Chronocidal
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Given how pseudo-military Xaos was in the first place, I think all bets are off as to where they took their guidance from. One thing I am curious about is whether any of those "UN MARINES" or "UN NAVY" (or whatever other designations someone came up with) markings on VF-1s in assorted publications have any official source backing up their existence, or if they're just people being nostalgic for real-world markings, and projecting real life military delineations onto the Macross universe that don't actually canonically exist. Just from a practicality standpoint, depending on which version of SWI you reference, there may not have been enough people left of any particular branch of the military to remain functionally independent. Over time, the separations would make sense again, but if you were stranded in space with a mixed crew combined from Air Force, Navy, and , Army, and Marine Corps, and not enough chain of command for any of them to function without incorporating the others, I'd think they might just pick one system to stick with, or incorporate aspects of all of the into a single new system, with ranks and roles being divided up to best represent the remaining command infrastructure. Add in the Zentraedi influence, and you'll probably wind up adapting to some similar structure that completely re-aligns the designated areas of influence of the existing services, into something less splintered. As air and space merge into a single continuous battlespace, the need for actual ships would probably dwindle to near nothing. Why would you need boats on the water when they can just fly around, and go into orbit? The difference between land and water blurs, and you're left with "planetary" operations. I'd think the idea of a separate Air Force and Navy would disappear, and just be replaced by one command structure, while the Army would take over planet-based operations. I honestly don't know what would happen with the Marines, unless they were absorbed into the Army, but then you run into the idea of their being separate space-focused and land-focused troops. You could probably make the argument that the Army was everything related to planetary defense, while Marines were focused on offensive planetary operations. The existing military branches have pretty specific divisions of influence right now, but a lot of them are dependent on historical areas of specialization that don't really need to exist past a certain technological level, and get very blurry once you start dealing in interstellar terms. -
Finally got around to reading the Russo "explanation"... yeah, that explained nothing. Spoiler-free version is that their "rule" for the movie universe completely undermines the idea that anything "had" to happen the way it did. They just arbitrarily decided to not follow their own rules to fit the plot as needed.
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- don cheadle
- jeremy renner
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Finally just saw this last night, and yeah... I loved it, but my nerd side is screaming about the gaps.
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All snark about money and funding and such aside, I think one of the fan videos posted recently gives a good example of how ludicrously broad the scope of this game really is. (Early/ugly character models notwithstanding )
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Yeeeeeeeeeesh... $60 for decals, and a $70 weapons pack? That's not nickel and diming, that's highway robbery.
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- max factory
- dyrl
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The problem is that the higher cost is way out of proportion to other Macross merchandise. Bandai gives everything at this level of product the PF marking treatment as a baseline. The standard SV-51 is already twice as much as the DX VF-1. Arcadia has basically resigned itself to selling higher cost items that Bandai just doesn't seem interested in making, and is reaching "garage kit" status for price points. I feel like they're kind of stuck charging these prices in order to stay profitable, because they really can't compete with Bandai's production infrastructure.
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Arcadia's development and production cycle is much slower than Yamato's was, for reasons we can only really guess at. They're much more cautious about overproduction than Yamato, so they're selling much more limited runs, and raising their prices accordingly, I think. They have to walk a fine line on the supply/demand chart, because many of their releases are the more niche designs. The SV-51s were all shelf-warmers the first time around, so the price of these reflects the lower production numbers, and sales expectations. I don't feel like the bootlegs are doing that much damage, because they're still more expensive than the original Yamato releases, and they're not the major competitor anymore. I think the bottom line here is that they know they can't compete with Bandai on really any level. Arcadia had to reduce the prices on their PF VF-1s, because they were completely out of scale with the Bandai DX. You can factor the fast packs and missiles in there too to a point, but at the end of the day, the early PF releases were almost twice what the Bandai DX listed for. Unless Bandai gouges to high heaven, odds are, the 1/48 standard DX VF-1, combined with TWE missiles and fast packs, would still have been cheaper than a 1/60 Arcadia PF VF-1 release. Arcadia just cannot compete with Bandai's ability to produce lots of items at a very rapid pace. I don't think Arcadia has nearly the same size product lineup as Yamato did either, which hurts their ability to produce products. Smaller company, less products, less employees, and much longer development cycles.
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Ok, but seriously, where's my freakin IDEAS Shuttle, huh? Not to detract from the sets themselves, they look pretty fun. Though, with the new larger cone elements they made for the Harry Potter castle spires, I'd think they could come up with something better than the classic inverted curve stack of nose bits on that rocket. The Lepin news is just kind of wacky though. I'm pretty shocked to see China lifting any portion of a finger against a knockoff manufacturer.
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The only thing all of the DLC nonsense in the past years has taught me is to wait until the "complete" collection of any game comes out years later, and bypass the pile of extra payments you have to make to get the stuff early. Fortunately, I can wait until sometime during the PS5 era to get this one, since they've mentioned they're keeping PS4 games playable on it. I'm probably going to bypass the PS4 entirely due to this.
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The chest plate on the VF-1D is unique to that design, so it won't be interchangeable with any of the other VF-1s, sadly.
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Honestly, if you can see the die-cast, they're doing a terrible job. It should be hidden internally, so you don't wind up with paint scraping off everywhere. I'm not really sold on the elbow joint, and how that's suppose to be better though.. probably one of the uglier joints I've seen on a mech. But eh.. no harm in putting an order in at HLJ. Not sure if I'll keep it, but we'll find out.
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- macross zero ivanov
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Just picked a pair of VF-1Ds up from the post office, messed with one a bit. That head transformation into fighter was a bit hairy, I had to snap the hip bar under the head before I even connected the chest and backplates. Looks good otherwise though, and I'm glad to see they actually included the normal fighter mode stand adapter this time. Started work on some hardpoints to adapt.. not sure if I'll go ahead with just gluing these onto the underside of the wings, or painting them first. I'm curious if glue would even hold them well enough.
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I feel like this needs labels, because I had to look through the rest of the thread to confirm which was which. It looks.. like it should? It's exactly what I'd expect, and it looks good, but at the same time... it's like the difference between a 2018 car and the 2019 model, feature-wise maybe? I can't say I'm underwhelmed exactly, but not excited either.. to quote a friend recently, "I'm just perfectly whelmed." That being said, I'll probably have room in my budget for one, and I'll probably get Nora's when it happens. That way I can pair this one with my Arcadia VF-0S, and the Nora with my VF-0D, and leave my old Yammies paired up with each other. What I really want is a nice 1/60 F-14B++ for Nora to shoot down.
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STAR WARS Merchandise Episode - 2
Chronocidal replied to Black Valkyrie's topic in Anime or Science Fiction
If that's actually their gameplan, I hope it doesn't backfire spectacularly from how insanely tiny the "affordable" kits are. How many people who actually would shell out spectacular amounts of money for a centerpiece display kit are completely passing on these because they're too small to even see amongst their other display pieces? It's a freaking super star destroyer. There's nothing remotely impressive or imposing about a 7.5 inch arrowhead. It'll be dwarfed by even the A-wing kits I've built, because of how long and skinny it is. I would want something that substantial in the Star Wars universe to have some presence.. A 1/144 Falcon is still a nice size in-hand. The fighters in that scale are reasonable for displaying alongside it, but they're quickly driving these down from the category of "display model" and we're landing on "knick-knack." Great if you want a ton of little bitty things to decorate your office workspace with, but absolutely useless if you're after something to actually display. I know empty space is at something of a premium in Japan, but things like that 4-inch Tantive IV and this kit feel like an insult to the subject matter. -
Here's a wild idea.. why can't anyone finish a game before it's released anymore? Turn everything into a subscription model for non-stop cashflow.. yeesh.
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A good chunk of this is probably because the vast majority of kids watching Robotech never had any clue that DYRL even existed. I should probably be getting a pair of these by the end of this week, so I'm debating different potential methods to get some hardpoints on the wings. I've considered making a wing to get 3D printed copies of, but I'm also curious if I could just glue some drilled-out sprue nubs under the wings. I might even have some nearly-matching tan sprue saved somewhere in my stash.
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The VT-1 is a dedicated trainer, like a T-38. The VF-1D is more akin to a two-seat combat-ready version, like an F-5F. And either way, just because an aircraft is a dedicated trainer variant, it should still be completely weapons capable. How else are pilots going to learn weapons employment? Either way, it's a stupid way for Bandai to cheapen out. I love how they consistently fall back on "screen accuracy" as a way to excuse skimping on what other manufacturers would call a standard feature. Looks like I'm going to have to make some spare wings.
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I think whatever HG has had in its pipe for the past couple of decades has been well and thoroughly smoked.
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I mean, it's entirely fitting. We already re-film everything every few years or so. Why should the Macross universe be any different?
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I want to say 90% of ST:IV gets a temporal pass because it's just so entertaining. I never understood why anyone assumed the antique glasses require any sort of paradox though. Kirk joked about them being a gift again in the future, but that doesn't mean he would be the recipient of them a second time, or that they would even survive to that point in time. The timeline might not be entirely linear, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have a fixed starting and ending point.
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If anything, the events in Delta made me think that the Ai Oboete Imasu Ka was very likely used in the actual war, just from the effects it had... though again, this is assuming Delta isn't just another dramatization of actual events, and they just used the song as a nostalgia hook. Ignoring for the moment the idea that it seemed the Protoculture spoke Japanese for the first line, the rest of the song Mikumo sang was entirely different, and the implications for the song itself are that the first line of the song must have sounded like some sort of "ATTENTION: ORDERS INCOMING!" message for the Zentraedi. They keep hinting that the Protoculture lived and breathed music, so sung battle commands would be entirely fitting. In the meta sense, of being "in-universe" though.. let's be real here. None of the songs we've ever heard in any Macross series would be the "actual" song that stopped the war. If it actually had that much of an impact on the Zentraedi population, the song itself would have to be heavily guarded information. You don't just go broadcasting weaponized music on the radio any more than you would broadcast recipes for enriched plutonium on the Discovery channel. Frankly speaking.. the evolution of the events of SWI sound fairly realistic, as if new things were revealed over time. Consider the idea that Minmay was an actual singer recruited to sing a "song" unearthed from the databanks in the SDF-1, or from the Protoculture city. She's not going to be performing on a stage during battle, because that's ridiculous. They're either going to record her voice and weaponize the broadcast, or broadcast it through a tightly focused transmission directly at the enemy fleet, while she sings in a secure environment. Now, what headline would that give you? "Lynn Minmay's singing turned the tide of the battle!" Obviously, the mental image is her singing from the bridge while the ship charges into battle. So that's what the SDFM series depicted. By the time DYRL comes along, it's been leaked to the public that "Oh, yeah, she was actually singing some secret song unearthed from Protoculture history." The producers go, "Score! Minmay, we've got a new single for you to record!" So they make up the story about putting human words to the alien music, and write a new song that fits, because there's no way the actual broadcast is ever going to be declassified. I'd say the odds are pretty good that whatever "song" actually won the war may have been a garbled mess of tones more akin to the communication scene from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Minmay just happened to have the vocal range to pull it off. We've just never seen the actual events, because every Macross series is an in-universe dramatization. That's just my theorizing on the whole "there is no canon" thing though. Series-wise though.. I think in-universe, SDFM and DYRL essentially are similar to, respectively, Band of Brothers, and Saving Private Ryan. One is a serial dramatization of the period surrounding the war, while the other is a more focused one-shot about events near the end. Also, the idea of there being different versions of DYRL make perfect sense in today's creative environment. Obviously, the scenes not seen in the DYRL movie came from a Directors Cut, or a later reboot.
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Hah.. someone been watching Fight Club too often. Agreed about spoilers in general though. Seeing a clip from the end of a movie tends to make me more excited to see how we got there than anything else. Even knowing ahead of time who lives or dies might not bother me so much, because it lowers the stress level during viewing, and lets me focus on enjoying the story, rather than worrying if this or that character is going to live.
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Oh, I know, I'm just saying it's entirely possible her personal life would pull a 180 in the weeks after the whales were released in the unaltered timeline. It's entirely possible she met the man of her dreams in the next few days, and built a massive family that would have all poofed due to her going into the future. It's also equally as likely that she could have been distracted by the whales being released early, and walked in front of a bus on the way home, had she not gone to find Kirk instead. We really just don't know, and they never addressed it. Didn't have time to watch both, but that second youtube vid was a whole nother level of "what", though. Like.. what even? I had to peel my eyebrows off the ceiling.
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Ahhh, the Cheerio of Time. It's been a long time, but I think I do remember reading Imzadi. I think I shuffled through the Riker/Troi material, but the temporal murder mystery angle was pretty interesting. That, and I remember getting a few good laughs over Barclay having a series of aneurisms over seeing multiple copies of Data running around, while carrying the head of one of them and conversing with it about temporal mechanics. Or something. Like I said, it was a long time ago. One thing that still bothers me to this day however.. When they ripped Gillian Taylor, the whale specialist, out of the 80s, did anyone consider that they were wiping out any future descendants she would have had? Granted, small price to pay for saving the planet in the grand scheme of things, but would have been interesting to return to the future and discover that a whole bunch of people they used to know suddenly never existed.
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Only downside there is that the PF cockpit might have more markings than the original Yammie, but the VE-1 already had more than most other Yamato releases, so it might not be that different. I think it should at least still have the modex and standard cockpit markings (triangles, rescue markings, etc).