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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Because the guns on those escorts are nowhere near as big or as killy... they're probably about comparable to the larger turret-mounted guns of a Battle-class given their size. Not to mention a Battle-class's heavy quantum reaction cannon is an anti-fleet weapon, it has a LOT more firepower and the ability to kill whole squadrons of ships in a single shot... and the Battle-class also carries nearly a thousand Valkyries, potentially with thermonuclear reaction weaponry.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    It is the only known example of a 4th Generation emigrant ship to date.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Huh, for some reason your site's getting tagged as Unsafe by various security software including Norton SafeWeb?
  4. Seto Kaiba
    ... you weren't kidding, that's an Unpopular Opinion.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    's it just me or are those links not working? Is it that time of year already, @sketchley?
  6. Seto Kaiba
    It is, in fact, a different Eden. Turns out the One Steve Limit isn't rigidly enforced when it comes to naming planets? Makes you wonder if there's an Eden 2 out there. I can see the emigration advert now: EDEN 2: EDEN HARDER
  7. Seto Kaiba
    So... the Island Jackpot is a bit of a sticky wicket in and of itself. Despite being a reuse of the Macross Frontier series CG model for Island-1, albeit scaled down and with a new interior texture, it seems to have been intended as a stand-in for one of the very earliest City-class emigrant ships built before the armored "shell" was added to the design like those that accompanied the Macross 1 fleet. For what it's worth, the Macross 1 and Macross 2 are the only ones from that period not accounted for in terms of an established settlement. Macross 3 settled Eden 3 in 2040 before being forced to abandon it, Macross 4 settled Sephira, and we know Macross 5 was built with a shell and settled on Lux before being destroyed. The City-class, in all of its various permutations, was a 3rd Generation emigrant ship design. 1st Generation: Megaroad-class 2nd Generation: ? Possibly the converted Zentradi ships used in short-distance emigrant fleets 3rd Generation: City-class 4th Generation: Mainland-class? 5th Generation: Island Cluster-class
  8. Seto Kaiba
    It's gonna be the hardest of all hard passes from me. Star Trek: Picard's season one was some real weak sh*t that absolutely stank of desperation and the most abject irrelevance. Its continuation is a monument to the Sunk Costs Fallacy, if nothing else. Its viewership numbers were trash on CBS All Access in the US and worse abroad. It was supposed to sell on the strengths of the new characters, but nobody liked or cared about Picard's pack of Kirkland brand Ethnic Supporting Characters™ and their respective incoherent paper-thin "tragic" backstories. So now ViacomCBS is selling off stock to pay for this sad mess and they still have to depend on TNG walk-ons to keep anyone watching. Someone needs to gently remove Sir Patrick (and everyone else, TBH) from the writer's room and make sure the doors are locked so he can't get back in.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Your mind's ear can really hear the hollow "thud" followed by the wet fingers-on-glass noise of him descending the side of the VF-19...
  10. Seto Kaiba
    ... OK, I have to admit you managed to actually stump me a good ten, maybe fifteen, minutes there. (Seriously, a full on "Perhaps the archives are incomplete" moment...) It's the designation that threw me. Until now, I'd never heard of a predecessor to the SF-3A Lancer II from Super Dimension Fortress Macross being mentioned. I'd only ever seen the one isolated mention of a successor craft (no art) designated SF-5X. Nor had I heard of an official setting design named "Hound Dog". So I was well and truly lost until it occurred to me that it might be one of the unused designs conceived during the development of the original series... and lo and behold, there it was in the bottom left corner of page 242 of Macross: Perfect Memory. It is named "Hound Dog" (ハウンド・ドーグ) but it's not designated SF-1. It's described as a "Stratosphere+Space Fighter" (成層圏+宇宙戦闘機), and it's noted that the design is a final draft that was not included in the main story.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Greetings! The highest-numbered emigrant fleet that has been mentioned as launching from Earth was the Macross 29 fleet... also known as the 59th Large-Scale Long-Distance Emigrant Fleet. It was the setting for the 2012 stage musical Macross the Musiculture. Prior to that, the highest-numbered emigrant fleet launched from Earth that we know about was the Macross 25 fleet, also known as Macross Frontier, or the 55th Large-Scale Long-Distance Emigrant Fleet. Of course, those fleets have been in space for decades by the time they appear in their respective stories, so there is almost certainly a much higher-numbered fleet from Earth that just hasn't appeared or been mentioned yet. The Macross 11 fleet's environment ship is said to be a transitional type between the 3rd Generation City-class and 5th Generation Island Cluster-class, though it is still technically a 3rd Generation emigrant ship. The Macross Galaxy fleet's Mainland is the only example we've seen of a 4th Generation emigrant ship, but it is also noted to be a very unconventional design because of Macross Galaxy's adoption of many radical new technologies and minimal interest in things like the comfort of its population. (It's kind of a cyberpunk dystopian city in space.) No problems there.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    But that's only a rough-order estimate assuming a uniform distribution of personnel across all ship types in a Zentradi Main Fleet. That number is skewed pretty badly by the existence of the Mobile Fortress. A ship several times the size of the entire Japanese archipelago like the TV version Fulbtzs Berrentzs-class mothership likely has a gargantuan crew appropriate to its size. (Japan in 1982 was home to 118 million people, a ship several times its area could easily be home to half a billion or more.) Then, of course, the crew size is naturally going to vary by the size and role of the warship. The small 500m-class pickets are likely to have crews of a few dozen to a hundred or so based on their size in scale to their crews, and the larger warships are obviously going to have thousands. Macross Chronicle rolls with the assessment that Chlore's fleet is 500 times the size of the Macross 7 fleet, making it ~97,000 ships. She doesn't have a mobile fortress, and like most Zentradi forces and the Spacy itself a lot of her fleet's ships are picket ships. Odds are she actually has around half the number you computed based on the raw average, and probably less than that given that the females were elite forces with lower numbers than the males to begin with. Still a pretty substantial population, but not unmanageably so. Assuming they decide to settle on a world at all.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Even he's not THAT crazy... though those mad lads did rig zip lines all over the space between buildings where Basara usually parks it, so he ziplines down to it like a 60's superhero or something. (Which is almost exactly as dangerous, except you're trusting your grip strength instead of your aim.) They only use the winch thing like once or twice, and every other time they just put the Valkyrie in GERWALK mode with the nose to the ground and a hand out or have some other way to get into it like the Battroid being on its back. There's a whole bunch of scenes where they just don't show pilots embarking or disembarking to avoid having to work out how.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Variable Fighter Master File's volumes on the VF-1 offer some details about the Valkyrie's end-of-life with the New UN Forces after the First Space War. Both in terms of its service life extension upgrades (e.g. VF-1P, VF-1X) and what became of many of the VF-1 units that were not decommissioned and sold off to private buyers. Many, particularly a postwar model designated VF-1L, were converted into radio-controlled target aircraft for training exercises with live weaponry. The VF-1 Valkyrie has an embarkation ladder that collapses into the side of the cockpit in fighter mode. It's seen a bunch in the original series. The VF-19 is shown to have a winch with a foot stirrup and handgrip in Macross 7.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Probably purchased after the Destroids were decommissioned and sold off as potential industrial equipment as a museum piece. Eh... yes and no, but more no than yes. Many of the VF-1's seen in Macross 7 are supposedly units disarmed and sold off to civilians by the New UN Forces after the VF-1 was retired from service. Many more, according to Master File, met their end as target aircraft in training exercises with live weaponry. Past that point, most of the VF-1's we see in civilian hands are purpose-built civilian models which use more modern hardware and software.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    The Strongest Sage with the Weakest Crest is a strong contender for this season's worst-written series. It's not an Isekai series, but it indulges heavily in the same kind of over-the-top power fantasy that's the stock in trade of the very worst examples of that genre. The story makes zero effort to disguise that Matthias is a boring invincible protagonist. Everything he does in the first episode is treated as Beyond the Impossible in the story. So much so that the magic school he enrolls in appoints him a teacher despite him being only twelve years old, and entrusts him with the revival and promulgation of a nearly-extinct branch of magic that he's already an expert in... and the episode's barely half over. By the end of it, he's engaging in DIO levels of questionable time measurement, exposing a demon masquerading as a human under an assumed (and hilariously paper-thin) name at a higher-tier sister school, exposing an ancient conspiracy by demons to undermine all of humanity, and killing said demon infiltrator in one hit. You can't have drama if there are no stakes... and you can't have reasonable stakes if your heroic protagonist is so overpowered that they are, for all practical intents and purposes, invincible and all-capable. (You can make it work with a villain protagonist, as in Overlord, but then a Bad End is effectively a foregone conclusion and the main source of drama has to either be wholly internal to the villain protagonist's side or the open-ended question of when, why, and how the more heroic characters are going to lose and die horribly when their abilities fall VERY short of the mark.)
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Miss Kuroitsu in the Monster Development Department... is... good lord, how do I explain this premise? It's a tokusatsu superhero slice-of-life/office comedy about the titular Miss Kuroitsu's daily struggles as a punch-clock villain working the 9-5 as a lab assistant in Monster R&D for the obligatory villainous secret organization that's trying to take over the world. ... wow, that sentence was a rollercoaster from start to finish. I have to admit, I'm curious to see where this one's going, if only because the premise is completely bonkers. The first episode has a terribly relatable moment where Kuroitsu has to give a presentation on her superior's half-arsed deadline-stretching mess of a design to a management review and gets grilled savagely, right down to the punny name chosen for it, before it gets rejected. It's also surreal and surprisingly funny to see the intimidating tokusatsu main villain drop by the office as if he were a completely ordinary middle manager and starts lecturing them about how he could've covered for them if they'd let him know they were behind and then launches into a villainous monologue about avoiding burning out due to overwork and the need for skilled staff to take proper care of themselves. (Say what you will, apparently the world of organized villainy understands good employee relations?) EDIT: Good lord, episode 2 is like a punch right in the soul to anyone who's worked in forward model development. Too relatable.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Getting started with this season's new offerings while I work on sprint planning in IBM Rational Jazz. 🤢 Attack on Titan: the Final Season remains a tedious exercise at best. The original manga's awful art style aside, the novelty of its premise as a horror series wore off extremely quickly in the face of the story's unrelenting darkness and misery and the simple fact that the more you show a monster in a horror story the less scary it becomes. The Titans no longer invoke a sense of horror because they've become mundane. The final story arc feels like the author's love letter to antisemitism and fascism, and is also so tedious and unrelentingly grim it has no real impact as political commentary, horror entertainment, or anything else. The only satisfaction in watching it limp to its long overdue ending is knowing that soon we won't have to hear about it anymore. In the Land of Leadale is another minimum effort entry in the Isekai genre. It seems like it's trying to be How NOT to Summon a Demon Lord without the fanservice, drawing a lot of its inspiration for the character's circumstances from Overlord instead. The main character is a girl named Keina who was on life support for an extended duration after a car crash which killed her parents, and spent all her time playing a MMORPG called Leadale in which she became a stupidly overpowered competitive player due to her playing it constantly. She dies when the hospital loses power, and finds she's been reincarnated as her character in the world of Leadale 200 years after the game's setting. It follows all the same plot points as How Not to Summon a Demon Lord, just without the blatant fanservice.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    If it's not inconvenient, sure, I'd appreciate that. Obviously no rush, I'll have my nose to the grindstone until a week from Tuesday anyway.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    No, she is not an emancipated minor. Mylene is just living that old cliche of the teen who wants to be independent and talks their parents into letting them get a place of their own, like Usa in Bokura wa Minna Kawaisou, Futaba in My Senpai is Annoying, etc. etc.. She lives in an upscale condo in City-7 paid for by her parents, she drives a car given to her by her parents, and before Fire Bomber got its big break was almost certainly living on a stipend provided by her parents to cover her living expenses. Mylene just has super-indulgent parents who try to respect her desire to be independent as much as is feasible. (I privately entertain the hypothesis that Max and Milia jumped at the chance to get #8 out of the house so they could get some alone time.) For a year or two, anyway... not that he actually needed to. He was just a lazy and indecisive bum with no concept of what he wanted to do or be until he jumped into that downed VF-171 and discovered a love of flying.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    As in the real world, the New UN Forces appear to be willing to recruit people who are underage provided they'll reach legal adulthood by the time their training is complete. With the Space Forces pilot school being a three-year program, the minimum age by special admission under normal circumstances is probably 14. Gamlin, you'll notice, joined at 15 and graduated a year early but was still a legal adult (17) at the time of his graduation Mylene being 14 seems to be a bit of a special case, since the unit she joined are irregulars with special non-trainable abilities.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Pretty sure that's supposed to be a baby Mylene.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Thanks for taking the time to look for me. Shame, I was really hoping to get some actual specs for this damnable thing... because it is one of the prettiest of the VF-31s.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    We have that little detail via two characters: Macross 7's Gamlin Kizaki and Macross VF-X2's Aegis Focker. The former finished the three year program in two years, the latter having to repeat a year as punishment for AWOL. (For comparison, the US Navy's flight training is a four step program of 3 weeks of on-ground introductory instruction, 22 weeks of basic pilot training, 27 weeks of intermediate level pilot training, and 27 weeks of advanced pilot training to qualify as a pilot. That's a bit over a year and a half, though that doesn't count any other training or service obligations. The equivalent in Macross seems to be a combination of that plus a military academy.) Hikaru's abbreviated training of approximately a month was facilitated by him already being a qualified and highly skilled pilot. Basara had private schooling from a former New UN Forces ace pilot and Mylene's parents... well... see for yourself. Alto Saotome already had nearly two years of flight school under his belt before joining SMS. Hayate seems a little under-trained, given that Arad gave him one month for training and he blew off most of his actual lessons. It seems pretty irresponsible of Arad, in hindsight, given that the rest of his unit were ex-NUNS types who presumably went through the three year long flight training program.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Random question for anyone who got this one... Does the manual have the usual info blurb with stats at the front of it?
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