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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Seconded. She's much more entertaining than Stamets, even if he has lost a couple levels in arsehole since the second season started. That seen-it-all, not-impressed-with-your-space-voodoo-bullsh*t attitude of hers is like the quintessential suffering Starfleet engineer. It's like having Montgomery Scott or Miles O'Brien back, but without Miles's horrid wife. In a way, she might be a more convincing engineer than O'Brien was since she gives zero f*cks what the non-engineers think and has a demonstrated tendency to "wing it" building the tools she needs to get the job done. (If her attitude towards starship repair includes duck tape, I can only imagine what she'd do given some club soda or bondo.)
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Your understanding is correct. Please take care to note that the (hilariously awful) comic from Titan Comics is an adaptation gone off the rails, where the live action movie proposal that Warner Bros and now Sony Pictures have been studiously ignoring for over a decade now is for a rebooted-from-the-ground-up reimagining of Robotech. "Robotech in name only", if you will. It's something of an apples and oranges comparison. All of the above, really. Granted, quality-wise the difference between pre-Yune Robotech and post-Yune Robotech in overall quality is the difference between laying down in an overflowing septic tank and standing up in that same overflowing septic tank... but gains are gains. The quality of the writing in the 90's was so bad even Harmony Gold couldn't stomach it, and we know that their standards set the bar for quality so low it's a trip hazard in Satan's sub-basement. (When the licensees weren't committing serial copyright infringement, anyway...) As we've noted before, your tastes are... well... "atypical and highly specialized" might be a polite way to put it. That's kind of why nobody has tried making Southern Cross merch for Robotech before. The professional toy companies took one look at the estimated return on investment from such a small area of interest and wrote it off as a bad job. It's only now that they've whittled down the licensee pool to naught but little indie outfits that someone is finally willing to gamble on it, with the decline in quality you'd expect in switching from pros to grey marketeers and "one guy in a garage" outfits. If Harmony Gold is looking to convince Tatsunoko their brand is still viable enough to justify a license renewal, making toys that look like they were salvaged from the Matchbox era probably isn't the way to do it.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Well, come way may I hope that they can hang on to Anson Mount to play Captain Christopher Pike in season three. Discovery's original characters don't really have anyone who's ready to step into the big chair besides Commander Saru, and you know they'll always have a human in the center seat. Captain Pike has really become the heart and soul of the series, as the most likeable character on the series with only the new engineer Commander Reno coming close. Burnham will likely never escape that onus of "designated hero" that colors her actions and puts her in danger of Mary Sue status when everything she does is always right no matter how stupid or immoral/illegal.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    And yet, Tommy achieved more concrete success in the first few years of his tenure than Macek ever did and had a much higher average quality level... Folks romanticize the "good old days" until they look back without the rose-tinted glasses and realize that Macek was the man with the reverse-Midas touch and virtually all of what came out before 2001 was of comically poor quality. Somehow, deliberately producing poor-quality products strikes me as an extra-risky strategy for a brand that was already known for the poor quality of its... everything.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    ... so MAAS Toys is waiting on a company that is death on all things Kickstarter to approve their plans for a Kickstarter? Glorious. I can only assume this entire misadventure started with someone at MAAS Toys saying "I have a cunning plan".
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Well, to be ruthlessly precise, it's 29 days and 4 hours (700 hours) of operating time in atmosphere with a fuel consumption per engine of a hair under 0.28mL/s. Or thereabouts... (it's more like 45 1/2 minutes at maximum thrust with the First Space War-era Super Pack based on Master File's numbers). Those hybrid rocket boosters are supposed to extend operating time even further by reducing the demand for thrust production from the thermonuclear reaction turbine engines. To be fair, he didn't manage to empty his tanks so much as hit the safety limit that'd been set in his fighter's support AI. Propellant budgeting is a big part of space operations in a VF, even though Super Packs have mostly reached the point where they're more about adding maximum armament without compromising performance rather than adding a boatload of fuel garnished with a few weapons. Yeah, it was a couple days... but he was able to operate his fighter's engines in their more efficient atmospheric mode because he was on Earth.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    That's one thing I wish Master File would cover... actual weights for various weapons and pylon weight limits. Sky Angel did it. Yeah. I really wanna know how that half-helical magazine system works.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    If true, that bodes ill for Star Trek: Discovery's longevity. The Short Treks were occasionally entertaining but rather light on substance. They work well enough as a teaser for a new season of the show but I don't think there's enough to them to stand on their own. (We'd have to ask why they'd walk away from doing full-length episodes, and none of those questions are pretty.)
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Gave Dying: Reborn a go today... and this is one of the worst-designed games I've ever had the displeasure to play. I don't know if this game was developed by NEKCOM Entertainment's office in Wuhan, China and crudely localized via Babelfish or if the team in Los Angeles decided to farm the dialog out to an illiterate hobo. I'm two chapters into this game and I've legitimately got no idea what's going on except that some guy is in some... place... looking for his missing sister(?) and it's an escape the room type puzzle situation. Despite being a horror-themed puzzle game ala Zero Escape, it's impossible to feel any sense of dread when the dialog brings the protagonist's reaction to being kidnapped, locked in a decaying building full of traps, and repeatedly knocked out across as mild annoyance rather than fear. I don't know what this guy's deal is, but either this is an epically bad translation or this guy has less emotional response than a pre-Star Trek: Generations Commander Data. It's also rife with typos... my favorite so far being the game's loading icon, a cheerfully bouncing Jeep (because why not?) atop the word "LOADYING". The game design is appallingly bad. There's this weird oval filter over everything like you're wearing a pair of goggles that block out the corners of the screen, your footsteps are so loud it sounds like you're wearing tap shoes, and the interface is so fussy it's rather like this fellow is less man and more inebriated moose. The physics engine has some interesting, downright Aristotlean, ideas on the subject of inertia and motion. They couldn't be bothered to render a player model, so every time you walk in front of a mirror there's nothing reflected and any object you may be holding is just hovering in midair like you're a freaking poltergeist. I'm not sure why they apparently believed a guy in a leather jacket wearing what appears to be a Big Mouth Billy Bass on his head would be an intimidating enemy figure either. Dying: Reborn's scenery is supposed to be a creepy, dilapidated hotel... but unless conditions in China are even worse than I'd been led to believe, the structure they designed for the game looks a good deal more like a prison, a police station, or a really old YMCA.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Mainly Macross Chronicle, but it comes up in a number of sources... Frontier had a LOT of artbooks and magazine coverage. Granted, the exceptional fuel-efficiency of thermonuclear reaction turbine engines in atmosphere removes the main issue with a STOBAR-based approach to carrier operations... but the CATOBAR approach is friendlier to taking off from stationary carriers, to operating with heavy loadings, and to launching and recovering large numbers of aircraft in less time. With VFs being the default troops on the field, getting large numbers of aircraft in the air as fast as possible would be a must for the New UN Forces. With six to eight catapults, a carrier can get two platoons airborne more or less simultaneously and repeat the feat every couple minute or so since linear catapults apparently have trivially short reset times. (Also, with the excessively high exhaust velocities produced by thermonuclear reaction turbine engines, I'd be a bit worried about anyone or anything standing downwind even with jet blast deflectors up on a STOBAR carrier.) GERWALK recovery is easier in zero-g, whereas standard arrested recovery makes life easier on everyone in atmosphere and even in space where facilities permit, because at some point you gotta get it back into fighter mode for storage. The Guantanamo's lack of utility in atmosphere is kind of a non-issue, since the New UN Forces generally expect to do all of their fighting in space (if the Zentradi reach the surface of your planet you've pretty much already lost) and they're substantially more cost-effective than the more expensive and complex Uraga-class escort battle carriers.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    It would've been a lot better than what season one turned out to be. Well, duh... but we're looking at in-universe, in-continuity explanations here. Unless, of course, the Red Angel turns out to be Gene f*cking Roddenberry come to straighten out CBS's sh*t. (There are a couple similarly weird moments, the most glaring of which being the end of the Temporal Cold War where Daniels implies the events of last couple seasons just un-happened when the timeline reset...) That's not as dramatic or funny/awkward, though... Sybok's arguably worse than an outcast nut... being somewhere between a religious heretic and a counterculture hippie cult leader, he's basically a Vulcan Charles Manson. Burnham... well... what I question is why the entire Federation apparently blames her for starting the Klingon War. It's realy weird when you think about it, given that she didn't actually DO anything to provoke the Klingons into shooting (Georgeau prevented her from firing first) and the Klingons were quite open about having always intended to start a war. The only thing she did that had a measurable impact on the war was she shot T'Kuvma after the war had already started. All she's really guilty of is assaulting her superior officer, attempted mutiny, and attempting to commit an unprovoked act of war. It's like she irrationally blamed herself for the war out of survivor's guilt and the court martial just rolled with it in defiance of the evidence to the contrary. If we were looking only at Discovery and TOS, maybe... and maybe the Enterprise relaunch, since Sarek's parents figure relatively prominently in some of those books. It's not like Spock and his family dominate the story of 99% of the canon, after all.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Anything said on why they mysteriously went silent for almost two months with no warning? I wonder if they got cold feet now that even Harmony Gold is admitting they might not be able to secure a renewal of their license, or if Harmony Gold said crowdfunding of any type is right out so they have no way to fund it.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    "Slightly better than what we had in the 80's" is all we can fairly expect from Robotech-branded merchandise... the franchise hasn't really progressed since '86 anyway.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    The approach used in Macross: Do You Remember Love? and Macross II: Lovers Again is the proverbial odd man out, where those VFs are launching strictly under their own power... albeit with either significant supplemental engine power or simply a massively increased onboard fuel capacity and four built-in thermonuclear reaction engines. Macross Frontier establishes right in its first episode (16:40 in the Deculture edition) that carriers are using linear catapults, a high velocity non-contact electromagnetic catapult system using essentially the same principles as a coilgun. The holograms that the ship projects over the deck are apparently to denote the boundaries and directionality of the catapult's electromagnetic field, and warn personnel not to cross into that active catapult lane. (After all, nobody wants to get pasted by an accelerating VF or have a heart attack from wandering into a superintense electromagnetic field.) Well, catapults are advantageous in atmosphere because they can quickly accelerate an aircraft to takeoff speed and in space the catapult saves a modest amount of reaction mass by accelerating the fighter during takeoff. Flattop designs enable ships to operate as carriers in atmosphere or in space, but in space they have a unique advantage in that they have a highly versatile recovery approach... by throwing an artificial gravity field over the carrier deck, fighters can gently fall onto the deck for regular arrested landing or vertical landing. In the event that they need to, or it is otherwise advantageous to do so, they can also exploit that gravitational field to keep aircraft out on the deck even in space. IIRC, the standard is 0.5G over the carrier deck to facilitate landing.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, they've had it up for ages... CDJapan were the ones who were late to the party. They have it marked as Order Stop though, which means they won't take any more preorders until after it comes out. https://hlj.com/variable-fighter-master-file-vf-11-thunderbolt-sof60030
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Spock could have lied on his Starfleet application to avoid being given special treatment because of his father's status as one of the Federation's most accomplished diplomats. He wouldn't be the only character in Star Trek to have lied to get into Starfleet... Simon Tarses in Star Trek: the Next Generation lied about his ancestry to get into Starfleet because he was part-Romulan, and Dr. Julian Bashir in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine applied under an assumed name (his real given name is Jules, not Julian) and he lied about his genetic status on the application. (Spock also operated under a false identity when he used the Guardian of Forever in TAS to resolve a time paradox involving his younger self's untimely death.) Maybe Starfleet background checks are just on the honor system until you screw up badly enough, or maybe they have a section where you can opt out of identifying your family like you can opt out of stating your race on job applications today. IF they knew. As far as the high priestess who presided over that ritual, even over a century later (in Voyager) Vulcans are noted to be extremely taciturn and prudish about anything involving Pon Farr, so Kirk and co. may not have known that was anything unusual. Yeah, the chancellor of the Klingon High Council knows... and she's from House Mo'kai, who have intelligence-gathering and covert operations as their hat. Either that or they're going to dig even deeper into the relaunch novels for material and this incarnation of Section 31 will end up being destroyed to cover up the organization's existence the same way the one from Archer's era was. (Discovery has made at least a few references to Control, the AI from the novels that founded and oversees Section 31, destroying it whenever it gets exposed and refounding it when it's needed again.) Isn't that more or less what Discovery was supposd to have been initially?
  17. Seto Kaiba
    People talking isn't the problem... it's the impersonal records maintained by the Federation and its rival powers. Intelligence organizations have very long memories and obsessively write EVERYTHING down. Submerging won't make those records go away. Particularly not ones held by hostile foreign powers like the Cardassian Union, Klingon Empire, Romulan Empire, etc. Koval's dismissal of Section 31 as a fiction created by Luther Sloan to justify a rogue intelligence operation to take revenge for Vice Admiral Fujisaki's supposed assassination would not stand up under examination if the Romulans had any kind of records indicating Section 31 was a real organization barely a century ago. The Cardassian Obsidian Order, which was generally acknowledged to be the finest covert intelligence organization in the quadrant, had no idea Section 31 existed at all. The Founders, who had infiltrated Starfleet at its highest levels, were also completely clueless as to Section 31's existence even though the agency almost succeeded in wiping them out. Oh, absolutely... and they practically wrote themselves a blank check to do it back in Enterprise with the Temporal Cold War. Sadly, the only title to ever actually take advantage of it was the Department of Temporal Investigation novel series, which mainly used it to take potshots at the various terrible ideas that had been unsuccessfully pitched for new Star Trek shows by referencing them as "bad future" timelines created by Future Guy that were retroactively prevented by the temporal agents of the Federation Temporal Agency (31st century) and/or Temporal Integrity Commission (28th century). I was going to argue that there was no reason Burnham would list Sarek as her father on her papers when Sarek doesn't acknowledge her as his daughter publicly... but last night's episode torpedoed my argument. Burnham's status as Sarek's ward/foster daughter is apparently well-enough known that she's able to use it to get permission to land her shuttle directly at the ambassadorial residence from Vulcan's air traffic control.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    ... that's one way to look at it, yeah. Though with one or more books coming out a year, we won't gain much ground! Oh, it was all but inevitable Max and Milia would feature in the book. They are, after all, the first ones to take a VF-11 into live combat and the reason the VF-11's production spec includes the canards. (Plus Milia also had a VF-11C in Macross 7 Plus episode "TOP GAMRIN" (sic)). If they give us a good cutaway of the gunpod like they did for the GU-11 and GU-15, I'll be THRILLED. You mean themes like the ones here? That's what those are... cascading stylesheets (CSS). We're looking to do a more modern CSS1&2 page design that displaces most, if not all, of the layout information into the CSS so the impact on the individual pages will be zero or close to it if we decide to start tweaking the appearance of the site later. The learning curve is nasty, but it'll save us loads of work down the road by turning page-building into a glorified fill-in-the-blanks exercise.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    How much does the general public actually know about Sarek's family circumstances though? Either Jim Kirk failed one hell of a spot check, or Spock was somehow able to conceal the details of his parentage from his Starfleet file. Pike seems to be more clued in, but then he's just spent five years in deep space with Spock and is still picking most of it up from Burnham and Spock's parents as a result of Spock going bananas and subsequently AWOL. Maybe Burnham fell off Starfleet's collective radar by Kirk's time, having been reassigned to Space Siberia the way Scotty was in the Abrams movies. Totally unrelated, but did anyone else notice Pike's stand-in science officer looks and acts a lot like Arnold Rimmer?
  20. Seto Kaiba
    For what it's worth, I had the opposite reaction to the Generation 1 starters. They look so much alike (esp. Squirtle and Charmander) that they didn't feel very distinctive to me. Many of the early route pokemon had more exciting or interesting designs, like Geodude. (After all these years, Haunter is still a personal favorite just because it looks so happy with its own malevolence.) If I had to rank the generations by the appeal of their starters (best to worst) I'd go with: 2, 6, 8, 4, 7, 1, 3, 5. Anyhoo... this is apparently the "Galar" region. Between the overall shape, the preponderance of castles, and that bit about 1/3 of the way up from the bottom that looks like Palace of Westminster, I'm guessing we're headed to Poke-Britain this time.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Do we really need a new/additional explanation for it, though? Being incredibly averse to talking about family has been a part of Spock's character since "Journey to Babel" in TOS's second season. Kirk only found out that Sarek and Amanda were Spock's parents when he unwittingly cornered Spock on the issue by offering him a few hours of planet leave to visit his family while his parents were standing in the transporter room with them. Spock only admitted that Sybok was a family member when Kirk was on a tear in his own brig demanding to know why Spock hadn't shot the man trying to take over their ship. Is it really surprising that he wouldn't have mentioned the orphaned human girl his parents fostered without someone nailing him to the wall on it first? She wasn't even really a relative, they didn't get along, there's some as-of-yet unspecified bad blood between them, and to put the cherry on it she's also known as the idiot who assaulted her captain, tried to launch an unprovoked attack on the Klingons, and is credited with starting a war that killed hundreds of thousands, nearly crippled Starfleet, and almost ended in genocide twice. You wouldn't want to talk about having a family member like that either if you had one... just acknowledging it could be a career-killer without a suitably understanding CO. (Spock's TOS-era remarks about there being "absolutely no record" of a mutiny on a Starfleet ship becomes a case of exact words in highsight... since Burnham's record was expunged by the Federation president, the record of her attempted mutiny no longer exists.) Sarek keeping mum on her existence isn't surprising either given that he was as tight-lipped as Spock and sees his Sophie's Choice situation over the Science Academy as a shameful memory he refuses to discuss with anyone... and both TAS and DSC both imply other Vulcans see him as a bit strange for his interest in humans, which would also likely make him a little disinclined to talk about her. Burnham herself is unlikely to end up a high-flier. She may have been pardoned by the President, but nobody's in a hurry to forget she was Starfleet's first mutineer and attempted to start a shooting war with the Klingons. Even after being reinstated she got sidelined to science officer under someone who used to be her subordinate. She's just another one of the tens of thousands of Starfleet officers who are exemplary enough to climb the ranks to a senior position but not exemplary enough to leave a profound mark on the service the way Archer, April, Pike, Kirk, Picard, Riker, etc. did.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, I'm probably the one that was directed at... Don't blame us... blame CBS and the showrunners, who continue to insist that Star Trek: Discovery is a prime continuity series belonging to the same timeline as TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY, ENT, and the first ten Star Trek movies. They're adamant that Discovery is not a parallel universe story and is not part of the so-called "Kelvin timeline" created for those appalling J.J. Abrams reboot movies. Much of it can be made to fit or at least explained away with minimal hand-waving. Some things, though, are glaring enough to induce real headaches. They've tabled a couple reasons that Starfleet decommissioned and abandoned the Spore Drive technology already, most of which came before season one ended: Even when it's working properly, there's a nonzero chance that undetectable stellar phenomena will cause it to kill the entire crew by twisting them into fleshy rotini and wreck the entire ship. (This happened to the USS Glenn.) The drive system doesn't work without a very specific type of living navigator, and can be near-fatally injurious to said navigator. The Glenn only caught the one tardigrade by accident, and research showed it was intelligent and possibly sentient... in short, using them would be animal cruelty or slavery. Using a humanoid volunteer requires cybernetic implants and illegal genetic modification. Not to mention it's extremely painful and taxing, and overuse can put the navigator into a catatonic state. Malfunction or unintended operation can result in arriving at the right coordinates in the wrong universe entirely... or getting your consciousness trapped in the network. Abuse of the technology can cause damage to the subspace domain the spores exist in, with potentially fatal results for all life in the multiverse. The spores themselves are also apparently dangerous, requiring the engineering crew working on and around the drive be vaccinated against them at regular intervals. Other lifeforms living in the spore domain are fundamentally deadly to humanoid life and could potentially destroy a starship. Stamets and the Discovery's engineering crew were getting started with the removal and disassembly of the spore drive at the start of season two when Pike came aboard. At some point after the red angel nonsense settles down they'll probably finish removing the damn thing and it'll be carted off to whatever laboratory Starfleet was planning to send Stamets to. It wouldn't exactly be the first time Starfleet toyed with a new propulsion technology before discarding it and never mentioning it again... Excelsior's "great experiment" transwarp drive, soliton wave riding, Voyager's variable geometry warp drive, displacement wave, experimental Warp 10 drive, coaxial warp drive, graviton catapulting, quantum slipstream, spatial vortices, etc. To be entirely fair, Star Trek has been pulling "remember the new guy?" on a species-wide level since at least TNG Season One. Anytime the plot of TNG called for the Enterprise to run into an alien race powerful enough to tangibly threaten Starfleet but wasn't starfish aliens or some other incomprehensible space entity it was always a race who they totally had a ton of history with but who had otherwise not been worth mentioning up to that point like the Talarians, the Cardassians, the Sheliak, Tamarians, etc. As far as the never-before-seen alien species, the galaxy is a big place. The Federation itself had over a hundred member worlds, and there are tons of nonaligned worlds filling in the gaps. It's not surprising we're seeing species we've never seen before, when the previous shows (TOS, TNG, VOY) spent all their time out on the very frontiers of explored space and in the time of ENT those worlds were well beyond the frontiers of explored space at the time. In the ~100 years separating those three generations of exploration, the frontier moved out pretty far... so these species we're seeing for the first time may simply have been lost in the gaps as their regions of space went from "frontier" to "cosmopolitan" or at least were left alone by their own request. The Ba'ul are isolationists, the Kelpians and the species from the pilot don't have warp technology yet, etc. For redesigning existing alien species... it's not like this is the first time that's happened to any of them. This is what, the third time the Klingons have been redesigned? The Tellarites have had it twice, and so have the Andorians. The Saurians got a soft redesign, but it isn't actually all that different from the Saurians we've seen previously... just designed for facial motility. I loathed the Klingon redesign from season one, but they did make some good strides to harmonize it with previous Klingon aesthetics in season two (who'd have thought hair would make such a difference?). That is a little bit BS, yeah... mostly since it was an incredibly obvious attempt to make an otherwise-unlikeable character appeal to the Trekkie audience.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Don't get too excited... I've rounded up four other translators to help, but we're still estimating it's going to take something on the order of six months to a year per volume. (Srsly tho, any CSS gurus out there wanna throw me a bone and help unf*ck this stylesheet nightmare I've invited myself into? The O'Reilly book for it is so big I could use it to crush rats.) ... cautious optimism for this book is increasing. Several of those pics are downright gorgeous.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Once the cat's out of the bag, good luck getting it back in... Section 31 parading its agents around like it's a legitimate branch of Starfleet Intelligence runs completely counter to how they've been depicted in every previous appearance (canon and pseudocanon) as a secret, unsanctioned spy organization that had been operating autonomously without oversight since its inception. They were the Federation's best-kept secret, so much so that even the Obsidian Order and Tal Shiar had no idea they existed... and the Tal Shiar had been infiltrated by 31 at the very highest levels. But come Discovery, they're Starfleet's worst kept secret. They're standing around in plain sight all over the Discovery. Even the interns in the engine room know they're a thing. This can't be a recent development either, since Pike and Number One know a good deal more than Discovery's crew (to the point of being on a first-name basis with senior operatives) and they've been out screwing around on the frontiers of explored space for the last five years. The Klingon head of state is at least dimly aware of their existence. How do so many thousands of people get selective amnesia all at once that NO record is left of them by the time they abducted Bashir? ... also, whatever happened to the new captain that the USS Discovery was supposed to take on at Vulcan? Are they just sort of... stuck there... since Christopher Pike jacked their new command like he was picking up a rental car while his regular ride was in the shop?
  25. Seto Kaiba
    All I can tell you is that your hovercraft is full of eels either way.
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