Seto Kaiba

Given where it's placed, my guess would be 162 is his aircraft's modex number. No clue what 2101 might be, I don't recall seeing anything other than Battle Company numbers on Ride Armor line art. 21 would obviously refer to his being a part of the 21st Armored Battle Company, but he wasn't its leader so I'm not sure about the 01.

Yup... ancient graffiti has revealed that "Yo momma" jokes were alive and well during the Roman Republic, and the oldest surviving English language joke is a dick joke. That doesn't mean a new take isn't welcome, or sometimes eminently necessary... as with that godawful Star Trek: Titan story. EDIT: ... can't seem to reproduce his results in Google Trends though.

To be entirely fair, the show the showrunners shot wasn't the show the showrunners had intended to make... they were victims of the network's insistence on Voyager being TNG 2.0.

I hope the convention organizers release a statement soon to clear all this up. Right now there seem to be a fair few people getting incensed on her behalf on Facebook and other social media. I hope it doesn't hurt attendance, since I'm sure the organizers had no intention of making Mari feel slighted or replaced. They're die-hard fans too, so the idea of upsetting Mari is probably as disconcerting to them as it is to the rest of the fandom.

That was kind of a "depending on the writer" thing. Star Trek: the Next Generation was the worst offender, frequently depicting Starfleet (and other) ships as so fragile that a single hit from a phaser array, disruptor, or torpedo was enough to destroy them utterly. The Enterprise-D itself was a victim of several of the more egregious examples, seemingly exploding at the drop of a hat from damage that barely slowed previous Starfleet ships. The USS Reliant, for instance, was barely slowed by the loss of a warp nacelle where the Enterprise-D was totally destroyed by the loss of one in a collision with the USS Bozeman. As the effects technology improved along with the growth of the effects budget, Starfleet (and other) ships got a LOT more robust. USS Voyager in "Year of Hell" was probably the best example, completely riddled stem to stern with battle damage and still not just flyable but combatworthy. Nondestructive external battle damage was hard to model when ships were still being shot using physical models. It was easier and cheaper to just have a ship explode than it was to build a model and do a dedicated effects shot for battle damage the way they had to do in "Best of Both Worlds" for the Borg cutting a chunk out of the saucer section. CG changed the change there, so depicting severe battle damage became a lot easier. You could argue the opposite as well, that the incredible defensive and offensive capabilities of Starfleet ships - which are built as vessels of exploration but which can easily go toe-to-toe with purpose-built warships - is proof in concrete form of the Federation's underlying principle that peaceful coexistence yields far greater benefits than belligerence. Instead of being built with technology from a single species, Starfleet ships are built with the very best provided by all the Federation's members. They can explore the galaxy and bring the Federation's message of peace and goodwill while still having the means to defend themselves should their message fall on deaf ears. (In short, they're mighty because their message is right... whereas the Romulan, Klingon, and Borg attitude is that they're right because they are mighty.) IIRC, the showrunners had expressed a view that the success rate against the Borg was more a matter of tactics. Starfleet met the Borg at Wolf 359 arrayed in orderly lines of battle and fought in formation. Armed with Picard's knowledge, the Borg knew exactly where the weaknesses of those formations and ships were and took them to pieces easily. Presenting the Borg with an orderly array of targets just made their methodical approach to battle that much easier. The Enterprise-D's later success in confusing the Borg enough to rescue Picard was built on defiance of convention and insane troll logic, helped by the fact that the Borg didn't consider one ship to be a threat. Starfleet's later, better result against the Borg were a product of adopting a chaotic, highly disordered battle strategy to make it harder for the Borg to predict their actions (as in First Contact). The comparison to the Galor-class is probably unfair, since the Galor-class was more or less Cardassia's line warship... analogous to what the Excelsior and Miranda-classes were in the Dominion War. It's not surprising at all that the Federation's state of the art flagship class outclassed them. They were a challenge for Picard's USS Stargazer, but not so much the Enterprise-D or another of the Federation's flagship-level classes. That much is pretty much explicitly stated on a number of occasions in multiple shows. The USS Defiant aside, Starfleet ships are built for maximum multirole performance as vessels of exploration and scientific endeavor. It became a bit of a recurring thing for Janeway and other Voyager crew members to have to explain to the aliens of the week that Voyager wasn't a warship despite her amazingly overpowered weapons technology by the standards of the region. I think a part of it is that, after the Khitomer Accords ended the Klingon Cold War, Starfleet stopped focusing so much on combat performance since its ships were no longer heavily pulling duty as border patrol along the Klingon border. The Enterprise-A and the Excelsior had plenty of phaser banks and well upwards of a hundred photon torpedoes apiece. USS Voyager had plenty of phasers, but her torpedo magazine? 40. (Not that that stopped Janeway from firing over 125 of them during the series after indicating there was no way to replace them.) Once the Dominion War was underway, we saw even older ships like the Excelsior-class USS Lakota being upgraded with Starfleet's latest weapons technology including quantum torpedoes and new combat-ready ships coming out of the yards by the dozen (thanks to reused art assets from the recent films). (The novelverse, in cooperation with the old showrunners, explicitly established that Starfleet ships adopted the shape they did with the saucer section, the separate engineering hull, and the outboard warp nacelles, because that design produced the best multi-role performance in the warp drive. It made the warp drive more vulnerable in combat, but it made up for it by providing a more efficient warp field that allowed ships to use less energy to achieve the same warp factors, to achieve higher warp factors more readily, and more readily change warp field geometries on the fly to change course while at warp. Vulcan ships from Enterprise are described as being very fast and efficient in a straight line thanks to their coleopteric warp coil, but have very poor versatility and turning performance. Klingon ships with their centerline nacelles were described as more durable but far less efficient.)

It wouldn't... the UK and EU trademark laws were already pretty well-aligned before the UK joined the EU.

There were a fair few Star Trek fans among Macross's creators... and the Tatsunoko Production staff too. The Star Trek: Titan novelverse series did a plot a lot like this, tying into the aborted arc involving the crystalline entity from TNG's Data/Lore backstory, the space jellyfish from Encounter at Farpoint, and a few other giant space monsters from old Trek. Both were, in Star Trek: Titan, essentially invasive species by dint of having ended up outside their natural habitat. Captain Riker's USS Titan stumbles into their natural habitat well outside Federation space and discovered the jellies being preyed on by a violent humanoid species who turn their corpses into organic starships. Riker being Riker, they interfered immediately and later came to understand the species they'd assumed were cruel, inhumane hunters were more along the lines of the space DNR engaging in a vital ecological management program to keep these organisms alive in their natural habitat while also preventing them from the planet-destroying shenanigans they got up to in the TV shows.

BURN THE HERETIC! (Just kidding. )

Really, I think there's a lot of latitude for writing Star Trek stories. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine proved that a Star Trek story didn't need to follow the Gene Roddenberry "planet of the week" formula to be successful. You could set a show in a fixed location or indulge in serialized storytelling and still keep that essential Star Trek flavor. The thing that sets Star Trek apart from other sci-fi produced in the west is that the future it depicts is a fundamentally optimistic, aspirational one. That's where J.J. Abrams and Alex Kurtzman both screwed up. Bad Reboot's Star Trek movie trilogy and Star Trek: Discovery both dispensed with the idea that the future would be a bold age of space exploration in which humanity had long since learned how to treat itself (and others) with dignity and respect, and where clever diplomacy was just as potent (and far more preferable) a problem solving tool than violence. They didn't want to tell that kind of story. They wanted to make something more generic, the kind of standard space war story where the situation never gets more complex than Lawful Good vs Chaotic Evil and problems are solved by shooting each other with ray guns. That's why Star Trek '09's story created a parallel world with a more militant, openly nationalistic Federation and Starfleet who see the Klingons and Romulans not as worthy foes or potential allies in the future, but simply hostile aliens to be destroyed. That's also why Star Trek: Discovery's entire first season was one long war story, against a more bestial, far less civilized Klingon Empire full of cruel, bloodthirsty, warmongering savages who live by no law other than the survival of the fittest. They've been dehumanized to the point that they're not people, they're just space monsters the heroes can kill without remorse or complaint. There's no code of honor... they're just rapists and murderers and terrorists and every other kind of immoral thing you could think of. Star Trek: Discovery's second season was little better, with a few optimistic plots before the rot set in and they introduced an omnicidal enemy who wanted to exterminate all life and therefore diplomacy was never an option so massive ray gun battles and grisly combat deaths could be the norm. That's where I fear Star Trek: Picard is headed. Picard had issues with dehumanizing the Borg drones already, but now we're going to see the Romulans as irredeemable villains who're just keeping the Borg drones in gulags to torture them. You can write almost any story in that general setting and call it Star Trek, but without that optimistic, principled future it won't feel like Star Trek. That is the most important thing for writing a Star Trek story... that the future is a better place, that humanity and its allies have principles, and that differences are celebrated rather than shunned. That vision of the future is the quintessence of the Star Trek setting. Everything else is negotiable.

The novels, at least, had a coordinated continuity across the four Star Trek relaunch novel lines and the new TOS novels that were made alongside them. I'm not sure if the Star Trek: Discovery novels are coherent with them, but the TV series itself borrowed the second season's primary antagonist (Control) from them and the ending of season two seems written to avoid ruling out that the Control AI was actually permanently destroyed. (Control in the novel-verse was not a malevolent AI as such, but more a very well-intentioned extremist ala Sloan that would take any action, no matter how unsavory, to preserve the Federation and its ideals in a galaxy that didn't share them. The actual malevolent AI was Control's creator, the AI Uraei, a pre-Federation surveillance AI which created Control and Section 31 to take extralegal action on its behalf... and was deleted by Dr. Bashir a few years after Nemesis.) Star Trek: Picard poses more problems, being that the Borg apparently are the centerpiece of its plot... while in the novelverse the Borg ceased to exist when the "sufficiently advanced" race that accidentally created them killed the Borg Queen for good and cut off the Collective for good a few years after Nemesis. The whole reason that they went back to developing in the Prime universe was that Star Trek fans largely didn't really care for the Jar-Jar Abrams reboot films and their darker, more action-centric take on the setting, and the films themselves were not really all that successful commercially. Star Trek: Beyond in particular did very poorly once marketing costs were added in, which led to an exodus of financial backers that killed the fourth movie stone dead. Because the audience that DID like the films were mostly the casual viewers and the Star Trek fandom's feelings for them hovered between ambivalence and dislike, there was very little in the way of licensing revenue to recoup costs and losses. Going back to prime universe Star Trek made sense... as in "dollars and". Bad Reboot still wants to do things Abramsverse-style because that's their take on Star Trek, but because many fans don't care for it at all they keep increasing the percentage of prime continuity references and appearances by characters from previous Star Trek shows in the hopes of making their creative output less unpalatable to the die-hard fans who actually buy the franchise's licensed merchandise. They're hurting pretty bad because there aren't as many licensees buying licenses and paying royalties because market research shows them that the fans who are paying for merchandise don't like Abrams-era Trek.

Started Nobunaga Teacher's Young Bride today. It's pretty unremarkable so far. The only thing that really stood out to me was that, like Isekai Cheat Magician and a bunch of recent shows with odd premises, the protagonist accepts a completely implausible situation almost immediately and practically without question. He asks her a few basic questions about her name, her family, and what year it is, and jumps right to "this girl is the real Ikoma Kitsuno, the warlord Oda Nobunaga's lover and mother of his children, and has traveled 467 years forward in time". Seems like fodder for some decent-ish comedy tho, and it's pretty well-animated for a short series.

Battlestar Galactica's 2004 TV series was a strong performer, but it kind of burned out on its own when its spinoff Caprica was poorly received and got cancelled by SyFy in 2010. Game of Thrones was what I mentioned because it's the property that's generally credited (or blamed, depending on your perspective) with the spate of dark, action-heavy, highly serialized shows we're currently living with by producers and film pundits alike. Can't say that I have, and please tell me that isn't the real cover... that looks like he made it himself in Microsoft Paint during a boring staff meeting. Actors have a bit more clout working in feature films rather than broadcast television... though, to be fair, all my examples were supporting actors and actresses raising grievances with the producers. After seven seasons and two previous feature films as Jean-Luc Picard, Patrick Stewart could kind of hold the project hostage to get any changes he wanted made. It's not clear if he could do that with Star Trek: Picard.

Unfortunately, a full replacement of the Star Trek creative staff is unlikely to occur until (or unless) CBS decides the current Star Trek projects under active development are performing too poorly to justify continuing to keep around. Star Trek: Discovery is already performing poorly enough that Netflix only reluctantly agreed to bankroll season two after securing a promise it'd be more like real Star Trek and, unless I've missed something, neither Netflix nor CBS have made any announcements about having resolved their deadlock over the show's future. CBS's attitude seems to be that Star Trek: Discovery's status as the flagship series of their struggling CBS All Access service and all the sunk costs involved in its development planned to be amortized over seven seasons mean that the series is simply Too Big To Fail. They're plowing forward with season three development regardless of the ongoing legal proceedings for copyright infringement and Netflix's reluctance to actually give them any money to make it. Star Trek: Picard seems to be headed the same direction, relying on the same deceptive marketing tactics used in Star Trek: Discovery's second season in the hopes of bringing Star Trek fans back to the franchise long enough for CBS All Access to turn a decent profit. Amazon was already reluctant to give CBS anything close to the amount CBS wanted for the show's production, so it'll be interesting to see how the curtailment of the budget will impact the quality of CBS's spectacle-before-substance approach to Star Trek. I'm not so sure we don't start to see the end of it in the near future... a large part of the blame for the tsunami of dark, gritty, action-ized, spectacle-over-substance versions of shows cropping up in recent years belongs to Game of Thrones. Game of Thrones was a license to print money at the height of its popularity and success like that naturally leads to copycat behavior from rivals and partners alike. The ignoble failure of Game of Thrones's eighth and final season as well as the at-best lukewarm performance of a number of other big ticket properties that tried to imitate its style like Harry Potter's Fantastic Beasts spinoff or the Star Trek reboot films should serve to disincentivize going all-in on the dark and gritty BS in the future. (That said, I was actually rather surprised to learn that Fantastic Beasts: the Crimes of Grindelwald had been poorly received... I'd thought it was rather good since its tone was amply justified by being set in Europe between the World Wars.) That said, I doubt CBS/Viacom will budge on either Star Trek: Discovery or Star Trek: Picard. I think they're smart enough to know that no amount of retooling will make Discovery a watchable show and are determined to plow forward with it anyway in the hope that familiarity with it might breed something other than contempt for once. I don't think that they ever really gave up on making Star Trek: Discovery into Game of Space Thrones, they've just had to change tack after using the Klingons for it didn't pan out with nobody giving any f*cks about L'Rell and Voq because they were a career backstabber and unloveable bigot turned into a subtly racist meme. I'm less than optimistic that any objections on Patrick Stewart's part would make any impact on the producers... Star Trek's producers have a long history of not taking complaints by their actors seriously, going back to WAY before Kurtzman. Nichelle Nichols's grievances almost led to her quitting Star Trek's original series until Leonard Nimoy took Roddenberry to task and Martin Luther King Jr. begged her to stay on the show, Gates McFadden quit Star Trek: the Next Generation and was replaced by Diana Muldaur for a season because she was frustrated at her character's lack of development after having been promised she'd be Picard's romantic foil and Denise Crosby quit because she felt her character wasn't doing anything of significance, Robert Beltran spent seven seasons phoning in his performances in protest of Chakotay being rewritten into Janeway's yes-man on Star Trek: Voyager and Jeri Ryan's complaints about being unable to breathe properly in her original catsuit that were ignored until it started to negatively impact her health on set, and Jolene Blalock spent four seasons protesting the handling of her character and Vulcans in general being inconsistent with previous Star Trek shows to no effect.

Harmony Gold's pretty screwed... trademark laws in most of the world are written to give priority to the owner of a property rather than the first user. Since the United Kingdom is still a European Union member despite its hilariously self-defeating efforts to the contrary, the European Union trademark law firmly working in Big West's favor is skewed even more heavily in Big West's favor by the United Kingdom Intellectual Property Office's finding in Big West's favor being admissible as precedent. They're likely in a big of a scramble, trying to come up with something - anything - that might be used to convince the European Union to let them keep the trademark. My guess is, as they asked for a sixty day extension, they're trying to huddle up with Tatsunoko Production and see if Tatsunoko has anything that they could use as ammunition. (Tatsunoko is unlikely to be of any help, since they'd have to claim to own the Macross franchise to support Harmony Gold's claim, and THAT would get them sued by Big West.)

Even then, he's still an idiot for not responding to the Rebel assault with maximum force. Tarkin and Vader had a comically overwhelming strategic and tactical advantage and didn't use it. If the Empire had anything like a competent leader at Yavin, that would've been the end of Star Wars right then and there. If they'd just blown Yavin itself up with the Death Star's stupidly huge planet-killing gun they would've destroyed the entire moon the Rebel base was on as collateral damage without ever exposing their battle station to harm. Or they could've just sent an actual counterattack out to leverage their massive numerical advantage, wiped the entire rebel force out without breaking a sweat, and either captured the base or just blown it up at their leisure. To reverse a remark from Spaceballs... "Good will always triumph because Evil is dumb".

Wouldn't have helped... the redesign was visibly and obviously derivative of Macross designs, and its "creator" explicitly acknowledged it was based on Macross IP.

The artists must take it in turns to get blackout drunk while working on this comic. I know I would.

Variable Fighter Master File: VF-1 Valkyrie Vol.2 - itself presented as a 2030-vintage in-universe mass market publication - makes mention of a 2012 in-universe film called Macross: the Truth of South Ataria Island that dramatizes the events of the start of the First Space War and a forthcoming direct sequel set to release in 2031 (which we know is the in-universe take on Macross: Do You Remember Love?). It wouldn't be surprising if a production company with the connections to shoot multiple films with the military's support to promote the ideas the danger of alien attack hadn't passed tried to branch out from historical dramas to speculative fiction... especially with the Mardook being implied to be the Protoculture. A 2040s vintage Macross II: Lovers Again in-universe film might even have been a somewhat subversive piece intended to quietly call the military out for its abuses of authority and its general complacency that were already in the process of snowballing into the Second Unification War c.2050-2051.

The redesign went over exactly as well as you'd think given the Robotech fandom's aversion to change and attachment to the original show.

They don't really accomplish much... Vader's and his two wingmen do all the actual work, but the point is taken. It was more than three... but still far, FAR, FAR less than the seven thousand they could've and would've mustered to squash the Rebel attack outright if they weren't holding the idiot ball. If they'd taken their jobs seriously, Vader and Tarkin would still be alive, the Death Star would've blown Yavin IV to bits, and Lucas would've needed a rather different title for A New Hope. (The Emperor actually did it right, and would've won outright in Return of the Jedi if he hadn't let his complexity addiction force him to grab the idiot ball and fail to properly secure the perimeter of the shield generator base on Endor.) Tarkin was told point-blank that there'd been a security leak at the facility that developed the Death Star, and instead of fixing the problem used it to undermine a rival. He knew going into the Yavin operation that the Rebels had the Death Star plans he'd been previously told probably contained a potentially fatal intentional vulnerability and makes ZERO effort to protect the station. Then he's warned mid-battle that the Rebels are definitely onto something, and blows it off. That's not a one-in-a-billion freak accident, he was told several times there was a serious threat and he ignored it or dismissed it out of hand. If you got a recall notice saying that your car has a flaw that could cause it to spontaneously explode, a sensible person would get that recall taken care of straightaway. They wouldn't toss the recall notice unopened and then act surprised when the car blew up and killed them.

To be fair, this is the exact same f*ckup that Darth Vader made in A New Hope... Vader and Tarkin had command of an incredibly powerful battle station that supposedly had something on the order of SEVEN THOUSAND starfighters at its disposal, as well as a few docked Star Destroyers. The total number of starfighters launched to counter and contain the multiple fighter squadrons in the Rebel attack force? THREE. The total number of ships and starfighters launched to contain the Rebel base while the Death Star got into position? ZERO. The entire Star Wars series is only possible because the Imperials are juggling the idiot ball at any and every opportunity. Mostly, it takes the form of believing themselves to be totally invincible despite all evidence to the contrary (e.g. Scarif in Rogue One, the Death Star in A New Hope, the Death Star II: Sith Boogaloo in Return of the Jedi), though they moonlight as bumblers who screw up because the threat of having to explain themselves to Darth Vader has them so terrified they don't think rationally or behave professionally (e.g. every Imperial officer in Empire Strikes Back) or are so busy backstabbing and undermining each other in the name of political point-scoring that they do more favors to the Rebellion than themselves (e.g. Krennic and Tarkin in Rogue One). The First Order, as an Imperial remnant, are just keeping the grand tradition of Imperial incompetence alive and well into the future. Was it the first example? IIRC there was something about the hyperdrive leaking in The Phantom Menace that restricted the range of their hyperspace jump until they could no longer jump all the way to Coruscant, forcing them to divert to Tatooine. (I mean, they never say what the hyperdrive is leaking, but still...) I'd expect the reason they didn't split their forces was that they had one cruiser and three escorts. The vast majority of their forces were on the cruiser, the only ship big enough to hold them all, so splitting up would just give the First Order three weak escorts to ignore and one now-alone vulnerable cruiser carrying most of the Resistance.

Well, it's nice to know they didn't just fold or fall off the face of the Earth the way Harmony Gold's previous partners-in-cancellation did...

Actual character development and story progression in an "original" Robotech work? Jeez, look who wants the moon.

What it seems to be headed for is dying in interesting times... While the CBS/Viacom re-merger is cause for some slight optimism, I doubt it will have any meaningful impact on Star Trek: Picard or Star Trek: Discovery. The studio's already sunk a lot of money into Kurtzman's unsuccessful Abrams-ized bleak, depressing, action-oriented vision of Star Trek, and they're practically guaranteed to plow ahead with it regardless in a forlorn hope that it might one day be liked by fans and begin to pay off. The dearth of Star Trek: Discovery merchandise and the reported walkout of licensees who were solicited for bids on Star Trek: Picard merchandising licenses would suggest this is probably A Very Bad Idea, but some people will cling to a mistake just because they spent a long time making it. As polarizing as Bill Shatner has been in recent years, I have to admit I'm with him on one thing... the attempts to make Star Trek into a gritty, sci-fi action series through things like the J.J. Abrams films, Star Trek: Discovery, and now Star Trek: Picard and the persistent-but-apparently-unfounded rumors of a Quentin Tarantino Star Trek movie would have Roddenberry spinning in his grave. It's the polar opposite of the vision of an optimistic, principled, and inclusive future for humanity among the stars that he conceived in the original Star Trek and in Star Trek: the Next Generation. To briefly expound on the above, I think the thing that bothers me most about the Abrams/Kurtzman clusterf*ck in Star Trek: Discovery that's being carried forward into Star Trek: Picard is how Star Trek is suddenly treating racism (speciesism?) as something that's excusable, acceptable, or even justified. In every previous Star Trek show, judging a person by their race/species and generalizations about same was treated as a moral failing and something which wasn't acceptable, socially or otherwise. Burnham's bigotry is not only treated as completely acceptable in Discovery, it's excused and even treated as justified by making the Klingons almost completely malevolent for much of the story. I'm rather afraid of how Picard will run with the titular character's known issues with the Borg and Romulans, given the trauma he's encountered at the hands of both.

Remember to always spay or neuter your screenwriters. (In all seriousness, I thought screening it in theaters with liquor licenses was the fix.)