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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    As I understand it, the New UN Government banned self-aware AI entirely and imposed severe restrictions on the operation of fully-autonomous unmanned fighters comparable to restrictions on the use of nuclear weapons. The hardware that enabled Sharon Apple to do what she did was already illegal before the Sharon Apple incident. Afterwards, the interactive functions used in Sharon Apple were banned right down to the level of policing the contents of her studio albums. The autonomous air combat programs used in unmanned fighters like the Ghost X-9 were restricted to emergency use only and while there is research being done on personality emulation similar to what was used in Sharon Apple it seems to be being done using a conventional computing environment instead of anything that could produce an unpredictable AI. They covered up some other stuff too... illegal developments being made by the Macross Concern and all... Nah, the difference is more severe than that. Havamal exercised its authority as a VF-X Special Forces unit to subvert the government on Uroboros to its own ends, and wreaked havoc on the planet. Heimdall, on the other hand, is a non-governmental paramilitary organization made up of ex-military and civilian types that is only interested in going after another "rogue actor"... Lady M. They don't appear to pose an actual threat to anyone.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Against who? Lady M isn't the government, as much as she'd apparently like to believe otherwise. By all accounts, Heimdall's goal is to protect the New UN Government from Lady M... which, given the end result of her meddling in the Windermere situation, honestly sounds like a pretty good idea IMO. Unlikely, IMO... given that the Sharon Apple incident's coverup was pretty paper-thin, with the New UN Government even going so far as to legislate Sharon's music off the market for several years and issue a total ban on self-aware virtuoids. Likewise, Heimdall's Battle Astraea appears to be a reconstruction of the Battle Galaxy that was destroyed either in a fight against the Vajra or against the Battle Frontier... five'll get you twenty they KNOW why she got destroyed. Yeah, there hasn't been much in the way of mention of Battle-class ships operating outside of emigrant fleets. It's a bit less ridiculous-sounding in context, though. The New UN Government may have covered up the Macross Concern's role in the whole mess, but they still had to explain the whole mess and that resulted in a ban on self-aware virtuoids and a ban on Sharon Apple's music, not to mention a mess of cancelled defense contracts. The Sharon Apple incident was what poisoned the well for unmanned fighters and saw the Ghost relegated to a support unit for manned Valkyries. Not to mention the New UN Gov't is almost certainly going to have to issue a public condemnation of Galaxy's actions against the Vajra, given that they flagrantly flouted interstellar law, started a shooting war with their neighbors and with an alien race, and technically attacked Earth itself by proxy.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, just one could do some pretty significant damage... a Macross Cannon with several times the firepower of a typical super dimension energy cannon, a half-dozen or so super-large scale beam cannon turrets, innumerable smaller gun emplacements, hundreds of Valkyries, and thermonuclear reaction munitions make your typical Battle-class ship into a almost-literal fortress. Macross 13 is the only one that's been explicitly mentioned in connection with the New UN Forces... the "secret" flagship of the Earth defense fleet that was sunk in 2051 after the Earth supremacist movement Latence hijacked it. A replacement Macross 13 was subsequently built and in 2059 was under the command of Lt. General Kim Kabirov during the Vajra attack at the end of Macross Frontier. It's basically the Zentradi equivalent of the suffix 改 (kai, "revision", "modification", "improvement"), often translated into English as "custom". Heimdall doesn't really fit the definition of anti-unification group. From what we've heard of their motives, they're not opposed to the government at all... they seem to be some kind of paramilitary conspiracy theorist group who are trying to protect the New UN Gov't from outside influence by some sort of Luddite deep state. Really, they're not... for the most part anyway. The Anti-Unification Alliance of the Unification Wars was a loose confederation of various nationalist militias, terrorist groups, plausibly deniable state actors, and other small time troublemakers who were looking to settle old scores, continue their lifestyle of ethnic or sectarian violence, or paranoids who thought a world government would mean the end of their lifestyle or regional autonomy. Many of the so-called "anti-government" groups of the 2030s and 2040s were actually anti-fascist groups who'd taken up arms in response to a cabal of Earth supremacist fascists inside the New UN Gov't and New UN Forces using their influence to label anyone who complained about their efforts to concentrate governmental and military authority on Earth or the problems inherent in the central government's efforts to micromanage the rule of emigrant planets that were years away by space fold as a terrorist. The "big reveal" of the plot of Macross VF-X2 was that Latence had so thoroughly infiltrated the New UN Gov't and New UN Forces that they were wielding the Spacy's VF-X Special Forces as their own secret police force to stop out opposition to their agenda. Whether or not the player learns that is what decides if they get the Bad End or the True End, the latter of which has the VF-X Ravens join forces with the "terrorist" group Vindirance to stop a planned coup d'etat by Latence. Basically, the so-called Second Unification War was fought between two pro-Unification factions who just had different ideas about the amount of autonomy that was necessary for emigrant governments to function effectively. One side believed that all of humanity should present a united front concentrated on Earth to protect itself from a fundamentally hostile universe, and the other believed that emigrant governments should have the ability to make their own decisions on how best to protect and support their people without a need to refer every decision up the chain of command to Earth for approval. The latter faction won handily. Even after that point, the most prominent anti-government faction in the story is still a pro-Unification group that's simply the leftovers of the former faction.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Alternatively, there are also now apparently several change.org petitions to have the cancellation stand. Of course, being change.org petitions, they rank somewhere below temporary profile pictures and "thoughts and prayers" in terms of instigating meaningful change... so the Netflix execs who made the call are unlikely to notice or care either way.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    I don't believe it's ever been depicted with one, and Macross Chronicle doesn't mention it having one. Mind you, the Battle-class's Macross Cannon has disproportionately large firepower for its size since it's intended to one-shot a small fleet and still basically outclasses the firepower of a single Zentradi ship.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    It's physically bigger, yes... but the Battle-class massively outguns it thanks to its Macross Cannon. It's also not built by the New UN Forces, it's a refurbished captured Zentradi warship class.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    We do not actually know how the Macross Elysion-type - whatever its actual class name is - fits into the bigger picture as of yet. It is, however, extremely unlikely that it is intended as a successor to the Battle-class which are currently the New UN Forces heaviest standard warship. If anything, it seems likely that the Macross Elysion-type is a predecessor to the more compact Macross Quarter-class that was intended to bring the mobility of variable warships to an escort carrier while also having the firepower of a heavy cruiser. Xaos is generally presented as being less well-off than Strategic Military Services, and they seem to have had at least a few Elysion-type warships around the same time the Macross Quarter-class was entering the final phases of operational testing, which suggests the Elysion-type is older.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Specifically, elemental hydrogen... OTM thermonuclear reactors (AKA heat pile systems AKA fold reactors) use artificial gravity to achieve a more complete and efficient thermonuclear fusion reaction that emulates the hydrogen fusion chain reactions in stars to a greater extent than modern attempts at fusion power. That's... misleading. The fuel consumption rate is astonishingly low, but still very much present. Using the gravity produced by heavy quantum as a gravitational "pinch" in the compact thermonuclear reactor allows for the reaction to run much hotter than what would ordinarily be possible using magnetic or laser confinement, so only small amounts of plasma need to be bled from the reactor to introduce massive amounts of heat into the intake airflow. If you take the tech manuals at face value, the burn rate's a bit over a liter of hydrogen slush per hour per engine. (Master File suggests the fusion temperature inside OTM thermonuclear reactors is well in excess of carbon fusion's temperatures and pressures... well over 230 million degrees C. In the VF-25 book, the FF-3001A's reaction temperature is said to be close to 400 million degrees C.) To clarify, the reason that fuel consumption is significantly greater in space is because plasma from the thermonuclear reactor is used as a propellant.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    I have absolutely no idea. All in all, it's probably for the best that they didn't. From Macross Delta, it seems like if you use a dimension eater in the wrong place you can do unpleasant things to spacetime in the blast area like what happened to Carlisle. Definitely not. Ignoring, for the sake of my sanity, what a complete and unholy mess the entire concept of the "flower of life" and "protoculture" in Robotech is... Conceptually, they differ on pretty much every level. Keeping it simple, you could say the two defining traits of Robotech's "flowers of life" are that they're the raw material needed to create an exotic superfuel without which you can't do any advanced sci-fi shenanigans and that they're the rarest substance in the universe, which is why everyone's going to war over them. Macross's fold crystals aren't a fuel, and aren't used in the creation of fuel. Naturally occurring fold crystals are on the rare side, as something that can only be obtained from supernovae remnants, but they're not scarce by any means because they can be synthesized industrially. They're not essential for all advanced technology, you can power powered suits and other tech incl. giant robots with advanced nuclear batteries and other sources if you want. They're just essential if you want to use compact thermonuclear reactors as a power source and for FTL navigation and communication. All the other stuff can be done without it. They're also not consumed by use. They catalyze the creation of heavy quanta, but the same fold crystal can be used forever as long as it's suitably protected against mechanical stresses that might cause cracking or chipping. They have no practical use in bioengineering or anything outside of being the higher-dimension equivalent of a radio crystal and producing heavy quantum... unless you want to count non-practical uses like jewelry. Fold quartz is scarce for the moment because it doesn't occur in nature - it has to be synthesized - and humanity hasn't yet reached the point of being able to synthesize the stuff themselves. The Vajra Queens synthesize fold quartz biologically, and the ancient Protoculture had the means to synthesize it technologically, but humanity's synthesis tech hasn't quite reached that level yet so they're still dependent on extracting it from Protoculture ruins or Vajra carcasses. (This is the reason that ultra-high end VFs like the YF-29 or YF-30 can't be mass-produced... they require fold quartz in such huge quantities and high purities that it's nearly impossible to find without synthesizing it yourself, since even the Vajra don't normally refine it that much or in that size.)
  10. Seto Kaiba
    I'm gonna answer this one slightly out of order, because it'll make the explanation a lot easier. Fold quartz is a high-purity form of fold carbon, a type of crystal oscillator with higher-dimensional properties that is the essential macguffin behind gravity control and the various applications of fold technology. It functions as something analogous to a radio crystal in the production of fold waves and it's also used as a catalyst in producing heavy quantum, the dimension-crossing exotic particle with super-high mass which is manipulated with fold waves in order to produce various gravitational effects used in thermonuclear reactors, fold systems, and dimensional weapons. The amount of mass the heavy quantum has stashed in fold space increases with the purity of the fold carbon, so systems using higher-purity fold carbon can produce more intense gravitational effects. Heavy quantum produced by normal fold carbon has such stupendous mass that only a part of its total mass is needed to provide the gravitational pressure needed to ignite and maintain a thermonuclear fusion reaction. Abruptly triggering its mass to drop into realspace is used to provide the critical fuel compression used in thermonuclear weapons, an environmentally-friendly and infinitely sustainable substitute for the heavy-element fission bombs used as triggers in fusion warheads today... and the main reason that reaction weapons leave behind no long-term radiological contamination. By triggering the gravitational collapse of heavy quantum in an open-ended shielded space, it collapses on itself and the resulting thermonuclear explosion triggered by its self-compaction is corralled into a high-velocity fusion plasma beam... the super dimension energy cannon, known by other various names including "heavy converging beam cannon", "heavy quantum reaction cannon", and "Macross Cannon". As an exceptionally pure form of fold carbon, fold quartz produces an especially powerful superheavy quantum that exerts exceptionally intense gravitational force. This can be used to produce the "zero-time" fold waves and super-intense fold effects that are powerful enough to be unaffected by fold faults. It can also be used to produce an even more terrifying class of weapons of mass destruction. Fold carbon supposedly is a naturally occurring substance produced in supernovae, though virtually all of the fold carbon in use by humanity is synthetic and non-official setting materials like Master File assert that improvements in the quality of synthetic fold carbon have been a driving force behind the ever-increasing power of thermonuclear reaction turbine engines used in VFs. Synthesizing fold quartz is currently beyond what human technology can achieve, so the only way to acquire it is from mining Protoculture ruins on various planets or hunting Vajra, whose queens can synthesize fold quartz from fold carbon biologically. A dimension eater is, for all intents and purposes, a fold bomb created using fold quartz and the extremely intense gravity exerted by the superheavy quantum it produces. Thermonuclear reaction weapons use the intense gravity exerted by heavy quantum to trigger a fusion detonation in the hydrogen fuel stored in the warhead, resulting in a "clean" nuclear detonation that doesn't scatter fissile decay products. Dimension eaters use the even stronger gravitational force of the superheavy quantum only fold quartz can produce all on its own. When its full mass it forced into realspace via fold wave resonance, it creates a space fold effect so intense it's like a short-lived miniature black hole. Everything in range is violently crushed by the intense gravitational force produced by the superheavy quantum and pulled into fold space where it's annihilated. It can also be applied to dimensional beam weapons, changing the fusion plasma beam into a particle beam of microsingularities that strip matter right out of the universe, making it the last word in armor-piercing. The size of the effect is fortunately limited by the quantity of superheavy quantum in the warhead, though even a minivan sized bomb can potentially destroy a planet as happened to Gallia IV in Macross Frontier. Because the necessary superheavy quantum and the requisite fold wave resonance needed to set it off can only be created using fold quartz, the proliferation of the dimension eater weapons has been slowed considerably by New UN Government regulation of the mining and sale of fold quartz and the material's scarcity since it can only be obtained in Protoculture ruins and Vajra carcasses, neither of which are exactly safe to mess with. Protoculture ruins tend to be dangerous places where the terminally irresponsible, short-sighted Protoculture left dangerous weapons and the Vajra tend to take being hunted rather personally... and respond appropriately. (Restrictions on the mining and trade in the valuable crystals were a direct factor in the Kingdom of the Wind's decision to secede from the New UN Government, seeing those restrictions as an impedient to the economic growth of the planet which otherwise had only agricultural products to offer.)
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, he has a prosthetic leg... though in Macross Plus it appears to be a conventional prosthesis when we see him remove and adjust it in his office. I'd imagine they probably used their copy of the government codes to level a wobbly table or something.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, the visual effect for a space fold has changed a bunch over the years... though the description hasn't. There have been a few really odd moments like the Protoculture ruins on Uroboros using miniature fold effects as a point-to-point teleportation network for people (ala Star Trek's transporters) or the portal network maintained by the ruins in Delta. One can assume there are probably some pretty weird visual artifacts caused by bending the everloving hell out of 10+ dimensional spacetime. As I understand it, the Gestam Jump navigation from Space Battleship Yamato 2199 is sort of like a hyperdrive... though instead of propelling the ship into, and through, a separate sub-universe the ship is instead moving via the 4th dimension in realspace. IIRC, space as viewed in the 4th dimension is curved into waves and is in motion. When two points in the universe are at the peak of a wave at the same time and you can draw a straight line (4th dimensionally) between them, a wave motion engine can produce a tachyon wave to push the ship from the peak of one 4th dimensional wave to another and effectively circumvent all the 3 dimensional space in the "valley" between the peaks in the 4 dimensional waves. (That they have to wait for their current location and target destination to be aligned 4th-dimensionally is the reason they can only jump at certain times... and jumping at the wrong time can have disastrous consequences.) Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross copied the Yamato "warp" pretty much whole cloth for its own setting as well... though it was more concerned about the things that could go wrong if you screw up a jump (intentionally or by accident) like screwing up spacetime around the ship or launching yourself thousands of years backwards in time.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    That'd depend on how much of a generator surplus the ship has to play with. One of the problems with defensive measures in Macross is that a lot of them are very energy-intensive. Active stealth systems draw a lot of juice for high-speed analysis of enemy radar beams and generation of an inverse-phase pulse of the same wavelength and amplitude to cancel the radar return out. Energy conversion armor draws an enormous amount of power to generate the electromagnetic pulses needed to saturate the armor material and change its molecular bonding. Barrier systems are probably the worst of the lot, as the barrier is no force field... it's an artificial dimensional fault. A very localized twisting of a small area of space-time into an impassible knot. It takes a lot of energy to produce even a very small pinpoint barrier. Barriers are also very different from standard sci-fi "shields" in that they're not selectively permeable... the enemy can't shoot you through that artificially distorted space, but you can't shoot him through it either. It's an impassible obstacle in both directions. Active stealth is a standard defensive measure for the New UN Spacy's avoidance-based approach to the Zentradi and many ships use massively thick layers of energy conversion armor to beef up their defensive power. It's likely they just don't have enough energy to spare to produce a pinpoint barrier large enough to repel anti-capital ship fire. (Some escort ships, like the ones the NUNS Varauta system defense force had, did explicitly possess barrier systems but were never depicted using them in combat.) Yes, the miniaturized pinpoint barrier system was one of the defining features of 4th Generation Variable Fighter designs like the VF-19, VF-22, and VF-171. Of course, the aforementioned problem regarding power consumption still applies. That pinpoint barrier system draws about 60% of the VF's maximum generator output to produce one barrier about the size of the Battroid's head or up to three little ones about the size of its fist. The way power is reallocated between propulsion and defense between modes, that huge draw on the thermonuclear reaction turbine engine's generator stage meant that the barrier system could only function in Battroid mode. Improvements in engine and generator technology in the 5th Generation Variable fighters (YF/VF-24, VF-25, VF-27, YF-29, YF-30, VF-31, Sv-262, etc.) freed up the VF's options a little, with twin-engine VFs being able to operate their barrier systems in GERWALK mode in normal operation and sustain limited operation of their barriers in Fighter mode if a substantial external power source like the capacitor banks in the VF-25's Armored Pack were present. Four engine models like the VF-27 were noted to be able to run their barriers in a somewhat limited manner in Fighter mode without external assistance, though they were only noted to be used in the event the VF was trying to exceed the friction-heating "speed limit" at low altitudes (~10km and below) to avoid burning itself to a crisp with the air friction of its own speed.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Well, they're the most numerous by a significant margin (over 9,000 built by the mid-2040s) and tend to outnumber any other type in fleet operations by at least 2:1 because they're a dedicated escort/picket type... so the law of averages is working against them there in a big way. Their overall performance is said to be quite good even in 2059. There are enhanced versions and uparmed derivative models like the Stealth Cruiser from Macross Frontier.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    That one extra step that interstellar law said Thou Shalt Not Take... and then a couple more past that one. It's interesting to note that we do see a number of cyborgs who seem to have fairly advanced augmentations without Galaxy's questionable additions. Oscar Brauhitsch has a high performance artificial arm, Nicolas Berthier's got a fiber optic peripheral nervous system for boosted response times, Aisha Blanchett and Ushio Todo have networked brains, etc. (I don't think it's explicitly stated that Mei Leeron is a cyborg, but she'd kind of have to be given that her signature VF is a VF-27.)
  16. Seto Kaiba
    ... really? I thought the CG was pretty good in a lot of places and averaged at least "passable". That first shot of the Bebop going through the gate was pretty sweet, IMO. Spike's Swordfish was pretty damn well done too. I dunno... I'm inclined to doubt it, if only because recent-ish news from another franchise makes it looks like Netflix already cut the worst of its underperforming assets back in Q4 2020 or Q1 2021. Y'know, Star Trek: Discovery... ViacomCBS's $100M+ per season money pit. That one cut was likely enough to fund Cowboy Bebop in its entirety with anywhere from $17-40M left over given the average per-episode expenditure for shows like this. Normally when Netflix marks a series for cancellation this quickly it's because its average viewership rate is way below expectations.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    According to Macross Chronicle, cybernetics research was one of the fields that benefitted immensely from the introduction of overtechnology. The New UN Government heavily regulated that research and it applications to restrict its applications to medical care out of concern that it could be weaponized. The YF-21's BDI system was supposedly a New UN Gov't-sanctioned non-invasive application of some of that research. It sounds, at least in Chronicle, like the BDI was an outgrowth of research into cybernetic man-machine interfaces intended for benign purposes like linking cybernetic implants to biological nervous systems and giving people Ghost in the Shell-style networked brains. What Macross Galaxy did thereafter seems to have been pursuing the main branch of that research to its full potential with a society-wide application of networked brains and cybernetic performance enhancement... and then exploiting the inherent vulnerabilities in that technology for their own ends without telling anyone they were making the kind of cybernetically-enhanced soldiers who were illegal under interstellar law.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, very likely... esp. since Galaxy used a modified VF-22 as a testbed for their improved version of the Brain Direct Interface that eventually went into the VF-27. (Until one got stolen by Fasces, anyway...)
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Well, of course not... and not just because that switch is not, in fact, happening. The Guantanamo-class Advanced ARMD is only slightly older than the Uraga-class escort battle carrier, and it's noted to be a good deal cheaper and was highly versatile thanks to its simple and highly adaptable hull structure. Macross Chronicle indicates that the Guantanamo-class (sometimes called the Maizuru-class) is still very much the standard NUNS space carrier in 2059 (and beyond) for those reasons. The more expensive Uraga-class is used more sparingly as taskforce command ships and for surface operations because it was designed to be water landing-capable. Like the Northampton-class and Battle-class, those designs were made with an eye towards future-proofing and are being updated and modernized as time goes on rather than discarded and replaced. (Mind you, the New UN Spacy continues to use the ARMD-class and ARMD II-class as well. Waste not, want not, they might not have the long range endurance of the Guantanamo-class, but they make great planetary defense ships. An old ARMD-class in orbit of Eden was used as the base for space testing on the YF-19 and YF-21, and one is seen among the ships of the Macross 7 fleet in 2046 in Macross 7 Trash as well.)
  20. Seto Kaiba
    General Galaxy co-founder Alexi Kurakin was a bit of a pessimist... or maybe you'd call him a pragmatist. He had originally worked on the development of the Anti-Unification Alliance's SV-51 series variable fighter for the joint Sukhoi-IAI-Dornier design team and, after defecting to the UN Gov't, he foresaw the eventual return of VF-on-VF combat as humanity expanded into space and internal schisms formed. So he set up the SV Works in General Galaxy to consider the then-unasked question of "how do you design a Variable Fighter to fight Variable Fighters?". Kurakin was ultimately vindicated in his belief that internal schisms in the New UN Gov't would see VFs shooting at other VFs, both in the occasional acts of anti-government terrorism in the 2010s and 2020s and the gradual rise in internal tensions thanks to the New UN Gov't trying to micromanage its emigrant governments from Earth that resulted in a series of little brushfire conflicts that eventually blew up into the so-called Second Unification War in c.2050-2051. The SV Works wasn't intended to produce weapons for anti-government forces, but because the company can't really exercise control over what a government that buys its products actually does with them they ended up being used for that purpose anyway thanks to black market deals and unscrupulous arms dealers. The Slayer Valkyrie series were essentially a non-governmental competing brand for the finances of emigrant governments looking to upgrade their defenses. Windermere IV used their hardware with no complaints from the New UN Forces or New UN Government prior to their War of Independence in 2060, because they found the Sv-154's performance more suited to their particular style or price point than other offerings. It hasn't been discussed in detail yet, but it seems like General Galaxy has the Anaheim Electronics problem in that, as a megacorp, it's gotten so big and so spread out that it's no longer aware of absolutely everything going on under its roof. Like how Anaheim Electronics was firmly in the Earth Federation's camp officially but the staff at Anaheim's facility over in the lunar city of Granada made up for former Zeonic and Zimmad personnel covertly provided support to various Neo Zeon movements and then cooked the books to avoid getting implicated. Macross Galaxy may simply be General Galaxy's Granada... that place where the staff behave badly and cover up their misdeeds with doctored reporting. General Galaxy sponsored the Macross Galaxy fleet's mission, but it's questionable whether the head office on Earth was actually aware of what the Galaxy executives wanted to accomplish with the products they were developing. (Of course, you also have to remember that corporations are fundamentally amoral organizations... that being the reason the government regulations are often said to be written in blood.) They may have realized that the situation on Galaxy was... unpleasant... but not the full scope of the ambitions of its leadership. With everyone living in AR to make life more pleasant, it's possible they simply never got an honest report of how bad conditions were because everyone's perceptions were being edited to make them less so.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Super Dimension Fortress Macross was a bit of a joint effort. Studio Nue, and particularly Shoji Kawamori, originated the series concept and pitch and they developed it initially under the sponsorship of the Wiz Corporation... a name that Artmic briefly rebranded under in 1980-1981. Due to the reorganization of Wiz Corp, the series was cut loose and found a new sponsor in ad company Big West. They continued to develop it in partnership with Artland. When they completed development and went to start production, they quickly found out Big West had significantly lowballed the budget because of their lack of experience in animation sponsorship and so Studio Nue and Big West entered into a deal with Tatsunoko Production to have Tatsunoko bankroll the animation production and in exchange grant them the international distribution and merchandising rights to the series. (Artland's development involvement was the contribution of Haruhiko Mikimoto, who designed the characters, though the designs are owned by Studio Nue and Big West.) Ownership of the material is all about who paid for it to be made (work-for-hire). Artmic (as Wiz Corp) originally sponsored development but Studio Nue bought out Artmic's stake in the series when they parted ways. Big West sponsored the rest of development. So Big West and Studio Nue jointly own the designs, concepts, etc. of the series because they essentially split the check. Tatsunoko, for its part, owned the copyright on the physical animation itself but not the material in it because they only financed the show's production. Not without a retrofit. Since only twelve more Macross-class ships were made between the end of the First Space War and the design's retirement in favor of the Battle-class, it wasn't a concern that ever really came up. Especially since there's not really anything wrong with the postwar ARMD II-class that's usually used in that capacity except that it isn't particularly stealthy. Big West. They lowballed the budget on Macross because they were inexperienced with animation sponsorship and weren't expecting the series to take off like it did. Once it did take off, they (in partnership with Tatsunoko) are the ones who greenlit an extension to the series (ep28-36) and then Big West later greenlit a movie version based on the show's continuing success.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Finished Ghost in the Shell: Arise's Alternative Architecture and New Movie today. For a watered down version of Ghost in the Shell, it finally started to feel like a worthy installment once I got to the "Pyrophoric Cult" story and the movie. It's definitely weird having a version of the story where the Major's origin is actually known... she's always been a Multiple Choice Past sort of character, with various versions of the story going so far as to suggest NOTHING was known about her down to her age or pre-cyberization gender. Especially having EVERYONE ELSE apparently know it too. Not sure I care for the actual ending, since the villain of the piece gets off scott free and there are no real consequences for anyone involved in the Firestarter incident. It got a little into Ghost in the Shell's traditional transhuman philosophizing near the end... not enough to have any significant thoughts, but enough to at least feel like it deserved the title. My viewing group's gonna start Jojo's Bizarre Adventure VI: Stone Ocean later.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Alas, the world may never know what Kakizaki's favorite dry rub for steaks was... "Sort of" and "Signs point to No", respectively. Macross Chronicle devoted a World Guide sheet devoted to them (#18A). It mentions the prevailing theory is that Galactic Whales are a species that predates the evolution of the Protoculture. It also makes multiple references to the Zolan belief/theory that the white whale that Graham Hoyly was so intent on bringing down was potentially over one million years old (though the average whale's lifespan is believed to be ~7,000 years). If true, that'd mean the white whale was around when the Protoculture were still figuring out things like agriculture. Given what was established in Dynamite 7 about being able to harvest material from Galactic Whales for use in fold systems and Frontier's material later establishing the ancient Protoculture's technology was inspired by study of natural super dimension life forms like the Vajra, it seems likely that the reverse is true. That the Protoculture may have made studies of galactic whales to learn the secrets of space folding and potentially modeled the Zentradi's warships on the whales themselves.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    "I told you we should've pulled over to ask for directions..." ... I think there might be some Robotech-isms creeping in here. There isn't a Vajra "king", as such. The Vajra are not even individually intelligent. What their species has isn't quite a traditional hive mind so much as each Vajra is an individual node in a vast biological version of a distributed computer network achieved via biological zero-time fold communication. They have a communal intelligence that exists "in the cloud" the biological fold wave network forms, though its thought process and worldview are wholly alien to the individually-intelligent humanoids of the galaxy. The Vajra's Queen forms are no more sentient than any other Vajra on individual terms. Biological reproduction aside, their function is to serve as network routers that regulate and direct communication inside the Vajra's distributed network. It's not clear if the Vajra even have a concept of "conquest", their species has led a harmonious existence for so long that the Protoculture supposedly idolized them for it and tried to emulate it technologically in a bid to solve their internal strife. They nest in various places that are convenient to the resources they need to thrive, but they're not aggressive unless provoked and since they can live in places that are generally inhospitable to humanoids they're not exactly competing with humanoids for territory either. The only reason they were attacking the Macross Frontier fleet in Macross Frontier was that Ranka's biological fold wave emissions made them think Ranka was a Vajra and needed rescue (not to mention it was her signature song "Aimo" that is tuned to produce fold waves equivalent to a Vajra mating call), and they attacked Macross Galaxy because Macross Galaxy attacked them first and was actively hunting them for their fold quartz. As long as humanoids leave them alone, the Vajra don't seem to even mind living on the same planet as humanoids as on Uroboros.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, the turnout being low is kind of expected since they did pretty much bugger-all to actually advertise this one-day engagement outside of the die-hard Macross fandom, which has more or less been an underground phenomena for the last twenty-odd years. It's still a promising sign of things to come, and I'm glad they did it.
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