Seto Kaiba

Part of it is certainly people looking back at Robotech and coming to the realization that what they'd thought was a deep, sophisticated TV show as a kid was really a pathologically lazy, hastily slapped-together mess that compares unfavorably even to the blatant toy commercial kid's shows it ran opposite of. Most of it, however, is down to a mixture of Robotech's "creators" being pathological liars who simultaneously badmouth the creators of the original shows and take credit for their work, Robotech itself being a joke of a franchise that lacks any significant redeeming qualities thanks to it having evolved into little more than a commercially unsuccessful Macross mockbuster, and of course Robotech's owners doing everything in their mortal power to hurt the Macross franchise in the name of protecting their teaspoon-shallow derivative. The hate Robotech gets is, for the most part, richly deserved. About the only unjustified hate for Robotech comes from the BattleTech fandom. They're salty because FASA were even more creatively bankrupt than Harmony Gold, and managed to also be even worse at hiding the fact... leading to lawsuits for copyright infringement that dog the franchise to this day. Those lawsuits are one of the rare moments where HG is actually in the right. No, there really weren't. In fact, when it came to Robotech II: the Sentinels, a big part of why it ended up in development hell before its sponsored bailed and the exchange rate crash administered the coup de grace was that Macek's "vision" for the series was such an unholy mess the consummate professionals on Tatsunoko's side of the project couldn't get their heads around his godawful mess of a story and set out to turn it into something general audiences might actually want to watch. Macek took this rather personally, and had one of the anime industry's finest writers removed from the project in favor of a low-rent hack he picked. The Robotech material derived from it was bad not (or not only) because the people working on the comics and novels were bad at their jobs, but because the source material wasn't so much a dumpster fire as a landfill coated in white phosphorous. As we programmer types say, "garbage in, garbage out". Take out all of the context and some of it doesn't sound completely terrible, but the minute you attempt to actually accurately communicate the essence of the story it becomes an obvious mess. To wit: A cuckolded royal space lobster (yes, really) decides to vent his frustration with a little good ol' fashioned genocide for no real reason while his wife was out trying to score more space drugs. Off-brand Wookiees, knockoff Cylons, Space Amazons, The Coneheads, generic rock people, and mystic cat-wolves decide it's easier to use their new human friends as meatshields than actually defend themselves or doing anything to help, while a human mission to forestall a second alien invasion of Earth fails epically when everyone forgot to check if the people they were headed to meet were going to be in the office that week. So Earth is invaded and conquered TWICE because the military sent the competent soldiers into deep space with vague directions on a poorly planned errand and left Earth in the care of a rabidly xenophobic tyrant of a general who used to be an anti-government terrorist and saboteur commanding the spacefuture equivalent of MacNamera's Morons, troops deemed too incompetent and undisciplined to be worth trusting with real assignments and meant to mainly be cannon fodder. The occupation of Earth is finally ended when Cuckold King Space Lobster trusts a man who is so obviously untrustworthy that his leitmotif would be Voltaire's "When You're Evil" and is almost immediately killed by him as a result. The real military decides that the most expedient solution to recapturing Earth is to just blow it the f*ck up and plant their flag on the rubble when the smoke clears - never mind all the civilian casualties - and the Invid Regess comes down from a decade-long prog rock space drug binge to conclude the space fuzz are absolute madmen and she'd better leave before her people get eight warning shots in the back. Then the space robots who made the bombs decide that the people they gave the bombs to after promising to use them for genocide are bad people for wanting to use the bombs for genocide and decide the only appropriate response to this revelation is genocide. Even on paper, it sounds more like a parody than a serious story. Encouraging someone to commit acts of self-harm would be illegal, immoral, and a violation of the forum's terms of service. Nah, they could breathe oxygen just fine IIRC... their gimmick was that there was some other substance in their atmosphere that was lethally addictive. They had to breath it or die, and anyone who visited their planet without proper protective gear who breathed it wouldn't be able to leave. Well, what were you expecting from a fan of L. Ron Hubbard?

Superhot got a Switch port recently... somehow that flew under my radar. Apparently also Amnesia: the Dark Descent and Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs... I guess I know what the next couple weeks of my free time look like.

Nobody. They literally never decided on an identity for her when they were making Macross Delta. All we know is that she is someone who was alive during the First Space War and has been researching the military potential of song ever since. Smart money says that, if she's ever given an identity, it'll be a Remember the New Guy? moment like every other new character who was alive and active during that period like Col. Millard Johnson from Macross Plus, Black Rainbow ace pilot Timothy Daldhanton from Macross VF-X2, Macross Frontier fleet secret sponsor and SMS owner Richard Bilra, and the anti-government militant Naresuan in Macross R. No. Lady M is a wealthy industrialist who's been researching the military potential of songs and running a megacorp for the last fifty-odd years. Misa's been MIA for at least that long.

Robotech II: the Sentinels was, to be brutally honest, a fantastic example of how creatively bankrupt Carl Macek and co. really were when it came to developing new IP for the Robotech brand. The Sentinels aliens really shone in how lazy and derivative they all are and how little effort was made to hide exactly whose homework Carl was copying. One can hardly blame Tommy Yune for going the obvious route with Carl's store brand classic Cylons... he even subtly threw a bit of shade at Macek by making their fighter look like a classic Cylon Raider. They're an easy pass now too... but the Robotech fandom is not exactly renowned for it discernment or taste, that being 90% of the reason Robotech still has a fandom at all.

IIRC, it's actually a piece of concept art produced for the cancelled Robotech II: the Sentinels series that was reprinted/traced for Palladium Books's RPG in the publisher's usual manner. Robotech Art 3 had a bunch of line art material from the unproduced majority of Robotech II: the Sentinels. Virtually all of it, yeah... they only completed enough material for ~3 episodes of the planned 65. Apart from the godawful "Jack McKinney" novels, the only place the Karbarrans appeared was in the comics. They used that same design in the Waltrip bros Sentinels comic book series, but were reworked into something that looks less retarded for the Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles tie-in comic Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles (in which that same character, L'Ron, looks more like a fairly generic anthropomorphic bear in a maroon robe.) (And yes, the character's name is horrible too... it's a reference to L. Ron Hubbard, which shows how fantastic Macek's taste in sci-fi was... ) Not gonna lie... I can kinda see the resemblance between the godawful Sentinels aliens and the equally goofy-but-in-a-different-way kaiju-by-another-name from Macross 7, and I most definitely HAVE seen the series many times. Admittedly, I've always felt like the designs for Robotech II: the Sentinels looked like rejects from the short-lived Star Trek animated series... which did have a LOT of very silly alien designs in it.

Surya Aerospace's VF-31 wasn't - as far as we know - a product of a design competition like the one that gave rise to both the VF-25 and VF-27. They started with the already-completed YF-30 Chronos design and modified it significantly to meet the Brisingr Alliance NUNS's requirements for a next-gen fighter and economize it so that it could be mass-produced in the relatively cash-strapped Brisingr cluster with the possibility of later exporting the design. It's kind of a hybrid of the real-world backstories of the Mitsubishi F-2 and Mitsubishi ATX-X/X-2. There wouldn't have been a competitor design.

Yeah, that kinda settles it rather definitively... and means I'm going to have to bite my tongue and buy a copy of this book.

The Neo Glaug, which first appeared in the Sony PlayStation game Macross Plus Game Edition (2000). It was an unmanned two-mode (Fighter and GERWALK) variable fighter that was developed from the manned Variable Glaug as a competitor to the AIF-X-9 Ghost, incorporating the same Sharon Apple-derived AI technology. In Macross Plus Game Edition, the Neo Glaug intercepts Isamu while he's en route to Macross City and is defeated by him. The design the Neo Glaug is developed from in-universe, the Variable Glaug, appeared a year later in the 2001 Sega Dreamcast game Macross M3 as the signature mecha of Dancing Skulls ace Moaramia Jifon Jenius... being a Zentradi-developed 3rd Generation-equivalent variable fighter created by anti-government forces using a stolen VF-4 Lightning III and Zentradi overtechnology. The design later fell into New UN Government hands and a miclone-compatible version was produced. A manned version of the Neo Glaug, dubbed the Neo Glaug bis, appears in Macross the Ride as an Advanced Variable Fighter (4th Generation VF) equivalent produced by the New Nile Arsenal and General Galaxy and operated by the anti-government group Fasces, who are leftovers of the Latence faction from Macross VF-X2. Those aren't really unmanned fighters, per se... they're remotely operated target drones. Much like the real world militaries, the New UN Forces sometimes dispose of older model fighters that've been retired by converting them into remotely operated drones so pilots operating newer aircraft can train with live weapons against moving targets. (Those were, AFAIK, VF-11A units that had not been updated to the VF-11B standard when production began in earnest.) (Various books, including Master File volumes, have indicated that this was a fate met by many older model VFs and redundant variants that weren't sold off to civilians. The VF-1Ls apparently all met their end as remotely operated QVF-1 target aircraft for live weapons training.) It looks like it only has the two engines, but having extra engines comes with a significant increase in weight that degrades the improvement in performance from all that thrust. The VF-27's four engines make it quite a bit heavier than the typical VF of its generation, so a twin-engine VF with more power behind the individual engines like the Sv-262 Draken III can achieve very similar performance because it's also significantly lighter. The VF-27 and YF-29 appear to have had four engines not necessarily because they needed the massive thrust they provided, but because they needed the energy output of four thermonuclear reactors to power all their odds and ends. (The twin-engine YF-27-5 needed to carry an additional generator on one of its wings to power its beam gunpod.) Since Delta Flight's VF-31 Custom Siegfrieds are already well above production spec, my guess would be that this new foe will not be significantly more advanced or powerful than Windermere IV's Aerial Knights.

Finished To The Abandoned Sacred Beasts today, and it was probably one of the most lame, half-hearted endings I've ever seen. Hank gets beat up by Cain during a raid on a fortress occupied by Cain's newly declared nation of New Patria, then inexplicably goes Super Saiyan - yes, you read that right - punches Cain once, and the fight is just over for no reason. Do You Love Your Mom and Her Two-Hit Multi-Target Attacks may well be one of the very worst, most asinine things I have ever watched. This steaming turd makes me so disgusted with the light novel's author, the studio, and everyone involved with it, I would have believed you if you'd told me that famously inaccurate Miyazaki quote about anime being a mistake was legit if you told me he was talking about this TV series. It manages to combine all of my disgust with wildly inappropriate fanservice from Strike Witches with all of my disgust with terrible writing from Angel Links into some kind of loathing singularity. Kill this with white phosphorus because fire ain't cutting it. One Punch Man's second season proved to be pretty disappointing too. It built up a lot, but the animation quality was subpar compared to the previous season and the buildup isn't rewarded with any payoff... Saitama oneshots Centchoro, Garou gets rescued by the Monster Association, and it just sort of stops before anything could be depicted regarding the Hero Association's raid on the Monster Association.

The last unmanned VF we got didn't have a Battroid mode at all... Since we were promised a different antagonist for this new movie, my thoughts went from the strong VF-14 resemblance to the Elgersoln Gustav that Fasces was using as their answer to the VF-171 c.2058 in Macross the Ride.

We'll probably be chewing over that one in the Mecha Discussion thread for a while... at least until we something more final for the design.

Yeah, no kidding.

Perhaps... then again, perhaps not. Macross Delta did kind of mark another of the franchise's swings back towards the passively stealthy aircraft designs. General Galaxy was very big on fully internalizing armaments on their 3rd and 4th Generation concepts like the VF-14 Vampire and VF-22 Sturmvogel II. The VF-14 had built-in beam machineguns, internal missile bays, and an internal gunpod storage bay, and the VF-22 went one further with an internal bomb bay, dual internal gunpod mounts, and internal micro-missile launchers. Shinsei Industry's school of design is substantially more conventional and conservative, relying more on external and conformal mounting points than internal ones. Just because the armaments aren't immediately obvious doesn't mean they aren't there... e.g. the VF-14, VF-22, Sv-262, etc. Or just a really good wraparound holographic monitor system and armored canopy, like the Draken III had. ... Berger Stone does have that slightly untrustworthy air of the used Valkyrie salesman... Considering Keith's wind-riding was enough to incur some serious shop time (enough to have him switch to another aircraft), they probably aren't stressed for too much more than the 1,955kNx2 they've got as stock. Yeah, Windermere IV likely isn't their only customer... given how limited Windermere's finances are. Then again, our best possible candidate for a SV Works mass production aircraft based on requirements was the VF-22... which was explicitly an anti-VF VF, the SV Works's turf. Part of the peace process mentioned in the movie will probably include Windermere IV having to surrender part of its war materiel, including the Sigur Berrentzs.

So we've got this thing as a teaser for a new VF to be introduced in Macross Delta: Absolute Live!!!!!!. First blush reaction, this looks like a minimally-tweaked version of one of the early VF-27 drafts I remember seeing in Shoji Kawamori: the View Point of Visionary Creator years ago. The lack of an obvious canopy, the large sensor blisters, its delta wing with through-wing engine nacelles, small inward-canted stabilizers, etc. all positively scream General Galaxy's handiwork. This looks like nothing quite so much as a direct descendant of the VF-14. Five'll get you twenty this is either a new Dian Cecht SV Works unit or another General Galaxy 5th Generation main VF (perhaps an economized VF-27 derivative). Oh, almost certainly. Really, it's more a matter of whether or not a government in Windermere IV's position could afford them. Hard to say, since the Sv-262 Draken III is such a painfully unbalanced design... crippling overspecialization is a real thing, and the Draken III is its poster child. None of which we are presently aware. This could, of course, change at any time in a side story manga, light novel, etc. Do they have that infrastructure, though? They were explicitly leaning on the Epsilon Foundation and its subsidiaries for all of their equipment needs. They have the technical training to repair and maintain the Sv-262s they had, but do they have the factories and raw materials they need to actually make replacement parts? My guess would be "no". General Galaxy doesn't own the SV Works in the 2060s, they sold them off to an Epsilon Foundation subsidiary named Dian Cecht. The Dian Cecht SV Works were the ones who developed the Draken III. They have half a Protoculture ship at this point, they left a pretty big chunk of it behind on Ragna... and since its abilities largely depended on fold song, they're SOL now that their fold singer is out of commission after burning out his runes to power it during their conflict with the New UN Government.

Nah, Robotech 3000 was such a complete non-starter that it was more like it failed to pass POST. Can't reboot what never booted. Or a "take that", if they're deliberately taking the piss out of it... this godawful Robotech comic honestly felt like a bass-ackwards attempt at self-parody for a while. Doubly so when you consider that all of the references to the various past failures of the Robotech franchise like Robotech II: the Sentinels, Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles, Robotech: the Movie, and Robotech 3000 (but surprisingly not Robotech Academy) were done specifically so that the comic could write them AND the Masters Saga and New Generation out of existence entirely in favor of a new Macross-focused story. It was a piss-take, and a setup to write that garbage out of their canon the way HG was progressively writing it out of the official one.

In what sense is it a reboot? They never made the series beyond a single trailer, and what we see is just a handful of characters from that embarrassingly awful trailer...

There are a few publications that have glossaries of key terms but not much more than that.

Really, the only artist's error here is working on this comic... this will definitely not be going on their resumes when they're done. Mind you, the worse sin here is definitely the writer's. It's transparently obvious they're back to the old school ripoff behavior of Antarctic Press, throwing any and every piece of sh*t at the wall in the hopes that one will stick. It's the usual Robotech comic book affair... a disgraceful mess without the slightest trace of artistic integrity or dignity. Robotech 3000 was not a reboot... it was developed as a far-future sequel/spinoff to the Robotech television series. Robotech was rebooted for the first - and thus far, only - time in 2001 after Harmony Gold cancelled all development of Robotech 3000 for the second time and brought in Tommy Yune to replace Carl Macek as franchise creative director.

Yeah, kinda... it's not like they're going to starve thanks to their economy being built almost exclusively on agriculture, but they've lost the offworld market for their produce thanks to it having been used to spread Var syndrome. The Epsilon Foundation was almost certainly the secret buyer for their black market fold quartz, and now that Berger Stone's outed Epsilon's involvement (and himself with it), they've probably lost their only buyer as well as their source of advanced tech and weaponry. It'll be interesting to see if Epsilon's low-rent version of the fold wave system - the Fold Reheat - ever makes its way into VF designs by major aerospace defense firms like Shinsei and General Galaxy.

Slang that's even used directly in Macross publications like the Macross Frontier Pash! Animation File mook, which uses it as a synonym for "amazing" on several occasions.

Unfortunately, @Gubaba isn't on these boards anymore. Here's the link to his site: https://gubabablog.wordpress.com/

Well, for most things anyway... an automatic's chief virtue is that there really isn't a learning curve to using it. You put the shifter in D and you go. I've seen some pretty appalling things on test tracks over the years, including an awful lot of people who claim to have grown up with manual transmissions doing a pretty rubbish job with them. The big test drive events are kind of like torture. Oh, it absolutely is extra work. You just don't feel like it is once you're used to it to the point that it feels natural. The fact that it IS extra work is literally the historical reason semi-automatic and automatic transmissions were invented in the first place. It's not my intention to "deflate" the manual driving experience... you enjoy what you enjoy, and I have zero interest or stake in trying to change your mind. I was simply noting, in response to derisive remarks about people who prefer automatics, that the reason the automatic transmission was invented and became the industry standard is because it's a convenience feature. A lot of people just don't care to put in that small extra effort if they don't absolutely have to, especially when it comes coupled with the possibiliy of an error incurring a significant non-warranty repair bill. They don't want to have to think about how their car works, they just want it to work, and the automatic transmission helps fill that need. Convenience sells. That said, I do feel the age of the manual transmission is nearing its end as the push for better fuel-efficiency and lower emissions forces increasing amounts of powertrain computerization and automation. Hybrids, and then BEVs, are going to become the norm in the not too distant future and manual doesn't really fit into the picture of powertrain electrification.

Some people - a pretty significant percentage of 'em, anyways - want their car to "just work". They don't want to have to think about the nuts and bolts of what makes their car tick, they just want to enjoy the drive, listen to their music, or focus on the satnav system to get where they're going. Also, from my experience, proper shift timing is something that too many drivers simply don't have the patience to learn. "If you can't find it, grind it" is a very real, very disappointing phenomenon. Mind you, from my professional role in powertrain development and my interactions with ZF and Aisin, I'd question if there's even a future for the manual transmission now that the focus for improving performance, fuel efficiency, and emissions control has increasingly turned to electrification. You can still have a manual on a car equipped with a BSG, ISG, or a vehicle equipped with eAWD, but once you start getting into the realm of hybrid transmissions with mild- and plug-in hybrids it starts getting increasingly complicated and the best that's often possible is the faux-manual behavior of sport mode thanks to multiple torque sources in parallel and powersplit system designs, some of which are effectively outside of direct human control. In a few years, BSGs, ISGs, and powersplit MHEVs are going to be the new normal in order to meet the tightening CAFE and CARB requirements for emissions controls, never mind the more stringent emissions controls in Europe and China. With key European markets already moving to outlaw the sales of non-BEV cars within the next 30 years, odds are the push for electrification is going to make high voltage parallel and powersplit PHEVs the norm before long even in the US. There's just too much potential for the meatbag to destroy the transmission if there're emotors spinning parts of it rather than just the engine. Well, in America, that's because public transit is a poor people thing outside of city centers... and in true American fashion even lower-middle-class folks tend to see themselves more as temporarily inconvenienced millionaires. That, and the fact that convenience always sells. People might grumble about the idea of autonomous cars, but people take to the idea of SAE Level 4 and 5 autonomy VERY quickly... just look at how many idiots nap behind the wheel of their Teslas, which are technically only Level 3 capable (and only just, at that, given how often they autonomously run into sh*t). Just wait 'til we hit Level 5 capability, and we'll start seeing autonomous vehicles delivering people who've shuffled off their mortal coil en route without the car even noticing. It's not delivery, it's dead people!

It did get a bit better, but not by all that much. So far, it seems a pretty straight adaptation of the One Punch Man manga, which is fine. I don't care for the new OP though. Topping "The Hero ~ Set Fire to the Furious Fist" by JAM Project would've been a TALL order, and the new one doesn't even come close.

Yeah, she's not old enough... Lady M is said to have been researching the military potential of song in the immediate aftermath of the First Space War, meaning she'd be at least as old as Max (who was 52 at the start of Macross 7).