pengbuzz

On 3/1/2020 at 7:11 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

It's a 90's thing... I was only a kid back then, so to me it's rather nostalgic.

That said, the flight demonstration team colors on combat aircraft thing is never going away because Macross has to sell toys and that makes them very action figure-ous. 

Well, ya gotta admit: when Roy's valk is standing out like a sore thumb and the enemy still can't hit him for a hill of beans, that's gotta bee the most embarrassing thing ever! lol

4 minutes ago, Bolt said:

I would think any rt fan site would be having an (at least semi-) intelligent conversation about these comics. No?

We just intelligently bash it here

rofl!

18 minutes ago, JohnMc said:

Furman wrote the first series from Titan. Brendan Fletcher wrote the so 4 issues of Remix. Furman definitely deserves the blame for Max being crapped on. He's the one who wiped away Max's feats to give them to Rick. Fletcher continued crapping on him [despite him and Titan claiming that they realized the Max wasn't treated properly in the previous series and that Remix would right that ship.

Ah; I thought Furman wrote both. Thanks for the clarification, JohnMc.

3 hours ago, JohnMc said:

Both writers [Simon Furman wrote the original Titan series while Brendan Fletcher wrote Remix] didn't seem to like Max.

For some reason, I didn't flash on Simon Furman being the writer behind RT and Remix; that explains a LOT.

Furman did the same thing to Transformers, including the mythos of Primus he himself had created in the Marvel series. He ended Regeneration One by essentially destroying all the Transformers and Cybertron, and his work in the 2009 IDW series I didn't care for either.Furman seems to like tearing stuff down, even if he's the one who built it up. In Max's case in Remix, it's like Furman to take that character and utterly deconstruct him to the point where he's now essentially destroyed/ worthless. He's also trashed the Max/ Miriya romance to the point where only a continuity correction/ reset could ever repair it.

One last note: in RT, they took the SDF-1, rebuilt it with parts into the SDF-3 and sent that back into time to be rebuilt into the SDF-1. Has it occurred to anybody that should that be the new "timeline", the SDF-1 would repeatedly be sent back through time until the frame was too battered by going through the timeline and being sent back to hold, and the whole damned ship breaks apart on reentry into Earth's atmosphere? That ship is in an infinite loop, but it's not infinitely durable!!!

UPDATE-

Well, nearly there:

Now I just need to convert the head lasers from dual to quad (already sanded the head into a VF-1S config) and button up a few lose ends. Then we can attach the ordnance and mount this onto the launch arm.

Stay tuned...

1 hour ago, JohnMc said:

What maddened me about the series was the collective dump they took on Max. They took away his feats in the series [His wins over Miriya, and their wedding and birth of Dana being the crucial turning point in the Humans, Zentraedi relationship] and gave them to Rick [because that frakker didn't have enough feats already they had to take Max's and give them to Rick] and then they made the few Max and Miriya interactions so hate filled that there's no way that they can possibly get together now without some serious personality alterations. The laughable part is that the writer expects us to believe that Max is one of his favorites [along with Miriya and Dana] I asked the writer why we should believe that Max is one of his favorites when Max has been crapped on the entire. Ofcourse the coward wouldn't answer.

You know, it really sounds to me like much of the "Remix" fanfic here was written by a man who despised Max in the original RT and felt compelled to take a collective dump on him.

Keep in mind: a "favorite" can be someone's favorite punching bag...

2 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Now, in all fairness, the vast majority of the political spectrum seems to find the entertainment industry's deeply insincere ("fake woke") attempts to convert the various key issues that social reform advocates are pushing for into cashflow terribly obnoxious.  It's not JUST the basement-dwelling neckbeards rolling their eyes as Marvel and DC attempt to one-up each other with hilariously ill-advised attempts to pander like Marvel's newest superheroes: Screentime, Snowflake, and Safespace.  The basement-dwelling neckbeards and all the time the comics industry spend pandering to them are part of the problem, though, since pandering to their tastes meant comic books quickly drove away almost everyone else and left major publishers with a serious problem of slipping sales as the fanbase shrunk.

 Okay, I just took a look at their  "newest superheroes"... is it just me, or does the girl with the backpack look like she's wearing a phalanx?

2 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Very similar to Robotech's problem, really... except in Robotech's case the franchise's obscurity and lack of innovation over entire decades keeps casual audiences away and the fans are even more unpleasable that comic book guys because the Robotech they love exists exclusively in their fabricated memories.

<snip>

Really, Titan's Robotech and Robotech Remix were never going to be hits because they slaughtered the sacred cow that was the Robotech TV series story and then tried to market their bad Macross fanfic to an audience that doesn't really care for anime tropes either... they didn't consider who their audience was.

Yup. This pretty much sums the case up.

UPDATE-

Molded a new canopy:

Instead of trying to use the kit canopy, I simply carved a wooden plug and heat-molded a new one out of plastic from an old soda bottle.

Stay tuned...

35 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Really, it's not surprising... despite the popularity of comic book movies (well, the Marvel ones anyway) the comic book industry has been headed for another crash for a long time now and I've been inclined to suspect this'll be the one they don't recover from.  The mainstream industry as a whole is so innovation-averse it'd astonishing they've lasted this long.  Going digital-first might help them stay afloat a little longer, but they haven't really had anything fresh since the 90's.  Superheroes are played out and "indie" comics really can't fill the gap.

The entire entertainment industry is innovation-adverse, and it's going to take a major crash for them to realize that a lack of innovation is fatal. Frankly, they need to crash and burn hard in order to see what happens when they try to "capture lightning in a bottle again" by repeating tired old formulae.

1 hour ago, joscasle said:

Hi there!

Well, I started working on my next project: Bandai 1/48 X-Wing. The Tomiya 1/48 Tomcat is almost done, with the whole Covid-19 situation (Costa Rica is also having problems). I have a little more time to work on the X-Wing and other projects that I have not worked on, like my Hasegawa 1/4000 SDF-1 TV version attack mode and the 1/72 VF-25. For now, photos of the X-Wing. I'll build Red-4 from A New Hope Death Star Battle.

Cockpit paint

Black Basing 

First Marble Coat 

That's a replica of the Red 4, something like that is my goal

You look like you're off to an excellent start  there, joscasle!

4 hours ago, Sildani said:

It reminds me of a combination of a buoy in the ocean to track location and beam it to passing ships, and one of those roadside historical plaques we have in the US to mark a battlefield or a historic place. You can see them all over, I have one near me commemorating an old Nike-Hercules SAM site. This would be similar. “Hey, passing starship, think about this for a moment.”

"On this date in 1999, we ****ed up and doomed Mankind. Have a Nice Day."

5 hours ago, MechTech said:

 

Looking good Pengbuzz! It's sad about people buying everything out! No isopropyl on the shelves anywhere. No noodles, no TP, but there are plenty of vegetarian foods on the shelves!

 

No real photos yet of my canon build. The pieces would look like modern art until put together. - MT

Thanks MT; and yeah, the nonsense about the Alcohol is ridiculous! I imagine after the pandemic is over, you're going to have a lot of folks trying to sell TP and isopropyl dirt cheap (or explain to their families why they have no food but enough toilet paper to make a valkyrie!)

Looking forward to seeing the cannon built and working!

Meantime, paintwork progressing on the 1/100 Strike Valk:

Still needs detailing, a canopy, decals and such. But so far, so good...

1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

So... I think it's safe to say Robotech Remix #5 did not, in fact, come out this past week.

Given that the comic book industry in general seems to be circling the drain with Diamond Comic Distributors shut down due to the pandemic and the frankly hilarious idiocy of the big two making it worse, I wonder if Titan will even bother attempting to continue their Robotech license of if the losses incurred during this period will prompt them to shed the licenses in their catalog that aren't turning significant profits.

If they want to survive, some dead weight's gotta be tossed. And nothing is deader  than a comic based on a half-assed attempt to revive an 80's pastiche of anime trying to tell the Macross story without using Macross.

It's kind of like Pizza hut trying to stay in business without serving pizza.

Well, as for myself: my 1/72 VF-1S Hasegawa is on hold until I can find some more alcohol to clean off overly heavy paint (not to mention more primer and white!). meanwhile, I recently revisited my 1/72 scale Launch Diorama (DYRL) that I did a while back, and after some measurements and comparisons...

...it's not 1/72; it's 1/100!

Thankfully, I recently received a 1/100 VF-1 kit that is part of the "15th Anniversary" Macross series; it has the updated Strike Pack (including Mauser Dual Beam Cannon). I had to do some slight mods on the square missile launchers to make them the DYRL version, but nothing too exotic. Most of the work has gone into making the model non-transformable (a first for me, right?), as to save much unneeded weight and to properly accurize it.  Right now, I am going to be making a new canopy for it, as the old one is waaaaaaaay too thick and visually distorts the living heck out of the interior (probably use plastic from a soda bottle for that small of a scale).

I plan on adding panel lines based off of the Hasegawa VF-1S with a pencil (at this scale, carved lines are overkill). I really thought that I had built this dio on scale, but since I have a smaller, lighter replacement valk that scales perfectly with it, I'm not about to complain!

Stay tuned.

2 hours ago, Dynaman said:

I was about to post and then I remembered.  The Prequels and Sequels just aren't worth arguing about.  I'm sure I'll forget that later but for now give me Vader when we didn't know he was a whiny snot as a kid (and also before he wimped out in RotJ).

And the 5 minutes of Vader-matic doing Ginsu on the Rebel troopers...

31 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Even Nemesis wasn't that dark or depressing... courtesy of the movie still largely sticking with the TNG-era Federation as an optimistic organization that jumped at the chance to further improve diplomatic relations with Romulus and at least part of the Romulan military coming to the Enterprise's aid against Shinzon.

Heck, ST:P makes Nemesis look downright cheery.

10 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Smirnoff is practically tapwater... you'd need something a LOT stronger to get through Southern Cross, more like everclear.

Graves 180% Proof...would that do?

1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Bioroids... not very strong, and a mediocre experience for all involved.  Just like Smirnoff Ice.

Isn't Smirnoff what one would need to drink to get through a marathon of Southern Cross?

On 3/26/2020 at 11:16 AM, Seto Kaiba said:

It would, admittedly, have made more sense in context if Southern Cross hadn't been cancelled 16 episodes short of completion.

That said, the Robotech fandom also seems to find the Bioroids as uninteresting as the rest of the Southern Cross mecha.  Their unusual control system is all they've really got going for them, and other than that they're so weak that several are shown being taken down by small arms fire.

 

That may be a viable in-universe explanation, though the truth is the writers just weren't on the same page... because multiple episodes were being rewritten concurrently and nobody had the time to check the work of their colleagues to ensure they were producing a consistent product.  That's also why a number of characters are referred to by incorrect ranks in the early Masters Saga episodes.

 

Maybe, but this is Robotech and good lord does it ever have a complexity addiction.

Bioroids... not very strong but a pain in the a**. Just like Hemorrhoids...

11 hours ago, Chronocidal said:

Having built all those kits years ago in their earlier releases, I'm really glad they finally upgraded them all with those massive decals to make up for the lack of surface detail.

The one big error the Ent-E has though is that the old AMT molds were based on pre-production shots of the film model, before they altered the deflector array shape to make the exterior sequence set in First Contact easier to build.  Both of the AMT kits use the original curvy trough design for the deflector.

Correcting that on such a small kit though would be a massive undertaking, since you'd have to build a new array out of sheet plastic, and the shape is still complex enough to be a serious pain.

C is looking beautiful though, and I can't wait to see how the D and E come out!

Someone already did it; all they did was to cut a plastic piece out to fit the dish and the trench, glued it to the dish and glued the combined part into place:

https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/1-2500-enterprises.284682/

2 minutes ago, pablumatic said:

I'm going to be a nattering nabob of negativity as well and throw more shade on the show.

Picard definitely felt like a sequel to Nemesis, in that both are bad and depressing. So I guess it has that going for it unlike the Star Wars sequels which took a previously happy ending and crushed it. I wasn't stricken so harshly by what I saw. 

 

Everything in this show about Data was weird and creepy. Which is not how I wanted to remember the character (or Picard for that matter). 

Oh well.

 

Old weird creepy people' kind of like the "Starfleet Retirement Home for Aging Cliches".

1 hour ago, derex3592 said:

Gentlemen... NCC 1701 - C. I'm pretty proud of this one, came out pretty darn good considering all the challenges along the way. She's ready to join the fleet!  Now... Onto the main attraction. The Big D. 

 

Looking incredible, Derex! Good to see her finished and with full warp nacelles!

And with this... I declare Star Trek deader than dead.

Congratulations CBS/ Amazon/ Paramount... you managed to do what no alien of the week ever could. Just let Trek molder in it's grave, TYVM. And do the world a favor: join it.

9 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Originally, yes... the heavy losses the UN Forces incurred in the Unification Wars convinced the brass to go heavy on the unmanned fighters, so the original plans for Earth's defenses in space prominently featured the QF-3000E Ghost as the majority of space-based fighter aircraft.  The original writeup of the ARMD-class's fighter complement calls for a whopping 270 QF-3000E Ghosts supported by 78 manned SF-3A Lancer II's and 18 VF-1 Valkyries.

Postwar, the ARMD-class airwing composition changed somewhat due to the massive attrition suffered by the QF-3000s in the First Space War.  The writeup in Sky Angels indicates they scaled back to 120 QF-3000E Ghosts in favor of Regults and more Valkyries.

I recall that the Unification wars were considered quite bloody by historians; given that account, the sheer loss of experienced pilots would have made the UN Govt. reluctant to risk any more people than necessary.

9 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

VERY unlikely... the QF-3000E uses the initial-type first generation thermonuclear reaction turbine engine (FF-1999).  It's even less efficient and powerful than the FF-2001 engine that was developed for the VF-1 Valkyrie, and that thing consumed fuel 4,200x faster in space than in atmosphere.  Even if the QF-3000E's internal tanks were comparable to the capacity of a VF-1 Super Valkyrie's internal and conformal tanks combined, that's half an hour of maximum output at best.  I'd expect they'd probably be coming back fairly regularly to refuel, rearm, and receive basic maintenance since they were known to have cooling system issues thanks to their early model engine.

Wow... someone want to talk to NORTHROM about the VF-1 Gasguzzler? At that rate, the project logo should have been a female Viking chugging some 80% Octane!!!

9 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Their semi-autonomous AI suite is noted to have been a bit flaky, but serviceable... though not quite up to the task of being a viable replacement for manned fighters.  As a result, the Ghosts aboard the Macross were mostly used to scout out and delay incoming enemies until the Valkyries could get there and mop them up.  They took heavy losses in that role, and by the time the war ended there were only around 100 units left in the entire UN Forces inventory.

I wonder if the Zentran forces would have picked up on the cooling and AI issues and used those to their advantage? Confuse the daylights out of them, run them around until they overheated and then pluck them off? I don't know how imaginative the Zentraedi could be (probably not much),  but I could see someone like Quamzin toying with the Ghost fighters out of boredom.

2 hours ago, sh9000 said:

HISHE is not so bad at times as well.

I've seen them and at times, they are a RIOT!

2 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

That gets less true every day, unfortunately.

It's not for nothing that Star Trek lost licensees over Star Trek: Discovery and suffered a near-total licensee walkout over Star Trek: Picard.  With ViacomCBS doubling down on every one of the bad decisions that allowed those two shows to be shat into existence in the first place and even making a token effort to resuscitate the fourth movie in the horribly ill-conceived soft reboot Star Trek movie series, it's clear they're not learning.  It'll take a gargantuan effort to repair Star Trek once they finally oust the idiots responsible for the current mess.  

Then again, it's also possible they'll keep doubling down on their mistakes on the basis of a sunk costs fallacy and fly the franchise right into the ground.

 

At this point, who does?  His work is about as welcome in the average viewer's home as dry rot.

 

At some point, the networks need to start writing failure-severance clauses into the contracts with these studios.  Y'know, a nice trapdoor clause that lets them get out if the studio just f*cking flies their franchise into the ground the way Secret Hideout and Bad Robot did to Star Trek.

Here is what they need to do: