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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Given their hypothesized status as the last of the Protoculture's creations and their short lifespans, the Windermereans were more likely the Protoculture's last shot at creating a sub-Protoculture species who absolutely could not screw up the way the Protoculture did. They locked their world behind a fold fault to prevent them from being exposed to the massive mess the Protoculture'd made of the rest of the galaxy, they made empathy mandatory by giving them empathic abilities, and kept their lifespans short to slow their development by as much as possible so they'd have their sh*t together before they made it into space. Well, no... that's not correct. Like the Meltrandi mobile fortresses, Zentradi mobile fortresses are commanded by an AI. The only difference is that the Zentradi use a biotechnological living command computer where the Meltrandi use an optical holographic living command computer. Boddole Zer in the movie is no more a Zentradi than Moruk Laplamiz is a Meltrandi. They're both very talkative pieces of computer hardware. Macross Galaxy went all-in on cybernetics not out of any transhumanist sentiment, but because it made for easy mind control and provided the necessary level of combat ability to actually fight the Vajra on an even footing. (It's also worth noting the Protoculture toyed with, but did not actually attempt, networking the minds of sentients together on a large scale for fear of causing a Your Head A'splode outcome. It's not really a reprise of the Unification Wars though... the motivations are completely different. The only thing similar about them is the name.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    More like the version of Hammond in Michael Crichton's original novel... the self-obsessed "visionary" whose unshakeable belief that he is in control, that nobody is in any real danger, and insistence that everything was the fault of someone else rather than admit his vision was flawed ultimately got him and almost everyone else killed.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, that's easy... the rich text editor these forums use will automatically break up quote blocks for you if you poke it just right. If you quote a whole post, or just a large block of text, and you want to break it up... just go to where you want the break to be and add line breaks (hit ENTER) until you have the part where you want one quote block to end and the part where you want the next one to begin separated by a row with no text. Then go to that row, and hit ENTER one more time. The rich text editor'll automatically split it into two quote blocks with identical headers. I'm not grabbing each quote block one at a time, I'm grabbing the whole post, breaking it up, and deleting the bits I don't need/want. Much faster. My impression is more along the lines of the Protoculture being either naively optimistic or so carried away with their own cleverness that they just never conceived that failure was a possibility. Like the Sparks (mad scientists) in Girl Genius, they seem to have been so caught up in the rush of exerting their brilliance to create that they never stopped to consider how what they just made might go Horribly Wrong, the probability of it doing so, or how quickly it might do so and whether they'll still be in range when it happens. As a species, they seem to have never invented the Design Failure Mode Effects Analysis.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Humanity is in NO position to point fingers there...
  5. Seto Kaiba
    For basic continuity and setting purposes, every subsequent Macross title except Macross II: Lovers Again treats the Super Dimension Fortress Macross TV series as the "truer" of the two takes on the First Space War. Macross II: Lovers Again treats the DYRL? movie as the "truer" of the two. Neither is completely in one camp though. Aesthetically, the more polished DYRL? designs mostly replaced the TV ones in all the sequels. Sometimes justified in-universe (e.g. the movie VF-1 being a later production block that coexisted with the TV version), sometimes not. The creators just seem to like the DYRL? designs more. In DYRL?, the role of the Zentradi's ancient enemy was taken by the Meltrandi (female Zentradi). That version of the story presents the civil war that destroyed the Protoculture's interstellar civilization as being a result of society becoming divided along gender lines after their development of cloning technology removed the need for the opposite sex in reproduction. The male faction created the Zentradi, and the female faction created the Meltrandi, and when the fighting started it consumed the Protoculture's entire civilization. What can we say, he is voiced by Show Hayami... what lady could resist that majestic baritone? (As in the TV series, he and Milia were so impressed with each other as the top aces of their respective factions that they hit it off VERY quickly.) The Macross had an onboard factory that could recycle material to a certain extent. It was intended for producing repair and replacement parts for the ship and its complement of fighters while away from port, but it could be turned to other purposes too. The precious illusion of normalcy provided by the Macross's engineering crew maintaining the city and even providing features like an artificial sky were a major factor in keeping the ship's civilian population calm and distracted during the long flight back to Earth. They outnumbered the ship's crew almost three to one, so if they got well and truly p*ssed, the ensuing riotous mob would be extraordinarily difficult to contain safely. (Plus the crew probably felt a little bad about having accidentally involved civilians in their fight when South Ataria island was accidentally transported into deep space by the sabotaged space fold system.) (In DYRL?, this was less of an issue as the city was there intentionally due to the ship having been outfitted for long-duration space exploration and colonization.) Macross is a love story, first and foremost. It'd be a pretty short love story if nobody was ever indecisive or uncertain about their feelings, or if nobody ever had things get in the way of their figuring things out. It's drama! Kaifun was there partly to be a rival for Misa's affections, owing to his resemblance to her long-dead beau Riber Fruhling, and partly to provide an opposing viewpoint for all the soldiers in the main cast as someone fundamentally opposed to violence. Killing him off would've defeated the point of him. It's usually recommended to go in production order... since that gives you the organic building-up of the concepts underpinning the series. Especially when it comes to all of the mythos surrounding the Protoculture and the occasional bouts of one title setting up the next (e.g. Zero setting up Frontier). Frontier is often hailed as the best of the sequels, though.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    It seems to be a pretty common reaction among those who saw the TV anime first... having to force themselves to watch. It really a masterpiece of cringe comedy. Poor Alex Hassell's out there trying SO hard to be an edgy villain, but amidst everyone else's campy B-movie delivery it comes off like he's a cosplayer who wandered onto the set. In the show's defense, Faye was a no-win scenario. The showrunners could either be flayed alive for anime Faye's sexualization and down-on-her-luck bad girl behavior early on that set up her development later or jettison it to make her a more socially-acceptable Strong Female Protagonist™ at the expense of most of her original characterization.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Perhaps if their civilization had lasted a bit longer before its collapse. They likely had the means with their massive industrial base of autonomous mining and factory operations. They probably never had a reason to make the attempt, though. They had only been spacefaring for around 500 years when their civilization was wiped out by the Supervision Army. The first 300 years of that was using sublight generation ships for interstellar travel. The remaining 200 years was done with fold-capable emigrant ships. It's doubtful their population or utilization of the inhabitable planets available to them had ever reachd the level of an ecumenopolis (planet-city), never mind needing to make something like a dyson sphere, before their own creations destroyed them leaving a handful of survivors on the edges of the galaxy to slowly go extinct.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    To be honest, I feel like that early nugget of lore has long since been tossed since it's not mentioned in any other resource besides the Official Fan Book. It doesn't quite make sense for Macross Galaxy to be nearly ten years older than the Macross Frontier when the launch rate for these fleets is supposedly 1-2 per year and there's the whole matter of it explicitly being a generation newer than the City-class that was the standard in the 2030s. The City-class were 3rd Generation emigrant ships. Macross Galaxy is a 4th Generation emigrant ship, an intermediate generation between the City-class and larger Island Cluster-class. Logically, there should only be at most 4 years between having Macross Galaxy launch and Macross Frontier's own departure. WRT being "closer to a Megaroad design in philosophy"... so is most of the accommodation in the Macross Frontier fleet. Unlike the City-class, the Island Cluster-class has most of its population living in the "underground" sublevels while the area of open "sky" on top is essentially a massive public recreation area that borders on being a pre-war Earth theme park (no, really, it's said this is done for tourism reasons) that is frequently remodeled to keep it appealing and is also where the fleet's wealthiest citizens and those directly involved in its theme park-y upkeep and attractions live. (We see those sublevels in the first movie, when Ranka performs down there to promote transformable VF toys.) Nah, we know there are later fleet numbers than 7... Macross 9 is the setting of a radio play, Macross 11 is mentioned in Dynamite 7 and seen in Frontier, etc. etc. One of the new Macross Quarter-class ships in the 2nd movie shows up from Macross 17, and another is supposedly from Macross 23. It's a problematic bit of lore that was mentioned once and never again, meaning they probably realized they goofed.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Nope, AFAIK the only surface features on Zentradi ships that've been identified besides gun ports, engines, and launch bays are the communication beam emitters on the bow of the Nupetiet Vergnitzs-type. It has been theorized, though not based on anything firm, that the yellow blisters are sensor clusters and the grey are fuel tanks.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    If you figure it out, let us know... we don't know either. I'd assume the Battle Galaxy docks to that concave bit on the front.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    I'm not saying it's a bad show... IMO, it just didn't do enough to stand out among the dozen or so other isekai shows with the very similar permutations on "overworked wage slave gets reincarnated to lead the slow life". In hindsight, I'm not sure I'd even say that's a fault in that specific show so much as an issue with Isekai being massively overrepresented as a genre with an increasing number of low-effort copycat releases leaving everything feeling a bit samey. Nothing on the Winter 2022 release schedule so far really catches my interest, so I'm going to have another go at Lost Universe. The last two times I've tried to get through it, I just give up around episode 10 out of boredom. Not Hajime Kanzaka's best work by a long way. Crunchyroll's Winter 2022 offerings are pretty sad. The same old shounen stuff (One Piece, Boruto), shoujo stuff (Pretty Cure), yet more Case Closed (which will run forever into eternity), an OVA for The Irregular at Magic High School, Blade Runner, a reverse harem thing featuring the shinsengumi, and that's about it. All that really stands out from ANN's list is yet another Saiyuki Reload series, season two of Realist Hero, and the painful mess that is Attack on Titan final story arc limping to its long overdue end.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    IMO, the slow build-up in the prologue was a good call. Unlike so many dead parent backstories, this one actually gave the audience enough time to get properly invested in Blood, Gus, and Mary as characters to give their demise more of an impact than your standard "here to die" dead parents whose death is the only way they're remotely significant to the story (e.g. Thomas and Martha Wayne Syndrome).
  13. Seto Kaiba
    I'm not surprised... this one was cutesy and feel-good enough that it was at least inoffensive for an isekai series. Now that I've finished the season, I definitely share your position on it. First seven episodes? Gorgeous. Glamorous. Tight, compelling storytelling with an unusual setup. When you end your story's prologue with the protagonist repeatedly defeating a god - an actual, literal, cosmological deity rather than a powerful person with delusions of grandeur - anything they do afterwards is an anticlimax. Come episode 7.5, Will has defeated the God of Undeath in single combat TWICE and he hasn't even left home yet to start on his hero's journey. Going directly from that to spanking half-starved bandits and the odd wyvern?
  14. Seto Kaiba
    On the rare occasion that a planet turns out to be unsuitable, the emigrant fleet that settles it just picks up and leaves. Elysium was abandoned by its settlers in 2041. The implication, at least in Macross Frontier, seems to be that if an emigrant fleet is destroyed or so badly damaged that it must be abandoned the populace are treated as refugees and taken in by other emigrant governments as appropriate. There are probably a fair number of interstellar treaties and laws governing it. Macross 29 was an emigrant fleet that was something of a magnet for people fleeing internal and external conflicts like that. AFAIK, there's no mention of the Varauta 3198XE system being abandoned after the war. One would imagine that a fair number of people - like Chelsea Scarlett - wouldn't want to live there anymore after what happened, but there would also naturally be a fair amount to be gained from excavating and studying the Protoculture ruins on the system's 4th planet. Especially for advanced technologies like the entropy control field that keeps the 4th planet an ice world despite its orbit. The Macross 5 fleet's ships were destroyed by the Protodeviln and their brainwashed Varauta forces, so as a fleet they've ceased to exist. The surviving population of the Macross 5 fleet is noted to have been rescued from Gepernich's Spiritia Farm and the Varauta forces by the Macross 7 fleet. What became of them thereafter is unknown. Some of them may have joined the Macross 7 fleet, and others may have opted to stay on Varauta or join other emigrant fleets. Chelsea's circumstances were... unique and difficult. I'm not sure if she actually lived on Macross 9 or just visited there while touring as an idol singer. Macross 9 was the site of the incident where her rare Sophia Spiritia went out of control and caused a hundred people in the audience to black out during a performance. In the TV version, the concerns were somewhat more general in nature. Namely, that the damage to Island-1 and the loss of half a dozen or so Island-class environment ships had compromised the ship's bioplant functions badly enough that it couldn't restore the environmental balance on its own anymore. That led to, among other things, a decline in air quality and oxygen levels that led to them issuing oxygen masks to civilians. An emigrant fleet that decides its target planet is unsuitable could just pick up and go back to sailing the stars in search of a new one. If the fleet is destroyed, then the surviving population are refugees. If Frontier hadn't been able to force a landing on the Vajra planet they would probably have eventually been forced to abandon their battered emigrant ship and become refugees aboard the ships of the fleet's military contingent.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    I don't believe they were ever shown being used in the original series. They might have been if the series had been produced at its originally intended 49 episode length, plans for which included a number of other gimmick weapons for the SDF-1 Macross that were cut from its specs when the sponsor pared the run down to 27 episodes before re-extending it to 36 based on strong ratings performance.
  16. 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.
  17. 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.
  18. 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.
  19. 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.
  20. 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.
  21. 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.
  22. 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.
  23. 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...)
  24. 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.
  25. 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.
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