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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Or when some Zentradi decides to repurpose a suit made for extravehicular activity for combat...
  2. Seto Kaiba
    That's not the standard Zentradi spacesuit... this is: That's the general duty Zentradi space suit, variants of which were used in almost every battlefield role including being worn by spacecraft crews. This is a heavier armored spacesuit meant for hand-to-hand combat issued to the armored divisions. A lightweight variant of it was occasionally used as a pilot suit. Neither the standard-issue spacesuit nor the armored spacesuit is, in its standard configuration, equipped with flight capability or a powered motion assist. A variant of the armored spacesuit that appeared in the official setting PS3 game Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy WAS presented as a flight-capable powered suit... but it wasn't exactly great in actual combat. (It's basically the weakest enemy unit in the game by a substantial margin, and understandably so as it's basically just an ordinary infantry spacesuit that some idiot put rocket boots on.)
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, the Nousjadeul-Ger battle suit is a mass-produced mecha in the Zentradi forces in either version of the story. From the dates on the art, the Nousjadeul-Ger may have been so late to appear in the Super Dimension Fortress Macross TV series because its design wasn't completed until the series had been on the air for several months.
  4. Seto Kaiba
  5. Seto Kaiba
    So, we've got another look at the new VF-31 Custom that Delta Flight is using... GERWALK and Battroid modes this time.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    ... why Barbie pink? Meltrandi gear is typically either kind of lavender, blue, or red.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    There is that, yeah... we first saw something like this in Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy, where the ancient Protoculture's ruins on Uroboros had what amounted to a fold-based teleporter network that was used to facilitate moving between the area map and the various "dungeons" in-game. That got scaled up to interplanetary levels in Macross Delta when the activated Protoculture ruins in the Brisingr cluster revealed an interplanetary fold network joining the key worlds of the delta wave system.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Didn't pick it up myself because... y'know... the R-word... but from what I've seen posted the quality is about what you'd expect from a Robotech art book. (Which is to say, it sucks.) The "new" art seems to be mainly reprints from the Imai Files but with even less useful commentary than the Imai Files had.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    When companies start side businesses, the results can sometimes be rather odd. Among the historical side businesses of my last couple of employers are things like soy-based plastics, biofuels, charcoal briquettes, glassmaking, aircraft manufacture, ballistic missile parts, radar systems, spacecraft, and museum management. If those side projects take off you eventually end up with a conglomerate like Daewoo that does everything from make electronics to cars to guns to fabric to managing hotel franchises and container ship fleets. (This is how we ended up with companies like SMS and Xaos in Macross... a successful company founded a side business to take advantage of an emerging market and the next thing you know Space UPS has a private army and Space AOL is managing idol groups.) For an L.A.-based company to try to break into television is more cliche than bizarre.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Their primary business is a moderately successful rental property management operation that manages eleven apartment complexes in the greater Los Angeles area.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    That, in all likelihood, has to do with Harmony Gold's problematic attempt to migrate its streaming licenses to Funimation back in 2019. Harmony Gold has moved its portfolio of anime properties between streaming services a surprising number of times in the last ten years, likely due to Robotech's poor performance on streaming services in general as an old property that hadn't had any new material in ages. Their most recent attempt to change licensees back to Funimation ran into issues when HG's intermediary - Kew Media Group - abruptly declared bankruptcy, liquidated its assets, and went out of business just a few months after the deal was closed.1 Due to the bankruptcy leaving a lot of KMG's licenses invalid or in limbo, that likely disrupted Funimation's plans to add Robotech and its component shows to their library as well as any other streaming services that hosted that content via KMG. Oh, yes... it has been. Deliberately so, in fact. That was Harmony Gold's whole plan to "protect" Robotech... they leveraged trademark law and Big West's apathy when it came to the global market to effectively block anyone from licensing of distributing Macross titles outside of Japan. Big West only finally started to do something about that back in 2016, and the dam finally broke this past March. 1. Barely a month after closing the deal to have Funimation distribute Robotech, Kew Media Group notified its investors that its CFO had made inaccurate disclosures regarding the company's working capital. There were reports made to the media of significant internal accounting irregularities, including covering up losses by borrowing money intended for payment of royalties from their distribution arm. When the news broke, the company swiftly defaulted on a $100 million credit line extended by three different banks, ended up in bankruptcy, and had its assets liquidated. That left many of its contracts invalid or in limbo.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    The only place I can recall ever seeing stuff like that was in modeling magazines showcasing kit customizations from the 90's and early 00's... specifically ones that replaced the GBP-1S thruster "backpack" with a complete NP-BP-01 booster system from the Super Pack. (Like the one in the October 2002 issue of Model Graphix)
  13. Seto Kaiba
    To be honest, I have not seen it...
  14. Seto Kaiba
    No model of VF yet presented has the ability to space fold unassisted. Fold systems are, by necessity, somewhat large because they're using gravitational force to tie space-time in knots. VFs can, however, ride along inside of a larger vessel's fold effect without having to actually be physically inside of the larger ship due to the way folding works as has been seen on a number of occasions in Macross II, Macross Frontier, etc. Messer used a fold booster, which he's shown jettisoning during reentry (seen here):
  15. Seto Kaiba
    I thought Inspector Gadget was pretty good... for a family movie, anyway. But Netflix's Gundam project is a western live-action adaptation of an anime series, and that's a very different animal because a painfully small number of western writers and directors understand the little things like subtlety and pacing. Is it really going to feel like a proper Gundam series if the main character is Tommy Testosterone-Tits and the writers send him on your standard action movie killing spree intent on causing as much CG property damage as the budget can sustain with only the barest suggestion of a plot under the carnage? Giant robots tend to inspire Hollywood writers to "mindless violence" screenplays rather than the kind of anti-war character drama that is usually Gundam's stock in trade. Granted, anime movie adaptations have also come a long way from the "let us never speak of this again" era of Speed Racer and Dragonball Evolution and are now on the level where reviews can focus on specific poor decisions like wasting half a film justifying white-washing explicitly Japanese characters rather than just "Why have you done this terrible thing?".
  16. Seto Kaiba
    The original Super Dimension Fortress Macross TV series had some issues when it came to accurately depicting the size of the Zentradi... no doubt in part due to the show's very limited budget and tight production schedule. They were often animated as being as tall or nearly as tall as a Battroid when in reality the Battroid should be much taller than the average for a Zentradi at 12.68m. It's also worth noting that there's a pretty significant disparity in average height among Zentradi based on their actual rank/role by design. Your average Zentradi soldier is between 9m (29.5ft) and 10m (32.8ft) tall... five times the height of a tall man (5'11"-6'7" in scale). There are also plenty of examples who are below the average height like Roli Dosel. Command types are built bigger. In human scale, Quamzin would be a whopping 2.37m (7'9"!). Vrlitwhai would be a whopping 270.8cm (8'11"!). Boddole Zer was even taller than they are. The Protoculture didn't really give a damn about making their mecha ergonomically sound, so you can safely assume some uncomfortable bending is involved.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    As was Arad, yes... though it's worth remembering that both Delta Flight and Walkure are very recent developments in 2067. They've only been active for about two years. One thing that a lot of people aren't aware of is that it's actually perfectly possible to enlist in the military while underage even in the real world... with permission of a parent or legal guardian, of course. Underage recruitment is, of course, heavily scrutinized under international law and as such these arrangements tend to be deliberately set up to ensure that any underage recruits will have reached the age of majority before their training is completed or that they will otherwise be barred from direct participation in hostilities until they come of age. The US military recruits over 15,000 17 year olds every year under provisions like this. We know the New UN Forces have an arrangement like this as well thanks to the backstory of Macross 7's Gamlin Kizaki. He joined the New UN Forces Air Force School at age 15 (in 2041) by special entry, and his prodigious skill led him to complete the three year training program in two years and graduate to his posting in Diamond Force in 2043 at age 17. He had already achieved the rank of First Lieutenant at age 19 when Macross 7 started in 2045 and would later be promoted to Captain. That can make the dates work out. Valkyries also have a lot of convenience features like the Airframe Control AI that take the burden of the nitty-gritty details off the pilot's hands, and current-gen VFs are supposedly even easier to learn how to fly thanks to EX-Gear. Though, even with that, Hayate's training is so accelerated that it's hard to credit unless his long experience with Destroids was a transferrable skill (as it appeared to be given episode 1's outing in the VF-171).
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Yes... which is understandable, given what the show's primary demographic is. Though it's worth noting one odd touch in the Macross setting is that the Age of Majority under the UN Government and New UN Government is apparently 17 not 18... so many of the characters who are nominally "high school age" are, in the context of their respective stories, legally adults. (For Macross Delta, the ages skewing young may be justified in that Windermereans only live for about 30 years on average and so their society has different standards with regard to age.) Macross Plus has the oldest main cast with none younger than 23, followed by Macross 7 where all but one are at least 19, and then Macross Zero where roughly half the main cast is in their mid-to-late 20's.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Not to mention all of the official publications in the 90's and 2000's... In hindsight, it's actually REALLY weird that anyone thought that Big West or Kawamori in any way disapproved of Macross II considering how often it got brought up.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    As far as I know, the 117th Research Fleet's home port is not identified. In the Macross Frontier novelization, Manfred Brando was a part of the board of inquiry that investigated its destruction. That could be taken as circumstantial evidence that its home port was Earth since Brando and his company Critical Path were supporters of the Earth supremacist group Latence in Macross VF-X2. No involvement from Macross Galaxy is mentioned, but some of its surviving researchers (e.g. Grace) and its financial backers (Manfred) did move on to supporting the Macross Galaxy fleet.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    No, it's not a question of semantics... it's a distinction that the people who rag on Macross II don't want to acknowledge because it's inconvenient to their trollish premise. Macross II and its tie-ins were classified as a "parallel world". An alternate universe. Like the alternate universe storylines in Star Trek, in Gundam, or in DC and Marvel's superhero comics, they're separate but coequal official settings. Even if they're no longer under active development they're acknowledged and treated as valid installments in the franchise's storylines and promoted alongside the rest of the franchise. To be "stricken from canon" means no longer being a part of ANY official setting the franchise might have. Like Star Wars's original Expanded Universe, Gundam's Gaia Gear, Star Trek's original animated series (under Roddenberry), or the majority of the Terminator sequels. At best, those works might be considered apocryphal but generally they're ignored completely despite still being considered (if only technically) legitimate. Being "disowned" or "disavowed" is "stricken from canon, with prejudice". That's when the creator or franchise owner is straight-up denying that a work is a legitimate part of their franchise/series. Like Eon Productions' stance on the 1967 Casino Royale movie and Never Say Never Again, Robotech's position on almost all licensee-created materials that are dated prior to 2001 (due to copyright issues), how Kawamori has been documented as seeing Robotech, Alan Moore's position on Doomsday Clock, etc. This is straight-up "I have no son!" territory, where the work is explicitly not considered a legitimate part of the franchise to the point of being "______ in name only". Macross II may not be in continuity with the titles that came after, but it's not ignored either. Macross 7 has a fair number of Macross II nods in it. There were Macross II-derived elements in Macross 7 Trash and Macross the First as well.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    The ink's barely dry on the deal... it was only signed back in March. It's gonna take time for individual licensees and distributors to digest the big news, reach out to Big West for a better picture of the legal implications, and examine the market to see where the money is. I'd expect Q4 2021 at the earliest.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Yes, but he also doesn't say anywhere that it was disowned, disavowed, or "stricken from canon". Which, of course, it wasn't. It was merely an above average OVA that failed to live up to everyone's expectations that it'd set the world on fire. Nevertheless, Big West never disowned it, disavowed it, struck it from the canon Macross doesn't have, or in any way attempted to hide it... and it'll no doubt be prominently featured alongside its younger siblings when Macross goes to streaming and home video outside Japan in the near future.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Safe bet... streaming licenses. Harmony Gold's in bed with Funimation, which would make them landing on Funimation Now seem pretty likely.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    I'm amused that the "disowned" myth keeps going around WRT II... even after Kawamori himself publicly refuted it. I guess some parts of MW's toxic history simply aren't going to die easily. Really, no Macross sequel has been poorly received overall. II and Plus came the closest, being far better received outside Japan than in it. Too many folks in here generalizing from themselves when talking about how Macross shows were received tho.
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