pengbuzz

I think that was the intended effect: that even if he thinks the Federations "back is turned", they'll still see everything he does. It's pretty disconcerting when your enemy doesn't even have to be looking at you to know what you're up to!

When Picard drops a line like that an then turns his back on you, you know you done screwed up.

Yeah; that could also help as well, if there's enough room in the cockpit to do so.

Right? It's good to see Macross continue on; we'll have to wait and see what they do in this newest version.

The seat might be too shallow; try grinding a couple of mm out of it with a dremel bit.

Wheee! Plane go whooosh!!! Sorry...what were we talking about again? O.o

Right; that does no good either. It's lazy at best and downright criminal at worst, substituting style for substance. It's like twinkies: it may taste like a genuine snack dessert, but there's really nothing there. The origin of the Borg best exemplify the phrase "Some mysteries were never meant to be solved". Like replacing the engine of a Ferrari F-40 with one from a smart car and then wondering why it runs like $#!t. Yup; voted in 3189 as "Crew Most Likely To Strangle One Another."

If you remove what makes it Star Trek, then it isn't Star Trek. You're missing the whole point here. Even if you give it "lots of years", once you bring it back without what made it great, it's still just a dead corpse. As Seto stated earlier: it's the optimism, the belief in the human spirit to become greater than what it began as and to look for the best and the unknown in the universe that attracts fans to it. If you start focusing on "aliens", then it simply becomes alien and unrecognizable. You start putting fans into places where they cannot see the human adventure, the human spirit, and they're going to be heading for the door just like they did during DIS and PIC S1&2. If you include the "lore and facts" for the Borg. you finish killing the Borg. The Borg worked because they were an unknown versus our human/ humanlike crew. Their power was how unhuman they were: the Federation's best weaponry and tactics only worked once, maybe twice. And the fact that they were cybernetically altered into half-humanoid /half machine beings in of itself was pretty unnerving. They didn't need "kings and queens", which once introduced, gave them a human quality and began to reduce their horror. Once you give them a relatable past and relatable traits, they are not a threat, and villain decay has already reduced them to a largely pathetic joke. Sisko: he ran his story arc, and he's done now. He's with the Prophets, and is not coming back. That ship sailed some time ago. Wesley: Let's just pretend you never brought him up. No, the real trouble with Star Trek is that everyone wants to do their take on it by yanking out what made it work and thinking "I can just 'borrow the frame' and put my own engine in, and it'll be like Star Trek but with MY personal spin on it!!!" And it doesn't work that way. Star Trek works best when things are seen through our eyes (the eyes of the Federation, the stand-in for the audience), and issues that are common, universal and apply to everyone are examined by these various races in their own contexts. The "alienism" here works because it removes the familiar from the social issue or situation we are familiar with, and presents the situation in a way where the alien value allows the core(s)of the issue to be seen clearly. In other words: those cultures provide a "litmus" if you will, letting us see the scenarios with fresh eyes and from perspectives we would normally not have considered. And the best episodes were not the ones that gave "pat answers" to a problem, but left them to be dealt with (rarely "solved") by those involved. "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" was a good example in my opinion, because through an almost silly extremely hyperbolic example, racism was examined via Belle and Loki. The final resolution of that episode was both of them in a foot chase on their home world of Charon, now blasted to rubble and devoid of all life. Even if Belle caught Loki, what would he do with him? everyone that mattered, including their judges, were NOW DEAD. And that's the point. By removing the issue of race as we know it here in our day and age, and instead examining it in an alien context, we begin to see the issues with it., We also see where for Charon, it ultimately led to annihilation and a pointless extinction of their peoples. And the optimism here is: we don't have to follow that example. We can BE BETTER THAN THAT. Once you take out the ability to look towards a better future, see things through human eyes in non-human cultures, and the spirit of human exploration and courage... ...all you have is a bunch of nasty people without any human grace, who would just as soon kill one another as look at each other.

(Yes, this is a necropost) If you think about it though: it would certainly save wear on the canon mount motors to simply let the guns hang down rather than constantly trying to fight Earth's gravity,

You mean this one? Yeah, but it can be modded to look much better:

Maybe the artist worked from a misassembled kit? That would explain much.

are you talking about the ones on the "backpack" between the boosters?

I actually have that on preorder. Been dreaming of this for 40+ years!

Yeah, I had forgotten about his "signature line". Whoops.

Much appreciated Seto! When you state it in that way, it does indeed work. I wonder: even if they had adopted the BDI system (and the BDS control system), wouldn't the side effects and consequences have come out sooner or later? Given enough instances of loss of control and/ or the system misinterpreting thoughts and acting on errant ones, that would have at at the least caused a number of possibly fatal (and humiliating for NUNS) situations for the Unity Government? On a whole, it also makes me wonder if this incident, along with the Sharon Apple Incident, are contributing factors to the decentralization of the Unity Government?

Please tell me that Brook will be in this! (BTW: does anyone else think Brook resembles Slash from Guns N' Roses? )

Seto, does any of this square up with Macross Chronicle? I don't know how in-depth it went (if it did so in any way) into Guld's past. The part about AI ARIEL and "making it play nice with Guld's BDI system" would cerainly explain much in M+ (where Guld's system interpreted his "daydream" about crashing Isamu's VF-11 as a command input into the system).

WOW!! Talk about shooting your mouth off!

I LOVE the off-white you painted this; it's the perfect color for Skull-1!!! :yeah:

Yeah; it makes me wonder in the story that after the Unity Government deciding to keep all of that secret, the first thing that happens after the Valkyries and Destroids were revealed to the public was a demand for model kits and toys?

Now if they can get this series together in one piece...

Alternately: carve out the lights, glue in some clear styrene and file the light to match the wing contour and shape.

A few things here: 1) As any equestrian will tell you: any sort of padding or armor is only going to do so much for you in a fall. You land the wrong way and no amount of armor in the world is going to save you from a broken neck. And their armor didn't look to have much in the way of cybernetic reinforcement for their necks. 2) "Fast travel"; in an open cockpit with no apparent restraints, windshield, shielding or whatnot. After a certain speed, your own velocity works against you, and "armor" is simply a container for your remains. 3) That armor is going to do squat for them when enemy artillery (energy or otherwise) come their way in that open cockpit. This is how open that cockpit is (not no seat belt per se): Not to mention when it transforms into robot mode, it takes several seconds. That's an eternity in which an enemy can open up on the exposed pilot. You can also see here that the "cool armor" does not have much to protect the pilot's neck from stresses involving the head being thrown around (coup/contre-coup), or sudden twisting or jarring. @Seto Kaiba I'll bet I'm missing some stuff here... anything you want to add?

Looks like they put VF-1 legs on a VF-31...