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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    It would, admittedly, have made more sense in context if Southern Cross hadn't been cancelled 16 episodes short of completion. That said, the Robotech fandom also seems to find the Bioroids as uninteresting as the rest of the Southern Cross mecha. Their unusual control system is all they've really got going for them, and other than that they're so weak that several are shown being taken down by small arms fire. That may be a viable in-universe explanation, though the truth is the writers just weren't on the same page... because multiple episodes were being rewritten concurrently and nobody had the time to check the work of their colleagues to ensure they were producing a consistent product. That's also why a number of characters are referred to by incorrect ranks in the early Masters Saga episodes. Maybe, but this is Robotech and good lord does it ever have a complexity addiction.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, the easy way to do it is to just bring a temporal agent in and announce that those were "bad future" timelines created by the temporal cold war that no longer exist. They did that in one of the DTI novels, as a way to take cheap shots at several of the incredibly stupid Star Trek pitches that just wouldn't die.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Just finished rewatching Skullfaced Bookseller Honda-san and started up a rewatch of Charge! Cromartie High School. If there's one thing to say for getting to work at home, I can shoot through enormous amounts of anime while I work.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah... it was such a mess even Carl Macek washed his hands of it. It was kind of surprising to see Titan Comics referenced it in their last Robotech series, however briefly. Especially since Harmony Gold doesn't have any rights to Megazone 23 anymore and that could be considered copyright infringement. They seem to have left all of those dreadful cameos in the previous series, thank goodness. Literally nobody wanted a reminder that Robotech 3000 was a thing.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    That gets less true every day, unfortunately. It's not for nothing that Star Trek lost licensees over Star Trek: Discovery and suffered a near-total licensee walkout over Star Trek: Picard. With ViacomCBS doubling down on every one of the bad decisions that allowed those two shows to be shat into existence in the first place and even making a token effort to resuscitate the fourth movie in the horribly ill-conceived soft reboot Star Trek movie series, it's clear they're not learning. It'll take a gargantuan effort to repair Star Trek once they finally oust the idiots responsible for the current mess. Then again, it's also possible they'll keep doubling down on their mistakes on the basis of a sunk costs fallacy and fly the franchise right into the ground. At this point, who does? His work is about as welcome in the average viewer's home as dry rot. At some point, the networks need to start writing failure-severance clauses into the contracts with these studios. Y'know, a nice trapdoor clause that lets them get out if the studio just f*cking flies their franchise into the ground the way Secret Hideout and Bad Robot did to Star Trek.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Between Sky Angels and Macross Chronicle, I don't think I've ever seen them actually give a reason for the QF-3000E Ghost being so large... they mention various difficulties which were encountered during development, most prominently cooling, but nothing specifically about why it's such a big bird. My educated guess would be that, given that the QF-3000 was developed as an all-regime unmanned fighter, the airframe's unusually large size is a product of being designed for all-regime and all-purpose use with a first-gen thermonuclear reaction turbine engine. They needed to package the FF-1999 thermonuclear reaction turbine engine with a robust-enough cooling system to keep it from overheating in combat operations, enough fuel to sustain combat operations of a reasonable duration (which is like 4-5x as much fuel as in the VF-1's internal tanks), and then all the relevant hardware for the semi-autonomous AI and all the sensors it needs to operate properly. Then, of course, there's the weaponry... having six 55mm cannons and 12 internal multipurpose missiles is going to take up a fair amount of space too. (Some write-ups, like Macross Chronicle's first edition, copied an older version of the development history that cited it as having started out as a conventionally-powered unmanned fighter/attack drone that was later converted into an all-regime unit with a thermonuclear engine.) A pressure casing and booster system intended for underwater launches. Northrom likes its drones thicc.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    The original Southern Cross's take on Bioroid pilots would certainly have been way too dark for Robotech's intended audience... it's more palatable to have our heroes gunning down an army of unliving robots than a bunch of captured and brainwashed civilians from their own side. Nah, smart money says the single biggest factor is Mikimoto's inability to meet deadlines... he's overcommitted.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Doug Jones (Discovery's Saru) tweeted something similar about Star Trek: Discovery's next season a while back... and then tweeted out a clarification that the cast hadn't even been contacted about a possible season 4 despite CBS's claims that they'd renewed the series for season 4 and 5. The talking heads at CBS seem to be trying to pull off the Tomino Maneuver to protect their investments in Star Trek: Discovery and the Star Trek: Picard series. Promising a product that isn't even approved, let alone funded, in the hopes of using public pressure to secure funding that wouldn't otherwise be granted. CBS's announcement that Star Trek: Discovery had been renewed for season 3 was inevitably undermined by the news that it actually wasn't for quite a few months after the announcement, since they had quite a difficult time convincing Netflix to cough up a budget and had to resort to threatening a lawsuit over their lost investments if the series wasn't renewed. Their strategy now seems to involve announcing new seasons before the current season even airs, though word from the inside is that Discovery season 3 was filmed as a series finale in case it didn't get renewed and I expect Picard's will also end on a note that could be used as a series finale in case it doesn't get picked up for a second go. The audience doesn't seem to have a ton of love for Star Trek: Picard, and as with Discovery CBS is mysteriously not publishing the viewership numbers for totally unrelated reasons, honest.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, the VF-11D Thunderbolt wasn't introduced until late in Macross 7 alongside the Jamming Birds... I don't recall ever seeing an unmodified military spec version, just the Jamming Birds custom version and the civilian custom "Thunder Focus" news Valkyrie.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    I think they probably did, since they introduced an android character in the main cast of Robotech II: the Sentinels... who was meant, originally, to be a tie-in to Robotech: the Movie as a mechanical body for EVE from Megazone 23. That connection got dropped after Tatsunoko torpedoed the idea of making Robotech: the Movie a Macross Saga sidestory. (T.R. Edwards was originally supposed to be the same character as B.D. from Megazone 23 as well.)
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Not that I am aware, offhand... Apart from the obvious presence of VF-11B's, the only readily identifiable non-prototype VFs we see are the "hostage" VF-1J being used on the firing range, a pair of VF-17T Nightmare trainers, and an aircraft most fans generally agree is the Macross 7 PLUS type VF-14 Vampire from the episode "Spiritia Dreaming". The Macross Mecha Manual additionally lists the VF-5000B and VA-3, but in their case it's because they're first documented in This is Animation Macross Plus despite not actually appearing in the OVA. There are one or two background aircraft that do not match any known configuration as well, including one that looks like a relative of the VF-X-11 from Advanced Valkyrie.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    That's why it's not on Disney+ yet. They want to make as much money as they can off digital library sales through Amazon Prime, Google Play, etc. before they put it up for "free" on their own streaming service.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    CBS announced their intention to make a second season of the series before the first episode even "aired", but AFAIK there's been no word on if Amazon agreed and as they're holding the project's pursestrings theirs is the say that matters.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Well, as we've indicated many times before, your tastes are somewhat unusual. I know a lot of Robotech fans find the Robotech Masters (SC: "Zor") rather dull as antagonists go. This is, in no small part, due to the fact that they're humanoid but they don't react to things in a human-like way. Their extreme stoicism, combined with the very poorly planned and paced original story, meant that they only really react to things two ways: bland smug "we knew that was going to happen" or DULL SURPRISE. It isn't until the very end, right where Southern Cross's writers had started to panic and realize they hadn't developed them or their motivations at all yet, where they started to behave in a less robotic manner but by then it was WAY too late. The fact that Robotech's rewriters couldn't settle on whether a lot of them were clones, androids, or both didn't help. That, I suspect, is why Titan Comics seems to have been trying to make them more like the closest Macross equivalent... the Mardook.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    I'd pay real money just to hear it read by the intense voice guy from Honest Trailers.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Post. They were part of the space defenses conceived alongside the ARMD-class.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Honestly, the biggest problem with Star Trek: Picard's original characters is that they're all blatantly designed-by-committee. Not an intelligent committee either... that kind of tone deaf, out-of-touch, diversity-minded committee that produced cringe-worthy garbage like Marvel's new superheroes "Snowflake" and "Safe Space" or the SJW robot in Solo: a Star Wars Story. Cristóbal Rios is a citizen of the Republic of South American Stereotypes, a cigar-smoking, hard-drinking, unkempt, shady, roguish sort of character with a troubled past and nothing left to lose who speaks in an exaggerated accent, curses awkwardly in Spanish, and reads Spanish philosophy books just in case the audience forgot he's South American over the last week. Raffaela Musiker is a down-on-her-luck Sassy Black Woman™ who developed multiple substance abuse problems after losing her job and her family, who's just trying to go straight and get her kid back. Dr. Agnes Jurati is a standard-issue Socially-Awkward Nerd Girl whose main character traits are that she's naive, trusting, painfully shy, and more than slightly autistic. Elnor's not just a McNinja, he's an effeminate prettyboy, an orphaned kid who sees Picard as a surrogate father, a rebel against his native culture, the exposition magnet whose naive ignorance makes everyone explain things, and a comic relief character whose social awkwardness is played for unfunny laughs. Fleet Admiral Clancey is the foulmouthed professional woman who is trying too hard to be taken seriously and can't abide having her authority questioned for a second. Soji is the everywoman, a painfully generic character with no distinguishing traits to speak of except for the fact that she's good at everything... which they try to justify as her being an android. She's brilliant, skilled in multiple scientific disciplines, speaks multiple languages, is an instant expert on alien cultures, possesses superhuman strength, speed, durability, and reflexes as an android despite being made of flesh, and is instantly liked and accepted by everyone she meets and even gets a man who's been trained from a young age to hate and fear androids to fall in love with her while on a mission to investigate her. She's a Mary Sue.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    More like a space attacker, if we're being honest... it's essentially a manned missile with a VERY powerful but very short-lived thermonuclear rocket engine, a pair of VERY powerful beam guns, and six powerful but very compact thermonuclear reaction missiles. It's built for hit-and-run attacks on enemy ships with that powerful weaponry, then it coasts for recovery on its next orbit. The cockpit's equipped with a cold sleep system just in case things go a bit Tango Uniform. It kinda does (see above)...
  19. Seto Kaiba
    It's possible the kit maker didn't know... this was kind of obscure knowledge until Macross Chronicle reprinted the stats from Sky Angels.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Oh yeah, it's HUGE... in Macross 7 Trash, 1st Lt. Heuer owns or at least has access to one that's been converted for manned use with a fairly roomy two-man side-by-side cockpit.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    May I inquire what about it strikes you as incorrect? If it's the size of the SF-3A Lancer II or QF-3000E Ghost, they've always been those sizes... going all the way back to the 1984 Sky Angels tech manual.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Yep, Wiki Magic is a beautiful thing... especially when it saves people from having to buy obnoxious garbage to figure out WTF is going on. Well, it's nice to know Disney is staying true to the spirit of the Star Wars Expanded Universe. The completeness of my lack of surprise is surprising in its own right. This IS Star Wars we're talking about. The franchise that was already memetically famous for being so obsessed with minutiae that virtually every background character who appears in at least one second of film in the original trilogy has, at bare minimum, an entire short story devoted to telling you exactly how and why they came to be in that location at that exact time. Is it really such a shock that the franchise that felt compelled to devote multiple short stories to "I don't like you either" guy and his literally butt-faced friend and the green anteater Han Solo wasted in the pub would fill page count by explaining at great and tedious length that a group of card carrying Always Lawful Evil Space Nazis built a terror weapon designed to be as showy as possible even if it meant breaking the laws of physics to do it? It's not without reason that, when the anthology movies were first announced, people were making fun of the idea saying it was only a matter of time until this creatively bankrupt franchise tried to sell a movie about the walking garbage bin that goes "gonk" that the Jawas had in A New Hope. All that's really changed since Disney threw out the old EU and started making their own is that they're pandering to other groups in addition to die-hard Star Wars fans. I'm sure there are likely at least a few comics and short stories about the SJW droid Lando wanted to f*ck in Solo: a Star Wars Story. (And was it really necessary to tell us Lando was trying to get his leg over a glorified walking toaster?) Did he even know any of that, though? Does being dead in Star Wars make you clairvoyant? Not being sarcastic, inquiring minds want to know. Maybe we'll get lucky and they'll take advantage of reduced foot traffic to make theaters more comfortable. I don't know about you, but at 2m tall it's a pain to pretzel myself into the average movie theater seat.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    You may be thinking of the one that Ninja Division and Palladium Books put together for the failed Robotech miniatures game Robotech RPG Tactics. (Pictured below) Ninja Division's design for the "YF-4" bears a fairly strong resemblance to Big West's original VF-4 Battroid design that Koichi Ohata and Kazumi Fujita did for Macross: Eternal Love Song... though that's almost certainly coincidental given how obscure that game is and how little line art of the VF-4 Siren exists. Tommy Yune chickened out on the idea of designing a transformation for Shoji Kawamori's VF-X-4 design - which Robotech calls the YF-4 - in the Robotech reboot's flagship limited comic series Robotech: From the Stars. He did have the "YF-4" make a brief appearance in the first issue of that comic in fighter mode, and excused his inability to come up with an original alt-mode for it by having it run into mechanical problems when it attempted to transform. As far as I know, the one and only serious effort Robotech made to come up with a transformation for Shoji Kawamori's VF-X-4 is Ninja Division's design pictured above... which, IIRC, never made it to production in the Robotech RPG Tactics game because it was part of the cancelled Wave 2 backer rewards.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    The complaint about their ships I could understand, since they're a light facelift of the Macross Galaxy fleet ships... but the Draken III's a pretty cool design. It doesn't have to be unique. There are very few truly unique ideas due to the sheer volume of creatives working these days. What it has to be is presented in an interesting and/or compelling way. It's overdone, and it's very hard to fully develop an antagonist like that in a way that makes them compelling. For a good example, look no farther than MOSPEADA's Inbit. They're a race of unknown aliens from an unknown homeworld who invade Earth for reasons unknown... and they're BORING AS F*CK because it turns out an antagonist who is so alien you can't relate to them doesn't connect with the audience very well, especially when much of their menace is Informed Ability. That's a big part of why Robotech is so hung up on Macross, and why Titan Comics' Robotech Remix is basically a bad Macross fic that pays only the most token acknowledgement to the rest of Robotech. The inscrutable Invid are a boring, lifeless antagonist that would be more at home in a sci-fi/horror b-movie or one of the old 50's serials... especially once you factor in the scenery-chewing Ming the Merciless style ham the Invid Regent brought to the story. The Robotech Masters are uninteresting to Robotech fans for a similar reason... if they look human, but don't react to anything in a human way, they're just as boring as if they were a faceless alien menace because their one response is dull surprise. So Robotech fans are instead hung up on the Zentradi because they're the most human-like and therefore the most relatable. Every Macross story is essentially a sideshow... we're seeing what's going on on the periphery of any given war, because the focus is on the people rather than the conflict itself, and in many of the later shows the conflicts are also sideshows because they're minor wars out in remote regions of the galaxy. Y'see, that was the one area where I was honestly curious to see what Titan Comics would be able to pull off... Creating original mechanical designs is hard enough on its own, but creating new designs that fit seamlessly into an existing setting or transforming mecha are a lot harder. In Titan's previous Robotech comic, their "original" take on the VF-1 Valkyrie turned out to be someone's Macross fanart that they'd used commercially without permission and switched back to the classic Kawamori VF-1 after receiving a lot of negative feedback about the VF-0-inspired fan design. Robotech Remix stuck with the VF-1 and introduced MOSPEADA concept art as a "new" mecha without even changing the name (the Vector fighter), but they'd hinted that the VF-1's replacement in-universe was going to defy Robotech's usual progression by sidelining the "Alpha" (MOSPEADA's Legioss) in favor of the YF-4 (Macross's VF-X-4). That put Titan Comics in an interesting position. They'd established that the next main fighter in their version of Robotech was going to be the VF-4... but Titan Comics can't use the VF-4 from Macross, and they can only use the fighter mode of the VF-X-4 from Macross's original series. It's questionable if they could use the transformation that Ninja Division and Palladium Books concocted, which means Titan could've been stuck in the position of having to having to create their own original transformation for a VF-X-4 based VF-4. That would have been mildly interesting to see.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    HG's Robotech staff were never in touch with reality. FFS, Carl Macek thought L. Ron Hubbard was quality sci-fi and named a character in one of his sequel concepts for him. That stunning failure to connect with reality is how so many obviously terrible ideas keep getting approved, like Robotech Remix! It's not sad, it's just predictable. Hollywood has never been good at little things like subtlety and pacing, and directors who understand them and how to use them properly and consistently are incredibly rare. The rare occasions where Hollywood actually produces something of artistic merit seem to be more by luck than good judgement. Spectacle sells, far more than substance, so when the story calls for thought-provoking introspection (like Ghost in the Shell) or even just effective use of exposition they're up sh*t creek. It's a real problem with the series... the Windermereans are an extremely sympathetic antagonist, but all their character development was left in a manga. Nah, I've seen nothing to indicate that it was an Orguss reference... the dimensional warheads that were introduced in Macross Frontier don't really warp reality, they're just hyper-intensified fold effects. Robotech Remix seems to have gone with a Dana from another universe as a way to shift the story's focus without having to do a timeskip like the one in the TV series. That and it lets them write a version of Dana who isn't retarded, which is a big plus since she was far and away Robotech's most hated character.
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