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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    As much as I love Gundam, I've found the writing in the last few installments of Gundam to be pretty darn underwhelming. I'm not one of those fans who enjoys those all flash and no substance titles like Thunderbolt or SEED Freedom. I'd rather they take a few years between titles to come up with a really compelling story to tell instead of churning out a new series every year. Telling amazing stories is something they're eminently capable of. They've just been green-lighting a lot of mediocre nonsense lately.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Whether the ISO survived through the surviving engineers who formed all of the post-war companies or simply was reformed after the war ... I'm just going to leave this here because it's true either way. https://xkcd.com/927/ Sincerely, A guy who sits on like five standards committees at the SAE. (AKA "Part of the problem")
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Just the liner notes and series glossary. No hard specs or anything of that nature, just a few sentences of description about how it's a scaled-down work use Destroid that's popular among civilian operators and about basic design features like its roller-equipped feet, extendible arms, and more construction machinery-esque cabin. Official coverage of the "Destroid Works" (or Work) from Macross Frontier describe it as an unarmed version of the military's Cheyenne II. It's the same basic machine, the Works version simply omits the weaponry and weapons-related systems like the large radar in favor of high-precision manipulators, high-viz paint, and warning lights since it's meant to be used as general purpose heavy machinery. Indeed. We can be confident the Cheyenne II and Destroid Works are the same size because we're told they're the same machine plus/minus combat systems, but all we know about the Workroid is that it's "smaller".
  4. Seto Kaiba
    A shame... I know the goal was always to go for 5 seasons, but it's still disappointing to see this one end. If any recent Star Trek series deserved seven seasons it was this one.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    I'd rank it even higher than that, personally... but that's mostly a reflection of my own disinterest in the Jedi as a concept. (I'll always find The Chosen Hero of Destiny far less interesting than The Guy Angry Enough To Do Something About It in the hero department, there's so much more agency in the latter character.) One thing I did not appreciate when I first saw Rogue One, but came to understand after friends coerced me into watching The Clone Wars and Rebels... Not liking Saw Gerrera is 100% the correct and intended reaction.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... whether it is or not is beyond me, and I'm not going to judge you for it regardless. I've personally never cared for The Multiverse as a creative concept. Too often, it's an excuse for lazy storytelling. Creators can use The Multiverse to raise the stakes mindlessly without a care for the consequences and avoid having to properly develop new characters because they can just plug existing characters into these alternate reality stories. I'd agree that GQuuuuuuX has not really made effective use of its Alternate Reality premise. It feels like there wouldn't really be much to prevent this exact plot, minus the Rose of Sharon, from being ported to the main UC timeline as a post-Victory series after renaming some characters.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Not s'much. Destroids were practically abandoned as a concept after the First Space War. The only "new" models we've seen are modernizations and retrofits of pre-war 03 or 04 Series units like the Cheyenne II or Super Defender. The only commonplace one seems to be the Cheyenne II, partially (possibly mainly) via the unarmed Destroid Work model and the scaled-down Workroid. Yeah, it's a smaller derivative of the Destroid Work that's not meant for hazardous conditions. It's said to be quite popular as a piece of heavy industrial/construction machinery, though. Given that Hayate starts the Macross Delta series as a dockworker handling freight at the Shahal City spaceport and he finds Freyja inside a shipping container that had just been offloaded by a ship coming from Windermere IV, that that those containers are meant to be the same containers Hayate is handling day in and day out seems certain.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    I wouldn't call Rogue One a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination. I'd call it probably the single best movie outside of the original trilogy.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Rogue One. With the right people at the helm, LucasFilm is more than capable of making worthy additions to the Star Wars's storyline. Their track record when it comes to picking the right people is more miss than hit, though.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    YMMV, but for me the most frustrating part of GQuuuuuuX has to be that the main trio really only just got involved in the plot. We are ten episodes into what appears to be a one cour Gundam series and only now are the protagonists actually becoming relevant to what's actually going on in the story. The rest is just faffing about. Nearly as bad is all the subplots that the series wasted screen time teasing - the slow collapse of the Principality of Zeon after the war, the power struggle between Gihren and his sister Kycilia, everything to do with the Titans, and now Challia Bull's great revelation at Jupiter - are either being left hanging or hastily wrapped up in barely enough time to boil an egg. That most of these subplots are a lot more interesting than the main story does not help. We could've spent time on those instead of watching Machu and Shuji stomp on a string of jobbers in Clan Battles. Seems a safe bet that...
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Depends on the model, I guess... not so much of an issue for something like the VF-1 or Regult. I've got nothing for a Glue Valkyrie... but when it comes to welding, we've got you covered: https://www.macross2.net/m3/macross7/vt-1-battroidwork.htm
  12. Seto Kaiba
    I was thinking more of the crew spaces themselves, where most of the onboard shots take place. The Elysion's bridge appears no bigger than the Macross Quarter's, for instance. The briefing room where they hold several of their discussions with Berger and others is barely large enough to accommodate the main cast. To an extent, I suspect this is because of reused interior design from the Quarter. There are some shots in the TV series where the hangar appears to be a split-level affair to permit embarkation of VFs without ladders. As to the size of the Macross Cannon and whether it's present on both ships or just one... that's not officially confirmed AFAIK.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Model kits and toy companies are gonna do stuff like that as much as they can to keep costs down even if it's not necessarily screen-accurate. A lot of 'em are probably very happy that Macross is so friendly to parts-reuse with many variants of the same model that share most of their parts in common. Her hull's modular, they likely replaced or tore down and rebuilt entire modules where necessary. With factories in orbit producing more Macross-class parts, it probably wasn't particularly difficult... except for doing it under gravity. (Or maybe they just hauled the whole ship up.)
  14. Seto Kaiba
    The best case is to admit that the reality of animation is that it's never going to be perfect. The official sizes of the ships are set by the designers who created them, as guidance for the animators. The animators get "close enough" the vast majority of the time, and that's all they really need to do in order for the show to look right and look good. 100% fidelity is not, and never will be, a realistic expectation. The animators aren't given that much time or anywhere near enough resources to deliver perfection. What we're looking at here is mostly those odd cases where the animators didn't get "close enough". Most folks would write those moments off as animation errors and think no more about them. Some devoted fans want to examine everything in minute detail. I'd just change the proportions of the rear gate and leave it at that, TBH. That way it fits neatly with the handling of the Gefion both in-game and in the novel. 40 fighters is way too much for the Gefion in either version of the story. Considering how rare Konig Monsters are and how they almost invariably operate from larger main force carriers like the Mother Raven-type or a Battle-class, I'm not sure that's necessarily a useful advantage. The Gefion having no place to launch space-type Ghosts is a bit of a non-issue as it doesn't carry any, IIRC. It wasn't designed as a carrier, it was converted into an ad hoc one, so missing or having less-than-optimal carrier functions is not only not a dealbreaker... it's expected. There's several cases in Macross 7 where VF-11s can be seen launching from the front bay of Guantanamo-class ships. The disparity between the interior and exterior shots is quite something too. The interior shots, for the most part, make the Elysion look on the small side. Particularly given that there are only ~15 fighters in its carriers. The exterior, yeah, is out of all proportion to the point that you have to question is the animation team understands how big 800m is. It's an OP, random jump cuts are pretty standard. But yeah, if we were assuming that racetrack is on the ship I would wholeheartedly agree something is clearly off. IIRC, they essentially clarified that the 80,000 is the population of the fleet not merely the one ship. Of course, there's also some material about how the living conditions in a Megaroad-class ship were actually pretty awful to the point that riots were apparently a not-altogether-infrequent occurrance. Enough so that, by 2040, the New UN Gov't had commissioned the Macross Concern to work on ways to help keep populations calmer... resulting in the Sharon Apple system in 2040. Bro... did you... forget... that Earth totally rebuilding the ship to the point that its external appearance was radically different from its original form was literally how this all started? That sh*t is not only not beyond them, they've literally already done that once before. Presumably easier the second time around, since they were mass-producing Macross-class ships in orbit and could just ship parts down to replace destroyed sections en masse.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    GQuuuuuuX's tenth episode is probably the best episode to date, and certainly does the most to actually move the needle on the show's story. It finally gets the main characters involved in the actual plot, brings the Zeon civil war arc into the foreground, and features the first actual battle of any consequential length in the series thus far. That said, even with all that it's still not very good. The writers are clearly, clearly rushing to tie up as many plot threads as they can as fast as they can. It definitely seems like this series is ending in the next two or so episodes. There is so much happening here, and none of it is really delivered as well as it could and indeed should have been. They could've done this justice with another 13-26 episodes. As it is, what's left on the table in terms of unexplored character arcs and subplots is vastly more interesting than a lot of what's going on in the main story. Particularly Challia Bull's trip to Jupiter, which he implies broke him, sent him to the depths of utter despair, and then made him the man he is. There's like, three or four episodes worth of stuff going on here all packed as densely as possible. As a result, none of it feels as impactful or meaningful as it should.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    My read of your earlier images is that the Gefion's actually about the right size. The game itself, of course, plays fast and loose with scale on all large objects for the same of gameplay and visual appeal as noted previously, but even corrected for scale you showed that the Gefion's scale in-game is not THAT far off. A VF-25 can still get through the gate. It doesn't need to be big enough to hold 40 fighters either, it's meant to be an extremely small ship that can only hold a couple fighters, so IMO it's pretty darn close as it is. Making it big and capacious enough to rival a Guantanamo for capacity with even more firepower both defeats its purpose in the story and the purpose of the Guantanamo. Consider that Macross Frontier is not the only series to show the Guantanamo-class launching fighters. It's much easier to assume that the texture used on the low-detail model for distance shots is simply inaccurate, or that the larger hangar gates have been closed with an armored door similar to what we briefly see in Macross Delta. Eh... it does and it doesn't. Macross Chronicle doesn't give an exact number, but multiple sources including Chronicle say it's roughly the same size as the Northampton-class stealth frigate, and/or that it's a derivative of the Northampton-class stealth frigate. The Macross Elysion-type is probably the one ship in Macross where I am not happy with the official size. It feels like it was made to be MUCH smaller than it allegedly is. Especially since its fighter complement, in total, is only like 20 planes despite having two carriers attached to it. It feels like it was made to be the same size as the Macross Quarter officially is, not double that. Looking back at it, I don't think they ever really present the Acshio district as being far away from everything. It's abandoned because it's rundown as all get-out, but anytime Mylene has to get there she gets there within just a few minutes and it's basically walking distance from the parks that Basara's constantly performing in. Half the time, people don't even bother to drive and just walk there which makes sense given that at one point IIRC we see Mylene has to drive her car down a staircase to get there. It's basically just the Jeniuses who seem to take cars into that area. I don't think that racetrack is actually meant to be inside a Megaroad-class ship. Look at the sky in the OP, the Megaroad-class didn't have a seamless holographic skybox like the New Macross-class does and there's no sign of the structural members that you should be able to see from the ground. I think that's just meant to be a jump cut to elsewhere (and elsewhen?). That's incorrect on several levels. Officially, Macross runs on broad strokes continuity and there is no "canon". No one version of any given story is "true". The creators play Multiple Choice Past whenever they do a new series leading to some interesting mixing and matching, most blatantly in Macross Delta which devoted the better part of an episode to a history lesson that freely mixed bits from the TV and movie versions of previous titles. The official setting treats both versions as equally valid, and generally regards the DYRL? designs as postwar improvements to the TV series designs. The DYRL? VF-1 being a later production block of VF-1, the DYRL? Macross being a post-war repair/remodel of the ship and the design of the later mass production type using parts diverted from shipyards, etc. If you look in Ernest Johnson's office in Macross Delta, he's a got a TV Macross model for decoration, so it clearly does exist.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Actually, the full context included the Gefion from Macross 30 if you go back the bit I quoted... The Gefion is home to far, far fewer VFs than the animation error Stargazer from Macross 7. Around ten when all is said and done, based on the game and novel, which I'm sure you'll agree is a vastly more plausible figure for a ship of its official size that has undergone extensive modification to serve as a light aircraft carrier. Nothing about the Gefion's official complement of VFs requires it to be vastly larger than 250m. (She is not, in story terms, actually carrying the huge array of unlockable VFs the game offers.) That's not necessarily applicable to all of the examples I went for... several are listed purely with the hangar capacity. Of course, the Northampton-class can (and per the Macross 30 novelization, does) cheat a bit by using multiple decks worth of converted cargo bays for VF storage. It may not be one contiguous hangar deck, but its available space is not limited purely by the ship's length in a single run. We all agree that Macross 7's showrunners dropped the ball with Ep44 and the Stargazer. I don't think there's anything wrong with the Gefion's design, though. There's physically enough room to fit the Gefion's much smaller required number of VFs inside the ship without issue, and there are gates large enough to get them onto the catapult deck (though some may need to do so with their wings folded). Likewise, I don't think there's any particular issue with the Northampton-class's launch mechanism from Macross 7 PLUS either... the main sticking point is the exact physical location of the ramp, but there's a fair amount of real estate down there. It's an animation error... what more can we say? They dun goofed. I disagree with that conclusion, though. Even if we didn't say that the fact that those handful of scenes in Macross 7's 44th episode being clearly off-model weren't enough to toss it as evidence, the preponderance of evidence WRT the Northampton's size skews very heavily towards the official number. After all, this is a ship that appears in many dozens of shots throughout multiple series. Now, I'm sure you will not disagree that in those many dozens of fleet shots the Northampton-class is clearly drawn a good deal smaller than the Guantanamo-class. You've also said previously that the detail shots of the Guantanamo-class closely match the ship's official size of approximately 352m, even if the smaller CG model used for distance shots is not quite accurate in terms of surface detail. If we take your conclusion as accurate and enlarge the Northampton-class to three to four times its official size as you argue, then we either have to posit that LITERALLY EVERY fleet shot in multiple Macross titles is completely and utterly incorrect or we have to scale the other ships seen with the Northampton-class up by the same factor to match. We immediately start to run into problems there. The Guantanamo-class, for instance, is seen in close formation with Northampton-class frigates many times. If we scale that up to match, then we either have to treat the oft-reused launch scenes in Macross 7 and Macross Frontier as animation errors as well... or we have to scale up the Valkyries that they're shown launching by the same amount. If the VF-11 and VF-171 are also three times to four times larger than their official sizes to make the animation correct again, that means we've changed everything's sizes but fixed nothing because we're right back where we started with VFs too bit to fit into or out of the ship in Macross 7 Ep44. And that's not counting all the knock-on implications of arbitrarily enlarging those designs 3-4x. Like, for instance, the pilots having to also be enlarged by the same amount so scenes showing pilots getting into or out of their VFs work, or Alto's complaints about Island-1 no longer making sense because a 4x enlarged Island-1 would have a "ceiling" of 8,000m not 2,000m, meaning instead of kvetching about the sky being "too low" he'd be struggling to breathe or passing out (hypoxia starts setting in at about 5-6km, and the "death zone" is around 8). My preference, of course, is for the simplest answer that requires the fewest assumptions. That being, Macross 7 Ep44's Stargazer is just an animation error and the ship really is meant to be just 250m.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    It didn't consider only length... but the point there was to illustrate how silly the idea that the Northampton-class can't function as a carrier being "only" 250m is. There are several modern light or escort carriers that are very close in size to the Northampton-class, even if we're only considering the columnar center of the ship's design that's about 250m x 30m. It's never going to be as capacious as a ship that's essentially just a gigantic box built for nothing but holding aircraft... but there's nothing conceptually wrong with the Gefion at its 252.5m size as a light carrier holding a platoon or two.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    The old saying refers to "horseshoes" the game, not the process of shoeing horses. Oh, it still does... the humor is in gallows humor and in being comically serious most of the time. Star Wars, of course, has no such limitations and can (and should) have quite a bit more levity at times. I do hope they continue to avoid "minstrel" characters like Jar-Jar Binks in the future, though. There's comic relief and then there's that.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    What's that old saying? "'Close' only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades."? Oh I'm not saying they have to be more serious. Being grim all the time is no fun at all... unless you're Warhammer 40,000. No, what I mean is that they have to focus on developing and telling compelling stories with interesting and well developed characters. They're not going to be able to squeak by with just a never-ending stream of fanservice references to past shows and movies like they're trying to do in Ahsoka.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Andor was a good first step in that regard. That said, creating more series and movies on a similar level of quality to Tony Gilroy's work on Rogue One and Andor is a tall order. So tall that I'd bet against LucasFilm's regulars being able to pull it off. The main stumbling block is likely going to be LucasFilm CCO Dave Filoni and the sort of people that he tends to hire. Star Wars superfans don't seem to be able to write Star Wars stories with broad general audience appeal. They're too close to the subject matter. So much so, in Filoni's case, that it's allegedly hurting his prospects as a candidate to replace Kathleen Kennedy when she steps down. IIRC, the next series in the release schedule is Ahsoka season two... which seems unlikely to stick the landing, leaning as heavily as it is on fanservice, even without Andor being an impossible act to follow. Then again, the future is unwritten and so are these pending films. They could surprise us all, for good or for ill.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    I stand corrected. Just one recalibration, not two. Whatever their greatest sin was, it seems like the real test of whether the sequel trilogy era can be made long-term marketable after The Rise of Skywalker is going to be whether Starfighter and New Jedi Order do well.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Some people will, sure... that doesn't mean the argument is sound. Most people - fans and casual viewers alike - simply accept the easily verifiable reality that these occasional inconsistencies are mistakes that were made in production and not anything meant to have significance to the setting or the narrative. For example, you don't see Star Trek fans arguing that the USS Enterprise-A is three times her stated size in Star Trek V because the deck numbers in the turboshaft scene show numbers as high as 78 (and in reverse order) on a ship that only has 23 decks. It's just a mistake in set dressing and nothing more. Same as when, in Star Trek: Nemesis, Riker somehow kicks the Viceroy down into an inexplicable bottomless pit on the lowest deck of the ship (29)... somehow five decks below the previous lowest deck of the ship (24). Just a dumb mistake. To give another, you don't see Star Wars fans claiming the Millennium Falcon doesn't actually have a radar dish based on the fact that it's MIA when the ship is first seen in A New Hope. Or that Anakin obviously visited our galaxy to buy lightsaber parts given that the bottom of his lightsaber in Empire clearly bears the stamped words "MANUFACTURED BY GRAFLEX" and "ROCHESTER NY USA". Or that the Republic has only actually been around for 1,000 years based on Palpatine's dialog in the prequels. Sometimes... a lot of the time... an error is just an error. No hidden messages, no secret authorial intent. Just an honest-to-goodness screwup that didn't get caught.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Box office take isn't everything. Disney and LucasFilm were barraged by social media toxicity the whole time the sequel trilogy was in the works, and they did radically recalibrate the direction of the story twice after negative responses to films... leading to the absolute cluster**** that was The Rise of Skywalker's plot. One could say one of the cardinal sins of the sequel trilogy was that it self-sabotaged as a result of trying to please everyone... especally the unpleasable die-hard fans.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    No, I mean most Macross fans understand that animation errors are a thing and don't assume that a single moment of off-model animation overrules decades of official material from the people who make the show. That kind of questionable reasoning is more in line with another fandom that we don't talk about here. Your particular preferences don't mean the official information is wrong, though. You know that Macross 30's game engine is not representing the Valkyries, ships, etc. at true scale. You didn't need me or anyone else to tell you that. Your struggle seems to be because you chose to change the size of the ship rather than acknowledge that the game employs some acceptable breaks with realism to allow the characters to operate a lot more VFs than is realistic or accept that the animation is not perfect. What you do with your own fanworks is nobody's business but yours. People are going to raise eyebrows or argue if you go around telling people you know better than the show's actual creators, though.
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