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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Star Trek: Picard didn't leave itself a sequel hook to build on in "Et in Arcadia Ego Part II", which was a rather odd choice given that it was supposed to be an ongoing series. There's no obvious direction for the story to continue in for its second season. Jean-Luc Picard died trying to save the (incredibly cynically named1) planet Coppelius from the Romulans, Starfleet arrived just in time to save the day, and Sutra's plan to summon extradimensional artificial lifeforms to destroy all sentient life is foiled. Picard had assembled his crew for one reason only: to locate and save Dahj's twin sister. That was the only reason any of them stayed together and everyone's minimal character arcs were resolved by the end of "Et in Arcadia Ego Part II". Rios got vindication for his dead captain and the crew of the ibn Majid who were cashiered out of the service by Oh after assassinating the delegation from Coppelius. Musiker got snubbed by her son because of her crappy decisions but was ultimately vindicated in proving that the Romulans had infiltrated Starfleet and were responsible for sabotaging the evacuation of Romulus. Dr. Jurati found Bruce Maddox (and murdered him) then met the Soong-type android population on Coppelius that were her life's ambition. Seven of Nine got revenge for Icheb by killing his murderer in cold blood. Elnor had no ambition besides Picard's mission. What's left to build on? The only unfinished job in season one's story was taking Dr. Jurati to the nearest Federation starbase to be arrested and stand trial for the murder of Bruce Maddox. The Federation has more or less abolished the death penalty, so her fate will be serving a long rehabilitation sentence in a comfortable Federation penal colony like the one in New Zealand seen in Star Trek: Voyager. It's unlikely they'll get much mileage out of the fact that Jean-Luc Picard died and was replaced by a replicant that thinks it's Jean-Luc Picard. He's not a Starfleet officer anymore and he has no security clearances to speak of, so nobody really has any stake in that except his few remaining friends and anyone who might want to argue the philosophical point about whether the Picard replicant is the same person as the flesh-and-blood Jean-Luc Picard or whether or not it has a soul. (Picard's friends, also being old friends of Data's, are likely to take this in stride and not think too hard about it.) 1. As a reference to Coppelia, the name implies that the showrunners and/or this latest Dr. Soong don't think that the androids are people.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Like @sketchley said, with that one reference you've officially put significantly more thought into this than the writers of Star Trek: Discovery did. If we were being really charitable - and I mean REALLY charitable - we could hypothesize that they were drawing on take that some Star Trek novels from the 90's that started in a book called Prime Directive that asserted that dilithium crystals had higher-dimensional properties and could be compromised by a sort of subspace pulse. That's never been referenced by any Star Trek TV series or movie though. It sounds like whatever Su'Kal did caused the dilithium's properties to temporarily change, preventing it from reacting with the EM field.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, I'm not at all enthusiastic for Star Trek: Picard's second season. There's nowhere for the story to go... unless Jean-Luc Picard and/or Starfleet is going to spend the next ten episodes grapping with the fact that he's not really Jean-Luc Picard. He's a replicant that thinks he's Jean-Luc Picard.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    "The Burn" spread gradually across space from its origin point, albeit at incredible speeds faster than any faster-than-light stardrive. That it was a gradual phenomenon was what allowed the Discovery's crew to triangulate its point of origin using data from the "black box" data recorders of Starfleet ships that were destroyed as a result of it and a sensor network erected by a Vulcan experimental stardrive project. It didn't detonate dilithium, it made dilithium go inert temporarily. This meant that any ship powered by a matter/antimatter reactor that used dilithium to moderate the reaction between the matter and antimatter suffered an immediate catastrophic warp core breach when the reaction was suddenly uncontrolled. (We HAVE seen one technology that used subspace to teleport anywhere instantaneously... the coaxial warp drive from Star Trek: Voyager.)
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, Su'Kal's psychic powers being the origin of the Burn didn't have any established precedent anywhere. Various forms of psychic powers - telepathy, empathy, telekinesis, and precognition - were known and tested-for by Starfleet and the Federation even in the 23rd century. Gary Mitchell's personnel file in TOS included his aptitude scores in various psychic disciplines and notes about a history of psychic ability running in his family. You'd think that if Saru's people had any innate psychic ability it would've showed up when he was screened for that kind of thing during his application to Starfleet. His people's history doesn't include anything like evolving into energy beings or anything that might explain a Kelpien suddenly developing powers that could cause havoc on a galactic scale. There's never been anything to suggest dilithium had any unusual properties in interaction with life forms. Apart from being used in antimatter reactor cores, the one thing we've seen it used for is jewelry on planets that didn't understand its value in more engineering-oriented applications. They never actually attributed the subspace shockwave or the destruction of Praxis to dilithium. Praxis was just identified as [the/a] key energy production facility in the Klingon Empire. The one time they've commented on what was actually going on there, it was described as a geothermal power station tapping the moon's core for energy and a separate mining operation for unspecified mineral resources. (There have been a few stories that've discussed dilithium as a potentially volatile material, like "Pen Pals", or a few expanded universe stories where the stuff can be straight-up ignited like what happened to Coridan during the Earth-Romulan War.)
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Well, yeah... but that often isn't enough to make a movie succeed on its own. (e.g. Ghost in the Shell with ScarJo still lost a millions.) General audiences, women included, also aren't necessarily interested in seeing a movie simply because "girl power" either... which sank the remake of Charlie's Angels and several other films from the last year or so. An interesting coincidence... I ordered pizza for dinner and was Order 66. It'll be interesting to see if the new stream-centric outlook on new movie releases has a significant impact on Rogue Squadron's prospects. It's going to be harder to tell quickly what movies are successes and what aren't when they start becoming direct-to-streaming exclusives or parallel releases.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    It's all green screens, so probably not. ... that's different from what they've been doing how? Star Trek has always kind of danced around the idea of future fashion, but Picard's wardrobe seemed to be ripped from contemporary closets for the most part. Seriously, look at the cast. Everyone's wearing polo shirts, cable knit sweaters, and jeans except the Romulans, who are just wearing leather. Ah, the Ewan McGregor maneuver. It almost feels like we're headed in that direction. The production values of Picard's first season were already pretty poor for what the show allegedly cost to make.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Hm... I wonder how bad this latest round of budget cuts were. Picard started with just ten episodes in its first season. They can't cut many more before it becomes a miniseries.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    It's not so much that they were a forgettable bunch... it's that, compared to the Galactic Empire in the original Star Wars trilogy, they were downright toothless. General Hux was the highest-ranking First Order line officer in the first two sequel trilogy movies. He was, at best, an ineffectual commander who was all pomp and bluster with nothing to back it up and his incompetence was routinely played for comic relief. Captain Phasma, the commander of the First Order's stormtrooper legions, was the very incarnation of disappointment. They try to build her up as this top tier badass who commands the unflinching obedience of the First Order's ground forces, but the only thing she does is get her ass handed to her. Finn holds her at gunpoint, forces her to deactivate Starkiller Base's shields, and then he and Han Solo throw her down a garbage chute. The next time we see her, she's presiding over Finn and Rose's execution at Snoke's flagship and is killed when Finn smacks her in the face and lets her fall to her death. Ben Solo (alias Kylo Ren) was an angsty Darth Vader cosplayer who so busy trying to look and sound intimidating to actually be intimidating. He can't pull off being the First Order's intimidating masked man because he keeps taking the damned thing off, and Adam Driver just is not intimidating-looking on his own. It doesn't help that the only fight he actually wins unassisted is the one against Finn in the first movie. It's hard to take him seriously as The Dreaded when he gets his ass handed to him by Rey (who, at that time, had never held a lightsaber before), by Luke (who wasn't even physically present), by Snoke's guards, and then by his own Knights of Ren. You can't help but suspect if any competent Jedi had faced him he'd have been over their knee getting his ass paddled for being a naughty boy inside of five minutes. Supreme Leader Snoke looks creepy and deformed, but apart from repeatedly bullying Hux and Kylo Ren (a low bar) all he manages to do is throw Rey around the room a little before he misreads the future and is summarily cut in half by his own protege, in a death he literally saw coming but did nothing to avoid. It's no exaggeration to say that the most effective and intimidating was the one stormtrooper who shouted "TRAITOR", threw away his weapons, and dueled Finn... and even he got killed without an ounce of dignity. Now that we've all seen, in three movies, how utterly incompetent the First Order was... it's gonna be nearly impossible to take Rogue Squadron seriously if they present the First Order as a genuine threat. It's more or less canon that the only reason the First Order gained any ground is because the New Republic and Resistance were breathtakingly incompetent. That was more a joke about Snoke's questionable wardrobe choices than the character himself... After all, haven't a fair number of us also been working from home in our PJ's for the better part of a year?
  10. Seto Kaiba
    I haven't translated the interviews at the back of the booklet, but there's nothing new or noteworthy in the majority of it.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Well... this went downhill quick. I'll admit, the news that Rogue Squadron is to be set in the sequel trilogy era does not inspire confidence in me. I'd have a much easier time getting on board if there were a closer connection to Rogue One. It was the last truly good Star Wars movie, and I'd have liked to see them actually build on it by showing the formation of Rogue Squadron in the wake of the fatal derring-do that led to the Rebellion's first real victory over the Empire. Setting it in the sequel trilogy era means the connection is just the name and nothing else. Nobody's really all that invested in the Great Value brand version of the Galactic Empire as antagonists. They look the part, but they're not half as intimidating as the Empire because their leaders are hot garbage. (Admittedly, that Snoke telecommutes to run the First Order while in his pajamas and bathrobe feels a lot less silly now than it did a year ago.)
  12. Seto Kaiba
    There's one piece of art in the liner notes booklet that isn't in previous publications... but it's nothing particularly noteworthy. It's unused art for a revolver that would have belonged to Sylvie.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Granted, Star Trek: Discovery's writing leaves a lot to be desired... more so with each new season's fresh batch of poorly thought-out gimmicks and token attempts to convince the audience that it's "real" Star Trek. We're nearly at the end of the show's third season, and Star Trek: Discovery still feels like it doesn't really have a sense of what it wants to be or where it wants to go. The first season tried to go for nostalgia by having the pre-TOS Federation be at war with the Klingon Empire, but that ended up being so relentlessly grimdark that the morally ambiguous crew of the Discovery ended up looking scarcely less villainous than the Klingons did. So relentlessly grimdark, in fact, that the series itself seemed to quickly tire of it and switched gears to an equally grimdark plot involving the Mirror Universe in a bid to make the Discovery's crew look more heroic (or at least less villainous). Its second season tried to be more optimistic but its bait-and-switch with Captain Pike, Spock, and the Enterprise ended up devolving into an ill-considered ripoff of Terminator halfway through and its overwhelming focus on Burnham as Great Value John Connor meant that the rest of the cast still hasn't been properly developed. Now they're almost to the end of season three, they've jumped nine and a half centuries into the future to get away from the criticisms of their playing fast and loose with canon, they've once again fallen back on grimdarkness as a substitute for depth, and most of the cast still isn't developed because our new attempt to show that this show is drama is that Michael Burnham cries A LOT. To be honest, as we near the end of season three it really feels like a big part of the show's problem is that it never took the time to develop the rest of the cast. The ensemble cast that was the heart and soul of Star Trek for decades just isn't present in the writing of Star Trek: Discovery. Much of the bridge crew didn't even have names until the second season... something lampshaded rather cleverly by Harry Mudd in "Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad". Mirror!Georgiou was more a vehicle for various catty one-liners than a character, and has now departed the show after being visited by the Ghost of Christmas Past (whose name is apparently Carl). Saru and Tilly got an episode each in season two but haven't had anything meaningful since then. Only Michael Burnham is a fully-developed character, and she's an awful Mary Sue precisely because as the only fully developed character she has to do EVERYTHING herself in order to move the story along. We've had practically nothing for the rest of the crew... to the point that it was an obvious death flag when the show suddenly started developing Airiam. They're trying to make Sonequa Martin-Green carry this entire show and neither she nor the writers are up to the job. Now that the Discovery has found the incredibly lame source of "the Burn" and then been hijacked by Orion pirates who seem to be fixing to attack Starfleet Headquarters, they've got just two episodes to wrap this turd up and it feels like it's going to be a pretty rushed affair. Five'll get you twenty Starfleet Headquarters gets blown up and they hail Burnham as a hero anyway. He can't get much more inert than he already is... he's dead, and has been replaced by a replicant.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... that was always around in at least limited quantities. That's how the writers of previous Star Trek shows gave us gems like "Spock's Brain", "The Practical Joker", "Code of Honor", "Profit and Lace", "The Omega Directive", and "Regeneration". Apart from Voyager's "The Omega Directive", the glaringly stupid episodes never really had any consequences that lasted beyond the end of the episode or outside the scope of the planet/ship of the week. This nonsense about a guy whose psychic powers cause him to emit radiation that specifically makes dilithium inert AND NOTHING ELSE wouldn't be at all outside the spectrum of usual bad episode BS for Star Trek if it wasn't the crux of an entire season-long serialized story arc that impacted the entire galaxy. The inconsistency WRT dilithium recrystalization wouldn't be so glaring if Discovery's seasons weren't less than half as long as the seasons of previous shows either, I guess.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    IMO, the best part of this is that this statement could be sincere or sarcastic with literally no change. It's just so bloody ridiculous that the origin of "the Burn" - the catastrophe that caused the deaths of millions if not billions and effectively ended interstellar civilization in the galaxy - was caused by a Kelpien manchild's fear of a holographic fairytale creature known only as "the Kelp monster". In a way, it's the perfect microcosm of Star Trek: Discovery. Poorly thought-out drama that builds to an unsatisfying conclusion where everything revolves around an emotionally and mentally underdeveloped character whose ego must be appeased at all costs to save the universe. We'll get there. Started season one of Star Trek: the Original Series earlier today. There's a related "did not do research" plot hole in Discovery's third season where it's indicated that the galaxy was running out of dilithium in the 31st century somehow. Discovery's writers seem to have missed that the Federation developed a method to recrystalize refined dilithium back in 2286 (Star Trek IV: the Voyage Home), making dilithium an infinitely recyclable resource almost 800 years before "the Burn". It's an even more glaring oversight given that Discovery's own writers wrote TWO stories that involved dilithium recrystalization technology 30 years before Star Trek IV... one of which was the climax of the show's second season! Everyone was a bit gunshy about going back to using dilithium since nobody knew if the stuff would just spontaneously stop working again the way it apparently had during "the Burn", but it was also (nonsensically) much harder to come by which is why there are multiple plot points in the third season that involve dilithium scarcity. (The Orion pirate organization "The Emerald Chain" wants the Discovery because their dilithium stockpiles are drying up... apparently because the writers forgot that dilithium was a catalyst not a fuel.) Gary Mitchell, Elizabeth Dehner, and the other nine Enterprise crew who were affected by the energies of the galactic barrier were so affected because they were already documented powerful espers (by human standards) before encountering the barrier... and even then it still killed nine of the eleven people exposed to it. His personnel file in the episode "Where No Man Has Gone Before" showed that documented esper abilities went back at least six generations in his family and that his were good enough for him to carry on prolonged telepathic conversations. (Various Star Trek novels have suggested that Gary Mitchell's incredible powers weren't actually his... but that he was taken over by some higher dimensional entity, in one case an injured Q.)
  16. Seto Kaiba
    And my rewatch of Star Trek: Discovery's first two seasons draws to a close tonight with "Such Sweet Sorrow, Part II"... On my first go-round, my initial reaction was that season two of Star Trek: Discovery was a marked but short-lived improvement over season one. I have to reverse myself on that one. Season two of Discovery is actually the worse of the two, for one important reason. In Discovery's first season, its protagonist Michael Burnham is an arrogant know-nothing know-it-all who sincerely believes everything is always about her and always has to be right. In Discovery's second season, everything really is all about Burnham. It's obnoxious, really. She immediately gets into a dick-measuring contest with Pike's science officer that ends up getting him killed. She has to be rescued and becomes the first person to see the Red Angel after getting left behind on the Hiawatha. She has to involve herself in Spock's disappearance because he's HER brother and his psychological baggage is her fault. She has to be the one to take him to Talos IV to recover his lost marbles and reveal her shameful secret. Her dead parents invented the suit that the Red Angel wears and she takes up a new one to become the Red Angel and close a time loop, making even the episodes that weren't strictly about her into episodes about her. Even Control lampshades that everything is about her. The Mary Sue-ness of it all is just... off-putting. It was bad enough when she only believed she was the center of the universe. When the writers decided to establish it as fact that she actually was... that was just a terrible idea all around. Though the events of Discovery's most recent episode "Su'Kal" may well go down in history as the worst, most setting-breaking garbage in the Star Trek franchise's history. This show is just the Grand Central Station of disappointments.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    As is my custom, I started a rewatch of Star Trek as things at work wound down towards the start of the holiday season. Going in chronological order, I just got to Star Trek: Discovery's first episode last night. I have to say that it might actually be worse the second time around... and that's kind of impressive in its own right. One thing that really struck me this time was how very much Michael Burnham comes off as having a REALLY bad case of chuunibyou. Her establishing character moment at the very start of the series when she and Captain Georgiou are on that desert planet is her pretending to possess the same uncannily accurate predictive abilities and obsession with precision that was a signature trait of Vulcan characters like Spock, Tuvok, and T'Pol, and elevated to a high art (and running joke) by Data. She clearly believes she's a Chosen Hero of Destiny and The Only One Who Can Save Us as the episode drags on. After nearly dying from radiation damage she interrupts the treatment of her injuries to go running off to the bridge to immediately tell everyone it's the Klingons... a fact that they would have known fifteen seconds later without her input. Then she convinces herself that she has superior insight into the Klingons motives and uses that as an excuse to try to take over the ship to (in her mind) valiantly save her captain from fatally misjudging the situation. She's even more obnoxious in the second episode, when we see her in a flashback trying really hard to pass for Vulcan... by being incredibly arrogant and condescending towards Captain Georgiou. She tries to overrule Georgiou about dealing with T'Kuvma's ship, and when that goes pear-shaped she tries to claim credit for the entire war at her court martial because she's deluded enough to believe that she really was the sole cause of the war. Once you notice that, the rest of the flaws in the opening two-parter feel kind of trivial. Burnham is just flat-out delusional and it's actually kind of weird that nobody notices or comments on it. Especially when she first showed up and was acting like she was Vulcan. It kind of brings to mind that TNG episode "Hero Worship", where the orphaned kid from the Vico starts imitating Data as a really unhealthy coping strategy for his parents deaths.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Haruhiko Mikimoto Forever Coming... when it's done.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    The #1 question received by the (very irritated) Kaminar Office of Tourism. You never know... DSC might've had Klingons resort to actual man-eating, but the general impression was it was something done out of desperation but not socially unacceptable.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Yup... like 80% of Commander Saru's backstory is that his species, the Kelpiens, were/are a species that were kept as sentient livestock and routinely eaten by the dominant sentient species on their homeworld. They were also regarded as a delicacy in the Mirror Universe's Terran Empire. The first time the Discovery visited the Mirror Universe, Emperor Georgiou had a bunch of them and basically served them up "pick your own lobster out of the tank" style when she had Michael Burnham over for dinner. Fortunately this (illusory?) trip to the Mirror Universe passed without anyone eating a Kelpien onscreen unlike season one. Pretty much all of Mirror Georgiou's bad traits - which make up about 99% of her character traits - were left out of the last two episodes. I guess acting slightly less like a racist stereotype counts as character growth in Discovery. ... ... ... That would have been SO. MUCH. BETTER.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, this latest visit to the Mirror Universe was kind of a massive turd. In a way, it's pretty pathetic how far over the top Star Trek: Discovery has to go with the villainy of the Mirror Universe equivalents of its characters to make it obvious to the viewer they're the evil twins. We kind of had to take the show's word for it that Mirror Lorca (the only Lorca we ever meet) was someone so insanely xenophobic and bigoted that he was considered too insanely evil to be allowed to gain power by the incredibly evil Emperor Phillipa Georgiou, someone who cheerfully engages in cannibalism and genocide. Now that we've seen Mirror Burnham, any pretense of subtlety is gone and we're seeing levels of cartoonish villainy that even the worst writers would blanch at. Somehow, actual cannibal Phillipa Georgiou is presented as the voice of moderation in the Mirror Universe in a downright Dickensian secret test of character by the Ghost of Christmas Past "Carl" AKA the Guardian of Forever before sending her back in time. The episode even wraps with a hilariously insincere-feeling emotional sendoff to the one character everyone on the crew hated and knew better than to trust. I guess the Guardian of Forever sent her back in time in the forlorn hope that someone will agree to pay for Section 31.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    IIRC, Reed's main contribution was that he automated certain readiness functions like charging weapons and polarizing the hull plating when an alert was declared.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    So... in a continuation of what I started here and here, I'm going to delve into Variable Fighter Master File: VF-31 Siegfried to see if I can't figure out what sets the /FC1 and /FC2 engine designs used by the YF-29, YF-30, VF-31 Siegfried Custom, and Sv-262 apart from the regular FF-3001. One thing that's apparent is that the picture they used for the VF-31 Custom Siegfried's FF-3001/FC2 Stage IIC thermonuclear reaction turbine engine is almost exactly the same image used for the FF-3001A Stage II thermonuclear reaction turbine engine in Variable Fighter Master File: VF-25 Messiah. The hardware differences in the diagrams are fairly trivial. You can see they've drawn the bypass on the FF-3001A/FC2 diagram while they left it out of the original FF-3001A diagram, and there are some propellant inlets (the L-shaped bits) in later engine stages that were either omitted for clarity or omitted from the design itself. The rest is essentially identical but for the apparent misspelling of "GIC" and one of the GIC locations on the FF-3001A has been changed to "ISC Receiver". Proceeding into the actual text... the first immediately noteworthy detail is that the sidebar definition of "GIC" (Gravity and Inertia Control system) has added a clarification about the "Glenn Effect" mentioned in previous descriptions of the HamiltonX-Ash4 power generation system (H-APGS). It is, as I summarized in previous translations, the same principle as in real world thermoelectric converters (the Seebeck Effect) but applied to OTM superalloys. They even explicitly mention the Seebeck Effect this time. Apparently this new variation of the Seebeck Effect was discovered by a researcher named Steven Glenn, who worked at the Shinnakasu Heavy Industry New Materials Research Institute in 2020. The first actual paragraph tells us nothing new... just that the FF-3001/FC1 is more or less a custom made engine specifically for the YF-29 and that the /FC2 version is essentially the productionized version of it. The second paragraph has some meat on its bones... and it's more or less exactly what I suspected it'd be given the scarcity and substantial increase in power the engines displayed over the more production FF-3001A. The Gravity and Inertia Control system uses the same ultra-high purity fold quartz that's used in the fold wave system instead of synthetic fold carbon, which allows it to link up to the fold wave system and have its performance boosted by an order of magnitude. Part of the GIC system has been replaced by an Inertia Store Converter system (also synchronized to the fold wave system) to help stabilize the output. Other than that, the only noted significant hardware change is that the gear reductions in the turbine stage's transmission (on the turbine shaft at the aft of the engine) were adjusted. The fold wave system can also apparently assist with plasma confinement inside of the engine, reducing overall fuel consumption. The third paragraph notes that, like previous designs, the bypass airflow is not used to save fuel but to cool the engine housing. It also notes that the bypass airflow is pulled back into the engine and flash-heated as an "afterburner". The fourth paragraph confirms the earlier findings from previous books that the Stage II engines probably derive their name from the fact that they're basically two engines in one... a super-hot high-pressure turbine and a lower pressure turbine wrapped around it. If I'm reading this right, it looks like this setup also uses the gravitational compaction of airflow from the previous-gen thermonuclear reaction burst turbine engines. The fifth just talks about the two-layer turbine structure described above, and the transmission that connects the outer low-temperature turbine with the inner high temperature one to ensure that adequate airflow through the engine is maintained. It also mentions in passing the thermoelectric converter (H-APGS) and MHD generator inherited from the FF-3001A. The sixth and final paragraph just talks about what we already know about thermonuclear reaction engines in general being able to operate as a turbofan jet engine, ramjet, scramjet, and plasma rocket. It specifically notes that the switchover between operating modes is handled by the airframe control AI so that pilots won't have to think about it. This definitely explains why the more powerful /FC1 and /FC2 engines didn't become the standard. Because they've replaced the fold carbon in the GIC with ultra-high purity fold quartz, adopted an ISC system that also uses fold quartz, and require a fold wave system which also requires large amounts of ultra-high purity fold quartz to draw out their full potential, widespread adoption is impractical due to excessive cost or downright impossible due to the lack of sufficient supplies of that ultra-pure fold quartz. This also explains why Windermere IV was able to field a main variable fighter using /FC2 engines. Their planet is rich in fold quartz and without the New UN Government there to regulate mining of it they were free to extract enough to build a modest fleet of fighters with ISC, fold reheat systems, and /FC2 engines.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Ah, yes... you weren't the only one. I spoke to him as well. He came to a number of different Facebook groups and fan sites and told several wildly different versions of his story, none of which lined up with each other and several of which were completely contradictory. Even the Robotech fan pages dismissed him as an idiot or a crook and banned him. IIRC he was pulling the design down because he was informed that commercializing a derivative work explicitly based on the Macross IP was prosecutable as copyright infringement.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... I'm actually inclined to give them a pass on those. It's not like they invented the concept of alert status, they just applied something that had already existed for centuries to their everyday operations. Likewise, the force field tech that the Enterprise crew builds is something the episode it first appears in establishes is something Starfleet was working on for years and had almost completed, and is much more limited than incarnations of the tech from other shows. That's excusable, IMO, since it shows progression in the technology over time. Not like, say, the way Malcolm just casually breaks out a suitcase full of phasers that work just like 23rd and 24th century ones without comment or the new photonic torpedoes being the existing photon torpedo prop from over a century in the future with a matte grey paintjob instead of gloss black. It's when you get into the continuity-breaking nonsense that prequels like Enterprise or Discovery start to cause problems. Like the Enterprise crew making contact with species which weren't officially encountered until the 24th century and conveniently not catching their names (the Borg and the Ferengi, both over 200 years before official first contact), Dr. Phlox's successful invention of a way to prevent late 24th century Borg assimilation in 2151 (something beyond even late 24th century medicine), mid-23rd century Starfleet making common use of a type of holographic communications tech that explicitly wouldn't be invented for another 117 years (and a superior version of it at that), or Dr. Stamets creating a new faster-than-light drive technology that knocks every other form of space travel (warp drive, transwarp, quantum slipstream, etc.) into a cocked hat that is conveniently forgotten about after being tested ONCE. Think about that. The c.2257 vintage Crossfield-class has a more advanced propulsion system in 2257 than all of Starfleet in 3189. It was certainly more action scene-friendly.
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