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  2. Seto Kaiba
    To be frank, I doubt that's it. Ukyo Kodachi seems to have wanted to make the Gefion the smallest possible ship he could while developing the scenario for Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy. Not only to justify why Leon, who had only come to Uroboros to make a delivery, needed to be pressed into service as the Gefion's only regular fighter pilot and replacement test pilot for the YF-30 Chronos but also why Havamal and the Bandits don't see SMS as a real threat. He also seems to have wanted it to be a commonplace ship class so that it wouldn't stand out as home to something unconventional the way a Mother Raven-type or Valhalla III-type special forces warship might. The Northampton-class seems to have fit the bill for the story because of its sheer ubiquity, its status as a cannon fodder ship, and it being known to carry a single platoon of VFs under normal circumstances since that's all that ever launches from it for most of the game. It IS large enough relative to many modern STOVL carriers in service today that even an entire squadron being aboard would not be implausible. (Though when the game finally does show large numbers of fighters being launched for the final offensive, SMS is not using the Gefion anymore... they're operating from the Macross Quarter.) Please do remember this is a game and there are some Acceptable Breaks from Reality in place esp. in terms of where all the VFs you unlock are (or whether they exist at all in the context of the story). The only thing wrong with the size of the Gefion is that the hangar gates need to be bigger to accommodate the full wingspan of something like a VF-25. That's not exactly a deal-breaker for gameplay though, so it's not surprising they went with something that looked nice. The whole point of having the Gefion be a modified Northampton-class is making her small and unthreatening. The larger Guantanamo-class stealth carrier is a fair bit bigger and projects more power because it's typically home to 2-3 entire squadrons rather than a single platoon or two in a pinch. It's not about the beam gun turrets, it's about the size of a ship's airwing. As I said, there's nothing eyebrow-raising about Leon waking up after being shot down in the prologue to find he's the only pilot aboard a tiny escort ship that isn't normally home to more than 2-3 pilots at most. It's immediately eyebrow-raising to be the only pilot on a dedicated carrier that's normally home to almost fifty pilots.
  3. Chronocidal
    I'd drop a few significant organ donations on the table if it would get them to produce series based on some of the X-Wing books. Not sure I'd vote for the Stackpole books and the Corran Horn Show, but Allston's Wraith Squadron books always felt like the peak of the EU for me, for some of the same reasons Andor is being praised. Believable, funny, and above all vulnerable characters, dealing with the complications of war and terrorism from both sides, and some of the best treatment I think the force has gotten in any of the EU, due to how subtle it was. The settings and details of that particular series are flexible enough that they could probably wedge them into the new canon as is. Also, I honestly just want an excuse to commit "Yub Yub, Commander" to the canon.
  4. Nimilo533
    Nimilo533 joined the community
  5. Today
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Maybe... but, then again, we're talking about a clash of flavors there. Andor's brand of grounded, realistic, and mature storytelling with its focus on moral ambiguity and the struggles of regular people won't mesh well with the more fantastical style and larger-than-life characters and caricatures used in more conventional Star Wars media. Consider, if you will, that LucasFilm intended The Force Awakens to be a literal and maximally accessible fresh start for Star Wars rather than a simple sequel. The film being a de facto soft reboot of Star Wars was in aid of that goal. It was meant to be appealing and accessible to a new generation of viewers who may not have seen any of Star Wars before or at least may not have found their parents and grandparents old movies all that interesting. Hiring J.J. Abrams to helm it surely sounded like good business in the abstract since he was a rising star who had recently done a soft reboot of another major sci-fi franchise... even if they apparently missed that his attempt at a soft reboot of the Star Trek franchise was widely panned by fans and underperformed at the box office. The mess that ensued after the first movie's lukewarm reception was partly down to J.J. Abrams's tendency to save all the reveals and explanations for the third act (acceptable in a single film, but a terrible idea in a trilogy) and partly because the studio saw all of the social media hot takes and generally mediocre audience response, panicked, and overcorrected in the next movie instead of sticking to what they'd planned out. Disaster ensued. Yeah, that's not happening. Disney LucasFilm's not going to broom the sequel trilogy they spent so much money and tried to rebuild the brand around. I can see two probable outcomes from Disney LucasFilm in the event that the New Jedi Order movie underperforms, depending on how badly it underperforms. If it does so-so but not great, LucasFilm will probably have Rey succumb to the usual Jedi mentor occupational hazard and whoever's the most popular secondary character with fans replaces her as the protagonist for the rest of the New Jedi Order storyline. If the film is a bomb, LucasFilm will can the rest of their plans for New Jedi Order, retire the rest of Rey's storyline to the EU, and try to move on from the sequel trilogy era. We'll see... they've got some far-past sequel in development called Dawn of the Jedi, which is allegedly set 25,000 years in the past.
  7. sh9000
  8. sh9000
    https://store.crunchyroll.com/products/macross-plus-movie-ova-blu-ray-ultimate-edition-crunchyroll-exclusive-5037899090312.html
  9. Thom
    Which is a similar problem with the sequel trilogy. Such great actors reduced to wooden performances and simplistic dialogue. "I hate sand." "Somehow Palpatine returned." I'd say though, that the 'simplicity' of the fairy tale could do well with a bit of Andor'esq spice, especially considering the general love Andor is receiving. Considering ANH as a beginning, then showing such an emotional growth and complexity in later movies/shows would be a good thing. TFA didn't do that. It rebooted the story from the 'beginning' rather than really continuing anything. If the next two had grown from it with a concise and planned storyline rather than the willy-nilly-sillyness that JJ/Kennedy went for, the discussions would be entirely different. Such as now, we're expecting them to to just reboot Luke's story post RoTJ, only with Rey now. That's why I'm a proponent of just refilming 7 thru 9 entirely, even knowing that is an impossibility. If I had my druthers, they'd recast Luke, Leia and Han and start filming the EU, even though that mess also has its faults. With neither of that happening, the next trilogy centering on Rey needs to shift entirely from what came before, and following the more dramatic and well-paced vein of Andor is by far the better option. As to newer stories, I really hope the series focusing on the High Republic era, something far too early to be connected, does really well. And that they finally learn from last few shows, the good and the bad.
  10. treatment
    https://twitter.com/ARCADIA_Co_Ltd/status/1931632015302066329 web-translated:
  11. Scyla
    Is the Gamecube already considered retro gaming? Probably the last Gamecube game I am going to buy for the collection.
  12. F-ZeroOne
    Thanks, it sounds like I may have over-reacted a tad but didn't want anyone caught unawares if possible.
  13. Sokeijon
    My new Hi-Metal R collection.
  14. Apok451
    Well, they came back and said I had to pay shipping because of tariffs. $14 for shipping from China isn’t so bad. So hopefully I’ll have my not “jetfire” soon.
  15. TangledThorns
    Hopefully its good as THE EXPANSE was one of my favorite sci-fi series in the past ten years.
  16. grogall
    True! And Hobby JAPAN just released a photo shoot of Bandai's HG Turbo Custom, with some nice weathering.
  17. Duke Togo
    He had a stroke several years ago.
  18. SebastianP
    And what I'm saying is that *Studio Nue* did not care about making anything in true scale. The whole issue goes back to the Stargazer, which *should never have been a Northampton*, because there already were two carriers that were very under-utilized in the show. The precedent of the Stargazer I think why anyone even looked at the Northampton as a basis for the Gefion in the first place. I can buy most of the rest of your arguments, except that "the larger carriers would have been too dominant" - a Guantanamo, especially the true size version that they used for the cool launch shots in the Frontier opening battle, would have been smaller by some significant margin than they ended up making the Gefion, and been visually less threatening because of the lack of big guns, and would have had room for Aisha's VF collection and any other cast members, *and* been justified in that a VF development project obviously needs a carrier of some sort if it's not going to be land-based.
  19. MKT
    If it helps, I just measured it and it’s 8cm height till the tip of head lasers.
  20. Valkyrie Hunter D
    It may be totally unrelated, but I've been seeing a lot more Metal Structure Nu's on Mandarake lately.
  21. davidwhangchoi
  22. shazam
  23. davidwhangchoi
    Technical Stuff that i'm very interested in: Positive improvements for some games
  24. Seto Kaiba
    It's a video game, bro... I guarantee you the dev team literally did not care about making anything in true scale. 🤣 What Artdink's dev team did care about was picking a design for the Gefion that plausibly fit with the premise of the game's story. The SMS branch on Uroboros is not there to provide PMC services to Uroboros's government. They're not even really meant to be a combat unit at all. They're a well-funded, but minimally staffed, R&D unit led by an eccentric senior researcher. Their mission is to study the intense and widespread fold fault activity around the planet and work on ways for fold faults to be traversed safely. The minimal staffing and remote location make secrecy easier to maintain. In practical terms, that meant the Gefion needed to be: An escort warship large enough to plausibly hold 3-4 Variable Fighters for the main cast. Small enough to not dominate the area map in any of the game's zones and plausibly be operated by a handful of people. Lacking in offensive power to the point that SMS cannot plausibly overpower the other factions in the game using it. Visually communicate that SMS Uroboros is a small operation lacking the resources of a dedicated combat unit. The Northampton-class was a pretty ideal choice there, since it was a design used in Macross Frontier and its movies, it's a very small and lightly armed stealth warship, and it has been shown to carry ~3 Variable Fighters in normal operating conditions (in Macross 7). They just slapped some catapult decks on the side because that linear catapult launch in the Macross Frontier series is so dang satisfying. The scale's off a bit, sure, and once you've got a dozen or so support characters you start to wonder where they're putting everyone... but that was a lower priority than finding something that fit the bill, looked nice doing it, and worked naturally with the game. The only other pre-existing design that would have fit the bill would be the Valhalla III-type from Macross Digital Mission VF-X... which would've been kind of badass in its own right but the catapult launch on that one would've been much more complex and possibly induce motion sickness. Using one of the larger carrier classes was right out. They're too big, they imply too much power at SMS's disposal, and the player is naturally going to wonder why a ship that was designed to hold multiple squadrons of Variable Fighters only has one other pilot - who is also the ship's captain - aboard at the start of the game.
  25. sjoebarry
    I’d buy a green instantly
  26. TangledThorns
    I thought it was well made. There is only so much you can do with the PREDATOR and it seems they are pushing it more than ever before. Also, Michael Biehn's age seems to be taking a toll on him as he sounded much older than he really is.
  27. Seto Kaiba
    Naturally. Even the very finest actors cannot save a production with a garbage script and lackluster direction. Ms. Ridley herself is not the problem. She can only do her best with what she's given. The problem facing New Jedi Order is that they're trying to sell another movie based on a character whose audience reception hovers somewhere between total ambivalence and general antipathy. The writers of the sequel trilogy did a very poor job with Rey as a character and it's going to be very difficult, potentially impossible, for her to win over the crowd now. The kind of writing that works for stories like Andor doesn't really work for something like a Jedi-centric story. The Jedi and the Sith exist in a simpler, more child-friendly context where morality is reduced to a simple matter of Good vs. Evil, where the villains are melodramatic evil sorcerers and blood knights, and where the Chosen Hero of Destiny saves the day every time. You can't have that AND do grounded, morally complex, realistic writing like Andor's... they're antithecal premises. A lot of classic fantasy stories started out as folk tales... little bits of oral mytho-history, fairy tales, and folkloric explanations for the weirdness of the natural world. They're short and to the point because they exist to teach a simple moral lesson, to teach children what not to do, or just explain weird sh*t that happens naturally. Sequels, prequels, all that hot nonsense has existed for a long time too. One could argue that Homer's Odyssey was a sequel to his Iliad. Those existed more in the realms of complex, bawdy, and bloody mytho-history meant for the theatergoing adult. Commercial sequels... it's hard to say how old those truly are. Shakespeare did at least one, that being Henry IV Part II, but even that wasn't really making stuff up off the cuff to keep a story going past its end. They do imply that the war we see in the OT is only one that's happened, so it's justified even without showing another. I think moving far enough down the timeline that everyone from the originals is long dead would be a good move. They don't want to because they want to lean on all that residual goodwill audiences have for the existing cast. Developing new factions, a new main cast, and new designs all from scratch is a hard and a big investment... something they were burned by in the sequel trilogy. They can try to maintain stasis, much like how The Acolyte looks essentially no different to the "modern day" despite being 100+ years apart, but that's unsatifying in its own way. Kind of a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't situation IMO... but at this point they have little to lose now that Andor's over and the best they have in the pipe is more unintentionally sexist displays of girl power putting the entire galaxy in danger in Ahsoka season two.
  28. GMK
    Doesn’t look like it. Sprue “MJ” is the Max figure sprue.
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