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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    That is, I believe, from Macross Graffiti... so it's official art. There have been a couple different dates given for Hikaru and Misa's wedding, IIRC. Two of the four I'm aware of were October 10th (of 2011 or 2012), the others were in June of either 2012 or 2013.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah... well, you can't please some of the people any of the time. More like a release timeline. Since my new project's tentative launch date falls between expected airdates for the new Macross show's promos and the start of actual broadcast, what I'm wondering is if people prefer the typically light coverage a new series gets right when it first airs to take priority over older shows, or if I should hold off until the new series produces some publications with real meat on their bones. How important would you say it is to have trivia for a new show right away is what I'm asking, I guess.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Ah well, it isn't that long until Halloween... by which point we should have something about the new series to talk about besides how much everyone doesn't like ___________________ in a previous series. Random question... a newly launched reference site, would you prefer it to start with the new series and go backwards, or start with the oldest and go forwards? As I've noted before, it's not like they actually pulled a Karma Houdini... the unspoken consequences of their actions are going to hurt like a cast-iron b*tch in time. It wouldn't really be Macross's typical upbeat self if the ending was watching Windermere's infrastructure collapse as its economy goes to pieces and the government implodes. No he didn't... he just shot Grace, and who knows if that was even Grace's real/main body. She has reserves. The ending of the series shows Macross Galaxy is still out there, they just lost their Battle-class ship and some escorts. No it doesn't. The UN Forces in Macross 7 weren't pro-war... Basara was just too autistic to notice he was the test pilot in a military secret program to improve the Minmay Attack in order to stop battles faster. His VF-19 and literally every other piece of Sound Force equipment and technology was paid for, developed, built, maintained, repaired, and provisioned by the military. Poor Colonel Barton put up with so much garbage from Basara despite being responsible for all of Basara's fame and success and just wanting Basara to work with the military so he'd stop getting their pilots killed.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    On a skim, the development history of the VF-1EX on the preceding pages has some info about the general origins of the model but nothing particularly detailed about why it was necessary to graft a VF-25's nose onto the base model VF-1 they were using. There are a bunch of references to a new (Master File original) VF-1 variant that isn't documented anywhere I can find called the VF-1Z. This reads a bit like a summary of mule vehicle development... cobbling something together with off the shelf parts while you wait for production-intent hardware. It looks like the VF-25 cockpit ended up grafted on because they wanted the integrated sensors, avionics, airframe control AI, and vortex flow controller. Each new iteration walks it back a bit more towards the VF-1's base shape once the tech from the VF-25 can be properly repackaged. Version 1 seems to have integrated the ARIEL AI and avionics package but retained the VF-25 radar and VFC, while Version 2 repackaged the radar system and Version 3 updated to production-intent VFC.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Has anyone taken a whack at the three Star Trek: Discovery novels released thus far? Looks like the first one was penned by one of my least favorite Trek authors, David Mack. Dayton Ward did the second one, and the third by James Swallow (whose work I know more from WH40K). All three appear to be prequels to the first season of the TV series. Desperate Hours looks to be the story of how Burnham got the XO position on the Shenzhou, Drastic Measures is about the Tarsus IV massacre focusing on Lorca and Georgiou's involvement (I guess this may be the only story thus far which features the real Lorca), and the third Fear Itself is a Saru-centric story.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    I've not read the book thoroughly, but from what I've skimmed it looks like five sentences on that subject is all we get... three describing the v0 and two for the v1. I guess the v3 version is the one that's meant to correspond to the version actually seen in Macross Delta. Master File does seem to be out in left field a bit on page 110 when it's describing how the VF-1EX compares to the early and late model VF-1s in performance terms. One of its charts shows the top speed of the early, late, and EX versions at 10km. Where this becomes problematic is that it shows the early VF-1 topping out at Mach 3, the late at 3.5, and the EX at 6.4... which is not only wrong in three of three categories, but would also make the VF-1EX significantly faster than any other VF in the franchise at that altitude (even the YF-29 tops out at Mach 5.5 at that altitude). The early type VF-1s (A/B/D/J/S) officially topped out at Mach 2.71 at that altitude. Master File puts the VF-1X/P types in its spec at Mach 2.81 and 2.83 respectively, and those were its "late" type. The VF-1X+ is official Macross's late type, and that can only hit Mach 3.05 at 10km. The VF-1EX official spec that was published in the Macross Delta BD liner notes puts its top speed at Mach 2.89. This is one of those bouts of completely unnecessary extra variants that Master File's writers love to pad their books with that drive me nuts, because most of them are just silly. (I'm not sure which of them was worst... that one VF-22 that looks like a Kamen Rider mask or the VF-31 with the massive rockets twice the size of the fighter instead of wings.)
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Well, being back on topic lasted all of about six and a half hours...
  8. Seto Kaiba
    *Quietly hums the Final Jeopardy music*
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Nope. This latest Macross series appears to be using a similar release timeline to the previous two, so if the pattern holds there won't be any news until at least the end of September (the title announcement) and nothing with any substance to it until the end of October (first trailer).
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, FedEx will usually only accept a signature at the door for international parcels requiring a signature. The option I've found works the best with FedEx is their "Hold at Location" option in the app. That lets you redirect your package to any nearby FedEx Office or depot at no cost and usually with no delay, where they'll hold it for pickup at your leisure for 5 days. The FedEx Office storefronts are usually open 'til like 11pm, which makes the whole affair a LOT more convenient than trying to catch a delivery driver. (UPS offers a similar service, but the redirect costs $5.)
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Got my copy of Variable Fighter Master File: VF-1 Battroid Valkyrie today... picked it up on my way in to the office. Giving it a skim now while I wait for a conference call with Beijing to start. It's definitely written to a higher standard than the VF-4, VF-22, and VF-31 books. The first 51 pages seem to be the standard VF-1 Valkyrie development history stuff, but the good stuff starts on page 52. I see some references being made to Sky Angels content on page 61, there's a really good diagram of the hip articulations on page 63, some really excellent diagrams of how the main and sub nozzles in the engines work in the legs/feed on 66-67, 71-73 have some excellent diagrams of the engine interiors of the FF-2001 and the later models earlier Master File volumes suggest replaced it in later blocks (the one for the FF-2001 appears to be an updated version of the diagram in Sky Angels), the gunpod section on 81 has the two alternate gunpods that were used in early SDF Macross concept art of the battroid. Pages 89-95 definitely deserve special mention for showing how the actual controls WORK, which is just wonderful. (There is a very slight error on the throttle lever markings, with Overboost labeled at 200% power, but the official line art for the Block 6+ cockpit shows it at 240%.) There's nothing really remarkable after that point though. All told, not quite as good as the first two Variable Fighter Master File: VF-1 Valkyrie books... but that's complaining it isn't perfect, and it's definitely a return to form and vastly superior to the Squadrons book and the last three volumes of the series.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    I could see that... though that'd just make me wonder why they didn't go with the square hands from the outset. My guess would be that it may have something to do with structural reinforcement, since the rounded hand would make internal bracing more difficult. Possibly something to do with grip stability too, since I've seen a few remarks that imply the gunpod's main power sources is an external tap into the VF's power distribution system via the hand. Well, I'll draft a PM shortly then. Yeah, that's still a year or two in the future. We have a lot of large carnivorous reptiles in the house, so baby-proofing is going to be... complicated.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... honestly, I think Kirsten Beyer is doing rather too good a job at emulating the TV characterization of the Star Trek: Voyager cast.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    I swear, online package tracking is a special kind of psychological torture... "yes, the book you want is in our local depot, but you can't come get it until we've already tried and failed to deliver it once". I guess it's still better than UPS's approach of having zero states between "label generated" and "delivery exception". I really want to dig into the parts in the new book about the differences in the design of the VF-'s hands between blocks 5 and 6. I don't recall any official setting publication ever attempting to address the why of the design change. That's been one of my major nagging questions about the VF-1 for ages. Be careful when you make an offer like that... you might find I take you up on it. As far as I can suss out, it's only a legal problem if the translation itself is commercialized as in a Kickstarter or Patreon. Paying to commission a translation out of the project budget or donated money and making the resulting translation available at no cost is a much lower level of risk (and, for this purpose, could arguably qualify as Fair Use under certain conditions). If you're serious with that offer, I'll be back with a request for quotes on a couple books in your inbox in a month or two once I'm done setting up hosting and getting the necessary equipment. Ah, yeah... day jobs are ever the necessary evil of the hobbyist. The reason I'm finally able to get cracking on this project now after initially drafting it in 2013 is my 9-5 has finally started to settle down into actually being a 40 hour work week instead of 60-80. It's been so long since I've had proper free time I barely know what to do with myself.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Hey now, don't be selling Janeway short. One of the first things she did upon getting stranded in the Delta Quadrant was use an illegal subspace weapon to destroy the Caretaker's array... and she started as she meant to go on. She destabilized all of Kazon space, got into a shooting war with the Krenim, poked her oar into the Borg's war with Species 8472, she unleashed the Vaadwaur on an unsuspecting quadrant, picked a fight with the Voth, picked a separate fight with the Borg TWICE, her crew invaded the Q Continuum to get involved with their civil war, etc. That's not counting the relaunch, where her actions in "Endgame" causes two more Borg invasions that caused an assimilation virus to spread on Earth, destroyed dozens of planets, and left 63 billion dead and wiped out 40% of Starfleet, almost destroying the Q Continuum and the universe at the same time, destabilizing the largest Delta Quadrant government, makes the war between the Rilar and Zahl so destructive that one side resorts to bringing troops in from alternate realities, and may be headed into ANOTHER war with the Krenim. It's kind of amazing that the Federation hadn't made renewed contact with that bunch in seven centuries... Starfleet launched its first quantum slipstream starship barely six years after USS Voyager left their system, so they would've had it for 694 years by the point the Doctor was reactivated.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Just two more months, chaps... (Assuming they're using a similar release schedule to the last two Macross shows.)
  17. Seto Kaiba
    I guess... though Eden's normally put right up there with Earth in terms of wealth, technology, and trade status. You'd think they'd do a higher quality job than that, esp. considering the Earth NUNS still uses Eden's New Edwards TFC for evaluating new fighters. Sadly, my copy of the new book is STILL in transit. FedEx won't have it for me until Monday. Nah, I want to stay away from anything that might look like an attempt to profit from publishing translations since unlicensed translations are at best a grey market undertaking. What I'm aiming for, style-wise, is kind of like a web version of Macross Chronicle... but with proper source citations linking to English translations of the cited source, coverage in more depth, and covering topics outside the animated canon like Master File or the novels. We're tentatively planning to launch 1/1/2019. Still workin' out the kinks in the site's cascading stylesheets... I am WAY out of practice in web design.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    It makes you wonder if that guy from "The Neutral Zone" who went on to become the UFP Secretary of Commerce ever told his new employers he bankrolled Project Chrysalis and was thus indirectly responsible for the Eugenics Wars. IMO, it did make the events of "Endgame" a bit easier to stomach with the implication that the reason Janeway didn't face charges for her many flagrant breaches of the Temporal Prime Directive was because 31st century Federation Temporal Agency agents bent a few ears in the 24th century. It's a bit of fridge horror that Agent Noi's assurances that things would work out and Janeway would absolutely suffer karmic retribution later were what mollified Dulmer and Lucsly, considering... She definitely has more apocalypses under her belt... plus at least one entire civilization that thinks she's Space Napo-Hitler.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    While they appear to be a reuse of the CG model for the Cheyenne destroid's rotary cannons from Macross Zero... the firepower's probably serious business as a 2067-era rotary cannon on a pack that's traditionally used for heavy combat and anti-ship duties. (Considering the VF-31's got railguns on those arms too, I'd guess probably least a 30mm round... very likely at or over the 4km/s that the standard starting in the 2040s.)
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, that's pretty much what I've been banging on about... tastes are different between fans in Japan and the west, and since we're barely a rounding error in the grand scheme of the Macross fandom they're not going to pander to our wants and needs where they diverge from those of the Japanese fandom. Suffering blunt metaphors trauma from my alcohol analogy? Nobody was making that point though. The actual point that was being made was that our tastes aren't really under consideration here for development of future Macross shows because we're such a small minority in the overall Macross fandom. They're going to appeal to their main demographic, the new teenage viewers and Macross fans in Japan... the audience that actually did like Macross Delta, loved Macross 7, and was indifferent to Macross Plus. It's those people, voting with their wallets and their televisions, who are influencing what goes into the next Macross. TBH, I'm mostly thinking of the older fans I talk to on the various Macross groups on Facebook. Most of them are pretty adamant that 7 was garbage, Delta was garbage, were unsatisfied with Frontier, and seemingly won't settle for anything that isn't the second coming of Macross Plus. (The other common refrain is the equally-unlikely but far easier to understand bunch who wish for a direct sequel to Macross: Flash Back 2012 to continue the story of Hikaru, Misa, and Minmay.) The Old Guard here on MacrossWorld... no way. They were (and are) die-hard Macross 7 fans. and they're generally pretty positive about Macross Delta too. Their tastes are likely more in tune with Japanese audience's than ours are. Unfortunately many of them no longer come here for various reasons. Despite not being the easiest chaps to get along with (the pot calling the kettle black, I know) they were some of our most knowledgeable fans and not having them active here anymore is a loss to the community. It used to be II that was the whipping boy series before Delta came along. Was this topic ever honestly ON the rails? It was already veering towards the "Man, f*ck Delta" mess with the very first reply, not even an hour after it was posted.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    You mean Dr. Aries Turner? She wasn't so much a "childhood love interest" as an old girlfriend from Roy's time as an archaeology major before he joined the UN Forces. The events Claudia describes in her flashback in Super Dimension Fortress Macross Ep.33 occur around February 2007, between the establishment of the training center on South Ataria island in January and the start of flight testing on the VF-X1 the following month. The events of the Macross Zero OVA occur in July 2008, almost a year and a half later. Roy and Claudia met not long after the Russian separatists withdrew from the Anti-Unification Alliance, which official histories consider the ending of the Unification Wars. The actual fighting didn't come to an end until almost two years later, after the fallout of the Mayan island incident in Macross Zero caused the Alliance and its organized resistance to UN Gov't control to collapse and left the UN Forces free to mop up the remaining regional conflicts by the end of 2008.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Star Trek has always been a bit camp, so the groan-inducing moments never really felt unnatural in the "Prime Continuity" titles. J.J.'s Star Trek movies take themselves completely seriously though, a move that makes the intentionally campy bits feel incredibly forced and the unintentional ones feel narmy as hell. Discovery's got the same problem of trying to be Serious Business... which is enough to take several characters like Tilly who would otherwise have merely been late-TNG Wesley levels of obnoxious to the status of "The Most Annoying Sound". I get that they're trying to be inclusive by having one of the recurring minor characters be someone on the spectrum, but Tilly would've been annoying in a regular Trek show and in a grittily serious attempt at Trek she just becomes a Hate Sink. I've had @Talos twisting my arm to get me to read more Star Trek novels for years. It started with the relaunch books, then Starfleet Corps of Engineers. Lately, it's moved on to Vanguard, the short DTI series, and some of the older stuff. I just finished Shield of the Gods in the DTI series the other day. The writing in the novels these days is SO MUCH BETTER than what's coming from Discovery and the movies. Well, except for the Star Trek: Voyager relaunch... the writers there made the dual mistake of accurately replicating Janeway's bipolar, incredibly self-destructive behavior from the TV series and continuing Voyager's serial escalation to the point that every new book seems to require a universe-ending event that is incredibly traumatic for Janeway. (I mean, really... where do you GO from being responsible for saving the Q Continuum from an apocalypse?)
  23. Seto Kaiba
    I've got a new site in the works that aims to address that particular want... we hope to launch early next year, though it'll probably take years to get through all the Master File books. If HG were to lose the Macross license and its associated trademarks, there wouldn't be any obstacle to SoftBank releasing these books in the US in English. That's an IF that's still 2 3/4 years down the road though. Kickstarter, I think, would not be the best platform anymore... while Robotech RPG Tactics wasn't a proper Macross product, it's still a Macross-connected product that's connected to a big scandal on Kickstarter and it'll be years before that mess is gone and forgotten.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    That's more a mid-2019 question, assuming release schedules work out the way they seem to be headed. If Delta's movie sells well in export sales, it may well end up with official English subs as well... "We" in this case being a very small minority among the western Macross fandom, which itself is such a small percentage of the total Macross fandom that Macross's creators are barely aware that it exists at all. To wit, your discontent is mathematically insignificant in general terms... never mind your own, rather esoteric, tastes. Many western Macross fans, myself included, will continue to support new releases even if they're not exactly what we were hoping for because we love Macross and want to see more of it. Particularly for recent releases, since we want to encourage Macross's creators to make more material available to us in English so that fans who don't speak/read Japanese won't be dependent on grey market materials like fansubs and fan translations. Macross was never a serious work of science fiction. Indeed, if you ask Kawamori he'll tell you that the whole science fiction setting is just an elaborate framing device for the love story. It's always been that way, and it likely always will be. Macross is really not about giant robots, space war, and alien invasions... it's about love and music's power to communicate. More a distillation of the core themes about music's power to communicate. In that regard, it wasn't all that different from the love triangle in the original series. Minmay was so categorically oblivious to Hikaru's interest in her that she doesn't notice until literally after the end of the world. Even then, it still takes her a year or two to really get her head around it and by then it's too late. It had to be a bit lighter and softer... it was aimed at a younger audience than was typical for Macross, and during a period where anime was lighter and softer in general. (Look at its Gundam contemporary... Mobile Fighter G Gundam.) Macross in general isn't exactly aimed at the 30- and 40-somethings out there... it's targeted to the secondary school students (and maybe college students).
  25. Seto Kaiba
    "Good" is a purely subjective value judgement. "Well-received" is synonymous with "popular", which can be measured objectively via average viewership and merchandising sales. "Well-received" can be seen as synonymous with "Good" in the sense that a show that is well-received is one which a large audience subjectively judges to be good. Macross's creators and owners are, after all, running a business here. They'll go for what they think will be well-received because the goal is to turn a profit on these shows and their merchandise. That's why I'm pretty sure the news series isn't likely to be what older western fans want. They're going to be appealing to the younger, Japanese fans which make up their target television audience. While I don't wish to say or in any way imply your opinion isn't a valid one, it is essentially illustrative of what I'm getting at. Macross 7 was, in the final analysis, a distillation of Macross's core themes into a purer form than we usually got them in. It has more of the essence of Macross than almost any other title... more of what the Japanese audience has repeatedly said they want. Let's abuse an alcohol metaphor for a moment. The power of music is to Macross what ethanol is to booze. Anyone who said it wasn't essential to the experience is generally seen as a crazy person, but individual opinion differs wildly about how much is appropriate in a single serving. Plus is kind of like a microbrewery beer. It's sophisticated and artsy and impressive sounding, but there's not a lot of substance to it and it lacks punch. Macross 7's the opposite extreme... like shots of Everclear. It sounds like a fantastic idea when you're young and it's all but guaranteed to be a wild ride, but when you get older it sounds like less and less of a good idea. The other shows are sophisticated blends with varying degrees of kick to 'em. a cabinet of hard liquors. Big West and Satelite are marketing to a younger crowd in Japan... the viewers who are looking to indulge for indulgence's sake. They're gonna try a bit of everything, but they're going to hit the hard stuff first and fast.
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