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Chronocidal

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  1. Chronocidal
    Not a single cell.. a "positronic neuron", if the comments I've read are to be taken as reliable. Yes, they grew a computer by copy-pasting a portion of the hard drive. Far as the tone of the show goes though.. The thread I'm hearing from various directions is that people are getting tired of seeing their escapist fiction portraying a better, more hopeful future get shat on left and right with the modern day real world issues they are trying to escape from in the first place. People like the idea that we can do better. Why do they think the original show did so well in the middle of Vietnam and the Cold War?
  2. Chronocidal
    I'd totally aim for three VF-1Ds as well, just for the variety of display options. Course, then I'd feel the need to track down a 1/48 regult... Actually, I wonder.. how tall would a Zentraedi grunt be in 1/48? Might be able to get away with using a standard 8-to-12-inch figure.
  3. Chronocidal
    I always thought Rey would have been perfect using something like the lightsaber/staff combo you see used in some of the cinematic sequences for The Old Republic (or one of its expansions, I believe). However, I can safely say my biggest and most overwhelming disappointment in the fact that we didn't get to see that movie is the fact that we got cheated out of Luke becoming Kylo's Ghost Nappa. All character destruction from TLJ aside, Mark could have had a freaking blast playing that part, and it hurts me deeply that he was denied that opportunity.
  4. Chronocidal
    See, while there is some truth to this (because the Trek universe is such a fifty theme pileup as to be nearly unmanageable) , it's also extremely dismissive of some of the rather valid complaints against what they did to adjust the universe. This is also the central fallacy to the entire ideal of "appealing to a wider audience." When you take a property with a niche fanbase, and attempt to broaden the appeal to be not so niche, you take a big risk, because you're far more likely to come out at a net loss when you lose more original audience than you gain new. There really is no easy solution for this, but for all of the "niche" genre material we're getting made into blockbusters these days, you'd think someone would figure out that, yes, it is possible to make things like comic books, hard science fiction, and medieval fantasy appeal to a wider audience. You have to respect the material that inspired it, and build on it. What we keep getting instead is people deciding that building and improving on what came before is too hard, so they have to tear it down instead.
  5. Chronocidal
    I can't argue that it doesn't look nice, because it's beautiful, but while I know Bandai can engineer good toys, I cannot say that engineering was applied here in some ways. What Bandai did not account for (as it has failed to do in soooo many of their Macross chogokins) is that things become massively unwieldy when you start stacking on the assorted add-on parts. I'm not going to say this is nearly as bad as some cases (I don't think anything will ever top the VF-31 armor packs for their over-the-top five-handed nature), but they made a few fairly clear missteps in their design of the base DX VF-1. Spoilered for my tendency to go on long diatribes about mechanical design. Bottom line, the DX's heavy weight actually works against it in swooshability, because it just doesn't feel stable in your hand. The way the legs and arms and backpack wobble around and don't lock in any particular position just means these will be staying as static displays, while my old Yamatos will be what I actually find myself fiddling with on a regular basis.
  6. Chronocidal
    This would be easier to swallow if you didn't have to pay for it before you could judge it for yourself. I know there are ways around this, but the licensing/funding mess surrounding CBS All Access is one of the biggest factors driving me away from supporting it, completely independent of whether the content is good or bad. Whether it winds up good or bad, I don't see a reason to sign up for an entirely new streaming service just for one show, when odds are it will actually be cheaper to buy the entire season on dvd after it's done airing.
  7. Chronocidal
    I didn't mean the militia fleet.. I meant Kylo finding his way back. My bigger concern for the larger fleet was that they showed Kylo dodging and weaving through the nebula as if every maneuver was manually guided by the wayfinder, with his fighter barely fitting. Then they did it in the Tantive...V... then they managed to thread that needle using every massive ship they had any stock footage of, including Mon Calamari cruisers that looked like copy-pasted footage of Home One. Or maybe, as some have suggested, once they had they location, they could just go around?
  8. Chronocidal
    Urgh.. picked up a pair of strike packs I ordered after my original NY order, because I wanted more.. and of course they had them in-hand already, and arrived in 3 days. I'm utterly convinced that Bandai is absolutely terrified of introducing any sort of solid latching or locking mechanism in the VF-1. Everything just kind of.. floats. It holds together.. but nothing is solid in the slightest, and those press-fit pegs generally do nothing. I would have thought Bandai was smart enough to realize that the smooth tabs that hold everything so well on the HMRs wouldn't be enough to hold up something with roughly 8x the mass and volume. Guess not. Not going to say they don't look good (though, yes, the gun is honking massive), but yeah, in all the ways the Yamato design feels playable, this one feels like it is meant for display.
  9. Chronocidal
    Paid for by the studios and owners, not the consumers... unless you count indirect forms of consumer backing, like the ad revenue generated by people clicking whatever headline happens to pop up in their face. It's probably at least a little ridiculous to consider, but a part of me wonders if we've reached a point where even negative press can wind up turning a profit, just from the associated advertising revenue.
  10. Chronocidal
    I could see them mirroring the HMR releases actually, and releasing just Milia's as a TWE bundle (or valk and packs separately), but if we get a copy of the HMR paint schemes, I might pass. They have already displayed the TV-style arm packs though, so they're at least aware of the difference.
  11. Chronocidal
    I honestly don't know how Bandai would package M&M VF-1Js. On the one hand, they did make the HMRs as bundles... but that's also the only way they've released any HMR fastpacks. I would say that it would make sense to bundle them with the DX VF-1s, since they are individualized colors... except then I just look at how we had individualized packs for every single VF-25 and VF-31. Really.. I don't think they'll bundle them, just because it would bump up the price so much. I'll be happy to be proven wrong, I'm just not going to let myself start expecting Bandai to make sense.
  12. Chronocidal
    Fair, I've done a decent amount of that myself with Trek in general for a while now... actually most franchises I enjoy have gone through the picker over the past few years. I suppose my point is more that I'm sick of trying to cherry-pick, when all we seem to get is a continuous stream of grapefruits. I want there to be something worth cherry picking again, and I don't care how insistent the production teams are that grapefruits are better than cherries, because there is no way I'm going to attempt to bake myself a grapefruit pie. This is really where we're at, and it hearkens back to a rather scathing critique of the gaming industry I read not too long ago.. and the target wasn't the industry at all, it was consumers. The bottom line was, if you want people to stop making terrible content, you have to stop rewarding them by purchasing it. As long as money is flowing, they're going to stay the course. If people keep rewarding "adequate", that's the new bar they're going to shoot for, and they'll have no incentive to strive for anything better than that.
  13. Chronocidal
    Oh, good to know, I was thinking they would be more embedded in the mechanism. I'll have to do that for my interceptor too this weekend.
  14. Chronocidal
    Yeah, unfortunately I forgot that those are the itty-bitty versions, so they share more than usual, I think.
  15. Chronocidal
    They do have two distinct models, but they're all painted black, with gray solar panels, the opposite of the OT design, and even the lower-end models had extra greeblies added.
  16. Chronocidal
    But it wasn't a First Order Tie, and I know because that set off enough alarm bells in my head that I stared at it intensely on my viewing. It was genuine 100% OT paint-scheme, with no extra gobbledegook antennas, turrets, or tractor tires. Besides, do you honestly think JJ was going to sacrifice that opportunity to throw in another OT nostalgia zinger by not having a vintage Tie to park next to Luke's vintage X-Wing? Is it possible he found some fancy officer model with a hyperdrive? I guess? But at the same time, that still does nothing to explain how he got there without the wayfinder.
  17. Chronocidal
    Luke: "They followed us!" Obi-Wan: "No, it's a short-range fighter." Kylo Ren: "Screw the design limitations of your outdated technology, I have places to go!" Seriously. If we're stretching things far enough to permit there to be functional craft in the wreckage, he could at least pick a ship capable of making the trip. Like... I don't know.. a shuttle.. Between things like this, and the way hyperspace is treated in general, apparently the OT and PT are now regarded as apocryphal writing.
  18. Chronocidal
    Either way, Arcadia seem to be jumping on the weathered-PF bandwagon, which is where I'm personally jumping off.
  19. Chronocidal
    Nope, but that's not stopping Disney from threatening legal action against people making hand-crafted dolls. The x-wing arriving there via hyperdrive wasn't the main issue for me (though, how Rey pulled it off without an astromech to do the calclulations is a good question to ask.. does the navigation macguffin also function as a hyperspace nav computer?). I'm more curious how Luke preserved that x-wing in working condition underwater for so long.
  20. Chronocidal
    Really, it would take ripping apart the main hull, and removing the spring. After that you could probably replace the "launcher" portion of the wing strut with a long plastic or wooden shaft that extended deeper into the hull, and just secure it with a screw or something. As irritating as the springs are, having the wings remain removable is still a huge benefit for storage and transport.
  21. Chronocidal
    It pains me how accurate that sounds. As an odd side note.. I discovered something rather sad (and yet amusing) yesterday. I had to go by my local Wal-Mart for some household stuff, and dropped by the toy section out of curiosity. Outside of the usual LEGO assortment? There was no Star Wars section. Complete lack of anything. No vehicles, no figures, no lightsabers, no dolls, not even any of the themed HotWheels cars.
  22. Chronocidal
    The other problem with this situation is that it's getting close to a form of Stockholm syndrome. How many mental gymnastics do we have to perform, and how much of the story do we have to internally re-write before the show reaches a point that it fits into the universe it's intended to be a continuation of? Headcanons are fun, and good for filling in the blanks of an otherwise coherent universe. They should not be what the entire story depends on to function. How desperate for content does someone need to be to ignore all of the glaring inconsistencies in tone and theme, and just agree to pick up the burden of storytelling that the show's writers were incapable of lifting?
  23. Chronocidal
    These are precisely the sorts of questions they specifically do not want anyone to ask, because the only available answer is "Screw the rules, I have plot." None of the "navigation" sideplot in this movie made a lick of freaking sense. First they show Kylo having to dodge and weave through a nebulous mass of whatever that was on the way there, implying it's a very difficult route to take. Then they show him arriving toward Exegol, from within a distant nebula... that only occupies a tiny portion of an otherwise completely clear starfield, meaning the approach should have been clear from literally any other direction. Then after Rey recovers the navigational macguffin from his burning ship (how lucky for her that it wasn't damaged when she landed it on Ach-To, and set it on fire1), she flies a vintage x-wing that's been submerged in water for over a decade through the same course. And then we see the itty-bitty Resistance squad navigating the churning mass of space blood that Kylo's ship barely fit through.. with a sub-compact version of the Tantive IV?2 Then.. Kylo flies a vintage hyperdrive-less OT Tie Fighter out of the wreckage of the second Death Star.. on the same route, without the nav macguffin? Okayyyy... As a final middle finger to anyone paying attention. the movie ends with every ship in the known galaxy somehow making that same journey, and arriving at Exegol. Did they just happen to figure out that you could approach the planet from a direction not riddled with a nebulous mass of cloudy red plot cancer? ---- 1. Someone needs to explain how the nav macguffin happened to survive Rey lopping one wing off of Kylo's tie on Pasana... that was his fancy Tie fighter, right? So the macguffin he later crushes with his bare hand survived him totaling his ship in the desert.. or did he just not have it with him for the crash? How was he going to get back to report that Rey was dead once he killed her? Did he leave it in his spare fighter back on his destroyer? Did it also work like a tracking device to find the second macguffin in the wreckage on Endor, since he didn't have the knife? Or did he just ping her on Force Skype with a "Where you at?" gps locator? 2. Yes, the Corellian Corvette/CR-90/Blockade Runner model they used was like a soap-box derby cut-scale replica. They pulled a reverse JJ-Prise on it, and forgot that ship is like three times the length of the Falcon.
  24. Chronocidal
    Except I'm talking about individual instances within this trilogy, using a single ship. How many times did the Falcon bounce off of the landscape in TFA and come out without a scratch? And then it catches fire from over-using the hyperdrive (not from colliding with all the thousands of atmospheric obstacles they somehow managed not to hyperdrive directly into, after somehow missing all of the empty space between all of those planets that must have had astronomically microscopic distances between each other), but then the landing gear and hover capability break during landing after a perfectly functional takeoff? I get that they're playing fast and loose with physics like all science fiction does (yay structural intregrity fields), but if you're going to have the ship bouncing off of planets repeatedly with no damage, you have to give some reason when the ship suddenly doesn't work after a smooth flight.
  25. Chronocidal
    See, the "long time ago" bit doesn't work when you're dealing with a galactic civilization that has existed for thousands of years at a level of technology -far- beyond our reality. Safety codes, and all that are another issue, and those have always been laughably ignored by most of the movies to set up convenient ways for characters to fall to their doom, but I also tend to think that in a universe that has artificial gravity and tractor beams, you can easily make the case that there would be safety systems in place to catch people who fell accidentally. I'm not going to argue that that's not a tissue-paper thin excuse, but it's at least remotely plausible. When I think of all the characters and stormtroopers who died falling from things, I think the vast majority of them were already dead from being shot anyway. The issue I have with the Falcon breaking in this case is different though, in that there's no reason for the random crap happening to it. Yes, it's a fickle ship, but that botched landing came directly after successfully stealing it back from a First Order hangar where it was landed completely safely, had no apparent damage, and was not pursued. When did it break? Why can't it just hover like it did to rescue Rey? If you're saying the Falcon can't hover, it would have smashed into the planet like a flaming brick and killed everyone aboard, because the only way that ship flies in atmosphere in the first place is hovering.
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