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Seto Kaiba

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  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.)
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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".
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. 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.)
  11. 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.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Eech... I hope not. If it didn't work the first three times, why would the fourth time be the charm?
  13. 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. 😂
  14. 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.
  15. 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.
  16. 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.
  17. 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...
  18. 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.
  19. 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.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Master File's take on the VF-19 and VF-25 Super Packs is that they're using liquid fuel rocket motors... though the VF-19's is said to use hydrogen and oxygen stored as slush, while the VF-25's is said to use a gel monofuel that contains hydrogen and oxygen in high-density suspension that is decomposed using waste heat from the heat sequestration system inside the VF-25's wings to release the gaseous hydrogen and oxygen for combustion.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Disenchantment Part IV feels kind of directionless. For the third time, the big dramatic end-of-part cliffhanger is resolved in like fifteen minutes and quickly forgotten... then it's back to kind of uninspired hijinks until they start building up to the next one. It definitely isn't as fun as previous parts, and I honestly won't be surprised if Netflix doesn't pick it up for another season. It's kind of all buildup and no payoff.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    It makes perfect sense when you think about it. Hybrid rocket motors are mechanically simple and easy to manufacture, and they combine most of the advantages of both solid fuel rocket and liquid fuel rocket designs with few of the disadvantages, being able to burn a variety of different fuels with a variety of different liquid or gaseous oxidizers. They can be throttled like a liquid fuel rocket, but with a much lower degree of mechanical complexity. Simple enough to be easy to manufacture and cheap enough to throw away if the situation calls for it without breaking the bank. (Master File gives them a bit of extra credit by indicating the OTM-derived solid fuel is a plastic explosive-like fuel putty that is inert and can be handled and installed without needing special protective equipment.) The MythBusters made a bunch of different hybrid rockets. Their first, for "Confederate Rocket", was a couple lengths of schedule 40 plumbing pipe, four endcaps, a stopcock with a one-way valve, and a milled-graphite nozzle - a couple hundred bucks in plumbing parts all told - with a paraffin wax fuel and nitrous oxide oxidizer stage. Subsequent designs they tested used recycled paintball gun gas canisters full of nitrous and used fuels like dried salami, various kinds of processed gummy bears, and sun-dried dog feces. It's an impressive series of demonstrations of how absurdly simple and versatile the design is.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, they're hybrid rocket motors... solid fuel, liquid oxidizer.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Considering how engine designs changed between generations (as described previously) that may not be necessary with the fighter's ability to apply non-mechanical chokes using the GIC and the reconfigurable nozzle already present on the aircraft. Or, alternatively, since the choke moved outside the engine in subsequent designs it's possible that the conversion could simply be the installation of some optional hardware in the throat of the existing engine system, like how the VF-1 in Master File supposedly worked around its limited fuel initially by installing fuel bladders in the intakes. A pretty low-tech one, actually... the hybrid rocket motor's a technology that's been around since the 1930s, though Master File claims they're using an OTM-derived inert and non-toxic solid fuel instead of conventional solid fuels alongside their liquid oxygen oxidizer. The rest is just big honking pressurized fuel tanks for cryogenic fuel slush, which is ~1970s technology. Brute force solutions can be simple and effective as long as you're not overly concerned with efficiency. Internal ones? No. Reality ensued in that a transforming fighter automatically has less room for fuel because of all the mechanical bits and bobs, and the VF-1's design being set up to produce a Battroid approximately the size of a Zentradi only made the problem worse by constraining the size of the airframe overall to make it one of the smallest modern fighter jets around. External ones? Sure... that's what the FAST Packs on the sides of the legs are. Big honking fuel tanks. I've been working from home for two years and I swear I've changed time zones twenty or thirty times without leaving the house. Like jamming a HEMI into a smart car... lots of grunty multirole power, comparatively awful fuel efficiency and not nearly enough fuel tank to make it work. YF-29 what?
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Maybe? There hasn't been any direct mention of optimization of the engines themselves for space operations. Being space-optimized seems to mainly involve removing reworking aerodynamics to eliminate various atmosphere-only features like replacing canards with verniers, shortening wings, and fitting thrust-diverting vernier collars to the engine mounts. There is also mention of some other systems being exchanged for versions intended for extended space operations, but there is little in the way of specifics. I'll throw up a quick guide later. Eh... is it really slamming headfirst into reality if the problem is openly acknowledged as a design limitation in-universe? That thermonuclear reaction turbine engines are superefficient in atmosphere and have terrible efficiency in space has been a part of the setting pretty much from the outset, with the Super Pack being intended to address that specific deficiency in a brute force sort of way by adding more fuel and supplementary engines rather than addressing the defect in the engine concept. Later generation engine designs do have some cheats to work around the problem like the variable C-D nozzle structures mentioned previously... but also the use of Gravity and Inertia Control technology to provide additional flow compression as part of plasma confinement without the need for moving parts. The thermonuclear reaction burst turbines more innovative uses of gravity and inertia control are responsible for their far-greater efficiency and power compared to previous-generation engines. Master File explains that partly as being the use of the GIC to create an artificial high-pressure area of gravitational compression in the exhaust flow that acts as a sort of choke in and of itself to increase exhaust pressures when exhaust inflow forces matter out of the gravitational envelope and it explosively expands. lol, they rolled my arse outta bed for that one! Bingo... the whole reason FAST Packs exist being to work around the problems caused by having to adopt a multipurpose engine design and then sticking it in an airframe too small to carry enough fuel to guarantee an adequate operating time. The New UN Forces gained some ground by playing with existing GIC technology to provide new and exciting ways to cheat up the exhaust pressure as a workaround, and fold quartz is only going to make those more potent when humanity finally figures out how to synthesize it.
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