Nied

I thought those were AMRAAMs that mysteriously look exactly like Harpoons (Harpoons with their large anti-ship warheads at least make more sense than AMRAAMs). I own a copy of ID4 that I got in college, I used to put it on when I had to write a paper. It was actually vastly more entertaining when most of my brain power was tied up writing the paper.

I saw that thread and it looks like the same uninformed Super Hornet bashing I see all the time on the internet: "ZOMG!!1 TEH ST00PID HORNET SI TEH SUX@RZ!!!!!!!!!!!11!!111one" I'm reminded of your comment about airplane guys you made a couple pages back. Every time I see criticism of the Rhino it's from someone who doesn't fly it and hasn't fought it, or like in the ARC thread something along the lines of "my brother's friend's girlfriend's mother's second cousin is with VFA-103 and he said that it can't outrun a Cessna 172!" and every time I see an actual Hornet driver show up they rave about how great platform it is. See this thread at F-16.net for a good example of what I'm talking about (starting on the second page). I take these kind of "the Sewer Hornet can't break mach clean" comments with a salt mine's worth of salt.

I always felt that pic said more about the Super Hornet's dog fighting skills than it did about the F-22's. By the way it's talked about on the internet you'd think that taking a pic like that would be impossible for the "SuperSlow/Sewer/Sh*tty Hornet," but there it is with a Raptor in it's gunsights with the pilot's finger on the trigger. Not bad for what everyone thought was the slow fat kid.

OK Knight 26, is this maybe another one of those various reasons why you said you might never want to fly a an F-22? IMHO, I don't think all of the Raptors have this problem with their canopies. 395976[/snapback] Actually they just might. My understanding is that was a computer glitch with no way to overide it.

That's not entirely true. Rafales actually saw service over Afganistan. Unfortunetly they were Rafale Ms that hadn't had their A-G software installed yet so they were left flying CAP against the vaunted Afgan Air Force. Of course during the last few major conflicts European equipment saw real service. Just about every NATO air force participated in the first Desert Storm (with the exception of the W. German Luftwaffe), NATO aircraft were integral to most of the Balkan campaigns including Allied force, NATO was involved during OEF (see above), and the RAF saw quite a bit of action during OIF.

IIRC in the Robotech cartoon Protoculture is a power source nothing more nothing less. It's somehow plant based but beyond that not much is explained about it (the whole stasis field preventing germination was a rationalization from the RRG). In the novels its some mystical magical energy like the force only plant based and it makes mecha change shape, powers thinking caps and all sorts of other nonsense. In the cartoon the pre-crash SDF-1 is just some battleship fitted out to whisk around some VIP scientist and his nifty gadgets (including the "protoculture matrix" whatever that is) on whatever little trips he might go on. In the novels it's some custom wanktastic ubership that was designed by Zor himself while huffing protoculture fumes. Or something. Really I never much liked some of the unnecessary bullsh*t they invented for the novels.

The only change I can think to make is to add a proper centerline tailhook to the VF-1 (mounted on the backpack VF-0 style).

::Shamelessly steals from RRG::

M7 makes it clear that the full barrier is just standard Supervision Army issue, nothing special about it. It also makes clear that full barrier sheilding still arent workable for the UN Spacy by that point in time.

The FC-1 looks to be about equivalent to the PAF's F-16As (that's apparently what they and China were shooting for). I could see it becoming a good fighter for poorer Air forces looking to replace their Mig-21s or F-5s. Dassault actually did offer the Mirage 2000 to the IAF, however delays on a final decision from India finally forced them to withdraw their proposal in frustration. Apparently the only thing holding the Mirage 2000 plant open were the prospects of an Indian order, and after a while the price of keeping the plant open outweighed the money to be made from a prospective order. All the same since now the Indians have a chance of becoming the first export customers for the Rafale which has had truly awful luck to date.

Nice. I love the sense of motion in the first three panels, especially the first with the thrust vecoring vanes deflecting. I'd love to bring back the cult, but how do we get those custom member titles back?

The impression I got was that with the collapse of the Stellar Republic and the defeat of the protodevlin there's really nothing left of a command and control structure above the Boldolza level. Thus there's no one to coordinate a larger attack on Earth. That combined with the fact that most of the rest of the Zentradi are still out chasing down the remnants of the Supervision Army means Earth lucked out when it was most vulnerable. By the time any fleets were able to figure out what happened and marshall their forces for an attack Earth had been turned into the fortress we see in M+.

Fair enough. You know I did notice the 604 modex, and I noticed that it wasn't Toni's name on the canopy rail, but I didn't actually put 2+2 together to realize it wasn't Toni's VF. I think that says something about my deductive resoning skills.

Beautiful! It's hard to resist the technical nit pick, even on something as intentionally light hearted as this, but I just can't help it so here goes: Given that we see the VF-4's predecessor ingest all sorts of debris including whole cars and bits of various buildings, would a flock of birds do anything worse than mess up that pretty pretty paint job on Toni's Lighting III? Unless Ave Maria has Eden like pterosaurs then all bets are off!

Pardon the slight thread necromancy mods, but I thought Bay Area MWs might want to know that Mari is playing a concert this Sunday at the San Francisco Cherry Blossom Festival. Specifics are here.

One day you should ask Vinnie, Lightning 06 or me about the legendary "Cult of Lightning."

I have a bad feeling about this...

Gibberish. Pure unadulterated gibberish. I think one says something like "Hey look! It's that arrow thingy pointing that that box! asdfkasdfka adfkasdfj." Another warns of the dangers of urinating during high wind conditions. Most of the rest were made by banging on the keyboard with appropriate looking spaces.

The Army doesn't like people sending their soldiers e-mails with attachments in them so everyone gets to see what those VF-4s I posted last page look like full sized! SVF_143.zip

Kawamori studied as an aerospace engineer in college. At the time he designed the VF-1 angled tail fins were considered good design practice in aerospace cirlces as they allow for better control at high angles of attack (they still are). Other than the angled fins I don't see much similarities though.

There are some signs that individual countries still operate separate force though (one of the reconstruction episodes features a wrecked destroid with US Army markings on it). I imagine that a large chunk of individual countries militaries have been subsumed by the UN Spacy, but that they still operate some independent forces as well. Given what we see, they most likely buy standard Spacy equipment.

Holy crap!! That is definetly not good! Stay safe man, I don't think anyone wants to hear that you got blown up in some hellhole. It's good to see your VF-4 model again it's looking real good. If you need a better reference send me a PM with your e-mail address and I'll send you the full sized versions of the color schemes (they're about twice as big).

It looked from the vid that he was trying for a more scale landing, but ran into some nasty cross winds. I think he decided to just drop it on the gears rather than have it land wing first after an unexpected gust close to the ground.

For the life of me I can't understand why the LV2 draws so much fire around here. It's a pretty standard looking camo scheme (based on the one worn by JASDF F-1s), which I've always wanted to see on a Valkyrie.

Hey it's been a week! Any updates Vinnie?