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Seto Kaiba

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  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.)
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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...)
  9. 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.)
  10. 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.
  11. 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.
  12. 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.
  13. 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.
  14. 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.
  15. 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.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... as @Keith said, RottenTomatoes has kind of lost its utility as an actual metric for gauging audience opinions. It's too vulnerable to review-bombing from both sides in the general audiences section. It is interesting that two-thirds of the Top Critics, who are usually bought-and-paid-for or at least try to soft-soap their criticism, are raking the series over the coals too. CNN's reviewer straight-up called the series "dull". Time Magazine, the New York Times, New York Magazine, Empire Magazine, and Roger Ebert all basically said the only thing it's good for is reminding you the much-better anime exists. Ebert suggested someone should put a bounty on the showrunners! The nicest thing some of them could muster, like the Japan Times, is "not as bad as Death Note". That's somewhere between "damned by faint praise" and "murdered by words" considering that one usually gets mentiond i the same breath as Dragonball Evolution. There's no freaking middle ground in the audience reviews. It's all five star tongue polishing of the show's boots that tries to put the blame on fans of the original anime or one star reviews blasting Netflix for murdering a classic. There are a few more nuanced opinions, but they're a very small minority of the ~2,000 posts of gushing praise and scathing hate. (I am slightly bemused that the people who tried to drag politics into it from either side of the aisle seem to be united by their agreement that it sucks even while they blame each other for ruining it.)
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Whose "hyperspace drive"? That term is used by a lot of different sci-fi titles and performs differently in each. In Macross, space folding is already traveling via the higher dimensional spacetime broadly analogous to (and sometimes translated as) "hyperspace". It differs from a hyperdrive in, say, Star Wars in that the ship is not physically sailing through that higher dimension. Instead, the ship is using gravity control to bridge two points in realspace by compressing the higher dimension space between the two points until their respective coordinates overlap and then pushing the ship into and out of that collapsed higher dimension space to cirumvent the distance between Point A and Point B without actually moving at all. (Some Japanese publications refer to this as "exchanging" the space, with the implication the fold actually causes two volumes of space to violently switch places along with everything in them.) I'd assume that if the dimensional distortion of a fold fault is enough to knock a folding ship out of higher dimension space that it'd probably do something equally unpleasant to another other kind of stardrive tapping the same higher dimension to get around.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Just got back from the screening at the Rochester Hills, MI Emagine theater. The turnout was about what the online booking showed... roughly a half-full house. Everyone seemed to be pretty excited going into it, and the audience seemed to be having a good time throughout. I know I enjoyed myself immensely. The subtitle translation was a bit dodgy, but not enough so to be truly jarring.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Wasn't that kind of a books-only thing? It's been a while but IIRC it was only really Voldemort and the Hogwarts teachers who wore robes everywhere in the movies and everyone else would throw the occasional robe/cloak over a regular suit or school uniform. It'd be harder to do action sequences if everyone were pantsless. (That and, y'know, since they tried to grim things up a bit they don't have accidental comedy from folks going around dressed like the dumpster behind a Goodwill.) We should probably count our lucky stars they haven't gone back far enough to see pre-modern bathroom Hogwarts where students and staff canonically just sh*t on the floor and cleaned it up with magic. (J.K. Rowling is a very strange person.)
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Looking forward to seeing all these mysterious Macross fans I didn't know existed at the Rochester Hills showing...
  21. Seto Kaiba
    The surprise the Zentradi of the Vrlitwhai branch fleet felt when they saw what humanity had done to the Supervision Army warship that'd crashed on Earth ten years previously had a slightly more mundane origin. One of the ways the ancient Protoculture kept their Zentradi in line and under control in addition to strict military regulations was to impose mental conditioning (brainwashing/indoctrination) to dissuade them from pursuing creative/productive thoughts and actions. Not just in terms of artistic/cultural pursuits or reproducing, that also extended to the kind of thought processes involved in repairing or modifying technology. This set them up to be wholly dependent on the factory satellites that were also controlled by the Protoculture. That someone on the planet had changed the ship's design was reason enough for them to be gobsmacked. That, combined with the way humanity's original ships and fighters subsequently opened fire on them with weapons based on lost technology, gave them a lot of pause for thought about who exactly they'd been shooting at. The way the crew of the Macross constantly defied the rules of space warfare as the Zentradi understood them only exacerbated the Zentradi's bewilderment.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    My girlfriend's a huge Potter fan so I know I'll get dragged to see it regardless. That said, I absolutely adore the attention and care the production crews went to in recreating the period dress and architecture and I'm VERY curious to see how Mads Mikkelsen will do as he steps into Johnny Depp's former role as Grindelwald. I really didn't care for Depp's performance in The Crimes of Grindelwald, and I kind of suspect that Mikkelsen is going to be a much better fit for the role. He's playing almost-literal Wizard Hitler, someone who oscillates between social awkwardness and bombastic rage and charisma, which seems like a good fit for Mikkelsen's more reserved acting style.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    As I near the end of the series, I'm not even sure the writers injecting their own hot takes on everything and everyone is the reason Netflix's adaptation of Cowboy Bebop bombed. Sunrise's Cowboy Bebop certainly didn't lack for lighthearted or comedic/absurd moments but it was still a mostly-serious action/drama for all that. The showrunners working on Netflix's Cowboy Bebop seem to have concluded that, because the original work was an animated series, Joel Schumacher-era Batman levels of camp was the way to go. This could've been an absolutely amazing series if the showrunners had taken it seriously. Instead, the showrunners were so committed to the stylistic suck of making the series high camp that they keep disrupting the flow of the serious dramatic moments with unnecessary mood-killing jokes. Like when Asimov Solensan is trying to sell his stolen drugs to the bartender in the first episode and is momentarily thrown when the previously gruff bartender jovially offers him cupcakes. The double-take Asimov does is the only part of this scene that's actually believable, with him clearly racking his brain to determine if "cupcakes" is slang for something before being assured that he was being offered an actual piece of confectionary. They just keep doing it. Every time the series starts to set the mood they puncture it with a cheap gag, an incredibly campy line, or a deliberately terrible-looking fight/effects sequence right out of a schlock horror movie or cheap kung-fu flick. They clearly had the money and the resources to do the job right, but what they did with it was accidental self-parody. If you totally disassociate it from Sunrise's Cowboy Bebop and watch it like it's a cheap exploitation flick, it's not half bad. If you watch it as anything else... it's just cringeworthy. It's a weird thing about Cowboy Bebop that most of the characters were drawn mukokuseki-style without any (stereotypical) identifying features, except for the non-mixed Chinese syndicate leadership, the black characters, and Spike's one Native American friend.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    "Yes and no"? Presumably all ships of the same class as the Supervision Army gunship that crashed on Earth could theoretically transform the same way... but it's what you'd call an "unintended operating mode". It's likely not something the Protoculture who designed that class of ship ever considered doing. Without some of the additions made by human engineers, it wouldn't be particularly useful either. Not in the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross. However, the DYRL? designs have largely supplanted their TV series versions throughout the Macross franchise seemingly because the production staff prefer the less dated and more "alien" appearance of the movie versions... so it's highly probable that the Nupetiet Vergnitzs-class with the heavy converging beam cannon exists in the main timeline either as a replacement for the TV version or a variant of the class that coexists with it. (They do that kind of thing A LOT with the movie designs.)
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Initially, she didn't have implants because her parents were influential members of anti-legalization movement... and then her parents were killed and she was left a homeless orphan who was living on the streets until Grace found her and took her in. After that, she was exempted from the borderline compulsory implant use in the fleet for several reasons. Apparently being "all natural" was considered a selling point as an idol over in Galaxy despite the unaugmented otherwise living rather rough lives there. That's the reason she gives Alto in the series. (That the wealthy over there can have a fully prosthetic body that looks however they like may go a ways towards explaining why that is a selling point to Galaxy's population.)
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