JB0

Indeed. But between distractions, fact-checking, and whatnot, your post wasn't up there when I initially started mine, despite the >half-hour timestamp diffrence. So I hadn't seen it.

Ravage looks pretty good, IMO. I also like making him a Jaguar. In other Alternators news: I found another Mirage! Sweet toy, aside from the engineering snafu that left the panels to the sides of his chest unable to dock with the hood. They're either too long, or the hinges snap to the wrong angle. Your choice. The feet, while a tad petite, are a major step up from the RX-8 feet(no wheels on the bottom, and they actually LOOK like feet). The "real" license plate is also a nice touch. I'm tempted to take some tape or wire or something, and suspend him from his feet so he's "standing" on the ceiling above Shockwave. Just because it'd look cool. But I'm not gonna. It'd be pretty ugly when he fell and I had to buy a THIRD Mirage.

The biggest disicentive is it's really expensive and there's not an immediate financial payoff. We went to the moon to beat the dirty commie russians. After that, we were hoping there was some way to exploit it via mining. What we found was it's an incredibly hostile environment, sending people and equipment up is very expensive, and it's not easily exploited with conventional technology. All of which made it far cheaper to continue to buy stuff from terrestrial sources. It also takes a long time to get anywhere. The Voyager probes, the fastest man-made objects, took a year and a half "just" to get to Jupiter. Same for close relatives Pioneer 10 and 11. The Voyagers took 2 years to get to Saturn. Pioneer 11, the first probe to visit Saturn, took SIX years to get there.* It will take New Horizons 9 years to reach Pluto, and will take it about a year to reach Jupiter*. All 5 devices were built as light as possible, and the Voyagers and Pioneers were timed for a closest-approach scenario, which isn't feasable most of the time(in fact, Pluto was inside Neptune's orbit for their flights). A manned mission would be exponentially slower due to the much greater mass it has to haul. To illustrate: New Horizons reached lunar orbit in 9 hours. Apollo 11 took 3 days. And the Apollos were about as small as you could possibly make them, as well as riding a much bigger rocket. The further you go, the slower things get, due to the fact that you have to carry more consumables. *If you're wondering why the Voyagers wind up so much faster than the Pioneers when they start out fairly close, and why the New Horizons is slower when it will reach Jupiter faster... The V'gers used Jupiter's gravity as a "slingshot" to accelerate, while Pioneer 11 used a SINGLE slingshot off Jupiter to direct itself towards Saturn and Pioneer 10 made no use of the slingshot maneuver. New Horizons will use a single slingshot to accelerate itself towards Pluto, but lacking the slingshot off of Saturn, and V'ger 2's Uranus and Neptune shouts, ends up being slower even though it starts out faster. Pioneer 11 also had to double back across the solar system to reach Saturn, which was on the opposite side of the sun from Jupiter for the point where the 11 flew by. That added a lot of time. The Voyagers had a trajectory much closer to a straight-line run, as Jupiter and Saturn were more conveniently aligned for their flyby. ALL the gas giants for Voyager 2. They COULD have even done a Pluto flyby, but chose instead to do a more detailed look at Neptune. To be fair, they expected Voyager 3 to visit Pluto. They didn't know NASA's glory days were ending.

Awww.... ninja mechs rule! Yeah... Atlus says Banpresto had them on a short leash, so they had to get approval for every single thing they did, down to item spellings. But given Banpresto seems physically incapable of consistently romanizing names, that isn't necessarily a good thing. Ooooooohhhhh.... me want!

Because all the people in charge of the TV and movie companies don't understand why it was successful. So they take a formula they've constructed, where they take the features THEY noticed about the last really popular TV/movie, and try to fit whatever story they're given into that formula. Said formulas are usually off by several lightyears, and wind up reading like "bullet-time+R rating = blockbuster hit"

That was the premise of Metal Storm.

Only if you're lucky...

Nah. It made it out fine, they just never got a localization team.Which really sucked, but... whatcha gonna do? I'm under the impression it was intentionally spoofish.

I still say it's not a rush. But yah. The rapid discovery of new Pluto-like objects since 1992 , and subsequent establishment of the Kuiper Belt as fact rather than hypothesis, has really made it necessary to actually define planet. And while the IAU has tried to create a definition that keeps Pluto, they haven't managed to come up with a half-decent one that isn't special-cased to heck. The best shot they had was defining a planet as any object in orbit around a star above a certain size. The drafts using that definition intentionally set the threshold at just below Pluto. That definition wasn't liked because it was rather arbitrary. The last definition before the current one just set it as any object massive enough to pull itself into a roughly spherical shape, plus the clause about centers of gravity to block moons. It's a less arbitrary size, as it's based on a physical property instead of a random number, but it's also a really small size. I'm really seeing it a lot like Ceres. They called it a planet, then discovered how much other stuff was there and how small it really was. Only Pluto sat there longer because it was harder to look at. Had it's mass been accurately estimated at the time of discovery, it never would've entered planetary status in the first place.

As a sidenote: If Voltron came out dual-language, a large part of it would be english-only anyways. World Event Productions commissioned several new episodes of Golion/Lion Voltron exclusively for the US market, essentially doubling the series length.

Moral of the story: 80s cartoons were for future real men. Modern cartoons are for future sissies.

But it's okay, because the moon is now a "lunar planet."

Are you aware of how stupid you are? In point of fact, the FIRST proposed definition, which DID keep Pluto, was chased out because it opened the floodgates to everything else. Not Kuiper Belt objects, EVERYTHING. The only requirement was that it be round and the orbit's center of gravity not be inside a planet. There were at least a half-dozen asteroids on the list. The solar system would have something like a hundred planets before the dust settled. Hell, it was even possible to have "sometimes-planets" because the orbital clause(intended to keep moons from becoming planets) couldn't handle elliptical orbits. If you actually paid attention instead of just guessing based on media soundbites(and if there's one thing I've learned over the years, it's that the media CANNOT get a science article right), you'd know that they did everything they could to keep Pluto, but found no way to make a definition that kept Pluto without defining every rogue piece of stellar debris as a planet. Pluto has been the only thing holding a formal definition of planet up for several years. There's just no way to make a rational definition AND include Pluto. The only reason anyone fought about it is that Pluto has sentimental value. "My very elegant mother just sat upon nine" seems to be missing something. Diffrence is pluton was intended to augment planetary status, not replace it. Essentially would've divided things into the inner planets, gas giants, and plutons. It was also purposely constructed to maintain Pluto's signifigance in the face of the bumrush of Kuiper Belt objects that would have joined it on the planet list within a year. Dwarf planet is a formalization of the older minor planet status. Slightly? And Pluto has been debated since 1978! Before we were even sure there WAS a Kuiper Belt. I was mistaken earlier when I said '30s. That was when Pluto was found. Some of Pluto's problems relative to the 8 planets: It's orbit is highly elliptical. It's orbit is inclined relative to the plane of the system. It's absurdly small, and is in fact smaller than many known moons. It's moon is almost as large as it is. It's moon doesn't even orbit it. They actually orbit each other. This point was acknowledged in the former proposed definition, which promoted Charon to planet and the Pluto/Charon system became the first known binary planet. Acutally, Pluto's orbit is probably the most elliptical of all the Kuiper Belt objects, given that it's apogee and perigee hit the inner and outer edges of the belt. Except if you bothered to read, you'd know that it was of objects of similar size. All 8 planets have done that. Pluto has not. If it had, there would be no Kuiper belt. So you're saying that it's orbit is clear because it's too small to clear an orbit? Charon's existence shows it incapable of clearing an orbit. Quit saying suddenly. 2 and a half decades is not sudden. And we have a good deal of info already. The New Horizons mission won't profoundly affect the mass of Pluto or make it's orbit any cleaner.

Kinda like Macross 7, huh? *leaves thread quickly*

So THAT'S why I've been hearing about this game again! I heard about it shortly after it came out, then it just faded away. Nice to see it having a resurgence in popularity. And yah, it really needed a US release.

Speaking of Alternators... I found a Mirage RIGHT after the boards went down. And had to return it because Hasbro pumped a joint full of glue and it snapped when I tried to transform him. Haven't seen another one yet.

As far as brontosaurus vs apatosaurus... They're diffrent. But only one ever existed. The brontosaurus was an apatosaurus with the skull of a chasmosaurus. Pluto's non-planet status has been debated ever since the discovery of Charon in the '30s. It was just a matter of time. And the demotion is because Pluto's orbit covers pretty much the entire depth of the Kuiper belt. For it to be clear, there has to be a REALLY big hole in the KB. And there doesn't seem to be. Ceres is off the list. The promotion of Ceres was one of the things that killed the attempted definition that came up a week before this one(it opened the gates FAR too wide). Interestingly, Ceres was ORIGINALLY a planet. As were Vesta, Juno, and Pallas. After Pallas, they realized they weren't finding isolated objects, but an entire freaking belt of rocks, and all 4 were demoted to asteroids. They remain some of the largest objects in the belt(Ceres is a third of the belt's mass. Vesta and Pallas are the next-largest objects, and Juno is the 7th-largest). Pluto's in the same situation. It was originally a planet, and we later discovered it wasn't an isolated object, but part of the Kuiper Belt. And dwarf planet, while a retarded term, has some precedent. Minor planet is a term that's been in use for a long time. It's basically synonomous with asteroid, but... Ceres has also been promoted to dwarf planet status, apparently.

I was at about the same age level, and I didn't really care for Descent. Probably because I didn't have a good multi-axis stick, and tended to get lost, but still...Wish I could find some of my old shareware disks. There was a demo I had that kicked ass, but I can't remember the name or enough about the game to describe it. Darn right! I'd also just gotten a 5200, and played the ever-living crap out of Star Wars: The Arcade Game at about the same time(I was an avid retrogamer even then). After blowing a good 30 Death Stars up in a row, you start really rooting for the empire.

I'd like to think I notice when I hear a word I know... I'm chalking it up to "those silly wiki people." Even on "reliable" wikis like Wikipedia I can point to a half-dozen major errors without even trying. Including self-contradicting paragraphs.

Isn't that what the Thundercats WERE originally? Hey, you can't make the Silverhawks worse than they already are.And I disavow any knowledge of Jem.

12 is about right. 10-16, depending on how you count it. I was using a MS Strategic Commander. Deus Ex was a test game for it. The SC is a bit loose, but a hell of a lot more fun than keyboard mashing and far better suited to ANY commercial PC game than a gamepad.

The sequel was dumbed down for mass-market console play. So Deus Ex3 would be far better served by staying away from the PS3 and 360.

Dubya. Tee. Eff? Sometimes I wonder if these guys think about things at all. There's no name recognition for the current generation of kids, and we all know Snarf is the retarded sidekick that was only there for comic relief.

Yes! Get our TIE Fighter on, and some PC Battlezone(Starcraft+MechWarrior = fun?), maybe even some Tyrian or something.

Guld's "inherited condition" was just a short temper. Plenty of humans have it too, it's nothing major... Unless, of course, they have serious mental issues because they lost control of that temper, beat up their best friends in high school and maybe tried to rape one of them.