JB0

QRaus have laser guns in the forearms. Anyone you're in a position to punch can be perforated just as easily. Though there IS a certain stylistic flair in lunging at someone with a fist, only to stop at the last second and unload a burst of high-energy photons into their face at point-blank range. NosGers have handguns, presumably with their own self-contained ammo stores. LAME. They also have a plasma cannon in their chest, though. The QRau has "impact cannons" in the chest, and the NosGer's shoulder cannon is also an impact cannon. While what an impact cannon actually IS isn't stated, I can't see a way for these to be projectile weapons as there's very limited space for ammunition and a feed mechanism, especially given the NosGer's cannon is mounted on a swivel. Ammo shouldn't be a concern, as both mechs are loaded with integral energy weapons. Well a spartan is still slower than a valk from getting from place to place. So relative to a lighter mech I put it in crapper tier. Maybe amoungst it's own class (mecha which are mainly for the ground) it is speedy. That doesn't negate the fact it has limits which aren't worth highlighting. What about the Valkyrie's limits? It's very lightly armed and armored. The GBP makes a Valk into a passable Spartan substitute, but not a great one. There's still a signifigant armor disparity, and the VF-1's hands and feet still aren't built for melee. And all that extra mass is going to greatly reduce it's speed advantage. And while the GBP-1 has far more missiles/grenades than the Spartan, it lacks the other integrated weapons, most notably anti-infantry gear. The Spartan is built for an entirely diffrent mission than the Valk, and is infinitely better-suited to said mission. Sure it makes a crappy Valkyrie, but the Valkyrie makes a crappy Spartan too. And the cost of a variable spartan would be... armor. The variable Monster isn't a big issue. A Monster isn't supposed to BE in direct conflict, and if the enemy is landing hits on it, you've probably already lost. The relatively rapid deployment(it's still subsonic) of the variable design greatly outweigh the durability of a fixed-mode vehicle for the Monster. But for a Spartan, which is designed EXPLICITLY to wade right into the thick of things and take hits, a loss of armor is a very serious shortcoming. Because a clock-radio, while capable of functioning as a radio, doesn't do a very good job of it. That's why they never REPLACED dedicated audio systems. The clock radio is a Valkyrie, the stereo system is a Spartan. Better is a relative term. If you deploy a Valkyrie into a situation where it WILL take damage, it WILL be destroyed. If you deploy a Spartan or Tomahawk into a situation where it WILL take damage, it has the armor to shrug it off and come back home later. There's less chinks in the armor because there's no variable-mode joints, many of the joints that ARE there have thick armor skirts or sleeves, and the solid parts are ALSO far more heavily armored. Actually, that's exactly where you WANT a frontline combat destroid. If you've been rushed, then there's too many guns for a Valk to be safe, and way too many targets for it's gunpod to deal with. Remember, the Valkyrie is very lightly armored and very lightly armed. Again, it's a tradeoff. Durability is NOT something you can just ignore because "my army can run away if people start shooting." End part 1 of 2.

Been done over in the "other anime and scifi" section. And yes, the PS3 is just too expensive. I don't care what's in it, it's a game machine. I won't drop a half-grand on a game machine. For the console market to follow the folly of the PC gaming market is a very bad thing.

I'm kinda confused about how no one worked it out when Global started flying around the world going "Hey, we've got a hold full of dead people that are actually alive that we'd kinda like to unload plzkthx" on a general broadcast.

Wow I'm a dumbass/Jack-ass. Thanks JB0! I cleared the cache and it worked perfectly. It was probably always uploading right, and your browser just wasn't properly updating things on your end. They get stupid with the cache sometimes. Now THAT'S a good filter.

Just got around to watching the latest episode... Listen to my song, indeed. Showcases the less self-centered aspect of Haruhi, too. Always good to see her doing something OTHER than making someone's life miserable in the quest for entertainment. Too bad Yuki wasn't on drums. She'd make an excellent Veffidas.

My best guess would be browser cache. I'd clear that before uploading, and if it didn't work, clear it immediatly afterwards.

It happens to other people too. It seems he's got a loose mouth and quite often says something out loud that he's INTENDING to just think. Remember, the story's 1st-person. Any verbal slippage wouldn't be in quotes because Kyon doesn't realize he said it(not until someone replies, anyways).

Actually, the table of contents merely tells you the size of the disk contents. It's not synonomous with content size. You could conceivably create a copy-protection scheme revolving around a corrupt TOC(I believe it's a known scheme on CDDA), so it's a relevant distinction. ... That and I'd like to try and prevent the console warez kiddies from corrupting yet another term like they have with ISO and ROM(Oh man, have they corrupted ROM). Has anyone ever gone back and designed a nice-looking fliptop shell? The lack of aesthetic effort on the replacement shells has always disappointed me. I'd be more inclined to grab a busted PS2 off eBay or something, then go wild with a Dremel.

I assume just pessimism. Space War 2 COULD be the Protodeviln war, though...

I kinda like Haruhi. Bear in mind she was always the social outcast and has always seemed to be until recently all that "genki power" was unleashed when she met Kyon. Her "omnipotent powers" don't help in the brattyness since she keeps getting what she wants. It would be an interesting breakdown of the Haruhi character as the romance develops between Kyon and her. It'd be a REALLY screwed-up relationship. ... Actually, there's interesting personality parallels, which is probably why Haruhi gets along with Kyon in the first place(relative to her other classmates, she DOES get along quite well with Kyon). They're just 2 diffrent responses to the exact same situation. Both think the world would be a better place if more weird stuff happened. Kyon determined it just couldn't happen, gave up on his dreams, and became a well-adjusted, if insufferably dull, member of society. (Was I the ONLY person that wanted to hurt someone over the speech about how only incredibly rare geniuses could change the world and everyone else should just sit back and enjoy the ride because they were too stupid to change anything?) Haruhi determined it just couldn't happen, said screw it, and started trying to make it happen anyways. Not that its important. Maybe Kyon was never a real person (hence no real name) in the end, but a "Opened Space" entity Haruhi created to soothe her loneliness and someone to actually get her to make the SOS Brigade. Haha....i'm sorry but i tend to think every anime now focuses on existentialism. 409655[/snapback] If Kyon was never real and that's why he doesn't have a name, then why do Koizumi, Mikuru, and Yuki have names? Koizumi and Yuki both believe that all 4 of them are in the SOS Brigade specifically because Haruhi willed it to be so. Koizumi is certain his very existence, as well as that of Yuki and Mikuru, and quite possibly everyone in the entire world, is because Haruhi willed it. And Mikuru is hopelessly inept anyways so who cares what she thinks. Why would the one "normal" person on Earth that's worth spending time with and the only person, normal or otherwise, that deserves a place in the new world NOT rank a name? Arguably, Kyon should be the FIRST to get one, as he's the most important person to Haruhi(whether she admits it or not).

People scared to lose memories and intellect by going micro? The giant ape like commander might prefer using a heavy powered armor custom built for himself the same way you have elite ace pilots like char in gundam. Maybe something about the way the powered armor matches your exact body movements and allows you to do more fancy moves at close range, would seem preferable to aliens over robot controls? Think of the difference in agility between the Knight Sabers' powered suits in bubble gum crisis vs the more mechanical mecha the police use? (how they can dance circles around them and do somersaults, cartwheels and spins and poo?) Or a QRau VS a Regult? But the zentradi don't use power suits that way. The NosGer has the big guns. The QRau has enough missiles to equip a moderately-sized air force. It seems they give power suits to the people good enough that they never wind up in melee situations. And the Spartan was the only one designed for a role where speed and melee were needed. That's like griping because a hammer does a lousy job at cutting paper. Great plane, mediocre robot. The battroid reminds me of the saying Jack of all trades, master of none. Sure it can do a little of anything, but it's not great at anything either. Actually, the QRau doesn't match our notion of powered armor. The arms and legs don't fit into the mech's arms and legs. I think the line art shows a conventional control panel(I know Yamato's toy does). Though it doesn't rule out leg-based controls, it DOES rule out just walking to walk. Besides, motion tracking works really well for human actions, and a lot less well for non-human actions like flying through space or shooting missiles out of your shoulders. The big advantage is the form-fitting cockpit reduces the mech volume and surface area. Reducing surface area in turn reduces armor needed. So a Regult masses 37000 kg for the "base model." A NosGer masses 34700 kg. A QRau masses 33600 kg. Less mass = less momenteum = greater maneuverability. Of course, the NosGer has almost twice the power of a Regult, and a QRau has over 3x the power. That certainly doesn't hurt. It's more an issue of complexity. There's just too much information coming in and too many options going back out for a physical interface to remain intuitive. Real world example: Uppercut in Street Fighter 2: Rapidly tap the joystick right, return to center, pull it down, then push it to the lower-right corner while simultaneously pressing one of 3 punch buttons to select the strength of the punch. Uppercut in Real Life 1: Punch something. Punch harder to punch harder. You don't need to consider all the actions involved in actually making the punch. Besides, limited real-world studies have indicated that the brain develops brain regions dedicated to new hardware when hardware is made available. Assuming it scales... when a pilot finishes learning the YF-21 they aren't a big transforming robot pilot anymore, they're a big transforming robot that happens to have a soft squishy core("Mister Owl, how many hits does it take to get to the tootsie roll center of a YF-21?"). Bodolzaa was. As of yet, we don't know which version of Bodolzaa is the "real" one. Bingo. Conventional computers can only do what the programmer and user tell them to do. The DBZ computer hasn't been told to watch actual combat and adjust power levels based on observations. By the same token, the ship's computer on Britai's pickle wouldn't have seen footage of the "miclones" in Macross City after the first attack and reminded Britai that zentradi legend said that Bad Things happened if you messed with miclones. Exedol, as a sentient being, DID make the connection and brought it up. Human(and presumably zentradi) memory is massively crosslinked. "Submarine" might be connected to "really cool boat," "nuclear war," and "annoying song that loops in my head forever we all live in a yellow submarine oh god make it stop," as well as a massive number of other connections. It's a horrible database design, because a computer can't tell which links are contextually appropriate. It works for us because we can evaluate everything at once and determine what links are most likely to be useful. And if we occasionally get annoying bits of songs stuck in our head, well... it's the price we pay for sentience. While Sharon Apple and the X-9 could likely evaluate things in a similar manner to humans and zentradi, Macross AI has proven to be a dead-end technology. It's got nagging issues with mental stability that make it unfit to be implemented outside a research lab.

I like ASPECTS of Haruhi, but not the character as a whole. I think Kyon's just given up. He can't get away from her and he can't make her listen to anyone. So he just tries to keep her from inflicting too much suffering on everyone else. Not that I know of. From what I've heard, it's not established yet.

Isn't it also possible they continued to be an issue up through the orbital bombardment? I could be wrong(it's happened a lot lately), but wasn't the disappearance of Macross city attributed to a terrorist attack? The annihilation of an entire city, with 0 survivors, by a terrorist group was considered a plausible story. It seems to me that would require a well-trained and well-equipped force to pull off. 409581[/snapback] They could have been an issue, but details are sketchy around there. They didn't make enough noise to be noted in the chronology. I don't think we ever got an official word on what happened to South Ataria. I would have to watch SDFM again. 409595[/snapback] There were comments about it between when the Macross returns to Earth and gets chased off again after the barrier overload. Global was being told he couldn't unload the civilians because they were all officially dead and they didn't want Macross City running around telling people "Yeah, there's giant aliens shooting at us." Hence why he was cruising around Canada for a place to unload, since there was a "autonomous region" around Ontario. I just don't recall the exact conversation. It might've been pitched as an accident of some sort, but I think it was a terrorist attack.

Isn't it also possible they continued to be an issue up through the orbital bombardment? I could be wrong(it's happened a lot lately), but wasn't the disappearance of Macross city attributed to a terrorist attack? The annihilation of an entire city, with 0 survivors, by a terrorist group was considered a plausible story. It seems to me that would require a well-trained and well-equipped force to pull off.

On the toy? It does. Without even a flip-down cover plate over it. ... Even as a kid that struck me as stupid. "Wait... do they WANT the autobots to know what their weaknesses are?"

Fine. Then my wolf jammed for other reasons. It still got stuck. David: I remember it as looking diffrent. *rummages through list* Yeah, I had the OTHER wolf(-ish thing). "Fangry." Great name... *rolls eyes* http://www.tfracetrack.com/instructions/g1...icon/fangry.jpg

Maybe because it was overcast outside and they needed extra light? Sorry, not a photographer, so that's just my guess. 409283[/snapback] But they're shooting inside. After having read the first novel now, I think the filler was necessary. Otherwise, the series would only have been about six episodes long. 409409[/snapback] Well, the "filler" comes from stories written after the first novel anyways. They just don't get the big dramatic finale if they air things in order.

Micloning functions that way. It's unclear how regular cloning works. I would assume it works more conventionally, since otherwise deaths are a far bigger issue to the zentradi. And there winds up being confusion and a lack of low-ranking troops as multiple troops "did" the same prior experiences and remember holding certain ranks. It won't maintain morale very well if troops keep getting busted back down to the bottom rung for no reason other than the higher-ups need more bottom-end guys. On the other hand, the zentradi almost certainly DO accelerate the growth so clones come out as adults, and implant SOME brain templates, as they lack any knowledge of raising children. So it's an intermediate.

*cries over the Energon Shockwave toy again* I only ever had one headmaster. Was the wolf-ish decepticon thing. The transformation lock broke, so it was stuck in beast mode forever. 409082[/snapback] Only Powermasters had Transformation locks. 409094[/snapback] I'm pretty sure my headmaster did too, though I no longer have the manual to prove it.

GAH! Yah, that was pretty blatant filler. Some fun stuff(and me criticizing AFK for flagging the reflector a mirror*), but they spent almost half the episode just showing Yuki reading. I mean, I like Yuki as much as/far more than the next guy, but... that was a complete waste of time. Not even a good screenshot in the scene. *Can anyone figure out why Haruhi is using a reflector in that photo sequence anyways? They won points for including it and using it appropriately in the movie(Koizumi is seen using it to get sun onto Mikuru's face in the scene he's not supposed to be in), but I can't figure out why it's there in Rain. I suppose Haruhi might just be thinking "Pros use reflectors, so we need one too!" but they still used it RIGHT in the movie.

We have been since the '60s. And non-combat is misleading. They're trying to boost troop strength so they can carry more gear for more time without tiring. They already carry more than they're supposed to, and it greatly limits how far they can move on foot. So they may not be intending to use it in combat, but it's certainly not for pacifism. We will not see a government-sponsored guy run out in powered armor and try to stop the war with rock music... or the resulting doggie kibble when he takes an anti-tank round to the chest. And rest assured, once they get the speed and responsiveness up, we WILL see the things in combat usage. Screw bullet-proof vests, we have infantry tanks!

*cries over the Energon Shockwave toy again* I only ever had one headmaster. Was the wolf-ish decepticon thing. The transformation lock broke, so it was stuck in beast mode forever.

What's wrong with the movie?

It's because Haruhi is director. Seriously, it's because they want to close the series out with the ending of the Melancholy story arc. It gives them a story arc to sustain through the entire season and a big dramatic finish without signifigantly altering the original source material. On the down side, some episodes just don't make sense as-is. I think the baseball episode should've aired after episode 4, so all the major characters at least had their backgrounds established. Beyond that, it works. You generally have enough knowledge to know what's going on, though you'll be left scratching your head at a few references. Bah. Go read the translation of the first book, and then watch everything with full comprehension. It makes things more enjoyable, at least to me. I have to give the animators credit though... they pulled the Yuki fight off pretty well, and it's hard to vizualise, much less draw.

Yah. The genetic defects were due to inbreeding, not a side effect of cloning or size shift. There were just too many "twins" running around, so the odds of accidentally marrying* a cousin you didn't know you had crept up fast. And the population was large enough for good ol'-fashioned sexual reproduction to sustain growth at that point anyways. *Or not marrying. I doubt a society trying to build itself up from the threshold for survival is going to place too much emphasis on traditional monogamous relationships.