F-ZeroOne

People don't swear in space, of if they do, only in made up words like "Drokk!" and "Smeg!".

Ehhhmmm... Have you ever looked up "Smeg?" It's definitely not made up... and it's definitely not a good word. <_<

The scientist who knows everything about the artifact will be female, and very very hot.

All bases in far flung reaches of the Universe, and military spaceships on lonely patrol duty on the galactic rim will be equipped with incredibly sexy computer voices and/or nude female hologram computer avatars.

In the future, spacesuits will fit more snugly than your skin.

And those are problems?

Vostok 7

I'm afraid I haven't enquired into the origins of "S**g*, I always assumed it was made up because I haven't heard it anywhere else. I'm a bit afraid to investigate now...!

Its a problem having an incredibly sexy computer voice on a space ship because they usually always seem to have pumped up ultra-male only crews who have probably forgotten what a woman looks like. It must be like slow torture for them!

( husky PC Voice ) "Self destruct system activated. You have 60 seconds to abandon ship or the last remainng humans will be wiped out forever."

( male voice ) "So, er, are you free tonight?"

( BOOM! )

Edit: something didn't come out right first time...

Oh damn those are good ones

Thanks! The one about computer avatars was inspired by recently playing Halo. Will try and think of some more, but brain hurts right now...

Nope, there were never any Gekiganger anime, oustside of what you see in Nadesco.

Graham

Sorry, Graham, but there is in fact a Gekiganger III movie version, of a kind. Exactly what its status is, I'm not sure ( I think a standalone OAV, or possibly an extra with a Japanese release of Nadesico ). Its short, about 30 minutes. I saw it at an anime convention in England a few years ago. It consists of mainly clip footage from the Nadesico TV series with some new animation; the in-joke is that its the Nadesico crew watching a showing of the Gekiganger movie with clip footage and new animation... er... my head hurts...!

Edit: added "of a kind" comment, as in fairness it is arguable whether the GIII movie stands on its won as a GIII anime...

Is that a Nozomi ( Japanese bullet train ) Transformer, and if so, whats it called?

Aliens want our women! ( Arthur C. Clarke once argued that various visiting alien monsters should be allowed to shamble off with their beloved on the grounds of scienitific invetsigation - what, exactly, does a five armed bug eyed Bling want with a member of a different species who doesn't even have an attractive Z*^Tzkk, anyway? )

Swords - energy or otherwise - beat guns. Always.

All non-Japanese giant robot movies suck to one degree or another.

There is only ever "one" or a "few" good guy ship, and an uncountable number of bad guy ships. The good guy ship always wins ( just where were the other two thousand-odd TIE fighters during that trench run, anyway? )

DNA can be used to explain anything.

People don't swear in space, of if they do, only in made up words like "Drokk!" and "Smeg!".

The future will be dark. And raining.

The future will be bright white, and have a dome over it to keep out the rain.

Ancient knowledge & technology always beats modern knowledge & technology, no matter how advanced.

The scientist who knows everything about the artifact will be female, and very very hot.

All bases in far flung reaches of the Universe, and military spaceships on lonely patrol duty on the galactic rim will be equipped with incredibly sexy computer voices and/or nude female hologram computer avatars.

Alien fauna is always lethal.

In the future, spacesuits will fit more snugly than your skin.

How did I ever forget Reason? Ultima Ratio Regum!

An interest in guns is not exactly encouraged in the UK, and although I've got no interest in owning or firing one, I do have an interest in military history, and its kind of hard to avoid the subject in that...

Favourite real life weapons:

Broom-handle Mauser. I just love the way this thing looks; possibly the most stylish classic pistol - handgun doesn't seem the right term, somehow - made.

PIAT: Projector, Infantry, Anti-Tank. Quite possibly, the first and last spring-operated anti-tank weapon. Imagine being the Panzer commander who had to suffer the embarrassment of being knocked out by a spring-fired projectile... ( okay, it was a little bit more complicated than that, but while other countries were relying on rocket propelled anti-tank weapons, the British Army went back to the toybox and came up with a spring that required 200lbs of force to cock properly... )

Sci-fi:

The Lazy Gun. From the Iain M. Banks book Against A Dark Background. Difficult to describe out of context, but essentially, you never know what will happen when you pull the trigger. It might vapourize your opponent, nuke a city, bash someone in the head with a frying pan, or drop a safe on them...

Edit: forgot to mention: its possible to argue that a humble PIAT, fired by the right man at the right time, may have saved, or at least considerably, eased, the British invasion beaches at D-Day...

A few words I see come up during my browsing I have no clue about...

GODAIKIN ???

CHOGOKIN ???

POPY ???

VOTOM(s) ???

Are they name brands, series, or what???

Not sure about "Godakin", but as for the rest:

"Chogokin" (often shortened to "gokin") refers to toys with a high percentage of die-cast metal content, much beloved by collectors of vintage Japanese toys, who like hernias when they pick up their priizes. I believe the term originated with the grand-daddy of all piloted mecha anime, Mazinger Z, where it refers to a super strong metal alloy, and was later picked up as a marketing/collective term for high-metal percentage toys.

"Popy" was a very famous toy firm from the 70s that I believe was later "folded" back into Bandai. Known for some extremely fine toys.

VOTOMs - famous 80s anime series known for its realistic blocky mecha designs amd grim portrayal of future warfare. Very popular with modellers who like a real military feel.

Alen Yens Toybox DX site should be able to help you with these and many other terms:

http://www.toyboxdx.com/

Yes.

Really small text can look very slightly blurred, but believe me they're worth it, they are much superior to the Yamato stickers. The only downside is that they're not pre-cut, so a steady hand and several spare hours fiddling with scissors and a really sharp knife are required.

rewooh - "Claw game" machines are often referred to as "UFO Catcher" machines. They often have some very unique collectable items, but you can burn an awful lot of 100 yen coins trying to get them - it can be cheaper to go to a shop in Tokyo and buy the item in question...! (some Japanese people must make a fair living out of re-selling rare items to these shops! )

"Gashapon disease" is a term sometimes used to refer to bent or bendy material used in various toy lines; gashapon often have bent or bendy accessories ( swords, etc ) and the name is often applied to toys that aren't gashapon but have easily bent accessories - Gundam Mobile Suit in Action figures, for example.

It'll be a sad day to see birds flying without their pilots.

"And so ends the challenge... "

All I can say is, first hint of singing when they do the test flight, and I'll be digging my YF-19 straight out of storage...

I'm pretty sure that the original concept was an Osamu Tezuka idea. There was an anime version released in the UK a few years ago, "Ambassador Magma".

Him and half of Japan, to be fair...    ( when you travel about five hundred miles in a completely foreign country and meet three different people all of whom are Harry Potter fans, it kinda makes any argument about whether the books are any good rather redundant... )

There is a distinct difference between something being 'good' and something being 'popular'.

Just beacuse the masses like something, does not make it good. The Spice Girls & Britney Spears are two examples that spring to mind. But anyway, I digress, that is a discussion for another time.

Graham (not a Harry Potter fan).

I'm well aware of that, Graham, but I do think that the amount of publicity around the books does rather obscure the fact that they are, more or less, pretty good reads ( its also been pointed out that Britney Spears single "Hit me baby one more time!" is actually a pretty good song - by a British band called Travis, who did a slightly spoof cover version that has been remarked as sounding as if loneliness really is killing the singer... )

I'm not claiming that they're the greatest things ever written, but that doesn't make them bad either, and the impression I've got of J.K. Rowling is that she deserves at least some of her success. Also, we British do tend to be very hard on the successful, and I think its great that a British export has become so well known all over the World.

But, as you say, this isn't really the place and arguments like this do tend to go round and round in circles.

Maybe we should move on to wondering when the VF-0 Hoki no e Varible Broomstick will make an entrance in Macross Zero...

Edit: a further thought or two: perhaps anime fans more than others may appreciate the value of a story as a bridge between languages or cultures, as well. Rowlings England isn't the England I live in, just as the Japan of, say, Love! Hina isn't exactly the Japan I've visited. But a sense of the countries they're set in is there, and the generation of interest in other places hopefully works in two directions...

Him and half of Japan, to be fair... ( when you travel about five hundred miles in a completely foreign country and meet three different people all of whom are Harry Potter fans, it kinda makes any argument about whether the books are any good rather redundant... )

I can't wait to hear the radio chatter now!

"Skull One, Angels Twenty, vector three hundred, estimate bandits six million plus, over."

"Copy, Macross. Skull One to Skull flight, bandits at six o'clock high, climb at buster and engage. Tally Ho, and get Hikaru to put the kettle on, Emma, we'll be back in time for tea!"

Add another vote to Babylon 5.

"Its a Sunday, and I'm going for a drive."

Also Blakes 7 - there haven't been many SF shows that have had endings like that.

Anime-wise, Gainax do good endings. Nadia made me so happy I wanted to cry, and of course, Gunbuster.

Kimagure Orange Roads first movie conclusion to the love triangle actually hurts.

And also Maison Ikkoku the manga, because I never ever thought I'd see Rumiko Takahashi do that...!

Edit: moved KOR a little so people don't think I think its a Gainax show...

Good luck - Nintendo Europe have recently been coming down rather hard on UK importers, and I guess that might apply to exports in the other direction as well.

These may be of help:

https://www.anotherworld.co.uk/cgi-bin/awv2.pl

http://www.goblindirect.com/default.asp?KillKart=true

But if Mario asks, I didn't tell you... B)

F-ZeroOne, you live in Finland???

(or maybe Im just hallucinating that theres only two snakes in Finland, and only one is venomous, and theyre actually pretty rare because of their short time out of hibernation each year...)

-BEN-MAN-

Heh, good guess but no - I think I've dropped enough hints that I'm from the UK. Most of our wildlife is pretty harmless, at least in comparison to other countries. You'll notice that Steve Irwin has yet to do a programme here...

"And this little blighter is a common household pussycat, very common in England. Look how mean he gets when I stroke his fur the wrong way... "

( the lack of lethality among UK wildlife is probably why the UK had a Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals before it had a similar organisation for children, and even that hasn't got a Royal warrant...! )

One spider in Australia has caused a number of fatalties and it isn't even venomous...! It likes to live in cars, and has a habit of crawling out onto the windscreen when people are driving. The problem is that this spider is huge and people tend to react in a rather alarmed manner when the sun is being blocked out by an eight legged beastie... and swerve straight into the nearest immovable object...!

Kinda makes me glad I live in a country where the biggest spider is usually about th size of a penny and theres only one kind of poisionous snake, and thats not often encountered...

One quick web-search later...

Eep.

I'm gonna need a bigger gun...

while the white cropped delta with the famous blue, white, and red roundels is the TSR 2, arguably the greatest aircraft ever to be destroyed by political squabbling... 

That I did not know

but what I do know is that it is the same craft used in a new/recent japanese animation.

I dont know the name to this animation

but it was the other one alongside Macross Zero & Yukikaze at the panel at Hobby Expo

If I was to take a completely wild guess, its possible that animation is Firestorm, an anime series which originally had a degree of British involvement, which included Gerry "Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet, and please don't ask me about Space 1999" Anderson. I stress that is a complete guess, but seeing as the TSR-2 is quite an obscure aircraft relatively speaking... the TSR-2 was actually probably as close as anyone got to making a real Thunderbird-styled aircraft...!

( of course, we all know that Macross made the XB-70 Valkyrie quite famous - as did Zeta Gundam - and its always possible this unnamed new anime has some aviation nuts on the staff...! )

Edit: BTW, I think that spiders do a lot of good and largely unsung work in the ecological community. However, if something the size of my fist happens to be crawling across the floor, just pass me that Janes All The Worlds Variable Aircraft, will you...?!

Actually... some kind of spiders do have hive mentality. Though, they don't build hives like ants, they simply mark their territory.

Some thing size of your fist? Heh... in Amazon forest we get spiders the size of your upper body.

You can't scare me like that - I know that spiders can only reach a certain size because of the method they use for breathing (among other structual problems... )

Of course, if you were some kind of mad scientist, and tried to create some kind of... oh, I don't know... man-spider, then that might be suitably big and scary - wait, whats that scuttling sound behin - YEEEAAARRRGGGHHHHHHH!!!

Spiders definitely do get more film attention, but people should be more scared of giant ants - after all, I've rarely heard of spiders co-operating in real life, but ants do all the time... ( funnily enough, at least two spider movies have spiders acting more like ants than they do spiders... )

I believe Arthur C. Clarke once wrote a spoof SF short about a mad scientist who was teaching termites how to make fire...

Edit: BTW, I think that spiders do a lot of good and largely unsung work in the ecological community. However, if something the size of my fist happens to be crawling across the floor, just pass me that Janes All The Worlds Variable Aircraft, will you...?!

Excellent work, BlackAces!

The following image from your website caught my eye:

The plane in the left corner is actually a model of a real life, flying airplane (the "Proteus") made by Scaled Composites in Mojave, California. Scaled is headed up by none other than Burt Rutan, known for his "Voyager" trans-global aircraft, and who is a friend of a friend.

Scaled is currently working on a similar plane (), which serves as a launch vehicle for their experimental low-orbit spacecraft being developed for the <a href="http://www.xprize.org/">X-Prize competition.

The X-Prize contest seems like something straight out of a science fiction story, but it's real. I imagine that many of the folks here will appreciate the purposes/goals of this project. Give it a read!

If you like that, also check out my friend Peter's self-engineered and self built all-composite plane, <a href="http://www.melmoth2.com/">Melmoth2 here</a>. Melmoth2 recently graced the cover of Flying Magazine - some of you may have seen it.

Cheers!

Thank You very much for the kind comments

And thanks for the recommendations!

interesting!

Just for completeness sake, the small grey jet is an actual prototype technology demonstration plane thats been raising a few eyebrows ( I think its a Boeing product ), while the white cropped delta with the famous blue, white, and red roundels is the TSR 2, arguably the greatest aircraft ever to be destroyed by political squabbling...

3D CGI helps a lot, but even mega-budget films like Pearl Harbour often need close-up shots and the dilemma there is whether to make the 3D models match the authentic ones or what they've actually got available. In fact, when I saw one of the movie posters, I thought that the Japanese torpedo plane depicted looked a little strange - I later found out that some of the aircraft used were "pretend" Zeros and the like...!

( my all time favourite production story, though, is from when I visited Bletchley Park and the guide explained that the real mansion looks very different from the one in the film Enigma, because the producers felt that Bletchley Park didn't look enough like Bletchley Park! )

Gerwalker, there is a movie due out that will cover at least part of the Desert battles; its about that magician who helped the British Army with various camoflauge tricks and the like.

The war film I would most like to see would be a biography of the RAF reconnaissance pilot, Adrian Warburton ( sorry - make that Wing Commander Adrian Warburton, DSO & Bar, DFC & 2 Bars, US DFC ), whose remains were recently found in Germany and properly buried, finally solving a 60 year mystery...

A fairly common sentiment in the British press is that there should be more war films about British war stories...

I've long felt that an anime war anthology series would be an interesting idea. There would of course be some grumbling about Japanese animators being responsible for stories about American or British solidiers, for example, but I'd like to know where you'll find better animated flying sequences...!

The advantage animation would have would be that its a lot easier to use authentic equipment thats hard to find these days - just about every film featuring the Battle of Britain, for instance, has to make do with what aircraft are currently available; its not noticable for a general audience but for those who know what to look for, Mk. V or later Spitfires or a Merlin engined Bf-109 do tend to stick out in 1940...!