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Seto Kaiba

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About Seto Kaiba

  • Birthday August 22

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    http://www.Macross2.net/m3/m3.html
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    MacrossMike

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  • Gender
    Male
  • Location
    Lagrange Terrace (a stable community)
  • Interests
    Anime (duh), Antique Firearms, Cryptography, Mechanical Design

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    That's the problem with the secondhand market... avoiding the price gougers. That's a 20x markup over what those books cost new.😅
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Ameku M.D. remains a most epic trashfire... it really is impressive just how consistently bad the writing is. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, but I'm having fun tuning in each week to see what kind of braindead nonsense the writers come up with next. The writer's biggest problem is the pretense that the titular Dr. Ameku is a "genius". The writer(s) can't seem to figure out how to actually depict her as a brilliant pathologist, so the story compensates by making everyone else an idiot with no pattern recognition skills or situational awareness so she can appear brilliant by comparison. I May Be a Guild Receptionist wore out its premise and jumped the shark surprisingly quickly. The show's whole premise depended on its parallels to, and commentary on, Japan's toxic work culture... and it collapsed like a failed souffle when the story decided to reveal the protagonist's overtime woes are wholly self-inflicted. She doesn't have to work any of the OT she's working. She's doing it voluntarily (and unnecessarily). The comedy basically vanished as a result and what's left in its wake is an unremarkable isekai-adjacent light fantasy story about a girl who flies into a psychotic rage over any disruption to her day. I'm Getting Married to a Girl I Hate in My Class is still pretty OK, though it seems to be trying to tease a harem situation in a really awkward and unwelcome way. Medaka Kuroiwa is Impervious to My Charms is... well... basically unchanged from the start. It's still a cleaner, more kid-friendly version of B Gata H Kei... which tends to make it a bit one-note. It's still funny, but it lacks variety? Bogus Skill <Fruitmaster> is still absolutely dreadful. It's one of those ones like Isekai Cheat Magician where you kind of wonder how anyone looked at this and said "Yeah, that's good enough to release". I Want to Escape from Princess Lessons is still consistently good. I have a lot of fun with that one every week. Mainly because the characters are so spirited. Leticia has a level of charm that reminds me a lot of Macross Delta's Freyja Wion. She's here for a good time, and she's not going to let anyone or anything get her down and her optimism is infectious that way. Possibly the Greatest Alchemist is still pretty bland. Same as Welcome to Japan, Ms. Elf. Kind of the animated equivalent of white noise. Not offensive, but not something that I'd voluntarily tune in to. Blue Exorcist is still mucking about with flashbacks, and the delivery has lost all of its impact. I think a lot of it is just that its plot beats aren't really anything original or particularly well-delivered. The story keeps wanting to re-reveal that Rin really is the literal Son of Satan and have it be a big deal... but considering it was one of the first things we learned about him at the very start of the story, the response it prompts is less "OH MY GOD!" and more "Yes, we know. From all the other times you told us that."
  3. Seto Kaiba
    It's definitely an unrealistic expectation, yeah. Given how long it's been out-of-print, any major/chain bookstore would've returned all unsold copies to the publisher for a refund many years ago. There may be some unsold new (or "new") copies in the hands of the second- and third-tier retailers like the import hobby specialty stores in San Francisco's Japantown, that is kind of a long shot twelve plus years after initial publication. Secondhand significantly lowers the difficulty.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    The only difference between the Macross 2 OVA and movie versions are the omission of the OP and ED in order to string the six episodes together into one contiguous story. Even the title cards are still present.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Thanks for the tip. I'll keep that one in mind for filling in gaps in my collection. 😁 I'm kind of a stickler for physical media, though... so I'll doubtless end up chasing down physical copies of anything I get in ebook form anyway.😅
  6. PixelatedShinobi started following Seto Kaiba
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Don't get me wrong, I'm 100% behind supporting the original creators. It's the reason I import multiple copies of all the books I translate. I'm just saying, we're talking about a light novel that's been out of print for about ten years. As far as I'm aware, there hasn't been any announcement of a re-release, so picking up a secondhand copy is probably your only real option. (Thankfully, most of the sellers I can see who have posted gently used copies aren't price gouging.)
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Not sure if "new" is still an option... that light novel's well over a decade old at this point. You might have to resort to eBay or Yahoo Japan Auctions for a hardcopy. I can see a few copies of each volume from Japanese sellers on eBay.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    In the Macross 30 thread in the Game section:
  10. Seto Kaiba
    The handheld/container-mounted one, anyway. But they are referred to as gunpods in most publications... usually as a "mini-gunpod" (ミニガンポッド) and "railmachinegun" (レールマシンガン). Some of them, anyway. A few examples, like the VF-25G's SSL-9 Dragunov, use a railgun system to boost the velocity of a projectile that has already been pre-accelerated by a chemical propellant to achieve maximum stopping power.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    The movie never really touches on it. We see something similar happen in the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross TV series, where we don't really get to see the trauma this literally world-changing event had on people until an episode or two after the timeskip. One could say that everyone was so busy with the business of surviving that they didn't really have an opportunity to process the trauma of a near-total global apocalypse until things started the settle down. There are a couple possibilities. One, of course, is that the UN Forces kept as much information as possible about the state of Earth from the populace until after the fighting was over. Another is that the populace already basically knew, or at least suspected the worst for the entire year they'd been sailing back. Differences in the order-of-events in DYRL?'s version have the bombardment start before the Macross has even properly lifted off. With no contact from Earth in the six or so months they spent sailing back to it, it's possible everyone had already assumed the planet had bit the big one. It's also possible they were less concerned because, in DYRL?, the Macross was (re)built as an emigrant ship and it had been intended to leave the solar system. Being aboard a ship designed for long-term habitation and having already resigned themselves to never seeing Earth again might've softened the blow a bit. 'course one could also say that, because it's a movie in-universe, the civilian reaction was simply omitted to avoid distracting from the love story and war story.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Thus far, we haven't seen much in the way of official overlap in naming conventions. The few cases we have seen are mainly different organizations using the same nickname for a unit ("Skull Platoon") or two different ships being named after the same person (SDFN-04 General Bruno J. Global and CV-339 Bruno J. Global). We also see some in the opening animation of Macross VF-X2 (Aegis's Konig Monster steps on one) and some anti-aircraft batteries of various types in the gam'es fourth mission, though they are not named and called simply "Battery A" and "Battery B". Macross Chronicle only really describes the VA-3 as "having the special characteristics of both a VF and a Destroid". It never explains what that means, and the remark isn't found in the Technology Sheet that discusses Variable Attackers. It's possible that all they really mean by that is "it has heavier armor", since that's one of the few traits that's mentioned in the Technology Sheet and Mechanic Sheet as setting it apart from Variable Fighters. It's basically a side book to Master File. The only volume produced thus far is essentially an extended account of the VF-19's ARIEL integrated control AI system. Von Braun, Granada, and the other Lunar cities in Mobile Suit Gundam are built the way they are because of the limitations of the technology available to their builders and what they were built for. They're not really underground per se. They were built into existing lunar craters because it was convenient both structurally and for their intended purpose. They were established as space-based mining and refinery complexes producing construction materials for building space colonies. Building inside lunar craters provided the stable foundation for the mass drivers needed to launch materials to the construction sites and easy access to lower geological strata. Salla Base on Mars in Macross was set up as a research facility, so what we see of it is almost entirely surface-based with the only noted underground part being its power plant's thermonuclear reactor. We don't get to see Apollo Base at any point, but the brief descriptions we get describe it as being built on the lunar surface. The accompanying shipyard where the SDF-2 was built is noted to be underground, though. It's likely that the civilian residential areas on Luna are above-ground too. Macross's technology is more advanced than that of Gundam, relaxing the practical restrictions on what kind of structures can be built. The existence of gravity control technology would make permanent settlement of the moon a much more practical concern. Presumably other residential areas set up on Luna and so on take full advantage of the advanced technologies available to make them as comfortable as possible.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    That's probably the case, given that there are only really two story sources that depict the VF-11 using its underwing pylons: Macross the Ride and Variable Fighter Master File. Macross the Ride's depiction of the VF-11 using its underwing pylons - Anthony Clemens's VF-11C Thunderbolt Interceptor - didn't have any visuals until Chapter 10. That came out in October 2011, about four months before Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy was released. Variable Fighter Master File: VF-11 Thunderbolt didn't come out until March 2019, around seven years after the game's release. On an unrelated note, an interesting detail I found while working on Master File in a quiet moment offers an interesting explanation for the sudden (in-universe) renewal of interest in railgun and coilgun technology around the time of Macross Frontier. A point that Variable Fighter Master File: VF-25 Messiah keeps coming back to in several sections is how a closed-system environment ship like the Macross Frontier has to very carefully manage its usage of organic compounds in various non-recyclable contexts (such as explosives or combustible rocket fuels) because those resources are precious and necessary to the maintenance of the ship's artificial environment. As a result, these compounds are a good deal more costly for emigrant ships than planetary governments and thus create a cost incentive to explore alternatives like substituting railguns and coilguns for cannons using chemical propellants and swapping rocket motors for plasma arcjets on some missiles.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Like that short distance emmigrant fleet that found Eden. Imagine setting out on a multi-year mission to explore the area within a hundred light years of Earth and finding a Class A habitable planet practically on Earth's doorstep almost immediately. One has to wonder if the crew even had a chance to properly unpack their suitcases before the mission was over.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    G-Quacks has proven they don't have to settle for one or the other... they can do both at the same time! Looked at the scans for GQuuuuuux's theatrical debut booklet the other day, and oh lordy are these designs UGLY. Studio Khara's Ikuto Yamashita served up some of the worst mechanical design works in the franchise's history. 🤮 I'm looking at his design for GQuuuuuuX's version of the Zaku II and thinking "Look how they massacred my boy!". The fugly main Gundam is actually the best looking one of the lot.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    It's really no different. The art style in the vast majority of Gundam titles uses mukokuseki character design, so almost none of the character designs have distinctive features that are associated with a particular ethnicity. The few characters with explicitly stated backgrounds are from all over: America, Canada, Japan, Germany, Britain, Argentina, Puerto Rico, etc. It's intentional to show the Earth Federation is really the Earth Federation. Same way Macross's main cast practically has no two people from the same place. If it's romantic options you're worried about, well... Char and Amuro have always had one of the all-time great bromances/foemances. Folks have been shipping that for decades with no signs of stopping. More recent titles have been more overt about that too, like Tieria and Niel!Lockon in 00, Yanagi's crush on Shino in Iron-Blooded Orphans, the two leads in The Witch from Mercury, it's implied Angelo's carrying a torch for Full Frontal in UC, whatever Quatre and Trowa have going on in Wing, etc.
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