Aaaaah. If this is the case, then...hm. Well, if anyone can use one then he'd be relegating witches to Rosie the Riveter duty, which is better than the kitchen, but still panders to his disgusting ego. And, yeah, I sort of assumed they were kinda handwaving the bullets-against-alien-armor thing. =)

>
>>Hm. Well, yes, the witches themselves dodge the beams on a regular
>>basis, but they also have to fall back to the shields frequently when
>>the Neuroi box them in.
>
>Mostly, yes. Eila doesn't, but then, she can see a second or two into
>the future. (Later on there's a whole episode that's mostly about how
>she's shit at shields because she never has to use hers. :)

Well, I was generalizing. Also, haven't gotten that far in yet but it sounds cool.

>>As for Gryphon's pack, the difference between the Miyafuji Striker and
>>the new rocket pack is pretty obvious now--the speed and acceleration
>>are pretty damn powerful, but there's nothing in the rocket pack that
>>suggests superior maneuverability.
>
>That's always been the case in his experience - it comes up in the
>flight test scene in New Tricks, in fact, that whenever he and
>Mio dogfight, it's his acceleration and top end against her superior
>turning performance. Of course, he was handicapping himself a bit in
>that scene in that he'd turned off his X-20's advanced flight controls
>(inertia vectoring and so on). With that stuff turned on, a
>25th-century jetpack can make lightcycle turns.

Imagine trying to explain a -gravitic- propulsion system to a 194X person. Hoo, boy. I'm kinda wondering when it will slip out that he's a hell of a lot older than even the 501 girls realize.

>
>>We haven't actually seen how the
>>rocketpack achieves maneuverability, but if it's just flight vanes or
>>somesuch, the Striker will run rings around it. A rocket system really
>>needs verniers to compete.
>
>"It's really a jet" is going to be this show's "Frankenstein is the
>doctor," isn't it? :)
>
>Anyway, yeah, one thing G is rapidly discovering on his impromptu test
>flight is that, left to its own devices, the He 162 doesn't handle so
>good in town. It appears that's the main reason why the
>longest test flight was 112 meters - because, as Shirley speculated,
>you can't steer it without some supernatural means or another.
>I would guess that Reichenberg assumed the "warlock" he heard rumors
>of in 1943 was steering with body English and/or a helmet rudder (as
>indeed Cliff Secord does in the original Rocketeer material),
>but, well, that doesn't actually work in our setting, as five
>Projekt Salamander test pilots discovered to their chagrin.

Now, this is interesting. Reichenberg might have assumed all kinds of things about the Warlock of 1943, but I'm not sure how that translates into him thinking his own invention is going to be able to duplicate that. The whole point of the exercise from his perspective is to eliminate the necessity of the witches, or at least that's what Ursula is assuming. And it's a very good assumption. Whether the Warlock did it or not, if he doesn't know how it was done, what makes him think he can duplicate it?

>
>>I wonder how much it galls him he has to accept a witch
>>is working on his project.
>
>That might be his favorite part of the arrangement, actually. It
>keeps her from working on anything that might be of use to anyone
>else, and there's a certain pleasant irony in making a witch
>develop an anti-witch system. Particularly that irritating little
>slacker Hartmann's sister.

Oh, dear. Do I detect a severe underestimation? I do believe so. I think Reichy is about to get hoist on his own petard.

--------

this world created by the
hands of the gods
everything is false
everything is a LIE
the final days have come
now
let everything be destroyed

--mu