How do you classify Combiner Deluxe Air Raid?

[Paulbot]

I think most of the Combiner War toys (deluxes, voyagers, leaders) should be considered something like "co-designed" or "Co-developed" or maybe "co-tooled" since these toys have been designed from the start to be different toys (rather than putting a new head on an existing toy).

This has been happening for a while but Combiner Wars as taken this to the extreme.

[prjkt]

I'd call it a serious (p)retool, along the lines of Spring/storm

[UltraMarginal]

I think you'll find it has it's own entire mould, it just happens that a lot of the parts are the same due to the combiner design philosophy of maximising commonality. A lot of the cost in this sort of product is design and development time. By taking exactly the same framework and just changing the detail on part faces and not changing any of the interface surfaces they save a fortune.

it's a new toy but it's hardly original.

[Zommael]

I suppose you could call it a reused transformation scheme. Energon Starscream and G2 Smokescreen use the same transformation scheme but none of the same parts, for instance. That seems to have happened a lot with CW as well. But since it uses the same parts it isn't really the same thing.

[DELTAprime]

I think of them as unique moulds that share some basic elements. Same goes for PRID Arcee and Gen Chromia in my mind. And as UM said, they should each have their own unique moulds.

[Demonac]

We can take this all the way back to g1.
The 4 aerialbot limbs, Hot Spot & Onslaught, the Firecons, Breakdown & Dead End...

[GoktimusPrime]

This could arguably even trace back all the way to 1984 with Bumblebee, Cliffjumper and Bumper. Common parts shared by these moulds are:
* Legs
* Ridiculously oversized rear licence plates
* Die-cast back panel
* Wheels (incl. tyres and hubcaps)
* Various other parts, e.g. buttocks panel, sliding shoulder joints, soles & ankle joints etc.
Parts which differ include:
* Heads
* Arms
* Feet/vehicle front section
* Main body (of vehicle and robot)
* Front fenders (Cliffjumper has no separate front bumper piece)

And much like some of these CW toys, those three moulds were likely co-designed simultaneously when they were released for New Microman's Micro Change series. And this would've long predated today's CAD process, but may have just been an expedient and cost saving way for Takara to release three different Choro Q (Penny Racer) style Micro Change figures.

TFwiki's consensus
Their Cliffjumper page states:

Though broadly similar in construction to Bumblebee and commonly called a redeco/retool of him by fans, Cliffjumper is actually an entirely different mold that just uses the same transformation scheme.

Well... not entirely different (as pointed out above), but certainly significantly different. And the caption underneath the photo of the G1 Cliffjumper toy states:
"For 28 years, this was his only toy that wasn't a Bumblebee redeco or retool."

The entries on Bumblebee and Bumper make no mention of these moulds being retools or redecos of each other or Cliffjumper. Hubcap's page does of course state that he is a retool of Cliffjumper, as this is true. So it seems that tfwiki considers Bumblebee, Cliffjumper and Bumper to be different enough to not consider them to be redecos or retools of each other, which is how I've always viewed them too.

Air Raid was the only CW Aerialbot that I didn't have on hand when I was working on the translations for the Hasbro import release of UW Superion. As I'm sure you can all imagine, translating instructions is super-duper easier when I have the mould in front of me, because there are just certain things in the Japanese text which don't quite sound right when you translate them too literally into English. It's often a juggling act of what the text is actually saying vs. what text in English would make more sense to an English reader. Too literal translations produces Engrish; the job of translating is to convey the intention of the original text. So naturally this was much easier with the other Aerialbots, but it was much harder with Air Raid as I only had the original Japanese instructions (i.e. 2D illustrations and text) to work from. Then a few days after the deadline, I got CW Air Raid.

Through this experience, I definitely say that Air Raid isn't really a retool of Skydive. Let's say Hasbro asked me to translate instructions for UW Bruticus next week. I would grab my CW Alpha Bravo, Rook, Quickslinger & Hot Spot. The first three would be easy to translate for. Onslaught might prove to be trickier as he looks to be a more significant retooling of Hot Spot, and Brawl would be the hardest as he's a whole new mould that I currently don't own any version of.

Ultimately, like any form of classification, this is all going to be incredibly subjective. Some might say that a toy that isn't 100% original is still a form of retool/redeco, which is perfectly understandable. Where you draw the line is going to vary between individual collectors. A couple of years ago I made a column for me to tick off which toys in my collection are retools. But I never got around to completing it (let alone updating it), and I've recently just deleted the whole column. I only made it because I was curious, at the time, about what percentage of my collection were retools. But of considering that the very definition of 'retool' is subjective anyway, I probably wouldn't get comparable results unless I pre-define the parameters of what counts as retools and... nah... I just don't want to do that.