All Activity

Definitely get what you're saying, but it seems like the same thing where dedicated machines could do the same jobs more efficiently. A 9.5m tall robot is super strong and dextrous, but a crane can lift something to the top of a building and be disassembled for storage when it's not needed. A forklift might be slower than a workroid, but it's also less likely to pulp your cargo spinning and dancing on the way to the loading dock (it's honestly a wonder Freyja was still alive after Hayate's transit 😉). I'll give you construction, because hands to hold a girder in place while people attach it is better than a crane, but again is going to be limited to a structure only as high as it can reach, so not great for building skyscrapers. It's all moot, and I'm mostly just being nitpicky for the sake of fun. Once you have giant robots, I'd use them for everything I possibly could, too, just because it's cool. To a man with a hammer, all the world's a nail, so why not? It does raise another another thought in me, though, which is how much are smaller power suit type machines used? Or humanoid robots in the 1.8 - 2m size? Not at all that we've seen, but it seems like another obvious extention of the technologies at play and possilby more useful at the same tasks. A robot drink machine is cool, but a robot firefighter that can go up stairs and rescue soft meat bags from back hallways would be truly useful.

Yup, one of his first roles. I don’t think he really understood the politics behind the story and has come out in interviews saying that he never intended any harm by taking the role. Just seems like a young actor hoping for that breakout role and it got him more notice. It’s a terrible movie, but if you can have fun with bad movies and don’t take it seriously, it’s kinda fun with the right kinda friends to do a silly rewatch. Might even make for an awkward historical watch with the kids to kinda show them the temperament and odd paranoia of the time. It would also make for fun if you got young ones that maybe don’t quite get how far things were trying to get simple things like music, games and cartoons banned. The 80’s had a lot of cool things going on with entertainment and parental groups just thought they were evil, not like bad influence, actually evil

Ah, another sofubi guy. Man after my own heart. I asked because I wondered if it was someone who outbid me on Whatnot not long ago for the same. Sometimes it's a small world.

Looks like they updated them. Less arm armor on the brownie

Oh man - Tom Hanks was in that M&M drivel?

New Moderoids

Yup, the guys look to be about the same size. Won’t give off the same vibe as the original movie, where there was this massive height difference between Connor and the Kurgan.

Looks pretty good for a first try. Given what they're used for, honestly the more dinged-up the better IMO. Frontier's Destroid Works and Delta's Workroid probably find a lot more use than the military version. After all, this is basically a cheap piece of multipurpose heavy machinery that can be used for all different kinds of heavy work with modular parts or handheld equipment. We know from the Macross Frontier TV series and movies that they're used for disaster recovery and cleanup, firefighting, construction, and even mining. They're spaceworthy and the rollers they have on their feet can be magnetized, so they can be used for repairing ships and space stations from the outside. The Workroid version is shown to be the world's most OP freight handling machine, able to manhandle multiple 20ft-class ISO storage containers at one time exponentially faster than any crane... Mining, construction, and demolition is already a pretty huge portfolio for a single multirole machine. It's basically the equivalent of a Zentradi skilled tradesman without the resource issues of sustaining a population of giants.

@Big s Thanks

Looks like the Macross main cannon on the back of the bot to the right

Mazes and Monsters was on a bunch when I was a kid. At the time, we didn’t realize at that age that it was made as anti Dungeons & Dragons during the satanic panic era. I think it wasn’t until junior high when I kinda started catching on to what was going on since a friend had a bunch of anti cool stuff propaganda videos his church would hand out. I might not have checked out Celtic Frost til much later if it weren’t for those stupid videos.

The water turned out pretty great. Really love this color scheme even though the metallics don’t shine as bright as I bet they do in real life.

Oh yeah! Excited for an update.

As long as it looks cool, I'm down with it. 😉 First try at a workroid texture. Some clean up on the arms where the caution lines got distorted, and some of the scrapes and scratches need refined, but overall not too bad, I think. Along with all the above talk, I have to think even a workroid struggles to find a real application in world. Other than manhandling Vajra corpses onto a truck, I'm not sure what else they'd be good for. Poor Cheyenne, the red headed step child of the Macross universe.

Getting ready to jump back onto the saddle.

Still the most reliable source of DX VF-1 weapons.

The Demon King's Daughter Is Too Kind! is so cute. I hate to admit that I look forward to it every week. Doux makes me smile.

Curious if Hasbro's going to have a fanstream leading up to NY Toy Fair this weekend? Takara's doing their own this Friday at 3PM PDT, from what I understand.

@505thAirborne hey thanks! Same to you. Love seeing what you are working on. @Cheese3 That looks great! Making some progress on final assembly. Using a combination of regular cement and CA since lots of the connection points are just shallow rectangular shapes that slide around and I’m nervous about glue messing/creeping around on the paint. Slow and steady.

That, of course, being the question that hangs over the Cheyenne II's entire existence. "Aside from jobbing, why are you even here?" Macross Frontier materials tell us that the Frontier fleet chose the Cheyenne II for a very specific corner case... air defense inside of the Island ships where the regular air defenses can't reach. This is seemingly only a concern because the Island Cluster-class emigrant ships are SO HUGE that enemies flying inside the dome without being forced into a virtual trench run by skyscrapers is a realistic concern. Why they didn't use a more conventional self-propelled anti-aircraft platform like Japan's Type-87 SPAAG is anyone's guess, esp. given that their other defenses include conventional tank destroyers (based on the B1 Centauro). (The real-world answer being a cost-save by reusing an existing CG model leftover from Macross Zero.) Because it's based on the same technology, and has the same basic limitations, as real-world anti-aircraft weapons. Of course, AI is not magic. What you get out of it is only as good as what you put into it and AI technology in Macross is limited by hardware and by law. As far as we know, the CIWS systems in Macross are very much like the ones in the real world just with better/more powerful missiles and with particle beam weapons in place of high rate-of-fire solid ammo cannons. They're using radar and other sensors to identify and track targets, feeding that data to onboard computers to predict trajectories to gain a missile lock or calculate lead time for a gun firing solution. Much like modern equivalents, these systems can be confused or outright defeated by stealth, speed, or simply flying erratically. VFs use a mixture of passive and active stealth measures to diminish the ability of enemy radar to detect them. This makes it harder for defenses to spot and engage them at range since it takes powerful ECCM to cut through active stealth. Red raw speed is an option to defeat many types of tracking systems. Even though it is normally easy to shoot down a target that is moving in a straight line, you need at least two data points about its location over time to compute an estimated trajectory and speed and plot an intercept based on that. If the craft or projectile is clear of the sensor's FOV before that second sweep needed to establish speed and directionality, the system cannot track the target and usually writes it off as a false detection. This was the cause of the 1991 Dhahran barracks disaster during the Gulf War (due to a software bug in Patriot missile systems providing air defense) and is also the working theory behind "uninterceptable" hypersonic missiles that have been talked about in the last few years. Flying erratically can also make interception more difficult by making it harder to establish a viable firing solution by simply being difficult to predict. VFs are quite good at this since they can turn on a proverbial dime by transforming and the ones we see doing most of the AA-dodging are 5th Gen ones that can accelerate and turn beyond the limits of what a human pilot could normally endure thanks to the ISC (Vajra flight performance is as good or even better). This was one reason that Iraqi scud missiles got through air defenses unusually often. Modifications made to increase their range made their flight paths erratic and reduced their accuracy, sometimes causing them to tumble or corkscrew through the air. Combine those as most VFs do, and a kill shot with anti-aircraft guns and missile launchers is far from guaranteed... which is why AA guns need to improve alongside the aircraft themselves. Even modern AA guns need to put hundreds of rounds in the air (often from multiple guns) for the chance of connecting with just a few of them to score a kill. Destroid weapon systems work exactly the same way, they're just mounted on a more expensive self-propelled platform. The center of that particular Venn diagram being that we are told that quite a few of those Cheyenne II's, particularly the ones used on ships like the Macross Quarter, aren't even manned. They're remotely operated, making them just an overpriced regular AA gun. From what we're told, modern AA systems c.2058-2059 are mainly designed to counter 4th Gen VF levels of performance and need an update to be able to address the greater performance of a 5th Gen VF or something like a Vajra reliably. We do see the Frontier fleet's air defenses scoring kills on Vajra at several points in the series, but that's likely as much down to a dense field of overlapping fire as skill or good judgement.

That's generous praise, and I thank you. Toy reviews are decidedly not my, ahem, forte, which is why I both appreciate and wait for @mikeszekely's far more skillful efforts. In this case, it's a figure I really wanted to gush over, and in the absence of anyone else posting their thoughts, I figured I'd take the opportunity. I'm glad you liked the review, @tekering. Hopefully, Mike will get his up this week upon getting his furnace fixed. Concerning the Netflix show, I agree on all points. I loved the animation, how well it captured the look of the toys, the used and abused look of everything. That was a defining element of that show that made it stand above so many others, not to mention it was primarily G1 with some Beast Wars thrown in. The voice acting, for me, is what killed the experience. It made no sense to me, either, as Rooster Teeth have done a good job with story, dialog, and voice acting over the years with RWBY and Gen:Lock, a mecha series that I wish had gotten a second season. Anyway, it's a shame they didn't hire A-list voice talent, especially any of the original VAs, to reprise the roles and really deliver a premium Transformers experience. Not sure if it was Netflix or RT that made the VA choices, but they were wrong in the worst way possible, more's the pity. So, I have to shamefacedly admit that I've not read the comics, at least most of them, and I've no excuse as Mike, out of the sheer kindness of his heart and at his own expense, burned all the comics onto discs and sent them to me. They're on my PC even as I speak, but I often forget about them (threads like this remind me, and I feel guilty). Ironically, I'm a reader, at least of books. For some reason, though, I never got into comics or manga, even having read and enjoyed some graphic novels and having had a temporary Iron Man comic subscription in my early twenties thanks to a very generous friend (I still have them in a box...somewhere). I don't know why the medium never struck a chord with me, as it's exactly the sort of nerd fare that enthralls me. I can't explain it myself. I didn't mind the story they were telling in the Netflix show so much as the gawd-awful line deliveries. Every time certain characters talked, it was cringe-inducing and I have to wonder how any voice director could have thought it was good. It just takes you out of the enjoyment of the show. Well, that's lovely on both companies' parts. 😒 Not at all surprised by Harmony Gold's detestable actions, but it's dismaying that a company that made a defining cartoon that has had influence on my life so profoundly engaged in the same sort of shady shenanigans. Since they had overall responsibility for the final product, Sunbow deserves a kick in the balls for all the inconsistencies, gaffs, et al that plagued the G1 show. However, as much as I detest its influence on the look of the toys currently, especially in the legends and MP realms but slowly creeping into main line, I won't fault them entirely for the simplification of the animation. It was the way things were done, for the most part, they had no foresight into a future forty-plus years on to see the popularity of the brand still flourishing, nor could they have predicted the influence the animation would eventually have on the toys themselves, an ironic reversal of how the G1 animation was based on the toys. It's simply a product of its time and we can only lament that fact and engage in pleasant what-ifs.

With that title, I was half expecting Tom Hanks to show up to teach kids about the dangers of tabletop role-playing games!

Water effects! Now for trees and clean up!

This is actually the other thing that always pops to mind when thinking about destroids. If they can't be made useful, why do they exist at all? Yes, plot reasons, as sketchley pointed out, but in a setting with AI as advanced as we've seen and mechanical systems as durable and flexible as has been shown, why is CIWS not an impenetrable defense for just about any ship or fort? It's already pretty formidable in current real world settings, in Macross it should mean that a fighter can never even get close to an opponent ship unless they fold right next to it. For the most part, though, we only see WW2 style flak cannons spamming relatively uselessly into space while fighters fly in without much trouble. (This doesn't actually bother me all that much, it's just where my brain goes with any technical analysis of a setting. Armchair quarterbacking, there's always a nit to pick! 😉)