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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    You must not have read/watched much science fiction then. Granted, that kind of thing is pretty standard fare in fantasy... and I blame J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings for becoming the encyclopedia of Standard Fantasy Tropes.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Not a pinpoint barrier... energy conversion armor is a technology that's used on all VFs to compensate for their armor being comparatively thin in order to keep their weight down for flight. It's a system that uses a special layered, laminated armor material that becomes more resistant to damage when it's charged with electromagnetic pulses. That system draws a LOT of power, though, so VFs are forced to trade off engine output for armor strength depending on mode. Normally, the energy conversion armor is turned off in Fighter mode so a VF can exert all of its reactor output producing thrust to fly, it's turned on at partial power in GERWALK mode where demands for raw engine thrust are diminished, and full power for Battroid mode where thrust requirements are lowest. On the VF-0, the energy conversion armor made Fighter mode a fair bit tougher than the average fighter plane, GERWALK mode was as durable as a well-armored attack helicopter, and Battroid mode was as tough as a main battle tank. This way, a VF that has armor only a fraction of the thickness of a Destroid's can acquire similar defensive ability. The VB-6 Konig Monster in Macross Frontier was an improved type that uses a next-generation energy conversion armor technology that boasts defensive capabilities rivaling the armor of a heavy cruiser-class space warship when operating at maximum potential. It's even more Tonka-tough than the already incredibly durable VFs in common use (which are themselves several times as durable as the VF-1, which was by all accounts at least three times the toughness of a main battle tank). It's broadly similar to technologies like Star Trek: Enterprise's polarized hull plating, Gundam SEED's phase shift armor, and Gundam 00's structural GN fields.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Well, welcome! Dunno where you read that, because that's actually not true... they did actually render all three modes for Macross Frontier, though the Destroid mode puts in only one brief appearance in the final episode of the TV series. It's at 19:16 in the episode, where SMS's VB-6 is shown defending Island-1 during its landing on the Vajra planet. We see it transform at around 18:36, after it shot Battle Galaxy full in the face with four thermonuclear reaction warheads. It was also animated in the trailer for the second Macross Frontier movie, though that was an ultimately unused variant that has some big damn rotary cannons (reused CG models off the Cheyenne II destroid) on its arms. Konig Monster fans did at least get some recompense when Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy made the Konig Monster one of its playable VFs. Setting any weaponry from Macross up against the Inbit from Genesis Climber MOSPEADA - AKA the Invid from Robotech - would be a level of overkill that crosses the line twice and ends up feeling like bullying. The Inbit/Invid are so lightly armored that, even in the native MOSPEADA setting, their mecha can be easily destroyed by weapons little more powerful than modern man-portable rocket-propelled grenades and anti-materiel rifles. A 30mm rotary cannon like the A-10A Thunderbolt II's (or the trio of 'em carried by the AB-01 TLEAD AKA "Beta Fighter") is itself comical overkill against an enemy like that, and the VF-1's GU-11A gunpod is something on the order of 7 times as powerful. The Konig Monster has the firepower to flatten cities. (Never mind that the SMS/NUNS upgraded Konig Monster from the late 2050s and 2060s has advanced energy conversion armor that would make it difficult for the Inbit/Invid to do much more than scuff up the paint and annoy the pilot.) Yeah, all 5th Generation VFs have linear actuator technology. The VF-31 and Sv-262 are 5th Gen.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, and his only appearance after that was a cut cameo in Star Trek: Nemesis. They could always stick him in Star Trek: Discovery now that the unlovable cast of the show have f*cked off a thousand years or more into the future. Maybe he and an elderly Neelix can be besties with Burnham and they can change the show's name from STD to Star Trek: Cancer. With the Buffy the Vampire Slayer level of writing they've got going with the idiots from Secret Hideout, they could set a new speed record for cancellation. I'm most concerned that we'll start to see crap from Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Picard bleeding through into Strange New Worlds... especially since "time crystals" have already given Pike a preview of his own future.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Sounds about normal for a Macross development. IIRC, wasn't it about 2 years from Macross Frontier start of development to the first trailer?
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Surely you jest. Wil Wheaton may have managed to use The Big Bang Theory to at least partially separate himself from the antipathy that die-hard Star Trek fans and general audiences had for Wesley Crusher, but that's all he did. It's not like he managed to diminish the Star Trek fandom's loathing of Wesley Crusher, who was rightly lambasted as Star Trek's first Canon Sue. He was the Star Trek franchise's most loathed character, with only Star Trek: Voyager's Neelix and Star Trek: Discovery's Michael Burnham coming close to achieving the same levels of fan hate. (Kai Winn doesn't count, because she was deliberately written to be a Hate Sink.) Not doing something that's all but guaranteed to fail isn't exactly a "lost opportunity". Now, the proposed Hikaru Sulu series... that was a missed opportunity. Shame Shatner was so dead set against George Takei getting more time in the limelight. If CBS had an ounce of sense, they'd dump Discovery and Picard altogether and throw their budgets at Strange New Worlds.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    > implying Harmony Gold is capable of feeling shame Really, it's the quintessential Robotech setting... there's no chance for peace, love, or understanding in the universe because everyone has been driven mad by their lust for the ultimate power and nobody will suffer someone else to possess it. So it's just an unrelenting string of gritty, grimdark genocidal wars of conquest. Basically WH40K Lite.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    It was. But that's the point he's making... the ONLY successful part of Voltron is the part that's repeatedly adapting Beast King GoLion, just like the only part of Robotech that's successful is the part adapted from Super Dimension Fortress Macross. Nobody gives a damn about the other Voltron that was adapted from Armored Fleet Dairugger XV, just like nobody gives a damn about Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross. The oldest case of this that I know of is from 1939. A Moscow University professor named Alexander Melentyevich Volkov produced a Robotech-esque translation/adaptation of L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1939 under the title The Wizard of the Emerald City. It was so well-received in the Soviet Union that Volkov produced five original sequels for it: Urfin Jus and his Wooden Soldiers, The Seven Underground Kings, The Firey Gods of the Marrans, The Yellow Fog, and The Secret of the Abandoned Castle. (This is assuming you want to count only official commercialized media... otherwise the oldest case I know of is Sherlock Holmes fan fiction written in the late 19th and early 20th centuries shortly after Doyle killed Holmes off in The Final Problem in 1893.)
  9. Seto Kaiba
    So ViacomCBS's latest, and probably last, attempt to turn a profit on Secret Hideout's wildly unpopular take on Star Trek is... a Captain Pike series? I mean, yeah... Anson Mount's Captain Christopher Pike was basically the only character on Star Trek: Discovery that anyone actually liked, but it's not like that was an achievement when the entire rest of the cast consisted of shallow stock characters backing up a handful of Mary Sues and complete monsters (and a main character who managed to be all three). Maybe the third time really will be the charm, but I doubt it. They've already managed to turn Jean-Luc Picard, master diplomat and moral paragon, into an incredibly selfish and manipulative old man who endangers the entire galaxy for the sake of his own ego and had Pike spend an entire season as Burnham's doormat... I don't think they're going to change how they do things.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Only the Draken III and Kairos... the Siegfrieds had forward-swept winglets.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    The 8th Son? That Can't Be Right! is proving to be the painfully generic sleep-inducer I suspected it was going to be. Fantasy at its most generic, to the extent that I literally cannot tell you what the protagonist's name is, and I literally just finished the most recent episode. Reincarnated into an Otome Game as a Villainess with only Destruction Flags is proving to be a surprisingly lighthearted and entertaining series, in no small part because Catarina (the show's main character) has so thoroughly derailed the plot of the otome game setting she was reincarnated into that she's not only stolen the role of main character from the otome game's main character Maria, she's accidentally turned it into a reverse harem series with a harem of both the original male capture targets AND the rival female characters.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    So, probably from Comichron... albeit indirectly. ... there are still Robotech fans who think Harmony Gold is going to one day go back and finish Robotech II: the Sentinels. I wouldn't take their blind optimism seriously. Like Voltron, they keep coming back to the one and only part of the series that was actually well-liked by its audience. They literally can't move on from it, because it's the only part of the franchise that makes money and that's mainly just from nostalgia.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    That wouldn't be a spoiler... that'd be a warning sign that someone divided by zero and reality is starting to unravel. ... 22 July 2014 must've been a slow news day on io9. Their list is just a list of every failed/cancelled Robotech project except Robotech: the Untold Story, plus one that never even existed outside of Carl Macek's fevered delusions of Robotech being relevant and popular. Given that even Robotech fans don't seem to actually like Titan's take on the series, and that it's officially an AU, I think it'd probably fail to make the cut.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Do you have a source that actually gives an official sales figure? Or are you just using Comichron's approximation based on the Diamond Comic Distributors index ranking? I know in the latter case, the projected sales based on the index value was less than 4,500 total copies sold. (4,486) Thus far, there has not been an announcement from the distributor that the series is cancelled by the publisher. Titan Comics has not, AFAIK, made any statements of any kind as to the status of Robotech Remix. We may learn more from Diamond's cancellations list once they officially resume operations on 20 May. The only news I've received WRT the status of the publication is that Brendan Fletcher came down ill in late March and was bedridden until mid-April. Some Robotech fans who didn't work out the dates attempted to point to this as the reason for the delays, though the comic was already 47 days and two monthly deadlines late when he came down sick on March 24th (based on his own statements). Correction: Remix began on 16 October 2019, and Issue 5 was supposed to be released on 6 February 2020. When Remix #5 missed its 6 February release date, it was rescheduled to be released on 11 March before missing that date too and then falling off the radar altogether shortly before the UK went to stay-at-home orders on 23 March. It was 45 days overdue when Titan Comics temporarily suspended operations in accordance with the stay-at-home order. As I see it, the problem will eventually resolve itself. Robotech is a functionally-dead property, and Macross is thriving. Eventually, we will simply run out of Robotech fans due to simple attrition.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Well, you'd have to ask Egan Loo... that statement was ported over directly from his original Macross-class article on the old Macross Compendium website. What I can say with some confidence is that this statement was based on a later chronology, since the earliest versions of the chronology put the events of the first episode in October. For what it's worth, it generally agrees with what Macross Chronicle has written about the subject in the "Within the Macross" Worldguide sheet (No.07). That sheet has a diagram that indicates the city was built into internal compartments throughout the main body of the ship (everything aft of the main gun) and the engines/legs.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    My understanding is that the city occupied a number of different portions of the ship including a fair portion of the core block and was stacked five or six layers deep in places. There are a number of shots that clearly place at least part of the city inside the ship's core block, most particularly the immediate aftermath of the ship's first return to Earth. There are also a few shots that depict the city as actually existing in several distinct layers of town inside the ship, stacked vertically. The population density should be higher than what we see in the series, but it's possible the folks who lived in the highrise buildings we saw in the first episode were displaced to more space-efficient cabins in the rest of the ship and the actual "city" was mostly the suburbs with low-rise buildings that could be efficiently packed. (That said, 58,000 civilians is almost six times the Macross-class's long-term sustainable population if the Macross-class SDFNs are any indication... so it's not surprising the ship had so many problems accommodating them.)
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Or something similar, yeah. I can honestly say that's a new one... the Macross was originally going to have a lot more weaponized gimmicks back when the original series was being drafted, and most of them ended up cut from the concept.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, Dyaus nests are all over the world maps for the three regions in the game and their eggs are a collectible item. Some of the early City-class ships were a bit weird. Macross 1's City section, for instance, had no shell. The alternative is that it's maybe something like one of the supplementary habitat modules that were sometimes docked to the city ships.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    The Windermereans in Macross Delta are actually a much better example of that... right down to the Protoculture connections, song priestesses, and using songs to boost the combat performance of their troops. There were/are more virtuoids like Sharon Apple in the galaxy at one point... one of the characters in the stage musical Macross the Musiculture was one. The technology to make them truly alive/sentient/self-aware was illegal though, because it had a tendency to result in developing self-preservation behaviors and a case of crazy robots. The Dyaus are bio-technological, and are shown in the story to have the ability to reproduce biologically. How intelligent they truly are is anyone's guess, but they definitely react to intrusions into the Protoculture ruins in a coordinated way that suggests they're fairly intelligent. Yes, both Ragna and Voldor are New UN Government member planets and members of the Brisingr Alliance. Windermere IV was too, before the Kingdom of the Wind withdrew from the New UN Government in 2060. The Brisingr Alliance is a mutual defense pact and trade agreement uniting the New UN Government member planets in the Brisingr globular cluster. The cluster is so remote that it would be problematic to get reinforcements from outside the cluster should a world in it come under attack, and its remoteness also hindered the development of its economy. The practical solution to these problems was to form a united front where the various planets in the cluster would reinforce each other if one should be attacked and would support each other's trade to bolster their economies. The VF-31 Kairos is the Brisingr Alliance's economic brainchild, a locally-developed 5th Generation main Variable Fighter that they could sell as an export instead of having to spend money to import fighters or licenses to locally build fighters from outside the cluster. Nope. It's a reuse of the Island Cluster-class CG model from Macross Frontier but it's clearly MUCH smaller and landed on Ragna about 30 years ago (2037?). I have, in the past, speculated that it was meant to be an early 3rd Generation emigrant ship - one of the first City-class emigrant ships - possibly being the City-class component of the Macross 2. We know that the City-class had gained the "Shell" portion of its design by the time Macross 5 was built, and we know the fates of Macross 3 and Macross 4, which is enough to narrow it down to just the Macross 1 or Macross 2, and it doesn't match the pictured configuration of the Macross 1. This is, however, just speculation. Its identity hasn't been confirmed.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Hard to say... mostly for the lack of quantifiable data on the energy consumption of those weapons. Presumably the amount of energy that the heavy quantum beam gunpod can accept as input power is significantly less than the combined generator output of the VF's engines. There is the existing tradeoff between using reaction heat for thrust production vs. energy generation that caps the total available system energy in any given mode, but defensive systems on VFs are extraordinarily energy-intensive as well. A VF's energy conversion armor used to be the #1 draw on its generator output, consuming as much as 90% (on the VF-0) of its energy output in Battroid mode. The pinpoint barrier systems introduced on 4th Generation VFs displaced energy conversion armor as the new top dog, drawing 60% (on the YF-19/VF-19) of the VF's available generator output. Active stealth would be another big energy consumer given its complex processing requirements and the need for high-powered EM transmission to fool enemy radars, but it's not usually explicitly mentioned as a top consumer of energy. Once you subtract all that stuff out, as well as the power needs of the joint drive actuators and so on, that's what's left for something like a heavy quantum beam gunpod. The Compact Thermonuclear Reactors at the heart of thermonuclear reaction turbine engines produce astonishing amounts of power, so even a seemingly small percentage like 10% could still be a gargantuan amount of energy by today's standards. The VF-1 Valkyrie's two FF-2001A engines were rated for 650MW/ea (with a max of 1,700MW/ea in older material). 10% of that is 130 (or 390) megawatts. The only other VF to have explicit statements about its generator output - the VF-2SS Valkyrie II - had three times the VF-1's generator output (1,950-5,100MW/ea). 10% of that is still a freaking gigawatt, and in performance terms (given the relationship between generator output and thrust production) the VF-2SS is only on about the VF-11's level performance-wise.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Well, there's a few more... before Macross Delta rolled in and added the Ragnans, Voldorans, and Windermereans, Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy introduced two more. One is the biotechnological insectoid species called the Dyaus that that ancient Protoculture created to keep people from messing with the protective measures they built to seal away the Fold Evil they built that had the power to alter time, and the other being the possibility of a sentient bio-android that we later saw realized in Macross Delta in the form of Walkure's Mikumo Guynemer. I'm not sure I'd count the Protodeviln as a race or species, given that what we know as the Protodeviln are the seven Evil-series bioweapon prototypes that were manufactured during the Protoculture's civil war and were accidentally possessed by extra-dimensional energy lifeforms due to a buggy biotechnological fold dimensional energy conversion system they'd created to power their amazing combat abilities. It's not clear if they have the ability to reproduce, and by the time the dust settled over the second war against them there were only three left: Gepernich, Sivil, and Gavilgula. It's not clear if they're capable of reproducing, before or after becoming a species with the ability to sustain themselves by generating their own spiritia. I'm not sure those first three count as distinct variations of Zentradi, since the DYRL? versions of Zentradi tech have largely replaced the TV series versions from Macross II onwards... and the titles that followed don't treat them as distinctly different from each other. Are Galactic Whales sentient in the conventional sense? As to AIs, the technology to create a self-aware/sentient AI was illegal even before it was used in Sharon Apple... and IIRC didn't that ban get even stricter after Sharon Apple went berserk?
  22. Seto Kaiba
    On a more serious note, I've often wondered what kind of native lifeform the ancient Protoculture genetically modified to create the Windermereans. If you line Macross's timeline up with the understanding of the fossil record at the time it was made, the ancient Protoculture's intervention modified one of the early hominid species like Homo heidelbergensis into anatomically modern humanity. The Zolans seem to have originated with some kind of pseudo-marsupial mammalian lifeform. The Voldorans seem to have almost certainly been some species of large cat-like creature. The Ragnans are an interesting anatomical puzzle since the modern sub-Protoculture Ragnans have both mammal and piscine traits, which makes one wonder if they were all-fish before the Protoculture's intervention or if they were some kind of marine mammal with gills. The Windermereans are the ones that defy categorization. Their planet's signature animal is a gigantic bird the size of a small passenger aircraft, but they have weird anglerfish-like prehensile tentacles which act as light-up sensory organs. Were they an avian species, primate-like, or something else entirely? Did the ancient Protoculture create their runes entirely, or did they just adapt an existing organ? It's a fascinating and bottomless rabbit hole to head down if you're bored.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    I meant with respect to the Block IIIF only. (TL;DR: I misremembered something.) The VF-171EX has the metaphorical "complete package", with the upgrade to VF-19 engines (type FF-2550F), a redesigned canopy and forward fuselage, EX-Gear, and the MDE weapons package. The VF-171-IIIF in the movie only got some of the upgrades of its TV counterpart. It didn't get the redesigned fuselage and canopy, and it did get the MDE weapons package. What I misremembered was whether it got the engine update and EX-Gear. I got them switched around in my head, and foolishly didn't grab my copy of Chronicle to check before posting. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Sorry, I got my upgrades backwards... the IIIF had the VF-19 engines but not the EX-Gear.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Yes, all of the Windermerean VF pilots are Aerial Knights. The Aerial Knights are the planet Windermere IV's aerospace force, and the "knights" part isn't fanciful... they're an actual order of royal knights in service to the King of the Kingdom of the Wind. Organizationally, they're a continuance of the pre-contact knights who fought siege battles from the backs of giant birds. They've just traded the birds for something a bit more modern thanks to the introduction of human overtechnology following Megaroad-04 landing on their planet in 2027. They graduated from airborne cavalry to an aerospace force. As seen in Macross Delta Gaiden: the White Knight of the Black WIng, the introduction of modern technology hasn't changed their traditions or chivalric mindset much. Their ranks seem to contain a lot of highborn folk, the sons of nobles, religious officials, and wealthy merchants. Qasim's the only one of Keith's squadron who is lowborn, the son of an apple farmer who joined up as an adult instead of joining as a child. Their top ace still bears the title White Knight of Darwent, with two of the last three encumbents being members of the royal family. Keith's squadron seems to be the most elite squadron in the Aerial Knights. Yeah, we've seen three distinct versions of the VF-171 (four if you count Master File's take on certain Frontier content). The VF-171 Block II that is the standard model we see for most of Frontier and Delta, the Block III from the movies that was updated with VF-19 engines and MDE weapons but not much else, and the more extreme VF-171EX that got new engines, airframe design changes, and other major upgrades like EX-Gear.
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