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JB0

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Everything posted by JB0

  1. JB0
    Which is, honestly, probably a part of the problem. It strives for an attempt at realism, then does something I KNOW is crazy. Like I said, they were working with the best information they had available(I DO note the rings were made of what appeared to be exclusively water ice), and it really shouldn't bug me, but...
  2. JB0
    I DID probably come off ruder than I intended, really. But there won't be ice accumulation in a vacuum, because there's nothing to be icing the wings up. Anything that could has long since precipitated out onto something else or been blown away by the solar wind. Large asteroids don't retain an atmosphere. Not even Ceres. Ice accumulation in Saturn's rings would most likely be from running into the ice, at which point ice on the wings is probably not a primary concern.* But Pluto has an atmosphere, and the mass needed to keep any spontaneous release of water/nitrogen/methane/carbon monoxide vapors around long enough to start accumulating on planes. So weapons fire impacting the ground would rapidly make atmospheric conditions favorable for icing. The same is probably true of, say, Europa or Tethys. *Tangentally, it really bugs me how very wrong SDF Macross's portrayal of Saturn's ring system is. But to be fair, Pioneer 11 only flew by in 1979, with the V'gers right behind it in '80 and '81. Knowledge of the ring structure was understandably scant among non-astronomers in 1982, and I can't really fault them for not knowing the rings were so incredibly thin. I SHOULD just give them points for knowing they're largely made of water ice and move on with my life, instead of worrying about the ring system being thinner than the ships hiding within it.
  3. JB0
    I'm sorry, but FROM WHAT? In space, the VF is the hottest thing in it's immediate vicinity. And the "atmospheric pressure" is so low that any ice that DOES manage to start forming on a VF (we'll say there was a recent fold accident and you flew through a cloud) will sublimate almost instantly. Not melt. Sublimate. It will transition directly from solid to gas. That said, VFs are designed to be all-environment fighters, and capable of transition between atmospheric and space operation with no advance preparation required. And presumably they operate on a variety of extraterrestrial bodies as well. Icing could be a HUGE concern on, say, Pluto. A stray missile vaporizes a water ice mountain, and the humidity goes up enough for anyone in the vicinity to start experiencing icing problems.
  4. JB0
    ALL communications technology has been disruptive to manners. Right now we're just in a phase where manners haven't caught up to the state of the art. This too shall pass. Definitely an issue in society as it exists now. But on the upside, the known interface techniques can't exactly extract thoughts from your OEM computer and put them into a foreign system. Which is not to say that hacking prosthetics would not be real, and dangerous. Makes recent car-hacking demonstrations look positively benign. And, well... most companies have proven they have no idea how to deal with computer security, including a few at the root of the traditional computing market(Hi, Apple!). Get out into less traditional markets like artificial limbs, and you start seeing people who have no understanding of why you even NEED security designing computer interfaces. To take a currently real example, you have cars where the Bluetooth receiver in the radio is connected to the main system bus with no filtration or authentication, and an attacker can futz with the AC, stomp on the brakes, disable the brakes, kill the ignition, flash the headlights, jerk the steering wheel away... because they simply had no concept of the IDEA of someone attacking their car computer. Network security was not something they ever had to think about before, and they didn't think about it this time either. Similarly, the high profile pay card theft from Target exploited a vulnerability in the AIR CONDITIONER. The AC company has not typically had to be concerned with security, and didn't design to be robustly defended. The guys making the purchase decisions don't know much about security, and decided to install vulnerable AC control software on the same servers processing sensitive payment information. Well, that depends on the system design, doesn't it? Look at how reliable a car today is compared to one from the dawn of the automotive age(when someone hasn't remotely hijacked it). Now spin that kind of progress forward a few millenia and see what the future looks like. Computer systems are in many regards far less reliable than they used to be, but they also do so much MORE than they used to. We're starting to hit the point where most people's use cases are satisfied, and they can once again focus on stability and performance improvements instead of adding more. The OS on a zentradi ship is a fixed target. It can be burned into a solid-state read-only memory format at the factory. If something goes wrong, power-cycle the computer and it comes back up as good as new in a matter of seconds... just like a single-tasking 4-MHz machine from 1982 would have.
  5. JB0
    And an excellent use for any toys you can find no better way to display. Beats hiding 'em in the closet, for sure.
  6. JB0
    This is also a common practice in liquid-fueled rocket engines. Run the fuel/oxidizer lines around the combustion chamber, use the arrangement to both keep the cryogenic lines from icing up(regardless if the fuel is cryogenic, liquid oxygen is still the best oxidizer that doesn't hate civilization*) and cool the combustion chamber at the same time. *Fluorine is an even better oxidizer, and chlorine trifluoride is EVEN BETTER STILL. Also highly toxic, highly volatile, and can cause such traditionally fireproof substances as metal, concrete, brick, and ash to spontaneously erupt into flames/explode violently on contact. So we wisely use pure oxygen instead, since it is so meek and docile by contrast.
  7. JB0
    Will the jet transform this time?
  8. JB0
    On a related note, I pronounce it maaaaaaaaaac-ROSS.
  9. JB0
    That's a name I've not heard in many years.
  10. JB0
    No, no, Operation Stargazer FUSED the atom.
  11. JB0
    Oh my, how did I never see that panel of Breetai brawling with a robeast before? Because that right there is amazing!
  12. JB0
    Jeez, kid, did no one tell you to go for the neck?
  13. JB0
    Hey, at least Voltron had the decency to commit to making original animated content and follow through on it. A new season of the original show, apparently animated by the original staff, and two more original serieses. In that same time, Robotech did what? A TV movie scavenged from an aborted sequel, and then a direct-to-video movie of an aborted sequel twenty years later?
  14. JB0
    For real. I want this gig. That said, I'd really like someone competent to get in there. I want Robotech to be something other than a ridiculous shambling zombie leeching off nostaglia and what appears more and more to be stockholm syndrome. Since it seems clear it won't die outright, I want to know what it takes to get something more than the same rehashes and embarrassments. How hard will it be to shake up that status quo and get fresh blood and new ideas in there?
  15. JB0
    Repaint them all into GoBots. Except for Classics Mirage, because that's already an official mod.
  16. JB0
    Poor guy hasn't yet learned the difference between Macross and Robotech. Many of us were once that naive and ignorant.
  17. JB0
    It still reduces the burden on everything else, though. Pulling heat out at the "root" means less heat is going into everything else. At least, that was my thinking.
  18. JB0
    I'm amazed they managed to get the tooling for the Jag. Be awesome if they made a run of replacement Jag cases in custom colors while they're running the molds.
  19. JB0
    Clearly each feather is actually a protective shroud for a microvernier thruster, enabling finer control. (I think they're silly on a realistic robot, personally. They work better in a super robot show.)
  20. JB0
    I was hoping they'd splay out into an array of metallic feathers like the Wing Zero Custom(it's how they implement the variable wing surface like the YF-21 had, OBVIOUSLY). But Sound Booster on Steroids would be amazing.
  21. JB0
    Given the limited compatibility of the XBox One, it makes a lot of sense to me. If it's like the 360, they'll do a few compatibility updates, then stop. And then start selling emulated 360 games on the X1 online store, without enabling these same games in the backward-compatibility features.
  22. JB0
    It's worth noting there's three case revisions of the 360. The Slim had an angular cut-in, and the current version is very VCR-like in appearance, making it match the One.
  23. JB0
    That IS one possibility. If Pluto has a lot more radioactive materials than we expected, they could provide the heat. Especially if the water has ammonia in it, which will drastically lower the freezing point, to the degree it becomes reasonable to occasionally see liquid water.
  24. JB0
    Yeah, Pacific Rim didn't have near as much in the way of merchandise licenses as it could've. It kind of blew up in a big way that no one really expected, and everyone was caught with their pants down.
  25. JB0
    Nope. They're still tidally locked, so Pluto still doesn't experience any tidal forces. It's all really weird. Also weird: The largely featureless plains that exist within the Tombaugh Region(AKA "the heart"), and the general lack of cratering on both Pluto and Charon, which were both expected to be very heavily cratered.
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