Seto Kaiba

Well, there is at least some evidence to suggest the VF-17T Kai may have had wing pylons or some special equipment attachment point added during customization... since IIRC we see Ray deploy a Speaker Pod Gamma that way. Ah, yeah... I figured it was probably copy-pasted from the VF-171 page. lol, I wasn't exactly intending to complain... just wondering if you knew something I didn't. My inclination would be to connect that to the remarks made in Macross Chronicle about the VF-17's armaments being heavily modularized and easily exchanged/customized with other optional hardware... a trait inherited by its successor/descendant, the VF-171 Nightmare Plus, which enabled it to be converted to other mission roles like the VB-171. Granted... but it's packing more stuff in there too. Not just the gunpod and beam adapter (or spare magazines), it also needs that space for things like fuel tanks that double as the reactor coolant in space operations.

Eh... like any Facebook group, the number of members has no real relationship with the number of actual human beings or the number of actual contributors. Where it gets really fun is that those three numbers can be mutually exclusive thanks to bot accounts, dead accounts, and groups that allow non-members to post. Look at the actual activity in that group, and you'll see it conforms much more closely to what you'd expect from a Robotech group dedicated to the fanbase's un-favorite saga. They have about four active users, maybe fourteen if you count people who post once in a blue moon. Not fourteen hundred. Most of the group's activity is, as you'd expect, from two or three very dedicated users among whom are the group's administrator and everyone's favorite flesh-and-blood spambot and the ONLY Japanese Southern Cross fan Yuasa-san. To be fair, it wouldn't be surprising if a lot of those 1,400 members are bots or dead accounts... those two categories seem to make up a plurality if not a majority of all Facebook user accounts these days. THIS! Now, in all seriousness... one of Robotech's biggest stumbling blocks as a franchise is that most of its fans don't actually like Robotech. What the Robotech fanbase is obsessed with, as a result of going-on 35 years of failures and false starts, is not the Robotech series itself. What the fandom is obsessed with are its collective rose-tinted memories of the Robotech TV series, twisted and warped by the action of imperfect recall and decades of wild theorizing and headcanon-ing every little detail of the story and setting. The version of Robotech that the vast majority of the Robotech fan base loves simply doesn't exist outside of their own minds. When forced to confront the gap between their recollections and objective reality, it causes a cognitive conflict that ends one of two ways. They either walk away from the series after realizing that it doesn't stand up to their (fictive) memories of it, or they deny reality and insist that their recollections are accurate. It makes it very difficult to have any kind of discussion with large portions of the Robotech fandom, since anything that challenges their imperfect recollections must be wrong in their eyes... and that includes more recent developments from the franchise's creative staff. Sometimes, those fictive memories can be so wide of the mark that they bear no resemblance to the show or story at all. One of the Robotech fans I was on pretty good terms with for a very long time sincerely believed that there was an early test broadcast cut where Stick/Scott killed Batra/Corg execution-style with a ride armor's missiles rather than shooting him down in a dogfight. He would absolutely not hear of it that that memory was false and no such scene was ever animated. ... they don't, though. Even if they did, it would still be a ripoff... but they don't, so it's copyright infringement and that's a crime. Harmony Gold's license only covers the distribution and merchandising rights to the original 36 episode Super Dimension Fortress Macross TV series and to the two other unrelated TV anime series Genesis Climber MOSPEADA and Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross. They have a second, separate license to just the merchandising rights for the Macross: Do You Remember Love? movie that they got c.2001 to prevent imports of higher-quality Macross VF-1 toys from threatening their then-pending Toynami VF-1 "Masterpiece Collection" line, but that's it. They can't even use the designs of the original Macross series in new film works, they can only use them in merchandise like comic books, toys, or games. They've got no rights to any other Macross title... because the company they license their rights from - Tatsunoko Production - also doesn't have any rights to subsequent Macross works. (In fact, Tatsunoko once took Macross's owners Big West to court to claim they should at least be entitled to a share of the profits from subsequent Macross titles because they had worked on and partially funded production of the original series... an argument the court rejected completely, because Tatsunoko had only funded production not development and therefore had no rights to the intellectual property of the original series or the franchise.) Ripoff recursion? It was basically never relevant... at the apex of its popularity it was only a middle-of-the-pack kids show with an unsuccessful toy line. It was all downhill from there. Nobody wants to buy the Robotech franchise from Harmony Gold because the only part of it that's worth anything are the Macross distribution and merchandising rights, and even that isn't worth much because the license doesn't include the rights that would let them use the Macross designs in derivative works like a new TV show or movie. It would only be valuable to someone who intended to scuttle the not-so-good ship Robotech and negotiate with Macross's owners in Japan to bring the rest of the Macross franchise over.

Oh my... I can hardly wait. That or sheer laziness. So many of the old Robotech comics, like Titan's first Robotech run, were simply ripping off whatever was popular/iconic at the time. Macross Plus, Ghost in the Shell, Independence Day, and a dozen other titles fell victim to copyright infringement under Robotech's flag. That's why HG won't reprint most of the old comics, and why they won't ever consider them canon... it'd only draw attention to the crime. By bilking Robotech fans for $1.4 million (US) to make a tabletop game while lying about the actual completion level of the game's development, concealing massive cost overruns in development due to poor planning, misappropriating most of the remaining development budget to produce retail stock of their half-completed game on the (wrong) assumption it would sell like mad and fund the rest of development, and then spending the next several years lying to their backers and Harmony Gold itself about the state of the project to cover up the fact that nothing was being worked on after they found out the hard way they'd massively overestimated demand for the game and blown the entire remaining budget on an idiotic attempt to replenish it using profits from retail sales of the game, leaving them idiotically stuck holding a huge pile of unsold (and unsellable) inventory in their warehouse as pissed-off Kickstarter backers destroyed what little retail market remained for the game by flipping their backer rewards on eBay for a fraction of retail price, all while they waited for the fan outrage to mount to a level where Harmony Gold would rake them over the coals and possibly sue them for fraud. Most Harmony Gold licensees either give up because they realize there's no money to be made in Robotech, or because they do such a poor job that Harmony Gold isn't making any money on what the licensees produce. Palladium Books are the only ones who've managed to lose the license through sheer criminal misconduct. Been there, done that... or at least it seems that way given the (frankly sh*t-awful) quality of what Antarctic Press was publishing. Their comics were so crappy that Robotech fans APPLAUDED the decision to revoke Antarctic's license. More another loop in a terminal spiral... but it is what it is. Nope, cockroaches are WAY too successful at propagating themselves... Robotech is more like a coelacanth. You go ages without ever seeing it, and when it does finally turn up on one of its infrequent public appearances the main topic for discussion is why this relic of a bygone era is still around at all.

So... like Janeway, but without coffee? (EDIT: Actually, I'd pay to watch that... a truly cantankerous Starfleet captain, as if Gordon Ramsey decided to go into the hard sciences instead of culinary arts.) Fleet Admiral Clancey is rapidly becoming my favorite character in Star Trek: Picard. It seems that, in her minimal appearances, she's the only one who really properly understands what a load of crap this plot is and how completely full of himself Picard is. ... jeez. So we're watching Michael Chabon's Mass Effect fanfic acted out with Star Trek action figures then? ... why does this sound like an abused wife trying to convince herself that her husband really might mean it when he says he's changed this time?

While that helps a bit, it still doesn't chase away the thought that any self-respecting VF-1 would vomit her out rather than let her pilot it. No, but a Macross title not being released in the US has never proved to be an impediment to Robotech comic book authors ripping it off. Macross 7 was never released in the US, and Antarctic Press still ripped off the VF-19F Excalibur for one of their Robotech titles. Flash Back 2012 not being released in the US didn't stop Academy Comics from infringing on Big West's copyrights by using the VF-4A. Etc. Probably not. It's very rare for Robotech to end up working again with the same licensee twice... mostly because those licenses tend to end with the licensee dropping the license due to the title's perennially poor performance, but sometimes because HG itself dropped the licensee due to crap quality (e.g. Academy, Antarctic) or because of some great shame that further tarred the Robotech brand (Palladium). My suspicion is that, once Titan drops Robotech, they'll have to shop it around to find some other indie comic publisher willing to gamble on the Robotech brand because they were too stupid to investigate the brand's standing and took HG's press packet on faith.

Is it? I've never played Mass Effect... Perhaps unintentionally... due to the crap quality of the writing. ... no, this is definitely a Thing That Happened. She's also got a light-up spinal column like a Cylon from the Battlestar Galactica reboot.

Remember when the Star Trek: Picard showrunners said that returning characters from previous shows were going to be confined to mere cameos and guest appearances? Yeah, that was a bald-faced lie. This and more garbage on See? BS All Access. So now, "Broken Pieces". The Good The Bad The Ugly

Nothing explicitly stated... but we're all really hoping.

There was likely a fairly brisk competition between the various emerging megacorps that would dominate the defense/technology industry to improve the capabilities and reliability of fold systems in the wake of the First Space War. Improved reliability and efficiency aside, there doesn't seem to have been a real breakthrough until the Critical Path corporation discovered that fold quartz could be applied to fold technology to produce all kinds of improvements. Macross Delta was the first look we actually got at an interstellar freighter... and it looks like the lovechild of an ARMD-class space carrier and a big rig truck. A little from column A, a little from column B. We know that the purity of fold quartz impacts the quality of the heavy quanta it produces when energized, and that in turn impacts the intensity of the gravitational effects that the heavy quanta can produce. So the purer the fold quartz, the harder you can twist space and time. When you get to fold quartz levels of purity, you can produce gravity so intense it can effectively create black hole-like effects (which is how MDE weapons work). I think the biggest problem would be keeping the top packs with the beam guns aligned with the back, since the VF-171 has a much more VF-1-like transformation. Probably some old RPG stats... I'm pretty sure that's not the case, but I can see how they might draw that conclusion since Gamlin dumps his Super Pack (after exhausting its missiles) before transforming in Macross 7 ep44.

Or at least the Battroid vomiting her up out the neck hatch and then being violently ill...

Ah, you're right... I've got 3. I forgot about that one, since it's not in my study at home. It's in my office at work.

Can't say I'm surprised... audiences in Japan didn't have much use for Southern Cross either. Despite being in a good time slot, its ratings performance was so poor that TBS decided to drop it when the series was barely half-complete and several licensees opted to take a loss on the cost of the license and focus on other shows rather than continue developing merch for it. It didn't do much better as a part of Robotech, and remains a perennial unfavorite of the Robotech fandom to this day. Rather a risky move on Titan's part to make Robotech's single most hated character the main character of their new comic series... though from what I've seen this version manages to NOT be the offensively moronic airhead that so often motivated audiences to change the channel. "A Dana who doesn't suck" is a new and rather novel concept, TBH. How (in)appropriate its fit with Macross was probably wasn't even on their radar... they needed to throw together a series on the cheap, and they don't come much cheaper than a total flop like Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross. MOSPEADA was probably chosen for similar reasons too, since it was only a so-so performer ratings-wise and its merchandise line in Japan wasn't much better off.

Now if it were Komilia, that'd be one thing... but that wretched creature from Southern Cross? Talk about tainting an icon. I think that's kind of the point... otherwise they'll just get sued for ripping off Macross M3. Who IS this series for, again? Changes hands to who? This isn't a world where people are living in blissful ignorance of Robotech's history of epic failure... who would possibly want this turd now that a dedicated turd polisher has apparently failed with it? You say that like it's a bad thing.

Palpatine is confused! Palpatine used Force Lightning! Palpatine hurt itself in its confusion!

Yeah, but that's the Queen Mother of All Acceptable Targets... one of those titles that stands at the apex of Weeb Sh*t. I've finished Mangaka-san to Assistant-san to, and all I can really say for it as far as redeeming qualities is that it's short... being just 12 half-length episodes. Since Crunchyroll had it, I'm rewatching Nagasarete Airantou on a lark. It's entertaining to have a harem comedy where the harem protagonist isn't merely arbitrarily reluctant to be with the hordes of beautiful women throwing themselves at him. Even better if it has actual character development and a plot besides excuses for fanservice.

The decentralization of the government wasn't something that happened all at once... it was a very gradual process caused by the logistical problems of trying to remotely govern emigrant planets and fleets that were months or even years distant from Earth via space fold. Bilra owns an interstellar cargo service, so finding ways to overcome fold faults or even just making his fold systems more efficient and powerful would have been a HUGE draw for him. What logistics/freight company doesn't want to be the fastest around when it comes to delivery? The transformation changed pretty extensively, so I'd suspect they wouldn't work. Are you sure about some of the stuff on that page? You've got the VF-17 listed with wing pylons... in green text no less... but official writeups like the one in Macross Chronicle say ALL of the production VF-17's armaments were internalized to preserve its passively stealthy performance. Looking back at the official line art for the VF-17's bays, they don't seem all that capacious... certainly no more than the ones shown on the VF-11, VF-19, or VF-22. The kind of payload space that'll get you one reaction missile, maybe two medium-range missiles, or a dozen micro-missiles. The bays can't take up that much space because they're sharing space with the gunpod bay and things like the landing gear. Between the leg bays holding maybe twelve micro-missiles and the ~3 per port on built-in launchers, that's just 36 missiles. Not a huge sum compared to what you can get by using wing pylons to carry launcher pods.

That was my problem too... I watched two, maybe three episodes, and felt like Chris Hansen was gonna bust through my wall like the goddamn Kool-Aid Man. I'm told it's loaded with aviation history fanservice too, but I can't get past the fact that it's basically pure lolicon fanservice otherwise.

The novelization of the Macross Frontier TV series was the first to make something like that explicit, by revealing that the 117th Research Fleet's disastrous mission to Vajra space was at least partly instigated by the Critical Path corporation as part of their research into fold quartz and its potential military applications. Richard Bilra, the owner of Bilra Transport and its subsidiary Strategic Military Services, went to some pretty extreme lengths in his quest to overcome the obstacle fold faults posed to interstellar travel and commerce. He commissioned an entire emigrant fleet to go gallivanting off into Vajra space in search of a stable supply of fold quartz, established the pseudo-covert fold dimensional resonance program on the isolated emigrant planet Uroboros to develop a method to reliably penetrate fold faults without having to disclose the technology to the New UN Government, and sank a lot of cash into fold quartz research. It wouldn't be at all surprising if he also bought black market fold carbon from galactic whale carcasses in the hopes that it'd be more potent than the advanced synthetic fold carbon used in fold drives or thermonuclear reactor GICs. The Nightmare was an unusual one, for sure... very little payload versatility, but a surprising amount of integrated beam weaponry and nearly three times as tough as the VF-1. By the RPG stats I've written for it, it would've been one hell of a brawler. My current game's players are more about the VF-171. They've discovered that, thanks to its heavy modularity, it's basically a Swiss Army VF. All it's really missing is an Armored Pack. It'd be a hell of a thing if they came up with something like the Reflector Pack, since VF gunpods seem to be moving away from hard rounds to heavy quantum beam weapons... that would, durability aside, effectively make a fighter invulnerable to everything but missiles.

Me too, apparently... I just have a Messer and a 31A.

... unironically? Big F.

I've just started Mangaka-san to Assistant-san to and I think I set an all-time record for "show that had me looking at my watch the fastest". Ecchi comedy is a fruit so low-hanging you need a deep bore mine to pick it, and yet this show still manages to be bad at it... which is oddly impressive in a depressing sort of way. It's like watching someone die in a freak shoe-tying accident. You just can't help being impressed when bearing witness to such a master class in failure. It's not funny and it's not entertaining. It's just faintly embarrassing. If I were siding with Japan's "won't someone think of the children" moral guardian types and wanted to show that anime and manga are a bad influence on the country's youth, it'd be a toss-up between picking this or Strike Witches to build a case around.

Yeah, lol... I think I was still in high school when that site was at the apex of its popularity. The timeframe of Macross Dynamite 7 is about right for the discovery, in-setting, that there were biological lifeforms that possessed more advanced and powerful fold abilities than a manufactured starship. First contact with the Vajra had been around seven years ago, and the 117th Research Fleet's great expedition to Vajra space was already well underway with Critical Path Corporation (pioneers in fold quartz tech) footing the bill. Given that the Vahla Ena are a protected species, the likely client for whale carcasses is a private business interest with a vested interest in securing vast quantities of high purity fold crystals. This train of thought can go in an uncomfortable direction when you realize that most of the likely buyers for those materials are "heroic" companies from later shows, with the most likely culprit being none other than SMS's parent company Bilra Transport. None of my players ever showed any interest in the VF-17... they were always about the VF-11 or the VF-19. We had a similar situation in the Macross II game I used to run, with my players referring to the big damn railgun on the VF-2SS's Super Armed Pack as the "F-You Button" since using it for a called shot on an enemy mecha was basically a one-hit kill on any particularly frustrating enemy. (Justified, in that we see them splashing Gigameshes with the railgun in the OVA itself, and they're basically the heaviest-armored thing the Mardook have.) There are a few mentions of an electrical connection in the hand that provides power and data connections to the gunpod of some of the earlier model of VF. I'd assume that that didn't go away in later models. I doubt they'd have something like the G-Self's reflector pack from Reconguista in G though... damage from beam weapons was mostly dealt with using ablative anti-beam coatings and good old fashioned getting out of the way.

Oh man, I had forgotten about SteelFalcon. So much outdated info, lol. That whale poaching outfit in Dynamite 7 was suspiciously well-equipped... like, they had a fold-capable ship, a bunch of VA-3s, and were buying all kinds of black market weaponry like a thermonuclear reaction warhead. They were never entirely clear on how galactic whale carcasses are used, but the implication was that they could be easily made into materials for a fold system. I suspect they're a source of high-purity fold carbon, which would be very valuable in a pre-fold quartz galaxy. Yeah, it's a surprisingly small module for the kind of firepower Gamlin gets out of it... though IIRC we never see one fire twice, so it may be one-and-done. They go back and forth on how FAST Pack-mounted energy weapons are powered. Some, like the VF-1's Strike Pack, are indicated to be powered by the VF's own reactors or running off a rechargeable battery/capacitor that is constantly trickle-charging off the VF's reactors. Others, like the VF-11's Armored Pack or VF-25's Armored Pack, are supposedly running off internal capacitors only. With stopping power like that, I'd assume it's probably powered by the VF's reactors given how small it seems to be.

It works well in the sense that it keeps new Macross features largely accessible to new viewers... because it's an effective way to prevent the kind of continuity lockout problems that the Universal Century Gundam shows have become increasingly prone to. On the other hand, the more inquisitive casual viewers and fans can find this position frustrating since it makes it difficult to have a definitive answer to many questions. This, I suspect, is why Macross publications try to go both ways on it... Kawamori has his view, while some printed works take a firmer attitude towards continuity. Everyone gets what they want, and (almost) nobody goes home unhappy.

Much like the Robotech fandom, Khorne's standards have gotten lower over the years... ... which, in the case of Southern Cross, is asking the impossible.