Seto Kaiba

Potentially. Of course, that would require them to put a lot more thought into the story than they did. The only thinking the showrunners and writers seem to have done is coming up with a string of weak excuses to handwave away the aspects of Star Trek's far future that would have otherwise made the central conflict of their story irrelevant or laughably easy to resolve. Y'know, like why anyone is using warp drive when they've had better alternatives for around 800 years or why the Federation Temporal Agency didn't simply look back in time to find the origin of the Burn or ret-gone the event from the timeline. But all of those things would have diminished or eliminated Michael Burnham's ability to be The Messiah and singlehandedly Save The Universe. The whole plot was in service of Burnham's in-universe savior complex and the writers determination to make her the franchise's Main Character. Pretty much anything to do with fast sublight or faster-than-light travel or communication depends on subspace in Star Trek. Early impulse drives used subspace fields to cheat the ship's inertial mass down so fusion rockets could push the ship up to a decent fraction of c. Late impulse drives (TNG era and beyond) are basically sublight warp drives. Warp drives use subspace fields to expand and compress space to move the warp bubble through space at FTL speeds. A conventional transwarp drive is just a more potent version of that. Coaxial warp drives use a conventional warp field to fold space. Transwarp conduits and wormholes are essentially tunnels in subspace connecting two or more points in the universe. Quantum slipstream ships are basically a Star Trek hyperdrive where the ship travels through subspace. FTL sensors and comms are subspace-based, and transporters use subspace to send the matter stream to/from its destination. That why, in Voyager the Omega Directive was a By Any Means sort of special order. If subspace goes bye-bye thanks to omega particles then pretty much everything modern civilization depends for travel and communication goes bye-bye. YUP.

We know NuTrek doesn't have the support of a team of science and technology fact-checkers the way golden age Star Trek did... but you'd think they'd at least have checked its Wiki page, consulted a chemistry textbook, or at least loaded up a NileRed video on YouTube. It's a lot easier to research these things now than it was 60 year ago when Star Trek was first being written. Seems like that the creative team knew juuuuuust enough to know that strontium is often mentioned around things like nuclear fuel waste and nuclear bombs and assumed that all strontium was the dangerous radioisotope strontium-90 that is occasionally used in RTEGs due to its short half-life. Naturally occurring strontium that you might dig up out of the ground is non-radioactive strontium-88. Pure strontium is reactive enough that it can be made pyrophoric when finely ground, but the danger level is more "mistaken for fireworks" than "mistaken for an attack". Assuming Nus Braka is telling the truth about his parents, for all practical intents and purposes his family likely accidentally blew themselves up when their homemade signal flare accidentally ignited the fireworks factory they lived and worked in. Either that or he told an embarrassingly easy-to-debunk fib.

Anisha Mir's reason for being mad at Captain Ake seems to wander a bit and suffer some motive decay as the episode progresses due to the dodgy writing. She starts out being angry at Ake for separating her from her son when she was sentenced to prison and her son's subsequent hard life. That seems to gradually blur into her just being angry that the Federation made her face the consequences of her actions (prison time), then being angry at Ake as a proxy for the Federation because she was living a hard life without the Federation's foreign aid, and by the end of Ake's "trial" she seems to have settled on hating Ake personally for taking the easy way out by resigning and feeling bad about it all from a cushy job on a safe planet instead of doing something. Of course, at no point does she ever seem to confront the fact that she is far more responsible than Ake was for what happened to Caleb. She's the one who told him not to trust the Federation and encouraged him to run away. He did what she said and ended up living on the streets. Had she not said that (or had he ignored her) he would have gotten to have a normal, peaceful childhood as a Federation citizen living on Bajor. Let's ask Jonathan Archer. 😅 The implication of the episode seems to be that these are representatives of fence-sitter powers that either weren't affected badly enough by the Burn to be prioritized for foreign aid from the Federation or resentful minor hostile powers looking for the enemy of my enemy. With the Emerald Chain destroyed and the Breen Imperium having collapsed into a succession crisis, the United Federation of Planets is essentially the only remaining superpower in the region. Hostile powers are probably feeling pretty threatened even though the Federation isn't an expansionist power, and Braka clearly sees an opportunity to exploit this make the Venari Ral into the next crime syndicate so powerful it's a de facto government. It wouldn't have worked for two reasons. The writers were trying to do a really hamfisted allegory about fossil fuel depletion, even though the parallel doesn't work because dilithium isn't a fuel. Omega particle detonations damage subspace for millions of years, meaning the destruction wouldn't be "fixable". Pretty much every established technology would be left unusable, forcing them to totally reinvent the setting.

Yeah, this trailer does have a lack of emotion to it doesn't it? Everything is a sort of neutral "I'm coming off dental anesthesia" or dull surprise at best.

Y'know what Starfeet Academy really needs? Hammy 40's newsreel announcer guy from Star Wars: the Clone Wars. I feel like all the absurdity, all the pants-on-head stupidity, and all the completely inane character writing could only be improved with a sassy matter-of-fact voiceover. The season one finale - and, sadly, not series finale - is "Rubincon". Did the screenwriting team (or ChatGPT) forget to use spellcheck? That's not how you spell Rubicon. Oh well, here goes something... This is an Idiot Plot. A story that is literally only possible because everyone in it is behaving as stupidly as possible at all times. There's a wonderful little meta moment where Nus Braka makes a string of forced and painfully unfunny jokes and then gets upset that nobody is laughing. You can almost hear the writers speaking through him, demanding to know why almost nobody likes this show and why the studio had to resort to an astroturfing campaign to try to depict its critics as paid trolls. "Come on, guys, I made a funny! Laugh!" - it's almost the perfect encapsulation of every moment of dogsh*t writing in this series. So... the Doctor's mobile emitter from Voyager is back. It was at this point that the Paramount+ app on my streaming pod died... apparently a valiant suicide attempt to save me from the rest of this episode. Honestly... Braka's making some excellent points here. Yeah, his slant is obvious but he's actually got Ake's number on several topics especially how she dragooned Caleb Mir into Starfleet by giving him a choice between service or a death sentence in an alien gulag. We learn that the guy that Caleb's mom went to prison as an accessory to the murder of was on his last rotation before retirement, because no cliche is getting left behind today. Using a real element in Braka's speech earlier turns out to have been a mistake, as the writers are now inventing fictional properties to the stuff... Honestly, the fleet shots we get in this episode serve to remind how little Starfleet Academy resembles Star Trek. So few of those ships look like they belong to Star Trek at all, many look like they'd be more at home in Star Wars. Very little of the franchise's iconic design language is on display. The credits definitely make it feel like they weren't expecting the series to get renewed too, going through the cast's childhood photos (or younger photos of the older cast) in a setup that feels like it was designed for a series finale. With the first season of Starfleet Academy now officially over, I can say this of it. It sucks. It really sucks. To paraphrase the composer Gioachino Rossini: "It has some good moments, but awful quarters of an hour." There are a few moments of solid character writing scattered across its ten episodes, but the vast majority of the series is just pure low-effort slop. It'd be a fairly generic, but painfully unfunny, coming-of-age school dramedy if it weren't for the paper-thin Star Trek veneer over the proceedings. The writing is fairly cringeworthy throughout and has three main recurring problems: It's incredibly patronizing. The cadets are meant to be audience surrogates, and it's incredibly clear the showrunners do not respect their intended audience. The cadets are audience surrogates and college-age students who the series insistently treats like unruly primary school children most of the time. As much as it tries to respect past Star Trek, it can't help sh*tting all over it. Not just in depicting this class of cadets as immature morons, fratboys, and meatheads who lack all of Starfleet's signature discipline and desire to learn. They also unintentionally assassinate several legacy characters. Especially Ben Sisko, who is ex post facto turned into the absent black father his actor Avery Brooks fought so hard to not present him as. It's clear the respect for past material is purely superficial and an attempt to get fans invested in the series. Every time the series attempts to step away from generic fratboy hijinks and do actual Star Trek-like storytelling it immediately serves up an idiot plot every time. The whole crisis defining the second half of the season was brought about by a string of unforced obvious errors by Captain Ake, whose depiction veers from desperate to reckless to simply out-and-out incompetent most of the time. These problems were/are fixable. This series could be made watchable, if not actually good. I definitely agree with how it landed on Rotten Tomatoes and other review aggregators. It's not as dog**** as Discovery, but it's still noticeably worse than Strange New Worlds's worst effort and light years short of the high mark set by Prodigy and Lower Decks.

Huh... so... yeah... that was certainly a trailer. Kind of an underwhelming one when all's said and done. I'm sure that was probably meant to be weathergirl getting possessed by aliens, but between the face she was making and the sound effects all it was missing to be a rejected Pepto-Bismol ad spot was the tagline "Where will you be when diarrhea strikes?". Kind of a tension-destroying audio choice... unless you're the one mopping the floors, I guess. Having the aliens come to Humanity speaking the dreaded language of the Ta-ko B'el (or is that Wytte Kast-El?) feels like a "fire your sound engineer" sort of decision. Doing another movie around the fairly generic premise of the government covering up the existence of aliens until first contact because Mankind Is Not Ready is certainly a choice too. That premise aged like milk, and in the present day it seems especially silly and unbelievable. Unless they've got a better trailer waiting in the wings, I'm definitely waiting for this to hit streaming.

Hopefully we'll get news of the western release soon.

They have their own approach to it... The Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force has a profound love of theme naming. In most cases, all the ships of a particular class follow the same theme. You've got the usual ones named for provinces, towns, islands, peninsulas, etc. Then you've got the ones where they really went ham with it and every ship of the class is named for kinds of rain, or wave, or ocean current or just different adjectives stuck in front of a common word. <Something> Dragon, <Something> Moon, <Something> Whale, etc. China does something similar, with all their submarines of a type have the same name. All the boomer subs are Long March #, and all the regular ones are Great Wall #. Maybe farther down the road, once some of these emigrant governments in Macross are more established, we'll start seeing more idiosyncratic naming schemes for their warships. (Though I guess it's pretty hard to maintain a theme across potentially hundreds of warships.)

Nah, this is what happens when Dave Filoni has creative control. IMO, there's not a lot of difference between his output and an AI tool's. They both mindlessly regurgitate and recombine preexisting material into a glorified mad-lib story because they lack imagination. The AI does it because that's all it's really capable of. Filoni does it because he thinks that's actually a good way to write. Everything has to be a crossover, a callback, a continuity nod, or a cameo. Every character has to know, meet, or be related to every other character with the fewest possible degrees of separation. I'm sure Filoni didn't think it out any farther than "Well, Mando's going to an ice planet so we have to have tauntauns". One more callback in a promo that's been nothing but.

The leftmost one definitely has two. I have a question of my own, though... there are no runners on that sled. Did the LucasFilm art department forget to model them or is Mando completely unnecessarily having a bunch of animals draw a powered hovercraft?

It's all fun and games until someone has to actually serve on the Northampton-class Domo Arigato Mr. Furigato. Well, you'd think with dozens of different nations right here on Earth each maintaining their own navy there'd be some pretty significant variation in naming schemes... but most of them go in for the same basic strategy of naming ships after places (major cities, states/provinces/counties, landmarks), heads of state, celebrated veterans, objects of national pride (e.g. official state flowers, birds, etc.), or various adjectives of an aspirational nature (e.g. "fearless"). Most of the emigrant fleets and planets don't have enough history yet to have their own body of celebrated veterans, heads of state, etc. and the like to name ships after.

Dave Filoni really is starting as he means to go on, eh? Everything's a Clone Wars callback.😅

The final twist of the knife is that the fansub groups who are distributing the leaked version w/ subtitles are crediting Khara with the raw release.😆 Yoko Taro has to be wondering WTH kind of amateur-hour circus he just signed up to work with after this.

Oh hey, isn't that the short we've been hearing about that was supposed to be event exclusive, got camripped basically immediately, and then Khara accidentally leaked the actual file by attaching it to their DMCA takedown requests for the bootleg uploads? 😆

I can't speak to the concert Blu-rays. That's not really my thing, so I haven't collected them. Macross Frontier has two movies: The False Songstress and The Wings of Goodbye. The two films together form a single DYRL?-style alternate version of the events of Macross Frontier's TV series with different approaches to the characters, some original designs, etc. It also has one epilogue OVA, The Labyrinth of Time, which is packaged with the second of Macross Delta's movies, because they were released together as a double-feature. There is also the aforementioned Macross 7 crossover/clipshow OVA thing Macross FB7: Listen to my Song!, which is kind of a 7-Frontier mashup similar to Flash Back 2012. Macross Delta has two movies: Passionate Walkure and Absolute Live!!!!!!. The first (Passionate Walkure) is a DYRL?-style retelling of the events of the Macross Delta TV series, albeit without much in the way of new/original design works or radical changes. The second film (Absolute Live!!!!!!) is an all-new original story set after the events of the first film with an emphasis on wrapping up the various dangling threads of character arcs for characters like Hayate, Freyja, and Mirage. Absolute Live!!!!!! also came packaged with Macross Frontier's epilogue short The Labyrinth of Time.

Aside from any eccentricities specific to your preferred online storefront, the main thing you have to worry about is sticker shock from the cost of physical media and the cost of the international shipping. CDJapan has been my preferred store for a couple years now. I've generally had a very good, problem-free experience with them. I've typically used DHL or FedEx for international express shipment and that's been largely problem free for me aside from one or two delays in customs. Yes. Yeah, aside from I think one specific box set the Macross Frontier releases are Japanese-only while all the Macross Delta Blu-rays were cheekily given English subs in anticipation of them being purchased internationally in defiance of Harmony Gold's then-ongoing blockage of licensing outside Japan. Quite good, IMO. The movies, mainly. You've already covered Macross II and Macross Plus. The Macross 7 "Complete Fire" two-volume box set has all the Macross 7 supplemental material including the Macross Dynamite 7 OVA, Macross 7: the Galaxy is Calling Me! movie, the Macross 7 PLUS omakes, and the unbroadcasted episodes sometimes referred to as Macross 7 Encore. Macross FB7: Listen to My Song! is sold separately, and the Macross Frontier: the Labyrinth of Time is included with the blu-ray of the second Macross Delta movie. Macross Zero's available in the US already, so you don't have to worry about that one.

I'd just cross my fingers and hope that all copies of that one were lost in the war. ... a few of those you might be able to get away with. 😅 There's a city named Broken Arrow in Oklahoma, for instance, and we know they name ships and classes after municipalities still (e.g. Northampton, Uraga, Brampton). You could probably get away with Hunter's Moon too... we've had Silver Moon and Red Moon. There've been a few warships named Chameleon already. A few named Legion too. Star Runner doesn't sound too out of place either. Kickboxer wouldn't even look that out-of-place... the US and British navies have had a BUNCH of ships named Boxer (and yes, the original ship was named for the sport). I'd be worried about a ship named the Hard Boiled. That seems like they'd cause a lot of unnecessary property damage. In the wise words of Radiohead... "You do it to yourself, you do. And that's what really hurts."

Wasn't Stealth a box office flop? 😆 A Japanese wiki editor reached out to me and mentioned that we do see one named ship of the class, apparently named Akatsuki for one of several old IJN warships. Gotta confirm their source, but that's a start.

I just realized, Nus Braka's whole master plan is just...

S1 E9 "300th Night" really has a hum-dinger of a description. Imagine a protagonist being so completely dim-witted that this is actually a choice at all. I would give real money for the next season to drop Stephen Colbert. His role in this series is not funny. It's cringe. Pure, undiluted cringe. And just in case we thought this setting couldn't get any stupider... it immediately gets EXPONENTIALLY stupider once Admiral Vance calls up Team Incompetence to let them know what their ten-thumbed Pakled-tier ineptitude in that hostage situation allowed the Venari Ral to steal. My head hurts from watching this. Why does every character have a room temperature-at-best IQ? So... why are there transwarp tunnels still? Discovery never really addressed that. The Borg transwarp network collapsed eight hundred years ago when Voyager infected the Borg Queen with that pathogen and blew up the hub. It's at this moment that it struck me... I am unspeakably bored with this. There is no payoff here, because Caleb's mom is an undeveloped flat character and Caleb himself is barely developed and kind of an unlikeable git. We either waited way too long for this, or not nearly long enough. Either way, it lands with a thud. What is with this series and Starfleet ships apparently being made of crepe paper and wishful thinking? Only now that Braka has played his hand does Ake finally figure out what Braka's plan was.

Candidly? No, you really aren't missing anything. There are occasional moments where the writers almost seem to grasp what Star Trek is about, but then they lapse back into churning out faintly patronizing Discoveryslop.

True, though the state of technology and manufacturing even in the early emigrant era would make not using these things arguably much harder than using them. They were using municipal thermonuclear reactors even before the first emigrant ships launched. (With populations living in the spartan conditions of early emigrant fleets already being prone to riot when conditions are bad per Macross Chronicle, needlessly antagonizing the populace seems like a pretty awful long-term career strategy.) Even just plugging a disused Destroid into an energy capacitor to power the grid could provide enough power for hundreds of homes. The Tomahawk's backup generator has the lowest output of any of the Series 04's, and it's still producing 450kW. That's a huge amount of power in household terms. IIRC, 60A/100V is still pretty high-end for a home main breaker in Japan. That's 6kW peak load and by the 80% rule for electrical breakers a peak sustained load of about 4.8kW. That single Tomahawk's backup generator is enough for powering 93 houses at peak sustainable load by Japanese standards. A Phalanx's more robust backup generator could do over 200. A single VF-1 Valkyrie reactor? 135,416 6kW home main panels at nominal output (354,166 at maximum). Maybe, but it seems very unlikely given that no attempt has been made to connect that throwaway line from Macross Plus to fold carbon or fold quartz the way that they have with the hyperspace resonance lens from Macross VF-X2 or the crystalline bodies of the galactic whales in Macross Dynamite 7. I'd have to check, but I don't think Macross 7: the Galaxy is Calling Me! ever explains what the mineral the locals are so keyed up over - Barnagium - is used for. That the locals are ready to pop a cap in Basara's ass just for being there suggests the stuff is really valuable, though we're never told anything about it besides the name. It seems likely to be a liquid or gaseous, though, since the town appears to be full of pumpjacks and we never see any other mining equipment. Oh yeah, no fanfic is ever going to be perfect... but it's clear that they put a lot of love and thought into their work and trying to make it consistent with the show to the greatest extent possible, and I respect the hell out of that. Or it's made of a different material and isn't actually rusted? Materials shouldn't oxidize in space. Describing it as "the remains of a former self-propelled colony capsule" suggests that there used to be more of it... meaning the Akusho district might not even be an entire ship in its own right. It may be a leftover piece of a larger ship that was scrapped or was abandoned for some reason. "Self-propelled" doesn't necessarily mean "fold-capable" either. Yeah, as I'm sure you recall my project over the last few years has been examining how the lore has changed over the years. The coal mining outpost on Banipal still makes no sense in context or out. Especially once fold crystals were introduced to the setting. Humanity doesn't mine fold carbon, since they can synthesize it in industrial quantities. They "mine" for fold quartz... which is a polite euphemism for digging up former Vajra hives or pillaging Protoculture ruins for those rare samples of fold quartz. "Fold coal" is supposedly the lowest purity crude fold quartz... the stuff that we're told is borderline a waste product of thermonuclear reactors and fold systems. It's unlikely they would mine for it when they're making the stuff whether they want to or not. In fairness, the difference there is almost entirely just a superficial terminology change. They didn't really change anything about how it works or the fact that it's energy waves caused by sentient thoughts and emotions in higher-dimensional/fold space. Even making flowers bloom with it was something they were already doing in Macross 7. They just applied a more scientific name to it because the existing in-universe term wouldn't be coined for another thirty-something years of in-universe time. Yeah, the novelization of Macross Frontier explicitly connected the hyperspace resonance lenses of VF-X2 to fold quartz. Prior to that the only connection between fold systems and anything crystalline was the implication from Macross Dynamite 7 that something about the crystalline bodies of the plant-mineral galactic whales could be used to make high-end spaceship engines. That feels a bit misrepresentative... esp. since many of those early terrorist incidents are Zentradi who haven't adapted to peaceful life and the later ones were regular people being put in impossible positions by an increasingly oppressive fascist movement inside the New UN Forces not necessarily something motivated by a desire for independence. One thing to note with Master File is that, like Sky Angels before it, while it may be "not official setting" its information tends to bleed into the official setting fairly easily. Not the historical stuff, but the technical details. Quite a lot of the material related to the Daedalus, Prometheus, ARMD-class, VF-1, SF-3A, and QF-3000 comes to us not from TV series-era official media but the Sky Angels doujinshi and has since been retroactively adopted. We've been seeing examples of that almost since the Master File series started, and that's grown more pronounced since Absolute Live!!!!!! due to the lack of information about the movie's mecha in any official source. There are some obvious problems with the material, but if you leave those aside a lot of what it's in there fits quite nicely with existing material and there are plenty of examples of official material building on it directly. Novels referencing Master File designs, encyclopedias pulling specs from Master File, etc. Considering the coal mines only come up in terms of possible punishment assignments for Isamu, odds are the intent never went any farther than sounding like an absolutely horrid posting the Spacy's #1 regifted problem child would not enjoy. Haruna not Hakuna, lol. It's named either for dormant volcano Mount Haruna in Gunma prefecture or for one of the Japanese warships named for said mountain... either the Kongou-class battleship Haruna from WW2 (that ARMD-10 was named for) or the Haruna-class destroyer JS Haruna used by the JMSDF from 1972-2009.

The Akusho-type is too new... it screams 2030s construction, and seems natively compatible with a late 2030s 3rd Generation emigrant ship. Whether it even has an independent propulsion system is unknown. The Qultra Queleual-class, well... that'd be the obvious choice among Zentradi ships since it's a comparatively lightly-armed ship that is basically a massive box designed to have the maximum possible carrying capacity. If you're looking to haul a lot of stuff in the short term, it's probably about the best option available at the time. They do, though given what we know of fold carbon and the fact that fold quartz was not properly known or understood until the late 2040s it seems unlikely that anyone was out there mining for fold carbon when it could be synthesized in industrial quantities. (The assumption that fold carbon was being mined at all comes from the bizarre statement about the presence of coal mines on one emigrant planet... a material that would be totally useless to a civilization with ultra-high efficiency renewable energy sources and thermonuclear fusion power.) Yeah, Circle FANKY's Battleships of the Galaxy Vol.2 gives the ship the unofficial/fan name of "Osaka-class". Max's first command, which he is promoted to at the end of Macross M3 Episode 6, is the stealth space cruiser Haruna. (ステルス宇宙巡洋艦ハルナ suterusu uchuu jun'youkan Haruna) Oddly, this is the second Spacy ship Haruna with the first having been ARMD-10. We're never told what class the second Haruna was, but given the circumstances it's probably also an Algenicus-type stealth space cruiser. It's perhaps worth mentioning that FANKY's attempt to explain the nonexistence of the Frontier stealth cruiser in Macross 7 is that the class was not introduced until ~2041, which would pass the sniff test as a justification for why it is not seen among the Earth defense flotilla in 2040 or the 37th fleet in 2045-6 but is present in the 55th fleet forces. Official media generally suggests that the Macross 7-era ships are mostly products of the very late 2020s and early-to-mid 2030s. The Northampton-class seems to be the oldest, being present in the Macross 1 fleet alongside ARMD II-class space carriers while later fleets had the Guantanamo-class and Uraga-class.

The New UN Spacy stealth cruiser is presented as a distinct class of warship separate from the Northampton-class frigate it's based on. The problem is that it is has only ever officially been referred to as "stealth cruiser", never by any kind of name in official media. It's listed in Macross Chronicle as "Space Cruiser Stealth Cruiser".

Which was initially difficult to explain, but now has an easy/obvious answer in "they're just using larger and/or higher-purity fold crystals in the fold system". Ever since Macross Frontier - or technically Macross Dynamite 7 - the size and quality of the fold crystals used in many forms of overtechnology has been the go-to explanation for differences in performance and capability in almost every major form of overtechnology. High-purity fold crystals are in high demand in the military and private sectors for use in fold navigation, fold communication, cross-dimensional radar, thermonuclear reactors, gravity and inertia controllers, beam weapons, and so many more technologies essential to Humanity's burgeoning interstellar civilization. It certainly explains why the poachers in Macross Dynamite 7 were so determined and so suspiciously well-connected. The previous vague statements about how the products of galactic whales could be used in spacecraft engines almost certainly means they contain very high-purity fold carbon which would naturally be a rare and high-demand material until synthesis processes caught up. It may well be. Jupiter is a gas giant, after all. It may not have a surface you can stand on but that doesn't mean it doesn't have obvious value beyond pure scientific curiosity. It's basically a giant ball of fuel that mother nature obligingly gathered into one place. The atmosphere is principally hydrogen and helium isotopes, meaning collection and processing of atmospheric gases can yield valuable fuels for thermonuclear reactors as well as elemental hydrogen gas for use in fuel cells and combustion engines. (Gundam's Universal Century timeline has permanent colonies around Jupiter for the same purpose, to extract and process deuterium and helium-3 to be shipped back to Earth in the massive tankers of the Jupiter Energy Fleet.) Yeah, we gotta go through that footage and find the first one that gets named and just use that... the same way Star Trek does for ships without an official class name. Available materials suggest they used lightly converted Zentradi ships from the former Vrlitwhai branch fleet. Having remained within a 100ly distance of Earth means they were able to lean much more heavily on Earth for resources to set up their colonies too. There's definitely an element of luck to it. The process of exploration, at least as it's been defined for the audience, is pretty simple. The emigrant fleet folds into a region of space and dispatches pilot fleets from its escort that scout out the nearby star systems for either usable resources or viable planets to colonize. If they don't find a suitable planet among the star systems they've scouted in that region they jump to the next likely area their advance scouting detail identified. They repeat this process until they find a suitable planet. They lack Star Trek-style FTL sensors that can identify habitable worlds from light years away and the means to scan the worlds they pass while folding (because fold navigation is basically teleporting) so a map of the space they're exploring might look like a string of pearls with each pearl being the sphere of space they studied between fold jumps.