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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    The smartarse in me wants to answer with "big ones". The ancient Protoculture's cloning technology is capable of copying everything, even an individual's memories, though the Zentradi appear to allow their clones to gain experience naturally. (That's actually how micloning machines work. They just grow a new body and pipe the consciousness over to it, then break the old one down for raw material.) Sure. Mind you, other clones off the same base template as her wouldn't have her specific memories and experience she does that made her such a superb pilot. In all likelihood, there were several Milias kicking around at any given time. She's Milia 639 in the Do You Remember Love? movie. Nope. Yup. The New UN Government made extensive use of captured Zentradi Army cloning tech to shore up humanity's population for about twenty years following the conclusion of the First Space War. They only stopped because the excessive use of cloning was linked to a rise in the incidence of recessive genetic illnesses in subsequent generations of natural-born people. Yes. There are "identical" clones, they're just not all one series of clones like the Grand Army of the Republic in Star Wars was. We've seen cases where there are two or more clones based off the same genetic profile, like Quamzin in the original series and his double Temjin in Macross Frontier. Presumably the factory satellites producing clones have been working to the same program of patient refinement that the factory satellites producing equipment have been, taking feedback from units in the field and remedying weaknesses and deficiencies to produce a better weapon.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    It's unsurprising to say the least... with animated Robotech once again dead after a pair of embarrassing failures, no sign of the proposed live action movie, and Titan's one comic being regarded as something of a cringeworthy joke, these "indie" toys are about all Robotech fans have to cling to to convince themselves the franchise isn't dead. Admittedly, I was rather surprised to see another indie outfit trying their hand at Southern Cross so soon after the last outfit went under in a case of stupidity-induced self-destruction. The scale is a REALLY weird choice that I suspect is going to give them a LOT of issues. 1/48 was the smallest scale Imai Kagaku considered doing a model kit of the Spartas at, and it wasn't an articulated model. A 129mm/5.1" inch tall fully-articulated transforming toy is going to be pretty fragile. I'd have expected them to go for something more like 1/24 (a 10 1/8" toy).
  3. Seto Kaiba
    You're not wrong, but that's not really what I was getting at... poor quality is simply Robotech's natural condition, they've seemingly never considered not doing a sh*tty job because the fans will buy whatever they make regardless of quality.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Well it IS branded as the dreaded R-word... they haven't learned that lesson in 35 years, so it's unlikely they intend to start now.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    At least they're consistent. Yeah, a Spartas at 1/48 would be approximately 5 inches tall (12.5cm).
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Well, yes and no... CBS announced that they were planning to renew Star Trek: Picard for a second season, but because they aren't the ones picking up the check for production it means virtually nothing. If Amazon does what Netflix almost did after Discovery's second season and refuses to put up a budget to produce season two, the show is cancelled whether CBS likes it or not. This is why Section 31 hasn't gotten produced thus far. CBS's brain trust green lit it, but nobody was willing to put money into it. Quite the opposite... if he reacted anything like he did to the marginally more military Starfleet in the last couple TOS movies, Gene Roddenberry would be suing CBS. Paramount was only rescued from that looming lawsuit when he up and died.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    That would certainly explain the smiles...
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Bad Robot and Secret Hideout have been trying to turn Star Trek into a generic edgy sci-fi property since Star Trek '09... and doing a pretty sh*t job of it, which makes it all the more perplexing that people keep giving them money to try the same bad idea over and over again.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    OK... just cleared a tough-AF work week, and now it's time to sit down and give Star Trek: Picard the beating it so richly deserves this week thanks to "Stardust City Rag". Perhaps future Star Trek conventions can replace autograph lines with "punch the producers" lines? The Good The Bad The Ugly
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Haven't watched the episode yet, thank goodness, but this prompted some thought from me... There are actually a fair few instances in Trek implying that interspecies pregnancies occasionally require a helping hand from genetic medicine. DS9 and ENT were the ones to lay it on real thick, with Bashir cautioning Dax that getting Trill and Klingon DNA to play nicely enough to have a baby might not even be possible and ENT showing an unsuccessful binary clone child that was half-Vulcan. That was never depicted as illegal or even questionably legal though. Bashir was able to proceed with Dax and Worf's fertility treatments without any kind of special permission or pushback from Starfleet or civilian authorities. (Tom and B'Elanna didn't need genetic engineering help to have a kid tho, they needed it to correct a Klingon birth defect that ran in B'Elanna's family.)
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Finished a binge rewatch of Overlord... to remind myself of what good isekai is like when we're currently being deluged with bad isekai. Enrolled Demon Iruma is about 3/4 over, and so far it's turned out to be a mildly entertaining but toothless and entirely predictable take on the whole "kid enrolled in a school who has to keep their true nature secret or face expulsion or worse" schtick that was done better in Rosario+Vampire and Actually, I am.... Fun to watch, but it does so little to surprise that it's almost paint-by-numbers. Science Fell in Love, So I Tried to Prove It kind of petered out pretty quick there. It was a cute concept, but it feels like the original author had exactly one joke and proceeded to wear it out VERY quickly. It's going to run for 12 episodes, but as of episode 8 it feels like it's just treading water. Isekai Quartet's staying weird and proud of it. Now that I've seen three of the four shows it's mainly referencing, the humor's a little better. I still have to get around to Re:ZERO, but the combination of Overlord, KonoSuba, and Yojo Senki is definitely a breeding ground for TONS of weird. They made a lot of noise about including the cast of Shield Hero this season, but they're basically a glorified cameo. My Hero Academia's into one of the manga's weaker arcs... it feels like they should've saved Overhaul's arc for a longer run. Definitely over too soon. My Youth Romantic Comedy is Wrong, as I Expected is a pretty dreary show so far. I feel like I'm forcing myself to watch it because there is ZERO character development. Hachiman is such an unrepentant misanthrope that he can't develop. Five Equal Brides (The Quintessential Quintuplets) is a bit of a slog too... what's with this recent trend of half-assed harem shows where the protagonist is an impoverished academic?
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Looking back at the 2007 release calendar, I don't think they did miss it... 2007 was the year that gave us TV anime like Nagasarete Airantou, Shuffle!, Gurren Lagann, and Gundam 00. They just seem to have rather cynically believed that buxom women in catsuits was, on its own, going to make the OVA irresistable to the serious anime hobbyists. It was a rather glaring demonstration that the morons at HG didn't have a clue about the very industry they erroneously claimed they created. I won't even attempt to argue that fanservice on its own doesn't sell (Queen's Blade and To-Love-Ru proved that point well enough), but if you're going to try and sell your series using fanservice alone you have to go lewder to get the SO RONERY crowd's attention, and if you're not then the tame fanservice needs to be a sideshow to a compelling story, well-developed characters, and animation at a much higher level of quality. Nope, they're still batting a 0.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Eh, I still like senior management's ending better: "F*ck off, we're not wasting any more money on your sh*t." For one, it's Robotech... a title of such low potential that even a small time outfit specializing in licensed comics like Titan made no effort to bring their A game. If they can't be bothered to do a decent job with the art - the thing that sells comic books - why would they put any effort into the writing? For two, it's Robotech... the target audience are 40- and 50-somethings who saw the series when it aired in 1985 but haven't given up on it yet. If you look at what passes for storytelling in Robotech of days past, they're not here for thought-provoking tales or to have characters espouse high-minded moralizing. They're here for "humans good, aliens bad, kill them with giant robots". That's about as sophisticated as Robotech gets when it's not ripping something else off... and when it is, it isn't much better. For three, it's Robotech... subtlety is as alien to the property as the Invid/Inbit were to humanity. Its "creators" thought the the way to bring in a mature anime-viewing audience was a ton of pointless T&A. They're either hopelessly inept or surprisingly aware of what their faithful audience is actually like.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Historically speaking, there's a good argument for "PC culture" having actually gotten started in the 70's... though that is merely the latest name for a socio-political debate that's been ongoing for at least as long as we've had the written word, and probably a good deal of time before that. Captain Planet and the Planeteers, though, wasn't diverse simply for diversity's sake... it was attempting to make a well-intentioned point that environmental issues are global problems in a manner every bit as hamfisted as the rest of the show's writing. You had two planeteers from the major world powers of the day (US and USSR), two who were from areas that are ecological crisis zones (the Amazon rainforest and the advancing edge of the Sahara desert), and one who's just sorta there to round out the classical elements (possibly because the show's writers didn't feel comfortable having the American outnumbered 2-1 by communists?). That said, if you're seeing a socio-political agenda in Titan's Robotech or Robotech Remix, your eyes are playing tricks on you. They're so incoherent that it's doubtful the writers could rouse themselves from their absinthe-stupor to voice a thought of any type. They're writing by throwing darts at a wall full of trope titles printed out at random.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, they'll go for the old hot take on that... Lancer's Rockers. Don't you just think this guy is screaming for a gritty modern adaptation?
  16. Seto Kaiba
    A little from column A, and a little from column B... it's written and illustrated by the cheapest "talent" available because it's Robotech. Looking for a sociopolitical agenda in a story so incoherent it borders on straight-up Dadaism is a waste of time. It's a midnight search in a dark cellar for a black cat that isn't there.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    When a series only has ten episodes in a season, it needs to hit the ground running to have any chance of getting anywhere in that short span of screen time. Star Trek: Picard hit the ground like a centenarian with a broken hip and promptly took off at a blistering pace rivaled only by the East Fort Myers zimmer frame relay team. Next episode is the halfway point in Star Trek: Picard's first - and, great bird of the galaxy willing, only - season and they've only just finished assembling the main cast. Never mind that none of the original characters are developed at all, and that there's been zero sense of direction to the story thus far. It's a random series of events connected only by a sad and elderly Jean-Luc Picard saying how sorry he is over and over again to a succession of people we neither know nor care about. Really, I'm kind of surprised that La Sirena has a commbadge at all... that's a gimmick that was always reserved for Starfleet or the militaries of the Federation's neighbors. You'd expect a civilian freighter like La Sirena to be using something more primitive, like a handheld communciator or a wrist-mounted one like the Cardassians had in DS9. Or covering the Discovery blue pajamas uniform with tiny brass starfleet chevrons?
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Variable Fighter Master File initially drew pretty heavily on the old Sky Angels VF-1 tech manual for that kind of info and dredged up quite a few obscure and dated factoids. Well, to be fair, they do essentially just copy-paste from Macross fansites for this kind of thing. (They've ended up accidentally referencing a few DYRL-specific things with all that copy-pasting, like the UUM-7 micro-missile pods ending up in the RT stats because Macross sites don't differentiate between TV and movie specs.) Master File's take is that the Prometheus was only home to about 1/2 of the total VF-1 complement the SDF-1 Macross was carrying. Variable Fighter Master File: SDF-1 Macross VF-1 Squadrons asserts that there were 14 squadrons in total with 7 stationed on the Prometheus and 7 on the Macross itself. Yes, they were. We see a VF-1A aboard ARMD-01 when Vrlitwhai's shooting it up in Super Dimension Fortress Macross's first episode, and the oldest version of the ARMD-class spec says their normal aircraft complement is 78 SF-3A Lancer IIs, 270 QF-3000E Ghosts, and 18 VF-1A Valkyries. (The postwar complement for ARMD-9 thru 16 in the same book - Sky Angels - is given as 96 Regults, 120 Ghosts, and 24 VF-1As.) Possibly the same as the DYRL? version. The reason the UN Spacy used SF-3A Lancer IIs in the initial encounter was because they made up the bulk of the aircraft complement that the Harlan J. Niven1 (ARMD-01) and Invincible (ARMD-02) carried, and contrary to their fighter designation they're basically attackers meant for anti-warship hit and run strikes. The Lancer II's basically a manned missile, with a 1500kN-class (2255kN-class at max power) thermonuclear rocket engine providing propulsion. It's got a pair of 750MW beam cannons (that's 150x as powerful as the VF-1's lasers) and six light thermonuclear reaction missiles. It's designed to strafe enemy ships at 7km/s or so and then cold cruise for recovery. The unit even comes equipped with a cold sleep system in the event the pilot misses recovery on the first orbit. It's powerful, but it's all-or-nothing on its one attack run. The VF-1s would've been kind of a poor choice since the Super Pack was still in operational evaluation back then, and the way thermonuclear reaction turbine engines work a VF-1 consumes its fuel exponentially2 faster in space... giving it only a few minutes of burn time at maximum thrust before its tanks are dry unless augmented by bolt-on tanks. Without thermonuclear reaction warheads of their own, or at least the Strike Pack that didn't even exist yet in-universe, they wouldn't have made much of a dent. They were never really rivals... the Lancer II was a product of the sort of gleeful insanity that comes with a golden age of technological development. It's basically the UN Spacy's riff on the Bachem Ba 349. 1. One of the more shameless nods in the oldest material, the Earth Unification Government's first prime minister was Harlan J. Niven... named for Harlon Jay Ellison and Larry Niven. He was assassinated in office, but ARMD-01 was named in his honor. His successor, Robert A. Rhysling, is named for Robert Heinlein and the Rhysling Award and had ARMD-14 named in his honor. 2. 4,200x faster. The same 1,410L of hydrogen slush that confers 700 hours of continuous operating time in atmosphere is burned through in a mere 10 minutes of maximum thrust in space because plasma from the compact thermonuclear reactor is used as a propellant for space flight to simplify the fuel system and maximize its capacity. This is why conformal fuel tanks became so important for space operations. Master File claims the SDF-1 Macross used a stopgap to extend range slightly, installing fuel bladders in the unused-in-space main intakes and BLCS sub-intakes.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    That'd be an odd but welcome bit of off-color humor. As badly as Titan's Robotech and Robotech Remix are written, I suspect attempting to ascribe any kind of sane or rational motive to any character's actions is a bit of a boondoggle. It's better to assume they're all coming off of heavy doses of surgical anesthetic and aren't quite rational.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    ... never expected to get summoned to the CaliberWings thread, what with me being vehemently opposed to supporting any Harmony Gold licensee on principle. It's not as boneheaded as it could've been, I suppose... Max and Milia's VF-1Js are the only two main character VF-1s that never had any modex number attached to them in an official or semi-official source. Applying the same number to both is a boneheaded mistake, sure as sure, but at least they didn't compound it by also contradicting an official number. They could have literally picked any two numbers and been OK... (For the record, Roy's VF-1S had 001, Hikaru's original VF-1J had 023, Max's VF-1A had 111, and Kakizaki's 112... except in DYRL, where Hikaru, Kakizaki, and Max were 011, 012, and 013 respectively.) Variable Fighter Master File: VF-1 Valkyrie Vol.1 "Stratosphere Wings" asserts that Max and Milia's VF-1Js were stationed aboard the SDF-1 Macross itself, rather than the Prometheus. It attempts to justify this, and other things, by asserting that the Spacy leveraged the PR importance of the first interstellar marriage by relieving Max of his regular duties and putting him and his new bride in a new independent unit codenamed "Love Birds", which was based directly aboard the Macross. They fulfilled a variety of duties, including acting as a mobile reserve force to leverage their super-ace talents during the war. The lack of a modex on either aircraft seems to be intentional, as they're outside regular force organization. In later "Love Birds" paintjobs, like the one for the VF-4, Max and Milia's modex numbers were 01 and 02 respectively. 212 and 150 respectively. Exactly where they came from is unclear... but Master File at least claims that they were deliberately painted for Max and Milia's personal use.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    But how will they save Zion without the powers of The One? Because death would be a sweet release from this Robotech nightmare, and he doesn't want to suffer alone? ... when you try way too hard to give a character a meaningful name... What's next? The Death of Rick? Funeral for a Flop? Reign of the Rickmen? It's like they're trying to cram all the concentrated stupid of other, more successful properties with badly thought-out multiverse settings into one comic. Are we in for Rickboy Prime? Rick-616? The Amazing Arachno-Rick? (Okay, I've taken the joke too far and now it just sounds like I'm pitching episode titles for Rick and Morty...) Just in case you weren't already clear they were completely out of ideas. So now the plot can finally transition from almost completely incomprehensible to COMPLETELY incomprehensible and anything resembling continuity can f*ck off. ... Titan Comics must really have a problem with the employees huffing paint, or they must REALLY be desperate to fill page count. Harmony Gold couldn't organize their own sock drawers, and their previous takes on Robotech were pretty misogynistic. If anything like this is going on, and I suspect you're just reading things into it that aren't there in the search for nonexistent hidden meanings, it's almost certainly Titan Comics trying to find a market for this steaming turd because the profit margin's shrinking as Robotech fans abandon this going-nowhere mess.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    That fleet was from the Brisingr Alliance NUNS. Its commander was the same guy who visited Xaos repping the local NUNS Staff Office earlier in the series.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    None of that involved clownish levels of cosplay though... even on the part of the local Planet of Hats. Even on the wackier holodeck adventures or when Q decided to throw everyone into a recreation of Robin Hood folklore, it didn't cross the line into looking completely ridiculous the way "Stardust City Rag" did. Voyager had one really good, silly one involving that 19th century Irish town holoprogram Tom Paris created that was used in a few episodes. The period dress was taken completely seriously, but in "Spirit Folk" the program's built-in weirdness censor that kept the holograms from noticing out-of-character/setting behavior failed and they became convinced that their visitors from Voyager were trickster faeries and tried to exorcise them. As far as lurid dress, there was that one Hawaiian shirt that Tucker wore that even T'Pol snarked at... but even that doesn't come close to this: Incidentally, didn't we last see this bouncer in Hellraiser?
  24. Seto Kaiba
    They're not similar at all, though... Chobham armor is ceramic tiles arranged in a complex sandwich of fiber-reinforced plastics, rubber, and corrugated aluminum. The armor material in Macross is layered, laminated, metallic carbon allotrope. Like bulletproof glass, except the glass is replaced by layers of metallic carbon harder than diamond. OTM isn't the name... OTM is short for OverTechnology of Macross, the term that was used in even the oldest materials to refer to pretty much any technology or supermaterial which was reverse engineered from the Macross. Also, "space metal" didn't come from Kawamori... it came from Masahiro Chiba, who included the term in his detailed write-up of the VF-1 as one of several nods he made to Mobile Suit Gundam in it. (Specifically, a nod to the Luna Titanium the titular Gundam was made from.) "Hypercarbon" could be said to be Kawamori's term for it... but it's not Carbon 60 (Buckminsterfullerene), hypercarbon is a metallic carbon allotrope. An allotrope of carbon that had metallic properties was pure sci-fi until 2015, when NSCU researchers created a substance called Q-carbon that is harder than diamond, metallic, and responds to magnetic fields. ... perhaps it would be advisable to care at least enough to get your facts straight?
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Honestly, the trailer for the next episode is easily the most horrific part of this episode... This episode was merely awful, that trailer promises a viewing experience so painful it contravenes laws on the humane treatment of prisoners of war.
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