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Seto Kaiba

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    Lagrange Terrace (a stable community)
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    Anime (duh), Antique Firearms, Cryptography, Mechanical Design

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    To add, prior to DYRL?, the instances we see of Zentradi text onscreen are typically just perfectly legible English written in the Zentradi alphabet rather than alien words. For instance, the interior of the Quel-Quallie recon pod has the English words "ESCAPE POD" written over the escape pod hatch in the bottom right corner there.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    They're either coming up with the names themselves or they're using names they've found while researching on Robotech fan sites. There is writing on a number of the pieces of line art for various Zentradi mecha, but they're mostly unit numbers. For example... Using the official guide on Zentradi language from Macross Chronicle, none of them that have writing on them in the line art appear to have anything recognizable as a word. The writing on them, according to Macross Perfect Memory, are unit markings and other identifying marks. The letters under the camera eye are the pilot's initials (L.O.), the numbers written on the side above the leg are the platoon number (T-25, the circle and symbol is the number 20 not 2), and the writing on the hip joint itself is an identification number for that aircraft (appears to be C and then 1025D6). The chevrons on the back of the knees (not seen here) are identified as rank insignia. Similar markings for the same purpose are found on the Nousjadeul-Ger, Queadluun-Rau, etc. The Quel-Quallie appears to have a identification number written on its underside. Neither the Gnerl nor the Recovery Craft have any writing on them in their art.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    回収機 (Kaishuu-ki, lit. "Recovery craft" or "Retrieval craft") is the only label ever applied to it in the art books. I don't believe it's been given a name in the Zentradi language, officially. There are several designs that were not given a name in the alien language. Like the medium scale gunboat that Quamzin used at the end of the series, the Zentradi picket/scout ship, or many of the non-battle pod small craft.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Hmm... it's a lovely piece. Kind of reminds me of a piece that Shatner himself wrote into one of those novels he penned where Spock visits Kirk's grave on Veridian III. The deepfake faces are a little unsettling to me, though.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Nope. It repeats info from Perfect Memory and other books that the two models of space suit are the Type 6 armored space suit (worn by Quamzin and others) and the Type 8 general-use space suit. The Type 6 armored suit is noted to be used by unit leaders and for armored units fighting in close combat. The Type 8 suit is the standard one that we see most Zentradi pilots use, incl. the Regult pilot who transports Exsedol to the Macross in Ep26 of the original series. Quamzin's Type 6 suit is noted to have different colors from the regular model, which has the same color palette as the Type 8 suit. Yeah, it's in a few artbooks. This is Animation #3 page 69, for instance.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    "It's showtime!" Anyway... I'm assuming this is with respect to the toy pictured on the previous page. Those colors are very wrong indeed. Using Macross Chronicle SDF:M TV Zentradi character sheet 03A and some accompanying screenshots as reference, the flexible material at the suit's joints is meant to be black which this toy got right. Where the toy has dark purple, there's meant to be dark gray. That weird maroon is supposed to be lavender. The hip pouches and shoulder pads are meant to be brown not red, and the pouches themselves as well as the straps of the harness across the chest are meant to be a slightly blueish white or very light gray. That little rectangular bit under the main part of the breastplate is meant to be the same color as the harness straps and belt pouches. Those white patches on the shins and shoulders are not in the animation reference either.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    I had a bit of an epiphany about this as I was getting ready for dinner. Gundam SEED's characters mostly look the same because Hisashi Hirai's one of those designers who can only draw like six or so designs. But at the same time, there's also an in-story explanation for why everyone looks the goddamn same. Most of these characters are Coordinators. Designer babies whose parents handpicked most, if not all, aspects of their genetic code. They all look the same because the Coordinators, like the global elites who perverted the gene-repair tech used to cure reproductive harm from NBC weapons to create the first Coordinators, insist on engineering their kids to be good looking and the Lego Genetics way Coordinator gene tech works likely means all of them have the very same genes for generic good looks. If everyone's a designer baby whose looks were tailored to the same beauty ideal at the genetic level, everyone's gonna look very similar as they grow up. That's also likely the real world reason behind the fertility problems Coordinators have. It's glossed-over as issues of "genetic compatibility" between individuals... but Coordinator society is full of people who were extensively genetically engineered using the same templates for desirable traits, Coordinator genetic diversity must be in the freaking toilet. It's entirely possible that many coordinators who aren't related in familiar terms are genetically close enough to be third or fourth-degree relatives. Coordinators have fertility issues that get worse with each successive generation because they're technically massively inbred. That might even explain why second and third generation coordinators like Shinn have volatile tempers and overall poor emotional control. Even the Naturals have been subjected to much more limited applications of the same gene editing technology to repair the reproductive harm caused by the use of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons in the world wars before the start of the Cosmic Era. So that might explain why even they don't look too different. So it's bad design, but it's also unintentionally brilliant in a fridge logic sort of way. I'm not a dubs guy by any means, and with the quality of the SEED dub I'm tempted to make a smartarse remark about how no audio is the opposite of a problem... Anyhoo... yeah, Kira is a very polarizing character. The accusations that he's a godmode sue are not without good reason, and the reason Shinn failed to supplant him as the main character in Destiny has a lot to do (according to the creators) with Shinn being wildly unpopular. That said, a lifetime of emotonal scars or death is par for the course for a Gundam character so I'm not sure he's necessarily any worse than anyone else in that regard.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    I'm not sure what I was expecting from a teaser trailer for what is, by any rational standard of measure, a glorified filler episode prequel to the Gundam franchise's least necessary movie. I swear, half the characters in the trailer look as bored to be there as I would be to watch it. Gundam SEED always had a real problem with most of its character designs looking exactly the goddamn same, and it feels like the higher animation quality of the movie and this teaser make the problem feel worse somehow.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Well, the 2024 Autumn simulcast season's about 2/3 over... and I'm surprised how many of the new titles I'm having fun with this season. Ron Kamonohashi's Forbidden Deductions continues to be a lot of fun. I'm not super-thrilled that it leaned far enough into the Sherlock Holmes references to become an unofficial sequel/spinoff of Arthur Conan Doyle's 19th century detective series, but that happens so wearily often in detective anime that it was expected. The actual cases are always very inventive and have wild conclusions, which keeps the series fun. As long the "House of M" stays in the background it should remain an exciting detective series. MF Ghost is another one where I'm consistently impatient for the next episode. It's everything a racing anime should be, which you'd expect from Shuichi Shigeno penning a sequel to his iconic series Initial D. The shilling for Toyota is at least understandable, and it's almost funny how Kanata seems to be able to summon a Eurobeat soundtrack as soon as he starts drifting. IMO, the only weakness MF Ghost has is that its occasional asides with the race queens for fanservice purposes veer into creepy "My face is up here" territory more often than not. As a Reincarnated Aristocrat, I'll Use My Appraisal Skill to Rise in the World has finally stepped foot into the civil war arc it was teasing at the end of the first season. It's doing OK with it, since the protagonist Ars stays out of the combat for the most part and focuses on what he does best which is reading people and trying to manipulate events through non-violent means. It's still plenty engaging, but the last few stories have felt a little... thoughtless? Like the original author didn't know quite how to resolve those plots while keeping Ars out of the fighting. Blue Exorcist's fourth season has finally found the point where the original manga started to suffer from darkness-induced audience apathy. It's handled extremely well by the studio (which is to say, the intense creepiness of the moment is brought across faithfully) but it still ends up making the story less interesting by raising the stakes TOO far to the point that the series is suffering a multiple impending-apocalypse pileup. 365 Days to the Wedding continues to be a fun little romcom. It's slow, but the way the characters are handled manages to keep it a lot of fun to watch. Yakuza Fiance/Raise wa Tanin ga Ii is a pretty wild ride too. It's another one where I'm impatient for each new episode of this hilariously awful mismatched arranged-marriage mafia couple.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    I've mentioned her a few times before in this topic. First mention of the Graf Zeppelin II (CVN-100) was in Variable Fighter Master File: VF-0 Phoenix (2012). She's mentioned and shown in the section of the book devoted to talking about the Asuka II (CVN-99) as a second ship of the same experimental class and type that was a predecessor to the Prometheus (CVS-101). Master File says she served as part of the UN Navy 2nd Fleet and that her home port was Norfolk, VA. She's seen among the ships defending South Ataria island in December 2008 in Macross the First (2014), as a carrier launching VF-0's. Her name is noted to be something of an irreverant in-joke regarding the circumstances of her construction. The Asuka II-class was designed in Japan and was originally meant for service with the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Forces. When the UN Forces decided to build a second ship of the same class, the contract to build the new ship landed at some unspecified shipyard in (West) Germany. The irony of this was apparently too much to be contained by anyone in the military administration, and she was named in honor of Germany's only other aircraft carrier Graf Zeppelin, which had also been a copy of a Japanese aircraft carrier design. Defense forces for those worlds settled by the short-distance emigrant fleets were probably initially quite small. They're probably not small anymore, given that those emigrant planets are within spitting distance of Earth and were among the first planets colonized. They'd have had more time than almost anyone to build infrastructure, harness natural resources, and grow their local defense forces with the close support of Earth's immense manufacturing power. I'd assume the lander can operate independently. Zentradi ships use networked clusters of reactors and drives, so I'd assume the lander probably has its own fold system cluster and we know it has its own reactors, engines, and weapons. For a given value of "assault"... they're not really made to land ground forces. The Daedalus II-class is as close as it really gets, but it's not an assault lander like the Daedalus was. It's a dedicated space carrier like the ARMD-class but with the capability to carry out ramming attacks.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Normally when a film is that bad we see a brief advertising blitz to get as many people in theaters for opening weekend before word gets around that it's a turd. From this one? Nothing. It's like theater chains entirely forgot that this film comes out less than a month from now. It's not even in the "Coming attractions" reels in the actual theaters themselves.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    If you think about it, that's kind of... everywhere. Post-war culture is a hodgepodge of whatever cultural artifacts and traditions survived the First Space War and whatever they've come up with since to fill in the gaps. There are whole fleets that devote their living spaces to enthusiastic recreations of pre-war Earth like Macross-11 or Macross Frontier. Macross Frontier goes so hard on it that they made recreations of multiple cities worth of historic districts complete with superficially appropriate vehicles and other aesthetics. The ultimate fate of the Asuka II is not stated, but she was likely destroyed in the bombardment. Her sister ship, Graf Zeppelin II, was assigned to protect South Ataria island and may now be floating out near Pluto. At the very least, we know of one crew member on the Asuka II who has living descendants after the war. The movie Macross Delta: Passionate Walkure establishes that Walkure member Makina Nakajima is the great-granddaughter of the VF-0 program's chief mechanic aboard the Asuka II: Raizo Nakajima. That's the Battle Astraea, yeah... from the NUNS's 7th Fleet, prior to it being stolen by its commander and crew and becoming the flagship of Heimdall. Available information suggests planetary defense forces vary in size depending on the emigrant fleet that ultimately colonized the planet. The New UN Spacy escort fleet that the emigrant ship was protected by becomes the planet's New UN Spacy defense force after colonization begins. So some planets have a Battle-class to rely on because they had the good fortune to be colonized by a 3rd Gen or later emigrant fleet. Fleets that didn't leave with one (or lost theirs) would have to build one or buy one. Presumably the reason we see no Battle-class ships in the Brisingr cluster is that it was colonized by 1st and 2nd generation fleets like Megaroad-04. Macross Frontier is just as blatant, with the uppermost level of Island-1 being a loving recreation of several parts of San Francisco... right down to the infestation of Toyota Priuses and Ozma's replica of an early 90's Lancia Delta HF Integrale. Though I think no example better suits the post-war fervor for recreating pre-war history than Culture Park in Macross II: Lovers Again. Lovingly crafted recreations of many world famous pre-war monuments with Disneyland-like abandon. The whole scene is a massive homage to Roman Holiday, so we see a lot of Roman landmarks like the Trinita dei Monti church and the famous Spanish Steps, the Mouth of Truth in the Piazza della Bocca della Verita, and the Flavian Amphitheatre. We also see several other monuments from other places and cultures like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Louvre in Paris (we see Ishtar pose in front of Eugene Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People), the Moai from Easter Island, the Great Wall of China, and Petra's Khazneh el-Far'oun... all lovingly recreated for the sake of an enormous historical theme park. Or that Marines are simply carried as infantry aboard naval vessels... the Marines we see postwar have been the Spacy Marines.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    We got another month before this one comes out, right? I've been to the theaters like half a dozen times in the last two weeks and I've seen NOTHING about Kraven there. If there was any advertising at all, it seems like it's been buried under the advertising blitz for Red One.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Is there a petition we can sign to get the showerunners of Andor put in charge of Star Wars as a whole? Seriously. This is ten thousand times more interesting than anything about the glowstick society.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Just got back from a showing of Overlord: the Sacred Kingdom. Not gonna lie, I can see why IGN gave the movie a bad review. It's a very compressed adaptation of the light novel that is absolutely no ambassador to anyone who hasn't seen the anime up through the middle of its fourth season. It cuts out several major scenes, and merges a few others. Unfortunately one of the scenes it left out was a really important one that explains why the demons absolutely ham it up about Neia's bow being a "rune" weapon, so there are several scenes where demons just engage in dreadful acting about it with zero direct explanation. It's not a bad speedrun of the story, but it's definitely not for the non-fan.
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