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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    "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.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    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.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    ... it strikes me as slightly odd to expect professionalism from what is, by definition, essentially a bootlegging outfit.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    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.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    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.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    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.)
  7. Seto Kaiba
    You could get a display box for it with UV-filtering glass/plexiglass.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    ... 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.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    That's Robotech for "cancelled".
  10. Seto Kaiba
    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.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    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.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    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.)
  13. Seto Kaiba
    This actually came up in Macross Frontier... I believe it was episode 12. Fold faults are at their most dangerous when you don't know they're there. Blindly plowing into one is incredibly dangerous, since powering through an unexpected fault or two can leave a ship without enough stored energy to return to realspace like what had allegedly happened to the SDFN-04 General Bruno J. Global. A ship that's blessed with good luck might just get knocked back to realspace in an ugly mess the way Megaroad-04 was. If you know they're there and you know how severe they are you can factor them into the computations for fold navigation, avoiding ones too severe to attempt to cross and banking enough energy to safely traverse the weaker ones that can't be avoided practically or economically. The catch is that doing so greatly increases the disparity between the subjective and objective passage of time in the ship. The trip to Gallia IV was a great example of this. By avoiding some faults and crossing others, the most efficient route to Gallia IV felt like a short commuter flight to the Galaxy Starliner's crew and passengers but was actually over 7 days of real time (a whopping +172.25 hour adjustment to ship time) as a result of the fold faults magnifying the disparity between the pace of time in realspace vs. fold space. The New UN Spacy's fleet probably planned to just power through the well-charted fold faults surrounding Windermere IV on their way to attack it. Their ships are at least theoretically capable of interplanetary flight in a reasonable timeframe, but you sacrifice the advantage of surprise doing so. Folding there might take longer due to the faults, but they'll only know you're coming shortly before you arrive, and surprise is an important advantage when you're planning to drop a planet-killing dimensional bomb on an enemy planet.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    You could make a compelling case that Windermere IV actually deserves the appellation "backwater", since it's so far off the beaten path that the SDF-5 Megaroad-04 only found it by crashing into the fold faults around it, it's isolated by those same fold faults, its economy is stagnant, underdeveloped, and principally agricultural, the locals are living with the cultural values of a bygone era, and there's more than a little folksy racism on display. As I remarked a bit snarkily on some of the episode reviews, you can practically hear banjos on the fold jump there.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Well, I'm not sure about the idea of different levels of membership... but Kawamori did indicate in the Otona Anime #9 interview about Macross Frontier that the European Union was the modern governing body most closely resembling the function of the New Unification Government (c.2059). Zola's status was never really discussed... though as I recall it was generally assumed that the planet was something akin to a protectorate back before Macross Frontier. Now they seem to be full members who are simply too peace-loving to want to maintain a proper military so they have a well-equipped but studiously non-lethal space police force instead. Given what's said in Macross Delta and the gaiden manga, Windermere IV and the other worlds of the Brisingr globular cluster are (or were, in Windermere case) full New Unification Government members with all the ups and downs that entails. The Kingdom of the Wind's war of independence was essentially fought because Windermere IV's leaders felt that its membership in the New Unification Government was all give and no take. Specifically, because their planet was so remote and isolated by fold faults they were having troubles with growing their economy, and they felt the government was not only not doing enough to help but actively hurting their situation via the heavy restrictions it imposed on mining and trading in fold quartz (Windermere IV's only significant non-agricultural resource). They were also less than thrilled by the losses they took as a result of having sent reinforcements to support neighboring systems attacked by rogue Zentradi as per their obligations as a New UN Government member. (It was almost a war fought over "What have you done for me lately?"... since Windermere IV was benefitting significantly from all the technology they were importing.) One of the things established back in Macross 7 and finessed heavily by Frontier was that the individual emigrant fleet and planet governments have a lot of latitude in deciding how to organize and equip their local defense forces. They operate under the auspices of the New UN Forces, but they're not necessarily all organized the same. Macross Galaxy's was a corporate army that operated as the fleet's local New UN Forces. Windermere IV's Aerial Knights were the same, operating as their planet's New UN Spacy defense force during the world's thirty-three year stint as a New UN Government member, reinforcing other NUNG member worlds under attack and so on. Their different taste in equipment seems to have had its roots in their feudal martial tradition more than anything organizational. That's probably got a lot more to do with the sheer remoteness of the Brisingr globular cluster than anything else. The Brisingr globular cluster is 10+ years from Earth by space fold, in a fairly isolated region of the galaxy. It's noted to have had some moderately negative consequences for their economic growth. The Brisingr Alliance is basically space-NATO meets space-NAFTA, a mutual defense and economic partnership of astrographically-close states. Their isolation and the ensuing economic problems were cited as a reason they opted to develop their own 5th Generation VF, to stimulate their own economy, keep the cash inside the cluster, and to hopefully produce something they could sell in export. (In a close parallel to the Mitsubishi ATD-X/X-2, including in that they basically ended up buying a ton of hardware from the outside anyway.) The difficulty with getting the Federal New UN Forces involved in the conflict with Windermere IV was explicitly political, the conflict was seen as a tiff between emigrant planets so the federal forces were taking a hands-off approach because getting involved would be politically difficult. (The heavy-handed suppression of emigrant planets in the 2040s and 2050s hadn't exactly been forgotten yet... you might remember them as the events that came to a head in the Macross VF-X2 game.) With respect to the above about the local government of the NUNG member states having broad authority over the maintenance of their armed forces, Macross-29's case is one of the fleet government voluntarily disbanding its armed forces. Macross-29 was a gathering place of sorts for people with strong pacifist leanings, and many of its inhabitants moved there from elsewhere in the galaxy to get away from various conflicts. That profound aversion to conflict led the fleet to disband its armed forces and install pacifist doormat Serge Glass (brother to deceased Macross Frontier fleet president Howard Glass) as City-29's mayor. Macross-29's severe trade deficit and the ensuing economic crash were a product of the City-29 government's commitment to its policy of total pacifism and unarmed neutrality. It made the Macross-29 fleet government into extreme doormats in their trade negotiations with neighboring fleets and nearby planets. They were so conflict-averse that they would eventually agree to even the most unilaterally unfavorable terms if it meant avoiding a fight, so their neighbors took merciless advantage of them until their economy was teetering at the brink of total collapse and high unemployment had riled the population enough that a significant portion of it was ready to remove Glass by the ballot or the bullet and start busting heads if that's what it took to balance trade with their neighbors. That, of course, was embodied by the Neo Zentran political movement that favored reinstating the fleet's armed forces and assuming a stronger posture in the fleet's negotiations with its neighbors. (The two prominent sides of the Neo Zentran movement being, essentially, those who favored "ballot" like the protagonist and those who favored "bullet".)
  16. Seto Kaiba

    Macross 30

    Seto Kaiba replied to Tochiro's topic in Games

    Random question... anyone still have a copy of that .zip archive containing Macross 30 art assets that was doing the rounds a couple years back?
  17. Seto Kaiba
    I've got a plan in the works to go quite a bit farther than that. Over the last couple of years various folks have gently suggested I really need to properly organize and systematize my collection of Macross knowledge and/or start publishing all the translations and analyses I've done over the years. I've been supporting the Macross Mecha Manual by handling its web hosting and providing translations for some of its articles, but the scope of my own work has increased quite a bit and no longer really fits within the site's narrow focus. I didn't really have the time to do anything about it until last year, when my day job had a reorg that solved my team's critical manpower shortage. Not having to log 20+ hours of OT every week freed up a lot of time for other pursuits, so a few friends and I started giving serious thought to creating a Macross reference site with proper academic rigor. Right now, the site itself is still a work in progress. Designs for the various pages are more or less finalized, but the actual coding is slow going since my web design skills are rusty as hell after five years of not being used. I've got all the tools together except for a replacement for my ancient scanner that won't work on Windows 10 (recommendations would be enthusiastically welcomed), and at some point in the coming months I'm gonna have to find an artist to commission a few simple pieces that my art-fu is too weak to do myself.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Kinda burned out on superhero movies in general, but this looks like it might actually be pretty interesting if they stay away from the special effects extravaganza shenanigans.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    CBS All Access just dropped the latest episode of Star Trek: Discovery... "Through the Valley of Shadows". All in all, great B and C plots that feel like real Star Trek... and the crappy Burnham-centric A-plot continues to circle the drain and get dumber all the time. Next episode looks to be headed into action-heavy territory, as the teaser consists entirely of the USS Discovery and USS Enterprise preparing for a battle against Section 31's fleet. This, at least, goes a small way towards explaining why Section 31 was forgotten by Picard's time... it was destroyed by Control, much like it was repeatedly destroyed and refounded by Control in the relaunch novel series.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    For what it's worth, I've found that the difference between being funny-bad and embarrassing-bad usually lies in how seriously the cast is taking the truly awful screenplay they've been handed. When the cast know they've been handed a real turd of a screenplay and make a heroic professional effort with it anyway, the result is usually a painful-to-watch mess that leaves you feeling a little bad for the cast. Treating an awful screenplay with the same gravitas as an Oscar-worthy one just highlights how bad the screenplay was to begin with. On the other hand, when the cast know they've been handed a steamer and either try and utterly fail to make a professional effort or simply can't be arsed, a truly bad screenplay can be transmuted into unintentional comedy gold. A cast that decides to either have fun or be completely unprofessional with a bad screenplay can be enormously entertaining. Starship Troopers 2 always felt to me like it belonged to the latter class, where the cut-rate cast knew from the outset that the screenplay would be illustrated with stinklines and went about Shatnering it up any time they stepped in front of the camera. Watching them overact the hell out of every scene made a painfully generic sci-fi horror plot actually kind of fun, especially when the bottom fell out near the end and it devolved into a snarky zombie action flick instead. Historically, Robotech has always desperately wanted to be taken seriously as both a science fiction series and an anime series. They don't have the talent pool to turn out screenplays that aren't dreadful and are so committed to taking them completely seriously that the end result crosses the line twice into unwatchable stupidity. If they stopped taking themselves and the series so seriously they could maybe achieve something in the field of ironic retro camp humor, but they seem to be holding out hope for a big budget sci-fi action movie like Paramount's Transformers film franchise, Star Trek, or Star Wars.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    How is this crap still in print? HOW? Seriously, we're hitting levels of soap opera BS and M. Night Shyamalan hack twists that shouldn't be possible.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... there's a not-so-fine line between "so bad it's funny" and "so bad you're embarrassed on behalf of people involved in it". On the one side you've got your Dooms and your Plan 9 From Outer Spaces, but original Robotech productions usually land on the other side where films like the Star Wars Holiday Special, Ishtar, and Dragonball Evolution live. They would be VERY lucky to get something even as funny-bad as Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation or Reefer Madness.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Yes, it does... but in the most stringently literal sense there is nothing new to see there. Excluding its gunpod, which did not get a cutaway or anything, it's all weaponry we've seen before in other books. Variable Fighter Master File: VF-11 Thunderbolt is absolutely a book worth having and has a lot of frankly gorgeous art, but like the books for the VF-0, VF-1 Vol.2, Battroid Valkyrie, and Squadrons, it's one of the books where the real gems are in the text rather than the art.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    You're right. I've revealed I'm also a filthy filthy casual when it comes to comic books. I confused publishers for my two examples of botched representation characters, the other one being the first token black character in the Legion of Super Heroes who happened to have been written as a racist by a racist (Tyroc). They'd be a lot better off if they'd just go off the rails with it and let the story go where it will.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    With what IP? How do you do a Netflix-style reboot of a property that doesn't actually own - and thus can't use - most of its story or any of its design works? That's the eternal sticking point for Robotech. Copyright law with respect to derivative works being what it is, Harmony Gold can't claim ownership of 99.9% of what's in Robotech and thus 2/3 of it is off the table for future adaptations without the written blessing of Tatsunoko's lawyers and a hefty check for royalties owed and the remaining 1/3 is just plain off the table permanently. They can't pull a Voltron: Legendary Defender and make new designs based on the existing ones because that'd be copyright infringement if they did it without permission. Seems like they'll make a movie about anything these days... except Robotech. They'll never recapture the magic of that one year where the April Fool's joke was a report stating they'd fired the Yunes and had security walk them out of the building, complete with a photograph of (IIRC) Tommy hauling his crap out of the building in a cardboard box.
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