aurance

I’m not worried about it, it’s not like I’m going to starve if I don’t eat my toy.

I have plenty others to eat.

Wotafa, one of my go-to YouTubers:

https://youtu.be/14LLXtlE6iU

Yep, Lunapark. No news. I’ll follow up in a week or two.

3 minutes ago, Master Dex said:

Yeah I don't care how much more expensive SMS is, if hiring Xaos means getting these law dodging operations that'd potentially leave me liable, then the money is worth giving to the real professionals.

And that's assuming I actually need a PMC for the job if the cost is that much of a concern.

That’s why presumably whoever’s doing the hiding would have risk assessment to factor in the liability. Both companies have military hardware and skilled operators that can do routine things without shooting their feet off, much like, say, Comcast and Tesla, Seto’s hyperbole about incompetence notwithstanding.

Hah. Yes, for the second time, based solely on the initial question “bang for the buck,” depends on how much buck and what you want the bang to be.

5 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Eh... we're basically in the gap between Return of the Jedi and the point where the novelists felt compelled to address the point by explicitly and on no uncertain terms stating that that outcome absolutely would've happened had the Rebel fleet not put in a herculean effort to contain the damage in the wake of the battle.

Xaos has explicitly been involved in a lot of explicitly shady BS... and they don't have an out like that (yet).  The writers explicitly put them in those positions, and then just expected the audience to forget the heroes are keeping Mikumo as a slave, that her creation was illegal, that Xaos's involvement in the war is illegal to the point the protagonists were tried for it and only escaped execution for it via jailbreak, etc. ten minutes later at most.

I understand TV Tropes likes to call this kind of a thing a "karma houdini"...

Exactly. This isn’t stellar writing. But that’s one of the reasons why we don’t take it as real life with logical consequences. So ignoring writing intent and just trying to extrapolate without it leads to not a whole lot more than cliched pot shots and then in a circle right back to “it’s bad writing”.

Amusingly this kind of narrative intention vs exacting extrapolation of on-screen events always reminds me of what some people say about The Return of the Jedi, that the Rebels are careless a-holes who blew up a moon in low orbit of Ewok’s home, causing them all to die. No, guys, Rebels are heroes and Ewoks are fine, because RotJ was not written as a holocaust drama, just as Delta was not written as a slapstick satire of corporate ineptitude.

17 minutes ago, Master Dex said:

You ask me the writers are intending this on some level because Frontier proves they can do this without these implications.

I don’t agree with this, because: 1) they are not the same writers, and 2) even still, writing quality and attention to detail can depend largely depend on pressure, motivation, and payment. It’s fun to extrapolate “facts” based on sloppy writing but at some level of that the answers become arbitrary and make less and less sense.

Again, all of that is contingent on price and job. Also, putting aside the pretty obvious real world narrative intentions that ameliorate your admittedly comical comparison, Xaos simply cannot exist for long as a company if they continuously suck at everything in the way that you imply. Regardless of how you (we) feel about it Delta wasn’t written to be a farce, and Xaos is supposed to take the role of cool heroes in an action anime and presumably there’s stuff behind the scenes to justify that tone. Funny list though.

That would depend on the job, and perhaps more importantly what their pay rate is.

Duct tape

If anyone’s seen Delta movie 2, do you know what the Kairos AX’s thermometer cannon does compared to, say, its gunpod?

Yep. My point being if you had the tech to create an exact duplicate of yourself down to age, you’d most likely be able to generate any age you want to give yourself younger bodies, another sci-fi trope. Macross skips that though, which is interesting. Just big or small.

8 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

The body that's constructed by the miclone machine is, more or less, an exact copy of them genetically... and the cause of aging is technically a generic factor (telomerase), so cloning your way out of aging doesn't quite work.

I can tell you as a former (cancer) molecular biologist that what’s happening in micloning isn’t cloning in any modern sense. I don’t think you can match the age of one body to another by telomere length (assuming this is causative and not just a marker of biological age, which is not at all certain) in all cells without some sort of incredibly high resolution magi-tech scanning and printing, and at that point I would assume this tech could make your other host body whatever age you want. So yeah, this is pretty anime fantasy.

On 12/14/2021 at 9:52 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

Whose "hyperspace drive"?  That term is used by a lot of different sci-fi titles and performs differently in each.

In Macross, space folding is already traveling via the higher dimensional spacetime broadly analogous to (and sometimes translated as) "hyperspace".  It differs from a hyperdrive in, say, Star Wars in that the ship is not physically sailing through that higher dimension.  Instead, the ship is using gravity control to bridge two points in realspace by compressing the higher dimension space between the two points until their respective coordinates overlap and then pushing the ship into and out of that collapsed higher dimension space to cirumvent the distance between Point A and Point B without actually moving at all.  (Some Japanese publications refer to this as "exchanging" the space, with the implication the fold actually causes two volumes of space to violently switch places along with everything in them.)

I'd assume that if the dimensional distortion of a fold fault is enough to knock a folding ship out of higher dimension space that it'd probably do something equally unpleasant to another other kind of stardrive tapping the same higher dimension to get around.

This overlapping still seems to appear sometimes as if the ship is traveling through some hyperspace-like medium, not a Battlestar Galactica style transposition, which is what I would more expect it to be from your description. (Mac Plus Isamu with fold booster, Sheryl's ship in MacFront, etc)

You just remove two screws on the feet and it comes apart, that’s all. No nasty surprises.

I opened it up. It’s interesting, the ball joint is metal but the socket has plastic lining that presumably helps with the grip and friction. The Pledge should adhere to the plastic bits so hopefully it’ll go smoothly.

Yeah this is just Pledge, I have a big bottle of the stuff and it works well (for plastic joints anyway). I was wondering if anyone had any experience disassembling the feet and any potential issues. I guess I'll just try it.

Has anyone tried disassembling VF-25 / 29 / 30 / 31 ankles to tighten up the ball joints? They’re okay but a bit more loose than I would prefer, making balancing tricky. Any tips?

Public shoutout to pengbuzz again… second time you’ve rescued my valks from a sad life of staring at the wall in shame. 😝😝 Thank you for your craftsmanship and good humor!

1 hour ago, azrael said:

The Chronicle mentions this so whether you believe it or not...

This actually lines up with how power usage in Macross is distributed between modes. For VFs, power is devoted to the engines in fighter mode, getting the best performance out of the engines and less for other systems which are less advantageous in each mode. Switching modes redistributes power to other systems like the robotics motors, defensive systems (ECA/PPB) and weapons. The same concept applies to the capital ships. Switching modes reallocates power to systems that need it more. Of course they can reallocate in other modes but switching modes does it as part of standard operating procedure. Switching to battle-mode automatically diverts power away from engines, which will need less power, to defensive systems, barrier systems, robotics, or weapons, which need it more. That surplus of power can also feed the gunship to improve recharge time (rate-of-fire) or power output/shot.

If you've ever played Star Wars: Squadrons, X-wing vs TIE Fighter, X-Wing, or TIE Fighter, the power distribution concept is the same.

Yes. All I’m saying is that the transformation does not plausibly seem to be a requirement of the power rerouting (at least any longer) per se, rather that the rerouting and transformation happen as a necessity of those other advantages that Seto mentioned, for both capital ships and fighters.

5 hours ago, azrael said:

Part of it is lost in translation. It's written as 監察軍 or Inspection Army/Controlled Army/Supervised Army/Monitor Army; as in the controlled army of the Protodeviln. Over time it's just shortened to "Supervision Army".

 

Yes.

I actually answered this very question back in 2003 and 2004.

The actual reason is so the gunship can main-line from the primary reactor(s) of the mothership, thereby increasing the rate of fire or power output. In ship mode, power is devoted to the engines. Battle mode redistributes power away from the engines to other systems like the gunship. 

That doesn’t sound right. Presumably the ships could redirect power at will regardless of shape (unlike SDF-1 where the actual machinery was damaged/missing). Seto’s answers seem much more plausible.

3 hours ago, 100mega said:

  

 

I guess I'm sort of asking about things I don't understand so sorry if it was confusing. I am personally trying to decide if I want the Hayate one with the fold projector or the new Hayate AX one. The shape of the planes looks pretty different to me like W-shape vs a diamond shape and since this AX, the diamond shaped one, is like the previously released Kairos I guess I was wondering is if people prefer one style of design over the other since the older Kairos has been out in the wild. I guess the transformation of each is pretty similar and the different wing shape is just throwing me off.

Yep, the transformation of all of those are almost identical. (AX has flip out arm covers that the others don’t.) So it’s pretty much personal preference.

I wonder if this has drones or missiles in the leg bays. Presumably missiles because no charger? Could be wrong.

You’re a true craftsman!