This Confuses Gamlin

On 2/5/2017 at 8:10 AM, Marzan said:

She's got a very pleasant voice and it's a pretty nice cover. She's kind of hard to hear amongst some of the other members of Walkure and I kind of wonder how much she has to change her intonation to play Reina.

In case you haven't heard it, here's the "One Nao Show."

Yes, Touyama Nao voices everyone by herself here.

On the topic of cockpit shielding, we can compare the survival rates in Delta of people taking direct shots to the cockpit.

On 1/27/2017 at 3:14 AM, Atheonyirh said:

 the AC5, 10, 20, etc thing was an abstraction and autocannons of the same class by different manufacturers could and would behave differently, including one huge slug versus firing a burst of smaller ones

Piggybacking onto this, depending on how picky your gamemaster was, for tabletop you either had people who let you salvage any sort of ammo for your 'Mech from any weapon of the same type, or the ones that kept you painfully grounded in reality because you had to match the ammo to the same model of weapon or at least the same weapon manufacturer.

Yes, I ended up arguing with someone because the "soda can" micromissiles from the Spartan/Archer looked significantly different than the pointier style found in the Trebuchet/Zeus/Catapult/other Duane Loose original artworks. 

15 hours ago, treatment said:

Any of you guys on MWO?

I was during the open beta a couple of years ago, took a long break when they started piling on new features faster than they could be reliably playtested, and now occasionally pop in once in a while but not seriously.

I don't think I've ever been totally happy with a BT sim-style game, being much more accustomed to the rhythms of tabletop. The upcoming Harebrained Schemes turn-based game project thus has me very intrigued. And some of my money.

MWO has some of my money too, but they've long ago used that to pay for lunches.

2 hours ago, NZEOD said:

It was its most fun when it was Wasps, Valkyries, Stingers, Warhammers, Marauders, Victors etc and a few hover tanks and helicopters. 3025 was the best codex and the simplest.

And then we minmaxed everything with medium lasers and PPCs. 

The ranges are artificially shortened to keep tabletop sizes down within reason and to encourage flashy physical attacks.

I haven't played in a long time. I have the Total Warfare rules, but the ruleset that I remember the most is the mid-1990s era.

21 hours ago, Chronocidal said:

On the subject of canards.. does anyone have any memory or know of an instance showing whether the ones on the VF-31 series actually move, or are they just stationary surfaces? 

Episode 4 concert, several shots of the canards moving as full control surfaces.

Tracklist for the new album includes covers of Seikan Hikou and Diamond Crevasse.

http://macross.jp/news/?id=459&series=13

Still enjoying the BD shorts, even raw... like Reina's jellyfish.

Did they ever release a complete sound track for Delta? I've looked but only find individual songs..

There are two:

http://www.cdjapan.co.jp/product/VTCL-60426

http://www.cdjapan.co.jp/product/VTCL-60435

Keeping in mind that this is the music, not the five or so Walküre song albums.

New Macross Delta modeling book?

I don't know exactly what it is, but I preordered it anyway.

Volume 4's Mini Theater has the lewdest rune action yet. Just sayin'.

That doesn't seem like it would do a lot in an atmosphere, but... magic!

No, it isn't. Whatever a VF mounts, a warship can mount in a bigger and badder version. The problem is technology seemingly advancing too fast to catch up and build new warships and retire old ones fast enough. Or is it? Macross-Quarter, Half-A-Macross...

I miss a One-Eigth-A-Macross in there, or even a Golg-Gant-Charts or Quell-Quallie micron equivalent. A VF the size of a VB-6 but capable of folding, with two or more beam turrets with the punch of beam grenades and 4-5th generation acceleration. A frigate with a buster cannon and Quarter-class mobility. A light carrier with even bigger and badder ISC to protect its crew against insane defensive maneuvers, or assault shuttlepod to launch from big carriers and deploy a dozen VFs or thrice the QFs. Something that is more survivable than the target rich environment of legacy frigates, destroyers and carriers with G acceleration in the single digit class.

Personally, I'm not so sure that's actually the case... or at least, that it's not the case when there aren't Villain Sues and copious shenanigans.

In Frontier, the New UN Spacy flotilla protecting Island-1 scored quite a few kills on the highly mobile Vajra with their AA guns despite the Vajra in question being far more agile than the typical variable fighter of the day. At the end of the day, only a handful of Vajra actually made it through the anti-aircraft fire to the emigrant ship, and a large share of the blame there rests with a lack of preparedness on the part of the fleet's top brass for venturing into Vajra territory and not bothering to equip their fighters with ammunition powerful enough to hurt the Vajra. We only see ships taking a pasting when the fighter screen has taken a powder.

Delta is an exception, but that's pretty much entirely down to the fold songs of King Ketchup giving the Aerial Knights an unfair leg-up and making it all but impossible for the fighter screen protecting the warships to do its job.

The capital ship screen wasn't totally useless, but that one Stealth cruiser blowing up was one of Frontier's more popular bits of recycled footage, which goes back to "if the plot demands that the enemy show some effectiveness, destroy the midsized capital ships." I know that point is straying away from the technological side of things and reliant on the demands of the story, but it still happens, and it's unlikely that the franchise will ever choose to feature a story about some guys in a regular cruiser when the fighters and the giant transforming ships are more famous.

Tossing out a hastily-arranged thought here: For dramatic reasons since Frontier, the mid-sized capital ship has become the cannon fodder of the Macross universe. (I could also replace "Macross" with "Gundam"...) Variable Fighters are small enough to be difficult to hit, can easily carry ship-killing ordnance, and can use a reasonable amount of Fold Carbon/Quartz/etc. for a large boost in performance (particularly in recent series). At the large size there are hero ships like the original SDF-1, the Battle-classes, and other largish things that mount a Heavy Converging Energy Beam Cannon. Meanwhile Northamptons, Guantanamos, and Uragas and the like get blown up by pretty much everything.

Does it have to be this way? SDFM demonstrated numerous classes of capital ships that had large beam cannons on them, and presumably could be refit with niceties like pinpoint barriers. Large capital ships are appropriately rare, but the midsize ships would be the primary ones dealing with the still-extant threat of undiscovered Zentradi fleets out there.

Or would it just be easier now to build a lot more top-generation VFs that can easily slip through a fleet defense and deliver reaction weaponry up close, instead of relying on a lot of squishy midsized ships?

Has the franchise written itself into a familiar technological corner where the one-man hero mecha is now the ultimate power in the universe?

This happens in Episode 3 of Shuumatsu no Izetta, which aired earlier today:

Spoilers here...

Combined with other things that occur, my first thought is that Cygnus multidrones are sufficiently-advanced technology that's indistinguishable from magic. But it's not magic, it's science!

I found Master Tenjin.

If you're at NYCC, he's doing the drawing demo at 4 PM through Saturday.

Do you have any further information on that? Wacom's info page on the NYCC website is infuriatingly cut off.

Izetta's first episode was interesting. The world-building should be good with a writer from Code Geass and Sora no Woto aboard.

Can they even play Stateside? You know, I can think of a certain company that might raise up a fuss.

I think this would be one instance where the heavy marketing of "Walküre" as an independent entity even within their own series would work as legal cover. (j/k, sorta)

Roid would tell him that it doesn't work because Basara isn't Windermerean, Basara would make it work anyway.

Doing any concert-related podcasts?

I totally spaced on that Heinz getting poisoned plot, what ever became of that plotline. I've totally forgotten.

I think the poisoning was an implication, but the way the reveal played out, the first doctor may have been implying to Keith that Heinz was being treated for old age by telling Keith what drugs were being used, which Keith confirmed through the Jussilas and further confirmed by yanking off the covers.

Here's a thirty-second cheap sequel hook: While everyone was Tang, Richard Bilrer felt the presence of Minmay, or at least he thinks he does; it's not easy to sift through several hundred million other conciousnesses without a phone book. So when he gets out, he immediately commissions an expedition to go to the area that the Megaroad is in.

Along the way, they visit the casino planet, meet their counterparts from an evil mirror universe, get made very small, etc.

VF-9:

To the Macross Mecha Manual and the color-coded transformation guide! (Waves at Chad.)

My two cents: It does give more protection to the pilot in the event of a non-crippling chest hit, but it does so by putting a flying surface in harm's way. It would be inconvenient to lose a wing while blocking a hit, transform out of Battroid... and either tumble out of the sky because the wing fell off, or be stuck in Battroid because the wing is now permanently fused to the torso.

It's also moving the wingtips really far every time it has to transform to Battroid. I'll give the design credit for turning the wings into something other than borderline kibble the way they are on many other VFs, but it's a lot of extra movement.