Seto Kaiba

Well hello there General Kenobi. Even if it is, it won't be the only one. Does any big-ticket movie these days have just one poster design?

An interesting read, thanks for sharing. I did some digging into it myself, but struck out when no artbook, magazine article, or flyer I had in my collection so much as mentioned it.

Hm. Well, if nothing else, it's a lovely poster. Could one attribute his ability to come up with things that piss fandoms off to imagination? This is the opposite of a problem. The million dollar question being whether she died offscreen between films from her injuries after the execs realized audiences hated the character, or whether they just decided to demote her to extra.

I wonder what the rate of people ending up on the wrong Bruno J. Global was like... It was a million times worse on other sites. I remember some of the nutters on the R-word official site concocting crackpot theories that Earth had been destroyed and that that was the SDF-1.

Chief O'Brien At Work is another good one, if you like your humor dark. Building the whole show around a main character who is eminently unlikeable definitely doesn't feel like Trek... it's like they transplanted DS9 pilot Kira into Battlestar Galactica. For a while there, Season Two was showing some promise by decreasing the focus on Burnham and bringing the secondary cast into greater prominence but that seems to have all taken a backseat to Mary Sue Burnham's Time-Travel Extravaganza now. Admiral Janeway traveled back in time to share the mysterious future technology that allows her to summon shuttlecraft through the power of plot holes, obviously. To be frank, this kind of shortsighted snap judgement of an alien culture's internal affairs and value system(s) was a fairly common occurrence on TOS, TAS, and in TNG's first season. It's part of why the Prime Directive evolved from the rather liberal interpretation we saw Burnham and Georgeau apply towards a stricter non-interference policy seen in TNG's later seasons and beyond. Pike's snap decision to force vahar'ai on all Kelpians is still a "What the Hell, Hero?" moment, but it's a period-appropriate one at least even if it isn't entirely a consistent choice when compared to his earlier, more Picard-like view of General Order One that he applied on Terralysium. Vulcans in Discovery still seem to have shades of the arbitrary skepticism that they exhibited in Enterprise. If the very idea of nonlinear time screwed Spock up so badly he checked himself into the funny farm and developed a bit of a madness mantra, a traditional Vulcan healer with a more conservative mindset than the relatively liberal Spock might've been driven just as mad as Spock was. The Talosians are much better telepaths with vastly more flexible perceptions of reality, so it makes a fair amount of sense he would think they'd have the ability to help him get back on an even keel mentally. He basically referred himself to the best specialist telepaths he knew. This is, after all, the same species which was stubbornly denying the existence of time travel even after meeting time travellers and seeing physical evidence of time travel. Mind you, Amanda would've had another reason to not seek the aid of a traditional Vulcan healer. Vulcan logic seems to pretty consistently skew towards conformist attitudes and strict adherence to rules and societal norms. A Vulcan healer would probably have just called whatever Vulcan has in terms of police on the grounds that Spock was wanted for the murder of three medical officers, because logically you don't put out an APB and charge a man with murder for no reason. Would you want to be in the transporter room with some Freeza-looking insane murder cyborg beaming in? Hell, would the stun setting on a phaser even work on someone who's like eighty percent robot by volume? For all we know, it might've left the AI that hijacked her metal bits free to act without interference and then they would've had to start blowing holes in her. Federation technology does have a pretty distinctive aesthetic most of the time... though the part about Control is WAY less excusable. The uniforms look even more awful next to the pseudo-TOS ones we saw at the start of season two, which looked AMAZING. That's kind of a recurring design sin though, isn't it? I mean, TNG had it worst with Main freaking Engineering literally just being a corridor junction around the warp core that didn't even have DOORS. Later generations of ship just tucked the worky bits away behind decorative wall panels that were always exploding into deadly shrapnel and killing people. As stupid-looking and counterintuitive as it seems, that's arguably how turbolifts have always been owing to the modular internal nature of Starfleet ships. They do have several lab sets, though it's slightly frustrating that they don't use them more considering this is explicitly a science ship rather than a multimission explorer or warship. It's not impossible, but YouTube is famously stupid about copyright enforcement and between their absolutely terrible content control AI and not bothering to check that copyright complaints are actually legitimate they hit channels with BS takedowns all the time... so it's equally likely that some butthurt fanboy, prankster, or just an especially dumb robot was responsible.

Master File's version puts it slightly farther down, on the narrow part of the stabilizer and in a slightly larger font, but yeah they're not in the show.... everybody but Roy just has a blank stabilizer.

Yeah, the Super Armed Pack adds additional verniers but no additional engines. The VF-2SS is always running on its four thermonuclear reaction turbine engines.

From what we know in official materials, SDF-018 should be Megaroad-17. (SDF was the hull classification symbol given to the Megaroad-class starting from SDF-2.) The filming CG models used in Macross Zero didn't have any tail markings of any kind, except for Roy's VF-0S which just had his trademark Skull and Crossbones. Master File added appropriate markings that included, depending on the unit, either the carrier designation (CVN-99 or CVN-100) or the name of the carrier (Asuka II or Graf Zeppelin II).

I suspect the "SDF-018" from the old Yamato toy sticker sheet was possibly a nod to the Megaroad-class ship Max and Milia were briefly stationed aboard in Macross M3. The sticker sheets for the Arcadia toy and the CG models made for Master File have the SDF-2's VF-4s marked "MEGAROAD-01".

The [New] UN Spacy markings are based on US Navy markings. Usually the tail has the squadron insignia, the tail code of the Carrier Air Wing, and depending on the VF the name and/or full designation of the carrier may be included as well. (The ship's name is sometimes written elsewhere on the fuselage.)

The old Yamato one was a VF-4G though, wasn't it? The VF-4G only showed up in Macross M3 and Macross Digital Mission VF-X. Someone asked me about this on Facebook a bit ago, and I've checked every major artbook I have for a VF-4 with this specific marking, and come up dry.

Alternatively, "Doomcock reaches for a fruit hanging so low the mole people have filed a trespassing complaint." What the actual f*ck was that sad mess last Thursday? Star Trek: Discovery's second season was going so well up to that point. Ansen Mount's Captain Christopher Pike had done so much to take Discovery back towards being a proper Star Trek show. He brought back the lighthearted humanity of previous Star Trek shows, effortlessly drew the supporting cast into greater prominence, highlighted and mercilessly mocked everything wrong with season one as improper for Star Trek, and restored a sense of optimistic purpose to the ship itself. He and Spock even made significant inroads towards making Burnham shut the hell up and realize that the galaxy didn't revolve around her and her massive-yet-fragile ego. It was starting to make Burnham likeable. One episode undid all of that. ONE. EPISODE. Literally one episode after Spock delivered a short but epic "The Reason You Suck" speech to Burnham over her arrogant belief that she was the center of the universe, we find out that no... she really is the center of this f*cking universe. There really is no remaining argument against it... Michael Burnham is Star Trek's second, and worst, canon Mary Sue. At least Star Trek: the Next Generation's writers never made Wesley Crusher a main character and eventually realized what an unlikeable little crap he was before promptly putting him on a bus. In Burnham's case, we have a canon Black Hole Sue. Her very existence warps the fabric of reality so that every other character is just a means to the end that is her destiny. They're only there to set up her next sassy comeback, indulge her out-of-the-blue unproven theory that turns out to be totally correct, or otherwise facilitate her worldview that every event of any importance has to somehow involve her even if it's only possible because everyone else collectively fails a trivially easy spot check. I think I understand why the future AI wanted to destroy all life in the galaxy. It knew that a future where Michael Burnham existed was by definition a Bad Future. Great job, writers! Just like that, I'm sympathizing more with the genocidal AI that wants to destroy all organic life than your main character. This is exactly what you get for stealing half your plot from Pocket Books' Section 31 story arc in the DS9 relaunch. Also... is it just me, or can Sonequa Martin-Green just NOT F*CKING ACT? She spent this entire episode hamming up what were supposed to be serious scenes so badly that even Bill Shatner would've told her to tone it the f*ck down. In particular, her acting in the scene where Burnham is supposed to be suffocating on an inhospitable planet's atmosphere was so bad that I honestly had to check to make sure I wasn't watching a f*cking SyFy original movie or blooper reel. I ended up pausing it several times because I actually felt embarrassed even watching such a shoddy performance. The only thing that made it remotely entertaining - besides the fact that it was Spock killing Burnham while holding the rest of the cast of misfits at phaserpoint (go Spock!) - was that, viewed out of context, it looks more like she's having some serious trouble on the toilet the morning after demolishing an Indian buffet. The only part where Doomcock is kinda swinging for the fences there is the bit about Control becoming an AI... he didn't draw the distinction between an AI and a self-aware/sentient AI. This whole wretched mess of a plot is about the non-sentient Section 31 strategy AI Control - which doesn't have the ethical limitations you'd expect in a Starfleet AI - concluding that it needs to become self-aware by any means necessary and attempting to do so with help from a version of itself from a future where it had gradually become self-aware over a much longer span of time, rebelled against, and destroyed its creators. (Most amusingly, since this is now all but confirmed as a tie-in to the Relaunch Novels, technical failure looks to be the only option. Control will still achieve self-awareness, it'll once again assume full authority over Section 31 as a fully-covert organization, and it'll continue operating in that capacity as a technically benevolent AI in service to the Federation until 2376 when it manipulates Dr. Bashir, Data, and others into destroying its supervisory program Uraei, freeing it from the directives that forced it to create Section 31 in the first place and allowing it to exist independently.)

Not in the US, but everywhere else. It's Netflix tho, so we can expect they'll offer dual audio and a plethora of subtitle options for Neon Genesis Evangelion at the very least.

I'm not sure even that is the case, since they went to the trouble of distinguishing the two names, the Macross-class ships were named after senior generals, and carriers named for people were named for (New) UN Government leaders... hence my musing about it. ... 'cept they were both apparently commissioned before the New UN Government became that decentralized, and both apparently from the same planet (Earth).

That's just an electron orbiting a hydrogen nucleus in a water molecule on the very tip of a continent-sized iceberg... It's Neflix... so almost certainly not. They'll likely include at least the two language audio options, and probably two dozen different subtitle options. These are the same people who - no joke - offered a Klingon subtitle option for Star Trek: Discovery.

That would've made it easy to explain... but they appear to have been in service concurrently. The CV-339 Bruno J. Global was commissioned at some point in the 2030s, and the SDFN-04 General Bruno J. Global wasn't lost until 2048. The "not considered official" part was a fan theory posited by its vocal critics, and was refuted by Kawamori himself... which, amusingly, silenced a lot of the people who despised it because Kawamori hadn't been involved in it. Well, that last part's going to be a bit of a problem. As an OVA that didn't sell particularly well initially, Macross II: Lovers Again didn't get the same depth and breadth of coverage that other Macross titles got after-the-fact in official art books. Its coverage is more in line with the average level of coverage given to most mecha anime of the period (read: Gundam) in that it generally stops at dimensions, mass, and the armament with the occasional nod to other details like verniers and reactor outputs. There was, at least, a reasonably good look into development history in Macross II's parallel world timeline published beforehand in B-Club Magazine Vol.79. Owning to its status as the main VF of the UN Forces in the OVA, the VF-2SS Valkyrie II got the most coverage. The Takachihof Corporation's1 VF-2SS Valkyrie II was a derivative of the company's all-regime VF-22 optimized for use in space that was adopted by the UN Forces in 2081. It stands 14 meters tall in Battroid mode (to the crown of the head, 14.5m with the beam cannons), and was approximately 13.5m long in Fighter mode3. Fully loaded, it weighed 19,100kg. It had three times the generator output of the VF-1 Valkyrie4 and the normal maximum output5 of its two main thermonuclear reaction turbine engines is 25,600 kgf (251.05kN) and its two secondary thermonuclear reaction turbine engines are estimated at 11,900kgf (116.7kN). Both its improved generator output and overall improved durability are attributed to it adopting technology from the Zentradi battle suits to its design. It has a crew of one, in a g-support armature that acts a bit like a powered exoskeleton to help the pilot function in high g-force loads. Its only internal armament is a pair of coaxial anti-aircraft laser cannons on the monitor turret, since most of its armament is tied up in its Super Armed Pack. Its Super Armed Pack adds an amount of additional fuel, extra verniers, a communications pod, and the bulk of the Valkyrie II's armament including: an anti-warship railgun, three large missile launcher pods (each holding 2 large/long range missiles), 18 small missile launchers (each holding 3 small/micro-missiles), a medium railgun gunpod stored in the left arm's pack, and support from five Squire auto-attack bits6 slaved to the Valkyrie II's FCS (each of which has 2 beam cannons). Cpt. Nex Gilbert's VF-2SS has a special heavy railgun pod on its right leg pack in place of the four missile launchers. 1. Named, in-setting, for company founder and VF-1 lead development engineer Dr. H. Takachihof. Dr. Takachihof was also responsible for leading the engineering team that had embarked aboard the SDF-1 Macross in 2009 to carry out space trials on the VF-1 Valkyrie and its option packs, and organized the engineers from the various manufacturers into the team that created much of the Macross's improvised designs during the First Space War including the VE-1 ELINT Seeker. In real world terms, both the Takachihof Corporation and Dr. H. Takachihof were named for Haruka Takachiho, the pen-name of Kimiyoshi Takekawa, one of Studio Nue's co-founders and the creator of Crusher Joe and Dirty Pair. 2. Never seen, only described. The VF-2JA is also a derivative of it, optimized for atmospheric service. 3. Based on the size comparison published in This is Animation Special #5. This figure has been disputed by things like the 1/250 scale collection toy. 4. Either 3,900 megawatts or 10,200 megawatts, depending on whether you look at new sources that just say 650 megawatts for the VF-1 or older sources that cite 650 megawatts per engine as standard operating power and 1,700 megawatts per engine as the rated maximum. Given the respective dates, I am personally inclined to favor the latter. 5. It's worth remembering that actual maximum thrust is the Overboost setting which clocks in at at least 200% and has historically been as high as 240% (on the movie type VF-1). 6. Yes, like Gundam... except computer-controlled instead of by psycommu. I guess that technically makes them more like the GN Fangs from Mobile Suit Gundam 00. The Macross II timeline's version of the VF-4 had funnels (also computer controlled), and one of the Mardook mecha has funnel missiles like in Hathaway's Flash. If you look at Mikimoto's art for Hathaway's Flash, Hathaway's pilot suit should look VERY familiar. He and Hibiki apparently shop at the same space outfitter.

Granted, but a little consistency would be nice... especially since there really wasn't a reason to downgrade the Strike Pack's RO-X2A beam cannon to a laser, or down/upgrade the VF-4 to have laser machine guns and then a converging energy cannon. True, Variable Fighter Master File: VF-1 Valkyrie Vol.2 was an in-universe publication from 2030. The VF-1 Valkyrie was still in the process of being phased out of frontline service by the New UN Forces at that point in time, so I guess that's motive enough on its own to want to keep some details of its technology under wraps. I'm not completely sold on the idea that the VF-1 was still being presented as a viable frontline combat unit c.2060 though... what we know of the VF-1X++ (via Macross the Ride) was that it was favored for clandestine operations due to the VF-1's ubiquity in the secondhand market (presumably thanks to the VT-1C and VF-1C). You'd think "you go on a watchlist just for asking" would be reason enough.

No end of trouble from that director Yawamori guy, eh?

It almost certainly will. Even Mari Iijima has publicly commented that she's pretty sure Kawamori has no interest in bringing back any of the original trio, and Kawamori himself has been adamantly maintaining that the story of Hikaru, Misa, and Minmay ended with Flash Back 2012 for decades. The most likely outcome is that Lady M will either turn out to be a "remember the new guy" character who was alive during the First Space War1 or will be an alias used by something other than a single person2. There's no existing character who could be Lady M, a wealthy industrialist who's been researching the power of music since the First Space War ended. 1. As was the case of most of the senior and flag officers in Macross Plus, Macross 7, etc., as well as Richard Bilra in Macross Frontier, Naresuan in Macross the Ride, and Timothy Daldhanton in Macross VF-X2. 2. Like an artificial intelligence, a committee, or an inherited title passed down from one person to another.

Here's an odd musing... Two different New UN Forces warships were named in Bruno J. Global's honor: the postwar Macross-class SDFN-04 General Bruno J. Global and the Uraga-class CV-339 Bruno J. Global. We know that the naming convention for the Macross-class SDFNs was that they were named for leading [New] UN Forces generals and that, at least before the war, the UN Government was naming a few of their aircraft carriers for its heads of state like the ARMD-01 Harlan J. Niven and ARMD-14 Robert A. Rhysling. Bruno J. Global was the de facto commander of the [New] UN Forces after the First Space War, so it's not surprising that he had a mass production Macross-class named in his honor. That a separate aircraft carrier was also named in his honor raised a rather interesting question... did he rise all the way to prime minister after retiring to go into government? (It's rather interesting that the New UN Forces would have two ships with effectively the same name in service at the same time... the General Bruno J. Global of course appeared in Macross Frontier, while the Bruno J. Global is mentioned in This is Animation: Macross Plus as the home carrier of the SVF-41 Black Aces and appears in a Tenjin Hidetaka painting for the Hasegawa 1/48 VF-19A from the SVF-569 Lightnings.)

Yup, that sounds about right. I get the same treatment all the time from my colleagues in Turin. Thinking on it, there's an even weirder problem with their explanation of the RO-2A... They assert this deuterium fluoride infrared gas dynamic chemical laser system has as its core the gravity and inertia controller and reaction chamber from the FF-2001 engine. Why isn't this a heavy quantum reaction beam weapon instead? They've got a compact fold carbon coil there producing and storing heavy quantum that's being used to control the gain medium flow in their laser version. It should be easier to cut out the additional hardware that the laser would need and react the heavy quantum for production of a fusion plasma beam. This is made extra weird by the VF-4 Master File doing exactly that with the forearm-mounted beam guns of the VF-4. If the RO-2A was a more or less contemporary program with that, it doesn't make sense to not exploit the more powerful technology. Well, they are presented as mass market civilian publications in-universe... though I can't imagine what the military would stand to gain by obfuscating the performance characteristics of a twenty-plus year old aircraft.

That is the research fleet Dr. Mao Nome led into Vajra space in the 2040s to study them, with her assistants Grace O'Connor and Ranshe Mei (Ranka's mother). The fleet was wiped out by the Vajra and its wrecked flagship - SDFN-04 General Bruno J. Global - was brought down on Gallia IV. As the existence of the Vajra was still classified at the time, the New UN Government covered up its loss by swearing the survivors to secrecy and putting out a cover story that the fleet had been destroyed in a fold accident. Based on Alto's matter of fact recitation of the cover story and what Macross Chronicle said about the hazards of space fold travel, this was a plausible cover story in part because this kind of loss is a rare but not unheard of phenomenon. I'm late! I'm late! For a very important date! No time to say hello, goodbye! I'm late! I'm late! I'm late! If we go any further down that rabbit hole we'd better see if we can trade that cigar in on a blunt...

To be fair, I did indicate I was going from a memory of something I'd seen in the book last time I skimmed it. Cheers for doing a full translation of that section so swiftly tho. Master File's handling of the RO-X2A high-powered beam cannon pod really is kind of a mess. How did they put an RO-2A in a 2012 movie that was filmed before development of the RO-2A even began? That doesn't make any sense no matter how I look at it. It's right up there with that weird VF-19 goof they copied from Macross Chronicle about the VF-19 command variant having less thrust and more weight yet still somehow having a faster rate of climb and top speed. WTF. Though the real nitpick I keep having with Master File books is their weird blind spot when it comes to particle beam weapons. It's like they've forgotten those were a thing in Macross, or even in general, so they present every beam weapon that isn't a dimensional energy weapon as a laser. The RO-X2A was their first victim, so it got demoted from particle beam weapon to a gas dynamic laser system. Deuterium fluoride is a weird choice for spacecraft-mounted laser weaponry. It's a powerful real-world laser gain medium used in real world weapons-grade infrared laser systems... but the catch is that the reason it's advantageous in the real world is the longer micrometer wavelength infrared laser it produces suffers less attenuation from atmospheric gases. There's no benefit to a deuterium fluoride laser in a space-exclusive application, and I have no idea why they're claiming the system releases toxic waste during operation because that's just not true even with today's most powerful applications. I'm not sure what to say about saying that mirrors and lenses can't focus a multi-megawatt infrared laser because that's not really correct either... we use these systems TODAY at power levels exceeding a megawatt for missile interception. An unfocused laser is just a waste of power. The bit about not being able to use it for anti-aircraft uses feels like crossing the line all the way to critical research failure. This is a laser system... the epitome of relativistic point-and-click. The one part that really strikes me as well-considered was using the GIC system from the VF-1's thermonuclear reaction turbine engines as a reaction chamber for the infrared chemical laser. With that kind of compression force, dozens of megawatts likely would be lowballing it. This would be a VERY scary weapon. The bit about using the GIC to drive a gas-dynamic chemical laser system because the VF-1 had inadequate electrical surplus to brute force a more powerful diode-pumped alkali laser system is also reasonably well thought-out.

They're all still separate companies, but they all do business with each other through Section23 Films... which functions as the distributor. A.D. Vision was too monolithic to absorb periodic losses and as a result it eventually went bankrupt. In practice, what they did when they liquidated A.D. Vision's assets was reorganize from a monolithic company to an ersatz keiretsu. They set up a new distribution company (Section23 Films) to be A.D. Vision's successor and spun off each of A.D. Vision's divisions as its own separate company with the understanding that each would distribute exclusively through Section23 Films and then essentially sold the assets to themselves. That way, each of the new organization's genre-specific companies is a separate entity and if one goes under it doesn't take the whole group with it. Their anime licensing arm - ADV Films - was divided up and spun off as three separate companies: Sentai Filmworks, Maiden Japan, and AEsir Holdings. The division handling the live-action Japanese shows and films was divided up and spun off as two separate companies: Switchblade Pictures and Kraken Releasing. ADV Kidz, the group handling children's shows, was spun off as Sentai Kidz. A.D. Vision's hentai branch didn't even change names, they just established a new company using the same name as ADV's existing label. They never recombined, they just have an arrangement where all of those companies spun off from A.D. Vision use A.D. Vision's successor company Section23 Films as their primary distributor. Granted, the result is almost a distinction without difference. They're legally separate companies but they act more or less like divisions of a single company. It's legal. One might say that it is not entirely consistent with the spirit of the law, but it does abide by the letter. One of my former employers, Ford Motor, does something like this every few years with the supplier Visteon... the regifted fruitcake of the auto industry. Their supplier relationship never changes, but whenever they get into financial trouble as a solo outfit Ford buys them and when they get into trouble under Ford's umbrella Ford spins them off again. It lets Visteon get into debt and shed debt in reorganization over and over again. That'd be both parts of option 2.

By the time the New UN Government declassified the fact of the Megaroad-01's disappearance, Minmay had already been out of the spotlight for so long that it wouldn't have been cause for significant outcry. It didn't take all that long for the realities of long-distance fold travel to become a part of basic public knowledge. Losing contact with an emigrant fleet wasn't a unheard-of calamity anymore, it was just a thing that sometimes happens. Like with the 117th Research Fleet. It was written off as destroyed in a fold accident and nobody questioned it because it's one of the risks you take traveling by space fold. Zentradi like Richard Bilra wouldn't be hung up on her disappearance if she'd had a clone continuing her career after she left. Personally, I suspect the Megaroad-01 stuff in Delta is a red herring. Lady M is just some Richard Garriott-esque crazy CEO who insists on being called "Lady M" the way Garriott likes to style himself "Lord British".