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Seto Kaiba

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Everything posted by Seto Kaiba

  1. Seto Kaiba
    ... sh*t, he's right. Not gonna lie, a well-made Dark Eldar kabalite warrior or a Necron Phaeron would open my wallet right up.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Wasn't every one of Sharon's tracks by a different performer? That'd make it rather difficult/expensive.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, its box office take was pretty unremarkable. I dunno, they could always take the same approach that the Star Trek: Enterprise relaunch took to deal with the last few arcs of the series. "It was a lame cover story for something else" was a great way to take the piss out of it. Same. "All Good Things" was a surprisingly tight series finale that didn't really require following up on. Generations was a weak film that really didn't deliver on what it promised vis a vis passing the torch from the TOS to TNG crew, and the Enterprise getting Worf'd by a century-old Bird of Prey was downright comical. First Contact was 50% hilarious classic Trek time travel episode and 50% bad sci-fi zombie flick that ruined the Borg by giving the faceless an easily-related-to face. Insurrection... exists. Nemesis was a terrible fanfic that somehow slipped the net, with the evil twins and overpowered fanboyish uber-ship and a lot of really weak gags. Nothing will ever be quite as incandescently awful as Star Trek V: the Final Frontier, but Insurrection, First Contact, the J.J. Abrams movies, and Discovery are all strong contenders for second place.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, it'd be downright criminal considering that Jean-Luc Picard spent seven seasons and four movies as Starfleet's paragon of virtue. He's the only Starfleet captain thus far who never really compromised himself in any way. Just so long as we don't have to watch Patrick Stewart lose another fistfight to a man in a rainbow pleather onesie again...
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Young Luke was... there are two key differences between what we saw with Luke Skywalker and what we're allegedly going to see with Jean-Luc Picard: Time and Maturity. Luke Skywalker c. A New Hope was a painfully naive and sheltered 19 year old kid hopped up on adrenaline and idealism. He was all of about 22 or 23 when the Empire fell. He did 30 years of growing up in the real world away from the sheltering influence of his aunt and uncle between Return of the Jedi and The Last Jedi and saw plenty of things to make him cynical and defeatist in that time. He saw the enemy he and his friends gave so much to defeat come right back like nothing had happened while he was powerless to stop them... and then had years to dwell on having not only directly caused the rise of the dark side he'd thought defeated but having ensured it rose stronger than before. It's no surprise that the naive young man who believed so firmly in the triumph of light over darkness and a heroic destiny would be so badly broken by seeing everything he'd worked for fall apart in such short order. Jean-Luc Picard c. The Next Generation "Encounter at Farpoint" was a 59 year old, thoroughly seasoned, Federation Starfleet captain with 31 years of starship command experience and combat service in the Cardassian border wars under his belt. He was under no illusions about the galaxy's ability to be a random, occasionally cruel, place full of injustices and worse. By the time of Star Trek: Nemesis he was 74, with 46 years of command to his name and had seen the worst the galaxy had to offer courtesy of the Cardassians, Romulans, Klingons, Borg, Dominion, Son'a, and various corrupt Starfleet officers, and weathered it all without sacrificing his belief in the Federation's values or his explorer's soul. That's why Luke's characterization in The Last Jedi is NOT a betrayal of the character... but why a Jean-Luc Picard who has left Starfleet to head up Section 31 WOULD be a betrayal of his character. You want to judge Luke's mature self based on how he behaved when he was a rash youth who'd never truly been tested. By contrast, Jean-Luc Picard is someone we were introduced to after he had already weathered many tests of strength and character, and weathered many more in the parts of his life we got to see. "Into exile I must go. Failed, I have." - Yoda What long game? Yoda and Obi-wan f*cked off with no plan beyond saving their own hides and keeping Vader from finding his children. Obi-wan's ghost had to browbeat Yoda into training Luke. Pretty much the same thing Luke did, just Luke didn't have to wait as long. So Yoda's consistent. He spent almost twenty years hiding out on a remote planet until a potential student showed up, and even then he refused to teach him until a ghost showed up to twist his arm. What we've heard is that he's supposed to be the head of Section 31. Given the rogues he's slumming with, it sounds like he's in the thick of it doing morally questionable sh*t that the Jean-Luc Picard we know would've flipped his sh*t about.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    It seems a safe bet that, if the Ultrasmurf sells well, they'll move on to the other most popular chapters like the Space Wolves and Blood Angels for paintjobs if nothing else. I'd still like a Beakie though. If they do 'em in the same scale, sure.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    If nothing else, it's one area where Chiba excelled himself... not only working out how much power it'd take to produce the amount of thrust the VF-1 needs in space, but how fast it'd burn through its fuel doing so. One fan theory posed by the doujinshi circle FANKY Publishing that I thought was quite sensible was that the large silver "blisters" on the sides of Zentradi warships are high-capacity fuel tanks not dissimilar to the external fuel tanks that officially exist on the Guantanamo-class. It's something I've been meaning to look into to see if there was any official basis for it.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Nope, about all we know is that it's a thing... and we only have that from the line art of the overhead shot of the hangar on Vrlitwhai's ship in "Blind Game" from page 89 of This is Animation: Macross Vol.1.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    ... oh f*ck no. I can't believe I have to say this, but that sounds substantially worse than Star Trek: Discovery. The Star Trek fandom still largely despises Wesley Crusher. Even in reruns, ratings clearly show that episodes with Wesley Crusher have significantly lower ratings than those without him. Wil Wheaton's own stock only rose because he made the hate work for him by candidly admitting that he fully understood why the fans hate Wesley and that he hated Wesley too. (Even the knowledge that it was Gene Roddenberry's executive meddling that made Wesley a Marty Stu hasn't tempered the fandom's loathing for Wesley.) Unless something changed recently, the Star Trek fandom doesn't have a lot of use for The Big Bang Theory either given its use of Star Trek fandom as shorthand for being a socially dysfunctional ass. That's expensive, and CBS seems to be rapidly running out of money to keep Star Trek moving between Discovery generating near-zero licensing revenue, Star Trek: Picard drawing a big fat zero from the licensees, and Netflix passing on Star Trek: Picard altogether. Star Trek was doing woke crap decades before "woke" was even a thing. CBS's problem is that they let Star Trek: Discovery prioritize demonstrating how "woke" it was over literally everything else in the show... like creating engaging characters, telling an actual story, etc. They'd be fine if they'd just stick to the "woke" approach that worked so well for every previous Star Trek show: anvilicious Aesops in allegorical morality plots like TOS's "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" and "The Omega Glory", TNG's "The Drumhead" and "The Outcast", DS9's "In The Hands of the Prophets" and "Past Tense", VOY's entire schtick with the Maalon, or ENT's Pa'nar syndrome AIDS allegory and "Chosen Realm". Granted, past Trek has missed as often as it's hit with that kind of Aesop (Voyager mostly missed) but it goes down a lot easier when they're not doing a little victory dance about how progressive they are having a black woman main character while completely forgetting to not make her the worst human being in Star Trek so far who wasn't from the mirror universe. (That, I swear, was Discovery's one moment of self-awareness... having to go to the mirror universe and dial up its evilness to 11 just so Burnham and co. would seem like a lighter shade of grey, and then have her worry that she's fitting in too well.) Disney made Skywalker do exactly what the previous generation of Jedi masters did when they screwed up and led the dark side come to power... so it wasn't exactly what you'd call unreasonable or out of character. (They weren't terribly subtle about it either, bringing Yoda along to chastise him for stealing his bit.) What CBS has done to Star Trek is way, WAY worse... they took a high-concept intellectual sci-fi series in which humanity had transcended such petty things as racism, sexism, and petty warmongering and turned it into a lowbrow action series about a racist warmonger and garnished it with huge helpings of misandry.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    The captions read: 1st Squadron S-type Major Roy Focker (the skull and crossbones) 2nd Squadron S-type Major Kabiru Hajadin (the eagle with the big red eye) 1st Squadron A-type Warrant Officer Nguyen Som Dok (the horned skull) 4th Squadron A-type Sergeant Mario Frosini (the demon?) 3rd Squadron A-type Warrant Officer Tagan Kinba (the hornet) 4th Squadron J-type Captain Georg Schmidt (the blue dragon) They appear to be markings for individual pilots, rather than unit markings.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, it's stated a number of times that the Vajra's abilities are on par or better than the typical 5th Generation VF's. It's also possible that they were afraid of encouraging the Vajra to change up their tactics in response to the NUNS changing up its own. The Vajra may be cheating the whole g-forces issue, given that they get around using reactionless flight via gravity manipulation instead of by thrust... their tails are one big gravity controller.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    They don't specify how.
  13. 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.
  14. 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.
  15. 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.
  16. 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.
  17. 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.
  18. 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.
  19. 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.
  20. 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.
  21. 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.
  22. 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.
  23. 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.
  24. 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.
  25. 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.
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