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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I can only speak about Kotobukiya’s kits, haven’t touched Tomy’s. The engineering precision isn’t up to Bandai’s lofty standards. You’ll run into plenty of jank, such as pieces barely fitting together, requiring uncomfortable amounts of force and large gates in unfortunate locations. For example, the Geno Saurer here had large gates on the inside of a curve on the forearm armor pieces, the purple ribs along the spine are held in place by a handful of tiny pegs and material tension, and I had a hard time getting some of the polycaps in their sockets. The manuals throw a lot of info at you at once - each segment of the tail consists of nearly 20 pieces and the assembly instruction was a single panel per segment. Plastic cement is recommended, if not downright necessary in places. Some kits that come with prominent pieces painted on the runner, such as the Shadow Fox and its gold, will require painting, since nothing is undergated.

    That said, they’re well worth the effort in my opinion. They certainly take more time and care than your average MG, but the end result will absolutely stand out in almost any display. Or maybe I’m biased, since I got into the hobby with a HMM kit






  • It’s an absolute masterpiece. The only real downside to the kit, as you said, is the funnels. A lot of small, undergated pieces and you’re building the same thing six times over. For anyone who’s planning to build this kit, flip to the end of the manual and build the funnels first. Get the annoying bit out of the way first, the rest of the build is wonderful.

    Don’t know how much of a stickler for accuracy you are, how do you feel about the kit being out of scale? Canonically, the Hi-Nu is a little shorter than the Nu Gundam, but the RG kits are the same height.







  • Because NASA, with nearly 30 billion in funding and using technology designed half a century ago, took 11 years to build a Shuttle cosplaying as a Saturn V. They were legally mandated to. That’s not a dig at NASA, it’s a dig at the morons who hold their purse strings.

    In roughly the same timeframe, SpaceX developed two brand new engines, both of which have amazing performance in their weight class. They developed a reusable medium lift rocket that’s now one of the most reliable launch vehicles ever. Now they’re working on a fully reusable super heavy launcher that’s capable of interplanetary missions. And they did all that without NASA’s budget.

    Private launch companies, of which SpaceX is only one, allow for faster development, faster innovation and cheaper launches. They’re actually saving taxpayers money. And the amounts that NASA does pay them don’t just vanish into the CEOs’ pockets the moment the payment clears. It goes to engineers, maintenance workers, construction workers, caterers, everyone employed by these companies and their suppliers.



  • Yeah, it compiled system files/shaders on every launch. I’m honestly surprised they coded the game to do that instead of storing the shaders after first launch, though I suppose it’s to account for newer drivers possibly changing the shader pipeline. I think I ran it off my M.2 drive, loading times to get in-game were around 5 minutes and nearly all of that was shader compile.

    I haven’t overclocked my CPU or GPU, but I have enabled the XMP equivalent on my RAM. That still only brings it up to 32GB@3200MHz.

    Bought and launched through Steam.

    And optimizing for PC is HARD. There’s countless permutations of hardware. As a developer you can aim for the median configuration, the rig built of all the most common components, but what do you do when that’s just not enough oomph to run the game well? Hell, there’s variability even among the same components. CPUs of the same model can ramp up to higher or lower boost speeds due to minute imperfections in the silicon. Someone else, who got the same RAM sticks as I did, might find that their system becomes unstable at 3000MHz. As the components get more and more intricate, such tiny faults can have mounting effects on overall performance.


  • Even if the US and EU pony up the not insignificant amount of cash to do it, there’s still nothing that can put 1000t into orbit, let alone L1. And splitting it up into 100t segments isn’t a solution, since L1 is unstable. The segments will need power, thrusters, gyros, propellant and guidance for station-keeping, so there goes a large chunk of your mass budget. To compensate for that, you need more mirrors. And they need to be continuously replaced as they break down or run out of propellant.






  • And it shouldn’t be. Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2 are amazing games that pioneered or popularized many things we’ve come to expect in modern RPGs, but they’re also 20+ years old. If Bioware’s Baldur’s Gate was released today, it wouldn’t be revolutionary. It would be an excellently made throwback to how RPGs used to be.

    BG3 isn’t made by the same studio, let alone the same people. Their admiration of what they’re building upon is clear as a sunny day, though. So let this carry on the spirit of what was and be the foundation of something new.