Seto Kaiba

One has to wonder what exactly the poachers thought that reaction warhead was going to accomplish. They were trying to kill a creature whose entire metabolism is built on absorbing enormous amounts of stellar radiation by firing a warhead that emits a short, sharp pulse of powerful thermal radiation at it. That's like trying to kill a potted plant by watering it slightly faster than usual. If they'd had a dimensional resonance speaker, harsh language might actually be more effective.

Macross Chronicle is surprisingly insistent that it is, in fact, pollen.

The past moves more merchandise. There are a lot of other potential explanations besides "Rey is a secret Skywalker". My money's on The Rise of Skywalker being about subverting and deconstructing the whole "chosen one" schtick that was the driving force of the original and prequel trilogies, as this is supposed to be the conclusion of the whole Skywalker storyline. Rey's going to delve into the history of the cursed Skywalker bloodline before she ends it forever when she chops Ben Skywalker into toppings for an Ewok house salad. (Or maybe this new Jedi order will turn "Skywalker" into a title...) Can you rewrite cancer to be more appealing? No offense to Ms. Tran, but the character Rose Tico was the story cancer that caused the whole Canto Bight plot tumor in The Last Jedi and dispensed many of its worst moments and lines of dialog. The character is tainted, even if the writing is competent this time around. It's like bringing back Jar-Jar. You could have fantastic writing for him, but because everyone's seen The Phantom Menace nobody will like him no matter how well-written he is the second time around. Well, we don't know if he's alive or a ghost and what his actual relevance is... though Ian has mentioned he isn't there simply as a callback.

IMDB's full cast and crew listing shows Ian McDiarmid is set to reprise his role as Palpatine. (Sadly, it also indicates that Kelly Tran is set to return as Rose Tico.)

So... The Force Awakens The Last Jedi From His Nap?

Well, not quite... the VF-19P that Basara "borrows" (read: "steals") from the Zola Patrol to go chasing whales has a standard VF-19P-type monitor turret the entire time. After it gets bukkake'd1 by galactic whale pollen2, he tries to clear the polarized cover over the monitor turret optics with one of the hands and what he manages to wipe away makes it look like the VF-19P has a face similar to what Basara's VF-19 Custom had thanks to the light from the sensors causing the polarized cover to glow green. I'd imagine anyone from Death Note save perhaps for Misa would find the entire cast of Delta appallingly clueless... 1. ... no, I honestly can't think of another word for it. Galactic whales got so fired up by Basara's singing that he got blasted with massive quantities of reproductive material. 2. Yes, pollen. Turns out galactic whales are much closer to being plants than animals... which makes a certain amount of sense given that they're space-dwelling lifeforms that are sustained by the stellar radiation they absorb while passing through the star systems on their migration routes.

Yeah, what finally got me to break down and read it was the repeated references to it in a Dan Abnett novel I'd been reading.

To be fair, yeah... most bootleggers do churn out merchandise of obviously inferior quality because most of them are in the business of counterfeit merchandise rather than producing unlicensed original products. So, naturally, most of them do a pretty poor job because they're trying to make their money through false or deceptive advertising practices. Outfits like MAAS Toys are in this weird periphery demographic of bootleggers with work ethic. Every now and then you'll find ones like that in the wild; bootleggers who are either so skilled or so committed to making a convincingly professional-looking counterfeit product that, by accident or design, the product they put out is as good or better than the real deal. Others, like MAAS, are the skilled but amoral sort who aren't about to let a little thing like the law get in the way of making the products they want to make. Back when I was first starting to collect anime on DVD, I found some box sets of Cowboy Bebop and Trigun at a local con. Some enterprising bootlegger had done such an amazing job creating counterfeit DVD sets of those shows that not only did they look more professional than the genuine article, their work was so convincing it took us over a decade to figure out that they were bootlegs. We only noticed because of a discussion of the various home video releases in the US and couldn't find our box set there... he'd created professional-looking original packaging, screen-printed the disc art differently, and even concocted his own original menus.

Must be. As far as we know, the original YF-24 that was codeveloped by Shinsei Industry and General Galaxy c.2040 was nameless and the final prototype Shinsei independently made after reviving the program was dubbed "Evolution". Yeah, the Xaos Pipure branch's Echo Platoon machine specification after Kite's VF-171EX gets REKT and rebuilt as a support unit for Tactical Sound Unit "Thrones" with a radome that'd been converted into a "Live Dome" fold wave amplifier and that weird EVA-02 lookin' face. (And, of course, that bizarre Barbie Pink paintjob... truly there is no color more appropriate for a stealth variable fighter than a bright pastel fuschia. Ray Lovelock would approve.)

Not according to Kawamori.

Any unlicensed third party producing and selling merchandise is by definition a bootlegger. After all, the definition of the word "bootlegging" is "the unlawful manufacture, distribution, or sale of goods". If they don't have a license, that means they're manufacturing, distributing, and selling those goods unlawfully. They'd prefer "unlicensed third party" because that weasel wording is just obfuscatory enough to not instantly brand them as the petty criminals they are. There is no gray area there... it's either licensed and legal or not and not. Don't expect MAAS to communicate like a professional toy company because they're not one. They're a bunch of guys out there somewhere trying to make a buck on someone else's IP without getting caught and sued down to their skivvies.

The Queadluun-Rhea's thermonuclear converter belongs to a completely different category of reactor system, so we're not really sure how it shakes out when compared to a VF's thermonuclear reaction turbine engine. The VF-1's ROV-20 laser cannons are shown to be pretty darn effective throughout the original series... one of the first uses we see of 'em is Roy popping a Regult like a big metal balloon with a quick burst from his VF-1S's four. Most of the kills we see the brownies rack up are with their laser weapons too. Well, it's all a question of scale... if you're looking to take down a lightly armored target like a Battle Pod or a VF that's in fighter mode, you don't need a ton of firepower. If you're trying to take on a hard-armored target like a Vajra, blow up a target in one hard hit, or punch through the hull of a battleship you need a LOT more oomph. That's where you get the much more powerful beam weapons in Macross Frontier. 'course most of what's seen in Frontier are dimensional weapons, and it takes a fair amount of power to make them work in the first place but you get a lot of energy out of it too. Those little laser cannons and beam machine guns are enough of a threat for VFs to have defensive countermeasures specifically against them like ablative anti-beam coatings to soak some of the damage from them. FWIW, I'm pretty much going with the official generational definitions for the .0 Generations. Definitions of fighter generation in Macross are likely a good deal less granular precisely because there isn't that kind of external pressure on development. The Zentradi Army hasn't had a new technological development in half a million years, the first new hostile race to emerge wasn't seen until 2040, and the second was using fighters designed and built in the New Unification Government's sphere of influence by one of its own defense contractors. The 2nd Generation design classification largely focuses on the idea of efficient, low-cost VF designs with common parts and a focus on creating VF designs that excel either in space or in atmosphere rather than focusing on all-regime performance. It's not so much a radical increase in performance or technical capability as a radical rethinking of what the actual requirements for a successful variable fighter should be. Particularly within the limitations of a VF that might have to operate for decades aboard a cramped emigrant ship without a highly sophisticated onboard factory. The VF-4, for instance, was the first true space-optimized variable fighter. It wasn't that big of a leap forward in terms of technological sophistication or capability, but it added a lot of new features to help it in its intended role. Thermonuclear reaction ramjet engines improved high-altitude performance. Semi-conformal missile mounting stations improved its payload versatility and passive stealth properties. Modular main weapon mounts enabled the fighter to swap from particle beam weapons to rotary cannons based on where it was expecting to operate. Improvements were made to avionics, active stealth, controls, and so on. The VF-5000 came at it from the opposite angle, focusing on keeping costs low and providing an extremely effective no-frills atmospheric fighter to pick up any slack the VFs up in space left. Its adoption of the same advances in avionics, active stealth, controls, engines, etc. and Zentradi overtechnology, as well as internalizing some of its armaments made it part of the 2nd Generation (also having been developed after the VF-4 further justifies that classification). It was one of a number of VF designs developed for the same role, with similar requirements, and they all fall under the 2nd Generation umbrella. Really, the VF-11's controls and cockpit configuration are more or less identical to what we see on the VF-1A-6 and later... some of which is tech we saw being evaluated on the VF-0 in 2008. The improvements it's officially listed as offering are, yes, the bulletproof shield, better stealth performance, and improved armament and fuel capacity due to its larger size. ... kinda curious how you've got one going backwards there. The VF-5000 was developed from the failed VF-3000 program and the VF-9 was its facing competition from General Galaxy. Generally each "next main fighter" is the start of a new .0 generation. The VF-1, VF-4, VF-11, VF-19/22/171, and VF-24 so far... Fighter-scale pinpoint barrier systems, native fold booster support, thermonuclear reaction burst turbines, and third generation active stealth are all explicitly design requirements that were the foundation of the 4th Generation "Advanced" variable fighters. It wasn't a feature that came in alone, it was part of a package of advanced features that were all part of the same requirements package in Project Super Nova.

Since the subject of Generations came up, it's about time to revive THIS monstrosity I wrote...

"Nothing fundamentally different" is about the shape of it, yes. The reason we don't see radical jumps in engine performance in the first three generations of Variable Fighter designs is that they're all using the same initial generation of engine technology. It's applied to engines of different sizes and with gradual improvements to the underlying technology so we see small improvements. Major improvements in engine performance coincide with the adoption of next-generation engine technology, like the jump that occurred when the thermonuclear reaction burst turbine engine technology was developed for 4th Generation VFs and adopted by some late 3rd Generation designs like the VF-17 (from the -D variant onwards) or VF-11MAXL. Then, of course, there was the Stage II thermonuclear reaction turbine engines developed for 5th Generation VFs that introduced another major leap in performance. ... I have no idea where you got any of this. We have never had any statement of output power from a mecha-scale Zentradi thermonuclear reactor. The VF-1 Valkyrie was frequently shown scoring kills on Zentradi battle pods using its laser cannons in Super Dimension Fortress Macross. Max is also shown inflicting severe damage on Milia's Queadluun-Rau using his VF-1S's laser cannons in Macross: Do You Remember Love?. AFAIK, there has never been any statement that the Tomahawk destroid was unable to move and fire its charged particle beam cannons at the same time. Ah, not quite... but I can see where your reasoning came from, and it's not that wide of the mark. You see, this isn't down to beam weapons being ineffective... but rather, where they are most effective. The VF-4 Lightning III was predominantly a space fighter. As a space fighter, the VF-4 was ideally suited to leverage the full offensive power of a high-output beam weapon as the vacuum of space has no dense atmospheric gases to attenuate or defocus the beam. Its atmospheric variants - the VF-4D and VF-4S - were equipped instead with a 30mm rotary cannon on each forearm to provide it with atmosphere-specific firepower that wouldn't suffer the kind of performance degradation its particle beam cannons would. Likewise, its atmospheric counterpart as 2nd Generation main variable fighter, the VF-5000 Star Mirage, opted for a projectile primary armament for the same reason and transitioned its laser weaponry to blind spot coverage in fighter mode. Their replacement, the VF-11 Thunderbolt, was developed as an all-regime but heavily atmosphere-focused design and so it eschews beam weaponry as a primary offensive option and follows the same design philosophy Shinsei Industry had pioneered on the VF-5000. The VF-11's rival design, the space-optimized VF-14 Vampire, put beam weaponry back in the primary gun role for fighter mode. Macross Chronicle would disagree, as it cites the VF-19, YF/VF-24, VF-25, etc. as continuations of the VF-1's family line. While it is true that General Galaxy's designs do have a rather unsubtle Zentradi influence thanks to chief designer Algus Selzaa, neither of these designs were influenced by the tech obtained from capturing the Quimeliquola AWDAP station in 2035. The VF-14 had been in mass production for seven years already when the station was captured, and the VF-17's design had already been completed and entered testing that same year. The VF-14 Vampire is actually using the same generation of engine technology as the VF-11... its engines are just much bigger than the VF-11's because the airframe is also quite a good deal larger. Also, you're judging the VF-17 on the basis of the engines it didn't get until the -D variant. When it was first rolled out, it was using engines from the same generation as the VF-11 as well. The -D variant and beyond were updated with the next-generation thermonuclear reaction burst turbine engines developed for the 4th Generation VFs. The VF-14's loss to the VF-11 in the New UN Forces' selection of their 3rd Generation main fighter had more to do with the military's desire for an all-regime fighter as a successor to the VF-1's all-purposefulness. Despite its loss, the VF-14 was still widely adopted by emigrant governments that felt a superior-quality space fighter was more advantageous to have than an all-regime one. Megaroad-13 was one such government. You could say that even though the VF-14 "lost", it didn't actually lose. Macross Chronicle's evolutionary diagram would likewise disagree with the idea that the YF-21 and Q-Rhea being the end of that evolutionary path... the VF-24, VF-171, and VF-27 follow on from General Galaxy's design lineage there. Credit where credit is due, the factory satellites have also been patiently refining the designs to improve their reliability for half a million years and counting... you can do amazing things when you've got five hundred millennia of DFMEA output from practical usage testing on your design. That has more to do with the Protoculture's ancient standing order to leave them and their sh*t the hell alone... something first discussed in the original SDF Macross series. It's the humans who have learned to be wary of the ancient Protoculture's ruins, since long experience have taught them the ancient Protoculture were somewhat irresponsible when it came to storing their superweapons. They'd build crazy nightmare engines of apocalyptic destruction and then just bury the damned things in their backyard. At least the ones on Uroboros were smart enough to realize that the ruins needed a nice, utterly unambiguous "Keep Out" sign... and that hives of massive, self-replicating, bio-technological insectoid sentries programmed to take violent exception to intruders would be a good place to start. Nothing says "F*ck off" quite as effectively as a murder-bug the size of a starship - and equipped with weaponry to match - coming after you for messing with what ought not be messed with. The VF-25's (and other 5th Generation VF's) maintenance requirements are noted to actually be less extreme than many preceding designs because the linear actuator technology it adopted allowed it to do away with many of the more complex, fragile, fiddly moving parts. That, plus radical improvements in materials and manufacturing ultimately make them a good deal more robust than anything that came before. There are actually pretty good delineations between the in-universe fighter generations... and it's not accidental considering how frequently Kawamori has hung lampshades on it.

The bit about the in-universe version of DYRL being different from what audiences saw is more in reference to what we see in terms of excerpts from the film that appeared in Macross 7... they showed clips from the in-universe version of the movie to the cast of Lynn Minmay Story that included things like a movie version of Max and Milia's wedding.

... it strikes me as slightly odd to expect professionalism from what is, by definition, essentially a bootlegging outfit.

I've recently finished the Star Trek: Vanguard novel series that was recommended to me by @Talos. Not quite my cup of tea thanks to the rather relentlessly dark story, but as EU stuff goes it's much better written than average. I'm also following the Yen Press translation of Kugane Maruyama's Overlord light novels. Their translation has been quite good. Currently starting Robert W. Chambers' The King in Yellow for a change of pace. Some nice proto-Lovecraft existential horror.

Jeez... my sympathies. OK, let's stop there for a moment. "Canon" is a word that's rather difficult to apply to the main Macross continuity at times. Kawamori's view of canon is that there isn't one. He's variously attempted to explain this as either each Macross series being a dramatization of a "true" history we haven't seen or that each Macross title is a stand-alone story with a shared broad strokes-only history. In more practical terms, it's Kawamori's way of not landing Macross in the continuity lockdown mess that Gundam has been in for what feels like forever and a way to dismiss questions about continuity out of hand in interviews. Whether anyone else involved in the running of the Macross franchise actually got that particular memo is unclear, as an awful lot of Macross stuff made after that pronouncement seems to ignore it completely. That kind of loosey-goosey policy would make it rather difficult to sell things like art books or write spinoff materials. It's worth noting that this is a relatively recent decision of Kawamori's, and he's previously expressed somewhat firmer ideas about continuity that line up with what's still being done in official publications. ... a word to the wise, save yourself a LOT of frustration and don't take ANYTHING Berger Stone says seriously. It's hard to tell who exactly is to blame for this one, really. On the one hand, Berger Stone is an extremely shady character and the very picture of an unreliable narrator with a very obvious agenda when it comes to manipulating Xaos. On the other, Macross Delta's writing is spectacularly sloppy garbage throughout the show's second half. Berger spins some very elaborate yarns that contain some very obvious contradictions to those who pay attention. Our protagonists, however, are apparently not sharp enough to notice the parts of Berger's story that don't line up, so he manipulates them fairly easily and seems to be having a lot of fun doing it. (The bit about music as a weapon appears to be something of a pet project of the Epsilon Foundation's, as they were actively trying to weaponize fold songs in the Macross Delta gaiden manga.) That's a very definite maybe. Starting from Macross II, DYRL? has been gradually displacing the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross both aesthetically and narratively. Macross II was also the first sequel that cut a dash between the two versions of the First Space War, more in line with the novelization of DYRL?. If you look carefully, you'll notice both Macross 7 and Macross Frontier used the DYRL? version instead of the TV version. One of the things that came in with Macross Plus and Macross 7 was the view that the series continuity was the more correct version but that DYRL? visual aesthetics and other parts of it were also "true". For instance, the TV and Movie VF-1s were both used during the war with the TV version being the VF-1 from the earliest production blocks and the one used for the movie being a block update introduced shortly after the war started. Another example was that Exsedol's appearance in the TV and Movie versions were both true... the TV version was his miclone appearance with his role-specific genetic mods stripped out and the movie version was his true giant appearance. This same philosophy of "TV for timeline, Movie for aesthetic" seems to have gotten carried over to subsequent titles as well. Macross Frontier's prequel Macross the Ride generally follows the TV version of events but they also explicitly assert the existence of the YF-29. (If you look carefully, you'll notice there's a BAD model of the TV version SDF-1 Macross on Ernest Johnson's desk.) That said, it should be remembered that we're basically watching Berger Stone's PowerPoint presentation and not an actual depiction of events, so his choice of soundtrack may be biased by his personal tastes or whatever dramatization of Lynn Minmay's life he thought the crew would've seen most recently. The battle itself did go on for many hours, so there is the distinct possibility Minmay sang most or all of her repertoire during it.

I'm not sure there's any reasonable doubt that it doesn't all revolve around Burnham anymore, as Season Two has seen both Spock hang an enormous lampshade on it by chewing her out for her wanting to make everything all about her followed by future Control revealing she's the only one that can supposedly stop it, then the reveal that the Red Angel was her supposedly-dead mother who's been altering history left, right, and center to un-kill her literally hundreds of times (she's apparently more death-prone than Hank and Dean Venure) and then present-day Control revealing that she's the only one its predictive model thinks can actually prevent it from achieving its goal. It's hard to argue that it's not all about her when mulitple characters with future knowledge have clearly stated it really is all about her. Really, from what I've seen, heard, and read in the Star Trek fan community it doesn't appear to be a matter of race or sex that made Anson Mount's Captain Pike and Doug Jones's Commander Saru much more popular. They're more appealing to the audience than Burnham because they're not a-holes. Michael Burnham is kind of an a-hole. She's arrogant, she's rude, she's condescending in the extreme, she's a poster child for disruptive workplace behavior and she's frequently openly disrespectful of both fellow officers and superiors, and she's got that martyr complex causing her to annoy everyone else. She's basically an even more annoying and overdramatic version of Wesley Crusher and you know how fans hated HIM. Tilly seems to get more of a pass because some people believe she's a representation character for fans on the autism spectrum while others think she's essentially a homage to Star Trek fans themselves. Personally I find her annoying. Mirror Georgeau tests unusually well with the audience, which is weird since she's a one-dimensional asian femme fatale character in the Bond villain's sidekick category... she's horribly amoral, she knows kung fu, she wears exclusively tight black leather outfits, her dialog is mostly catty remarks and sexual solicitation, and she's promiscuous to the point sleeping with anything that moves and tells everyone about it at the first opportunity. It doesn't help that the writers keep trying to build an unrepentant mass-murdering despot with the blood of billions of innocents on her hands as "a very fine person" because of their obsession with Section 31. (An obsession that prompted them to propose two different Section 31 TV shows, one featuring Michelle Yeoh and the other allegedly featuring Sir Patrick Stewart.)

You could get a display box for it with UV-filtering glass/plexiglass.

... you seem to be operating under a severe misconception about what Macross is. Macross is, and always has been, a romance story driven by music set against a backdrop of space warfare. The space warfare stuff is B-plot, not the focus of the story. Also, no offense, but that sounds absolutely awful.

That's Robotech for "cancelled".

If your logic circuits came to any other conclusion, I'd be recommending you contact a service technician immediately. Another Macross Delta movie didn't make sense... it made cents, as in "dollars and". Given that Macross Delta is more or less just an overwrought commercial for Walkure's CDs, you can expect all five to be present and contractually immune from anything that might constitute more than superficial character development. Can't do anything that might make the girls less marketable as waifu material after all. Oh, undoubtedly... the only question there is whether it'll be all tease and denial or just a messy finish that leaves everyone unsatisfied. Xaos will be around. It's an interstellar conglomerate whose star has been on the rise for the last decade or so. The entertainment division managing Walkure and the other Tactical Sound Units and the PMC division providing security personnel in the Brisingr globular cluster are just two of their many business ventures. Their main business ventures are in fold navigation (cargo/passenger transport?) and fold communications. They've been in business for 50+ years, so they're not gonna vanish overnight. The VF-31's going to be around for a while, even if we don't necessarily see it, since it's tipped to be next main fighter for the Brisingr Alliance NUNS when it's formally adopted two or three years down the line (c.2069-2070) and we can expect it'll get twenty or more years in that role before its replacement starts to be phased in. I'm inclined to wonder if it will wind up being widely adopted, since it's a latecomer to the 5th Generation and by all accounts the VF-24 and VF-25 made considerable inroads in that field already. The writing quality of Delta's second half suggests pocket lint and a particularly exhausted gerbil.

Based on what King Grammier VI said on the subject in The White Knight of the Black Wing, the New Unification Government wasn't just strictly regulating how much fold quartz that planets like Windermere IV were allowed to export at a time. They also apparently exercised direct oversight of the actual mining/extraction operations themselves to ensure that no shortsighted idiot with dollar-sign wingding eyes was going to do something apocalyptically stupid like attacking a Vajra hive or recklessly invading a Protoculture ruin keeping some ridiculous superweapon from the schism war sealed. If nothing else, it proves the New UN Gov't is learning from its mistakes and becoming rather genre-savvy. (For their part, the Vajra aren't ones to take attacks laying down and at least one faction of ancient Protoculture realized that a Keep Out sign can be self-enforcing if it's made in the form of a swarm of heavily armed and highly aggressive self-replicating biotechnological killing machines that take violent exception to intruders.) I doubt it would've worked out... Windermere IV wanted to have full control over their fold quartz mining and exports. They didn't have the technological base to manufacture their own overtechnology, so it'd be down to them and not the New UN Government to try to attract private enterprise to Windermere IV to build fold systems there. Even then, it likely wouldn't have appeased King Grammier since the workforce would likely have been brought in from offworld to do the manufacturing and most of the money would likely end up flowing into the offworld coffers of whatever corporation set up shop there. The net economic stimulus would probably be pretty small. Really, I expect the next Delta movie will likely go somewhere else. Windermere IV was pretty comprehensively declawed at the end of Macross Delta. Prince Heinz II was permanently out of action thanks to having abused his runes to the point that he's as infirm at age 9 as his father was at 35, they lost the Star Shrine, and the Aerial Knights took heavy losses including the Knight-Commander, the White Knight of Darwent, and several of their top aces. The whole galaxy is wise to their plan to use their food exports to spread Var syndrome, so their economy's headed down the tubes and they've lost their exclusive business partner in the Epsilon Foundation so military procurement is a great big goose egg. If it wasn't an agri-world, any future visit to Windermere IV would probably feature them boiling their boots for nourishment.

I'm familiar enough with the EU from my day job, I'm just saying that I can't really think of anything said thus far in Macross that'd support the idea of different levels of NUNG membership. The Windermere IV situation kind of presented it as an all-or-nothing affair. They didn't really get to pick and choose which NUNG policies they had to follow... they tried to negotiate opting out of a couple parts of the terms and conditions and were rebuffed, which was depicted as part of what convinced King Grammier that there was no diplomatic solution to Windermere IV's economic crisis in the gaiden manga White Knight of the Black Wing. (In all fairness to the New Unification Government, Grammier was trying to negotiate his way out of having to abide by what was essentially a strategic arms anti-proliferation treaty aimed at controllng the spread of dimensional warheads. They can hardly be blamed for saying no, even if Grammier didn't want to hear it.)