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JB0

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  1. JB0
    It definitely does look cool. Of course, they did have that crazy giant bulldog guy I don't remember the name of, but that was well after everyone had accepted that Sound Force/Fire Bomber had to fight some of these fights. Otherwise, he seems like exactly the thing Diamond Force would've been sent after.
  2. JB0
    In all fairness, I probably already was. The burden of curiosity, I suppose. Hello, NSA monitor. Yes, I know you're there. I hope you are having a good day. Enjoy your coffee.
  3. JB0
    Hence why M7's Diamond Force were launched from catapults on turrets? So they could be sent directly towards "that guy" without having to deal with "all his mates"? Or was that just for the look-cool factor and I'm overthinking things now?
  4. JB0
    Old pacemakers used them. They don't anymore because there are chemical batteries that last a decade, and if it is in there much longer they like to be able to upgrade your components. I did have to do a targeted search to check the gunfire resistance(and I'm pretty sure it is limited to handgun rounds).
  5. JB0
    Sounds like a teachable moment! Bust out a BluRay!
  6. JB0
    I expect an endless chain of releases, each bungled in a new and excitingly different way. It just wouldn't be Robotech otherwise. This whole situation would break my heart if I wasn't a 100% Real Macross fan these days. But I do still have a soft spot for the old Robotech cartoons, and it does sadden me to see the state the franchise is in.
  7. JB0
    Green Lantern and Spiderman 3 were bad movies. One does not have to be a "real fan" to dislike them, and in fact many people who are not "real fans" hated them(hence why they bombed). Whatever a "real fan" is. Manga purist here. The first movie broke my heart, and it left me unable to love another animated adaptation. <sarcasm>REAL FANS HATE OSHII!!!</sarcasm> You're right, the major does have only a minimal presence in 1.5. But she's a she again. No word where she picked up the new body, though it DOES have "made in Japan" painted across the chest in the chapter cover, which seems an unambiguous assignment of manufacture for THIS body. I genuinely recall no such information about her "original" one, but it may be a forgotten detail(or from those filthy cartoon hackjobs!11). I believe it is possible, that from a manga purist's perspective she is largely a blank slate. A. Hollywood does have a serious race issue. Though I'd really argue they need to just do more diverse casting, not specifically focus on casting adaptations "properly". That there seem to be few enough non-white people in Hollywood's entire roster of stars that I can count them on one hand is incredibly troubling. (They also have a serious sexism issue, though it is far less overt.) B. I was one of the first people in the thread to CALL IT whitewashing. My stance remains as it always was. If you are going to whitewash a character, the major is one of the few you can justify it with from a narrative perspective, due to her vague backstory and transient body. As a societal issue, this is ridiculous. As a Ghost in the Shell issue... not so much.
  8. JB0
    Is it too soon to nominate Batman VS Superman yet? Because that was pretty darn godawful and I still want every minute I spent in the theater back.
  9. JB0
    Looks like Devastator's ready to kick the boss down and squish him like a bug. "Megatron must be stomped, no matter the cost."
  10. JB0
    Zero-G shooter? Someone needs to get Rovio to do something with Shattered Horizon.
  11. JB0
    Ahhhh, so there WAS a reason aside from sheer idiocy. That makes it a bit less of a travesty.
  12. JB0
    Not even a remotely accurate shuttle, but still a damn sight better than the Unite Warriors Blast Off shuttle. And to be fair, the original Blast Off wasn't a very good shuttle either(though it WAS more accurate than this one).
  13. JB0
    RTGs use thermocouples to generate electricity. We're on the same page, I think. A small fission reactor is, well, not likely. There's geometric considerations that place a minimum size limit, though apparently some the size of large trash cans have been built. And yeah, in the event of a casing breach, RTGs would be dangerous, but that's why the casings are heavily armored. It's like a car is dangerous because the fuel tank might explode. It is POSSIBLE, but not LIKELY. So just saying "RTGs are dangerous" oversells the situation greatly. Small RTGs are considered safe enough for human implantation(and were designed to withstand gunfire), so I reckon the danger is minimal. Yeah, that doesn't make sense either. If the environment is hotter than the engine, then you will take in heat regardless. If the engine is hotter than the environment, you don't need to preheat the coolant because it will rapidly rise above ambient temperature regardless. And if the environment is not cooler than a fusion powerplant, it means your vehicle is operating inside a star and you have bigger problems than your engine overheating. Venting coolant works exceptionally well, but has exactly the drawback you mentioned. You could, however, make a hybrid system. For instance, have a tank of ice water that you spray across a car radiator to enhance cooling in hot weather. It sounds like, when Battletech is attempting to operate within the bounds of physics, they consider each system completely independently, and get crazy illogical because of it. "Oh, but the cooling system won't work if ambient temperature is higher than the coolant. Better put in rules about preheating the coolant." "Umm, won't the GIANT BALL OF NUCLEAR HELLFIRE preheat it for you?" "What are you talking about? That's the fusion reactor, not the cooling system."
  14. JB0
    Knowing Fist? Kenshiro punches the Earth's pressure point and it explodes. Everyone dies, except Kenshiro, who goes on to punch all the planets.
  15. JB0
    Oh, real-world thermocouples are inefficient as heck(less than 10% efficiency). But not slow or dangerous. You get electricity instantly, from simple heat. Certainly, with a real-world RTG there's some danger from exposure to radiation in the event of a major accident(this is why the radiothermal generators are massively overbuilt, so if the rocket blows up the RTG stays intact when it slams into the ground), but... other than that, they're 100% safe. But the concern is the plutonium heat source, not the electricity-generating thermocouple(hence why they can also use thermocouples in oral thermometers). And, well, the lump of plutonium is among the LESS toxic things in the typical space launch. It's just gonna sit there quietly oozing low levels of radiation. As they use materials with a long half-life and low levels of neutron radiation, the risk of exposure is relatively mild(as long as you don't ingest it). I'd stand next to the dented RTG before the dented tank of hydrazine any day. But all that's neither here nor there. The Valk has the fusion powerplant already. The risk is the same whether you attach thermocouples to it or not. There's no point in just ignoring that massive pre-existing heat source. And I simply assume overtechnology has produced thermocouples far more efficient than real-world ones, because overtechnology has provided similar leaps to virtually every form of technology seen in the franchise. It's an interesting concept, it just exists outside the bounds of physics is all. But that is exactly the same kind of excitation they're talking about. In fact, they're talking about turning the exhaust itself into a lasing medium. But if you add energy to an atom to raise the energy state of its electrons, you also make it hotter, by definition. (Let's just ignore the additional heat generated by these lasers for the moment) Injecting more heat is very rarely part of an effective cooling solution. And yeah, "quantum is a magic word that makes everything work" is the guiding premise behind their method of function. So they should rename it the "quantum optical heat sink", and that would resolve all the problems inherent in the "laser heat sink".
  16. JB0
    We actually have the technology now to convert heat directly to electricity. We have made use of it in several space probes, particularly ones traveling far from the sun where solar power isn't viable. Notable missions include, but are not limited to, the Viking landers, Pioneers 10 and 11, Voyagers 1 and 2, Galileo, Cassini, and New Horizons. As you can tell, they have quite a proud history. The space probes use the a lump of radioactive material on one side of the thermocouples as a heat source, and a lot of big radiator fins on the other side to keep the outside end cool. The temperature gradient results in electrical output. The problem we've seen with the Voyagers and Pioneers is neutron radiation from the heat source damages the thermocouples, so power output falls dramatically after a decade or two. Not a problem for a Valkyrie, for multiple reasons. I like to believe that overtechnology has created a higher-efficiency version of the humble thermocouple, and that is a variable fighter's primary source of electrical power. But this is extremely noncanon. Don't worry, it isn't a failing on your part. You don't get it because the explanation is , to be blunt, complete nonsense. There are legitimately brilliant ideas which sound like the babbling of a madman to the uninitiated, but this is not one of them. The writeup is full of the worst kind of technobabble, where they just string words together and hope no one notices the lack of a coherent idea. The basic idea presented appears to be "we heat the hot exhaust gasses up so they're EVEN HOTTER and glow visibly, which somehow results in a net cooling effect because lasers. Also quantum." The most notably silly part is "convert infrared energy to light", because infrared is a FORM OF LIGHT. Though the idea that by converting it to visible light they can shunt it out of the machine with mirrors is funny too. Light striking a mirror generates heat, and they're talking about megawatts of light. They should've not explained the how, just described the effect(enhanced cooling, strong visible light emission) and left the mechanism to the audience's imagination.
  17. JB0
    Is that what happens when Shockwave and his mini-me laser pistol transform?
  18. JB0
    That is exactly what I thought! Personally, I enjoy speculating and working out the (il)logic behind this stuff. It may be noncanon, it may be a huge waste of time, but gosh darnit, it's FUN. Sometimes it just leads to dead ends, though. I've never figured out an explanation for why the Enterprise doesn't have seatbelts.
  19. JB0
    The artifacting is a noticable problem with the GG files, too. It's visible in the title sequence, so it is not isolated to a single episode. Basically, high action scenes demand more bittage than they've allotted. Delta is too good for the internet! And sparklies are closely related to grain, which is darn near impossible to compress. The deadfish re-encode is going to show it worse, though. Combination of encoding from a lossy source to a lossy target(which will always cause more loss), and that they're using an older, less efficient MPEG4 profile(so a given bitrate generates lower quality than it would on a more modern profile) exacerbates the root issue. There's actually a chance the artifacting is visible at times the original DTV stream, though it'd be far less severe.
  20. JB0
    That is dangerously close to a practical thermal management technique. You just have to automate it. Realistically, you'd be using some kind of ejectable liquid or gas. Warm it up, vent as needed. Problems are that the technique incurs a lot of dead weight if you aren't using some substance that has a practical use, and discharges result in attitude changes to your vehicle unless very carefully controlled. But if you can find something that needs addition heat that you're going to be ejecting later ANYWAYS... pre-warming fuel is an actual cooling technique used on rockets. They run the cryogenic fluids through tubes around the combustion chamber, and the heat is pulled out of the combustion chamber walls and used to raise the fuel temperature to something more convenient to work with. No icing of the fuel lines, no overheating of the combustion chamber, no excess weight from a dedicated cooling system. Everybody wins. You could probably use the cryogenic hydrogen as a cooling system. Dump heat into the fuel lines via heat exchangers, which warms the fuel up so it doesn't ice the lines, and then inject the now-gaseous hydrogen into the fusion core. If you need MORE cooling... You could probably have an emergency system that heats hydrogen fuel and then dumps the hot gas into the normal exhaust stream, bypassing the fusion reactor. But you wouldn't want to waste fuel like that if it could be avoided.
  21. JB0
    Cryogenic fuels are pretty common in spaceflight and nuclear fusion. In a Valk's case, the primary fuel is most likely liquid hydrogen... well, hydrogen slurpee, anyways.
  22. JB0
    Or the way the M-21 carried a D-21? Pity that Ray isn't styled after the D-21, he could actually be something that BELONGS on a Blackbird.
  23. JB0
    Bingo. Note, though, that liquid transfer doesn't actually solve the problem. It just moves the heat around, typically to a location where it is easier to deal with (like from the engine block of a car to the radiator). Ultimately, you need a device to get the heat out. Keeping spacecraft(both manned and unmanned) at safe temperatures in the real world is a complex problem. Variable fighters have the advantage of seeing short deployments with a visit to a climate-controlled environment between outings. They have to control temperatures for hours at a time instead of days or months or years, and then they can cool off in a room full of glorious heat-conducting air. They also have the advantage of being built around a thermonuclear reactor(which is a really good heater) so they never never really have to worry about being too cold.
  24. JB0
    You tell 'em!
  25. JB0
    Well, the entire premise of a variable fighter increases complexity and cost. You can't really say that complexity is a problem on newer fighters without ALSO considering it to be a problem on the older ones, right on back to the VF-1. Better to ignore it and just go with the flow.
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