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Seto Kaiba

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  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    If the word through the grapevine is accurate, it might actually be worse... Word is, Kurtzman's story concept for Star Trek: Picard is that Jean-Luc Picard moved on from the USS Enterprise to become head of Section 31.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Hard pass. The crap Kurtzman is churning out isn't Star Trek and CBS All Access is a garbage service not worth the subscription fee.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Ah, yes... that was an unfortunate consequence of Star Trek: Discovery coming under fire from the genuine bigots and incels back when CBS first started promoting it heavily. Fans who actually like Discovery got so accustomed to dealing with criticism from racists, misogynists, etc. that assuming anyone criticizing the show is one seems to have become a conditioned response. On many Star Trek Facebook groups, it's basically impossible to have a mature discussion about the series because of it. In some groups it's so bad that it's become a bit nonsensical. I've seen fans attack other fans who belong to the minorities the characters on Discovery are meant to provide proper representation for for saying those characters are kinda sh*t.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Hm. I guess whoever put that note on the Japanese Wikipedia page must've copied it straight out of the book. EDIT: It just occurred to me that my question about Wikipedia may have sounded like a snarky remark. It wasn't intended as such. Rather, your quotation was formatted pretty much exactly like what I'd read on the subject on Wikipedia when it occurred to me to check where the "bis" was first used, so I was wondering if you'd grabbed it from there.)
  14. Seto Kaiba
    ... did you grab that from Wikipedia? From the sound of it, he never actually completed a Battroid mode design for the Neo Glaug... and only finished the design for the earlier (chronologically) Variable Glaug that made its debut in the later (real-world chronologically) game Macross M3. I'll check the contents against the light novel's collected edition later today. Yeah, I've got the first few chapters in the original magazine form but I'd like to get a complete set put together since the light novel itself is on my group's to-do list.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Go home, Titan Comics... you're drunk.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    No word at this time. If the timing is similar to season one, I would expect it in late November or early December.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, I'd never really imagined it as a big armed raid on an Imperial data storage facility. I'd always imagined it was some kind of Mission Impossible sort of affair where the Empire only noticed the data'd been stolen when it was transmitted to the Rebels the first time, and Vader spent an arbitrarily long time chasing a daisy chain of retransmitted plans to Leia's ship in the hopes of stopping the leak. Many Bothans died to bring us this correction.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Odds are they have a fair-sized chunk of additional story written but between redoing pages for the Cycomi re-release and other obligations they need to actually sit down and draw the stuff out. If they'd foregone the do-overs on a bunch of pages, they'd probably have fresh material ready now.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    CBS seems to be a little gunshy about HD remasters after Star Trek: the Next Generation's didn't do so hot. Mind you, Kurtzman also seems to want to sweep Deep Space Nine and Voyager under the rug so he can pretend Star Trek: Discovery was more progressive than it actually was. When they were first trying to promote Discovery, they kept trying to pass Sonequa Martin-Green's casting off as an unheard-of representational coup for women and black actors. It isn't as impressive once you realize Star Trek already logged a whopping 14 seasons and 341 episodes under black and female captains already. Appropriately, given Star Trek's fixation with the number, that accounts for over 47% of all Star Trek episodes produced up to that point (47.7%). Across the other four Star Trek shows, Kirk, Picard, and Archer combined managed only 33 more episodes... 22 of those being TAS. The only new ground Discovery broke (besides being a commercial failure) was to have an openly gay couple, which Star Trek's producers had previously backed down from on at least three prior occasions: DS9's Elim Garak, First Contact's Lt. Hawk, and Enterprise's Malcolm Reed.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    It'd be interesting, but since Battroids are basically the de facto main infantry force of the New UN Government's various member nations the footsloggers aren't likely to get much focus. Those linear rifles were pretty effective against the Vajra larva in Macross Frontier, but it was the Special Forces models with those special anti-cyborg harpoons that took down the Macross Galaxy fleet's cyborg soldiers. Oh, I agree it's highly probable the Macross Concern submitted responses to both of the New UN Forces' Requests for Proposals for nextgen fighters. What makes less sense is that they would submit two responses to General Gomez's unmanned fighter program and end up competing against themselves for the next generation unmanned fighter contract. Both the AIF-X-9 Ghostbird and Neo Glaug are Macross Concern unmanned fighter prototypes built on their Sharon-type AI. I can't honestly recall a time when a company ended up competing against itself in a military design competition... The drone version only had two modes, though... it's only the manned version that was depicted with a Battroid mode. Eliminating Battroid mode likely cut the cost a fair bit. As far as we know, the only version of the Neo Glaug that was actually built was the unmanned version... at least, prior to when we see manned versions in the late 2050s in Macross the Ride (2058) and one of the Macross Frontier manga titles (2059). ... wait, what? You've got the actual issues of Dengeki Hobby, right? Could you check the title pages for chapter 8 "Combat Open"? If you haven't seen it before, I'm wondering if they changed the unit's name between the light novel's run in Dengeki Hobby and the release of the collected edition and those visual books that collected all the art and modeling pages. Macross the Ride Visual Book Vol.2's version of the chapter 8 title page has a model-builder credit right under the chapter title that reads: 模型製作:佐藤匠真（NEO GLAUG bis）. Curiously, in the text of the novel itself, the "bis" part is always written in English while the rest of the mecha's name is always in katakana (save for that title page where it's written in full in English). The text on the title pages themselves have a few mentions of "bis" in the paragraphs running along the bottom of the next page. (For those with the Visual Book, I'm referring to pages 18 and 19 of Volume 2.)
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Gotta run up those Bothan body counts somehow...
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Well, a lot of the improvements in conventional firearms technology that've come from overtechnology have been increases in the power of chemical propellants, the strength of armor-piercing ammunition, special classes of AP rounds, etc. A lot of that simply wouldn't be applicable to conventional small arms, and the improved propellants would increase power but at the expense of the guns being harder to use safely and accurately. So most of what we've seen is pretty clearly lightly improved versions of typical modern firearms that may benefit from things like improvements in materials but haven't really changed much because a human being can't safely leverage the kind of improvements OTM could bring. A lot of them seem to be modeled on Heckler & Koch's stuff... the bland name P8 in Plus and unnamed one in 7, the not-a-MP5 in Plus, and the not-a-G36s used by the New UN Forces infantry and Windermere infantry in Frontier and Delta respectively. The only thing we've seen that's really "out there" is the laser small arms the Varauta forces and various people in the Zola system used. The Zolan lasers were apparently non-lethal stunners that could only kill at point-blank range (a nod to Star Trek VI?), where the Varauta ones seemed to be pretty inefficient weapons that routinely shot clean through targets in a massive waste of energy. (Realistically, you don't want a through-and-through because most of the energy of the shot is being wasted on whatever's behind your target.) The only really effective energy small arms we see seems to be Feff's pistol in Macross II, which blows an enormous hole in his records officer without any apparent collateral damage. Even in Macross II, the unused designs for UN Forces small arms (like Sylvie's pistol) were largely conventional weapons. Sylvie's unused pistol design is a big, chunky revolver. EX-Gear suits had linear rifles, so apparently the problem of more advanced weapons not being safely usable for humans is not as big an issue if they're wearing a big chunky powered exoskeleton to help them cope with the recoil.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Despite CBS's protestations that Star Trek: Discovery is wildly popular, Netflix's dissatisfaction with the show's performance on their service internationally and Alex Kurtzman's apparent inability to keep the production on budget would've made another Kurtzman-led Star Trek show a VERY tough sell for Netflix's management. That Star Trek: Discovery's merchandising partners are reportedly quite upset that the series turned out to be a merchandising dud probably didn't help either, since Netflix is likely contractually entitled to a non-trivial share of the show's licensing revenue. CBS and Kurtzman wouldn't have had a lot of options for getting the Picard series funded. For whatever reason, CBS is stupidly determined to keep Star Trek streaming-exclusive and their enticement to finance the series is the international streaming rights. Netflix isn't interested, and they're the metaphorical 500lb gorilla of the streaming world. They can't go to Netflix's chief rival Hulu because 90% of Hulu is jointly owned by two of CBS's own rivals: NBC Universal (30%) and Disney DTCI (60%). That basically left Amazon Prime and YouTube, both of whom already carry Star Trek properties on their digital library services. I suspect YouTube was probably the less attractive option to CBS and Kurtzman because it'd link their videos directly to the overwhelmingly negative reviews for Kurtzman-led Star Trek already dominating discussion of the franchise on the platform. Amazon expressed a desire to get more into content creation the way Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube already have, so they may see this as their foot in the door. All told, with the licensees, the Star Trek fandom, and the franchise's #1 financial backer all convinced that Kurtzman's vision for Star Trek is a steaming turd... I can only wonder why it hasn't occurred to CBS to remove Kurtzman and start fresh with something people might actually want to watch. They keep doubling down on bad decisions and wondering why the things they create aren't popular. I mean, it's generally a pretty bad sign when actors who've only just finished shooting for your flagship property go on talk shows and to cons with the intention of talking about what a crappy job you're doing and how awful you are to work for... and when the only positive press you can drum up is the stuff coming from "news" sites that you own. EDIT: Word on the street is that the claims that the Picard series started filming are only technically true. They're apparently just shooting B-roll in an attempt to say work has commenced while they sort out licensee grievances.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Meant to reply to this much earlier, but Thursday and Friday were a mechanical nightmare. The problem is the Macross the Ride light novel seems to have forgotten that the Variable Glaug was developed in the 2010s, so it acts like the Neo Glaug was the original model. The explanation also has some issues as to why the Macross Concern was marketing a competitor to their own X-9 Ghost prototype... My hypothesis/interpretation would be that the Neo Glaug was probably a parallel development of manned and unmanned modernized versions of the New UN Forces reproduction Variable Glaug. Having manned and unmanned fighters that shared a considerable number of parts would probably have been a strong selling point form a logistics standpoint, but the manned version apparently wasn't able to adequately rival Shinsei's YF-19 and General Galaxy's YF-21, so it got dropped before the final competition. They completed the Neo Glaug's unmanned specification only for Isamu to blast it to scrap near Macross City in 2040. I'd guess the Neo Glaug bis is a manned conversion of the drone specification of the Neo Glaug, essentially re-converting it into a modernized Variable Glaug. Well, that is why the Strike pack is called the Strike pack... having a big damn beam gun for knocking holes for engaging ships or ground targets counts as being an attacker. "Artillery" is a matter of perspective in space where microgravity isn't going to substantially affect the trajectories of shells. Considering the Meltrans in the main Macross timeline were basically an attempt to solve the Queadluun-series battle suit's problems with Zentradi not being able to pilot it by just designing a better grade of pilot, it makes sense. They naturally have better g-force resistance and reflexes because they were designed that way. Possibly. The Intellectual Passive Interface in the EX-Gear with those electromyographic sensors would probably go a ways towards making up the gap in terms of reflexes, but the Meltrandi still have better g-force endurance than Zentradi or Humans. They might get all the way there if they had something like an inertia vector control system or inertia store converter.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Literally anything else. Trying to convince Darth Vader that the ship he just forcibly boarded is an ambassadorial transport on a diplomatic mission after he'd literally watched the ship narrowly escape from him at Scarif is like a kid caught sneaking cookies mumbling they they didn't take any cookies through a mouthful of cookie. It's convincing nobody. That's the part Rogue One screws up in A New Hope. They were caught, yeah... but trying to feign innocence is like the least effective thing they could do. Spouting defiance, giving an array of sarcastic answers to interrogation, name-calling, pretending they don't speak English, anything to keep Vader's attention on the crew and not Leia. The guy's gonna kill you himself or hand you over to be shot by a firing squad, so why not spend your final moments tweaking him for a petty thrill? Prior to Rogue One there was implicit plausible deniability there. Vader hadn't personally witnessed that very ship blasting off after personally witnessing the plans being transferred to the ship. Feigning innocence was a valid strategy there given Alderaan's very well-known neutrality policy. It doesn't make sense anymore in the wake of Rogue One where Leia's ship practically fled with Darth Vader's fingernail marks going down the side.
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