JB0

Basara Prime is the obvious marketing decision, but I'm still disappointed given Armada Starscream is RIGHT THERE.

He basically already has sound boosters in the design, even!

6 hours ago, rsvictor1976 said:

Finally happening! Good job to everyone that contacted Disney and complained. If only we could do the same to Harmony Gold to let us have Macross and DYRL. 

It is weird to me that Flashback 2012 is okay but SDF and DYRL aren't.

1 hour ago, aurance said:

So - valkyries have a lot of very thin and pointy bits, e.g. things that are probably control surfaces in flight mode. When they're in battroid mode, assuming they get into some sort of hand to hand combat, wouldn't those surfaces get subjected to tremendous torsion or other stresses if, say, a battroid falls down? Are those surfaces designed to bend to absorb stress (other than the weird wing material we see with YF-21)? Do they just snap?

I think the official answer is overtechnology makes them durable enough that it doesn't matter.

Battroid mode in particular is noted to be more durable due to having spare juice from the reactors to power the very hungry energy-converting armor systems that make the machine MUCH more durable. (Historically, this isn't active in fighter mode since the engines are busy throwing the plane forward and have less power available, hence why they can beat on a battroid all day but a fighter folds like paper-mache)

I just wish they'd figured out  this was d ad two years ago and not spent... however much money and manpower has gone into it since the trouble started.

CED is wild tech. But yeah, there's relatively little hardware, and the styluses haven't been made for decades. The format isn't completely unplayable yet, but it is well on its way.

YouPotato Technology Connections did a five-part documentary about the format and it's history because there was just slightly too much information to fit into one episode... and slightly too much information to fit into the second episode, and slightly too muck information to fit in the third... and his thirty-minute swim turned into a two-and-a-half-hour deep dive because there was just so much going on.

https://youtu.be/PnpX8d8zRIA

2 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Thrust can be just as much about how much propellant you're willing to use, how hot you can make the propellant, and the structure of your nozzle.

And what we know of overtech in the setting suggests they can get their propellant very hot indeed.

Most of my Quest 3 time is split between Synth Riders(my music game of choice) and Elite: Dangerous via PC linkage. 

The ability to connect to a PC and play any SteamVR game is not to be underestimated.

That said, I'm still mad at Meta for erasing everyone's Rift homes. I had a nice place in cyberspace, and now I'm cyberhomeless.

9 hours ago, davidwhangchoi said:

why is megatron shaking hands with prime

 

Statistically speaking, they probably teamed up to clown on Starscream.

Yeah. The existing Game Metroplex is sort of gangly and lanky. In my mind, Metroplex should be the opposite of that.

Maybe a faithful G1 Metroplex is TOO boxy, but... meh. I like what I like.

25 minutes ago, Jeff J said:

hyped-up-but-ineffectual weapons in 7.

In fairness, Operation Stargazer did show reaction weapons to be extremely powerful. It just... also showed them to be susceptable to teleportation.

7 hours ago, Jeff J said:

2) set up humanity for disaster when at least some of it could've been abated.

It really couldn't have been abated to any appreciable degree. The show presents the argument as "opening negotiations before or after demonstrating our military might", but the zentradi didn't want to talk regardless. Evacuation of the Earth was completely beyond humanity's capabilities at the time.

3 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Yeah, and it makes sense to look to that for guidance since Macross's thermonuclear reactors work very much like stars given that the force compressing the fuel and maintaining plasma confinement is gravitational rather than magnetic.

Official setting publications generally avoid mentioning what fuel is used in Macross's thermonuclear reactors.  Instead, they often mention that those reactors can use a variety of potential fuels including ones that would not be considered usable in conventional reactors due to their use of GIC systems to start and control the reaction.

Seems like the fuels we look at in modern terrestrial fusion are actually still the most suitable, though. Stars burn a bunch of stuff that is pretty inefficient as a fusion fuel. Not just hard to fuse, but they get less energy out of it too.

So it makes sense the usual suspects are still what Macross uses in practice even if they can technically use other fuels.

...

And I still wonder what Back to the Future's  "Mister Fusion" was ACTUALLY doing.

8 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

Actually, hydrogen has a lower cooling point than nitrogen, so it wouldn't be too hard to fractionate the two gasses. The Nitrogen would condense first and could be discarded, while the hydrogen would be ported off to holding/ storage tanks.

I guess that'd work, but you won't get much hydrogen. 0.5 parts per million hydrogen.

As an aside, looking this up led me to looking at stellar evolution, and apparently there's a lot of energy loss due to neutrino production when fusing heavier atoms.

2 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

Maybe in a future VF they can do atmospheric refueling for their main tanks, but apparently only for maneuvering propellant right now.

It probably wouldn't be worth it. While I can't speak for the colony worlds, Earth's atmosphere is mostly nitrogen. And while nitrogen CAN be fused, it is significantly harder than the traditional hydrogen or helium.

On the other hand, it's much easier to get your hands on nitrogen.

Fire Guts Truck God Ginrai.

On 12/17/2024 at 2:44 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

MF Ghost 

Not ONCE have I read this title as anything other than someone swearing at an annoying spectre.

On 12/14/2024 at 4:05 PM, mikeszekely said:

Sure, but if you're going to start making improvements to articulation, why not make more improvements? Replace stickers with paint. Fix the wonky proportions. Tweak the decos to make them more cartoon accurate. 

They actually did replace stickers with paint and molded detail.

Of course, the proportions and deco being the same as the original toys is the whole point. I feel like the concept pitch could be "the toys you thought you had as a kid". They could make them look puffy and unpainted toon-accurate. But then they'd just be yet another way to do the same thing as the MP line and Studio Series.

I know they DID the toon-color Missing Link, and also the toon-color G1 reissue, but... I don't understand them. 

Surprised they ran the Unreal Tournament episode after Epic pulled it from all modern stores.

I guess that means we're probably still go for Concord in the back half.

1 minute ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Paramount's hemorraging money and its share price is down over 70% across the last five years.  The company is desperate to sell out or merge with another so someone else can take the helm... and this is what they're sinking money into?  🤣

Well, if they knew what to sink money into, they wouldn't be having those problems.

9 hours ago, M'Kyuun said:

Is it just me, or does the car mode give off a Fisher Price Batmobile vibe? I wish it was Batman instead of Sonic as I'd likely get a copy.

The car is based heavily on the one Sonic drives in the Sonic & All-Stars racing game trilogy.

Miles "Tails" Prowers' airplane prop should stick out his butt. I'm just sayin'.

13 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

Thanks for confirming that Seto. I admit that it does kind of put me off that Earth would want to retain the edge when it comes to fighters (not wanting the colonies to have as advanced tech as they do), but I can see where it would be necessary in case of rebellion or such.

It isn't too different from real-world fighter jets in that regard. The countries that develop them keep the best stuff for themselves. Just ask anyone in NATO whose flag has less than 50 stars what it feels like to fly an F-22.

And it makes sense, given the transition from "Earth runs the galaxy" to "the colonies are more or less independent states". While the Sol system is still at the forefront of development and has more resources to work with, the colonies are more allied countries than they are part of one big happy expanded Earth. Occasionally the colonies go to war with each other, and someone wants to make darn sure they don't get ideas about trying that nonsense with the motherland.

13 hours ago, F-ZeroOne said:

I saw that video the other day. What got me the most was the beginning, when game boxes came with stuff! (might be a bit different for most of you folks, I know you had your Apple IIs  and things but the general impression I get is the NES is kind of the King of Retro for you; in the UK home computers held on for longer as a gaming platform; it was really the Mega Drive - Sega Genesis - that kicked off consoles here [1] whereas "big box" computer titles stuck around for some time).

[1] Simplifying, the Sega Master System for example was popular here before that for example.

To clarify, the "retro gaming experience" in the US was mostly "computers are for nerds".

Most people just didn't have home video games between the time they liquidated the Ataris, Colecos, and Intellivisions and the time Nintendo rose.

11 hours ago, no3Ljm said:

That's probably more of a Takara/Hasbro thing. 

Other entries in the modern Chogokin line suggest otherwise. They've even released a Rubix Cube that turns into a robot. Heck, they released a toy of the Chogokin logo that turns into a robot.

Minor tweaks to greatly improve a toy:

So I was kinda ADDing and grabbed a random nearby toy robot to flip parts around on. Laid my hands on a Ratchet van. I couldn't remember which one, the internet says it was from the Bumblebee movie.

What I do remember is he's been in the ambulance-esque mode almost since I got him because the humanoid form  is kinda short and dumpy. And he came with an eff-off huge cannon that looks like it belongs to Megatron. And that's still true today, though my memory is harsher on these proportions than my eye, but the gun's still ridiculous... but there's this purple car I don't remember the name of with a neato pistol that kinda looks like some sort of cybertronic multitool. Swap the two weapons around and now Ratchet looks like a doctor and random purple Car-tron looks dangerous.

Edit: Ehh, my camera didn't pick up the details on the hand-tool. To my eye, it looks like some sorta combination scanner/knife/welding laser.
Even if it reads as a gun, it isn't a GIANT gun. It's actually kinda tiny, by the standards of the franchise. So at worst, it looks like an emergency sidearm. Ideally it looks like he's carrying a sci-fi medical tool. Either way, it's more appropriate to a medic.

5 hours ago, M'Kyuun said:

Got my copy of Agent Knight today (earlier than projected, thank you very much, Amazon Prime) and I cannot get the central bit of his hood, which folds inwards similar to the ER Datsun design, to snap into place within the grey part of his abdomen.

Yeah, I dug up some videos after having similar issues. It just takes a terrifying amount of force.

There's a visual tell that the manual TRIES to call out, but without using words it is often hard to tell WTF these illustrations mean. The plate that flips down in his stomach area mates into a cubby in the gray part, and there is  tab at the bottom that is supposed to secure that plate. There's a gap along the bottom of that plate that disappears once the chest is fully engaged and the tabs on the black and gray pieces interlock.