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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    At the very least, the Galactic Whales have to have some kind of fold carbon in their bodies and a biological means to contain and manipulate it given that they use fold navigation to travel interstellar distances. They spend their lives soaking up radiation from stars, so it's possible they don't actually need a dedicated power system like a reactor to produce energy for a fold jump. (IIRC, they're described in Macross Chronicle as being a sort of halfway point between a plant and a mineral life form.) Macross Chronicle goes so far as to suggest that as the origin of Overtechnology... the Protoculture coming into possession of Vajra carcasses, studying them, and reverse-engineering their biotechnology. (It's an interesting possibility that even their genetic engineering technology may be derived from the Vajra's control over their own evolution.) I'm not sure that's really conceit... the Protoculture were the first conventionally sentient race in the galaxy and the first ones to develop their own culture. The Vajra absolutely predated them as a spacefaring species, but Vajra are not individually intelligent and show no sign of anything beyond basic biological drives. There is one factoid that suggests the Protoculture originally took a direct hand in controlling the Zentradi. Macross Chronicle mentions that the Fulbtzs Berrentzs-class Zentradi fleet mothership has an area that replicates the environment of the Protoculture homeworld. There wouldn't be any functional reason to have something like that unless the ships were originally designed to have Protoculture living aboard them as well.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, the Boston Dynamics dog series? Yeah, they're the epitome of "tests well, but can't perform". They started out as a DARPA project called BigDog that was supposed to be a sort of robotic pack mule to accompany infantry into areas where wheeled and tracked vehicles were unable to maneuver. It proved to be too noisy, too heavy, and have too short of an operating time to be even remotely practical. It went through a few more demonstrator model phases that performed well on closed courses but had issues in real world conditions. Their first viable version was the Spot, which was scaled down considerably to address all the weight and balance issues, but it's basically a showpiece as expensive as a small car that can do a decent job following basic preprogrammed routines but handles poorly off level ground. It's more or less an overcomplicated bomb disposal robot that isn't actually used for bomb disposal. (You probably have more to fear from the bomb disposal robot, it's got tracks so it's not going to tip over like a dozy cow if you walk up an incline.) There is, however, a very entertaining video by Michael Reeves of him modifying and programming one to "dispense" beer... You might say Boston Dynamics is taking the... ... ... you know what, I'm not going to finish that joke. It's just too easy. Initially, sure... though the Protoculture built on such an insane scale that it's unlikely they cared, and if the miclone and bioplant systems we've seen are any indicator they had some pretty insane recycling technology too. No offense, but I get the general vibe that you're more about that other series we don't talk about here. Assuming you were a Zentradi pilot headed into a surface theater in a Regult, you'd probably be rather unconcerned about it since you'd know the Regult's greatest mobility on the ground comes from jumping/hopping and have been trained to abuse that advantage liberally. (You'd probably be far more upset that you're going to spend your time being jostled around inside that cramped cockpit.) Even in the setting material, humanity can only really guess at what caused the ancient Protoculture to design things they way they did. The original cultural, political, technological, and strategic context that led to the Zentradi military hardware being designed the way it is has been lost to half a million years of time and the general indifference of the Zentradi themselves. Humanity just has to roll with it, because the galaxy is going to be dealing with the fallout of the Protoculture's poor decisions into eternity. It has been addressed, albeit indirectly, a few times.... like Macross Delta mentioning that the New UN Government has a ban on the use of cloning for military purposes that makes Mikumo's creation a crime. Humanity apparently has rather higher moral standards than the Protoculture did.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    To make up for my grievous error in my initial reply to twich, I'll do a quick runthru of the Great Mechanics G stuff tomorrow during my tedious transmission team meetings. (Completely misread his post and dashed off a reply that was about 80% gibberish and 20% misunderstanding. >_< )
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Edit history says it's Azrael doing it, tho. Looks like he's putting in some info from the theatrical pamphlet. That was one of the few details we already had, though the DX Chogokin seems to have thrown some interesting wrenches into the works by having the same model number of railgun as the regular Siegfried.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, absolutely. The amount of time it takes to transition a thousand or more pilots to a new model of fighter alone ensures the VF-171 has quite a few years left to it. That'll only be lengthened by the amount of time it takes for various emigrant governments to decide on a 5th Generation Valkyrie and start building them. For instance, the Brisingr Alliance won't start adoption of the VF-31 Kairos until 2069 or 2070 according to Kawamori. Even as squadrons transition to the new model, the VF-171 will continue in service for years until it has been completely supplanted by the new model in every role. (For instance, the Frontier Government was still in the process of phasing out and decommissioning its remaining VF-11s in 2058, over a decade after they were replaced by the VF-171.) Also, WRT the Regult, it's worth noting that even though it's hard on its pilots due to the comparatively low degree of system automation and has some noteworthy vulnerabilities, it shares a lot of the VF-171's virtues. It's a simple, proven design that's extremely cost-effective and has a high degree of versatility. It can be equipped to fill a wide variety of roles in battlefield operations with minimal design changes. It might not have all the newest and best bells and whistles, but it's rugged, dependable, and its simplicity makes it easy enough to handle that even average operators can bring out the design's potential. That it and its pilots are designed with "acceptable losses" firmly in mind is unavoidable, but while it isn't going to win any awards for survivability it's fast and agile enough to remain threatening with a reasonably balanced armament and the fact that you're never fighting just one... the Regult pilot inevitably shows up to battle with about fifty of his closest friends.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    To be fair to the Type-104 and Type-106, none of the Zentradi mecha in the original "stock" state significantly prioritized survivability. Improving that was something that the New UN Forces took as a serious consideration when designing upgrades like the Queadluun-Rhea. Now, in all fairness, there's a pretty big difference between being frugal and being a cheapskate... and what the Brisingr Alliance is being is frugal. The Brisingr Alliance's isolated position out on the fringes of the galaxy and with some areas of intense fold fault activity has done a lot to hinder its economic growth, so the Brisingr Alliance's planetary governments have to make every penny (or whatever their local currency is called) count. Locally developing their own 5th Generation Valkyrie is something they did very deliberately in a bid to create jobs locally and provide some economic stimulus for the cluster by selling their new model as an export fighter as well. While the VF-171 is often treated with a bit of scorn because it compares unfavorably to the new hotness that is the local 5th Generation VF tipped to replace it, it is by no means an inferior or inadequate fighter. It served with distinction for two decades and counting as the main Valkyrie of the NUNS, and is noted to be an effective and highly versatile Valkyrie more than adequate for fighting the Zentradi or most anything else that isn't the Vajra.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    AFAIK, fold faults haven't been established to have any effects besides obstructing fold navigation and fold communication. Macross Frontier's 13th episode, Memory of Global, had something called a "D-Pulse burst" that appears to be some kind of fold wave interference (fold wave EMP equivalent?) that's potent enough to knock out the controls on Alto's VF-25F and disable the long-range detection systems of the 33rd NUNS Marines.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Ironically, official material notes its legs are actually quite fragile... but that's segregation of gameplay and story. Not me, @Podtastic. Basically, he's upset that the Zentradi and their mecha in the official setting don't align with his personal impression of what they should be like. All I've done is note that having legs does not necessarily mean a mecha is intended primarily for ground combat, and point out a few points regarding the Regult's handling from the official materials like it being physically demanding to operate because of its low level of system automation, that it's noted to be top-heavy with low stability and easily damaged legs, and that it does a lot of its maneuvering in the form of jumping. At no point did I say or imply that the Regult operates poorly. Just that it doesn't operate quite how he wishes it operated. @Podtastic chose to interpret the disparity between how the Regult actually operates and how he wanted it to operate as it operating poorly. 😉 (Goodness knows they're shown to be extremely agile in the original series and in Delta, ESPECIALLY while jumping.)
  9. Seto Kaiba
    It seems like a reasonably safe assumption that any Protoculture-use command and control infrastructure was probably destroyed early in the fighting, along with anyone who had the necessary authority to order the Zentradi to stop fighting. ... we have the ability to make very slow, very clumsy drones that can walk on flat services without (frequently) toppling over and even jump from one flat surface to another without (usually) falling but they're prohibitively expensive, fussy, and their capabilities are VERY limited. The Protoculture didn't see the Zentradi as people, but rather as living weapons. Chatty autopilot systems made of meat. We don't know what their original development environment was like, you're judging it on the basis of what you wish was true rather than what the facts are. At the time the Protoculture created the Zentradi and their equipment, they had only been a spacefaring civilization for a few hundred years. They were simply advanced aliens, not yet the sufficiently advanced aliens whose biotechnology invoked Clarke's Third Law as seen in Macross 7, Macross Zero, and Macross Delta. It says quite a bit that even then, they'd managed to make military hardware and autonomous logistical support infrastructure that was effectively Ragnarok-proof even if some of it was deliberately made simple to make it economical to mass-produce. That it does, yes. There really isn't a ton of difference there from the outsider's perspective. They're both big, shouty, xenophobic, genetically-engineered abominations that know only war. (Spess Muhreens are only nice guys who don't burn planets out of spite when they're Lamenters or the Ultramarines 4th Company. ) It's the Supervision Army.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Nothing will ever top the matter-of-fact, utterly boisterous delivery of "Nanomachines, son!". (Revengence is the best Metal Gear. Fight me.) Probably not, I would say. Macross Chronicle and other sources have waxed downright lyrical about the Protoculture's admiration, bordering on reverence, for the Vajra. The favored explanation among the current sources seems to be that the Protoculture developed their overtechnology from the study of Vajra carcasses they found and that they designed their war machines based upon those advances in imitation of the Vajra's own forms seemingly in an application of "nature is the best engineer". For a given value of "nature", considering the Vajra evolved to the point of being able to take direct control over their own evolution in the distant past. The Vajra were an ancient and estalished interstellar species when the Protoculture's civilization was taking its first hesitant steps into space. Presented with the opportunity to study a far more advanced species, the Protoculture would naturally hit on the idea of copying the Vajra's biotechnological "designs" because those were already proven by the Vajra's continued use of them. Assuming such a system exists, and that the Zentradi would even recognize or understand such a message 500,000 years or acknowledge its authority 500,000 years after their creators disappeared. The Protoculture tried something similar in Macross Delta's backstory, using their delta wave system to try and bring a halt to the fighting by creating a galaxy-wide hive mind, but apparently decided the risk of Your Head A'splode was too great to turn it on.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Erm... no. FISSION MAILED I have to admit, the idea left me with the strange mental image of a bunch of Zentradi wiseguys all leaning out the windows to shoot like mafiosi in a car chase. Exactly what any of the Zentradi equipment was originally designed for is a question to someone who's been dead for half a million years. What they're used for now is primarily space combat. Remember, the equipment the Zentradi force use hasn't changed in that half-million year span except for various technologies that've become lost because their factory satellites were destroyed (like thermonuclear reaction weaponry). The descent pods exist for the sake of transporting the Battle Pods in bulk, because they can't make reentry or return to orbit under their own power. Remember, this is still lowest-bidder military hardware even if it is made autonomously by robotic factories. The Regult was a no-frills, no-modcons, heavily economized for large-scale mass production military vehicle whose designers gave exactly zero ****s about the lives or comfort of the Zentradi piloting it. Its main problem is that, to keep costs down, there is very little onboard automation. Most of its systems are manually operated by a Zentradi pilot who's in a cramped and uncomfortable position inside of its cockpit. It was designed to imitate the form of a Vajra larva, which gets around mainly by hopping and flying, which is also the way the Regult mainly gets around. Its high center of gravity makes it liable to tip over in collisions and so on, so its pilot has to exercise great care. You've missed the point of them completely, I'm afraid. The Zentradi weren't created to be - and aren't - a super cool, awesome army of intergalactic conquest. They were an entire race of disposable people created by the Protoculture's two sociopolitical factions for a single cruel purpose: to fight their brutal, pointless, incredibly short-sighted civil war for them. The Protoculture were so fixated on destroying their own people over petty differences that they raised up an unstoppable force of destruction, armed it so well for the purpose that it could fight into eternity if need be, and turned the nightmare they'd created loose on their fellows. Initially, the story was that they achieved mutually assured destruction just in case this Cold War allegory isn't obvious enough. In practical terms, this isn't G.I. Joe... this is borderline Lovecraft. The Zentradi's genre is cosmic horror, not action-adventure. Even though humanity were able to turn part of one Zentradi fleet to their purpose and teach them there is more to life than war, there are still thousands upon thousands of fleets out there, composed of millions of warships, and the only thing protecting humanity's fragile and nascent interstellar civilization from utter ruin is that the Zentradi don't know that we exist yet. The New UN Government takes great pains to keep it that way, because a single main fleet is a force on such a cyclopean scale that they can't be fought on an even footing EVER. The tragedy of the Zentradi is that they're a race of thinking, feeling, sentient beings who were created for brutal, short, senseless lives of violence in the name of masters who are long dead and can't even contemplate ending the violence. They are a senseless force of largely indiscriminate destruction unleashed upon the galaxy by the Protoculture's arrogance, and there's the possibility they might be unwittingly protecting the galaxy from something even worse.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    It probably wasn't the standard in the Protoculture's heyday. It likely became a part of the Zentradi's standard playbook after the Protoculture rescinded the directive "Do not interfere with the Protoculture" to combat the Supervision Army's forces, which grew by capturing and brainwashing the populations of entire planets. What independent missions? The Zentradi have been operating on a single directive for the last 500,000 years: Search and Destroy. Branch fleets of hundreds of warships seem to be the smallest default unit the Zentradi send to a theater. The standard response to a force of that size meeting an enemy that it can't overcome? Summon Bigger Fish. They'll call in reinforcements until they find a hammer big enough to crack that nut, like how Vrlitwhai called in Quamzin, then Laplamiz, and eventually referred the matter up the chain of command to Boddole Zer himself. As we saw in DYRL?, when an enemy fleet is found by a branch fleet force, the standard approach is to roll up with your entire main fleet and try to wipe them out in one go. The same was true in Macross 2036 and Eternal Love Song too. Well, no... of course there aren't. The Zentradi have no concept of creative actions or thoughts, so their interest in information only extends as far as actionable intelligence... and you can get that from the wrecks of enemy ships after they've been shot to pieces. Likewise, they have no need to secure resources or technology because all of their logistical needs are met by the millions of automated factory satellites the Protoculture made for the purpose. Those factory satellites autonomously handle every step of the manufacturing process from mining the raw materials all the way to assembling the completed product for delivery to a stockpile or fleet. So, yeah... the answer is to just atomize everything, because the Protoculture's last directive to them was to destroy the Supervision Army. Having legs doesn't necessarily make it a land vehicle... the Regult is actually noted to be not very good at walking. They're mainly used as fighters in space battles.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Wouldn't a doghouse be more appropriate, if he's a flying ace? Cardboard boxes are for espionage. Everyone knows that. 😉 What possible use would massed infantry be in a fleet engagement where two fleets of spaceships are shooting at each other from hundreds or thousands of kilometers away in a No Quarter battle in deep space? It's not like they can roll down a window and stick a rifle out or march over to the enemy fleet on foot. There's very little reason to even consider boarding actions if your goal is to simply destroy your enemy utterly and if your goal is to board an enemy ship mecha have been shown to be effective in that regard. The standard Zentradi approach to finding an enemy planet is to roll up with a Main Fleet and convert it into a parking lot with massed bombardment, no need to land any ground forces. There may, at one point, have been a call for Zentradi infantry but they seem to be an all but exclusively mechanized force by the time humanity encounters them. The only times we see Zentradi infantry during the First Space War are minimal security details aboard ships or off-duty mecha pilots reacting to threats inside their ship. Perhaps there was a point in the Protoculture's history when Zentradi existed but their mecha did not, and they were used as infantry instead. Maybe it was necessary to make them super-resilient to the point that they shrug off 55mm cannon fire. Maybe the Protoculture just thought it was super intimidating to be ten meters tall. Maybe the Protoculture found it easier to dehumanize them if it was immediately obvious they were non-Protoculture? Whatever the original reason was, it's been lost to time since the Protoculture went extinct. That'd just take away from their ability to deploy flight-capable armored vehicles that are even more heavily armed and not significantly larger.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    If I had to guess, I'd assume that the VF-31AX Kairos Plus's specifications will probably not be significantly different from those of the VF-31 Siegfried. After all, what we know of them is that they were VF-31A airframes that were retrofitted with spare parts from the Siegfrieds that were destroyed earlier. The only upgrades specifically mentioned are the fold quartz used in the fold wave system and the ordnance container w/ beam gunpod being exchanged for a more powerful model. With that as the baseline, I'm inclined to suspect that the Sv-303 Vivasvat is probably not going to be all that impressive either. Maybe VF-27 level, given that Max supposedly beats them handily in a YF-29 that was no different in spec to the original type.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    True, though that's something it shares in common with Picard and Discovery... some of the worst writing in the franchise's history.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    His music will endure, sure as sure... His agent hasn't identified his cause of death. He was vocally anti-vax and opposed to COVID safety restrictions. TMZ and one or two other entertainment outlets reported he'd been hospitalized with a severe case of COVID, but those reports were unconfirmed.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    It's been quite a while since Frontier, so I'd have to look at the relative release dates to be sure... but my gut feeling is that in this specific case (Absolute Live!!!!!!) there's been a rather surprising dearth of information about the new mechanical designs in the movie. I'd have kind of expected a major feature in Great Mechanics or something, but all we got was an 8 pager crammed into the back of the winter issue. I noticed that on the toy thread... with the barrels beefed up like that, I was expecting a much larger round for greater stopping power, especially since the VF-31AX was hacked together for actual combat not for airshow use. If Max's YF-29 is what we've been led to believe it is - essentially unmodified from the original Macross Frontier fleet specification - then they can't be that powerful. Especially if the VF-31AX can fight them, since what little data we have suggests they're just Kairos airframes with Siegfried parts and higher-quality fold quartz in their fold wave systems. It's irritating, at least. Then again, when it came to the Macross Delta TV series we didn't start seeing properly detailed stats until - IIRC - the TOMYTEC model kits dropped. That was literally the entire reason I bought them.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Not a clue. Not Macross though, AFAIK. From the oldest versions of the lore, the only time the first space destroyer Oberth is mentioned are the start of construction in 2003 and its commissioning in 2005. The only two ships of the class noted to have seen combat prior to the First Space War were the Oberth-class's second ship Goddard and third ship Tsiolkovsky, which fought each other after the Tsiolkovsky was hijacked by the Anti-Unification Forces and used to attack the Mars Return Fleet. Other than that, the only other two named Oberth-class ships in official material are the Miranda and Akishima, which were sunk in the opening battle of the First Space War.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    After some quick double-checking, it appears to may be conflating events from the official Macross timeline with events from the Robotech short comic "Mars Base One". In Macross, the fate of the Oberth-class's namesake ship Oberth is unknown... but she was likely one of the hundred-plus sunk during the First Space War. In Robotech's "Mars Base One" short comic, the Oberth was sunk in orbit of Mars by a Zentradi warship performing advance reconnaissance in 2005 while attempting to evacuate the personnel remaining at Mars Base.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    His Macross Chronicle character sheet (PLUS Civilian 04A) says it was his space suit, though they don't refer to it as a cold sleep function... rather, as a "simple" sleep or "quasi" sleep (簡易のスリープ) function. They don't elaborate further on the subject, unfortunately, and it's not covered further in the Technology sheets about spacesuits or helmets.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Maybe if it had the budget of Discovery's entire first season (~$120M, $60M adjusted for inflation)... though Final Frontier's executive producer Ralph Winter publicly refuted Shatner's claims that Final Frontier's problems were caused by its budget back in a 2010 interview. Final Frontier's initially-approved budget was over $27M, more than twice what was spent to produce Wrath of Khan, and by the time all was said and done it was over $5M over budget, making it almost 3x as expensive as Wrath of Khan and the second most expensive TOS movie overall. Though given what was said about what was cut due to budgetary constraints - like Shatner's ridiculous rock monster - we should probably be grateful it didn't. Discovery and Picard supposedly cost around $8-8.5M per 43 minute episode, not counting the cost overruns that were supposedly endemic to the production of both shows and got their budgets slashed repeatedly. Picard had to go for the absolute minimum runtime in order to afford that level of per-episode spending under Amazon, and Discovery's now down to a ten episode season from fifteen originally due to budget cuts and overspending.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    ... that is certainly possible, yes. Highly probable, IMO, given that Star Trek: Picard seems determined to revisit every dangling plot thread from TNG and its four movies and tie them up in the most depressing and dystopian way possible. Always remember Rule of Acquisition number Two Hundred and Eight: "Sometimes the only thing more dangerous than a question is an answer." Oh, undeniably. It'd be hard to argue otherwise when the review aggregators agree Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Picard are the worst and second-worst rated Star Trek TV shows in the entire franchise by a fairly significant margin according to general audience scores. Some of it's not even excusable. I mean, we all remember what happened the first time someone introduced a heretofore unseen and unmentioned sibling of Spock's. Star Trek V: the Final Frontier... the worst-rated Star Trek movie of all time, and the worst-rated Star Trek title overall. It probably would've worked better for them if the Discovery OCs weren't so mired in edgy writing that they all came off as unlikable toxic douchebags led by a manipulative psycho and Picard's hadn't been a pack of faintly racist ethnic stereotypes hastily wrapped in poorly thought-out tragic (and edgy) backstories that don't make sense in context if you know anything about the setting. (Basically, the longer this drags on the more convinced I am we're watching Star Trek's chuunibyou phase.) Honestly? I'd give that one a fair shake just to see if their Bizarro World writing efforts somehow yield the unthinkable and theoretically impossible Good Wesley Episode. Hell, after the damage done by Picard season one, Wil Wheaton might find himself playing the least-hated character on the show! That seems to be the prevailing mood among those fans who are still committed to watching it. They lost a lot of people when they ended their partnership with Amazon Prime outside the US.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Happens a few times in Macross Delta, actually... Hayate misplaces several Battroid arms that way, trying to use his pinpoint barrier and forearm-mounted shield to block beam grenade shots from the Sv-262's beam gunpod, which inevitably mostly succeeds but at the cost of the arm blowing up too.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Interestingly, they have... One of the more unconventional ways the VF-27 exploited the atypically large generator surplus it had from four Stage II thermonuclear reaction turbine engines was using its energy conversion armor and pin-point barrier system in Fighter mode to allow it to briefly exceed the usual Mach 5+ heat resistance boundary and achieve Mach 9 at ~10km by beefing up the armor strength and using the pinpoint barrier to shield the fighter from as much air friction as possible. Unfortunately, that draws a lot of power and can only be done for short periods.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Submarines in general are not a tall gent's friend... I'm a bit under 2m, and let me tell you having to pretzel myself into the Gato-class USS Silversides was not a pleasant experience. I kind of expect the Nautilus to be roomier, since it isn't wasting huge amounts of space on lead acid battery stacks and diesel fuel tanks. The worst experience I ever had with cramped interior spaces was the lower level of the engine room on the Edson... if you want to maneuver safely in that space you'd better bloody well be boneless, two-dimensional, or a Smurf. Kind of makes you wonder what the conditions were like on the Spacy's Oberth-class missile destroyers, given that the Spacy was apparently recruiting experienced submariners to crew including Bruno J. Global, whose previous command was the submarine Marco Polo. More than that, aerodynamics are a common factor too... if you want to go insanely fast in atmospheric combat the way the Feios Valkyrie does, your aerodynamic options are VERY limited.
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