Nied

This has been going on too long, but I've got to say it,

Commercial aircraft/airliners = zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.............

But I guess when in Rome, do as the Romans do, so whenever I get the pictures I took at the air show at Lincoln a few weeks ago I did get some pictures of commercial airliners landing on the adjacent runway.

Seriously. I once asked my father why he didn't become an airline pilot after leaving the Navy (he flew F9F-8 Panthers), he told me: "that's like asking a former race car driver why he didn't drive a bus after retiring."

In other news I finally got to see an F-22 in flight (2 actually) over the weekend at the fleetweek airshow. They were only up for about ten minutes of zoom climbs but damn was that impressive! Nice cap to getting married and spending a week and half in Hawaii.

I've been watching "Balance of Terror". Fortunately, it's not as bad as I feared. Several shots do look like the old models and not cartoonih CGI (though one shot of the updated Bird of Prey was absolutely atrocious - bad paneling, overly dramatic lighting, it looked horrible).

It still doesn't have the thumbs up from me, but I probably won't batty much about it. That's provided that this is exactly what the rest will be like. It's not bad, but I'll hardly be singing their praises like they expect. They're not all that prettier. They have changed some movement. it is a bit smoother.

Still, I don't get why they couldn't have just restore the old effects like the rest of it. Why bother with this if they're not changing much besides a bit more detailing? I'm still guessing that it gives them an angel to market it, and that they wanted to redo the planets. Blending the effects probably wouldn't have worked or they figured, "We've come this far..."

I think the problem was that they intend to broadcast this in HD when available and while it was pretty easy to take the old film stock and do an HD transfer for the live action shots, the effects shots were probably of lower quality because of all of the composting work. If they didn't have the original elements available (quite unlikely, IIRC it was considered pretty remarkable that George Lucas saved all of the effects elements for the SW trilogy) you would have had to settle for beautiful HD interior and live action shots and worse than SD FX shots. This way they get to air the whole thing in HD and fix any little niggling errors while they're at it. IMHO they could have spent more time fixing some ship movement issues but over all it's a pretty good job.

What kind of excuse is that?

I know! Women, they just don't understand what's important in life: Airplanes and toys.

I'll be getting married the day after it's over, and my fiance is understandably against me travelling across the country the day before our wedding to see an airshow.

I had no idea. I just now googled for a picture of the Smithsonian model, and it is indeed way too weathered. The original prop model was probably a bit boring to look at, but to deface a piece of TV history like that...

To be fair, I used to live near the Smithsonian and as any who's read the Aircraft Vs Superthread can imagine I visited the Air And Space museum fairly regularly, and saw the E-nil both before and after the restoration. While it looks like crap in the pictures it the weathering is much subtler in person. Last I saw of it the Enterprise was housed in the gift shop.

All right here's some of the new stuff I was talking about. Vinnie and I have been going back and forth over this for the last few weeks and we have something that we're both really happy with. This is what the Pukin Dogs' ride looked like back in their heyday in 2017. I'm also workng on a "rival squadron" in both 2017 era and 2038 era colors (PM for ya Vinnie) that I better hope I can post in the next two weeks.

My only disappointment with this is that it appears they've really done a move for move re-creation of the effects from the original, complete with all the weird ship movement artifacts from the pre-motion control era special effects. Thus the shiny new CG Enterprise still bounces around drunkenly while flying towards that planet instead of going in a straight line. One wonders if they're still going to switch between the pilot version of the ship and the series version of the ship between shots like in the original. Also while they made a big deal about the Earth supposedly looking so great in the promotional stuff I've read but seeing it for myself it looks really bad (not enough clouds I think). I am really impressed with how good the original footage looks though. The colors are much brighter and everything is much more defined. Overall I guess I was expecting more from the new Special Effects and less from the original footage.

are those "modded" F-5s or redesigned and brand new?

I'm not too familiar with f-5's so forgive my ignorance, we're talking about the little dart looking things that were used in top gun as migs right?

Actually both of the F-5s in the in flight picture are examples of Iranian reverse engineering. The camouflaged two seater in the back originally started life as a single place model (Iran only ever bought single seat F-5s) but it was re-built as a two place model after the Iranians reverse engineered some Pakistani examples. The Iranians claim the twin tailed plane is a completely new build, given the amount of modifications to the basic F-5 design I'm willing to believe them.

Meh, I'd take Iran as seriously as any of the other pissant Arab air forces in the region. The plane looks entertaining, but I would not want to be flying in the Iranian air force if the US ever decided to get serious on launching an air offensive against them. However, if they were to go against Iraq (without US involvement), I'd give them more than even chance on gaining air superiority.

Considering that the current IrAF consists of a couple of helicopters, a handful of second hand C-130s, and some light scout planes, I'd give the IRIAF very good odds of gaining air superiority against them (that is without US involvement). Actually given the level of training in the IRIAF, and their relatively intact air force compared to the other countries we've faced, I'd say that the IRIAF could inflict some real damage before finally being ground down by superior numbers and technology.

Well, Iran says it makes it so manueverable that radar can't pick it up, thus a STEALTH F-5...

Seriously?! Where'd you here that one, and where can I get some of whatever the Iranian official is smoking? I could see it being pull one of those maneuvers that fool Doppler radar momentarily (which should be rather useless against an AESA set). Unfortunetly I can't remember the name of the maneuver or the specifics of how it worked.

I've been wanting to post this since I first saw it but the boards were down.

Sharp eyed observers will notice that the nose is slightly deeper than a standard F-5 (and I don't mean the knockoff F model behind it). Also note the intakes.

If I had to guess I'd say that Iran is trying to squeeze a better radar set into the nose of an F-5, speculation on the internets has it that that deeper nose could introduce some adverse yaw effects, hence the need for more vertical stab area.

That's not bad. Some of the shots of the big cruisers duking it out have kind of a nBSG feel to them, it works pretty well.

Vinnie posted some new stuff at MN while MW was down.

Here...

And here...

He told me via PM that his Army duties have him pretty busy again (there they go again thinking National Security is more important than us getting our webcomic), so it may be a while before we see something from him. I've actually got some stuff I'm working on for the comic that I might post in a few days.

This is kiind of morbid don't you think? Talking about eating dead Zentradi? Ewwwww, the steak you could be eating could be Zentradi backside, you just ate someone's butt!! Granted the same could be said about the cows we use, but we don't interact or treat them like people, eating Zentradi is almost borderline cannibalism don't you think?

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Given that humans and Zentradi are related closely enough to interbreed it is cannibalism. Besides I'm told that human flesh is more like pork than beef, so Hayo's steak couldn't have been Zentradi. Cloned beef grown in a vat (not even a whole cow just the muscle tissue) is my bet.

Didn't Baltar run these numbers?!

Anyways I always figured they used some of the extra space of the Macross plus the land from the island to have fields and grow some crops.  Maybe alot of small gardens or something.  And they're talking about ways to make synthetic meat now - maybe in Macross-universe they got that down.

Besides, according to the Compedium the longest they went without restocking was 8 months - Feb to Oct when they hit Mars.  If the Galactica could pull it off with all their emo bs I'm sure the Macross could last!

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Exactly dude!!! Fields of soy!

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And Vats of Steak!

Why don't we just agree that JAG was terrible show?

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No kidding. That episode guide was a good reminder, a pilot says "no martin baker" to indicate that he didn't eject without the Iranians finding out? What the heck do the writers think the IRIAF has in their F-14s? Lawn chairs?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but that looks to me like the "fat neck" for the landing gear problem may well be a bit of a non-issue. Astounding!

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I'm still waiting for some good pics of it from the side preferably with the gear up before I make that determination, a good shot of GERWALK mode from the side would work too. As Nani? pointied out so far all the shots we've seen make a concerted efffort to hide the neck.

Holy Crap! 

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3656815532557531640

That's a carrier deck!

Dayum!  Well, guess they had to get it on there somehow....

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4015390308129405896

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That's the JFK IIRC. As the blurb for the video says it would have made for a killer COD option if it weren't for the difficulty. Around the same time they also made plans to launch and recover the U-2 from carriers (I think it's the U-2R that's equipped with a carrier capable tail hook and folding wings).

I'd imagine that hydro/airponics would take care of most of the food needs for the Macross's crew and civilians. As for some of the meat products, as someone mentioned it could just be soy or TVP, or if you want to get more exotic it could be that they used OTEC biotech and grew cultured chicken, cow, or fish tissue in vats, something we aren't far from being able to do today.

Ah have to love it when morons think that modifying an aircraft is that easy.  Or what was the discussion we had here a few months ago when that little dippy said that Japan should building the planes from its anime not knowing anything aircraft design.  Overall though the stealthy tomcat was not a terrible idea, it just wasn't a practical one as a swing wing aircraft would have serious design issues if your tried to make it stealthy.

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I don't blame Phalanx for that, after all when major industry mags run articles about giving F-14s stealth noses in all seriousness it's not hard to get some misconceptions about aircraft design in your head. I don't doubt you could design a stealthy aircraft that would look very much like the F-14 (look at the NATF version of the F-22) but to try and build one out of existing airframes sitting in AMARC is so ridiculous it's downright laughable.

Found something similar to what shindensetsu describe years ago. If this has been posted before then let me know.

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I remember that. I remember seeing that picture in Combat Aircraft or Air Forces Monthly back in early '02 in an article that advocated cancelling further Super Hornet orders then pulling all the F-14 hulls out of AMARC and doing that to them. The authors thought that somehow welding an entirely new front end (and wings from the look of it) onto a 20 year old hull that had been sitting in the Arizona desert for the past 6 years or so would not only be easy, but cheap and fast as well.

I'm gonna stick up for David here and say I too want to see them fix the anehedral, it's pretty omnipresent in the anime and lineart (so far I've only seen one shot that kind of suggests otherwise and it's drawn to simulate a fisheye lense so it's distorted) and more importantly it makes the fighter mode look meaner. The only reason I can think of for Yamato making it the way they did is that it might affect the look of the already kinda weak shoulders in batroid mode. And David is right if he really wanted to be nitpicky he could talk about the incidence, camber and twist of the wing (one of the cool things about the YF-19 is that Kawamori really poured all of his knowledge of aerospace design into it and it shows to airplane guys like David and I).

That notch is on the LSA too. I'm not sure why it's there, drag reduction maybe? It seems like they are trying for a pretty slick design. Speaking of which that wing looks mighty smooth to be aluminium, I wouldn't be surprised in the least if it was some kind of carbon fiber (which would be strong enough that having a weird mate to the fuselage might not matter).

IIRC the anti-UN plane was based on a Su-35 not a Mig-29.

I bet it's a 4 seater and the 4th (or maybe 3rd?) door is there for convenience. That wing got me as well, it's so small that I can't imagine it has very good stall characteristics, the slight forward sweep might help with that though.