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Seto Kaiba

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Everything posted by Seto Kaiba

  1. Seto Kaiba
    So... it turns out that, according to Star Trek: Picard production designer Todd Cherniawsky, the La Sirena was/is intended to be a non-Federation freighter design. Its various Federation mod-cons like the emergency holograms, holosuite, and so on are additions/retrofits Rios made after he acquired the ship. Admittedly, looking at the internal layout its alleged role as a freighter makes about as much sense as the Millennium Falcon's... which is fitting, I guess, given that the showrunners very obviously fondly imagined La Sirena to be Star Trek's Millennium Falcon. There's nowhere to actually put cargo, unless they just pile it up unrestrained around the transporter pad, and even then it won't hold much.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    What all goes into a setup like that? I've got a Savannah Monitor who loves roaches... but they're so bloody expensive.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Well, another episode of Monster Musume no Oisha-san has come and gone... and I'm baffled that this even got published as a light novel. It's not that it's bad - all told it's utterly mediocre - it's that it's so completely and utterly devoid of anything resembling original thought. Yoshino Origuchi was absolutely copying from Okayado's Monster Musume no Iru Nichijou chapter and verse, that much is painfully obvious. What's more impressive is that, with all that blatant copying, they still couldn't manage to pen a worthwhile story or likable character. It feels a lot like Macross Delta, in that regard. The audience is clearly expected to like these characters because they resemble characters in an earlier work someone actually put effort into... not because of anything the characters themselves actually contribute to the story. Episode 3 of Monster Musume no Oisha-san is two running jokes from Monster Musume no Iru Nichijou tediously drawn out into an entire 24 minute episode... Zombina falling to pieces in public places to people get freaked out by moving disembodied limbs, and Lala's body getting molested by someone while her head isn't on it.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    To be fair, what we're told in Deep Space Nine itself is that those ships (the ones the Maquis had) were really basically defenseless in their stock configuration. They really were courier ships originally. The fact that they could support weapons capable of going head-to-head with a then-state-of-the-art Danube-class runabout just goes to show they were every bit as overbuilt as everything else the Federation builds. (La Sirena is a fair example, being a civilian ship that somehow can fight on a level footing with a modernized, but century-old, Romulan warship and survive an uncontrolled crash landing from orbit in good enough shape to be rendered flyable with minimal repair.)
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Given what I've heard from the Robotech staff at HG directly, the looming prospect of facing litigation from Big West dominated every aspect of the Robotech franchise's reboot efforts in the 2000s. They were so afraid that they'd do something to bring Big West down on their heads in the wake of the cease and desist debacle that kicked off the copyright reviews in Japan that HG's management mandated that absolutely everything related to Robotech had to be reviewed by the company's legal counsel before it saw the light of day. Not just the big stuff like concept art for Shadow Chronicles or merchandise proposals... even stuff as trivial as news stories for the front page of the official website. That's why Robotech.com was always the last to have any kind of news. Smart money says that even Titan's proposals for story and design in Remix had to be run past the lawyers to make sure they weren't going to bring Big West down on everyone's heads. That's probably why the comic is death on the very idea of Max and "Miriya" getting together. It's too overtly Macross-y. Truth be told, at least some of their stompings-on of other franchises in court have been alleged (by HG) to be on the insistence of the Japanese IP owners. The most recent rounds of legal action against the BattleTech/MechWarrior franchise, for instance. 'bout the only thing you can do when it comes to Robotech... incompetence is all that's ever on offer.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Well, it was a capitalistic arms deal... brokered by a Ferengi (Quark) no less. The Maquis weren't getting any weapons under the table from Starfleet the way the Cardassian colonists in the DMZ were getting theirs from the Central Command, and they weren't willing to wait for the Federation to solve it diplomatically. Their solution was buying weapons and equipment from third parties like the Pygorians (and later, the Klingons) to retrofit their standard Federation courier ships and other craft with. It's not clear if the Starfleet fighter is an upgunned courier based on the Maquis approach, or the Maquis upgraded their couriers based on the Starfleet fighters.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Well I won't be watching.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Granted, that'd sound almost sensible if only the Southern Cross Army in Robotech wasn't canonically the dumping ground where the real military disposed of its rejects, washouts, and all of the other unwanted dead weight personnel that would be least missed on or behind the lines in the event of an actual conflict. (Of course, in the Palladium RPG's 2nd edition, all of their gear - armor included - was substandard hardware.) I can't imagine it would've fooled anyone, since the fact that the military's best were all in the Expeditionary Forces wasn't exactly a secret... nor was the do-nothing "mind the house while the adults are gone" nature of the assignment. I think the gist of it from the original Southern Cross was something more along the lines of the military existing mainly for show and not being intended to do any actual fighting. Now if Bandai were to make models of the original arming doublets from Science Fiction Sengoku Saga, they might have my attention...
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Somehow, I doubt the irony is lost on them... the fact that they now live in fear of a lawsuit from Macross's owners as a direct result of their own attempts to falsely assert ownership of the Macross franchise can't have escaped them.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Improvised ones, apparently... the "Federation Attack Fighter" design was originally presented in Deep Space Nine as a lightly armed civilian-use courier craft that the Maquis used as a raiding craft after being retrofitted with aftermarket weapons.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, five'll get you twenty it's legal's doing. Max and Milia are featured prominently in Macross's sequels and spinoffs, and Harmony Gold doesn't want to do anything that might draw the attention of Big West's layers ever since the whole Big West v. Tatsunoko dustup they inadvertently triggered. That's why Robotech: Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles got rid of every remaining Macross Saga character apart from Rick Hunter by either killing them or putting them on a bus as preparation for the Shadow Chronicles movie. Ah, I'm sure that was embarrassing as per the usual Robotech convention experience.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Seems a safe bet... declaring that a project is "on hiatus" has been the Robotech franchise's favorite way to announce cancellations for over a decade now. Still, what's the source? Did Harmony Gold announce that, or Titan Publishing? I know Diamond Comic Distributors has Robotech Remix remaining issues listed as cancelled these days. Then let us hope she fails miserably in that endeavor. A Robotech timeline bereft of both Dana and the collection of short bus seat-warmers that was the Army of the Southern Cross in the Robotech TV series is surely the Robotech franchise's best of all possible worlds.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Ah, yeah... it never made a ton of sense for the ō-yoroi armor designed for Science Fiction Sengoku Saga to be carried over into the very non-Japanese Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross. Nothing worse for your health on the battlefield than wearing a great big sign that says "shoot me, I'm an officer". I guess Tatsunoko was just too damn proud of the admittedly rather stylish-for-the-time armor designs they'd made.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, too western... this is anime, so you'll be boiled alive in the giant rice cooker. It's dead from a production standpoint... but they don't need to produce new shows to hold onto those trademarks that they're using to keep Macross out of the US. So I'm still gonna judge the crap out people who still buy their sh*t because they're directly financing Harmony Gold's legal effort to stop Macross's expansion into the global market.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    We can expect the unexpected. Kawamori hates retreading old ground.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    To be fair, the amount of content the VF-31 book copies from the VF-25 book is pretty well justified by the amount of hardware the VF-31 shares in common with the VF-25 in-universe.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    That is such a little thing and yet makes such a huge improvement... Relics? My good chap, the oldest starship class in this shot hasn't even been in Starfleet service for forty years at the time of Star Trek: Picard's events in 2399. The Nebula-class ships spotted at the back of the formation are from the early 2360s, making the class around 37 years old given the oldest vessel of class's commission date. The Runabouts in the foreground are either the Danube-class that entered service in 2368 (31yo) or Yellowstone-class from a decade later (~21yo). The Intrepid, Sovereign, and Akira-class ships seen in this shot are less than thirty years old since their respective classes entered service in the early 2370s. Even the Galaxy-class would only be pushing forty at that point in time... the Enterprise-D would've been 37. Compare that to the service lives of previous mainstay Starfleet ship classes like the Saratoga or Excelsior, that were still pulling their weight a century and a half after being introduced.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    ... 2020 is a weird year. Who thought bringing this back was a good idea?
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Why not just buy a copy? It's not hard to get on any of a dozen websites. My group is working on translating the Master File books, but it's slow going and we're not likely to get to the VF-31 book for years. (Admittedly we're also not very enthused for that particular volume either, as it's heavily derivative of the earlier VF-25 book.)
  20. Seto Kaiba
    You won't find anything about that in there... lol All it brings to the table on that note is an unverifiable rumor from a character who spends the entire series jerking people around.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    It's pretty inaccurate, all told... though some of its mistranslations can be awfully entertaining.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Monster Girl Doctor's second episode is up on Crunchyroll... missed that it got posted because the new app surprisingly doesn't seem to want to display it in my bookmarks. Still not over the fact that the lamia's name is, for all practical intents and purposes, "S. Nakes"... and the anime's opening isn't doing much to dissuade me from thinking the author of the light novel ran more than a cursory eye over Okayado's Daily Life with Monster Girls when they were writing this. Admittedly, this one is shaping up to be a lot less ecchi, and that would be a significant point in its favor. (I'll admit that the at-least moderate case of showing their work WRT albinism in snakes scored them a few points too.)
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Your previous post on this topic was merged into the Newbie and Short Questions thread. (You have an answer waiting for you in there.)
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Since this season's proving to be kinda weak, I've started some more old shows including KyoAni's Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid. It's not quite what I was expecting, but in a good way. I was expecting something a bit more comedy-heavy, but this is more a surprisingly pure slice of life story. That kind of light and innocent story is right up my alley right now, given how stressful the world has gotten. I'm three episodes in and enjoying it immensely, though I'm a bit perplexed that Crunchyroll put the French dub as the default start position instead of the original Japanese audio. My weekly work watch parties are going smoothly in isolation too. My team's halfway through Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable and they all seem to be loving it. They want to tackle Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood once they finish Golden Wind.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    They're strongly implied to be the descendants of a surviving group of Protoculture, but it's never stated outright.
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