Physalis codename. In the show, Gato steals it from a Federation base and detonates its warhead in the middle of a Federation naval review, vaporizing a large chunk of the assembled fleet, while delivering the line "Solomon, I have returned." For a debut product, under the brand name Solomon, it is a pointed choice: the machine and the studio name both pull from the same corner of Zeon lore.

The kit received a wide range of praise from the Gundam fan base. It is a large 1/100 with a full inner frame, a motorized bazooka, a built-in LED unit, multi-layer armor that opens to show the mechanical parts underneath, and a healthy amount of pre-applied metallic finish. The launch MSRP was aggressive for a kit this size, which became part of the problem later.

Part of why the kit drew attention is what it was competing against. Bandai's only GP02 in this scale is the Master Grade from the late 1990s, a kit now pushing 25 years old and showing its age in articulation and detail next to anything modern. Bandai has never given the GP02 a Real Grade or Perfect Grade. So a builder who wanted a current-feeling, heavily detailed GP02 did not have an official option, which is the space Solomon stepped into.

The Kshatriya "Osiris Aerial Dominator" (Big Green Pepper)

The second release, the first to wear the Axis Model Works name, was the NZ-666 Kshatriya from Gundam Unicorn. On the box, the studio calls it the "Osiris Aerial Dominator." Most people just call it the big green pepper, a nickname that long predates this kit, since fans had been calling the Kshatriya that for years thanks to its pod-like green silhouette with four binders sprouting off the back.

Mechanically it follows the GP02 template and adds to it: denser inner frame, the four signature binders, more lighting integration, and more of the open-it-up internal detail. The kit drew the same kind of praise from the Gundam fan base that the GP02 did. By most accounts in the community it is the more refined build of the two. It also launched at a higher MSRP than the GP02, and ran into the exact same wall. More on that wall now.

The Kshatriya gap is even wider than the GP02's. Bandai's only release of the design is the HG 1/144 from around 2009. There has never been an MG Kshatriya. Bandai did announce an MGSD Kshatriya for September 2026, notable as the first non-Gundam mobile suit in the MGSD line, but that is a small SD-proportioned kit, not a full 1/100. So when Axis put out a large, detailed 1/100 Kshatriya, it was offering a format Bandai itself has never made.

The Pricing Drama and The Backlash

Whatever you make of the kits on the table, the buying experience is, by a wide margin, the most common complaint in the Chinese hobby community, and it shows up in two flavors.

First, cancelled preorders. Builders report placing orders at the official MSRP and then having those orders cancelled outright, with the stock reappearing later at a higher price. Second, and this is the part that separates Solomon from ordinary scalping drama, the price manipulation is widely believed to come from the manufacturer itself, not just opportunistic resellers. The accusation that circulates in the Chinese community is that the studio deliberately throttled release quantities to manufacture scarcity, pushed retail prices up, and raised wholesale prices on the stores carrying the kits. Scalping by a reseller is a market doing what markets do. Scalping engineered from the top is the maker treating its own scarcity as a revenue lever.

The severity tracked with each release. The GP02 climbed over MSRP but stayed within reach. The Osiris Aerial Dominator was the bad one: during the worst of the scarcity, street prices doubled over MSRP, if not more, before additional production runs eventually pulled them back down. Once a kit reaches an overseas hobby shop, import and reseller markup stack on top of whatever the going rate is, so what a buyer outside China actually pays bears little resemblance to the original sticker.

The community reaction has been blunt. The recurring line is that this is a studio with real design talent and shady business practices, the kits admired and the way they are sold distrusted in roughly equal measure. Solomon did eventually do additional production runs after the first wave of backlash, which let some people buy in at fairer prices, but the reputation stuck. Cancelled orders and price drama are now the first thing a lot of builders mention when the name comes up, before they get anywhere near the actual plastic.

To understand why that accusation lands as hard as it does, you have to understand how this end of the market is structured. After the legal troubles that hit makers like Dragon Momoko and Daban, the bootleg industry moved away from the single-flagship-store model, because one dedicated storefront is one easy target. The makers now tend to operate through a shifting web of stores spread across China's marketplaces. When a new kit drops, a cluster of new shops appears alongside it, and buyers mostly assume they are purchasing from the maker, directly or one step removed, without ever being able to confirm whether a given store is an independent reseller or a front for the manufacturer. That ambiguity is the normal condition of buying these kits. It is also what makes manufacturer-driven price manipulation so hard to prove and so easy to suspect: when the maker may be wearing several of the storefronts at once, "the resellers raised the price" and "the maker raised the price" stop being distinguishable. The suspicion that the studio, under either name, was doing both at the same time is a large part of why the community reaction went past annoyance into real anger.

For all that, it is worth keeping the grievance in proportion. None of it is about the kits failing on the table. The complaints are about conduct and price, not build quality, which is a different problem than "the model is bad." Whether any of it is a dealbreaker depends on how much a buyer cares about how the maker behaves, and whether they managed to get a kit without paying peak-scarcity rates.

Is Solomon secretly Supernova? Or Orange Cat?

Because the kits looked unusually refined for a brand-new studio, the obvious question in the community was: who is actually behind this, and is it a front for an established factory? Two names get floated.

The first is Orange Cat Industries (橘猫工业). This one is a clean no. Orange Cat is a Shanghai company that does licensed IP and mecha-girl kits, a completely different lane, different products, different everything. The only thing the two share is that "Solomon" appears in some of Orange Cat's product names, which is a coincidence, not a corporate link.

The second name is Supernova, the company behind SNAA. This rumor has more legs, because Solomon's part sharpness, inner-frame style, and lighting gimmicks do resemble Supernova's house style, and Supernova has historically operated through several sub-brands. But "resembles" is not "is." There is no verified corporate filing, no matching tooling, no shared factory address, and no insider confirmation tying Solomon to Supernova. The honest version is that Solomon is most plausibly a newer team that may share talent or a contract manufacturer with the bigger players, not a confirmed shell of any of them. Anyone stating the Supernova connection as fact is repeating a rumor, not reporting a finding.

Where Solomon and Axis Actually Fit

There is a definitional debate Solomon and Axis kick up, and it is bigger than one studio. A chunk of the Chinese community refuses to file the brand under "guomo" (国模, domestic original mecha) at all, on the grounds that its products are unlicensed recreations of Bandai's Gundam designs rather than original IP. By that logic it is closer to a high-end bootleg than to a homegrown brand with its own characters and world.

That line separates Solomon and Axis from studios that build their own designs from scratch. If you want the version of this hobby that is original Chinese mecha, that is a different shelf entirely, and we walk through it in Beyond Gunpla: A Guide to the Third-Party Mecha Kit Brands Worth Your Time. This studio sits on the other end: it does famous Gundam machines that Bandai itself has not released in this format, with this much internal detail, at this kind of launch price. It belongs to a long Chinese tradition of unlicensed Gundam, the same lineage we trace in our bootleg Gundam history series. The plastic got more elaborate. The legal grey area did not move an inch.

If you want to follow the rest of this rabbit hole, our bootleg Gundam history series covers how China went from crude Gundam knockoffs to studios like this one, and the Beyond Gunpla guide is the place to start if you'd rather build original designs with no Bandai asterisk attached.