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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Thus far, the only sentient non-humanoid species to be depicted in Macross have been the incorporeal energy beings from higher-dimensional space that became the Protodeviln and the insectoid Vajra. The Vajra aren't individually intelligent, though, the consciousness exists "in the cloud" formed by their zero-time fold wave network so they only count en masse. Galactic whales were confirmed to be an intelligent form of life in Macross Dynamite 7... but the jury is out regarding exactly HOW intelligent. They're definitely not the purely instinct-driven hybrids of plant and mineral they were initially believed to be given that they were shown to be capable of complex communication. Most sentient life in the galaxy is humanoid, because the Protoculture made it in their image.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Each emigrant fleet charts its own course through space in search of a habitable world to settle. The short-distance emigrant fleets focused on exploring space within 100 light years of Earth, which led to the discovery of planets like Eden. The far larger long-distance emigrant fleet formations don't have a specific destination in mind, but they're not wandering aimlessly by any means. Even the fleets that don't have a general area of the galaxy in mind do quite a bit of planning before and after launch, and diligently scout out their chosen course and the area of space around it using small pilot fleets of escort ships. They look for all kinds of things like exploitable resources (e.g. asteroids or comets to mine), for inhabitable planets, for already-inhabited planets, for potential or actual threats like Zentradi fleets, etc. etc. For their part, the Zentradi don't really care about planets - inhabitable or otherwise - unless the Supervision Army is present. Their indoctrinated-in mindset is extremely simplistic. They care about finding and destroying their enemy, and everything that isn't related to that goes in a great big category of "that's nice, I don't care". It's been indicated that they're apathetic even towards potentially-dangerous navigational hazards like fold faults because they're not an enemy or potential enemy in the conventional sense. Being entirely fleet-based, they have no interest in planets unless the planet harbors an enemy or potential enemy. Emigrant fleets that bump into the Zentradi in open space or get unlucky enough to have a Zentradi fleet stumble on the planet they've settled on run the risk of being mistaken for Supervision Army or simply being attacked as a potential threat, which is why there are New UN Forces directives and guidelines involving destroying rogue Zentradi fleets (e.g. "Fleet of the Strongest Women") or avoiding them whenever possible. TL;DR: the Zentradi have probably stumbled across a lot of potentially inhabitable planets... but unless there's something to fight there it's not something that they bother with.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    That, of course, being why we're all very confused by the Battle Astraea... it looks for all the world to be a repaired, recommissioned Battle Galaxy, which shouldn't be possible given the ship was destroyed in both versions of Macross Frontier. Even if the wreckage was still orbiting the Vajra planet, you don't just sell off the wreck of a fleet flagship-grade space warship that was beyond state of the art just a few years prior. (Someone has some explaining to do.) (Unless, of course, there was more than one. An oft-overlooked detail of the old City-class environment ships is that they technically had provision for THREE Battle-class ships to dock there even if they typically only had the primary dock occupied.)
  4. Seto Kaiba
    For those interested in music/music history, I found a rather good documentary... Spike Jones Off the Record: the Man Who Murdered Music. He was basically the Weird Al Yankovic of the 40's and 50's.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Most of the way through season two of Let's Make a Mug Too and I have to say the real charm of this series isn't the animation, it's the 9 minute .1-numbered episodes where the voice actors go and explore the locations visited in the series and try to do some of the activities seen in the series. I have to admit, I am really warming up to this series entirely because of those 9 minute segments. It's one thing to have a mildly edutainment-type TV anime. It's quite another to actually Show Your Work by having the cast go and try it out for themselves. It's especially entertaining seeing them discuss the things they've decided to make in their impromptu pottery class. One opts to sculpt chopstick holders based on her family's pet dog. Another decides to sculpt a really nice ass for some reason. They seem to be having a lot of fun, and it's a surprisingly feel-good watch. Like, I could take or leave the animated segments but the live-action bits involving the actual cast are quite charming.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Depends on the version. Macross Frontier's TV anime version has the Macross Galaxy fleet appear to be wiped out by the Vajra early on, only to later reveal the distress call was disingenuous at best and the fleet used its supposed destruction to go under the radar and pursue their agenda against the Vajra. In that version, the Mainland and at least a portion of the Galaxy fleet are revealed to still be out there after the Vajra and Macross Frontier fleet sink the Battle Galaxy and most of its escorts in orbit of the Vajra planet. The Macross Frontier movie version reverses the scenario in almost every respect. The Macross Frontier fleet receives the Macross Galaxy fleet's distress call, but presumes it to be part of a hostile intelligence operation and refuses to dispatch any reinforcements. SMS sorties after being independently contracted to assist Macross Galaxy, and discovers tha the distress call was quite genuine... a dozen or so light escort warships full of refugees being all that's left of Macross Galaxy, with the Galaxy Executives hiding among them and reworking their plan to capture and use the Battle Frontier instead.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Almost certainly, yes. You could probably draw a connection there to the 33rd Marines being stationed out in the middle of bloody nowhere. No others have been mentioned to date. Unless you want to count the Macross Galaxy Corporate Army, which was technically a private armed force though it operated under the auspices of the New UN Forces because the Macross Galaxy corporate government operated as a New UN Government member state. There are likely others out there. All of the PMCs that've been mentioned so far have been subsidiaries of megacorporations or mega-conglomerates... and there's plenty of those around in the Macross setting these days. The Uroboros Hunter's Guild could be called a marginal case. It's not organized like a military unit in any sense - and a fair number of people in-universe and out would say it really isn't organized at all - being a trade association and licensing body for private Valkyrie operators. If you got all or even most of them together they'd be a fairly formidable force by sheer weight of numbers even though most of them are operating 1st and 2nd Generation Valkyries in a period when real militaries and PMCs are using 4th Generation Valkyries, but they're spread across a wide array of freelance gigs from bounty hunting to private security to resource gathering/prospecting and high-speed courier services. As I've mentioned in past posts, the Macross Frontier short story Wired Warrior talks about the Macross Galaxy fleet's prototype attempt at this... a young lady named Greenwich Meridian, who is was made by reprogramming a salvaged brain from a dead New UN Forces soldier. They don't seem to have taken it any farther than that, though. Even Brera, who was a fully-cyborged soldier and subjected to mind control, found the entire idea repellant. Mind you, neither Project Meridian nor its nominal rival Project Stella were intended to circumvent limitations on the usage of fully-autonomous combat AIs. They were efforts to circumvent the two main logistical problems inherent in expanding the Macross Galaxy fleet's armed forces: the limited availability of people who are suitable for military service and the significant investment in time and resources it takes to train a soldier to the level of combat readiness. Project Meridian tried to resolve the problem of availability by the simple expedient of reprogramming the brains of the recently deceased with an artificial personality and installing them in artificial bodies. Project Stella tried to eliminate, or at least greatly abbreviate, the amount of time it takes to train a soldier by giving them a sort of artificial multiple personality disorder in the form of a combat AI that'd take over in combat. Neither project seemed to pan out as expected, or at least never got far enough by the time of the fleet's destruction to be put into widespread practical use. Not that we know of. Mind you, they wouldn't need to go that far. Existing AI technology used in unmanned fighters can already achieve superhumanly-fast response times. What the Ghost X-9's use of a Sharon-type AI was trying to achieve was fully-autonomous operation with a level of unpredictability rivaling a flesh-and-blood pilot. The air combat AIs used in Ghosts can react much faster than a living pilot can, but their behavior is defined by preset routines and responses to specific criteria that make their behavior predictable in combat. They require a certain amount of external direction in combat because of this. In 2059, LAI was working on a new approach to personality emulation in an attempt to achieve the same kind of unpredictability and autonomous operation as the Ghost X-9 but without the inherent instability of the Sharon-type AI. They used SMS Skull Platoon as a model for the system. When things came to a head in the TV series, Galaxy just used the fully-autonomous air combat software from the Ghost X-9 illegally...
  8. Seto Kaiba
    TBH, I'll take the aircraft in its base state please and thank you. I've said before that I think the VF-31's Armored Pack is hands-down Kawamori's worst design. Not just because it contains a lot of reused art assets from Frontier, but because it doesn't mesh with the VF-31's design at all. The VF-25's Armored Pack didn't lose the silhouette of the aircraft under the parts. The VF-31's Armored Pack just looks like someone covered a VF-31 kit in glue and rolled it through some model builder's bitz bin. None of it looks like it goes together and none of it looks like it goes with the VF-31's design. It's an ugly, chunky, overly-busy mess. The Super Ghost pack is a cleaner, more streamlined design that looks like it might fit with the VF-31. The Super Ghost looks like a slightly modified version of the Ghost V-9 from the Macross Frontier series, but it feels like we've reached some unnecessary complexity about it. The Ghost has a Super Pack, fine. The Ghost IS a Super Pack, also fine. But to use a Ghost with a Super Pack AS a Super Pack feels like we've gone a bit too far. Like, we've got rotating-wingtip engine Ghosts used as rotating-wingtip engines on a VF. It feels like the design kind of missed the original point of the wingtip-mounted drones in the first place. The Sv-262 Draken III needed the wingtip-mounted drones because it didn't have enough fuel for a prolonged engagement in space. They weren't there to give it super-high performance, they were there to take the burden off the main engines and extend their range as a result like a regular Super Pack does. When you start throwing additional rocket boosters and wingtip engines onto 'em, you're just making them less good at the one thing they're there to do by making them heavier with less endurance.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Finished season one of Let's Make a Mug Too. It's not bad. It's one of those weird half-length episode shows and each episode is paired with a 9 minute little segment where the four principal voice actresses go places related to the events of each episode. That said, it's really clearly struggling to decide what kind of series it wants to be. There's a lot of info dumping about the pottery-making hobby and an attempt at being a character drama, but it doesn't feel like the series really gives either side of it enough time to really develop. There's apparently a second season as well.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Since they seem to have gotten their weapons via the Epsilon Foundation, there's probably a connection to the events of Macross E where an old Macross-class was rebuilt in a similar fashion by the Epsilon Foundation and Zelgaar Heavy Industries.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Finished Tenchi Muyo! OVA 4. This OVA is... well... it's basically two hour (4 episode) advertisement and exposition dump for Isekai no Seikishi Monogatari that has basically nothing to do with any of the characters in the main series. It backtracks to before Tenchi's dad remarried at the end of OVA 3, goes into a lot of depth explaining that his second wife is from an alternate reality, the situation on Geminar, that she's an artificial human, etc. etc. before timeskipping ahead to the birth of Tenchi's half brother Kenshi (the protagonist of Isekai no Seikishi Monogatari) and an episode basically devoted to expositing on WHY he's such an unstoppable juggernaut compared to Geminar's natives despite being only like 15. Kind of unnecessary, IMO... especially if you pay attention while watching the spinoff. Started Let's Make a Mug Too over dinner. Seemed like it was going to be a cutesy sort of "let's exposit on this hobby" sort of series like a couple that've come out recently. Got heavy FAST with the protagonist Himeno coming right out with telling her class her dad's business went bankrupt and her mom died.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Started Tenchi Muyo! OVA 4... and woah is the change in animation style jarring compared to OVA 3. I guess that's what a distance of 13 years gets you. AIC brought in another studio, C2C, to help animate this one. The color palette's a lot brighter than the previous installments, though it's a lot lower detail. Feels kind of like Satelight's work, almost. Going into it right from OVA 3 and GXP, it's super weird to think that the opening scene of everyone getting ready for breakfast constitutes a gathering of firepower exceeding that of most galactic governments. Also Tokimi's still around for some reason, so that's a breakfast attended by four gods, a demigod, three princesses, a walking probabilistic anomaly, and a spaceship. Looks like they decided to go back in time a bit to just before the wedding at the end of OVA 3 for some reason. (I swear these shows need to start coming with a printed family tree so I can keep track of who the hell everyone is and what their relation is to Tenchi... they've had four characters from GXP dropped in already.) EDIT: Good lord that is the worst CG compositing job I've seen since the early 2000s... Tenchi's little work truck is so poorly modeled it looks like a cardboard model with 2D graphics printed on each face someone's sliding around.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    So... Tawawa on Monday. An ONA, for a Twitter artist's series that could best be summed up as "cutesy art of life when your rack's bigger than your head". Interestingly, it's more cutesy than fanservicey... making it actually kind of almost watchable instead of a cringeworthy exercise like Peter Grill or any of those other recent ONAs built on fanservicey stuff. @BlackRose got all caught up on her rewatch of the first three Tenchi Muyo OVAs, so later we're going to start OVA4, 5, and then segue into Ai Tenchi Muyo and Isekai no Seikishi Monogatari to wrap up the Tenchi prime timeline. With all the emphasis on the PG-13 harem shenanigans, you almost forget how BIG Kajishima made the setting. It doesn't. It just sort of limps lamely to a finish it stole from Macross Frontier. Some absolute bangers on the soundtrack, but the writing is incredibly disappointing. I'm not sure I'd say the death is even better done... he still dies, and it's still completely pointless and devoid of any emotional impact because of what an unlikeable prick he is, but it's done slightly differently so it briefly attempts to fake out the audience about his fate.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    WRT the part that was on topic... There's no indication that any of the characters who left the New UN Forces to join a PMC did so because they were unable/unwilling to kill if the situation called for it. They've only done that with one character so far, and that was Chelsea Scarlett in Macross the Ride. For Arad and Chuck, the issue that drove them out of the military seems to have been who they were fighting and why. The 2060 war with Windermere IV seems to have been a sore spot for a fair number of New UN Forces soldiers. They hint that Chuck has some bad memories/issues involving a conflict he participated in where the enemies were human. Mirage left for issues totally unrelated to combat. Messer's issues... well... he seems to be a little too willing to kill.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Favorited for later use. Thank you for this most excellent resource.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    As far as we know, the only one of the lot who received a BCD invitation to leave was Ozma Lee in the Macross Frontier novelization. He was let go after he attempted some percussive behavioral correction on a member of the board of inquiry into the loss of the 117th Research Fleet for aggravating Ranka's severe PTSD. It turns out assaulting a really well-connected civilian during a military legal proceeding is a poor career choice even if they REALLY deserve it. The other ex-NUNS members of SMS are not indicated to have been forced out, such as Henry Gilliam Ford or Jeffrey Wilder. Mirage Jenius explicitly quit the New UN Forces of her own accord because she couldn't cope with the expectations of greatness that came with her family name, being a pilot of only average skill. Arad Molders is strongly implied to have quit the New UN Forces because of personal issues caused by the Windermere war of independence. Chuck... we're not really sure what his deal is, but he seems to have quit the New UN Forces for personal reasons too given his reaction to being asked about fighting humans. Messer seems to have gotten himself the spacefuture version of a Section 8 or AR 635-200 for SEVERE PTSD after the Alfheim Var riots.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... maybe? I mean, Zentradi ships are big in human terms, but they're not exactly big in astronomical terms. It'd be pretty hard to spot them with something like a telescope unless they're quite close. You'd be much more likely to spot them with a gravity wave detector, though since gravity waves propagate at or very near lightspeed you'd likely only find out a Zentradi fleet was in your backyard years or decades after it arrived and left. (Kind of like how Vrlitwhai found Earth... his fleet was lucky enough to be in exactly the right place to see the residual gravity waves of a defold event ten light years away ten years after the fact, and triangulate them to Earth's solar system.) Mind you, if your system has any kind of space fold-based traffic coming and going that'll produce noise that'll muddy any potential long-range detections. In addition to space folding being a pretty terrible way to get around, the other part of the double-blind that's keeping humanity quite safe in a dangerous galaxy is that the range of sensor systems is quite short in interplanetary terms. A really good, high-end cross dimensional radar has a range of about a light day (173.15 AU). More traditional options are a lot shorter-ranged. Master File mentions 4,000,000km is pretty well outside the operational detection range of a Zentradi fleet. That's enough distance to give a fleet literally DAYS to decide how to respond.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Komi Can't Communicate really is a well-done series. It's a reasonably sensitive treatment of the subject of social anxiety, and still manages to be quite funny and cute. It's especially nice to know this one's set for a second season next April.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Or, as the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has it...
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Humanity, for its part, seems to have at least partly made peace with the fact that it's a big screwed-up galaxy (because of the Protoculture) and they just live in it. The fact that the galaxy is a STUPIDLY HUGE place and that space folding is an absolutely terrible way to get around it if you're looking for something and don't know where it is is a bit of a comfort too. The odds of running into the Zentradi, the Supervision Army, or someone else out there in deep space are vanishingly tiny. Sometimes you beat the odds, but if that happens you can usually just draw upon the Joestar Family's Secret Technique and run away. For everything else, there's indecent amounts of thermonuclear weaponry.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Like the Destroids, the SF-3A Lancer II space fighter wasn't a great fit for the realities of space warfare and didn't last long after the First Space War and humanity getting to grips with the "playbook" for space war. It was basically a manned missile. Its design intent was for orbital use, to get up to a very high speed and make a single hit-and-run attack on an enemy ship that exhausted all of its fuel and ammunition then await recovery when its orbit next intersected that of its mothership. Its weapons were extremely powerful for its size but its high-powered thermonuclear reaction pulse rocket engine only had enough fuel for one really hard acceleration burn (at about 15G!), after which it was at the whims of gravity and inertia. Understandably, not a great idea for deep space use.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    We basically know nothing about the current disposition of the Supervision Army. Just that they're out there.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Not that we know of... though it'd likely be difficult to tell at a glance, given that a fair amount of the Supervision Army would theoretically be using the same equipment the Zentradi forces use because of the way the organization was created by capturing and turning Zentradi forces. One would assume that, like the Zentradi, they would be hostile to anything that presents itself as a threat and ignore anything that doesn't. As to culture shock, it's hard to say. If their troops are still under the same brainwashing, they might actually be more vulnerable to it than the Zentradi.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    ... well, as far as how they're supposed to work... they don't. At least, not that way. It's possible they're articulated like the cat ears, tails, and claws Walkure and Delta Flight wore when they infiltrated Voldor, but they provide no empathic ability. The gaiden manga White Knight of the Black Wing has almost the exact scenario you describe occur when Roid and Keith meet an undercover Wright Immelmann, disguised as a Windermerean. They notice more or less right away that they can't feel anything from his runes and aren't quite buying his cover story of being a traveler, but because he was only asking for directions and their minds were on other things they initially shrug off the whole encounter. Trying to go undercover on a planet of empaths whose abilities only work with their own species is an admittedly terrible idea. Especially if some members of the team have their own anatomical oddities that'd give the game away immediately like Mirage's pointed Zentradi ears. To their credit, they seem to have been well aware their disguises wouldn't be convincing up close for exactly that reason and tried to keep their distance and let Freyja do any necessary talking in the hopes that they'd look the part from outside of the range of empathic communication. (Or at least hope that the locals in Freyja's village would accept her word that the Xaos crew had no intention to do anyone any harm.)
  25. Seto Kaiba
    I know you said you intended this as sarcasm, but there's some unintended hilarity in that their suppliers were absolutely already psychos... Remember, Xaos bought a lot of the equipment that wasn't on loan to it from the Brisingr Alliance New UN Forces through Epsilon Foundation subsidiaries... and you know what they're like. They one-stop shopped a worse war profiteer than Anaheim Electronics. At least AE could blame the divisions that used to be Zeonic and Zimmad for their covertly selling arms to Neo Zeon. Epsilon has no such excuse.
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