Jump to content

Seto Kaiba

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    12767

  • Joined

  • Last visited

 Content Type 

Everything posted by Seto Kaiba

  1. Seto Kaiba
    IMO, that's the opposite of a problem. The start is so compelling who gives a toss about the remaining episodes. They could have stopped it after episode 7 and it would've still been great.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Started The Faraway Paladin. Honestly, the first five episodes or so were quite well-executed... that they managed to present the situation in a relatively interesting and engaging manner despite it being another bloody isekai is a point in their favor for sure.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    It doesn't have to be a heavy quantum reaction beam cannon... and it almost certainly isn't one. New UN Forces escort warships generally can't meet the energy and cooling system requirements of a Macross cannon. The vast majority of ship-based beam weaponry are the more conventional charged particle beam weapons that scale so easily from mecha to large warship turrets. It wouldn't be at all difficult to just mount a large fixed electron beam cannon down the throat of a Guantanamo's front dock for temporary bombardment use without needing to extensively modify the rest of the ship.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Nope. I've only ever seen them referred to as "Defense Satellite". Can't recall having ever seen any proper line art for them... which'd be why you don't see them on M3. Considering the Guantanamo-class is basically a hollow rectangular prism, it doesn't even necessarily need to be a variant... they could've just stuck a temporary-use beam cannon down the main gate of the hangar. Either that or one of the defensive turrets is firing a massively overpowered blast.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    As far as we know, the New UN Government established after the First Space War never bothered to revisit the Grand Cannon concept. The Earth UN Government and its UN Forces designed a lot of their defenses - including the Destroids and Grand Cannons - around the belief that an alien attack on Earth would take the form of an invasion. They were expecting a fleet to roll up and try to land ground forces with a goal of conquering the planet intact. Destroids were built to fight an alien invasion force on the ground, and Grand Cannons were built to sweep orbital space clean of the alien ships supporting the ground-based invasion force after the Spacy's defense had either been overcome or forced to retreat. They were caught completely flat-footed by the actual tactics of space warfare as employed by the Zentradi, who couldn't have cared less about capturing the planet intact and simply rolled up en masse to convert it into a parking lot with orbital bombardments. After the war, the New UN Government and New UN Forces were wiser for the experience and suitably chastend by the total defeat their predecessored suffered... and structured their defense plans around those newly-learned realities of space warfare, with the overwhelming emphasis on space-based defenses to prevent enemy fleets from approaching. The Grand Cannons were undeniably incredibly powerful, but had simply been built for entirely the wrong kind of war.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    While it is true that the Frontier fleet is described as one of the wealthier emigrant governments, and likely got moreso once they settled on the Vajra planet with its rich reserves of fold quartz, slum districts have never been indicated to be commonplace among even struggling emigrant fleets. The Macross 7 fleet's Akusho district is a rare exception. Its official status as an unregistered emigrant ship occupying one of City-7's docking ports without permission is a pretty unconvincing cover story for its role in the military's top secret Project M. All pretense to the contrary seems to have been abandoned around the time Sound Force was officially established as it became their base of operations. Many of the buildings on its uppermost level were clearly in disrepair, but all of the utilities were still connected and working in that district and other than that the ship was obviously maintained in good working order. That "slum" district had power, oxygen and waste recycling, hot and cold running water, the same environmental simulation used in the main dome, cable TV and internet access, and free access to the rest of the fleet. It was less an actual slum and more a carefully managed simulation of one that was kept up so nobody would poke around a black project test site. Macross Galaxy is a different story. Despite its vast wealth, the fleet has massive income inequality and unemployment problems because the fleet's corporate government put efficiency above all else and converted much of its manufacturing to automated processes and eliminated manpower-intensive quality-of-life operations like the production and preparation of natural foods in the fleet's Sunnyflower-class and Riviera-class environment ships in favor of factory-produced synthetic food. Eliminating whole industries which previously employed a fair percentage of the fleet's population created widespread unemployment and led some districts within the fleet to deteriorate into slums as a result. It essentially only has slums by choice... Macross 29 was on its way to being a slum fleet, but that was another extreme scenario. The way the fleet is described makes it sound like the original goal was to be a Space Switzerland and provide a safe space for people sick of war by remaining neutral in all internal conflicts. It's not clear how well that worked out initially, but once they took that neutrality policy to the extreme of unarmed total pacifism reality ensued pretty quick. Other governments strongarmed them into badly unbalanced trade agreements that just about destroyed the fleet's economy and led to widespread unemployment and eventually to rioting in the streets. At the very least, the problem was being taken seriously and political activists had two different proposals for fixing the problem (maintaining pacifism and switching to cultural exports, or adopting Switzerland-style armed neutrality). He did, but then... he wasn't exactly so hard pressed by the Vajra situation that his fleet couldn't continue to operate normally. Even in the movie version, we see the fleet is still going about its daily business and even engaging in asteroid mining.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    True that, though I'd imagine there's got to be a pretty significant amount of cost going into both making them structurally sound enough to be walked in by a 6+ tonne lady and into making them comfortable enough for said 6+ tonne lady to wear for long periods. The heel especially would have to be made of some pretty tough stuff.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    To frame that excellent point in a usable perspective... The pair of heels on display behind Alto there are labeled as on sale. If the nonspecific future currency they use in the Macross Frontier fleet is functionally equivalent to the Japanese Yen, the sale price on those shoes with the exchange rate at the time this episode aired would've been approximately $35,318 (USD). You can get a brand new, current model year four door sedan from most any major automaker for well under that price point. The MSRP of the Toyota Prius that Island-1 is infested with modern imitations of (thanks CG stock models) was less than $22,000 in 2008. Marked down, those heels cost 160% of a new car. Hopefully that store is what it appears to be (a designer outlet) and all Zentradi clothes aren't THAT ruinously expensive. (You have to admit, a Zentradi mall brings a whole new, and entertainingly literal, meaning to "upscale" shopping...)
  9. Seto Kaiba
    More than that, they have twenty or so just at Earth. Factory satellites don't each make everything the Zentradi use, though. They produce one produce one particular thing all the way from mining raw material with robotic ships to the finished product. The factory satellites known to be in humanity's hands are mainly made for producing mecha, though humanity has modified them for other purposes including to serve as shipyards for building human-designed ships and to churn out material for use in Earth's postwar rebuilding and ecological recovery programs. They do make use of some of those factories to produce their own updated versions of the Zentradi mecha in limited quantities like the Queadluun-Rhea, the Super Glaug, and the Type 104 and 106 Regults. The logistics of supporting giant Zentradi troops are a hassle so there aren't tons of units of giant troops anymore when Valkyries are demonstrably a good deal more effective anyway.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Maybe, but it's not logistically feasible due to the lack of ships and personnel. The New UN Government only had a hundred or so secondhand Zentradi ships when the dust settled literally and figuratively on the First Space War. Many of those weren't in the best of shape either, and doing extensive retrofits on a Zentradi ship takes a significant investment of time, resources, and manpower that could potentially produce multiple of the smaller, more efficient, and stealthier human warship designs. There just weren't anywhere near enough ships to go around even if they hadn't repurposed some of the larger ones as short-distance emigrant ships. With the humankind seeding plan calling for emigrant fleets to be launched pretty much yearly, using smaller and more efficient human-made ships were the only real option. By the mid-2040s, there were something like 169 emigrant fleets of various sizes launched, ranging in size from tens of thousands to tens of millions of people and escort fleets of anywhere from a few dozen to hundreds of warships. Not to mention that, with the mechanics of space folding, you don't want the force that's scouting ahead of your emigrant fleet to be too far ahead or they can't meaningfully warn you about threats along your course. It can take a decade to cross the galaxy by space fold. If your scouts are years ahead if you, any warning they send is meaningless since conditions will have changed by the time you get there. Ships in general aren't indefinitely self-sufficient. Zentradi ships depend on the supplies from factory satellites, storage depots, and mobile fortresses to sustain operation out in deep space for months or years at a time. Humans have to drag massive space going factories with them and mine comets and asteroids to make ends meet on those long haul voyages, and even then they're noted to be not-terribly-comfortable places to live for most. So much so that the Sharon-type AI was created in part to use a mild hypnosis to help take the edge off and maintain public order in emigrant ships.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Thus far, the only sentient non-humanoid species to be depicted in Macross have been the incorporeal energy beings from higher-dimensional space that became the Protodeviln and the insectoid Vajra. The Vajra aren't individually intelligent, though, the consciousness exists "in the cloud" formed by their zero-time fold wave network so they only count en masse. Galactic whales were confirmed to be an intelligent form of life in Macross Dynamite 7... but the jury is out regarding exactly HOW intelligent. They're definitely not the purely instinct-driven hybrids of plant and mineral they were initially believed to be given that they were shown to be capable of complex communication. Most sentient life in the galaxy is humanoid, because the Protoculture made it in their image.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Each emigrant fleet charts its own course through space in search of a habitable world to settle. The short-distance emigrant fleets focused on exploring space within 100 light years of Earth, which led to the discovery of planets like Eden. The far larger long-distance emigrant fleet formations don't have a specific destination in mind, but they're not wandering aimlessly by any means. Even the fleets that don't have a general area of the galaxy in mind do quite a bit of planning before and after launch, and diligently scout out their chosen course and the area of space around it using small pilot fleets of escort ships. They look for all kinds of things like exploitable resources (e.g. asteroids or comets to mine), for inhabitable planets, for already-inhabited planets, for potential or actual threats like Zentradi fleets, etc. etc. For their part, the Zentradi don't really care about planets - inhabitable or otherwise - unless the Supervision Army is present. Their indoctrinated-in mindset is extremely simplistic. They care about finding and destroying their enemy, and everything that isn't related to that goes in a great big category of "that's nice, I don't care". It's been indicated that they're apathetic even towards potentially-dangerous navigational hazards like fold faults because they're not an enemy or potential enemy in the conventional sense. Being entirely fleet-based, they have no interest in planets unless the planet harbors an enemy or potential enemy. Emigrant fleets that bump into the Zentradi in open space or get unlucky enough to have a Zentradi fleet stumble on the planet they've settled on run the risk of being mistaken for Supervision Army or simply being attacked as a potential threat, which is why there are New UN Forces directives and guidelines involving destroying rogue Zentradi fleets (e.g. "Fleet of the Strongest Women") or avoiding them whenever possible. TL;DR: the Zentradi have probably stumbled across a lot of potentially inhabitable planets... but unless there's something to fight there it's not something that they bother with.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    That, of course, being why we're all very confused by the Battle Astraea... it looks for all the world to be a repaired, recommissioned Battle Galaxy, which shouldn't be possible given the ship was destroyed in both versions of Macross Frontier. Even if the wreckage was still orbiting the Vajra planet, you don't just sell off the wreck of a fleet flagship-grade space warship that was beyond state of the art just a few years prior. (Someone has some explaining to do.) (Unless, of course, there was more than one. An oft-overlooked detail of the old City-class environment ships is that they technically had provision for THREE Battle-class ships to dock there even if they typically only had the primary dock occupied.)
  14. Seto Kaiba
    For those interested in music/music history, I found a rather good documentary... Spike Jones Off the Record: the Man Who Murdered Music. He was basically the Weird Al Yankovic of the 40's and 50's.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Most of the way through season two of Let's Make a Mug Too and I have to say the real charm of this series isn't the animation, it's the 9 minute .1-numbered episodes where the voice actors go and explore the locations visited in the series and try to do some of the activities seen in the series. I have to admit, I am really warming up to this series entirely because of those 9 minute segments. It's one thing to have a mildly edutainment-type TV anime. It's quite another to actually Show Your Work by having the cast go and try it out for themselves. It's especially entertaining seeing them discuss the things they've decided to make in their impromptu pottery class. One opts to sculpt chopstick holders based on her family's pet dog. Another decides to sculpt a really nice ass for some reason. They seem to be having a lot of fun, and it's a surprisingly feel-good watch. Like, I could take or leave the animated segments but the live-action bits involving the actual cast are quite charming.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Depends on the version. Macross Frontier's TV anime version has the Macross Galaxy fleet appear to be wiped out by the Vajra early on, only to later reveal the distress call was disingenuous at best and the fleet used its supposed destruction to go under the radar and pursue their agenda against the Vajra. In that version, the Mainland and at least a portion of the Galaxy fleet are revealed to still be out there after the Vajra and Macross Frontier fleet sink the Battle Galaxy and most of its escorts in orbit of the Vajra planet. The Macross Frontier movie version reverses the scenario in almost every respect. The Macross Frontier fleet receives the Macross Galaxy fleet's distress call, but presumes it to be part of a hostile intelligence operation and refuses to dispatch any reinforcements. SMS sorties after being independently contracted to assist Macross Galaxy, and discovers tha the distress call was quite genuine... a dozen or so light escort warships full of refugees being all that's left of Macross Galaxy, with the Galaxy Executives hiding among them and reworking their plan to capture and use the Battle Frontier instead.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Almost certainly, yes. You could probably draw a connection there to the 33rd Marines being stationed out in the middle of bloody nowhere. No others have been mentioned to date. Unless you want to count the Macross Galaxy Corporate Army, which was technically a private armed force though it operated under the auspices of the New UN Forces because the Macross Galaxy corporate government operated as a New UN Government member state. There are likely others out there. All of the PMCs that've been mentioned so far have been subsidiaries of megacorporations or mega-conglomerates... and there's plenty of those around in the Macross setting these days. The Uroboros Hunter's Guild could be called a marginal case. It's not organized like a military unit in any sense - and a fair number of people in-universe and out would say it really isn't organized at all - being a trade association and licensing body for private Valkyrie operators. If you got all or even most of them together they'd be a fairly formidable force by sheer weight of numbers even though most of them are operating 1st and 2nd Generation Valkyries in a period when real militaries and PMCs are using 4th Generation Valkyries, but they're spread across a wide array of freelance gigs from bounty hunting to private security to resource gathering/prospecting and high-speed courier services. As I've mentioned in past posts, the Macross Frontier short story Wired Warrior talks about the Macross Galaxy fleet's prototype attempt at this... a young lady named Greenwich Meridian, who is was made by reprogramming a salvaged brain from a dead New UN Forces soldier. They don't seem to have taken it any farther than that, though. Even Brera, who was a fully-cyborged soldier and subjected to mind control, found the entire idea repellant. Mind you, neither Project Meridian nor its nominal rival Project Stella were intended to circumvent limitations on the usage of fully-autonomous combat AIs. They were efforts to circumvent the two main logistical problems inherent in expanding the Macross Galaxy fleet's armed forces: the limited availability of people who are suitable for military service and the significant investment in time and resources it takes to train a soldier to the level of combat readiness. Project Meridian tried to resolve the problem of availability by the simple expedient of reprogramming the brains of the recently deceased with an artificial personality and installing them in artificial bodies. Project Stella tried to eliminate, or at least greatly abbreviate, the amount of time it takes to train a soldier by giving them a sort of artificial multiple personality disorder in the form of a combat AI that'd take over in combat. Neither project seemed to pan out as expected, or at least never got far enough by the time of the fleet's destruction to be put into widespread practical use. Not that we know of. Mind you, they wouldn't need to go that far. Existing AI technology used in unmanned fighters can already achieve superhumanly-fast response times. What the Ghost X-9's use of a Sharon-type AI was trying to achieve was fully-autonomous operation with a level of unpredictability rivaling a flesh-and-blood pilot. The air combat AIs used in Ghosts can react much faster than a living pilot can, but their behavior is defined by preset routines and responses to specific criteria that make their behavior predictable in combat. They require a certain amount of external direction in combat because of this. In 2059, LAI was working on a new approach to personality emulation in an attempt to achieve the same kind of unpredictability and autonomous operation as the Ghost X-9 but without the inherent instability of the Sharon-type AI. They used SMS Skull Platoon as a model for the system. When things came to a head in the TV series, Galaxy just used the fully-autonomous air combat software from the Ghost X-9 illegally...
  18. Seto Kaiba
    TBH, I'll take the aircraft in its base state please and thank you. I've said before that I think the VF-31's Armored Pack is hands-down Kawamori's worst design. Not just because it contains a lot of reused art assets from Frontier, but because it doesn't mesh with the VF-31's design at all. The VF-25's Armored Pack didn't lose the silhouette of the aircraft under the parts. The VF-31's Armored Pack just looks like someone covered a VF-31 kit in glue and rolled it through some model builder's bitz bin. None of it looks like it goes together and none of it looks like it goes with the VF-31's design. It's an ugly, chunky, overly-busy mess. The Super Ghost pack is a cleaner, more streamlined design that looks like it might fit with the VF-31. The Super Ghost looks like a slightly modified version of the Ghost V-9 from the Macross Frontier series, but it feels like we've reached some unnecessary complexity about it. The Ghost has a Super Pack, fine. The Ghost IS a Super Pack, also fine. But to use a Ghost with a Super Pack AS a Super Pack feels like we've gone a bit too far. Like, we've got rotating-wingtip engine Ghosts used as rotating-wingtip engines on a VF. It feels like the design kind of missed the original point of the wingtip-mounted drones in the first place. The Sv-262 Draken III needed the wingtip-mounted drones because it didn't have enough fuel for a prolonged engagement in space. They weren't there to give it super-high performance, they were there to take the burden off the main engines and extend their range as a result like a regular Super Pack does. When you start throwing additional rocket boosters and wingtip engines onto 'em, you're just making them less good at the one thing they're there to do by making them heavier with less endurance.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Finished season one of Let's Make a Mug Too. It's not bad. It's one of those weird half-length episode shows and each episode is paired with a 9 minute little segment where the four principal voice actresses go places related to the events of each episode. That said, it's really clearly struggling to decide what kind of series it wants to be. There's a lot of info dumping about the pottery-making hobby and an attempt at being a character drama, but it doesn't feel like the series really gives either side of it enough time to really develop. There's apparently a second season as well.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Since they seem to have gotten their weapons via the Epsilon Foundation, there's probably a connection to the events of Macross E where an old Macross-class was rebuilt in a similar fashion by the Epsilon Foundation and Zelgaar Heavy Industries.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Finished Tenchi Muyo! OVA 4. This OVA is... well... it's basically two hour (4 episode) advertisement and exposition dump for Isekai no Seikishi Monogatari that has basically nothing to do with any of the characters in the main series. It backtracks to before Tenchi's dad remarried at the end of OVA 3, goes into a lot of depth explaining that his second wife is from an alternate reality, the situation on Geminar, that she's an artificial human, etc. etc. before timeskipping ahead to the birth of Tenchi's half brother Kenshi (the protagonist of Isekai no Seikishi Monogatari) and an episode basically devoted to expositing on WHY he's such an unstoppable juggernaut compared to Geminar's natives despite being only like 15. Kind of unnecessary, IMO... especially if you pay attention while watching the spinoff. Started Let's Make a Mug Too over dinner. Seemed like it was going to be a cutesy sort of "let's exposit on this hobby" sort of series like a couple that've come out recently. Got heavy FAST with the protagonist Himeno coming right out with telling her class her dad's business went bankrupt and her mom died.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Started Tenchi Muyo! OVA 4... and woah is the change in animation style jarring compared to OVA 3. I guess that's what a distance of 13 years gets you. AIC brought in another studio, C2C, to help animate this one. The color palette's a lot brighter than the previous installments, though it's a lot lower detail. Feels kind of like Satelight's work, almost. Going into it right from OVA 3 and GXP, it's super weird to think that the opening scene of everyone getting ready for breakfast constitutes a gathering of firepower exceeding that of most galactic governments. Also Tokimi's still around for some reason, so that's a breakfast attended by four gods, a demigod, three princesses, a walking probabilistic anomaly, and a spaceship. Looks like they decided to go back in time a bit to just before the wedding at the end of OVA 3 for some reason. (I swear these shows need to start coming with a printed family tree so I can keep track of who the hell everyone is and what their relation is to Tenchi... they've had four characters from GXP dropped in already.) EDIT: Good lord that is the worst CG compositing job I've seen since the early 2000s... Tenchi's little work truck is so poorly modeled it looks like a cardboard model with 2D graphics printed on each face someone's sliding around.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    So... Tawawa on Monday. An ONA, for a Twitter artist's series that could best be summed up as "cutesy art of life when your rack's bigger than your head". Interestingly, it's more cutesy than fanservicey... making it actually kind of almost watchable instead of a cringeworthy exercise like Peter Grill or any of those other recent ONAs built on fanservicey stuff. @BlackRose got all caught up on her rewatch of the first three Tenchi Muyo OVAs, so later we're going to start OVA4, 5, and then segue into Ai Tenchi Muyo and Isekai no Seikishi Monogatari to wrap up the Tenchi prime timeline. With all the emphasis on the PG-13 harem shenanigans, you almost forget how BIG Kajishima made the setting. It doesn't. It just sort of limps lamely to a finish it stole from Macross Frontier. Some absolute bangers on the soundtrack, but the writing is incredibly disappointing. I'm not sure I'd say the death is even better done... he still dies, and it's still completely pointless and devoid of any emotional impact because of what an unlikeable prick he is, but it's done slightly differently so it briefly attempts to fake out the audience about his fate.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    WRT the part that was on topic... There's no indication that any of the characters who left the New UN Forces to join a PMC did so because they were unable/unwilling to kill if the situation called for it. They've only done that with one character so far, and that was Chelsea Scarlett in Macross the Ride. For Arad and Chuck, the issue that drove them out of the military seems to have been who they were fighting and why. The 2060 war with Windermere IV seems to have been a sore spot for a fair number of New UN Forces soldiers. They hint that Chuck has some bad memories/issues involving a conflict he participated in where the enemies were human. Mirage left for issues totally unrelated to combat. Messer's issues... well... he seems to be a little too willing to kill.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Favorited for later use. Thank you for this most excellent resource.
×
×
  • Create New...