|
Community Links |
Social Groups |
Pictures & Albums |
Members List |
Search Forums |
Advanced Search |
Go to Page... |
|
Thread Tools |
05-23-2011, 04:01 PM | #1841 |
EQ-Viper
Join Date: Oct 2008
Location: Canada
Posts: 4,343
|
Thanks!
Also, I don't know if you noticed it, but I've since placed the air defense guys as part of the law enforcement section. The air defense guys have always been a bit problematic, not to the same extent as the pilots, but pretty close, in the sense that just like aircraft units, air defense units also need a lot of supporting infrastructure: they need a lot of forward area alert radar support, even if they're just using shoulder-fired stinger missiles. Another issue is that the Army and the Marines have been moving away from using dedicated stinger gunners... the MANPADS crewman MOS in the Army is now a Reservist only job, and they've been in the process of phasing it out for a while now. All the MANPADS crewman roles are being rolled into the do-it-all Air and Missile Defense Crew Member 14S MOS (the 14S MOS is also absorbing the old Avenger Crewmember MOS, IIRC). Anyway, having a dedicated air defense unit doesn't make sense for my take on the Joe team... the Stinger gunners had to be in charge of something else more central to the GIJOE mission I outlined besides air defense, which is where I hit upon the idea of turning Knockdown and Backblast into former LID MPs (Light Infantry Division Military Police Company). Apart from the Air Defense Artillery, LID MPs are the only other Army personnel who are regularly issued Stinger missiles (18 missiles to a 9-man LID MP formation) and train in their use, AFAIK (SF Weapons Sergeants also get trained in them, but I just don't see Knockdown and Backblast being SF guys). Also, LID MPs don't need all the forward area alert radar support like true ADA units... they are on "weapons hold" status as far as their Stingers go unless fired upon or in danger of imminent attack, so everything they shoot at is within close visual acquisition/IR range. The third guy on their little air defense-capable law enforcement team will be Rampart. I'll be rewriting his origin as that of a Naval Coastal Warfare-assigned Master-at-Arms who is qualified in NEC 9540 (Stinger ATW Operator/Maintenance Man). The Navy doesn't have "dedicated" Stinger gunners like the Army used to have. Instead, select members of a ship's crew or a shore activity are trained to use the Stinger for ship or point air defense alongside their other duties. Also, this allows me to field the air-defense capable team as a unit composed of an odd number of men (three, in this case). I was previously stuck using an even number of Joes because ADA doctrine is that the Stinger missile system should always be operated by a crew of two (a gunner and a spotter) and it was always hard trying to figure out who the fourth air defense guy was going to be, since the Joes only ever had three real air defense guys (Knockdown, Backblast, Rampart... Hawk was originally an ADA officer, but there was no way I was going to use him as the team's commander and also leading a small 4-man ADA section... it just doesn't happen that way). LID MP and NEC 9540 doctrine doesn't have the same crew requirements though when it comes to employing the Stinger, it's one man to a missile. |
05-23-2011, 06:01 PM | #1842 |
Iron Grenadier
Join Date: Apr 2007
Location: Stone Mountain, GA
Posts: 658
|
The MANPADS team, the laser, EOD, and CBRN guys all got a lot more useful.
|
07-04-2011, 04:39 PM | #1843 |
EQ-Viper
Join Date: Oct 2008
Location: Canada
Posts: 4,343
|
Something I've been thinking about these past several weeks... I think I'm going with a major, fundamental change in the project. I know a lot of you guys have stuck with the thread with these changes and whatnot, but I've finally come to the conclusion that with GI Joe, the original setting was just as important as the characters. It was a fun, fun diversion, trying to recreate the GI Joe designs as modern military types, but the more time I spent writing "modernized" filecards and thinking about how I could possibly update the Soviet Union's Oktober Guard, the more it started feeling like a fool's errand. Substituting the Balkan conflict for Stalker's and Snake-Eyes' Vietnam War experiences just didn't have that same sense of history and significance. It would be as if I re-wrote Captain America's origin and had him as a Vietnam War vet instead of a World War II vet. The contexts that inform the character change, and it's just not the same character anymore.
GI Joe is a product of the Cold War, and taking it out of that context, I've found, changes the property on some fundamental level that makes it less interesting to me. So why come up with redesigns then if I'm just sticking with the original 1982 setting? Well for one, I like compositing images. Another thing is, I still want to see how the Joes would look like depicted in era-accurate gear. And as for the document itself, I feel like I can add so much more to the historicity of the filecards and such. |
07-04-2011, 07:32 PM | #1844 |
Iron Grenadier
Join Date: Apr 2007
Location: Stone Mountain, GA
Posts: 658
|
I was wondering if you were starting to lose the passion for the project and I can respect where you're coming from but the modernization was the most interesting aspect to me. Ultimately, this is a fan project so you should do whatever inspires you. It's been a fun couple of years. I returned to the Joe community prior to the "Resolute" movie and happened to stumble across the "What secrets lurk in the filecards" thread. I saw one of your early images before you were doing filecards and was hooked. You were making the kind of Joe project I always wanted and I want to thank you for the piles of redesigns and research you do did that I can choose from for my own projects. I do wish you were able to complete an iteration or two of the COBRA files, but I'm really thankful for what we got. It was a massive amount of work and I appreciate you trying to incorporate as many of our comments as you did. In a sense, this is where I hop off the train.
I wish you the best of luck and whenever you finish up, shoot me a line! |
07-04-2011, 08:08 PM | #1845 |
EQ-Viper
Join Date: Oct 2008
Location: Canada
Posts: 4,343
|
I guess the tipping point for me was, and it sounds ridiculous on the face of it, seeing X-Men: First Class. It wasn't a perfect movie by any stretch of the imagination (it went on for too long, crappy character choices, etc.) but it was satisfying for me in a way the other prior films weren't. Then it hit me: the earlier X-Men films didn't work for me because the characters had been stripped of all their original context.
I started the project thinking that the core GI Joe characters were strong enough on their own that they could survive being transitioned into a new era, with histories re-written to suit the modern day. But the more I got to know the characters, the more I realized that where they were situated in time and history was a huge part of what they were and what made them so attractive to me in the first place. A "modern" 21st century GI Joe would be better served using totally all-new characters, rather than force-fitting such specific character concepts into a different time period. I guess a way to think about it is, if say, a writer were to write a new Conan the Barbarian story, it wouldn't make much sense for him to situate Conan in, say, Medieval Europe. Conan's identity is tied to him being a denizen of the Hyborian Age and I think in the same way, Hama-era GI Joe's identity is tied to the height of the Cold War. I appreciate all of the comments and correspondence over the past couple of years, though, and hope you'll still see fit to send comments my way every now and then when I post images and such. |
07-04-2011, 08:49 PM | #1846 |
Iron Grenadier
Join Date: Apr 2007
Location: Stone Mountain, GA
Posts: 658
|
I can understand that, but I actually feel differently about the subject. The fight for civil rights is a timeless concept not tied to any one era (although Magneto is the one major character in X-Men lore who belongs to a time). To be honest, I prefer it when the white Malcolm and Martin operate in a space separate from their "inspiration" (which is a flawed concept since Xavier is more violent than Martin and Malcolm didn't believe in subjugating white folks).
At the same time, GI Joe: ARAH is about a special operations force going against a rogue organization. There's nothing explicitly Cold War era about it. Vietnam didn't shape any of those characters in the way WWII shaped Captain America or Magneto. There's absolutely nothing wrong with preferring the property sticking to it's original era, but to say X-Men or GI Joe: ARAH are strongly tied to those eras conceptually in the way something like Captain America or Platoon is false. If anything, most of the discourse in the "What secrets lurk" thread bear this fact out. The fact that so much time is given to fun speculation over when certain characters were there and what operations they might have been a part of shows this. -A first shirt who spent time among the tribesmen in a warzone who gained respect for turning down a commission. -Former Detroit gang member who goes to the in the military and finds honor and discipline along the way. -An academic who looks for more excitement out of life and a new way to apply his education. -A poor kid from Mississippi who is sold on the Army as a way to see the world and eventually become a chef. -A downtrodden businessman whose loathing of the current state of the country and failures spirals out of control. -An Arms dealer who has his own set of morality that often clashes with that of his customers. -A member of a Japanese assassination family whose jealousy at falling out of favor to an western outsider fuels his desire for vengeance. Those characters at their core, much like the fundamental concept itself, can function well in several different eras. I'd be happy to still pop in time to time, but I think by sticking closer to the source material there won't be as much for me to offer though. I was always more of the design/relationships guy, lol. Last edited by Master Thespian; 07-04-2011 at 08:53 PM.. |
07-04-2011, 09:39 PM | #1847 |
EQ-Viper
Join Date: Oct 2008
Location: Canada
Posts: 4,343
|
>shrugs<
I don't know. The problem in adapting and changing something, I think, is that one ends up interminably dealing with the sorites paradox, which I think was what was at the core of the struggles I had with the project. At what point, after applying all sorts of little changes, does the item being adapted "stop" being that item? In the end, instead of drawing up some arbitrary guideline for "what is accurately GI Joe" and "what isn't accurately GI Joe," I just decided to go with using an established version of GI Joe (one that I personally favoured over all other versions) as my guideline. My own guidelines have been, and continue to be, so subject to whims and taste and all sorts of changeable, arbitrary limits that I would be better off just making up my own characters if I were to continue in that vein, and I'm not really interested in that. |
07-04-2011, 09:49 PM | #1848 |
Iron Grenadier
Join Date: Apr 2007
Location: Stone Mountain, GA
Posts: 658
|
Quote:
>shrugs<
I don't know. The problem in adapting and changing something, I think, is that one ends up interminably dealing with the sorites paradox, which I think was what was at the core of the struggles I had with the project. At what point, after applying all sorts of little changes, does the item being adapted "stop" being that item? In the end, instead of drawing up some arbitrary guideline for "what is accurately GI Joe" and "what isn't accurately GI Joe," I just decided to go with using an established version of GI Joe (one that I personally favoured over all other versions) as my guideline. My own guidelines have been, and continue to be, so subject to whims and taste and all sorts of changeable, arbitrary limits that I would be better off just making up my own characters if I were to continue in that vein, and I'm not really interested in that. |
07-04-2011, 11:48 PM | #1849 |
W.O.R.M.S. Commander
Join Date: Nov 2007
Location: Back in the US of A! (NoVA)
Posts: 10,649
|
I wonder if you should start a new thread? Are you going to change most of the images? I don't know have this one be the Modern era, and the new project be the Timeless Era? I was ust reading this article below, about the last vietnam era draftee CSM Mellinger. Not so interesting, but it brings up the fact these guys were still around.
Last Vietnam-era draftee decides to retire - Yahoo! News
__________________
Improvise, Adapt, and Overcome. |
07-05-2011, 01:44 AM | #1850 |
EQ-Viper
Join Date: Oct 2008
Location: Canada
Posts: 4,343
|
Quote:
I'm trying to stick with the original 13 for now. I'm not entirely sure how I'll proceed from there, but for the moment, I just want to focus on those guys and the enemies that appeared in the first 10 issues of the comic book (Cobra Commander, Baroness, Kwinn, the Oktober Guard, maybe Commander Wingfield). Neat article by the way. Thanks for the link. |
Similar Threads | ||||
Thread | Thread Starter | Forum | Replies | Last Post |
cobra hiss concept art | gijoe071681 | G.I. Joe Customs General Discussion | 4 | 01-18-2011 12:16 AM |
Custom Cobra Commander from Gentleman's Concept Art | Kambei | G.I. Joe Customs Finished Projects | 14 | 04-12-2009 02:45 PM |
Concept Art For Cobra Commander REleased. | lerath666 | G.I. Joe News and Rumors | 27 | 07-08-2008 11:20 PM |
Sgt. Slaughter Triple T box and Cobra officer filecard | Novacaine | G.I. Joe Buy Sell Trade | 1 | 04-26-2008 12:55 PM |
|
|