JB0

I imagine the fact that there seems to be no requirement to keep things together during the whole transformation helps a bit. I don't mind the speedy transformation so much as the "comes totally apart then snaps back together" aspect. Sure it's justifiable from a technological advancement standpoint and all. It just doesn't appeal to me.

Wikipedia is wrong. You did not play Galaxian 3. http://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=83...p;gid=2688#2688 You played a sequel. Most likely Galaxian 3: Project Dragoon, though possibly G3: Attack of the Zolgear. Despite Wikipedia's insistence that all three games are the same thing, they pretty clearly aren't. Project Dragoon could be a REMAKE of Galaxian 3, but it's certainly not the same thing given the original was a full circle with 28 guns and PD was a flat screen with 6 guns. Not that it isn't sexy as hell anyways.

If Millia is any indication, that's not necessarily a problem.

Could be worse. Could be Vanessa. What, she is too? Well... crap. There goes that plan.

NO DISASSEMBLE! Seriously, I've checked the date on that article multiple times now to make sure it wasn't a missed April Fool's gag. I just cannot figure out how that makes any real sense.

In exchange, you can't attack from behind your shield. Not explicitly stated, but look at the end of Space War 1. They bust into the core of the flagship, full of thousands of zentradi ships, and they wait until AFTER the cloud of thermonuclear death is clear of the ship to activate the shield? I'd bet that it's a 2-way shield, and they would've been trapped in a bubble with a swarm of angry nukes if they hadn't waited those extra seconds. Did they? It seems to me they spent a lot of time and effort miniaturizing the pin-point barrier system for fighter usage, as well as adding it to all of their warships. And you're talking about a barrier orders of magnitude larger than the Macross' for protecting a planet. Assuming a linear scaling ratio, surface area will be absurdly expensive, and if power scales with volume... If it doesn't scale linearly, things could be quite a bit easier(most of the cost is in initial setup, and size of the barrier is largely irrelevant) or much more difficult(an given increase in barrier size requires a much larger, possibly even expontential, power increase). There could also be absolute upper limits on shield size. Given we don't know what sort of physics it operates under, we can't say for sure. As an example... hypothetically, you can keep adding particles to an atomic nucleus to make bigger and better atoms to infinity. But past a certain point, the nucleus expands beyond the effective reach of the strong force, and starts spontaneously fissioning. It's why radioactive elements exist(But not radioactive isotopes of stable elements. That's a different effect.), and why very large atoms have half-lives measured in fractions of a second and will never be observed outside of a lab. We also don't know how barrier capacity scales. We know that the barrier deflects some energy and stores the rest, and that if it absorbs too much, it goes kerblooie with spectacular results. It could just be that the facilities needed to store the sort of energy a planetary bombardment generates are prohibitively large. Or it could be that all barriers have the same energy absorption, and that a planetary barrier would rapidly overload just from solar radiation. If everything was as simple as "build it small, then make it bigger," the world would be a lot different. See the robot. Aibo, Asimo, and Robosapien are all highly articulated robots that move fairly reliably. And if you scale them up, they collapse under their own weight because volume(and hence mass) cubes while surface area(including the cross-section of load-bearing structures) squares. Or a lack of knowledge? Remember, the entire THEORY for the barrier system was developed after the fold accident. Assuming it can hold up to a significant bombardment instead of failing instantly, and can be energized rapidly enough to stop a mass assault. They had an orbital defense fleet. It got raped. They also had several anti-fleet cannons under construction on the Earth and the Moon. Only one was completed, and it served it's people well before it went kerblooie. Complaining they didn't create a functional planet-sized version of a device that wouldn't even be PROTOTYPED until almost a year after the Macross was launched, and a mere two months before the final attack on the planet, is a bit unfair. The fact that they DID continue using pin-point barriers, and expanded their usage, suggests that the PPB is just plain better. Also of note: The Macross 7 has both PPB and ODB systems. http://macross.anime.net/mecha/united_nati...ross/index.html The ODB was never used in animation, despite it's greater coverage. Of course, the hazard a barrier overload would pose to the other ships in the fleet(especially the unarmed and vulnerable colony ships) could be considered a significant mitigating factor.

Good point. I dragged the comparison a bit too far. It's more like... that clash of ideals and reality is, in some ways, a sign of growing up. Most people at some point have to accept that the universe is NOT a friendly place, and ideals aren't completely compatible with reality. That's actually one of my complaints. The show has a lot of interesting concepts present, but they're stunted by the "monster of the week" and "prefab pop-band promotion" angles.

Check the brawl in the restaurant. Kaifun hit at least one person. He also threw booze at Minmay. Anyways... It's also worth noting that Hikaru was, at one point, a pacifist. A major point of his early development was coming to terms with the fact that sometimes life throws situations out that just can't be resolved peacefully, and that arc peaks in Transformation with his decision to enlist after the destruction of the rebuilt Macross City(and I only just realized that's not the painfully literal episode title it seems to be...). Hikaru's still not going to run out and pick a fight, but he acknowledges the necessity of taking up arms in defense of your home, your people, and your world. IMO, Basara is Hikaru, just without that moment of realization. He never accepts that sometimes you can't solve a problem in a non-violent manner, and gets pissed when people make him resort to violence. Singing to a group of street thugs trying to punch your lights out isn't any more effective than sitting in a park and sulking while aliens shoot at your space ship. Fortunately for Basara, singing to interdimensional invaders trying to eat your soul IS more effective than shooting at them, and his stubborn adherence to an ideal is ultimately to humanity's benefit.

I actually find this a HIGHLY unfair argument. The zentradi are established as having a long, proud tradition of sterilizing any planet they come across that has "culture." They were not shown as being inclined to negotiation once the cultural contamination became obvious. MAYBE the war could've been avoided had the Macross not been rebuilt, or not been booby-trapped. But as things happened, the military didn't really botch anything. In fact, throwing the Macross to the wolves was a sound strategical move. The enemy's interest WAS solely in the battleship, as far as anyone could tell. When the Macross left Earth, the aliens followed it, and expressed no interest whatsoever in the planet until the Macross returned. And when it left again, the aliens left with it. ... And then they signed a peace treaty with the Macross hours before their boss came to blow everyone to hell. Certainly, the military's immediate dismissal of Misa's first-hand experience with the alien fleet was poor judgement, especially since the viewer knows she was 100% accurate. But there WASN'T any evidence they had a fleet the size of her report, and eyewitness accounts ARE prone to extreme variability. Especially when the planetary sterilization was a planned demonstration. That was VERY easy to fake. Their later observations of the fleet during their escape are disrupted and colored by their attempts to escape. It is NOT what you would call ironclad evidence. Also note that by this point in time, the spies are already aboard the Macross, beginning the chain of cultural contamination that will ultimately lead to the decision to sterilize the planet. Things had already started rolling at this point, and the ultimate conclusion was arguably inevitable. And this is only tangental, but... for all the military's pride and arrogance, the Grand Cannon WAS relevant to humanity's victory. The allied fleet advances towards the zentradi flagship through the path cleared by the Grand Cannon, sparing them a large number of ship-to-ship battles. Kaifun is an apeface. Before the end of the war, he blames the military for the Macross' situation. Which is only partially accurate, given the Macross fired an automated attack to start the war. AFTER the war, he acts like the military wandered into the Zentradi fleet, punched Bodol in the nose, and laughed at him. In point of fact, the military had ALREADY DECIDED not to start a fight with aliens when Britai first showed up. The first shot is beyond human control. The second shot is by the zentradi. After that, opportunities for discussion and a peaceful resolution to the conflict are surprisingly limited, especially since the aliens spend most of their time on the other side of the solar system. Notable typos fixed during the production of this post: A continued traditional confusion of Kamjin and Kaifun. Britai = Britain

Well, he DOES...

To further muddy the waters, there's also the VF-1X, an upgraded VF-1 with increased performance and modernized controls.

You probably OWN a cheap bridge. I have my 360 connected to my PC, and XP is bridging the wired connection to the wireless one. Granted, my 3690 is right next to a PC, but... Also, I'm using a wired-only router to connect the 360 and PC. A crossover cable would be saner, but A. This left me the option of taking the PS2 and XBox 1 online, and B. I already HAD a router. A crossover cable would have cost money.

Don't forget naming Megatron's gun Leader-1 in Armada! I think that was just spiteful. Okay, we get it. Transformers won. No need to go dragging the GoBots through the mud like that(It doesn't hurt that I absolutely LOVED my Super GoBots Leader-1). They also did a series of "Go-Bots" in Generation 2. Cars with HotWheels-style axles. But the point is taken.

Actually, SDF really DOESN'T need a BR release. The film grain is the ultimate determination of whether there's a point or not in this case. If you can see film grain, you've hit the limits of your source footage and a higher resolution transfer is meaningless. The film grain was visible in SDF. Of course, Animeigo stripped it out during the remaster, then added some of it back in, but the fact remains that the DVD transfer has a higher resolution than the original footage does. I don't know about the audio quality, though. Presuambly more space would help that, but BluRay is overkill. I suspect, with no real proof, that part of the reason for ADV's lower quality(as compared to Animeigo) audio track is because they reduced the bitrate to fit more content in, since they have the glorious upsampled-from-mono, 5.1-even-though-there's-almost-no-subwoofer-content dub track. If I owned the ADV disks, I could make more than a guess.

Geez, it's been a while since I messed with mine... I should bust them out and check them. Then immediately burn backups. Only disk I've ever had crack on me was a Tyrian 2000 game CD. It was just sitting in the box, I pulled it out to listen to the music, and it split in two.

Dave already answered. 'S why I'm considering changing my current DVDRW out for an SATA one(now that they, you know, actually make them). ... Well, that and I have a black case and a beige writer. I'd LIKE to get a BR reader + DVDRW, but those things are silly expensive.

Seconded. Unless you've got a compelling reason not to(like attempting to go total SATA), optical drives are the single most reusable component.

Moremore importantly, when is the original cut that Lucas has promised we'll never see again?

For some reason, I'm getting a weird Last Starfighter prototype vibe from that first pic.

I wasn't really trying to be rude. Sorry I came off that way. I genuinely thought it was an innocent oversight(one that's easy to make, even if you know better). Anyways, confusion cleared. We're all gonna die. Eventually. Resume normal conversation.

There's actually an excuse for this one. Most of the destroids were packed into the Daedalus and got blasted in the initial boarding operation. Certainly they should've brought more VFs in, but...

Right. You're missing the other side of that coin, even though you use it to make your point with Betelgeuse. Since we're looking into the past, we have no way of knowing if a star has actually exploded or not. There is, in fact, no guarantee that WR104's Wolf-Rayet has not ALREADY detonated, possibly a VERY long time ago. If that star explodes today, we won't know for 8 millenia. But if it exploded 8 millenia ago, we'll be finding out any day now. Of course, this is a lot of discussion for a gamma ray burst that only MIGHT be aimed at us.

You've gotten it exactly right, actually. People tend to forget that we don't see things as they happen, because they're used to the incredibly short distances of terrestrial life. It's easy to forget that we're seeing ancient history when we look at the night sky. Heck, you can see the birth of the universe if you know where to look(the blanket microwave background radiation is an almost unimaginably red-shifted Big Bang).

They've even got a Light/Dark side motif going. ... Ps3 is the dark side of gaming? Hmmm...

I thought Kirk was a tad unique among Feddie captains. Weren't most of them supposed to be a bit more... reserved?