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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    One of the more unusual touches in Macross II: Lovers Again's continuity was that the UN Forces were quite blatant in their application of Zentran and Meltran overtechnology. Their new warship classes have acquired Zentradi and Meltrandi aesthetics, they use the space warfare tactics they've learned from their Zentradi and Meltrandi defectors, and their mecha have obvious Zentran and Meltran-inspired design touches. The New UN Forces in the ongoing Macross timeline supposedly do, but you'd never know it outside of being told... except maybe on the YF-21/VF-22.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Not unless he can time travel... because his stated disinterest in revisiting the story and characters of the original Macross series goes back to shortly after Macross: Flash Back 2012 was released when he considered the Macross story to be definitively concluded, and Harmony Gold didn't start to become the legal impediment they are to Macross today until ~2001. "The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined that time travel is impossible." Macross Zero was, put simply, a prequel made during a period where prequels were trendy and the story doesn't really touch on Super Dimension Fortress Macross at all. The gist of it was "Hikaru, Misa, and Minmay's story is over. They've sailed off into the sunset, so let them go."
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Among the improvements identified were enhancements to thermonuclear reaction power systems and actuator technology derived from the capture of a factory satellite specializing in battle suits. All of the Macross II VFs are basically hybrids of the Nousjadeul-Ger and VF concept.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    I've got copies of all the pieces... as a translation it was pretty iffy and they tried to fill in gaps with a lot of wild-ass guesses. Eventually I'll get 'round to publishing a full translation of the original Japanese articles promoting the OVA. Right now I'm working on the old Sky Angels VF-1 Valkyrie tech manual. This ancient version of the lore is just WEIRD.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    It'd be nice to finally get some specs for the YF-24/VF-24. Between what we've been told about how all the other 5th Generation VFs were developed from heavily redacted versions of the YF-24 Evolution spec and how the YF-29 was made in an effort to exceed the YF-24, they do make it sound like a rather over-the-top performer.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    That's anime in general... as a translator-for-fun, I have to say the worst offender I've yet encountered is Masaki Kajishima's Tenchi Muyo! franchise. There's easily twenty or thirty times as much official setting material in his self-published setting books and the official art books than there is in the actual shows, and that's counting the liner notes as part of the shows! To be fair, there WAS a partial translation of the Macross II timeline materials that came out in English fanzines when the OVA was being promoted... but it was kind of an iffy quality translation and it was spread across three or four different publications like Mangazine, Mecha Press, etc. It was a bit odd to see them translate the term for the UN Government as "the Federation". (Someone at Mangazine clearly had Gundam on the brain.) Honestly, the way I always took it was as an affirmation that what mattered wasn't the ship itself, but the message it conveyed. I would! The 5th Generation VF program was THE biggest defense program in the Macross setting since the initial military buildup after Alien Spaceship One landed on South Ataria in '99. It took them 17 years to suss out the problems with the all-important Inertia Store Converter technology that was meant to address the problems that kneecapped the 4th Generation designs in the adoption process, and it's the basis of every single new VF from 2057 on except one. Many of the improvements to 4th Generation VFs were technology backported from its descendants or put on them for evaluation for a future 5th Gen VF.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    This is a very popular misconception, due in part to the Macross II: Lovers Again OVA's supplemental materials not making it to the west and the subject not coming up during the OVA proper. The Unification Government in the Macross II timeline was heavily invested in launching emigrant fleets. They never got as big as the ones in Macross's main/ongoing timeline with millions of people, but they were launching them fairly frequently using a mass-produced version of the Macross-class in addition to the Megaroad-class. The program seems to have been put on hiatus after a particularly brutal war with a Zentradi Army main fleet in 2054 that totalled most of the UN Spacy's fleet in the Sol system... a war that began when a newly launched emigrant fleet headed by the Macross-class ship Million Star blundered directly into a Zentradi fleet only a handful of light years outside the system. The result was, in addition to a small fortune in captured Zentradi military hardware, that the UN Forces had to batten down their proverbial hatches for a bit while their forces were rebuilt and the technological advances wrung from the spoils of war started a second Overtechnology boom that led to a sweeping modernization of their equipment. The Zentradi invasion of 2082 was their first real test of the new warship classes, the VF-2SS Valkyrie II, and much of their other new hardware. (IIRC, in the novelization they did start launching new emigrant ships after the Mardook conflict in 2092.) That had nothing to do with the ship itself... just that the ship's accumulated history happened to broadly match a Mardook myth of a savior-ship from a blue planet that would bring peace. Ingues himself demonstrated (by destroying it) that there really wasn't any special attribute in the ship itself. (Like so many prophecies, that one turned out to be so broadly written that it could mean almost anything to the right reader. Nostradamus was great at that kind of writing himself, which only really required one to let the reader draw their own conclusions and nod along when they start going on about your genius.) (That Ishtar could glean as much from contact with the ship's systems makes more sense when you know that the Mardook were strongly implied to be the descendants of one of the groups of Protoculture refugees that fled the collapse of their civilization.) Super Dimension Fortress Macross is probably not a great way to judge the Zentradi's overall belligerence, since Earth was found by a branch fleet rather than any particularly large formation and said fleet's commander was cautious and inquisitive enough to think terribly hard about why the Supervision Army ship he'd found had been rebuilt into such a nonstandard specification and wonder at the fact that the unknown classes of ship defending the planet were flinging lost technology weapons at him so casually. Basically, Earth lucked the f*ck out because the Zentradi fleet that found them was commanded by a thinking man like Vrlitwhai and not a meathead like Quamzin. Boddole Zer's own presentation to the captured UN Spacy personnel suggests that glassing a planet is basically SOP when there's a confirmed enemy presence. You have to know which ships those are, first... the only reason that approach was workable in the First Space War was that it was proposed by a high ranking Zentradi commander who had just defected in the face of a friendly-fire execution, so his forces knew EXACTLY who to shoot at to undermine the chain of command. Without that inside track on the fleet's organization to know which ships to target, the only viable way to carry it off would be to go after the mobile fortress and sink that... which is a high casualty, low survival rate operation if there ever was one.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    From the composition and font, I'm going to guess it's from one of the semi-recent Hobby Japan mooks about Macross modeling. It's definitely a customized model kit... from the look of it, a VF-25 kit (-A or -G type) with a custom delta wing. You can see it has the VF-25's wing glove.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... 's more like it'd be virtually impossible. The New UN Government knows their victory in 2010 was more by luck than good judgement, and even then over sixty percent of the Boddole Zer main fleet is still out there. There are 2,000+ more fleets just like it kicking around the galaxy. Even the ancient Protoculture took one look at a threat like that and decided to get the heck out of dodge, and they had MUCH better military technology than the New UN Forces did. Essentially, the decision to launch emigrant fleets to spread humanity across the galaxy was mainly predicated on the simple understanding that there was no realistic way to defend one planet from something like that once without colossal loss of life... and doing it repeatedly was right out. Their chances were better spreading the species out across the galaxy so the loss of any one planet was not an extinction-level threat and they could slip through the cracks while they got back on their collective feet. (This is in sharp contrast to the UN Forces in the "DYRLverse" timeline of Macross II: Lovers Again, which by 2092 had successfully fended off or otherwise defeated five more main fleets using the Minmay Attack stratagem that worked so well in the First Space War and were getting more than slightly overconfident about it when the Mardook showed up with a fresh-baked humble pie as a getting-to-know-you gift.) It'd still be brown trousers time and Earth would absolutely be calling for reinforcements from Eden and its other neighboring systems, but Earth definitely has the biggest guns at their disposal thanks to being the New UN Government's leader in technology. As far as I'm aware, there weren't any battles in the play at all... just a hostage situation.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    There is also a brief mention of the YF-24 in the liner notes for the sixth volume of the Macross Frontier blu-rays.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    That is, or so I have been told, the reason that Kaifun's cover band was Fire Bomber American... the Macross-11's city section was supposedly modeled on an unspecified US city. I'd imagine Kaifun is pretty content there. He has a band that is at least locally popular, even if it's reviled everywhere else, and he has a military he can rail at endlessly which probably doesn't know or care that he exists. Basara's attitude towards pacifism seemed to be pretty darn liberal. It kind of reminds me of Dr. Phlox's interpretation of the Hippocratic Oath from Star Trek: Enterprise... he won't cause harm (physical injury), but he can inflict as much pain as he likes. Basara seems to be just fine with strictly non-lethal violence. After all, he spends much of the first part of the series shooting at enemy VFs with that speaker pod launcher, and you'd have a hard time characterizing that as a non-violent act. Either that or he's simply blind to the possibility of hurting or killing someone by accident, like when he fired a Speaker Pod Gamma into the bridge of Gepernich's ship that caused a loss of atmospheric containment. The Humankind Seeding Project wasn't to avoid humanity becoming overly militarized... it was because they knew full bloody well their "victory" over the Boddole Zer main fleet was them getting stupid lucky, and wanted to spread out into the galaxy to avoid presenting a single target that could result in the extinction of the human species. They sent the emigrant fleets out into deep space with a large military escort because the galaxy is a dangerous place and the only reasonable approaches to dealing with a rogue Zentradi fleet are not getting seen in the first place (preferred), legging it (next best), or maximum overkill (if running away won't work). Now that I don't know. Macross the Musiculture was a stage play, so the fleet's total disarmament is presented as a simple fact and not really gotten into because the important bits are the character drama about the political situation.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Hulu appears to have picked up Akane Iro ni Somaru Saka, which I mentioned way back when has a brief appearance by Colonel Jeffrey Wilder from Macross Frontier.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    When those shots were doing the rounds on Facebook IIRC it was mentioned that venue is in Chile... South America's got kind of a China-like reputation for not really giving a damn about IP laws, tho I have mainly heard that in relation to software and video piracy.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Bets on whether this ends up merged into the Newbie and Short Questions thread or Super Macross Mecha discussion thread? EDIT: Newbie and Short Questions thread it is! None that has been announced. Given that the YF-24 Evolution has never actually appeared except as a wireframe drawing in one very brief shot in Macross Frontier and the VF-24 production type has only ever been alluded to, it seems profoundly unlikely one will be made unless some future show should prominently feature New UN Forces troops from Earth itself. There is no story. It's mentioned in passing in an explanation of the YF-24's development history in the Macross encyclopedia Macross Chronicle (Technology Sheet 01P: Variable Fighter Development History 4). Variable Fighter Master File: VF-25 Messiah talks briefly about the YF-24 and VF-24's development in connection with the VF-25's, but the total material is less than a page's worth of text on pages 18-19. Those two pages are mostly dominated by clean versions of the same line art used in the screencap above.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, he is... but Macross-11 is also quite literally Space!'Murica, so he's kind of pissing into the wind there. At least in Variable Fighter Master File, Macross-11 shows a very American enthusiasm for having the latest explody bits... they were early adopters of both the VF-19 and VF-25. Page 122 of the VF-25's volume has an exemplar from their forces, a VF-25S-6 from the SVF-188 Firestars. Weirdly, the ship they're said to be based on is instead named for a British Royal Navy Rapana-class merchant aircraft carrier (MV Acavus), which was a converted oil tanker operated by Royal Dutch Shell in World War II. (Or at least I'm pretty sure that's what it's named for. The only alternative I can find for that name is a genus of air-breathing land snail native to Sri Lanka.) EDIT: Turns out it's both... all nine Rapana-class ships were originally named for genera of mollusc: Acavus, Adula, Alexia, Amastra, Ancylus, Gadila, Macoma, Miralda, and Rapana. Clearly Royal Dutch Shell had a sense of humor at one point... It never really comes up outside of the original series and Macross the Musiculture... so we're 50/50 on whether people realize total pacifism a dumb idea in-universe. (Funnily enough, @Jack Verse and I were watching the dub of Gundam Wing while we waited for our respective flights out after Super Dimension Con, and between Relina's endless carping about it and shouting for Heero to come and kill her it all became rather absurd. Decorum was lost completely when we realized General Septem is voiced by the same guy who did Nappa in Dragon Ball Z.) Kaifun was kind of his own worst enemy. Being a massive hypocrite and unlikeable bellend meant he was only able to find an audience after the war ended, and only then by riding Minmay's coattails. It kind of died out the minute she dumped him, though he was never particularly convincing as a kung fu guy who seemed to enjoy picking fights. The Neo Zentran movement in Macross the Musiculture clearly understand what's wrong with Serge Glass's policies, but Vigo Walgria tries to stupidly take responsibility for the coup attempt which he had zero actual involvement in, and instead ends up knuckling under to Glass's pacifism and going forward with an insanely stupid plan to try and shift the fleet's economy to entertainment media... through the Miss Macross contest, which most fleets already have one of.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Didn't know we had one of those... Anyway, it only took a minute or two of judicious Google power user-ing to find out who our generally trustworthy friend on these forums who said that this was not an animation error. It was @Renato, in a post dated 20 January 2004. It sounds like it'd probably come up a few times before that, but those posts may have been archived or lost. If he has a print source for that statement, I'd be thrilled to know what it is. (I don't doubt him, it's just that if there's a print source with goodies like that hidden in it who knows what else may be in there? It may be an untranslated portion of a book we already have, since we do kind of neglect the crap out of the interviews in art books...)
  17. Seto Kaiba
    The 59th Large-Scale Long-Distance Emigrant Fleet's government adopted a policy of total pacifism after getting swept up in a philosophical movement of "spreading culture to the galaxy". The fleet's population has a lot of people who moved there to get away from the fighting in other fleets, which colored their attitudes and political views accordingly. As policy goes, it was one of those idealistic arguments that sounds great on paper but fails in real-world application because of human nature. Making total pacifism, unarmed neutrality, and confrontation-avoidance into national policy swiftly rendered Macross-29 into the galaxy's doormat. With a willfully weak negotiating position, it didn't take long for their trade negotiations with their neighbors to become exploitative to the point that the Macross-29 fleet was nearing economic collapse due to a crippling trade deficit. (Macross the Musiculture's plot revolves around a rearmament movement called Neo Zentran which emerged in response to the fleet's high unemployment and other economic difficulties. Their main goal is to defeat incumbent mayor Serge Corvin/Glass in the next election so they can institute new policies aimed at rebuilding the fleet's military and renegotiating its trade agreements from a much stronger position. Unfortunately, idiocy prevails when hardliners from the Neo Zentran party try to launch a coup instead and the fleet government stubbornly tries to stick to pacifism and rebuild its economy through the entertainment industry instead.) Pretty much... the problems it causes are the crux of the plot in Macross the Musiculture.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    We have good cause for optimism... We know Harmony Gold's license expires on 14 March 2021. They've soured their relations with Tatsunoko Production in an arbitrated legal dispute over the royalties owed for home video licensing, complete with infuriating Tatsunoko with some stupid claims that they owned Tatsunoko-copyrighted IP from Southern Cross and MOSPEADA. Tatsunoko Production's parent company, Nippon TV, reportedly wants to keep its properties on a shorter leash. Tatsunoko itself has been conciliatory towards Big West lately as well.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    It was a thought that occurred to me back when Macross Delta was in the runup to the series finale, when Deadfish subs included a translator's note that baselessly claimed Lady M was Lynn Minmay... which caused a great big ruckus. No existing character met the criteria to secretly be Lady M, the wealthy industrialist who founded Xaos as an interstellar communications firm in the wake of the First Space War. A new character's connections would have to be non-trivial, and when it was revealed that Mikumo was a clone that just sort of clicked. Meanwhile, Berger Stone is lurking in the back of the karaoke booth pounding glasses of oolong-hai with a pained "I told you so" expression... I'll be pretty damned disappointed if it has. On the one hand, it'll give me time to get my new project at least partly up to speed before I have to start contending with material from a new TV series. On the other hand, it means we're stuck with a sequel to Macross Delta... which is all kinds of totally unnecessary. Macross Delta's story might have just sort of lurched to a graceless, screeching halt in the TV series rather than coming gracefully to its conclusion, but it did in fact end and there wasn't really a story hook to build a sequel onto. Macross doesn't need a movie with an excuse plot so an idol group can have a two-hour animated concert. Moreover, Walkure emphatically does not need the help. Unlike Mari, Walkure isn't really bearing the onus of being the girls from that show, so for self-promotion they're not really dependent on Macross. They'll probably still be doing great when the Macross Delta series is inevitably forgotten in a few years.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    And they're all too polite to say anything about her tone-deaf caterwauling, so we can get a nice bunch of comedic reaction shots.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Oh hell yes. They need to do this... complete with clone!Mikumo gritting her teeth and cringing at how bad of a singer her gene-donor "mother" is. Bonus points if it occurs in a karaoke booth. ... does it really count as an arc if it never actually comes up and 99% of it occurs offscreen and utterly without explanation?
  22. Seto Kaiba
    First they'd have to actually sit down and decide who Lady M is... Delta's creators never determined an identity for her, Berger Stone's baseless rumor-mongering notwithstanding. (Personally, my suspicion is that Lady M is the original Mikumo Guynemer, the genetic donor whose DNA was merged with the Protoculture ruins DNA to create the Walkure member Mikumo.)
  23. Seto Kaiba
    From what I can find on the official channel, it's just Build Fighters, 00, Wing, and Iron-Blooded Orphans. Google Play has only Iron-Blooded Orphans, Unicorn RE:0096, and 00. (For some reason, Fafner in the Azure shows up as a Gundam show on Play?)
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Yup... though, from the production art and animation model sheets, one might get entirely a wrong idea of what they were intending to do with her. (Someone on the art staff is definitely an ass man, and everyone on the writing staff is an ass, man.) ... not sure that's really a flashback, since the same image shows up in Berger Stone's little "Uta wa heiki" Powerpoint slideshow in episode 19. More an illustrative image, I expect. Or, since Mikumo was effectively a bio-android, a genetic memory of her original purpose encoded into her program. Still, that'd be hilarious. People were already accusing Macross Delta of ripping off Macross II... and that would put it beyond any hope of claiming the resemblance was coincidental.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    As far as which streaming services have which Gundam shows presently (US): Netflix Mobile Suit Gundam UC (OVA Ver.) Hulu Plus New Mobile Report Gundam Wing Mobile Suit Gundam 00 Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans Mobile Suit Gundam: the Origin Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn (OVA Ver.) Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn RE:0096 Mobile Suit Gundam Seed (Remastered Edition) Mobile Suit Gundam: the 08th MS Team Crunchyroll Mobile Fighter G Gundam New Mobile Report Gundam Wing New Mobile Report Gundam Wing: Endless Waltz Mobile Suit Gundam SEED (Remaster) Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny Mobile Suit Gundam 00 Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn RE:0096 Gundam Build Fighters Gundam Build Divers
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