Seto Kaiba

Oof... this season has just been an absolute mess for me. Mechanical Marie, Isekai Quartet, My Awkward Senpai, and Pass the Monster Meat, Milady! have remained pretty enjoyable. May I Ask for One Final Thing? is my stand-out for the season. Scarlett is just a delight to behold. It's not often in this sort of series that the main character actually takes direct action instead of working through proxies, and Scarlett is the type to say that she knows violence isn't the answer and that she got it wrong on purpose. It's a huge breath of fresh air in the stale as hell villainess genre. Tales of Wedding Rings, The Dark History of the Reincarnated Villainess, A Mangaka's Weirdly Wonderful Workplace, Lil' Miss Vampire Can't Suck Right, Let This Grieving Soul Retire, The Banished Court Magician Aims to Become the Strongest, My Friend's Little Sister Has It In For Me!, and Inexpressive Kashiwada and Expressive Oota are all just kind of white noise. They aren't terrible but they are so underdeveloped and one-dimensional that it's hard to pay attention to them for any length of time because there's just nothing engaging going on. (A truly ironic statement when that first title involves a man who gets superpowers from polygamy!) Let's Play never stopped being an audiovisual trashfire in the key of "Ally McBeal but Anime". This series is all bad, all the time, to the point that it's somewhat worrying. It's one of those cases where someone's creative vision clearly needed corrective lenses, or maybe a cane and a seeing eye dog. The only reason I'm still watching Solo Camping for Two is bile fascination. It's like the Hindenburg disaster of hobby edutainment. It is almost Springtime for H****r levels of Doing It Wrong when it comes to trying to present camping as a fun, interesting, and enriching hobby. Its own author seems to be unable to conceptualize any aspect of "camping out" apart from pitching a tent and day drinking. The picture it paints is that camping is a hobby for low-functioning alcoholics and misanthropic loners only, and the main girl seems to only be there so Gen has someone to dispense product placements to and so he won't feel so much like a future serial killer. A Gatherer's Adventure in Isekai apparently decided to engage in some Rian Johnson-esque "subvert expectations" partway into its run and is now being really obnoxious with it. So not only did we have that amazing hot take on elves, the quest to find Brolite's sister that underpinned this entire story arc ends with the two of them brawling because... actually... why are they brawling? I think it's just because the writer thought it'd be funny. It's not, but bless 'em they're at least trying now.

Hm... yeah, a third season of Star Trek: Prodigy would almost certainly get a warmer reception from fans than another season of Discovery's 32nd century grimdark misery, even if it is leaning very heavily on Star Trek: Voyager for audience appeal. That said, that reception would still be pretty darn frosty considering the second season ended with a descent into the grimdark miserable hopelessness of the Picard era that will dominate the setting for at least the next 17+ in-universe years. Fans hated it in Picard, so they're not likely to welcome it as part of Prodigy either. Now that I think about it, it's a bit odd that Paramount cancelled Prodigy only to essentially introduce a new series with a very similar premise in Starfleet Academy. In both cases, the story revolves around a bunch of kids who've been in Starfleet barely long enough to ask where the bathroom is being packed onto a training ship and sent into harm's way.

That seems to be what Master File is implying for the laser version, yeah. Though how one shoots a fast-moving target effectively from a light second away is anyone's guess. Oh, it was. Col. Johnson frames it as such in Macross Plus. Basically, the New UN Forces took the use of their next-generation main Variable Fighter in internal conflicts into consideration when laying out the requirements for the prototype designs tested in Project Super Nova. They wanted their Next Main Fighter to be able to use its high mobility, high stealth performance, and independent fold capability to resolve conflicts quickly and with the minimum necessary use of force by slipping behind enemy lines to do things like rescue hostages, strike enemy command centers, and generally take the fight out of the enemy without needing to kill them en masse. About 1.28 light seconds on average... but close enough for round number purposes yeah.

Not sure how deniable a several-hundred-megawatt laser cannon strike from a light second away would be. It's not a capability that most forces would have, so it'd be pretty easy to narrow it down. It'd definitely be sudden and unexpected, though a VF would not even be able to close the distance in a reasonable span of time to capitalize on the strike without a fold booster. (Even at 7km/s that's a 14 hour flight.) It is described as being use for "sniping" though... a more correct use of the word than what goes on in Frontier at the very least, shooting from a frigging light second away. The particle beam version is described as having been used in a stealth counterterrorism operation that involved ambushing a small fleet of rebel Zentradi ships occupying a factory satellite and disabling them by shooting out their power systems.

To be honest, I feel like that example underlines why they need a fantastically good explanation for why the Earth campus's first incoming class have been sent into harm's way on a starship instead of attending classes. The Motion Picture was the second-lowest rated title behind Final Frontier until Section 31 rolled in and stole the bottom spot, and the whole "the Enterprise is the only ship in range" thing is one of Trek's most-mocked cliches due to ex post facto setting changes in later works. Starfleet Academy is going to need a fantastically good explanation for why the entire incoming class of cadets were packed onto a starship and sent into harm's way or it's going to get branded an Idiot Plot because there's no obvious contextual explanation for it. The occasional bit of bad writing was easier to excuse when seasons were twenty-six episodes long, but when you only have ten episodes per season the audience is a LOT less forgiving. Not to mention that if you launch your series with an Idiot Plot your series is unlikely to recover, as Discovery and Picard both failed to do. I'll probably hoist the ol' jolly roger to see if the first season is worth it... though as you can tell I am not getting my hopes up even a little.

I'm not the one who said it, though. 😆 But hey, I'm a Macross fan and an engineer... getting "too mathematical" is a fair description of my day job and my hobby. (Doubly so given that my specialism was cryptosystems, which even the computer science folks think is too much math.) 😆 On the math-y front, I am mildly frightened by the Master File's description of the VF-22's GCA-27R GIC-focused laser cannon. Not only does it allegedly dispense toxic gas during the firing process (I'm guessing another deuterium fluoride laser like the RO-2A), its range is such that a VF-22 equipped with this weapon is said to be able to hit fast-moving targets at a distance of 1.2 light seconds (that's 359,751km) and against stationary or inertial-coasting targets is 4.2 light seconds (1,259,126km). There's something fundamentally wrong about a fighter-mounted weapon that can effectively strafe targets on the moon from Earth orbit. The fact that both the GCA-27S and GCA-27R look like prototypes for the VF-27's BGP-01 is not lost on me either... 🤔 Why a fighter would need range like that is anyone's guess. At that point, just mount the gun on a freaking ship and have done with it. (Indeed, the section suggests the GCA-27S was originally developed for warship use!)

No, I'm pretty sure Michael Burnham isn't in this one... 🤔😜 I'm sure the academy curriculum has probably changed a bit since the 2370s when field study was a sophomore year activity, but all things considered if this series is going to work at all it's going to need a fantastically good explanation for why the Starfleet Academy Earth campus's first incoming class in over a century is being immediately thrown into harm's way on a poorly supervised training ship in the badlands instead of... y'know... attending classes at the titular academy. Having said that, I know it's going to be the dumbest f***ing thing I'll have seen since SNW dressed Chris Myers up like a Power Rangers villain and tried to play it laser straight.

There's only so much an education in the fine arts can do when the student is completely lacking in talent or simply unwilling to understand the assignment. And oh boy are Paramount and Alex Kurtzman unwilling to understand the assignment. Their commitment to making this unasked-for grimdark Trekslop instead of what audiences have clearly said they want is quite something. I mean, you'd think when the franchise's bottom ten seasons by review score reads like an itemized list of your efforts it'd be time to consider an alternative approach. Like maybe changing jobs to become a mime.

As a point of linguistic clarity, "three feet square" is not interchangeable with "three square feet". They mean different things. "Three square feet" is a measurement of area (any shape). "Three feet square" means a square area with a side length of 3 feet (and an area of 9 square feet). The math error I corrected was approximating a meter to 3 feet instead of 3.3 or 3.28 as one normally would depending on how fussy one is about rounding. Oh yeah, if you want biological warheads look no further than plants... there's a whole bunch of them that engage in "ballistic seed dispersal". Literally creating exploding fruit or seed pods. The sandbox tree is the poster child for this one, having earned itself the righteous nickname of "the dynamite tree" from the noise of its fruit exploding and flinging seeds as far as 100m fragmentation grenade style.

'lil bit, yeah. Variable Fighter Master File: VF-1 Valkyrie Vol.1 describes the four key overtechnologies that made Variable Fighters possible as: Compact thermonuclear reactors Energy conversion armor Superconducting drive motors Energy capacitors Two of the four are essentially the VF's power generation and distribution system, and the other two being two of the three most energy-hungry systems. Speaking as an engineer, as cool and "sci-fi" as 1 and 2 sound it's 3 and 4 that would turn the f***ing world upside-down. Mass production room temperature superconductors and lossless energy storage? The ability to send power anywhere with negligible line losses and store it until it's needed without conversion losses would revolutionize the power grid and anything/everything electronic. Even the best batteries lose about 5-7% of the power they store in the conversion process and we lose around 8% of the power we generate in the process of transmitting it to where it's going. That's not counting storage losses as chemical batteries degrade. You'd almost be able to abolish the power grid entirely for the residential user with high-efficiency home renewables. Electric cars would charge in seconds and outrange gas cars easily. Portable electronic lifespans would skyrocket. The application of superconducting motors to generator systems would be insane in its own right, with huge efficiency and output jumps from things like hydroelectric and wind farm generators. Adding clean, limitless thermonuclear power to that... well... yikes. The entire world's peak energy demand could be satisfied by just a handful of ship-scale reactor systems. Of course, most sources would generally agree that the heart and soul of most OTM is actually Gravity and Inertia Control... since that's essential for the operation of compact thermonuclear reactors, artificial gravity, fold navigation, fold communication, cross-dimension radar, active stealth, beam weapons, and a variety of other systems.

It's actually worse on a second watch. The writers are really doing a champion job of making this captain look like a complete buffoon. With so many cuts, it's hard to tell if it's the writers or the editors who are making the captain look like the galaxy's least attentive Pakled.

Moving this over from the Books topic. It'd perhaps be more accurate to say the VF-31 was seen as a solution to some of the Brisingr Alliance's economic woes. The VF-31's particular situation is heavily inspired by Japan's own domestic Next Main Fighter program (the Mitsubishi ATD-X/X-2/F-2). Another build-under-license agreement like the one they had for the VF-171 was certainly feasible, but the Brisingr Alliance was attracted to the idea of domestic development of a next-generation Main Variable Fighter to replace the VF-171 because it was a way to stimulate the cluster's economy and create jobs, to improve their defense autonomy with less dependence on outside governments and corporations for military hardware, and as a potential source of revenue via export sales to other governments. The VF-19 might have been cheaper, but it would also probably not have been as attractive an option since its performance was much lower than true 5th Generation fighters and it would be another build-under-license agreement they'd be paying another government for. Master File has some thoughts on that, though they mostly amount to a four-engine version of the VF-31AX ala the YF-29.

I'll answer the tech-y bits in a more appropriate thread. How much lore this book'll dispense is unclear right now... it seems to be light on text, so I wouldn't expect too much. Certainly not a lot in terms of new detail that we haven't got from existing sources already.

Which is itself, like most particle beam concepts, ultimately based on the "Teleforce" weapon concept that Nikola Tesla conceived in 1934 in a bid to secure funding from J.P. Morgan Jr. and later described in his 1937 treatise The Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-Dispersive Energy Through The Natural Media. Some of the only actual science to come out of the scientific community's "Death ray" craze in the 1920s and 30s. Nikola Tesla's original practical proposal for a charged particle beam weapon was for a metallic ion particle beam using mercury or tungsten vapor. Macross seems to have at least four, possibly five, different flavors of particle beam weaponry kicking around based on my deep dive into energy weapons. Macross Chronicle seems to imply there are two different kinds of charged particle beam weapon. Technology Sheet 10A "Beam Weaponry" seems to imply that there are two distinct kinds of charged particle beam weapon. It mentions that ship-based and destroid-based beam weapons fire charged heavy metal particles. The implication, supported by Master File, seems to be that VFs or battle pods do not and use charged particles from their compact thermonuclear reactors instead. It also lumps impact cannons and fluid plasma cannons under particle beams, but it remains unclear what an impact cannon is beyond not being a dimensional beam weapon. 😕 Master File poses the interesting prospect that the particle beam cannons on Zentradi ships are something akin to a laser-coupled charged particle beam cannon that serendipitously uses a laser produced by vaporizing tungsten in the compact thermonuclear reactor to help cohere the metallic particle beam after it's launched by the GICs. Possibly the weirdest thing that's come out of this deep dive has been an explanation for why the VF-31AX's container is so damn huge. It's a massive energy capacitor driving the rear-facing laser cannon and the beam gunpod.

Just think, some bright spark at Paramount thought that this mess was so impressive it would entice people to subscribe to their sh*tty streaming service for the sake of watching this extremely sh*tty-looking show. 🤔🙃 Spending millions on CG only works to your benefit if your designs look good... and the ships in this look like something nicked from a decade-plus old non-Star Trek video game. I'm getting strong Halo/Covenant vibes from the protagonist ship and PSO2/Luminmech vibes from the enemy one. The lighting is so dim that I'm left to wonder if the studio's keeping it dark to hide problems with the sets the way they did when Generations reused the TNG TV sets. But the thing that inexplicably bothers me the most is that the captain both looks and sounds like a heavy smoker. (Also, why TF is she wearing granny glasses? Federation medicine had already solved the problem of age-related vision degradation by the mid-2280s. Over 900 years ago, from the perspective of Starfleet Academy in ~3192. Complete ocular replacement was also an option from even longer, being available since at least 2256.)