Seto Kaiba

Variable Fighter Master File initially drew pretty heavily on the old Sky Angels VF-1 tech manual for that kind of info and dredged up quite a few obscure and dated factoids. Well, to be fair, they do essentially just copy-paste from Macross fansites for this kind of thing. (They've ended up accidentally referencing a few DYRL-specific things with all that copy-pasting, like the UUM-7 micro-missile pods ending up in the RT stats because Macross sites don't differentiate between TV and movie specs.) Master File's take is that the Prometheus was only home to about 1/2 of the total VF-1 complement the SDF-1 Macross was carrying. Variable Fighter Master File: SDF-1 Macross VF-1 Squadrons asserts that there were 14 squadrons in total with 7 stationed on the Prometheus and 7 on the Macross itself. Yes, they were. We see a VF-1A aboard ARMD-01 when Vrlitwhai's shooting it up in Super Dimension Fortress Macross's first episode, and the oldest version of the ARMD-class spec says their normal aircraft complement is 78 SF-3A Lancer IIs, 270 QF-3000E Ghosts, and 18 VF-1A Valkyries. (The postwar complement for ARMD-9 thru 16 in the same book - Sky Angels - is given as 96 Regults, 120 Ghosts, and 24 VF-1As.) Possibly the same as the DYRL? version. The reason the UN Spacy used SF-3A Lancer IIs in the initial encounter was because they made up the bulk of the aircraft complement that the Harlan J. Niven1 (ARMD-01) and Invincible (ARMD-02) carried, and contrary to their fighter designation they're basically attackers meant for anti-warship hit and run strikes. The Lancer II's basically a manned missile, with a 1500kN-class (2255kN-class at max power) thermonuclear rocket engine providing propulsion. It's got a pair of 750MW beam cannons (that's 150x as powerful as the VF-1's lasers) and six light thermonuclear reaction missiles. It's designed to strafe enemy ships at 7km/s or so and then cold cruise for recovery. The unit even comes equipped with a cold sleep system in the event the pilot misses recovery on the first orbit. It's powerful, but it's all-or-nothing on its one attack run. The VF-1s would've been kind of a poor choice since the Super Pack was still in operational evaluation back then, and the way thermonuclear reaction turbine engines work a VF-1 consumes its fuel exponentially2 faster in space... giving it only a few minutes of burn time at maximum thrust before its tanks are dry unless augmented by bolt-on tanks. Without thermonuclear reaction warheads of their own, or at least the Strike Pack that didn't even exist yet in-universe, they wouldn't have made much of a dent. They were never really rivals... the Lancer II was a product of the sort of gleeful insanity that comes with a golden age of technological development. It's basically the UN Spacy's riff on the Bachem Ba 349. 1. One of the more shameless nods in the oldest material, the Earth Unification Government's first prime minister was Harlan J. Niven... named for Harlon Jay Ellison and Larry Niven. He was assassinated in office, but ARMD-01 was named in his honor. His successor, Robert A. Rhysling, is named for Robert Heinlein and the Rhysling Award and had ARMD-14 named in his honor. 2. 4,200x faster. The same 1,410L of hydrogen slush that confers 700 hours of continuous operating time in atmosphere is burned through in a mere 10 minutes of maximum thrust in space because plasma from the compact thermonuclear reactor is used as a propellant for space flight to simplify the fuel system and maximize its capacity. This is why conformal fuel tanks became so important for space operations. Master File claims the SDF-1 Macross used a stopgap to extend range slightly, installing fuel bladders in the unused-in-space main intakes and BLCS sub-intakes.

That'd be an odd but welcome bit of off-color humor. As badly as Titan's Robotech and Robotech Remix are written, I suspect attempting to ascribe any kind of sane or rational motive to any character's actions is a bit of a boondoggle. It's better to assume they're all coming off of heavy doses of surgical anesthetic and aren't quite rational.

... never expected to get summoned to the CaliberWings thread, what with me being vehemently opposed to supporting any Harmony Gold licensee on principle. It's not as boneheaded as it could've been, I suppose... Max and Milia's VF-1Js are the only two main character VF-1s that never had any modex number attached to them in an official or semi-official source. Applying the same number to both is a boneheaded mistake, sure as sure, but at least they didn't compound it by also contradicting an official number. They could have literally picked any two numbers and been OK... (For the record, Roy's VF-1S had 001, Hikaru's original VF-1J had 023, Max's VF-1A had 111, and Kakizaki's 112... except in DYRL, where Hikaru, Kakizaki, and Max were 011, 012, and 013 respectively.) Variable Fighter Master File: VF-1 Valkyrie Vol.1 "Stratosphere Wings" asserts that Max and Milia's VF-1Js were stationed aboard the SDF-1 Macross itself, rather than the Prometheus. It attempts to justify this, and other things, by asserting that the Spacy leveraged the PR importance of the first interstellar marriage by relieving Max of his regular duties and putting him and his new bride in a new independent unit codenamed "Love Birds", which was based directly aboard the Macross. They fulfilled a variety of duties, including acting as a mobile reserve force to leverage their super-ace talents during the war. The lack of a modex on either aircraft seems to be intentional, as they're outside regular force organization. In later "Love Birds" paintjobs, like the one for the VF-4, Max and Milia's modex numbers were 01 and 02 respectively. 212 and 150 respectively. Exactly where they came from is unclear... but Master File at least claims that they were deliberately painted for Max and Milia's personal use.

But how will they save Zion without the powers of The One? Because death would be a sweet release from this Robotech nightmare, and he doesn't want to suffer alone? ... when you try way too hard to give a character a meaningful name... What's next? The Death of Rick? Funeral for a Flop? Reign of the Rickmen? It's like they're trying to cram all the concentrated stupid of other, more successful properties with badly thought-out multiverse settings into one comic. Are we in for Rickboy Prime? Rick-616? The Amazing Arachno-Rick? (Okay, I've taken the joke too far and now it just sounds like I'm pitching episode titles for Rick and Morty...) Just in case you weren't already clear they were completely out of ideas. So now the plot can finally transition from almost completely incomprehensible to COMPLETELY incomprehensible and anything resembling continuity can f*ck off. ... Titan Comics must really have a problem with the employees huffing paint, or they must REALLY be desperate to fill page count. Harmony Gold couldn't organize their own sock drawers, and their previous takes on Robotech were pretty misogynistic. If anything like this is going on, and I suspect you're just reading things into it that aren't there in the search for nonexistent hidden meanings, it's almost certainly Titan Comics trying to find a market for this steaming turd because the profit margin's shrinking as Robotech fans abandon this going-nowhere mess.

That fleet was from the Brisingr Alliance NUNS. Its commander was the same guy who visited Xaos repping the local NUNS Staff Office earlier in the series.

None of that involved clownish levels of cosplay though... even on the part of the local Planet of Hats. Even on the wackier holodeck adventures or when Q decided to throw everyone into a recreation of Robin Hood folklore, it didn't cross the line into looking completely ridiculous the way "Stardust City Rag" did. Voyager had one really good, silly one involving that 19th century Irish town holoprogram Tom Paris created that was used in a few episodes. The period dress was taken completely seriously, but in "Spirit Folk" the program's built-in weirdness censor that kept the holograms from noticing out-of-character/setting behavior failed and they became convinced that their visitors from Voyager were trickster faeries and tried to exorcise them. As far as lurid dress, there was that one Hawaiian shirt that Tucker wore that even T'Pol snarked at... but even that doesn't come close to this: Incidentally, didn't we last see this bouncer in Hellraiser?

They're not similar at all, though... Chobham armor is ceramic tiles arranged in a complex sandwich of fiber-reinforced plastics, rubber, and corrugated aluminum. The armor material in Macross is layered, laminated, metallic carbon allotrope. Like bulletproof glass, except the glass is replaced by layers of metallic carbon harder than diamond. OTM isn't the name... OTM is short for OverTechnology of Macross, the term that was used in even the oldest materials to refer to pretty much any technology or supermaterial which was reverse engineered from the Macross. Also, "space metal" didn't come from Kawamori... it came from Masahiro Chiba, who included the term in his detailed write-up of the VF-1 as one of several nods he made to Mobile Suit Gundam in it. (Specifically, a nod to the Luna Titanium the titular Gundam was made from.) "Hypercarbon" could be said to be Kawamori's term for it... but it's not Carbon 60 (Buckminsterfullerene), hypercarbon is a metallic carbon allotrope. An allotrope of carbon that had metallic properties was pure sci-fi until 2015, when NSCU researchers created a substance called Q-carbon that is harder than diamond, metallic, and responds to magnetic fields. ... perhaps it would be advisable to care at least enough to get your facts straight?

Honestly, the trailer for the next episode is easily the most horrific part of this episode... This episode was merely awful, that trailer promises a viewing experience so painful it contravenes laws on the humane treatment of prisoners of war.

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).