KingNor

This looks fantastic!

That Thor costume looks terrible.

That looks amazing, I've always liked the look of the orbital launch platform for the valks, though it always seemed like a lot of effort to get a single valk into space. odd machine, great model

Valks pick up closed circuit TV on their targeting computer pretty well.

The monitor however makes 20 something women look like old ladies.

I think the show was pretty adamant that the CF could NOT take this kind of punishment with out exploding catastrophically. NOT CANNON!!!

Thanks fly4victory, I don't know why my searches failed to find those.

I was just wondering what an excellent condition, opened/displayed, with box and all parts, undamaged 1/48 original low vis VF-1a would go for these days. I can't seem to find any auctions anywhere.

I liked KickAss but it has some problems:

The first half was great, it did a good job of poking fun at the cookie cutter superhero/comic book movie cliche's and I really enjoyed seeing someone from the real world try and mostly fail at being a super hero (heeere mr. bitey). And I liked how despite his ineffectiveness he was popular in the community.

About halfway through though the tone shifts, and it BECOMES the unimaginative action/superhero/comic movie it was initially deconstructing. It was still fun and a lot of laughs, but it could have been so much more. The second half not living up to the first half is what disappointed me the most. Still a lot of fun though.

Also HI MW, it's been a while.

while i realize the importance of music in macross, jpop isn't really my thing, so the music is more or less all the same bubbly gross stuff no mater which i'm watching. I do like a few from SDF but the heavy use of synthesiser and digital music always puts me off.

the gravity system uses plot-tonium to opperate. it works perfectly in all situations except for the times when it doesn't.

it's amazing that so many of you have somehow missed one of the major keystones of macross, that it's not about how good you are, anyone can get killed any time in combat. your skill might have something to do with your kill count, but it doesn't have much to do with if you die or not.

an ace can fly for 3 months, shoot down five enemies and then be killed in combat. a non-ace can fly for 3 months, kill 2 enemies and be killed in combat. they both survived exactly the same amount of time.

Pilot skill means how well someone can control their plane, has nothing to do with combat skills, many fighters have proven that many things besides raw skill can get you out of hairy situations.

also pilot skill having less effect in a lower performance machine is rediculous, if anything pilot skill means MORE in lower performance vehicles. a prop driven bi-plane cant make up for pilot error with raw thrust, or massive cannons. the pilot needs to size up the situation, prepair, plan, get good position, match mettle with his opponent.

there are no heat seeking long range missles and explosive shells to use in a fokker, no 10:1 thrust weight ratios, no advanced avionics.

ww1 pilots were' probably some of the best and bravest pilots our species will ever see, since the fighter pilot profession will most likely be obsolete in a few decades or lifetimes (what with the plane's capabilities so far out pacing the survivability of the pilot).

IMHO hikaru gets himself into stupid situations like diving into a group of 10 zentradi and relying on them missing him, while he stands stationary and kills them all. that's not good piloting, but it is kills. He makes it out of these situations either on luck, or on simply being the protagonist of the show. maybe it's luck to prove a point in the show. roy was a great pilot (and not a blithering drunk all the time, that's a steriotype that gets over played) and he got killed, both by a random shot and by lack of good self preservation skills (and weird story telling).

I realize it's nice to use kill count as a means to identify "great" pilots, it's a nice easy number to count, pin to a wall and compair to other numbers. but piloting skill is harder to quantify.

What maneuvers could pilot A do that pilot B coudln't? if in the same plane who could do more g's? who could really lead the plane through the air? It's a tough call to make, especially since we're debating fictional characters in hugely varying styles/vehicles/quality productions/eras/etc. characters in these shows can kinda suffer from DragonballZ syndrom where they get more powerful arbitrarily depending on what the episode calls for. The pilots in Macross Frontier withstand G's that would atomize the very plane they're flying, let alone squish the pilot, how can the much more realistically animated mac plus and SDF characters compete?

I feel like i'm rambling, but yeah, kill count doesn't = flying/pilot skills to me. combat flying is it's own beast.

I feel Hikaru is heavily underestimated. If we are talking combat pilots then Hikaru is the only pilot thats a match for M&M. Hikaru is both an established stuntpilot in a flying circus and amateur aerobatics champion before he became a fighter pilot. That alone is enough to call him an expert pilot. Kawamori is a airplane fanatic and he knows his aviation history.

Losing a plane shouldn't affect ranking. For example: histories greatest ace Eric Hartman lost 14 planes while getting 352 confirmed kills. In general top aces rarely die in combat, but most of them have lost several planes during their carreers.

actualy, hikaru is SUPPOSEDLY an established stunt pilot, the only stunts i saw him perform was a dangerouns flythrough of a valkyrie high speed pass and a verticle rocket burn. maybe in the flying circus he wasn't so much a stunt pilot as a warm body to fly the dangerous parts of the show. "look hikaru, sit in the seat, when i tell you, fire the rockets, try not to die" one of the criteria is that feats of daring do need to be on screen, hikarus aerobatics are all mentioned but not seen.

wether or not crashing planes is considered good piloting or not i guess can be a mater of debate. i'd also have to take exception to top aces rarely dieing in combat, i think they die just as often as anyone else. several top aces i can think of died in combat, several of the fling tigers, the red barron, the marine pilots that were killed defending midway, i'd have to research more, and i don't remember names.

imagine how good hikaru would be if he'd just get his hair out of his face.

there's so much good stuff to watch in the history of film, i don't really see why anyone would waste their time watching a remake of the A-team. /humbug

Ok this is a little off topic, but after my above crack, i went to the Red Barrons wiki page out of curriosity.

check out this line:

In January 1917, after his 16th confirmed kill, Richthofen received the Pour le Mérite ("The Blue Max"), the highest military honor in Germany at the time.

So the best pilot in Germany who flew a bright red and white plane (the colors of miria's plane) was awarded a medal called the Blue Max? Btw also in the article, the tri-plane that Richthofen was so famous in was a Fokker.

Since so much of macross's machinery is pulled from military history i think it's pretty safe to see the some connections there. You think it's just coincidence?

And my answer to that would be in this very same thread:

http://www.macrossworld.com/mwf/index.php?...st&p=655535

luck isn't a skill.... My main justification is that Isamu is an idiot.

If Max is akin to Manfred von Richthofen then that puts Isamu akin to a redilin deprived hyper active A.D.D. kid with too much sugar in his system and soaked in coffee.

Max and Isamu both survived a lot of stuff, but for very.. very.. different reasons.

does that make hikaru the best after all?

hikaru is an interesting exception. i'm not sure why anyone would think he's a great pilot, he's possibly the most shot down mecha pilot of all time. he must have raw plotonium running through his veins to keep him alive.

it's been quite a while since i watched but i know he was shot down in the vf-1d... twice? then he got it so beat up that Roy had to save him. then he flew his turbo prop plane INTO SPACE and crashed it into the SDF. then i belive he got his VF-1J blown up by the Daedalus maneuver, then crashed his 1J into that spy thing the zentradi were using, which then exploded. He also got captured by the zentradi. The excalibur he was using took an unprecidented amount of damage with out exploding outright, which i attribute to his plotonium blood. (that was hikaru's excalibur right?) He also crashed and burned several times with both Misa and Minmay.. there's no end to this guys incompetence. I forget if he ever wrecked Skull 001 or Booby Duck, but I wouldn't put it past him.

hell, he was probably behind the wheel of the Megaroad when it went off the radar, seriously i wouldn't be supprised.

anyone who was in a destroid, engaged in combat, and DIDN'T die...

was better than any valkyrie pilot.

i've heard of real life misa's...

is minmay a real name?

So....

Who do you love more? Misa - or Minmey?

Pete

what the hell kinda silly question is that??

pssh, what ever, this thread took a serious turn in just the last few posts before i got here. no fun.

**edit for being a level headed yutts**

that looks terrible.

The real question is... are the smaller guns aimed the same way?

Because it'd be hilarious watching a zentradi troop shaking his head to aim the back guns.

or the toe lasers? god help this guy if he tries to track and fire all of them at once.

"I'm not listening to a woman!" -Hikaru

"Look a hotel!" -Hikaru

Also anytime Misa says anything. Good times.

i love that the zent pods' guns are basically just opperated by hand in the lowest tech manner possible, i wonder how they're aimed, or if the zents just fire randomly in all directions.

actually i think there is enough room, the arms don't' retract inside of walle, but sort of lay into his outer casing. his tracks are tricky, since they used a little massaging to get them to fit, his tracks are essentially elastic, and stretch over several very flexible wheels, In the movie his wheels are all completely independent of each other and if you bunch them up properly there is room for his head. essentially his wheels and head all occupy his trash compactor area.