Defender_16

Arg. I'm having trouble forcing ship battle with the computer to see what the ships look like. Hmm... Just had an idea. Will update in an hour. Fascinating. It's a very interesting look that you've gone for with the heavy cruiser. In terms of shape I find myself comparing it to a Golan 3 Platform in many respects. The rocky look of the ship is well done. When looking at the ship from forward and just slightly above, the armatures of the ship look almost like a ribcage that's opened up alowing the larger center most one to escape. Kinda like the Alien, like something out of a horror movie, quite terrifying. The larger one toward the back looks like a giant bridge tower when looking at the ship from other directions. The Frigate analog almost seems to be something else entirely. It's very um... green? This is an excelent opening step, though I do have some ideas. I need some sketchpaper my scanner and some time. I don't know what you'll think of my idea but I'd rather show a concept then merely discuss it. I'll try and post later tonight.

Odd. I just tried to download some models that I had misplaced and kept having trouble on cetain ones. The Matalok Cruiser Analog and the Hapan Battle Dragon. Whenever I tried to 'save target as' in IE6 it would just sit in the download screen not yet letting me choose a location to save the file. I let it sit there for a few minutes before searching my computer some more and eventually finding where I had put them. Man I seem to be having a lot of trouble downloading models made by you lately Krytos.

Oh! Um, wow! The newer (as yet) un-textured version looks I dunno, befiting it's namesake. It's Majestic looking! I never commented on the older one because I figured anything I would say wouldn't be either polite or constructive. So I just didn't say anything. But the new one is looking awesome! (btw Krytos, MSN isn't letting me download the Models you e-mailed to me for some reason. I've been trying to get at them for about a week or more now. Stupid Microsoft. ) EDIT: It Finally let me download the models you sent me! Yay! I'm testing them out today.

In the case of the SSD's what you really need are just a few Tie Defender Squadrons. At the start of the battle the Defenders draw the attention of the Rebel fighters long enough to launch Interceptors which cause real problems for X-wings. With the X-wings eliminated early by combined fire from the Interceptors and the SSD's the Bulwarks would find temselves outclassed by the SSD'd superior (*Checks stats* wait when did the Bulwark get that many Turbo lasers?) by the SSD's superior shielding and repair abilities. It'd still be semi-close though. EDIT: Man had to finish that up faster then I had planned.

Among other things I got a Terry's Chocolate Orange! The chocolate you whack and unwrap. *WHACK* ...hmm, maybe a couple more times. *WHACK* *WHACK* *WHACK* And for an extra special present I got laid off for the winter...

Ever seen the Anime Music Video set to that song? It's got tons of scenes from Macross/Robotech and finishes up with the biggest Orbital Bombardment I've ever seen.

5 Feb 05 S&T: ASTEROID 2004 MN4: A REALLY NEAR MISS - a 320m diameter rock will pass within 30,000km of the Earth on Friday 13 April 2029. Since the Earth travels at about 1800km/minute around the Sun a "miss" of 30,000km represents 15 minutes in the least favourable configuration (Earth moves one radius in 3.33 minutes). A 320m asteroid is not particularly "huge" but if it hit it would create a 6km wide crater and flatten buildings out to about 100km. On 18 December, the object was rediscovered by Gordon Garradd at Siding Spring in New South Wales., Australia. This raised an alert among astronomers who, fortunately, now know that it will miss the Earth in 2029. But it will come back to haunt us in subsequent centuries. Gordon was a member of Spaceguard Australia, which was disbanded in 1996 when Australian government funding was stopped. In frustration NASA has partly funded his important work. http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/a99942.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_MN4 She's small enough that I figure we can just smack her with a bunch of nukes at the last second if we need to. Maybe a penetrating nuclear device, like a bunker buster.

Man with that end of the world header I thought you were going to be talking about that asteroid that may or may not hit us in 2036 depending on which way it skips off the atmosphere in 2029. Has anyone ever thought of buying up a stockpile of copies of Rebellion? Setting up a paypal system with the site here to cordinate possible distribution of copies of the game? Just a thought. I know Evaders probably doesn't need something else to complicate the site with.

Uugh. Chewy is normally the first of my characters the get killed in any campaign. The only time he doesn't get killed off really is when I've changed somone out for Corran Horn. A standard invasion of Coruscant: Luke: Oh my Force! They killed Corran! Han: Those Sithspawn! Mon Mothma: What's with all the swearing about? Jan: Could somone please take down the shield generators? Madine: I'm still captured you know. Borsk: Hurry up and capture the planet so I can turn them to my- er OUR cause. Vader: Luke, *I* am your father. Luke: No, that's not true! That would make ME the Sithspawn! That's impossible! Vader: Search your feelings, you know it to be true! Luke: NOOOOO!!!! Corran: I'm still dead here guys. Can we load a save game?

*Screams* Mad you wern't supposed to tell him him how to actually do any of it! We're all doomed now! DOOMED!!!!

Yeah that's how we pronounce it here too. Though without the Texan accent of course. (Is getting totally off topic) There was an articale in National Geographic on how regional accents in North America are intensifying with time instead of being erased by television as had previously been anticipated. There's a nifty colour coded map of the different accent locations which fades out once you get into the Western areas because they haven't been settled as long. (The only way somone can tell me apart from my father over the phone is through accent, as he grew up about +100km north of were I'm from. Different river valley, slightly different accent.) *We now return to the main topic. * Isn't MS Paint standard on most computers (that use Windows)?

I just thought of something that would be neat. If you had the option to display the local weather for the location of each tab. (Mine would show people burried in snow. )

F-f-f-f---Finished?!!? *Faints* EDIT: Man! I TOTALLY forgot to go test out those models on the weekend. *Kicks self*

Yay! Hmm... Heavy Cruiser, heavy... cruiser... riiiight. Honestly it's been so long now since I thought about it I can't remember. The heavy Cruiser shouldn't be too different from the regular Cruiser Analog, it's just been "grown out" bigger. Bigger, Bulkier, um Grand-ier. *Goes to check another thread for a second.* Had to look at my Vong Starship Ship list to check on what ships I was using. ( Yuuzhan Vong Slayers Craft ) ( Yuuzhan Vong Corvette Analog ) ( Yuuzhan Vong Frigate Analog ) ( Yuuzhan Vong Light Cruiser Analog ) ( Yuuzhan Vong Cruiser Analog ) ( Yuuzhan Vong Carrier Analog ) ( Yuuzhan Vong Heavy Cruiser Analog ) The Carrier and Heavy Cruiser Analog could both be based off of essentially the same model to speed things up. They both look like larger uglier verions of the Matalok but with tons more of the coral armatures that you see on the cruiser on the Dark Tide I: Onslaught book cover. http://www.swgalaxy.ru/books/images/eng/onslaught.jpg On the Carrier these armatures carry the many many skips. On the Heavy Cruiser the armatures have additional plasma weapons, dovin basals, grutchin launchers, and they add armour to the ship. The Matalok masses as much as an ISD. These things must be getting close to the mass of an Alleigance SSD. (Eventually the Heavy cruisers "grow up" to become the Grand Cruisers like the one seen at Ithor. The Grand's weren't that common in the war though so I won't be including them.) You could send them to me and I'll try them out on the weekend?

Woo! Starting to look nice and developed. Can that thing land on water? It just kinda looks that way...

For number 2 above do you mean if Vader didn't die? or if Palpy didn't die? Because there was a Star Wars alternate universe comic book in which Vader didn't die but joins the rebellion. (Palpy escapes, stage left.) Anyways... what if. What if Palpatine never rose to power, and in his place a coaliion of species bent on the destruction humanity rose to prominance. Destroying the Jedi Order, though not quite as effectively as Palpy did. Forcing humans to flee into the depths of space, eventually forming a rebellion to fight back in the name of a new Pro-Human Empire! MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!! *Ahem* Basically a totally inverted Rebellion. Everything's switched arround... maybe the clone wars don't even happen, that would simplify matters. The humans hold out arround the core for awhile then are forced to take their fleets and escape into deep space with as many refugees as possible. Think Battlestar Galactica but with multiple fleets. A handfull of ISD's would have been built before the escape and SFS mostly goes underground suporting the humans. "A battered CEC Corvette flees before a Mon Cal cruiser, above the surface of Tatoine..."

I keep having this problem too. (Or did in my last round of attempts to play the game.) Only it's just me using the router. I can get LAN games going just fine.

Mmmm... chocolate. Makes me want to hop in the car and drive through the snow storm for forty minutes to raid the Hershey plant. hmm... on second thought, it's too cold out. *Runs arround house trying to find chocloate of anykind*

Gah! I can't ever seem to scroll up becaus the Paypal button overlaps the up arrow. I couldn't stand it anymore I had to say something. It takes me 5 minutes of scrolling to get the darned arrow to work most days. Can't seem to find the right spot today and it's ticking me off. We now return you to your regularily scheduled program.

Holy cow! That must have taken a few attempts to get the head melting thing right.

Halo PC is one of the few games I have ever played online with any consistency. The mods are interesting on occasion but mainly I play for the larger 16 player games that are hard to put together with X-boxes. (Here anyways where I'm one of ten people in town that has an X-box.) Another thing that's nice if you have the full retail version of the game is that you can download and run Halo CE. Custom Edition allows players to add maps built by players from scratch, new weapons, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_CE http://xs37.xs.to/pics/05280/YoyorastIsland1.jpg Before I stopped following Halo CE news somone had come out with a nearly complete Zelda map pack. The only this that didn't work too well were that the horses still behaved more like jeeps. [/b]

Banned X-box360 commercial. (I can see why but funny.) http://www.break.com/articles/xbox360banned.html

You're supposed to take your time reading it. (I'm an information junkie anyways.) EDIT: I'll be inputing the links to those in...um... well, before Friday for sure.

(It'd be great if people would post any other new advanced technology as they come out.) This particular post is on the Carbon Nanotube. This news is actually a few months old but I didn't find out about it untill a few weeks ago. Prepare for a flurry of stuff from a ton of different sources. I haven't archived the links for many (if any) of these. Carbon nanotube From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/4/46/Louie_nanotube.jpg/330px-Louie_nanotube.jpg Carbon nanotubes are cylindrical carbon molecules with novel properties that make them potentially useful in a wide variety of applications (e.g., nano-electronics, optics, materials applications, etc.). (Edited) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_nanotube Carbon nanotube fiber & film One application for nanotubes that is currently being researched is high tensile strength fibers. Two methods are currently being tested for the manufacture of such fibers. A French team has developed a liquid spun system that involves pulling a fiber of nanotubes from a bath which yields a product that is approximately 60% nanotubes. The other method, which is simpler but produces weaker fibers uses traditional melt-drawn polymer fiber techniques with nanotubes mixed in the polymer. After drawing, the fibers can have the polymer burned out of them to make them purely nanotube or they can be left as they are. Ray Baughman's group from the NanoTech Institute at University of Texas at Dallas produced the current toughest material known in mid-2003 by spinning fibers of single wall carbon nanotubes with polyvinyl alcohol. Beating the previous contender, spider silk, by a factor of four, the fibers require 600 J/g to break. In comparison, the bullet-resistant fiber Kevlar is 27-33J/g. In mid-2005 Baughman and co-workers from Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization developed a method for producing transparent carbon nanotube sheets 1/1000th the thickness of a human hair capable of supporting 50,000 times their own mass. In August 2005, Ray Baughman's team managed to develop a fast method to manufacture up to seven meters per minute of nanotube tape [5]. Once washed with ethanol, the ribbon is only 50 nanometers thick; a square kilometer of the material would only weigh 30 kilograms. In 2004 Alan Windle's group of scientists at the Cambridge-MIT Institute developed a way to make carbon nanotube fiber continuously at the speed of several centimetres per second just as nanotubes are produced. One thread of carbon nanotubes was more than 100 metres long. The resulting fibers are electrically conductive and as strong as ordinary textile threads. [6] [7] Current progress In April of 2001, IBM announced it had developed a technique for automatically developing pure semiconductor surfaces from nanotubes. On September 19, 2003, NEC Corporation, Japan, announced stable fabrication technology of carbon nanotube transistors. High purity (80%) nanotubes were reported in June 2003 with metallic properties can be extracted with electrophoretic techniques. [8] As of 2003, nanotubes cost from 20 euro per gram to 1000 euro per gram, depending on purity, composition (single-wall, double-wall, multi-wall) and other characteristics. In June 2004 scientists from China's Tsinghua University and Louisiana State University demonstrated the use of nanotubes in incandescent lamps, replacing a tungsten filament in a lightbulb with a carbon nanotube one. In 2004, Nature published a photo of an individual 4 cm long single-wall nanotube (SWNT). In August 2005, GE announced the development of an ideal carbon nanotube diode that operates at the "theoretical limit," or best possible performance. The company also observed a photovoltaic effect in the nanotube diode device that could lead to breakthroughs in solar cells that make them more efficient and a more viable alternative in the mainstream energy market.[9] In September of 2005 Texas-based Applied Nanotech, in conjunction with six Japanese electronics firms, have created a prototype of a 25-inch TV using carbon nanotubes. The prototype TV does not suffer from "ghosting," as some types of digital TVs. In September 2005 researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory demonstrated that ignition by a conventional flashbulb takes place when a layer of 29% iron enriched SWNT is placed on top of a layer of explosive material such as PETN. With ordinary explosives optical ignition is only possible with high powered lasers [10]. In September 2005 researchers demonstrated a new way to coat MWNT's with magnetite which after orientation in a magnetic field were able to attract each other over a distance of at least 10 micrometres. [11]. The nanotubes were functionalized with negatively charged carboxylic acid groups in a AIBN type free radical addition. Magnetite nanoparticles prepared by the Massart method were given a positive charge by washing with nitric acid which made them stick to the nanotubes by electrostatic forces. Carbon nanotubes in electrical circuits Carbon nanotubes have many properties—from their unique dimensions to an unusual current conduction mechanism—that make them ideal components of electrical circuits. Currently, there is no reliable way to arrange carbon nanotubes into a circuit. The major hurdles that must be jumped for carbon nanotubes to find prominent places in circuits relate to fabrication difficulties. The carbon nanotube production processes are very different from the traditional IC fabrication process. The IC fabrication process is somewhat like sculpture—films are deposited onto a wafer and pattern-etched away. Carbon nanotubes are fundamentally different from films; they are like atomic-level spaghetti (and every bit as sticky). Researchers sometimes resort to manipulating nanotubes one-by-one with the tip of an atomic force microscope in a painstaking, time-consuming process. Perhaps the best hope is that carbon nanotubes can be grown through a chemical vapor deposition process from patterned catalyst material on a wafer, which serve as growth sites and allow designers to position one end of the nanotube. During the deposition process, an electric field can be applied to direct the growth of the nanotubes, which tend to grow along the field lines from negative to positive polarity. Another way for the self assembly of the carbon nanotube transistors consist in using chemical or biological techniques to place the nanotubes from solution to determinate place on a substrate. Even if nanotubes could be precisely positioned, there remains the problem that, to this date, engineers have been unable to control the types of nanotubes—metallic, semiconducting, single-walled, multi-walled—produced. A chemical engineers solution is needed if nanotubes are to become feasible for commercial circuits. ________________________________________________________________________________________________ Purity pays off for nanotubes 2 August 2005 Physicists in the US have developed a new method for making electronic circuits with carbon nanotubes. The technique involves dipping semiconductor chips into a purified solution of nanotubes, rather than the conventional method of growing the nanotubes directly onto the chips. The resulting devices are much better than those produced by other approaches (Nature Materials 4 589). The features in conventional microelectronic circuits are getting smaller and smaller and will soon reach the limit imposed by the fundamental properties of silicon. Scientists hope that carbon nanotubes - which are essentially rolled up sheets of graphite, just nanometres in diameter, with excellent electronic and mechanical properties - might one day be used to replace silicon in electronic circuits. Large quantities of single-walled nanotubes can be produced by the high-pressure decomposition of carbon monoxide (HiPCO) method. However, nanotubes grown by this technique usually contain large amounts of carbon-based impurities that degrade the properties of nanotube devices. The purification method developed by Alan Johnson and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania begins by heating nanotubes produced by the HiPCO method in wet air in the presence of hydrogen peroxide, followed by a gentle acid treatment. Next, magnetic fields are used to separate the nanotubes from the impurities. The semiconductor chips are then dipped into a solution containing the nanotubes to create circuits. "Ultimately we can make it so the nanotubes only stick where we want them to in order to form a circuit," explains lead author Danvers Johnston. The UPenn team has already made field-effect transistors from the purified nanotubes and shown that they have superior properties compared with devices made from non-purified HiPCO material. Moreover, they have shown that they can determine the energy gap of individual semiconducting nanotubes by measuring the current in their circuits and varying the temperature and gate voltage. ________________________________________________________________________________________________ Nanotube laser treatment could destroy tumours 3 August 2005 Researchers at the University of Stanford, US, have used single-walled carbon nanotubes and a laser to selectively destroy cancer cells. The modified nanotubes entered cancer cells and were heated by a near-infrared light beam, killing the cells. One of the longstanding problems in medicine is how to cure cancer without harming normal body tissue," said Hongjie Dai, of Stanford University. "Standard chemotherapy destroys cancer cells and normal cells alike. That's why patients often lose their hair and suffer numerous other side effects. For us, the Holy Grail would be finding a way to selectively kill cancer cells and not damage healthy ones." Dai and colleagues functionalized the nanotubes with a folate moiety. Unlike normal cells, cancer cells have receptors for folate on their surface. This means that in laboratory tests cancer cells took up the nanotubes by a process of endocytosis, but normal cells did not. Irradiating the nanotubes with near-infrared light excited electrons in the structures, causing them to heat up and destroy the surrounding cancer cells. Typically, an 808 nm-wavelength beam with a power of 1.4 W/cm2 caused extensive cell death after two minutes, but such wavelengths passed harmlessly through healthy cells. "We're using an intrinsic property of nanotubes to develop a weapon that kills cancer," said Dai. "The laser we used is a 3 cm beam that's held like a flashlight," said Dai. "We can take the beam and put it anywhere we want. We can shine it on a local area of the skin or inside an internal organ using a fibre-optic device." And that's just the start. "Folate is just an experimental model that we used," said Dai. "In reality, there are more interesting ways we can do this. For example, we can attach an antibody to a carbon nanotube to target a particular kind of cancer cell." A team from Rice University, US, has carried out a similar technique using gold nanoshells in place of carbon nanotubes. But Dai and colleagues say their nanotube method compares favourably as it needs a lower laser power and shorter radiation times to destroy cancer cells. Dai and colleagues also used nanotubes to transport molecules inside cells. They conjugated DNA to the nanotubes and allowed cells to take up the nanotubes by endocytosis. Then they used a pulsed near-infrared laser to break the membrane around the nanotube and detach the DNA. Pulsing the laser meant that it released the DNA without heating the cell sufficiently to cause its death. The result was delivery of the DNA to the cell nucleus. Dai says that delivering therapeutic molecules of DNA, RNA or protein directly into the cell nucleus could help fight various infections and diseases. The researchers reported their work in PNAS. About the author Liz Kalaugher is editor of nanotechweb.org. UT Dallas-Led Research Team Produces Strong, Transparent Carbon Nanotube Sheets University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) nanotechnologists and an Australian colleague have produced transparent carbon nanotube sheets that are stronger than the same-weight steel sheets and have demonstrated applicability for organic light-emitting displays, low-noise electronic sensors, artificial muscles, conducting appliqués and broad-band polarized light sources that can be switched in one ten-thousandths of a second. Dr. Ray Baughman discussed this work at the 2005 nano Summit. His talk will be shown on our web site shortly. It is also discussed in the August 19 issue of Science. Carbon nanotubes are like minute bits of string, and untold trillions of these invisible strings must be assembled to make useful macroscopic articles that can exploit the phenomenal mechanical and electronic properties of the individual nanotubes. In the Aug. 19 issue of the prestigious journal Science, scientists from the NanoTech Institute at UTD and a collaborator, Dr. Ken Atkinson from Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), a national laboratory in Australia, report such assembly of nanotubes into sheets at commercially useable rates. Starting from chemically grown, self-assembled structures in which nanotubes are aligned like trees in a forest, the sheets are produced at up to seven meters per minute by the coordinated rotation of a trillion nanotubes per minute for every centimeter of sheet width. By comparison, the production rate for commercial wool spinning is 20 meters per minute. Unlike previous sheet fabrication methods using dispersions of nanotubes in liquids, which are quite slow, the dry-state process developed by the UTD-CSIRO team can use the ultra-long nanotubes needed for optimization of properties. ________________________________________________________________________________________________ Nanotubes show their strength in numbers Super-strong sheets could be used in future screens and surfaces Two carbon nanotube sheets support droplets of orange juice, water and grape juice. The mass of each droplet is up to 50,000 times that of the contacting sheets. By Kathleen Wren Science Updated: 4:07 p.m. ET Aug. 18, 2005 WASHINGTON - Carbon nanotubes, the wunderkind molecules of the nanoworld, are finally showing strength in numbers. Researchers have now made large nanotube sheets that have many of the same star qualities as the prima donna-like single molecules, bringing the promises of nanotechnology a step closer to reality. The flexible, transparent sheets can conduct electricity and emit light or heat when a voltage is applied, leading their creators to propose that our car windows and the canopies of military aircraft could contain nearly invisible antennae, electrical heaters for defrost, or informative optical displays. These sheets, which are presently several meters long but could potentially be much larger, might also be useful in everything from flexible computer screens that could be rolled into a sack, to light bulb-like devices providing uniform lighting, to strong sails that could be propelled in space by sunlight. When you have a remarkable material, it’s easy to make advances in terms of applications,â€

No, no. Certainly not. No, never, mabey, no. Yes. I mean No! NO, no...and no... To Mad; I have absolutely zero experience with 3D modeling. I know about it, and how other people do it, but have never done any myself. Soo...yeah. Good thought though.