Chronocidal

Ok, that is by far one of the dumbest repaints I've yet seen. Seriously, this reminds me of those times when I was about 8 years old, and decided to add "detail" to some of my models. I took a paint marker, and decided to paint random panels different colors. This is exactly like that. THEY PAINTED THRUSTER VENTS FREAKIN' ORANGE. It's like they took the normal paint palette, and just said, "Ok, lets just put orange paint in the machine instead of black." ... Actually, looks like that's EXACTLY what they did... the colors are reversed. Everything that used to be black is now orange, and all the stuff normally red is black, even the intake warnings, and the borders around the nose sensors are now orange. Fail. The color scheme itself isn't that bad really, it reminds me of old test model markings. If only they'd bothered to give a second thought to what parts needed to be changed, and what needed to stay the same, it wouldn't look like some 10 year old had just photoshopped the thing. Still not quite on the level of the "lets paint it black and add a gold border to EVERYTHING" version, but not far off.

*gets his files and putty ready to fix the fail* I just hope the thing is styrene plastic. At least if they release it with the TCS chin pod, the lower sensor is still reasonably close to the original early A sensor pod. Really saddened by this actually... You'd think for all the work they put into the thing on little details, they'd at least get them right. It's like if Ferrari engineers designed the best car ever made.. but decided that they'd only sell it in 3 colors: throw-up puce, baby mustard yellow, and sunburn pink.

I just nearly crapped myself when I got my latest Lego email. Quote: "Celebrate the 10th anniversary of LEGO® Star Wars™ with The Battle of Endor™ and the Home One™ Mon Calamari Star Cruiser™!" Unfortunately, the title was a little misleading. It's not another UCS set (good thing actually, I can't afford any more of those), it's a playset based on the briefing room and hangar. It's not bad though, and the hangar comes with what I think is a new style A-wing.

One other thing to check on the cannons.. I don't remember if both ones with striped guns had this, but I do remember at least one of them having the front ring before the gun barrel painted a sort of yellowish color. I'm pretty sure Red 3 had this, but not sure about 5 (I believe 3 is the model pictured on the box of the old ROTJ edition MPC/ERTL kit).

Any particular details you're looking for? And are you just interested in paint schemes, or surface details as well? It gets complicated here, since many of the randomly colored panels on the ships were actually places where they slapped on patches of sheet styrene, or other spare parts, and incorporated them into the paint patterns. I have a set of instructions for the fine molds kit somewhere, but I don't remember how much detail they go into.. they're for the 1/72 kit, so a set from the new 1/48 one would be better. I can check my references a bit later, I think I have at least a few shots of each hero model from ANH, mostly Red 3 (and if not, I can get some screencaps from the dvd). I remember Reds 3 and 5 were very similar, with a few differences (the movie actually swapped them in a few shots if I recall), and Red 2 was an oddball that used some different parts, including a different canopy frame, and probably engines (funny thing... there's an old vintage J-79 mounted on a stand near where I work, and while the surface details are a bit different, I can never keep from thinking of it as an X-Wing engine.. the shape is identical). Also, I could be wrong, but I don't think they paid too much attention to the markings in Ep 6. The number of ships at Endor was so massive, I don't think they had more than one or two hero models made of X-Wings, and I don't remember any closeups of Y-Wings. I've only ever seen one large scaled X-Wing that survived that movie, and it appears to the one used for Luke (though it may have been used for a couple of the Wedge closeups, I'll have to watch again). It's also VERY different from the original models, and about twice as big. At that size, they couldn't use the same kitbashing techniques, so a lot of the details changed drastically. Funny, since Endor was so huge, ILM actually turned to the original MPC kits to make the bulk of the cannon fodder ships. And I'm pretty sure some of those models survived for a while... if you look closely at the X-Wings during the Star Tours ride at Disneyland, it's easy to recognize a few particular features of the MPC/ERTL kits.

Well, letting go of the controls worked back in the day when you didn't have any choice but to make aircraft stable.. no computers and such to get you out of a jam. Some planes were still unstable in certain areas, but for the most part planes had to be designed stable before they would build them. Course, I think only static stability is a requirement, not dynamic stability (whole mess of aerodynamics in this area, and the math gets very ugly, very quick). Nowadays, letting go of the controls works, but only because the computer will fix the plane for you. That's really what planes like the F-14 needed from the start.. God only knows why, but the F-14 was designed with an inherent instability in the yaw axis. There's literally a "OMG! FLAT SPIN! EJECT!" type warning in the flight manual... Get the yaw rate up too high, and a giant arrow in the direction of the yaw appears over all the cockpit displays. I'd have to read it again, but I think it says if you don't correct it within a few seconds, you should just eject.

Yeah, except they may have completely screwed over the people counting on profits from those episodes. Sure, the fan rage is funny. But unless they come up with some way to fit all 8 episodes on one dvd release, AND keep it the same price as the others, the sales for those episodes are going to tank. People will likely buy the beginning and end episodes, but depending on how the dvds are organized, 2-3 discs might be largely ignored by all but completists.

I love how that one looks like someone basically made a mech out of F-16 parts. I wonder what other armored core parts they have though.. just finished playing through AC:FA, and now I'm wondering how much you'd have to spend to get a decent sized set of parts to customize.

Yeah.. lack of any sense storywise, and an utter lack of aircraft variety made it pretty mediocre, in spite of the pretty pictures. Well, that, and they gave the uberplane what essentially amounted to an Itano Circus launcher. Fun in single player for a few laughs and achievements, but it completely borked multiplayer to the point where the plane isn't even allowed.

I'm not exactly sure, but I think the model name is 504x Scorpion EXO 900, or something close (it's in the image name). No idea who makes it.

Speaking of playtesting.. I'd say HAWX falls under the "Play-test? What is play-test?" category, especially the pc version. "Please press the ESC key to continue..."

I would say doubtful, since the wheels fold up similar to the VF-1, but since this one still seems to use the oversized main gear bays from the 1/72, it might be possible.. Even though they're inaccurate, with bays that deep the wheels don't need to pivot to fold up, and can just fold straight back. Personally, I think the gear were the weakest point on the 1/72 kit. The front gear already look a bit better from that pic, but the main gear needed a complete rebuild.

Nice, looks like they gave it a bit of a surface detail makeover. Lots more panel lines on this than the 1/72, and that cockpit looks awesome. Even got the internal sensors modeled into the nose lenses.

I know it's from a while ago.. but it just now hit me what this reminds me of. All we need is a wilted christmas tree, and a black and white beagle. On that note, I should have a fitting edit coming shortly along these lines.

I realize this may be a bit off topic (not pictures of finished cosplay anyway), but those of you looking for a good base for a TV style helmet you can actually use... you might want to check this out. Would take a bit of work, but it's an actual helmet, and even has the retractable visor built in.

Actually.. that pic is interesting. I could be wrong, but it looks like they beefed up the gullet a bit. Not to 1/60 levels, but the area ahead of the arms on the underside looks a bit beefier. As slick as it was, that actually was one of the most obvious variations on the Hasegawa 1/72 when compared with the lineart. You know that sharp edge along the side of the fuselage that blends between the nose and the hip area? The 1/72 kit has that area completely flat underneath, making it more wing-like on the edge. I don't have the pic available right now, but the lineart shows that area very clearly angled downwards, dropping the gear area down a bit. Also, from the looks of it, they're building in the internal details on the leg missile bays. Whether they'll be fully molded, or you'll have to option to fill them with missiles has yet to be seen though.

Big possible problem I see with a 1/18th transforming valk is weight. True with something that size, you gain a lot of interior space for joints/hinges etc, but all that mechanism will get heavy on some valks. If you could manage to make the structure light enough, give it massively strong and versatile joints, and still give it enough weight to be sturdy, you'd probably be past that problem. Then you're just left with where to put it. On the plus side though, Valks are very modular, due to their transformation. Make the major assemblies separate, and you're golden. You just assemble it when you want it out, then it collapses into a nice flat box under the bed. The Lego one I tried was about 1/18, and fighter mode was about 3 feet long. I dunno how tall it would've been, but if you just scale up a 1/48, battroid is a bit shorter than the fighter length, so it would probably only get to about 2 and 1/2 feet tall.

Anyone make out the price on that masterpiece Skywarp? I live in the middle of nowhere, but if one of those pops up at the local walmart, I won't be able to resist. I'm also curious to see what that Ramjet looks like in fighter mode... it looks like he stole Jetfire's colors!

Freelancer I actually understood the control scheme for, as awkward as it was. It's hard to come up with a good interface when you're working with a wacked out rpg/space combat/insterstellar trade/fps hybrid game. For what it was, if you ignored all notions of it being a space sim, and looked at it more as an fps/rpg where you just happened to be in a spaceship, it worked much better. Player mods fixed a lot of the main gripes about the way combat worked later on. Still in the Chris Roberts genre though, EA's (or was it still just Origin at the time?) handling of the Wing Commander franchise has been a crime against sanity. The marketing that buried the Kilrathi Saga under the glitz of WCIV, and relegated KS to uber-rare, crazy expensive game status just sucked. That was only the start though. Since then, EA has continued to sit on the license, and done nothing with it. Given the ease of making animated cutscenes nowadays, I'm still waiting for someone to realize what a gold mine they could have if they rebuilt the original WC I and II for current computers. I would say to rebuild all of them, but only if they agreed to keep the original live action cutscenes, and just rebuild the game engine around them. I've never been able to play Ace Combat 3 unfortunately, but from what I've read, I agree about that one. While removing the story may have actually improved some of the AC games (looking at you 6 ), that wasn't one of em.

You know what's funny about this (besides all the obvious reasons already mentioned elsewhere)... I wonder if it's a stalling tactic. Not just to stall for insanity's sake, but to accomplish something behind the scenes. Really, I wouldn't expect them to flesh out the entire timeline yet, so whether they're doing them chronologically or not, it doesn't mean we're absolutely going to get the filming story this season. They may pull the same stunt some time in the future, and insert even more new episodes. What struck me as a serious problem when this started was that when the theoretical episode lists started showing up, they would lead to an unfinishable show. Any way you slice the Disappearance story, once it starts, you're in for a ride to the end of the novels... or should I say, the lack of an end of the novels. While it may be filler, this marathon of monotony is doing something very obvious, and possibly very important: it's building up a huge mass of fanbase rage, from fans who're sick of KyoAni's tactics. For this story in particular, what does it do?? People get impatient waiting for the ending. So, they find other means of getting the rest of the story. Which is actually already easily available... in the novels. While I don't know if they'd be so incredibly devious, this stunt almost makes me think they're trying to convince the author to go back and write more novels. I'd like to see the sales figures for the book containing the original Endless Eight story for the past few weeks, and see if there's been any jump. It may be too complicated to be realistic, but this could all be a giant plot to reinvigorate the fanbase and get them to pursue the novels, and get the author to realize he has a potential legion of fans waiting for the end.

Unless they go back later, and make a big nonsensical movie to explain everything. So, I'm guessing for "End of Haruhi" we find out that Kyon really is the key to everything, and he has the power to reshape the world through his own desires. So, he has this crazy dream sequence full of classical music and crazy doodles, and voiced over by Morgan Freeman explaining how he had the power to change things all along. Then he wakes up on a beach next to Haruhi and the whole world has been swallowed by closed space and destroyed by Ang.. I mean those big glowy giant things, and now it's his job to reform the world from scratch with her... Why does this seem familiar? Btw, I decided to try one of the dubbed season 1 episodes the other day, just to see how it sounded.. I can't say it was all that terrible, but I hit upon the main reason I don't watch dubs very often.. every time I do, I wind up hearing the same voices, and it just drives me nuts. They're definitely good voices at times, but they're so recognizable it kinda ruins it. If I close my eyes, it sounds like Alucard arguing with Vash the Stampede about whether or not they should let Blackrose continue her harassment of Silmeria.

*dies*

Until they pay you to take it away, I'll pass. Everyone who buys it is essentially paying to beta test their game for them.

Seriously?

I'm surprised at you people.. no one's said anything yet. Don't you realize what today is??