Nosecone is the only Technobot I owned as a kid.  In fact, I owned him twice!  Sometimes that happens when a guy is a low pricepoint and your parents and your grandparents are shopping for you at the same time.  Two Nosecones!  

So I've decided that owning both the Combiner Wars and Unite Warriors Nosecones is merely a brilliant homage to my childhood.

Of the two, I do have a clear favorite.  I mean, let's be clear: Brawl is easily my least favorite Combiner Wars Deluxe.  His shoulders are really awkward, he's kind of slight for a big bruiser such as Brawl, his forearms are dinky, and oh jeez that waist.  Meanwhile, Rook (before UW Strafe happened) was my favorite Combiner Wars Deluxe.  And so, y'know, I'm prooooooobably going to prefer the Nosecone built from my (second-)favorite Deluxe versus the one built from my least favorite Deluxe.  

Adding to the TakaraTomy version's favor is the amount of retooling.  He's got a new Nosecone head, and about half of his drill-tank mode is new.  He has treads where he had wheels before, and the whole front roof of Rook's vehicle is replaced with.... well, an arm for the drill with a tiny pair of windows sculpted into it.  It's not the greatest bit of retooling, but you can kind of bury it with all the extra weapons they gave him.  

(Yeah, he gets three new guns.)

The sizeable drill can turn, but it's pretty stiff at the base, and it seems to lock in place every 180-degree turn.  The tip is spring-loaded, though.  

The one thing the Combiner Wars toy gets right over the Unite Warriors toy is the color scheme.  Chocolate brown with orange and yellow feels more Nosecone to me than the washed out brown and yellow.  TakaraTomy were trying to go for the animation colors, which were based on an earlier, redder prototype of Nosecone's toy.  But their toy isn't very red, it's light brown, so I think maybe they were trying to find a compromise point between the animation and the toy.  

If you put the CW colors on the UW toy, you'd have the perfectest thing.