Seto Kaiba

Nope... I'd call Variable Fighter Master File: VF-31 Siegfried one of the most disappointing installments in the series. Most of the VF-31 book's technical material is reprinted content originally written for Variable Fighter Master File: VF-25 Messiah. It must be admitted that this is at least partly justified by the VF-31's high level of parts commonality with the VF-25, but it's still disappointing. The portions of the VF-31 book that are actually original are mostly garbage. The worst of its issues is that the writers seem to periodically forget that the Siegfrieds are extremely expensive one-of-a-kind Ace Custom units individually tailored to their pilots by a third party that modified trial production VF-31A Kairos units from their stock configuration. It keeps trying to pass the Siegfried off as a production-intent configuration.

When you think about it, the VF-4 can be described as the merger of a VF-1 and its Strike Pack.

True... it's the fact that their VP of Marketing has no idea how to put together an online press release that stops them from doing press releases. No joke. The whole reason that the annual Robotech convention tour exists is because McKeever and co. seriously believe that that's the most effective way to promote the brand. It's not just their show that's decades behind the times. Nothing whatsoever. As I noted in my last post, Harmony Gold effectively defunded new Robotech development back in '07 when Shadow Chronicles flopped and seem to have abandoned the field entirely after Robotech Academy bombed on Kickstarter in '14. Last I recall hearing, Harmony Gold was still halfheartedly trying to do that thing they do where they pretend their most recently cancelled project is just "on hiatus" and might still get made one day... though the studio that made the Robotech Academy trailer indicated quite clearly that it was definitely cancelled.

As a Magic 8 Ball might say... Outlook Not So Good. Thanks to the pandemic shutdown, a lot of stuff got delayed... including some shows that were in active production being put on hiatus for the health and safety of the production staff.

Based on what's said in Master File with respect to the capacity of the conformal fuel tanks the Super Pack adds... between 30 and 45 minutes of main engine operation at full power, but that's extended by the use of rockets to supplement the main engines. Not to mention that the VF-4 is a substantially better space fighter than the VF-1 is at any range. What was the number they gave? A 40% improvement over the VF-1 Super Valkyrie in space combat performance? There's some talk in the second VFMF book about fuel bladders that were inserted into the intakes for that purpose, but they didn't provide a significant increase in fuel capacity.

Sort of... their thermonuclear reaction turbine engines use the plasma produced in their compact thermonuclear reactors as propellant in space flight. This approach understandably has its ups and downs. The practical benefits include a greatly simplified fuel system that only needs tanks for one type of fuel material that can be used with equal ease in atmosphere and space and being able to make that hydrogen slush fuel pull double duty as a coolant for the engine. The primary downside is that using the plasma produced in the reactors as main engine propellant in space flight forces the VF to consume its fuel exponentially faster in space. This, of course, led to the addition of FAST packs that compensated for this shortcoming by adding liquid-fuel rockets to reduce the burden on the main engines and massive bolt-on fuel tanks to extend the onboard fuel supply. A VF-1's FF-2001 engines have enough fuel to run for almost a month in atmosphere... but in space, at maximum thrust the internal propellant supply is good for about ten minutes at the VF's maximum thrust. That's 4,200x increase in fuel consumption. Verniers and so on burn liquid hydrogen and oxygen, as do the liquid fuel rockets built into some VFs (e.g. the VF-1's backpack) and bolt-on rockets like the VF-1's Super Pack.

There's not a lot, really... though the absence of various types of development is one way to gauge things. Robotech is functionally dead as an animated property. The last serious effort to continue the Robotech animated series - Tommy Yune's "Shadow Saga" OVA - ended in cancellation after just one episode when it was poorly received by fans and ignored by most everyone else. That failure caused Harmony Gold to cease funding future development of Robotech's animated series, and seven years later fans refused to foot the bill for the Robotech Academy pilot on Kickstarter. All development halted after the campaign there failed. Robotech is a nonexistent property as a live-action film franchise. There has been no indication of any progress made towards the start of development, never mind production, in the thirteen years and counting since the license was announced. Robotech is functionally dead as a comic book property. Titan Comics' Robotech Remix appears to have been cancelled early this year after just four issues, with the publisher refusing to answer any questions about its status. The only forthcoming titles are an assortment of trade paperback reprints of old Comico comics. It is not immediately clear why Titan abandoned Remix, since their sales were poor but certainly no worse than those of many long-running niche comics, but the distributor is not expecting any new issues and has cancelled all outstanding orders. Robotech's gaming side is in a pretty pathetic state. There are no forthcoming video games for any console. Palladium Books, the franchise's oldest licensee, had its license revoked by Harmony Gold two years ago over fiscal improprieties related to a Robotech-branded tabletop miniatures game that Palladium was developing via Kickstarter. The "traditional game" licenses passed to indie outfits like Strange Machine Games who produced a few cheap and forgettable cardstock boardgames that sold only to die-hard fans and only in very limited quantities, the first installment new RPG that most Robotech fans found obnoxiously half-assed, and some so-so miniatures that are at least better than the mess Palladium came up with (which is "damned by faint praise"). Robotech's toy side is also in a pretty pathetic state. Toynami is making some knockoff Funko Pop-type collectibles, Caliber Wings did an F-14 redeco and non-transforming VF-1 of passable quality, and the rest is low volume indie stuff from Hong Kong that has met with very mixed receptions or incredibly overpriced limited edition statues that double as bluetooth speakers. By in large, the real licensees seem to have given up the ship in the face of competition from Japan's Macross franchise and everything the rest make these days is dual-branded in the hopes of attracting Macross fans to buy it. At least two of their licensees were actual toy bootleggers, one of which went out of business due to mismanagement of its own finances. Robotech's online community is kind of a joke. The official website's discussion boards are populated more or less exclusively by bots, and the Facebook groups are mostly devoted to taking the piss out of Robotech. For ultra-low-volume borderline bootleg stuff, yeah. Nope.

So I've started watching Today's Menu for the Emiya Family... and apart from being an extremely low-rent attempt to get on the cooking show bandwagon Shokugeki no Soma started, it reminds me of nothing quite so much as a gag from Excel Saga about how shoujo anime increases bloom and highlights by like 15%. A bland and inoffensive mixture of Fate fanservice and food porn without the actual porn of Fate or borderline porn of Shokugeki no Soma. It kind of tries to be a cooking tutorial, but without showing enough to actually useful in that regard either... so unremarkable it's average!

Well, things are definitely still getting worse for Robotech... at approximately the same pace as before the license renewal announcement.

It doesn't quite line up with any publication I've checked so far... this may be their own original render. The closest match is the line art in the first Variable Fighter Master File, but this is missing some details that are in that art and has some details that are noticeably different. Like the front view in this pic has the intake covers closed, they're almost invariably drawn in the open position.

In the past (read: The Rise of Skywalker), we've seen Disney try an approach to storytelling that basically involved leaking proposals and then rolling with the ones best-received by the target audience... or, at least, the ones that garner the least negative feedback. I wouldn't be at all surprised if that was what was going on here... but then, I am a massive cynic. Oh, I'm certain they do... but do they care? Star Wars merchandising doesn't perform like it used to, and that makes the Expanded Universe much more disposable than it was when Star Wars was a merchandising juggernaut. I don't doubt for a second that Disney would chuck its own Expanded Universe material in favor of an official setting replacement (theoretically) with broader audience appeal. After the sequel trilogy boldly and dynamically sh*t itself in public, they're looking to make the Mandalorian lightning strike twice and put a few in the Wins column.

We were supposed to get another series.

The only other specifically-identified camera on the YF-1 I'm aware of is the one on the back of the head.

Ah, yeah... pretty much the only Robotech fans who consider that site any kind of viable reference are the ones who edit it. Nobody else uses it. It's kind of a problematic site to use because it takes a "holistic" view of Robotech and has content from explicitly non-canon sources rubbing shoulders with official setting material in a lot of its articles. It's a lot like Star Trek's Memory Beta in that regard, where the same article can describe a character dying six different ways because they've been killed differently in a bunch of different media... just without an actual community behind it the way Memory Beta has.

That... is a surprisingly apt analogy, esp. since Remix started to actively take the piss out of Robotech's official setting with borderline meta commentary near the end. Given some of the more... questionable... creative decisions to come out of the comics industry that still somehow sold, I can definitely understand why Titan Publishing thought they could make such an oddball premise work. It's no less strange than a lot of what goes on in special limited superhero comics, a surprising amount of which involves zombies in some form or another. If they'd kept the "invaders from an alternate reality" shenanigans to a minimum after the end of their first Robotech limited series, I'd have honestly given them credit for coming up with an at-least mildly interesting and somewhat original take on the Robotech story. Well... almost everyone else. The BattleTech/MechWarrior fans and Transformers fans would be right there with Macross fans in deriding it, for much the same reason. HG's various, and occasionally justified, legal shenanigans haven't endeared them to either of those fandoms either. (Fans of BattleTech and MechWarrior definitely live in hope that Robotech is going to go under soon, though that's admittedly in the false hope that that will clear them to resume using "the Unseen" when it will really only change who's suing them.) For a given value of "far", I'm actually inclined to disagree. Titan's first Robotech comic series made it to the end of its planned run (24 issues) without readership dropping low enough for the publisher or distributor to consider dropping the series. That's much farther than the average Robotech comic book usually gets, and ending on their own terms instead of being cancelled is definitely an unusual fate for Robotech's new developments in general. Even if fans didn't necessarily like it, it was different enough to hold their attention and keep them buying. Sales were slipping, but I think if they'd toned down the weirdness or at least picked a protagonist the fans weren't long-conditioned to loathe when they launched Remix they could've gone the distance... by which I mean, "finished the planned 24 issue story arc". In all fairness, the current Robotech creative staff are building on a whopper Carl Macek told back in '86-87 in which he implied something very similar to that. Specifically, Carl Macek frequently claimed to have drawn up detailed plans for future expansions of the Robotech TV series that would increase its length by hundreds of episodes. He wasn't consistent on exactly how many when recounting this "fact" over the years, though. He and others variously claimed that he had plans for enough episodes to make the series span every weekday in a calendar year (261, +176eps), a year and a half (390, +305eps), or that the final length of the series was to be 285 or 300 episodes. His final take on that story prior to his death was in a 2007 interview, in which he claimed to have had plans for Robotech to be a 300 episode series in total. That's a big part of where this "Macek's original vision" schtick is coming from. There's no evidence that Macek ever conceived fo any kind of long-term plan for Robotech, but the fans believe he did because he spent so long saying he had despite the obvious inconsistencies in his account.

I'd say lock it once Titan actually admits the comic is cancelled or the distributor puts up a status for it indicating cancellation.

Well, there's a very remote possibility that you may be in luck there... In a proud Robotech tradition, the publisher is unwilling to admit that this book has been cancelled. They've claimed their failure to deliver the fifth issue is due to the Coronavirus shutdown, despite its missed delivery date being two months before the shutdown started, and are claiming that the issue is basically done. It's not impossible that this'll be the first Robotech title to actually end up rescued from that old The Emperor's New Clothes-style denial game, since Titan is arguably Robotech's first competent publishing licensee. Entertainingly, the publisher's website is down...

That's not really what that discussion was about... that was more a rebuke for whining about Macross not being something it literally never was. That's... not actually quite true. They were hastily adapting Macross based, in part, on their earlier aborted plans to produce a localization of it. Once they got past that and into Southern Cross, they were basically making it up as they went. That's why the Masters Saga has so many inconsistencies and plot holes. They had multiple writers working independently, with no plan and no time to check each other's work, and they were writing in the expectation that the audience would be the K-6 crowd so they were also frantically trying to dumb everything down so that a younger audience would understand it. A big part of why Robotech attracted an older audience than intended was that they did an absolutely terrible job of it. Macek's own account was, predictably, pretty inaccurate from the get-go and got moreso as time went on and he found a market for claiming to be a creative genius who defined the entire genre instead of just being that guy who hastily cut together three unrelated shows to save a bad Transformers ripoff merchandise line. Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts on the subject with me. Admittedly, a lot of Robotech's licensee-created material comes off more than slightly fanfiction-y... and the McKinney novels definitely being the worst of that bad lot. The one thing always struck me as odd, and the genesis of my question, was that nobody working on Robotech in any of its incarnations ever seems to have entertained the idea that there could be a non-dystopian future. Luceno and Daley's idea for a conclusion was to have the heroes who'd sacrificed so much to liberate the people of the galaxy sent back into the distant past to become the original generation of evil aliens who enslaved the galaxy in the first place. The few comics to try and go beyond the existing story depicted various flavors of Earth as a dystopian military dictatorship. For all its faults, Titan Comics was the only outfit to really attempt to do something different from the usual Robotech story. Their short-lived Robotech series had some pretty awful writing, but it at least managed to set up and ending for itself that didn't involve one or more genocides. Not that the Zentradi weren't trying, mind you. I know a lot of Robotech's fans consider the plot beats and themes of the series to be a bit of a sacred cow, so I was naturally left to wonder if Remix's more optimistic take on the future was something fans received well or poorly (independently of the crap quality of the actual writing). I myself can't really form an opinion because I really can't get past the absolutely terrible writing of Titan's comic. It was a nice way to dodge the problems inherent in doing a different take on Robotech that appeased fans by acknowledging the official setting of the animated series while also being its own thing. Sadly, it deteriorated into fanservice fairly quickly... admittedly with the implicit critique of all previous iterations of the franchise as bad futures were humanity failed to break out of the time loop.

Oh yes, it's rather telling that literally nobody can seem to muster a defense of Titan Publishing's additions to the ongoing travesty that is Robotech... Though since Robotech fans and even some folks here were at least reading that dreadful tome, they ought to be able to offer the desired feedback on whether Titan's effort to rework the Robotech story into something more upbeat and Macross-y was an improvement on Robotech's general tone of doom and gloom or not. (Because, let's be honest, Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles wasn't exactly a prize either and it was as doom-and-gloom-heavy as the rest of it.) Only practically? I'm pretty sure there's a fair bit of actual screaming about it in there somewhere. Ironically, one of Gundam's scheduled releases for this year is arguably one of its most depressing and least subtle anti-war pieces yet... Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway's Flash. The light novel was upsetting to read, to say the least. Poor Hathaway. That's one of the fundamental differences in dichotomy between Gundam and Macross... whether or not the average person is basically decent. In Gundam, there are no good guys because everyone's an arsehole looking out for number one. In Macross, there are no bad guys because everyone's a decent person trying to do what's best for their people. Not caring about the message doesn't give you a valid point when you're whining about the franchise not making something that is the antithesis of that message. It just means you didn't get the bloody point.

Their respective creators have been quite clear on the message their work is meant to convey. Unsurprisingly, a lot of Japanese fiction that features war stories of some type outside of the setting of Japan's feudal period tend to include fairly strong anti-war themes and messages that are both central to the story and a major part of character development. Again, that's kinda just you.... you seem to miss a lot of points with distressing consistency. To most of the audience, that anti-war message is a core part of the individual story and one of the overall themes of the franchise as a whole. Gundam, in particular, is very fond of stressing how war breaks families even before the fighting actually starts and how the people whose families have been broken by war go on to sustain the cycle of hatred that gives rise to future wars and how those psychological wounds never truly heal. Macross is somewhat more optimistic about people's ability to heal or at least forgive when the conflict ends and the talking begins, but even that has occasionally shown that some people really do end up broken beyond repair (like the racist General Gomez in Macross Plus). The point you're resolutely missing is that war in a lot of fiction is ALSO hell for the characters... and that is often the basis of a point the author is trying to make. This isn't escapism, this is social commentary... tackling themes like militarism, nationalism, dehumanization, bigotry and discrimination, the psychological and social cost of war, etc. I'm not really interested in your perspective. As we've established before, your views are so skewed and your interested so hyper-specialized that you don't seem to even understand what these shows are about. There's a pretty damned big gulf between Star Trek and "classic" Robotech's downright Warhammer 40,000-esque attitude that the only good alien is a dead alien and that aliens who side with humanity are tools to be used and potential betrayers. That's why I'm interested in what people who read Titan's comic thought of the more Macross-like approach to the story instead of being Oops! All Genocide!

Zany is definitely not a word I'd have used for it. It's not a pure comedy so much as it is a slice of life about an incredibly dense girl whose efforts to avoid a terrible fate turned a love story on its ear and continually exasperate all the love interests that she doesn't know she has. It's meant to be an affectionate parody of a typical otome game.

*sigh* The first three words of what I wrote were "By Macross's standards". Of-bloody-course it's not going to be as relentlessly grim as a Universal Century Gundam show... those are unstinting war-is-hell, black-and-grey morality slogs through the emotional and psychological deterioration of unfortunate kids who wind up forced onto the front lines of a war with actual Nazis... and occasionally of Yoshiyuki Tomino himself. Mind you, that seems to be exactly what the mercifully few western fans who want Macross to be more war-centric are hoping in vain we'll one day receive. It's the same sort of crowd who missed the very pointed reminder at the end of Mobile Suit Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket about how people who are only watching for the giant robot fights missed the entire point of the story. That is to say, the lesson about the toll that war and death take on people. As in Macross, the giant robots in Gundam are but set dressing for a story about what a profoundly evil, ugly, and senseless thing war is. The key difference between the two being that Macross is fundamentally optimistic and Gundam is fundamentally pessimistic. To the writers of Macross, the power of communication and mutual understanding can de-escalate and end wars and allow former enemies to live together in peace. To Gundam's writers, a never-ending cycle of hatred will always be there as the defeated simply nurse their wounds and plan their bloody revenge with no hope of ever giving up long after the cause is lost and no chance of ever understanding or even trying to understand each other. Robotech, of course, is even worse as humanity very quickly learns that the only way to achieve peace in their wartorn universe is unrelenting genocide. I'm not sure if Titan's take on it would count as better or worse, since the end result of any war is always the aliens being exterminated unless they submit to serve humanity. The Zentradi who refused to live among humans are killed to a man, and then the ones who agreed to fight for humanity are killed off in an internal conflict. The Robotech Masters and Earth forces genocide each other to a standstill and are then both wiped out by the Invid. Humanity tries to exterminate the Invid entirely, and only narrowly fail, only to immediately end up on the receiving end again due to one of their subjugated alien races secretly wanting to genocide them both. I wonder if Robotech fans saw Titan's more Macross-like setting as better or worse than the unrelenting cycle of war and death in Robotech's TV series?

It's so pure, lighthearted, and fun... it's the perfect counterpoint to the rather upsetting times we live in. It's got none of the usual fanservice you expect from a show like that, and sells itself entirely on the strengths of its characters. It's got a very all-ages appeal to it, IMO.

By Macross's standards, Macross II was pretty damned gritty for the time... what with the UN Forces being a stagnant and overbearing military that maintains the illusion of perfection by exercising heavy press censorship, the Mardook being a race of genocidal religious fanatics who use mind control to force their Zentradi into kamikaze attacks, etc. It took a lot of pointers from Mobile Suit Gundam, which I'm sure had nothing to do with all the Gundam staffers working on it. What's that old saying? "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt"? Harmony Gold invested a lot of time and effort into creating and sustaining a culture of deliberate ignorance in the Robotech fandom with the specific goal of keeping Robotech fans willfully ignorant of anything outside the Robotech franchise. That cult of ignorance has manifested in a lot of different ways, but particularly in the fandom's ridiculously toxic habits in anything resembling a debate or discussion. There are some reasonable voices among the vocal Robotech fans, but they're drowned out by the totally unreasonable fanboys who refuse to accept any evidence that doesn't fit with their personal headcanon. It's not at all uncommon for them to repeatedly insist that an easily disprovable claim is gospel truth... well after it's been disproven with source citations.1 Many of them believe the easily-disprovable lies they've been told by Harmony Gold, Carl Macek, and Tommy Yune without any question or an ounce of thought. Other fandoms don't want Robotech fans around, because nobody wants to deal with the fallout of a practical demonstration of the Dunning-Kruger effect. The few people who remember Robotech exists at all generally have no strong feelings about it at all... their disgust is typically reserved for the dishonest behavior of Harmony Gold and the trollish behavior of Robotech's fans. Looking at what Robotech has "accomplished" in over three decades inspires pity more than anything. That's what this thread mainly is... bystanders gawping at a train wreck in progress, wondering how anyone could've thought that was a good idea. Oh, I absolutely want to see more of the kind of Star Trek that I enjoy... and I express that desire through the ways in which I support the franchise. I like TOS, TAS, TNG, DS9, VOY, and ENT... so I support those parts of the Star Trek franchise by buying merchandise when they produce something that appeals to me. I watch them on TV or streaming, I buy them on digital library or home video, etc. I don't do that for the parts of the franchise I don't like - Discovery, Picard, and the Abrams movies. That shows, in a very real and very tangible way, what I think of Star Trek and what I want to see more of. I'm voting, as I like to say, with my wallet. If fans don't like it, licensees won't bother to license it. That kind of thing demonstrably works. These entertainment companies are in business to make money, and if there's supply but no demand for one product and more demand than supply for another, they'll absolutely change their focus to support the one for which there is demand. That's how we're seeing studios release alternative cuts of films they never intended to allow to see the light of day. That's why Star Trek: Discovery flopped and was retooled twice, and why Star Trek: Picard got no licensee support at all and had to find funding elsewhere. That's why Strange New Worlds exists at all... it's an attempt to give the people what they want after trying something different and failing. Of course, it helps to be with the majority on things like that. You're falsely presuming a Boolean condition here... that things must either fall into "Things I like" or "Things which are crap". That isn't the case, and it never was. Just because it does not appeal to you does not mean it is objectively bad. I don't care for rap music, but that doesn't mean I can dismiss it as having no artistic merit. It simply isn't for me. Art is all about pushing boundaries in ways that speak to people. It wasn't that long ago that uptight idiots considered Jazz to not be "real" music. That's a collective "we". You'll notice that nobody here agrees with you, and a lot of people are seconding what I said? Yes, I am completely serious. Super Dimension Fortress Macross was, first and foremost, a character-driven drama and love story. All that crap about giant robots and space war is an elaborate backdrop for a story that's focused on love, teenage angst and awkwardness, the idol phenomenon, and music's power as a form of communication. It's cool, and it helps sell the main story, but that's all it's for... helping to sell the main story. That hasn't changed at any point in the franchise's history. The VF-1 was cool, but Mari Iijima's Lynn Minmay was the real phenomenon... so much so that it had some fairly significant consequences for her singing career as a result of being intrinsically associated with Minmay. You'll notice that, when Macross stories acknowledge the events of previous ones, it's almost always the characters - and specifically the singers - they acknowledge. Myung wanted to be an idol singer like Lynn Minmay and participated in creating Sharon Apple as a way to fulfill that dream after not making it as an idol herself. Basara was inspired by Minmay's story to become a singer, as were many others like Mylene and Emilia Jenius. Ozma Lee is a huge Fire Bomber fan and when it comes to fame the crew of the Macross Quarter make the instant connection to Minmay and Fire Bomber. Sheryl Nome's concert in the first Macross Frontier movie opens with an acknowledgement of the previous Macross singers. The list goes on and on and on... and homages to this have spilled over into more titles than can readily be counted. Even Gundam couldn't help but acknowledge its power. 1. I've had to deal with this garbage as recently as just a few days ago... when Robotech fans decided to butt into a question about the Macross setting to try to argue the Robotech definition of a fold drive, despite their claim not lining up to either pre- or post-reboot Robotech official materials, and then tried to argue that that same incorrect conclusion also applied to Macross.

They had a brief face-to-face meeting in episode 8, when the members of Walkure and Delta Flight who stupidly went undercover on Voldor escaped after being captured. They each picked each other out as the other's rival pretty much right away, despite the fact that they had never seen each other outside of a VF before. Instead of fighting on the ground, Keith promised to finish him in the sky. I'm not sure it was convoluted... its story is exceedingly simple and a big part of its second half is largely cribbed from Macross Frontier. It's just badly laid-out and nothing is properly explained because there was no time to explain it. I mean, they're all third rate at best... this was a bush league conflict by any standard of measure. Messer or Arad would have to claim the title of "least crap", but of course Arad is perpetually out of focus and Messer was the one Keith singled out as his rival ace. That's got basically nothing to do with the actual show, and everything to do with the real idol group Walkure.