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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Well, my bizarre adventure through David Production's adaptation of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure is almost at its end. I'm ten episodes from the end of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure Part V: Vento Aureo, and it's been a hell of a wild ride.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    To me, Daniel Craig's tenure as James Bond as a whole has felt eminently skippable. They're just... dull. Craig's Bond is just an utterly generic grizzled American action hero, who makes a few (incredibly forced) attempts to ape the dry wit and class of previous Bonds with little success because the actor has exactly one facial expression... staring into the middle distance like he can't remember if he left the oven on. Casino Royale is supposed to be a Bond origin story, but it removes so much of what makes film Bond iconic that it would probably be better if you took the James Bond name off of it altogether. I'll probably get No Time to Die when it hits home video, but I plan on skipping it in theaters as I did with Skyfall and Spectre.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    "Truth in television", as it were... both in terms of the bruised egos on the part of Henry Ford II and Enzo Ferrari, and in terms of the antagonism between Henry Ford II and Lee Iacocca. As Iacocca himself famously put it, "If a guy's over 25% jerk he's in trouble, and Henry was 95%."
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Since everything's digitally-animated these days, I dunno... maybe they can re-render stuff in 4K the way they'd do a new transfer from original reels.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Not quite what I was getting at, but yeah... there is that aspect to it too. The last trailer and TV ad spots we've been seeing lately for The Rise of Skywalker feel like they belong to a movie where the producers know they have a turd on their hands, and used every good bit of the film in the promotional material in the hopes of getting as many butts in seats as possible during opening week before word can get around that it sucks and the box office revenue drops to practically nothing. That's not really something that you expect from a franchise like Star Wars, which until Solo: a Star Wars Story was considered essentially failure-proof. Really, I suspect the opposite... that the audience is going into The Rise of Skywalker so firmly convinced that it's going to suck that nothing will change their minds. After The Last Jedi went over like a neutron star matter balloon and Solo: a Star Wars Story landed in a broken heap with an almost audible splat, most Star Wars fans (and especially the YouTube gutter snipes) seem to be pretty convinced that Star Wars is Ruined Forever and are just bracing themselves for whatever knee-jerk idiocy J.J. Abrams pulls out of his hat to try to fix Kathleen Kennedy and Rian Johnson's compounding of his own mistakes. They're divided as to whether Abrams will fold or double down, but either way they're sure it's going to suck. I'm rather glad this movie comes out so late in December, because several of my coworkers are Star Wars fans and I won't have to hear the wailing and gnashing of teeth until after the new year so they'll have had a chance to get some of it out of their systems.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    At-home charging for BEVs is a bit of a sticky wicket right now, since most homes aren't wired to deliver more than 36 amps on a 240 volt branch (@50-60Hz). That's what all of the major charger standards are engineered around: SAE J1772 (US), IEC 62196 (Europe), and GB/T 20234.2 (China). Consequently, charging an electric vehicle is still a rather time-intensive operation. Using your garden variety American home electrical outlet at a nominal 120V 15A, you're looking at around 14 hours to recharge a 40kWh Li+ battery pack like those found on many PHEVs and light-duty BEVs. Something like a Tesla needs anywhere from 80 to 100 hours of charging from that same outlet to fully recharge a depleted pack (because their packs are 85kWh or 100kWh). Using a dedicated 240V charger, it's about 2 hours to recharge that 40kWh pack on a PHEV or light-duty BEV and between 9 and 11 hours to recharge the 85-100kWh pack of a BEV like the Tesla Model S. That's about the limit of what you can achieve with home charging right now. The twinned holy grails of BEV design are a battery pack with performance that won't deteriorate noticeably in cold weather (graphene!) and achieving a network of high-voltage DC current charging stations that can achieve near gas station-like "refueling" speed... so you can plug your car in, even in deepest midwinter, and be fully recharged in minutes instead of hours. SAE J1772 DC Level 1 fast charging is up to 450V at up to 80A and its gruntier Level 2 version can go up to 200A. DC Level 1 could charge something like that 40kWh pack in about 30 minutes, or the Tesla's 85-100kWh packs in a bit over 90 minutes. DC Level 2 could do that 40kWh pack in about 10 minutes and the 100kWh pack in about 30 minutes. That's a charger you're not going to want in your house though, because they're big and noisy and they require dedicated branch circuits that aren't normally built into a house. The ones I used when we were working on Phase III of the RAM 1500 PHEV (https://www.allpar.com/model/ram/electric-PHEV.html) for the USDoE were around the size of a vending machine and weren't exactly quiet with all the cooling fans and the big chunky contactors opening and closing. Newer models are slimmer and quieter, but they're still around a foot or two thick and six to seven feet tall with an operating noise like a restaurant-grade refrigerator. It's amazing stuff, and the idea of combining battery production with carbon capture and sequestration technologies really rubs me the right way. Turning pollution into batteries to store clean green energy? I am 200% ready for that sh*t. Yeah, kinda... though it's got more commercial applications than residential ones.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Well, there is... but graphene batteries are still in the process of being scaled up to a usable level for something as big as a PHEV or BEV. Ten years or so down the road, we could get there. Graphene's got a major advantage over lithium since graphene batteries aren't temperature sensitive, eliminating a major roadblock to PHEV and BEV adoption. Yes and no... the US electrical grid is pretty damn dilapidated, but the communications infrastructure necessary to support grid-friendly "smart" charging has actually been in place for a while now. It's the same communications tech many of the more efficient models of water heater, furnace, AC, etc. employ. (IEEE 802.15.4 or ZigBee, and SEP2.) I actually used to be in charge of the SAE interoperability and security panels for this stuff. The actual physical charging stations are stupid easy to install if your house has a 240V branch accessible and they're pretty damn cheap too. The main problem is inadequate capacity in the grid itself, not a lack of infrastructure or difficulty in installing the requisite infrastructure. Depends where you are. Sensible countries that are adopting high levels of renewables and energy sequestration systems can easily support fleets of electric cars without burning fossil fuels. The ones who've doubled down on supporting renewables with nuclear DEFINITELY can. The only reason America can't is because the coal lobby has part of congress by the balls.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Well, yes and no... as an engineer working forward model development, I can say (without breaking any NDAs) that you'll absolutely see more choice in electrification by 2023. That said, most of it is going to be in BSGs1, MHEVs2, and PHEVs3. You'll see a few more vehicle lines offering full BEVs4, but not many because the electrical grid here in the US just isn't ready for en masse adoption of 500V or 800V battery-electric cars and they're not as profitable due to the decrease in tax incentives to buy them in the last year or so. That will likely change with the next administration, though. If a hybrid truck or SUV would be on your radar, you may find yourself spoiled for choice by 2023. You probably heard Sergio Marchionne announcing before he passed that Jeep's entire lineup was going hybrid, and he bloody meant it. (That is literally my department.) Eh... you're 50% correct. We will absolutely see an increase in vehicle electrification in the coming years. Why? Because there is no f*cking way any automaker is going to meet the government-mandated fuel economy and emissions requirements for the next decade without going at least partially electric on most of their vehicle lines. ESPECIALLY for trucks and SUVs, which are not exactly the most fuel efficient of vehicles even under perfect world conditions. Autonomy is a stickier wicket. We'll likely see progress made towards universal adoption of SAE Level 1 and 2 autonomy features like lane stay and adaptive cruise control, but the Elongated Muskrat is living in a fantasy world if he thinks we're going to get workable Level 4 or 5 autonomy (true self-driving in all possible road conditions) anytime soon. There are just too many factors to be accounted for, the sheer level of sensor fusion and processing power necessary to make it workable just isn't practical for a consumer level car right now. SAE Level 4 or 5 autonomy might be workable in somewhere between twenty and fifty years on a consumer level, but definitely not in ten. Tesla's autopilot is a dangerously underequipped attempt at autonomy, which is why Teslas keep running into stationary objects (and why the government keeps riding the Muskrat's *ss about how unsafe it all is). Radar and ultrasonics just aren't enough to do it safely, you need high-precision cameras and LIDAR too. Autonomous taxi fleets will be a thing, but under rigidly controlled conditions in low speed environments like downtown areas in major cities where any speed collision caused by autonomous AI defect or meatbag failure will be easily survivable. Yeah, you'll likely end up with a hybrid... non-hybrid options are going to become something of an endangered species in the coming decade due to the aforementioned tightening CAFE and CARB requirements, and several European countries outright banning the sale of gasoline-only cars in coming decades. You'd probably have fun with a BEV minivan or D-SUV. Maximum torque available from 0rpm. That's beyond even the most optimistic assessments I've seen... but we may one day reach that point in the next fifty years or so. Right now, autonomous vehicle technology just isn't mature enough for that, no matter what the Elongated Muskrat might want to tell his customers. 1. Belt-mounted Starter Generator, for the more aggressive implementations of Auto-start/stop, the lowest-end MHEVs. 2. Low-voltage hybrids that contain one or more emotors to assist the gas engine, and utilize regenerative charging to refill their batteries. 3. High-voltage hybrids that contain one or more emotors that can either assist the gas engine or run independently of it, which use both regenerative charging and power from the grid to replenish the battery. 4. Battery Electric Vehicles, pure electric powertrains with no gas engine component.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Well, that certainly... exists. The Rise of Skywalker doesn't feel like it's making much of an impact with these TV ad spots and trailers. This left the very distinct impression that this is going to be a bad movie, as the trailers are all action sequences with nothing to tease the story beyond the fact that this is the end.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Granted, but most militaries do accept extentuating circumstances if you're taken prisoner or so on... they don't exactly encourage you to do anything to save your skin, but they also don't actively encourage you to do anything in your power to get your *ss shot while being held prisoner. Odds are they do have something like that... which ties into my response to your second point. There probably was something similar to the monitoring station we saw on Snoke's ship that noticed even the momentary flicker in the ship's shields. The First Order, like the Empire before it, ingrains strict (blind) obedience to the military hierarchy into its troops in all divisions of the service. Shield Monitoring Mook A likely saw the shields going down, had a brief "WTF" moment, then saw it was a shield deactivation requested/ordered by Captain Phasma and assumed that if one of the First Order's most senior officers on base was requesting shield deactivation it must be some real sh*t well above their paygrade and questioned it no further. After all, it's not like the Empire or First Order ever encouraged subordinates to ask questions. Drawing attention from one of the most senior officers can be a distinctly unhealthy thing when the chain of command includes unstable psychopaths and magical space monks who can strangle you to death with their mind or chop you into bits with their laser sword with impunity. (I mean, a pair of First Order stormtroopers investigating a disturbance on the detention level at Starkiller Base not only don't investigate an open cell formerly holding a priority prisoner, they practically run away when they notice Darth Tantrum is in there engaging in his vigorous laser sword anger management routine.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Was he? I don't remember him doing much besides whining at Vader and standing around menacingly. Who's going to know? Unless she tells someone herself, literally the only way anyone would find out would be if they were a force user and read her mind, and those are pretty thin on the ground and not part of her normal social circle since her branch of service is normally represented by General Hux. Any access records related to her disabling Starkiller Base's shields went up in smoke with the base itself. They held her at gunpoint and made her deactivate Starkiller Base's shields under the implicit (or perhaps explicit) threat that they'd blow her head off if she didn't. That is the very definition of coercion. I mean, yeah, her actual job is to NOT do that kind of thing but still... If you take the bounty head alive, sure... "storm the place, guns blazing and then pick through the bodies afterwards" doesn't really require much smarts. Boba Fett did have to be warned not to disintegrate the target by Vader. Oh, I'm knocking both... put simply, both the old Star Wars Expanded Universe and the new Disney Star Wars sequel trilogy are the same garbage, just packaged differently. Neither the EU writers nor Disney could conceive of a way to move the story forward without effectively undoing the happy ending of Return of the Jedi. Balance wasn't restored to the Force, the Emperor isn't actually dead, the Empire continues to exist and just retreats a bit from its former key holdings before ultimately reconquering the galaxy, the Republic that our heroes fought so long and hard to restore barely lasts a generation, the next Skywalker generation falls to the Dark Side and repeats Anakin's mistakes, etc. The old, familiar characters from the movies get beaten into the ground until everything likable about them is gone. Remember that time Han, Leia, and a bunch of other characters all collecively got highly selective amnesia about Han's fascist cousin and arbitrarily commit treason against the Republic to help him? That's some quality writing there, eh? Or the time that the galaxy was invaded by the BDSM space bat-people immune to the Force? Or the time Leia almost f*cked a neon green reptilian crime lord who was trying to make Darth Vader jealous and capture Luke while everyone else was trying to track down the Death Star plans and a bad Han Solo knockoff was trying to track down the real Han Solo? Or the time the giant space lizards who had tongues in their noses invaded to turn people into batteries for their technology because it never occurred to them that you can store energy chemically? Or that time Han Solo's kids did a multi-novel anti-drug PSA? Or even a happily after of finite duration... everything must exist in a state of perpetual f*ckedness in order for the galaxy far far away to exist in a state of semi-perpetual war. The Expanded Universe seemed to have a new major conflict or diplomatic crisis every alternate tuesday. Honestly, a novella of Carrie Fisher-style musing on the nature of politics actually sounds like a pretty good time to me... she had very little time for bullsh*t (or diplomacy, a proper subset of bullsh*t). I dunno, I think Disney could've had a real good time with her as an evil queen the way she was originally intended to be... but they don't have the balls to write a face-heel turn for a popular character like that.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Ah yes, what new and exciting holes with the feared and fearless Captain Phasma fall down this time? She's already fallen down the garbage chute and into a hull breach the size of a city... why not go for the gusto and fall into a black hole next time? Surely there won't be another convenient desert-dwelling space anus for her to fall into. It sounds exciting and dramatic until you realize he just tailgated the Falcon to Bespin. Other than that, all he does is growl out a protest that Vader might accidentally kill his bounty head and stand around omniously without talking. Phasma does a lot more talking, for one... she's apparently the First Order's Drill Sergeant Nasty. She doesn't really do much in The Force Awakens besides talk a lot of sh*t and get thrown down the garbage chute after she takes the shields on Starkiller Base down at gunpoint. Phasma gets more in The Last Jedi, since she passes sentence on and presides over the attempted execution of Finn and Rose, then gets an actual fight scene with Finn aboard Snoke's ship before she gets the laser trench club or whatever it is upside the head and falls into the hull breach. That officially puts her one-up on Fett, whose only action scene was shooting Luke in the back of the hand before a blind Han Solo hits his jetpack with a stick, sending him sailing into the side of Jabba's sail barge and then into the mouth of the majestic desert space anus. You could just as easily interpret Vader's rebuke of Fett as Fett being a gung-ho moron like Killcrazy from Red Dwarf... the fact that Darth freaking Vader has to remind you that alive means don't kill them when most people wouldn't need to be told twice by one of the highest ranked Imperial officials (and the galaxy's all-time leader in casual workplace homicide) doesn't argue for intelligence or discretion. Everything the fans built Boba Fett up to be is so weirdly irrational, because he's literally nothing more than another death-prone mook in a slightly cooler mask who checks out with even less dignity than the average masked mook. His only real trait is that he's a very action figure-y design. Y'know, that hadn't really dawned on me until you said it. I'm not much of a Star Wars fan, but I can at least hum a few tunes from the original and sequel trilogies from memory. I can't for the life of me remember a single piece of music from the sequel trilogy. To be fair, this was a problem with the old Star Wars EU as well... the fans just don't want to acknowledge it. Ultimately, to keep the story going and have more wars in Star Wars, everything our heroes did must inevitably come to nothing. The galaxy would never know peace and stability again, and every victory would become a bitter defeat in the long run, because nobody's buying Star Wars without the wars. Characters would get old, and grey, and long in the tooth, and be forced into many situations that would be ridiculously out of character, the government they helped restore would fall again to the ambitions of Imperial posers, the Sith take over again, etc. The more I read of the old Star Wars EU, the more convinced I am that these new movies are actually a MASSIVE step up from what Star Wars had before. It isn't so much that fans didn't want or expect their childhood heroes to grow old, it's that they didn't expect them to grow up. The profound lack of imagination in Star Wars's efforts to grow its story past Return of the Jedi requires certain conditions like the Jedi Order collapsing again, the New Republic that Leia worked so hard to establish to fail hard enough for the Empire to come back, and another Skywalker to take up the mantle of the Dark Side and Darth Vader. Luke's naive farmboy optimism, Leia's belief in the power of democracy, and Han's devil-may-care attitude were never going to survive that. The result? Luke goes into exile the way his mentors did, Leia starts her own damned militia and to hell with the government, and Han falls back on his old bad habits after whatever stability he'd gained in a life with Leia broke down when she became a paramilitary commander and went off the grid. I'm sure there are probably some Gen Z kids who thought The Last Jedi was a perfect movie, but I suspect those are few and far between given how the response sank Solo and that even Jar-Jar Abrams has been forced to admit Star Wars fans hate the new trilogy in interviews. That and, a lot of those younger viewers will have been introduced to Star Wars by their elder siblings and parents and will be judging Disney Star Wars by much the same yardstick as older fans.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, exactly like Boba Fett... who just stood around looking menacing then got one-shotted by a blind man and plunges headlong into a giant anus monster in the desert. Phasma arguably accomplishes more than he ever does, but because she's an obvious attempt to create a designated cool character the attempt fails.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Well, that's what happens when you try to deliberately make a "cool" character. She's the Great Value version of Boba Fett.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Honestly, the best part of the whole thing is how the characters react to them. 3-CPO panics as is his custom, while Finn sounds outraged and slightly offended and Poe sounds wearily resigned to this bullsh*t. Rey, meanwhile, seems to offended beyond words by their very existence and just starts shooting with a disgusted look on her face. You have to admit, they're pretty effective in that regard every time they actually show up.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    One of the bigger, more problematic plot holes in the J.J. Abrams Star Trek bastardization that will only get worse as time goes on is that Starfleet crossed the Godzilla Threshold more or less right off the bat for reasons unclear in Star Trek '09. Even the USS Kelvin, a ship constructed before the timeline diverged from the main Star Trek timeline, is absolutely colossal by the standards of the period. The Constitution-class was Starfleet's biggest, fastest, most advanced, most powerful starship class for almost half a century until the Excelsior-class was introduced in the 2280s. The USS Kelvin, according to the special features on the Star Trek '09 Blu-ray, is almost 60% larger than the Constitution-class and has not quite twice the crew of the USS Enterprise... and she's supposed to just be one of Starfleet's scoutships. The Kelvin is dwarfed in turn by the alternate universe Constitution-class, which is larger than a prime timeline Sovereign-class ship and is armed to a similarly heavy extent. Unless I missed something, it's only the Federation who benefitted from detailed scans of the 24th century Romulan mining ship (with Borg technology). That'd make the Enterprise a proper bloody dreadnought by the standards of the day. What possible threat can the other major powers in that part of the galaxy possibly pose when the Federation's rocking that future tech that puts them half a century or more ahead of the hostile powers in their neck of the woods? The Romulan ship from "Balance of Terror" wouldn't be much of a threat to the Enterprise-E. The only way to credibly threaten the Enterprise was to bring a ship from the late 24th century, then an even bigger and more advanced version of itself, and then an entire functioning armada of ships from a much more advanced (but extinct) civilization. You can't have every movie feature a new apocalyptic threat to the entire Federation, it loses most of its sting in consecutive uses like that. Who's left who can threaten them, unless they steal a plot from the Star Trek relaunch and have the Federation's enemies team up and form their space Warsaw Pact (the Typhon Pact) a century and a half early. Depending on which version of its development history you ascribe to, the Miranda-class is potentially over 130 years old...
  17. Seto Kaiba
    ... and people wonder why Cycomi apparently dropped Macross the First. Mikimoto-sensei must be a Douglas Adams fan. Mr. Adams once opined "I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."
  18. Seto Kaiba
    I'm not sure where you're getting that, to be honest. Of the five new Starfleet starship designs that debuted in Star Trek: First Contact, the Sovereign-class is the only one described as having been redesigned in any way in response to the ongoing Borg threat after the Battle of Wolf 359. Even then, there's no description of the design changes being specifically anti-Borg countermeasures. It's just described as a general expansion of the ship's offensive and defensive systems. None of them were developed as warships, but rather as multi-mission explorers (Sovereign-class, Akira-class), utility transport ships (Saber-class), and border patrol ships (Akira-class, Norway-class, Steamrunner-class). None of them, save the multi-mission explorers, overlapped roles with other new classes like the Intrepid-class long-range exploration/survey ships. They were, instead, replacements for older models of ship used for border patrols and general duty like the Constellation-class, the Miranda-class, and Excelsior-class. They weren't built to fight the Borg or even redesigned to fight the Borg specifically. They were just shootier than previous generations of Starfleet ships because the Federation had more belligerent neighbors in the second half of the 24th century than it was used to having. Starfleet, as so many episodes and movies insist, are not soldiers (most of the time). They're explorers. Their ships are built to explore, for science and for diplomacy. That they're so heavily armed is just an acknowledgement of the reality that not everybody they meet is friendly (and that the Federation's philosophy of mutual cooperation is vastly superior to the Federation's rivals policies of conquest). That's why J.J.-Trek is such an affront to the Star Trek name. He tried to reinvent Star Trek to make Starfleet into the Federation Army so he could focus on ray gun battles, explosions, and lensflares... because diplomacy doesn't make for exciting action sequences full of special effects the way fights do.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Ruse or not, it's still a massive plot problem caused by trying to write a Star Trek action story. The more action-ized Star Trek gets, the bigger and more glaring the plot holes become. That's why news of a fourth J.J.-Trek movie is so disappointing... they embody that very problem. The more action-ized Star Trek tries to be, the more they end up sacrificing its soul and its quality. Like the last few episodes of Star Trek: Enterprise, it was such a mess that the relaunch novels could only shake their heads and take cheap shots at it for the entertainment of fans. The Borg apparently didn't assimilate their time travel tech, it was given to them by a faction in the Temporal Cold War, and was apparently confiscated after they failed given that the Borg never used it again and had never used it before that point.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    So, I did some checking into this, and that statement seems to be based on the fan assumption that the Defiant was the only prototype built and not anything in the episodes cited. The only source I could actually find alleging the Defiant-class was actually put into production was an AOL Chat with Ron Moore from 1997, and I'm not sure how official that'd be considered given that it wasn't an official interview or anything. (Granted, Starfleet absolutely IS stupid enough to engage in No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup, but they have had moments of Reality Ensues where multiple prototypes of ships were acknowledged to be present and actively tested on, like the Vesta and Luna classes, the Yellowstone-class runabouts, the NX warp 5 testbeds, etc.) Was that ever in any doubt? The man himself complains to Worf about how wasted he was on the Enterprise-D just standing around in a transporter room waiting for something to break down, and he does things that'd make even Scotty's eyes cross... like turning an unviable prototype into one of the meanest ships in the fleet, and making a Cardassian space station's systems play nice with grafted-in Federation and Bajoran technology. (One has to wonder how Sisko, and not O'Brien, ended up posted to the Utopia Planitia yards on Mars.) Starfleet had the Borg cube essentially swinging wild for the entire time it took the Enterprise to warp all the way from the Romulan Neutral Zone. Depending on the writer, that's either most of a day or several days. So, I did some checking into this as well and while I distinctly remember hearing the Akira-class was designed to fight the Borg, I'd never heard it of any of the other original designs used in the film (e.g. the Sovereign-class, Steamrunner-class, Saber-class, and Norway-class). I wasn't able to turn up any statements to the effect that any of them had been built to be "Borg killers" in official material. Most of them lack any kind of official development history, but the ones that do have one mentioned in expanded universe material are weirdly consistent in being said to have been on the drawing board before Wolf 359, several (e.g. the Steamrunner, Saber, Akira) are implied or outright stated to have been developed as a response to the Federation's border conflict with the Cardassian Union as upgunned patrol and utility ships to police the Cardassian border. The closest I was able to find to a ship designed to fight the Borg (besides the Defiant) was a mention that the Sovereign-class was reworked while still on the drawing board to increase its combat performance after the Battle of Wolf 359 (but not specifically to make it an anti-Borg warship). TL;DR, the Defiant is basically the one and only time Starfleet set out to build a dedicated warship... their fleet is made up almost exclusively of (well-armed) exploration, patrol, and utility ships.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Later incidents in the Dominion War proved that the Galaxy-class was more than the equal of practically any hostile warship. The USS Odyssey still massively outgunned the Jem'Hadar ships attacking it despite being outnumbered three to one, and would very likely have won that engagement without breaking a sweat if it'd had shields able to deflect phased polaron beam fire at the time. Starfleet's engineers plugged that hole in their defenses in short order... it's not a representative sample. Because the objective wasn't to defeat the Dominion fleet, it was to break through it and recapture Deep Space Nine. Sisko slowly fed his forces into the grinder trying to provoke the Cardassians into opening a hole in the Dominion formation he could fly through. Did they, though? Or are those other Defiant-class ships prototypes that Starfleet dug out of mothballs like the USS Defiant herself? Speaking as a design engineer, you usually don't build just one prototype if you can help it because every breakdown means losing test time and you're SOL if that one prototype breaks down. Something the scope of a Galaxy-class is so big and expensive that a single prototype is the only practical method, but the Defiant-class is pretty small and would be a lot easier to build multiples of to test (esp. if the ship were to be tested in live fire testing given its role as a warship). So far, the only enemy that's ever been acknowleged as prompting the Federation to consider a dedicated warship design was the Borg... and Starfleet backed away from that in favor of improving its tactics. As noted by First Contact's creators, Starfleet's main problem at Wolf 359 was trying to fight the Borg in orderly battle formations and standard maneuvers, allowing the Borg to make use of Picard's knowledge to turn the engagement into a shooting gallery. Starfleet had all but deadlocked the Borg by using the chaotic battle plan they used in First Contact until the Enterprise showed up and finished the job. Even century-old ships can still kick ass and take names if updated properly by Starfleet. Even in the noticeably more militant, xenophobic J.J.-Trek Federation, Starfleet's multi-mission explorers seem to be the shootiest things they've got, by dint of being able to redirect all that extra power from things like science labs and elaborate sensor arrays to weapons and shields, likely giving them an advantage over ships built without that kind of excess output in mind. The stupidly fanfic-y USS Vengeance wasn't a warship per se, she was an instrument of genocide... meant to launch a preemptive decapitation strike against the Klingon Empire using advanced weapons that could engage from beyond the range of any Klingon retaliation. It's basically Admiral Marcus's My First Death Star.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Still psyched for this one. This is the first anime title I've seen make the jump to 3D that actually still looks good.
  23. Seto Kaiba
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Needing "more ships" isn't the same thing as needing "warships". It's seldom directly acknowledged, but one thing Star Trek has been pretty consistent about since its earliest days is that most of the ships Starfleet uses for missions of peaceful space exploration and diplomacy are so heavily armed and armored that they're equal or superior to the dedicated warships of the Federation's enemies in a stand-up fight. Every now and then, a new alien species of the week will note that the Starfleet ship visiting them is suspiciously well-armed for a ship on a mission of peaceful exploration. TNG made a lot of it implicitly, with almost every belligerent confrontation with a major hostile power (Romulans, Cardassians, etc.) involving the Enterprise up against two or more of the latest, best warships the hostile power in question has. Voyager hung a lampshade on it several times early on, with the Kazon considering the lightly armed (by Federation standards) science ship to be almost stupidly overpowered. Deep Space Nine had a moment during the Dominion War where the USS Defiant was stopped in its tracks by an almost century-old Excelsior-class ship (USS Lakota) that'd been upgraded with the latest Starfleet weapons updates... a purpose-built anti-Borg warship stonewalled by a eighty-year-old multi-mission explorer that had just come from the refitters that was nevertheless able to fight it on an even footing (and was actually winning until the Lakota's captain stood down). The only time Starfleet main line ships have ever been depicted as unequal to the task of handling enemy warships was Star Trek: Enterprise, before the NX-01 Enterprise was upgraded with phase cannons and photon(ic) torpedoes.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Quidditch troopers? Nay, those are Adidas Troopers... Sith gopniks! Turns out Palpatine's actually Russian... we'll see him in the Death Star II's throne room, slav squatting, and he'll greet Rey with "You underestimate the power of the Dark Side, сука блять." Hey, a laser sword is a fine thing but some asses cry out for a cap.
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