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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, but I do insist. I love seeing what people come up with for this sort of thing... for much the same reason I enjoy the "Squadron Marking" sections of the Master File books and the Macross Plus This is Animation Special book, and the custom model kit features in Model Graphix, Character Model, etc. It's a beautiful grab bag of "just looks cool", neat references and in-jokes to the series, and historical references to famous fighter squadrons or other things. That's kind of intentional, yeah... One detail that's not really brought up in either series but is fairly important and comes up a lot in supplemental material is that the reorganization of the New UN Forces following the Second Unification Wars (the events of Macross VF-X2) stripped the military of a lot of the authority and unchecked power it previously wielded and decentralized command to the individual (and more autonomous) emigrant governments. As a result of that and a growing reliance on unmanned fighters, the quality of the average soldier in emigrant fleet New UN Forces has declined a bit. The troop quality situation is surely not helped in the least by having PMCs owned by unfathomably wealthy mega-corporations headhunting top talent away from the military with sheer spending power. That said, the presentation of the New UN Forces at the start of Macross Frontier is pretty unfair to them. The Frontier branch of SMS is the very definition of the words "spared no expense". They are the very finest mercenaries money can buy, headhunted away from the most elite New UN Forces units and equipped with the very latest and best weapons, to protect an emigrant fleet sponsored by SMS's parent company on a mission set by the company's founder as a part of his personal obsession with finding a way to overcome fold faults. They're not just the most elite soldiers in the fleet, they're likely SMS's most elite soldiers in the galaxy. Plus the Frontier NUNS initially doesn't have weapons that can hurt the Vajra. Scorning them for feeling fear when they're fighting a fight they have no hope of winning and dying for it is pretty unfair. Once they get better munitions meant for use against the Vajra they give a pretty good accounting of themselves. It's perhaps more blatant and also less intentional in Macross Delta, where the Brisingr Alliance's economic situation means the local New UN Forces are underfunded and less well equipped, though even they still thrash the Aerial Knights despite a massive disadvantage when the playing field is leveled. Macross 7 was perhaps where it was most justified to have an elite unit with ace custom mecha. After all, the anima spiritia users were rare and effectively irreplaceable assets who were 100% necessary to oppose the Protodeviln and their forces. Maximizing their effectiveness meant non-standard gear designed for their non-standard approach to warfare, and giving them gear with the best possible defensive ability was only sensible to ensure that they came back alive. (Why the fleet military didn't assign them a permanent bodyguard unit like Diamond Force or Emerald Force is beyond me... could've saved a lot of trouble, not that Basara would've given them the time of day.)
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Secrets of the Silent Witch had a pretty decent episode today.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    At the very least, link it here. It's definitely on topic!
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Caught the first of the new episodes last night - Part II of "Hegemony" - and I have to say I still hate what Strange New Worlds has done to the Gorn.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Macross II: Lovers Again was another one where the members of the main cast in the military all use the same model. Possibly the most strict example, since the only "ace custom" variation is a special gunpod on Nex's machine rather than any performance differences. It is rather sad that we don't get to stick around and see emigrant governments actually adopt their respective 5th Generation machines, though they do get acknowledged here and there in novelizations and games and manga and the like. (It's also worth remembering that all of Macross runs on broad strokes continuity, so there isn't any such thing as "unambiguous" canon anyway.) There's definitely an element of "the hero must have a distinct machine" that I'm sure the toy partners enforce... though as of Absolute Live!!!!!! even they seem to be dialing it back somewhat and making the ace custom machines more closely resemble the production ones. (That might have something to do with fans thinking the VF-31A looks better, too.) That said, I think the tendency to have the protagonists equipped with the latest and greatest VF ahead of the actual military is pretty silly. It kind of worked in Frontier, because the story's theme was heavily about abuse of corporate power and influence and SMS's parent company more or less ruled the titular fleet indirectly through sheer financial power and even SMS's staff were in a way dehumanized as disposable. Delta doesn't do as good of a job with it, since the whole premise is lazily copied from Frontier even though Xaos is not anywhere near as wealthy or influential as SMS or its parent company. I get the feeling Macross's creators have started to cool on the idea of PMCs too, since the materials for the second movie increasingly depict Xaos as incompetent and other PMCs as criminal. Hopefully once we get away from PMC protagonists we'll see more mass production machines getting to shine. NGL, that kinda rocks. I'd buy that in a DX. We've gotten a couple New UN Forces color schemes for the VF-25 thus far. The two main ones that show up most often are essentially the same as Alto's VF-25F and the generic SMS VF-25A but with New UN Forces markings instead of SMS ones. There's also the unlockable New Game+ colors for Havamal in Macross 30.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    I quite like this one. It feels like a very natural evolution of the pre-Federation Earth Cargo Service freighters from Star Trek: Enterprise and a nice sort of middle ground with the TOS/TAS-era Antares-type.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    The amazing recycling technology that Humanity uses to make its emigrant fleets so efficient and long-term sustainable had to come from somewhere... and we know the New UN Gov't has put a lot into studying and restoring factory satellites. Maybe one use-case for the fold-capable factory satellites is to move them into the vicinity of old battlefields and have their robot ships hoover up the wreckage and debris in order to break down the composites, alloys, and organic compounds from ships, pods, and dead bodies into usable raw materials for the manufacture of fresh ships, pods, and soldiers to man them all. Perhaps that's where they got the technology they're using to recycle the bodies of the dead in Macross Frontier.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    We've already heard about it all the way back TOS's first season episode "The Menagerie", which recycled large chunks of the "The Cage" series pilot. We've also actually seen the training accident happen in Star Trek: Discovery's second season episode "Through the Valley of Shadows", thanks to some timey-wimey crystals that show Pike his future when he touches them. There was a reactor accident aboard a training ship full of cadets while he was aboard for an inspection tour, and he was near-fatally irradiated while trying to save as many cadets as he could in the ship's engine room. You can watch the series on other services... even YouTube's digital library service has it. Here's a clip from the episode of Star Trek: Discovery where the accident is shown.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    The Water Magician is going where the vast majority of isekai stories have gone before. New Dandadan today too...
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Welcome to the Outcast's Restaurant seems to have run out of ideas a mere three episodes in. I'm tentatively moving this one to my "best skipped" pile. Picked up a new series, Solo Camping for Two, which I'll give a whirl later alongside Hotel Inhumans and Apocalypse Bringer Mynoghra.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Saw a news piece the other day which said that Strange New Worlds aims to end the series with the transfer of command from Captain Pike to Captain Kirk, essentially making a direct segue into TOS. I have to admit, I rather like the idea.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    If only the entire film were that campy, I might actually go and see in the theater. The worst thing they could possibly do with a Mortal Kombat movie would be try to take its premise seriously.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    I can no longer tell if New Saga is just badly written or if it's actively taking the piss. I'm undecided as to whether that marks an improvement in its writing or not... the protagonist certainly seems to be about as bored with the business of becoming The Hero as I am of watching it, and is actively trying to speedrun the process to the point of rudeness.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    According to Exsedol (and Macross Chronicle), there are somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 Main Fleets active in the galaxy c.2010. These fleets range in size from several hundred thousand to several million warships each. We don't know. Macross Chronicle describes the automated factory satellites as being supported by a fleet of robot ships that mine the necessary resources and warehouse satellites that store the raw material until the production lines need it. The Mechanic Sheet for the Factory Satellite seen in the SDF Macross TV series has a section that notes there are some factory satellites which are outfitted with their own fold systems, while others that are located in resource-rich areas lack them. The implication there seems to be that some factory satellites need to periodically relocate to obtain the resources they require to continue operating (and/or chase the fleets they're supporting), while others are so efficient and/or in such resource-rich environments that there is no realistic prospect of local resources running out during the facility's lifespan. Considering how resource-rich space actually is... it's unlikely the galaxy is in any danger of being picked clean by the Zentradi in any timescale Humans can comprehend. EDIT: Whether the Zentradi (and/or Supervision Army) recycle is another matter entirely. The Zentradi are known to have a rescue and recovery pod of sorts, and we've seen surprisingly little in the way of wreckage from Zentradi ships and mecha in later stories. If they're recovering and recycling corpses and battle pods and maybe even ships to reprocess the material that help the resource situation a bit too.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Can I get a blurry, out-of-focus picture of you to go with the photos of the other cryptids? (I joke, there are plenty of Gundam ZZ fans out there! It's not my favorite, but it's a worthy installment in the UC and in some ways a breath of fresh air after Tomino's relentlessly grim ending to Zeta. I picked those three in particular because they're usually held up as the most impactful... the OG series, the highest-rated series, and that one movie nobody ever stops referencing.) Yeah, that's a pretty reasonable assumption IMO. The NUNS Marines would probably be infantry stationed on the Spacy's warships as well as providing orbit-to-surface work. Kind of the whole "space marine" gimmick anyway. So, when you mentioned this it occurred to me to go look it up and see what the caption on the image had to say. For those interested, that picture can be found in the VF-1X/P section on page 090 of Variable Fighter Master File: VF-1 Valkyrie Vol.2. All three pictures on that page, as well as the two pictures on the next page, appear to depict the same aircraft... a VF-1P Valkyrie with modex 406 and tailcode ZZ. The top image from page 091 shows it's attached to SVC-131, a Spacy composite squadron. The caption on the picture with the two Regults says that it's an aircraft of the Planet Zola Defense Forces, that the Regults it's flying next to are from the UN Spacy Marine Corps, and that both units are en route to a training area for joint exercises. (SVC-131 is presumably an aggressor squadron.) That would make for an interesting series... you could easily work some VF combat into that if there are rogue Zentradi nearby, or the planet is home to some large fauna that are potentially dangerous like on Gubaba's homeworld or the planet from Macross E. The Octos bis is perhaps a bit more explicable. Macross Chronicle notes that the factory producing the Octos for the Anti-Unification Alliance was found and pressed back into service by the UN Forces after the Unification Wars ended. They note that a further 28 Octos units were produced and delivered to the UN Forces before the line was destroyed in the First Space War. Presumably whichever one of the UN Forces defense contractors assumed control of the factory between the Unification Wars and First Space War was able to preserve the design the same way they preserved those of the destroids developed for the UN Forces. Given that Master File suggests both the VF-0 and SV-51 became "phantom" aircraft after the First Space War, presumably much less (or nothing) survived of the specifications or production lines for the VF-0 and SV-51. (Master File has a whole section devoted to Shinsei Industry having to essentially reverse-engineer the VF-0 back into existence based on the wreckage of several VF-0s that were shot down during Macross Zero that was found in a cargo container years after the First Space War. The same was presumably true for the SV-51.) I'm not sure I'd call it a natural resource, at least in the context Humanity and other species are finding it in... Protoculture ruins, old Vajra nests, and Vajra carcasses. Considering where fold quartz is typically found, and that the restrictions on the mining and trade in fold quartz seem to have come about as a result of the Vajra conflict, I'd expect there probably wasn't too much grumbling. The Vajra had all but effortlessly destroyed one of the wealthiest and most heavily armed emigrant fleets in existence, beat the snot out of another, and then attacked a bunch of New UN Government member worlds before the Galaxy fleet's conspirators were stopped. Nobody wants another war with the Vajra. The story of Macross Delta also mentions the New UN Gov't heavily restricts and regulates the mining and trading of fold quartz and banned the use of dimension bombs in war without New UN Gov't approval, suggesting there was probably broad consensus that fold quartz and weapons based on it needed to be tightly controlled to avoid disaster. (Leading right to Cromwell's discontent over the limits placed on the usage of such weapons and other potentially useful technology.)
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Turkey! Time to Strike is back... Wasn't this supposed to be a bowling anime?
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Topic aside, you should definitely give more of Gundam a whirl... some of mecha anime's greatest classics are in there. The original, Zeta, and Char's Counterattack for sure. WRT Gundam and the Super Prototypes trope, the original series may have more or less defined the trope but ironically almost no Gundam series actually USES it. The majority of Gundams in Gundam are basically bespoke ace custom machines rather than prototypes (super or otherwise) for any future machine or technology demonstrators. Macross thankfully treats its prototypes in a more realistic manner. The final prototype is usually identical to the initial mass production type, and the early prototypes for any given design are usually hacked-together and lower performance than the final model. (There is that weird corner case that is Macross Plus, though the performance difference there is more because two incredibly talented pilots turned unstable systems unsuitable for production into a sort of Disability Superpower.)
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, this is 100% what the Siegfrieds should have looked like the entire time. Those forward-swept winglets never did look quite right, and what a miss it was to not have the protagonists use a delta-wing VF in a series named Delta. They fixed it in the second movie with the VF-31AX Kairos Plus at least.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Caught the latest episodes of Cultural Exchange with a Game Centre Girl, See You Tomorrow at the Food Court, and started a new series Ruri Rocks. Pretty happy with all three, TBH. Ah yes, the ever-present threat of magical bowling balls. How could I forget? 😆
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Macross 7 definitely works better as a weekly series. It's not something that benefits from watching multiple episodes in one sitting or a full-on marathon to get through it as quickly as possible. That slow burn start of very nearly 20 episodes is a pain in the butt, in no small part due to the early lack of musical variety, but it does a good job of getting all the main characters established before the plot proper kicks off with the creation of Sound Force. I'd actually recommend watching Macross Dynamite 7 and the Macross 7 movie The Galaxy is Calling Me!. They're much tighter, self-contained stories than the main series and some of what goes on there is a little bit important later on. At least in other side stories.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Gundam almost never actually does that, though. The RX-78 was intended to be an actual prototype, but most of those that came after weren't even technology demonstrators. They were simply showy ace custom units that were in no way intended to refined into something practical, like the Double Zeta, the Nu, or the Unicorn. One of the few exceptions there is the RX-178 Gundam Mk.II from Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam, which was an actual production model that never got mass produced due to the Titans huffily cancelling their order after three of the four trial production units ended up in the AEUG's hands. The one infamous actually-mass-produced Gundam being the Victory from the series by the same name. In both the game version and novel version of Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy, Aisha does imply that she (and by extension, SMS and the Shinsei Industry dev team) planned to take the YF-30 design into further development towards a production concept. (Aisha fairly gushes about how the container system's going to revolutionize Valkyrie design.) It's not so much that they didn't have a choice after the events of Macross 30, it's that they were always planning to market the YF-30's innovations not tied to Richard Bilra's personal obsession. The novel version mentions that various SMS branches have been collaborating with the defense industry in a way the military no longer can in order to get their foot in the door of that lucrative market for themselves.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    So... Turkey! Time to Strike is a thing that exists. The first twenty minutes of this series are a "What do you mean it's not awesome?" girls sports anime about bowling, in a similar vein to Iwa-kakeru! and Birdie Wing... with a very unsuccessful school bowling team of five girls having one member quit because they're always losing, a match to attempt to persuade her to stay on the team, and then it starts getting weird. The only thing I can say to this is "What." I do not get it even a little.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    As a trope/cliche, it has its origins in the original 1979 Mobile Suit Gundam series as a sort of Drama Preserving Handicap. Mobile Suit Gundam was the first "real robot" subgenre mecha anime, and even though the series more or less established the idea of mass producing giant robots as weapons of war the titular mobile suit still had a lot of "super robot" DNA in it. The Gundam was a de facto one-of-a-kind hero mecha that singlehandedly changed the course of the war with its incredible capabilities. Its exotic super alloy armor made it nearly impervious to the enemy's weapons. Its beam rifle and beam sabers were so powerful they could destroy an enemy robot in a single hit. Its learning computer meant that it got better at fighting with every battle it fought and its kid pilot became a better fighter the more experience he gained. White Base's mission was to return the Gundam, Guncannon, and Guntank to the Federation Forces HQ on Earth so they could be analyzed and the data from them used to complete the Federation's mobile suit program. Resolving that thread of Gundam's plot posed a problem. They couldn't very well have the Gundam itself be mass produced without removing their hero mecha's visual distinctiveness and removing any prospects for future dramatic tension in the story. It wouldn't be much of a war once the Federation entered the fray with thousands of identical, nigh-invulnerable robots that could each take on whole squads of Zeon mobile suits at a time. So they created the GM as a "loser" version of the Gundam so the Gundam would remain special and visually distinctive and the Federation could have cannon fodder machines without having to bring the Gundam down to "normal" status. That's the Doylist explanation. The accompanying Watsonian explanation they cooked up to justify the GM's existence is that the Federation originally did intend to mass produce the RX-78 Gundam. The course of the war, the cost involved, and the immediacy of their need for large numbers of mobile suits in the field forced them to compromise and simplify their design to speed up production and get as many units in the field as quickly as possible. They started with the RX-78 Gundam's basic design and started removing everything that was not considered 100% necessary and/or a potential cost or time bottleneck in production. Luna titanium got the axe because it took too long to make and cost too much. Core Block functions were removed as unnecessary complexity. The simpler head design from the Guncannon was adopted because it was easier to manufacture, etc. The end result was the RGM-79 GM, a machine with higher performance than Zeon's flagship MS's but without the invincible hero properties of the Gundam. Had the Federation's need for mobile suits not been quite so immediate and urgent, they would have proceeded to mass produce the Gundam and the final stages of the war would likely have gone VERY differently (and a great deal worse for Zeon). Past that point, though... the writers kind of forget that aspect entirely and Gundams become one-off super machines that Anaheim Electronics makes to try out a new technology or simply because they have nothing better to do. The next few "real robot" titles kind of played with the idea of a mass-produced hero mecha, but ultimately avoided it through plot contrivances. Dougram had the titular mecha be set up for mass production but then the factory and blueprints were destroyed, leaving it a one-of-a-kind machine. Xabungle also implies that the Xabungle is a production machine but a very low volume one with only a handful made. It's not until Super Dimension Fortress Macross that we get our first real robot mecha anime with a truly mass-produced "hero" machine, eliminating the need for super prototypes or super prototype-like plot contrivances.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    In some of the line art, it looks like that case might almost be large enough to hold one of the drums... but we don't actually know that the drum is the laser machine pistol's magazine, or where the magazine is. Pretty much, yeah. The 6th Generation prototypes veer heavily towards Gundam-style Super Prototype territory heavily enough as it is. The main thing keeping them from actually getting there is that they're held in reserve as an 11th Hour Powerup for the story's climax rather than being the main mecha, and that in-story the developers absolutely intended to mass produce them as-is instead of watering them down into a much weaker production machine.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    According to Macross Chronicle Mechanic Sheet SDFM TV Zentradi 03A "Nousjadeul-Ger", it's a magazine case meant to hold reloads for the Nousjadeul-Ger's handheld weapons like the laser machine pistol it normally wields. One would presume the UN Marine Corps would be primarily naval infantry, with armored and aerial support as appropriate... though we have almost no way of confirming that. There are precious few sources that actually mention the UN Marine Corps. The oldest, the Sky Angels VF-1 Valkyrie tech manual, mentions that there were a substantial number of Marines stationed aboard the SLV-111 Daedalus. Not as Destroid operators, but as a naval infantry force supported by a number of marine aviators to man the helicopters, fighters, and support craft carried aboard the ship. Sky Angels also asserts that there were UN Marine fighter and fighter/attack squadrons using the VF-1 Valkyrie. Macross Zero does show one UN Marine Corps soldier named Katie training with the VF-0 pilots and indicates she's going to be training on a VF-0. Official media does mention the Marine Corps had a purpose-made VF-0 variant of their own (the VF-0C). Hasegawa did a model kit for it back in the day, and the markings they chose to give it were those of UN Marine Corps model conversion training squadron VMFAT-203 Hawks. The Hawks are noted to have been a Hawaii-based squadron that had a number of aircraft stationed aboard SLV-111 Daedalus in 2008. The Hawks transitioned to the VF-1 Valkyrie in 2009 and trained Marine Corps aviators on the fighter for a brief time before being transferred to being a Spacy Marine Corps squadron under the designation SVFM-31 (probably supposed to be SVMF-31) for a period of about two years until they were again reorganized by the newly established New UN Forces and became a Spacy squadron as SVF-31. I wonder if the regular Marine Corps simply got absorbed by, or is interchangeable with, the Spacy Marine Corps past a certain point?
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