those mid school rippers and quads were fantastic bikes, not just a show-pony but a serious race bike too, and you can see the heritage in it too, it actually looks like a"pk ripper"
its what i really wanted the current se racing to do with the new rippers, utilize modern tube technology to keep as close to the original as they could, imagine a new school ripper that made use of high qualty internally butted tubes and modern buildng techniques
you'd have an elegant, great looking race frame that was still able to cut it in the mains, a bike worthy of the old "ripper" name,
instead they just took the name and jumped in with the "who can make abike look more like a spaceship" crowd,
the first one they tried was even worse, with that big fooking toptube wishbone that was more "assasin" than "ripper"
in there defence though the retro quads are lovely, the retro rippers are looking good too!
just to go back to the "porker" analogy one last time, porsche spends a massive amount of money developing cars (911) packed with the latest technology but still look connected to the original, which is why its still a legend, if they suddenly made a car that looked like a mazda rx8 and called it a 911 the porsche fans would say "get right to fook thats not a 911"
that ripper is very nice dude
i dont usually like gold stuff personally but it rocks with the dark met green
(if it WAS a porker it'd be a classic 964 variant
)