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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    That and "Do they still sings songs about the Great Tribble Hunt?"
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Even better from that episode is Worf's non-answer to the TOS Klingons. "We do not talk about it."
  3. Seto Kaiba
    TOS understandably had some Early Installment Weirdness caused by the setting still being developed, some wardrobe issues, and some differences in creative vision between its principal creative leads. Sort of. The uniform's color (or accent color on later shows) denotes the Starfleet service division the character belongs to. The three main service divisions are the Command division, Operations Division, and Sciences Division. Command division personnel are the ones on a career path towards starship or starbase command and other positions of similar authority. Science division personnel are specialists in various fields of scientific research like the ship's medical staff, resident experts in things like linguistics, biology, chemistry, astrophysics, and the like. Operations is basically everything else, covering the gamut of practical needs that make a ship work like engineering personnel, logistical support personnel, subject matter experts in various portions of starship operations, and the ship's security force. Prior to the 2350s, the Command division wore gold, the Science division wore blue, and the Operations division wore red. After the 2350s, the Command division and Operations division switched colors so Command personnel wore red and Operations wore gold. In TOS, the banding around the cuffs denotes rank and follows the same pattern used in US Navy officer uniforms. There is some early installment weirdness involving certain characters belonging to other divisions. It's also possible to switch between divisions, with later titles establishing that most Command personnel start out in other divisions to gain experience. (Most notably, Worf transfers from the Operations division to Command division in DS9 when he joins the series, which is why he switches from a gold-trimmed uniform to a red-trimmed one after accepting a posting on the station.) The TOS movies introduced a different color scheme for the undershirts that went with the "monster maroon" uniforms that had more variations for specific specialisms. Nah, that's just early installment weirdness in play... they retooled the uniforms after the pilot. Though Starfleet does change its uniform design fairly often in-universe, with several shows highlighting the introduction of new uniform styles like DS9 introducing the type used for much of its run and VOY's, First Contact introducing the uniform that became the standard for everyone except Voyager's crew thereafter, and Discovery's second season introducing a more TOS-like uniform to replace the much-maligned blue pajamas of that show's first season. There are a bunch of minor uniform variants scattered about the series though. Kirk has one dress uniform variant that's a double-breasted shirt in green, there was a short sleeved variant in TMP, the undershirt-less version of the maroons that showed up in flashbacks in TNG, the unisex "skant" from TNG, and a few others along the way.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    *whistles* Now that's an extra-risky move, considering the fanbase's general opinion of Star Trek V: the Final Frontier closely mirror's Roddenberry's. He had a lock on the uncoveted status of the TOS era's most loathed character before his adopted sister Michael Burnham was introduced in Star Trek: Discovery. Then again, I guess I shouldn't be surprised. Strange New Worlds seems to be on a five year mission to make as many references to previous Star Trek titles as possible... to the extent that I'm almost tempted to suggest they change the title to Strange Old Worlds. Still light years better than previous attempts at new Trek tho, which is damned by the very faintest praise possible.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    For the longest time, it wasn't. Gene Roddenberry was unhappy with how Star Trek: the Animated series turned out and declared it non-canonical in the runup to Star Trek: the Motion Picture in the late 70's. Few of Gene's increasingly vitriolic declarations were taken seriously by Paramount, with only three really carrying any weight: Star Trek licensed works are non-canonical. Star Trek: the Animated Series is non-canonical and not to be referenced. Star Trek V: the Final Frontier is at-best apocryphal and is not to be referenced. The first and third rules on that list have been adhered to religiously, but the second started losing ground shortly after Gene was ousted and kicked upstairs. After his passing, writers started gradually slipping references to TAS into mainstream Star Trek and increasing amounts of references in licensed works (esp. the Starfleet Corps of Engineers novel series). Their token insistence that TAS was non-canon lasted until 2006, when Paramount publicly reversed itself and reinstated TAS into the canon shortly before the series was re-released on DVD. So now it's kind of back to being the final two years of Kirk's five year mission... and, semi-officially, a big part of the reason that Starfleet suspected Kirk was trolling them and making things up with some of the reports they received from him. Lower Decks seems to take particular delight in referencing TAS's campier moments, but nods to TAS have shown up in DS9, ENT, the "Star Trek 2.0" remaster, and Discovery so far. The remaster was very much a labor of love. They did a fantastic job of it, IMO.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    If memory serves, that rumor started because they did remaster selected scenes from Deep Space Nine for the What We Left Behind special that came out back in 2018. Originally the plan was to remaster all the older Star Trek shows in that manner. The official word at the time was that plans for "DS9 2.0" and "VOY 2.0" were put on indefinite hold after the "TNG 2.0" remaster was less enthusiastically received than expected.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Based on my research into publicly-accessible military standards documents on laser safety, yes... the laser sensors would be a lower class. Depending on type, the military-use ones are anywhere from Class 1 (eye-safe) to Class 3B (eye protection necessary to protect against direct exposure). Guide laser oscillators are probably 3B or 3A. LIDAR systems tend to be Class 1 or 2.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    My favorite TOS moment actually comes from the tell-all book The Making of Star Trek. When they were shooting "The Cage", apparently nobody told the film processing company that Vina-as-the-Orion-slave-girl was supposed to be green. So they'd shoot that scene and send it out for processing, and the processor would dutifully correct "[the actress's] sh*tty green skin tones" in processing before sending the processed reels back. The team at Desilu would promptly scratch their heads and wonder how the very-obviously-green Vina had come back with normal skin tones in the processed reels, and reshoot it with another, greener body paint. This loop happened several times before someone thought to ask the processor what was going on and the poor man, practically in tears, explained that he had been furiously color-correcting Vina under the assumption that it was a lighting problem that was causing her to show up green.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, yeah. TOS was the first one to get remastered. At the time, they branded the remaster as "Star Trek 2.0". They had first-generation camera negatives to work with for most of the footage and they did a pretty good job of it. I remember when SpikeTV got it back when I was in college. It has its moments, for sure. Just not any of them in season three... those are bad moments. It was the very epitome of "troubled production" thanks to a lot of outside circumstances including fights over creative control, executive meddling, disputes between actors, and the like. If you want the complete experience, you might wanna combine your watch of that with TAS since that was supposed to be the remainder of Enterprise's five year mission before Kirk's tenure ended and he got bumped upstairs prior to TMP.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Crunchyroll started announcing its next season's offerings.. Classroom of the Elite S2 The Devil is a Part-Timer! S2 The Girl from the Other Side Fuuto Pi Rent a Girlfriend S2 Oddtaxi in the Woods Yurei Deco Black Summoner Dr. Stone Special Episode: Ryusui Dropkick on my Devil!!! X Engage Kiss Harem in the Labyrinth of Another World Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer Lycoris Recoil Musasi-No My Hero Academia S5 OVAs My Stepmom's Daughter is My Ex Obey Me! The Anime S2 Orient (2nd cour) RWBY: Ice Queendom Shadows House S2 Shine On! Bakumatsu Bad Boys Shoot! Goal to the Future Smile of the Arsnotoria Teppen!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Laughing 'Til You Cry The Maid I Hired Recently is Mysterious The Prince of Tennis II: U-17 World Cup The Yakuza's Guide to Babysitting Tonikawa: Over the Moon for You Special Episode Utawarerumono Mask of Truth Yurei Deco and at least seven more to be announced. Kinda hoping one will be a Macross title.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Just finished Love After World Domination. Definitely one of the season's stronger offerings, but the ending felt a bit... out of the blue? I know it can be hard to find a logical stopping point for a 12 episode-only anime that's adapting a manga, but the last episode is a "Giant Space Flea from Nowhere" plot. RPG Real Estate never really developed into anything of substance. It's just a cutesy slice of life schtick that is clearly aiming for the waifu crowd in a very halfhearted way. They tried to throw a serious plot in at the end, which fell embarrassingly flat. I would've liked it a lot better if they'd stuck with satirizing the (frankly absurd) housing market in Japan instead of the tedious sitcom nonsense they got up to instead. Good first episode, eleven episodes of bad followup. Don't Hurt Me, My Healer! unfortunately also started reasonably strong but quickly devolved into a stumbling mess with exactly one joke. Carla pretends to mishear something that is said to someone else and turns it into verbal abuse. It wasn't funny the first time, it wasn't funny the fiftieth. Nor, for that matter, is the endless repetition of the same plot where they go somewhere on a fetch quest and encounter some monster that conveniently isn't hostile and just wants to talk. It's not subverting expectations anymore when that's the standard form letter plot. Kaguya-sama: Love is War! season three remains a strong series to the finish. But then, that's one advantage of adapting a manga that's mostly finished AND was well divided into a story arc structure short enough to be adaptation-friendly. It'll be nice if they do a fourth arc to wrap up the entire story of the manga since now all that's left is the arc where...
  12. Seto Kaiba
    TOS is a product of its time for both good and bad. It's sooooo melodramatic at times, but that kind of camp and the terribly unsubtle musical cues and stings were the style at the time. It is pretty fun to watch a young Bill Shatner embark on his five year mission to ensure no piece of scenery is left without his teeth-marks though. Even more fun once you read a bit on it and realize how shoestring the whole affair was, and how much insane innovation and out-of-the-box thinking went into little stuff like props and set dressing. (Or how bad the costumes were, between the ones that had to be held up with double stick tape and the ones that had to be replaced every few weeks because they couldn't be washed without also shrinking.)
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Good lord that's pretty. The Mauler RoV-20 laser cannon is a 5,000kW (kilowatt) laser. I have to say, I love the attention to detail here. My inner engineer is torn over whether to keep the correct real-world classification of Class 4 from the warning placard on the side of the cannon or the fictional Class 5 from the tip of the barrel. Class 4 is currently a catchall for anything more powerful than Class 3B (which usually tops out around 0.5W or 30mJ depending on frequency and pulse duration). Those two labels should probably match either way, though.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    None, to be frank. That was the reason Palladium's introduction of rules for "IMUs" or "Frankenmecha" were not so much poorly received as they were laughed out of town. The few sample designs provided looked as terrible as you'd expect and combined parts from mecha of wildly different sizes without respect for scale... with fans immediately pointing out where that didn't, and couldn't, work. (The Auroran with Defender arms got dragged particularly hard, since the Defender's cannons are each physically bigger than the entire Auroran and they forgot about the ammunition entirely.) The human-built mecha of Southern Cross are around 6m tall, MOSPEADA's are ~8m, and Macross's are 10m+. The junkyard vomit that is the cobbled together battlepod replacements was just a bad stylistic choice that also failed to account for scale... but mechanical design is hard, and Palladium couldn't exactly afford to hire a professional, so they did the best they could within the constraints they had.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    It is never established how large the actual Mardook main fleet is. It's implied to be on par with a Zentradi main fleet and echoes the visual presentation of Boddole Zer's main fleet from DYRL very blatantly. The first scouting force the UN Spacy encounters when they defold near Mars is a 30 ship taskforce. Thereafter, the UN Spacy fights a series of branch fleet-sized forces indicated to be ~1,300 ships strong. The Mardook replace them pretty casually throughout. When the Macross Cannons destroy about 800 ships in a single shot in "Station Break", another even larger force immediately defolds into the combat area to replace that branch fleet while the main fleet is chilling out near what appears to be Saturn.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Well, The Greatest Demon Lord is Reborn as a Typical Nobody is... I'd like to call what it's doing "limping to a finish", but that would imply the story had some sense of direction. This is just a clusterf*ck of isekai protagonist tropes vaguely huddled together in the hopes of being mistaken for a narrative. This is the TV equivalent of shovelware. Cheap, low effort garbage hastily churned out in the hopes of riding some other title's coattails. I am flat amazed that this ever got the go-ahead from a production committee. Not only is the actual title false, but I get the feeling a more accurate one might be "Help, We Spent All The Budget on Animated Magic Circles!". Love After World Domination's latest episode was kind of iffy as well. I guess they're struggling to find a tidy way to wrap this up at twelve episodes.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    No other Mardook fleets are ever mentioned.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    TBH, I'm not sure. Macross II's setting plays by rather different rules. The Mardook were an overwhelmingly powerful foe to the UN Forces in Macross II because they were effectively immune to the Minmay Attack, meaning there was nothing stopping them from pressing the advantage of their superior technology and overwhelming numbers. Ingues's mobile fortress tanked hits from firepower far exceeding what a Battle-class can produce as well. I don't think a typical emigrant planet would have much chance against them simply because they have such a huge numerical advantage, which is not appreciably a different situation from just being attacked by a Zentradi main fleet. We don't have any real idea what Earth's actual offensive capabilities are in the main timeline beyond "really really good", so it's impossible to say. They've never had to face a second main fleet in their timeline the way that the UN Forces in Macross II have done.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Well, in Gundam certainly... I can't really think of any other franchise that does so on a regular basis, and even Gundam doesn't do it to THAT degree. That is in full-on junkyard robot territory.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    I'd be prepared to wager that the "fireworks" are exactly why the mods prohibited those topics. 🤣 If the strictly-objective aspects of the comparison interest you I can send you the information by PM as well.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Please forgive me if I misinterpreted your remark here... but the way I read it it sounds like you aren't aware that that "restyled" battlepod IS Palladium's art. Specifically, it's art from the last Robotech sourcebook Palladium published before losing the license for the second time: UEEF Marines. Palladium had to come up with its own art to replace the original, legally-problematic, art for the battlepod and destroid designs from the aborted Robotech II: the Sentinels series. They were also prohibited from doing anything of substance with the Sentinels plot itself due to HG's policy on that, so the book was mostly MOSPEADA concept art from the so-called Imai Files being given Robotech backstories and setting material that was Sentinels with the serial numbers filed off. Dunno why they decided to go with ugly kludges of bits from multiple mecha. The only possible explanation that springs to mind being they'd literally introduced a game mechanic to do exactly that in the previous book. Can't put that evil on Strange Machine.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Granted, Leon Fou Barfort is a bit of a bastard... but not irredeemably so, given that he's doing it deliberately to show his contempt for the ridiculously sexist lady land he's living in and to play the villain in order to get the otome game story back on the rails. He gets mixed results with it, but it does make him rather difficult to like. He has a few moments that make him less obnoxious if not mildly relatable, but he does seem to enjoy playing the villain rather a lot. It doesn't help that the rest of the cast isn't exactly developed beyond the cliches of the otome game he so hated.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... cross-universe "vs." topics are expressly prohibited by the forum rules, so I'd err on the side of "you shouldn't". What I'll say on the matter without indulging a direct comparison between settings is that the Invit/Invid are from a setting and story where technology is more "fifteen minutes into the future" and laser weapons replaced hard rounds for the logistical benefits rather than any performance advantage. I'll explain in more detail via PM. There were some... limits... imposed on the replacements for the Sentinels designs. After all, the reason they abandoned the original Sentinels designs was for fear of a lawsuit given how obviously derivative they were of Macross's designs.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Someone did it with the X-9's AI and an upgraded Variable Glaug. Maybe that concept was another casualty of the Sharon Apple incident.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah. This first happened in the Macross II timeline, where after the First Space War the surviving elements of Stonewell, Bellcom, Shinnakasu, and various others merged into the dominant player in the VF market in that timeline: the Takachihoff Corp. (Named after in-universe character Dr. H. Takachihoff, who was named in honor of Studio Nue cofounder and Crusher Joe and Dirty Pair creator Haruka Takachiho/Kimiyoshi Takekawa. Macross Plus later established that the same thing happened in the main timeline, with Stonewell, Bellcom, and Shinnakasu merging to form Shinsei Industry in 2012 and OTEC merging with the various destroid manufacturers to form General Galaxy in 2017. They didn't do great, but then neither did the VF-171s. The New UN Forces have their own separate units for Zentradi who prefer to live as giants, like the 33rd Marines in Macross Frontier. Veffidas was living planetside, though that was presumably before the ban on giant Zentradi on Earth came down at the end of 2030. Emilia's living on a remote planet that doesn't seem to have any strict laws against living as a giant, but the local populace are still afraid of her. Shinsei Industry was barking up that tree on and off for about twenty years, with various efforts to make the VF-19 actually-flyable by normal pilots. They don't seem to have ever achieved success in that regard and moved on to the YF-24 program and its derivatives.
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