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  2. mikeszekely
    Gonna take a break from DNA kits to talk about some A-Level stuff... Studio Series Deluxe-class Transformers One Orion Pax. This is an interesting release, to me, because we already had Optimus, and they're the same guy, right? Except that's not exactly true. There was Orion Pax before he got a T-Cog, then there was Orion Pax after he got his T-Cog, and those two versions got the bulk of the screen time. Pax doesn't become Optimus Prime until he gets the Matrix right before the big final battle. There is, correctly, the obvious height difference between Pax and Prime, but if you look at concept art for the film there are other small details that are different between Pax and Prime's models. The most obvious is that Pax has no faceplate and smaller ear-tenna, sure, but Pax also has smaller smokestacks and a narrower chest window, all of which the new figure accurate depicts. It's less obvious, but the two models had different shoulders, and you could chalk the extra painted mechanical details on Pax's shoulders to that. While Hasbro did manage to get the differences differences right, I think I have more of an issue with the similarities not quite being similar enough. For one, I'm pretty sure Pax and Prime are supposed to be the same color (differences in screenshots are differences in lighting, not the actual color). Pax has much more saturated red and blue colors, with gray plastic that isn't pre-yellowed. I think a lot of people are going to see Pax and say, "Dang, why didn't they make Prime those colors in the first place?" There's also some painted mechanical details on Pax's forearms. These details exist on Prime's character model and are molded onto the toy but weren't painted. So there's a temptation to say that Pax at least looks better than Prime. It's been a minute since I watched Transformers One, but regardless of what he used when in the movies it makes a certain amount of sense to not just regurgitate the same energon axe accessory for Pax that came with Prime. Also, as a smaller, simpler figure than Prime, it makes sense that more of Pax's budget would go to his accessories. So he comes with two. First you have the map he, Elita-1, D-16, and Badassatron used to find the cave. You also have the big digger tool used by the miners. Pax's head is on a ball joint with a fairly good up/down/sideways tilt, in addition to the expected swivel. His shoulders swivel and move laterally 90 degrees. His biceps swivel, and his elbows are double jointed, though you're looking at closer to 120 degrees of bend than 180. His wrists swivel and bend inward. He technically has a waist swivel, but it's in his backpack farther out than his butt, so it looks extremely awkward if you use it for more than a slight turn. His hips are ball joints, and his hip skirts do move, though it's a single piece tabbed into his pelvis, so you can expect about 90 degrees of movement forward, backward and laterally. His thighs swivel, and his knees bend 90 degrees. His toes have some downward tilt due to transformation; if you try to tilt them up they'll pop off. His ankles can pivot about 90 degrees. Pax can hold the mining tool with both hands. The blades on the tool spin. The map can plug into a small peg on either of Pax's forearms. All of his accessories can be stored on his back. The tool uses too tabs that plug into slots on the backpack, while the map fits onto one of two small pegs on the bottom of it. Pax is not simply a downsized version of Prime. Although their transformations do share some similarities, there are some pretty big differences, and it winds up being just a bit more awkward for it. Like, yes, the entire lower body folds back so you can fold out the grill and tuck in the forearms, but then you have to fold it back, spin the waist, and move the legs like he's sitting down. The arms, in theory, stay in place by plugging on to a thin flap you fold out from under his chest, then ridges on the forearms are supposed to slide into a slot on his butt. In practice it's very difficult to line everything up just right, and on my copy things keep popping out. Frankly, I'm not even sure the end result is worth it. I mean, it's kind of cool that they tried to tuck Pax's arms up into the cab instead of leaving the most of his arms just lying along the side, but Prime's shoulder shift at least made for a pretty intact cab. There are massive gaps on the sides through which you can clearly see his fists. The back of the cab is a small improvement in that it's mostly red, but there's still deeply recessed and a part of Pax's forehead is showing. At least Pax can tow his gear. The mining too uses tabs that go into the bottom of Pax's shins to ride on the back of the truck. Alternatively, you can use the same tabs as his bot mode storage to plonk the whole thing on the roof. The map uses the same small pegs it did in robot mode to sort of hang off the back of the cab. Hasbro seems determined to milk Transformers One for all it's worth. I don't necessarily mind it, as I did like the film quite a bit. I suppose that an Orion Pax who's slightly different than Optimus Prime was inevitable, then. I guess we should expect D-16 in the future (and maybe he'll come with Megatron's cannon, since Megatron came with D-16's). But it's a bit frustrating that, to maintain some semblance of scale, Pax wound up with a design that's worse than the already very mediocre Optimus Prime. If not for the fact that I think Hasbro wanted all the main characters to be Deluxes to make them easier to push on kids who saw the movie instead of adult collectors, I think Hasbro would have been much better off making Pax (and D-16) better Deluxes while making Prime and Megatron Voyagers. As it stands, Pax isn't a great toy, and you should probably skip him.
  3. TangledThorns
    It's HBO's Paramount's new Star Trek Star Wars.
  4. Duke Togo
    They're going to be giving it the Dune treatment: ‘Game of Thrones’ Movie Officially in the Works at Warner Bros. From ‘Andor’ Writer
  5. Seto Kaiba
    The New UN Spacy stealth cruiser is presented as a distinct class of warship separate from the Northampton-class frigate it's based on. The problem is that it is has only ever officially been referred to as "stealth cruiser", never by any kind of name in official media. It's listed in Macross Chronicle as "Space Cruiser Stealth Cruiser".
  6. azrael
    I think it was an either one-or-the-other situation with those boards. You can't mix the 2 RAM types. It was also only a feature of 13th & 14th gen Intel and that's DOA. Intel is already on LGA1851/Core Ultra-series. Also, 13th & 14th gen Intel were notorious for the degradation issues. I'd avoid 14th gen if one can help it. LGA1851 is DDR5-only. LGA1700 was treated as a transition-series since DDR5 was already out and about when Raptor Lake came out. You can still update the GPU to RTX 50-series and R90-series but it is limited to PCIe 4.0 with AM4 and 13th gen Intel. 14th gen Intel will get you to PCIe 5, but the CPU is a deadend for upgrades. AM5 and Core Ultra is better to longevity. But the latter are DDR5.
  7. Today
  8. pengbuzz
    Northampton-class, by any chance?
  9. Slave IV

    1/55's revisited

    Slave IV replied to kanata67's topic in Toys

    Haha, that's why I never sell anything unless I have extra. But that's also why my house is basically a warehouse, which is another form of idiocy, lol!
  10. 26662
    I'm not certain of its vintage. My Google-fu returned about a bazillion Godzilla toys - most of which, like the one linked above, were beyond impressive. I lost track of most everything kaiju in the early 90s. But in the 80s? You couldn't tear me away from the TV if a monster/robot/kung-fu movie was on.
  11. 26662

    1/55's revisited

    26662 replied to kanata67's topic in Toys

    I've owned only one Joon's: I bought it in 1999 off eBay for <$100. It was stupid-floppy with obscenely-large tolerances. I relisted it almost immediately. Yes, of course, I wish I hadn't sold it. My younger self was an idiot in a lot of ways. Sadly, not much has changed on that front. 🙂😉
  12. Slave IV

    1/55's revisited

    Slave IV replied to kanata67's topic in Toys

    Saw this in a shop window recently.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Which was initially difficult to explain, but now has an easy/obvious answer in "they're just using larger and/or higher-purity fold crystals in the fold system". Ever since Macross Frontier - or technically Macross Dynamite 7 - the size and quality of the fold crystals used in many forms of overtechnology has been the go-to explanation for differences in performance and capability in almost every major form of overtechnology. High-purity fold crystals are in high demand in the military and private sectors for use in fold navigation, fold communication, cross-dimensional radar, thermonuclear reactors, gravity and inertia controllers, beam weapons, and so many more technologies essential to Humanity's burgeoning interstellar civilization. It certainly explains why the poachers in Macross Dynamite 7 were so determined and so suspiciously well-connected. The previous vague statements about how the products of galactic whales could be used in spacecraft engines almost certainly means they contain very high-purity fold carbon which would naturally be a rare and high-demand material until synthesis processes caught up. It may well be. Jupiter is a gas giant, after all. It may not have a surface you can stand on but that doesn't mean it doesn't have obvious value beyond pure scientific curiosity. It's basically a giant ball of fuel that mother nature obligingly gathered into one place. The atmosphere is principally hydrogen and helium isotopes, meaning collection and processing of atmospheric gases can yield valuable fuels for thermonuclear reactors as well as elemental hydrogen gas for use in fuel cells and combustion engines. (Gundam's Universal Century timeline has permanent colonies around Jupiter for the same purpose, to extract and process deuterium and helium-3 to be shipped back to Earth in the massive tankers of the Jupiter Energy Fleet.) Yeah, we gotta go through that footage and find the first one that gets named and just use that... the same way Star Trek does for ships without an official class name. Available materials suggest they used lightly converted Zentradi ships from the former Vrlitwhai branch fleet. Having remained within a 100ly distance of Earth means they were able to lean much more heavily on Earth for resources to set up their colonies too. There's definitely an element of luck to it. The process of exploration, at least as it's been defined for the audience, is pretty simple. The emigrant fleet folds into a region of space and dispatches pilot fleets from its escort that scout out the nearby star systems for either usable resources or viable planets to colonize. If they don't find a suitable planet among the star systems they've scouted in that region they jump to the next likely area their advance scouting detail identified. They repeat this process until they find a suitable planet. They lack Star Trek-style FTL sensors that can identify habitable worlds from light years away and the means to scan the worlds they pass while folding (because fold navigation is basically teleporting) so a map of the space they're exploring might look like a string of pearls with each pearl being the sphere of space they studied between fold jumps.
  14. M'Kyuun
    Lovely little ship- those angles are great, like an extrapolation of the Horton Bros' and Jack Northrop's flying wings. This itself would make for a splendid set, just saying. I'd be in for a couple copies. I'm a big Space fan, too, but I'm waiting for the fervor to die down, or for a double points period, or a visit to my local LEGO Store, whichever comes first. I don't have anywhere to display it, and this is definitely a display piece. I read a review saying that the head doesn't rotate, which would be fair if indeed there was some sort of hidden rocket buried within. However, the review made no mention of said hidden rocket, so it really beggars the question of why they'd leave such an easily accomplished bit of simple articulation out of the build. It's also a bummer that they used two 2x2 slopes with modern computer graphics instead of resurrecting the old CS computer graphics, a move that surely would've made a lot of Space fans giddy. Lastly, and the biggest black eye, they didn't include a proper astrofig. This would've been the perfect opportunity to officially give us the coveted light bley astrofig without resorting to piecing one together from disparate sources. The light bley fig would've been an apropos compliment to the large blue fig, recalling the old blue and grey ships. Just seems a huge missed opportunity to give Space fans an extra bit of Classic Space goodness.
  15. borgified
  16. rsvictor1976
    Is that the 2016 version? I thought it had more highlights? The one I want is the -1.0 2023 version.
  17. David Hingtgen
    New thought, because RAM is more insane than GPU the more I look: Re-use my existing DDR4 RAM. While there are DDR4+5 combo boards, none have 4 slots for DDR4. (even trying to get up to 64 of DDR4 is ridiculous right now, but I can make due with my current 48) So thinking: get a new DDR4 mobo, and whatever CPU is best to try to weather the RAM storm. Could even be AM4? But would like AM5 for for future-proofing. Seems Intel abandoned DDR4 comparability earlier, but some recent CPU's may still be an option? DDR4+late AM4 won't be a huge upgrade processing wise, but really I need better PCIe+GPU more than anything.
  18. 26662
    Like this one? This thing is ginormous! I saw one online retailer selling it for $1,500!!!! [But they had discounted it to $400. But still!?!?]
  19. davidwhangchoi
    woot has some parts you may be looking for but it may sell it quick. the 5090 sold out as well as the 5060 ti with 16gb ram and 9070 xt, there still a 5070 available, might be useless but doesn't hurt to sort through.
  20. danth
    Oh yeah, I noticed that too. According to the instructions, there is exactly one robot (even though the product description says "robots"), and zero hidden rockets. WTF, Lego?
  21. danth
    I ordered this when I stayed up past midnight this Saturday (or technically Sunday). As a Lego Space fan it was a day 1 purchase. Apparently it went into back order the same day. I ended up also buying the Arcade Machine (40805), the Moon Mission Science Kit (45200, already have Mars Mission), and the Baby Construction Loader (60483, mainly because of the dark orange parts I want to use in a 2024/25 City Space MOC). The Arcade Machine breaks my No Stickers rule but it does have a decent number of large prints. I also splurged on the recent Bricklink Designer Program Alchemist's Shop, because it's just super great. I've also been MOCing myself and designed this little Spaceship (sorry for terrible quality photos):
  22. sketchley
    There is very little information on those short range fleets. Some supposition is that the SDFN class (from Macross F) and Akusho (from Macross 7) may have at one point been involved in those short range fleets. The Battleships Of The Galaxy Book 3: Zentrādi Military Vessels (a fan-made dojinshi) supposed that the Unified Government converted the Zentrādi Kirutora Keruēru into Environment Ships (the Kirutora Keruēru-class Environment Ships), but the write-up indicates they were for the Super Long-range Emigrant Fleets. Nevertheless, it does suggest that other converted Zentrādi ships could have been used in those short range fleets. Those short range fleets also appear to mostly have occurred only during the initial period shortly after the end of the First Interstellar War. The limited materials on them suggest that they started being launched before the completion of the Megaroad-01. So, the supposition that ships used in those fleets later returned to Earth and were repurposed to other roles or fleets makes a lot of sense. Macross Chronicle did have a poetic line about some Super Long-range Emigrant Fleets being fated to spend "half an eternity" looking for a habitable planet. Yeah. The production team really played fast and loose with continuity in that game. I'm glad that they were reined in a lot more with VF-X2!
  23. F-ZeroOne
    Something thats been blowing my mind a bit recently is after watching a recent Jeremy Parish video is that the US only had two dedicated video gaming magazines for a period of about four years between 1984 and 1988, and one of those was a self-published newsletter apparently put out by two middle aged women that no-one has ever heard of. From a British perspective, thats... look, magazines were a huge part of the British computer/video gaming background of the 80s. We had "Crash", "ZZAP 64", "Your Sinclair", "Sinclair User", "Amstrad Action", "Computer and Videogames" - and thats just to name the famous ones; there also were the short-lived publications like "Big K" and even odd platforms like the Dragon 32 had their own titles. This continued well into the 16-bit and even 32-bit eras. Now, granted, many of these weren't in the strictest sense absolutely dedicated "videogame" magazines as they were largely covering personal computing and several started out as general computing titles with gaming just part of it but it wasn't too long before games were largely running the show for a lot of them (also, in those days, you needed at least a degree of familiarity with computing to be a gamer, from typing in a "LOAD" command just to start running a game to invoking the mysterious art of the "POKE" if you actually wanted to beat Jet Set F... REAKIN' Willy). The people that wrote for them were in some cases literally school kids and several have commented how they could be treated almost like rock stars when they met their magazines readers.
  24. sh9000
    https://www.target.com/p/-/A-94744409
  25. F-ZeroOne
    But is there an alternate build if you put it together in less than two hours though? 😅
  26. TangledThorns
    Yeah, may go see SCARY MOVIE if its actually funny. The first two films were funny and raunchy af.
  27. grogall
    So the May issue of Hobby Japan will be a special issue on Armoured Trooper V.O.T.O.M.S.. Not sure when the actual release is? via (X) twitter...
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