JB0

Ahhh, Transformers and jets... never the two shall meet successfully. Speaking of... saw an Iron Man Transformer. Is it just me, or are there actually some panels that fold out on the underside to hide the 'bot? Hard to tell in the package, but it'd be hilarious and pathetic all at once if Iron Man was a better jetformer than something actually DESIGNED to turn into a jet. Dunno, really. Though the Universe-branded Robot Heroes already HAS Beast Wars in it, so they're definitely doing that. Of course, Beast Wars is old enough to be considered "classic" at this point. It's scary to think that the kids playing with Beast Wars toys are adults with nostalgia kicks now.

That may be it, then. Mine's a slimline, and a recent slim at that.

Do it! Become the Angry Beer Nerd!

I doubt it'll worth with 3rd-party pads. Well, not unless they match the size closely enough(in all 3 dimensions). And use a similar mechanism(you'd be surprised how many different ways people can find to implement a d-pad). And I loved the S d-pad. It's not in the greatest location, but it's amazingly precise.

I saw a Classics Universe Prowl last night. I WOULD have bought it, but the paint, dear god the paint... The front quarter panel looked like it had been smashed and glued back together. That's how rough it was. I'm hoping it was a one-off. We'll find out when my area starts seeing supply.

PSP d-pad's not THAT bad. Not on mine, anyways. Sony's certainly got an up-and-down track record on that thing(the PS1's d-pad will kill your thumb). Now, there's something to be said for analog flight control. But really, with the range of motion afforded the PSP slider, it's not going to be very precise. Even compared to the usual sloppy thumbstick. I find it very interesting that Sony's still making the analog input a secondary control almost a decade after the PS1 started coming with Dual; Shocks. It's well overdue for a promotion like MS, Nintendo, and (sorta) Sega gave it. (The Dreamcast tried to strike a middle ground, so neither the analog stick nor the d-pad was in an optimum position. But there wasn't a clear preference either, and the shape of the grips was such that you could slide your hand up or down it easily to correct. Too bad you couldn't do anything about the missing C and Z buttons, or the fact that the d-pad sucked.)

There's a pad from Joytech called the "Joypad SE" It has a decent-ish d-pad, and moves start and select back to the superior position of the XBox 1's S controller. It might be hard to find. As I understand it, Joytech got bought, and most of their stuff was scrapped. Or you can go hardcore and get the Hori Fighting Stick EX2. This is the path I'm going. I always played NES with an Advantage, or the Wiimote NES mode would be really appealing. Whenever I get a Wii, I'll get a stick for THAT too. But in the meantime...

That could just be for comfort. People can tell when they're in a fold because of the color-shifting effect somehow. Otherwise Misa and company wouldn't have known they were folding, or how long they'd been folding. I imagine the different physics standards make for a disorienting ride. Didn't Deculture also make reference to "fold sickness"?

Yeah. That's been a long-running thing. Mickey's come close to going PD a few times since the original Steamboat Willie. And every time his time starts to run out, it gets extended. There's also a few "annoyances" like needing to renew the copyright and formally declare it removed . The ORIGINAL US law, from 1790, provided for a 14-year copyright, and a single 14-year renewal, IF the original author was still alive. 1909 extended it to 28, with a single 28-year renewal. 1976 extended it to 50 after the author's death, or 75 years for anonymous works and works for hire, as mandated by the Berne Convention. This was the first one that Mickey, created in 1928, benefited from(he would've gone public in 1984). It also removed the necessity of registering and formally declaring your copyright. 1998 extended it to 95 years after publication, 120 years after creation, whichever came first, or 70 years after the author's death. This is the one everyone blames Disney for. Though it was actually proposed by Sonny Bono, Disney DID lobby heavily for it. The stated reason for the bill was to bring US copyright periods in line with european ones, but... It could've been worse. The European laws we were supposed to be keeping up qith that not only extended copyright, but restored copyright to public domain works that wouldn't have lapsed under the new laws.

I've never figured out why, but people tend to get REALLY bent out of shape over Kamen/Mask. Happens with this and Sailor Moon both. I think it's just a gross misapplication of the "leave names alone" guideline, and they're not able to tell.

I may have, at the time. Custer's Revenge is only slightly less tired than "ET KILLED VIDEO GAMES!111" And face it... no one knew the game existed before Seanbaby dropped it on his worst games ever list. Now no one will shut up about it. It's become the most famous game no one played. Citing it in a worst games list is nothing more that total creative bankruptcy.

The mass market is irrelevant! Cater to my whims! *tangental rant about the evils of inertial dampers* Seriously, I wonder if they could get away with the old SDF "swap the head and throw some paint on it" routine if they tried really hard. The 1J and 1S existed to be "hero mechs" but it seems less offensive when it's not maintaining entirely different planes. (Admittedly, SMS has separation of gear from NUNS, so the usual gripes about maintaining two sets of planes don't really apply.)

It was the primary, at least originally. There was a new command center added somewhere in the core of the ship post-war. Of course, it had to be abandoned during the final episode, so they could all get together on the old bridge.

So I headed out... My Toys R Us had an entire aisle full of Transformers... from the movie. Animated-wise, I had my choice of Grimlock and Lugnut. Anything else was MIA.

But time dilation for FTL travel isn't the same as the relativistic effect. Notably, it takes infinite time to do anything at lightspeed, and infinite energy to attain lightspeed. Hence why there's a universal speed limit of 1c. And that brings us to subspace, hyperspace, fold space, etc. Drop yourself into a parallel universe with a different set of rules, one where lightspeed is higher, or the laws don't prohibit passing photons. Of course, universes with different rules can ALSO run at a different speed. Historically, that's been the most plausable explanation for the fold space/real space time discrepancy, fold space just has a slower time. Not relativistic time dilation. And now we get to the modern era of Macross, and the newest wrinkle. I wonder if it's truly 1:1 time correlation with the new prototype, or if it minimizes the effects of faults, but there's still an inherent time flow variance on top of that that was just irrelevant for the fold in question. Misa's statements in the original series implied a direct ratio, which doesn't line up with the fault explanation(remember, she's not OBSERVING the time discrepancy. She has no way of seeing time outside of the fold. She has to have prior knowledge that time isn't 1:1). Of course, fold time could also be continuously variable, and faults are just areas of particularly "slow" time. Frontier's graphic illustrated the ship flying around some faults and straight through others, so it's apparently not a case of COMPLETE impassability, leaving you to wonder what exactly a fault IS. It could just be a question of whether it's "faster" to go around a fault or to plow through it. Of course,(at least according to the subs I watched) the planet-buster bomb generated a fold fault. They don't seem very passable. Maybe they're different if they're actually IN fold space. In conclusion: ???

Ummm... there's an incredibly large body of evidence that suggests gravity does NOT cancel out inertia. You'll need to elaborate.

I didn't say this was the first occurrence. And there was also Diamond Force's VF-17s in Mac7, on the subject of hero mechs. Though at least Gamlin wasn't the ONLY VF-17 pilot.

I HATE inertial damping, precisely BECAUSE it's the easy way out. It's an epidemic excuse that isn't even remotely plausable and removes consideration for the design to do anything other than look good. And inertia damping automatically means you aren't being overly technical. It's the standard Trek solution to a problem: throw technobabble at it. I assume it doesn't exist until it's stated to exist. As of right now, it's not stated to exist in Macross(much to Guld's disappointment, as it would've saved his life). And that people can operate normally in it at all times. If it didn't have artificial gravity, the bridge crew would've drifted away when they defolded into deep space. There's also the catapults on the Prometheus. And combat on the ship's "skin". Destroids could have magnetic feet, but EVERYTHING sticks when it lands. I get the impression that the decks are always parallel to the ground when it lands. Artificial gravity is easy if you're stationary. It gets a lot more complicated if you're moving. You could put gravity generators on the walls in line with the thrust axis, so you could create a counter-pull. But that's complicated. And messy if something malfunctions. Ignoring stress placed on the ship by the thrusters, sure. If the attacker mounting is less sturdy than the cruiser mounting, there could be big problems. ... Or maybe I'm looking at this wrong... Macross City could be built along a different axis than the bridge. If they built it across the thrust axis originally, as would make sense for space travel... then when it's swung around for the transformation, it winds up parallel to the main thrust axis. Makes landing a pain in the rear, though. Same issues I was describing for thrust earlier. Only now instead of your thrust axis plus gravity axis, you're dealing with your gravity axis plus the planet's gravity axis. Antigravs? Certainly, their effectiveness will deminish as you get farther away from Earth, but that also decreases the amount of real thrust you need. Get far enough away that your secondary thrusters can send you flying, and you're good to go.

True... the bunnies WERE all hot and bothered by their captain. The original Macross had a much faster-charging cannon, by all appearances. The Battle 7 also had issues with capital-ship engagements. I accept dreamweaver's justification until such time as I feel compelled to redownload and rewatch Macross 7. Which probably won't be for a long time. Right. Well, sort of. Up and down DO exist once you A. fire up some gravity generators, or B. start accelerating. Once you light the engines, they start pushing everything directly attached to them forward. Everything INSIDE the ship, in a 0G environment, will "fall" towards the engines due to inertia. If you accelerate at 1G, you can walk on the floors just like at home. Or the walls, depending on how you look at it. Stop accelerating, and you start floating again. Slow down, and you fall towards the roof, making really big rooms a Bad Idea. If you add gravity generators, things get more complicated. As I understand things, the SDF-1 is laid out with floors parallel to the thrust axis in both modes(we know for a FACT that the bridge is. And we know that the bulk of Megaroad and modern-era colony ships are laid out in this manner, due to the massive windows domes making everything visible from outside). So the gravity generators are defining down. And when the ship accelerates, it creates a pull due to inertia in a SIDEWAYS direction, relative to the artificial gravity. So apparent gravity becomes a diagonal direction, unless you activate some other system to "correct" for inertia or keep your acceleration low to minimize the effect it has on the passengers. It's really a lousy way to design a spaceship, honestly. But it's the standard layout for TV/movie ships. There's also the possibility of structural stress in attacker mode. The "legs" don't look like they're attached as securely in attacker mode. There may be excessive stress on the "hips" that prevents using the main engines in that configuration.

! My Primus will have something to do other than play with his Micromaster pets!

Didn't one of the ACE games do that?

The problem with the New Macross not being the big guns is... Battle 7 is the ship that stepped up when they needed the big guns. They didn't have a dedicated gunship to blast the super-bulldog, they had to rely on Fire Bomber to immobolize it while the Battle 7 charged up. They DID hint at that, with comments by the zentradi of how travelling in attacker mode limited their speed(acceleration actually, I assume). And it IS shown using secondary thrusters on it's back to accelerate through space instead of it's primary "leg" engines. So they may've gone with it, and just decided that the reduced travel time wasn't worth the constant disruption of civilian life. Especially since it makes sense from both a travel perspective AND a passenger comfort perspective to use the leg engines, so thrust is oriented perpendicular to the floor instead of parallel to it. Keeps down being down instead of off at an angle(unless they used an elaborate set of secondary gravity generators, or *shudder* INERTIAL DAMPERS to counteract the effects of thrust). I'm referring mainly to the absurd amount of time it takes to charge and fire it's main cannon. All the power in the world doesn't mean a thing if you can't hit a target.

They shoulda got Micheal Bay to direct. He'd make sure there was a suitably badass Gort.

Of course, the Quarter's presumed lack of power(an assumption I share) is somewhat offset by the (rather absurd) degree of agility it exhibits. I think it could fly rings around ships the original Macross would plow right into(probably while someone shouted "Daedalus ATTACK!", but still...) The Battle 7 doesn't really have an excuse. It's slow, underarmed, and underpowered. Which is a lousy combination. That was my biggest disappointment with Macross 7. The New Macross class was a massive letdown.

Well, right now the only other SA ship they've found was the one in the factory satellite episode. And they wisely chose not to stop and investigate it since the Supervision Army is well-known for booby-trapping ships. You know, like the Macross was. It could be rather dangerous to run around reclaiming SA vessels. That and... honestly, the Macross seemed a lot more useful than the Battle 7. HOW long did it take to charge the Battle 7's "rifle"? The lag after you decide to fire is a serious tactical hindrance. The original Macross can fire it's cannon almost on a moment's notice.