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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    At the very least, it suggests that Netflix is paying sufficient attention to its substantial investment in Star Trek: Discovery and CBS's other Star Trek projects under development to feel that they're not getting value for money. Netflix being dissatisfied with Star Trek: Discovery's showrunners for their casual attitude towards overspending on production is a piece of news that goes all the way back to season one. Their reluctance to finance season two was allegedly the genesis of a lot of the changes intended to take Discovery back towards traditional Star Trek territory. The series still runs over budget with frankly monotonous regularity, so it's not all that surprising Netflix is reportedly upset again given that CBS has had to stretch the truth in their status reports on CBS All Access to make it sound like it's a hit... and got in trouble for doing so. Star Trek's merchandising partners seem to have hit the same brick wall with Star Trek: Discovery that they did years ago with Star Trek's reboot films. Reboot Trek and Discovery seem to test well with casual viewers but were not well-received by the fans... and fans are the ones who buy the merchandise. So most of what's getting made is inexpensive apparel, rather than more profitable collectibles. Either or both may have noticed that most of the actual praise for Star Trek: Discovery seems to be coming from "news" sites like ComicBook.com that are owned by CBS or one of its partners or subsidiaries. Fan reviewers responses to the series seem to be overwhelmingly negative, varying from reasonable-sounding disappointment to hyperbolic outrage. I don't normally make much use of YouTube, but when I went looking for Star Trek: Discovery reviews there I was floored to find that practically every channel reviewing the series on a regular basis was flaying the series alive. I'd figured Doomcock was a hyperbolic outlier, but his views seem to be pretty widely shared along with the various ways the show is mocked. Several of them have reported CBS launching copyright takedowns on their channels in recent months too, at least two of which ended in actual suspensions. Yeah, I gotta admit that definitely would be out of character for Jean-Luc Picard. Picard was hands down the most consistently moral, highly principled, honorable captain on Star Trek. He would've been disgusted to the depths of his soul to learn an organization like Section 31 existed at all, never mind taking the reins. Even in the Star Trek: the Next Generation relaunch novels, Picard was absolutely disguisted to learn that Section 31 existed at all and was beyond horrified to learn that...
  2. Seto Kaiba
    ... but he's the one who said it. That was his whole "you don't get to judge me" speech in Rogue One.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't Cassian Andor's whole schtick having spent his life as an amoral, largely unprincipled space terrorist for the Rebellion? Seems like kind of an awkward choice for a series... what with the whole glorifying terrorism and all.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    ... that'd be a downright plain name in several of the Gundam settings. But no, the Nightmare Plus EX "Thrones" type is totally a legit Macross design from the gaiden manga Macross E. Mercifully a limited custom job Xaos Pipure produced for their experimental Tactical Sound Unit. Elma Hoyly from Macross Dynamite 7 was involved in their development... she's gone and got a doctorate in something or other involved in biology or higher dimensional physics.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Or would Dance Band on the Titanic be more appropriate?
  6. Seto Kaiba
    What's the over-under on the closing credit song being Komm, süsser Tod?
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Not gonna lie, I would be very entertained to watch Rey subvert expectations, throw away that goofy glowstick she barely knows how to use, and beat the stupid out of Kylo Ren with that big metal stick of hers. "So uncivilized."
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Then I can hardly wait to see what you think of the latest episode, where any pretense that Michael Burnham is not a Mary Sue is flushed out the nearest airlock and subjected to a sustained photon torpedo barrage. I remember watching the episode, mildly horrified, thinking "dear lord, someone was paid to write this". "Yes", "Yes", and "Yes", respectively. She's a Black Hole Sue whose personal gravity is so intense plot cannot escape her surface. We may not have to wait very long for that. Rumors continue to circulate that CBS is now facing serious pressure from their distribution partners (e.g. Netflix) as well as their merchandising partners over Kurtzman's handling of Star Trek: Discovery and the greater Star Trek franchise. CBS and Discovery's showrunners still have a bit of a black eye over the network having overreported the CBS All Access new subscriber counts by 2x thanks to having counted free subscriptions given away to certain cable subscribers on top of actual paid subscribers. Star Trek: Discovery's sponsor, Netflix, is reportedly once again unhappy with the show's performance on their service and its near-constant budget overruns in production. The show's merchandising partners have been vocally unhappy with it for a while now since that promised demand for Discovery merch largely never materialized. Most of what the official store offers is CafePress apparel and Starfleet badges. Word on the street is that Netflix and the licensees want Kurtzman gone, and are blaming the aesthetic and creative choices that took Discovery away from the prime universe aesthetic for the brand's underperforming. Reportedly they're also unsatisfied with the plans for the Picard series, which leaks suggest is to feature an aged Jean-Luc Picard as the new head of Section 31 and are threatening to withdraw support for that and other proposed Star Trek titles on the grounds that this bleak and dark Star Trek isn't actually selling all that well among non-casual viewers. Man, what did the 32nd century do to deserve that?
  9. Seto Kaiba
    To borrow a turn of phrase from Star Trek: "He is the AMBASSADOR of Unhappy." I don't think I've ever seen that man pleased with something.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Hulu Plus is supposed to be carrying it, IIRC. Edit: yep, Hulu Plus.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    No one's ever really gone... so maybe we'll be treated to Kylo Ren being nagged and nitpicked to death by Han, Leia, Luke, Luke's apprentices, and all the others with grievances against him. Maybe that's why he's going to Palpatine, to ask him to make Anakin and Luke STFU so he can have a moment's peace.
  12. 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.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Macross Chronicle is surprisingly insistent that it is, in fact, pollen.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    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.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    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.)
  16. Seto Kaiba
    So... The Force Awakens The Last Jedi From His Nap?
  17. Seto Kaiba
    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.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    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.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    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.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    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.)
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Not according to Kawamori.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    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.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    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.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Since the subject of Generations came up, it's about time to revive THIS monstrosity I wrote...
  25. 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.
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