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Seto Kaiba

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  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.)
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Pretty sure that's supposed to be a baby Mylene.
  10. 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.
  11. 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.
  12. 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?
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... in terms of his prior experience handling a Destroid Work, there's a pretty big skills gap between driving a 50 year old glorified forklift and a next-generation high-performance fighter jet. Controls-wise... it's not a universal standard, no. On a very basic level, the physical control layout of a Valkyrie has been more or less standardized since the Block 6 update to the VF-1 Valkyrie back in ~2009 though there's a lot of variation in the details between models. The Destroid Work's controls seem to be loosely based on that basic setup. The software's also going to be very different. I'd expect the Destroid Work there to be running a cut-down civilian market version of ANGIRAS, the original generation integrated control AI. The VF-31s (and apparently even the VF-1EX) are using a derivative of the military's state-of-the-art 3rd Generation ARIEL II integrated airframe control AI. Of course, credit where credit is due, Hayate does suffer Reality Ensuing in the series version when he tries to fly without a support AI holding his hand and repeatedly loses control of his aircraft to stalls and barf-inducing instability. Not as such. Alto's PS/ML-21 EX-Gear was a high-performance civilian model that was specifically made to be compatible with the military's EX-Gear standard because it's intended for use in pilot training. Mihoshi Academy issues them to the students in their Space Flight pilot training program because it's set up to prepare students for careers in commercial aviation or military service. You could think of it as almost being a prep school for the New UN Spacy's flight school... to the extent that they train on real Valkyries (the VF-1C type).
  14. Seto Kaiba
    ... more than a bit, if we're being honest. I tend to think of the start as when my job went fully remote in April '20. Looking back, preorders started August-ish 2020? So about a year and a half since I filed the original order? I hope the quality was good.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Looks like, yeah. I guess they must have changed their Private Warehouse hold policy at some point not long after the pandemic really got going, since the original limit was not more than 60 days. I wonder if it had something to do with the Japan Post and other normal carriers not handling international mail at the time? I had legitimately forgotten that I'd ordered it, and apparently the Private Warehouse status emails about it have just been going to my spam folder this entire time.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    I completely forgot I'd ordered the Premium finish back around the start of the pandemic... HLJ sent me a... gentle but stern... note asking me to please ship the bloody thing earlier today.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    True that. One can imagine the New UN Forces probably understand the Birdhuman's distress only too well after dealing with Xaos's unwillingness to cooperate in any meaningful manner until it's way too late. The title of CAG (Commander, Air Group) in Macross is used mostly how it was used circa World War II. Put simply, it's a title and an accompanying administrative role given to the squadron leader with the highest rank (or the most seniority, if two or more have the same rank) among the squadrons embarked on an aircraft carrier. The CAG serves as the overall leader of all of the embarked squadrons and as a administrative department head for the squadrons who reports directly to the ship's captain. (Basically, if you're the most experienced squadron leader you get rewarded with extra paperwork and meetings.) Arad Molders is presumably the CAG of the Macross Elysion, or occupies some similar title since Xaos seems to organize its forces as an Air Force rather than the fleet-based Space Forces of the NUNS. Even if he didn't have experience beforehand, he logged over 300 hours of simulator time before being assigned to the SVF-1 Skulls Vermilion platoon. Normally, the flight school is like three year program IIRC. (Kinda makes it shocking how undertrained Hayate is, with less than a month of combined training not just for flying a Valkyrie but hand-to-hand combat, tactics, and everything else...)
  18. Seto Kaiba
    No, we know what happened to it... it's space junk. It'd already suffered enough battle damage to disable it in the fleet engagement that caused it to crash on Elysium in the distant past. If you look at its sprite in-game, the mobile fortress's command section is mostly just straight-up missing and the rest of the hull is liberally pockmarked by city-sized breaches. It was barely able to lift off after millennia of self-repair and some TLC from the Zentradi terrorists, and its defenses were mostly inoperable. Once its living command computer was killed by the VF-X Special Forces pilot player-character, it was little more than an elaborate and extremely large paperweight. It was already a wreck... there was enough of it missing that, if the fold system clusters were running amok and teleporting chunks of the ship into fold space, you'd never know by looking at it with all the battle damage it already had beforehand. Who's gonna notice a few extra dents in a car that already looks like it went ten rounds with the MythBusters? Or it's considered such a minor event that it hardly bears mentioning. After all, it wasn't a major threat or even a major incident. It was a high-profile civilian kidnapping by a minor terrorist group that was cleaned up quickly and discreetly way out in the galactic boonies by a single VF-X Special Forces team with barely enough manpower to field their own side in a baseball game. Or, alternatively, it was covered up in part or in full by the New UN Government and/or New UN Forces like the official setting Sharon Apple incident or the non-canonical "Spica Shock" from the VF-19 Master File.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, they were originally colored red in the Super Dimension Fortress Macross series and changed to yellow starting in Macross: Do You Remember Love?.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Fair enough, it looks like they've done quite a faithful job of it.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    ... I have a bad feeling about this. That the comic book quote about "using their expectations against them" in the Instagram post feels like the very worst kind of tempting fate for an already failure-prone franchise. The choice of replacement director feels less like tempting fate and more like actively courting failure. Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah don't have much of a filmography, and what they do have in that regard is pretty underwhelming outside of Bad Boys for Life. The costume... eh... I don't do superhero comics as a rule so I don't know about how authentic to the comic it might be, but is it supposed to look like someone took an off-the-shelf women's leather motorcycle suit and hastily painted it purple? (Given that Keaton's set to play Batman again, we should probably just be thankful Schumacher-era bat-nipples are a thing of the past.)
  22. Seto Kaiba
    It's not the same technology... the fold amps used by the Tactical Sound Units are an outgrowth of Dr. Lawrence's research into dimensional resonance, developed by his protégé Elma Hoyly. You could say they're related technologies, but they're not the same.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Really, any engineering discipline at all. I am endlessly floored by the number of people with college degrees who can't do basic math. It's pretty well established the Zolans are a sub-Protoculture species like all the other humanoids in the galaxy. Eh, those two things don't even necessarily have to be linked. We're talking about a crazy civilization with total mastery of genetic science and an endless fascination with the Vajra that Macross Chronicle suggests was the true origin of their advanced technology. It may have been nothing more than a desire for a fancy designer pet intelligent enough to not sh*t all over the place. Goodness knows irresponsible breeders today spend terrifying amounts of effort creating designer pets with little or no regard for the consequences. As wildly inaccurate as your posts have been, there really isn't anything to respond to... like the quotation below. 😉 And no, I don't trust thirdhand reports about Japanese audiences opinions of the movie either. To quote Luke Skywalker: "Amazing. Every word of what you just said was wrong." ... did you forget that rank, seniority, and the chain of command exist? Max's record as a squadron leader is exemplary. He commanded a New UN Spacy Special Forces squadron for a decade before moving on to commanding escort warships in a relatively typical trajectory for a modern fighter pilot. Roy Focker - and yes, the correct spelling is "Focker" - was the commanding officer of the SVF-1 Skulls because he was the ranking officer. His rank was Major (OF-3). He was also Commander of the Air Group as the most senior officer among the embarked squadrons from his airwing. Hikaru Ichijo also outranked Max for pretty much the entire original series. When Max and Hayao were assigned to the SVF-1 Skulls they were both Corporals (OR-4) and Hikaru was a Sergeant (OR-5) who had just been granted a commission and the rank of 2nd Lieutenant (OF-1) and command of Vermilion Platoon. He had been promoted once more to 1st Lieutenant at the time Roy died and was assigned to lead the squadron based on seniority and availability. He was later promoted to Captain (OF-2). Around that time, Max also got a commission to 2nd Lieutenant (OF-1), so he was still outranked by Hikaru and under him in the chain of command. Even if they were the same rank, Hikaru's greater seniority due to his longer term of service at that rank would have put him above Max. It's a popular fan theory, though there are a LOT of people ahead of him in the chain of command given that he finished Macross 7 at the rank of Captain (OF-2). He's got another three ranks minimum and a lot of seniority to accrue before he could attain a posting like command of a Battle-class or a New UN Forces defense force. (Max himself seems to have been on the low end there, commanding the fleet as the most senior Colonel. Most of them seem to be Brigadier Generals or higher.)
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Presumably.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Officially, it's the former... except it's way more than just one factory satellite of each type. According to the official encyclopedia Macross Chronicle, the Regult alone has several million factory satellites devoted to its mass production scattered across the galaxy. Each of the smaller fleets that makes up a Main Fleet has a logistical backbone of anywhere from twenty to fifty factory satellites producing its men and materiel. Over the millennia, some types of factory satellite have been targeted as strategic objectives and destroyed such as the plants producing thermonuclear reaction ordnance and the ones producing the Glaug Battle Pod, so the number varies a bit more than it did at the height of the Protoculture's civilization. To give you an idea of the scale at work here... if we assume Vrlitwhai's branch fleet of 1,213 ships and its parent Main Fleet of 4,795,122 ships were average sizes for the Zentradi, and that each branch fleet had just one factory satellite providing it with Regult battle pods, there were potentially TWENTY MILLION fully automated plants producing the Regult in the Protoculture's golden age.
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