Seto Kaiba

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.

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.)