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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    One of the Southern Cross model kits by Arii did it even earlier... complete with a removable chest plate so you could see Lana's knockers for some reason?
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Same... this is one of the rare Robotech products that doesn't look like complete arse, but because it has the R-word on it and profits Harmony Gold it's a hard pass from me.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    You just HAD to tempt fate... ... I hope this isn't the final cover. This looks way worse than the previous one, with the blatant copy-pasted ARMD-class ships and wonky lighting. The preview pics on Amazon are pretty underwhelming too. Nothing like an actual image of a page, just random shots of the VF-1S. I say again, the Mikimoto book's title should be changed to Haruhiko Mikimoto Forever to match its "coming when it's done" attitude towards release dates...
  4. Seto Kaiba
    The La Sirena set layouts shown on The Ready Room suggest the ship is MUCH smaller than that... and that the internal spaces we see comprise somewhere on the order of half or more of the ship's internal volume. That, combined with exterior shots (most tellingly the bridge windows) points to the ship being only two decks tall and maybe 2-3x the size of Picard's captain's yacht Cousteau from the Enterprise-E. Given that it's depicted as being a fair bit smaller than the 23rd century Romulan Bird-of-Prey, it's probably less than 100m end-to-end. (Cousteau was 33m, and the average Danube-class runabout is 23m, the BoP is 150m.) Granted, most of the technology in Star Trek: Picard fails to follow the established design conventions of Star Trek or anything resembling common sense... prompting the Star Trek: Picard creative team to trot out a variety of half-assed attempted justifications. (To date, I think my favorite is the half-assed excuse for their terrible props. The reason the phasers from La Sirena's armory and various other places look like modern guns with random crap glued to them is because they're old. REALLY old. Like a century and a half old, making them models introduced around the time the original USS Enterprise was commissioned. Rios can afford the latest holosuite and emergency hologram technology for his ship but makes do with phasers and tricorders from his great grandfather's era?) Based on the creator commentary, La Sirena was designed and built as a freighter... so it's unlikely that it was ever heavily armed. They seem to be too narrow for anything, really, unless they're meant to be fuel tanks or something like that. They're definitely not where the weapons are mounted, since La Sirena's only apparent phaser bank seems to be in its nose. What appear to be the ship's warp nacelles are connected to their bottom edges, however.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Tell that to the writers, who've been building on and directly referencing stuff that only happened in video games and light novels. Maybe it's time Macross branches out to something like metal? That seems like a genre that'd go over well with the Zentradi. Hell, maybe do a Zentradi version of Detroit Metal City, about an up-and-coming Zentradi metal band.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Placed my order... I figured they'd post it eventually.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Ration packs being horrible is kind of truth-in-television, tho... it's a rare soldier who thinks military ration packs actually taste good, most usually think they're iffy at best. They're at least VERY consistent in Star Trek that field rations are bloody awful. Even Gul Dukat chimes in that they've possibly started tasting even worse since the Cardassian border wars. (One thing in Picard that's really bloody incongruous WRT the show's weird hate-on for replicated food is Maddox's insistence that baking cookies with replicated ingredients somehow is different/better than just replicating the cookies. It's the same synthesized matter one way or the other.)
  8. Seto Kaiba
    ... too already done, that's basically Macross the Ride if you take out the grandpa and have the main protagonist's backstory tie directly into Macross 7.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, if they're gonna capitalize on Delta they're gonna keep pushing crap for the "waifu" crowd... maybe we'll get Daily Life with Valkyrie Girls. One poor schlub pilot gets stuck living with an ever-growing harem of variable fighters.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    O'Brien liked the field rations...? (I know, he's weird.)
  11. Seto Kaiba
    There's one of the little things in Star Trek: Picard that really bugged me... everyone bagging on replicated food. When replicators were introduced in TNG, they were praised as producing excellent food and drink. Like that drunk they revived in "The Neutral Zone" who praised a replicated martini as the best he'd ever had or the Bringloidi settlers who were taken aback by the quality of replicated booze. Later on there were occasional cases of people claiming replicators couldn't do justice to one specialty dish or a family recipe, but the only ones who ever presented replicated food as inferior to traditionally-prepared food were food snobs like the Siskos (who are restaurateurs), crazy survivalist types like the Maquis, and aliens who preferred live food. But it seems like every character in Picard hates the replicator... which is WEIRD given that replicators are so commonplace and so high-quality that most people don't even bother to learn how to cook.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid really is the feel-good slice-of-life story I needed in these stressful times. Ten episodes in, and I can't think of any one episode I'd say I didn't thoroughly enjoy. Peter Grill and the Philosopher's Time is... well... exactly what I expected it to be. It's actually kind of cringe-y to watch. My weekly watch party finished Jojo's Bizarre Adventure Part IV: Diamond is Unbreakable the other day and moved on to the very start of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure Part V: Golden Wind... and I think they're hooked. The sheer absurdity of Bruno's intro scene definitely grabbed their attention.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    IIRC, that's the rogue Zentradi unit that SMS's Apollo Platoon is fighting at the very start of the story. Their role in the story is essentially to set up Chelsea Scarlett's realization that, as much as she loves VFs and flying, that she isn't cut out to be a soldier because she can't bring herself to pull the trigger on a Zentradi soldier she'd cornered. The ensuing bout of soul searching is what leads her to her alternative... flying as a sponsored pilot in the Vanquish League air races. It's still out there, somewhere... Fasces had control of the Protodeviln Heritage during the events of the light novel.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    So... it turns out that, according to Star Trek: Picard production designer Todd Cherniawsky, the La Sirena was/is intended to be a non-Federation freighter design. Its various Federation mod-cons like the emergency holograms, holosuite, and so on are additions/retrofits Rios made after he acquired the ship. Admittedly, looking at the internal layout its alleged role as a freighter makes about as much sense as the Millennium Falcon's... which is fitting, I guess, given that the showrunners very obviously fondly imagined La Sirena to be Star Trek's Millennium Falcon. There's nowhere to actually put cargo, unless they just pile it up unrestrained around the transporter pad, and even then it won't hold much.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    What all goes into a setup like that? I've got a Savannah Monitor who loves roaches... but they're so bloody expensive.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Well, another episode of Monster Musume no Oisha-san has come and gone... and I'm baffled that this even got published as a light novel. It's not that it's bad - all told it's utterly mediocre - it's that it's so completely and utterly devoid of anything resembling original thought. Yoshino Origuchi was absolutely copying from Okayado's Monster Musume no Iru Nichijou chapter and verse, that much is painfully obvious. What's more impressive is that, with all that blatant copying, they still couldn't manage to pen a worthwhile story or likable character. It feels a lot like Macross Delta, in that regard. The audience is clearly expected to like these characters because they resemble characters in an earlier work someone actually put effort into... not because of anything the characters themselves actually contribute to the story. Episode 3 of Monster Musume no Oisha-san is two running jokes from Monster Musume no Iru Nichijou tediously drawn out into an entire 24 minute episode... Zombina falling to pieces in public places to people get freaked out by moving disembodied limbs, and Lala's body getting molested by someone while her head isn't on it.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    To be fair, what we're told in Deep Space Nine itself is that those ships (the ones the Maquis had) were really basically defenseless in their stock configuration. They really were courier ships originally. The fact that they could support weapons capable of going head-to-head with a then-state-of-the-art Danube-class runabout just goes to show they were every bit as overbuilt as everything else the Federation builds. (La Sirena is a fair example, being a civilian ship that somehow can fight on a level footing with a modernized, but century-old, Romulan warship and survive an uncontrolled crash landing from orbit in good enough shape to be rendered flyable with minimal repair.)
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Given what I've heard from the Robotech staff at HG directly, the looming prospect of facing litigation from Big West dominated every aspect of the Robotech franchise's reboot efforts in the 2000s. They were so afraid that they'd do something to bring Big West down on their heads in the wake of the cease and desist debacle that kicked off the copyright reviews in Japan that HG's management mandated that absolutely everything related to Robotech had to be reviewed by the company's legal counsel before it saw the light of day. Not just the big stuff like concept art for Shadow Chronicles or merchandise proposals... even stuff as trivial as news stories for the front page of the official website. That's why Robotech.com was always the last to have any kind of news. Smart money says that even Titan's proposals for story and design in Remix had to be run past the lawyers to make sure they weren't going to bring Big West down on everyone's heads. That's probably why the comic is death on the very idea of Max and "Miriya" getting together. It's too overtly Macross-y. Truth be told, at least some of their stompings-on of other franchises in court have been alleged (by HG) to be on the insistence of the Japanese IP owners. The most recent rounds of legal action against the BattleTech/MechWarrior franchise, for instance. 'bout the only thing you can do when it comes to Robotech... incompetence is all that's ever on offer.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Well, it was a capitalistic arms deal... brokered by a Ferengi (Quark) no less. The Maquis weren't getting any weapons under the table from Starfleet the way the Cardassian colonists in the DMZ were getting theirs from the Central Command, and they weren't willing to wait for the Federation to solve it diplomatically. Their solution was buying weapons and equipment from third parties like the Pygorians (and later, the Klingons) to retrofit their standard Federation courier ships and other craft with. It's not clear if the Starfleet fighter is an upgunned courier based on the Maquis approach, or the Maquis upgraded their couriers based on the Starfleet fighters.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Well I won't be watching.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Granted, that'd sound almost sensible if only the Southern Cross Army in Robotech wasn't canonically the dumping ground where the real military disposed of its rejects, washouts, and all of the other unwanted dead weight personnel that would be least missed on or behind the lines in the event of an actual conflict. (Of course, in the Palladium RPG's 2nd edition, all of their gear - armor included - was substandard hardware.) I can't imagine it would've fooled anyone, since the fact that the military's best were all in the Expeditionary Forces wasn't exactly a secret... nor was the do-nothing "mind the house while the adults are gone" nature of the assignment. I think the gist of it from the original Southern Cross was something more along the lines of the military existing mainly for show and not being intended to do any actual fighting. Now if Bandai were to make models of the original arming doublets from Science Fiction Sengoku Saga, they might have my attention...
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Somehow, I doubt the irony is lost on them... the fact that they now live in fear of a lawsuit from Macross's owners as a direct result of their own attempts to falsely assert ownership of the Macross franchise can't have escaped them.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Improvised ones, apparently... the "Federation Attack Fighter" design was originally presented in Deep Space Nine as a lightly armed civilian-use courier craft that the Maquis used as a raiding craft after being retrofitted with aftermarket weapons.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, five'll get you twenty it's legal's doing. Max and Milia are featured prominently in Macross's sequels and spinoffs, and Harmony Gold doesn't want to do anything that might draw the attention of Big West's layers ever since the whole Big West v. Tatsunoko dustup they inadvertently triggered. That's why Robotech: Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles got rid of every remaining Macross Saga character apart from Rick Hunter by either killing them or putting them on a bus as preparation for the Shadow Chronicles movie. Ah, I'm sure that was embarrassing as per the usual Robotech convention experience.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Seems a safe bet... declaring that a project is "on hiatus" has been the Robotech franchise's favorite way to announce cancellations for over a decade now. Still, what's the source? Did Harmony Gold announce that, or Titan Publishing? I know Diamond Comic Distributors has Robotech Remix remaining issues listed as cancelled these days. Then let us hope she fails miserably in that endeavor. A Robotech timeline bereft of both Dana and the collection of short bus seat-warmers that was the Army of the Southern Cross in the Robotech TV series is surely the Robotech franchise's best of all possible worlds.
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