Seto Kaiba

Just a brief nitpick... the "Chobham armor" thing is a Robotech-ism that Palladium came up with for its "2nd Edition" RPG. Macross's Destroids use the same OTM composite materials the VFs do, just in greater thicknesses to compensate for the lack of energy conversion armor reinforcement. Pretty much the only time strictly conventional armor tech was used on mecha in Macross was the VF-0's reactive armor packs.

So, boys and girls, the fourth episode of Star Trek: Picard has dropped like a turd into a toilet bowl after shotgunning an entire bottle of laxative and here's the postmortem. Brace yourselves for me to be absolutely candid about "Absolute Candor". The Good The Bad The Ugly

Granted, it's a very poor substitute and it seems nonsensical to us Macross fans who are spoiled by a wealth of information in official artbooks and other official publications... but for the Robotech fanbase, which has practically no official publications to speak of, a poor substitute is better than nothing. Robotech's official information largely came from the OSM, filtered through the old Palladium Books RPG's misconceptions, thanks to fans who treated the RPG books like they were reliable sources of information. To be entirely fair, it's not a completely unreasonable conclusion that Palladium Books and Strange Machine both jumped to. Robotech's setting doesn't have things like the energy conversion armor technology that makes the 30mm-thick armor on the VF-1 every bit as tough as the much thicker composite armor on the Tomahawk Destroid in Macross. If you were just looking at them in terms of one being a walking tank and one being a fighter jet that turns into a robot, you'd expect the walking tank to be a LOT more heavily armored. (Palladium actually fixed this partly in RT2E, with the Tomahawk having only 35% more MDC than the initial type VF-1 and only 13% more MDC than the late type.) They probably would've have been aware of Macross sources that explicitly state that the VF-1 and Tomahawk have comparable defensive strength because the VF-1's armor gets ten times stronger in Battroid mode. Since this forum software uses a rich text editor, it'll copy the source formatting of whatever you're copying from... so if you copy from something like MS Word, it'll assume that you want the text to be the specific color it was in that other source (in this case, black). If you use CTRL-SHIFT-V instead of CTRL-V, it'll paste without the source formatting. You'll lose italics, bold, underlines, and other formatting like that but the text will come through as the forum's default color rather than an explicitly-set one.

It's not that there's one concept/formula/idea that would let Viacom-CBS revitalize Star Trek... there are dozens, even hundreds of concepts that would work if Viacom-CBS were smart enough to do two very basic things: Ditch this dystopian take on Star Trek's setting. Science fiction with a dystopian future setting was really edgy and cool forty f*cking years ago... but overuse and abuse of those tropes has made the dystopian space future into the default science fiction setting the way overuse and abuse of tropes from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings became the default fantasy setting. Unless you've got a new hot take on it, the way Game of Thrones did for fantasy or Black Mirror has for sci-fi/horror, you're just another squirt in a very large crowd. Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Picard's writers are full of that "fake woke" cr*p that's going around Hollywood these days, and they're constantly trying to make obvious and terribly cliched points about how much they think the modern world sucks by making their vision of the future suck even more. That's not what Star Trek is about. That's never been what Star Trek is about. Star Trek is about saying that we can - and will - be better than that. That the future WILL be better, because we will eventually find the solutions for today's problems and rise above them. This is such a basic premise that even Futurama's Fry understood it. Star Trek is about hope for the future. Get away from the J.J.-Trek visual aesthetic. Seriously. Very few Star Trek fans like the J.J.-Trek visual aesthetic, and it f*cking shows in the fact that J.J.-Trek was a flop at the box office and in merchandising, that audiences largely hated Star Trek: Discovery's J.J.-Trek-derived visual aesthetic to the point that there's virtually no merchandising for the series, and that Star Trek: Picard only managed to secure two merchandising licenses: one for cheap wine branded as Chateau Picard, and one for a cheap replica of Dahj and Soji's necklace. The J.J.prise is an ugly piece of sh*t, the Discovery is an ugly piece of sh*t, and La Sirena is an ugly piece of sh*t. Nobody wants to watch this ugly sh*t, and nobody wants to buy merchandise of it. That it's a dead end design-wise really shows in Star Trek: Picard, where every prop and set piece looks hopelessly generic except for the ones that are explicitly nods to previous Star Trek titles. Frankly, if there's anything at all to the latest round of leaks from generally-reliable leakers inside the Star Trek franchise, this current revolting mockery of Star Trek doesn't appear to be long for this world and the franchise may end up taking an involuntary hiatus. Viacom-CBS is apparently rather unhappy with the performance of both Star Trek shows, and have been tossing around the idea of dismissing both Kurtzman and Chabon. Star Trek: Discovery's third season is apparently working with significant budget cuts because Netflix is also very unhappy with how the show is performing, and the third season finale has been reportedly written as a series finale in the event that viewership slips further and the series isn't renewed. Star Trek: Picard's apparently shaping up to be a one-and-done thanks to fan dissatisfaction with the series's dismal Discovery-esque tone. They've even claimed that the talk of the Section 31 series being approved is not technically true, with no series order from CBS it's just Kurtzman and Secret Hideout developing it by redirecting staff from other projects. I can't say I'd be upset if it all turned out to be true... this current brand of Star Trek deserves to be kicked out of the series canon the way TAS once was.

Well, yes... though, to be honest, that Harmony Gold is no longer exercising that creative oversight is likely to hurt the market for Strange Machine's Robotech RPG somewhat. A Robotech role-playing game isn't something that has much appeal outside of the most dedicated circles of Robotech fans, and one of the weirder things about Robotech's fans is that most of the fans who buy the books for an official licensed Robotech RPG have no intention of ever playing the game. A lot of the RPG book sales are actually fans buying them to use them as ersatz reference books because, until very recently, the franchise never had anything like a proper artbook or official encyclopedia. If the info in the book is blatantly incorrect, that could put a pretty big dent in sales among that non-gamer majority who buy them as reference books.

Yeah, Star Trek: Voyager can still be a lot of fun to watch because despite all the executive meddling they still ended up with a couple sets of characters who had really great chemistry like Paris and Torres, or The Doctor and Seven of Nine. The network execs plans to turn it into TNG 2.0 succeeded at least in that the crew of the USS Voyager seemed to be a crew of competent professionals who actually liked working together. Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Picard are a lot less fun to watch because the protagonists do not enjoy their lives. They're miserable, broken people who are seemingly committed to remaining as miserable as possible. They are, to borrow Julian Bashir's term, The Ambassadors of Unhappy. The only people in Star Trek: Picard who seem to actually enjoy life are Laris and Zhaban, who think the whole main plot of the show is a boondoggle (and I'm inclined to agree).

You only get the VF-4 Siren in the last mission or two of the game, with the Prometheus II launches a ramming attack on the Burado fleet's mobile fortress and you fight the last boss (basically attacking Burado himself, like how Hikaru gunned down Boddole Zer in DYRL?). This art was from a promotional piece in a PC Engine-specific gaming mag. I have a mountain of back issues I bought looking for this exact piece, so I can get you a title once I get home.

That's not from Macross: Remember Me... or any of the FamilySoft Macross games. That's from Macross: Eternal Love Song, a TRPG for the Turbografx-16/PC Engine's Super CD-ROM2 add-on published by Masaya in 1992. Eternal Love Song was one of two Macross II: Lovers Again tie-in video games that were released on the PC Engine Super CD-ROM2 that year, the first being the R-Type-style side scrolling shooter Macross 2036. This VF-4 design was made specifically for Macross: Eternal Love Song, since Kawamori's VF-4 design was incomplete at the time, and had both a more traditional VF-1-like transformation and vaguely UC Gundam-esque equipment like a beam rifle and funnels.

Probably not... at least, not in any depth. Harmony Gold stopped exercising the editorial powers it wrote into its post-reboot licenses after its management pulled the plug on Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles just one episode into a four part OVA and defunded the development of future animated Robotech works. That editorial oversight is why the first few volumes of Palladium's Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles Role-Playing Game actually managed to be pretty accurate to the source material, and the lack of that oversight is why the last two books in Palladium's "2nd Edition" Robotech game and Strange Machine's Robotech game are such a mess.

Which, IMO, could have been amazing... if it weren't for the show deciding to make the Vulcans so adversarial in ways that agitated even the cast. It wouldn't have been anywhere near as weird or potentially problematic as some of the stuff planned for the unproduced season five, like introducing the Kzinti from Star Trek: the Animated Series as a new antagonist (and yes, those are Larry Niven's Kzinti from Known Space... he rewrote The Soft Weapon for use as a TAS script). Personally, I'm inclined to suspect that audiences would've been a lot more receptive of a more unconventional Star Trek series with a more conflict-heavy narrative back when Star Trek: Voyager was on the drawing board. Star Trek had been on the air continuously for eight years when Voyager premiered, and audiences were starting to get burned out on the episodic "strange planet of the week" story format. I think Voyager as originally planned would have been a much easier sell back then. Instead, they stuck religiously to the TNG formula and it cost them in the form of a steady ratings decline across all seven seasons that even the introduction of a Miss Fanservice failed to arrest. Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Picard are running up against the same problem in reverse. Dark, gritty, unpleasant, conflict-heavy sci-fi became the norm while Star Trek was off the air, so this awful new brand of Star Trek is just another squirt in an overcapacity crowd rather than the breath of fresh air that many Star Trek and sci-fi fans were hoping for. That's why there was such praise for The Orville... it delivered what Star Trek was supposed to, but didn't. It doesn't help that Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Picard are trying to have their cake and eat it too, clinging to classic Star Trek tropes and characters while doing a terrible job of trying to be dark, gritty, and action-packed. We're watching the franchise's emo phase and it is CRINGEWORTHY.

Ah, Star Trek: Voyager... the show that got made and the show that the producers had planned, developed, and auditioned actors for was a very different creature to the Star Trek: Voyager the network let them shoot. Star Trek: Voyager was originally going to rely much more heavily on Deep Space Nine's serialized storytelling format instead of the episodic formula that The Next Generation had depended on, and it was going to be a fair bit darker than was typical for Star Trek. You could say that the Voyager episodes "Worst Case Scenario" and "Year of Hell" are surviving bits of the original series concept for Star Trek: Voyager. They were going to have the Starfleet and Maquis crews aboard Voyager being suspicious of and hostile to each other, with Janeway and Chakotay essentially being rival captains constantly at odds with each other over how to do things (Janeway being the by-the-book Starfleet officer, and Chakotay being the "screw the rules, what works works" guy). Voyager itself was also going to sustain persistent damage the more fights it got into, with the gradual deterioration of the ship's systems being part of the cause for the drama as niceties like holodecks and replicators break down with no way to repair them. UPN didn't like that idea, so they forced A LOT of rewrites on the show until the concept was essentially TNG 2.0 and the various logistical and moral dilemmas of being a ship stranded alone and far from home that were to be the focus of the drama had been all but completely excised from the story. Several of the actors were quite upset that their characters were rewritten to declaw them for the new, friendlier take on Voyager. Robert Beltran (Chakotay) was so incensed he phoned in his performance for seven seasons, and concessions had to be made to other characters whose roles were significantly hampered by the elimination of the hostile setting, leading to things like the Tom-B'Elanna romance and dropping characters like Lt. Carey who had originally been set up and auditioned for as rivals to other characters.

This is about average for Harmony Gold's legal counsel, TBH. Back when Harmony Gold was in arbitration with Tatsunoko over Tatsunoko's accusations that Harmony Gold had been shorting them on royalties owed for broadcast, streaming, and home video sales, the attorney representing Harmony Gold apparently had a bit of an aneurysm and briefly forgot how intellectual property law worked. He claimed, on HG's behalf, that having used (with permission) aspects of the MOSPEADA IP in derivative works like Robotech II: the Sentinels and Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles made Harmony Gold owner of those aspects of the MOSPEADA IP and allowed them to continue using them even in the event of the license expiring. He was then reminded by the court and Tatsunoko's attorney that that's not remotely correct.

I disagree... there's abundant evidence that Gene Roddenberry was a pretty mediocre writer going back to well before he ever conceived Star Trek. His style never really grew beyond its origins, writing for hammy 1950s sponsored serials like The Kaiser Aluminum Theater and Goodyear Theater. Like George Lucas, he was a good idea man but he needed good writers to distill a good concept into something you could actually write about. Star Trek only really ran into problems with his vision when they took him off the leash in TNG Season 1. Even Roddenberry was going back and forth about that in TOS... "is Starfleet a military or isn't it?" is one of the oldest inconsistencies in Trek. Also Ira Steven Behr: the Federation is an idealistic, money-free utopia and even in time of war they hold its ideals of peace, equality, and the dignity of life sacred ad freaking nauseum and even the Very Bad People who don't uphold those ideals still respect them and seek to preserve them (e.g. Section 31) Ronald Moore: "I have a colossal twelve-foot boner for TOS and show it at every freaking opportunity." Also (literally) Ronald Moore: "The first duty of every Starfleet officer is to the truth, whether it's scientific truth, or historical truth, or personal truth! It is the guiding principle on which Starfleet is based, and if you can't find it within yourself to stand up and tell the truth about what happened, you don't deserve to wear that uniform." Also Ronald Moore: F*ck executive meddling, we had a f*cking plan and you bastards ruined it.

Don't do drugs, kids!

Yeah, the production-intent Surya Aerospace VF-31 Kairos uses the same FF-3001A Stage II thermonuclear reaction turbine engines that were used by Shinsei and LAI's VF-25. They're tuned slightly differently, so the FF-3001A engines used by the VF-31 produce slightly more thrust (1,645kN vs 1,620kN), but otherwise they're the same. So... theoretically, the VF-25 should be able to operate the VF-31's LU-18A heavy quantum beam gunpod. It probably helps that the LU-18A seems to lack the high-powered "beam grenade" mode that previous models of heavy quantum beam gunpod had.

And here was me suspecting it'd be "Mann". Hugh Mann. That's the quality of writing we're looking at here in Star Trek: Picard. It took TNG a while to find its feet after that disastrous first season. Geordi pioneered what O'Brien had to go through... engineers must suffer. Gene's vision is problematic when it's not strained through the filter of capable writers. He was fine as long as he had DC Fontana and the others holding his leash. A good idea man, but a complete hedonist who was a little too in love with moralizing, paradoxically enough. To wit, there's nothing wrong with Gene's vision... the problem was with Gene's writing.

Well, most warships are built with machine shops and so on to build repair parts and tools and so on to keep the ship and any of its aircraft going between resupply operations... and the Macross was intended for long-duration space operations as a fleet flagship. The factory was part of the ship's intended equipment when she was relaunched, before taking on a city. Given how big some of the ship's hatches are, it was probably easier to just carve entire city blocks out of the island and move them in one piece into the ship before connecting them to utilities. Yeah... in Macross: Do You Remember Love?, the Macross had been rebuilt as a warship that could pull double duty as an emigrant ship for space exploration. That said, that trait was not confined to the movie. The mass-produced Macross-class ships that were built to escort the Megaroad-class ships had limited emigrant populations themselves (~10,000 people long-term) supported in a small town inside the ship. In at least one documented case, a Macross-class ship became the de facto planetary capital of the emigrant planet it landed on... Uroboros, where the SDFN-08 General Vrlitwhai Kridanik was the planet's main city "Vrlitwhai City". In Macross II's timeline, Macross-class and Megaroad-class ships were both used as emigrant ships. The 2054 Zentradi invasion was caused when a Macross-class emigrant ship blundered directly into a Zentradi main fleet on its first space fold out of Earth's solar system. In Macross IIs timeline, the onboard factory aboard the Macross was assisted in its endeavors by staff from the various defense contractors who were there to oversee space testing of things like the VF-1 and its option packs... and it was those engineers on the Macross who were responsible for developing its original designs like the VE-1 (in that timeline).

Yup. Even then, a simple sanity check should always be performed on any name or face allegedly attached to the project because they try to build hype by claiming people are attached who actually aren't... like Kasdan, Millar, and the other writers who were just guys who turned in story treatments for a quick buck with zero intention of sticking around.

It's not a stupid question... it's a complex situation and you're asking for information from the experts. That's the smart thing to do. Sorry for answering out of order, but the answer will flow better if I answer the second question first. What Harmony Gold renewed last year was their license from Tatsunoko Production that grants them the international distribution and international merchandising rights to the three original anime series used to produce Robotech: Super Dimension Fortress Macross, Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross, and Genesis Climber MOSPEADA. Essentially, what they've renewed is the exclusive permission to edit those three shows and put them on TV, home video, and streaming services outside of Japan and to make and sell merchandise based on those three shows outside of Japan. Those are the only rights they have to those shows under their license from Tatsunoko Production. All they can do is distribute those shows and make merch for them, though. They can't use the designs, characters, music, stories, etc. to make new animated or live action film works without the express permission of the copyright holders. For Macross, that means Big West. For the other two, that means Tatsunoko. Nope. They would need Big West's permission to adapt the Macross story, characters, mechanical designs, etc. for a live action movie. If they tried to just do it, they'd get sued for infringing on Big West's copyrights on the Macross material.

I'm not sure it necessarily hit the ground running, but it stumbled a lot less off the line than TOS, TNG, VOY, or ENT. STD tripped over its own feet at the starting line, and STP seems to be limping in entirely the wrong direction.

Well, yes... that was why the proposed live action Robotech movie was described from the outset as a "reimagining" of the story. Harmony Gold has, despite the claims of many fans to the contrary, known all along that it can't use the Super Dimension Fortress Macross IP in new film works of any type. That's why fans are always disappointed in new Robotech works, as they're essentially expecting bootleg Macross sequels, and why they did their best to control expectations when they were first announcing the Robotech live action movie proposal... because there's no mortal way they'd be allowed to base anything off the Macross designs, and most of the creative decisions in any live action movie that got made would be dictated by the need to avoid doing anything that might provoke a copyright infringement lawsuit. Even then, Robotech is too obscure to attract any investors. They can talk all they want about who's supposedly going to direct it or who wrote the latest story treatment when they needed a few bucks to pay the rent on their Los Angeles office, but without investors willing to put their money into a Robotech movie there's no chance of it ever getting made, no matter what. They can't, or at least they wouldn't be able to call it Macross due to HG's trademarks on the name, logo, and key iconography in the US.

Nah, stuff was already happening in Deep Space Nine right in the first episode. What you're referring to is the point where Deep Space Nine started experimenting with augmenting the standard Star Trek episodic storytelling format with serialized storytelling in the form of season-long story arcs... and it's not fair to characterize the episodes before that point as "nothing happening", because an awful bloody lot happened in those two seasons. They managed to set up their entire premise and introduce the entire cast in the space of a single two-parter. Nah, the way they're talked up the Zhat Vash don't come off as a Section 31-equivalent organization. Section 31 was a separate organization from Starfleet Intellgence, and was so incredibly hypercompetent about its secrecy that you only knew about them from working for them. The Zhat Vash supposedly run the Tal Shiar, making them more of an inner circle with its own agenda... plus they're as bad at keeping themselves secret as the Tal Shiar are, with rookie agents apparently swapping rumors about the Zhat Vash almost as an initiation ritual. It's still corny as f*ck, mind you... and the idea that the Zhat Vash are death on all forms of AI doesn't quite work given that there was mention of cyberneticists on Romulus who'd love to study Data in Star Trek: Nemesis and their ship computers would have to be using some kind of AI for all kinds of tasks like voice recognition, target recognition, sensor fusion, that fancy forensic scanner from last episode, etc. I'd actually quite enjoyed it, both because it was pretty much inevitable that a group like Section 31 would exist in the Federation to do disavowable things and because it made for several great Bashir episodes where he learned to regret that spy fantasy of his.

I'm about halfway into Enrolled Demon Iruma, and let me tell you the idea that it's Rosario+Vampire meets Actually, I am... is DEAD ON. Like, hitting the bullseye with laser guidance. It's not a bad show, by any means, but if you've seen either of those other two shows you've essentially already seen this one.

I've heard the same rumor... and I'm inclined to doubt it, unless it turns out that "Freecloud" is the only place in the galaxy that still practices spray-on tanning. Mind you, Star Trek already had a major antagonist who did an AMAZING job of embodying those same evils of rampant, socially-accepted racism, sexism, and xenophobia without also sacrificing the fact that the character was a person who made choices rather than a monster who was simply evil-by-nature. That was Deep Space Nine's Gul Dukat.

You wouldn't, yeah... because Andy Muschietti had never made any commitment to direct Robotech in the first place. Like Sylvain White, Nic Mathieu, James Wan, and a double handful of other people that the rumor mill and entertainment "reporting" of at-best dubious merit claimed were attached to direct Robotech, Andy Muschietti was approached about the film but never committed to have any involvement with it. They simply spun the lack of a hard "No" in that inevitable politely worded form letter response as a "Yes" to build hype for a proposed development and started talking about it as though he was set to start work on Robotech as soon as he finished It: Chapter Two. We've simply hit the point where even Robotech fans have to acknowledge that Andy Muschietti isn't going to direct Robotech. He's already committed to Netflix's Locke & Key as a producer, and Warner Bros has him signed to direct their The Flash movie (set for a 2022 release) and a big budget American adaptation of Attack on Titan (release TBD). It's a thing we've seen before, like when it became obvious Sylvain White wasn't interested in Robotech and signed on to Walled In and The Losers, or when Nic Mathieu turned them down and directed Spectral instead, or when James Wan opted to do Annabelle Comes Home after Aquaman instead of Robotech. It's just come back around to that harsh realization Robotech fans have to face when the only piece of positive news they've heard in years turns out to have been fake news.