Jump to content

Seto Kaiba

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    13857

  • Joined

  • Last visited

 Content Type 

Everything posted by Seto Kaiba

  1. Seto Kaiba
    IMO, it wouldn't be hard to make Nichijou a lot better... just cut the overlong reaction shot gags and drop absolutely everything to do with the professor. I don't know if it's cultural or what, but I can't find a bratty kid abusing their caregiver with impunity funny. If ever a kid needed a swift caning, the professor is it.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    So... yes, the VF-19 Excalibur and VF-22 Sturmvogel II are in limited use in some emigrant fleets. The New UN Forces decision to drop the VF-19 from its planned adoption as the Next Main Fighter due to a combination of factors including cost, training accidents, and arms export restrictions imposed by the New UN Government saw the VF-19 effectively join its one time rival the VF-22 as a Special Forces VF. The Macross Frontier fleet (c.2058) was known to have a special forces unit codenamed Round Table that used a locally-developed VF-19E derivative designated VF-19EF Caliburn (see Macross R). The Frontier fleet used customized VF-19s for data collection in the development of the YF-25 as well (the VF-19ACTIVE). The VF-171 was the New UN Forces Main Variable Fighter though due to the lower initial cost and lower cost of operation it ended up effectively sharing the main fighter role with the semi-autonomous AIF-7 Ghost.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    So... I'm nearly done with Nichijou. I can definitely say that I didn't enjoy this series as an anime. It might be more enjoyable as a 4koma. Its main problem is that what little content it has is spread so painfully thin that it tries to fill runtime by presenting excessively long reaction shots as a joke in and of themselves. That kind of gag is funny once, or once in a while at the absolute best. If you use it every episode or multiple times per episode like the Nichijou anime does, it becomes obnoxious very quickly.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    In all fairness, it wasn't even really Sharon Apple's fault... the computer model of a human mind she was built on was populated with emotion data from Myung Fang "I have issues" Lone, and then that idiot Marj Gueldoa installed a processor that might as well have had a label "CRAZY INSIDE" into her to make her autonomous.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    All in all, probably not. Much like how, in the real world, there are some pretty significant technological and ethical hurdles to be overcome before unmanned fighters achieve enough acceptance to wind up being considered as a true replacement for manned fighters, the Macross universe seems to still have a lot of unsolved ethical concerns about unmanned fighters that aren't going to be going away anytime soon. If anything, I'd say we're in for something more like Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere or Ace Combat: Infinity's Butterfly Master with pilots operating Valkyries remotely much the way that Grace O'Connor and Brera Sterne were shown doing with their VF-27s. Almost certainly not. Especially since artificially intelligent virtuoids like Sharon Apple was initially faked-up to be (and later became) are illegal under the New UN Government's laws. The "last manned fighter" thing? That's mentioned in a few different sources in connection with the VF-25 and VF-27. Master File mentions it as well, IIRC.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, absolutely they do. The... "assertions"... about supposed World War II subtext in the Super Dimension Fortress Macross series are completely baseless nonsense you posted in an utterly transparent attempt to appear knowledgeable. Macross Dynamite 7's entire A-plot revolves around Basara becoming involved with a Zolan family who are involved in galactic whale conservation efforts, a group of poachers who are illegally hunting galactic whales in the Zola system, and Basara's efforts to communicate with the galactic whales via song. The story ends with Basara successfully communicating with the leader of the pod of galactic whales, foiling the poachers, and establishing that the galactic whales are intelligent life forms. It's about as transparently Save the Whales as it gets. Macross Frontier's official setting materials are similarly quite clear that the events of Macross Plus caused the New UN Government to shelve its plans to adopt an unmanned fighter as the next main fighter of the New UN Forces on the grounds that it deemed autonomous unmanned fighters dangerously unreliable. That, combined with the issues the military had in its efforts to transition from the VF-11 to the VF-19, led to the development and adoption of the VF-171 as the 4th Generation main fighter and the deployment of the stripped-down semi-autonomous AIF-7S Ghost as a supplemental aircraft. It's also noted in several publications, incl. Macross Chronicle, that the fully-autonomous combat functions that the Ghost X-9 demonstrated are prohibited or heavily restricted by law. The Macross Galaxy fleet is noted to have illegally loaded its AIF-9V Ghost V-9's with autonomous air combat AIs and to have programmed them to carry out kamikaze attacks if they were running out of fuel or ammunition. (When Luca enables the autonomous air combat AI in his three Ghosts, which he's noted to have received special dispensation to install, he refers to it as "the power that once plunged Macross City into the depths of fear". It even carries a rather ominous name, "SYSTEM JUDAS", in keeping with Luca's habit of giving his gear biblical names.)
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Yup... though Kawamori is known as something of an "out there" director who does unconventional things as he pleases. Oh, likely. After all, the 5th Generation Variable Fighters are tipped to be the "last manned fighter" in Macross the same way that real world 5th Generation fighter jets are tipped to be the "last manned fighter" before unmanned fighter aircraft take over. Given concerns about the usage of unmanned combat aircraft it seems unlikely that the 5th Generation will be a final one for manned fighters in the real world or in Macross, but it's wearing the real world parallel on its sleeve. ... no, it's not taboo. It would just be completely unfounded nonsense. And no, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not a common theme in 70's and 80's anime. Outside of a few rather niche and very strange titles, Japanese media tends to avoid or downplay the Second World War and the rather touchy subjects therein. There have been whole franchises cancelled for the suggestion that they were in some way glorifying Japan's... behavior... from that period. The one real influence from World War II that you'll find in sci-fi/mecha anime most of the time is the taboo against the "good guys" using nuclear weapons... which is frequently worked around by the simple expedient of either calling nuclear weapons something else or explicitly having some form of ersatz nuclear weapon that is just as destructive but is explicitly non-nuclear. Even then, both Gundam and Macross buck the trend by explicitly featuring the protagonists using nuclear weapons.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Macross does tend to mirror real world issues in its setting fairly often. It's not surprising that modern anxieties about unmanned combat aircraft would find their way into the story in one form or another, not just in terms of general anxieties about arming robots but also in terms of the revelations from whistleblowers about the frequency with which drone strikes were killing people other than the intended target (a whopping 90% of the time). Macross Dynamite 7 was perhaps Macross at its most blatant in that regard, being a spectacularly blunt Aesop about whaling.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    That was kind of inevitable the minute they announced it was getting an Autumn release. Here's to hoping there's no more pandemic-induced disruptions to the release schedule.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    There is at least a promotional screening mentioned in November: https://macross.jp/news/?id=1489
  11. Seto Kaiba
    It might be... and the exact reason that the VF-19S has so many guns is unclear. That said, the VF-19S is actually carrying two different types of directed energy weapon on its monitor turret. The VF-19's first mass production type - the VF-19A/B/C/D/E? - had only the one Mauler REB-30G anti-aircraft laser cannon on its monitor turret. It was replaced by a small bore particle beam cannon on the VF-19F and VF-19S and the VF-19S adopted that quartet of anti-aircraft laser cannons in addition to it for reasons unclear. Macross Chronicle's Mechanic Sheet for Docker's VF-19S notes that the laser cannons can also be used as a laser communication system, suggesting that's part of the communication robustness improvements that tend to come with the "S" variant command specification, but offers no further justification. I'd almost argue the extra laser cannons are simply a New UN Forces tradition at this point to make it look more like the VF-1S. Master File has a rather odd (unofficial) take that the VF-19F/S type also normally uses the REB-30G laser cannon that the initial production types used, that the particle beam cannon is not an entirely stable system, and that the lasers were added to the VF-19S type to provide a backup in the event that the beam cannon fails.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    But he's looking for the... Cannon... answer.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Same with Azumanga Daioh, as it happens... the parallels are stacking up.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    It's definitely worth a watch, IMO. It's a lot more grounded than Nichijou is, with more focus on the actual characters, though it does have some truly bizarre and surreal moments.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    ... it definitely has a vibe reminiscent of Azumanga Daioh to it. That said, I don't think I like it as much as I did Azumanga Daioh. A lot of the humor here seems to just be "random things happen", which can be funny if done right but it feels a bit overused at 5 episodes in.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    My backlog slog continues... on to Nichijou, and my first thought is "it's Azumanga Daioh but on even more drugs".
  17. Seto Kaiba
    That does appear to be the case in the Macross Frontier audio drama Luca and the Three Ghosts. In that, L.A.I. obtained special dispensation from the Frontier Government to work on developing a high-performance, fully-autonomous air combat AI for a next-generation Ghost. I don't recall where I read it, I think it was Great Mechanics.DX 14, but I remember it being said that fully autonomous unmanned fighters are restricted as heavily or nearly as heavily as the usage of (thermo)nuclear weapons and that their usage was strictly prohibited except in very specific circumstances.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    So... yeah, Macross Chronicle's Mechanic Sheet for the AIF-9V Ghost "V-9" does mention that it was outfitted with autonomous air combat functions that contravene the New UN Gov't restrictions on AI usage. It's said that its AI is the same type used in the Ghost X-9. Incidentally, Luca Angeloni's three modified AIF-7S Ghost wingmen (QF-4000) also use the same autonomous air combat AI software used in the Ghost X-9.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Macross Chronicle doesn't put quite as much emphasis on the self-preservation instinct aspect. On the Glossary Sheet (17A) entry for it, it credits the New UN Government's ban on the technology more to the fact that the chips produce unpredictable behaviors that have a significant chance of the AI running on the chip going out of control. Given that the Macross Concern was using data from the Sharon Apple project and bio-neural processors themselves in an attempt to make their next-generation unmanned fighter more effective by making it able to respond in less predictable ways, it seems like Myung's neuroses were the Grand Central Station for calamity.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Admittedly, I'm up for almost anything that takes the piss out of Messer... though I don't think any of it could be quite as well done as the Macross Delta shorts where Messer is a pizza delivery boy.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    That's not why the New UN Government had outlawed bio-neural processors well before the Sharon Apple incident. The reason that technology was banned was because it was dangerously unstable. It was intended to improve the performance of unmanned fighters by allowing the non-sapient AI to react more flexibly and less predictably. In practice, the bio-neural chips tended to become too unpredictable and exhibited dangerous unintended behaviors that were often linked to the chips developing self-preservation "instincts". It wasn't an ethical concern, it was a safety concern about a microprocessor technology that resulted in standard sci-fi computers-gone-rogue, much like Sharon Apple herself did in the wake of being fitted with one. (Future attempts to improve the reliability and autonomous operation quality of unmanned fighters hinged on similar approaches to pre-bio-neural chip Sharon... virtual modeling of the human mind and personality. In the Macross Frontier audio dramas, L.A.I. is working on a successor to the AIF-7 Ghost that uses human personality AI systems modeled on real people: Luca Angeloni, Alto Saotome, Michael Blanc, and Nanase Matsura.)
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Well, yeah... Basara's emotional responses are definitely atypical, but in a way that suits his conflict-averse beliefs and the story's themes. Can you imagine what'd happen if a hack like Michael Bay got ahold of him? Basara's a great pilot but he's basically a non-action protagonist, since he refuses to actually fight anyone. Michael Bay would turn him into some kind of gung-ho punk in order to get the action scenes he can't live without and ruin the story's themes in the process. Imagine Macross 7 where the role of Basara is played by Nathan Explosion.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    If anything, that might actually be worse... Macross 7's Basara is a technical pacifist, which is about as far from what Bay can work with as it gets, and while there are some explosions a lot of the story revolves around Basara's general unwillingness to hurt anyone.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Can any of us even hope to rival the nearly Lovecraftian horror that @Einherjar keeps reminding us already exists? It'd be almost exactly like that, except everything would be on fire or exploding. Well, he is a massive walking American stereotype after all...
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Oh boy, wait 'til you hear about Gundam... Get your masked space nazi ace pilots with sister complexes in red uniforms in the money saving twelve pack!
×
×
  • Create New...