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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, Star Trek fans were pretty emphatic about wanting Star Trek back on television again. No, for several reasons. First and foremost, ViacomCBS trotted Star Trek: Discovery's premiere on broadcast television not as an idle "well, this garbage'll fill some airtime" move... this was their streaming service's - and network's - flagship series going to broadcast, and they treated it like it was a major event. Secondly, what was it actually up against? The kind of people who usually watch Star Trek are usually not the same demographic rabidly watching professional or collegiate sports. Looking at the schedule, they weren't up against the NFL... all they had to contend with outside of a NBA playoff game was reruns. Years-old reruns of crime shows like Law & Order: SVU and Chicago P.D., of reality TV like Dr. Pimple Popper and Deadliest Catch, and of cartoons like Bob's Burgers and Rick and Morty. The flagship not only of the "revived" Star Trek franchise, but of ViacomCBS itself, flopped when all it had to compete with was reruns in a late Thursday prime time timeslot. That's not being disingenuous, that's being baffled and slightly amused at how they keep failing after putting not-inconsiderable effort into stacking the deck in their favor. No, Star Trek: Discovery killed this thread by... well... being just a really badly written TV show in general. People gave it a fair shake and the vast majority were disgusted by it. What more do you want from us? My good chum, when the feedback for a product is overwhelmingly negative... that is not indicative of a problem with the consumer base, that is indicative of a problem with the product. Like the O'Jay's once sang. "You got to give the people what they want". (And much like in the song, what we want is the return of that future that had freedom, justice, and equality.) Do you honestly think we're any different in that regard? Star Trek fans WANT to see more Star Trek. We grew up with it too and want to see it thrive... but it's NOT thriving. It's failing. Miserably. Because the people in charge of it are idiots who refuse to acknowledge that their... spin... on it isn't something that fans or general audiences want. They refused to acknowledge that it was demonstrably something fans and general audiences didn't want before they even started making it, because the prototype for it was a box office flop. They've forgotten the cardinal rule of developing for television: "remember your audience". Ironically, we're actually sick of the constant negativity too... IN THE STORY. That's a big part of the problem. Discovery is so relentlessly and uniformly negative that there's no joy in it. There is no thrill of discovery, no high adventure, no bright future for humanity among the stars. Everything has to be dragged down and degraded so that the show's horrible main character can appear heroic despite being an objectively awful person. Every new discovery is a reason for fear and paranoia. Every new alien a resource to be exploited or a threat to be evaluated and potentially destroyed. I'd say this is like Warhammer 40,000... but that at least is tongue-in-cheek about it and does plenty to laugh at itself. Picard has the same problem. It's all grim business and no fun. No joy. No dignity. A great principled hero and diplomat was pointlessly torn down to become a manipulative old man crying crocodile tears over something that was never his fault. When Star Trek is positive again, fans will be positive again. Until then, we're just kind of watching this train wreck play out and hoping Star Trek survives this mismanagement to thrive again.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Given how tight the budget on 7 was, that may just be a consequence of how bloody expensive it is to draw someone properly playing something like a guitar, bass, or keyboard that requires complex finger movements. Macross 7 and Macross Dynamite 7 were hand-animated, not like the later Macross Zero OVA and Macross Frontier series that leveraged the latest digital animation technologies.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, it's technically a rerun... but they're marketing it as a broadcast debut. Normally, the fans would come out in numbers for even a rerun or to support a show's launch on a new channel/platform, and a lot of Star Trek fans were put off by locking Discovery behind a paywall on CBS All Access for North American viewers. You'd think they'd be able to drum up an actual audience, but this just shows how much damage they've done to their own brand.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    The definition's painting with too broad a brush there. Only super dimension energy weapons can be upgraded to MDE specification... not conventional particle beam guns. The Zentradi infantry-issue beam rifle is an electron particle beam gun not dissimilar to the main armament of the Regult battle pod. That was a laser. Specifically referenced as an infrared laser in the remake, but really any laser could do the same thing. Pretty much everything did that back then. They loved that effect. The ones that really lingered in Macross were thermonuclear reaction warhead detonations, which produced a plasma fireball hundreds of meters across.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, I can see why they wouldn't perceive that as a threat to Discovery when it came out... Now that Discovery is the Star Trek with the worst-ever broadcast debut AND worst-ever per-episode ratings of any live-action Star Trek sequel or spinoff by a significant margin, First Frontier might finally get to experience the loving attentions of ViacomCBS's copyright lawyers.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    I don't think he's got the necessary power level... you might wanna talk to Heaven Ascended DIO to see if he can slap you into an alternate reality where Japanese audiences actually watched Southern Cross. Yes, but... well... it's not at anything like a usable size or level of clarity. You can see bits and pieces of it in the Bioroid images I posted a few posts back. The plan view images of the Bioroids are partially obscured by other line art that was printed on top of them, and the whole three-view diagram is also only about the size of an index card.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Facing a lean season due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on production, the brain trust at CBS decided to pad their lineup with a broadcast run of the CBS All Access "no you can't see the viewership numbers" darling Star Trek: Discovery... and it went EXACTLY as badly as the show's critics (AKA much of the Star Trek fandom) said it would. https://variety.com/2020/tv/news/big-brother-abc-game-shows-star-trek-discovery-tv-ratings-1234783699/ Star Trek: Discovery's broadcast debut garnered 1.7 million viewers and a rating of 0.2, making it far and away the worst-ever broadcast debut of a new Star Trek live-action sequel series and the worst-rated episode of a live-action Star Trek sequel series so far by a considerable margin. Fans everywhere immediately chorused "Well, we told you so... idiots." To put the magnitude of this failure in perspective, the previous title-holder for worst broadcast debut of a new Star Trek live-action sequel/spinoff series was Star Trek: Enterprise with "Broken Bow" earning 12.5 million viewers. This poor performance isn't just the worst-ever broadcast debut for a live-action Star Trek sequel/spinoff series by an enormous margin, it's also the worst-ever ratings performance for a Star Trek sequel/spinoff episode by a fairly significant margin. ENT's "Babel One" was the previous holder of that title with 2.53 million viewers in its broadcast debut, and the final season of Enterprise averaged 2.9 million viewers. "The Vulcan Hello" couldn't even perform at the level that got Star Trek cancelled with prejudice at peak sequel fatigue in the 2000s. If this isn't a wakeup call for CBS, I don't know what is... since they didn't take notice when Netflix cut their budget twice and threatened to back out of funding the series entirely, and shrugged off Amazon Prime's buyers remorse over Picard.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    TBH, your topic made way more sense before you edited it. One of the common terms used for mecha is "mobile weapon", but unless a series has some kind of interactive media (read: "game") where you can get a proper feel for how different weapons systems on a mecha perform in combat you're not going to find many people who have an opinion about specific weapons systems. Macross is really the only one of the three shows mentioned that has any real variety in enemy weapons, with lasers, electron particle beams, plasma, and super dimension energy weaponry supplementing missiles and the occasional kinetic weapon. In the original MOSPEADA, it's all lasers on the Inbit side. In Southern Cross, it's all unspecified "beam gun". There's no variety. It's like asking someone what their favorite socket in their socket set is (and everyone knows it's 10mm). Incidentally: That's an energy weapon, so it can't fire hard rounds. (It's captioned ビーム小銃 - "beam rifle" - in the line art.) They already have a pair of laser antipersonnel guns for that. The other stuff you've got involves tech that doesn't exist in the series that the mecha you're talking about is from...
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Like I said, nobody's got a complete translation... because nobody has THAT kind of free time. It's not that Macross Chronicle is a difficult publication to translate, it's that it's so bloody huge. 2,560 pages is going to take a long damn time to get through even if it's no more complex than Dick and Jane just because of how much of it there is. In any other year, that'd be the time I took off to go to Super Dimension Con and see a bunch of fellow fans in the SoCal area for an annual get-together... but since the panedemic canceled that, I had a choice between either divvying it up or just taking the entire month of December off. Workin' on that. My group is rolling through Macross Chronicle in series-production order. We've done almost all of the sheets for Super Dimension Fortress Macross so far (excl. the Goods sheets we don't care about), though I won't get to post our work until I finish with ironing the bugs out of my website's design. Once we're done there, we'll do DYRL, FB2012, II, Plus, 7, D7, Zero, Frontier, and the Frontier movies. Then it's off to the artbooks and Blu-ray liner notes, Master File, etc. Many hands make light work. I'm the one holding up the party since I'm way behind on the website development. I hate CSS.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Well, the prevailing in-universe hypothesis is that the Brisingr globular cluster was the last place the Protoculture fled to in order to escape the ongoing conflict between the Zentradi and Supervision Army before going extinct. The fact that the Star Singer they created figures prominently in the mythology of the sub-Protoculture native Windermereans suggests they stuck it out on Windermere IV long enough for the undeveloped natives they genetically re-engineered to become aware of their existence and incorporate them into their religion. Their religion seems to border on being a cargo cult, inspired by the abilities the Protoculture engineered them with and myth-preserved memories of the Protoculture's sufficiently advanced technology. Probably not, given that the people researching the Brisingr globular cluster's relation to the Protoculture believe it was the very last place the ancient Protoculture fled to before going extinct. The Star Singer, Sigur Berrentzs, and the whole delta wave system they constructed seem to have been one last attempt at unifying the galaxy, ending the war between the Zentradi and Supervision Army while also achieving their societal ambition of becoming a unified species in a manner similar to the Vajra. Whether they died out before they could test it or had the same fear the NUNS did that it'd cause a mass "your head a'splode" is unclear, but they never activated it. One point that argues strongly for it being one of their last creations is that it requires a Windermerean to activate it.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    That would've been the thing to do... bring in these superfans whose work was hotly anticipated and say "we're giving this the full-professional upgrade". Berman and several other long-time Trek showrunners started out as superfans too.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    The Zentradi 425th Main Fleet's Gol Boddole Zer mobile fortress (Macross: Do You Remember Love?) Lord Feff's custom Gigamesh mobile battle suit (Macross II: Lovers Again) Milia 639's Meltrandi gunboat (Macross: Do You Remember Love?) Mardook-issue Zentradi Powered Suit (Macross II: Lovers Again) Mardook-issue Meltrandi Powered Suit (Macross II: Lovers Again) Mardook-issue Zentradi Battle Pod (Macross II: Lovers Again) Golg Gants Charts Zentradi Heavy Attacker (Macross: Do You Remember Love?) Zentradi unnamed Powered Suit (Macross Plus) Variable Glaug (Macross M3) Feios Valkyrie (Macross Digital Mission VF-X) Couldn't come up with anything from MOSPEADA or Southern Cross. MOSPEADA's Inbit never really "grabbed" me, which is kind of ironic given that one of their mecha is basically named "Grab". They're alien, but not in any way that really impresses. They're just inscrutable but they're also REALLY dumb and kind of ineffective in a fight. Their saving grace was that humanity was dumber still, choosing to engineer its entire military around fighting them as ultra-short ranges where the Inbit's superior numbers gave them the advantage. Southern Cross's designs were just... ugh... they managed to be rushed and lazy at the same time, and the only designs that weren't heavily derivative were jumbled garbage. The Zor's only real mecha is a cheap and unapologetic knockoff of Mobile Suit Gundam's MS-06 Zaku II and they didn't even make an effort to hide the fact.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    It's easy to see why the IP owners shut it down... it's way better than anything they were working on at the time (or now).
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Thus far, humanity has not encountered any other sub-Protoculture species that had reached a level of technological development rivaling pre-Overtechnology Earth at the time they were discovered. Zola seems to have been the farthest along, with the native Zolans having an acknowledged tech level rivaling early 20th century Earth at the time the New UN Government discovered their homeworld. Windermere IV was still a medieval civilization when the SDF-05 Megaroad-04 discovered it after being damaged by the fold faults surrounding the system, and its neighbors Voldor and Ragna are implied to have been at roughly similar levels of development when they were contacted by humanity. It seems likely that most of the Protoculture's engineered species were either destroyed alongside their ancient creators at the outset of the Stellar Republic's war with the Supervision Army or were caught up in it in the intervening millennia. The ones who've slipped the net, like humanity, were still hundreds if not thousands of years from independently developing faster-than-light travel. The most advanced were only just starting to explore space inside their own solar systems. Humanity got lucky/unlucky when someone dropped a mostly-intact Supervision Army gunship on their doorstep and were just advanced enough to start figuring out how it worked by investing almost the entire planetary economy into studying it after the mass "oh crap" that came with the realization that it was a warship of breathtaking size and power. If there were other sub-Protoculture species that were farther along, they may have either been destroyed by one side or the other in the Protoculture's civil war, been "drafted" by some part of the Supervision Army, or simply been destroyed in the crossfire at some point in the last 500,000 years of war between the Zentradi and Supervision Army. (There is an outside possibility that they took one look at the state of the rest of the galaxy and went "Nope! Nope! Nope!" and decided to isolate themselves from the greater galaxy, which would account for them having not been discovered.)
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, that's just the tip of the iceberg... you also have to consider a bunch of other aspects of maintenance: How much disassembly and reassembly stands between you and the parts that are most likely to fail, need the most periodic maintenance, and/or require the most frequent update/replacement. How readily periodic maintenance on different systems can be timed to coincide with each other to minimize trips to the "shop". How frequently the manufacturer is releasing software/hardware updates for stability enhancements, issue fixes, and quality of life improvements. How readily available repair/replacement parts are, and whether they can be fabricated onsite or have to be shipped in from a supplier. How high the failure rate of newly introduced technologies is. How consistent the manufacturing process is, i.e. how many units with manufacturer-induced or repair-induced "eccentricities" will end up in your lap. I can safely say that being fleet maintenance lead for even a small fleet of relatively low-complexity hybrid electric vehicles was enough to take years off my life for the above-listed reasons.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    For the record, nobody has done a complete translation - or even a more than fractionally-complete translation - of Macross Chronicle. At almost 2,600 pages (counting the table of contents and introduction), it's too big for any one translator working in their free time to do in a reasonable span of time. The original edition was 1,600 pages and the expanded revised edition was 2,560 if you didn't count the table of contents in Vol.81. AFAIK, my group are the only ones insane enough to have actually announced that we're going to attempt a (mostly) full translation. That's five of us, and we still expect it to take six months or more. We're skipping the Goods sheets, but we're planning to do everything else. I'm very excited for October 7th. That'll mark the end of the ridiculous work schedule that's kept me from working heavily on Macross Historica and the start of me having nothing but four day work weeks for the entire rest of the calendar year. I'm gonna be making SO MUCH headway on the site. Literally all that's standing between me and that wonderful world of slacking off with official sanction for the rest of the year is a pair of network spec releases for Jeep programs.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Thousands, actually. Macross Chronicle has indicated that, at the height of the ancient Protoculture's power, there were at least FIVE THOUSAND Zentradi main fleets. Exsedol's remarks suggest there are somewhere between two and three thousand main fleets still operating in the galaxy after 500,000 years of continuous warfare with the Supervision Army. Fortunately for humanity, space folding is an absolutely terrible FTL technology for actually exploring space. Teleporting from place to place like that means you're never exposed to anything or anyone in the space between where you are and where you're going. The only way to bump into someone is if you're so fantastically unlucky that you defold right on top of them. (This has happened, but it's very VERY rare.) Yeah, that kind of thing actually became a plot point in Macross II's timeline. Destroying Boddole Zer's mobile fortress and a bunch of lower-tier command ships forced a mass retreat, but it didn't really do anything to stop Boddole Zer's subordinate commanders from periodically coming back to have another go if they were feeling hard enough. Most of Boddole Zer's subordinate commanders ran and kept running, but some were ballsy enough to muster their forces and return to try to finish the job. That meant Earth's UN Forces had to deal with a steady trickle of rogue Zentradi at periodic intervals. That was what led to Earth getting overconfident about its defenses and over-reliant on the Minmay Attack in Macross II. They did face several very serious threats, thanks to escaping Zentradi alerting other main fleets to Earth's existence and location like the Neld main fleet that attacked Earth in 2036 and the Burado main fleet that attempted to weaponize Earth's culture against the Meltrandi in 2037. An emigrant ship that blundered directly into a Zentradi main fleet also led to an invasion from an unnamed Zentradi fleet that lasted most of 2054. It was after that occasion that they really stepped up their defense programs to create things like the Macross Cannon-class and next-generation warships like the Gloria and Heracles. Earth in the main Macross timeline got luckier, in that Boddole Zer's subordinates mostly decided to not go back to that scary scary place... so encounters with rogue Zentradi fleets are mostly just examples of emigrant fleets blundering across the path of a branch fleet that's patrolling some forgotten backwoods sector of space for Supervision Army ships or the occasional case where a fleet will stumble upon an emigrant planet by coincidence, like the Macross Frontier fleet's run-in with a small Zentradi force back in 2058 at the start of Macross R or the Zentradi attack on the Brisingr cluster in 2060 that Windermere was salty about providing reinforcements for.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, the whole thing happened VERY quickly. From the dialog in Ep27, it took less than five minutes for the Zentradi to destroy Earth's surface completely. The Grand Cannon needed another five minutes (300 seconds) to finish charging before it could fire, and the Zentradi totally flattened the planet before it could even start the firing process. There were still two minutes left on the countdown when they restarted after the bombardment. When you get right down to it, at no point in any Macross story so far have the UN Forces or New UN Forces had the kind of firepower to actually fight a Zentradi main fleet. They're just too big at ~5 million ships apiece. The Grand Cannons were the closest that the Earth UN Forces ever came to having the firepower necessary to take on a Main Fleet, and unfortunately those weren't mobile (and thus were useless offensively) and were too slow and too lacking in versatility to be an effective defense against such a large force. The Macross II UN Forces c.2092 had constructed ships with the firepower to effectively confront a branch fleet-sized (~1,200 ship) force with every expectation of annihilating their enemy, but even those Macross Cannon-class ships were way short of having the firepower to take on more than a few hundred ships each at any given time. The main Macross timeline's Battle-class supercarriers have the firepower to take out a few dozen ships at a time at full power, and at least one system government (Varauta's) built a massive mobile fortress with the firepower to theoretically take down a Zentradi branch fleet on its own using a combination of eight Macross cannons and eight anti-fleet ultra-high-yield thermonuclear reaction missiles with cluster warheads, and the only one of those we know about fell into enemy hands. The main Macross timeline New UN Forces' approach to dealing with Zentradi fleets is avoidance if at all possible, up to and including self-destructing ships with MDE warheads to prevent them from falling into Zentradi hands. Macross II's UN Forces rely almost exclusively on the Minmay Attack to level the playing field and then go hog with the reaction warheads.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    In light of the rather sparse offerings of late, I find myself wishing with increasing frequency that David Production would get on with animating Stone Ocean... For now, I've fallen back on catching up on older titles again. Today's menu includes Gasaraki, Lost Universe, and Saiyuki Reload: Blast.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... depends on the when. The only realistic way for the Earth UN Forces of the First Space War to take out the entire Boddole Zer main fleet would be for all five Grand Cannons to be in working order and fire on the fleet unobstructed. The problem there is that Boddole Zer's final offensive was a surprise attack that left only a couple of minutes tops to respond, so even if all five of Earth's Grand Cannons were in working order it wouldn't really change the outcome. They wouldn't have been able to charge up and fire until after the Boddole Zer main fleet had finished destroying Earth's surface. It might mean a few hundred thousand more survivors at the end of it all, and the land battle against the stranded/abandoned Zentradi troops might not have happened or might've been a much shorter affair, but it wouldn't have materially changed the story. The only way to save Earth would be to have anticipated the surprise attack and kept the Grand Cannons on hot standby indefinitely, ready to fire at a moment's notice. (It's doubtful you can even do that with a super dimension energy weapon.)
  21. Seto Kaiba
    You're gonna need something way stronger to get the Japanese market to care about Southern Cross. For the purposes of toy collecting, perhaps... but that's as far as it goes. In terms of proper classification, it's six models of Bioroid and a one-off/custom unit. It wouldn't be called a variant because "variant" implies that it's a productionized derivative that's being mass produced... i.e. that there is more than one of that specific unit. A custom unit is a one-of-a-kind unit that deviates from the production specification. Seifreit's Bioroid is a custom unit. (I realize I'm splitting hairs over terminology, but I am a big believer in precision when it comes to things like this... esp. since there's so little in the way of accurate info on the series out there.) I don't recall the creators of Southern Cross ever giving any real indication as to why Seifreit was given a one-of-a-kind Bioroid when he was no different from any other abducted and brainwashed soldier the Zor used. It's clear in production terms they wanted an enemy ace character and went with a very blatant homage to iconic rival ace Char Aznable, but I don't recall ever seeing an in-story explanation for it.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    When the New UN Government launched these various emergency measures to preserve the habitability of Earth and begin the recovery of its ecosystem, the First Space War had only just ended. They needed to take immediate steps to ensure that Earth would remain a planet capable of supporting life because the newly established New UN Government lacked the resources to carry out even a partial evacuation of the planet and they didn't have anywhere to evacuate the planet's population to either. It wasn't until almost four years later that an inhabitable planet was discovered in another solar system (Eden) and trial emigration started. Sentiment is certainly a part of it, but I'm inclined to argue that there were elements of a sunk cost fallacy involved. The New UN Government had invested massive resources into the preservation of Earth's ability to support life and the beginnings of ecological restoration, mobilized the military to obtain unheard-of levels of manufacturing muscle to facilitate their plans to restore Earth, and started mass cloning to repopulate the planet. Relocating became increasingly logistically complicated as time went on, so by the time Eden was identified and the first wave of emigrants confirmed the planet was generally safe for human life they'd already invested so heavily in restoring Earth that relocating would've slowed or stopped the all-important space emigration program and made all their efforts to keep Earth livable seem like a waste. I think by the time they realized that it was a workable option and they actually had the resources to make it happen, the rebuilding had gotten far enough on Earth that nobody wanted to go through having to strike camp and rebuild society AGAIN. (With the emigrant ship designs available, it would've taken over 300 round trips to get the original survivor population off of Earth, by which point they would've been playing a losing game against explosive population growth.)
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, it's the document mentioned on the cover as "Scenario File". I've got a lead on scans for you though, so I may be able to save you a hunt.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    ... y'know, if it looks like a cartoony postage stamp and makes you see sounds, that's acid not sugar. Yup. Like I said, most people legitimately do not remember that there were other types of Bioroid than the Early Period Type I and II. To be honest, I'm not sure I'd call that "considerable" customization. Seifreit's has nipple piercings or whatever, that thing on its chest that looks like a butt moved up a bit, and the clamps on the polarized sensor cover are a different shape, but that's pretty cosmetic stuff. It's nothing that really changed the shape, profile, or capabilities of the mecha. It's surface detail. Yeah, that's the right issue... if you go hunting for it make sure you get the scenario file with it.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    As noted previously, Seifreit Weiss's red Bioroid is explicitly and on no uncertain terms noted to be the same model as the green Bioroid (Early Period Bioroid Type II)... it's just a custom unit, while the greens are in their stock configuration. (It's written up as 前期II型改 in This is Animation 10.)
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