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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Adam Savage once said "Reality makes for a crappy special effects crew." There is a similar principle at work in both the Star Wars prequel trilogy's conclusion and more recent entries like Rogue One, The Force Awakens, and The Last Jedi. The original Star Wars trilogy was a pure science fantasy story arc with an almost literal black-and-white morality to it as the noble and selfless seekers of liberty in the Rebellion clash with the vile minions of tyranny from the Galactic Empire. Since the Senate was dissolved offscreen early in the first film, the only politicians we see are Leia Organa, Mon Mothma, and Lando Calrissian. Lando is the only one who behaves even remotely realistically in that he's mainly just looking out for his own interests and those of his constituents even if it means kowtowing to obviously evil parties to do so. He's still shown behaving as a selfless heroic individual once evil finally pushes him too far... which isn't particularly realistic for a politician. Starting in the prequel trilogy, a deeper look into the corrupt politics of the Old Republic shows us a very familiar "ripped from the headlines" picture of a governing body wherein the politicians invested in maintaining the status quo have little interest in doing anything involving the "greater good" unless their own interests are under direct and immediate threat and otherwise spend their time furthering their own agendas and those of the special interests who back them. The Galactic Civil War was literally started when the Senate issued a rare rebuke to a corporate special interest group (the Trade Federation) after its leadership got busted engaging in blatantly illegal activity and the government of the victimized world made enough noise about it that protecting that corporate special interest group from prosecution by burying the matter in a subcommittee was no longer possible. The actual war was literally the Chancellor wielding the corporate special interests that ran the Confederacy of Independent Systems as an elaborate distraction so that the self-obsessed politicians would gleefully erode the foundations of democracy for him by voting more and more power to him as long as he promised to make the boogeyman he created go away and stop threatening their interests. Likewise, the New Republic Senate being so busy and self-involved as it bickered over scaling back its armed forces and a million other trivial nothings involving establishing its public policy that it almost completely missed a threat that was practically right in front of them is, to borrow a turn of phrase from Disney itself, practically a Tale as old as time. Fairly half of the large empires that fell in antiquity fell for that exact reason... they were so preoccupied with internal matters that they didn't notice or minimized the threat of an invading power until its boot was descending upon their necks. That kind of incredible, incomprehensible stupidity is in fact distressingly common in politics even today. It just doesn't make for particularly exciting storytelling. Realistic depictions of routine politics seldom make for riveting entertainment... that's why C-SPAN's viewership is so low.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    VF-4 development began in 2005, officially. That said, that is pretty clearly the production VF-4 that didn't exist until 2012.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    The First Order doesn't need to occupy every planet in the galaxy in order to become its de facto rulers... they just need to be able to project more force than any other interested party. With the bulk of the New Republic fleet having been wiped out along with all the planets in the Hosnian system, they are now the dominant military power in the galaxy. They're essentially ruling the galaxy using the Klaus Wolfenbach method: "Don't make me come over there." What makes this possible is that Star Wars is a setting where interstellar faster-than-light travel on a pangalactic scale is available to all and sundry. It doesn't take an inordinate amount of effort for the First Order to shift a fleet with more firepower than any one system's defenses can hope to resist, and that fleet can be on your doorstep in a matter of days. It doesn't help that the New Republic, like the Old Republic before it, seemingly concentrated all of its military power into a single centralized armed force. The Old Republic's member worlds had no way to realistically defend themselves from the Grand Army once it turned on them to serve Palpatine. With the New Republic defense forces crippled by the loss of their main fleet, most if not all of its member worlds likely have little in the way of defenses. Had the New Republic not been scaling down its military, it might not be screwed. (IIRC wasn't it a thing in the now-Legends continuity that many of the Rebellion's warships were modified starliners and the like.) That blowing up their massive headquarters installation (Starkiller Base) doesn't seem to have slowed them down much, I think we can surmise that the First Order is VERY VERY BIG. IIRC it's supposed to have been started by Imperial Forces who didn't surrender after Jakku. I'm sure the Disney EU has a lengthy and detailed explanation as to how the New Republic stupidly (yet realistically) ignored a huge and painfully obvious threat brewing on their doorstep. Didn't they also abduct a crap-ton of kids and indoctrinate them into troops like Finn? They're probably only just finding out around the time The Last Jedi takes place. The total loss of the Hosnian system barely gave the people there enough time to look up and go "What's that?", so the sudden loss of communication would not have instantly be interpreted as "The First Order blew it up". It would be down to the Resistance to get word out, and they don't seem to be as big or as connected as the Rebellion was.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    I'll admit I unapologetically ship Mylene x Gamlin in no small part because those two are the only ones outside of Colonel Barton who actually attempt to chastise Basara for his asinine behavior.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    ... this feels like it might be a bad idea. I mean, I know Star Wars fans love Boba Fett and all, but this seems like kind of a one-note concept that'll get old very fast.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    I may be completely wrong, but the impression I got was that the First Order's entire schtick was that they regard themselves as the Galactic Empire's de facto government-in-exile and that the main goal of their overthrow of the New Republic was to restore Imperial governance across the galaxy. That's kind of an awful thing for most of the galaxy, since IIRC the Empire saw non-humans as second class citizens at best and had legal slavery and all kinds of other atrocious behaviors. If the map I found is accurate, we're talking at least half the galaxy... relocating THAT population is a rather big ask, and abandoning them to their fate isn't something the former Rebellion/New Republic would find ethically sound. (Plus, the First Order isn't likely to just let them go and would probably pursue them to wipe them out.) The galaxy's a populous place? I mean, the Old Republic-turned-Empire supposedly controlled most of it, and the First Order's looking to recapture that. Being Space Rome, the rest is the unexplored wilderness and full of who knows how many hostile powers who might resent massive amounts of refugees flooding their space. Stupidity, mostly.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Sort of... it helps to look at WWII organization for the US forces too, since the UN Spacy's squadron organization is a weird melange of US and Imperial Japanese practices drawn from their respective armies, navies, and air forces. They seem to be pulling unit sizes from the Air Force side, IMO. The standard squadron size is the Imperial Japanese Army Air Service's 15 planes, while the maximum in the US Army Air Force in the same period was 24. It's a slightly awkward situation, translation-wise, thanks to the UN Spacy's organization being such an odd mixture of different branches of service and that the IJN organization doesn't line up neatly with the USAF/USN ones. Partly, this is because there is no organizational level between NATO II (Battalion/Squadron) and NATO ••• (Platoon/Flight) in the aviation context. So instead of being Squadron > ??? > Flight, it comes out as Squadron > Flight > Element. Though, in possibly deference to the Battroid's status as a land warfare weapon, they seem to have opted to make Platoon the official translation for that lowest level since that same number (3-4) is what you get in a tank platoon. It's a messy bit of translation, that's for sure.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    No, she just has the outgoing innocent sweetness and periodic foul temper of a teenage girl whose crush is a completely oblivious prat.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Militarily, at least, it's not an unprecedented loss. What the First Order achieved by destroying the Hosnian system is basically what Imperial Japan attempted to accomplish with the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. One swift strike to destroy their enemy's fleet and cripple any attempt to coordinate counter-offensives aimed at preventing their advance. The First Order just had a lot more success since they did it with a super-WMD instead of through a sneak attack with conventional weapons. (WRT putting all one's eggs in a single basket... it's worth remembering that the United States keeps its capitol building and its supreme military headquarters in extremely close proximity to each other as well. They're only about four miles apart, as the crow flies.)
  11. Seto Kaiba
    That's one of the plot threads in The Last Jedi and The Force Awakens that doesn't really make sense when you think about it. The whole reason the Resistance exists is because the New Republic was organizationally aligned to Lawful Stupid, not only having left a significant Imperial remnant kicking around the galaxy but also disbanding a large part of its armed forces to make some kind of bass-ackwards political point. For them to have allies in another part of the galaxy who are powerful enough to realistically challenge the entire First Order militarily but can't be arsed to intervene to save the Resistance kind of means they're not actually allies. If they were supplying the Resistance with weapons and training, it'd be them using the Resistance for plausibly deniable proxy warfare with the First Order the way the US used Afghani insurgents against the Soviets. IIRC, the official explanation of the assertion that the First Order had effectively overthrown the New Republic simply by destroying the Hosnian system was that the Hosnian system happened to be the seat of the New Republic government AND where the bulk of its defense fleet was based. So when the whole system suffered an earth-shattering kaboom, it took the New Republic's entire supranational (supraplanetary?) government and military out of the picture. Really, I don't think Rian Johnson was deliberately setting out to f*ck things up out of malice or even idiocy. He noticed - because you'd have to be a real idiot not to - that The Force Awakens was just a by-the-numbers remake of A New Hope and that the sequel was set to be more of same. He wasn't going to get away with a total plot derailment, so he attacked the script with the manic energy of a writer-director who is either a brilliant visionary or a card-carrying member of the Dunning-Kruger club and injected a few ill-considered twists in an effort to subvert the usual Star Wars narrative of The Chosen One. On some levels it worked pretty well, IMO. Rey is a more interesting character as a blank slate who isn't being railroaded down her path by family ties and a mysterious past. She has more agency as the lead character that way. She's less The Chosen One and more The One Who Chose. On others... well... Canto Bight.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    That's going to be the tricky bit... Rian Johnson pulled a 180 on a fair few subplots from The Force Awakens in The Last Jedi, so Jar-Jar Abrams is gonna have to decide whether he's going to have to abandon those orphaned plot threads or try to unpick the Gordian knot Rian Johnson left him. Considering the First Order basically already won in The Last Jedi, having reduced armed resistance to their agenda to barely enough people to form their own baseball team, it's going to be hard for them to come up with a credible way for the Resistance/Rebellion to turn it around in the space of just one movie.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    It's a factoid that makes some other details given about later-model VFs using heat-sequestration techniques to reduce their visible IR profiles during combat make a bit more sense. The last thing you'd want to do when the standard short-range missile is an imaging infrared seeker is go about emitting heat from every bloody surface... especially since that's a technology intended to make a missile less vulnerable to flare countermeasures. Honestly, when I first started researching 'em I figured they were probably using a mixture of infrared and command guidance since the effective range is so short and thus the possibility of friendly fire is remote. It was inevitable radar would be right out when Macross started making more of a meal out of active stealth technology in Plus and Zero... and, sure as sure, Macross Chronicle indicates that using active radar homing is for medium-range missiles and up since they need powerful ECCM onboard to cope with VF-mounted ECM and active stealth systems.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    MODEX numbers are a tiny bit wrong in the UN Forces vs. what's used by the US today... given that they start at 000 instead of 100. They also seem to include multiple squadrons in a single bracket of MODEX numbers, given that we have some ships with as many as 750 fighters aboard and we have yet to see a four-digit MODEX. (It doesn't help that art for the original series didn't include MODEX numbers, which may have ended up a bit jumbled anyway when the influx of new recruits ended up expanding the Prometheus's squadrons with every spare airframe that was on hand.) It's only books like Master File that show MODEX numbers for the TV series versions... Roy's is given as the standard 001, Hikaru's as 023, Max's as 111, and Hayao's as 112 in Variable Fighter Master File: VF-1 Valkyrie Vol.1. (For Hikaru's, they're drawing on his callsign from his first sortie, where he went by Skull 023.) It's probably better/easier/safer/saner to use their DYRL? MODEX numbers of 001, 011, 012, and 013 for Roy, Hikaru, Kakizaki, and Max respectively. The one time an example squadron organization has been given in an official publication, it was a squadron composed of 15 VF-1's divided into platoons of 3 aircraft apiece. Dialog from the series proper suggests a UN Spacy VF squadron is 15-24 fighters. DYRL? shows the same squadron with platoons of 4 aircraft instead. (It's worth noting that the numbers of variants given in that chart do not jive with the numbers of all the variants aboard the Macross. They have way too few VF-1J's and too many VF-1A's to create the sample disposition. Assuming a DYRL-like composition with a greater number of A-types makes more sense. The numbers in the Sky Angels book shake out almost perfectly for a DYRL?-style squadron and support Master File's contention that the Macross was home to 14 squadrons.) Later Macross titles, starting with Macross: Do You Remember Love?, have variously shown the (New) UN Forces and other organizations using platoons of either 3 or 4 aircraft: SVF-1 Skulls, Skull Platoon in DYRL? was 4 planes Fairy Platoon in II was 4 planes Diamond Force and Emerald Force in 7 were 3 planes apiece Sound Force was 3 planes SMS Skull Platoon was 4 planes (only 3 actual combat models tho) SMS Pixie Platoon was 3 battle suits Alto's NUNS Sagittarius Platoon was 3 planes Macross 30's SMS unit fields a 3 plane platoon Roy leads the squadron's command platoon, which shares the name of the squadron. In DYRL?, Hikaru, Max, and Kakizaki are the other three members of Skull Platoon.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Macross Chronicle suggests that the majority of micro missiles use imaging infrared homing and preset guidance data to independently track targets after launch. Some may equip active laser homing or optical seekers. ("Expanded universe" sources like Variable Fighter Master File have occasionally suggested guidance systems are modular and that this is simply the most common guidance configuration.) Radar homing is noted to be greatly diminished in overall effectiveness due to how prevalent active stealth and ECM systems are on VFs. Consequently, practically all missiles in Macross are of the active or passive self-guided "fire and forget" variety and guidance tech like semi-active homing has fallen out of favor. Most missiles in the Macross universe seem to use at least two guidance technologies. The larger missile types do often use ECCM-equipped active radar homing in addition to both infrared and optical homing.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    If you mean the Thrawn trilogy, I could perhaps agree. The rest... eeech... ... but Kylo's grandad was also a sullen, testy, angsty little emo drama queen who dressed in rather too much leather, had stupid hair, and was stalking an obnoxious girl. Maybe Episode IX will give us Rey chopping off a bunch of his extremities, setting him on fire, and assuming some nearby lava will finish the job so he can come back as a 7'2" asthmatic robo-gimp just like grandpa (but not as cool or menacing). Protip... they're not really the ancient founding texts of the Jedi order. Luke is upset because Rey ran off with his porn stash.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    The Kelvin timeline's Constitution-class USS Enterprise left port ahead of her planned maiden voyage on (or shortly before) 11 February 2258 with a crew of cadets under Captain Christopher Pike. All of the advances gleaned from study of the Narada likely slowed down plans for the Constitution-class's construction to the point of making Pike her first captain. The Prime timeline's Constitution-class USS Enterprise was launched on her maiden voyage on 4 July 2245 under Captain Robert April, who had supervised her construction and testing. The production staff for Star Trek (2009) did confirm the Admiral Archer in question was Jonathan Archer from Star Trek: Enterprise... so we can presume the advances in technology that led to USS Enterprise launching thirteen years later also extended his life at least 12 more years given that he was still alive to ream Scotty for losing his beagle in a transwarp beaming experiment in 2257. (I wonder if that means medicine in the Kelvin timeline found a way to reverse transporter-induced systemic damage? Archer was said to be suffering from peripheral nervous system degradation as the result of overusing the NX-01 Enterprise's primitive transporter. I guess he lucked out on not getting a full-blown case of transporter psychosis.)
  18. Seto Kaiba
    I'd say roughly 0%, but that may be tainted a bit by my complete dissatisfaction with his work on the new series of Star Trek movies... They've done such a good job of making [Ben Solo/Kylo Ren] an unlikeable little b***h, appropriate to his role as a major villain who jumped off the slippery slope feetfirst, that I really don't see a way for them to wrap up his arc short of Redemption Equals Death like they did for Vader. Trying to go any other route, like having him see the light and repent, would just feel like a karma houdini for a guy who's got multiple counts of mass murder on his CV.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    15 June 2010, in Variable Fighter Master File: VF-19 Excalibur, AFAIK. It was included in Macross the Ride's description of the VF-19EF Caliburn the following year. I'm fairly certain that's not it. We're shown a paint scheme for the ARIEL system demonstrator, which includes a logo for the ARIEL system itself. The logo is a sylph, which is the class of air spirits that the character of Ariel in The Tempest arguably belonged to. (Ariel was, admittedly, referred to with male pronouns in The Tempest, even though the character was frequently played by women and the common image of a sylph for centuries has been that they're uniformly female. I blame von Hohenheim.)
  20. Seto Kaiba
    A few side notes with respect to the ANGIRAS, ARIEL, and ARIEL II airframe integration management control systems... ANGIRAS was originally described in the Macross Journal Extra: Sky Angels VF-1 Valkyrie Special Edition doujinshi by Masahiro Chiba. The first mention of ANGIRAS in official setting material was in Macross the Ride, in the official specs for Anthony Clemens' VF-11C Thunderbolt Interceptor. Its airframe control AI was given as the ANGIRAS-GFW204, said to be a high-end version for the VF-11. As with modern control systems, there are individual versions of ANGIRAS, ARIEL, etc. for given models, variants, blocks, etc. of variable craft that customize its performance for that vehicle or add/remove functionality. Only a few have been explicitly named, like the high-end ANGIRAS-GFW204 control AI for the VF-11 mentioned above, the ANGIRAS-AD3 control AI used by the VF-1X (and VF-4?), and the ARIEL II build codenamed "Brunhilde" that was used by the YF-25, VF-19ACTIVE, VF-25, and YF-30 with various adjustments.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, they'll totally stick with it. Archer passing away the day after the TOS Enterprise was commissioned is just too perfect for jerking the fandom's heartstrings. Sato had a pretty sizable hatedom, so they'll likely leave hers alone simply to avoid discussing her. (I'm betting they work it into the Discovery novels about the hunt for Kodos.) EDIT: Esp. in Archer's case, since they established that he was apparently alive around the time the Enterprise was launched in the Kelvin timeline.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    One of the pitfalls of academia... you end up learning a lot of superficially polite-sounding ways to say one of your colleagues is full of crap. Once you've got tenure, the foul language flows a good deal more freely. His paper certainly ticks all the usual checkboxes for a study aimed at grabbing the attention of the mainstream media's sensationalist side. It's a small independent study with a sample size that's far too small to be taken as entirely reliable and a vague conclusion that can be easily reinterpreted by omission to sound far more incendiary. "The Last Jedi haters are all trolls or Russian influencers" sounds a lot more impressive and headline-worthy than "assuming this tiny sample population is a perfect scale representation of the entirety of the Star Wars fandom, that my poorly-explained and highly subjective methodology for determining what constitutes 'trolling' is perfectly valid, and that there are some resemblances on a few accounts to Russian election year social media trolls, I conclude that the hate for The Last Jedi is a secret, evil Russian political campaign intended to undermine our democracy... no, stop trying to take away my tinfoil hat". It's marked as Preprint status, so it hasn't been accepted by any scholarly publication at this time... let alone actually put out for comment. That's the biggest hole in the paper... at no point does Dr. Bay consider that there might have been other motivations for the malicious behavior, like people just being a-holes. He leaps directly to a conclusion that it's part of a sinister social media influence campaign aimed at triggering some kind of sociopolitical upheaval. Seems a bit hyperbolic for angry fans raging about a movie full of angsty space wizard-monks with laser swords. Honestly, as poor as the quality of this study was, I suspect that may have been the point. Dr. Bay does seem to have gone into it with, if not a goal of then a vested interest in, smearing The Last Jedi's critics. Weirdly, thinking back on this, I have to admit I think I might see why the Star Wars fans on the far right seem inclined to hate Disney for brooming the old Expanded Universe to make way for this new trilogy. The old Star Wars EU seems to carry a fairly overt Aesop that democracy doesn't work and that authoritarianism is the only way to get crap done or form a functioning society. There are some shades of this in The Last Jedi vis a vis the commentary on how useless the New Republic is, but it's not nearly on par with the books showing them as an ineffectual and hopeless corrupt bunch of total bunglers who go barely last a century of chaotic democratic rule before the Empire takes over again.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    I've often wondered... high-powered searchlights like the one used for the Bat Signal can easily draw ~7kW in operation. That could get expensive pretty fast. Does Bruce Wayne covertly reimburse the Gotham P.D. for the cost of operating it? Ironic that you'd notice the term in the VF-19's Master File book... the Shinsei Industry VF-19 was the first production VF that didn't use it. ANGIRAS was the first-generation airframe control AI technology that was used on the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Generation Variable Fighters. It's basically the VF's equivalent of the learning computer that the titular Mobile Suit had in the original Gundam series... an AI-based control system that functions as the intermediary between the pilot and the mecha's various systems.1 It's the computer running all the various systems in the VF's "glass cockpit": interpreting control inputs and feedback commands for the digital fiber optic fly-by-wire system2, managing sensor integration and prioritization for the cockpit displays, and overseeing all the various essential systems that would otherwise require a lot of the operator's attention so the pilot can focus on flying. 4th Generation VFs like the VF-19, VF-22, and VF-171 used the next-generation airframe control AI system that was introduced to replace ANGIRAS: ARIEL.3 5th Generation VFs are using an upgraded version of the ARIEL AI system called ARIEL II. 1. In this sense, "ANGIRAS" counts as a punny name or an obscure reference. Angiras was a Vedic sage in Hinduism who was famed in scripture as, among other things, a mediator between men and the gods. 2. The oldest versions of the technical materials mention an AMBAC system as one of the flight control systems it oversees. "Fly" might be a misleading term too, since the same control system (and physical controls) are used for maneuvers in the air and on the ground in the other modes as well. 3. This acronym has not been explained, AFAIK. I suspect it is a reference to the character of Ariel in Shakespeare's The Tempest, an all-seeing spirit of the air who is based on a spirit from renaissance demonology that is described as an Archon of the Winds, Spirit of the Air, and Wielder of Fire.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    On a skim of the paper during a particularly tedious and unnecessary meeting I just escaped, I have to say I find his conclusion specious. Dr. Bay's sample size is vanishingly small at just 967 tweets collected over a 219 day period, focused exclusively on ONE Twitter account (Rian Johnson's). Actual description of his methodology is short and vague, and points to a highly subjective filtering approach beyond the most basic distinction of positive vs. negative commentary. For much of his analysis section he's drawing conclusions based upon circumstantial or insufficient evidence, particularly in connecting Russia to the 33 accounts he categorized as malicious actors based on highly general conditions common to disposable "burner" accounts. While it's true that 3 or 4 of the accounts he examined were purged by Twitter in one of its periodic purges of sockpuppet accounts, he doesn't seem to have even considered that people creating new accounts specifically to behave like jackasses and post inflammatory material is not a hard and fast indicator of an account being part of a Russian influence campaign. It feels rather bizarre that the doctor, a research fellow at the Center for the Digital Future at USC's Annenberg school, would be overlooking or completely discounting the rather more obvious possibility that many of these bad actors are just ordinary trolls and butthurt misogynistic fanboys covering their asses by creating a disposable secondary account. We do live in a time where employers are terminating people over things they post on social media, after all. For the TL;DR crowd... this chap's conclusion feels a bit like McCarthyist paranoia. There's a vague possibility he's onto something, but it feels more like he's jumping at shadows.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Seems like practically everyone wants to take "Russian cyber-interference" as a get-out-of-jail-free card these days... Anyway, an abstract from an unpublished doctoral student's essay with a premise based on vague, highly subjective criteria and with an unnecessarily hyperbolic conclusion hardly seems like a news-worthy topic. I can practically hear his advisor's eyes rolling.
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