Drunkard's Walk Forums

copying the notes from the YouTube post:

Showing off the functional landing gear, dive brakes, ailerons, flaps, rudder and elevator, then transforming for a flyaround like the earlier video clips. I really like the intermediate mode, it's like some hunched over mutant shark-beast.

Finally finished modeling this one, with my laptop returned to the world of the living. Due to the very curvy shape of this plane, the polycount is a rather hefty 2544 as shown, just shy of 3000 with the rocket boosters and a pair of heavy missiles outboard of the "christmas trees."

As for the title, I've decided to make my own mecha action RPG to be called "Astro Cross: Flashback 1942" and have therefore removed references to other trademarked media. This is the initial player unit, though due to difficulties with duplicating energy weapons at the beginning of the game the first one only has a single light machinegun on each "ear" with the magazine filling the lower position, and the forehead beam is both weak and single/aimed shot only. You get to power it up after capturing or salvaging some laser-armed enemy craft, though

=========

A (conventional) gunpod is provided to offset the light armament, as well as a melee blade.
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows

...does it come in black?
Seriously, though.  This is good.  Quite good.  I do have one question/comment/gripe, though.
It's a P-38, so its fighter mode is propeller-driven.  That I get.  But what about the humanoid configuration?  One of the major benefits of going battroid in a VF-1 was that doing so put the jets in the legs, so you effectively had your main engines on independent vectoring systems, giving you a (metric) crapload of maneuverability.  This is, of course, on top of the upward thrust.
Moving the props to the shoulders takes a huge bite out of your aerial maneuverability.  I'd say this bird wouldn't be turning quickly or side-dodging in midair- if anything, your non-linear movement will mostly be limited to rotation and altitude control.  More like a tank than a dancer, really.  I'd almost see doctrine being to keep that configuration ground-bound, only really using the propellers for transition into fighter mode and for tactical movement.  They look like they'd be *really* good for making jumps.

---

My Unitarian Jihad Name is: Brother Atom Bomb of Courteous Debate. Get yours.

I've been writing a bit.

You do also have the eight mini-jets at the knees - with thrust vectoring, which sidesteps the control freeze the real P-38 tended to get due to compressability issues when diving. It's still a subsonic airframe at heart, though, so you still need the dive brakes. Having the wings in a near vertical configuration also places their control surfaces to aid in generating side-slip, at least to a degree. There's a pair of booster rockets (profile lowered from the bulbous footbals of the earlier still image) that become a backpack available as well.

Of course, in the end, any such discussions are meaningless when you're dealing with something as ridiculous as a prop plane that turns into a giant robot and (later, with boosters, if you're crazy enough or lazy enough not to switch to a later type) flies in space.

What, don't look at me like that! Superdimension Cavalry Southern Cross did it with helicopters first! And all the engines are fusion powered turbines, that's why they're so small - the materials can only be produced in small parts until 1941, well after this was designed. The Fw-190 will be like that too - half a dozen little fusion turbines geared to a prop shaft in place of the OTL piston engine. I thought about giving it a more turboprop style five blade propeller, but the three blade prop is almost as much a part of the classic image as the bulge on each side of the booms (oil coolers in the original.)

(Of course, SDFCSC was the redheaded stepchild of the Superdimension trilogy, but let's conveniently ignore that)

You're right though in that B-mode is considered ground use only under most conditions - it's hard to melee in the air with no leverage, and if you just need arms to aim a gunpod around for off-angle attacks that's what C-mode is for. Flying up to a bomber, transforming, and tearing it apart is an interesting mental image - I might have an antagonist character do it in a cinematic...

ETA:

Bluemage Wrote:...does it come in black?

http://www.bushwings.com/Diary%20Photo%20Album3.html

http://www.ipmslivonia.org/ipms/Gallery ... 8-JF-2.htm

http://www.fritzandsheila.com/P-38/Frit ... 20Page.htm

Yes.
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows

Ah, that explains it.  More mobile than I thought, but not so much high-altitude/high-speed B-mode as you'll see later.  The knee jets don't really show up well, and weren't listed in the features, so I wasn't quite aware they existed.  I've only skimmed the last page or two of the other thread, so d'oh, my bad.
As far as the B-mode 'jump' is concerned, I was considering that more in the sense of increased ground mobility- getting from Point A to Point B quicker, dodging obstacles located at Point C midway between, and so on, without spending too much time as a midair target or cranking up to full F-mode speeds.  Might be something the Germans would have more use for than the Americans, anyway.
That really brings up an interesting point.  Early WW2 air doctrine was focused on bombing- fighters basically existed (when they did- the Americans thought they could send out armed/armored heavy bombers unescorted) to clear the path for bombers.  The RAF and USAAF were focused on strategic bombing, while Nazi Germany and the USSR focused more on tactical support bombing.  How does the existence of variable fighter technology change this?  (Obviously, it makes fighters more important, but to whom, how much, and in which roles?)  Would the German VF ('fliegenpanzer?') be an air superiority/infantry support bomber?  Would the VP-38 be used for long-range escort and, say, mobile ground AA?
Most of this isn't so important for the game (where all you need is game balance, model plausibility, and OMGVARIABLEWW2), but it's such an interesting question, I can't help but ask.
...also, now I can't help imagining the variable equivalent of some of the OTL Nazi wunderwaffen.  fP.VIII Maus super-heavy variable tank, anyone?  Destroid-equivalents, instead?

---

My Unitarian Jihad Name is: Brother Atom Bomb of Courteous Debate. Get yours.

I've been writing a bit.

The only thing that bugs me is that the propeller blades appear to retract into the engines. Or at least, where the engine block should be.

This is, of course, nothing more than mild pedantry.
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

Indeed they do. If it had Allisons under the cowls this would be a major problem, but instead it's just a matter of a telescopable prop shaft coming from the gearbox in the back of the engine space, with microturbines arrayed around it. I didn't model the thing, but did a napkin sketch of the arrangement. the turbosupercharger on the upper nacelle... uh... it makes it look like a P-38. Hmm, how about we say it's part of the cooling system for all those little fusion chambers?

As for the knee jets, they're pretty clear on the C-mode ("gerwalk" in Macross-style, but I expect it's a trademarked term) and in the initial A(-ttack or -ircraft)-mode pass you can see them going through 15-20 degree (I forget now) thrust vectoring, though since elevator input is happening at the same time only one actuates at once corresponding to aileron movement, since the other would be opposing the elevator's effect. I only realised after everything was said and done and rendered and posted that I should have run the ailerons in the opposite directions, so the camera motion would look ;like the plane was swooping under the control input.

I don't think I've gone over any machine stats in detail - if I have, I don't remember the details myself either. I haven't thought too much on it, it's basically eye candy plus getting frustrated over not being able to play Macross 30 multiplied by the fact that the only gameplay video series' I've found are by people who should be hiding their shame, not posting it on YouTube.

(insert image macro here: "YouNoob: Embarrass Yourself")

That is a rant I'll skip for now except to put on a phony accent and say, "My pride as a mecha pilot is offended by seeing you flail about with such pitiful skills! GERWALK! Learn it, love it, live it! When engaging anywhere but melee combat, G is the ideal blend of mobility and off-track shooting capability. Armor! It's not just for Destroids, ESPECIALLY IF YOU'RE NOT DODGING AROUND LIKE A CRACKHEAD SQUIRREL IN GERWALK! ARRRGH!" Then I go play Ultimate or Triangle Frontier for an hour or so to repeatedly obliterate either the kind of enemies they were facing or their player mecha, before coming back to my project of creating something to have a big screen and better customization than just paint scheme tints and stat mods of a fixed weapon mix. Though today's challenge is trying to get the J7W1 exported from Blender 2.63 into something 2.61 will read the faces of, instead of only importing the wires... I loathe 2.63+'s n-gons and even more so the fact that you can't disable n-gons as the default, but due to the rewriting .blend files are only nominally backward compatible, and I don't want all the annoying work already put into texturing the damn Shinden to go to waste.

ETA: Ah, I've gotten into bad habits with months of only being able to post short stuff, now I only try o cover one question per post and if it work's I'm happy... Anyway, WRT roles of variable fighters, the main difficulty has been in building a suitable control interface light enough for aircraft - semiconductors were only just being worked on in labs at this point OTL, and for a mecha you need both an esper pilot and an amplifier network built into it to extend their automatic body-reinforcing TK to the unit. Not only is doing so on a mass production basis troublesome, as you noted the air force commands involved were at best on the stodgy side - only the proven effectiveness of the few example Bluo mecha - and the fact that when they arrived in 1920, there was not a weapon system on Earth capable of reliably fighting them, since anything with enough damage output couldn't hit except by chance - had US designers working on them at all. The ground forces have lots of things in various grades of walking tank, but since most of the Battle form's effectiveness comes from physics-raping hax the benefit of increased structure is more place to put amplifier systems or powerplants to run them.

I'd happily welcome a collaborator or two for fitting the history/politics/ops doctrine together, but basically yeah, I'm operating on the level of OMGVARIABLEWWIIAWESOME more than anything.
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows

When it comes to roles and missions, even the original P-38 could pretty much do anything you could ask of a single seat (or double seat in later variations with a radar operator for night-fighting) heavy fighter, and that much doesn't change - being a transformable mecha just makes it better. Even with a total of 14 mictroturbines most of the work comes from heating up intake air so fuel endurance essentially becomes a nonissue compared to pilot endurance. Bomber crews loved the OTL Lightning because it had the legs to stay with them longer than Mustangs or Spits, this one can go all the way and back, and that's an order of magnitude higher when it runs on a whiff of hydrogen rather than gallons of avgas. For groun attack it can slow way down and skim along in C-mode like a helicopter, or a pilot with developed clairvoyance and TK can do the modern trick of "which window do you want the cruise missile to go in through?" from high speed and high altitude (bombs, probably not going to be involved, though modern physics engines make them easy to code, becasue I can't think of any way besides player skill (as opposed to character game mechanic skills) to control where they land. B is mostly about facing other mecha, because the best way to fight a mecha without massive area attacks (ie dropping a load of bombs on their depot or column) is to punch it with another mecha - kicking and stabbing with mecha-sized blades works too. There are things a regular human can do better - anything involving tight spaces or stealth, or just sentry duty - but mecha ranging from automobile size and up are kings of the ground war - their being on the ground in large numbers in Europe is why the aliens can't just curbstomp all opposition there like they did in most of the world and take over entirely. But, the situation can't be resolved without taking to the air, and that's just beginning at this point...

... which is all a fancy way of saying that it's a game about daring fighter jock mecha pilots, and the PC's actions matter, therefore the most important forces in the world are the variable fighters, plus a couple of variable bombers (the Ho229 & LPL, and my Raven variable bomber slightly recast to be fifty years younger, little of which changes the visual design at all)
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows

A few stills of the unit, with option parts and a few tweaks



Just these crappy trim bits add 12,000 polygons - mostly in the font. There'll be simple decal geometry to add a transparent .png onto for the game version, but it suffices for the render.






Note that the last is of a Block 1 unit, with a single-shot brow laser and lacking the ear guns entirely due to difficulty producing the energy weapons it was designed for, and the gunpods which they were delivered with to make up for the lack. Each has a 20mm autocannon and two .50 cal machineguns (as in the OTL P-38) with 150 and 500 rounds each respectively, but each one also holds three of each caliber ammo bins (the .50s are combined into a single unit with two spools that feed into opposite sides) with only the ones closest to the grip actually being used at any one time, as the unit has hands and can switch them like a soldier with rifle clips and the gunpods have to occupy a hardpoint anyway, it was thought that the weapon might as well make use of the full carrying capacity. When occupying the inboard, "armpit" hardpoint, the guns are within the plane of the propeller, therefore they are equipped with an electro-optical interrupter system to prevent shooting off the plane's own propellers. When handheld or one the outboard hardpoints they enjoy their full rate of fire, a truly terrifying concept if all six are filled and fire-linked for a ground attack mission. The pilot's telekinesis is responsible for moving them to and from the hands when transforming.

ETA: How the decorations line up in B


--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows