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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Well, technically both... it's kind of contextual, and in later Macross stories it may actually have become a matter of slang. Originally, in Macross: Do You Remember Love?, "deculture" was a Zentradi/Meltrandi expression of shock, amazement, outrage, and potentially disgust that could be translated as "shocking", "amazing", "bizarre", "unbelievable", or potentially even "gross". Tacking "Yak" onto the front makes it more emphatic, like saying "how revolting!" or "how strange!". It would depend on usage whether it were truly positive or negative. (The Japanese Wikipedia article actually compares the term's usage to the English interjection "Oh my god!" for multipurposefulness.) Based on a conversation Alto and Ranka have in the first Macross Frontier TV novel, the usage of "deculture" that crops up in later shows appears to be human slang not dissimilar to the American English slang usage of the word "sick"... heavily dated human slang, given that Alto teases her about that being old-fashioned. Tone and context are about all that stands between "Yak deculture" meaning "That's incredible!" and "That's pretty f*cked up". The way it's used in Macross: Do You Remember Love? is predominantly negative, since the Zentradi and Meltrandi find humanity's mixed-gender society confusing and more than a little disturbing. Later Macross titles, especially the Macross Frontier series, use it as a more positive expression.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Nobody in particular. No, really... she's a nameless background character who spends the entire Macross 7 TV series trying (and failing) to give Basara a bouquet of flowers because she's a fan of his. That's all. She has no bearing on or relevance to the plot.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Hack out the oft-repeated scenes of the same VF-11 getting blown up and its pilot spiritia-drained and Basara's VF-19 transforming, and you could probably take another hour or two off it. Sadly, that's what happens when you develop anime and spend most of your budget on music. Anime was on a razor-thin margin and tiny budget already...
  4. Seto Kaiba
    There's always the Macross novelizations, esp. the Macross the Ride light novel. @Gubaba is working on at least one Macross novelization, AFAIK. I've got another that's a WIP.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    No clue... it's supposed to be coming out next year sometime, so I'd assume we'll start seeing news about it as the year draws to a close. Macross seems to really like dropping trailers and teasers around the year-end holidays, so maybe we'll get something then. Nah. Big West made a mint on Walkure when they first debuted and everything I've heard suggests they're still making quite the profit from performances, media sales, and various otaku waifu BS. They're not going to turn down a chance to keep Walkure in the limelight as long as possible by voluntarily abandoning another two hour long commercial for their CDs thinly disguised as a movie. 20% feels exceedingly generous. Even Macross Delta: Passionate Walkure's additional and original battle scenes were pretty tame stuff and generally failed to satisfy, with the only new mechanical design being that truly hideous spare parts kludge Armored Pack for the VF-31. My guess would be that there will be the bare minimum of mecha action, just enough to justify putting the Macross title on the movie, and that otherwise the film will focus on the painfully underdeveloped Walkure characters. If they're adding a new one, I doubt they'll improve characterization much either since an entirely new member will have to be introduced. I often suspect Kawamori is over-credited and over-blamed for things in Macross. Like when Macross Delta came out and people on these very forums were tearing into him for the writing... which he had no hand in. He's a supervisor, sometimes a director, and he does mechanical designs. I doubt he's micromanaging every aspect of development and production. What's more, I doubt we'd want him to. We've seen what happens when you let famously auteur creators like Gene Roddenberry and George Lucas slip the leash, and the results are seldom pretty. Star Trek: the Next Generation season one and the Star Wars prequel trilogy, anyone?
  6. Seto Kaiba
    I can perhaps assist you there? I'll be attending.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    We're reasonably sure it isn't Basara, at least... given that the liner notes for the Fire Bomber album Re:Fire, which debuted in-universe in 2060, Basara still hasn't returned to the 37th large-scale long-distance emigrant fleet "Macross 7" after 13 years of wandering the galaxy. He didn't even turn up to record that 15th anniversary album with the band, he sent the guitar tracks to the label over the galaxy network.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Jeez... what the hell happened to the animation quality for One Punch Man season two? It looks like complete arse compared to season one.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    ? Basara leaves the 37th large-scale long-distance emigrant fleet in 2047 and never comes back... so no.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    It's not really a minority, I think... most of us here appreciate Macross 7, we're just not blind to its faults either. Basically, Macross 7 was a series with a great story and great music that suffers a lot from having been made twice as long as it needed to be. The main plot doesn't even kick off until episode 23, and a lot of the stuff in the episodes leading up to that point feels like filler. If you cut it down to 36 or even 26 episodes, people'd be a lot kinder to it. That glacially slow start is a big part of what turns western fans off the series, since there's very little musical variety in it and it's mostly just Basara being a self-absorbed jerk to everyone around him.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    It's like G Gundam that way... the ridiculousness is part of the entertainment value. Admittedly, the first 20 episodes were the ones you probably should've watched at 2x speed, since those are the boring, glacially slow build-up to the actual plot.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    *looks at the Sv-262 Draken III's fold reheat system and all the war materiel they probably bought with fold quartz they mined* Yes. Absolutely. Too bad.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Because the New UN Government has to abide by its own laws, which strictly regulate the mining and trade in fold quartz to limit the proliferation of dimensional warheads and other particularly nasty weapons. Also, the New UN Government essentially monopolizing-via-regulation Windermere IV's fold quartz industry was a big part of what started the first war between the two powers. Seizing a native population's resources like that, especially those of a species who are no longer New UN Government members, would be a clear violation of galaxy law that prohibits things like invading the planets of sentient species.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    That's the most recent Variable Fighter Master File book, yeah. Kind of a so-so book, but it answered a few questions I had so I'm prepared to call it a success.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    @Master Dex is quite correct... the YF-30 had a VERY specific mission profile. It was to evaluate the Fold Dimensional Resonance system's ability to penetrate fold faults. It was part of Richard Bilra's pet project-slash-personal ambition to overcome the fold faults that made long-distance interstellar travel fraught with difficulty. That it was also evaluating other advances like the Ordnance Container system was incidental, a product of its lead designer Maj. Aisha Blanchett's personal obsessions, but something that ultimately ended up as a rather useful addition given the circumstances. I'm not sure it's necessarily a lie... so much as a deliberate gaming of the system to avoid having to disclose the specs of the YF-30 and, more importantly, its experimental proprietary hardware. If they'd lied, it would be a crime. What they did was legal, but questionable. That so many talented pilots found the Y/VF-19 difficult, if not impossible, to handle was a big part of why the "tame and stable" VF-171 ended up ousting it as the New UN Spacy's 4th Generation main VF. What good is having the latest bleeding-edge specs and the highest performance if the monstrously pricey aircraft in question is so far beyond the abilities of the average pilot that none but the most exceptional pilots can actually fly it safely? I mean, that Shinsei had to write off one of its two prototypes completely and had six of their seven test pilots suffer severe injuries as a result of loss of control-related test flight accidents - two fatally so - would have been a bit of a red flag for the New UN Forces. General Galaxy's more advanced YF-21 had its own control issues, but they never wrecked a prototype or had a pilot die or suffer severe injuries in an accident (as far as we know). Guld did die, but that was a death of his own making/choosing in a live combat situation. At the end of it, even the Earth NUNS was so frustrated with the problems in trying to adopt the VF-19 as its next main fighter that they ultimately bailed on it and the few VF-19s in service ended up in the hands of elite special forces units like the VF-X Ravens. The VF-22 was adopted as a Special Forces VF after losing out to the YF-19 in Project Super Nova, so its low adoption numbers were somewhat less than surprising. I don't think we will ever see a full spec VF-24. It'd be a story-breaking addition... like adding Kira "Jesus" Yamato to one of the other Gundam AUs. Variable Fighter Master File did, at one point, include a New UN Forces YF-30B Chronos specification (in an eye-searing Barbie pink) along similar lines to the YF-29B Percival that was depicted in Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy as an informal limited production military specification. Probably not, given that the Fold Dimensional Resonance system was a proprietary SMS development based on the Fold Wave system. Earth has never been one to not lead the pack technologically, though, so they may well have a technology that's better than either... and it's implied they're actively working on a way to get around the main limitation on systems like that by finding a way to synthesize fold quartz. Right now, VFs with the Fold Wave system, Fold Dimensional Resonance system, etc. are too expensive for almost any government to deploy in numbers due to the scarcity of fold quartz of sufficient size and purity.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Macross 7 is actually a pretty fine Macross series, but it's best taken in small doses due to the slow pace and lack of musical variety in the first half. When I watched it the first time I absolutely loathed it, because I tried to marathon it and the show was just irritating. It's a lot more enjoyable in small doses, not more than one or two episodes a day so the slow development of the story doesn't get infuriatingly samey.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Maybe they'll follow it up with an Empok Nor, which'll look exactly the same as the other two but with a stand that's canted at a 70 degree angle.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, I'm finding very little to enjoy in the current season's offerings... even To the Abandoned Sacred Beasts ended with a whimper and there seems to be precious little coming save for more of the usual Fate/waifu bullsh*t. There is an upcoming 4th season of Shokugeki no Soma though, so at least foodgasm fans will have their fill.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    None that I have seen, recently anyway... the last book they put out from a series I was following was a Master Archive book for the Nu Gundam from Char's Counterattack.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    It should be noted that, given the notorious controllability problems the VF-19 exhibited that caused even the Earth NUNS to scrub its plans to adopt the VF-19 as its next main fighter, having a reduced-performance version could be argued to actually be advantageous since it would be accessible to a broader group of pilots. Only a small number of elite pilots were equal to the task of operating the full spec VF-19 thanks to its punishingly high spec maneuverability that exceeded what even well-trained pilots of average skill and talent could take. A monkey model VF-19F/S type would be nearly ideal, with reduced performance compared to the full spec type but with all the performance stability enhancements which were done by Shinsei in an (ultimately futile) attempt to address the VF-19's self-defeating design flaws even after the NUNS decided to pack it in and go for the less-extreme VF-171. This is essentially what the VF-19EF Caliburn was... a VF-19 2nd Mass Production type with all the lessons learned and major tech advances to make it less brutal on the pilot incorporated save for going all-in on an ISC. (If nothing else, this marks Aegis Focker, Isamu Dyson, Timothy Daldhanton, Angers 672, Naresuan, and a handful of others out as incredible badasses even in-universe, as men and women who not only tamed the famously untameable Advanced Variable Fighters but apparently ENJOYED IT immensely.)
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Nope, apart from the fact that it's a mass produced version of the final YF-24 Evolution prototype... the design that all 5th Generation VFs are derived from, and which the YF-29 was an attempt to exceed the performance of. (In short, circumstantial evidence suggests that Earth's VF-24 is the highest-performance 5th Generation production VF by a non-trivial margin.) Well, it's not quite fair to compare the two on their performance as military aircraft since the YF-29 was actually built with live combat in mind while the YF-30 was a lightly armed and minimally-equipped experimental technology demonstrator. I've had to do some revision to my YF-29 spec, since Macross Chronicle increased the YF-29's empty weight to 15,620kg from its original 11,920kg. This narrows the T/W ratio gap between the YF-29 and VF-27 significantly, and actually makes the YF-30 the new top dog in terms of the thrust-to-weight ratio at empty. (M3's article is, unfortunately, outdated in this regard.) The YF-30 weighs slightly more than half what the YF-29 does, at a mere 8,106kg to the YF-29's 15,620kg. Presumably a fair amount of that disparity in mass is the YF-30's massive amount of onboard weaponry, the extra pair of engines, and its double thickness of energy conversion armor. The YF-30's FF-3001/FC2 engines are a further refinement of the FF-3001/FC1 engines used as the main (leg) engines on the YF-29. The actual increase in power is extremely small, however, at a mere +5kN. The YF-29's armament is pretty huge by Variable Fighter standards on its own, with a pair of 25mm high-velocity machine guns, a heavy quantum beam gunpod, a MDE beam cannon turret, a combat blade, and internal missile launchers for 100 micro-missiles. The YF-30's armament consists of a pair of 12.7mm beam machine guns, a heavy quantum beam gunpod, and whatever's loaded into its ordnance container. The YF-30's Fold Dimensional Resonance system is said to be a more powerful and effective version of the YF-29's Fold Wave system. In terms of actual flight performance, the YF-30 has a modest edge in acceleration with a T/W ratio of 53.085 to the YF-29's 46.675... which is more down to the difference in their weight than anything. (For comparison's sake, the trial production VF-25's T/W ratio is 39.685, the VF-27's is 46.493, the trial production VF-31A's is 40.664 without any ordnance container mounted, the VF-31 Custom's is 44.854 without any ordnance container mounted, and the Sv-262's is 40.642. At its original empty weight, the YF-29's was 61.164.) It's somewhat misleading, since the YF-30 is not intended for use in live combat and is only minimally armed. It was a Fold Dimensional Resonance system demonstrator, meant for evaluating the system's ability to penetrate fold faults. Based on what's been said in Macross the Ride, Great Mechanics, Macross Chronicle, and even Variable Fighter Master File, a combination of factors led to the New UN Government deciding to heavily restrict exports of high spec 4th Generation VFs like the VF-19 and VF-22. The implication is that most, if not all, VF-19s operated by emigrant defenses forces in the galaxy are the reduced capability "monkey model" export specifications. The VF-19EF in Macross the Ride was the first time "monkey model" was explicitly used, but the VF-19P was later identified as a reduced capability export variant as well. The ones in Macross 7 are not explicitly identified as monkey models, but it seems likely that they are given NUNG reluctance to permit the export of previous variants like the VF-19E at full spec.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    I'm not sure that's better, given what a mess their attempts to spin off the story were previously.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Depends on the version of the story. In the Macross Frontier TV series, the Macross Galaxy fleet's Mainland and its escort group are assumed to be at large and still intact given that Kawamori has indicated the Galaxy Executives (TV ver.) are still alive and at large. In the Macross Frontier movies, the Mainland and Battle Galaxy were sunk by the Vajra, so presumably a significant chunk of the civilian population (if such a thing could be said to exist when the fleet was mind-controlled) presumably died.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    I don't recall him mentioning anything like that in anything I've read... @Tochiro would probably know, if anyone would. They're still aboard Mainland for the most part, and its accompanying logistical support ships. (Macross the Ride indicated that the Macross Galaxy was accompanied by the same type of support ships seen in Macross 7, albeit ones modified to improve the efficiency of the fleet overall by producing artificial foodstuffs instead of natural ones.) The population is predominantly cyborgs, who are living in the fleet's augmented reality network environment. In practice, they're living everyday with a mild case of mind control as their perceptions are manipulated and filtered to make living in Galaxy a more pleasant experience than it would otherwise be given the fleet's rather dystopian, utilitarian style. TVTropes would describe their situation as being trapped in a Lotus-Eater Machine. It's not clear if the average joe there is full-on cyborg hive mind once things started heating up with the Vajra or if they're just living their lives in AR blissfully ignorant of what the fleet is doing because the company controls the network and therefore their perceptions of reality.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Trademark, not copyright... almost every country has the same basic set of laws on copyright (due to international treaties), but trademark law is more varied.
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