mechaninac

Okay, the miniseries is growing on me a bit. I guess I'm a purist with an open mind. The second episode was a little better than the first, but still way too slow in the first half. Now some observations: 1. I still miss the old show's "Chariot of the Gods" motif. It gave depth to the human cultures of the colonies and created an instant link to the lost 13th tribe. 2. As mentioned before, I too would have liked them to have kept the originals time and spatial measuring conventions. It was very original. 3. The president's character was much better on the second episode. I'm actually beginning to like her. The decision to abandon the slower ships to their fate was a tough one. My previous comment that she should have been spaced on an earlier post may have been premature. 4. I liked the "chick Boomer is a Cylon without knowing it" twist at the end. I must admit I didn't see that one coming. Now let's see what they do with it. Will the Cylons just flip the proverbial switch and she becomes evil like Talia Winters in B5; or will the unknowing sleeper agent be so enamored of humanity that she will become conflicted about where her loyalties lie. 5. I liked the use, reuse, minor updates of many of the civilian ships. It was a very welcomed tip of the hat to the original show. 6. I still think the new Baltar is lame. 7. WTF...Cylon femme fatale turns into Harvey the neuro-clone...no, wait, that was different show... 8. Still think Stabuck with boobs is just awfully lame. I don't mind a female butch character per se, but she should not be called Starbuck (name or call sign).

If I were to grade the show so far I'd have to give it a C+. The first hour was really bad, with few exceptions. The second half was much better. The Good: 1. The father-son rift. Apollo was a flat character in the original; this made him more interesting 2. The Cylon back-story. The "we should not play G*d" and "our own creations will come back to bite us in the a$$" angles are very standard sci-fi fodder; but they makes a bit more sense than an extinct reptilian race having created the Cylons in man's image. 3. The space flight physics. Enough said. 4. The Cylon raider IS a Cylon. I'm sure this was inspired by SW:TPM; which begs the question: if the Droid Fighters were Droids, shouldn't the Trade Federation tanks have been droids too, instead of piloted by droids? 5. The MK IIs were cool and, I'm not sure, I think I saw a MK I way in the back in the museum. 6. Missiles and Bullets. While the turbo-lasers were cool in the original series, it makes a lot more sense to shoot guided missiles at long range than to duke it out WWII style. 7. The Nuclear bombardment of Caprica, and the other colonies. The Bad: 1. That little tub Boomer was flying. 2. The Galactica itself was fugly as sin. 3. The Cylon femme fatale. Despite what the writers may say or think, the idea of human-like Cylons is not new. There was an episode of Galactica 1980 where two android Cylons and one Centurion crashed on Earth in an experimental craft during, conveniently, mardi-gras. It was lousy then...it's lousy now. 4. The Raptor was just plain ugly. It's good that the MK II will be the hero fighter of the show. 5. Retro tech. I understood where they were going with the notion of non-networked computers, manual valves, wired comms, et al. One Cylon compromised system won't compromise the whole works. But from a technological standpoint it make absolutely no sense that older systems would be less vulnerable to jamming and hacking then modern ones; whatever happened to redundant systems, emergency standbys, firewalls, etc.? 6. I thought the thunderclap effect of B5 PPG was hard to get used to. Those side arms were crap. The Ugly: 1. The new president of the 12 colonies. Give me a break. Anyone with a modicum of common sense would have overruled her decision to continue rescue operations in the face of impending attack. I agree with a previous statement: dump her out the nearest airlock; 43 down...bring on number 44. 2. Boomer is a girl! WTF! Granted that she was pretty hot and all (a lot easier on the eyes than the original Boomer). But if they had to have that character, why not just call her something else...like Hoshi Sato. 3. Baltar. They turned a cool, albeit two dimensional, villain into a boring self-pitying worm. 4. Starbuck. Every time he, she, IT was on screen I just felt like groaning. That was, by far, the worst case on PC rework since the computer airbrushing of guns into walkie-talkies in ET. Starbuck was one of, if not the, best characters of the original series; now Starbuck is just a cigar chomping butch.

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1/60 destroids by Yamato...that would be sweet.

Cobywan: Now that is some sweet work! You'd think it wouldn't be that problematic, but I know what you mean. I play around with LW whenever I have the chance and have tried using smooth shift to give uniform thickness to "skins" with complex curvatures and have gotten mixed results at best, and simply extruding the things results in varying thickness. That's where a solid modeler really shines: all you have to do is create your canopy shape out of surfaces and extrude it in to make it a shell, or if you create the shape as a solid all you need to do is tell the program to shell it for you with the thickness you want by selecting wish surfaces to remove and you're done; it actually takes less time to do it than it takes to explain it. As for creating canopy frames all that's necessary is for the frames to be offset outward or the glass areas to be offset inward, and the final part is one single piece. Here's an example of what I mean. The part has a uniform 1.5mm shell thickness. (You can also see my Ishforn chassis above; it is fully shelled at 1.25mm wall thickness at the moment).

Now for my humble contribution. A small break from the Orguss Ishkicks. May I present the Ishforn (quite a ways to go yet).

Aztek, Datterboy: I was only speaking from personal experience. Most meshes I've downloaded off the Net have been modeled with optimization and poly-count reduction in mind. Take a fighter's canopy for example: most people will create the outside shape, make the resulting polygons double-sided, and proceed to texture and/or assign material properties (extremely efficient, but the end result has no volume). The fact that you guys create everything as enclosed volumes speaks volumes to your dedication to realism (at the cost of increased polygons). Cobywan: Tooling out of wood and foam...I guess what you have in mind would me more akin to a solid resin kit then a styrene or hollow-cast one. That would definitely make things simpler. Brianw76: Stunning! Just stunning.

Now, there's an idea! What scale would you CNC into? 1/32? 1/24? And wouldn't you need enclosed volumes as opposed to double sided surfaces that only mimic shells? The reason I ask is that I work as a designer/engineer and utilize Pro Engineer (a high-end parametric solid/surface engineering application, for those who don't recognize the program) as my primary design tool and know that non-volumetric models are useless for Stereo Lithography unless you close all gaps either before-hand or in the 3D-Lightyear application used to prepare the STL files for construction, but this can cause unwanted patching because the program is only doing it's best guess at filling in the blanks (perhaps tool path vectoring requirements for CNC are not as stringent as those for SLA; please enlighten me). Regardless, this is a bold and fantastic idea, and would love to see it done. Only one word of warning: Beware of Harmony Gold...the pricks

Aztek, Rodovan....fantastic work!

I've never really noticed it on the show and would love to take credit for its design; alas, it is not an original. The commander version is an Orguss canon Gerwalk. I based my model off my original standard version Ishkick and Takatoku's toy of the mecha. I don't actualy own the thing, so all my model work was based from a couple of pictures I copied off an eBay auction (see bellow for the toy box).

And the rear 3/4:

And here is a "new" one: the commander version of the Ishkick: Front 3/4:

And the rear 3/4:

Whew! Modeling is all done on this baby, except the cockpit interion, but that can wait. Frontal 3/4 view:

MM, absofreakinlutely gorgeous.

Cool, I loved that series. Just like Stargate SG1, Farscape reveled in contemporary pop culture and Sci-Fi cliches. Bravo!

I saw a bit of a Galactica special on the upcoming miniseries on the Sci-Fi channel, and while I don't mind a retelling of the story I do not like the PC direction they've taken on one of my favorite characters from the series...THEY'VE MADE STARBUCK A WOMAN, DAMMIT! Starbuck was a womanizing, fast talking, cynical, arrogant, extremely loyal, hard-drinking gambler with an endearing child-like zest for adventure that made HIM a perfect counter-balance to Apollo's goodie-two-shoes persona. Now Starbuck is a Xena/Beca Valentine (Andromeda) clone. Other changes that are a bit jarring to a series fan: Baltar looks like a wuss (In the series, while Baltar was a bit 2 dimensional, he was a cool villain); Cylons were created by humans (Cylons got their name from the extinct reptilian race ,that revered the human form as the epitome on perfection, that created them ); the council knows about Earth and Adama knows where it is (Only Adama held the old legends as fact but only had a vague idea where to look for the decedents of the 13th tribe) The special effects are, not surprisingly, light years better than the original series, and the new Viper does look cool and instantly recognizable; but, as with many new shows and films based or related to older (60's, 70's, early 80's) sci-fi...cough-Star Wars-cough-Star Trek-cough...it lacks all of the charm or the original. I just had to vent...I feel much better now

The company that makes them is "EVA Models", or at least a version of it. Here is a link

Yes, there is a DYRL Roy pilot. The Strike VF-1S also icludes the ducting behind the intake (introduced in the VF-1A CF) that fills in that ugly a$$ gap in GERWALK mode that is so prominent on the first 3 1/60 releases. Other than that, as mentioned before, it has all the proper attachment holes and slots for the armor bits.

Thanks for the compliment; it's always encouraging when others appreciate your work. As for plans...I don't really have any. The entire model you see is a parametric Pro Engineer assembly, and pretty much incompatible with any other software (I think Solidworks is an exception) unless I convert it to a "dumb" solid such as STEP or IGES formats, or export it to OBJ format for CGI applications; this is what I may eventually do. However, Pro E's OBJ converter leaves much to be desired as it creates some very funky surface triangulations, and requires extensive downstream clean-up to make the file an optimized mesh; if I ever do this I may yet release the model publicly. Another idea I was contemplating was to export an STL and make an SLA model of the thing in something like 1/35th scale; but getting free time and/or space on the company's machine is a difficult proposition at best. Sergio PS.: Your pilot looks great, but IMO the helmet visor should be larger towards the bottom. Other than that it's awesome.

You are most welcome. As for the Tread/Beta...good luck ; I've never been able to find anything even close to usable anywhere.

Oops! the attachment didn't take...Let's try this one more time:

Sorry for hijacking this; but since I have a multi-view drawing of the alpha that some may be interested in, I thought I'd post it here (this drawing is derived form a poor 3 view picture I got off the internet that someone scanned from an old Robotech magazine or the REF Field Guide Book). I don't know if it's entirely accurate, but it's as close as I was able to get given what I had to work with:

And a multiview. The model is not yet finished, I still have to add a lot of small details here and there, but it's close.

And here is a rear shot...