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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    It's not that they're afraid to try... it's that they legally can't. (In animated form, anyway...)
  2. Seto Kaiba
    The more I look at it, the more clear it becomes just how unreasonably huge the Stellar Whale really is. If that thing is JUST a luxury ferry, it's operating WAY under capacity carrying just 4,500 people. You could comfortably park TWO Icon-class cruise ships in the area we're told is reserved for passengers, and each of those has a nominal capacity of 7,800 plus amenities like pools, a water park, a theater, a dance hall, multiple restaurants, etc. If just the parts of the hull below the dome are for cargo, a single Stellar Whale can laugh the world's largest container ships out of town without trying. In general, sure... though considering the sheet describes the trip as taking multiple days and the sheer size of the ship, it feels like there might be a bit of room for overlap there. When it comes to missile warheads, I'd expect they'd just go for one really big warhead since ERA isn't a thing... though "general destruction" is more "I'll keep poking holes until I find something that goes 'boom'".
  3. Seto Kaiba
    In general terms, yes. More specifically, what they've often said that they want is The Continuing Adventures of the original Macross series characters... and they want it to look as much like the original 80's art style as possible. As wants go, it makes perfect sense from a nostalgia standpoint. They want more of what they loved in '85. It's just not a realistic wish, for various practical reasons on HG's end. 🤷‍♂️ From HG's standpoint, it's easier to deliver nothing for the anniversary because it has the smallest chance of them getting chewed out for it.😵‍💫
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Big "If"... trying to be different is the one thing Robotech won't do, and for good reason. Robotech fans are kept around by nostalgia for the '85 TV series, and they have a history of aggressively rejecting anything that deviates from the "original 85" too much. They want new Robotech to be just like 80's Robotech in every way. It's why the 90's comics and novels were a source of so much contention, why Robotech 3000 was rejected, and why HG's efforts to reboot Robotech in '01 met with so much resistance. The only way they're gonna do something different is if they're burning the franchise down to start over.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Feeling kinda cheated by I Want to Escape from Princess Lessons. It feels like I just watched the queen gaslight the main character into thinking she's in love with the obnoxious manchild prince.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Perhaps... though I see two potential problems with it: Scaling a warhead like that down will result in a considerable loss of power. The GU-11A's 55mm bullet is a bit less than 1/8th the size of the Javelin's tandem shaped charge warhead. The armor technology that the Javelin's tandem warhead was designed to defeat - explosive reactive armor - isn't used by the Zentradi and hasn't been used on a VF or other advanced weapon since the Unification Wars. (The only known OTM weapon to use it was the VF-0's Armored Pack.) Macross Frontier may have been the first onscreen mention of the Spacy's Marine Corps, but mentions of them in official publications go back to the 90's in publications released for Macross Plus and mentions of VFs being intended for all branches of service with aviation arms go back even farther to '84. The VF-1 is said to have been developed to meet the needs of the Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, and Space Forces. I'm not sure what the Sonicbirds or Blue Phoenixes are in reference to. I'd have to do some research (I'll get there eventually). A lot of the early VF squadrons mentioned in older publications are named for (or in some cases implied to be direct continuations of) real world fighter squadrons. They get progressively less so the farther down the timeline you go. Yeah, its Macross Chronicle Mechanic Sheet even describes it as a luxury cruise ship (豪華客船 Gouka kyakusen) in the sheet's title: "A luxury space cruise ship for tourists that connects resort planets with Earth." The inclusion of airline-like seating arrangements seems odd when you consider the ship is said to be able to sail continuously for 30-60 days, that the trip supposedly takes 3-4 days, and that the ship includes restaurants and a shopping mall. The area from the bow to the mast and antenna section is said to be made up of passenger rooms and living spaces. 4,500 people is a comically small number for such a big ship in airline-like seating. The Stellar Whale's passenger section is something like 500m long and is 148m wide at the widest point. A Boeing 787-10 has a cabin about 50m x 6m and holds about 300 people in mixed seating. If you put 16 787-10 cabins side-by-side across the waist of the ship (50m x 96m) you'd have over 25m to spare on either side at the ship's widest point, and a seating capacity of 4,800, and be using about 1/10th the total length of the ship on a single deck. The only way I can think of that the Stellar Whale makes sense is if its interior is set up with mixed accommodations like a long-distance train. Regular commuter seating for the folks taking only a short leg of the trip, and sleeper cabins for people on longer trips. Then the size of the ship makes sense. (The largest conventional cruise ship currently in service is the Icon-class, which is about 1/2 the length and 1/3 the width of the Stellar Whale and has 2,805 passenger cabins, over 80% of which can accommodate 3+ people.) We've never seen a "Satellite City", so it's hard to say. Artificial gravity is a thing, so they could be building Star Trek-style space stations in orbit of these planets. My personal mental image, apropos of nothing in particular, is something akin to a Sunny Flower-class environment ship or a group of same in orbit of a planet. https://www.macross2.net/m3/macross7/sunnyflower.htm We know O'Neill cylinders are also a thing in Macross, with some of the First Space War survivors and manufacturing facilities servicing the rebuilding of Earth being located in space colonies at the Lagrange points (even called Bunches, in Gundam tradition). Based on Macross Delta's second movie, the answer appears to be "Yes"... as we inexplicably see Max's YF-29 firing paint rounds from its beam gunpod.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Due to the interesting way copyright law works with respect to adaptations and localizations, Harmony Gold's copyright on Robotech only extends to those aspects of it that aren't part of the original Japanese shows. The movie license is essentially just to the brand name, some key terms and character names, and a few original plot beats. For all the stuff fans actually care about, like the original stories and designs, the studios would have to seek a separate license agreement with the Japanese IP owners. Why would any studio make a Robotech movie when all the license actually gets them is a brand name with a dubious reputation? They have to develop what's essentially an all-original IP anyway, why not just call it something else and keep all the money for themselves?
  8. Seto Kaiba
    That comic was taking more piss than the World Cup stadium men's rooms. I did find it funny that it went out of its way to establish that every Robotech story was a Bad Future timeline that just resets and repeats the same mistakes. Imagine you license your IP to a second-tier comic publisher and the one new comic they make with it is a story about how your writing sucks, your stories never go anywhere, and how the only good ending is the one that skips the entire rest of the story. I think that's a fair point for them to pack it in and say "Eh, maybe no more comics." Well, yeah... they're not crazy. As much as the folks doing Harmony Gold's convention tour might talk a good game, that's just marketing. HG's corporate leadership are acutely aware that Robotech has tried and failed on five separate occasions to produce a viable continuation to the animated series. The only reason they were willing to try the fourth time (Shadow Chronicles) was because the series had a brief resurgence of public interest and conditions looked almost favorable. Even then, the HG management weren't willing to bet more than they could afford to lose on a horse that'd failed to finish the last three races. The fifth and final time was them throwing up their hands and saying "OK fans, if YOU want it so bad YOU pay for it this time". That's the one that ended with them cancelling their Kickstarter when it became clear they wouldn't get anywhere near their funding goal. New development's not bringing in money, but flogging nostalgia via cheap merchandise is... so that's where their efforts are concentrated. Cynical, but undeniably the correct choice for their business's situation.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    I'd imagine a gunpod round is probably too small to get away with a tandem warhead like the Javelin's. Official setting publications mention a few different types of ammunition being used in Valkyrie gunpods, but they're pretty conventional stuff. The common ancestor of Valkyrie gunpods, the VF-0's GPU-9, is described as using composite heavy metal armor-piercing rounds and airbursting tungsten submunition rounds (AHEAD rounds). The Technology Sheet for gunpods in Macross Chronicle mentions five distinct ammo types and implies the existence of others: High Explosive Armor Piercing (HEAP) High Explosive Incendiary (HEI) Armor Piercing Incendiary (API) Advanced Hit Efficiency and Destruction (AHEAD) Micro Dimension Eater (MDE) We can safely say that Tracer rounds, Training rounds, and Paint rounds exist because they appear onscreen at various points... most prominently in Macross Plus. Variable Fighter Master File, for its part, explicitly mentions five types in the first VF-1 book: Armor Piercing Discarding Sabot - Depleted Uranium (APDS-DU) Armor Piercing Tracer (AP-T) Shot Shell (SS) High Explosive Anti-Composite Armor (HEACA) Multipurpose (MP) HEACA rounds are described in vague terms to be shaped-charge warheads designed to defeat (OTM) composite armor. They mention the Munroe effect, but also mention that other techniques can be/are also used. Multipurpose rounds are mentioned to be similar to the Bofors 3P bullet, a programmable proximity-fused blast-fragmentation round that can be configured to operate in several different ways depending on the target. There's also mention, in passing, of rocket-propelled variants of this ammunition to reduce recoil forces and for space use. The VF-19 Master File mentions two more subtypes. The GU-15A is said to use a Base Bleed (AKA Base Burn) round that increases range and muzzle velocity via drag reduction as its standard, and also mentions Howard developing a dual-feed magazine to accommodate both normal ammo and a specially developed hard resin round meant for riot use. So I guess we're part of the way there... we know, at the very least, they're using the individual types of explosive warheads that are used in those two-stage missile warheads, just not together (as far as we know).
  10. Seto Kaiba
    TBH, that does sound like a pretty plausible problem... if someone pierces the energy conversion armor with an explosive armor-piercing rounds, you could end up with Galom leaking out (however slowly) until the wing surface was completely gone. (As far as jokes go, I made and then deleted a Terminator 2 reference when I started calling it "liquid metal alloy"... alas, no mention of the YF-21/VF-22 being able to form knives and stabbing weapons.)
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Kind of an occupational hazard of main VFs, it seems... the VF-4, VF-11, and VF-171 spent almost their entire service lives offscreen and the latter two's main appearances were at the end of their generation's service life jobbing against superior foes. It's only ever in comics, games, or novels that they get to shine. I think the only protagonist who has a VF-11 as their main/signature ride is Macross 30's Mina Forte. (Still salty Bandai only gave us a DX YF-30 and not a VF-19E and VF-11C to go with it.) Hm... to be honest, I'd call it Macross's version of the McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom. Both the F-4 Phantom and VF-11 Thunderbolt are 3rd Generation fighter designs in their respective lineages. Both are the most-produced fighter of their type. Both are used by multiple branches of the service. Both are noteworthy for their main flaw being lack of a built-in gun. Both were converted into target drones for testing newer model aircraft at end-of-life. One particularly backhanded connection I found is the first VF-11 paintjob in This is Animation Special: Macross Plus is a reference to the 35th Tactical Fighter Wing, a decorated USAF unit that operated out of Japan at several points after the Second World War and was responsible for training foreign pilots on the F-4. The exemplar aircraft has the same camo paint style as the 35th's F-4s, has the same iconic WW tail code, and is even noted to be assigned to the same airbase (the now-defunct George AFB) where the 35th did all its F-4 training ops. Perhaps not coincidentally, the 35th Fighter Wing was transferred back to Japan about two months after Macross Plus's first episode came out. Yeah, with ~30,000 of the bloody things kicking around... that's enough to fully outfit almost 17 Macross 7-sized emigrant fleets worth of the things. If we take Master File's remarks on scrapping VFs as guidance, it probably also helped that the structural strength of materials used in VF construction makes them difficult and time consuming to scrap and recycle by conventional boneyard methods. IIRC, Shinsei Industry also has a branch that specializes in starship design... and as a parent of Shinnakasu Heavy Industry it's also involved in making things like reactors, reaction engines, armor, VF option packs, and missiles. Not really. We know that they exist, since obviously some kind of interstellar shipping has to be happening for commerce to go on and we know that Richard Bilra built his HUGE fortune on an interstellar shipping empire that had SMS as its private security force. We didn't actually clap eyes on one until Macross Delta, which showed us cargo ships of the 2060s are something like the lovechild of a container ship and 18 wheeler. A massive flatbed hull that was loaded with spacefuture versions of standard shipping containers. There are several other ships of questionable purpose in the refugee fleet that flees the Brisingr cluster halfway through the series that may be logistics/cargo ships from the Epsilon Foundation. That's a bit of Macross II creeping in, I think. In Macross II, the Mardook are noted to use songs to trigger emotional responses in their brainwashed Zentradi like a combat drug. I think Mikimoto and co. slipped a fair few Macross II references in there. The pilot suit Mahara Fabrio wears is a modified version of the one Mikimoto designed for Macross 2036, one of the Macross II tie-in/prequel games. In DYRL? and the TV series, the Zentradi definitely have emotions... but some are stunted by indoctrination steering them away from creative and constructive pursuits. It was music that let them start to explore their sense of wonder and emotions outside those closely associated with their military duties. It wouldn't surprise me. After all, Earth had a hundred or so working Zentradi ships after the war and thousands upon thousands of wrecks to pick over for materials. I'd imagine cargo ships probably aren't anything fancy to look at. Probably just a box with some engines on. Maybe Galaxy Starliners are used to carry light cargo and mail and such like modern airliners are? The Stellar Whale-type we see in Macross Plus was NOT small. It could likely carry quite a bit.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Based on Master File's description, the layered stretchable skin applied over the Galom-α and hypercarbon fiber mesh frame that forms the exterior of the wing surface contains the energy conversion armor and other protective measures against heat and energy weapons.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    "Galom-α" seems to be even weirder than that, really... it's described as something akin to a non-newtonian fluid (like cornstarch and water). It's a liquid metal alloy of gallium and an unspecified OTMetal that has a superhigh viscosity. On its own, it's said that if you were to fill a pool with Galom-α you could sink in it if you stood still... or you could run across the surface like a solid. It's noted that this makes the material extremely resistant to impacts of short duration (e.g. explosions), but paradoxically soft to sustained pressures like simply leaning on it. You could reversibly dent it just by pushing hard, but an explosion won't even move it. The actuators for deforming the wing are embedded in it as part of a hypercarbon fiber structural sheet and the whole thing is wrapped in an outer skin to keep the Galom-α from falling off the surface... but combined like that, it apparently makes for a highly durable reversibly deformable airfoil that isn't subject to normal strain-point weaknesses. For reference, the Mythbusters Walking on Water episode's demonstration of cornstarch and water's properties...
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Andor is, at least IMO, the finest writing Star Wars has ever had. Star Wars has always had an element of sociopolitical commentary to it, but usually it's either too subtle and easy for the audience to miss entirely (as in the OT) or so hamfisted that it's impossible to take seriously (as in the prequels). Andor, though... Andor does it at a level that rivals the very best other, more overtly politial, titles like Star Trek have done and it's amazing. Not only is it a proper exploration of what drives people to join the galactic civil war, it spans multiple levels of society and both sides of the conflict. It shows how people on the fringes of Imperial society like Cassian struggle to live and are forced into increasingly desperate situations by the Empire's repressive policies, but it also explores how regular workaday folks like Brasso and Bix cope with the slow loss of liberties as the Empire's policies get more restrictive until society as a whole becomes a powder keg. The show's villains are not cackling dark sorcerers, they're just committed civil servants who are just trying to do their jobs. Syril Karn and Dedra Meero's obsessive belief in justice ends up driving them to commit all kinds of personal and societal harms and make a bad situation worse. Then, we have social elites like Mon Mothma or Luthen Rael, both of whom benefit from the Empire, but where Mon Mothma is a coward unwilling to risk upsetting the status quo by doing anything more than performative opposition to the Empire Luthen is perhaps TOO willing to burn it all down to show his contempt for the system. The critique of several current political and cultural instutions is downright blistering and very effective as a result. On the other hand, what if Cassian talked for a while about how much he doesn't like sand? 🤣
  15. Seto Kaiba
    She's barely in Return of the Jedi, but even in Rogue One she's stuck in the role of the naively idealistic rebel figurehead whose role in the story is to propose a course of action that obviously won't work and then be ignored by the other rebel leaders. If they're gonna go to the expense of having the actress show up, at least do something interesting with the character right? She's worth more than just being a narrative speed bump.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Padme Amidala did a pretty fine job of it throughout The Clone Wars series. There were a few others in that series as one-shot or minor recurring characters. Not a lot of politics after the prequel era tho, so that is kind of a narrow category. In all seriousness, Mon Mothma's not written as a strong leader in any of the shows. She's written to be a narrative speedbump. In both Andor and Rebels, she's written to be the authority figure who's bitterly opposed to whatever action the protagonists need to take to win the day. She's a plot device to jack up the tension by having the protagonists either go anyway against orders with the threat of having to face the music later or lose time trying to convince her so they make a last-second dramatic entry to save the day. Ahsoka makes her explicitly a very weak political leader, who both spearheaded the disarmament that let the First Order rise to power in the first place and failed to address the issues in the Republic's system of governance that caused the Old Republic to fall apart years earlier.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Considering what we see of her in shows set during the Rebellion, that sounds incredibly boring. Who's going to tune in to a series about a sheltered 1%-er politician clutching her pearls every five minutes because the rest of the Rebellion actually wants to fight the Empire not bury it in sternly worded letters of protest? Absolutely they can. Absolutely they do. Princess Leia Organa, Hera Syndulla, Ahsoka Tano, Ursa Wren, and many others in Star Wars attest to that fact. Mon Mothma's just, y'know, not one. Like Duchess Satine from The Clone Wars, she's presented as a painfully naive and sheltered idealist so out of touch with reality that her own faction regards her as a liability and an obstacle to be worked around not as someone to take guidance from. The actual rebel leaders don't respect her. We see that many times, in Andor, in Rebels, and even after the war in Ahsoka. She's a figurehead who doesn't realize she's just a figurehead. The token politician from the deposed government the rebels keep around so they can claim to be a continuation of the previous government in exile. Even then, she wasn't their first choice... they had the vastly more effective Bail Organa in their corner before A New Hope.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    After a chaotic period at work forced me to step back from translating, I'm back on the Master File train. Past a certain point, it starts to feel a bit weird seeing so many publications rave about how amazing and successful the VF-11 Thunderbolt was when its one major appearance in the anime (Macross 7) treated it like it was ineffectual and undercapable. Variable Fighter Master File: VF-22 Sturmvogel II blows more smoke up the VF-11's arse, talking about it being essentially The Perfect Valkyrie of the 2030s and the most-produced Valkyrie of all time. I guess the QF-4000 Ghost is what's standing between the VF-171 and that title. It feels a bit funny to look at the VF-11 and then see a book say it has no obvious flaws. Master File's take is that the VF-11 was apparently SO perfect that more than 30,000 of the bloody things were made and that the military apparently considered themselves to be set until ~2060. The idea of using Gallium in a structural material is a bit insane too. The VF-22's flexible skin is said to be a Gallium-based compose called "Galom-Alpha" (feeling a bit Gundam?) made from woven hypercarbon fiber sheeting soaked in this Galom-Alpha non-newtonian metallic composite fluid and then wrapped in a bunch of different film layers that keep it warm (and pliable) and provide protection from various hazards. There's also a mention in the VF-22 book of a similar technology to the energy cartridge system that shows up in the VF-31AX book. They describe an emergency power system that uses burning hydrogen-doped metal cartridges to feed a small capacitor bank and provide electrical power in the case of a loss of generator access. The VF-31AX book had described something similar for powering the beam gunpod. The FAST pack section has what I think may be the only mention Macross has of a macron gun AKA a "dust gun". Basically, particle accelerator that fires a stream of elemental or larger particles instead of elementary particles. It's described as being kind of a side effect of an attempt to create a fusion-pumped laser cannon with a power output of several hundred megawatts but the laser beam ends up pushing the heavy metal particles used as a gain medium out at near lightspeed thanks to the GIC confinement used to focus the beam. Nasty nasty weapon.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Sounds like they've gone to quite extraordinary lengths to make the second season a suitable lead in to Rogue One. That said, I'm hoping we see a LOT less of Mon Mothma unless the writers have finally resigned themselves to making her matter to the story. The story's past the point where it needs the Rebellion's obstructive bureaucrat to complain about the heroes getting results.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Ameku M.D. has served up another glorious trainwreck this week. On the one hand, it's surprising that any studio or production committee looked at this amateur hour screenplay and said "Yeah, that's good enough for a TV anime". On the other, it's weirdly impressive how consistent its awfulness is. Its author is supposedly a doctor, but crafted a "medical mystery" story so wildly unbelievable and unscientific that it feels more like a Japanese House MD fanfic than anything.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Well, yeah... that's the expected result. Harmony Gold officially pulled the plug on new Robotech development 18 years ago in the wake of the Shadow Chronicles debacle. Their last gasp attempt to get their fans to put up the cash for new development on Kickstarter ended 10 1/2 years ago. They even struck out re-attempting their 90's strategy of blindly farming the license out to anyone who'd cut them a check because the one publisher willing to touch it mainly just reprinted old comics and ran one new comic that was mostly a piss-take... and even that was cancelled without notice under mysterious and unspecified circumstances. There's a page quote from Warhammer 40,000's rulebook... "Success is commemorated; failure is merely remembered." Probably, yeah. The franchise's main value is squatting on the Macross license and associated trademarks, which let them collect royalties from Big West in select markets. They could almost certainly get good money for it, but they seem to be content with whatever small amount of royalties they get from Macross licensing instead.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    As worried as I am about Sunrise doing this one, the one part I have absolutely complete confidence in is that they'll once again pick an amazing performer to be the lead singer. 😀
  23. Seto Kaiba
    This has been really polarizing simulcast season for me... I've found a few really good shows that I'm absolutely loving, but the rest of the shows I've picked up have steadily been trending towards "garbage". Blue Exorcist... eech... either I somehow forgot how bad the writing got in the original manga or the adaptation to anime really allowed the suck to flourish and bloom. They've now spent nine entire episodes on a flashback to the Blue Night, which have varied from painfully dull to unintentionally hilarious when they're all meant to be tense and dramatic. Evil flying babies, anyone? Honestly, the worst is any scene involving the twins mother Yuri Egin... she's the most frustrating character in the show by far, with her imbecilic naivete leading her to unwittingly shape the story's main villain (Satan) from nonsentience into a supremely malevolent monster. Still having a LOT of fun with I'm Getting Married to a Girl I Hate in My Class, OKITSURA, and I Want to Escape from Princess Lessons. My watch group started Ascendance of a Bookworm recently too... a nice touch since I recently finished the light novel. It's weird watching it and being able to pick out all of the foreshadowing going on now. That one's getting a new season next year that'll go into Part III (of V) of the light novel too, which should be wild.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Not quite? Many models of Variable Fighter including the VF-1 Valkyrie inherited their names from older models of fighter, bomber, etc. used by real world militaries. The VF-1 is named for the North American XB-70 Valkyrie supersonic bomber. (Hikaru even has a model of one in his quarters in DYRL?.) Other examples include: There are a few cases of VFs with explicitly mythological names, but those are all much rarer and most are fairly recent. Some were chosen by fans as part of a contest, while others were riffing on the names of previous models with inherited military names.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Considering she's 71 and has a whopping 44 years as a producer and 12 as President and CEO of Disney LucasFilm to her name... nobody'd blame her if she actually took a full retirement. It's a hell of a career. If she were being forced out, it'd be something like what happened to Carlos Tavares last December. No advance notice, no talk of choosing a successor, just "We've decided to part ways" and an immediate and unfilled vacancy. (Not that anyone will miss Carlos.) Yeah, the brainrotted culture warriors aren't exactly ones for little things like perspective.
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