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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    I know I'll probably get tarred and feathered for saying it, but Alien* and Predator are right up there with Terminator in terms of being iconic 80's sci-fi/horror/action properties to wind up saddled with a raft of categorically unnecessary bad sequels that diminish an amazing original film. Terminator, sadly, was hit the hardest by the unnecessary sequel baseball bat... to the point that the last one had to resort to multiverse theory to explain the constant retcons. It was enough to keep me out of the theater when Dark Fate dropped. Sounds like a lot of people had that reaction after Rise of the Machines, Salvation, and Genesys, with Dark Fate apparently set to finish well in the red, kill any sequel plans, and probably trigger another do-over a few years down the road. * Yes, I know Alien actually came out in Autumn 1979, but it's close enough.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Looks like someone stuck Sovereign-class warp nacelles onto the Shepherd-class CG model for the USS Gagarin from Star Trek: Discovery... and that mostly looked like someone had turned the Centaur-type CG model from DS9 upside-down. Starfleet designs got WEIRD after the Expanded Universe stuff started having Starfleet adopt quantum slipstream drives. Both of these are pretty freaking ugly, though.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Twenty episodes in, and Jojo's Bizarre Adventure Part V: Golden Wind is still a pretty wild ride. I feel like it's officially hit its first real speed bump with...
  4. Seto Kaiba
    No, the Macross Grasion was another Macross Two-Thirds-class1 ship owned and operated by Xaos like the Macross Elysion. Macross Grasion and Macross Megasion were both presumably used the same way Macross Elysion was, serving as the headquarters and mothership for a regional branch of Xaos's PMC division. Emigrant fleets were initially escorted by regular warships and Macross-class mass production ships (SDFNs), and later fleets used the larger Battle-class. 1. The class has no official name thus far, leaving Variable Fighter Master File's name for it as the only one yet offered. Similarly, the Aether and Hemera have only been given a class name in that same Master File, as the Enterprise-class.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    You're not wrong. Well, we've got about 52 days until we find out...
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Disney Star Wars just reeks of designed-by-committee. A lot of its creative problems in The Force Awakens are pretty obviously a result of trying to play it as safe as possible where the problems in The Last Jedi were overreactions to fan criticisms of The Force Awakens made by the same completely clueless think tank. Somehow, the idea of wanting Star Wars to head back to safe territory where nobody could conceivably screw it up and the idea of handing control over it back to Jar-Jar Abrams feels like Disney's working at cross-purposes here. I doubt anything leaked will make it into the final film... didn't Disney more or less admit the leaks were market research and the feedback they were getting was pretty awful?
  7. Seto Kaiba
    TBH, the same could've been said of George Lucas or Gene Roddenberry at a number of points in the history of their respective franchises... they succeeded despite themselves in a lot of ways, due to the production staff keeping them on a short leash. What was it Harrison Ford told George Lucas during late development of A New Hope? "George, you can type this sh*t, but you can't say it!" On that, I am undecided. I've never seen Game of Thrones... it's on my to-do list, but life keeps getting in the way, but it's unclear how much of the show's success was down to the strength of its source material and how much due to the contributions of Benioff and Weiss in distilling it down into a workable screenplay. Word going around was that Benioff and Weiss had been tapped to develop and direct a Star Wars movie trilogy set in the Old Republic. Say what you will about the quality of Game of Thrones's final season, but production design for the show was pretty amazing and intricate... which strikes me as the kind of thing Disney would want to do with a Star Wars storyline in the distant past of the setting. Star Wars has always been science fantasy, and going backwards from Phantom Menace's very Lord of the Rings-y sort of visual aesthetic would make the ornate fantasy aesthetic of Game of Thrones quite attractive (never mind that Game of Thrones made approximately all the money before it tanked in season 8). I think Disney was after more than just street cred, I think they wanted Game of Space Thrones.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Whether anything of value was lost remains to be seen... Either that, or Disney's execs were so desperate to generate some positivity about the Star Wars franchise in the news after the events of the last two years that they stretched the truth (or perhaps even changed their minds) about David Benioff and D.B. Weiss committing to direct a Star Wars trilogy. Let's face it, it's been a ROUGH two years for Star Wars. First there was the beating the brand took over EA's microtransaction-heavy Star Wars: Battlefront II and EA's idiot ball attempt to defend their terrible design choice that became Reddit's all-time most downvoted post. Then barely a month later they rolled out Star Wars: the Last Jedi and promptly to a massive beating from the Star Wars fanbase. Not even six months after that, Solo: a Star Wars Story came out and was promptly beaten into the ground to the point that 7th most expensive movie ever made was a box office flop that became the franchise's first legitimate commercial failure. Disney theme parks' new Star Wars land, Galaxy's Edge, opened to basically no fanfare and record low turnouts and met with harsh criticism for excessively high prices and lack of attractions apart from the cantina. It wouldn't be surprising if Disney were looking HARD to create some positive press. (They recently got some, via the preorder ticket sales, but after Game of Thrones S8's flop finale Benioff and Weiss's departure might count as good news as well.)
  9. Seto Kaiba
    One legion of the Empire's ground troops was defeated by a crack Rebel assault force and a numerically superior force of pissed-off locals who also had the advantage of surprise... the size of a legion in Star Wars isn't specified, but if it's anywhere close to the Roman usage of the term he entrusted the defense of the all-important Endor shield generator complex to a force no larger than a single modern infantry brigade (~4,500 men) dispersed over a wide area. The actual force defending the shield generator, including the light armor support, was barely company-sized (~80-150 men) and so arrogantly assured of their own superiority they actually fell for Han Solo playing ding-dong-ditch at one point. (That's right kiddies, the Empire's armed forces are so incompetent their defenses can be breached without firing a shot by the favored tactic of your local UPS delivery man.) The actual fight was up in space, and even then the Rebellion's fleet had the Imperial Navy on an even footing or better before the shield generator went down and the attack on the Death Star II started in earnest.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    We don't have an absolute figure, only relative measures... but it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 2-3x as tough as the VF-25's conventional energy conversion armor. The defensive capabilities of the VF-25 Messiah's APS-25 Armored Pack are compared to two things: the armor of a New UN Spacy heavy cruiser and the YF-29. We don't really have a frame of reference for the cruiser, but the YF-29 is known to achieve better defensive ability than the VF-25 Armored Messiah by having twice the usual thickness of energy conversion armor running at twice the usual power. That'd generally suggest the Armored Pack is at most three times as strong as the VF-25's regular armor. (The one time Armored Pack defensive performance was objectively quantified - on the VF-1 in some VERY old tech materials - the Armored Pack's defensive ability was 1.667x as tough as the VF-1's own armor, leading to the VF-1 almost tripling its defensive ability when the pack was equipped.)
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Heh... ah well, not being a football fan I don't really have a stake in it either way. (One of my brothers is currently doing his DVM at OSU, so ours is a house divided.) Eh... while it does inarguably show a lack of imagination on Jar-Jar Abrams's part, it's more a case of even-less-subtle blind imitation because that aesthetic choice was actually made by George Lucas during the development of Star Wars: A New Hope. Modeling the Empire's aesthetics and organization on Nazi Germany was a quick and effective visual shorthand that made it immediately clear to the audience that the Empire was EVIL. The Imperial officer uniforms were modeled on those of the SS, their foot soldiers are called stormtroopers (what the SA were called), their control is handled through regional governors appointed directly by the head of state the same way Nazis ran Germany and captured territories, etc. The Nazi connection was already about as subtle as a half-brick to the head in the original trilogy, but J.J. Abrams went full ham with it in The Force Awakens. General Hux's speech and the venue for it were very VERY obviously modeled on the Nazi party's Nuremberg rallies. (Gihren's famous Sieg Zeon speech from the original Gundam and Emperor Charles's state funeral for Prince Clovis in Code Geass both borrowed this visual aesthetic to indicate the governments holding them were evil authoritarian states in a similar fashion.) Well, they are going to lose... it'll just be more humiliating than what happened to the Empire since instead of being taken down by a dedicated, highly organized, and well-trained rebel army with the support of dozens of planets and hardened by years and years of armed resistance against the Empire, the First Order is going to go down to a double handful of spacky twits and johnny-come-latelys because Disney's bottom line and Destiny say so even though they've demonstrated breathtaking levels of incompetence. Disney doesn't have the balls to end this new trilogy with a victory for the bad guys, so the Resistance will triumph and the New New Republic will be established... and because this trilogy is ironically a story about NOT learning from history, Disney'll launch an Expanded Universe storyline or five subverting THAT happy ending with the rise of ANOTHER neo-Imperial force. It's not even out of place... it's just badly done. Instead of being worked into the story, it was like Rose stopped the freaking film and walked sideways off the set while cameras were still rolling in order to give a forty-minute diatribe about the evils of the military industrial complex.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    What @DewPoint said... I'm pretty sure the reason Gundam fans so often side with the Char clone has an awful lot to do Gundam's writers march in lockstep with the franchise's tired formulae that stifle any protagonist character development by making them either a naive, introverted whiner with genetic godmode cheats (e.g. Amuro, Kamille, Judau, Banagher, or anyone in SEED) or a clinical psychopath all but incapable of feeling or understanding basic human emotion (e.g. Setsuna, Mikazuki, Heero, Io). In either event, they're usually just the boring invincible hero... which makes the villains oddly sympathetic since they get all the character development and have to fight the boring invincible hero without cheats. Star Wars fans identifying with the Galactic Empire or the First Order is much less explicable. Both the Empire and the First Order are literal faceless evil most of the time. Their troops are disposable anonymous masked grunts who unquestioningly commit acts of heinous villainy and excessive violence seemingly for no reason other than the jackbooted thugs in the upper ranks want to make sure they fill their monthly heinous villainy quotas even if what they're doing makes no strategic or political sense. Their leaders are also masked men, very obviously unstable masked mystic warrior monks who are so comically unsuited to leadership that their forces become substantially less effective whenever they happen to be around thanks to the interrelated problems of their unreasonable demands, their obsession with immediate results at any cost, their temper tantrums, and their knee-jerk tendency to murder whoever happened to be in charge during the temper tantrums they throw after not getting their way. The jackbooted functionaries in the middle are more or less the boss from the movie Office Space, except he's asking if you've finished murdering those children instead of filling out your TPS reports. There's nothing remotely likeable or relateable about them... which makes it really weird and slightly unsettling that so many Star Wars fans seem to prefer them over the protagonists. They're every bit the pack of literal space nazis that the Principality of Zeon are, and even more unsympathetic since they don't even really have a theoretically noble-sounding cause to pay lip service to while committing their atrocities. (Well, at least before this latest crop of even more hopelessly unlikeable protagonists anyway... fans aren't so much cheering for the First Order as they are cheering against the Resistance. Like how footballs fans here say "my favorite teams are Michigan and whoever's playing Ohio State".)
  13. Seto Kaiba
    ... several of which, like the X-Wings, were actually evolving backwards towards their original McQuarrie concept art. (Which, as an admirer of his work, is the opposite of a problem in my opinion.) Isn't that the point, though? The prequel trilogy was all about the Republic's slow evolution towards becoming the Empire and our boy Mannequin's slow evolution towards from Jedi aspirant to perpetually-angry 7'2" asthematic cripple in a cyborg gimp suit. A few examples of the Phantom Menace aesthetics did stick around all the way into Revenge of the Sith. Most notably the Naboo cruiser that Amidala uses to get around. Someone get Disney on the line... this should be added to the concessions for Galaxy's Edge. From what I've seen, this is a pretty typical trajectory for Star Wars fans as a whole... the longer they associate with the franchise, the more they seem to drift towards preferring the Empire and the Dark Side over the actual heroes of the story. Possibly related to the franchise's recurring obsession with "Evil will always triumph because Good is dumb".
  14. Seto Kaiba
    ... and just like that, now I just want The Rise of Skywalker to be a What We Do In The Shadows-style mockumentary narrated by Kylo Ren, continuously expressing his incredulous disbelief over how this sh*t turned out.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Can we just blame everything on the Jedi, like a Star Wars-specific version of A Wizard Did It?
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Not yet, but working on it.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Quite. The relatively wealthy Macross Frontier fleet restricted the Armored Pack on the basis of its high cost... the comparatively broke Brisingr Alliance would probably balk at the cost of the ASWAG that made the pack so expensive in the first place. That may be a big part of why the VF-31's ugly-AF Armored Pack is almost exclusively offense-focused. That said, the VF-25 was likely off the table anyway because the Brisingr Alliance's underdeveloped economy needed a shot in the arm that buying export model VF-25s or a license to locally produce the VF-25 wouldn't help one bit.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Economics. In some respects, the Brisingr Alliance's decision to domestically develop their own next-generation main variable fighter broadly parallels Japan's own course of action with regard to its attempts to acquire a 5th Generation fighter for its defense forces. Arms export restrictions prevented them from acquiring the New Hotness (the VF-24 in Macross, the F-22 in the real world) and purchasing an export variant from elsewhere was economically and politically unattractive, so they opted to develop their own next-gen main fighter domestically as a way to create jobs and stimulate their economy while filling that particular military need. On completion, it would also offer additional potential economic advantages in terms of the ability to sell their own design as an export to other governments. Like the Mitsubishi X-2, the process still ended up involving codevelopment partnerships with foreign companies to reach completion... Surya Aerospace being a joint venture of four different companies including Shinsei and LAI, and building on a design that had originally been designed and built elsewhere (like Northrop Grumman's proposal to turn the X-2 into an improved YF-23). If we're being honest, this is the main reason. Bandai needs new designs.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    It'd make for the happiest ending... the First Order and the incompetent idiots in the Resistance wipe each other out along with all the Jedi and dark side users, leaving the galaxy to finally experience peace without a bunch of space monks trying to rule the universe with magic. Approximately 100%. Even though Rise of Skywalker is the end of the so-called Skywalker Saga they're absolutely going to leave a sequel hook or twelve. Speculation has it, based on the way Rose is allegedly being systematically deleted from promotional art, that J.J. Abrams and co. are largely writing her out of the story because of how wildly unpopular she is. The blue check marks on Twitter will rage and storm about it but I doubt anyone else will particularly care if she's demoted to a background character and/or killed off unceremoniously the way they offed Ackbar and others in The Last Jedi. I find your faith in the Hollywood creative process disturbing. Well, I'm officially baffled then... how do you blow up a construct almost the size of Saturn's moon of Phoebe orbiting at an altitude of only a few hundred kilometers over the moon's surface without utterly devastating the surface of the moon? Especially if the explosion was from a highly energetic reactor system capable of producing enough power to reduce an entire planet to rubble. On its own, that should've been an extinction event-level disaster... never mind the subsequent debris strikes from armor-grade hull materials making reentry at extremely high velocities as a result of the detonation.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Personally, I think there's something to the theory Snoke was one of the kids Vader massacred in the Jedi Temple who kept himself alive through tapping into the dark side and didn't heal from his wounds as prettily as Kylo Ren did.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    A bunch of different news sites are reporting that it's the Death Star II, but the only reference I've found is to a Disney blogs post that doesn't actually specify anything except that the moon's name is Kef Bir. I think everyone's assuming it's the Death Star II because Palpatine's involved.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    I think I was kinder to it in theaters... but then, I wasn't entirely sober when I watched it in theaters. (Honestly, theaters with liquor licenses are a godsend considering how awful much of what makes it to theaters is.) Duly noted. My assumption was that this was another moon also orbiting the same gas giant as the Endor... gas giants do tend to have an awful lot of those. (Jupiter has 79 of the damn things, for instance.) To be entirely fair to Star Wars, this problem exists in the real world too. For instance, Jupiter and Saturn both have moons (Ganymede and Titan respectively) which are larger than Mercury and Jupiter's moon Callisto is only slightly smaller. There are 7 moons in the solar system bigger than Pluto, which is variously considered a planet or dwarf planet, including Ganymede, Titan, Callisto, Io, Luna, Europa, and Triton. The only real distinction there between moons and planets is whether they orbit the star directly or orbit an object orbiting the star. An arrangement like Endor or Yavin IV could conceivably exist in the real world and would be considered a moon rather than a planet because they orbit a gas giant planet not the system's star(s). This wouldn't be outside the bounds of what I can find on the subject from Star Wars sources... apparently tractor beams in this setting are, in fact, gravitational in nature. What I'd assumed artificial gravity worked like was an artificial gravity well, presumably created by manipulating gravitons. It wouldn't have a sharply defined edge, unless there was some amazingly precise technology in play. Are we certain they're firing energy bolts and not solid shells? Some propelled types of shells could conceivably produce that kind of curved trajectory... though the million dollar question then becomes why solid-ammo cannons? It wouldn't be the weirdest thing we've seen done with laser technology in Star Wars... the Jedi and Sith heroes wield laser swords made by somehow causing a laser beam to pull a hairpin 180, which is all kinds of impossible normally. Or put it in an orbit where it had plenty of time to spin... gravity is a harsh mistress, but also frequently a surprisingly patient one. Perhaps plot armor... or are we still calling that The Force?
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Given that the launch mechanism is essentially a coilgun... they kind of did. Really, the whole thing was a stupid idea intended to cash in on Star Wars's not-terribly-subtle "space warfare is World War II but IN SPAAAAAAAAAAAACE" aesthetic. The magnetic guidance thing is, however, a terribly stupid idea since that would just cause the bombs to clump up into a big ball and probably set themselves off rather than falling in nice orderly lines. Kind of emblematic of the new trilogy's persistent problem with talking too much in some places and not nearly enough in others.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, I know... if the dreadnought's artificial gravity field extended beyond its hull by accident or design, that could explain why gravity bombs would be workable. (That said, a quick spot of research turned up an official assertion that the bomber's deployment mechanism is essentially a low-powered coilgun not a passive gravity drop system and that the bombs themselves were also using electromagnetism to accelerate towards their target. The latter part of this explanation has its own, worse, problems regarding exponential magnetic field decay with distance... but the former part would be enough to make it halfway defensible I suppose.)
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Well, they did essentially have an explosion powerful enough to vaporize most of a moon-sized space station made of armor-grade materials... so it wasn't exactly an M80. That said, the Death Star wreckage is on a different moon orbiting a different planet? Not another moon orbiting the same planet? It'd be easy if it was another moon orbiting the same planet... but another planet entirely? Depending on how artificial gravity is achieved, it wouldn't be entirely unreasonable for it to extend beyond the inner hull of the ships creating it... to facilitate repair and maintenance work, for instance. (Macross does this deliberately for the various space flattops to recover fighters... throwing a 0.5G gravity field up over the deck. WH40K has a similar situation, albeit by convenient accident, where the exteriors of large ships not only have appreciable but low gravity but also a very thin atmosphere being held in place by the artificial gravity generators and the ship's shields.) Honestly, I'd be more put out that blowing up something the size of a moon and made of blast-resistant armor material in the forest moon's orbit didn't essentially destroy the moon's entire surface with debris strikes.
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