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Arc Hammer posted:I feel I don't really like transforming mobile suits. I don't know if it was a toy mandate or something else but besides the ashhimar I don't think I've seen a transforming suit that didn't look like a jumbled mess in its transformed mode. iirc Kawamori is fond of making little lego mecha to demonstrate the transformation and such so it's no surprise Macross is rock solid in that department.
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Dec 12, 2022 06:33
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Argas posted:iirc Kawamori is fond of making little lego mecha to demonstrate the transformation and such so it's no surprise Macross is rock solid in that department. The designer for Nier Automata's mechs also prototyped using plastic building toys. It's a common method for quick prototyping for transforming mechs that allows for more understanding of what goes where.
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Dec 12, 2022 06:41
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Argas posted:iirc Kawamori is fond of making little lego mecha to demonstrate the transformation and such so it's no surprise Macross is rock solid in that department. Good for Kawamori that's a smart way to do it. I just have no clue how Gundam has been doing transformations for decades and yet out of the hundreds of designs there's maybe a dozen that have good looking alternate modes while the rest look like they were rebuilt by blind airline crash investigators. How do you make transformations a staple of your mecha design for decades and yet be so bad at it?
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Dec 12, 2022 06:42
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I actually feel like I remember the Delta Plus having a surprisingly good profile But it really does seem like Gundam transformers in general are just mostly designed with one form being the most important and the rest working around it, and a healthy reliance on animation magic to make said transformations work because unlike Valkyries I've pretty much hated every model I've ever bought of a transforming mobile suit because they were horribly compromised by the process. Traumatized by some horrid old release of the Zeta that was a nightmare to change forms and then could barely stand up
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Dec 12, 2022 06:47
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The Banud Doc is a pretty rad transforming mobile suit. It goes from being the inspiration for Nightmare in Soul Calibur to an old Soviet electric razor. Kids love razors, right?
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Dec 12, 2022 07:26
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Arc Hammer posted:Good for Kawamori that's a smart way to do it. I just have no clue how Gundam has been doing transformations for decades and yet out of the hundreds of designs there's maybe a dozen that have good looking alternate modes while the rest look like they were rebuilt by blind airline crash investigators. How do you make transformations a staple of your mecha design for decades and yet be so bad at it? https://tfwiki.net/wiki/To_sell_toys
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Dec 12, 2022 07:35
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Nessus posted:Remember ye the Law: Oh, that's not why Gundam's transforming mechs look bad. It's spite. Gundam is a continual competition between mecha designers who want to make toy engineers suffer by designing mechs that won't work in plastic, and toy engineers devoted to proving them wrong.
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Dec 12, 2022 07:45
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chiasaur11 posted:Oh, that's not why Gundam's transforming mechs look bad. I remember watching or reading something that cited an interview with the guy behind G Gundam's designs and how he didn't take it seriously at first and actively set out to design something gundam not only hadn't really done yet, but that he was certain the toy designers wouldn't be able to do, thus leading to the shining finger. And then he was shocked, and impressed, when they managed to pull it off.
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Dec 12, 2022 07:54
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I think it's unfair to compare transforming Gundam to Valkyries when Transformers is right there and 99.9% of airplane/Jet transformers suck rear end to this day. I really think Kawamori must have sold his soul to pull of those designs
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Dec 12, 2022 09:10
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https://twitter.com/mobilesuitmia/status/1602262788138754048?s=46&t=TAJ1dkSVIU2K1OKibpin6Q
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Dec 12, 2022 16:45
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Char got that evil Owen Wilson look going on. Also discovered that there's a bit of a meme going around that things in Gundam The Origin are over the top because it's Char retelling his past and punching up the details to make himself seem cooler. https://twitter.com/TheOtaking/status/1601703199857344512?t=j_eCodRyFS1IytQlTUKckQ&s=19 "This guy grabbed my shoulder and I stared at him so hard he couldn't move his hand and then I flicked him and he went flying thirty feet." Arc Hammer fucked around with this message at 16:52 on Dec 12, 2022 |
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Dec 12, 2022 16:49
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"also I'm really good at basketball"
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Dec 12, 2022 17:10
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War and Pieces posted:"also I'm really good at basketball" Tell that to the Nu Gundam. On the Hathaway front, the Penelope and Xi are considered 5th Generation Mobile suits, a nod to 5th Generation fighter aircraft that were just starting their development infancy around the time Tomino wrote Hathaway's Flash. That leaves four generations of mobile suits and me wondering where you would draw the lines between generations. 1st Gen would start with the Zaku 1 and probably end in the mid 0080s. 2nd Gen would be the new line of Titans suits and the Gundam MK2 being the poster child. 3rd Gen would be the new advances made by Neo Zeon suits during ZZ and include stuff like the Doven Wolf, Double Zeta or the Zaku 3. 4th Gen starts in CCA and I'd say also includes the suits up to the Unicorn. Here's around the time that you really see the Federation finally standardize their MS lines with the Jegan and it's offshoots and they seem pretty comfortable sticking with the frames for decades afterwards. So Hathaway is where you get the 5th Gen and the start of minovsky flight systems. You've still got 4th Gen hardware like the Gustav Karl that needs a base jabber for prolonged atmospheric flight but the flight systems on the 5th Gen machines really revolutionizes things and sets them apart from older models. Arc Hammer fucked around with this message at 18:42 on Dec 12, 2022 |
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Dec 12, 2022 17:15
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Gripweed posted:https://twitter.com/mobilesuitmia/status/1602262788138754048?s=46&t=TAJ1dkSVIU2K1OKibpin6Q I hate that people actually seem to take that connection between Zeta and Char's Counterattack seriously when even the "look at Char thinking about his discussion with Amuro moment" people point to in Char's Counterattack is explicitly Char thinking about Lalah's death and that the motivations Char exhibits in the film (i.e. "I want to punish Earthnoids") are almost the exact opposite of what either Amuro or Char are talking about in that scene. Arc Hammer posted:That leaves four generations of mobile suits and me wondering where you would draw the lines between generations. A quick Google says that according to various data books it basically breaks down to be: 1st Gen: Any mobile suits that isn't another generation. 2nd Gen: A mobile suit built out of Gundarium gamma, with a morvable flame and panaromic cockpit. 3rd Gen: A transformable mobile suit. 4th Gen: A mobile suit with a stronger reactor that can power lots of built in weaponry. 5th Gen: A mobile suit with a Minovsky flight unit. There's some discrepancies between different sources that imply it was never really solidly set out by any one and people just tried to back fill it most likely. I'd have personally thought 2nd/3rd gen units with movable frames and transformations were basically one and the same and 4th gen wasn't a thing at all because "stronger reactor" is so nebulous and mobile suits have had some built in weaponry with so long by that point, but those are the delineations laid out in databooks like the Entertainment Bibles apparently. Which means that there were two generations of mobile suit pioneered within at most a year over the course of Zeta, since the Mk II was the first suit with a proper movable frame (though it didn't use gundarium armor so it's not even a 2nd generation unit really) and there were transformable mobile suits by episode 10 of the show. tsob fucked around with this message at 22:25 on Dec 12, 2022 |
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Dec 12, 2022 22:20
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That's why I think 4th Gen makes more sense as a general move towards standardized designs. The GM line was a mess of dozens of different suits that ranged from cobbled together GM 2s and even some GM3s being built out of ancient OYW era GM1 hardware. The Jegan on the other hand is a really well built grunt suit and an excellent baseline for newer models like the Jesta and Gustav Karl. You finally get to that sweet spot where your technology is good enough to produce a well armed, durable and fast mass production unit that isn't being built out of leftovers from a 20 year old conflict. You still have gundam prototypes pushing the envelope of course but that's what they're meant for.
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Dec 12, 2022 22:25
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I saw a Youtube video exploring this question a while ago... here it is. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUAdrbMH2RI
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Dec 13, 2022 01:13
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"Generations" doesn't even hold up as a concept in the real world, foisting it upon a created work is never going to work in any way that isn't incredibly messy. Mobile Suits, Moveable frame suits, and suit miniaturization are the only criteria you have that are universal enough to apply to enough suits to use as a useful distinction. Maybe panoramic cockpits, but that comes pretty part and parcel with the moveable frames barring a few outliers.
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Dec 13, 2022 01:52
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chiasaur11 posted:Oh, that's not why Gundam's transforming mechs look bad. "I got an idea; We make it so it'd be the size of a child in 1:144 scale, with a big halo behind it, six arms, and stick a Sinanju Stein in it too to up the plastic count."
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Dec 13, 2022 02:02
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Neddy Seagoon posted:"I got an idea; We make it so it'd be the size of a child in 1:144 scale, with a big halo behind it, six arms, and stick a Sinanju Stein in it too to up the plastic count." Bandai designers: Challenge accepted. Invents an entirely new engineering process to show up the lineart designers.
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Dec 13, 2022 02:10
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I'd love to see an in-universe arms fair where there are 5 GM upgrade kits on display talking about how they'll turn it into a 2.5 generation mobile suit through cockpit and sensor upgrades.
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Dec 13, 2022 11:11
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ElBrak posted:I'd love to see an in-universe arms fair where there are 5 GM upgrade kits on display talking about how they'll turn it into a 2.5 generation mobile suit through cockpit and sensor upgrades. Everyone points to "We are Federation Hooligans" whenever this topic of making a story about research and development crops up but we really need a Planetes style story about thr Anaheim mad scientists. As for a personal view of MS generations I'm still inclined to go with my view. 1st Gen is OYW suits. 2nd Gen is 360 cockpits and movable frames. A 1.5 Gen is early testbed models like the Alex for these technological advances. 3rd Gen is typified by high performance suits with the proliferation of newtype weaponry. A smaller generation but with almost as much experimentation as the 1st Gen. 4th Gen is the adoption of standardized designs. 5th Gen is internal flight systems to prolongue atmospheric endurance.
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Dec 13, 2022 16:58
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Smaller generation is rather underselling it, since there's only a handful of Newtypes or Cyber Newtypes who actually use Newtype weaponry even during Zeta and ZZ combined. Newtype weaponry typically being remote weaponry of some kind, though you could probably count a psycommu or some derivative of it too. The problem there is that both remote weaponry and the psycommu originate in the One Year War. Regardless, assuming you did count them then unless you just want to count any suit being used by a Newtype or Cyber Newtype as having Newtype weaponry, then really there's just like
Which is 8 suits, and yes I'm counting any suit where a character like Mashymre displayed a Newtype aura as having a biosensor and thus Newtype weaponry, even if the official stats have never listed them. You could expand that somewhat by counting the 12 mass produced Qubeleys, but even then it's still only 20 suits. Which is a ridiculously tiny "generation". Adding a few suits from Char's Counterattack wouldn't expand it much either. I'd also find the idea of "standardization" being the mark of a generation rather suspect, frankly. It's not like the Federation didn't view the GM and offshoots of it in the decade after the One Year War standardized, or Zeon the various late war suits under the "United Maintenance Plan" standard. A standard isn't some magical thing that no-one reached until the UC0090s, and every prior generation (bar the 3rd, going by your definition of it) had some standardization of the new elements it introduced. The entire point of a generation is to do so really, to introduce new things that become standard.
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Dec 13, 2022 17:13
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What would be a better definition then? F-15 and 16s are both 4th Gen fighter jets that have had incremental upgrades over the year but they're still identifiably the same airframes. By CCA, Unicorn and Narrative the newest frontline suits are a lot more uniform while older suits are relegated to garrison duty or remnant resistance cells. What would differentiate a 4th Gen from a 3rd Gen. Psychoframe tech?
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Dec 13, 2022 17:23
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Almost every suit the Federation fielded in UC0079 through UC0087 was a GM variant of some kind, so how is that any less uniform an approach than what they had during the UC0090s? If you want an answer for what I think is better then I'd think "generations as a concept are kind of bunk" as Gaius Marius pointed out is the answer, and that even if you want to include them, trying to imagine 4 generations during the span of 25 years during which there isn't enough innovation of entirely new concepts that see any kind of spread to justify that is just silly so just use as many generations as needed instead, regardless of how many that is.
tsob fucked around with this message at 17:34 on Dec 13, 2022 |
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Dec 13, 2022 17:32
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The Generations thing is bunk because obviously Zaku I Guncannon and Guntank are the first generation. Zaku II Gouf and Dom are 1.5 and everything with beam weaponry and anti beam coating is generation 2. No I will not be adapting this schema for 008th MS team.
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Dec 13, 2022 21:46
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The generation thing is dumb because the series goes out of its way to separate human generations from their capabilities (there are young old types and old new types) so it’s unsurprising that you can’t apply that classification system to the suits they use to explore that concept
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Dec 13, 2022 23:17
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Arc Hammer posted:Everyone points to "We are Federation Hooligans" whenever this topic of making a story about research and development crops up but we really need a Planetes style story about thr Anaheim mad scientists. There's Developers: Mobile Suit Gundam Before One Year War, if you want nobody getting shot. It's about a small family owned business that gets subcontracted by Zeonic to help create the Zaku I. It's pretty charming, if you can forget what the Zaku would go on to do.
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Dec 13, 2022 23:25
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The shows themselves have enough dumb poo poo, don't make things harder for yourself with the dumb poo poo that isn't even in the shows.
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Dec 13, 2022 23:36
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War and Pieces posted:The Generations thing is bunk because obviously Zaku I Guncannon and Guntank are the first generation. Zaku II Gouf and Dom are 1.5 and everything with beam weaponry and anti beam coating is generation 2. The Guncannon can and does use a beam rifle of it's own throughout the original show though? I'm also not sure any One Year War suit uses anti-beam coating; there probably is one in a manga or something I suppose, but I'm pretty sure that didn't exist as a technology in animation at least until Zeta.
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Dec 14, 2022 01:05
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Kondo likes to stick bits about MS development in his works though he gets a tad weird with it
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Dec 14, 2022 01:16
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tsob posted:The Guncannon can and does use a beam rifle of it's own throughout the original show though? I'm also not sure any One Year War suit uses anti-beam coating; there probably is one in a manga or something I suppose, but I'm pretty sure that didn't exist as a technology in animation at least until Zeta. Ok fair point tho my understanding is that those bean rifles need too hook up to the White Base to "charge" whereas later models can run off battery packs? Pretty sure the Gundam's shield has anti beam coating, probably the Geogoog's as well.
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Dec 14, 2022 03:57
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War and Pieces posted:Ok fair point tho my understanding is that those bean rifles need too hook up to the White Base to "charge" whereas later models can run off battery packs? The Gundam and Guncannon's rifles run off e-caps, which are basically internal magazines that get charged between missions by the White Base. Later they get refined into e-packs, which are the same thing as an e-cap except hot swappable and suits can carry several and reload mid-combat - these are what almost every suit with a beam rifle in Zeta uses. Notably, both e-caps and e-packs don't provide all of the power for a shot on their own - the suit's reactor has to basically kick-start the reaction to fire a shot, which is why you can't just hand any suit an e-cap loaded beam rifle and have it go to town. Beam sabers and the like charge directly off the suit's reactor, and big whammy beam weapons like the Mega Bazooka Launcher, the Hi Mega Cannon, and the VSBR all run directly off a suit reactor. This is what led to weird stuff like the Hizack - its undersized reactor meant that it could only use one beam-type weapon at a time, so it could either have a beam rifle and a heat hawk or a machine gun and a beam saber, because it lacked the power to charge and run both beam weapons at the same time. The Gundam's shield doesn't have an anti-beam coat, though IIRC the Gelgoog's does.
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Dec 14, 2022 04:15
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War and Pieces posted:Ok fair point tho my understanding is that those bean rifles need too hook up to the White Base to "charge" whereas later models can run off battery packs? I have nothing to add to Kanos' explanation, but I do want to say that a bean rifle makes for a pretty fun mental image.
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Dec 14, 2022 15:54
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Just as an update, Urdr Hunt had another sidestory release. Apparently, Gaelio was a test pilot for the Schwalbe Graze at one point. Guess that gives him something to bond with some of Gundam's OVA protagonists over in a future Super Robot Wars. Also explains why the Graze replacement program is so controversial if it's been a decade or less. When you just finished mass producing your new mainline design and distributing it to every major fleet, having someone go "Wait, wait. We're starting from scratch on a new machine" would make the budget committees antsy. (The Reginlaze was also Yamazin's baby, so that's yet another mark. She's not the maddest of Gundam scientists or anything, but she's not the person you send in front of doubting beancounters to convince them that everything is being run rational and proper.)
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Dec 15, 2022 13:23
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drrockso20 posted:Kondo likes to stick bits about MS development in his works though he gets a tad weird with it Kondo MS generations: thicc, slimthicc, bigthicc, dummythicc
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Dec 15, 2022 18:44
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https://twitter.com/DTZ1200WG/status/1604823189258805248?s=20&t=9xUdWatwaFuyfZY-iuQEwA
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Dec 19, 2022 15:49
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I'm finishing out 2022 with Iron Blooded Orphans and outside of the OP, the regular background music is also really my jam.
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Dec 21, 2022 06:25
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I hate Todo and his kawaii Hitler face and I hope he dies.
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Dec 21, 2022 07:59
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War and Pieces posted:Kondo MS generations: thicc, slimthicc, bigthicc, dummythicc To be fair he does sometimes go in reverse such as with the Breda, G-Drei, or Goblin
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Dec 21, 2022 09:08
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Tulalip Tulips posted:I'm finishing out 2022 with Iron Blooded Orphans and outside of the OP, the regular background music is also really my jam. The track that plays every time Mikazuki is about to really kick some rear end is good.
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Dec 21, 2022 15:35
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