Seto Kaiba

The sources you cited a both pretty clear that the correct term is Unmanned, not Uninhabited... the first of the two noting that the term "uninhabited" was briefly used but that "unmanned" is the correct one. Ah, so it was your vehicle? I see, what we have here is a failure to communicate. I assume the failure is mine, as I notice I've failed to properly define my terms. As I've said before, the grade of hardware I'm talking about that would be necessary to make a safely operable robotic vending machine like what we see in Super Dimension Fortress Macross is the kind of stuff used for SAE Level 4 or 5 autonomy. The kind of hardware designed for a robotic car that can fully drive itself on public roads without any operator in the vehicle. They use complex networks of LIDAR, RADAR, optical cameras, and high-precision GPS to control the vehicle. This technology isn't available on consumer-level vehicles yet. Right now, the best that's available to the general public is legally SAE Level 21, which depends mostly on short-range optical cameras with limited fields of view, ultrasonic proximity sensors, and usually a single tight-focus forward camera and radar. Level 1 and Level 2 are only conditional driver assistance systems, not true autonomous function. Because those units are purely dependent on regular optical cameras, they tend to have trouble making out signage at a distance or on the periphery of the camera's field of view. Basically, what I'm saying you'd need to do to make something like the Petite Cola machine with today's technology would be give it the sensor suite off the autonomous taxis being trialed by Waymo and Uber, or the autonomous semi trucks from Waymo, Embark, and Tesla. LIDAR and RADAR for environment sensing including hazard detection, optical camera systems for short-to-mid range, and a multiply-redundant navigation system. It can absolutely be done, but it's gonna be a vending machine with a sticker price like an entry level 4 door sedan. (Admittedly, getting all those sensors into a large upright box in a streamlined manner would be substantially easier than trying to work them into a nice, streamlined van.) 1. Tesla's Autopilot HW2 and later is capable of Level 3 functionality under very specific circumstances but is still classified Level 2 because it can only do it under those very specific circumstances. They like to claim the computer will support SAE Level 5 one day, but I don't think they'll ever get there with the sensor suite they've got. They just do not have enough depth of field in any direction other than dead ahead.

Why do you keep saying "Uninhabited"? UAV is short for "Unmanned Aerial Vehicle". It doesn't mean there's nobody at the controls (and never has), only that there's nobody in the aircraft itself. (And while it is standard practice to have someone supervising operations, some models like the MQ-9 Reaper ARE capable of autonomous flight and have logged tens of thousands of automatic takeoffs and landings without human intervention.) ... it sounds to me like you're conflating a couple different incidents here. There have been a number of incidents where autonomous vehicles failed to merge onto or off of a freeway because they couldn't detect an adequate opening to take a lane right, and others where they were fined for driving well under the speed limit during manned test runs on freeways for safety reasons, but I don't think I've seen any reports of vehicles mistaking what lane they were in. (Or you may be mistaking the Tesla fatality from last year, where the somewhat less autonomous than advertised Model X autopilot misread lane markings and plowed into a barrier because it thought it was on the other side of an exit ramp.) Level-4 autonomy hardware would be more than capable of producing a safe robotic vending machine.

... I know several choreographers who would disagree. But they are, by nature, a curmudgeonly lot. Honestly, I doubt it. I know a lot of people want to find significance in trivial stuff in animation, but sometimes the animators just do things because they look good or because they didn't want to mess with the audio. Actually, Delta did... just not in the field. You'll find conventional microphones in a number of scenes during Freyja's audition and training early on, and during their practice sessions. As to Frontier and "vintage" vehicles, the fleet went to considerable lengths to maintain the pre-First Space War aesthetics of the historical locations replicated in it like San Francisco, Shanghai, Beijing, Shibuya, Taiwan, Yokohama, and Yamanote. This seems to have extended as far as ensuring civilian vehicles were period-appropriate even if they were significantly more modern under the hood like Ozma Lee's replica Lancia Delta HF Integrale. (The mechanic sheet that features Ozma's car actually asserts this is something the population enthusiastically appreciates... which for me is a bit horrifying considering most of the background vehicles are stock CG models of Toyota small cars.) "Cheap drones" are generally just remote-control toys with little to nothing in the way of actual AI features... that's rather different from what we're talking about. As our resident USAF chap noted, this is patently untrue. (Calling us "the IT crowd" makes me feel like my office should be in the basement with a guy named Moss and a goth.) Simple color optics can be used for that. Observing traffic signals has not been a problem for autonomous vehicles, and would not be an issue for a robotic vending machine using the same technology. The program I worked on logged over a million miles of driving with exactly ONE accident that wasn't the result of a negligent human... and a vending machine on the sidewalk doesn't generally have to worry about being blindsided by a human in a car under normal circumstances.

The notification sound effect is also behaving badly, it's coming out more as a staticky squelch.

This past week's episode of Star Trek: Discovery manages to simultaneously be one of the strongest and weakest episodes of the series so far. "If Memory Serves" opens on a recap of the lovingly restored original Star Trek pilot "The Cage" and transitions with uncommon grace directly into the episode proper. The only real problem is that the episode's A-plot about Burnham and Spock's visit to Talos IV is a painfully dull dump of plot-critical exposition is nowhere near as compelling or interesting as its B-plot about Hugh Culber dealing with the trauma of having been murdered, hunted through the mycelial network, and then unceremoniously brought back to life. Don't get me wrong, the visit to Talos IV is a lovingly produced aesthetic update to "The Cage" and "The Menagerie" but Spock and Burnham are incredibly boring. Once the Talosians sort out Spock's brain (hoho) and he delivers his incredibly stupid exposition about the rest of the season's plot and the identity of the Red Angel, he and Burnham just start sniping at each other until the Talosians reveal what ultimately ruined their relationship. You probably expected something unique or interesting from the Red Angel, but no... we're just doing a less involved version of Enterprise's Temporal Cold War arc. Even the reveal of what caused the bad blood between Burnham and Spock is a massive moronic anticlimax. She tried to run away from home, and he tried to stop her, so she tried a "break your heart to save you" gambit and insulted him by calling him a half-breed. Apparently it never occurred to her that the "logic extremists" (now there's a stupid term) would take just as much exception to Sarek's human wife and half-Vulcan son as they did to her, so the whole running away bit that nearly got her killed and ruined her relationship with Spock was pure self-serving self-righteous BS. Probably a good thing she's got no chance at the center seat now, as she's clearly got a lifelong Martyr Complex. The B-plot with Dr. Culber getting used to having been unkilled by the jahSopp is a lot more interesting. For once, the trauma of having died and been brought back to life wasn't a case of "death is cheap". He's got some actual PTSD to work through thanks to having been murdered by Voq, hunted through the mycelial network by the jahSopp, and then being brought back to life after he'd achieved something resembling closure. We get to see the difficulties he has as his partner Stamets tries to simply pick up where they left off as though nothing had happened, his difficulties accepting what happened to him, aggressive outbursts as a result of being put in proximity with his killer, and so on. It really throws both Ash's and Hugh's damage into sharp relief, as the two men who probably suffered the most as a result of the Klingon war. It's quite a strong character episode on their part, though it still does feel like they're having trouble with the idea of having a gay couple on Star Trek.

You can program for a choreographed performance, or to have the unit hold position relative to a part of a person's body. (Position-holding could be achieved by something similar to beam-riding guidance, with them wearing some directional transmitter that the microphone is programmed to stay centered in the path of.) I legitimately did not recall that occurring in the series, but then it has been good while I last rewatched Macross 7. I concede the point that the microphone system may have a basic AI for guidance. That doesn't establish AI as ubiquitous in the Macross setting, but it does establish one more (temporary) category where AI made inroads into the consumer-level technology of the Macross universe. (One does have to wonder why they were seemingly abandoned in favor of conventional microphones later on though... did someone lose an eye or something? We do see civilian drones, but curiously they seem to largely be little more sophisticated than what we have today.) You're looking at it from the opposite direction I am, which I suspect is why my point isn't getting across here. If you want to support a software feature, you need to have the available system resources to support it and ideally you don't want to redline the system doing it. This is why most consumer-grade technology with rudimentary AI is extremely simple (e.g. the Roombas) or network-based. Even basic AIs tend to have surprisingly high system requirements, and that leaves you a choice of expanding the available sources locally (more cost), running the system ragged (reduced lifespan both in operating time and overall durability), or you outsource the complex tasks to another system with more resources. This is why those cheap system-on-chip setups you keep referring to are cheap... because the AI features they support are largely cloud-based to avoid the additional cost and complexity of faster processors, more memory, more local storage, and more capacious batteries. The more you want the system to support locally, the more demand on the local hardware and the more expensive the unit gets. Now, if we're talking about something like a FAST Pack that's meant to be as aggressively inexpensive as it can be for the military, there's two questions to ask. What benefit would having an AI on the pack be, and is it sufficient to justify additional cost? As I see it, there's no real benefit to it when the packs are tied directly into a military-grade AI right there inside the fighter and they usually contain nothing but fuel tanks, verniers, rocket boosters, and weapons systems slaved to the fighter's FCS. Same story for most other military hardware. ... "autonomous vehicle" usually refers to cars. When it's aircraft, they're usually called Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. Level 3 and 4 autonomous cars do, in fact, have the software to receive and interpret the inputs from things like LIDAR arrays, RADAR, and so on in order to safely navigate public roads, observe and follow lane markings, prevent collisions with other vehicles or pedestrians, etc. The same technology could be applied to create an autonomous robot vending machine, but it would be a significant increase in cost to an already expensive vending machine for no real gain besides the "ain't it cool?" factor. Being an engineer, I'm all about making cool sh*t for its own sake, but I'd imagine potential customers are gonna want a business case demonstrating why it's an advantage over a static machine besides being a novelty (because the novelty will wear off quickly).

Yes, but sentient AI is such a psychotic crapshoot it had to be outlawed entirely... so you know it prefers store brand cola.

It can be easily achieved by computer control, and unlike AI we can show that computers have infiltrated all manner of areas that they wouldn't until decades later in the real world like tablets having replaced newspapers, television cameras being remotely operated drones, etc. Program the cues, and let the computer handle the timing of the mics. It doesn't need to be an AI, it just needs a little prior planning not dissimilar to the cues used to turn mics on and off on theater performances and concerts when a mic isn't needed. Even if it were an AI managing it, it wouldn't establish that AI technology is ubiquitous in Macross. It would just confirm what we already knew that rudimentary AIs can be used to take over certain jobs nobody wants to do like picking rubbish or putting a microphone in front of Basara without beating him with the stand while most of the rest of technology's seemingly unimpacted. I could see a stronger case for it if the microphones responded to, say, gestures (like summoning one with a wave of the hand), demonstrated collision avoidance behavior, or could follow Fire Bomber outside the stage, all of which would require a lot more immediate, precise control outside of what could be preprogrammed. While I've not been around many bands trying to make it big, even the amateur musicians I know tend to own at least a microphone or two and some entry-level mixing equipment... it would not unreasonable for Ray to have purchased that sort of thing for practice. Yes, it can... but at a lower level of precision and with a lot fewer features. That's point I've been tilting at here. Yeah, you can technically run some of these rudimentary AI features exclusively on a system-on-chip, but at the cost of significant demand on processor time, memory, local storage, and energy that's generally greater than what you would see in an operating environment where you can displace those resource-intensive operations to a less limited system. This is why many modern AI technologies are network-dependent. The technology already exists for autonomous vehicles. LIDAR systems to monitor the movements of other vehicles, people, animals, road markings, hazards, and so on in the proximity of the vehicle, low-power RADAR for short-range collision avoidance, infrared for living object detection and motion tracking is commonly used in the XBox's Kinect peripheral and Nintendo's Wiimote, a decently grunty lithium ion battery can be pillaged from something like an electric wheelchair or a small electric golf cart, emotors can be obtained at shockingly compact sizes that with a few modest gear reductions can easily develop enough torque to shift a vending machine (see Jamie's mechanical ascender in Mythbusters's superhero special, which uses an emotor about the size of a soda can and a few gear reductions to lift a standard 95th percentile male). Really, a robotic vending machine is basically just that robotic mall cop with a minifridge strapped to it. All the various pieces exist but, as I said, it's "awesome but impractical" All that extra expense for what actual gain besides making an already expensive vending machine MORE expensive without materially improving its ability to do its job.

Granted, the litter-picking robot would have to be marginally cleverer than a Roomba... but the Roomba is about as basic as your consumer-grade robotics get. Its program is little more than a scheduler, a motor-RPM-based distance measurement algorithm, and a directive to turn ninety degrees when it bumps into something or is half a device radius from overlapping its path. It really isn't beyond the scope of what a high school robotics team could knock out. That said, the litter picking robot's additional complexity wouldn't be enough to put it out of the reach of the high school robotics crowd either. The additional embedded controls for the arm are almost literal child's play these days, making image processing that design's only real improvement over the Roomba. I've seen a lot of unsubstantiated fan theories over the years, but this is one of the odder ones... Has it occurred to you that, as a microphone in a concert venue, it's vastly more likely that it's simply a remote-controlled device run by the venue's sound engineer in response to predefined cues in a choreographed performance with a set list? (Basara's a prick, to be sure, but even he doesn't generally deviate from the set list.) Your contention that AI technology is everywhere in Macross is entirely unsubstantiated. (Mind you, I'd be curious how that microphone is hovering. There's no evident thrust and it's too small to be contragravitc. Maybe a Biefeld-Brown effect electrohydrodynamic lifter? Though I guess you wouldn't want to touch it if that were the case.) I'm not sure where you thought you were going with this one... there's a pretty significant difference in processor, memory, and sensor utilization between a barebones open source word processor than, say, a piece of software that's trying to convert your speech into text, divine your intent, and convert it into actionable instructions for itself and other applications. The reason the system-on-chip AI software depends so heavily on external processing is because doing all the processing locally would need significantly greater local storage requirements and place far greater demands for resources on the processor, memory, and energy storage system to do the job with anything close to the same level of accuracy. Well, maybe better than a Tesla... but their entire autonomy stratgy seems to be "make misleading statements, backpedal, promise there'll be a patch in the future". The vending machine and litter picking robot are both within the reach of today's technology, and the litter picking robot would be little more sophisticated than a consumer-level robotic vacuum cleaner or lawnmower. The vending machine would be nearly as complex as an autonomous car, mainly to avoid damaging themselves and hurting people. Either could be available today, but in practice they aren't because they are "awesome but impractical".

The Spoiler function also appears to be missing.

Yeah, it's a bit of a math fail. Empty weight usually means the aircraft is drained of fuel and consumable stores, but is otherwise fully topped-up on hydraulic fluid, lubricants, etc. 18,500kg - 13,250kg = 5,250kg of odds and ends to be accounted for including (but not limited to): The pilot (Hikaru is 58kg without his pilot suit) Life support system gases (trivial weight?) 1,410L of hydrogen slush fuel for the main engines (119.85kg @ 0.085kg/L) An unknown quantity of fuel for the liquid-fuel rockets in the "backpack" (liquid oxygen is 1.141kg/L) A Howard GU-11[A] gunpod with 200 55mm rounds (1,550kg) Twelve AMM-1A all-purpose medium-range missiles (12x125kg = 1,500kg, not counting the weight of the pylons) Chaff, flare, and smoke charges for the countermeasure dispenser. Basically, with the knowns we can whittle it down to ~2,022.15kg of unaccounted-for mass. If the four pylons are of similar mass to the F-16 Station 3/7s you quoted, that's another 480kg accounted for putting us at 1,542.15kg of unaccounted-for mass. We could go deeper if we knew how much fuel and of what type was in that rocket assembly, and had more info on the contents of the countermeasures dispenser.

... since we're talking of rogue vending machines, this needs to be posted: ("Aggressive" vending machine designed and built by Jamie Hyneman of M5 Industries and Mythbusters fame.)

A fair point!

Within the bounds of the very, VERY specific corner case you've constructed here... yes. ... which naturally explains why the technology is nowhere to be found in Macross outside of high-end military hardware1, litter-picking robots, and vending machines. Ah, I see the reason for the misconception... you're operating under the common misconception that the system-on-chip in something like a phone is doing the thinking locally. The reason those applications of very, VERY rudimentary heuristics work at all is 1. because of how basic they are and 2. because much of the actual processing burden is non-local... it's being done external to the system-on-chip on a remote server or in "the cloud2". When you try to do the thinking locally, it requires a lot more system resources. Even seemingly simple tasks like driving a vehicle on well-mapped public roads (Level 3 or 4 vehicular autonomy) requires a surprising amount of power just to handle sensor input analysis. So much so that those computers can end up weighing hundreds of pounds when you factor in their power and cooling requirements. (This I know from firsthand professional experience.) Likely by a high-efficiency battery or fuel cell. Given the many interesting things Overtechnology has achieved with carbon allotropes, I'd assume it's probably something analogous to a stacked-graphene supercapacitor. Even with today's technology those achieve similar energy density and slightly better performance than modern lithium-ion batteries. OTM would probably better that substantially and give those machines a range measured in weeks or hundreds of miles. There are some entertaining alternatives like magnetic induction, using a receiver pad in the underside of the unit and charging pads buried in the sidewalk3. This would keep those vending machines on the sidewalk and potentially allow them to self-limit their range to just a certain array of associated charging pads. They could be using something like Tesla's wireless power concept (though I doubt it since that saturates the entire area with a charge), or potentially even be operating on a small hydrogen combustion generator like you'd find in a series hybrid car. Ones operating outdoors could potentially use high-efficiency solar, either with a material like vantablack paired with the high-efficiency thermoelectric converters we know exist (because they're used in thermonuclear reaction generators4) or maybe just photovoltaics. Cooling would be an interesting proposition. Electrically-driven conventional mechanical refrigeration is one option, of course. If they're operating on the hydrogen combustion generator option they could potentially be using the cryogenic fuel itself as a coolant to keep the beverages frosty cold, which would also serve to warm the fuel for the injectors5. Thermoelectric cooling is another option, again thanks to OTM-based superefficient thermoelectric technology. Maybe the cans themselves have a small flask of liquid CO2 that releases during dispensing to flash-cool and carbonate the drink (using a CO2 fire extinguisher is a surprisingly effective method to rapidly cool drinks on a hot day). I'm a bit curious how autonomous those vending machines actually are and how they detect customers. I'd guess they're probably semi-autonomous, remotely managed by some central system that is tracking inventory and the locations of the various machines so it can recall them for restock or repair. They definitely have rudimentary voice recognition, as they respond to shouts of "cola" in Super Dimension Fortress Macross, coupled with directional microphones to allow them to locate the speaker. I wonder if they're using LIDAR or RADAR to track the terrain to make sure they don't tip over on the curb or stray into a navigational hazard like traffic. The unit definitely seems to want to rotate towards whoever hailed it, so I'm guessing it's not full 360 degree sensing. I've got a keen suspicion that the way it differentiates potential customers from other objects is by infrared. It's probably setting the ambient temperature as the background level and then looking for objects warmer than that around 36-38 degrees C. Maybe it's using a laser rangefinder to ensure it stops at a comfortable distance from its summoner to ensure it doesn't accidentally mow them down? 1. Sharon Apple doesn't count as a separate category because her AI was military-grade hardware that was shared with the AIF-X-9 Ghost... and she probably would have been used for the Minmay Attack if she'd been completed in a stable state. 2. As a network engineer, I loathe the term "the cloud". It's obfuscatory language at best. There is no cloud, it's just someone else's computer. 3. This technology is being toyed with for extending the range of pure-electric cars, embedding wireless charging pads in the surface of the road that switch on as a vehicle passes over them and off again when the vehicle is past them, allowing it to be "plugged in" and actively recharging while driving. This tech was proposed back in '72 by Professor Don Otto of the University of Auckland and has gone into practical trials on a few stretches of road in Britain in the last few years. 4. One of the two power stages of a thermonuclear reaction turbine engine, the other being a high-efficiency MHD dynamo. 5. Variable Fighter Master File: VF-1 Valkyrie Vol.2 indicates the VF-1 uses the hydrogen fuel slush in its tanks as a coolant for its engines prior to introducing it into the reactor in this fashion.

A number of forum dialog promps are also broken and displaying no text, such as the confirmation request when you cancel editing a post.

I'm well aware of what bingo fuel means. Space is rather different from atmosphere, however. You don't need to continuously run the engine to stay flying, but you do need to save enough fuel to decelerate when you get where you're going and want to stop. Thermonuclear reaction engines are fabulously inefficient in space flight, so a drone that has just enough fuel slush left to limp home is not a likely candidate to do anything except set a straight-line course home, burn the engines long enough to get up to speed, and save the rest of its go juice to decelerate for recovery. Not necessarily, in the case of the Super Packs. VFs with the linear actuator system are capable of some incredibly complex feats of electromagnetic field manipulation to keep parts in proper alignment during transformation and so on. It's possible that same field manipulation is what is causing the "bunching" of the pack on ejection and the proper reconnection on the VF's return. Putting an AI into every piece of the Super Pack would potentially take a trivial cost into nontrivial territory and incur additional costs from the support systems needed to keep those AIs running. (There are a few isolated instances of FAST Packs having internal power sources, mainly capacitors but in one case a small reactor, but most packs operate solely on external power from the VF itself.)

One interesting thing I noticed while I was reading the Project Trapeze section over lunch... for the long flight, it sounds like they converted that VF-1A's engines from an augmented fusion rocket to a fusion-powered thermal monopropellant rocket. Kind of a neat way to think about long-duration spaceflight for a VF and possibly a fun little nod to Gundam's UC timeline as well.

The fleet legging it... meaning recovering the drone wouldn't be on anyone's mind anyway. Also, since the verniers and main engines are pulling from the same tanks most of the time, a drone on bingo fuel wouldn't be maneuvering period. It may not even be something that needs to be done by a human either. When even the equivalent of a forklift has a support AI, C4I center on the mothership may have probably has some fairly grunty AI assistance so the human operators don't need to take their attention off the battle to poke individual recoverable assets one at a time. For the record, it isn't clear if that reattachment function is on the VF, the Pack, or both.

Excluding the Cassini probe's trip through the gap between Saturn's F and G rings during orbital insertion - which required special measures to be taken to avoid damage even in the relatively debris-free space between the rings - it generally stayed at least a light-second from any planet or moon. That's quite a bit different from, say, flying through the Cassini divide laterally, in orbit of a planet with significant space traffic, or in an asteroid field being mined for resources by an emigrant fleet. That kind of assumes the human operator is directly controlling the unit... the way it's described is more like a RTS, where they're selecting a bunch of semi-autonomous units and pointing them in the general direction of something that needs its sh*t wrecked, assigning target priorities, etc. One of the benefits of using 'em is that you can manage a large drone air force with relatively few meatbags. As a rule, if an enemy force (e.g. a Zentradi Army branch fleet) have already spotted the emigrant ship... the entire situation has gone sufficiently pear-shaped that recovery is not likely to occur at all. (Legging it is still the preferred solution in situations like that, and in some Master File accounts, including possibly self-destructing any ships that can't make their fold jump away to prevent capture.) Depends what kind of enemy. Some, like the Vajra, are known to home in on things like active fold wave emissions from communications systems, fold reactors, and the like, so the drone may still be drawing fire even if it's operating in low power mode simply because it presents as a threat and is an easy target. It'd be less an issue for, say, an enemy VF that's using a mixture of RADAR, LIDAR, infrared, and optical sensing rather than fold wave detection since the only thing likely to draw attention is the drone's engine heat. While we haven't had much information on how overtechnology-based artificial intelligence systems work in Macross on a hardware level, some of the terminology choices suggest they're using an entirely different architecture from anything we would recognize as a conventional computer. This reasoning may or may not apply... doubly so given that some of the systems are apparently based on organic technology. (Save for Macross II where the word "apparently" gets jettisoned from that sentence, because it's outright confirmed.) Super Packs are something we've had a fair amount of insight into the inner workings of, and they're generally pretty bare-bones because they are intended to be disposable should the situation call for it. The first several generations of Super Pack were fairly bare-bones affairs, being that they were mostly just high-capacity fuel tanks and hybrid rocket engines with some additional verniers. The addition of weapons to the packs in the form of some simple micromissile launchers was almost an afterthought. It wasn't until changes in engine technology and a larger average airframe greatly reduced the need for massive bolt-on fuel tanks in space that we started to see recoverable Super Packs. That was when the focus of a Super Pack changed from extending operating time to offsetting the loss of performance caused by carrying absurd amounts of ordnance. Those packs could even bunch up in orbit for later automatic reattachment if a fighter needed to make planetfall, so I wouldn't be surprised if they also had recovery beacons of their own... though normally if a Super Pack is being jettisoned during a fight, it's because the pack is damaged to the point that it's a liability or being used as an emergency anti-missile countermeasure.

Granted, Picard did take a licking in the movies... but it was mostly physical, rather than mental, abuse. Generations was more about beating the hell out of Kirk (and LaForge) with Picard riding in to give Kirk a "what the hell, hero?". First Contact was a rough trip since the Borg are Jean-Luc Picard's personal berserk button. Insurrection was a pretty standard "screw the rules, I'm doing what's right" plot. Nemesis wanted to be psychological abuse for Picard, but it was Troi who took the beating instead once the plot became self-aware enough to notice there was no way Shinzon could relate to Picard at all. Wasn't that pretty much entirely because she was a fellow archaeologist though? I recall him being pretty put-off by her casual willingness to engage in dodgy behavior and trying to distance himself from her because of it. Sito Jaxa's definitely the better example there. He only permitted Ro Laren on his ship because he was ordered to, and only allowed her to remain after she had already redeemed herself by outing a flag officer's dodgy plan to wipe out a Bajoran resistance group on Cardassia's behalf.

Gonna second the bug report of Quote blocks no longer showing the original post's author.

My apologies, I thought you were expressing frustration with a lack of AAA fighting games in general rather than just those specific titles since the Nintendo fighting game scene hype is usually dominated by Super Smash Bros. That said, have there actually been Dead or Alive games for a Nintendo console besides the rather lamentably bad Dead or Alive: Dimensions for the 3DS? I'd thought that franchise was more or less wedded to the Playstation in recent years, though I do recall playing Dead or Alive 2 on the Sega Dreamcast back in high school. Soul Calibur 2 as well.

That probably has a lot to do with the Switch's hardware limitations. It definitely doesn't seem to be a port-friendly console when it comes to current games. Doom 3 and Dying: Reborn had some very evident graphical downgrades (and Dying: Reborn jettisoned all of its dialog audio) compared to versions from other consoles.

They've got BlazBlue: Central Fiction and Cross Tag Battle, Dragon Ball Fighterz, Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2, Guilty Gear Accent Core Plus R, Mortal Kombat 11, and Ultra Street Fighter II?

Well, it's not like a thirty-plus year totally unbroken streak of abject failures did great things for the pool of prospective licensees. It isn't like they were spoiled for choice at the outset either, as a kid's show that got middling ratings and had an unsuccessful toy line. They attracted the scrubs, for the most part, and now that the scrubs have lost interest or had their licenses revoked it's all down to the small time indie operators who are looking to make a name for themselves but can't afford a license for a big name property.