Nied

Funnily enough there was a period where it felt like the 104th FW was stalking me because I couldn't go to an air show without one of their F-15s turning up. Ironically I've been living in MA for 12 years now and I still haven't been able to go to an air show at Barnes ANGB because of scheduling conflicts or cancellations (including this year).

Seriously. Super pixelated 480p just doesn't cut it these days. I need my VF-4s in 4K HDR dammit!

On the F-15 it was mainly a combo of inertia and bad timing. While MacDac made the structural modifications to accept the F110 when they designed the F-15E, to my knowledge no one had gone through the trouble of actually flight testing or certifying it on the Beagle. By the time the AF looked at new engines for the F-15 the F100-229 was out and offered performance that was basically identical to a F110-129 so it didn't make sense to go through the trouble of making the structural mods to the F-15C fleet or building a new logistical train. Now that Korea paid the money to make sure there wouldn't be any problems with the F110 everyone's been buying GE powered Eagles so it made sense for the USAF to follow the heard there. Also I imagine there was a desire to throw business to GE to keep them in the fighter engine game given that Pratt is the only manufacturer of engines for our 5th gen fleet.

The no turkey feathers thing is exclusive to P&W F100s, and it's less of an issue of the Air Force removing them than the F-15s removing them themselves. Because of some aerodynamic issues peculiar to the Eagle the turkey feathers started getting sucked off the plane at high speeds when the F-15 was introduced. The Air Force looked at a bunch of ways of fixing this but line mechanics realized you could just remove the feathers with basically no effect on performance and pretty soon everyone but the Israelis were flying Eagles with bare butts. The GE F110 attaches it's turkey feathers differently so with the advent of the GE powered F-15K for South Korea in the early aughts you started to see Eagles with turkey feathers again. The EX is the first F-15 with F110s in USAF service so I don't see a reason why they wont follow the example of the rest of the F110 powered Eagles and leave them on since they can.

Yes designing and flight testing an all new airframe with new avionics and a whole new manufacturing and logistics train would definetly be less difficult than fitting new avionics to an existing airframe. That's why an F-15EX costs twice as much as a Raptor. They moved past the minimal viable product years ago when Block 3f went into service. Now they're working on Block 4 which is all the post IOC wishlist items.

I don't know that a whole new plane solves any of those problems either.

The talk of a cheaper "4.5 gen" plane to supplement the F-35 makes me wonder if it'll be less of an F-36 and more of a watered down F-35. People forget that the JSF was originally envisioned to have an avionics suite closer to a Block III Super Hornet or Advanced F-16 F-21, but the program managers saw a lot of the possibilities being demonstrated on the F-22 and decided they could add a full ELINT suite with a side of broad spectrum jamming for free because it was all just software. Of course in the real world software development costs a lot of money, and the extra processing power to run it is heavy and expensive while the extra generation and cooling to keep that running is also heavy and expensive. An "F-35D" with all that extraneous crap taken back out would likely be cheaper and also higher performance to boot without all that extraneous weight.

I mean I have been lurking here since then. I guess I don't find the evidence here very convincing. Producers talk up the talent they've approached for a project all the time when trying to attract investors and if shitty tie-in comics were all it took to kill a franchise every property since Star Wars would have been dead as a door-nail. Frankly all I care about at this point is being able to buy non-bootleg Blu-rays of DYRL, Plus and 7 for a combined price that's less than a 10 year old Honda Civic. The fact that this deal ups the chances of new Robotech stuff from "basically impossible" to "not very likely" is just gravy.

Agree to disagree cause they both sound goofy as hell to my ears. Anyway we live in a golden age of goofy stuff from our childhoods being taken seriously in big budget action movies. How many movies got made where the villains seriously got called "Decepticons"? 'Robotech' is downright prosaic next to that. As someone who seriously looked at using some of their stimmy to buy a grey-market Macross Plus Blu-Ray but gave up when it would cost close to $600 I'm pretty happy for this.

I don't know if it's any worse than "Overtechnology" & "Zor" though.

My guess is Sony would likely split the difference. Sell the movie as Robotech here in the states and other countries where it's known by that name, and Macross back in Japan and other parts of Asia.

Unless this contract has a clause inverting the time-space continuum it'd be pretty odd to talk about past Robotech and Macross projects as future ones.

The Press release explicitly talks about HG and BW partnering on FUTURE Robotech and Macross works. I seriously doubt that's going to just be comics as HG's been in the clear on promotional materials like that as part of their original license with Tatsunoko.

So HG will never make future Robotech works featuring elements from Macross but the reason they'll partner with BW for future Robotech works is because they will feature elements from Macross?

Something else that just occurred to me: If this really is HG abandoning the field and bending the knee and whatever other overwrought metaphor Seto says, why did HG and BW agree to co-produce future Robotech properties?