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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, my sincere apologies for having standards... How lazy is this? This is Delta's writers literally ripping off something that was in the novelization of the Frontier movies where Max (and Milia!) show up to the final fight on the Vajra planet as part of the combined NUNS/SMS reinforcement fleet and fight in VF-25s.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    I'm actually kind of disappointed by this. Other than that, this new teaser doesn't really have anything to write home about. We got another too-quick-to-be-useful action shot of the new enemy fighter, some shots of the new VF-31AX Kairos Plus in the same hideous Armored Pack from the last movie, and some shots of characters who can best be summed up "Walkure, but from Hot Topic"... which is kinda sad, since most of the Delta characters are already store brand versions of the Frontier cast.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Shinsei Industry codeveloped the original YF-24 prototype with General Galaxy... then, after the project was cancelled, resumed and completed its development solo in the mid-2050s as the YF-24 Evolution that all 5th Generation VFs are based on. Their branch in the Macross Frontier fleet codeveloped the VF-25 and YF-29 with Legodt & Angeloni Industries (LAI), their branch on Uroboros was involved in developing the YF-30, and their branch in the Brisingr globular cluster codeveloped the VF-31 with several other local firms under the name Surya Aerospace. ... oh my, no. Shinsei Industry was formed way back in 2012 as the product of a merger between VF pioneers Stonewell and Bellcom and the aviation division of the FAST Pack and reaction engine developer Shinnakasu Heavy Industry. As you know, Stonewell and Bellcom codeveloped the VF-0, VF-1, VF-4, and VF-3000. Post-merger, their first project was the VF-5000 that the New UN Forces adopted as the atmospheric-use counterpart to the VF-4. They were also responsible for the upgrades to the VF-4, the development of the VF-11 Thunderbolt as the New UN Forces' 3rd Gen main VF, the VF-19 as the initially-accepted 4th Gen main VF, and the YF-24 Evolution that was adopted as the 5th Gen main VF. Shinsei Industry's branches were also behind the VF-25, YF-29, YF-30, and VF-31... the last being as a joint venture with several other companies under the name Surya Aerospace. They're also supposedly contributing developers on the Macross Quarter-class. Basically, Shinsei Industry and its forbearers have been the dominant force in Variable Fighter development for as long as VFs have been a thing. General Galaxy was kind of that slightly-eccentric rival company that popped up in the late 2010s and found a niche for itself marketing low cost VFs to recently-settled emigrant fleet governments. They're the ones who always come up second-best to Shinsei in main fighter design competitions like Project Nova (where their VF-14 lost to the VF-11) or Super Nova (where the VF-19 beat out their VF-22). They had a nice niche making special forces VFs, with their one real "win" being when new arms export laws and troubles transitioning to the VF-19 saw them secure the contract for a 4th Gen main VF after initially losing the contract to Shinsei in Project Super Nova and producing the VF-171.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    It's... well... it's cringe. It's meant to be cringe comedy, but it's just pity-inducing levels of cringe. After a break for my girlfriend to marathon most of the James Bond movies, I'm back to catching up. Currently watching The Slow Life of a Cheat Pharmacist. Kinda feeling like it's the exact same setup as I've Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years but with a male protagonist. EDIT: I'd call this show "weak tea" but that would give it too much credit. As tea goes, this is "a mug of tepid water that was in the same zipcode as a tea bag at some point".
  5. Seto Kaiba
    No such show. That was a hallucination. Swamp gas. A weather balloon. Something like that. Given the Gundam franchise's general obsession with turning its now-vestigial War is Hell message into straight-up misery porn... I can all too readily imagine that'd end up as Puella Magi Madoka Magica but with giant robots. Not sure if that's better or worse than the comparisons made between Macross Delta and Pretty Cure...
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Gundam magical girls coming soon?
  7. Seto Kaiba
    MOSPEADA's creators didn't put a ton of effort into the details of the background and one-shot characters, I'm afraid... though at least their uniforms share the same design as Lt. Bernard's own.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Some of the New UN Spacy's postwar ship designs are specifically designed around the idea of operating as conventional navy vessels in addition to operating as space warships. The Battle-class and Uraga-class, as well as the Saratoga II-type, are examples of this. Others, like the Guantanamo-class, are supposedly meant for use exclusively in space but can apparently enter the atmosphere and sustain flight using gravity control. Some may be able to make water landings and then take off again using gravity control. Well, one... but it was the assault landing bow section of a Queadol Magdomilla-class command ship, which is specifically meant to enter a planet's atmosphere and land troops. On other occasions, as in Macross Delta's first episode, the Zentradi ships were shown to simply hover using gravity control rather than land. Yes, in episode 23... but it's the command ship attached to a Three Star-class factory ship. It may have been intended to disconnect itself and return to orbit. That was a water landing, though, which seems to be the preferred method for landing the larger spacecraft in Macross going back to Macross II: Lovers Again where the UN Spacy had a large water dock complex immediately adjacent to its headquarters that was servicing both captured Zentradi ships and human-built space warships.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Granted, it's that way now... but as far as I know that was a mostly unbuilt trope at the time Super Dimension Fortress Macross was made. In the original Space Battleship Yamato, there was a "hero" fighter in the form of the pair of (prototype?) Cosmo Zero fighters aboard the Yamato to supplement the existing squadrons of Cosmo Tigers. It's wasn't a squadron leader machine, it was just kinda... around. The only example that really matches is in Mobile Suit Gundam, where a few of the mobile suits that Char Aznable used (the Zaku II, Z'Gok, and Gelgoog) had command variants. Though Char was the only one ever really depicted using them in the series so it wasn't immediately clear that they weren't an Ace Custom (and they were, but they were an ace custom OF a command version).
  10. Seto Kaiba
    So, I've basically come up dry in my research into that topic. My best guess is that it's a nod to some of the practices in the First World War where ace pilots tended to rotate through multiple aircraft and receive the latest models first, but that's less a deliberate organizational choice and more a matter of those aces being the pilots who came back alive and whose feedback was used to refine aircraft designs. Either that, or it really is a Gundam reference as @Keith said.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, it's pretty much just those few pencil sketches of characters like Yellow or Jim in the duty uniform from the first recapture mission. There's no real detail to it.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Sounds like a good Christmas gift for my rabidly Trekkie parents. Shatner did get his short torn a fair bit in TOS.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    As a completionist for several other franchises, I can certainly understand why a completionist might want the Visual Archive book. For a less determined collector, I don't think it's quite worth the asking price based on the quality and availability of the same material in official Japanese artbooks. From my review of the Visual Archive books, there is a fair bit of art from the Imai Files in the MOSPEADA one that is not in the official artbooks... but, again, if you've downloaded the Imai Files you've already seen everything the Visual Archive has to show you. It'd probably have been better if they'd just published the Imai Files as-is. It was pretty disappointing (to me, at least) that they really did a terrible job framing some of that material in its historical context or didn't even make the attempt (esp. in the Southern Cross book). I'm fairly certain the art you're referring to WRT Armor Bike riding poses and indicators of what angles would cause the rider to be thrown or fall is in both of the books I mentioned.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... the only one of the three that's really worth getting is the Southern Cross one, if only because the only other Southern Cross artbook is even more embarrassingly bad and only really worth buying for the staff interviews. There's not really any point in getting the Robotech Visual Archive book if you've already got a copy of the Entertainment Archive MOSPEADA: Complete Art Works or Genesis Climber MOSPEADA File books and have downloaded the Imai Files at any point. Text-wise, you're basically just buying a printout of the "New Generation" section of Harmony Gold's website padded with a lot of little thumbnail-quality screenshots. (Consequently, because the info is mainly sourced from the old RT Infopedia, most of the info is just wrong.)
  15. Seto Kaiba
    I'm still doing some research on the topic... the aces-with-custom-paint-schemes thing was a very real thing in the Imperial German Army's Flying Corps. That much is pretty well-precedented. Having trouble finding examples of mixed-composition squadrons though.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    I mean, there is that... but that connection gets drawn more to Milia than anything, since her signature color is red and she's the enemy "one man army" top ace. There's no real world precedent I can find or recall for squadron leaders to be issued different variants of the squadron's aircraft with higher performance.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Love it! I motion to rename the Bioroid the MS-06WPP Witness Protection Program Zaku. Maybe their real origin is from all those Space Nazis who moved to Space Argentina and assumed new identities to avoid prosecution for Space War Crimes. Might be time to make an appointment with your ophthalmologist, then... because I'm pretty sure the rest of us can see it. Hell, it's not just the outward appearance. They outright used the Zaku's sound effects in their first appearance complete with iconic "glowing eye". Their color schemes related to role match too. You've got the Standard Model (the MS-06F Zaku II) and Early Type I Bioroid) in green, the improved performance model often used by unit leaders (the MS-07B Gouf and Early Type II Bioroid) in blue, and the super-tuned ace custom several times faster than the normal model that's used by the mysterious male antagonist who is a foil to the main character (the MS-06S Zaku II Command "Char Custom" and Early Type II Custom "Seifreit Weiss special"). Later types clearly ape the design of the MS-09 Dom and other Zeon mobile suits. It's stupid levels of obvious that Ammonite was ripping of Gundam, Macross, and Yamato when they were making Southern Cross.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    That's not real world, though.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Got caught up on My Next Life as a Villainess... and I'm really beginning to suspect that the series has run out of ideas. At this point, the series is literally on its THIRD back-to-back kidnapping-with-lethal-intent-via-dark-magic. It's like that's the only way the original author could add drama. Maybe by the end, everyone'll have been kidnapped and tortured with dark magic at least once. The kidnapper is always forgiven in the end too, which takes all the sting out of it. Sirius and his suspiciously similar stand-in Sora both got jobs as a direct consequence of their dark magic kidnappings. Odds are creepy girl is gonna land a government job because of this too. What little relationship drama the series had built up with Caterina finally realizing her fiance is actually serious about marrying her is obliterated within an episode or two when she's preoccupied by her adoptive brother going missing. Welcome to Demon School, Iruma-kun! has kind of petered out as well. There's some going-nowhere shipping between Iruma and his two principal love interests but it's absolutely not going anywhere because Iruma is a pathological nice guy and immune to innuendo. Couldn't get into Watamote... it's just... TOO cringe.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. It's an old comedy that's got a little bit of everything. It's got high comedy, it's got pratfalls and dirty jokes and buffoonery. It's got some bawdy bits. It's got some action and a nicely choreographed classic chase scene. Some memorable songs. Some great performances by actors like Zero Mostel, Phil Silvers, Buster Keaton, and Michael Crawford. Like the overture claims, it's got Something for everyone! A comedy, tonight!.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Funimation's improved quality of service continues to impress... though now that I'm not constantly frustrated by the poor quality of their streams I'm noticing all the other problems in their workmanship. There are translation errors all over their subtitles for Hellsing Ultimate. New releases have been pretty disappointing this season. Welcome to Demon School, Irumi-kun! has been pretty mediocre now that it's burned through the limited appeal of its fish-out-of-water "I hope nobody learns the secret that'll get me killed on sight" story line and started moving in the direction of becoming a standard shonen series similar to what happened in Rosario to Vampire. My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom! has lost a lot of its appeal too, since the first story arc was almost a rote repeat of the final story arc of the previous season and its lack of any real compelling story arc once its oblivious protagonist no longer had foreknowledge of her fate occupying her mind kind of leaves it in awkward reverse harem territory for the rest of its run without anything interesting to bring to the table.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    So, Funimation pushed an update to its mobile apps and smart TV apps today that actually goes most of the way towards fixing their previously trash-tier app performance and service quality. I am legitimately impressed by the improvement. Since Hellsing Ultimate has been on my to-rewatch list for a while now and I can't bring myself to start Phantasy Star Online 2: Episode Oracle, I'm giving Hellsing Ultimate a whirl as my benchmarking of the new app. In a rare moment of utterly unqualified positivity, the new app is performing splendidly on my QLED set and the quality is virtually indistinguishable from physical media. Just buttery smooth, once it got past the initial second or two of optimization. It is slightly irritating that Funimation's subtitles went with "Arucard" instead of "Alucard" like anyone with a goddamn brain would have... but hey.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    This is true, though there was some variance in the design concept. Some command tanks like the Russian T-54K and (Nazi) German Sd.Kfz 267/268 Tiger II sacrificed some of their magazine capacity for additional radio equipment but were otherwise no different from the standard models. Others, like the (fascist) Italian M42 and British Valentine OP, sacrificed their main weaponry to become dedicated command and control vehicles.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    It was pretty good... not great, IMO, but definitely better than a fair amount of the other stuff I've watched recently. It isn't... Mangaka-san to Assistant-san to occasionally - and not unjustifiably, IMO - gets dragged by a fair portion of its viewers because a lot of its comedy comes from its protagonist unthinkingly sexually harassing his assistant(s) and suffering violent retribution for it. (He's a massive pervert with a panty shot fetish who is so oblivious that he never seems to notice the things he's saying are INCREDIBLY creepy and offensive to the women he works with, until he's facing the threat of imminent violence.)
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Offhand, I am not aware of anything I could point to as a firm example of an aircraft squadron leader being issued a higher-performance aircraft as a matter of regulation or protocol the way Macross depicts. Military aviation's formative years in World War I did see a number of cases of squadrons composed of a number of different models or variants of aircraft, most infamously ace of aces Baron Manfred von Richthofen's "Flying Circus". That was more a consequence of the rapid pace of aircraft design development and refinement based on feedback and the preference of the experienced pilots of the era leading directly to the rapid release of iterative improvements. The Baron von Richthofen is probably the origin of the trope, since despite his fame largely tying him to his Focker Dr.I triplane he actually frequently switched aircraft based on availability as new models were introduced and/or his current aircraft's maintenance needs. (He's also the origin of the whole "ace pilot color scheme" schtick, thanks to a decision to paint his Albatros D.III bright red.) I think, all told, the closest you'll get is probably the US Army Air Force's "Flying Tigers" (1AVG) in China during World War II... everyone was flying some extensively modified Curtiss P-40's B, C, and E variants. Mind you, it's worth noting this action figure-friendly choice is the exception rather than the rule in the New UN Forces. Most main variable fighter models are "one variant fits all" types like the VF-4, VF-11, VF-171, and VF-31.
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