Seto Kaiba

I really, really, really really wish I was exaggerating for effect there... but I'm not. Star Trek: Picard is just a bad series concept start-to-finish. A disgraced Jean-Luc Picard putting together a new crew of misfits, outcasts, and nutjobs like he's forgotten he's not in an Ocean's movie, to go find Data's "daughter" and Bruce Maddox because he... actually, why IS he going to find Bruce Maddox? We know he wants to find Dahj 2 because she's Data's "daughter" and wants to protect her, but why does he even care about Bruce Maddox? It feels almost like an excuse plot. It's also unmistakably being done a LOT cheaper than Star Trek: Discovery. Except for Chateau Picard (actually in California's wine country) and Vasquez Rocks (playing itself for the first time in Trek history), there's very little location shooting. Everything seems to be green screens and a lot of the green screened backgrounds look painfully fake. I mean, DSC was bad but it at least was professionally bad. This just looks and feels very amateurish by comparison... like a lot less effort was put into it at every level. Well, that was Patrick Stewart's aim here... he's trying to make this series into political allegory about the rabid and self-destructive nationalism and xenophobia that created Brexit and the current American political climate. It says a lot that even people like me who actually share a lot of his political views find this show nigh-unwatchable due to the obvious and incredibly one-sided author insert narrative where you are either with Jean-Luc Picard or an objectively awful person. It's not like the franchise's politics were ever particularly subtle, but this feels more like a strawman argument than anything. With Kurtzman onboard? I admire your optimism.

So... Star Trek: Picard episode 3 "This Embarrassment is just beginning". Er... sorry, "The End is the Beginning". The Good The Bad ... and The Ugly

I'm not sure that's really it in this case... Picard seems to be assembling a crew of burnouts, wastrels, and other people as broken as he seems to be. Even the more idealistic setting of previous Star Trek shows had its share of do-nothings, leeches, and questionable characters like Harry Mudd, Cyrano Jones, that group of hippies in "The Way to Eden", literally everyone on Tasha Yar's home planet, the Orion syndicate's members, Dr. Bashir's parents, that quack doctor Geiger from "In the Cards", quite a few members of the Maquis, Tom Paris and Nick Locarno (who I only count as 1 because they were originally supposed to be the same guy), etc. Musiker seems to be an unemployed former Starfleet officer, which probably doesn't afford as comfortable a life even in the Federation's guaranteed-basic-income social democracy as Picard was able to enjoy by retiring to manage his family's ancient and respected vineyard in France. (Essentially, Picard seems to have still been technically working and contributing to society, where Musiker seems to be living on the fringes of society as a bum by choice.) It was never sterile, and debatably never communist... but the complaint is more about destroying that optimistic vision of the future where humanity had at least outgrown things like poverty, disease, and social inequality.

What, do you WANT to see people parading around in rainbow pleather onesies? Let's be honest, Garak was completely correct when he suggested the Romulans needed a good tailor.

Truth in television... the United States Army has, in 244 years, modified or outright replaced its uniform design 39 times, at least a dozen of which were major changes to the design of the entire uniform. They averaged about two changes per decade between 1810 and 2020, with the only skipped decades being the 1840s, 1860s, and 1980s. Not counting its predecessor, Earth Starfleet, the Federation Starfleet has been around for approximately 238 years at the time of Star Trek: Picard (2399) from the inauguration of the Federation in 2161. We've seen 15 or so different styles of Starfleet uniform (ENT, DSC, DSC-TOS, TOS Pilot, TOS, three major variants of the II-VI maroon uniform, three major variants of the base TNG uniform, the DS9/VOY uniform, the TNG Movie uniform, the Picard 2385, and Picard 2399. Really, if anything's unrealistic it's that Starfleet held onto the iconic "maroons" uniform almost unaltered for nearly a century (2270s to 2350s) with the only change being the shirt that was worn under it.

Yeah, the main Tenchi Muyo! OVAs can be a bit of a drag... Kagato's kind of a weak first villain, and Dr. Clay isn't much better. I've been marathoning Enrolled Demon Iruma (localised as Welcome to Demon School! Iruma-kun), and it's... odd. It's like someone combined Rosario+Vampire with Actually, I am....

Yeah, it is... but some Robotech fans really have been living under a rock all this time, and have no interest in "Japanimation" beyond Robotech. Robotech Remix and its constant references to Macross must be a weird, foreign experience to them.

A lot of that had to do with those of us who knew better torpedoing the various... interesting... interpretations of the Macross rights situation that Robotech fans were coming up with, virtually none of which bore any resemblance to objective reality. To be entirely fair, it isn't like Robotech fans concocted that ridiculous delusion themselves. That was a lie told by Carl Macek himself in several interviews, including the three-part interview he did that was published on the official Robotech franchise website in 2003. Macek was a habitual liar when it came to interviews and convention panels, and frequently exaggerated both Robotech's standing and his own to make himself seem more important. The lies changed over the years as his audience became more aware of Macross and Robotech's true origins, but he never stopped lying about it. He just changed to lying about aspects of it that were harder to verify. His early lies about having created the stories of Macross, Southern Cross, and MOSPEADA and paying the Japanese to animate them are lies that can be debunked with a few minutes on Google or Wikipedia. The lies he was telling in the early 2000s were harder for Robotech fans to spot the flaws in, because they required you to actually know a bit about Macross... something Harmony Gold spent a lot of time and effort discouraging Robotech fans from doing because Carl Macek was telling them that those original Japanese shows were flawed, inferior versions of Robotech. Poisonous toadstools don't change their spots, my friend. You'll find that, even now, many Robotech fans still desperately want to believe that Robotech is an internationally successful mega-hit and that Macross is some incredibly obscure TV series nobody would know about if not for Robotech... because the alternative is acknowledging the reality that Robotech was really never a successful series, that it never will be, and that it's actually even more obscure than they like to pretend Macross is. "Reflex denial", it would seem, is the ultimate expression of Robotechnology.

In before Newbie & Short Questions thread merge... Nope. The most we see/hear of Shin Kudo or Sara Nome after the ending of Macross Zero is when time-displaced versions of the main cast (Shin, Sara, Mao, Nora, and D.D.) from during the OVA's events briefly appear on the planet Uroboros in 2060 due to the influence of a Fold Evil that a rogue NUNS VF-X Special Forces unit is screwing with. "Canon" is a word that is difficult to apply to Macross. Shoji Kawamori's attitude towards continuity amounts to a "broad strokes" canon, and he's often opined that he sees each Macross title as a dramatization of a "true" history. (When you get right down to it, it's that he just wants to tell his stories and not get bogged down in minutae.) Official publications like Macross Chronicle generally favor the "series" version of any given story for timeline purposes, though as with DYRL they often acknowledge movie-only things as things that exist in their setting too but under a slightly different context. Examples include the movie VF-1 being a later block version of the VF-1 than the TV VF-1, or both of Exsedol's forms being true... one being his miclone form and one his giant form. As is customary for Macross, we don't really have any significant information about what happens to the characters after their story ends. Kawamori likes to move on once a character's story has ended, rather than have them hang around once they're no longer the focus of the story. Ranka and Sheryl are implied to have continued their music careers after the events of the series, but that's about all. The only hard info I can recall comes from non-official material like Variable Fighter Master File, which has some minor remarks that confirm that Ranka and Sheryl were still touring as idol singers into the 2060s. One entry describes a New UN Spacy squad which pulled escort duty during one of Ranka's tour stops on an emigrant planet in 2062 painting one of their VF-25Cs with her likeness to commemorate her visit there, and another describes the SMS bodyguard detail assigned to Sheryl once she started working out of Macross Olympia temporarily being redesignated a special unit "Queen's Knights" with modex numbers picked by Sheryl to match her and Alto's birthdays (Aircraft 1123 and 727). EDIT: The most we usually get when a past character is referenced is a brief and usually minimal statement of what they're up to... like Basara still bumming around space c.2060, or Kim Kabirov having stayed in the NUNS long enough to become a General.

Verniers. They're tagged with "Beware of Blast" markings. Dunno what those are, actually... I don't recall seeing any source explicitly identify them. Oh, those thrust-vectoring verniers never went away... they just got harder to model as VFs got bigger relative to the size of those verniers. If you look at the line art with a careful eye, you'll find they're still present on practically every major model of VF like the VF-11, VF-17, VF-19, VF-25, VF-27, and YF-29. General Galaxy pioneered an alternative approach on the space-optimized VF-14 Vampire that was the standard for space-use VF designs for a while. What they came up with was essentially a thrust-vectoring thrust reverser that they called a vernier ring. The vernier ring is essentially a bunch of small thrust reversers each covering a portion of the circumference of the engine nacelle, all able to be independently turned on or off to produce steerable thrust for maneuvering. By using this as a replacement for a lot of the high-thrust verniers, fewer verniers were needed elsewhere on the airframe and by using main engine thrust it reduced design complexity a bit by eliminating dedicated vernier systems and propellant tanks. General Galaxy used it on their VF-14, VF-17, and VF-171, and Shinsei even adopted it for their space-optimized VF-19 2nd mass production type (VF-19F/S).

Oh, it has one... that fin on its head is a semi-fixed, rear-facing, anti-aircraft laser system meant to cover the aircraft's blind spot in fighter mode. The production version had multiple options for that weapon, including the same model of laser used on the prototype or a more powerful miniature converging beam cannon. Even the VF-1 Valkyrie could... it's just a question of "for how long?". You see, a VF's thermonuclear reaction turbine engines use the heat produced in the compact thermonuclear reactor for both energy generation and for thrust production. Fighter mode energy usage is low because the energy conversion armor is either not running (Gen 1-4.5) or running in low power mode (Gen 5+), so most of the reactor's heat output can be reserved for producing thrust. GERWALK mode requires more electrical power for actuators and to increase the energy conversion armor's durability, so the available heat from the reactor to produce thrust is reduced because more of it is being converted into electricity. Battroid mode maximizes the energy demands because systems like pinpoint barrier projectors are active and the energy conversion armor is running at maximum power, so comparatively little heat is left available for thrust production. The limiting factor is going to be how much of a power surplus is available and the cooling state of the engines themselves. We see instances of practically every major VF being able to hold altitude in Battroid mode for at least a short time... I'd expect that they get better at it as time goes on, but it's all about engine surplus output and cooling. Much like the VF-1, it's an issue of fuel capacity and system efficiency. Early flight-capable mobile suits like the MSZ-006 Zeta Gundam and RGZ-95 ReZEL are using their Minovsky reactors to drive a pair of fairly small and rudimentary thermonuclear jet turbines for atmospheric flight. They've got a decent thrust-to-weight ratio (4.43607 for Camille's Zeta) but because the aerodynamics of the unit are poor they're basically flying on brute force as much as they are on lift, which is a terribly inefficient way to get around. Much like the VF-1, once they hit the atmospheric service limitation of those turbines they're stuck switching to rocket thrust to get around... but the Zeta Gundam's at a bit of a disadvantage there because its rockets aren't made for sustained flight and their output power is actually lower than that of the thermonuclear jet engines. They simply don't have enough fuel to keep going up once they hit the atmospheric service limitation, and once the tanks are dry you're flying a brick. The VF-1 Valkyrie had it better given that their thermonuclear reactor and generator design is a LOT more efficient and powerful than those of flying Mobile Suits, they've got a more aerodynamic profile, superconducting ram-air precompressors to function better at higher altitudes... but even with all that, they were burning the candle at both ends to even reach the edge of space (100km). Yeah, the initial generation thermonuclear reaction turbine engines were revolutionary and offered incredible fuel efficiency... but the thermonuclear reaction burst turbines that the 4th Generation VFs introduced and the Stage II thermonuclear reaction turbine engines the 5th Generation VFs introduced benefitted not just from improvements to fuel efficiency and heat energy conversion efficiency, but also from MUCH larger airframes with significantly more room for onboard fuel storage without having to resort to cheats like externally mounted fuel tanks. That greater efficiency, output power, and fuel capacity made flying straight to orbit a lot more achievable and efficient. The VF-0 Phoenix uses a pair of overtuned conventional turbofan jet engines for thrust and power generation... the output of which is a lot lower than what a thermonuclear reaction turbine engine is capable of. Even with the reduced energy demands of the much less powerful energy conversion armor, Battroid mode on a VF-0 is monopolizing at least 90% of a VF-0's generator output, leaving the engines generally incapable of sustaining flight by thrust alone.

Yup... but it comes across more as that guy with the neckbeard, fedora, and katana saying "*teleports behind you* 'nothing personal kid'". Star Trek: Picard has a pretty high cringe quotient.

Uwe Boll, call your agent. ... and before the hilariously bad Voltron crossover, it was the comic book tie-in to the failed Shadow Chronicles OVA. Before that, it was the limited run reboot comics that were basically bad Macross fanfics. And before THAT it was a series of steaming turds that sold so poorly Harmony Gold mercy-killed the license and now refuses to acknowledge them because of all the copyright infringement. Robotech is a veritable smorgasbord of sh*t. You can cherrypick if you like, but the difference is between stool samples... not turds and chocolate bonbons.

For what it's worth, the rear-facing laser or beam gun positioned to provide coverage for the aircraft's blind spot was a concept that Shinsei Industry would fully realize on its very next design a few years after the VF-4's introduction: the VF-5000 Star Mirage. Coaxial gun mounts don't seem to have been considered essential equipment after the First Space War. The more traditionalist designers at Shinsei Industry kept them on most of their designs, but the more experimentally-minded designers at General Galaxy left them out of their company's flagship 2nd and 3rd Generation VF designs (VF-9 and VF-14) and didn't adopt them until their late 3rd Generation special forces fighter concept (the VF-17).

More like Robotech's Make a Wish Foundation wish to be "American Macross".

Well, that's probably got a lot to do with the radically different transformation... the VF-4's head is mounted dorsally where the body merges into the wing surface. The VF-4 compensates for the lack of coaxial laser cannons with a pair of high-powered particle beam cannons mounted on its forearms that fill many of the same roles while offering a lot more stopping power. We've seen (in the Macross M3 opening cinematic) these beam guns one-shot a power-up Glaug. Macross: Eternal Love Song - one of the two Macross II: Lovers Again prequel games - was the first title to feature a transformation for the VF-4. Its VF-4, which was called the VF-4 Siren, had a more VF-1-like transformation, four coaxial lasers on a VF-1SR-like monitor turret, a beam rifle that bears a startling (and probably not coincidental) resemblance to the one made for the Zeta Gundam, and funnels. Kawamori's VF-4G has a variant head that IIRC has only been seen in model kits (pictured below), which features a rear-facing beam gun similar to those found on later models of VF in addition to its particle beam cannons.

@sketchley's answer captured the situation with admirable completeness... though I'd add two more factors, the size of the fleet and the state of the fleet economy. Most, if not all, of the emigrant fleets that were launched with the VF-4 Lightning III as their main fighter were the 1st and 2nd generation emigrant fleets. Comparatively small fleets of a few dozen ships led by a Megaroad-class ship with ~80,000 emigrants. Those early fleets weren't economic powerhouses the way the much larger fleets that followed were with their millions-strong populations and dedicated factory ships, so with their more limited manpower and skill sets they'd likely have lacked the resources to develop major updates to the VF-4 themselves. That'd put more pressure on them to upgrade to newer models if they could afford it. The governments that couldn't would just soldier on with their VF-4G's until the cost of maintenance got too high. (Pressures like this did not disappear in the larger fleets, though... Back then, there wasn't as much of a difference between the main UN Spacy forces and the emigrant fleet forces... so you'd get an answer of "Yes" to both. The VF-4G was the last (official) variant developed for the VF-4, used by the main UN Spacy and emigrant fleets alike. To be fair, we should probably draw a distinction between the last general-issue production variant (VF-1X) and aftermarket modifications like the VF-1X++ and VF-1EX. All available evidence points to "before". Like all Master File books, it self-disclaims as not part of or relevant to the official setting, so it can do stuff like that and get away with it because it isn't really trying to line up 100% with the official setting. The VF-4 book was a bloody train wreck though... critical research failure. Yes, it's within the realm of possibility. That said, the way aircraft are phased in and out of service pretty much guarantees that the VF-4 remained in service well after its nominal replacement as main fighter. It takes years for an aircraft to be gradually phased out of service when its replacement is being phased in, as units retrain on their new aircraft during the transition. Often, those older aircraft are kept around for training purposes and used for miscellaneous purposes for years or even decades after their replacement. This bit of "Truth in Television" holds true in Macross too... in Macross 7 Trash, a Macross 7 side story set in 2046, we see that the 37th Long-Distance Emigrant Fleet Macross-7 is still using the VF-4 as a training aircraft and a testbed for some experimental technologies. (A testing accident in one that leads to the test pilot's death is what kicks off the plot.) In Macross the Ride, the Macross Frontier fleet is still in the process of decommissioning and disposing of its VF-11s in 2058... by which point they're also in the last stages of picking the VF-11's successor's successor. (Chelsea Scarlett buys three VF-11Bs in a NUNS disposal sale to build her VF-11B Nothung II custom race plane at the end of the story.) Part of that is misleading, since (as was recently pointed out to me on another board) the VF-4 article is actually missing the overboost values for the main engines... and on top of that, the VF-4 doesn't have any performance spec for its ramjets or rockets. So when you get down to it, the VF-4G on main engine thrust alone should have a peak T/W value of 5.67722 not 2.37, slightly better than the VF-1X's 5.19837, and the VF-4's got four more engines to supplement that advantage with, not to mention more weaponry. (One other area M3 needs correction is that Overboost on the late block VF-1 and VF-4 is 240% not 200% as seen in the art.)

This really has been a rather disappointing season... there have been a number of new shows I've had to force myself to marathon just to get through them.

Well those are some unexpectedly specific questions... I'll do my best to help. Approximately 23,300 square feet, I believe... probably slightly more. https://arts.torranceca.gov/venues/meeting-rooms-and-banquet-facilities Assuming the layout won't be changing this year, SDCon is spread out across three areas of the Torrance Cultural Arts Center: the Toyota Meeting Hall, Torino Festival Plaza, and Ken Miller Recreation Center. Check-in is in the Toyota Meeting Hall lobby, and the Meeting Hall itself is the vendor hall and artist booths. The Torino Festival Plaza is where they do the group events like the art contest, karaoke, and the auctions, as well as where the concession stands and cosplay cafe set up. The Ken Miller Recreation Center auditorium holds the panels, cosplay contest, and concert, with autograph sessions with the convention guests being held in the lobby and the memorabilia museum in the adjoining assembly room. It's a smallish convention, usually a couple hundred people. I have some photos from previous years I can share, though I believe the con's facebook page has some good pics from previous years taken with cameras better than my humble POS cell phone camera. Well, that's up to you isn't it? Speaking as a fellow Michigander, that flight from Detroit Metro to Los Angeles International can be a bit of a bear if you're not used to long flights. It's approximately 5 hours if you fly direct. More like 7 if you take a connection through Salt Lake City or Minneapolis/St. Paul. That said, I've found the con enjoyable enough to fly out for the last four years and I'm planning to do it again this year. I usually try to take a few extra days and do some tourist-y stuff in the area to get the most out of the airfare... side trips to places like the USS Iowa, the Aquarium of the Pacific, or the La Brea Tar Pits Museum. (It's pretty easy to game the system to get cheap airfare, though the hotels are on the expensive side since the venue is near the fashion district and the hotel restaurants are on the expensive side too.) It's a smallish con, so I'm not sure I'd say it's a "big deal". There's usually at least one high profile guest like Mari Iijima (Minmay), Run Sasaki (Vanessa Laird), or last year's coup double-feature of Tsutomu Takeyama (Hibiki Kanzaki) and Takumi Yamazaki (Isamu Dyson). One year they got the US Renditions crew who did Macross II's dub, including several of the key voice actors. Usually most of the "big name" fans who run the major English-language fansites are there, like MW's Shawn, the Speakerpodcast guys, Richard from Gubabablog, etc. (not sure if I count in that, for M3?) and the auctions invariably have one-of-a-kind collectibles like original sketches from Tenjin Hidetaka or other artists. The "party scene" is pretty laid-back. The afterparty was made an official event last year, and it was a pretty relaxed event in one of the Torrance Marriott's ballrooms. Light social drinking, music, that kind of thing. Nothing I'd characterize as a wild party, TBH.

... I have it. The most perfect way to Macross-ize MOSPEADA. The Mars forces defeat the Invid by blasting Crab Rave at them and they all start dancing. It's so horrible, this comic might actually DO it!

Alternatively, this entire series is just Sela gaslighting Picard for yuks... the Zhat Vash doesn't exist, Dahj and her sister are paid actors, and the whole thing's just a sham.

Bah, who cares... all that matters is whether or not you've brought enough melted butter and a robust enough hammer.

Yahari Ore no Seishun Love Come wa Machigatteiru is... interesting. It's kind of depressing, really, given how perversely proud Hachiman is of being socially withdrawn and how much hate he seems to have for his classmates.

Eh, maybe... but none of them ever approached the level of animosity towards artificial lifeforms that's on display in Star Trek: Picard. They were also pretty much invariably the ONLY person present who didn't regard Data as an equal when they appeared and everyone else was visibly a little put out by their attitude. True to Star Trek form, Hobson, Haftel, Maddox, and Pulaski all changed their tune fairly quickly and all but Pulaski pulled their respective 180s in the space of a single episode. Odds are he'd probably be pretty disappointed in his future self for leaving Starfleet and his ideals for such a petty reason instead of trying to reform the organization and live up to the ideals he espouses.

We don't have to look back very far... because they're still using it. The last time someone called me a "Macross purist" and meant it as an insult was barely two months ago. It was always most popular among the Robotech fans who thought the Masters Saga was actually watchable.