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JB0

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  1. JB0
    "Why" could most likely be answered as "because an alien warship done crashed itself in our hometown." It is a less dramatic illustration of the "everybody died in an orbital bombardment" impetus for the TV series immigration. If the wreckage of alien battleships are washing up on your shores, it is safe to say aliens are at war nearby and you stand a good chance of getting caught in the crossfire (which is exactly what happened in both the series and movie).+ "Where" can probably be deduced as "inside the solar system." If the launch of the Macross was more orderly than in the TV series*, the fold accident may not have happened. IF that assumption holds, then we can deduce their initial colonization target was most likely in the solar system. Even if the fold accident DID happen, their initial plan was likely not interstellar. Begin big wall of speculative contemplation! My logic is... if they are carrying civilians as a pre-planned colonization effort, it means the ship has finished the shakedown cruise, all the tests are done, and all the hardware works. Were they planning to colonize an extrasolar planet, they would've presumably already folded out of the system. But wait, there's more! For a species with exactly one working starship... the instant they colonize a world that requires fold travel to reach, then necessity dictates the Macross become a dedicated supply** and communications ship between that colony and Earth. This would be a LOT of defensive power stationed at neither Earth nor Extrasolar Colony One, because the ship spends a lot of time between those two ports. So humanity can't really start colonizing other star systems until a second vessel is ready.*** Likely the Macross would be scheduled to tour the solar system setting up colonies on every chunk of rock or ice reachable with rockets until more fold-capable vessels were operational. The moons of Saturn are prime interplanetary real estate, as are the more obvious targets of Mars and Venus. And, you know, good ol' Luna, but you don't need overtech to do THAT. It's only a couple days' flight by a conventional H2/O2-fueled rocket. *That the Macross docked with the ARMD-1 and ARMD-2 instead of jury-rigging the Daedalus and Prometheus, and contains a purpose-built city instead of a jury-rigged one, implies the launch did in fact go much smoother. Exactly how much smoother is unknown. I do seem to recall the movie saying they launched under fire, but I don't recall if they reference the fold accident. They probably do, rendering half of this moot. ** Certainly a colony is intended to be self-sufficient, but there needs to be a safety net while they are getting established. Otherwise they might all get ate by space dinosaurs after the ship leaves. And it seems like FTL communications didn't yet exist at the time of SDF and DYRL. *** The Megaroad, obviously, was not humanity's only fold-capable vessel when it launched, nor their only one with big freakin' space guns . Even ignoring the Macross, the captured/defected zentradi ships would leave humanity with HUNDREDS of the things. Earth and Extrasolar Colony One can both have a small defensive fleet and run supply/mail ships. End big wall of speculative contemplation. + And IRL there's a lot of good arguments for extraterrestrial colonization we DO know of. The Earth is not intrinsically safe. There are several major extinctions in the fossil record, some of which we can link to devastatingly powerful extraterrestrial events. It only takes one space rock going Yucatan Peninsula on our butts to wreck our entire civilization. But it is likely stretching things to think that the denizens of the Macross universe bear that much more foresight than the citizens of our own.
  2. JB0
    DAMMIT, JAPAN.
  3. JB0
    "Hey Ed, you see any craters in the runway?""Nope. Reckon that'll do for FOD."
  4. JB0
    Last news I heard was that the ewoks play a pivotal role in the handoff of the plans from JarJar to Princess Leia.
  5. JB0
    Basara x Scarfish OTP
  6. JB0
    I see Mirage cooks just as well as her grandmother. It must run in the family.
  7. JB0
    Man, Dragon's Trap is so friggin' awesome. Really lookin' forward to seeing the new version.
  8. JB0
    I like how we took half of the female list. Heck, Sheryl isn't even in a current program and she's still ranking. I almost feel bad for all the shows we are trampling. ... Almost.
  9. JB0
    That's fair. But they are far less useless than they used to be, since they DO have enough thrust to stay airborne and dodging. Combined with the much faster mode changes of modern valks mean one can "pop" into battroid mode briefly for 360° shooting and advanced evasive maneuvers(or showboating, depending on how you feel about the immelman dance), then drop back to fighter to get moving again. Granted, Hayate is a unique pilot and general atmospheric tactics do not seem to call for the pop-up battroid, but...
  10. JB0
    WE'RE NUMBER ONE! WE'RE NUMBER ONE! WE'RE NUMBER ONE!
  11. JB0
    Guyver II in the comics was very male. It has been years, but as I recall, he was the kind of male you often see in comics that look like they're wearing football shoulder pads ALL THE TIME. He was changed to female for Guyver: Out of Control, almost certainly to add a chance for some sexy drawings. At the time, there wasn't a lot of Guyver comics to adapt, so the show ends with the first appearance of Guyver III(no information as to who he is was available). MUCH later the manga added Guyver II F, which is a completely distinct character and mostly-distinct guyver unit from the original Guyver II. (And it would be a lot less confusing if she was named Guyver IV, though there are good plot reasons for her to not be Guyver IV.) The author reuses the decades-old OoC Guyver II design in a completely new context... and as an excuse to add some sexy drawings. The more things change, right? The "movie version" is being overlooked by most of the sites because OoC is largely forgotten. It was released before Guyver "got big". (Editor's note: I keep having to review these posts for consistency, as I flip between arabic and roman numerals more or less randomly on Guyver names.)
  12. JB0
    Ah, fudge. I was thinking the energy armor was only active in battroid mode. Welp, that completely derails that train of thought. I have always taken the Plus "Guld's eye view" scenes as more artistic interpretations than literal representations. Like the hanger scene, I don't think Guld was ACTUALLY flexing his hands to control the wings, it was just representational of how "natural" the controls were. My impression was that, through the BDI, Guld's view WAS the aircraft's view. Which is a remarkably unclear way to say it, but... The CG fighter scenes I took as a sort of tactical display, distinct from the "normal" in-flight view. Or, again, artistic interpretation. Removing information Guld had that just served to make the actual intent of the scene unclear for audiences. It made it clear, for instance, that those cones in the scenes where he flew through the missile cloud were computer projections of the flight paths and not the missiles shooting lasers at Guld, which COULD have been an interpretation if the prediction cones were layered on top of the normal visible-light view. Ultimately, though, it is impossible to illustrate how the BDI actually "looks" to the pilot, because we can't plug a DVD into our brains. If EVERY camera goes out, your plane has been blasted from so many different directions that it is likely a rapidly expanding ball of plasma regardless. There's a LOT of redundancy inherent in the glass cockpit(as I shall persist in calling it), particularly if it is displaying in 3D(and why wouldn't it, with holographic projection being cheap and easy). An electrical failure would do it, sure. But it'd ALSO take out your controls. It seems like modern battroids are much more functional in the air than the older ones were, so I'm not sure "battroids are on the ground" is a safe assumption anymore even for terrestrial combat anymore(and it was never a safe one for space combat, particularly after the advent of super packs). Though it was a sound assumption in the good ol' days when they were making the VF-1, and such assumptions DO tend to outlive their foundations. I find this reasoning more sound than "in case of complete failure of a multiple-redundant system". The glass cockpit DID show up at the same time as the fighter-mounted PPB, and the latter goes a long way towards obviating any need for a more durable cockpit.
  13. JB0
    Yeah. I am watching Josuke mostly because a friend is. But the most recent episode is one of my favorites. Up there with the time Joseph decided to sneak into a nazi base by crossdressing.
  14. JB0
    Oh well, I rescind the oh well.
  15. JB0
    The female Guyver 2? That is a weird thing. It is from farther through the manga the last anime released, but it ALSO first appeared in anime. In the FIRST Guyver animation, Guyver: Out of Control, Guyver 2 was female. Simple and straightforward enough. Fast forward two decades, and the design got reused in the manga as a FOURTH Guyver... which isn't called Guyver 4 because PLOT. So this doll can be that first animated Guyver 2 OR the manga Guyver 2 F, depending on how weird you want to be.
  16. JB0
    Nope, it's for aerial DANCING! More seriously, heavy damage can leave a vehicle incapable of transformation. So each mode should have the same priority placed on survivability, because the pilot might not be able to get back to F mode when the poo hits the fan. I assume fighter/GERWALK primary sensors are in the nosecone, since the head turret has a very poor view outside of battroid mode and the nose has a very poor view while IN battroid mode. Hooray for redundancy! But... you get redundancy in the fully camera-ized situation, too. The head turret alone is not enough for a full YF-19-style display. The holosseum cockpit requires an array of cameras with overlap in their field of view, so losing any one camera isn't going to devastate your basic visibility in any mode(but there's far less coverage on more specialized sensors, obviously). But the glass cockpit (wait, that means something else) seems less present in Delta. That may be one of those things that the UN doesn't export, and thus a moot point outside of Plus. Oh well.
  17. JB0
    Unless you're in battroid mode, and then cameras have always beat the eyeball.
  18. JB0
    If the canopy is similarly durable to the rest of the airframe... how come when Hikaru and Misa are escaping the grand cannon's destruction an explosion shattered the canopy "glass" but left the rest of the GERWALK more or less unscathed? My impression has been that the canopy, although insanely durable by any modern standard, is still weaker than the surrounding armor. Of course, if THAT is the case, one can ask why the YF-19 doesn't utilize a fully holographic cockpit instead of just a holographic floor. A "metal" bubble would appear to be far safer than a "glass" bubble, and damage visibility isn't a concern if the battroid design is any indication.
  19. JB0
    Blasphemy! Burn the heretic!
  20. JB0
    Go Civilian A x Civilian B!!!!
  21. JB0
    So, ummmm...
  22. JB0
    Latest episode of Jojo was the best thing ever. The evil villain's cunning master plan was
  23. JB0
    Initially, yes. The concept has grown a lot since Space War 1, and packs are now treated as just a way to offer one plane that can be configured multiple ways.. It varies from valk to valk, and sometimes with pack set on the same valk. Some packs are more aerodynamic than others, with a few being positively formhugging(The Plus valks spring to mind).
  24. JB0
  25. JB0
    That explains quite a bit, actually. I hadn't realized the whole story was that complex. I thought it was just "smutty pinups are making me more money than narrative works". I do remember reading an interview back at the turn of the century where he mentioned his comics sold better in America than Japan, which pretty much guaranteed that overall sales were low(especially for the era, where the manga market was much smaller than it is today), so I am not SURPRISED that smutty pinups made him more money than "proper manga". It kinda blew my mind at the time because Ghost was A. friggin' awesome and B. kind of foundational anime fan content in the US for quite a while. In hindsight, it would be far from the only time that America has liked wildly different anime and manga than Japan. It is almost like they are two different countries!
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