I wanted to ask : from where are the girls in power armour on the lower shelf in that Strike Witches pic?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busou_Shinki
Made by Konami, originally released in conjunction with a (Japanese-only) PC game that was a sort of MMO raising/management game - you got codes with each figure that unlocked them in the game, and could direct how they trained and fought, but actual combat was controlled by AI (you could input some indirect hints, but only broad strategies like all-out-attack, defend, etc). Later they released a couple of PSP games (which are more straightforward action games, without the MMO component, and weren't tied directly to the physical figures).
They also did a TV anime in 2012. Although by then they'd stopped actually producing the figures (they showed some prototypes of unreleased ones back in 2011, but there's been no sign of them since, and Konami stopped showing up to figure events entirely), so all it did was drive up secondary-market prices to truly ludicrous levels (and a few prize figures and whatnot, but no proper releases). Because producing an anime based on a figure line while you're not producing said figures makes PERFECT sense when you're Konami.
The most interesting thing about them is that the power armour parts are all removable, and use a common peg/hole system to fit together, so you can completely reconfigure their armour (there's usually a few setups listed on the instruction sheet, but really the only limit is your own creativity), and if you have a bunch of them, you can combine parts from multiple sets and do things that are truly insane:
(image from some crazy japanese guy, not one of mine)
