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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    That's not a concession of any kind from Big West. The validity of that license was never disputed by Big West... only by third parties like FASA, Catalyst Game Labs, etc.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    TBH, I kind of expected this was the direction things were heading. Harmony Gold had already lost the fight for the Macross trademarks in almost every key market in the world. Big West had obtained all the leverage it needed to effectively shut down the Robotech franchise outside of the Americas. With the Robotech franchise devoid of any realistic future prospects, it was more or less inevitable that Harmony Gold would look for a way out either by bending the knee to Big West in order to obtain a percentage of the profits from Macross releases worldwide or sell their stake to someone else who would. Harmony Gold bent the knee, brothers. We have won.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    For the record, the US term "season" and its UK equivalent "series" do not imply any particular length. It only actually means "a new annual or semi-annual set of episodes" usually as an unbroken production run. I'll do you one better. Red Dwarf series/season IX. It's got a whopping THREE episodes. But that's British brevity for you. Still, it's more telling that Star Trek: Discovery's per-season episode count continues to decrease WITHOUT a corresponding increase in per-episode production spending. That's Star Trek: Discovery's showrunners feeling the sting of performance-based budget cuts without being able to compromise on quality in the cutthroat, VFX-heavy direct-to-streaming TV market. When you see a successful series losing episode count it's usually because per-episode spending has increased dramatically, as it did on Game of Thrones starting in its 7th season. If Discovery's fourth season continues the pattern, it'll have 12 episodes or fewer... indicating yet another major budget cut from Netflix.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    ... well now I can't unsee it. There really is a rather profound stylistic similarity between these promo shots and the promotional music videos made for League of Legends. (Incidentally, a spot of research indicated that the studio that did those has also done work with/for Nickelodeon. I wonder if the resemblance is purely coincidental...) It is more than a bit odd that there'd be yet-another Starfleet ship lost in the Delta Quadrant so soon after Voyager's return. Doubly so that it'd be carrying a training hologram modeled on Kathryn Janeway... a controversial captain whose actions in the Delta Quadrant saw Starfleet "reward" her with a desk job at the earliest opportunity. This is meant to be a kid's show... though the premise raises a lot of extremely uncomfortable questions if you think about it. Well... that's definitely the case for Picard and Discovery, but it's a bit early to say that for Prodigy. After all, the man DID produce Star Trek: the Animated Series in all its screwball glory. Odds are Prodigy will end up being a very tame, very bland sci-fi adventure series of the type Nickelodeon gets fifty pitches for a year. It's pretty obvious the only reason ViacomCBS got a series order for this one is they own Nickelodeon.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    It's supposedly set just five years after Star Trek: Voyager ended. This iteration of Janeway is credited as "Emergency Training Hologram". Apparently a bunch of random kids in the Delta Quadrant find a derelict Starfleet ship with the Janeway training hologram aboard and decide to seek thrilling space adventure... which is about the last thing a hologram of Kathryn "Mama Bear" Janeway would ever condone given how Federation starships blow up if you look at them wrong and how very many Delta Quadrant races she pissed off to the point of homocidal intent. It's another attempt to take Trek back to fanbase-friendly waters, so kinda?
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Odds are we've gotten about all we're going to get about the Supervision Army from Macross 7 and Macross R, and pretty much any coverage of the Stellar Republic concerns its collapse and the aftermath thereof.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    We don't know what the original composition of the Supervision Army looked like when it first emerged during the height of the Protoculture's Stellar Republic. Thus far, we've only seen one class of warship belonging to the Supervision Army: the medium-scale gunship that would later be rebuilt into the SDF-1 Macross. (Another derelict of the same class was discovered after the First Space War by the UN Spacy force sent to capture a factory satellite.) Their force was likely a mixture of captured and original ship designs initially.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    The character animation is reasonably consistent... but there are a lot of moments of weird, off-model animation where Southern Cross's mecha are concerned. So much so that some background mecha are drawn off-model far more frequently than on. Like the Sylphid, which is drawn off-model so often that fans of Robotech assumed there are three of four major variants of it with different wing designs.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    ViacomCBS itself, by the sound of it. They're having so much trouble finding funding for development of their streaming properties that, late last month, they announced plans to sell off $3 billion in stock to finance new development for Paramount+. The news led to a massive sell-off as major stakeholders liquidated their positions and the value of ViacomCBS stock cratered. The company lost over 55% of its valuation in less than a week and have continued to slip ever since. At time of writing, ViacomCBS is down 57.2% from where it was when they made the announcement. Pretty poorly... but not for the reason you think. We massively overestimated ViacomCBS's intelligence. They've fallen prey to a sunk costs fallacy, and continue to desperately pump money into the failed series in the hopes that it'll take off and they can recover the hundreds of millions of dollars they spent developing it. Rather than admit that they misjudged their audience, they're flying themselves and their flagship brand into the ground. Their fallback recovery plan, Strange New Worlds, is effectively a series version of the concept of a "bottle episode". They're taking the production assets leftover from Discovery's post-S2 retooling and attempting to make a whole second show out of them with the only parts of S2 that tested well as cheaply as possible in a desperate attempt to get some money coming in. Well, no... the whole problem is that it isn't. Not enough to offset what they're spending to make it, anyway. Netflix, the show's financial backer, has made major cuts to the show's budget at the end of every season thus far because Discovery is not performing up to expectations overseas. They tried to back out of the series altogether at one point, until CBS threatened to sue them for breach of contract. CBS's financial position was already perilous because Discovery killed the Star Trek merchandising money printer, and after merging with Viacom their position has bizarrely gotten even worse to the point that they're at risk of the Justice dept. finding them in violation of the terms of their merger agreement. Now they're selling off huge quantities of stock in an effort to raise the money they're no longer able to get from investors and distribution partners, and it's tanked the value of the company's stock. They literally managed to lose money on raising money.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Well, for most of Star Trek: Picard's first season the chateau itself was a hologram in La Sirena's holosuite (AKA Picard's quarters)... and may still be in this case as well. Though the painting of the Stargazer could just as easily be a replicator "print" rather than the original. Yeah... about the only news coverage Picard gets is speculation about which TNG veteran will be making an appearance next. Which makes it so very ironic that the showrunners originally made such bold declarations that the show was going to focus on the original characters and wouldn't devote itself to walk-on roles for TNG regulars the way it's currently doing. DON'T. TEMPT. FATE. This is, after all, the same series that decided Picard should be a sad old man apologizing for white privilege in an civilization that's been postracial for centuries, that tortured Icheb to death to add some cheap pathos to Seven of Nine's character, and felt the only way to make a black or latino character relatable was to have their characterization be 99% racist stereotypes. These show runners see "how low can you go?" as a challenge, not a condemnation.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Who thought this was a good idea? This feels as bizarre and ill-conceived as Games Workshop's attempt to launch a Warhammer 40,000 young adult novel series.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... unpopular opinion, but high definition won't make the show look better. It just makes the lapses in animation quality more evident. (As we've seen in the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross series Blu-rays.)
  13. Seto Kaiba
    "All" and "None", respectively. The Unification Wars weren't a single conflict. It was a collection of little brushfire wars, terrorist campaigns, and other armed interventions that sprang up all over the world for a wide variety of reasons, many of which were largely unrelated to each other. We're talking everything from nations fighting over territorial disputes down the scale to pre-existing ethnic or religious tensions boiling over, unrest caused by the immense economic toll the Unification Government's defense initiatives were incurring, or simply violent nationalist hissy fits over the whole idea of a supranational world government. The Anti-Unification Alliance wasn't an alliance of nations opposed to the Unification Government. It was a loose confederation of various regional violent nationalist hissy fit throwers from around the world who were opposed to the Unification Government for their own reasons and, in a moment of breathtaking cognitive dissonance, banded together into a global alliance dedicated to carrying out guerilla campaigns aimed at opposing or hindering the newly formed Unification Government. The Alliance had grassroots support and clandestine backing from some corporations, regional governments, and nations, but it doesn't look like any nation was willing to paint a target on itself by supporting them openly. It's noted that a fair amount of the Alliance's clandestine support came from the former Warsaw Pact nations, where the defense industry was salty about lucrative UN Forces contracts mainly ending up in the hands of companies based in former NATO nations and their close allies. This ultimately led to the Alliance's collapse. When they attacked the UN Forces in regions where their own supporters were, they ultimately lost that support. The tipping point was when they deployed reaction weapons against the UN Forces in central Russia and destroyed St. Petersburg. That poor decision led directly to the Russian separatists backing out of the Alliance entirely, costing them much of their support and leading to the Alliance's total collapse after the debacle on Mayan.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Do not want.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Perhaps not decades, but it would've been a lot more resource-intensive and painstaking than it ended up being. Plus there wasn't all that much incentive to do so until the prospect of an alien invasion reared its ugly head. Building a permanent installation on Mars would've been especially tricky without the ability to power it with a thermonuclear reactor.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Season two's coming in July.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    "Bottom Shelf Gun", I suppose. I'd have just said "bottom gun" with suggestive emphasis before it came out that Messer's lack of interest in women was because he was a creepy stalker, not playing for the other team.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    The only space installation mentioned prior to the outbreak of the Unification Wars was Space Station New Frontier, in orbit over the Phoenix islands. Construction of the first permanent Lunar settlement, Apollo Base, didn't begin until two months after the outbreak of the first armed conflict that the timeline generally considers to be part of the Unification Wars. Construction of the first Martian settlement began about a year after that.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Can they even expect die-hard Star Trek fans to keep watching? From what I've heard, Paramount+'s subscriber counts are in the toilet right out of the gate and die-hard fans are still drifting away from the franchise because of Discovery and Picard. ViacomCBS seems to be having a difficult time finding investors willing to fund its streaming properties as well. Two weeks ago, they announced a $3 billion stock sell-off to fund their future streaming developments and their stock price almost immediately cratered. VIAC lost over 55% of its value in just six days with major holders liquidating their stakes. It's now trading well below its 5 year average.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Remember when Star Trek: Picard's showrunners were adamant that their series was going to focus on developing the new characters? How it wasn't going to be a TNG cast reunion? Funny how that worked out.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    It shows how much forethought and planning the Kingdom of the Wind put into their preparations for their second war with the New Unification Government. The Aerial Knights knew going into it that the New UN Forces in the Brisingr globular cluster had significant advantages in training, experience, and sheer weight of numbers. Few Windermereans who served in the last Zentradi attack on the Brisingr cluster c.2059-2060 were still fit for duty, so their forces were mainly combat virgins banking on their greater natural abilities, the far greater performance of their Sv-262's compared to the New UN Forces' VF-171's, and weaponized Var syndrome to make up the difference. As we saw late in Macross Delta, once Walkure started actually supporting the NUNS the playing field leveled fairly quickly. Xaos is definitely not on par with Sol system-sourced New UN Forces... or even SMS. I've argued in the past that Macross Delta is basically a war between two bush league powers... the Aerial Knights, and Xaos. Yeah, one big thermonuclear reactor was enough to meet the energy needs of Mars Base Salla easily enough. The VF-1's problem wasn't so much the expectation of a terrestrial war as the expectation that they'd be fighting infantry. The fighter's size was constrained by a perceived need to match a Zentradi soldier on foot, little realizing they don't fight that way. Yeah, Xaos is not as upscale a PMC as SMS, since their parent company is a conglomerate that started as a communications firm rather than one of the biggest interstellar shipping concerns in the galaxy. Where SMS was able to recruit from the wealthy and well-maintained Frontier NUNS and even pick up troops from the Earth NUNS in a couple places, Xaos's troops are mostly local boys from the Brisingr Alliance NUNS and not really up to the same standard.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Difficult to say, since their cost relative to each other is not commented on... and the Sv-262 is a production aircraft while the Siegfried-type VF-31 used by Delta Flight are expensive aftermarket custom units incorporating a lot of the same high-end performance features the Sv-262 has. The Sv-262 is definitely more expensive than the stock VF-31A Kairos used by the other elements of Xaos Ragna 3rd Fighter Wing though.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    As far as we know, except for the Sv-262 Draken III. Depends on how you want to define "a small amount". In MOSPEADA, a single Type-3 HBT cylinder was enough fuel for 380km of driving. (An HBT canister doesn't contain straight hydrogen, though. It's a room-temperature hydrogen storage medium similar to cycloalkanes like methylcyclohexane. A way to store a lot more hydrogen in less space at room temperature for combustion use. A hair over three and a half seconds, all told... assuming a standard 1ml eyedropper. The hydrogen fuel used in a compact thermonuclear reactor in Macross is a cryofuel, yes. It's slush hydrogen. MOSPEADA's HBT is a hydrogen fuel storage compound, it's meant for combustion rather than fusion. Almost certainly not. Doing a multi-part movie would have been practically unheard-of. Yoshiyuki Tomino had to engage in some serious shenanigans to get Gundam's three-part compilation movie approved, and even then Parts II and III were contingent on the success of Part I. Even then, the only way he got away with that was that the Gundam movies were a compilation feature, reusing existing animation as much as possible. Macross: Do You Remember Love? was all-original animation, and therefore much more expensive.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Pretty much the only place the Regult's compact thermonuclear reactor could be is in the mecha's "pelvis", for want of a better term. It's a safe bet that the battle suits keep theirs in the "backpack" so it's close to the engines it's powering and protected from the front by the body of the mecha. One of the virtues of Overtechnology-based thermonuclear reactors is that they can be made VERY small if need be. The one in the heart of the VF-1's FF-2001 engines are less than half a meter long and maybe a third of a meter in diameter. Basically, about the size of a standard 16" beach ball. One of the other, highly relevant virtues of Overtechnology-based thermonuclear reactors is that the reaction with standard fuel is aneutronic and the reaction itself produces little in the way of harmful radiation. The vast majority of the reaction's energy is released as heat, with byproducts including small amounts of neutrinos, positrons, and gamma ray photons. The reaction is contained by an intense artificial gravity field, so exposure is essentially a non-issue though the reactor is well-shielded by overtechnology super-alloys and a lot of the byproducts are still used to generate energy.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Not that I am aware of. The first battle sequence in the series does depict at least some of Walkure's gear, like the Cygnus multi-drone plates, as having limited battery life that needs recharging from an external power source (e.g. the chargers carried by the Delta Flight VF-31s). It's not clear how long the battery life on those devices is, since in most cases they're seemingly being operated using external power. Though, the "flight" isn't really flight... they can hover to a limited extent and slow long falls to a non-injurious degree using a nitrogen gas jet cluster worn like a skirt. It's a separate system from their costumes with very limited endurance. Sheryl Nome used a similar system in the first Macross Frontier movie, and like Walkure's it was worn as a skirt underneath the holographic costumes.
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