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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    *impressed whistle* The bad news just keeps coming. Reports from the usually-reliable CBS insiders allege that negotiations with the licensees have well and truly broken down, with no takers for the merchandising rights to Star Trek: Picard. Amazon is also reported to be putting up significantly less money for Star Trek: Picard than Netflix was for Star Trek: Discovery's season one and two in exchange for the international rights to the show, so there'll likely be a sharp dip in the overall quality of the production. The news that Netflix officially passed on Star Trek: Picard is bad news for Star Trek: Discovery too... CBS has confirmed that they renewed Star Trek: Discovery for a third season, but Netflix hasn't (yet). The series could see major cutbacks or even be canceled should they decide they're going to scale back their funding of the series or withdraw entirely. They've got the international rights to the show, so if CBS decides to plow ahead without them they can't distribute outside of the US and Canada.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Well... long story short, it's an aggressor aircraft for combat training. Long story not-so-short... after the Macross Frontier fleet's local New UN Forces got their clocks cleaned a few times by the Vajra in March of 2059, one of the many measures they took to improve their readiness was to use the combat data they'd collected to start Dissimilar Air Combat Training (DACT) of their VF-171 pilots against simulated Vajra foes. To facilitate this, four VF-25A/MF25 Messiahs were modified to reproduce the Vajra's maneuvering characteristics and designated VF-25VJ "Vajra Aggressor" to serve as Vajra stand-ins. The four VF-25VJ Vajra Aggressors were assigned to the fleet's 6th Combat Training Squadron "Red Bugs" to serve as DACT opponents for the fleet's VF-171 pilots. Once the Vajra realized the NUNS started adapting to their normal maneuvers they started mixing it up, and the VF-25VJs were further modified to replicate the Vajra's fold wave patterns to also serve as aircraft for anti-Vajra ECM/ECCM training. The training itself proved to be too dangerous, and the four VF-25VJ airframes were eventually returned to their original VF-25A/MF25 specification.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Just when you think the Macross Galaxy fleet couldn't get any creepier or more horrifying... I was skimming a Macross Frontier short story titled Wired Warrior, and one of the Galaxy fleet soldiers involved in testing the YF-27-3 Shahar-M one-ups Maris Stella and Project Stella for creepiest unethical Macross Galaxy fleet project. Greenwich Meridian is a prototype bioroid, and if I'm reading this right her brain isn't synthetic... it's human grey matter which was salvaged from the corpse of a Macross Galaxy corporate army pilot who'd died in battle with a new artificial personality installed on it. Meridian 01 is basically a cyber-zombie. It's so distasteful even the normally unflappable Brera is disgusted by it, and cremates Meridian after she's killed in battle.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Sure, the problem is the other half are filled with untreated sewage, hospital waste, and depleted uranium... and we're watching the train wreck in super-slow motion, so it's taking forever for the last bits of shrapnel to finally come down. After all the crap this franchise has put him through, anyone would. Game of Thrones was actually good for a good while there... so its fans being livid over what it's devolved into is a lot more understandable than, say, expecting quality from a franchise that's known for little else besides epic failure.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    They've tentatively advertised it as premiering late in 2019. Whether they'll actually meet that target is questionable, given the difficulties CBS is reportedly having with its other Star Trek plans in the face of having to find new sponsors for the under-development projects Netflix is apparently no longer interested in in light of Star Trek: Discovery's less than stellar reception and the licensee problems they're having over the current Star Trek aesthetic's lack of marketability.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Incidentally, for interesting squadrons, I would recommend This is Animation Special: Macross Plus (OVA Ver.) and the Variable Fighter Master File books. That's where a lot of the info about squadrons and paint schemes are.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Would now be a bad time to mention that there is no official Southern Cross publication with detailed views of the Auroran or physical dimensions? Anything of that nature would be fanmade and pure conjecture.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Those are late drafts of the YF-19 design from the development of Macross Plus, from Shoji Kawamori's Macross Design Works book (page 080). There's a brief comment on how the drafts evolved between September '93 and February '94 as Kawamori explored different designs for the position and shape of the engines and the canards.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    You're surprised? At its very best, this comic has been an insipid mess of generic soap opera plot twists and they've been foreshadowing this time loop BS from the start with all of the subtlety of a half-brick to the head. FFS, when Hayes and Roy explore the ship at the start of the comic they find the corpses of its human crew from the future and the one that gives Hayes pause is strongly implied to be a future version of his daughter Lisa. The computers even already have QWERTY keyboards and speak English. As we've noted on several previous occasions, your particular tastes are... unconventional.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, I don't doubt it... I've often opined that Kawamori's view that each Macross series is an island unto itself isn't an actual policy of his, it's just his "get out of fan's question free" card. Hm... I should check the Egan Loo-assisted subtitles from the Animeigo Super Dimension Fortress Macross release to see how it's spelled there. When the question of where "Gnerl" is actually used came up, I remember that Macross 30 was the only title I could think of that actually used it. I only remembered it because there was one area on the Sierra Desert western side that was constantly swarming with Gnerls and Nousjadeul-Gers. "GNERL" was what was used onscreen in Macross 30, so it's what I'll be using when I translate it.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Well, I am now officially convinced that Furman and co. hate this comic as much as we do and want out. They've been trying increasingly ridiculous ploys to get Robotech fans to stop reading, but they've drastically underestimated how low three and a half decades of hilarious failures have set the bar for quality in the Robotech fandom. This is their Hail Mary: introducing the single most hated character in Robotech in the hopes that she can drive away all all the remaining readers. It'd only be raping it if Sentinels were, y'know, actually good. Sentinels is as much an unwatchable/unreadable hot mess as everything else Robotech has done for botched sequels, so it's just homage. Nah, everything in the Sentinels dumpster fire revolved around Rick and Lisa, and to a lesser extent their unlikeable carbon copies Jack Baker and Karen Penn.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Didn't Star Wars officially jettison all that stuff to the non-canon "round recepticle"? They'd be flying blind, not adapting an existing story from the old EU.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, the only writers up to now who dared connect him to anything Section 31-related were the writers who did the Tezwa arc of the Star Trek: the Next Generation relaunch. The closest he ever got to being involved in Section 31 was unwittingly assisting in a Section 31 operation to cover up President Min Zife's breach of the Khitomer Accords during the Dominion War by forcing him to resign (and then assassinating him). He was so appalled to learn what he'd unknowingly assisted that he thought he'd gotten off too easy being told his career prospects were now nil. Jean-Luc Picard was hands-down the most morally upright and least willing to bend the rules... his first instinct if he knew about Section 31 would be to burn it down and salt the land.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    If the word through the grapevine is accurate, it might actually be worse... Word is, Kurtzman's story concept for Star Trek: Picard is that Jean-Luc Picard moved on from the USS Enterprise to become head of Section 31.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Hard pass. The crap Kurtzman is churning out isn't Star Trek and CBS All Access is a garbage service not worth the subscription fee.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Ah, yes... that was an unfortunate consequence of Star Trek: Discovery coming under fire from the genuine bigots and incels back when CBS first started promoting it heavily. Fans who actually like Discovery got so accustomed to dealing with criticism from racists, misogynists, etc. that assuming anyone criticizing the show is one seems to have become a conditioned response. On many Star Trek Facebook groups, it's basically impossible to have a mature discussion about the series because of it. In some groups it's so bad that it's become a bit nonsensical. I've seen fans attack other fans who belong to the minorities the characters on Discovery are meant to provide proper representation for for saying those characters are kinda sh*t.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Hm. I guess whoever put that note on the Japanese Wikipedia page must've copied it straight out of the book. EDIT: It just occurred to me that my question about Wikipedia may have sounded like a snarky remark. It wasn't intended as such. Rather, your quotation was formatted pretty much exactly like what I'd read on the subject on Wikipedia when it occurred to me to check where the "bis" was first used, so I was wondering if you'd grabbed it from there.)
  18. Seto Kaiba
    ... did you grab that from Wikipedia? From the sound of it, he never actually completed a Battroid mode design for the Neo Glaug... and only finished the design for the earlier (chronologically) Variable Glaug that made its debut in the later (real-world chronologically) game Macross M3. I'll check the contents against the light novel's collected edition later today. Yeah, I've got the first few chapters in the original magazine form but I'd like to get a complete set put together since the light novel itself is on my group's to-do list.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Go home, Titan Comics... you're drunk.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    No word at this time. If the timing is similar to season one, I would expect it in late November or early December.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, I'd never really imagined it as a big armed raid on an Imperial data storage facility. I'd always imagined it was some kind of Mission Impossible sort of affair where the Empire only noticed the data'd been stolen when it was transmitted to the Rebels the first time, and Vader spent an arbitrarily long time chasing a daisy chain of retransmitted plans to Leia's ship in the hopes of stopping the leak. Many Bothans died to bring us this correction.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Odds are they have a fair-sized chunk of additional story written but between redoing pages for the Cycomi re-release and other obligations they need to actually sit down and draw the stuff out. If they'd foregone the do-overs on a bunch of pages, they'd probably have fresh material ready now.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    CBS seems to be a little gunshy about HD remasters after Star Trek: the Next Generation's didn't do so hot. Mind you, Kurtzman also seems to want to sweep Deep Space Nine and Voyager under the rug so he can pretend Star Trek: Discovery was more progressive than it actually was. When they were first trying to promote Discovery, they kept trying to pass Sonequa Martin-Green's casting off as an unheard-of representational coup for women and black actors. It isn't as impressive once you realize Star Trek already logged a whopping 14 seasons and 341 episodes under black and female captains already. Appropriately, given Star Trek's fixation with the number, that accounts for over 47% of all Star Trek episodes produced up to that point (47.7%). Across the other four Star Trek shows, Kirk, Picard, and Archer combined managed only 33 more episodes... 22 of those being TAS. The only new ground Discovery broke (besides being a commercial failure) was to have an openly gay couple, which Star Trek's producers had previously backed down from on at least three prior occasions: DS9's Elim Garak, First Contact's Lt. Hawk, and Enterprise's Malcolm Reed.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    It'd be interesting, but since Battroids are basically the de facto main infantry force of the New UN Government's various member nations the footsloggers aren't likely to get much focus. Those linear rifles were pretty effective against the Vajra larva in Macross Frontier, but it was the Special Forces models with those special anti-cyborg harpoons that took down the Macross Galaxy fleet's cyborg soldiers. Oh, I agree it's highly probable the Macross Concern submitted responses to both of the New UN Forces' Requests for Proposals for nextgen fighters. What makes less sense is that they would submit two responses to General Gomez's unmanned fighter program and end up competing against themselves for the next generation unmanned fighter contract. Both the AIF-X-9 Ghostbird and Neo Glaug are Macross Concern unmanned fighter prototypes built on their Sharon-type AI. I can't honestly recall a time when a company ended up competing against itself in a military design competition... The drone version only had two modes, though... it's only the manned version that was depicted with a Battroid mode. Eliminating Battroid mode likely cut the cost a fair bit. As far as we know, the only version of the Neo Glaug that was actually built was the unmanned version... at least, prior to when we see manned versions in the late 2050s in Macross the Ride (2058) and one of the Macross Frontier manga titles (2059). ... wait, what? You've got the actual issues of Dengeki Hobby, right? Could you check the title pages for chapter 8 "Combat Open"? If you haven't seen it before, I'm wondering if they changed the unit's name between the light novel's run in Dengeki Hobby and the release of the collected edition and those visual books that collected all the art and modeling pages. Macross the Ride Visual Book Vol.2's version of the chapter 8 title page has a model-builder credit right under the chapter title that reads: 模型製作:佐藤匠真（NEO GLAUG bis）. Curiously, in the text of the novel itself, the "bis" part is always written in English while the rest of the mecha's name is always in katakana (save for that title page where it's written in full in English). The text on the title pages themselves have a few mentions of "bis" in the paragraphs running along the bottom of the next page. (For those with the Visual Book, I'm referring to pages 18 and 19 of Volume 2.)
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Gotta run up those Bothan body counts somehow...
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