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JB0

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  1. JB0
    Makes you wonder if maybe they needed one more meeting than they had. "Hey, you hear anything about the new VF-19?" "The guys I ran into said they're working on big avionics changes to make it more pilot-friendly." "Huh. Wonder why no one told us a new revision was coming. Let's see if we can't get another thousand kilos of thrust in there, so the pilots can make the most of this new friendlier OS!"
  2. JB0
    Also, the delay before the toned-down, more-controllable VF-19 variants came out left an opening for the VF-171 to exploit. Particularly as even after the VF-19 stopped killing pilots, it still had to overcome a reputation and was still pretty expensive.
  3. JB0
    Hopefully this goes well. The idea that we might see a return to the moon in my lifetime is suddenly looking real again.
  4. JB0
    Godzilla in that picture's just going "Bro, seriously? I gotta drop you to the floor AGAIN?"
  5. JB0
    They definitely weren't planning on coming back for the protodevlin, but the rest? Maybe. "You know, this is wildly and irresponsibly dangerous, but it hasn't actually tried to kill us yet. Let's think about it for a bit before we do anything we can't take back."
  6. JB0
    Gotcha.
  7. JB0
    A real Jingle Bell Rock & Roll Out kinda feelin'. Yes, that was terrible. No, I'm not sorry.
  8. JB0
    The Birdman is exempt, at least. It was SUPPOSED to be laying in wait as a moralistic boobytrap. I'll even give 'em a partial pass on the Sigur Berrentzs, since they may very well have wanted to think about this for a bit and then come back to it if it turned out they did the math wrong and it wouldn't actually set fire to the atmosphere make everyone in the universe's head do the gooey kablooey. But the rest? Sheesh. Just render it down into something no longer resembling structured matter as soon as possible.
  9. JB0
    Seriously, though. Were the protoculture somehow completely unaware of any black holes they could drop these things into?
  10. JB0
    Beachstormer. Hot Shot is mostly just from the splashes of red in the yellow chest and (especially) the awkwardly-large shoulders.
  11. JB0
    You aren't wrong. And in terms of existing characters, they missed the obvious choice of, you know, HOUND. But yellow character with disproportionately huge shoulders? Hot Shot.
  12. JB0
    With those shoulders, I think Hot Shot woulda been more appropriate than Bumblebee.
  13. JB0
    The voltage rating of the wires was different and the construction of the connector was different too. There seem to be (at least) two different revisions of the adapter "in the wild". GN is trying to get adapters from other people, especially people who have had failures or have one with 150V-rated wiring. Because Steve knows we won't be happy until there's a fire!
  14. JB0
    Interestingly, Gamers Nexus was unable to recreate the failure(no fire, worst GN investigation ever), and the adapters they got are a completely different construction than the one dissected by Igor's Lab.
  15. JB0
    I love the "random widgets under glass" look too. But hey, at least Skids wasn't in the cartoon enough to matter, or you'd be shouting into a howling vortex of "featureless blue rectangles because toon accuracy or gtfo". So there's a bright side!
  16. JB0
    We are protoculture. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated .
  17. JB0
    Presents are the right of all sentient beings.
  18. JB0
    There's rumors he's been at odds with the entire rest of the crew since the first episode, as he's basically the only one involved that cares about the books and games. And several of the writers have expressed active hatred for the source material. He may just be completely unwilling to ride this train to the final stop after the writers moved it from Albuquerque to Saskatchewan.
  19. JB0
    Nice! I really like the Tetsujin FX.
  20. JB0
    I think I DID notice that before! It actually bugged the heck outta me.
  21. JB0
    Gotta buy all 7 billion characters!
  22. JB0
    Ayup!
  23. JB0
    Space folds: they work like they need to.
  24. JB0
    I'm actually curious where the first actual description of how a space fold works actually was, though I don't doubt you in the least. Given the amount of depth the series has had in background material over the years, it was probably well before Frontier made fold mechanics an actual plot point. That was just the point at which an anime-only audience was exposed to these mechanics. To an audience without access to the voluminous supplementary material, a space fold usually appears to be flying through fold space. Certainly, though, the name "space fold" implies more than that, and the infamous first fold did look like a portal, with the sunny sky over the ocean visible where the Macross defolded, as though sunlight was still pouring through. But on the other hand, we know that the trip (normally) takes measurable time to the passengers inside the fold, so it isn't just a portal(and travel within the fold is illustrated as chromatic aberration in the original series, and a trippy CG rainbow tunnel in Plus). Also, rather than a visible portal, we see a light show on most folds. This creates the implication that there's actually different KINDS of fold. Or that the fold from Earth to Pluto was embellished for artistic effect, or that it behaved differently because it was a clear malfunction of the system, or... Too many words starts now! Ill-informed speculation: The big problem, to me, is that the "exchange of a volume at each end" explanation doesn't work well when the defold is non-synchronous. It causes a problem in one of two ways. 1. The volume of space that a ship folded to will arrive at the place it left some time after the ship gets there. Best case, it arrives instantly whenever the ship defolds. So there's essentially an undetectable mine sitting there where the vessel launched from, just waiting to go off at some indeterminate point in the future(a very long time in the case of, say, the Megaroad). Admittedly, this is a really good reason to not do folds in atmosphere, in addition to "we're hauling a huge bubble of atmosphere, ocean, and island with us". You'll do a lot less damage if a block of mostly-empty space suddenly drops onto an innocent vessel cruising through a place you folded out of years ago. ... 2. If the volume at the defold location arrives instantaneously while the ship takes decades to defold, you've created a trivial time travel mechanism, as the volume from the destination will arrive when the fold is initiated rather than when it is completed. In an illustrative example, the Megaroad's "destination volume" has ALREADY arrived at Earth even though the Megaroad herself won't be swapped into that space for many decades. She has pulled a chunk of space from the future into the present at the instant of fold initiation. Since a fold swaps equal volumes, the transit is obviously bidirectional. Some unfortunate soul caught without warning in a ship's defold location will find themselves flung backwards through time into the past. Figure out how to start yourself at the "defold" side and travel to the "fold" side, and you can go back in time at will. This shouldn't actually be hard, since the same fold drive generates both openings, apparently simultaneously. The protoculture were horrified enough by the prospect of time travel to cover an entire planet with self-replicating murderbots to make sure no one actually DID it after they built a time machine(as is typical of the protoculture, this was in lieu of converting the time machine into a black hole). It seems probable that they wouldn't leave everyone with a potential time machine just sitting in their ship's engine room. Warning! Unfounded non-canon explanation! No one should take this as fact! Personally, I think it can be cleaned up consistently, though I doubt anyone writing for the franchise cares what I think. A fold opens a portal into fold space as a ship enters the fold, and a portal out of fold space as a ship leaves the fold. Within fold space, all matter moves at a constant velocity. For undisturbed fold space, that velocity is ∞(or so close it doesn't matter). A fold in such conditions is, in fact, instantaneous and the fold just looks like a portal from point A to point B. When fold space is stressed, that speed goes down, and a ship spends a measurable time traveling through fold space before arriving at the destination. In those scenarios, a fold just looks like a portal into fold space, because both portals are not open simultaneously, so you just get the flashy light effect instead. And from THAT perspective, a better fold drive works like an improved suspension on a car, in that it allows faster travel over worse conditions. And the "zero-time" fold drives are just an ideal suspension that allows travel at maximum speed under all road conditions(I believe such a car is called an airplane). A fold fault in this analogy is just an extreme stress in fold space. Completely pointless sidenote: I find it interesting that fold faults and fold-based time travel both wound up being present in the Robotech novelization years and years ago. I am pretty sure it was wild coincidence, but it is interesting nonetheless.
  25. JB0
    Yeah. Blasting Again did it first, but it was really just namedropping Eve. Who died offscreen before the game started, as did Jason. Zero, I feel, did it harder, though Zero Eve is not the novelization Eve. The first world of Zero 2 seems an overt homage to the origin of Novel Eve and Sophia 3. The novelization of Blaster Master had a LOT of elbow room for improvization, as the manual story leaves gaping holes. There's no explanation how we go from "chasing after a pet frog" to "driving a jumptank in a one-man war against the Plutonium Boss", and the novel wrote a big sci-fi story to fill in the gaps(chasms, really). Probably the most fun Worlds of Power book to write, since there was so much blank space. I think that's why it is best-remembered of the series. ... Kinda wish I still owned it, actually.
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