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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    By all accounts, most of the ships named Enterprise was originally named something else and were either rechristened or had their names changed during construction... and it's been indicated in some of the supplemental materials that most name reuses are rechristening ships that were being built under other names. Picard's Enterprise-E was originally built with the expectation of being commissioned USS Honorius before the Enterprise-D went down over Veridian III. That wasn't the Yorktown, that was the Saratoga... a Miranda-class ship that was one of several redresses of the ILM Reliant large studio model built for Star Trek II: the Wrath of Khan. Its crew didn't die, and its main power was restored when the whale probe left at the end of the film.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, the Yorktown is the one most often cited for that... Unrelated, but looking at that trailer... either someone found Noonien Soong's safe deposit box or Bruce Maddox has been a busy, busy boy over the last thirty years.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Same. Frankly, I'd be surprised if the subject of the Enterprise-E's disposition doesn't come up at some point early in the Star Trek: Picard given that it was Picard's last command, and one of the things that was done in the tie-in comic that was used to set up all the Kelvin timeline nonsense prominently featured a revived Data as the Captain of the Enterprise-E when Romulus was destroyed by the Hobus supernova. Unless Bad Reboot is planning to ditch their own groundwork for the Kelvin timeline in the bargain, the subject of who commands the Enterprise-E really ought to come up at some point given how important Data is apparently going to be. To be fair, their service lives aren't intentionally short... ships named Enterprise tend to attract trouble and meet violent ends, from the very first Enterprise in Starfleet. That's the reason there's such high turnover in Enterprises relative to other ships of the same class. The actual origin of the Enterprise-A isn't completely clear given that it tends to vary by the author, but most tend to agree that the USS Enterprise (NCC-1701-A) was actually a pre-existing Constitution-class refit that was renamed near the end of its refit when it was tapped to become the next Enterprise. She was, in all likelihood, of comparable age to the Enterprise Jim Kirk self-destructed over Genesis. NCC-1701-B's fate is not elaborated upon officially, but in the novel verse she disappeared and was presumed lost with all hands, suspected to be a result of her crew succumbing to an alien virus. NCC-1701-C and NCC-1701-D both went down fighting. Attrition from the Dominion War likely helped shepherd a number of older classes out of service when they were lost in combat or proved to be unequal to the task of continuing to defend the Federation. The Galaxy-class fared pretty well, but there were never all that many of them to begin with. Not when you consider that many of these ships we're shown are not patrol vessels, but long-range exploration and science ships surveying on or beyond the Federation's borders. Warp drive isn't actually all that fast, so many of those ships are literally months, even YEARS, from a place where they could readily rotate personnel out. The Enterprises are also prestige commands, it might be more typical for captains to be rotated when ships are closer to home or less prestigious, but the Enterprise is Starfleet's number one sledgehammer for solving any problem that resists less extreme measures, so keeping the most experienced captain with a top flight crew makes a certain amount of sense. Or for Jean-Luc to hold the rank of Fleet Captain... though there are some incidents that suggest that as captain of Enterprise, Jean-Luc Picard was more or less the most senior Starfleet captain, or at least the one with the most clout.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Which, really, shouldn't have happened given the forum rules... I've argued against it on a few occasions, in light of the obviously criminal nature of some of those enterprises. On quite a few other sites, you could perhaps make a case for that... but this is a site where posting that kind of thing really could result in lost sales from people not importing the books, because we are exactly the kind of people who DO import goods directly from Japan.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Even Janeway wasn't THAT much of a gung-ho psychopath. That shot is just the stuff of terrible, terrible fanfiction... worse even than the time Shatner wrote a Star Trek novel in an attempt to end the Kirk vs. Picard debate in his own favor by having Kirk brought back to life only to destroy the Borg Collective. Well, the Federation does tend to run ships named Enterprise rather harder than the rest of the fleet... Of the thus-far seven Starfleet ships to bear the name, only the original Constitution-class USS Enterprise and the Excelsior-class USS Enterprise-B had lengthy service records. Archer's NX-01 Enterprise was in service for less than a decade before she took a beating that put her beyond repair in the Romulan War, Kirk's Enterprise-A was only in service for a handful of years before all the old Constitution-class ships were decommissioned, Garrett's Enterprise-C was in service for about twelve years before Romulans blew it to scrap at Narendra III, and Picard's Enterprise-D was nine years old (only seven of which spent in actual service) when it was sunk by Lursa and B'Etor's Bird of Prey at Veridian III. If Picard's Enterprise-E is still sailing in 2399, she'll have something on the order of 27 years on the clock... which would give her a plausible claim to second longest-serving Enterprise after the original NCC-1701, which had logged forty years before Kirk blew her up over Genesis. Some fans are probably expecting the Enterprise-E to have been retired or sunk by now, since STO has the Enterprise-F already in service in the first decade of the 2400s. Maybe they did. One of the lazier recurring plot threads in Star Trek ever since the Federation's brief war with the Klingons in DS9 is a breakdown of diplomatic relations with the Klingon Empire that results in yet another shooting war.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Thought we generally had a policy of not posting scans of entire books here?
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Unfortunately, the New UN Forces Zentradi mecha we saw on Al Shahal are barely discussed at all in the official Macross Delta print materials. About all we have for sure is their designations, but we can take a guess as to most of their weaponry since their update hardware is mostly borrowed from elsewhere.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    He used somewhat stronger language than that... 阿呆 cropped up a few times. Well he does use more terms of endearment for the YF-19 No.2 prototype than he ever does for Myung in the OVA. He literally calls it "Kawaiiko-chan" ("cutie") at one point during his first flight in it.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Let's not, and say we did. I've come to loathe what Star Trek has become since Jar-Jar Abrams got his grubby mitts on it. Star Trek is no longer the high concept, aspirational science fiction series I fell in love with as a kid. Abrams and Kurtzman's obsession with making Star Trek into Star Wars has sucked the soul out of the series in the name of cramming in ever greater amounts of CG-heavy action sequences and all the hate and fear necessary to justify them. This trailer has Seven of Nine, one of the most restrained and composed characters in Star Trek, dual-wielding disruptor rifles like she's Space Rambo. That's some dumb sh*t on a level even the worst of the Star Trek novels never sunk to. That right there really tells you how low Star Trek has sunk thanks to Abrams's efforts to turn Roddenberry's utopian vision of the future into another space war dystopia.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Well, two-of-a-kind. Shinsei Industry made one for Isamu and one spare according to Macross Chronicle. Seems unlikely, though it got two different releases for the PS3.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Different Macross publications seem to have different takes on how famous/notorious Isamu actually is... Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy tries to build Isamu up as a famous badass, even though the story doesn't seem to really have a lot for him to do besides give Aisha the excuse she was looking for to stick Reon Sakaki in the cockpit of the not-yet-complete YF-30 Chronos. A lot of Macross's written materials tend to imply that the New UN Government and Earth New UN Forces kept the details of the Sharon Apple incident classified, and the true extent of Isamu's involvement was never made public... so he shouldn't be all that well-known except as a dangerous hothead. Odds are the Earth NUNS officials who decided to call Isamu for the final demonstration of the YF-24 Evolution prototype knew full well what he'd done in 2040. His voice actor, Takumi Yamazaki, seems to be firmly of the opinion that Isamu's an idiot. Yeah, that was in 2057. There was no hope of Isamu getting a VF-24 of any spec. That fighter was brand new and apparently only just entering mass production c.2059, and there's no way the Earth NUNS were going to let their shiny new toy fall into the hands of someone like Isamu without adult supervision. Especially not when he was working for a PMC.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... for all the hype it got, it only shows up in one scene near the end of the film and not for very long. The changes in maneuverability were more or less the same as the Draken III's. The VF-24 and YF-29 were both developed around the requirements of anti-Vajra combat after first contact was made when them in 2040 and the disastrous loss of the 117th Research Fleet in 2048. Both would be exemplary all-around VFs, but that's mainly to do with the fact that the Vajra are so damned OP that they exceeded the performance of 5th Generation VFs in plenty of ways. As far as we know it's a main VF, so it's more a multirole strike fighter than an attacker. Imagine what a properly focused attacker could do if built to the same tech level as the VF-24... Yup. That's in Macross Chronicle's history of the YF-24 Evolution program. IIRC, that's also the one to mention that the test pilot for the final YF-24 Evolution demonstration to the Earth NUNS brass was Maj. Isamu Alva Dyson of the NUNS Reserve. If I had to guess, I'd say it's probably something in the avionics that prevents the VF-171 from making folds THAT precise on the fly.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Well, that's a hard pass for me... Star Trek: Discovery's showrunners seem like they won't be happy until they've shat all over every part of Star Trek's legacy and message. After the sh*t-awful mess that was the second half of season two, I can't begin to guess what madness could have possessed Netflix to agree to continue sponsoring this train wreck already-in-progress. Eh... from what I've seen, it's not virtue signalers so much as it is a conditioned response to the actual racist, misogynists, and so on who inundated every mention of Star Trek: Discovery before it'd ever aired whining about the black main character, the racially-diverse cast (as if that wasn't SOP for Star Trek), and Star Trek's social progressive politics. Star Trek fans who were enthusiastic about the series before it aired were inundated with that kind of crap, so they started to assume everyone who bashed the series was a bigoted neanderthal. It's not all that different from how we've been conditioned by long experience to expect any vocal R-word fan to be an ignorant cretin. There are plenty of Star Trek fans who can be completely reasonable about the series and discuss it fairly on its own merits, but there are equally as many who've been so overexposed to the actual racist, sexist trolls that they assume everyone who speaks ill of the series is one until proven otherwise. (Unfortunately, since many of the completely legitimate complaints about the series revolve around Sonequa Martin-Green's character and her Mary Sue effect on the story, it's often nearly impossible to convince them that there isn't a racist or sexist motive for the complaints.) In a way, it's painfully ironic given that Star Trek: Discovery itself is probably the most unwittingly bigoted Star Trek series ever put to film thanks to all the stereotyping going on.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Those sketches went for a pretty penny... the Southern Cross one went for a grand, and the Tenjin Macross Plus one went for two.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Hrm... well, the higher maneuverability they confer does make the Draken III a more effective dogfighter. They're not much in the offense department though, armed with a single beam machin gun, a few micro-missiles, and energy converting armor they can't utilize unless they're docked to the Draken III.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, that's one of the bigger issues with the Sv-262 Draken III... we're told that it's an anti-VF VF from a design team who've been specializing in anti-VF VFs since the late 2010s, but we haven't really seen anything in the specs that we can point to and say is a feature intended specifically for anti-VF use. ECM that can defeat an enemy VF's ability to identify its target doesn't necessarily make the fighter harder for the enemy to hit, it just makes it harder to know who you just hit. Likewise, the programmable camouflage doesn't do anything except conceal their markings and make them more difficult to identify. The heavy quantum beam gunpod will be just as effective against a Zentradi battle pod or battle suit as it will against an older model VF, if not slightly more so since those don't have barrier systems, and its missiles are pretty conventional stuff. It's got a sword instead of a knife, but the sword is so fragile because of weight reduction that it needs external power to make it strong enough to use, so it doesn't really feel like an advantage.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Well, no... it's because Robotech isn't their main business. They own and manage apartment buildings in the Los Angeles area, which is a fairly profitable business considering what the area's high cost of living does to rent rates. They also have a private theater that they rent out for screenings of films. Well, that's why Robotech is still around, at least... squatting on that trademark to Macross, making knockoff Macross merch, and suing copyright infringers on Big West and Tatsunoko's behalf is about all the brand is good for.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Well, the Slayer Valkyrie designs all have the distinction of having been developed by the same design team... the SV Works team established by General Galaxy cofounder, Sukhoi SV-51 and SV-52 design team member, and VF-X-4 development team member Alexei Kurakin and staffed initially with several fellow veterans of the SV-51 and SV-52 programs. Other than that, all that really sets them apart is that their designs are optimized to fight against other VFs rather than Zentradi mecha in ways which are not specified. I've seen a description that implies that the Slayer Valkyries are interceptors with an area defense focus. I don't completely buy this explanation, despite both known SV Works products being modeled on real-world supersonic interceptors (the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter and Saab J 35 Draken), given that the Sv-262 Draken III is depicted operating more or less exclusively as an air superiority fighter in Windermere IV's campaign against the Brisingr Alliance. But none of those are Slayer Valkyrie designs by the SV Works. The SV-51 was developed by some of the engineers from Sukhoi, IAI, and Dornier who would later go on to join the SV Works after General Galaxy's founding in 2017, the VF-4 was likewise created before General Galaxy and the SV Works were founded, and the VF-27 was developed by the Macross Galaxy Variable Fighter Development Arsenal "Guld Works", a team named in honor of the late test pilot Guld Goa Bowman. The SV-51 and SV-52 carry the SV designation for unrelated reasons, being principally developed by Sukhoi. The only SV Works designs we know 100% were SV Works designs were the Sv-154 Svard and Sv-262 Draken III used by Windermere IV's Kingdom of the Wind. The only other VF design we've yet seen that might be a SV Works development is the YF-21/VF-22 Sturmvogel II given that Project Super Nova's operational requirements included things like being used to suppress uprisings and terrorist activity on emigrant planets. Well, it's in what they're designed to fight. Most VFs were designed around the assumption that they'd have to fight the Zentradi. The majority of 5th Gen designs were designed around the requirements of having to fight the Vajra. The Slayer Valkyries stand out as having been designed specifically and principally to combat other VFs.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    023. Hikaru mentions it exactly once, right before launching from the Prometheus on his first sortie in Ep6 of Super Dimension Fortress Macross. Variable Fighter Master File: VF-1 Valkyrie Vol.1 uses that as his aircraft's modex number. It gives Max and Kakizaki's as 111 and 112 respectively.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Why stop there? Let's be honest enough to admit that the weird and ridiculous stuff did not, by any stretch of the imagination, confine itself to the secondary materials in either case. Hell, in some cases, the weirdness in Robotech's primary materials is straight-up inherited from the originals... there are two entire episodes devoted to trippy fever dreams full of just plain insane sh*t, soldiers brawling in a coffee shop using pro-wrestling moves, giant space aliens who mistake wire-fu movies for confidential military records, alien spies dressing in drag by mistake, soldiers getting into catfights over an expensive dress, and a grown man's horror realizing he's been fapping to an extremely pretty man and not a woman. Super serious this ain't. Well, there's another difference in terms of overall quality. Macross might do weird sh*t, but it's pretty uniformly high quality weird sh*t. Robotech is done as cheaply as possible with no regard for quality whatsoever, with that last part being the reason Harmony Gold is so ashamed of what was produced on its watch during the late 80's and the 90's (by their own admission).
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Oh golly, where to begin? One of my favorite "bad test track" stories is one that happened to me personally. I took a BEV prototype out to the test track to discharge the battery with some aggressive driving, as that was a faster way to discharge its battery pack than asking the mechanics in my lab space to dismount the pack and hook it up to a charge controller. Didn't realize that the emotor controller software was new and didn't have cals merged yet, so when I put my foot down expecting its usual kinda-dozy start off the line I discovered the hard way that it wasn't going to derate the emotor based on velocity... so I got maximum instantaneous torque at 0rpm and proceeded to leave a sixty-foot strip of rubber on the track and almost put it into one of the guard rails on the outside edge of the first hairpin turn. Ruined two tires, and incurred the wrath of the facilities maintenance for leaving rubber all over their pristine track. I've experienced several "camo malfunctions", where bolt-on camouflage caused doors or even the hood to fly open during a test by interfering with latches. I had a total failure of the powertrain on the above-described BEV caused by one of the vehicle's other users subjecting it to a fording test without telling anyone in advance, so water infiltrated the pack because the seals had been removed to connect it up to the charge control system and promptly froze until driving heated it up enough to melt and short the pack. I've seen an 8-speed automatic accidentally destroyed on a test track run by a test engineer who failed to take the car out of low/tow gear mode and proceeded to try to get the truck it was installed on up to 70mph+. There were bits of gear teeth in the transmission fluid when it was brought back for maintenance. I've seen similar damage inflicted on manual transmissions several times when people who swore blind they knew how to drive stick failed shifts and went to an unintended gear at unacceptably high RPMs, including one accidental attempt to shift into reverse at over 55mph and 6,000rpm. I've seen defective supplier hardware and software brick vehicles while stationary or in mid-drive, with the worst recurring culprit actually being a badly-programmed data logger. I've seen prototype control boards fry under load spikes, and on one memorable case I saw an EVSE explode due to what was later determined to be a manufacturing defect in the EVSE itself. I've seen a couple crashes caused by software defects, driver inattentiveness, weather conditions, and suicidal wildlife... the latter being a significant recurring problem for the test track I most frequently use. I've seen a number of wild turkeys meet their ends in the grills of test vehicles, and I've seen the aftermath of two deer strikes as well. I've also seen a couple of vehicles suffer tree related damages from attempting to evade wildlife on the track. Yes to both. One of the senior powertrain calibrators who I met when I moved from experimental vehicles to forward-model development was an absolute poet with a manual trans, and could probably have found steady work as a stunt driver. I could take or leave a manual... I'm very much with the convenience crowd, though my preference would be for a BEV that didn't need a transmission at all. Something about the higher powertrain efficiency levels just really gets me worked up. You'll never get better than about 48-52% energy efficiency from a combustion engine. You can get upwards of 90% efficiency from an electric. Oh, I imagine our engineers have a pretty good understanding of why manuals are such a "car guy" thing... but they're "car guys" themselves, for the most part. It's the majority who are non-car guys who do kind of dictate what features are standard though, for better or worse. People really like convenience, which is why so much of what's being done to load down CAN buses and lowspeed vehicle ethernet networks is convenience feature content like infotainment, comfort features, and lower level autonomy features. That's kinda what Sport mode is trying to do... but it's a pretty terrible imitation for the most part.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    What I've heard on that score (no pun intended) was that Victor Entertainment wanted prospective Macross 7 licensees to license Fire Bomber's entire catalog and not just the double handful of songs actually used in the show. That put the price tag on the rights to the all-important music beyond what any western distributor could cost-justify based on expected return-on-investment for the series. It'd probably be less of an issue nowadays... both because anime is gaining acceptance in western markets and because the albums are mostly pushing twenty-five years old.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    IIRC it's live bidding.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    And yet, they keep coming back to the Unseen because those are the designs that BattleTech fans consider the franchise's most iconic... which is also why the franchise ends up in legal hot water every few years when they try to reverse course and make the battlemechs look more like the Unseen. Much like Harmony Gold, FASA built a brand on "borrowed" IP that turned out to be more popular than anything they came up with themselves and have spent the intervening decades desperately trying to recapture that fleeting high instead of making a clean break. I'm not sure I'd say that was in the 90's, given that it was basically '99 and beyond. HG claims it was an innocent misunderstanding on their part WRT their claims to having the exclusive worldwide rights to every part of Macross... but nobody really buys that. Have you ever noticed that Claude Leon from Southern Cross seems to go to the same tailor as Zap Brannigan? Seriously, because I can't unsee that... or that his relationship with Emerson is basically a less comedic Zap and Kiff. Yes, but after the weather warmed up one would typically want to put as much distance between themselves and the dumpster fire as humanly possible... Oh that's an easy one... it's because it's not their main or even their secondary business. Robotech's basically the company hobby, like knitting socks to sell on Etsy. Nothing miraculous about it... Harmony Gold had no legal power to block Macross releases prior to registering trademarks on the original Macross series's title, logo, and associated key art ~1999-2001. They had no more power to stop Macross II and Macross Plus from being released worldwide than I do to stop the Earth from turning. Those trademarks are all HG has to stop Macross's expansion into the west, and while Big West will likely never win a trademark challenge in the US due to the way trademark law is written here, they've been challenging and beating Harmony Gold in other key markets and taking back the Macross trademarks. Harmony Gold also didn't have any exclusive rights to the characters apart from their likenesses from the original SDF Macross series, so since Max, Milia, Exsedol, etc. all looked different to their TV series versions, HG would not be able to raise any complaints regardless... (and they only had merchandising rights to those likenesses anyway... so it wouldn't have stopped them from distributing the show. Robotech was, at the time, effectively dead save for a trickle of incredibly sh*tty comic books from bottom-tier hacks... they were, for once, apparently being honest when they admitted that nobody was "minding the store" in that period. They didn't start to take any kind of active interest in anime again until about 1998 when they started trying to revive Robotech with Robotech 3000's laughably ill-fated series concept.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Macross Chronicle uses Macross Zero's cross emblem as the formal insignia of the Anti-Unification Alliance. It was used on both the SV-51s and the MiG-29s that appeared in the Macross Zero OVA, and it's also used on their Worldguide sheet for the Alliance. They are described as being a loose alliance of the various national partisan groups who were opposed to the introduction of the one world government... so it's certainly possible. The official Macross chronology does tend to agree with that implication, indicating that the Anti-Unification Alliance was more or less on the ropes and the Unification Wars were at least officially considered to have already been over for like a year at the time Macross Zero is set due to the Russian partisans withdrawing their support for the Alliance. Likely their reason for pulling out had something to do with the Alliance destroying the city of St. Petersburg with a thermonuclear reaction weapon. How last of a gasp the Mayan Island incident actually was varies depending on the story. The main Macross chronology does indicate the Alliance collapsed about two months after the Mayan Island incident when the remainder of its sponsors abandoned the organization. Macross the First has a laster-than-that gasp in the form of a Fourth Defensive Battle of South Ataria island on Christmas Eve, 2008. The Alliance submarine carrier Kursk launched a surprise attack on South Ataria near midnight as part of an attempt to nuke the island with a reaction warhead mounted on a remotely operated SV-51. I don't believe TPTB have ever implied the F-15 Eagle inspired the VF-1 program. Even the original tech manual from '84 is pretty blatant about the VF-1 having been based on the F-14.
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