Seto Kaiba

There are two right on the front page... one of which is someone else asking basically the same question.😅 Well, without knowing you it's kind of hard to answer an open-ended question like that. Personally, I would say that Macross II: Lovers Again is just as worthy of your time as any other Macross title. It was kind of the odd man among Macross sequels (at least prior to Delta) in that it didn't take a radically new approach to the setting. It's a fairly safe, conventional sequel that builds on what came before but takes no major risks with it. It presents a rather different view of Macross's future than the sequels that came after, built exclusively on DYRL?.

Oh yes, that's Variable Fighter VF-1 Valkyrie Vol.1 page 78. There's a blocked-off section on that page that talks about how OTM-based threaded fasteners work and how the Human engineers from OTEC were flummoxed by what the Protoculture had done with a concept as simple as threaded fasteners. Their analysis found two revolutionary concepts: The bolts/screws they studied were machined with zero fit, meaning they were machined so precisely that there were absolutely gap of any kind between the root and thread of the screw and the socket they engage with. The surface of the bolts/screws and sockets were treated with molecule-thin layers of two different compounds that contact bond to each other via intermolecular forces and secure the bolt/screw in the socket until a certain amount of torque is applied at which point the bolt/screw turns freely (but which will re-bond cleanly once torque is no longer being applied). You've probably seen videos like the below showing off near-zero tolerance machining... but zero fit machining is even more precise than that. The molecular coating is a bit harder. In principle it's a bit like loctite, but somehow built into the screw/bolt and socket respectively and infinitely rebondable. Something like that is a bit beyond our modern technology and would definitely provide a more secure fit than anything we can currently achieve.

There's a pretty good reason given directly in the episode for why they wouldn't be able to send holograms over... the Miyazaki had no power, so the holoemitters that have lined the corridors of ships for emergency hologram use since VOY "Message in a Bottle" wouldn't be operational. (SAM presumably has something like Arnold Rimmer's light bee keeping her program going?) The idiot ball moment is more "Why was it necessary to go to contested space and put the first-year cadets in actual danger when they could have just as easily simulated this using a training ship or just a regular holodeck where they would not be in any danger of being murdered by space pirates?" We know Starfleet Academy has had simulator training since before the holodeck was even a thing... the infamous Kobayashi Maru test that Kirk infamously cheated was one.

... ... ... sh*t, that's a really good point. Why wasn't this training exercise carried out on a holodeck?

A little bit of Google-fu suggests that The Mandalorian's third season, Ahsoka, and Skeleton Crew all happened roughly concurrently in 9 ABY. They're probably still trapped in that other galaxy.

Maybe it's something like Discovery did with the Breen, where the Human-like face is their original/normal one and their more exotic and alien-looking appearance is something they regard as special or private or something they only adopt situationally.

Remember that time Captain Kirk literally advocated for the literal devil? Fun times... and a much better episode than anything Starfleet Academy has brought to the table despite being cornier than a state fair. That's not a sonic weapon then, that's a gravimetric one that produces sound as a secondary effect. Oh, yes... the novel Forgotten History. Weird story, that one. Equal parts fix fic for a bunch of old TOS episodes like "Miri" and "The Omega Glory" and attempt to un-noodle the DS9-era DTI's noodle incident-induced loathing for James T. Kirk and his promotion to Admiral between TAS and the first movie. The life support belt - and personal forcefields in general - was a really short-lived concept from TAS. Same as a bunch of other actually pretty useful ideas like having automated defenses against being boarded. It's part of why I'm so very amused to see the humble life support belt back on top after a whopping 926 years.

When it comes to unnecessary and plot-derailing callbacks, continuity nods, crossovers, and cameos from Darth Filoni, you'd better believe that...

All right, we had a new episode of Star Trek: Star Feet Academy last Thursday and I'm only just now getting around to it... "Come, Let's Away" So... that's new. A photosensitivity warning due to some scenes having strobing effects. The writers invoke their inner Roddenberry by reminding us that Deltans hat is being from F**k Planet for the first time since Star Trek: Enterprise. That was a creepy bit of lore by old man Gene that I think would probably have been best left forgotten, but here we are. It's still weird hearing licensed music in Star Trek too. This whole opening has "UFO" by Olivia Dean as BGM. So Starfleet Academy and the War College are on joint exercises together aboard the Athena. Honestly, while I am gradually warming towards this series the Athena is still emblematic of how the 32nd century Starfleet ships are irredeemably fugly. Also, these cadets have been in their respective service academies for only a few weeks. They're already doing field training? And in a starship graveyard, no less. Maybe start the kids who've been in the service for only a few weeks on something a little simpler like, y'know, routine shipboard duty? Then again, these kids never seem to actually go the **** to class... so they're even less prepared than they ought to be. Seems like the showrunners spent so much money on extras in heavy prosthetic makeup, licensed music, and unnecessary CG for things like Reymi's face that they couldn't afford actual spacesuits for the characters away mission. But since everything old is new again, I'd like to bid a fond "Welcome back" to the Starfleet Life Support Belt from Star Trek: the Animated Series (1973). "Starfleet's newest plasma-based life support system" is tech from 2269 that somehow manages to look worse in this $8M+ per episode streaming series than it did in Filmation's 1973 hand-drawn animation produced on a budget of two Cheerios box tops and whatever change Gene had in his sofa cushions at the time. Come on Starfleet Academy, you were doing so... almost not terrible... up to now. One little bit of space adventure and you fall back onto an idiot plot immediately? Also, why are there so many hybrid aliens now? They can't be arsed to say what species the Furies are, but they're half-Human half-something. Honestly, the fact that Captain Ake is the one who points out what a stupid idea this entire plot is is very much in "the worst person you know just made a great point" territory. Why is being thrown out the airlock even an issue? All of you are wearing personal life support force fields. If those things can't activate automatically when they sense a vacuum the way the 23rd century equivalent could, then they're actually less useful than a regular spacesuit. There is practically nothing stopping them from deliberately spacing themselves and just floating home. Paul Giamatti's performance here is so detestably awful that I very nearly gave up and turned the episode off. This is a line of actual dialog delivered by him in this episode: Someone wrote that. Likely workshopped that for days if not weeks through table reads and rehearsals. And said, with the gleeful ten-thumbed incompetence of the very meanest Pakled, "Yeah, that's good enough dialog for Star Trek." To this episode's writers, Kenneth Lin and Kiley Rosseter, I will say only that I hope you stub your smallest toe on the corner of every piece of furniture in your respective homes at least once a day for the rest of your miserable lives you absolute hacks. Much of the rest of his dialog is similar in content and delivery. That Mr. Giamatti apparently did not look at this script and immediately turn to the writers and say "What the f*** is wrong with you?" is a true black mark on his professional comportment as an actor. To make a dumb character dumber, one thing we learn about Nus Braka in this episode is that his character has cut a game of tic-tac-toe into his own hair on the right side of his head. A game that was apparently played by someone VERY bad at tic-tac-toe. Say it with me now: Space is a vaccum and sound waves do not travel through a vacuum. A sonic weapon on a spaceship is fundamentally useless. I have an actual headache from watching this. Like, an actual migraine headache forming from watching this. Medication is required. Whether that'll be alcohol or just advil I have not decided.

Favreau and Filoni turned season 3 into an open-air dumpster fire by indulging in Filoni's favorite obsession with The Lore. You'd best believe that's what you're in for more of, now that Filoni's slipped the leash.

It's got the same writing team as S3... it can absolutely be worse.😜

Eh... I'm definitely going to wait 'til this one hits streaming to see it. The trailer doesn't look bad visually, but it does reinforce the idea that this is very much a Dave Filoni project and will be overrun with mindless fanservice in the form of callbacks, continuity nods, crossovers, and cameos. The two minutes we've got have at least six obvious ones. Somehow, making Mando a direct stakeholder in the New Republic's inevitable fall-due-to-incompetence feels like A Very Bad Idea.

Ah, no... unfortunately it seems you are misinterpreting what I am describing. Probaby because I'm not doing a very good job of describing the mechanism at work here. 🤔 The way ISC is described, it seems to work a bit like Star Trek's mass-lowering subspace fields used in its impulse and warp drives, just in reverse. Instead of bending space around the field source to move a discrete bubble of space through space it's bending space to temporarily "pocket" an inertial force above a certain set limit and then return that inertial load to the vehicle in a controlled manner. The way it works is essentially predictive, under the direction of the ARIEL II integrated control AI, which anticipates what maneuvers on the mecha's part will induce loads above the limit and activates the ISC appropriately to compensate for forces above the limit. Whether the field is limited to just the cockpit or is centered on the cockpit and distributed across the frame at a lower level varies between sources, but it's never described as offering any protection against an externally-imposed force like a collision or weapon strike. Much like how a ship in Star Trek can accelerate to relativistic speed without any inertial consequences using a subspace field but will shake violently or be forced into a spin from outside forces in the form of phaser/torpedo strikes. It only seems to shield the craft against inertial forces internal to the field's frame of reference (acceleration/deceleration of the craft itself). The VF-31's application of the technology is even expressly indicated to have actually made mechanical stresses worse by changing how the inertial forces were returned to the airframe. Based on what we know, I don't think it can do what you're envisioning... though honestly, a pinpoint barrier could already do much of that with much less cost and complexity as that operates by creating an artificial dimensional fault as a literal immovable object. Eh... yeah, given what we've got on the subject of space pirates and similar in existing Macross materials that's pretty much guaranteed suicide. Macross Dynamite 7's galactic whale poachers, Fasces's "recruitment" teams in Macross the Ride, and Gunness Mordler's bandits in Macross 30 are all united by one thing: having a substantial amount of black market military hardware at their disposal. They're not coming at a civilian freighter in spacesuits and waving cutlasses. They're coming with Valkyries, with civilian ships retrofitted to carry military-grade weapons, or even the occasional stolen or salvaged warship. Even the least threatening of those three examples - the poacher group - was showing up with at least a squadron's worth of fully-armed black market VA-3s, multiple auxiliary ships armed with military-grade laser weapons, and had just bought several VF-17s and a tactical thermonuclear reaction warhead. A Destroid waving a sharp bit of metal around is just going to get Temple of Doom'd with a rotary cannon or laser machinegun... likely before it ever gets close enough to do any damage. It's bringing a knife to a three-dimensional gunfight against gunmen who can fly and attack indirectly with guided missiles. It's also probably worth noting that the ship's crew doesn't have to be kept alive to take the cargo... they can shoot the ship full of holes and then send Valkyries over to collect the cargo once the crew have all asphyxiated. Fasces is the only one of the three with a vested interest in not killing, and that was because they were taking prisoners to "recruit" them into their organization via mind control. (This is, in short, why SMS was founded. Its parent company Bilra Transport is an interstellar cargo service that needed to be able to protect its shipments in transit and formed a private army because that was what was necessary to get the job done.) That's coming along really well. It looks great.

I'm not sure the ISC can do that. Its description is vague at best, but it seems to mostly be warping certain dimensions of space around the Valkyrie to displace inertial forces for a short time, but it doesn't seem to offer any protection against bullets, missile warheads, beams, etc. Bending time is possible with fold mechanics, but it's not something humanity has experimented with (as far as we know) with the only known example being something that was quickly judged far too dangerous to be allowed to exist. (The Fold Evil that the Protoculture buried on Uroboros in Macross 30.) If it's projectile and impact resistance you're after, the barrier alone would do the job with a lot lower costs since you're shielding the mecha with a portable singularity. Eh... I dunno. The idea of bringing a sword to a long-ranged particle beam cannon and guided missile fight just feels like it's destined to end one very specific way: Or if you prefer the robot version: After all, most Zentradi pods don't even have limbs appropriate to hand-to-hand combat. They're likely to have the same reaction Indy did. ... if gigawatt heavy metal charged particle beams, hypersonic armor-piercing explosive rounds, and high-yield missiles with OTM-enhanced Munroe effect warheads won't cut it against said giant space monsters, why would a sword? The kinetic energy of even a scaled-up buster sword won't really compare to those other weapons. Scaling from the very heaviest buster sword replica ever made (a whopping 123lb) and an expert swordsman's swing, we're still only looking at about 35MJ of energy in a REALLY hard and fast swing from that sucker. That's several times what the lightest beam weapons in the setting can put out, but at least a full order of magnitude short of the stopping power of gunpods and so on.

This got my scratching my head and sent me to the books... because I have no idea if an ISC can even be made to work that way. Normally, it's warping space to temporarily displace inertial forces before returning them to the frame in a controlled manner but the field is at least technically stationary WRT the movement of the vehicle itself. I'm not sure it would work on something passing through the field since the ISC doesn't offer any protection against bullets normally. (Now, I can think of a way to do this kind of thing... but you'd want the VF-22's Inertia Vector Control System instead. That magnifies or shrinks inertia vectors, but cannot change their direction. Using that, you could theoretically boost the acceleration of a Destroid to the point of turning a running punch into a guillotine, as long as you had a barrier to cushion that impact on the arm.) Wheeled bots DO spin and twirl. Hayate was doing exactly that at the start of Macross Delta, to the point that Freyja nearly lost her lunch. 😅 They just don't normally spin and twirl, because they're usually equipped for high-precision shooting. That said, I don't think "carrier deck brawls" are really a thing anymore after the First Space War. The only reason the Zentradi tried to board the Macross during the First Space War was that they had no idea what was going on with it or its crew due to the frankly insane circumstances of that first contact event. Their normal approach with an enemy warship is to just destroy it. New UN Forces warships developed after the First Space War generally aren't large enough to be home to a Destroid force either, with the exception of those 12 mass-produced Macross-class ships and the smaller Macross-type warships like the Elysion-type and Quarter-type that have a small number in external bunkers. Ideally, in a melee situation, you want something you can attack and block quickly with and quickly change direction with in a pinch. A weapon like a buster sword with huge mass requires a huge windup, a lot of recovery time between swings, and can't be maneuvered quickly. It's an invitation to getting shot fifty times while setting up your swing. (Though that's generally true for bringing a knife/sword to a gunfight in general and likely why the Spartan was seemingly the first/only Destroid role to be totally retired.)