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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Oh yeah, it's HUGE... in Macross 7 Trash, 1st Lt. Heuer owns or at least has access to one that's been converted for manned use with a fairly roomy two-man side-by-side cockpit.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    May I inquire what about it strikes you as incorrect? If it's the size of the SF-3A Lancer II or QF-3000E Ghost, they've always been those sizes... going all the way back to the 1984 Sky Angels tech manual.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Yep, Wiki Magic is a beautiful thing... especially when it saves people from having to buy obnoxious garbage to figure out WTF is going on. Well, it's nice to know Disney is staying true to the spirit of the Star Wars Expanded Universe. The completeness of my lack of surprise is surprising in its own right. This IS Star Wars we're talking about. The franchise that was already memetically famous for being so obsessed with minutiae that virtually every background character who appears in at least one second of film in the original trilogy has, at bare minimum, an entire short story devoted to telling you exactly how and why they came to be in that location at that exact time. Is it really such a shock that the franchise that felt compelled to devote multiple short stories to "I don't like you either" guy and his literally butt-faced friend and the green anteater Han Solo wasted in the pub would fill page count by explaining at great and tedious length that a group of card carrying Always Lawful Evil Space Nazis built a terror weapon designed to be as showy as possible even if it meant breaking the laws of physics to do it? It's not without reason that, when the anthology movies were first announced, people were making fun of the idea saying it was only a matter of time until this creatively bankrupt franchise tried to sell a movie about the walking garbage bin that goes "gonk" that the Jawas had in A New Hope. All that's really changed since Disney threw out the old EU and started making their own is that they're pandering to other groups in addition to die-hard Star Wars fans. I'm sure there are likely at least a few comics and short stories about the SJW droid Lando wanted to f*ck in Solo: a Star Wars Story. (And was it really necessary to tell us Lando was trying to get his leg over a glorified walking toaster?) Did he even know any of that, though? Does being dead in Star Wars make you clairvoyant? Not being sarcastic, inquiring minds want to know. Maybe we'll get lucky and they'll take advantage of reduced foot traffic to make theaters more comfortable. I don't know about you, but at 2m tall it's a pain to pretzel myself into the average movie theater seat.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    You may be thinking of the one that Ninja Division and Palladium Books put together for the failed Robotech miniatures game Robotech RPG Tactics. (Pictured below) Ninja Division's design for the "YF-4" bears a fairly strong resemblance to Big West's original VF-4 Battroid design that Koichi Ohata and Kazumi Fujita did for Macross: Eternal Love Song... though that's almost certainly coincidental given how obscure that game is and how little line art of the VF-4 Siren exists. Tommy Yune chickened out on the idea of designing a transformation for Shoji Kawamori's VF-X-4 design - which Robotech calls the YF-4 - in the Robotech reboot's flagship limited comic series Robotech: From the Stars. He did have the "YF-4" make a brief appearance in the first issue of that comic in fighter mode, and excused his inability to come up with an original alt-mode for it by having it run into mechanical problems when it attempted to transform. As far as I know, the one and only serious effort Robotech made to come up with a transformation for Shoji Kawamori's VF-X-4 is Ninja Division's design pictured above... which, IIRC, never made it to production in the Robotech RPG Tactics game because it was part of the cancelled Wave 2 backer rewards.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    The complaint about their ships I could understand, since they're a light facelift of the Macross Galaxy fleet ships... but the Draken III's a pretty cool design. It doesn't have to be unique. There are very few truly unique ideas due to the sheer volume of creatives working these days. What it has to be is presented in an interesting and/or compelling way. It's overdone, and it's very hard to fully develop an antagonist like that in a way that makes them compelling. For a good example, look no farther than MOSPEADA's Inbit. They're a race of unknown aliens from an unknown homeworld who invade Earth for reasons unknown... and they're BORING AS F*CK because it turns out an antagonist who is so alien you can't relate to them doesn't connect with the audience very well, especially when much of their menace is Informed Ability. That's a big part of why Robotech is so hung up on Macross, and why Titan Comics' Robotech Remix is basically a bad Macross fic that pays only the most token acknowledgement to the rest of Robotech. The inscrutable Invid are a boring, lifeless antagonist that would be more at home in a sci-fi/horror b-movie or one of the old 50's serials... especially once you factor in the scenery-chewing Ming the Merciless style ham the Invid Regent brought to the story. The Robotech Masters are uninteresting to Robotech fans for a similar reason... if they look human, but don't react to anything in a human way, they're just as boring as if they were a faceless alien menace because their one response is dull surprise. So Robotech fans are instead hung up on the Zentradi because they're the most human-like and therefore the most relatable. Every Macross story is essentially a sideshow... we're seeing what's going on on the periphery of any given war, because the focus is on the people rather than the conflict itself, and in many of the later shows the conflicts are also sideshows because they're minor wars out in remote regions of the galaxy. Y'see, that was the one area where I was honestly curious to see what Titan Comics would be able to pull off... Creating original mechanical designs is hard enough on its own, but creating new designs that fit seamlessly into an existing setting or transforming mecha are a lot harder. In Titan's previous Robotech comic, their "original" take on the VF-1 Valkyrie turned out to be someone's Macross fanart that they'd used commercially without permission and switched back to the classic Kawamori VF-1 after receiving a lot of negative feedback about the VF-0-inspired fan design. Robotech Remix stuck with the VF-1 and introduced MOSPEADA concept art as a "new" mecha without even changing the name (the Vector fighter), but they'd hinted that the VF-1's replacement in-universe was going to defy Robotech's usual progression by sidelining the "Alpha" (MOSPEADA's Legioss) in favor of the YF-4 (Macross's VF-X-4). That put Titan Comics in an interesting position. They'd established that the next main fighter in their version of Robotech was going to be the VF-4... but Titan Comics can't use the VF-4 from Macross, and they can only use the fighter mode of the VF-X-4 from Macross's original series. It's questionable if they could use the transformation that Ninja Division and Palladium Books concocted, which means Titan could've been stuck in the position of having to having to create their own original transformation for a VF-X-4 based VF-4. That would have been mildly interesting to see.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    HG's Robotech staff were never in touch with reality. FFS, Carl Macek thought L. Ron Hubbard was quality sci-fi and named a character in one of his sequel concepts for him. That stunning failure to connect with reality is how so many obviously terrible ideas keep getting approved, like Robotech Remix! It's not sad, it's just predictable. Hollywood has never been good at little things like subtlety and pacing, and directors who understand them and how to use them properly and consistently are incredibly rare. The rare occasions where Hollywood actually produces something of artistic merit seem to be more by luck than good judgement. Spectacle sells, far more than substance, so when the story calls for thought-provoking introspection (like Ghost in the Shell) or even just effective use of exposition they're up sh*t creek. It's a real problem with the series... the Windermereans are an extremely sympathetic antagonist, but all their character development was left in a manga. Nah, I've seen nothing to indicate that it was an Orguss reference... the dimensional warheads that were introduced in Macross Frontier don't really warp reality, they're just hyper-intensified fold effects. Robotech Remix seems to have gone with a Dana from another universe as a way to shift the story's focus without having to do a timeskip like the one in the TV series. That and it lets them write a version of Dana who isn't retarded, which is a big plus since she was far and away Robotech's most hated character.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    ... if it were anyone other than you, I'd assume they were missing the point with comedic intent. The maturity on display here is simply breathtaking. There's some quality irony there... the Windermereans are potentially one of the most complex and interesting antagonists Macross has had. Their main problem is that the writers of the Macross Delta series and movie left developing their backstory up to the Macross Delta Gaiden: the White Knight of the Black Wing manga. Instead of just being "hostile aliens of unknown origin", they're a former New UN Government member world who were motivated to war by economic, political, and religious reasons. Wasn't that how they set up the original Super Robot Wars? The dimensional bomb from the start of Orguss merged all their realities? We've done that once already... Mikimoto-sensei just don't seem to have the time to do a proper job with Macross the First in the face of everything else he's working on.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    That'd be another way to look at it... though admittedly a pretty sad take on the series as a whole. You'd think Jean-Luc Picard had a better imagination. I think I see the "out" here for Patrick Stewart. Picard's going to "die" but they're going to transfer/copy his mind into that "golem" that Soong built, so Jean-Luc Picard the human will die and Patrick Stewart will bow out of the series and they'll continue forward with a new actor as Android!Picard.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Those are fun... they run counter to a lot of official specs for those ships, but they're still a good source of information for something like an RPG campaign.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, I'm not attached enough to any of these characters to do that... I doubt I could name more than two or three of them, and I literally just finished rewatching these movies less than twelve hours ago. Must be because the Force was awake this time... as much as the Force seems to be hurrying destiny along, it must have the caffeine sh*ts from one too many cups of coffee after its awakening two episodes ago.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    So, we finished rewatching all of the Star Wars movies today... finishing with The Rise of Skywalker this morning. Quite honestly, this hardly feels like a movie at all. The viewing experience is perfectly described by a line from Rick and Morty: "more like a clip show made of clips you never saw". It was, to be frank, one of the most bewildering viewing experiences I've had in a long time. The story changes direction so many times that it feels like someone was trying to cram an entire trilogy's worth of plot twists into a single film. Characters skip all that "exposition" business and jump right from plot thread to plot thread at lightning speed without explaining anything to the audience. So many plot twists are driven by simple convenience that it feels like it all comes together too easily. Rey goes off to finish a quest that consumed years of Luke's life and finishes it literally in the space of a single afternoon with like half a day left over. Everything anyone needs is in literally the first place they look, and every obstacle ends up coincidentally putting them right next to the thing they need next. The dominoes line up so neatly that it doesn't feel like there's any work involved for the characters. It's like they had cheats enabled or something.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Let's be honest... if it hasn't sunk in by now, it's not likely to do so at any point in the foreseeable future. But, because Robotech's development costs have long ago been repaid and they can continue to eke out some tiny quantity of money from licensing they're not likely to give up until demand declines to the point that there's no point in even making the token effort.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Read a WEIRD fan theory online today about this latest identical descendant of Arik Soong... some fans are theorizing that Alton Soong is actually a "skinjob" version of Lore who may have been reactivated by Maddox at the Daystrom Institute. IMO, it's not a particularly credible fan theory except for the fact that Soong is INCREDIBLY blase about the ancient androids commiting mass murder to protect his double handful of "children" and that he's named all of his androids after less-than-factual forms of written records. Personally, I suspect he's just another mentally ill and incredibly naive Soong who's inherited the family thesaurus.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    TBH, I don't think Titan Comics' Robotech Remix has anywhere near the level of average readership it'd take to survive a hiatus and relaunch. It's barely hanging on as it is with Diamond's overshipments and Robotech fans buying multiples for the variant covers to pad its sales numbers. If they're in actual trouble with HG or a third party over the actual content in the comic, it'll almost certainly mean the permanent end of the series and possibly HG revoking Titan's license.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    As seen in Star Trek: Voyager, the Q Continuum are surprisingly reluctant to use their powers to (permanently) kill... but see little-to-nothing wrong with the idea of depowering repeat offenders for the purpose of teaching them a (non-fatal) lesson as they did and often threatened to do to Q or simply imprisoning them indefinitely to ensure they'd no longer pose a threat to themselves or others like they did to the suicidal Quinn. "God" - AKA "The One" - lost most of his powers and was imprisoned for eternity in the great barrier at the galactic core until he either repented for his crimes or the universe ended, whichever came first. Being shot in the face (though at that point he was literally a disembodied head) by a Bird of Prey didn't kill him, it just pissed him off. The Q set him up with a near-ideal prison where he was deprived of both the means to cause mischief and anyone to actually hurt via that mischief.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Well, you're technically not wrong... the Robotech live action movie isn't cancelled, and it technically can't be cancelled because neither of the studios that've held the license approved the proposal for a live action movie. You can't cancel a project that was never even officially planned, let alone started. It's rather odd that Titan Comics committed to a new Robotech comic after their short-lived Robotech reimagining ended and then suddenly went silent about it just four issues in. The plans for a trade paperback and re-releases of old Comico and Eternity/Malibu Robotech comics suggest that they haven't lost the Robotech license to a sudden revocation the way the last two pre-reboot licensees (Academy and Antarctic) did, but the total silence about the status of the publication after unexplained multi-month delays is an odd move for a normally professional publisher. I'd expect an announcement of a delay even if someone connected to the publication had died abruptly. The only thing I can think of that'd cause TItan to just clam up like this about the status of the series as a whole and the next issue is if they were facing the prospect of legal action and their attorney advised them not to discuss it publicly. That, of course, would raise further questions like whether this apparent delay/cancellation is because Harmony Gold found some content in issue 5 and/or plans for future issues that would've caused a lawsuit and they're frantically reworking the comic or they've already received a cease and desist or a summons over something in a previous issue (e.g. the copyright infringement1 in the previous Robotech comic) and put future development on hold while the lawyers sort things out. 1. For instance, having used the design of the factory satellite from Macross VF-X2 as Dolza's mothership in the Robotech comic series. Neither HG nor Tatsunoko have any rights to Macross VF-X2, so the use of the design constitutes copyright infringement.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Oh god, I've fallen victim to a prequel meme!
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy has several other interesting technological attractions too. Such as: The Gefion, a light aircraft carrier based on the Macross Frontier version of the Northampton-class stealth frigate that serves as the mobile headquarters for the SMS branch that's operating on Uroboros. VF-0s and SV-51s with thermonuclear reaction turbine engines. The novelization and some of the writeups indicate these are replica aircraft that were built using later tech from the VF-1 and VF-5000. The Double Strike Pack. We always knew it was theoretically possible, but it's actually a playable option once you unlock it. A VF-1 Strike Valkyrie with two Mauler RO-X2A beam cannons instead of one, and with a SP attack that is straight out of Dragon Ball Z. A version of the Zentradi armored spacesuit from Super Dimension Fortress Macross that is a flight-capable powered suit. The first main character VF-11 since Macross Plus. The first non-Macross Frontier YF-25 (from the Sephira SMS). The first official-setting depiction of an actual VF-19E (Aisha's). The first depiction of a non-Macross Galaxy VF-27 Lucifer. A military spec YF-29, Rod Baltemar's YF-29B Perceval. The YF-30 Chronos.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    ?
  20. Seto Kaiba
    ... eh, I wouldn't put it past Star Trek: Picard. Its writers seem absolutely determined to turn Star Trek into another maximally dystopian sci-fi setting like Star Wars, Alien, or Warhammer 40,000 where there is nothing but hate and war and hope is a weakness for those who don't know better.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    As I noted on the previous page, Titan Comics hasn't been answering reader questions about the status of the series on their social media. That's one of the things that makes this "delay" so odd... Titan Comics is normally fairly willing to communicate with its customers via its official website and social media, but there has been no news about the now-substantial delay in the fifth issue's release and questions posed about the status of the series on social media go unanswered. If this was just some kind of delay caused by mundane business reasons like a key staffer's illness or a problem at the printer's it'd be a simple thing to announce that wouldn't reflect badly on them. Even if the series were cancelled, saying something about it being cancelled would be the norm. This total silence on the subject is what makes it look suspicious.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Macross Perfect Memory suggests that the Supervision Army warship that became the SDF-1 Macross was built with a modular design to improve its overall survivability. The goal was presumably to decentralize certain key systems to prevent battle damage to one area from disabling the entire ship, enable a limited form of repair by replacing modules instead of whole ships, and facilitate working around battle damage to systems that couldn't be decentralized. Variable Fighter Master File does occasionally include segments that talk about certain important classes of ship like the Asuka II-class, Prometheus-class, ARMD-class, and so on. It's not significant coverage (just a few pages, usually), but it's something. The Squadrons of the SDF-1 Macross book offers more detail about the Macross herself, but it's mostly in terms of its carrier operations and defense strategies. Gundam's Master Archive Mobile Suit series did something similar for the Pegasus-class assault carrier White Base.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Are we sure about that? Titan Comics' own website lists only two more releases planned for the month of March: Well, kind of... the above is a screenshot from Diamond Comic Distributors' cancellation list for the month of April 2020. You'll notice the cancellation reason is 2, meaning that this issue was delayed or otherwise on hiatus for long enough that the distributor cancelled all open orders for it but the publisher at least theoretically intends to release this issue at a later date (or simply hasn't announced the series is cancelled yet). However, it should be noted that this cancellation is for next month, which suggests that Titan will not deliver the issue this month or next month. If the issue were just straight-up cancelled we'd expect to see cancellation reason 4... and if Titan Comics announced that the series itself was being terminated we'd see a 9. Does anyone care? ... so, the home universe of DC's Bizarro, where bad is good and vice versa? It sounds unpleasant. At least Titan Comics hasn't been so crass as to attempt a Superboy Prime with one such universe being the universe where Robotech is a popular comic/TV/movie series.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    It's definitely that one. There've been a fair few occasions in interviews where he clearly did not remember plot points from previous Macross titles when the interviewer asked about them. It's one reason I don't take his stance on things completely seriously. He changes his stance on things A LOT depending on how much he remembers about a subject on any given day. Yeah, I think pretty much anyone who was watching Macross Delta expecting some kickass mecha action was pretty disappointed after the first two or so episodes. We got promised some sweet mecha dance-battling and what we got was an "elite" unit of mercenary fighter pilots who know exactly one maneuver. At least Delta Flight is more reliable than most color printers... they didn't crap out and refuse to fly because they ran out of Cyan in episode 13. Play Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy and behold the splendor that is PLAID VFs! (That is not a joke, BTW... it's an actual option for several VFs including the YF-29.)
  25. Seto Kaiba
    The Star Trek relaunch novelverse and the non-canon novels both attributed those barriers to the Q Continuum. The barrier around the outer edge of the galaxy was set up to keep a malevolent entity called 0 out, and the one in the core was a prison meant to hold the being who presented itself as God in Star Trek V after both were tried and convicted of various crimes by the Q. (That particular storyline connected the sudden supernova that destroyed the T'Kon empire with Q and four extradimensional ne'er do wells... 0, * AKA the Beta XII-A entity, Gorgan, and The One AKA "God". A bored Q let them into the universe via the Guardian of Forever, and 0 was the one who first put Q up to the idea of "testing" lesser races for entertainment. The Q Continuum took a dim view of them blowing up the T'Kon Empire's homeworld with a supernova and arrested Q, 0, and The One. * and Gorgan escaped but lost most of their powers, to be encountered later by the USS Enterprise, while The One was depowered and locked away on a remote planet behind a barrier in the galactic core and 0 was depowered and punted into intergalactic space with a barrier put up around the galaxy to prevent him from returning.) That said, I have to wonder if this incredibly lazy and apparently incredibly unoriginal Star Trek plot will culminate in these machine people from outside time and space being the machine race that created V'Ger after Voyager VI fell into a black hole. Since Star Trek: Discovery was stealing ideas from the novelverse it seems likely Star Trek: Picard will too... Control was straight out of the DS9 Relaunch, and the machine race (The Body Electric) were encountered while pursuing a project that would've caused the extinction of all life in the galaxy.
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