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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    There was likely a fairly brisk competition between the various emerging megacorps that would dominate the defense/technology industry to improve the capabilities and reliability of fold systems in the wake of the First Space War. Improved reliability and efficiency aside, there doesn't seem to have been a real breakthrough until the Critical Path corporation discovered that fold quartz could be applied to fold technology to produce all kinds of improvements. Macross Delta was the first look we actually got at an interstellar freighter... and it looks like the lovechild of an ARMD-class space carrier and a big rig truck. A little from column A, a little from column B. We know that the purity of fold quartz impacts the quality of the heavy quanta it produces when energized, and that in turn impacts the intensity of the gravitational effects that the heavy quanta can produce. So the purer the fold quartz, the harder you can twist space and time. When you get to fold quartz levels of purity, you can produce gravity so intense it can effectively create black hole-like effects (which is how MDE weapons work). I think the biggest problem would be keeping the top packs with the beam guns aligned with the back, since the VF-171 has a much more VF-1-like transformation. Probably some old RPG stats... I'm pretty sure that's not the case, but I can see how they might draw that conclusion since Gamlin dumps his Super Pack (after exhausting its missiles) before transforming in Macross 7 ep44.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Or at least the Battroid vomiting her up out the neck hatch and then being violently ill...
  3. Seto Kaiba

    Bandai DX VF-31

    Seto Kaiba replied to UN Spacy's topic in Toys

    Ah, you're right... I've got 3. I forgot about that one, since it's not in my study at home. It's in my office at work.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Can't say I'm surprised... audiences in Japan didn't have much use for Southern Cross either. Despite being in a good time slot, its ratings performance was so poor that TBS decided to drop it when the series was barely half-complete and several licensees opted to take a loss on the cost of the license and focus on other shows rather than continue developing merch for it. It didn't do much better as a part of Robotech, and remains a perennial unfavorite of the Robotech fandom to this day. Rather a risky move on Titan's part to make Robotech's single most hated character the main character of their new comic series... though from what I've seen this version manages to NOT be the offensively moronic airhead that so often motivated audiences to change the channel. "A Dana who doesn't suck" is a new and rather novel concept, TBH. How (in)appropriate its fit with Macross was probably wasn't even on their radar... they needed to throw together a series on the cheap, and they don't come much cheaper than a total flop like Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross. MOSPEADA was probably chosen for similar reasons too, since it was only a so-so performer ratings-wise and its merchandise line in Japan wasn't much better off.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Now if it were Komilia, that'd be one thing... but that wretched creature from Southern Cross? Talk about tainting an icon. I think that's kind of the point... otherwise they'll just get sued for ripping off Macross M3. Who IS this series for, again? Changes hands to who? This isn't a world where people are living in blissful ignorance of Robotech's history of epic failure... who would possibly want this turd now that a dedicated turd polisher has apparently failed with it? You say that like it's a bad thing.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Palpatine is confused! Palpatine used Force Lightning! Palpatine hurt itself in its confusion!
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, but that's the Queen Mother of All Acceptable Targets... one of those titles that stands at the apex of Weeb Sh*t. I've finished Mangaka-san to Assistant-san to, and all I can really say for it as far as redeeming qualities is that it's short... being just 12 half-length episodes. Since Crunchyroll had it, I'm rewatching Nagasarete Airantou on a lark. It's entertaining to have a harem comedy where the harem protagonist isn't merely arbitrarily reluctant to be with the hordes of beautiful women throwing themselves at him. Even better if it has actual character development and a plot besides excuses for fanservice.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    The decentralization of the government wasn't something that happened all at once... it was a very gradual process caused by the logistical problems of trying to remotely govern emigrant planets and fleets that were months or even years distant from Earth via space fold. Bilra owns an interstellar cargo service, so finding ways to overcome fold faults or even just making his fold systems more efficient and powerful would have been a HUGE draw for him. What logistics/freight company doesn't want to be the fastest around when it comes to delivery? The transformation changed pretty extensively, so I'd suspect they wouldn't work. Are you sure about some of the stuff on that page? You've got the VF-17 listed with wing pylons... in green text no less... but official writeups like the one in Macross Chronicle say ALL of the production VF-17's armaments were internalized to preserve its passively stealthy performance. Looking back at the official line art for the VF-17's bays, they don't seem all that capacious... certainly no more than the ones shown on the VF-11, VF-19, or VF-22. The kind of payload space that'll get you one reaction missile, maybe two medium-range missiles, or a dozen micro-missiles. The bays can't take up that much space because they're sharing space with the gunpod bay and things like the landing gear. Between the leg bays holding maybe twelve micro-missiles and the ~3 per port on built-in launchers, that's just 36 missiles. Not a huge sum compared to what you can get by using wing pylons to carry launcher pods.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    That was my problem too... I watched two, maybe three episodes, and felt like Chris Hansen was gonna bust through my wall like the goddamn Kool-Aid Man. I'm told it's loaded with aviation history fanservice too, but I can't get past the fact that it's basically pure lolicon fanservice otherwise.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    The novelization of the Macross Frontier TV series was the first to make something like that explicit, by revealing that the 117th Research Fleet's disastrous mission to Vajra space was at least partly instigated by the Critical Path corporation as part of their research into fold quartz and its potential military applications. Richard Bilra, the owner of Bilra Transport and its subsidiary Strategic Military Services, went to some pretty extreme lengths in his quest to overcome the obstacle fold faults posed to interstellar travel and commerce. He commissioned an entire emigrant fleet to go gallivanting off into Vajra space in search of a stable supply of fold quartz, established the pseudo-covert fold dimensional resonance program on the isolated emigrant planet Uroboros to develop a method to reliably penetrate fold faults without having to disclose the technology to the New UN Government, and sank a lot of cash into fold quartz research. It wouldn't be at all surprising if he also bought black market fold carbon from galactic whale carcasses in the hopes that it'd be more potent than the advanced synthetic fold carbon used in fold drives or thermonuclear reactor GICs. The Nightmare was an unusual one, for sure... very little payload versatility, but a surprising amount of integrated beam weaponry and nearly three times as tough as the VF-1. By the RPG stats I've written for it, it would've been one hell of a brawler. My current game's players are more about the VF-171. They've discovered that, thanks to its heavy modularity, it's basically a Swiss Army VF. All it's really missing is an Armored Pack. It'd be a hell of a thing if they came up with something like the Reflector Pack, since VF gunpods seem to be moving away from hard rounds to heavy quantum beam weapons... that would, durability aside, effectively make a fighter invulnerable to everything but missiles.
  11. Seto Kaiba

    Bandai DX VF-31

    Seto Kaiba replied to UN Spacy's topic in Toys

    Me too, apparently... I just have a Messer and a 31A.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    ... unironically? Big F.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    I've just started Mangaka-san to Assistant-san to and I think I set an all-time record for "show that had me looking at my watch the fastest". Ecchi comedy is a fruit so low-hanging you need a deep bore mine to pick it, and yet this show still manages to be bad at it... which is oddly impressive in a depressing sort of way. It's like watching someone die in a freak shoe-tying accident. You just can't help being impressed when bearing witness to such a master class in failure. It's not funny and it's not entertaining. It's just faintly embarrassing. If I were siding with Japan's "won't someone think of the children" moral guardian types and wanted to show that anime and manga are a bad influence on the country's youth, it'd be a toss-up between picking this or Strike Witches to build a case around.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, lol... I think I was still in high school when that site was at the apex of its popularity. The timeframe of Macross Dynamite 7 is about right for the discovery, in-setting, that there were biological lifeforms that possessed more advanced and powerful fold abilities than a manufactured starship. First contact with the Vajra had been around seven years ago, and the 117th Research Fleet's great expedition to Vajra space was already well underway with Critical Path Corporation (pioneers in fold quartz tech) footing the bill. Given that the Vahla Ena are a protected species, the likely client for whale carcasses is a private business interest with a vested interest in securing vast quantities of high purity fold crystals. This train of thought can go in an uncomfortable direction when you realize that most of the likely buyers for those materials are "heroic" companies from later shows, with the most likely culprit being none other than SMS's parent company Bilra Transport. None of my players ever showed any interest in the VF-17... they were always about the VF-11 or the VF-19. We had a similar situation in the Macross II game I used to run, with my players referring to the big damn railgun on the VF-2SS's Super Armed Pack as the "F-You Button" since using it for a called shot on an enemy mecha was basically a one-hit kill on any particularly frustrating enemy. (Justified, in that we see them splashing Gigameshes with the railgun in the OVA itself, and they're basically the heaviest-armored thing the Mardook have.) There are a few mentions of an electrical connection in the hand that provides power and data connections to the gunpod of some of the earlier model of VF. I'd assume that that didn't go away in later models. I doubt they'd have something like the G-Self's reflector pack from Reconguista in G though... damage from beam weapons was mostly dealt with using ablative anti-beam coatings and good old fashioned getting out of the way.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Oh man, I had forgotten about SteelFalcon. So much outdated info, lol. That whale poaching outfit in Dynamite 7 was suspiciously well-equipped... like, they had a fold-capable ship, a bunch of VA-3s, and were buying all kinds of black market weaponry like a thermonuclear reaction warhead. They were never entirely clear on how galactic whale carcasses are used, but the implication was that they could be easily made into materials for a fold system. I suspect they're a source of high-purity fold carbon, which would be very valuable in a pre-fold quartz galaxy. Yeah, it's a surprisingly small module for the kind of firepower Gamlin gets out of it... though IIRC we never see one fire twice, so it may be one-and-done. They go back and forth on how FAST Pack-mounted energy weapons are powered. Some, like the VF-1's Strike Pack, are indicated to be powered by the VF's own reactors or running off a rechargeable battery/capacitor that is constantly trickle-charging off the VF's reactors. Others, like the VF-11's Armored Pack or VF-25's Armored Pack, are supposedly running off internal capacitors only. With stopping power like that, I'd assume it's probably powered by the VF's reactors given how small it seems to be.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    It works well in the sense that it keeps new Macross features largely accessible to new viewers... because it's an effective way to prevent the kind of continuity lockout problems that the Universal Century Gundam shows have become increasingly prone to. On the other hand, the more inquisitive casual viewers and fans can find this position frustrating since it makes it difficult to have a definitive answer to many questions. This, I suspect, is why Macross publications try to go both ways on it... Kawamori has his view, while some printed works take a firmer attitude towards continuity. Everyone gets what they want, and (almost) nobody goes home unhappy.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Much like the Robotech fandom, Khorne's standards have gotten lower over the years... ... which, in the case of Southern Cross, is asking the impossible.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    I suppose it would... though I've often wondered why fans seem willing to now give a pass to the prequel trilogy that did the exact same thing to Darth Vader and pretty much every other dark side user. Rogue One tries very hard to cover up the damage with the badass action scene at the end, but for me Darth Vader will never escape being Little Orphan Anni who doesn't like sand. Like his whiny grandson, he's just an emo kid in a gimp suit who only gets away with his magic strangletantrums because he's in a highly suspect relationship with a powerful creepy old man.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah... and still made billions of dollars doing it. Mind you, I'd say failure was the only option for Disney. Star Wars fans were never going to gracefully accept the new trilogy no matter what it turned out to be because it retconned out the setting as they knew it for something else entirely. For those who weren't invested in what came before, they were more successful (or at least failing less hard).
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Max and Milia formed the NUNS Special Forces team "Dancing Skulls" in 2014 aboard the cruiser Algenicus. During their tenure with the Dancing Skulls, Max and Milia participating in the flight testing of a number of different prototype VFs including the VF-5000, VF-9, VF-11, and VF-14. The VF-9 is noted to have been strongly influenced by Milia's preferences, and Max and Milia's input was also the deciding factor in adopting canards on the VF-11. Max was later (2028) appointed captain of the stealth space cruiser Haruna, while Milia was appointed as an instructor at the Eagle's Nest Air Tactics Center (basically TOPGUN for the Spacy). They served aboard the space carrier Red Moon in 2031 where Mylene was born. In 2038, Max was granted command of Battle 7 as part of the 37th long-distance emigration fleet and Milia was attached as his XO. She also served as a chief flight instructor for the Spacy forces based in the fleet where she trained Gamlin. Milia retired from the Spacy in 2042 to become Mayor of City 7.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Ah, well there we go. What a freaking weird place to end it... cliffhangers are all well and good but this just kind of came out of nowhere. 23's a weird number to end on too... normally it's 25 or 26.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    It's not that they were being lazy... they were playing it safe. Under Disney, Star Wars is taking no risks and pushing no envelopes. Disney went into the sequel trilogy trying VERY hard to make a Star Wars movie that'd have the broadest appeal possible and do as little as possible to alienate the well-established fanbase that was such a merchandising cash cow for the franchise. The easy answer to that set of goals is simply to change nothing... or as little as you can get away with, on the reasoning that if it ain't broke don't fix it. None of them would.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    That's kind of an awful paintjob... it just looks dirty, like a car that went down a dirt road during a rainstorm.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Blend S was pretty good while it lasted. Admittedly, once they introduced the trap I started to get the distinct feeling I'd seen this all before... and then it hit me. This is Kaichou wa Maid-sama as a pure comedy. Still, that didn't detract much from enjoying the series. Mairimashita! Iruma-kun is plodding towards its end with all the vigor of an old-school zombie. I'm not sure that's really a problem in the story so much as a lack of compression in the introductions. They've only just properly introduced most of the main cast, and it has like two episodes left in its broadcast run unless it gets a second season. It's like they're going to try to cram the first real story arc into the very end of the series in a big hurry. Isekai Quartet 2 is still doing its in-joke thing and at least having fun with it even if a few of the gags aren't so fresh.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Granted, the new design teased a while back has an undeniable General Galaxy aesthetic and a vaguely VF-14-esque profile... but it has the wrong proportions to be either the Spiritia Dreaming VF-14 or the Macross M3 VF-14. Spoiler: the new threat teased in promotional materials is audiences realizing that Delta's characters are all painfully underdeveloped and boring. (Either that or the NUNS finally came calling to arrest Lady M and Ernest Johnson for their many crimes.)
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