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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    It does a bit, yeah... It'd probably have helped matters if Abrams had gone into his bastardization of Star Trek with a plan for a story arc. The original six Star Trek movies have some overarching themes that help link them up into a rough story arc about Kirk, Spock, and McCoy coming to terms with growing older and Kirk having to confront true no-win scenarios and accept loss. The Kelvin Trek movies don't really have anything like that... which might hurt the fourth installment, since it doesn't really have anything to build on.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... hm... really, I feel like that's almost a symptom of a deeper, more fundamental problem with the character. The James T. Kirk of the official Star Trek timeline was a decent, upstanding, highly principled man and a hard worker. The James T. Kirk of the Kelvin timeline is a sh*theel. And not even a capable sh*theel, come to that. His (dubious) achievements are mostly attributable to a combination of riding his dead hero father's coattails and nepotism from his father's friend Captain Christopher Pike. He's infuriating because most of us have known someone exactly like him. He's that one brainless jock who peaked in, and mentally never left, high school. The one who gets admitted to college as a legacy and joins the frat his father belonged to in order to spend his days drinking cheap beer, smoking pot, and trying to pick up every girl who'll give him the time of day while trusting his father's connections to keep him from being expelled or worse. He's unprofessional and his rank is undeserved, but that's really just a symptom of the fact that he's so painfully underdeveloped as a character that he's mostly just a flat character mindlessly going through the motions of Kirk's backstory armed with only the jokes Star Trek fans have always made about the behavior of Shatner's Kirk. To be frank, it's just lazy writing. The studio wanted an origin story, but for some reason they felt compelled to make it a shared origin story for ABSOLUTELY EVERYONE instead of for the main character. So there's a lot of moon logic in play to make it work. Hrm... I disagree, for one main reason. From its inception, Star Trek's Starfleet was always intended to be at-most Mildly Military. Gene and co. were insistent even in the early development of the original Star Trek that Starfleet was a non-military space exploration service. A future analogue of NASA (and the Soviet space program). That aspect actually got carried forward throughout the prime timeline clear to the end of Enterprise, with references to Starfleet being an outgrowth of the United Earth Space Probe Agency. It wasn't until Nicholas Meyer took the helm in Star Trek II: the Wrath of Khan that Starfleet started adopting the trappings of modern navies with any real devotion. Of course, those trappings also disappeared when he left because the creators working on the TV shows and most of the movies were following the originally laid-down concept that Starfleet was the Federation's space agency not its armed forces. That idea also got carried through into Enterprise, where there was a clear distinction drawn between Earth Starfleet's personnel and the Earth military's MACOs. It's not that the production staffs of the pre-Kelvin Star Trek works didn't know how the military works... it's that they were specifically NOT depicting Starfleet as a military. It's not a bug, it's a feature. What Abrams did was just take that to its illogical extreme with a Designated Hero who has to be The Captain because he's famous in the real world as Captain Kirk, not Cadet Kirk, so the plot bends over backwards and makes confetti out of common sense to make it happen.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Odd thought... if they wanted to do Kelvin Trek 4 as a comedy-focused story like Star Trek IV: the Voyage Home, Seth MacFarlane would actually be a pretty good fit given his work on The Orville. I might actually go see that in theaters if they did it. I know it's been said that they've thrown out several story treatments for Kelvin Trek 4 because the studio rejected them or actors were unavailable/too expensive...
  4. Seto Kaiba
    If the only thing that entertains you is mindless violence, you need help. Badly. The arts do not exist purely to entertain, artistic expression is a form of communication and education. Star Trek has always been political, always been driven by social commentary, to the extent that it would not be even a slight exaggeration to say that that is very much The Point of the franchise. How subtle it's been about it has varied over the years, but it has always been driven by that. If that bothers you, then Star Trek isn't for you and it never will be. Y'see, Star Trek's creators were/are educated people... people who paid enough attention in their history, political science, and civics classes to know that western democracies aren't exactly different in that regard. Imperialist western democracies like the US, Great Britain, etc. have perpetrated just as many horrors as the "Communist" or fascist autocracies... in many cases the exact same horrors attributed to the Communists, as a hostile joint venture with them in the great zero-sum game that was the Cold War. Star Trek is not exactly a subtle voice on that topic. Indeed, there's hardly any bit of scenery without toothmarks once they really get going about the Cold War. They, and indeed most Star Trek fans, would find your argument here hilariously hypocritical. Doubly so since you profess your favorite Trek movie is Undiscovered Country... you're basically making the exact same unconvincing argument as Cartwright or Chang, the villains of the piece. Nobody in this universe - or any other - cares. For the record, Paramount has tried going the "dumb action movie" route with Star Trek several times in the past and it has never ended well for them It was the cause of two of the three worst financial disasters in the franchise's history: Star Trek: Nemesis and Star Trek: Beyond. Might be four for five given Paramount+'s significant losses, poor reviews, and slow-to-minimal merchandise returns for Discovery and Picard as well. Yeah, that's definitely been a spanner in the works for new Trek. Though, IMO, the reason that's such a problem is because [CBS/ViacomCBS/Paramount] insisted on retrying ideas that they knew from past experience didn't work. It's a big universe. All they needed to do was put enough space - literal and/or chronological - between the new developments and previous material to prevent any crossover and the creative staff would have had a lot more freedom to work. A lot of new Trek's problems - especially with the Kelvin movies - stem from trying to simultaneously hold existing material at arm's length and lean on it to drive sales. If they'd either just made a new main timeline Trek movie or done a straight AU story focused on an all new group of original characters they'd be in better condition than they are now because they would either be able to lean on continuity fully or dispense with it fully and do their own thing. By trying to have it both ways, they're trying to run a marathon while dragging a bicycle behind them. Seth MacFarlane has, at least, proven that you can do something that respects the spirit of Star Trek without any direct connection to existing material as long as you have decent writing behind it. Kelvin Trek 4 - or Star Trek XIV - is probably not going to get made, IMO. If it does, I expect it'll run afoul of the same problems that sank the previous three because Paramount doesn't learn from its mistakes anymore. I dunno... Mel Brooks kind of lost his touch as time went on. The remake of The Producers was pretty weak stuff compared to the original.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    If there is, it's never been published.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    It loses a certain je ne sais quoi without the Scooby-Doo scrambling noises...
  7. Seto Kaiba
    ... I would think the answer would be obvious. You're not going to be able to march an infantry column very far - or at all, really - through the vacuum of space. The Zentradi are a predominantly fleet-based space force waging a forever war against another predominantly fleet-based space force. Aside from basic deck protection duties in case the ship is boarded like in DYRL?, there's not a lot for infantry to do. It's not like they can roll down a window and start shooting out. Battles take place at ranges of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of kilometers, well beyond the reach of man-portable weapons. Most operations against enemy forces based on a planet take the form of a massed bombardment of the planet's surface, which also leaves little for infantry to do. Not to mention the Regult battle pod is more agile and more heavily armed than a soldier on foot. Yes and no. That first one is an unarmored regular-duty space suit used by regular crewmen and various battle pod pilots. The second one is an armored space suit used by some battle pod, battle suit, and light spacecraft pilots.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    ... I see the dial marked "DRAMA" in Doomcock's lair still hasn't been turned down to a reasonable level. As far as I can tell, there is not a (direct) reaction to the announcement of Abrams Trek 4, Strange New Worlds, the impending cancellation of Picard, or Discovery's terrible reviews. It's a reaction to three factors: ViacomCBS's decision to rebrand itself again... this time to "Paramount Global". (Multiple rebrandings in a short span of time not being indicative of stability.) A lukewarm 2021 Q4 earnings call that confirmed that, while total revenues and subscribership are up, direct-to-customer (streaming) is hemorrhaging money like nobody's business and the rate at which it's hemorrhaging money is expected to increase for years to come. They're losing over $1B a year on Paramount+ and that's expected to go nowhere but up thanks to significant increases in spending on new content development. Guggenheim Partners, Bank of America, and other financial institutions downgrading the stock's rating based on reassessment of its risk level. This is actually the third time since December last that the stock has dipped this low... which is nothing compared to the 62% plummet the stock took back in mid-March 2021 after ViacomCBS execs moved to raise $3B for streaming development by selling stock. That dip had nothing to do with anything except the erosion of shareholder positions due to the massive spike in the number of shares in circulation. Granted, that Paramount+ is losing over a billion dollars a year does reflect rather poorly on its incredibly expensive, poorly-received, flagship shows Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Picard... but that doesn't really have any connection to the proposed Star Trek XIV, which is almost certainly not going to be bankrolled by Paramount to begin with. (Finding someone willing to fund it is a whole other kettle of particularly odious fish considering the last installment finished well in the red... but hey.) Yeah, the old Trek movies did a lot of strange things to work their way around various aspects of the MPAA's guidelines.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Not that I'm aware of. The production reason was that the MPAA of the time would have slapped an R rating on Undiscovered Country had the blood been red. I know the production staff have excused or dismissed it on occasion by claiming it was an effect of microgravity on the blood. ... eh, if you completely miss the point of Star Trek, maybe. The endless technobabble is iconic of Star Trek, so to most viewers that's a feature not a bug. 😉 Janeway's inconsistent characterization was partly just bad writing and partly executive meddling, but it is an oft-cited complaint with the series even by its cast. Kate Mulgrew has previously opined that inconsistent writing makes Janeway come off as having an undiagnosed bipolar disorder. Not that I am aware of. Species 8472 largely buggers off after "In the Flesh" and aren't really heard from again afterwards. I don't recall Roddenberry ever putting a label on his personal political views. He is on record as saying that Star Trek reflects his philosophy on things like politics, racial justice, and social/religious matters. The United Federation of Planets was always Gene's allegorical stand-in for the United States... albeit a future, "perfected" version of the United States that actually practiced what it preached regarding equality, liberty, personal responsibility, etc. and had resolved all contemporary sociopolitical problems like racism, sexism, inequality, and so on. If you were to put a modern label on it, the Federation is a post-scarcity democratic socialist state not a communist one. They've gone back and forth on whether or not there was money in the Federation depending on the writer, but they've never depicted an absence of property rights or autonomy... only that, in an enlightened post-scarcity society, there isn't a social emphasis on accumulating material possessions anymore. Mind you, Roddenberry was an educated man and knew full bloody well that the Red Scare was nothing more than a convenient and well-traveled boogeyman politicians used on the naïve and credulous to justify the ever-escalating Cold War defense spending that was returning to them as kickbacks and donations and as a way to demonize any movement intent on sociopolitical reform like labor unions, feminism, and the civil rights movement. In modern terms, much like insecure 90's kids falling back on "gay" as the I-don't-have-a-decent-comeback comeback, calling someone a "dirty commie" was nothing more than a cheap ad hominem used by people who didn't have a cogent counterargument. 😉 He displayed his disgust for such blatant chicanery in "Encounter at Farpoint", when one of Q's attempts to cajole the Enterprise into returning to Earth took the form of dressing up like a Cold War-era USMC Captain and imploring Picard to "go back to [his] world and put an end to the commies". Picard casually dismisses it as nonsense with barely disguised incredulity.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Considering preventing alterations to the timeline - retroactively or otherwise - is literally their job, it's kind of amazing they haven't stepped up to do something about it. (The DTI novels, amusingly, did have the TIC retrocausally prevent the existence of a timeline based on the rejected series pitch that became Discovery's 3rd season... and get rather cross about having to do so.)
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Now now... his other achievements include getting the sh*t kicked out of him repeatedly, getting accused of having sex with farm animals, and admitting to having sex with farm animals (allegedly in jest, but I have my doubts). Maybe they can salvage it down the road by reinventing him as Harry Flashman... he's certainly enough of a tosspot to walk into that role without issue. It couldn't possibly be as bad as the proposed Section 31 series... Though time travel in Trek is messy enough as it is, and I'm still waiting for the 29th century Temporal Integrity Commission or 31st century Federation Temporal Agency to roll up and make the Kelvin timeline un-happen.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    When they fit with the story, sure. Being a more cerebral sort of sci-fi, Star Trek doesn't offer quite as many opportunities to work that kind of thing into the story and when they become a bit too frequent it starts to feel out of character for the series and the franchise. Deep Space Nine balanced it with a lot of character-heavy breather episodes in the Dominion War story arc, though Voyager's story got criticized a lot more heavily for its increased emphasis on action in later seasons and Enterprise really felt the impact of (relative) darkness-induced audience apathy as the Temporal Cold War story arc dragged on. The space battles and other action sequences were a lot easier to justify when it was the TOS crew under Jim Kirk, since they were always more a "cowboy cop" outfit. When the movies turned to the TNG cast under Jean-Luc Picard it got a lot harder to take seriously. Picard was a consummate diplomat who always had a vocal disdain for violence, so to many fans it felt like a bad fit when Insurrection and Nemesis tried to turn him into an action hero. (After all, he had Riker for when things needed to get physical...) It's more a bell curve sort of situation, really. The producers and writers had Roddenberry on a short leash because he, like George Lucas, was a good idea man but a desperately awful writer. TOS was a lot of allegorical morality tales, but it was tempered by the staff reining in Roddenberry's excesses. When he slipped the leash and secured full control of TNG in its development the staff really struggled under his rather dictatorial edicts as he took the utopian concept to its illogical extreme by mandating that the crew were all just such consummate professionals that interpersonal conflicts weren't a thing anymore. Everyone had to be a Saint, and that made the series boring. After he was ousted, the new showrunners reversed course back towards the more nuanced and tempered version of that utopian vision that'd been used in TOS. DS9 was itself an act of rebellion against his crazy edicts, and spent a lot of time exploring the logical implications of that kind of setting without actually compromising the core of that vision of a more enlightened future. Sisko's "Saints in Paradise" speech is basically a distillation of what DS9's showrunners thought of the unchecked Gene Roddenberry's creative edicts. Whether or not it goes over well is all about managing audience expectations. People expect to see amazing space battle action sequences in, say, Star Wars... it's right in the title. It's not something people usually come to Star Trek for... which was part of why the action-centric Abrams movies didn't test well.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, even the most devoted Star Trek fans will generally admit Trek movies in general are VERY hit-and-miss. Usually, you'll hear that the even-numbered movies (Wrath of Khan, Voyage Home, Undiscovered Country, First Contact) are the good ones and the odd-numbered movies (The Motion Picture, Search for Spock, Final Frontier, Generations, Insurrection) range from "less good" to "just plain bad". It wasn't until Nemesis - the 10th and final Trek movie - that the pattern finally broke with a lamentably bad even-numbered movie. The Abrams movies... the first one wasn't bad, but it wasn't in any way memorable either. The second was a real stinker, and the third bombed badly enough that it killed the series and lost enough money to leave the whole affair a wash if not a loss. Not a lot of enthusiasm among fans for Kelvin Trek 4. The reactions I've seen have been more like a wary sort of "I wonder how they'll screw THIS up".
  14. Seto Kaiba
    As ever, it's weirdly impressive how completely you miss the point of any story that isn't about endless pointless warfare. It's enough to make me rather worried about you, TBH. Star Trek has always been high-concept sci-fi about allegorically examining the human condition and the promise of a better, brighter future where the better angels of human nature have prevailed. It's never exactly been super subtle with its allegory either. It's what separates it from the thousands of generic sci-fi or sci-fa titles that are just weak excuses for a bunch of ray gun battle action scenes. The questionable writing inherent in terrible fanfic-tier ideas like the uber-powerful black starship with the edgy name aside, that Admiral Marcus had colluded with an unsanctioned rogue intelligence agency to launch a genocidal preemptive strike against the Klingons was the giveaway that he was The Bad Guy... because that's massively counter to Federation ideals on top of being shady AF and a great way to start an unnecessary war for no reason. It's a great example of the kind of dodgy, ill-conceived writing that we've come to expect from the so-called "Kelvin timeline". It's not really Star Trek, it's a generic sci-fi action movie thinly disguised as Star Trek... like a mockbuster, but higher budget.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    I'm not sure that's actually an obstacle. I'm kind of hesitant to just say it in plain language out of respect for the late Mr. Yelchin... but I don't think audiences are really all that attached to, or invested in, the Abrams Star Trek cast. The Abrams movies were stand-alone, and even their positive reviews tend to mention how forgettable the films are. The Abrams cast isn't immediately recognizable and associated with the characters the way the TOS and TNG casts were/are because they haven't been around long enough to build up the necessary familiarity. So they could probably recast Chekhov (and any number of other characters) without anyone really noticing or caring.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Well, yeah... if you're only looking at the raw box office gross and literally nothing else. The problem with that view is that it's so badly out-of-context that it's a meaningless factoid. Yeah, the new movies brought in more dollars in absolute and unqualified terms... but that ignores literal decades of inflation, the increase in ticket prices over that period, the simply gargantuan literal order of magnitude difference in product costs, etc. Unadjusted for inflation, Star Trek: Into Darkness had a worldwide box office gross five times the size of Star Trek II: the Wrath of Khan's... but it cost 15.5x as much to make. Adjusted for inflation, Into Darkness cost 6.5x as much to make and only earned about twice as much. So the ratio of box office gross to budget actually massively favors Wrath of Khan (2.5x vs 8.1x). Even that is a pretty significant distortion, however, because it doesn't account for advertising spending. The global advertising blitz that accompanied Into Darkness is estimated to have left only about $30M of the film's $467.4M box office take as actual profit. Adjusted for inflation, if Wrath of Khan made $12.5M or more in profit in 1982, it outperformed Into Darkness. If only the international box office take was profit, Wrath of Khan blew Into Darkness into the weeds. (If you look at the cost performance of Trek movies in terms of spend vs. box office gross as a percentage, Into Darkness is outperformed by every single pre-Abrams movie except Insurrection and Nemesis, two films virtually all Trekkies agree were stinkers. In those terms, Into Darkness is the franchise's third-worst performer overall, slightly behind Final Frontier, and Beyond is the second-worst, with Nemesis taking the all time turdburger prize it so richly deserves.)
  17. Seto Kaiba
    General audiences and their investors kind of already did. Into Darkness struggled to break even and Beyond finished deep enough in the red to obliterate the modest profits from Into Darkness too. That was what motivated the investors to tell Paramount to stick part 4 in their ear.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Eech... I hope not. If it didn't work the first three times, why would the fourth time be the charm?
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Yes, but that page exists for one and only one reason... to explain why the VF-19F and VF-19S pages did not update to use the Macross Chronicle numbers. It's a good one, sure as sure. 😂
  20. Seto Kaiba
    That whole page essentially IS the annotation... or perhaps it might be fairer to call it a lengthy footnote. The main articles for the VF-19F and VF-19S direct the reader there to see the explanation for why the engine output is NOT derived from Macross Chronicle.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    In short, the engine outputs given for the VF-19F and VF-19S in the original and revised editions of Macross Chronicle are aligned with each other... but not with any of the previously published official material. That fact - combined with Chronicle's rather nonsensical attempt to justify it - is why the Mecha Manual opted to continue with the figures given in previous official publications that are logically more consistent with the rest of the VF-19F/S's stats and common sense. It's not misleading, it's a deliberate (and annotated!) dismissal of an obvious error/inconsistency. If you have two aircraft that are virtually identical in every way except one is slightly heavier and has a lot less engine power... the heavier one with less engine power is not going to be faster at altitude or climb faster from sea level. That's some extremely basic physics. Indeed. I've added it to my notes for those mecha as well.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Further to the topic about nozzles... Variable Fighter Master File: VF-1 Battroid Valkyrie pg66 indicates the presence of a mechanical variable-aperture sub-nozzle just outside the VF-1's engine. It's not a huge choke, but it's between the end of the engine and the thrust vectoring nozzle (almost on top of the back end of the engine) and can swing down into the space there to choke the exhaust flow. No, I'm afraid it doesn't offer any cutaways of the Super Pack itself. As for what should be inside of the large/main nozzles... a black void is about on brand, since the fuel grain of a hybrid rocket is basically just like a model rocket engine (a cylinder of fuel with a cylindrical hole down the middle) but without an oxidizer mixed into the fuel.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Looking at the above, that may explain why the official line in Chronicle is that the VF-19 Kai started life as a VF-19F...
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Look at those numbers again. I'm going to highlight the bits that changed in red for reading convenience. The old Macross Compendium value gives the VF-19S's engines a rated output of 78,950kg. Macross Chronicle, for whatever reason, listed it as 68,950kg... which is different from both 78,950kg AND the 68,500kg value. Macross Chronicle's number is neither the higher nor the lower number. It's 10,000kg different from the higher value, and 450kg different from the lower value. Likewise, for the VF-19F, they inexplicably seem to have transposed a digit from the lower value on the VF-19S's specs into the VF-19F's original listed rating. The VF-19F was given an original listed thrust of 72,500kg, but Macross Chronicle listed it as 78,500kg. That's... not what it says at all. I know the wording is confusing, but please look again. So... funny story... I was doing some digging thru old boxes and such looking for the sources of some of these numbers and I think I found the actual answer. Macross 7's artbooks didn't really print decent specs for the mecha, so the specs we have originally came with toy and model kit packaging. The reason for the bracketry in the old Compendium article has nothing to do with space vs. atmospheric use... it's because the Bandai 1/100 VF-19 "Blazer Valkyrie" was originally a combo kit that could let you build the F type or S type. The Bandai 1/100 scale kit packaging presents the performance specs thusly: VF-19S: 78,950kg VF-19F: 68,500kg VF-19 Kai: 72,500kg This is repeated between the original 1994-1995 run and the 1997 reissue Bandai 1/100 plamodels, and on the Bandai 1/65 scale toys. Now, you'll notice this is very different to the numbers that came along later on. The VF-19S is unchanged, but the VF-19F has the bracketed number from the old Compendium's stats and the VF-19 Kai Fire Valkyrie has the 72,500kg figure we normally associate with the VF-19F. Somewhere along the way, the VF-19 Kai's 72,500kg thrust got changed to 82,500kg of thrust and the VF-19F inherited the previous 72,500kg figure, leaving the 68,500kg figure it had previously had as a now-invalid value. Presumably because, for most of the time, the VF-19F and VF-19 Kai were both listed as equipping the FF-2500F engine. The reason it's listed 78,950kg [68,500kg] on the old Compendium is because that's how it was listed on the old kits, which were set up to let you make either a VF-19S or a VF-19F depending on which head you built and which decals you applied. So it doesn't appear to be a space vs. atmosphere thing... more a lazy model kit manual writer trying to be as concise as possible with the printed stats so they wouldn't crowd out the printed art and product photos.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Supposedly the gel is inert until it's heated past a certain point, so it can't be ignited accidentally. It's not a great angle, but remember these are artistic impressions meant to look cool... not necessarily be 100% technically accurate. The bay in the VF-19's legs is actually quite shallow, and depends heavily on the concavity of the door. Nope, the topic has not been touched on since Macross Chronicle and Variable Fighter Master File came out... mainly because there haven't been any new publications covering the Macross 7-era variants since. When Mr March and I were working on that section, a transposition error is all we could come up with to explain the very very obvious discrepancies between what was written in the Macross Chronicle Mechanic sheets, what had previously been available, and common sense. Not the only typographical error in Macross Chronicle by quite a ways either. For the record, it's the hobby magazines, model kits, and toys from the time Macross 7 was coming out. The Bandai 1/65 scale VF-19S toy, for instance, lists the VF-19S as it appears on the old Compendium page, with a mass of 8,620kg and thrust of 2x78,950kg. Macross Chronicle demonstrably did change what'd previously been published... though, given the nature of the error, we suspect it was unintentional.
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