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Chronocidal

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  1. Chronocidal
    So.... the pit of similarities just gets deeper. Disney just picked their "Picard."
  2. Chronocidal
    For what it's worth, I would qualify it being "a brand new mold in nearly the exact same shape as the old one." Unlike things like the VF-1 and YF-19, the Macross Zero designs were always computer generated to specific proportions, so there's never been any question of how they're shaped. The differences we're going to see will be kind of like going between different generations of a model kit of the same aircraft. More refined detail, a few more features or options, etc. I think the joints will be a little sturdier and more flexible, and I think they added more moving parts, like the lift fan cover and canards.
  3. Chronocidal
    Oh they absolutely took great joy in being dismissive of any effort the Rebels could make at taking them down. They did seem to learn at least a smidge by ESB, but I think a good deal of the hubris on parade was due to Tarkin and the Emperor enjoying toying with the Rebellion, and teasing them out to defeat them in as spectacular a manner as possible. On the other hand, now I'm curious. What would have happened if they used the Death Star on the gas giant?
  4. Chronocidal
    Which, they still seem to forget every other issue, because they keep flip flopping on designs.
  5. Chronocidal
    How long did it take them to fix the chest strip angle? I'd give them at least that long. So that should be... what, about another thirty years? I really would not be at all surprised if they use that as a selling point to re-issue every valk a decade from now though. So long as they keep clinging to that old school Chunky NostalgiaTM, I honestly have zero expectations for them to ever care about that level of aircraft-related detail.
  6. Chronocidal
    Fair, though I think the severity only became clear as a result of the details in Rogue One. Ignoring that for the moment, the warning he received in ANH always felt like a precautionary warning of "Oh, they're actually targeting something that's distantly connected to a critical system." He was warned of the possibility that the Rebels might be able to find a weakness, not that they might have been informed about a known vulnerability. It has been a while since I watched Rogue One again though, so this is as good a reason as any to review that. I forget, was it Krennick that told him about the flaw built into the reactor? If that was the case, given the circumstances of Tarkin's takeover of the project, I actually wouldn't be surprised if Tarkin dismissed that as sour grapes, assuming Krennick was just fishing for some excuse to make Tarkin think he was indispensable.
  7. Chronocidal
    I know things changed a little conceptually from the details given in Rogue One, but I really don't think Tarkin had any reason to suspect there was any chance that anything could go wrong with the station. Was he blinded by confidence? Absolutely, but then, when you get in your car to drive, do you worry that a random flying squirrel is going to get jammed into your radiator and plug a coolant line, causing your engine to catch fire? From what I recall, it wasn't actually even Tarkin who ordered any fighters launched at all. I think the only fighters that launched were the ones under Vader's direct command, from his own destroyer. That may have been an EU-ism, but it's what's stuck in my mind for some time.
  8. Chronocidal
    It's worse than that. They lived because the First Order didn't have the tactical capacity to win a game of "Connect Two." They fired on the empty base, instead of the ship everyone was escaping on. By all rights, the movie could have ended in the first five minutes as the Resistance cruiser evaporated in orbit. The worst part about that? Plus or minus a few characters, we still wound up in almost that exact same freakin' place after two hours of the most boring chase scene in cinematic history. Everyone in that movie was drowning in their own stupidity. "Watch as the fighters of the Resistance give everything they have in a desperate struggle to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory!" Seriously. If all the important characters had been the last to land on the cruiser, with the potential to still escape in whatever smaller shuttle they were on, you could literally delete everything between the evacuation and the fight at the old base, and lose absolutely nothing, while making the situation actually feel dire, instead of being poetic justice for the idiots who caused it.
  9. Chronocidal
    Yeahh.. I've never walked out of a movie wishing so hard that some of the main "heroes" had died from a sudden fatal application of karmic blunt trauma. In TFA's case, I understand why people like it, and I can't blame them, because it was still fun, even if the plot was full of craters. My issue isn't that it was a carbon copy so much that it was a cheap, flimsy, and bad-quality carbon copy that made no attempt to either hide or resolve the loose ends that left the plot feeling completely incoherent. Stuff didn't happen because it made sense, it happened purely because the plot had to visit all those famous ANH landmarks on the nostalgia tour.
  10. Chronocidal
    That's all kinds of awesome and encouraging, really. I hope the Air Force has the wherewithal to drum up a true replacement by then. Honestly, for some aircraft, I don't see why a complete replacement is even necessary. Obviously, combat aircraft do need upgrades and enhancements to keep them relevant, but when you have a tried and true design, I often wonder whether it would be viable to open production lines to produce upgraded copies of older designs. I imagine a rather large issue is keeping the tooling intact, but I mean, look at the C-130. They're still cranking brand new variants of that plane out of the factories. When you have something that does the job well, sometimes it just makes sense to keep making them.
  11. Chronocidal
    Honestly, with how much assembly we tend to do, I think we should just be making printed wings with hardpoints already attached. Color matching is no joke though.
  12. Chronocidal
    I think at least some portion of the fanbase has developed a distaste for TFA retroactively, just from being associated with TLJ, or being associated with Disney's path with the franchise in general. Personally I hate how they just eschewed all pretense of making a stand-alone story, and gave you the movie equivalent of DLC in the form of novels that tried to pave over the landscape full of plot holes. At the core though, TFA is a paint-by-numbers photohop of the original trilogy, like a mashup of the individual movie posters that looks good at a distance. If you get up close, you start to see the problems, like the shadows and lighting that come from different directions, or the random portion where people are wearing concept-art versions of clothing, or the bit where they edited out someone's mechanical limb to avoid spoiling it. Is it a decent movie? Yeah, I'd say so, I enjoyed it. It had some great character moments, and was overall fun to watch. But for me personally, there were a lot of really ham-handed aspects that left me cringing from the get-go, and they're by and large storytelling issues. It just wasn't a good story, because it was sloppily constructed on what I would consider to be a pile of really flimsy pretenses. They couldn't decide on whether something should change, or just stay the same, and in the end it didn't really do anything but rehash a bunch of things we'd already seen before, in even less believable ways. TLJ just took the smoking jalopy and Mythbustered it by strapping a hyperdrive to it before suicide jumping it into a smoking crater in the middle of the franchise.
  13. Chronocidal
    Honestly, we just need re-designed shields that include the rotation joint necessary to get the weapons facing forward. The pylons should be mounted directly on the shields. How Bandai managed to screw that up is just one more mystery for the ages.
  14. Chronocidal
    The younger cast is just par for the course, yes. What does stink of this actually having some merit is exactly how "25% different" all of the designs come off as looking, when you think of it from that direction. The designs of the prequels were all unique, some more radically than others, but they still managed to show a design lineage by sharing features. A hefty chunk of stuff in the sequels can't be called an original design so much as a stylistic tweak of something that already existed.. more a "this year's model" approach to classic designs.
  15. Chronocidal
    Hm... obviously can be taken with a few billion grains of salt.. but the similarities might run even deeper than I first thought. Suddenly Threepio's red arm makes a lot of really annoying sense. Does not surprise me in the slightest about the merchandise kerfuffle though.
  16. Chronocidal
    I'd say even half an ass is being too generous there. I don't want to dig too deep into the Trek technobabbleverse, but unless they managed to throw a quantum slipstream drive into the JJ-Prise, nothing in that movie was going to work the way it did. I know they kind of threw temporal contamination to the wind there, but that would require Spock single-handedly advancing TOS-era technology to post-Voyager levels (meaning the tech future Janeway hijacked to bring Voyager home early). Even aside from the tech levels though... no amount of 'splaining is going to excuse the fact that Spock watched his homeworld dissolve into a black hole with his naked eyes, from a moon in orbit of that same planet. Star Wars as a rule has pretty much always operated at the speed of the plot, and hyperdrive was always kind of assumed to be much faster than the actual speed of light, but until TFA, I don't think we never saw a hyperspace jump without a scene cut. I don't recall if we saw that in the prequels, since I haven't watched them in a while, but the use of scene transitions at the start and end of hyperspace jumps (or even just long travel periods like in ESB) did a nice job of leaving you with a very vague sense of how long travel was actually taking. It just worked well cinematically, even if it didn't hold up under intense scrutiny. Rey jumping the Falcon at the end of TFA blew that out of the water, and made the entire "we don't know where Luke is" plot feel even more meaningless than it already did. Seriously.. if we make the Evel Knievel-esque leap of logic that somehow that piece of space was missing from every available starmap known to everyone in the galaxy, did it never occur to anyone to look in that big empty space?? A little subtlety with the map discussions would have gone a long way to making it look not-ridiculous, but they had to go 500 lb gorilla-fisted with the visuals. Of all the comparisons to make, AotC already did that plot, and managed to not make it look stupid, when Obi Wan went looking for Kamino, and found it was deleted from the Jedi Temple databanks. When the prequels did something better and more sensibly than your movie, you need to look deep inside yourself and figure out where you went wrong.
  17. Chronocidal
    Ok, sure, but there's a not-insignificant difference between a ship that's "trackable," and one that blasts "I'M RIGHT HERE COME GET ME" on every available broadcast frequency whenever it's up and running. Of all the weird things to think they messed up in the new movies, it's that somehow, they managed to make space feel tiny.* *Yes, I know JJ isn't directly responsible, but it's the exact same issue that plagued the Star Trek reboot. No concept of scale, every planet was within a quick 5-minute warp distance, and they made the entire universe feel like it was the size of a neighborhood block. If Voyager ever gets ported to the Kelvinverse, they'll be home within a day.
  18. Chronocidal
    Heheh.. yeah, it's mostly just my thought that if you take the key points of the plot, separate from any actual dialogue or acting, the story mostly flows pretty well. I can't say that about the new trilogy in even the slightest sense. Nothing about the story flows from one point to the next with any coherence, and every character seems to be stumbling their way through the plot with their pants over their head. Actually.. I just realized something about TFA that has bugged me for a while, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. The entire movie depends on the incomprehensible coincidence that Han just happened to be floating around at the right time and place to yank the Falcon into his cargo bay. That's like randomly stepping on a needle on a planet covered in haystacks, and it painfully reminds me of the opening scenes of Star Trek Nemesis, where the crew just happens to suddenly detect another copy of Data somewhere in space. If they had actually written him to be looking for the Falcon at the time, it would have at least made passable sense. But no.. he was in the middle of transporting a bunch of tentacle monsters in search of a doujinshi.
  19. Chronocidal
    So, I don't have any idea why, but I know somewhere I've got what I think is a Matchbox "Blue Thunder"... painted in firefighting markings. Edit: Apparently there was a whole line of these? Funny, they don't list the fire one though. http://diecast.spiraln.com/helicopters/mb_missionchopper/index.html
  20. Chronocidal
    Say whatever you will about the acting in the prequels, or the quality of the films themselves, but they at least told a mostly compelling and coherent story. The new trilogy flipped that on its head, and now we have an amazing performance of someone's terrible Star Wars fanfic.
  21. Chronocidal
    I mean, if that's the way they want to go, fine, but that might be literally the most depressing storyline possible. Literally having the hero go into a crippling depression, and crawling into a cave to die?
  22. Chronocidal

    Bandai DX VF-31

    Chronocidal replied to UN Spacy's topic in Toys

    Ah, sadly not exactly spares in the usual sense, I just mean that since Arad came with them, I'll have an extra set to load Chuck with when I put the armor on Arad's.
  23. Chronocidal
    Yeaaaaahhh... the entire plotline of this new trilogy never made sense to begin with, and Hamill pretty much nailed it when he said he was playing "Jake Skywalker." I feel like we've been getting an alternate timeline reboot of the franchise that they sneaked in under our noses.
  24. Chronocidal
    Pfft. I hate that idea with every fiber of my being, but it would definitely explain the "connection" she felt to the saber in TFA, and how she flashed back to that exact time. If they can't come up with something better than that, they need to all just flat out give up, and just let Timothy Zahn write the rest of their movies. They lifted enough ideas from him already.
  25. Chronocidal
    He's got probably 90% of my favorite LEGO aircraft in his portolio. Amazing renditions, especially his larger scale ones. I've always been astounded that enough bricks in the right shapes and colors even exist to do what he does.
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