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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    That doesn't seem to be the case. After all, the New UN Forces in Macross 7 spent literal years and vast sums of money on Project M for the sake of further developing the Minmay Attack as a military stratagem to be used against enemies without culture and as a way to make peaceful first contact with new alien races who did. The first thing Max does in "Fleet of the Strongest Women" once the enemy are identified as a rogue Zentradi fleet is send in Sound Force for a Minmay Attack. Similarly, in Macross Frontier, the very first suggestion Leon Mishima offers with regard to the Vajra attacks is to have them "listen to a song" (i.e. the Minmay Attack). Earth's insistence on destroying the Chlore fleet feels a bit weird and out of place on its own, though since Macross 7's themes lean heavily into rebelling against authority having an officious jerk to humble is a bit of necessary comedy. Their attitude makes a bit more sense with the extra historical context from Master File, with it having been only about 9 years since the last run-in with such a large rogue fleet and that incident having started with the loss of an entire planet, 73 warships, 600+ Valkyries, and almost 600,000 lives. Telling the crew of Battle 7 to destroy the fleet also makes a bit more sense in that context, since the Battle 7 was the flagship of the fleet mustered against the previous Zentradi fleet 9 years ago and absolutely had been able to take down a fleet that size. Maybe. Then again, considering how many of them there are and how short they seem to be on Isamu's service record even calling them "wars" may be giving them too much credit. That can't be all fleets beefing with each other either... at least one of them is a civil war and another is described as a revolution, suggesting some of it is a single fleet or group of colonists from one fleet fighting another. Others may be run-ins with Zentradi forces like the one at the start of Macross Plus's OVA version.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    There are two main reasons, and a third is mentioned in Variable Fighter Master File: VF-31AX Kairos Plus... First, laser and particle beam weapons lose some of their range, accuracy, and stopping power in atmospheric use due to the beam's interaction with atmospheric gases. Laser beams suffer energy loss and scattering/defocusing as a result of a phenomenon called thermal blooming as they heat the air they pass through. Particle beams also suffer some power loss due to the beam colliding with and ionizing atmospheric gases in the beam's path. High-velocity hard rounds like the explosive armor-piercing shells used by (and against) VFs are a great deal less affected (particularly since, on impact, the secondary charge will have no power loss at all). Second, laser and particle beam weapons are at a bit of a disadvantage right off the jump because modern VFs have adopted energy weapon-specific defenses in the form of an anti-beam weapon ablative armor coating. This coating is designed to vaporize when struck by an energy weapon, fogging the path of the beam and robbing it of much of its power. The coatings in use from the Frontier era onward are said to be able to reduce the effectiveness of a beam machine gun-grade weapon by 30%. You can of course overpower this by the simple expedient of an excessively powerful beam weapon like the much larger and more powerful beam gunpod, but the explosive armor-piercing shells are totally unaffected by it. Third, Master File contends that a forearm-mounted weapon with high stopping power was considered desirable to minimize the amount of time the VF is nominally defenseless during or immediately after a transformation. A high velocity railgun with explosive armor-piercing ammunition fit the bill nicely.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    AFAIK, that hasn't really been elaborated upon. We know the New UN Government has some kind of system for ranking/classifying the habitability of planets given mention of Vajra being an "A-class habitable planet" but we don't know what criteria they use, what the other classes are, or how long it takes to reach such a determination. A-class planets are said to be few and rare, and the implication from Macross Chronicle and Macross Frontier seems to be that those are ideal or near-ideal Earthlike planets that are suitable for immediate colonization and development. Macross VF-X2 suggests that less suitable worlds (classification unknown) may require years of environmental modification to become suitable for emigration. Presumably the amount of time and effort required to modify a planet's environment to make it suitable are factors in deciding whether a planet is worth colonizing in the eyes of a particular fleet, and whether that investment is containable for the fleet's resources and economy. Macross 7: the Galaxy is Calling Me! has that one unnamed planet that was apparently colonized despite being a marginal case because of the presence of rare and valuable minerals.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    I guess that depends on how you want to define "run into". Emigrant fleets operate in a manner intended to avoid such run-ins whenever possible. They operate with a massive early warning picket spread across a wide area around the fleet's main group (as seen several times in Macross Frontier) and also send advance reconnaissance taskforces out ahead of the fleet along its intended course to preemptively identify any threats and locate potentially valuable resources and habitable planets so the fleet can plan accordingly. Based on Master File, if a large hostile force is detected in or entering the area then SOP is to execute an emergency fold to leave the area before being detected. If a ship can't flee the area by emergency fold and is at risk of being captured it's evacuated and then destroyed so it can't be studied. The New UN Forces only really fight Zentradi fleets if it's unavoidable. Like to protect an emigrant planet, or if it's not possible for an emigrant fleet to evacuate the area in time to avoid a confrontation. The same rules of engagement almost certainly apply to the Supervision Army if they're ever encountered. They would probably treat the Supervision Army similarly to the Zentradi and hit 'em with the Minmay Attack while spamming Macross Cannon fire and thermonuclear reaction weapons.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Pedanticness train pulling into the station! I didn't say that no CF model has had "visor"-type optics... I said: While most CF variants tend to have "monoeye face" with a single large polarized cover over a multitude of optics and other sensors, there are a few out there that go against the grain. The VF-4A has a visor-type monitor turret, as does the VF-5000B Star Mirage, and the VF-14A Vampire. The VF-171 Nightmare Plus is also a visor type, as does the Sv-262Ba. ... if not for the VF-5000B's presence on that list, I would say all of the exceptions are General Galaxy's fault.😆 (Well, the Macross II Valkyries all go in on visor types too... since they've largely gotten rid of the A-type head in that timeline as of the 2070s or so.)
  6. Seto Kaiba
    If that's a virus, it's absolutely endemic anywhere modern "horror" stories are told... and it's why most modern "horror" isn't remotely scary. Effective horror needs tension, and it's hard to build tension if your characters are falling over each other in a bid to be first to become Purina brand Monster Chow™️. Making sure a monster or killer has a huge body count isn't scary in and of itself. The gore is just gore. If the audience knows where it is at all times because it's constantly mugging for the camera its ability to frighten is thoroughly minimized. Likewise, if the killer's victims consistently exhibit a lack of common sense to the point of reckless disregard for their own safety and/or that of others it's next to impossible to get the audience in their corner to build tension over their fate. Combine those two problems and you have something that's gory but feels a bit like one of those comically over-the-top safety video parodies than something intended to frighten. Alien: Earth's whole plot is full of people doing the dumbest possible thing at any given moment.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    It's such a weird choice of character, if you think about it. Aisha Blanchett was the director of an SMS branch and an aerospace engineer with a basically unlimited budget and a romance with a SMS pilot... so how'd she end up in the boonies working for a different PMC as a clinical pathologist? Those aren't exactly related branches of science. I guess she's become some kind of Star Trek-y omnidisciplinary scientist. It's weird that they wouldn't just use the existing character that the gaiden manga already established was a Var syndrome researcher and the developer of a fair bit of the Tactical Sound Unit kit... Zola's Dr. Hoyly. Doubly so given that Dr. Hoyly's mentor was one of the leading researchers studying dimensional resonance effects and she was heavily influenced by the work of Dr. Chiba.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    There's a Macross 30 reference in there too. The Dr. Blanchett that's mentioned in this chapter is none other than Aisha Blanchett, former director of SMS's Uroboros branch and lead developer of the YF-30 Chronos. (So there's some incorrect pronouns in this translation where they refer to Dr. Blanchett as "he". Machine translations do that a LOT.) I do appreciate the fun little historical note Kodachi put in about the "comfort' features of naval warships like the soda fountains on IJN Yamato or the infamous ice cream machines on US Navy warships. (They omit the most excessive version, the US Navy's Barge Refrigerated Large... often slightly inaccurately called the "ice cream barge", a massive refrigerator with an ice cream factory aboard able to produce 5 tons of ice cream a day.) It is a bit weird that they have to have an "As you know" section devoted to explaining the events of Macross VF-X2 and dimensional weapons, though.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Has anyone done a fan edit of the series with Yakity Sax BGM and cartoon sound effects? That might actually improve it. Episode 5, the "how this sh*t started* flashback episode, is almost a competently written horror story. Almost. Its main stumbling block is that the characters featured therein are all exhibiting Covenant levels of suicidal incompetence. So much so that it honestly seems like they want to get killed horribly. The rest of the series? An eminently skippable example of minimum effort spinoff slop. There's a barely-there fanfic tier story that shows the writer learned NOTHING from the poor reception of Prometheus and Covenant, pacing so poor that there's no tension whatsoever, and "scares" so stale and telegraphed they can't even startle. Most of the time its feeble attempts to scare are so un-scary that it ends up unintentionally funny. The characters are so incredibly dim-witted that it's impossible to sympathize with any of them. The only signs of intelligence come from the monsters, and even they aren't very bright. My key takeaway from season one was that Noah Hawley probably used ChatGPT for a lot more than just "research" while writing it despite his claims to the contrary, and that he's almost certainly got an oral fetish. There are Quentin Tarantino levels of "the director's obvious fetish" crowbarred into this series with the camera spending more time up close and personal with the bottom half of Sydney Chandler's face than her dentist probably has. (I'm not saying she had bad teeth, I'm just saying if the camera gets any closer it's going to be less a sci-fi "horror" series and more an upper GI endoscopy.)
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Ah, the sunk cost fallacy triumphs yet again at the House of Mouse. What a pity. ChatGPT and Noah Hawley will be allowed to inflict another season of their D- community college creative writing assignment on the defenseless Alien franchise. If nothing else, one has to admire their commitment to ensuring that neither Prometheus nor Covenant will be remembered as Alien's most embarrassingly stupid installment.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Machine translation is a tool like any other. What you can make with it will reflect your experience and the patience and care you put into its application. I don't think it makes fan works less valuable in any way. Careless use of it can create some frustrating misunderstandings... but so can careless manual translation. The risk of errors is higher with the machine translation, but for a quick-and-dirty summary it's at least "good enough". One thing I really love is that it has driven a massive improvement in OCR capabilities. There was a time, long ago, that I was stuck manually transcribing every book I worked on one character at a time (often with a magnifying glass). Now I can just plonk the book I'm working on under my fancy laser book scanner and let the machine transcribe a whole page in just a few seconds that I can paste right into my working file and have the original text side-by-side with the translation with minimal effort. Perhaps the one thing that chapter does well that the series didn't (because the arc was jettisoned to a gaiden manga) is explain that Windermere IV's grievances with the New UN Government were legitimate. The TV anime and movies never really delves into why the Windermereans wanted out of the New UN Government as badly as they did, though even the novel here kind of glosses over that as frustrating as the Windermereans found the New UN Government's [restrictions on/control of] fold quartz extraction frustrating the restrictions were set for very good reasons like discouraging any more idiots from unsealing canned evil in Protoculture ruins and preventing the proliferation of a material that can be used to make planet-killing bombs.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Machine translation has clearly made some progress in recent years. There's not nearly as much "my hovercraft is full of eels" in this as an attempt a few years ago would've had. That said, I kind of feel like Kodachi is reaching way too hard to try to make connections to other Macross works in this one.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    After the most recent episode, it really f***ing does. Actually, it's kind of weird that we've got a couple different titles this season that have plots revolving around a female lead who is essentially a helpless crybaby who needs to have everything done for her. Maybe it just feels extra weird to me since my weekly watch group has been doing Tenchi Muyo!'s OVA timeline, where (as the punny title suggests) the men are "useless" and the women run everything.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    It is a little depressing how much of this season is white noise-tier writing. I've kind of given up trying to get anything of value out of Li'l Miss Vampire Can't Suck Right, Let This Grieving Soul Retire, My Friend's Little Sister Has It In For Me, Inexpressive Kashiwada and Expressive Oota, The Banished Court Magician Aims to Become the Strongest, My Awkward Senpai, Solo Camping for Two, The Dark History of the Reincarnated Villainess, A Gatherer's Adventure in Isekai, and A Mangaka's Weirdly Wonderful Workplace. Most of them are not bad so much as just bland. My Awkward Senpai, Inexpressive Kashiwada and Expressive Oota, Let This Grieving Soul Retire, and Li'l Miss Vampire Can't Suck Right never venture beyond their single premise for any episode. Li'l Miss Vampire is probably the worst of the lot. It's started to feel kind of cringeworthy and incel-ish, to be honest.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    The Protodeviln? They aren't, as far as we know. Probably never have been, in the direct sense. It's a fairly safe bet that the mind control tech the Protodeviln used on the Varauta forces is the same stuff they used for the Supervision Army, and the way it's described in-series and in supplemental materials it's basically Hollywood hypnosis. They drain a person's spiritia to weaken their mental defenses and then equip them with a sonic device that emits special sound waves to keep them in a sort of hypnotic trance so they're suggestible enough to follow orders. The only people the Protodeviln have really controlled in a direct sense are the people they possess in Macross 7 like Gepernich, Gigile, or (occasionally) Sivil.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    They would have to be. The war between the Zentradi and the Supervision Army has been going on for 500,000 years. The captured and brainwashed Protoculture civilians and Zentradi soldiers who made up the original generation of Supervision Army soldiers are no more immune to injury or to the ravages of time than a Human. Given that the Protodeviln and their Supervision Army drove the Protoculture to the brink of extinction in a few short years, there would be only one way for the Supervision Army to feasibly sustain itself long-term: using the existing factory satellite infrastructure in the territory they controlled to create fresh clone soldiers, mobile weapons, and ships for their cause. Ultimately, the Zentradi and Supervision Army are two inexhaustible armies of Zentradi clones locked in a Forever War with each other because their last orders were to "destroy the enemy" and anyone capable of ordering them to stop died or disappeared half a million years ago. They didn't really ditch the Supervision Army. They were defeated, captured, and turned into Sealed Evil in a Can by the Protoculture's Anima Spiritia. They remained sealed for 500,000 years until Humanity colonized the Varauta system and started poking around in the Protoculture ruins on one of the other planets in the system, where the Protodeviln happened to have been sealed. They accidentally let the Protodeviln out, causing the events of Macross 7. Of course, since the Protodeviln were simply the Supervision Army's top-level commanders rather than being some kind of puppeteer parasite controlling those people directly, their defeat and sealing did nothing to actually stop the Supervision Army. Their brainwashed troops just kept right on fighting according to their last orders.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Nothing, in all likelihood. The Protodeviln aren't controlling their forces with telepathy or space magic or anything like that where No Ontological Inertia might apply. Being drained of spiritia (mental energy) puts people in a state of mental collapse that makes them more vulnerable to technological mind control. As shown in Macross 7, the spiritia-drained Varauta forces were kept in line by mind control devices built into their helmets and other headgear. The Protodeviln learning to generate their own spiritia and taking off wouldn't free them from control. Only the removal of the mind control devices and a good blast of sound energy to help them regenerate the lost spiritia can bring them out of it. Kind of the same reason the Supervision Army wasn't really slowed down much at all by the Protodeviln being defeated and sealed away by the anima spiritia in ancient history.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    There hasn't been any mention of direct contact with the Supervision Army in any official media AFAIK. Macross 7 depicts the New UN Forces encountering the Supervision Army's creators/leaders (the Protodeviln) and fighting a war against what is essentially Supervision Army v2.0, but nothing is said of the original Supervision Army forces still fighting the Zentradi across the galaxy. It may be difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish a Zentradi force from a Supervision Army one at a glance though. The Supervision Army wasn't a bespoke army created from the ground up to fight for the Protodeviln the way the Zentradi were developed to be the Protoculture's army. The Supervision Army got its start as an ad hoc force made up of anyone and everyone the Protodeviln could capture, drain of spiritia, and mind control into doing their bidding and in their initial rampage across the galaxy their forces grew mainly by the simple expedient of doing the same to everyone they captured and making use of existing ships, weapons, facilities, etc. from those they captured. Most of their forces would have been captured and mind controlled Zentradi, and that's probably even more true in the modern day 500,000 years later. Their forces likely consist almost exclusively (if not entirely exclusively) of Zentradi clones using equipment produced in captured factory satellites. Aside from ship classes and some equipment that may have been unique to certain regions and Protoculture emigrant governments, their forces probably look almost exactly like the Zentradi at a glance. Since the New UN Forces practice a policy of "avoid whenever possible" when it comes to the "wild"/"lost" Zentradi roaming the galaxy, it's entirely possible they've detected several Supervision Army fleets and simply not stuck around long enough to tell them apart from the regular Zentradi.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    That might have something to do with their international agreement with HG, who still have the exclusive merchandising rights to the original series outside Japan. Now, I'm not a super-big collector but IIRC the VF-31A was a very hot ticket item when it came out... made quite a bit of cash for the scalper crowd. IMO, it's not a bad thing that they're revisiting in-demand items that didn't get widely distributed for the benefit of the international crowd too. Wasn't the problem that it was a web exclusive because they didn't think anyone would want the CF version compared to the character models, only for it to turn out to be a high-demand item that got scalped to hell and back?
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Now, I'm not saying they're the same picture, but... ... well, when the group is a blonde "prince" leader, a cold and calculating megane who actually runs things, mischievous twins, an immature kid and a gigantic stoic... well... let's just say it could be hard to tell which one you're referring to without some extra context. 😆 Honestly, that there hasn't been a parody bit under the title Darwent Castle Host Club is both a shame and a waste. I assume they left Qasim and/or Hermann out of the wall scroll because they're not as photogenic as the other five.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Probably owes a fair bit to how most anime licensing flows through the US, and the US distribution situation immediately screwed it up by splitting the license up among multiple companies.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Considering how fiercely sought-after the original DX VF-31A release was, I imagine this'll be fairly well-received. It's still the best looking of all the VF-31s, ironically.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Capturing and relocating enough factory satellites to make a noticeable dent in the logistics of the Zentradi's Forever War with the Supervision Army is probably impossible with the resources Humanity currently has or will have at any point in the foreseeable future. According to Macross Chronicle, each individual fleet (not a main fleet, a regular one like Vrlitwhai's) has a logistical support backbone of approximately 20-50 factory satellites. Each main fleet is made up of hundreds or thousands of branch fleets, and at the Zentradi's peak there were approximately 5,000 main fleets. The Mechanic Sheet for the SDF:M TV series factory satellite asserts that there are millions of factory satellites out there just making battle pods day in and day out. Tens of thousands making battleships. Hundreds building the huge fleet motherships/mobile fortresses. And because the Protoculture can never resist going overboard, there's also a factory satellite making other factory satellites.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    So, it's a bit difficult to say for a couple reasons. First, several different estimates for the number of Zentradi main fleets still active in the Milky Way have been given over the years. "Over 1,000", "between 1,000 and 2,000", and "between 2,000 and 3,000" have all been given at various points. IIRC in DYRL?, Perfect Memory, and SDF:M TV respectively. So there's a rather broad range of possibilities there. If we assume Boddole Zer's 118th/425th (depending on version) main fleet is typical, that's anywhere from 4.8 billion to possibly 14.4 billion. Second, it's possible that not all main fleets are the same size. The only one we've seen animated is Boddole Zer's fleet of approximately 4.8 million warships. Macross II prequel games Macross 2036 and Macross: Eternal Love Song both went for the "millions of ships" route for the three main fleets presented between the two games and the fourth one the timeline mentions encountering later. While it's not strictly official setting, Master File mentions a main fleet (the 1,534th) that is "only" 120,000 ships strong. Third, factory satellites are in play. The Zentradi forces have their galaxy-spanning network of factory satellites churning out new ships, pods, and soldiers constantly and the big fleet motherships are no exception. Depending on how much opposition they're facing from the Supervision Army at any given point, that number could be going down OR up. Thus far, the only confirmed intergalactic travelers are the Vajra. Presumably this is because they benefit from the superior abilities of fold quartz-based "super" fold navigation.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    So, is it Goo or Mobile Saurian Godzilla 00? Or does Godzilla just have terrible version control? Another couple films and we've got Godzilla 98, Godzilla Me, Godzilla XP, and Godzilla Vista!
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