VF-19

Actually, there's only two "giveaways" on Hound (aside from the obvious liscence plate). The first is on the hood, and the second is on the rear bumper. However, due to the dark colours of Hound, they tend to dissapear under somewhat dim lighting. But yes, I love my Hound. Except when viewed from a side profile. His chest is empty...

Silence Naysayer, and go drink your coffee! Seriously, I'm going to wait until the end of time to get my YF-19. I've waited this long, what's another year or two?

I prefer flat paint for mainly 2 reasons. The first being, that I like the look of flat paint. The second being that I can more easily tell when the paint is dry. I find that Tamiya's gloss paints still look "wet" when dry. But then again, that's just me.

I have him. Long story short: Assemble him into Devastator, and don't take him apart too often. The pegs on the leg plate is rather iffy, and I've already broken one of them. Oh, and on mine, I had to do some modification to the neck so the head could stare straight ahead. Nothing too complicated, just some plastic shaving. He's a great knockoff. I also have the Defensor knockoff, but the main torso is red, not blue... Odd, and he's not compatable with the official parts either...

Psh. Do you really think those satellites we put up in space is used for navigation and communication? No way man. Those satellites were put up there to get a jump on the rest of the world when aliens try to contact us. lies! when aliens contact us the satellite companies will broadcast our tv channels like mtv and pro wrestling to them to make mega bucks or latium or what ever they would use for currency if they have it. The sad part about all that, is: Our radio and TV shows are our ambassadors to the other races. Aliens are going to get a VERY screwed up perception of us. Especially when it comes to the old Superman broadcasts...

Ahh, but the catch is: We (by "we" I mean North and South America) would have to be facing the radiowaves as they come in. If we are facing the other way, Europe, Asia et al would get the message. Plus, since the Earth revolves, the US would "set" as the message is being broadcasted. So sharing message components is a must, in order to get the entire thing. The next trick would be to figure out what the heck it means.

If aliens really did contact us, everybody would know. The signal wouldn't be soley inteded for the USA. Not to mention, scientists have a habit of shooting off their mouths (ie, meteor strikes turn out to be near misses). I always thought the movie "Contact" did a good job of portraying the "what if" scenario concerning alien contact. The book was excellent too.

The two "thin" white boosters that are attached to the whole shuttle contraption are recovered after they're used, reprocessed, and slapped on the next shuttle. What's probably confusing you is the Challanger footage. Normally, rockets, and boosters have a self destruct mechanism, so that if anything goes wrong, they can be blown up, rather than risking having a rocket that can't be shut off (at least the solid fuel kind) going who knows where. How often you can use these things I don't know. At the very least, you'd might want to replace the nozzle at the buisness end of the rocket on a fairly frequent basis, as that part does get quite a bit of stress over the duration of use (hot gasses etc...). The only part of the shuttle that isn't recovered is the orange main fuel tank. That is jettisoned very late into the orbital ascent, and either burns up on re-entry, or is torn to pieces by atmospheric forces.

There is one tiny catch. A carrier is only so big. The Atlantic and Pacific are much much bigger. Granted, if the sattelite is overhead the carrier and taking pictures at the same time, then yes you'll spot the carrier where it was. Since carriers are almost always on the move, such information would be useless. Spy sattelites are great, but they can't see everywhere at once. Now, I know its fiction, but Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan novels do point out the limitations of such sattelites quite frequently.

Contrary to popular beliefs, black boxes aren't totally indestructable. The ones from the World Trade Center would have most likely been destroyed when the towers collapsed (assuming they remained in the towers, and didn't get blown clear like one of the engines). The one from the Pentagon, however, I'm unsure. It looks like it could have survived the impact, and possibly the collapse (assuming, again, it was inside the pentagon, not on the lawn). Frankly, there are many theories about this tragedy, some silly, some perfectly explainable. I've heard quite a few.

Not really. If you've played X-Wing alliance, many of the fighters had automatic convergance on the wing mounted guns. So no matter what the range between you and it (it being whatever it may be on the buisness end of your guns), your guns were properly set for proper convergance. Now, granted X-Wing Alliance isn't exactly "official", but it was a nifty concept.

If you want to pre-order Predaking, HLJ.com has it up for preorder for the measly price of 14250 yen, a 5% savings off of 15000 yen. Pre-ordered mine!

And new forearm bits. And perhaps a slightly different backpack. Other than that, it's made from 90% of the Mg Wing Ver Ka.

What's really sad about all this is: I'm trying to get into Customs for post-graduate work... Don't worry, I'll be your champion when it comes to tracking lost packages!

Archviles don't show up until the recycling complex. Treat them like imps, only pay attention to the rockets, as they home in on you. Mind you, they're not the worst thing so far. The evil hell-babies with their glowing eyes are worse on the disturbing factor...

Spiffy! Although, one minor nitpick. I would put a snap on cover over the CD-ROM. I'm not to crazy about having the thing exposed in the back...

Navy: Yes (but laughable) Carrier: No. But we used to (something that surprised me very much when I found out about it).

Update to my situation: Long and the short of it: Using Catalyst 4.7 for me resulted in Doom 3 not working at all. I'd be able to load the game, but after starting a new mission, the game crashed right back to the desktop. Upgrading to DirectX 9.0c didn't do squat, as I had the same problem. I took the plunge and installed the 4.9 betas, and lo and behold, the game actually worked! I'm a little peeved that I needed to go to beta drivers just to get the damn thing to work, but I'm running Windows XP, so if anything goes wrong, I can roll back to 4.7. Doom 3 is fun fun fun. Not really scary (System Shock 2 was better at this), but man does it ever put out some nice eye candy. I really really want to get my new CPU and RAM... Sigh... Where's cash when you need it...

Not overclocking, not running multiple displays, and I don't have DirectX 9c. Something to get. Also, I've been hearing that the ATI 4.7 drivers don't work well at all, and in order to fix/get Doom 3 to work with a Radeon card, you need the 4.9 betas... Sloppy...

Got Doom 3 today, and the game installed fine... Except, it doesn't want to work. It loads up properly, but when I go and try to start a new game, the load screen comes up, finishes, and then drops back to the desktop... So far, I'm NOT impressed.

The problem with radar is that, depending on the seas, you can miss a small boat that is well within your radar range. It's also possible that the dhow was either too small to be picked up on radar, or was below the minimum height to show up on radar. But yah, I can see the end of quite a few people's careers...

Hmm.... The only weak link in my system would be my CPU: A Athlon 1800 XP. While it's not a total slouch, I would like to upgrade to one of the faster Athlon CPUs... Preferably something that starts with a 3. Lucky for me, I picked up a nice Nforce 2 Ultra 400 GB based motherboard, that allows me for a ton of upgrades for $70 CDN. I love crazy sales. Consider me ready for Doom 3... As soon as I get a new CPU that is.

Yikes... For starters, go and get proper painters tape. Usually, Walmart should have these right next to the paint (wherever the paint is stocked) in the hardware aisle. Consider 3M blue tape if you want, but basically, you're looking for any type of paint that's of low tack (AKA not very sticky), so that you don't damage the paint underneath the tape. I don't use 3M myself, but plenty of others do. I basically use cheap low tack tape. So far, it hasn't failed me yet. Although, I'm probably am going to try out Tamiya's masking tape or 3M one of these days.

To be fair, $30 for a Gen-1 reissue is a steal, considering that many of the ones being reissued can go for very high prices on E-Bay. I just wish they'd get around to the combiners one of these days (preferably Predaking). As for here in Ottawa, all we got are both Smokescreen and Sideswipe. Probably in a few months Hound might show up... On a side note, I put myself down for the insecticon re-release by takara. I can't wait for September!

Well, if you go the cheap route, then there really isn't any quiet air compressors out there. What you could do is get a noisy air compressor with a large tank, fill the tank up during the day, and then use the stored air at night. Since you're airbrushing mostly at or around 20 psi, a 2 gallon tank at 100-150 psi will last you for quite a bit. Oh, and David, there is one other thing I forgot to mention when you buy your airbrush: Ease of getting spare parts and the cost of spare parts. It really would suck to have something break on an airbrush only to find that the spare part is really expensive, and it will take you more than a month to get the part in.