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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    's why it makes so much more sense to have the Bioroids do it... not only because it fits with the series chronology, but also because they're already about the right size for the larger Invit/Invid forms. There was a fan film that tried to do that, but it got shut down on a copyright claim.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    That they not only didn't make the attempt but sealed and buried the time travel-capable Fold Evil they built and set an army of self-replicating technorganic monsters to keep all and sundry away from it shows that, at least at the end, the Protoculture were starting to learn from their mistakes.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... it's more like "scale of budget". The lower the budget for a given Robotech project, the less incentive the staff has to do a quality job and the more inconsistent the scaling becomes. Robotech's efforts to develop an original work have always operated on a hair-shirt budget, and the licensees who worked on the comics and novels cheaped out so badly that even the pittance spent on developing new animation looks like unprecedented largesse by comparison. Needless to say, consistency has consistently been more than they could afford. 😅 The novelization was... contentious... to say the least. It differed so heavily from the series that even its proponents advocated treating it as a wholly separate story, and Harmony Gold ultimately weighed in on the side of its critics twenty years ago by classifying it as "Robotech in name only". Titan's time loop plot seems to have been entirely to set up skipping the other two Robotech "sagas" in favor of doing their own original storyline.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    The main/ongoing Macross continuity generally takes the view that the ancient Protoculture are extinct. Their interstellar civilization was all but completely destroyed in the Supervision Army's initial rampage across the galaxy. What was left after the Protodeviln were defeated and sealed by the anima spiritia apparently wasn't enough to sustain itself, and their remaining isolated population centers slowly died out over the next 22,000 years. Macross Delta offered up a theory in-universe that the Brisingr globular cluster was the last enclave of the Protoculture where the species finally died out completely. Macross II's parallel world continuity offers a different take where the Mardook are strongly implied to be the descendants of a surviving group of Protoculture refugees like the ones who settled on Earth and created humanity in DYRL?'s backstory, though their entire original civilization was obliterated by the out-of-control Zentradi and Meltrandi forces.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    More or less, yeah. The ancient Protoculture screwed up pretty epically. Not only did their civil war spiral so far out of control that it resulted in the destruction of their civilization and their eventual extinction... they left the galaxy a Forever War between two inexhaustible armies of clone soldiers who can't even consider an end to the hostilities, let alone comprehend that the entire reason for the war faded into irrelevance hundreds of thousands of years ago.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    I'm not sure it could be said that the captured and brainwashed Varauta system New UN Forces developed any new weapons after being taken over by the Protodeviln. The ships and weapons they used in Macross 7 are just modifications of the equipment they were using when they were captured. The only thing they had that was constructed after the takeover of the system was a stretch version of their cruiser-scale carrier to serve as a dedicated aircraft carrier. Most of the Supervision Army would naturally have been Zentradi forces defending the Protoculture emigrant planets that the Protodeviln attacked. They lack the education and the mindset needed to modify existing weapons or create new ones. The Protoculture who were dragooned into service didn't have enough time to develop new weapons if they were so inclined... the Protodeviln's whole rampage across the galaxy only lasted a bit over a year before they were sealed away and the Supervision Army was left directionless to fight against the now uncontrolled Zentradi.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    On that score, your guess is as good as mine... there's nothing said about the Zentradi Heavy Attacker that would indicate it's in any way rare or obscure as a design. It doesn't actually have a name though, it's only ever referred to as "Heavy Attacker" (重攻撃機) in official materials. It's identified as Zentradi in official materials. That said, I'm not sure there is such a thing as a "Supervision Army" design. The Supervision Army was originally formed by the Protodeviln capturing and brainwashing Protoculture civilians and the Zentradi forces defending various Protoculture emigrant planets. Their military forces would surely have been primarily, if not exclusively, made up of whatever they seized from the people they captured and dragooned into service. Since the Protoculture were divided into two factions militarily opposed to each other at the time, there were very likely different designs used by the Zentradi forces of the two factions, but it's unlikely the Supervision Army came up with anything new on their own in the short time they were the dominant military power in the galaxy.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    That backstory was created for the Robotech novelization, which was never canon and these days is officially considered by HG to be "Robotech in name only".
  9. Seto Kaiba
    There is very little information available on it, but it is indicated to be a design from the Protoculture's civil war... though they remain vague about whether it's a standard issue design that is now rare or whether it was an isolated development by some Protoculture colony or other and is only used by a small number of Zentradi fleets as a result.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    The Robotech timeline is super vague thanks to the lack of any planning during the show's production. The Robotech Masters supposedly invaded, ransacked, and glassed the home world of the Invid in the ancient past (thousands of years ago, at one point IIRC they imply it was 500,000 years ago) and the Invid didn't get around to counterattacking until ~2022 with the Robotech II: the Sentinels OVA showing the start of their offensive. Robotech is never clear on why the Zentradi were created, when, or to fight whom... the post-reboot franchise always stayed away from the idea that the Zentradi were created to fight the Invid since the Masters sacked their homeworld before creating their interstellar empire and the whole idea's kind of silly on the face of it because of the massive difference in their scale. It doesn't really make a ton of sense to create an army of giants to fight an enemy who's smaller than your existing military hardware.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Nope! In actual fact, the official/canonical Robotech stats are based on those from the MOSPEADA OSM... plus or minus a few rounding errors and typos. The official size for the Invit Iigaa in MOSPEADA is 2.5m. The official size for the Invid Scout in Robotech is 2.5m. The official Robotech stats actually make the Invit Grob/Invid Trooper SHORTER than its MOSPEADA counterpart... 4.4m instead of 5.1m. That's not how big they actually are in Robotech, though. As anyone familiar with Robotech knows, the pre-reboot (pre-2001) licensee-created materials were a study in half-assery by third- and fourth-rate authors and publishers who had inclination to put more than the most cursory effort into adapting the series. The only reason any of that material got approved for publication is that nobody at Harmony Gold was paying any kind of attention to what its licensees were doing, and we have Harmony Gold's own word for that. That was the reason they gave for disowning all that hilariously awful, wildly inconsistent licensed material when they were trying to relaunch their brand as a sci-fi/mecha anime franchise that they hoped could be taken seriously by the industry. If they were that big, they'd be towering over literally everything in the "New Generation". Even if they were as big as the Zentradi, they wouldn't be a threat because most of them don't have ranged weaponry... they'd just be easier targets. It just changes the format a little from "man stomping on insects" to "turkey shoot".
  12. Seto Kaiba
    That would be worth seeing... but not because it would make a thrilling story. It'd be worth seeing because it'd be a fountain of memes. Not just because Robotech media is pretty uniformly terrible and therefore meme-able, but because of the massive size difference involved is going to make it look completely idiotic. Essentially, it's gonna look like this: Your average Zentradi is between 9m (29.5ft) and 10m (32.75ft) naked and flat-footed. 10m is the number most often cited, so let's roll with that one because it makes the math a lot easier. The Invit Iigaa is 2.5m tall. If you shrunk that Zentradi down to a statistically-average 5 foot 10 man... the Invit Iigaa is about the size of a corgi or the coconut crabs the fellow in that charming illustration is fighting. Then consider that the Regult is 15.12m tall. The Glaug is 16.55m tall. The Nousjadeul-Ger is 16.4m tall. Scale those down to approximately statistically-average human size and that Invit Iigaa is smaller in scale than a standard Barbie doll. Now consider, if you will, that this isn't Gulliver's Travels and the Zentradi aren't likely to sit idly by while the Invit swarm them... they have laser machine guns, particle cannons, and missiles with extremely powerful high-explosive blast-fragmentation warheads. Any face-to-face fight is likely to be little more than the Zentradi massacreing an enemy that can't reasonably fight them in any capacity. Never mind that the Zentradi are likely to just roll up and flatten the planet from orbit. Even the Invit's largest mecha are not going to be any bigger to a mounted Zentradi than a toddler or a grade schooler, so it'd be like watching a grown boxer savagely beat a group of small children.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Partly, though it was also to deter them from pursuing any "creative" or "productive" lines of thought and keep them tractable. Probably also to save resources, since the Protoculture seem to have considered the Zentradi extremely expendable and were shown to not be terribly concerned about the comfort or survivability of their hardware. The Regult is noted to be a human factors nightmare scenario that's uncomfortable and exhausting to use because its level of automation is low and the pilot has to control a lot of it manually. Even on the comparatively posh Queadluun series battle suits, they cheaped out on armoring the cockpit and putting redundancy into the control system. Nope.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    To be fair, that's basically how whole sectors of the entertainment industry work. Especially the anime industry. Run out a bunch of different concepts all at once and hope that one of them becomes a runaway hit that brings in enough profit to cover the losses incurred by the ones that flop, while the majority break even either immediately or in the long term. What's surprising is that Netflix is apparently so divorced from the sunk costs fallacy that they pulled the plug on Cowboy Bebop after just one season despite it being a reasonably well-established and respected brand. You'd normally expect a studio to be willing to run a property like that at a loss for a while in the hopes that it'd eventually catch on and that the profits from a delayed success would offset the initial losses... like what Paramount tried (and failed at when the backers pulled out early) with the J.J. Abrams Star Trek films. Cowboy Bebop could be salvaged if Netflix were willing to have the producers cut the campy BS... but I get the feeling that's $70M they're not willing to spend on second chances when they're already hurting a bit from the segmentation of the streaming market. (Ironically, it'd probably also be pretty good if they went all-in on the camp and just dropped its connection to Cowboy Bebop. The half-measures really ruin it.)
  15. Seto Kaiba
    It's interesting that we're seeing so many cancellations from the major streaming services lately... especally from Netflix. Netflix had a whopping THIRTEEN shows cancelled after a single season this past year. Most other streaming services only had about four, though they may be somewhat insulated from that because they aren't going quite so hard with original direct-to-streaming programming. Either way, it seems like Netflix has abandoned the Sunk Costs Fallacy that protected all but the weakest network TV shows in favor of giving underperforming properties the axe right away. I suspect that if the critics hadn't been just as brutal to Cowboy Bebop as general audiences were Netflix might've at least entertained the idea of trying to salvage it, but it seems pretty unlikely that they'll decide to give it a second chance after the drubbing it got.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    It's a safe bet that they do... the Supervision Army was made up of Protoculture and their Zentradi forces who fell under the sway of the Protodeviln, so the logistical arm of those Zentradi fleets would've fallen to them as well. We know from Macross the Ride that even after being sealed for 500,000 years the Protodeviln were able to use at least one of the factory satellites they'd obtained to support the captured New UN Forces troops in the Varauta system. (The so-called "Protodeviln Heritage" facility that Fasces was using c.2058.)
  17. Seto Kaiba
    I'd expect a fair few fleets are still using the VA-3 Invader... there really hasn't been a replacement mentioned, and as a 3rd Generation design like the VB-6 it isn't that old yet. (Though in the light novels, the Macross Galaxy Corporate Army has a bit of a thing for fielding modernized versions of obsolete General Galaxy designs.) True, though that setting's development was very different. Yeah, though a fair amount of that wasn't so much the need for performance improvement as an attempt to address the hilariously awful survivablity of Zentradi mecha in general, and to a lesser extent the atrocious ergonomics of their design.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Y'know... now it's my turn to feel a bit silly. I'm so used to only seeing it used with Zentradi mecha (or written in Cyrillic) that I'd completely forgotten it's a real goddamn word. 😅 (It's especially terrible on my part because it's Latin, and I had four years of Latin in school... formal Imperial Latin rather than the watered down churchy stuff, but still.) Kind of ended up right for the wrong reason as its (predominantly Russian) usage in aviation is as I described... it denotes an improved/modified model that is listed again under the same designation as its original specification. It is functionally equivalent to 改. So, yes and no. The VB-6 Koenig Monster is not a Destroid, it's a Variable Bomber. For the most part, the New UN Forces stopped using Destroids somewhere in the 2020s or 2030s and most of the inventory that hadn't shipped out with one emigrant fleet or another ended up decommissioned, stripped of its weaponry, and either sold off to civilians for use as heavy industrial equipment (see Macross 7) or converted for use as a live fire test target (see Macross Plus). Development of Destroids basically dried up and died around that time. There were a few bizarre attempts to revive the concept that found their way into the hands of paramilitary organizations like Vindirance or Black Rainbow, but it'd be hard to call either a "destroid" and they're lumped under the generously vague term "mobile weapon". The Gjagravan Va was, in concept, analogous to a Destroid though instead of a bipedal humanoid form it was built like a water strider and got around on four legs. The Annabella Lasiodora was... well... more a small frigate with arms than anything. There basically hasn't been a new "true" Destroid design in about 50 years by the time of Macross Frontier, or almost 60 by the time of Macross Delta. Some emigrant fleets did revive the Destroid concept somewhat by purchasing a modernized version of the old ADR-03 Cheyenne series Destroid as a mobile AA gun for use inside of environment ships. Of all the strange things, the rollers in the feet seem to have been the major selling point because it meant the Destroid wouldn't rip up the pavement trying to get around. (No really, that's the actual reason given.) The Macross Galaxy fleet did some toying around with modernizing the Series 04 Destroids (the Tomahawk, Phalanx, and Spartan) c.2058 in the light novel Macross the Ride, as well as some of General Galaxy's older VF lines, with mixed results. Those designs don't seem to have caught on outside the Galaxy fleet though, while the so-called "Cheyenne II" seems to have had at least some acceptance elsewhere in the galaxy like the perpetually cash-strapped Brisingr Alliance. It's probably also worth noting that quite a few of the Cheyenne II units seen in Macross Frontier were not manned... the ones used aboard the SMS Macross Quarter were remotely operated, making them excessively expensive gun turrets. (Which was, ironically, the reason Destroids fell out of favor... the Zentradi don't do ground warfare if they can help it and conventional point-defense weapons are way cheaper.) You're probably thinking of the VB-6 here... the VA-3's Battroid mode has always been referred to as a Battroid mode, though the Koenig Monster's has been called Destroid mode officially.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    I guess that would depend on whether future works consider the Macross Frontier TV series or Movies to be the "correct" version. In the TV series, Battle Galaxy and a fair portion of the Macross Galaxy Corporate Army were destroyed but the Macross Galaxy fleet's Mainland and at least some of its forces weren't present and survived. Odds are in that case the New UN Gov't probably considers Macross Galaxy a rogue state or possibly an occupied one since the Macross Galaxy citizenry aren't exactly on board with the whole galactic domination plan willingly. In the movie version, the Vajra almost completely destroyed the Macross Galaxy fleet and only a dozen or so ships carrying refugees (and the Galaxy Executives) were able to flee the battle and take refuge in the Macross Frontier fleet... where they later seized control of Battle Frontier under mind control and were largely wiped out. In that case, Macross Galaxy is likely filed under "solved problems". It's more a matter of the fact that the grid proved almost totally ineffective against them... the YF-19 and YF-21 proved to be a little too good at what they were designed to do, and so the New UN Government got REAL anxious about the prospect of weapons like that ending up in the hands of anti-government (or "anti-government") forces.
  20. 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.
  21. 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.
  22. 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.
  23. 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.
  24. 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.
  25. 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.
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