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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Imagine my amusement that this was apparently a topic George Lucas felt merited his attention and an official response. "Word of God" from George is that you're right, they get fool around just in a commitment-free manner. 🤣 No wonder so many Force users are messed up.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Still waiting for my copy to roll in, but from what I can see in those photos there's nothing new there except the VF-31AX's Armored Pack. It's all information you can find on the Compendium, the Mecha Manual, Sketchley's gateway, etc. I did a breakdown of the 31AX over in the Super Mecha thread back when the Master File came out... and of the Sv-303, since Master File had specs for it and this doesn't seem to.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    I must not have gotten to that part yet. So far, all I've really seen from the Jedi in The Clone Wars is casual danger dialogue, snark, and a lot of hypocrisy from Anakin. But yeah, the Jedi seem to have only two visible moods most of the time: "Stoic" and "Dull surprise". I foresee an awful lot of Jedi gazing into the middle distance like they're trying to remember if they left the kettle on in their apartment in The Acolyte. So the Force is passed on through one night stands? I wonder how many languages in the galaxy have "Jedi" as the word for "deadbeat dad".
  4. Seto Kaiba
    They have one... his name is Qimir, and he's played by Manny Jacinto. He's the one who, in the trailer, talks about the Jedi justifying their domination of the galaxy as "peace". Yeah, I've never been quite so glad that my local theater has a liquor license as I was for the day of the Phantom Menace theatrical re-release. 🤣 It's a much better (or less painful) movie after a few drinks. Just don't drink every time Jar-Jar does something stupid, it's not worth the liver damage. To be honest, I'm not expecting more depth than that. One thing I've noticed increasingly often in my exploration of Star Wars beyond the movie trilogies is that Force users tend to be flat characters. The Jedi Order's trademark emotional detachment tends to produce only three types of character: the Old Master, the Dutiful Apprentice, and the Paragon who Rebels. The Old Master and Dutiful Apprentice character archetypes make up the overwhelming majority of Jedi characters and tend to have little personality and less emotional range because they dutifully maintain their emotional detachment at all times. Their dogmatic adherance to the Jedi Order's rules and philosophy tends to make them into generic "noble and selfless hero" types. The Paragon who Rebels is usually the Dutiful Apprentice (rarely the Old Master) but with feelings and opinions about things. Usually it just means they're frustrated or angry about something like corruption (Dooku), complacency (Qui-Gon), not pandering to their ego (Anakin), or attempted homicide (Ben). The Sith have a very similar dynamic, but with only two types of character: Chessmaster and Angry Boi. Both types are card-carrying villains and professional sadists who feel compelled to demonstrate their sadism at every opportunity as though a moment not spent making some suffer and die is a moment wasted. Chessmasters spend all of their time on or around elaborate thrones boasting about how everything is going according to their plans and what they have foreseen and threatening the Angry Bois with vague or non-specfic punishment should they fail in their orders. The Angry Bois do all the actual villainous work, seething constantly with unfocused rage that's just waiting for a target. They have no emotional range and practically no personality because mustache-twirling villainy is pretty much all they're actually good for in the story. (Which makes it odd that so many are cleanshaven.) The Acolyte's cast has offered us all three standard Jedi archetypes and the one Sith archetype so far... we have Old Masters Sol, Indara, and Kelnacca, Dutiful Apprentice Jecki, and Rebellious Paragon-turned-Angry Boi Mae. None of that augurs well for them having more than the bare minimum amount of character development. Honestly, Rebel Moon was one typo away from being a zombie movie... Instead of "grains", "brains"... because they won't STFU about grain. You'd swear the movie was produced by the US Grains Council.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Lies and slander. The sequel trilogy was nothing if not an essay on how nobody wants Rey... not her parents, not the OT cast, not the Jedi Order, not her gramps... not even the audience. 😛 OK... kinda wondering how many were active concurrently, since a population of just 10,000 Jedi doesn't seem likely to be able to keep up a bunch of different temples across the galaxy unless they're very small ones. The only one that ever seems to be shown or mentioned in the prequel era is the one on Coruscant. It's seen in The Acolyte's trailers too, so presumably that's the one that's going to feature in the story. If you ask George Lucas, they're ALL kids movies. 🤔 (I have my doubts about Rogue One, but I can see the point for the others. Then again, I'm barely into Clone Wars season two and there is some DARK sh*t there despite it being a kids show. Was prequel-era Star Wars just on a mission to create some generational trauma or something?) Shakeups in the creative team are a pathway to many plot developments some consider to be... unnatural. He was doing a great job with the "kill your past" thing until Rise of Skywalker forcibly course-corrected him. Which is how you know he was an only child. 🤣 Is it the Emperor's Hand-book? It's great how little effort went into these. Like, really. Practically every Jedi character fits these descriptions. Every Jedi Master is wise and respected and strong in the force. You don't get to be a Jedi Master if you're not! They're all skilled combatants who don't seek combat but are ready for it if it finds them because that's literally what they're all trained for. The padawans are always studious and skilled greenhorns who look up to their masters because they're mostly child abductees who've been indoctrinated into the Jedi's belief system. Seriously, enough of these stock characters. I wanna see the Jedi Master who's a foolish and impulsive jerk that nobody respects and... oh bloody hell except for the "Master" part I'm describing Anakin aren't I? With Star Trek: Discovery ending and Star Wars: the Acolyte starting soon after, I'm once again left to wonder what it is about Hollywood that feels compelled to write every black woman in a sci-fi show's main cast as mentally unbalanced and emotionally unstable because of a tragic past and a self-destructive desire for revenge? Star Trek did it on three separate occasions in quick succession (Discovery's Michael Burnham, Picard's Raffaela Musiker, and Lower Decks's Beckett Mariner) and now Star Wars is doing it. I just hope it doesn't come of as lowkey racist like those first two did.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    So, I was poking at a few books here and there, and noticed a detail I'd never really paid any attention to before. Kazutaka Miyatake's concept and design for the QF-3000E Ghost in the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross TV anime was based on a SF novella series that he wrote while he was in graduate school. He only ever published two of the planned three volumes in the science fiction fanzine Space Dust in 1978 and 1980, and they featured an unmanned (USAF?) ground attack aircraft. The first volume, SUPERBIRD, featured a manned but mostly AI-controlled plane while the second, COPPELIA, a truly unmanned attacker that was fully AI-controlled. The description suggests it was intended to be deployed as a parasite aircraft on a hypersonic missile, and then detach to strafe ground targets. There's a bit of commentary about how the fully unmanned attacker in COPPELIA was meant to play on the fear of a weapon that blindly follows orders without reason or question. The designs that were drawn for those novellas became the starting point for the QF-3000E when Kawamori asked Miyatake to design a drone. (He also suggests Kawamori was unhappy with not being able to use the Ghost very much in Super Dimension Fortress Macross, and that that was a factor in the decision to use the unmanned Ghost X-9 as the "villain" in Macross Plus.) I kinda wanna see if I can track down those issues of Space Dust for those novellas. IMO it's also rather interesting that the fate of unmanned fighters in Macross ended up mirroring the concerns the unmanned fighter in COPPELIA was meant to invoke. Sharon Apple's hijacking of the Ghost X-9 left the New UN Forces and New UN Gov't wondering what might happen if a fully-autonomous weapon like the AIF-X-9 Ghost were to take its literal orders to illogical extremes or to start acting under its own (faulty) judgement for some reason.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Spending some time getting caught up after I got distracted by the remaster of Paper Mario: the Thousand Year Door... At around 3/4 of the way through the Spring '24 season, many of the titles I had high hopes for have not lived up to their promise. An Archdemon's Dilemma is still quite a lot of fun even if it kind of has bogged down in Family Dynamics. The Many Sides of Voice Actor Radio continues to be excellent week after week, for which I am heartily grateful. It's a strong contender for my "best of season". Vampire Dormitory's started to drag a bit as its main plot kicks into gear... I'm actually kind of disappointed in how quickly it seems to be abandoning its initial premise. Astro Note is unexpectedly stuck in a bit of "two lines, both waiting" involving Mira's plot and a love triangle that's more a series of one-sided infatuations with someone who's too oblivious to notice ala To Love-Ru. As a Reincarnated Aristocrat... is still doing OK, the story's turned towards the serious but it's not really clear if it'll be able to make any meaningful progress before the end of the season. Tadaima, Okaeri is practically impossible to take seriously thanks to some unfortunate narrative decisions and terminology choices, and A Salad Bowl of Eccentrics jumped the shark HARD in the last few weeks...
  8. Seto Kaiba
    I'm starting to question if the people writing HIGHSPEED Etoile have a humiliation fetish. How many episodes of a one cour series can you reasonably devote to a protagonist failing miserably at literally everything in a public setting? Something like 1/3 of the latest episode is devoted to Rin trying and failing to drive a conventional gas-engine car with a manual transmission and her friends being impressed that she gets less sh*tty at it with practice.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    They did? We've only seen the one AFAIK. Mind you, "temple" can be used in a non-religious context and the Jedi don't seem to engage in anything resembling religious practices as far as we've seen in the movies and the TV shows. Buddhism is often argued to be more a school of philosophical thought than a religion, but their congregation places are often referred to as "temples" in English. Eh... IMO, it was inevitable Star Wars would have to introduce some kind of foolproof and objective test to identify latent Force users. It made the most sense to introduce it in the prequel trilogy, when the Jedi Order was at the peak of its power. Even with ten thousand Jedi, there just aren't enough of them to go touring Republic space (never mind the whole galaxy) looking for Force sensitive kids manually. It's a pragmatic necessity given the sheer scale of the setting. Plus it was kind of necessary for The Phantom Menace's story to work at all. Qui-Gon Jinn needed hard evidence that Anakin was The Chosen One™️, and a big showy demonstration of Force power would have required teaching him before he was allowed to join the Order and broken the flow of the story up to that point. (Plus it would also raise the awkward question of what the Jedi do with the kids who they train enough to test and then DON'T let join the Order... unfortunate implications abound.) That's one of the reasons his redemption doesn't really track with his character development. All he had to do was let Palpatine and Rey fight and kill the exhausted victor, and he would claim all the spoils... how much of his redemption was him and how much was him being influenced through the Force by Leia? He definitely didn't seem put off by Palpatine's plan until very late in the game and he had zero reason to care about Rey beyond his attempts to turn her to the dark side. What even are the qualifications for being a Sith? Does his apprenticeship under Snoke count? What even was Snoke? Is Kylo Ren some kinda Sith intern? Maybe The Acolyte'll clear the Sith career path up a bit. As much as I'd like to go for the low-hanging fruit and say that a Ren is the partner of a Stimpy... well... a wren is a bird, but I find Adam Driver looks far more like a whippet than a bird. (Considering his heel-face turn at the last second, does that make Ben Solo "Whippet Good"?)
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Is there a source for that? Legitimately curious here. Oh, absolutely... but lore is an additive process and people've been piling on for almost half a century. The Acolyte will shovel some more grist onto that mill, sure as sure. 's probably worth considering that both of the people who refer to it as a "religion" did so while mocking it... it may not be literal. (One of the two guys who calls it "religion" also calls Vader a sorcerer in the same statement, after all.) I'm not sure whether I agree or disagree with the idea that it lessens the impact of the Force's role in the story. That said, I do think it's a logical inclusion in the story. Star Wars is science fantasy. It exists at the intersection of the science fiction and fantasy genres. Even in a pure fantasy setting, the existence of magic might get a handwave but there will still almost inevitably be people researching it (wizards) both to figure out how it works (what rules it follows) and how to apply it in new and different ways. A scientifically and technologically advanced civilization like the one in Star Wars that discovers the existence of practical "magic" like the Force would absolutely study it extensively rather than handwaving it. Not just out of scientific curiosity, but with an eye towards practical application. The powers that Jedi have through the Force could have some pretty broad applications if you think about it even a little. (Even if you're thinking strictly non-military, the Jedi's telekinesis via tapping into a limitless energy field continuously produced by all life opens the door to all kinds of nonsense like reactionless flight or even practical overunity machines. Literal free energy. The ability to convert thought into mechanical force is a scary prospect.) Ben... also kinda died before we could see if he would have to struggle against his addiction to the Dark Side. He doesn't seem to so much turn back to the light as just turn against someone more evil than himself, which is probably reflective of the original intent being for him not to be redeemed. (Both he and Vader seem to be forgiven awfully easily for all the murder too... one deathbed confessional and they're both off the hook for genocide?)
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Hrm... I dunno. I feel like there's been a fair amount of evidence pointing to Force sensitivity not being entirely mystical from the start. After all, Star Wars has always maintained that Force sensitivity is something you're born with. It's innate mystical ability. It's not something you can pick up through the power of faith (like theurgic magic/miracles), through diligent study of esoteric forces (wizardy), or by making a pact with a mystical entity (invocative magic). It's not something a person can become... they either are one all along, or never will be one. Beyond that, one of the earliest details we learn about the Force in A New Hope is that talent/power in the Force can run in families... a detail later explicitly confirmed in Return of the Jedi. If Force sensitivity can be passed on to one's offspring, it has to be a biologically-linked trait. We know it can't have been nurture, because Anakin Skywalker didn't raise either of his children and neither had substantial contact with any other Force practitioner growing up. What really seems to have clinched the idea that ability in the Force was a biological trait was the 1991-1993 Thrawn trilogy - the only EU novel series I've ever read! - in which the Empire manages to successfully clone not one but two Jedi with their powers intact. If you can grown a new person from a Force user's cell sample and that new person is also Force sensitive (never mind being exactly as powerful) then that means Force ability has to be a biologically-linked trait. That's eight years before Phantom Menace. That seems to have been tried both pre- and post-Disney, with inconclusive results? A little Google-fu pointed to a story where Palpatine tried to make General Grievous force sensitive with a blood transfusion from a Jedi master... the same schtick that our boy Moff Gideon tried in The Mandalorian season three. It supposedly didn't work for Grievous, but we have no idea if it worked for Gideon's clones. IMO, it actually makes a modicum of sense for there to be a measurable/quantifiable expression of Force potential. Most science fantasy or science fiction titles where quasi-magical powers are a part of the setting at least handwave it as something that's been subjected to intense scientific scrutiny, and those where it's prominent often have some kind of in-universe system for measuring and quantifying a person's paranormal ability. It'd actually be weird as hell if there wasn't something like that used by the Jedi Order, considering they were looking for vanishingly rare latent Force users in an unfathomably huge population. ... and so on and so forth. When you consider the level of technology available in the Star Wars galaxy and that the Jedi have supposedly had 25,000 years to study the origin of their powers, it'd be weird as hell if they didn't have some system for predicting or measuring a person's potential as a Force user after all that time or some idea of how all their fancy abilities actually worked. Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from science. 😉 So, I did a little more digging. The bit about "grey" Jedi not being a thing comes from the franchise's executive setting coordinator Pablo Hidalgo. Disney's official position on the Grey Jedi seems to be that they can't exist because the Dark Side's nature is inherently evil and corruptive. You can't tap into it without ending up being influenced by it, so it's not something that can be used "in moderation". It's more a slippery slope/"The road to Hell is paved with good intentions" sort of thing. Evil is not a toy, after all, and "evil in moderation" is still evil.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Why not both? My read of the whole "midichlorians" thing from back when it was introduced in The Phantom Menace was that it's basically another kind of mitochondria that taps into the Force to produce telekinesis and telepathy instead of tapping into oxygen to produce chemical energy. Based on that, I kind of look at the Force as a less sh*tty version of the Warp from Warhammer 40,000. It'd be there regardless of whether or not there were sentient beings who were capable of tapping into its power consciously or unconsciously, but because there is so much life in the galaxy contributing to it consciously or unconsciously even at very low levels it has taken on aspects of life and developed its own will. If mitochondria are present in all cellular life in at least minute quantities the way mitochondria are present in all eukaryotic life, that would allow for both to be true. I looked into this because it sounded like some writer's attempt to cheat the system that the movies had put into place... but the official position from TPTB is that they don't exist in the Disney canon.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    IMO, the why of the Force's seemingly self-enforcing extreme moral dualism is less of an issue than the fact that it exists at all. It's gotta be a nightmare to write for a setting where one of the main mechanics of the shared universe requires that the primary protagonist and antagonist factions inherently and actively gravitate towards the most extreme moral positions possible. What's worse, this tendency is so consistent and so pronounced that the characters in story itself have gone beyond simply being aware of it to treating it as a truism. The Inquisitors in Obi-Wan Kenobi present the aphorism "the Jedi hunt themselves" as a way of commenting on how the Jedi's inability to rein in their White Knight tendencies undermines their efforts to remain in hiding. It doesn't give me great hope for the writing in The Acolyte, since the Jedi cast are going to by by default be "noble and selfless hero" types and the titular Acolyte is a member of what can only be described as a cartoonishly evil cult straight out of a past decade's moral panics. (Then again, my pessimism may simply have been cranked into overdrive after starting The Clone Wars for the first time... I know it's old and it's a kid's show, but it shows that same extreme dualism at every turn. Characters are either selfless noble heroes or the kind of over-the-top exaggerated caricature of villainy that brings back memories of the writing in Captain Planet.)
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... I'm not sure there was necessarily a right thing for the franchise. It was definitely the right thing for George Lucas, though. He made a mint on that sale and by all reports is now the largest individual shareholder in the Walt Disney Corporation. The setting isn't the problem... it's one of the problems, plural. The main reason the setting is a problem is, as you said, "the heavy reliance on the whole Jedi thing". Despite there being at most ten thousand active Force users at a time in a galaxy said to have a population of ONE HUNDRED QUADRILLION - that's one Force user per 100 billion people or one Force user for every thirteen planets with a population the size of Earth's - the Force users still somehow manage to end up at the center of every noteworthy event throughout the franchise. The writers clearly have no sense of scale, but at the same time having a high midichlorian count seems to come with nasty side effects like Main Character Syndrome and being locked into a rigid, self-enforced, and nuance-less Good vs. Evil dualistic morality system. The setting limits Force users to one of two diametrically opposed moral positions: the noble and selfless hero or the cackling Saturday morning cartoon villain. They can't deviate from either extreme without charting a course towards the opposite one. If a user of the Light Side shows self-interest or "negative" but normal emotions they're on the fast track towards baby-eating and if a Dark Side user decides to Pet The Dog that can only be them charting a course towards redemption. If makes so many Force users flat characters, and flat characters are boring. The kids'll give 'em a pass because they're here for the exciting action set pieces but anyone older'll start to get frustrated with the lack of any real character development or variety if there's more than one in play. That lack of character development drives simplistic stories that get boring and repetitive quickly. The Acolyte is going to get hit with this HARD because it's a Jedi-centric story even more than the usual. Eh... in my opinion as an outsider/casual, the problem is not in the writing but in the concept being developed. Obi-Wan Kenobi, The Book of Boba Fett, Ahsoka, Solo: a Star Wars Story, and now The Acolyte are all made with one clear focus: to pander to hardcore Star Wars fans. Y'see, casual viewers do not give a damn about backstory dumps or what Minor Character A was doing before or after their limited role in the main movies. That's material for the hardcore fans. These were all stories that, from the perspective of general audiences, did not need to be told. In many cases, telling those stories is counterproductive at best or simply a waste of time because the story has nothing to say and nothing meaningful to contribute to the setting. They're doing it because they're desperate to find something the fans will accept after the underwhelming response to Solo, The Last Jedi, and The Rise of Skywalker. It's the same reason The Mandalorian's getting a movie despite the story very definitely having ended at season three. The writers can only do so much to make a series or movie watchable. If their work is freighted with a list of Must Haves from the studio, the producers, the director, etc., then it's not always possible to make those additions to the narrative feel unforced or make the narrative flow smoothly. Of course, if the direction is lacking or the actors are phoning it in then it doesn't matter how good or bad the script is.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    In hindsight, he's kind of lost the plot as of A New Hope. Old Obi-Wan knows the Emperor, Darth Vader, and the head of the Imperial Security Bureau personally... and it's the down-on-their-luck population of Mos Eisley spaceport that he feels are the worst people in the galaxy? Never mind that whole "grooming his best friend's son into his religion in order to set him on a quest to unknowingly slay his own father" thing. IMO, the Jedi being more than a little out of touch with reality goes all the back to the start. 🤣
  16. Seto Kaiba
    If you think about it at all, The Acolyte "pushing in the direction of martial arts films" was the obvious right move. Why? For the same reason the prequel trilogy's villains used a droid army instead of flesh-and-blood soldiers: it lets the Jedi can show off without engaging in "unheroic" conduct. They don't use blasters, so gunfights are largely off the table. Attacking the Jedi with blasters makes for boring and repetitive action set pieces because it turns into a game of blaster tennis where the Jedi hardly break a sweat while their attackers die in droves to their own deflected shots. Using a lightsaber offensively against normal people or even against a lightsaber-less enemy force user is villain behavior and violently dismembering your opponents is pretty unheroic on its own. Martial arts is basically the only option they have to allow the Jedi to use their powers and show off without destroying the drama by making the fights hilariously one-sided.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Nah. Speaking as a filthy casual in the Star Wars audience, my gut reaction to The Acolyte is that it reads like a product of the same Fanservice First development process that shat out the likes of Solo: a Star Wars Story, The Book of Boba Fett, and Obi-Wan Kenobi. Why? Because The Acolyte is fundamentally a backstory dump. Casual viewers don't care what the characters or factions were doing before the story started or after the end of the story. If those details were important, they'd have been in the main story not some spinoff made decades later and only tenuously connected to the films. What the Sith were doing a century before the Jedi realized they were still around isn't something that has any real bearing on the story of the film trilogies, so casual viewers won't really care. This series is meant to appeal to the die-hard fans who are here for the continuity nods and the in-jokes. That transition started waaaaay before the prequels, man. That grew out of the original trilogy's biggest sequel-induced plot hole when Empire Strikes Back's big twist revealed that Obi-Wan had lied to Luke about his father's fate. That got progressively worse when Yoda and Obi-Wan doubled down on it from "a certain point of view" in Return of the Jedi and Luke followed up on it by getting all smug and preachy with Vader on Endor and with the Emperor on the Death Star. The prequels just took that existing development and ran with it full tilt.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Well, two reasons. Practical effects were the only real option when the first three movies were made, and that made alien characters very expensive as they either required prosthetic makeup or an uncomfortable and downright unsafe full-body costumes. (Consider the hell Tony Daniels and Peter Mayhew had to go through playing C-3PO and Chewbacca.) The other reason is that it's a bit of truth in television. At the time the original three films were made, many combat roles in the armed forces of most nations were not open to women. That didn't start to change in the real world until a few years after [i]Return of the Jedi[/i] came out, when Norway and Israel opened all combat roles to female troops. Other nations like the US and UK only relaxed those restrictions in the 2010s. There was similar thing going on in the original Star Trek, with the network rejecting the "The Cage" pilot in part because they felt having women in prominent positions of military(-esque) authority was not believable at the time it was made (1964). Like any other work of fiction, Star Wars is very much reflects the era in which it was made. Even though the prequels are set before the original trilogy, they were made after it and reflect the societal values of a later day. The same will be true for The Acolyte, sure as sure.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Macross Chronicle, Great Mechanics, etc. have pointed to two specific design issues that are echoed as root causes of the testing accidents in Variable Fighter Master File. The exceptional maneuverability the YF-19 achieved via its inherently unstable forward swept wing design and its powerful next-gen FF-2200 thermonuclear reaction burst turbine engines was ultimately a double-edged sword. Its sensitive handling and powerful acceleration combined to make it easy for pilots to unintentionally exceed their physical tolerance for g-forces (esp. lateral g-forces) and lose control of the aircraft. Shinsei Industry built the YF-19 No.1 and No.2 prototypes with the latest previous-gen ANGIRAS-GFW204 airframe control AI. It's said that this control AI system (which is presented as a high-end VF-11 control AI in Macross R) wasn't able to keep up with the YF-19's higher performance. AFAIK, official media gives us no guidance on what the circumstances of the fatal and injurious testing accidents the YF-19 encoutered were. Master File offers a brief description of the YF-19's first test accident and first testing fatality. It asserts that YF-19-1 crashed on its second test flight out of Eden's New Edwards Test Flight Center on 30 July 2039, which ultimately cost the life of Cpt. Juuso Grennan. Cpt. Grennan lost control of the aircraft during a test sequence (impl. due to a control AI issue) and ejected late due to trying to regain control of the aircraft. He did successfully escape the aircraft, but having ejected low and with the nose pointing down he ended up hitting a slope in a mountainous region on landing and sustained severe injuries that ultimately cost him his life. Once selected, there were a number of additional YF-19 prototypes... official sources mention, I believe, a No.3 and No.4 prototype that used the new ARIEL airframe control AI that is production standard for 4th Gen VFs. Master File mentions prototypes as high as No.8. After the final design was OK'd by the military, low rate initial production started on the VF-19A so that the first squadrons from the Earth NUNS could start transitioning to the new model. The VF-19A had essentially the same specs as the YF-19 final prototype (and not appreciably different from the No.2 and No.3 prototypes), and once it started ending up in the hands of less-veteran pilots the problems started to become apparent. Multiple loss of control accidents occurred during model conversion training and that combined with a number of other factors like the revised arms export restrictions and the VF-19's extremely high initial and operating costs to see the plans for widespread adoption of the VF-19A cancelled. Shinsei Industry tried to further refine the VF-19 to address the issues the military had reported, resulting in the development of the second production type (VF-19F/S type). Their rival, General Galaxy, understood the assignment slightly differently and went back to the drawing board to prioritize easy handling, cost performance, and operational versatility in their next 4th Gen proposal and based it on the already-proven VF-17D Nightmare. General Galaxy's proposal ultimately won out, and the VF-171 Nightmare Plus became the new 4th Generation main fighter to replace the failed VF-19A and the VF-19F/S became a Special Forces Valkyrie. (It's ironic in a way that chronic envelope pushers General Galaxy finally beat Shinsei Industry's more conservative/play-it-safe design team by putting forward a design that was more conservative than Shinsei's.)
  20. Seto Kaiba
    It doesn't matter how many different flavors of rubber forehead and mocap suit are represented among the main cast, it's another bloody ****ing story about sectarian violence in the glowstick enthusiast community. 🤣 There are something like 1.3 million worlds in the Old Republic* and Coruscant alone is home to approximately three trillion-with-a-T people. Yet somehow, the writers seem to be all but incapable of conceiving a story that doesn't revolve around the two tiny cults of squabbling space wizards occupying the extreme ends of the moral spectrum and the same few planets. * Or so Google tells me.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    I'm not sure what I expected, but Master File predictably offered an explanation of the VF-1's Block 1-5 hand design and it's just a rounded metal housing around the same single axis articulations that the square-edged hand has.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    On a skim, I don't see anything about it in the few official artbooks and Macross Chronicle pages that discuss Ray's backstory and the episode where Pink Pecker team is mentioned. That said, it's not the kind of name you'd pick if you were being anything but deliberate about it. 🤣
  23. Seto Kaiba
    ... and now I'm headed down the VF hand design rabbit hole.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    The way it's written up, it does kind of have that vibe... albeit not from the New UN Forces side. Rather, it's Shinsei Industry who seem to be absolutely dead set on finding some way to make the VF-19 marketable no matter how long it takes. After the military's plan to transition to the VF-19A went down in flames and procurement switched to Special Forces use only, Shinsei still kept trying to find a way to fix the issues and make the VF-19 a viable 4th Generation main VF. They radically changed the design starting from the VF-19F, they swapped out basically every part they reasonably could, and while they managed to make it accessible to more pilots it never really reached the level of being a viable main fighter. Even as late as 2058, fully 17 years after the VF-19 bombed out of the Spacy's service, they were still selling their own management on plans to refine and improve the VF-19 like Isamu's VF-19EF/A. How much of that was a sincere belief in the design's viability and how much was simply sour grapes over having lost the main fighter contract for the first time in the company's history is unknown. General Galaxy definitely realized it was a sore spot for them, which led to some unsubtle trolling with the Macross Galaxy Corporate Army building a small number of VF-19C's under license for one of their elite units as a way to show they could build a better VF-19 than Shinsei could. Not as such. Project Super Nova wasn't set up to fail from the outset. The New UN Forces really did want those fighters. The program's cancellation came when the pro-unmanned fighter faction among the military brass won out and pushed for adoption of the X-9 Ghost instead... only to end up with enough egg on their face to kill an entire Zentradi main fleet through high cholesterol when Sharon Apple hijacked the prototype and went on a rampage through Macross City. It's almost like Shinsei Industry and General Galaxy were so preoccupied with chasing the highest possible performance to outdo each other that they forgot the aircraft they were developing had to have a pilot. They achieved stunning performance to impress the military brass and completely blew past the physical endurance limits of the human body. So once the dust settled on the VF-19's botched phase-in plan, the military threw up their hands and said "OK, maybe we went a bit nuts with the requirements...".
  25. Seto Kaiba
    As ever, I am absolutely gobsmacked by just how consistently terrible HIGHSPEED Etoile manages to be. Bile fascination is the only reason I can keep watching this hot mess. It's not just that the full 3D CG animation looks like absolute arse and looks like an embedded video from a 20 year old console game, it's that the writing is if anything even more detrimental than the animation is. In a way, I guess I can commend it for being an unflinchingly accurate depiction of what would happen if a professional racing team decided to hire a teenage kid whose only driving experience was playing a console port of Forza. They'd do a pretty awful job, fail constantly, and probably crack under the stress. Having the main character be arrogant in a very dimwitted way AND incompetent to the point that failure is the ONLY option is a very strange way to write a sports anime. The audience is supposed to be rooting for the main character to grow and move up the ranks and become the champion, right? HIGHSPEED Etoile's protagonist seems to be actively getting worse as time goes on.
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