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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Goin' in for number two... For all Disney+'s usual polish, I really cannot get past how there's this weird imbalance of production values where set design, wardrobe design, and the writing make this feel a lot lower budget than it is. Even though I didn't care for Obi-Wan Kenobi or The Book of Boba Fett, both were still very polished-looking, professional-feeling undertakings that felt like their main flaw was just an unnecessary or underdeveloped premise. The Acolyte weirdly feels like it lacks that polish and professional tone... like it's a high-budget fan film. Believing whatever you're told without evidence seems to be a bit of a theme with this series. OK, I'll admit it... I asked for non-heroic Jedi and the The Acolyte delivered exactly what I literally asked for. I was just expecting something more... fun? Personable? Capable of displaying more emotions than "deadpan" and "dull surprise"? These Jedi are non-heroic, but it's mostly just because they're awful judges of character and kind of sh*tty people. Which is realistic, I guess, it's just not very fun or interesting. This really is just a full-on f***ing idiot plot. This story can ONLY occur because everyone in it is behaving like the biggest idiot possible at all times. Seriously. What the hell. If this is how the Jedi protected the peace in the Republic for thousands of years, it's amazing it took another 113 years for them to get Order 66'd. There it is... the obligatory "I have a bad feeling about this". On the whole, The Acolyte's second episode was definitely better than the first. It has all the same problems, but the plot feels at least a little more together and flows better from set piece to set piece. It's still an idiot plot, but it's no longer an incoherent one. If it were handled differently - like having civilian law enforcement trying to solve these murders instead of the Jedi - The Acolyte could be an interesting story about hunting a killer out for revenge across the stars. Its main narrative flaw is that most of its cast are Jedi. They've got some good actors here but their performances come across as wooden and boring because they're playing characters for whom displays of emotion are fundamentally out of character. By the same token, the antagonist's performance comes across just as bland and insipid despite a capable actress the character is limited to the extremes of just a few emotions like anger and sorrow. So it leaves just two people in the story thus far who actually behave like relatable people, so the performances don't really shine because they're sharing every scene with flat characters. The Jedi just aren't relatable as characters. Audiences can relate to Din Djarin's desire to protect the Child, to Boba Fett's desire for a better life, to Obi-Wan's lingering guilt over Anakin, or to Cassian Andor's smoldering discontent with the injustices he suffers. There's nothing to relate to in Sol, Indara, Yord, etc. thus far. Even Osha's participation in the story seems little more than incidental.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    All right... wading into this one while the fine folks from animal control de-bat my attic. (No, that isn't a euphemism for anything.)🤣 Well, the first casualty of this roaring rampage of revenge is my immersion. RIP, you were with us for only two minutes and just three lines of (intelligible) spoken dialog, but forever in our hearts.💀 Who wrote this crap? Oh... Leslye Headland, the executive producer, wrote this. Delightful. That bodes SO WELL for this show. After all that fuss and being so prominent in the advertising, Carrie-Anne Moss... Can we briefly stop to appreciate that we have a character who is a repair technician on a ship whose owners don't care about workplace safety who is named Osha? As in, Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Naming wise, this is up there with the likes of Cad Bane, Moralo Eval, or Darth Sideous. This seems to be an authentic idiot plot so far. The story is only able to proceed because everyone involved (most of them Jedi) behaves in the stupidest manner possible. It really is remarkable how remarkably unlikeable all of these characters are. All in all... ugh. One episode down and I am already ready to call this one the worst of the Disney Star Wars shows so far. It's not a slow start. There's a LOT going on here and a lot to unpack. It's just that all of it is nonsensical and it's packaged with some of the worst acting and writing I've seen since the prequel trilogy.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Well, I'm game. This looks like it'll be a good set.👍
  4. Seto Kaiba
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, you're not wrong... at this stage of the game, the audience score is all but completely meaningless. It'll only start to become a viable metric once RT clears out the pre-release review bombing by toxic Star Wars fans, the season has aired in full, and a few months have passed for them to accumulate a decent body of reviews by people who've actually watched it.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Critic scores are almost completely meaningless these days. Too many of the critical reviews are bought-and-paid-for by the major studios and the networks. If you look at RT's new releases on streaming, 80% is practically the floor for critical review scores on anything new. For proof, just look at Paramount+'s recently concluded flagship series Star Trek: Discovery. Its critical score average across five seasons was 84%, on a series that did so poorly worldwide that its sponsor tried to cancel it three separate times before selling the rights back to Paramount at a loss to be rid of it. The audience score average? 34%. The delta between the critic score and audience score got as wide as 67% during the show's run. The only way that happens is if the critics are either completely out of touch or the studio's putting its finger on the scale... and I don't doubt for a second that's already happening with The Acolyte too, regardless of where its audience score eventually stabilizes because that's marketing.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Me too. IMO, that we're seeing plenty of the xenos in the trailers isn't a great sign... that's a pretty good indicator we're headed more into the slasher flick territory of Alien 3, Resurrection, and Covenant than the horror of the original and Isolation game.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Hrm... I wonder why Rolling Stone and a few others withdrew their reviews then? Disney's Ministry of Truth (marketing dept) got 'em, maybe? 🤣 Ah well, I'm headed into this one with my expectations kept pretty low. Three seasons of The Clone Wars and counting has, if anything, reinforced my opinion that Force users are the least interesting characters in any Star Wars story. A story that's positively infested by them doesn't appeal much. I'm open to having my mind changed, though. After all, I do love Andor and that started out feeling like an advertisement for Dramatic Walking as a cinematic device the same way Battlefield Earth is an advertisement for Dutch Angles. 🤣 I was going to make a joke about how I'm keeping my expectations low enough that only Master Sol spending the entire first episode in the john coping with the aftermath of a questionable food truck taco could truly make it unwatchable... but then I realized that would actually just make him the single most relatable Jedi in the franchise.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    We've seen multiple approaches, if we consider Master File as well. Macross the Ride's VF-0改 "Zeak" [sic]* was only superficially a VF-0. It faithfully recreated the appearance and transformation of the VF-0, but "under the hood" the VF-0改 was for all practical intents and purposes a VF-25A-0. Macross 30's VF-0 Replica is a less extreme example that follows the same basic approach as the VF-0改. It was a reproduction VF-0 made with more modern materials and using systems from Shinsei Industry's VF-5000 and VF-1C** including thermonuclear reaction turbine engines. (That makes it something akin to an upgraded version of Master File's VF-0+ Phoenix Plus, which was a VF-0 upgraded with the VF-1's engines and some other improvements that was supposedly used in the closing days of the Unification Wars, which may have been used in Macross the First as well based on creator commentary.) Variable Fighter Master File: VF-0 Phoenix's VF-0 "The Nostalgia" was a true reproduction of the VF-0 in as close to the state it was actually flown in as possible. It was built as a private project by Shinsei Industry staff based on the analysis of wreckage of two VF-0A's that were recovered from the ruins of Edwards Air Force Base after the First Space War.*** * Should be "Zeke" not "Zeak", it's one of several Macross R references to World War II-era aircraft... in this case, the Allied nickname for the Mitsubishi A6M Zero. ** A civilian-use VF-1 variant that appeared in the Macross Frontier short story Actor's Sky and the Macross Frontier novelization. It's used as a flight training aircraft at Mihoshi Academy, and was used by the actor who played Shin Kudo in the Bird Human movie filmed in Macross Frontier's TV series as part of research to play the character. *** Said by Master File to have been No.07 and No.13 from the CVN-99 Asuka II's carrier air wing, which were damaged beyond repair during the Mayan Island incident and transferred to Edwards AFB for storage before the First Space War ruined everything.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    It seems that a couple of entertainment news outlets like Rolling Stone either weren't aware of, or forgot, that The Acolyte doesn't drop until 9pm today and briefly published their reviews from the screening events early. The articles have since been taken down, but they made no secret of their dislike for the series. Rolling Stone's article was titled "The Acolyte Review: This Star Wars prequel series isn't a Force to be reckoned with - Even a veteran Jedi master would lose their patience with this latest Disney+ addition to the canon, which focuses on a pair of twins and revenge, and... zzzzz." (It still shows up as the top search on Google, though the article itself now returns a 404 error.) That said, the same reviewer (Alan Sepinwall) absolutely loathed Andor season one... the best-written, best-acted, most profound piece of media Star Wars has produced since the franchise was sold to Disney by a comically gargantuan margin and IMO a supremely strong contender for the single best-written Star Wars story ever made. So it's worth taking that opinion with a piece of salt big enough to build another Starkiller Base on..
  11. Seto Kaiba
    The whole situation is made worse by the fact there are at least two VF-0 models that are built by post 2012 Shinsei Industry between the official setting and Master File. In Master File, Shinsei Industry was responsible for a reproduction VF-0 to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the first space war armistice. In Macross 30, they're presumably the ones behind the reproduction VF-0 models that are used all over Uroboros.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah... Stonewell AND Bellcom vs. Stonewell Bellcom is one of those long-running inconsistencies in how the company names are presented in Macross publications. I mentioned it a while ago while I was going over the VF-0 book, but Master File took a whack at explaining away the inconsistency as "Stonewell Bellcom" being a joint venture by the separate companies Stonewell and Bellcom dedicated to variable fighter development. That's the thing... the founded-in-2012 Shinsei Industry was the ONLY company named Shinsei in the setting until Macross Zero. The Macross Plus and Macross 7-era materials all list only three companies involved in the creation of Shinsei in 2012: Stonewell, Bellcom, and Shinnakasu. The creative team working on Macross Zero seems to have forgotten that Shinsei Industry was founded after the First Space War and erroneously credited them as codevelopers on the VF-0... four years before the company was founded in-universe. The "second Shinsei" mentioned in Macross the Ride and Macross Chronicle appears to be an attempt by the creators to explain this continuity problem away by breaking the One Steve Limit and retroactively adding this second Shinsei company to the aforementioned merger which previously did not mention or include any such company. Master File, as noted, attempts to explain this in more detail by claiming the pre-war Shinsei Industry (written 新星工業 as opposed to 新星インダストリー) was a developer of land warfare weapons systems and subsidiary of shipbuilding firm Yashu Heavy Industries. (And yes, the fact that they're both named Shinsei Industry really takes the cake...)
  13. Seto Kaiba
    The reason for this confusion just hit me. Macross Plus and Macross 7-era materials describe Shinsei as a new company that emerged out of the merger of Stonewell, Bellcom, and Shinnakasu Heavy Industries. Macross Zero-era materials inexplicably mention Shinsei as an involved party in the development of the VF-0 despite that being set four years before Shinsei was previously said to have been founded. Variable Fighter Master File: VF-0 Phoenix offers some mild clarification/explanation in its development history of the VF-0. It asserts that the original Shinsei Corporation was a land warfare weapons company and subsidiary of Yashu Heavy Industries, the shipbuilding firm that would go on to design the Macross Quarter-class.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    I don't think so, no... If you go back to the materials for Macross Plus and Macross 7 - e.g. This is Animation Special: Macross Plus - there is no mention of a fourth company named Shinsei going into the merger. "Development began as a joint project between Shinnakasu Heavy Industries and Stonewell Bellcom in 2011. However, in 2012, just one year after development began, the aircraft development divisions of Shinnakasu Heavy Industries and Stonewell Bellcom merged to form the new Shinsei Industry, making this [the VF-5000] the first aircraft developed by Shinsei Industry." - This is Animation Special: Macross Plus pg68 3rd sentence. I'll check more extensively later today, but I'm reasonably sure that most other works that discuss the merger don't mention a fourth company already named Shinsei in the merger that produced Shinsei Industry. EDIT: Macross Chronicle's Worldguide Sheet 06A "Military Manufacturers" describes Shinsei industry in the same terms as above.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    ... having zero familiarity with the content creator in question, I question the necessity of the jab at their content. Yes... but not to the extent shown in that YouTube video. I'm guessing whatever models they're using - physical or CG - are not built to the same scale. It's like they used a 1/60 scale Valkyrie next to a 1/72 scale Legioss. Macross's VF-1 Valkyrie is 12.68m tall in Battroid mode. MOSPEADA's AFC-01 Legioss is 8.75m tall in Armo-Soldier mode. As such, the Legioss should be approximately 2/3 as tall as the Valkyrie if both are in their respective humanoid robot forms.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Hmm... pass. Tomb Raider lost a lot of its charm and sense of fun when the games made the move from being an Indiana Jones by way of James Bond pulpy sort of action-adventure series to a more grounded survival-focused series. New Lara's too much of a generic action hero to get me interested.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Kawamori has done a lot to change the context of the events of Macross VF-X2 in the last 20 years. It graduated from "an isolated incident" to "the cause of the government reformation" to "a symptom of the government reformation" to "a small part of a larger series of smaller conflicts over the structure of the New UN Government". Macross VF-X2's story makes you think it's something that's isolated to just Earth's "neighborhood", but Macross Delta has revealed that the conflict was fought as far afield as the Brisingr globular cluster... which is about as far from Earth as it gets. We've seen some radically different approaches to airframe retention over the years in Macross, so it may vary depending on the perceived need of the local military at the time. For instance, Earth in Macross Plus was shown using decommissioned VF-11A units as remotely operated target aircraft in the Ghost X-9's testing c.2040 while Macross Frontier was sold off a bunch of its old VF-11s to civilians when the military deemed them no longer service-worthy. Yeah, you'd think an alleged mega-conglomerate like Xaos would have the funds to afford a more reasonable training aircraft for new pilots like a VF-11D, a VF-171T, or even a VF-31D. Then again, the fact that Xaos's PMC division runs out of money within days of being chased out of the Brisingr cluster by the Aerial Knights says that they were either not getting paid properly or were living paycheck to paycheck as a corporation which is even worse. Just the designs from the original series, as far as we've heard. I think it's equally as much a way to justify in lore why VF vs VF combat is almost always a dogfight. Normally, fighters would stand off against each other with long and medium range missiles before ever attempting to dogfight. Macross's explanation for skipping right to the good bits is that missiles need powerful ECCM to counter the active stealth Valkyries have, so long and medium range missiles that rely on radar guidance are less effective in combat than short range missiles that rely on emissions that can't be masked like infrared radiation from engine exhaust and optical seekers.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    They became Shinsei. Shinsei Industry was formed in 2012 when VF-1 and VF-4 codevelopers Stonewell and Bellcom merged with each other and with FAST Pack and thermonuclear engine manufacturer Shinnakasu Heavy Industry. General Galaxy was also formed by a merger of existing defense companies several years later in 2017. The overtechnology research and development firm OTEC merged with other surviving defense industry companies. Obvious things like industrial espionage aside, the one illegal activity I'm fairly certain Shinsei Industry will have engaged in is covertly selling weapons to the anti-government forces during the Second Unification War. (The obvious copout there being that said "anti-government" forces were actually the paramilitary volunteer forces of the pro-autonomy faction in the Second Unification War, the "good guys" backed by Max et. al. who were resisting the fascist abuse of governmental authority by the pro-centralization faction. It's illegal, but nobody's going to prosecute the company because the pro-autonomy forces won.) There's a limit to it, though... No longer being the latest and greatest model doesn't mean a fighter immediately becomes useless. Older models that have either recently been phased out or are in the process of being phased out can still be used in a lot of different capacities because they're not immediately obsolete. We see this a few titles like Macross 7 Trash, where the Macross 7 fleet NUNS has a number of old VF-4's that it uses for things like training flights and evaluating experimental technologies. They can still be updated and modernized up to a point, with engine swaps and avionics upgrades and the like. Not every government feels compelled to upgrade to the latest and greatest right away either. Like in Macross Dynamite 7, the Zola Patrol were a police force for a government that generally believed in pacifism and didn't have a ton of money to throw around, so the export model VF-5000G suited their needs just fine. With the exception of the VF-1, the point where retirement and replacement seems to be necessary is when a design is two generations old. For instance, the Zola Patrol in Macross Dynamite 7 was upgrading from their 2nd Gen VF-5000s to 4th Gen VF-19 monkey models. Or the Macross Frontier fleet retiring and selling off its 3rd Gen VF-11s as it prepared to begin its transition from its 4th Gen VF-171s to its locally-developed 5th Gen VF-25 in Macross the Ride. As far as we know, those are still unofficial. The closest we've seen to a direct reference to them is a YF-29 in the SW-XAII's colors in Variable Fighter Master File: VF-25 Messiah. Probably not for much longer, thanks to the international distribution agreement supposedly requiring them to "retire" the designs shared with the original series in any works that are meant for international distribution. That said, it was already getting quite silly even before Macross Delta. After all, the VF-1 is a 1st Generation VF and it was hilariously outdated by the time the VF-11 was introduced. Look no further than Gamlin's comical reaction to piloting Milia's old VF-1J Super Valkyrie in Macross 7 ep18. He trained on the VF-11C Super Thunderbolt before he moved to the special forces, and he's absolutely flabbergasted at how low the VF-1's performance is. It's enough of a moment that his reaction is presented in big bold text in the Macross Chronicle episode sheet:「ちぃ、これで全開なのか!?」"Tch.... is this full throttle!?". And of course, he gets shot down because the VF-1's performance is so much lower than even the baseline of what he's used to. It makes sense that it's become popular as a civilian model due to having had decades to polish its performance and handling after being retired from military service, and that it's a popular choice to teach people the rudiments of how to pilot a Valkyrie because of that low cost and low performance. Like how Mihoshi Academy in Macross Frontier uses a civilian model VF-1 for its pilot trainees. That said, as a training aircraft for military use like in Macross Delta it's pretty absurd because its performance is SO LOW compared to what the pilot is training to fly that it's a joke to even consider using it. At that point, it's four (and a half) generations out of date and its performance is a tiny fraction of even the base model VF-31's. Using one to train a pilot for a VF-31 would be like using a go-kart to train someone to race in the Indianapolis 500. All Valkyries have stealth systems.... thanks to a retcon in Macross Zero. Macross Plus was the first title to explicitly mention and depict the existence of active stealth technology, but Macross Zero retroactively established that all VFs have had an active stealth system. Macross Frontier would later clarify that the new active stealth system in the Project Super Nova prototypes was the debut of the 3rd Generation of active stealth systems. The picture painted by subsequent material incl. Master File has been that there's sort of a pendulum effect as detection systems and active stealth systems advance in opposition to each other. Because active stealth in Macross is a form of destructive interference-based ECM that operates by analyzing incoming radar beams and then producing a matching offset antiphase wave that reduces or zeroes the amplitude of the radar waves reflected from the aircraft's skin, the larger the aircraft is and the less passively stealthy its design is the harder the active stealth system has to work to mask its radar returns. So it's kind of an arms race. As radar systems get better ECCM and adapt to existing active stealth, the active stealth has to improve and/or VFs have to be made more passively stealthy to reduce the burden on the active stealth system. The VF-14 and VF-17 are on the large side, and came in during the 2nd Generation of active stealth systems, so it was advantageous for them to adopt a more passively stealthy profile. Especially the attacker-focused models like the VA-14 and VF-17, which have to contend with more powerful ship-based and ground-based radar systems in addition to the radars of enemy aircraft. As active stealth gains an edge, we see more externally-carried weaponry and such, and when radars start to catch up again we see a move towards internaly-carried weapons and passively stealthy designs. Yeah, it's big. 126.7 meters long and 57.8 meters wide... making it 20% longer, but slightly narrower, than a FIFA regulation football pitch (105m x 68m). Or to put it in another perspective, end to end it's about two Boeing 747-700s in length. Stood on end, it'd be about 35 storeys tall. It's almost exactly the same length as the US Navy's old Forrest Sherman-class destroyer, but about four times as wide.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    I'm sure they have at least some... after all, Shinsei Industry is one of the oldest, most successful, and most influential corporations in Humanity's defense industry. That's not a position you earn, or keep, without having at least a few skeletons in your closet. We do know their predecessors Stonewell and Bellcom employed former Anti-Unification Alliance engineers from the SV-51 program after the Unification Wars. That's how Alexei Kurakin, General Galaxy's cofounder, survived the war. He was on Luna doing space testing on the VF-4 when everything went to pot. Maybe... though the designs of that era are kind of a Lost Generation in terms of depiction in Macross works. We only ever got to see the 3rd Generation on the way in in Macross M3 and on the way out in Macross 7. That said, I'm inclined to doubt that the VF-14 would've received the same kind of excessive service life extension the VF-1 got. The VF-1's unending utility is practically a running joke, and the main reason it's stuck around as long as it has after being aged out of main military service is because civilian market VF/VT-1s are so ubiquitous that the military's Special Forces supposed use VF-1X derivatives because they're as close to inconspicuous as a 12+ meter tall transforming robot can be. Macross Chronicle's descriptions of the Fz-109 series suggest that the Elgersoln's performance improvements owe a lot ot other areas beyond simply raw power... it's said that they made refinements to basically every system, though the transformation is specially noted to be much smoother than the original aircraft's due to their improvements. The overall performance is said to greatly exceed the original VF-14's, which yeah... I guess makes the Macross 5 and Macross 7 fleet's VF-11s supremely unlucky to run into enemy forces who are fielding a Gen 3.5-equivalent as standard.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Hm... I'm not sure it's "everyone has a lightsaber" so much as it is the franchise's obnoxious tendency to put the vanishingly tiny minority of Force users at the center of every major event in galactic history. The Jedi represent just one ten-trillionth - 0.00000000001% - of the galactic population before Order 66. After it, they're on the order of one ten-quadrillionth of the population... but any even slightly important event seems to involve at least one. I only noticed that detail recently, but damn if it doesn't bother me. I'm going to go on a bit of a rant here...
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Didn't we already have something like that in The Last Jedi? Not the memes, I mean, but those guard in Snoke's room had a bunch of weird lightsaber-like weapons including a whip. After getting almost two seasons into The Clone Wars, I'll settle for lightsabers being treated like actual deadly weapons and not just paddles for games of laser ping-pong.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    One aspect of the period spanning the events of Macross Frontier and Macross Delta that is often overlooked in the face of the conflict itself is the rise of corporate power and the huge amount of influence those large corporations wield. Macross Galaxy is the best/worst example, being a subsidary corporation of General Galaxy that was set up as a literal corporate state. With that kind of power behind them, it's not surprising that the wealthy and influential choose to flout the law whenever it becomes inconvenient like Ivan Tsari did. How Mei Leeron, the relatively humble head of a mercenary NGO on a remote planet came by something like a VF-27... we'll never know. Probably not, yeah. Well, Fasces had certain incentives to use the Varauta models where possible. They had control of the factory satellite that was producing them, so they didn't have to worry about issues with illegal procurement or little things like having to pay for them. That they were also roughly comparable in performance to a VF-17 or VF-171 didn't hurt their feelings either I suspect. There probably wouldn't have been much of a push to adapt the Varauta forces improvements to the VF-14 and VA-14 given the timing involved. Their performance was around the same as the Gen 3.5 VF-16 and VF-17 and inferior to the VF-19 and VF-22. And just two years after the conflict ended the 4th Generation VF-171 debuted and began to replace the VF-11s and VF-14s in service at the time.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    It seems a reasonably safe bet that the VF-27 is not a lost/phantom design after 2059 given that several of them do show up in stories set years after the events of the Macross Frontier series/movies. That said, both of the VF-27s we see after the events of Macross Frontier appear in side stories and are shown to be in the possession of (extremely well-connected) civilians. If you don't count the generic VF-27 in Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy and the unlockable Havamal colors for same, the only time we've seen it in a pure NUNS livery is in the VF-25's Master File. (On page 27, by happy coincidence.) The two we see in civilian hands are: Mei Leeron's personal VF-27γ in Macross 30. The Uroboros Hunter's Guild boss seldom takes to the field, but when she does she's shown to have a VF-27γ Lucifer with a unique white and purple color scheme and Hunter's Guild markings. Ivan Tsari in Macross Delta Gaiden: Macross E. The head of Zelgaar Heavy Industry is shown to have a personal VF-27γ Lucifer with "jet black" coloring that he uses during the events of the story in 2062. He, unlike Mei Leeron, is also confirmed to be a full-body cyborg.
  24. Seto Kaiba

    Macross 30

    Seto Kaiba replied to Tochiro's topic in Games

    Good to know. I've got multiple copies, but my old PS3 is showing its years... and replacing it with emulation seems like a good way to replay the game into the future.👍
  25. Seto Kaiba
    That news is actually about ten years old now. Next Generation Air Dominance requirements came out in '14, and multiple governments have been publicly working on unmanned "loyal wingman" systems since at least '15. The US has been flying prototypes since at least March '19 (with the Kratos QX-58 Valkyrie). Mind you, the idea of unmanned escorts in fiction is a pretty old one too. It goes back to at least the 1960s as far as I'm aware... and seems to have been the logical consequence of late 1910s and 1920s advances in remote control of vehicles via radio making their way into the commercial sector in the 1950s and a growing interest in the idea of AI and robotics kindled by 1940s developments in computing and popular fiction from writers like Isaac Asimov. By the late 1960's and early 1970's the idea had enough traction to get used in Star Trek at least twice, with the most blatant example being Kirk's Enterprise using two unmanned Antares-class "robot ships" as wingmen against the Klingons. That said, Macross didn't actually start doing "loyal wingman" style drones until 2008's Macross Frontier debuted the RVF-171 and RVF-25 acting as motherships for groups of QF-4000 Ghosts. The Squire used by the VF-2SS Valkyrie II in Macross II: Lovers Again is not a true unmanned fighter like the Ghosts used in other Macross titles. Rather than being an AI wingman capable of independent operation, Squires are "dumb" drones that are controlled remotely by the onboard computers of the Valkyrie II they're assigned to. All of the thinking behind their operation is done by the Valkyrie II's computers, the Squire is just a remote weapons terminal. That's why Macross II's official materials refer to Squire using a borrowed term from Gundam: they're Bits, not Ghosts... just controlled by computer over radio instead of via psychic waves from an ESPer. The Macross II timeline version of the VF-4 had funnels ala Gundam too, though with the same computer-based control system. (The distinction between funnels and bits in Macross appears to be exactly the same as in Gundam too.)
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