Seto Kaiba

I've been poking at the engine section in Battroid Valkyrie a bit between meetings. It's interesting to see how radically the Master File writers assert the VF-1's engines changed during production. Most VFs are lucky to get one engine upgrade in their entire service lives. Master File asserts the VF-1 had AT LEAST FOUR. The initial type FF-2001 engine on Blocks 1-5, FF-2006 on Blocks 6-8, FF-2008 on Blocks 9-17, and two more engine upgrades after mass production ended (FF-2012 for VF-1X, and FF-2079 for VF-1X+, and then whatever they put into the VF-1X++ stock model). Anyone out there a network engineer looking for work? I need two, possibly three.

As the youth say... "Yeet". Are we counting the number of people likely to actually buy this steaming turd, or are we guessing that issue five has been pushed back a full calendar year? It IS interesting to note that Robotech Remix currently has no further scheduled new issues releases on Titan Comics' posted publication schedule. The only Robotech publications they have on the docket are the April release of the Robotech Remix trade paperback collecting the four issues published thus far and a July release for a reprint of the first part of Comico's adaptation of Robotech's Masters Saga. There are no new issues of Remix on the schedule clear through the end of August 2020 and #5 is over a month late. It really looks like it's been cancelled.

It's literally just a cheap knockoff of the MS-06 Zaku II.

To be honest, 1,400 is a gargantuan number considering the Robotech fandom mostly considers the Masters Saga to be an unlovely and unlovable red-headed stepchild of a story that boasts the franchise's worst... well... everything. Worst writing, worst characters, worst mechanical designs, you name it. 14 or so actual members sounds much more reasonable. The hate for the Masters Saga was, and is, very real and VERY commonplace. The last time HG held a poll about whether the fans considered the Southern Cross Army competent the fans overwhelmingly responded "No". Let's just hope Titan finally decided to mercy kill this turd. Surely SOMEONE will let Robotech die with some remaining vague semblance of dignity.

Cleaning up around my study during isolation... I'd call my filing system pretty masterful in this case. (This is just the shelf of doubles for Master Files...)

Yeah, they're using uprated versions of the same TO21 ISC used by the VF-25. The original model provided with the VF-25 was rated for 27.5G (for 120sec). The VF-31A Kairos's version is rated for 28.0G, and the VF-31 Custom Siegfried's is rated for 29.5G, both presumably for 120 seconds.

Granted, but we're not bombing naval ships that are only moving in two dimensions... this duty involves striking ships moving in three, which makes them more like really big, really slow enemy fighters than boats. All told, I think a big part of this has to do with the prevalence of powerful warship-based ECM, active stealth, and the use of laser and beam weaponry for point defense. The farther away you launch your missile from, the greater your chances that your missile will either lose the target as ECM and/or active stealth interfere with its guidance systems or that it'll be identified and shot down by a point defense turret armed with lasers or beam weaponry. Your best bet is to conceal your presence and get as close as possible before you launch to minimize the probability of intercept. That's mostly the domain of Strike Packs or the Konig Monster, then.

Current projections are that it's supposed to burn itself out before Autumn.

Finished rewatching Nagasarete Airantou... it's just as much fun as I remember, being a rather self-aware harem anime that constantly pokes fun at the indecisive male protagonist who can't cope with a little skin. When folks with Meiji-era values are telling you you're a ridiculous prude, it's time to reevaluate your life choices.

People love Mobile Fighter G Gundam... I suspect Macross 7 would get a similar reception, given that it's exactly the same over-the-top retro-camp hamstravaganza from the same era. Macross Delta might be a harder sell, but only because of the barely-there plot that is so transparently copying Macross Frontier's homework... the waifu crowd will eat it up, though, so no worries there. Speak for yourself... I'm all about the objective data.

Most VFs are, by their very nature, multirole strike fighter aircraft... but I'm not aware of any that are specifically intended for anti-warship use. The VF-17 Nightmare is noted in one or two sources to have been intended for long-range attack missions, and we know it's a space-optimized variable fighter, so it may technically fit the bill even if it would just be a stealthy method of deploying thermonuclear reaction missiles since it lacks any heavy offensive options besides its gunpod's beam adapter. Outside of the obvious point that thermonuclear reaction munitions allow pretty much any VF to take the fight to enemy capital ships, any VF with heavy beam weaponry more or less fits the bill. The VF-4 and VF-14, for instance, or anything with a FAST Pack that mounts heavy beam weaponry like the VF-1's Strike Pack, VF-1R's Attack Pack, VF-25's Strike Pack and Tornado Pack, VF-31's Super Pack, or the heavy quantum beam gunpods that have a "beam grenade" mode used by the YF-27, VF-27, YF-29, YF-30, and Sv-262. Define "large". There were standard gunpods up to 60mm, but most of the really big guns on VFs are beam weapons. The VB-6 Konig Monster obviously tops the charts with the biggest variable unit-mounted solid ammo cannon... but it's a bomber, not a fighter. We've seen beam weapons with bores of anywhere from 11mm up to 180mm.

So... this came out early. I got notified yesterday that my girlfriend's preorder for Rise of Skywalker was filled on Google Play and it's showing as an unwatched playable title in our library. We're embarking on a rewatch of all the Star Wars movies to remind ourselves to keep our expectations painfully low thanks to there being only three good Star Wars movies.

So... our key takeaway here is that Robotech zombies see by radar instead of with their eyes? Well, he's not wrong... in Robotech, Dana did get pretty much everyone killed when she f*cked up hard enough that she caused a third alien invasion of Earth that got the entire rest of Earth's military massacred and cost the lives of like 2/3 of the offworld forces. Let's be honest, for most anyone who actually watched Robotech's Masters Saga or Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross, having Dana/Jeanne strangled to death by a much less stupid character would be the best thing that ever happened in connection with that unlamented waste of a story. As ever, you're probably reading too much into it. Titan is taking the same approach to Robotech as previous publishers, and just blindly copying anything and everything they think is popular in the hopes that some combination of ripoffs will strike a chord with their readers. A fourth wall-breaking recap gatefold has been a staple of several different comics for ages... most iconically for Deadpool. So Rick is Wesley Crusher now? ... it is a comic book. A badly written, badly drawn comic book. They're basically just ripping off Deadpool's framing device by giving a character contextual medium-awareness. You are putting WAY more thought into this crap than the people who make it did. ... that's just sad. And rather atypical for a Robotech fan too. Most of the Robotech lifers hate Harmony Gold almost as much as fans of Macross, Transformers, or BattleTech do, as the result of their efforts to reboot Robotech or simply that they've dismissed their personal fan theory or their favorite badly-written comic. I'd have expected it to be a photo of Macek, since Robotech fans believe he was a genius despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary in the same way Scientologists believe L. Ron Hubbard wasn't a drooling simpleton. Yup... but that's nothing new. Robotech comic book writers have been doing that almost from the very beginning, with Comico being the only real exception. Each new licensee was progressively more creatively bankrupt than the last and relied increasingly on ripping off other series and franchises to fill page count. We've gotten to watch this happening in an incredibly compressed timescale at Titan, with them having essentially gone from Eternity/Malibu levels of incompetent to Antarctic Press levels of incompetent in the space of less than a year. Like everything Robotech does, Robotech Remix is simply decades behind the curve. This kind of meta commentary on the medium and source material was really popular, funny, and innovative... in the late 1990s when Marvel's Deadpool and DC's Joker were doing it. It aged like milk, for the most part. It's pretty clear that the people working on Robotech Remix either prefer Macross or recognize that even Robotech fans don't like Southern Cross and have very little interest in MOSPEADA. They probably think what they're doing is a homage or a thinly disguised meta-complaint about Macross features not being available in the west via legitimate channels.... possibly even another stealth critique of Robotech's various bad habits like when they had Dana take cheap shots at the idea that the Legioss would be a replacement for the Valkyrie. Some Robotech fans would probably read it as attempted cheap shots at Macross, but then they've been desperately battling an inferiority complex on that front for decades.

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.