Sildani

With Frontier, I think Bandai issued Alto’s YF-29 three times, Ozma’s VF-25S three times, and his Durandal twice. They made three versions of the Nightmare Plus. I think it’s clear where the merchandising emphasis was placed on Frontier, and where it’s placed in Delta. 
 

And let’a not forget the fact the Renewals were a thing. 

On 12/16/2019 at 1:57 PM, mikeszekely said:

Apparently Hasbro's having a warehouse sale at the Carlisle Convention Center in Carlisle PA.  Anyone near there?  Rumor has it that they're selling Siege Omega Supreme for an insanely low $20!  I'm pretty caught up on Transformers, but I'm half tempted to go check it out anyway; it looks like it's a little under a three hour drive for me.

If you go, let me know so I can give you a small list!

‘Cause he makes that money, yo!

‘Tis the season. 

Seeing it next Thursday with the fam. 

I’ll watch a flick about a female Double-O agent no problem as long as it’s got a good story.  Call it Tales of MI-5 or something. 
 

James Bond is a man, though. English or Scottish. Race doesn’t matter, gender does. 

I see Minmay in a red winter coat. On Mobile Safari on my iPhone. 

Well, the Narada and her crew had been Klingon prisoners for the time between the Kelvin events and Kirk being in Starfleet Academy, so about 20ish years. You can see Nero’s flashbacks to this time. Then they escape somehow - those are the Klingon reports Uhura was talking to her roommate about - and go to Vulcan to do their dastardly deeds. 
 

If the Klingons hadn’t done any analysis and made any insights into the Borg tech in those 20 years, they’re too dumb to exist. I might argue they did, though, looking at the JJ-verse D-7. It’s spikier and more... involved looking than usual. 

Where was it explained whether it was a ruse or not?

The AT-AT was purely psychological. 

3 minutes ago, Dynaman said:

Plot armor giveth and plot armor taketh away.

Too true! But that’s what we have to work with: what we see on screen. I don’t know what all is “canon” or not... with Macross, it all mostly comes from Kawamori, and he doesn’t like to be held down by it too much. And there’s stuff like the Master Files books which kinda are and aren’t all at the same time. Mostly aren’t. 
 

Star Trek though... there’s a lot of producers, actors, and so on running around having their say. Is Memory Alpha canon? Memory Beta? The Eaglemoss magazines packed with their models? What the Trekyards guests say?

So yeah, plot armor. It’s fun to think about though!

9 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Later incidents in the Dominion War proved that the Galaxy-class was more than the equal of practically any hostile warship.  The USS Odyssey still massively outgunned the Jem'Hadar ships attacking it despite being outnumbered three to one, and would very likely have won that engagement without breaking a sweat if it'd had shields able to deflect phased polaron beam fire at the time.

Starfleet's engineers plugged that hole in their defenses in short order... it's not a representative sample.

 

Because the objective wasn't to defeat the Dominion fleet, it was to break through it and recapture Deep Space Nine.  Sisko slowly fed his forces into the grinder trying to provoke the Cardassians into opening a hole in the Dominion formation he could fly through.

 

Did they, though?  Or are those other Defiant-class ships prototypes that Starfleet dug out of mothballs like the USS Defiant herself?

Speaking as a design engineer, you usually don't build just one prototype if you can help it because every breakdown means losing test time and you're SOL if that one prototype breaks down.  Something the scope of a Galaxy-class is so big and expensive that a single prototype is the only practical method, but the Defiant-class is pretty small and would be a lot easier to build multiples of to test (esp. if the ship were to be tested in live fire testing given its role as a warship).

 

So far, the only enemy that's ever been acknowleged as prompting the Federation to consider a dedicated warship design was the Borg... and Starfleet backed away from that in favor of improving its tactics.  As noted by First Contact's creators, Starfleet's main problem at Wolf 359 was trying to fight the Borg in orderly battle formations and standard maneuvers, allowing the Borg to make use of Picard's knowledge to turn the engagement into a shooting gallery.  Starfleet had all but deadlocked the Borg by using the chaotic battle plan they used in First Contact until the Enterprise showed up and finished the job.  Even century-old ships can still kick ass and take names if updated properly by Starfleet.

Even in the noticeably more militant, xenophobic J.J.-Trek Federation, Starfleet's multi-mission explorers seem to be the shootiest things they've got, by dint of being able to redirect all that extra power from things like science labs and elaborate sensor arrays to weapons and shields, likely giving them an advantage over ships built without that kind of excess output in mind.

The stupidly fanfic-y USS Vengeance wasn't a warship per se, she was an instrument of genocide... meant to launch a preemptive decapitation strike against the Klingon Empire using advanced weapons that could engage from beyond the range of any Klingon retaliation.  It's basically Admiral Marcus's My First Death Star.

As for the Odyssey, very well. I will point out that, even with power diverted, the fire from her and a runabout didn’t seem to injure a Jem’Hadar fighter too much. 
 

Regarding Operation Return, the hole wasn’t being created until Dukat gave him one. Sisko knew it was a trap and took it anyway. When the Dominion jammed Starfleet comms, their battle formation pretty much disintegrated into ship-to-ship fighting... which wasn’t going well until the Klingons interceded. 
 

Even with them, only the Defiant broke through initially to get to DS9... and only 200 friendly vessels eventually followed her. Considering that probably more than a few of those were Klingon, out of an initial fleet of 600+ ships, having only some 200 survive is a loss rate of more than 60%... that’s thousands and thousands of officers and men. Yes, they were outnumbered, but if the Starfleet ships were as powerful as all that, they should have had fewer losses, damaged the Dominion fleet to a greater degree without the Klingons’ aid, or both. 
 

The Battle of Sector 001: multiple Starfleet vessels had been destroyed, whereas the single Borg cube had sustained “heavy” damage to its outer hull and had cheerfully proceeded all the way to Earth. Hardly “deadlocked.” Losses were comparable to those sustained during the Battle of Wolf 359, despite the Federation having years to advance its technology and tactics. It’s interesting to note that the larger vessels were destroyed, whereas the Defiant was beat to crap but salvageable. 
 

As for large multi-mission vessels having more power to divert: take that same power output, put it into a smaller spaceframe for a smaller target and better maneuverability, overbuild the structure itself, and you have a warship. The Defiant-class, in fact. That’s why she almost shook herself apart during tests. 
 

And thanks, JB0. 

...and the Federation’s first belligerent encounter with the Dominion, which led to the destruction of the USS Odyssey with the loss of all hands. We’ll also note that in “Sacrifice of Angels” the Federation Combined Fleet was having a very hard time of it at the hands of the combined Dominion/Cardassian flotilla until the Klingon fleet arrived. I grant you the Feds were outnumbered two to one there, but the sequence showed many more Starfleet and Cardassian vessels damaged or destroyed than Dominion classes. 

Finally, I suppose the best evidence the Federation realized the need for warships was the fact that they produced more Defiant-class ships. Valiant, São Paulo, and a couple more unnamed vessels we see in the combined Fleet that goes after the Dominion in “What You Leave Behind.” It might have been more efficient from a production point of view to simply build more, upgunned Intrepid-class or Centaur-class vessels, but Starfleet did not. 
 

Although I broadly agree that Starfleet’s normal ships were powerful, well-protected, and more than a match for most of the crap the galaxy could throw at them, it has to be said that there were enemies that made the extra size and power requirements necessitated by “multi-role” ship design a disadvantage in combat, especially by those races who were naturally more belligerent and designed their ships in kind. 

Especially the Borg, but I could see an argument made for the Four Years’ War and the Romulan War (forget the canon name.) 

As for the scale model on Adm. Marcus’ desk, Abrams said its presence was a filming mistake and it was never supposed to be there, so at least Marcus wasn’t THAT dumb. 
 

And I honestly like the Vengeance design and its rationale for existing - whenever Starfleet thinks they don’t need warships, they get slapped by some Big Bad and find that yes, they do - but it was the wrong movie and method for her to exist. 

Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment. 

Star Trek Into Darkness would be “fixed” in great measure if Cumberbatch’s character had actually BEEN John Harriman, and Khan himself was still on ice. Last scene see Harriman back in his capsule, pan over a couple pods and see another pod, the faceplate mostly frosted over but a mane of silver hair is visible; and below is an obscured nameplate that reads “KHA############INGH.”
 

That would have hooked me. Plus that crap about the Vengeance. There’s no way something that big could be built by that many people and crewed by that many more, and nothing leaked or was noticed by bureaucrats. 
 

That said, it was an awesome design, and if the Federation didn’t keep its blueprints in some deeply buried file somewhere, they’re fools. 

Awesome! I’m getting mine from BBTS, so it’ll probably be end of December, eh?

Huh. So. BBTS will get them... in January? I’m assuming ship travel. 

PO’d at BBTS. After 30+ years, Sentinel did it!

I’ve heard they were pleased with “Fulcrum” as well. 
 

There are other Russian aircraft with names; the Beriev Be-12 flying boat is called the “Tchaika” thanks to its gull wing, I think the Tu-160 strategic bomber is the “White Swan” for pretty obvious reasons. 

Not to brag, but I snagged my VF-31C and VF-1J preorders while lying in bed with my iPhone on Wi-Fi at Oh-Dark-Thirty. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it, but thought I’d contribute anecdotal evidence that, yes, Virginia, miracles can happen. 

Whelp, having looked at the 21 pre-flight and takeoff sequence again, the wings still have discrete control surfaces despite their MAW technology. 
 

And, looking at an “official, in-anime” front view of the 21, those stabs are huge. 

Pre-ordered from BBTS. Got the blu-rays, time to get some cool toys to go along. 
 

Anyone know if the helicopter gunship or the modded F-15 and F-16 were ever made into model kits?

“This one’s Des, and this one’s called Troy. ‘Cause when you put ‘em together... they destroy.”