Seto Kaiba

The frustrating part is that CBS showed that they absolutely know how to make real Star Trek - as seen in the first few episodes of Star Trek: Discovery's second season - but for whatever reason they seem unwilling to actually DO it despite the very vocal demand for it. Maybe Secret Hideout sees having to fall back on making real Star Trek as a sign of defeat for their racist, sexist, xenophobic, pessimistic, action-centric take. To be fair, Enterprise not following the classic Star Trek look and feel was a deliberate creative choice intended to respect the original. The entire goal there was to show the formative years of Earth's space exploration as the newly Utopian Earth took its first steps into the greater galaxy and laid the foundation for the United Federation of Planets to become a force for peace. It was rougher, less principled, and so on intentionally. Some of its best episodes revolved around Archer and crew learning the lessons that would become some of the Federation's oldest principles. The problem is that it was undermined by executive meddling at every turn, same as Star Trek: Voyager was. Wouldn't have worked... audiences were burned out on Star Trek before Enterprise even launched. Star Trek been on the air almost continuously for nearly 14 years when Enterprise made its debut. It needed a break, and the franchise heads argued it needed a break, but the senior execs at the network demanded yet another Star Trek show that immediately fell victim to the same burnout-induced ratings tailspin that afflicted Voyager. Franchise fatigue is a very real thing... they should've spaced their releases out more, took a few years off between shows, etc. Instead, they wore their audience out and the talking heads in the boardrooms blamed everything except their own failure to listen to the franchise's creative team.

Maybe it hit an ammunition storehouse or something? I mean, it is a ship the size of a city crashing into another ship the size of a moon. There's gotta be LOTS of explosives there.

So? It does appear that they're tough enough to survive a crash from orbit in one piece... like the ships dotting the surface of Jakku. Lifting off through a few dozen meters of soil and rock would be no big deal compared to stresses like that. Though the whole schtick was clearly chosen for visual punch and not practicality. Evil is hammy in Star Wars, as evidenced by drama queen Anakin Skywalker.

Yup... that's basically what we've been saying about it. Disney bought LucasFilm for Star Wars, and the corporate committee running the show took the safest possible approach with their shiny new money printer and just remade A New Hope with a ton of cosmetic upgrades and a vastly less likeable cast meant to have the broadest possible appeal. The problem, of course, is that if you try to please EVERYONE as the Disney corporate leadership did, you'll end up spreading yourself too thin and pleasing nobody. The whole sequel trilogy is the embodiment of Disney's paralyzing fear of losing a few bucks because someone got offended. Now, if you threw a couple adjectives in there about the quality of the comics, the 800 page novels, and what have you, I'd find myself in complete agreement. The parts of the Star Wars Expanded Universe I've been exposed to are almost uniformly badly-written garbage that makes Solo: a Star Wars Story look like Oscar material. Far and away the best of it was the Thrawn trilogy and even a fair amount of that was pretty weak. No, but he was the one who set up the people who did... he put Bad Robot and Secret Hideout in control of Star Trek, and left Star Wars to Rian Johnson's tender mercies. ... when were they not? They're just laser swords. I can recall at least one instance in the EU where they were literally building the damn things on assembly lines. ... why wouldn't they have fuel tanks? They very clearly have engines that use reaction mass for propulsion, and that reaction mass has to come from somewhere. Likewise, they have to be getting power to run all their onboard systems from somewhere. As far as I can tell, that's not the case... The Last Jedi does feature arms dealer intermediaries who sell to both sides, something that happens distressingly often in the real world. Why not? I mean, this is a society that has mastered the casual use of gravity manipulation. It seems to me like it'd be more convenient to build a fleet in secret if you built it on a planet's surface. You wouldn't need to take all kinds of precautions to protect workers in a zero-g vacuum environment and you wouldn't have to ship materials up to orbit from a planetside refinery or factory. They're all massively oversold, TBH. Jango Fett wasn't any better than Boba Fett... they're both the alleged badass but can't back it up. They have a very action figure-friendly costume, but apart from being fairly snappy dressers they're pretty lame. Jango Fett subcontracts out of his actual day job as a bounty hunter, spends most of his screen time running away from Obi-Wan, and in his only actual stand-up fight (in Attack of the Clones) he's nothing more than a nuisance to his opponent and lasts a mere six seconds before being beheaded without once harming his opponent. Boba Fett tailgates the Millennium Falcon, whines some complaints at Darth Vader, and in his first and only fight he tries to tie up the space wizard with the laser sword, fails, and is unintentionally killed when a blind man accidentally knocks him into the waiting mouth of a space anus monster in the desert. They're literally less effective than the Stormtroopers, and the Stormtroopers are memetically MADE OF FAIL.

Giving Himouto! Umaru-chan a whirl... it's not quite what the memes led me to expect from it. I'm not sure why I was expecting something more like Lucky Star or one of the more pop culture reference-heavy 12 episode comedy series that've come out more recently. Its content is exactly what it says on the tin... a series about a younger sister who's a himono-onna, a woman who's proper in public but slovenly at home. It's occasionally funny, but most of the humor revolves around the titular character being an incredibly manipulative and selfish brat towards her doormat older brother. It gets old real quick, and then it's just kind of annoying how toxic their relationship is. There isn't even a reason given for it, she's just a naturally sh*tty person. Oh, it was... but, to be honest, that show was one incredible dumpster fire from the earliest phases of its development clear through to its cancellation for low ratings. It changed genres twice during development, from a creepy lolicon slice of life comedy series by an h-doujinshi artist to a reimagining of Japan's Sengoku period in a sci-fi context to being a tissue paper-thin effort to knock off Macross for a quick buck. The designs were done quickly and on the cheap, by an in-house design group at Tatsunoko with an incredibly unflattering name. That would probably have helped their ratings a bit, yeah. MOSPEADA could've been a much better series if there hadn't been so much executive meddling focused on copycatting Macross. It put the Legioss armo-fighter into too much prominence over the titular MOSPEADA.

As I understand it, Star Wars had a fairly complicated official canon policy that included the Expanded Universe materials before the sale of LucasFilm to Disney and Disney's subsequent decision to throw the entire Expanded Universe in the trash and start over. It's the fact that so much effort was spent making the Expanded Universe coherent and so on that made folks so mad when the Disney crew told them it was going away permanently. ... now this strikes me as complete BS. What did they think people were sending them checks for? A show of goodwill? They were collecting a fairy substantial amount of royalties from things like comic books, novels, and so on and there was a coordinated team of writers working on all of that nonsense. They literally had at least one person whose full-time job it was to make sure all of that stuff was consistent and police the writers of new content. He had some ridiculous title. Keeper of the holo-something? No, Star Trek flew into a brick wall because they put a talentless hack in charge and all he could think to do was to make Star Trek more like Star Wars... locking the franchise into a long-term contract with his like-minded partner. Star Wars flew into a brick wall because it was such a money-spinner that its new risk-averse owners refused to do anything more than recycle old ideas on the assumption that if the fans liked it once they'd love it twice... and once that didn't work, a committee deadlock on part 3 led to a small legion of cooks spoiling the broth as energetically as possible.

Mobile Suit Gundam: the Origin was a hard show to watch... the original series was dark, but Origin is darker still by a significant margin. Like showing the Principality of Zeon capturing Island Iffish and starting preparations for Operation British even before they gassed the population... then showing the actual gassing of the population. Isn't it just? I'm running out of shows in my queue on crunchyroll.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't kicking the sequel trilogy to the non-canon curb alongside Star Wars: Legends effectively "dumping" it? Based on everything I've heard and read on the subject, isn't all of the material that was collectively rebranded as Legends officially considered to be broadly non-canonical?

Isn't that kind of the reason they're allegedly plotting to dump the sequel trilogy in the first place? That nobody - not even the actors who starred in it - is all that invested in the Star Wars sequel trilogy? To a heavily merchandise-driven franchise like Star Wars, there's little-to-no immediate difference between an audience that's indifferent and one that's downright hostile. Either way, they're not buying the merchandise and they're not stampeding into Disney's theme parks to visit the Star Wars Land there. It's all lost revenue regardless of whether that absence of interest is motivated by antipathy or simple indifference. Disney bought Star Wars for the merchandising revenue, and if it's underperforming then Disney's management looks REAL bad in front of the stockholders... especially since everyone believed Star Wars was as close to a Sure Thing as it gets, and you have to be pretty damned incompetent to screw up a Sure Thing.

One of the members of my weekly Jojo's Bizarre Adventure watch party had to grab some shuteye early this week... so we ended up watching Ghost Stories. The horrific ADV Films gag dub of Ghost Stories. The original show was a mediocre exercise in standard Japanese ghost folklore, but dear sweet machine god the dub can only be the product of sampling all the pills in every voice actor's medicine cabinet simultaneously.

Well, you have to remember that as affluent as the Macross Frontier fleet is... it's still a city-state of just ten million people1 out on the edge of explored space. Local productions likely don't have the domestic audience to justify Hollywood blockbuster-level expenditures.2 The fleet does, after all, have only about 1/12th the total population of Japan. It's not something mentioned in the TV series proper... it comes up in the novelization, the short stories, etc. Mihoshi Academy had a number of VF-1C civilian-use Valkyries that were used for practical training in their aviation/space navigation major. From the sound of it, the VF-1C is a disarmed consumer-grade derivative of the VF-1A similar to how the VT-1C is a consumer-grade derivative of the VT-1 Ostrich. 1. Putting it in the same class, in terms of total population, as Bangkok or Seoul... and would be approximately the 34th most populous city if it existed on Earth today. As a nation, it would rank 91st... behind Azerbaijan and above the United Arab Emirates. 2. To put it in perspective, the entire population of the Macross Frontier emigrant fleet would have to watch Bird Human three times to narrowly edge out the total number of tickets sold for Star Wars: the Rise of Skywalker in its opening weekend, and four times for Avengers: Endgame's opening weekend. Not total ticket sales for either of those real world films, JUST their opening weekends.

That Hakuna Aoba named his custom VF-0 for the Allied reporting name for the Mitsubishi A6M Navy Type-0 carrier-based fighter is an odd choice, to be sure... though he's not alone there. Macross Galaxy developed a VF-22 variant named Schwalbe Zwei, the other name for the Messerschmitt Me 262. Can't give it a new design number tho, since it's a one-of-a-kind custom aircraft for (nominally) nonmilitary purposes. Calling it a "VF-0 Custom" feels a bit disingenuous since it's more along the lines of "disguised YF-25", but it's probably the most accurate since it WAS a VF-0 when Katori started and it still looks and transforms like a VF-0. What @Master Dex said. Granted, we don't know what the budget for Bird Human was... but given that the film was set to be the debut of a beauty pageant winner who presumably had no acting experience to speak of, it was probably closer in budget and scope to a Japanese domestic market film than an American big-budget Hollywood film. Tens, rather than hundreds, of millions of dollars for a budget. The most expensive film produced in Japan at time of writing - the 2013 animated fantasy film Kaguya-hime no Monogatari - had a budget of $49.3 million (US). Budgets in the single-digit millions (US) are more typical for a character-heavy drama. The estimated budget for the 2006 Death Note movie was $20 million (US) thanks to the use of CGI for its shinigami, comparable to what was spent on the hilariously camp direct-to-video Starship Troopers 3: Marauder. Purpose-building a handful of replica VF-0's and SV-51's similar to what was used on Uroboros for the dogfight scenes would probably have cost most, or all, of the film's budget... and hiring stunt pilots to fly them wouldn't have been cheap either. They'd already blown a chunk of their budget licensing a Sheryl Nome song for the movie too... that can't have been cheap. It's not clear if Strategic Military Services was hired for the film, or were simply volunteering their services in the name of some cheap advertising. I'm guessing it's the latter. Having the military support filming a movie ain't cheap either. Adjusted for inflation, having the US Navy's F-14's fly outside of their regular duties for filming cost the film's budget around $19,000 per hour just to get the F-14's in the air. Having SMS volunteer the services of highly trained fighter pilots and using their VF-25's for motion capture for CGI VF-0's that the filmmakers would add in post-production would have been a huge savings to the budget. Their only other options would've been to appeal to the Frontier NUNS or maybe Mihoshi Academy's flight school. SMS had the advantage that their VF-25s are similarly sized to the VF-0, where the Frontier NUNS's VF-171s are a bit smaller and Mihoshi Academy's VF-1C Valkyries are a LOT smaller. (In the Macross Frontier short story Actors Sky, the Bird Human movie's lead actor Akira Kamishima had to do some training in a VF-1C in preparation for reshoots because the film's director was unsatisfied with his performance in the cockpit shots... that probably would've cost a fair sum too.)

Well, it started life as a VF-0... what it was rebuilt into really belongs more in the same category as the SV-52 орел. "A customized Valkyrie of unknown origin produced to imitate the VF-0". Well, except that we know exactly what its origins are... the above remark is, save for the "VF-0" part, how the SV-52 орел is described since it's indicated to have a lot of VF-17 hardware under the hood despite allegedly starting its life as a SV-51. Katori Brown-Robins did some interesting things to that VF-0 airframe. The end result was more "a YF-25 thinly disguised as a VF-0" than anything.

Yup. There are several pictures in the book that show it flying alongside what appears to be a VF-11B. Oh, absolutely... though the replica VF-0's on Uroboros mainly used parts from the VF-1C and VF-5000. Macross the Ride featured a totally rebuilt VF-0 that was remodeled to use tech from the YF-25, including its FF-3001A engines. That was Hakuna Aoba's VF-0改 "Zeke".

We do not know. We have very few actual specs for that initial-type thermonuclear reaction turbine engine... most of which pertain to its propellant efficiency in space. The available data very loosely suggests the FF-1999 had about 90% the performance of the FF-2001. The VF-0 "The Nostalgia" restoration that was done for the First Space War armistice 25th Anniversary was using reproduction EGF-127 turbofan jet engines. Six engines were made as part of the restoration process.

Well, the VF-4's ramjets would only be an asset once it reaches a certain speed and altitude... and the rockets are going to have a very limited burn time before they run out of fuel. The VF-1's Super Pack boosters only have enough fuel for 150 seconds at maximum output. The VF-2SS's sub-engines are mainly to offset the extra mass of the Super Armed Pack, rather than to improve its performance. Excluding, of course, the VF-0 and SV-51... but not the thermonuclear reaction engine-equipped versions and later replicas.

Not sure! We know it's a next-generation engine technology that incorporated improvements made in heat exchange technology that greatly improved fuel efficiency and output. The specifics of what improved and how are unknown. There may be a "non-canon" explanation buried in the Master File books. Another excellent question we don't really have an answer for. Now, I have a theory about why the VF-4 does not list its other engine systems... but nothing more than circumstantial evidence to back it up. The physical dimensions in the VF-4 stats prior to Macross Chronicle did not match the physical proportions of the aircraft. I suspect that the specs we have were originally written for the VF-X-4, which didn't have ramjets and rocket boosters built into it the way the production VF-4 does. Still, it's an odd omission in all cases... esp. since the VF-2SS Valkyrie II and VA-1SS Metal Siren are both four-engine VFs. They have four thermonuclear reaction turbine engines... two main engines, and two "sub-engines". We can at least guess in the Valkyrie II's case, since it supposedly had three times the engine output of the original Valkyrie and the engines that are listed are a bit over two times.

So... that kind of depends on how you want to define "orbit". Even the comparatively humble VF-1 Valkyrie can reach altitudes in excess of 100km - the nominal boundary of space - on an Earth-type planet. It takes a lot of fuel to get up there, so it's often more economical to either have the VF ride to orbit aboard a ship or use a booster system to reach orbit without consuming any fuel from its internal tanks. It's not a thrust-to-weight ratio thing, it's more a question of how efficient the engine is and how much fuel the fighter carries. As VFs got larger, the amount of fuel they were able to carry internally increased. Likewise, as engine technology advanced the engines themselves got more efficient. What ultimately made the process of launching a VF from a planet's surface into orbit under its own power economical enough to be done casually was the introduction of the 2nd Gen thermonuclear reaction engine technology: the thermonuclear reaction burst turbine engine. They were a 4th Generation VF design feature, but some 3rd Generation VFs were outfitted with them like the VF-16 and VF-17D/S/T. Partly... but it's more along the lines of a fuel efficiency thing. Being able to reach orbit over an Earth-type planet while retaining enough fuel to usefully maneuver.

Nope. We can make some reasonable inferences, but that's about it. One detail that has remained mostly consistent is that model numbers ending in 99 are usually the initial model in a particular hardware generation. For instance, the FF-1999 being the initial-type thermonuclear reaction turbine engine or the FF-2099 being the first thermonuclear reaction burst turbine engine. Presumably, if the pattern continues, the Sv-262's engine (model FF-2999) was the initial-type Stage II thermonuclear reaction turbine engine. Model numbers 1999-2098 seem to be 1st Gen engine designs, with 2099-2998 being 2nd Gen engine designs, and 2999+ being 3rd Gen. There are a few aberrations, like the typo in Macross Chronicle that incorrectly gives the VF-11MAXL's engine number as FF-3600 and the VF-14 using model FF-2770 even though it was not a burst turbine model. The same with the FF-2450 on the VF-3000. Skipped design numbers usually mean a prototype that didn't pan out or a significant change in hardware prompting the start of a new design series. I'd ignore the VF-3000 on that front, odds are they didn't notice they'd already used that number... because the VF-3000's engines are 1st Gen and the VF-22's are 2nd. Higher number doesn't necessarily mean "more powerful" either... just (potentially) a later model. /FC1 and /FC2 denote some kind of upgrade, but we're not sure specifically what since the FF-3001[A] is rated for 1,620kN, the FF-3001/FC1 is rated for 2,105kN, and the FF-3001/FC2 is rated for 2,110kN. The Draken III's engines are FF-2999/FC2, so they're not the original FF-2999 spec. The FF-3011 used by the VF-27 is individually less powerful than the FF-3001, but the VF-27 has four of them. Engine tuning also affects its output power. You'll notice the YF-30's FF-3001/FC2 engines are rated for 2,110kN while the detuned version used by the VF-31 Siegfrieds is only putting out 1,875kN.

Don't get too excited, we're still months away from launching... getting absolutely destroyed at work thanks to furloughs and temporary headcount reductions brought on by the whole lockdown thing. I can't even interview replacements because of the extreme restrictions on access to our facilities now. At the very least, I'm fairly confident there won't be anything too attention-grabbing in Variable Fighter Master File: VF-1S Roy Focker Special that'll distract my group from working on Masahiro Chiba's original Sky Angels doujinshi. If it's anything like Master Archive Mobile Suit: MSV Ace Pilot Log it'll be mostly biographical info on Roy's military service. The Sky Angels book has been a really fascinating look into Macross's earliest lore. I especially enjoyed the foreword, which is presented as an excerpt from another fictional book by the title Valkyrie in the Blue Sky by an author M. L. Gadjet (sic) that talks about the first flight of the initial VF-1 prototype. That prototype, called VFX-FP-1, was a converted F-14 that was outfitted with the QF-3000's FF-1999 thermonuclear reaction turbine engine. It took off from the Rogers Dry Lake at Edwards Air Force Base for a 70 minute test flight a bit 12:30 on September 21st, 2006. Master File borrowed a fair bit of that, especially the use of the FF-1999 for early testing like it did with the VF-0-NF.

This just in, it's been retitled as Haruhiko Mikimoto Forever... coming "when it's done".

Bingo. There are books I have more than two of... but that's mostly because they're old enough that finding a pristine copy for scanning is difficult or if I screw up and accidentally win multiple copies on YJA. Incidentally, the terribly mysterious website's servers are up but haven't been populated with webpages yet... so I can at least say the project's official name is Macross Historica.

Oh ho! Maybe the comic book collectors. Collecting the larger publications is comparatively easy since publishers can't get away with just changing the cover a bit and re-sell the same book as a new product the way that toy companies can redeco an existing mold and call it an all-new product. They have to actually come up with new content or people won't buy their book. For the record, I have two personal-use copies of Variable Fighter Master File: VF-1S Roy Focker Special on order... one for my own use, and one for scanning and archival. Same as all the other volumes. We know the Master File for the "Roy Focker Special" isn't going to be a reprint of an older book. It's gonna be something akin to the Master Archive Mobile Suit: MSV Ace Pilot Log book that was done for Gundam, talking about the career of a particular ace pilot more than the actual mecha. Though, admittedly, even I wish they'd put their energy into a volume about something other than the VF-1. There are enough VF-19s floating around to do a VF-19 Vol.2, or maybe a VF-31 Vol.2 that actually talks about the production VF-31. Or a book for the VF-17 and VF-171. Or, shock, maybe a book about the SV-51 or Sv-262, or the SV Works in general. I don't expect anything great or particularly interesting from the Roy Focker Special book. Likely a lot of fuss and noise about the VF-0S, VF-X-1, VF-1A-1, and VF-1S-4, with some side notes about the F203 and probably F-14A+ to go along with a general biography of Roy and probably a featurette about the other units who drew inspiration from the SVF-1 Skulls like Max and Milia's Dancing Skulls, Ozma Lee's SMS Skull Platoon, etc.

Should we start a pool? Take bets on whether it'll be July, August, September, October, etc.?

Offhand, I don't recall Kawamori ever giving a specific reason for modifying the VF-1A's monitor turret design for the movie... but I'd assume he wanted to make it somewhat more visually impressive-looking since it was going to be (however temporarily) a main character mecha. The TV version VF-1A head is kind of flat and undetailed looking. The far more angular movie version looks a lot more impressive and dynamic. There was no need to mess with the VF-1D head since it wasn't appearing in the film (replaced by the VT-1), and both the VF-1J and the VF-1S already had that certain je ne sais quoi that makes them stand out as main character mecha even though the J was only getting a glorified cameo. I suspect the VF-1A head was the only one he set out to retool. But only one of those was done by Kawamori... he made some slight tweaks to the J-type head to modernize the design for Macross the First. The D-type head design was done by Hidetaka. Macross the First is its own alternate take though, and the revamped designs haven't been seen outside of it. Even Macross Delta, which was made well after Macross the First, uses an unmodified TV series VF-1J head. Since Macross the First is cancelled (again), I doubt we'll see any more of those designs. Personally, I think you're jumping to conclusions here and making a lot of unfounded assumptions of intent by the notoriously airy-fairy Kawamori-sensei who hates being pinned down to anything. Bandai would keep pumping out new versions every few years no matter what happened... they're Bandai, it's what they do. As to there being no way of knowing what head is correct... that's not correct. Excluding the VF-1A, there's only one official monitor turret design for any given variant. The VF-1A's two monitor turret designs are BOTH correct, given that the TV version officially corresponds to VF-1A's from Blocks 1-5 and the DYRL? version to Blocks 6 and later. They gave that explanation way back in Variable Fighter's Aero Report. ... as Gavil might have said under the circumstances, "The Beauty of Marketing to Collectors". They've got you lot over a barrel and they freaking know it. Yup... though there's a fun little asterisk there in that the "Movie-type" VF-1 was actually in service before the end of the First Space War. The TV version of the VF-1 is representative of the VF-1's first few production blocks (1-5), and the Movie version of the entire rest of the VF-1's production run (Block 6 and up). The SDF-1 Macross's VF-1s were mainly Block 4 and 5 aircraft, but there are a few sources (like This is Animation: Macross Plus) that put Block 6 VF-1s in operation not long after the First Space War began. It mentions a UN Spacy Marine Corps training squadron - SVMAT-102 - was equipped with the Block 6 VT-1 Super Ostrich and began a three month assignment to ARMD-04 Clemenceau in October 2009 (around the time the Macross reached Mars in episode 7). Yes, that's what the production block numbers denote... minor variations in hardware, software, and feature support made while a particular model or variant of aircraft is still in mass production that wouldn't, on their own, be enough to constitute a new variant. New aircraft are built to that updated standard, and older models are updated to it as resources and time permit. You may have heard in the news about the US Navy's recent delivery of the new F/A-18E/F Block III Super Hornets, and plans to update all the old Block II's to Block III level. The last TV version production block was Block 5, and the first Movie version production block was Block 6. Variable Fighter Master File, though not official setting material, follows this line religiously and asserts that Block 8 was the current standard in production when the Zentradi wiped out everything on Earth's surface. The reason given for the VF-1A's monitor turret design changing was an update/improvement/refinement in the design of the sensor cluster that went hand-in-hand with the various avionics improvements for operations in space that were also part of Block 6.