Chronocidal

Hehe... That was me.. I still haven't finished it. Chances are, I'll have to make the legs solid before it will stand up, but I'm stranded at college away from my legos as the moment. No room for them here in my apartment. There is one part that may hold it up, but I'll need to buy 2-3 AT-ATs first to get the parts, or find them online (it's a pretty rare part), and I'm pretty broke right now. Btw, I spent a few years perfecting my own UCS versions. They were all in pseudo-mini-fig scale, but I paid strict attention to the classic proportions of the originals. I had an X-Wing, Y-Wing, B-Wing and A-Wing... but I kind of obsessed about the scaling.. I built the X-Wing first, then calculated a scale based on the number of studs long the ship was. Yeah, I'm like that. The X-Wing came out to be about 18 inches long, the Y-Wing was about 2 feet long, the A-wing about 14-15 inches, and the B-wing was a little over 2 feet.. umm.. wide? Anywho, I have photos, but not here. The B-Wing and Y-Wing were taken apart to make the Valk, but the X-Wing and A-Wing are still in my closet. The A-wing turned out best I think, very carefully layered with plates to get the right shape. I just wish I had them here.

Actually, given how much crap has been floating around about how Lucas is screwing over the OT, Brooks has a motherlode of stuff to work with. LOL... actually.. what would be funny... SpaceBalls II should be a rehash of the old movie with scenes completely butchered on purpose, rampant CG effects where they aren't needed, badly redone lines, ridiculously bright flashes everywhere, etc... Knowing Brooks, he could probably do everything Lucas has done to the SW saga, and make it blatantly obvious (as well as completely hilarious), and people would love him for it, just for the sake of the fact that he's making fun of Lucas, and voicing the fans' opinion about his schenanegans.... LOL... If he did that, I imagine Spaceballs II would probably attract more of the SW fanbase than Episode III. I just have this lovely picture in my head of Spaceballs opening the day before Ep III, and stealing all of Lucas's spotlight. Hehe.. Then again, he could just call this Spaceballs: The Special Edition, make the movie completely different, and it might achieve the same effect.

Well, I do know it was used in all the tower-buzzing scenes, and there was one each at Top Gun and on the carrier. Dunno really. I actually prefer the names used in HotShots... "Knuckle Underwear Velveeta, this is Foxtrot Zulu Milkshake..."

Um... you have seen the movies, right? Did you actually watch them? Correlation != Causality. The "M-things" were not explained to be either cause, or effect. There was definately a noted correlation there in the extremely brief dialogue on the subject, but is it the chicken or the egg that came first again? All the "M-things" do is give a psuedo-physiological aspect to the whole "Force is strong in my family" schtick. Reproduction not necessary to keep a Jedi Order of approximately 10,000 out of a Galactic Republic of trillions of individuals from hundreds, if not thousands of species. Corran Horn's Jedi tradition was explicitly stated to be different from the norm. Lol.. actually, I was just being an arse trying to argue a stupid point, and make Lucas look like an idiot. You're right though, I just think it seems funny that they are forbidden to marry, when without marriage, you kind of rule out a very solid source of force-capable children. I'm thinking of force-power in the purely heriditary sense here too, so that if the jedi didn't produce children, they'd die out. That rules out random genetic mutation though, which, in the light of how many jedi there were, would probably be a more likely source of force-inheritance. What I meant mentioning Corran Horn's line is that his jedi grandfather had no problem marrying, and having children. Also, that kind of kills the whole "Children of the Jedi" storyline. But there's no real conflict there anyway since Lucas doesn't acknowledge the EU as canon. On the other hand, it also seems likely that not every force sensitive being would automatically give up his life to be a jedi either, leaving a lot of people out there who could produce force sensitive children. So yeah, I was just ranting. I'm still mad at Lucas for trying to explain away force sensitivity with some scientific answer, when it always seemed a more spiritual thing to me. But given that some people can't access it, the biological answer actually makes more sense than anything else.

Heh.. here's a funny contradiction.. so... according to Lucas, Jedi aren't supposed to marry. So, that effectively nixes the EU stories involving Jedi heritage, ie, Corran Horn's family. However, Lucas, in his infinite wisdom, has also indicated that sensitivity to the Force is a biological phenomenon, passed down genetically, caused by... umm... those "M" things of which I will not speak. So tell me again how the jedi were forbidden to reproduce, yet lasted 1000+ generations? Granted, yes, this assumes they held the same classic principle of only having children when married. I guess it would work to randomly breed Jedi with each other, and have the children raised by the Jedi community, but I have a hard time seeing that happening.

Hmm.. well, if it runs on a BF1942-like engine, and has vehicles.. my big question that may determine whether I buy or not... how bout spacecraft, ie X-wings, etc, or at least snowspeeders? I've been tempted to get BF1942, but never got around to it. I know there was a BF1942 Star Wars modpack, maybe LucasFarts finally took advice from fans, and used some of their ideas?

Oh heck yeah.. I'd gladly buy myself one of those given the chance. Although.. if they made those Manta fighters, I'd have trouble choosing. Honestly, aside from the final gag, the funniest part I thought was the part where the two of them wake up in bed in Shangri-La, then Polly tells Joe to turn around. It probably was the best movie I've seen in a long time. Oh, btw, I hope George Lucas has been taking notes.. THAT is how you do a street-level dogfight. Just to ask, did anyone else see the air-carrier and think to themselves, "Huh.. Cloud City...?"

Well, having seen it now, I think it pretty much lives up to the hype. Especially in the visual area.. but honestly, that wasn't what my friends and I noticed most... What we really couldn't help pointing out were... get ready for this one.. all the parodies/references to stuff from Star Wars. It really does have that old Buck Rogers feel to it, almost to the point of something like a graphic novel (the montage scenes of typing and such really were kind of weird at first, but they made an interesting effect). The stylization of some scenes also looked like it came straight out of a war recruitment poster, or something of that sort, and seemed funny acted out, but it seemed to work okay. But we were amazed by all the stuff that seemed to mirror Star Wars.. one line was actually taken directly from it, and I don't mean just the "I have a bad feeling about this." It was mostly in the way of an easter egg, it wasn't a line that most non-Star Wars fanatics would remember at all, much less be able to place. I'd have to see it again to remember most of them, but it kept us laughing for quite a while. One of my friends made a comment though that was pretty interesting to think about.. about 15 minutes in to the movie, during a mid-New York street-level dogfight, he said "Heh.. this movie's only beginning and it's already more like Star Wars than episodes one and two combined!" I had to agree really. The plot was hokey, sure, but at least having seen it, the title makes sense now. It also had a lot of quite funny situational humor thrown in, but it didn't try to be overly funny, which was good. The characters weren't well defined at first, but as the characters gained depth and got on each others nerves, the conversations became the source of quite a few laughs, and some background for the characters. On the down side, the plot really is pretty corny, as well as a good portion of the dialog, but it doesn't really seem out of place. Also, while cool, there is no way the P-40 could survive through the maneuvers it was put through, much less fly from NY to Nepal without refueling. The aircraft were pure sci-fi magic, albeit 1930's sci-fi magic. All in all it was worth the ticket though, it had some really good parts and some really funny humor and references thrown in. Not spectacular, but considering I went in expecting it to pretty much bomb, I was pleasantly surprised, especially by the twist at the ending. Now, keep this in mind, I'm not the greatest reviewer, and I've thought some real trash was decent. I'm pretty easy to please. But my friends all agreed it was pretty good, and we had a fun time. Given that that's the main reason I went in the first place, I wasn't disappointed.

Hmm.. Good Ideas: 1. Rogue Squadron series based on comics and/or novels (I would give my left ear to SEE one of Janson and Wedge's practical joke wars. Yub yub, Commander.) 2. Miniseries DIRECT adaptations of various books 3. Series about the Jedi Academy, old or new 4. Maybe a collection of stories based in the Old Republic, like the Sith Wars Bad Ideas: 1. ANYTHING to do with an Ewok family...unnngngg... 2. "It's the Ewoks-Droids Cartoon Hour!" 3. Making any series that involves the original characters without using the original actors, unless they're supposed to be younger versions. 4. eh, there's a lot of bad ideas out there... Now, coming out of left field.... 1. THE DARK APPRENTICE: Trump in Emperor garb sends contestants out to perform dark deeds, murder, pillage, promote Imperial control, etc. Shoots lightning from hand during "You're fired" line, vaporizing losers on the spot. Winner receives job as Emperor's Hand (Gotta replace Mara Jade, you know..) 2. Survivor: Alderaan.... hehe.. yeah, right. 3. Survivor: Tatooine: Mannn.... Roast Dewback AGAIN??? 4. Boy Meets Force: Jedi Academy drama/comedy involving young teens growing up while going through jedi training. Heheh.. just imagining Feeny as a Jedi master makes me laugh. A lot. ("Use the Force, Mr. Matthews.") And for once, Topanga wouldn't be any weirder than the other names. Course, letting Eric within ten miles of anything like a lightsaber would probably be a bad idea. There are so many things they could do.. and soooo many ways they could ruin what was always good about SW.

You know.. now that I think about it, genetic degradation might explain why the stormtroopers tended to be complete idiots, or at least horrible at killing anything. Heavily recycled genes....

Well, I honestly can't tell for sure, but I wouldn't give up entirely on the original versions of the films being released.. While watching Empire of Dreams tonight, I noticed a few things that gave me hope. Mainly, the fact that the original film from Episode IV HAS been restored.. and I don't mean the Special Edition stuff, I mean the old motion control battle scenes with models flying every which way. It's not for certain, and I guess it could have been from the THX release a while back, but it looked every bit as crisp and clean as any of the DVD shots I've seen. All, the old shots of the DS battle looked perfectly cleaned up, and the gunnery scene on the Falcon looked similarly clear. Also, when they showed shots of the original title scroll, it was clearly remastered for clarity, but lacked the separate EPISODE IV: A NEW HOPE line. So that proves that they've restored at least a part of the original version. Whether that means they've done the same to the whole movie, and will release it later remains to be seen, but I did see one shot of the original Greedo scene in there. I'll probably buy the new DVD set even with the screwed up Anakin ghost, just so I can actually have a set of my own. It's actually not as bad as I imagined it would be... I had assumed they would replace the dying Vader footage as well, with Hayden in a bunch of age/scar makeup, so thank God they didn't go that far. I'm leaving home for college, and no one is gonna let me take the old videos with me when I go. Besides, I've been dying to rip some real sounds and screenshots from the movies for years (FINALLY, a good accurate reference for building my X-Wing models ). If they release the originals later, I'll probably get them too, since we've refrained from buying the prequels, but that's just me. Maybe if I download a rip of the laserdisc set, I'll splice in the original Anakin footage just for the heck of it, and make a new DVD (heck, if I go that far, I'll replace Anakin's face and voice in Episode II with a cut and paste of William Shatner- the acting might be better ). But it's not that big a deal for me. I can always just fast forward. As for the later episodes, how the heck are they gonna do that? I was under the impression that Timothy Zahn got specific permission from Lucasfilm to make those first novels, allowing him to write the story. I guess I was wrong... But either way, there's probably no way the sequels will have any success with fans. Writing new stories for after Endor would pretty much negate any of the already accepted storylines and character relationships in the EU, as well as tick off a lot of authors who went to a lot of work to continue the story, only to be completely ignored by the man whose story they were contributing to, and previously seemed to acknowledge their efforts. GL will probably cut off a lot of his fanbase by saying all those books don't count. If anything, they should be making movies OF those books. Both the Thrawn Trilogy and Jedi Academy Trilogy would make incredible movies.

WOW.. judging by the size of that helmet on the X-Wing's nose, it looks a little small, but very nice... maybe it's just the wings being open that's fooling me. should be about 42 feet long if it's full scale. Btw, if you've ever read the X-Wing series of novels (#5 Wraith Squadron and #6 Iron Fist to be specific), one of the pilots made some modifications to his personal R2 that follow right along with that lightsaber launcher, but is a much more useful feature in real life. He had it so that if he called his droid and gave him the command "Cold One" he'd launch a chilled drink out through that same port. Would be fun to rig something like that up with a voice command module, and try it out at parties.

You know, I might be insane, but did you first introduce this design in the X-Wing Alliance modding community? I remember seeing this at X-Wing Legacy a few years back, I think...

Well, I can't say there has been no progress, since I did get FS2004, and am working to adapt it for that, but there has been little else that I've done. As soon as I get the effects and flaps working in 2004, I'll release a verion with textures, but that will be a while.... right now I'm concentrating on getting ready to move my stuff to my apartment for the coming year. The virtual cockpit is pretty crummy so far, but it's textured and looks ok, but not great. The textures are really low-res in it, since right now the virtual cockpit is just a copy of the exterior cockpit, and has no moving parts or anything. But once I get the flaps working, and the engines lit right, I'll put up something for y'all to play with.

Actually, looks like he used the standard YF-21 tails, but glued them to the top of the fuseage, and the stabs look like clipped off F-14 stabs..

Heheh.. well, all dreams of a battroid mode aside, there really is no reason for one today. But gerwalk mode.. well, we're closer to that than some people may think, and frankly, gerwalk seems to me like a heck of a lot better solution to VTOL than what we've come up with so far. With two engines to control stability, it would probably be a lot more stable in hover than current planes. But things are advancing at a rapid pace, and I wouldn't be surprised to see a gerwalk type transformation in the coming years. If anyone's seen how the new F-35 JSF does a vertical takeoff, then you probably know what I mean. The first thing I thought of when I saw that engine bend 90 degrees downward was "GERWALK! GERWALK!!!" Granted, they're only bending the afterburner can down, not bending the engine in the middle like Valks do. But it's a start, and if they have the technology to bend the engine down like that, and swivel it all around electronically to stabilize the hover like I saw (think foot/ankle joint), gerwalk can't be that far away.

Hmm... well, although they don't say it, Gundam W is involved in there too.. that's Wing Gundam in the front. Considering that series only got really popular in the US (I heard it did poorly in Japan, correct me if I'm wrong) it might give them reason to release it in the US. I can't tell for sure though, what's the big black thing in the background? It looks kinda like one of the mechs from G-Gundam, although it's too covered up to tell.

Heheh... pretty nice I have an older version of X-Plane, But I just got utterly frustrated with the lack of visual detail in the program. I was okay with the older versions, but in the most bass-ackwards "improvement" I've ever seen, the newer versions compressed all the aircraft textures into a single 1024*1024 texture map, with pre-set areas for each aircraft part, where the old version had allowed a separate map of that size for each part alone. It's a disaster, resulting in really terrible resolution on parts that are given small areas on the texture. I tended to get creative with part usage to allow more variety in the visual model, such as using fuel tanks as parts of the fuselage, and using a big texture on them to get some nice detail.. but when the tanks got assigned a 64*128 area on the texture, it ruined the idea of using them for detail. I had a really nice VF-1 in there once, but it got ruined when the new version wrapped the textures around wrong, and shrank them to microscopic sizes. In the world of flight sims, you've got two major competitors in the "pure sim" arena: MS Flight Sim, and X-Plane. To put it bluntly, X-Plane is ugly, and the interface and graphics are way behind the times, while MS Flight Sim is incredibly beautiful at times, with high quality graphics abounding, and a very user friendly interface. But then again, MS Flight Sim's flight models are entirely separate from the graphics models, and they can be a pain to tweak correctly, while X-Plane is used professionally to design and test REAL aircraft, since the physical flight calculations it does are above and beyond anything MSFS ever does. It's mostly a decision between visual accuracy and physical accuracy. If you like watching sunsets from 20,000 feet, get MSFS2004. If you want to test out a new design for a private plane, get X-Plane.

LEGO. Nuff said.

Eh, as dorky and ridiculous as those are, they are cute.. besides, after the uber-goodness that is the new Non-FX X-Wing, I think they've earned a little break from reality. If LucasPhlegm wasn't so darn copyright happy, this thing would be a great recasting candidate.

Well, it is taking a hideous amount of time, but I don't think I blame them.. the YF-19's gotta be one of the most complex designs in Macross, of not THE most complex. The fuselage literally has to fold over on itself into a pretzel shape to transform, and it's gotta play havoc with the proportions. If they're making it based on that custom model, it'll probably take a while to get it up to playable standards.. that thing looked pretty fragile.

Sorry to take so long, took a while to get the wing structure looking good, but I think I've got it working now... This model doesn't have any of the actual mechanisms for moving the flaps, but from what I've seen, this is approximately how they mount.

Hmm.. is there a statistic somewhere that says how many Tomcats were lost to spins? I just finished reading something about one Tomcat NASA had some fun with.. they added canards to the nose, and changed the avionics somewhat.. somehow they linked the roll control with the rudder control in the flight computers, and it made the plane able to stay stable at about 70 degrees AOA. Don't know how that compares to the standard Tomcat though.

Hmm.. what kind of limits does the engine have? Polycount, and texture size especially.. because if this game could handle some of the fancy 3d models that've been made, you'd have one beautiful Macross game on your hands. Also, considering this program's set in modern day times, why not do a Macross Zero scenario? Maybe tell the story of the Unification War, and end with the beginning of SDF Macross? Should be easy to find a Tomcat for that game if it's easy to mod, so you've got a lot of the stuff done already that way.

Yeah, I've been having the same problem on my CG Tomcat model.. I just figured it out though.. if you look at the top of a Tomcat's wing, there are small breaks in the spoiler that are raised up slightly..two per section on the 3 sectioned flap. Those are the places where the flaps are mounted... they had to leave cutouts in the spoilers and upper eyebrow door to allow clearance around the wing sections. I don't know where those sections would be in the VF-1. You may need to just find a good place to do it, like between spoilers, or flap sections, something that looks like a likely place for there to be a wing structure support, and then add those supports to the back of the wing to glue the flaps to. When I get the model done, I'll post a picture of what I mean.