Graham

Arghhh.....just wasted money on the Hong Kong DVD release of Kill Bill. Not only does it feature the crappy black and white fight scene, which sucks as here in Hong Kong we were originally treated to the glorious full color uncensored theatrical release, but also it has no English subtitles, which really sucks as a lot of the film is in Japanese. This is pretty unusual for a HK DVD release as being a so-called 'international city', with a large expat population, most DVDs here come with both English and Chinese subs. Oh well, that'll teach me for not doing any research before I buy. Anyway, after doing a bit of research, it seems like the only DVD release which features the full color fight and has English subs is the Japanese R2 version, which is due for release on April 16th. I've already pre-ordered my copy from Amazon.co.jp. If you want to see the film how it is supposed to be seen now you know which version to order. As I've watched both color and black and white versions of the fight scene with the Bride against the Crazy 88s my opinion is that once you have seen the color version, you will never want to see it in black and white again and after all, color is originally the way Tarantino filmed it. Lastly.....censorship sucks! Graham

It'll never happen, but as a fan of the EF-2000, I gotta say it would be really great (and funny as hell) if the US ended up buying several hundred Typhoons to replace the F/A-22, F-16, F-15 & JSF Graham

The wing-tip pods on that MSiA Skygrasper are definitely sagging. Sure case of gashapon disease there Graham

I'd say give the JSF the chop first (although I know that wont happen). As I've argued elsewhere, that plane is too much of a 'Jack-of-all-trades', does lot's of things reasonably well, but nothing spectacularly. And IMO it's not really much of an improvement on what we have already. In same cases, it actually offers less capability. And as much as I like the idea of the F-22, in this day and age of mostly low intensity guerilla type conflicts, it really is a plane in search of a mission. Unless that is the US ends up going to war with either China, Europe or North Korea, then an F-22 might be useful in achiving air superiority. If it was up to me, I'd say the USAF should scrap both the JSF and F-22 and instead engage in extensive upgrade or even new-build program on the F-15, F-16 and A-10. For the F-16, you could add things like RAM & thrust vectoring or even consider the enhanced performance variants such as the F-16XL and F-16 CCV. The F-15 could also be improved by going to the F-15 ACTIVE, and perhaps adding RAM and doing some subtle reshaping of some parts to (hopefully) reduce the RCS and make the plane at least a bit more stealthy. Other improvements such as off-boresight targetting and helmet mounted sights should also be added (same goes for the F-16). The A-10 could definitely benefit from a more modern cockpit layout and improved avionics and sensor package. Graham

I'll echo with what others have said in that I'd love to see this new HCM-PRO line include non-Gundam mecha. Personally, I can think of nothing more boring than yet another line of One Year War toys. Graham

Even taking into account using advanced technology lighter, stronger & thinner metals for the gun and using alternate ammo systems such as caseless ammo or liquid propellant instead of conventional shell cases, there is still a limit as to how much smaller you can make a gun which fires a 60mm shell. 60mm is 60mm no matter which way you look at it and the feed and breech mechanisms and barrels need to be sized accordingly. Not to mention that in order to assure that enough of the propellant powder is burnt within the barrel and to achieve a meaningful velocity, certain minimum barrel lengths are required. The Gundam's head Vulcans seem to have very short barrels, meaning low velocity. To quote from a passage from the Warbird Tech A-10 book by Dennis R. Jenkins: "It should be remembered that the overall size of a gun increases rapidly with greater calibre. The mass of each round rises with the cube of the calibre, and the loads on the breech, barrel and feed systems follow suit. Barrel length increases with the calibre and the velocity." Although I'm sure most of you have seen it before, here's the famous picture of the A-10's GAU-8 30mm gun shown dwarfing a VW Beetle, to give you an idea of it's size. BTW, fully loaded, the GAU-8 weighs about 3,900 pounds! Now just imagine how large a 60mm Vulcan would be. And by the way, going from 6 or 7 barrels down to 3 barrels doesn't reduce the size that much. Graham

GBP stands for Grenade Box Protector. Graham

LOL Graham

Ha Ha , that is so funny. Nice to know somebody at Google has a sense of humor. Graham

Fantastic work Kurt. I just wish I had the money to afford customs at the moment I'll get these added to the MW custom toy gallery at the weekend. Graham

Oustanding work as always Jung. the quality of customs we are getting from all you talented customisers recently is just mind blowing. I can't believe how many 1/48 customs we've been seeing recently. Anyway, I'll add this to the MW custom gallery at the weekend. Graham

You don't need to understand Japanese to be able to play the Japanese Macross PS2 game. Graham

Heh, don't get me started on what's wrong with Battlecry. How about poorly modeled valks, with missing wings in battroid mode, feet which look half open in fighter mode and a stuby misshapen nose in fighter mode. Horrible sound for the Valks engines. Makes it sound like the Valk is powered by a sowing machine engine. Also, horrible gunpod firing noise. Horrible, horrible voice acting by the main character. I can't stand to listen to his droning monologues. mediocre gameplay and poor control in fighter mode. Graham

Very hokey ending. I'm also not sure what actually happened. And I completely agree about the subs. The name change thing just got crazy. IIRC there were some episodes where the names changed several times within one episode. I'd love to buy a remastered Orguss set with decent subs.....AnimEigo are you listening? Graham

yeah,, waayyy better than Subways. Heh, Subway came to HK about 18 months ago, opened up two branches, but they only lasted about a year before they folded. I ate there about half a dozen times. Their food was ok, but I found all their sandwiches actually tasted pretty similar Unfortunately, HK has a serious lack of diversity in US style fast food as McDonalds rules everything here.......yuk de culture! We have like nearly 200 branches of McDonalds. I mean literally anywhere you are in HK, you are no more than 5-10 minutes walk away from at least one branch of McDonalds. We also have KFC and Pizza hut and a few Hardies (like maybe 3 branches left) but that's it All the Jack-in-the-Box, Wendys, Burger King shut shop and left down a long time ago....... I'd love to see a Taco Bell opening in HK and also Jack-in-the-Box return, as I loved their Ultimate Cheeseburgers. What were we talking about again........oh yeah, Macross Graham

I love Katoki's Victory and V2 MS designs and of course all his Gundam Sentinal designs, which are my all time favorite MS. However, I've never forgiven the man for the hidiousness (IMO) that is the Virtual On mecha Graham

To get back on topic sorta, I agree that I'd like to see more mecha toys with die-cast metal content from Bandai, but only for non-transforming mecha designs. I'm a firm believer in ABS for transforming toys and only having metal where it's absolutely necessary for durability, as you inevitably get paint chipping on die-cast transforming toys. Can't say I'm really interested in more Gundam toys, but I wish Bandai would concentrate on other neglected mecha shows. If Bandai or another company made toys of mecha from the following shows, i would buy them in an instant: - Gasaraki. Blue Gender. Dragonar. Bubble Gum Crisis. Metal Skin Panic. Graham

Personally, I care not one whit about the boxes. Toynami should offer them in brown paper bags to cut the cost Graham

Personally, I think that even without Gundam, we would have eventually ended up one way or another with realistic military mecha anime shows, but it's pretty much a moot point though as we can't travel back in time to change things, so we'll never know You got me about Okawara In my defense I guess that between the time he designed the RX-78 and the ATM-09 he might have actually studied up on military designs, which is why the ATs look much more realistic and practical, i.e. something that the military may actualy use in the near future as opposed to the much more unrealistic looking (IMO) MS. Anyway, there's a lot of things I don't find very realistic about mobile suits: - They are too damn big. An 18.5m tall robot is just a huge target if you ask me. At least starting from the UC120 era or there abouts, MS started to become slightly more reasonable in size, starting with IIRC, the F90 series. Most early mobile suits lacked any type of flight capability, meaning they had limited stategic mobility. Sure they could walk, run, skim in some cases (Doms) and do limited booster augmented jumps, but they lack the ability to quickly respond and travel from one area to another without having to rely on a seperate transport vehicle. Valks on the other hand are capable of supersonic or in some cases hypersonic speed alowing them to quickly travel from battle-site to battle-site, country to country etc. IMO Gundam is just giant robots for the sake of giant robots. At least Macross has an excuse why giant robots are needed. And no amount of reasoning is going to convince me that an 18.5m tall humanoid robot is the ideal size and form for a combat mecha. Most MS carry an extremely limited weapon load considering their large size. For example, the RX-78 has a beam rifle which is good for only 20 shots and then has to be returned to base to be recharged, or optionally a giant bazooka with only 4-5 shots, head vulcans which are totally unrealistic (I'll explain below) and the beam sabers. One of the prime reasons I state that Okawaro & Tomino didn't really have much of a grasp of military design and weapons when they created the RX-78 (and most MS thereafter) is that the head Vulcans in a Gundam are listed as being 60mm. Now sorry, there is absolutely no way that you could ever fit one let alone two 60mm Vulcans into the head of a MS. First of all, lets clear up what we mean by Vulcan. Well, Vulcan as I'm sure most of you know is the name for the General Electric M61A1 20mm 6 barrelled rotary cannon fitted to most USAF fighter jets that can fire up to 6,600 rounds per minute. However, in Gundam, Vulcan seems to be the general name for cannons mounted in the head of an MS. These are often (though not always) multi-barrelled rotary cannon (3-6 barrels). As calibre increases, so does the size of the gun. The M61A1 20mm is not too large and it might just be possible to fit one or two of these in the head of an MS. However, increase the size of the round and the size of the gun has to increase, including the barrels, breach and drive mechanisms, ammo drum. I'm sure most of you have seen the publicity shot of the GAU-8 30mm Avenger cannon from the A-10 next to a VW Beetle and that gun is huge. It's 6.4m long and weighs 281kg (not including ammo). Now scale up the cannon to fire 60mm rounds and you would end up with a huge weapon, certainly too big to fit in the head of an MS. This is one of the reasons why I consider Kawamori to have a better grounding in military equipment as he pretty much got the size of the GU-11 55mm gunpod correct. Now the recent Gundam SEED takes a steep further towards the ridiculous by having the head mounted guns of the MS as 75mm calibre....puh...lease! Minovsky particles and Minovsky physics along with other wonders such as Luna Titanium seem to be the OTM equivalent in the UC universe However I've always found the whle Minovsky thing to be a bit too unbeliveable and too much of a catch-all. IIRC, Minovsky particles can block radar, radio and IR and be used for flight (Minovsky drive) and IIRC is part of the beam saber, beam gun and beam shield operating principal. OK, I'm willing to accept that Minovsky particle can block radar, and radio. Now I'm not a physicist so I hope somebody can explain how a Minovsky particle can block the thermal signature from say an MS, car, Plane, human body etc? I probably shouldn't take all this stuf too seriously, not good for my blood pressure and all that Graham

Actually, I think the RX-78 is like a samurai. It has a samurai style head, plus the two swords (beam sabers) thing going on. Anyway, I've watched all the UC Gundam stuff years and years ago, except for ZZ, which I gave up on half way through. My favorites are 0080, 08MST, CCA and V. I don't actually like 0083 much as I find Kou and Nina too whiney and annoying. I also find Z to by very over-rated. Even though 08MST is more realistic than most, I still hate that they are taking these bright white, red and blue robots into jungle and desert combat. Talk about standing out like a sore thumb. At least the Zions had the sense to paint their Zaks green Graham

I quite enjoyed the WHR anime, although I found the pacing was a little slow at times. I have absolutely no interest to see a live action version of it though. As I've stated before, I just don't understand this obsession with turning all things anime into live action Graham

I like kittens (I have two cats), and I think bunnies taste mighty fine in a pie. Graham

I'd probably buy a DYRL Max VF-1S and definitely buy a DYRL Kakizaki VF-1A. Not much interest in a TV Max VF-1A though, it's too bland looking IMO. Also, I probably wouldn't buy an Angel Birds VF-1A as it looks too much like a Japanese sailor suit schoolgirl in battroid mode Graham

Actually, I have to disagree with that. My view is that Gundams in general come over looking more like unbelieveable super robots or Samurai robots (as mentioned previously), rather than ground-pounding, down-n-dirty, realistic war mecha. This is why I have trouble accepting Gundam anime as a so-called 'real robot' anime. In the history of anime, there are many mecha which look far more like realistic war machines than the Mobile Suits of Gundam, for example: - The Armoured troopers from AT VOTOMS, Tactical Armor from Gasaraki, Military Labors from Patlabor, the Armor Shrikes from Blue Gender, VFs & Destroids from Macross, Legioss from Mospeada, the mecha of Dougram, the Studio Nue designed powered suits from the 1980s Starship Troopers OVA, the powered armor from Metal Skin Panic etc......... My opinion is that both Yoshiyuki Tominio and Kunio Okawara have very little understanding or appreciation of military technology and design and this is reflected in the designs of the Mobile Suits. Graham

Heh, actually I'm pretty anti-Eva as well. Graham