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JB0

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Everything posted by JB0

  1. JB0
    Pretty much, yeah. The most annoying thing of the story is there's little STUBS of story. They act like they're important, kick you out of the gameplay to watch cutscenes, but then it all goes nowhere.
  2. JB0
    Ummmmm.... Not to be a nitpicker, but I'm gonna be a nitpicker. Metric prefixes are case-sensitive, so mW and MW mean different things. mW is milliwatts, and two milliwatts isn't enough to light an LED. A laser pointer is 500 mW. Yes, it's a terrible standard.
  3. JB0
    One wonders what weapons locker they found THOSE in.
  4. JB0
    Well, yes. Why WOULDN'T you take advantage of an additional cooling mechanism if it was available and easy to implement? I mean, the very act of using the air as a propellant MAKES it a coolant. It's simply far easier to cool an engine in atmosphere than space, because you CAN dump heat into the air. It's very hard to get heat out of a spacecraft since there's nothing to conduct that heat into. So you have to radiate it out, but... radiant cooling still works in an atmosphere. So you cool better in air than out of it in most situations(the big exception being high-speed atmospheric drag). It's not a design oversight so much as a technical limitation. They opted to design a ship for maximum atmospheric performance and gimped space performance instead of gimping performance all-around just to keep the numbers pretty and even. That's a good question! And, I figure it depends on a lot of factors. The arm can probably handle the recoil if the destroid is meant for heavy labor, but aiming could be a bit iffy with no actual targeting software present. And there's the question of if the hand can actually actuate the trigger. The Spartan comes to mind immediately as a machine that clearly has hands but could equally clearly never use a gunpod. Assuming, of course, the gunpod isn't reliant on some sort of computer data link to operate. The presence of a physical trigger DOES suggest that any possible data linkage is optional, though.
  5. JB0
    They're robots in disguise. I mean it says so in the song. One should therefore expect a decent vehicle mode, but... often it doesn't show up.
  6. JB0
    But none of those mechs look like a Gundam and a Valkyrie had a baby!
  7. JB0
    Non-japanese designs, even!
  8. JB0
    Very nice. I like Chamber, weird proportions and all.
  9. JB0
    I think Gubaba was politely requesting I stop derailing this thread with walls o' text. Which is a justifiable complaint. ... I still wanna see an upgraded Stampede Valk.
  10. JB0
    Doh! Yeah, I dunno where I got 17 from.
  11. JB0
    The WHAT? That's just... oh my god, what were they thinking?
  12. JB0
    Sorry. My inner scientist got the better of me. Just be glad it wasn't my inner mad scientist, I suppose. Glad some folks appreciated it, though.
  13. JB0
    Aside from the lack of moving parts, yeah. Fusion is a lot simpler than fission, startup costs aside. I don't think ionization is a goal, but yes. And releasing directly from the reactor isn't a goal, because it would leech energy you need to sustain your fusion reaction. I believe Valks use the heat from the reactor to superheat liquid hydrogen. It actually IS more efficient in atmosphere. Which is why they go to the trouble of heating air instead of just using space mode all the time. Welllllllllll... the thing is that while hydrogen and helium both fuse VERY easily, helium is a very difficult atom to split. It'd be a net energy loss. Now, on the other hand, you COULD have a multi-stage fusion reaction. If you start with hydrogen, you fuse that to get helium, then you fuse helium to get something heavier. You could continue this until you reach iron, but you get successively smaller amounts of energy out(and when you fuse iron, you get less out than you put in). Stars are purely fusion. They start with hydrogen, as they age and "burn up" the hydrogen, they start fusing the helium byproducts of their hydrogen fusion. In the sun, this is our end game. Sol isn't large enough to fuse anything bigger. But in larger stars, that cycle of "burning" byproducts continues on through carbon, oxygen, neon, silicon, and magnesium, ballooning to ridiculous sizes as they do so. And then they try to fuse iron. Iron doesn't release enough energy to support the giant ball of gas they have become, and they collapse under their own weight very rapidly. The shockwave hits hard enough to ignite a round of fusion like you won't see anywhere else. And this sudden burst of energy makes the star explode in a supernova that releases a cloud of literally everything on the periodic table(all fusion byproducts), leaving a superdense neutron star or black hole behind as a mark of the unfathomably large cataclysm. Sustained fission reactions are (almost) all the results of human engineering, because the setup is fairly complex. Outside of one REALLY WEIRD geological formation in Ohio, all known deposits of fission isotopes in the wild undergo nothing more than natural decay. I am a total science nerd. I make no apologies.
  14. JB0
    As far as a hostage rescue Valk goes... just make sure it moves fast in battroid and GERWALK modes and carry the rescuee out in a trash can in your robohand. If you're feeling ambitious, a padded trash can like the zentradi used to install spies aboard enemy vessels. See, we don't need a second seat at all! No worries. Just doing my part to raise awareness of the differences between fission and fusion. Also, fusion doesn't really have chain reactions, controlled or otherwise. It's a lot harder to make a large atom split into two smaller atoms than it is two make two small atoms combine into a larger one. Fusion reactions take a lot of energy to start(enough so that every real-world fusion bomb ever made uses a fission bomb as the detonator), and don't want to continue. It's the biggest problem facing real-world attempts to build a fusion power generator. On the upside, it also makes fusion reactors much safer. The stars keep burning because they're utterly massive. With enough weight, anything will fuse. No fancy chain reactions required. A fusion reactor is far different than a fission one, even though they're both "nuclear power." Think of a fusion reactor as a jar full of REALLY HOT fire(and now all atomic physicists in the area are sobbing quietly). If you stop feeding fuel into the fire, it uses up all the available fuel and burns out fast.
  15. JB0
    Critical mass is a concept of great importance in fission reactions, but not one with meaning in the realm of fusion where Macross operates.
  16. JB0
    Who the hey is Gumpy, anyway?
  17. JB0
    I'm just surprised no one's favorite is Gubaba. Not even Gubaba's.
  18. JB0
    But SPOILER is still correct! Oh, we all wanted to punch Sentinel in his massive chin. We were supposed to, of course. But on the other hand, Sentinel never ordered a team of autobots be buried alive because they were stupid. So... eh, the jerk scale is a little variable.
  19. JB0
    He also survived the pineapple curse!
  20. JB0
    Indeed it has. And ANN failed to actually link the campaign, near as I can tell. So I will.
  21. JB0
    Hey, I'm excited to see this finished. But... wrestling meltrans is a pretty hard act to top!
  22. JB0
    Oh, and let's not forget Sari is the least annoying human sidekick of all time.
  23. JB0
    What everyone else said. Initial trepidation gave way to "great show, shoulda been longer."
  24. JB0
    I think it just means I strike close to the truth of the matter.
  25. JB0
    How is that a tossup? The coke machine is hands down the better character.
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