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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    That's what the fans wanted, though. They rejected Disney's fumbling attempts to put a fresh face on Star Wars and now most of their efforts are focused on fanservice and combing through the open septic tank that is the old Expanded Universe for the least odious content they can find to repurpose. They brought Filoni back because the fans like him and he's obsessively tying things back to his own previous body of work. There is beautiful irony in this. The Jedi say that attachments and the fear or loss that comes with them are the path to the Dark Side, and The Acolyte harps on this heavily. The Acolyte's writing suffers in no small part because of its showrunner's attachments to Star Wars and its Expanded Universe. Leslye Headland is a "promoted" long-time Star Wars fan with a profound love of the series as a whole and the Expanded Universe in particular. Her attachment to that pre-existing material is inherently limiting, as it disincentivizes making creative decisions that might compromise the status quo of that older material she so adores and promotes "in the box" thinking and a tendency to focus on fanservice like continuity nods, homages, and in-jokes. This is extremely clear in the entertainment news coverage of the series, which focuses heavily on all the little "Glup Shitto" odds and ends rescued from one EU work or another and inserted into the background in The Acolyte that don't actually contribute to the story in any way. (Can I just say I love how the Star Wars fandom coins nicknames? "Smilo Ren" was solid gold, but "Glup Shitto" as a catch-all term for that kind of pointless and stupid rescuee from the EU is one of the best terms I think I've ever seen a fandom produce. Shine on you crazy diamonds, shine on.) It's no accident that the best writing Star Wars has had came under Tony Gilroy, a showrunner who was not a Star Wars fan. He didn't have affection for the source material getting in the way of telling the story.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Here's another view that shows the pilot with the arms still inside the torso.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    It depends on the model of battle suit, but the answer is yes and no. Typically, the battle suit pilot's legs extend into the legs of the battle suit but the arms are kept inside the battle suit's torso. The Queadluun Rhea seems to be the exception, with the pilot having a sort of squatting posture inside the torso similar to a Regult and all four limbs control remotely.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    "Magick." They spell it with a "k" so you know it's serious mystical stuff and not that silly Harry Potter kid stuff. As you might expect, the powers of the Witches aren't explained any more than the powers of the Jedi are. They just work. The closest we get to any kind of explanation in The Clone Wars, where witches featured most prominently, was that "magickal ichor" is somehow involved and they seem to be able to turn themselves into it like Dracula turns into mist. Thanks to The Clone Wars, that idea would probably be a non-starter. Even a century later, both the Jedi and the Sith treat the Witches as a largely inconsequential group of primitive weirdos from the space boonies whose worship of the Force (via the Dark Side, mainly) is seen as backwards and quaint and almost harmless. So much so that wiping them out is one of the rare occasions General Grievous and his comically ineffectual droid army got to chalk up an actual win in The Clone Wars. It kind of says a lot that the most powerful and dangerous Witch who didn't also have Sith training ended that series being defeated by the incredible duo of Mace Windu and Jar-Jar Binks.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    In the profoundly unlikely event Disney wanted revenge over a nonevent film like that... well... surely they'd realize that the best revenge is to let Alex Kurtzman et. al. finish flying the Star Trek franchise into the ground with series concepts nobody wants and cancellations for the shows that are actually doing well. Yeah, you're probably right. This latest episode's "big reveal" would've meant a lot more several episodes ago before Mae's arbitrary heel-face turn and her Sith master entering the picture. Mae herself is now headed towards irrelevance either because her master is the greater scope villain, his master is the greater scope villain, or because she's been replaced, so her motive for murder now doesn't really matter much.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    It seems like, after the episode's debut, the majority of the discussion and theorizing is now about whether... Nobody seems to be surprised that the story bent over backwards to get the Jedi off the hook, though.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Eh, yeah... considering The Acolyte's writers have been relentlessly teasing and building up to this episode as The Big Reveal, it's a truly underwhelming answer to the show's central question: "What happened on Brendok sixteen years ago that drove Mae to murder?" This is just my ignorant hot take, but in hindsight it honestly feels a bit like executive meddling to me. Someone in authority stepped in to ensure the Jedi couldn't really be the bad guys.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Definitely RVF fodder... sight beyond sight? That's AWACS territory.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Well friends, it's that time again. Time for... The Power of One! The Power of Two! The Power of Manny! So what's the over-under on this episode also being a tease-and-denial about WTH happened on Brendok? As expected, this episode definitely seems to be leaning towards the Brendok coven actually being the same evil previously seen in The Clone Wars and similar. For all Leslye Headland's talk of making the Jedi the bad guys in this piece, the story seems to be bending over backwards now to show that the Jedi are in the right. The writers have pretty definitively weaseled out of actually making the Jedi the bad guys here... exactly as predicted. The credits have a pop song instead of the usual orchestral music... which feels very out of place IMO. To make a long story short...
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Same. That was a Gundam UC title with some actual soul and an artistic statement to make. Plus the NT-1 is just a damn beautiful design on its own. I'm surprised they're bothering to probe it at all... VR seems to be struggling pretty hard thanks to the technology's relative immaturity limiting what can be done in terms of user experience. Game developers have really struggled to find anything meaningful to do with VR due to the limitations of the technology. Most VR games are more like tech demos or gimmicky casual games than the kind of fully developed immersive experience VR hardware developers keep promising.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Looks like it's already available for preorder on CD Japan and HLJ.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, the modern music is definitely in screamingly poor taste for this. It wouldn't even be good on its own, but attached to a movie set in the Late Roman Empire it's just wildly out of place. Hopefully it's just for the trailer or maybe the credits and not the actual film proper.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Macross Chronicle is the official Macross encyclopedia. Its first edition was published shortly after Macross Frontier came out, and its revised and expanded second edition was published the year after the second Macross Frontier movie was released. Both editions were published under the supervision of Macross's creators. Yes, the Macross Mecha Manual is definitely being cautious with its listing there because of the confusion that was caused by those misprints in early books. I don't believe any one publication got both the mass and the engine thrust wrong at the same time. They either get the mass wrong or the secondary engine thrust wrong, so if you take the majority of results from either group you get the same result as the official writeup from Macross Chronicle and the thrust-to-weight ratio of 46.6755. Macross Chronicle's version is the one that's been used by most publications, including those published after Macross Chronicle, so it does appear to be the official/correct set of stats. It's also the only version that aligns to the written statements about the capabilities of the VF-27 with Super Parts and VF-31AX Kairos Plus having performance similar to that of the YF-29.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Basically, typos. Our first look at the spec came from the Bandai 1/100 scale model kit, and the specs that were listed there contained a typo. The aircraft's mass was correct but the second pair of engines had the thrust listed as 1,970 kN instead of 1,470 kN. A later art book gave a incorrect mass for the aircraft but correct engine thrust, listing the mass as 11,920 kg instead of 15,620 kg. These two typos taken together, when examined on fan sites, produced a radically different picture of the YF-29's performance that put the YF-29's thrust to weight ratio in the 60s. Macross Chronicle set the record straight with official specifications, listing both the correct airframe mass and the correct engine thrusts, aligning it with the official statements that put the performance of the YF-29 at approximately the same level as the VF-27.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Hell, we don't even know for sure that Lady M is a flesh-and-blood person... she could be some random Protoculture artifact that's stranded the Megaroad-01 in fold space or some other nonsense like that. The restrictions on future international releases means they'll probably abandon that whole plotline, though. For the best, IMO, considering what a mess everything to do with the eternally-offscreen character was.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    The Ossan Newbie Adventurer had a new episode the other day... it's not doing a lot to deviate from the formula, but it's still pretty fun. Definitely very much in the mold of Mashle or One Punch Man in terms of the protagonist being a physical powerhouse who doesn't quite comprehend just how ridiculously overpowered they are. I also started Wistoria: Wand and Sword. It's another series in that same vein... a protagonist in a magic-heavy setting who has zero magical ability but is an incredible physical powerhouse to the point of doing things magic users consider impossible. The twist here seems to be that he's trying to graduate from magic school and achieve a high rank to fulfill a childhood promise to a friend who turned out to be a magical prodigy and is upholding the ancient magical barrier that protects the world from invasion. It's not bad, but thus far hasn't done much to stand out in a field populated by similar premises. Today's new start is My Deer Friend Nokotan... a comedy series about a former delinquent who's made a fresh start as an honor student in high school, who gets thrown for a loop when she encounters a strange girl with antlers on her way to school. This one has been the subject of a lot of memes, and seems to be the same kind of absurdist slice-of-life comedy as Charge! Cromartie High School or Nichijou. This series seems to like throwing photorealistic deer into backgrounds the same way that Cromartie liked doing with that gorilla of theirs. I'm not sold on it, as it seems to be just maximum randomness at all times.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Yup, in class. Our Latin teacher had a field day with it (he taught Imperial Roman Latin not Church Latin), and the marching band did a Gladiator-themed show. (The same teacher, for much the same reason, also screened A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum in class... and at one point also screened a bootleg of Austin Powers in Goldmember because he couldn't be arsed to find a more appropriate movie for the school's fundraising week.)
  18. Seto Kaiba
    That'd be wild... though I'd wonder how they'd explain it, since in Macross self-aware AI requires specific hardware. The irony there is that, in that same relaunch timeline, the planet V'Ger's actually from might as well be Cybertron... if Cybertron had its sh*t together. Oh, I know... that's why I called it "Star Trek's (thankfully non-canoncial) expanded universe" a few posts back. Even then, there's still a lot of "multiple choice past" in play... to a level that makes Macross's fuzzy canon seem blissfully clear by comparison.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    "Canon" is not a word that Macross really uses... the whole franchise operates on "broad strokes canon" or "fuzzy" canon, so that Kawamori et. al. aren't constrained one specific version of a past story's events when developing new stories. (There's a great example of this in play in Macross Delta, where Berger Stone gives his summation of the history of music as a weapon. Quite a few of the previous events that his presentation shows are mixing and matching between TV series and movie versions of events. For instance, the Vajra conflict he shows the end of uses the TV version of events but shows the movie costumes and the movie-exclusive YF-29.) That said, I don't think that jamming capability of the Fold Dimensional Resonance system is mentioned anywhere other than the notes section after the end of the novelization of the Macross 30 game. I don't recall that capability ever being used in the novel, and it's not mentioned or used in the original game either. Macross Chronicle doesn't really cover the Fold Dimensional Resonance system, and Variable Fighter Master File mostly glosses over it the same way the game does as an improved Fold Wave System. So it's sort of a "very definite maybe" without any kind of corroboration? Acceleration isn't the be-all, end-all of combat performance. The YF-29 is basically the meme about "thrust vectoring owns the sky" taken to its logical extreme. Not only does it have thrust vectoring on all four engine nozzles, the wingtip engines themselves can rotate 360 degrees parallel to the aircraft. This allows for a nearly unprecedented level of maneuverability when combined with the four very powerful engines and its inertia store converter. The YF-30's thrust-to-weight ratio may be slightly misleading as well, since that number is based on the core airframe weight that almost certainly (based on VF-31 specs) does NOT include the mission container. If that container weighs just 1,113kg, it obliterates the T/W ratio difference between the two aircraft. The YF-29 is also a prototype intended for use in actual (heavy) combat, so it is extremely heavily armed and armored. It has twice the usual thickness of energy conversion armor for its generation, achieving four times the defensive ability and exceeding the defensive potential of an Armored Pack. Its trump card is its heavy MDE beam cannon turret, which the YF-30 can also take (in the novel) but only at the cost of sacrificing its micro-missile capability. It also has the benefit of things like 25mm machine guns with enhanced armor piercing ammunition and missiles that can have MDE warheads. Otherwise, their armament is quite similar and the YF-29 just has more of it. Basically, the YF-29 is built for war... while the YF-30 is a technology demonstrator that's built for rough handling exploring Protoculture ruins but isn't meant to be a military-use VF. (Its classification as a prototype was its developer attempting to game the system and put off disclosing the new technologies developed for it to the central government as long as possible.)
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Hmm... Gladiator II could be a very interesting film indeed. I remember my Latin teacher had a lot of fun picking the historical inaccuracies (and accurate moments) in the original to pieces in class.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    To be fair, that's actually been pretty normal UC-era design practice for decades now. Especially in side stories. Build Fighters just stopped did away with any remaining pretense that it wasn't purely a tactic to sell the same kit to fans multiple times. Still... this VR movie seems like a real unnecessary addition to the Universal Century. I can only imagine how stilted it's going to be because of all the concessions it'll have to make to VR headsets.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    As of the most recent Macross title - the movie Macross Delta: Absolute Live!!!!!! - the YF-29 remains The Strongest Valkyrie as of 2068. It's actually referred to in those terms ("the strongest Valkyrie") in the official coverage of the movie. Its thrust-to-weight ratio is actually 46.6755. When the Macross Frontier: the Wings of Goodbye movie was coming out, there was some inconsistent info with the specs but that's since been cleared up. Like the VF-27, it's quite a bit heavier than the usual Valkyrie thanks to its large size and its four engines. It's actually higher than that... 53.0847. It may only have two engines, but thanks to that and to being a technology demonstrator rather than a full combat-ready military Valkyrie its weight is quite low so even with those two FF-3001/FC2 engines it's more get-up-and-go than practically any other Valkyrie. It lacks any secondary weapons besides the monitor turret-mounted beam guns and assault knife. Nope, it doesn't have that. It has a system called the Fold Dimensional Resonance system, which is actually a better/more advanced version of the Fold Wave System that was designed to allow the YF-30 to traverse fold faults. Finding a way to traverse fold faults was the private obsession of Bilra Transport Co. (and SMS) owner Richard Bilra, and he funded research into new technologies that might achieve that aim. The Fold Dimensional Resonance system was the culmination of that research, performing the same basic functions as the Fold Wave System on the YF-29 while also allowing the YF-30 to break through extremely severe fold faults. The one time a YF-30 is known to have fought a YF-29 (specifically the Special Forces use YF-29B Perceval), the YF-30 did win... but that's as much due to having a better pilot as it is to the specs of the aircraft itself.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    UC is the most environmentally responsible part of Gundam... they recycle everything. Characters, mobile suits, the plot... Gotta respect the laziness... screw painting them with new color schemes, let's just cast the new toys in matte silver and knock off for lunch. Seems like Anaheim'll sell Gundams to anyone these days.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    The movie Super Dimension Fortress Macross: Do You Remember Love? from 1984. Fans abbreviate that rather long title to just "DYRL" or "DYRL?". But that's more a topic for the Movies and TV Series section. 😉
  25. Seto Kaiba
    It's actually kind of odd that we haven't seen a planet of machine life in Macross, come to think of it... Unless you want to count the Dyaus on Uroboros, but they're not so much purely technological as organic technology. I guess the ancient Protoculture's obsession with bioengineering that they got from studying the Vajra never put them in the position of creating purely technological life.
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