Jump to content

Seto Kaiba

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    12935

  • Joined

  • Last visited

 Content Type 

Everything posted by Seto Kaiba

  1. Seto Kaiba
    "Slightly better than what we had in the 80's" is all we can fairly expect from Robotech-branded merchandise... the franchise hasn't really progressed since '86 anyway.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    The approach used in Macross: Do You Remember Love? and Macross II: Lovers Again is the proverbial odd man out, where those VFs are launching strictly under their own power... albeit with either significant supplemental engine power or simply a massively increased onboard fuel capacity and four built-in thermonuclear reaction engines. Macross Frontier establishes right in its first episode (16:40 in the Deculture edition) that carriers are using linear catapults, a high velocity non-contact electromagnetic catapult system using essentially the same principles as a coilgun. The holograms that the ship projects over the deck are apparently to denote the boundaries and directionality of the catapult's electromagnetic field, and warn personnel not to cross into that active catapult lane. (After all, nobody wants to get pasted by an accelerating VF or have a heart attack from wandering into a superintense electromagnetic field.) Well, catapults are advantageous in atmosphere because they can quickly accelerate an aircraft to takeoff speed and in space the catapult saves a modest amount of reaction mass by accelerating the fighter during takeoff. Flattop designs enable ships to operate as carriers in atmosphere or in space, but in space they have a unique advantage in that they have a highly versatile recovery approach... by throwing an artificial gravity field over the carrier deck, fighters can gently fall onto the deck for regular arrested landing or vertical landing. In the event that they need to, or it is otherwise advantageous to do so, they can also exploit that gravitational field to keep aircraft out on the deck even in space. IIRC, the standard is 0.5G over the carrier deck to facilitate landing.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, they've had it up for ages... CDJapan were the ones who were late to the party. They have it marked as Order Stop though, which means they won't take any more preorders until after it comes out. https://hlj.com/variable-fighter-master-file-vf-11-thunderbolt-sof60030
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Spock could have lied on his Starfleet application to avoid being given special treatment because of his father's status as one of the Federation's most accomplished diplomats. He wouldn't be the only character in Star Trek to have lied to get into Starfleet... Simon Tarses in Star Trek: the Next Generation lied about his ancestry to get into Starfleet because he was part-Romulan, and Dr. Julian Bashir in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine applied under an assumed name (his real given name is Jules, not Julian) and he lied about his genetic status on the application. (Spock also operated under a false identity when he used the Guardian of Forever in TAS to resolve a time paradox involving his younger self's untimely death.) Maybe Starfleet background checks are just on the honor system until you screw up badly enough, or maybe they have a section where you can opt out of identifying your family like you can opt out of stating your race on job applications today. IF they knew. As far as the high priestess who presided over that ritual, even over a century later (in Voyager) Vulcans are noted to be extremely taciturn and prudish about anything involving Pon Farr, so Kirk and co. may not have known that was anything unusual. Yeah, the chancellor of the Klingon High Council knows... and she's from House Mo'kai, who have intelligence-gathering and covert operations as their hat. Either that or they're going to dig even deeper into the relaunch novels for material and this incarnation of Section 31 will end up being destroyed to cover up the organization's existence the same way the one from Archer's era was. (Discovery has made at least a few references to Control, the AI from the novels that founded and oversees Section 31, destroying it whenever it gets exposed and refounding it when it's needed again.) Isn't that more or less what Discovery was supposd to have been initially?
  5. Seto Kaiba
    People talking isn't the problem... it's the impersonal records maintained by the Federation and its rival powers. Intelligence organizations have very long memories and obsessively write EVERYTHING down. Submerging won't make those records go away. Particularly not ones held by hostile foreign powers like the Cardassian Union, Klingon Empire, Romulan Empire, etc. Koval's dismissal of Section 31 as a fiction created by Luther Sloan to justify a rogue intelligence operation to take revenge for Vice Admiral Fujisaki's supposed assassination would not stand up under examination if the Romulans had any kind of records indicating Section 31 was a real organization barely a century ago. The Cardassian Obsidian Order, which was generally acknowledged to be the finest covert intelligence organization in the quadrant, had no idea Section 31 existed at all. The Founders, who had infiltrated Starfleet at its highest levels, were also completely clueless as to Section 31's existence even though the agency almost succeeded in wiping them out. Oh, absolutely... and they practically wrote themselves a blank check to do it back in Enterprise with the Temporal Cold War. Sadly, the only title to ever actually take advantage of it was the Department of Temporal Investigation novel series, which mainly used it to take potshots at the various terrible ideas that had been unsuccessfully pitched for new Star Trek shows by referencing them as "bad future" timelines created by Future Guy that were retroactively prevented by the temporal agents of the Federation Temporal Agency (31st century) and/or Temporal Integrity Commission (28th century). I was going to argue that there was no reason Burnham would list Sarek as her father on her papers when Sarek doesn't acknowledge her as his daughter publicly... but last night's episode torpedoed my argument. Burnham's status as Sarek's ward/foster daughter is apparently well-enough known that she's able to use it to get permission to land her shuttle directly at the ambassadorial residence from Vulcan's air traffic control.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    ... that's one way to look at it, yeah. Though with one or more books coming out a year, we won't gain much ground! Oh, it was all but inevitable Max and Milia would feature in the book. They are, after all, the first ones to take a VF-11 into live combat and the reason the VF-11's production spec includes the canards. (Plus Milia also had a VF-11C in Macross 7 Plus episode "TOP GAMRIN" (sic)). If they give us a good cutaway of the gunpod like they did for the GU-11 and GU-15, I'll be THRILLED. You mean themes like the ones here? That's what those are... cascading stylesheets (CSS). We're looking to do a more modern CSS1&2 page design that displaces most, if not all, of the layout information into the CSS so the impact on the individual pages will be zero or close to it if we decide to start tweaking the appearance of the site later. The learning curve is nasty, but it'll save us loads of work down the road by turning page-building into a glorified fill-in-the-blanks exercise.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    How much does the general public actually know about Sarek's family circumstances though? Either Jim Kirk failed one hell of a spot check, or Spock was somehow able to conceal the details of his parentage from his Starfleet file. Pike seems to be more clued in, but then he's just spent five years in deep space with Spock and is still picking most of it up from Burnham and Spock's parents as a result of Spock going bananas and subsequently AWOL. Maybe Burnham fell off Starfleet's collective radar by Kirk's time, having been reassigned to Space Siberia the way Scotty was in the Abrams movies. Totally unrelated, but did anyone else notice Pike's stand-in science officer looks and acts a lot like Arnold Rimmer?
  8. Seto Kaiba
    For what it's worth, I had the opposite reaction to the Generation 1 starters. They look so much alike (esp. Squirtle and Charmander) that they didn't feel very distinctive to me. Many of the early route pokemon had more exciting or interesting designs, like Geodude. (After all these years, Haunter is still a personal favorite just because it looks so happy with its own malevolence.) If I had to rank the generations by the appeal of their starters (best to worst) I'd go with: 2, 6, 8, 4, 7, 1, 3, 5. Anyhoo... this is apparently the "Galar" region. Between the overall shape, the preponderance of castles, and that bit about 1/3 of the way up from the bottom that looks like Palace of Westminster, I'm guessing we're headed to Poke-Britain this time.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Do we really need a new/additional explanation for it, though? Being incredibly averse to talking about family has been a part of Spock's character since "Journey to Babel" in TOS's second season. Kirk only found out that Sarek and Amanda were Spock's parents when he unwittingly cornered Spock on the issue by offering him a few hours of planet leave to visit his family while his parents were standing in the transporter room with them. Spock only admitted that Sybok was a family member when Kirk was on a tear in his own brig demanding to know why Spock hadn't shot the man trying to take over their ship. Is it really surprising that he wouldn't have mentioned the orphaned human girl his parents fostered without someone nailing him to the wall on it first? She wasn't even really a relative, they didn't get along, there's some as-of-yet unspecified bad blood between them, and to put the cherry on it she's also known as the idiot who assaulted her captain, tried to launch an unprovoked attack on the Klingons, and is credited with starting a war that killed hundreds of thousands, nearly crippled Starfleet, and almost ended in genocide twice. You wouldn't want to talk about having a family member like that either if you had one... just acknowledging it could be a career-killer without a suitably understanding CO. (Spock's TOS-era remarks about there being "absolutely no record" of a mutiny on a Starfleet ship becomes a case of exact words in highsight... since Burnham's record was expunged by the Federation president, the record of her attempted mutiny no longer exists.) Sarek keeping mum on her existence isn't surprising either given that he was as tight-lipped as Spock and sees his Sophie's Choice situation over the Science Academy as a shameful memory he refuses to discuss with anyone... and both TAS and DSC both imply other Vulcans see him as a bit strange for his interest in humans, which would also likely make him a little disinclined to talk about her. Burnham herself is unlikely to end up a high-flier. She may have been pardoned by the President, but nobody's in a hurry to forget she was Starfleet's first mutineer and attempted to start a shooting war with the Klingons. Even after being reinstated she got sidelined to science officer under someone who used to be her subordinate. She's just another one of the tens of thousands of Starfleet officers who are exemplary enough to climb the ranks to a senior position but not exemplary enough to leave a profound mark on the service the way Archer, April, Pike, Kirk, Picard, Riker, etc. did.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, I'm probably the one that was directed at... Don't blame us... blame CBS and the showrunners, who continue to insist that Star Trek: Discovery is a prime continuity series belonging to the same timeline as TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY, ENT, and the first ten Star Trek movies. They're adamant that Discovery is not a parallel universe story and is not part of the so-called "Kelvin timeline" created for those appalling J.J. Abrams reboot movies. Much of it can be made to fit or at least explained away with minimal hand-waving. Some things, though, are glaring enough to induce real headaches. They've tabled a couple reasons that Starfleet decommissioned and abandoned the Spore Drive technology already, most of which came before season one ended: Even when it's working properly, there's a nonzero chance that undetectable stellar phenomena will cause it to kill the entire crew by twisting them into fleshy rotini and wreck the entire ship. (This happened to the USS Glenn.) The drive system doesn't work without a very specific type of living navigator, and can be near-fatally injurious to said navigator. The Glenn only caught the one tardigrade by accident, and research showed it was intelligent and possibly sentient... in short, using them would be animal cruelty or slavery. Using a humanoid volunteer requires cybernetic implants and illegal genetic modification. Not to mention it's extremely painful and taxing, and overuse can put the navigator into a catatonic state. Malfunction or unintended operation can result in arriving at the right coordinates in the wrong universe entirely... or getting your consciousness trapped in the network. Abuse of the technology can cause damage to the subspace domain the spores exist in, with potentially fatal results for all life in the multiverse. The spores themselves are also apparently dangerous, requiring the engineering crew working on and around the drive be vaccinated against them at regular intervals. Other lifeforms living in the spore domain are fundamentally deadly to humanoid life and could potentially destroy a starship. Stamets and the Discovery's engineering crew were getting started with the removal and disassembly of the spore drive at the start of season two when Pike came aboard. At some point after the red angel nonsense settles down they'll probably finish removing the damn thing and it'll be carted off to whatever laboratory Starfleet was planning to send Stamets to. It wouldn't exactly be the first time Starfleet toyed with a new propulsion technology before discarding it and never mentioning it again... Excelsior's "great experiment" transwarp drive, soliton wave riding, Voyager's variable geometry warp drive, displacement wave, experimental Warp 10 drive, coaxial warp drive, graviton catapulting, quantum slipstream, spatial vortices, etc. To be entirely fair, Star Trek has been pulling "remember the new guy?" on a species-wide level since at least TNG Season One. Anytime the plot of TNG called for the Enterprise to run into an alien race powerful enough to tangibly threaten Starfleet but wasn't starfish aliens or some other incomprehensible space entity it was always a race who they totally had a ton of history with but who had otherwise not been worth mentioning up to that point like the Talarians, the Cardassians, the Sheliak, Tamarians, etc. As far as the never-before-seen alien species, the galaxy is a big place. The Federation itself had over a hundred member worlds, and there are tons of nonaligned worlds filling in the gaps. It's not surprising we're seeing species we've never seen before, when the previous shows (TOS, TNG, VOY) spent all their time out on the very frontiers of explored space and in the time of ENT those worlds were well beyond the frontiers of explored space at the time. In the ~100 years separating those three generations of exploration, the frontier moved out pretty far... so these species we're seeing for the first time may simply have been lost in the gaps as their regions of space went from "frontier" to "cosmopolitan" or at least were left alone by their own request. The Ba'ul are isolationists, the Kelpians and the species from the pilot don't have warp technology yet, etc. For redesigning existing alien species... it's not like this is the first time that's happened to any of them. This is what, the third time the Klingons have been redesigned? The Tellarites have had it twice, and so have the Andorians. The Saurians got a soft redesign, but it isn't actually all that different from the Saurians we've seen previously... just designed for facial motility. I loathed the Klingon redesign from season one, but they did make some good strides to harmonize it with previous Klingon aesthetics in season two (who'd have thought hair would make such a difference?). That is a little bit BS, yeah... mostly since it was an incredibly obvious attempt to make an otherwise-unlikeable character appeal to the Trekkie audience.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Don't get too excited... I've rounded up four other translators to help, but we're still estimating it's going to take something on the order of six months to a year per volume. (Srsly tho, any CSS gurus out there wanna throw me a bone and help unf*ck this stylesheet nightmare I've invited myself into? The O'Reilly book for it is so big I could use it to crush rats.) ... cautious optimism for this book is increasing. Several of those pics are downright gorgeous.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Once the cat's out of the bag, good luck getting it back in... Section 31 parading its agents around like it's a legitimate branch of Starfleet Intelligence runs completely counter to how they've been depicted in every previous appearance (canon and pseudocanon) as a secret, unsanctioned spy organization that had been operating autonomously without oversight since its inception. They were the Federation's best-kept secret, so much so that even the Obsidian Order and Tal Shiar had no idea they existed... and the Tal Shiar had been infiltrated by 31 at the very highest levels. But come Discovery, they're Starfleet's worst kept secret. They're standing around in plain sight all over the Discovery. Even the interns in the engine room know they're a thing. This can't be a recent development either, since Pike and Number One know a good deal more than Discovery's crew (to the point of being on a first-name basis with senior operatives) and they've been out screwing around on the frontiers of explored space for the last five years. The Klingon head of state is at least dimly aware of their existence. How do so many thousands of people get selective amnesia all at once that NO record is left of them by the time they abducted Bashir? ... also, whatever happened to the new captain that the USS Discovery was supposed to take on at Vulcan? Are they just sort of... stuck there... since Christopher Pike jacked their new command like he was picking up a rental car while his regular ride was in the shop?
  13. Seto Kaiba
    All I can tell you is that your hovercraft is full of eels either way.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Maybe* I was a cynical kid, because I can't remember a point where I didn't think the unevolved starter pokemon looked obnoxiously twee... and I started at Gen 1. It's not until they've evolved at least once that they start looking like they mean business. This lineup is the first in a while where it's not immediately obvious (at least to me) what the final types are going to be, so that adds a little interest. A grass monkey, fire rabbit, and water chameleon? * No, I was definitely a very cynical kid.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Not a main series one, anyway... though the Switch is halfway to being a portable, so I guess it was the logical port of call for the next Pokemon game. Looks like the visual aesthetic is going to stay similar to Sun and Moon, though with the Switch's gruntier graphics processor it shouldn't start chugging during double battles anymore.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Workin' it. I'm trying to get the website that'll host them put together. My web design-fu is a bit weak after years spent out of the game. (If you know anybody who's really good as CSS, we'd love the help.) Or Chinese. Some enterprising soul has already translated VF-0, VF-1 Vol.1, Vol.2, Squadrons, VF-4, VF-19, VF-22, and VF-25 into Chinese.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Pokemon Sword and Pokemon Shield, eh? https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/02/pokemon-sword-and-shield-will-hit-switch-in-late-2019/ From left to right, Grookey, Scorbunny, and Sobble, the new starters for Pokemon Sword and Shield.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Macross 7 Plus was an extra feature on the home video (VHS/LD/DVD) release after the series ended... that's a bit different from the Short Treks coming out between seasons. I definitely agree that Star Trek: Discovery's second season is finally starting to feel like a proper bloody Star Trek title.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Not gonna lie... I'm rather disappointed with this book too. It's well-written and informative, but I was expecting something more connected to the original light novel and/or anime. (Also, I think the M9/M9A1 and M9A2 heads are kind of ugly.) Writing the book as though it were an in-universe mass market publication wasn't a creative choice unique to Master File Arm Slave: M9 Gernsback. All of the SoftBank Master File and Master Archive books I've read so far have been like that. I'd assume it's a trait common to the entire line, including the other one-offs they've done for Dragonar, Vifam, and VOTOMS. The Macross Master File books are the most blatant about it, identifying their in-universe publisher and year of publication in-universe on the cover and even including a dated foreword from the in-universe publisher at the start of the book. Most sci-fi tech manuals are written as in-universe publications in my experience. They're just following the line's established and well-entrenched style, though I guess that's a detrimental approach for Full Metal Panic! since the story's focus is on an elite paramilitary outfit that officially doesn't exist. (MITHRIL's strategy of suppressing evidence of their existence online by using bots to get the poster dismissed as a crackpot conspiracy theorist seems to have worked fairly well if their existence is still just a conspiracy theory 15+ years after the organization was destroyed in a surprisingly public show of force by AMALGAM. About the only entity to actually acknowledge their existence is Ebisu Heavy Industries from Full Metal Panic! Another, who apparently reverse-engineered their TAROS from "a white AS of unknown affiliation that was destroyed in Tokyo" (the Arbalest).
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Speak for yourself, I am ALL about that sweet sweet techncial detail.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    After almost 25 years? Yeah, I'd say a few of us probably have. Some of them, like Spiritia Dreaming or TOP GAMRIN (sic), are pretty interesting additions to the Macross 7 story. I've got less use for the pure comedy ones like "Milia the President". For the mecha enthusiast, Spiritia Dreaming can be a bit frustrating since it's the only time we get to see the pre-modification pre-Macross M3 VF-14s.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    SoftBank's definitely going to be feeling the temptation to pad Variable Fighter Master File: VF-11 Thunderbolt since the fighter's official animated appearances are pretty sparse if you don't count the CF ones in 7... it'd be nice if the padding was from various other official materials instead of the pants-on-head stupidity of some of the stuff in the VF-4, VF-22, and VF-31 books.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Hasegawa's already supporting the Master File line and they had their fingers in Macross the Ride, so it might not be a bridge too far...
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Iiiinteresting... I wonder if this will be the announcement of the new Pokemon main series game they were teasing. Incidentally, after replaying the The Room quadrilogy and the Zero Escape trilogy my jones for horror/puzzle games still isn't satisfied. Nintendo recommended Dying: Reborn, but I can't seem to find much of anything about it. It came out about a month ago. Has anyone given this game a go?
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Attached are some shots of the book's contents... it has an abnormally large number of full-page images, but they're pretty well done. (Since it's not immediately clear what this diagram is... that is the M9's Ross & Humbleton APR2500a palladium thermionic reactor. I rather liked this diagram, which shows the movement of the mechanical articulations inside the M9's knee joint. The US Army M9 Gernsback mass production type eliminated the two 12.7mm chainguns in the head in favor of replacing the XM18 wire gun in the right arm with a single 12.7mm rotary cannon.
×
×
  • Create New...