JB0

In fairness, as often as holodecks malfunction with catastrophic results, WOULD it be safer than actual space pirates? Or would they be trapped in a death game while people struggled to bring the rest of the academy back online and reset the holodeck safeties?

It's still graphics cards, we just got used to paying scalper prices so they seem reasonable now. I'm hoping when the AI bubble pops, all the graphics cards and RAM they're hoarding dumps onto the market all at once and prices for those items just craters.

I'm personally deeply disappointed with Bristleback and Slog. (The teal+gold one and the gold+black one). They're both very far off the original designs, and not really in a good way. However, I greatly appreciate that Hasbro didn't decide to replace gold plastic with yellow plastic for these two, as I've seen them do for other characters with a lot of gold. Slog fares worse, and because he forms the upper body of Monstructor, his faults carry forward into the combined form's chest. His monster mode has gone from short and stout to tall and plump. He still looks like a difficult-to-define lump of gold plastic, so I guess he has that going for him... His humanoid mode is much lankier than I expect for a Slog, making him the only one whose humanoid form I have complaints with, but they're minor aside from the Slag-style hood over his head. All-around, he is the one it is most obvious is repurposed from a design that was never meant to be him. Bristleback originally had cool bladed wings that are totally absent from the new toy in favor of a huge armored shell that totally off-balances his color set and changes his image. He was a much sleeker robolizard-thing originally. But I GUESS it aligns with his original toy bio, where he hated becoming a pretender because it turned him from swift and nimble to slow and bulky. I'd give them credit if I thought it was intentional. Icepick(thea teal+red one) has the weakest transformation, but it's... actually pretty faithful to his original toy presentation, honestly. He has the same problem Optimus Primal has, where he transforms from a humanoid robot into a humanoid robot and the result is somewhat underwhelming. His leg-mate Scowl(yellow+purple) is actuall;y much improved in the update, in that he actually HAS a monster form instead of just pulling his head down and walking on his knees. Birdbrain(black and purple) is ... well, I like it even though it's deviating fairly widely from the original. I never understood how the original was supposed to be a bird, and this one has wings... but on his head for some reason? The potato monster form looks more like a sloth demon than the vulture theming he was supposed to carry, but that vulture theming never carried forward to the original robot, just to the pretender shell. Wildfly(red and yellow) is Wildfly. My only comment is the robot head sticking out through the monster head, but... that's honestly not far off the original either. On the whole this is better than I expected when the possibility of the Dinobot six-pack becoming Monstructor was put forward, but... it's not GOOD. There ARE some things I'm genuinely impressed with, though. And I especially like that Icepick and Scowl are flipped "upside-down" so their heads are at the knees instead of buried in the feet. I just like how it looks, especially for a combiner that's intended to be a horror show. Or as some would say... "Monstructor." A picture is not always worth a thousand words. ------------------------------------------------------- The original Pretender Monsters were also pretty weak, in all honesty. Despite my very strong opinions on them. They were basically Micromasters, with all the rich engineering complexity that subline was known for, so their transformations were ... minimal, to put it charitably. Figure I'll attach a photo of the original Monstructor here for reference, since I know he's late in the original line and fairly obscure. Image stolen from TFWiki. I know where my originals are, but I am not brave enough to push Birdbrain into the solid mass of ancient decaying gold plastic that is Slog. Also, my Bristleback's shiny metal rear-end shattered some time ago, so I can't exactly plug a fist into his exhaust pipe.

Devil's advocate, what if the sonic weapon is actually a specialized tractor beam that alternates pushing and pulling to induce vibrations in an audible frequency range on the target? As an aside, in a shockingly reasonable and logical piece of writing for Trek, Memory Alpha tells me that one of the novels mentioned the scant appearance of the life support belts in the setting. It said they were retired due to safety concerns. If an EVA suit is damaged or suffers an equipment failure you have a chance to patch it or return to safety. If a life-support belt fails, you just die. Which makes a lot of sense. It also kind of reminds me of the real world with NASA's Manned Maneuvering Unit rocketpack being retired after the Challenger incident because untethered spacewalks were extremely dangerous by their very nature, and the risk couldn't be justified. There's an obvious answer that author missed, though: Build life-support belts into EVA suits as an emergency backup. If something goes wrong, you slap the big red button to activate the life-support belt. This would even extend the accidental parallel with real world space exploration. After we retired the MMU, we proceeded to build the SAFER rocketpack that every astronaut wears when they go out the airlock so they have a chance to get home if they somehow wind up free-floating with a failed tether.

I am considering Shockwave the newest. If it shows up at a store, I will have to make an executive decision on the shade of purple they used. There is a range of purples I adore on Shockwave, a range that is completely unacceptable, and photos are often misleading on specific shades. (There's also a range of purples I can take or leave, but that's not a useful category.) In a way, it'd be good for my use case. My Siege Shockwave wears some of the extra bits, because I thought "Shockwave with a rocketpack" was kinda cool, and it'd be nice to have a "clean" Shockwave without the armor and texturing to stand next to him.

Guess I'm not buyin' it. My MP3 player ALSO glows blue and plays The Touch... if I can get anything to talk to it long enough to put music on it.

I don't understand. I thought we already HAD an America Transformer. He's red, white, and blue, fights for freedom for all people, and turns into a semi truck, the most american vehicle.

So someone elsewhere linked a photo of the new Shockwave attaching to Bruticus. And that's all well and good, but I'm looking at the process and just going "So they DID find a way to sneak a gun mode past legal." It isn't a historically accurate pistol grip, and requires you to disarm Bruticus, but... they snuck a gun mode in. Also, in doing so they kinda sorta published instructions for how an aftermarket parts company can mount a more appropriate pistol grip. So that's something to look forward to.

So I saw an in-hand picture, which makes judging size a lot easier. And I'm surprised. Blackout is actually notably bigger than Ironhide.

I'm surprised he wasn't the first Overgear they announced, and applaud their restraint.

For actual scale, I think the answer is "whatever scale you want them to be". Given we seem to have a truck and a helicopter of similar size, the vehicles aren't even in scale with each other. And there's no canon height for these two robots. The holy Sunbow chart holds no power here! As far as actual size, we're gonna have to guesstimate it based on the peg holes, of which they have a metric crap-ton. Most usefully, both of them have 5mm-compatible fists, with articulated fingers. The hands seem beefy, but not outrageously chunky. In mainline Transformers packaging terms, I'd guess the robots to be ... large Voyager, maybe Leader class? As far as what's near me for a reference, I'm guessing Ironhide is comparable to the JAXA crossover Luna Convoy.

But it still isn't NY- or CA-compliant. Actually, without a bright orange muzzle, it is not compliant at the federal level, and I personally don't want a Shockwave with a bright orange muzzle. CA law specifically requires a toy gun to be "the entire exterior surface of the device is white, bright red, bright orange, bright yellow, bright green, bright blue, bright pink, or bright purple, either singly or as the predominant color in combination with other colors in any pattern, or where the entire device is constructed of transparent or translucent materials which permits unmistakable observation of the device’s complete contents". Sure, Shockwave is purple, but is he BRIGHT purple? Do they even want to have to check that definition? And this version has a gray barrel. (Which isn't even right! Give me a proper SILVER!) I am reasonably sure they don't want to have to even LOOK at toy gun laws outside Nerf and Super Soaker.

One assumes his heavily-modified program has been reinforced and expanded significantly since then. Also, I didn't realize the time frames for Living Witness and Starfleet Academy lined up so closely.

Honestly, I dig this Blackout, in large part because he looks nothing like Blackout. He looks like the Bayformers toy-only character Tomahawk.

Awwww. : ( I suppose it is inevitable as a near-immortal machine intelligence that he'd have far too much experience with loss, but... frownie-face. I hope they reference the OTHER Doctor at some point. The lost backup EMH has been stuck in my head for years now. I want to know if he made it back to Federation space, and when.