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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, we already did the time travel schtick in Macross 30, and you know how Kawamori hates to do the same thing twice. If yoiu're going for VF girls, why not cut out the middleman and just adopt Strike Witches as a Macross series... Chris Hansen needs work, y'know. Nah, that was some garbage about a stable time loop, the original trio's kids growing up to be evil bald space Romans in ugly dresses, and magic flowers being The Force.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Fairly often, in fact... though it varies from franchise to franchise based on how official the franchise's supplementary works are and how much oversight there is. One of the most overt recent examples was the 2009 Star Trek movie. That entire film was set up by a comic miniseries that explained the supernova event, its threat to the galaxy, Spock's involvement, how the Narada came to possess Borg technology, and why Nero is so incredibly butthurt about all of it. The film's plot only really makes complete sense if you've read it. Star Trek: Enterprise season five was also headed that way before cancellation, vis a vis tapping TAS for ideas. Star Wars does this fairly frequently too... though less often under Disney as they used to, if only as the inevitable result of ditching almost the entire Expanded Universe. I'm given to understand, from a coworker, that Halo also does a lot of referencing its side stories with recent titles. Most any superhero TV show practically runs on this and nothing else. Gundam practically runs on minutiae from its "for fans" side stories these days... they're literally on their third TV series about Gunpla, never mind animated features like Gundam Unicorn that run on MSV designs. The whole franchise is coasting on nostalgia, in-jokes, and homages to stuff that the casual viewer probably hasn't seen. Macross also gets into this pretty heavily, though it's usually not the focus of the story. There have been quite a few points where supplemental materials "for fans" are the only ones explaining WTF was actually going on, like how Macross Perfect Memory is the only place to get an explanation of what occurred during the timeskip in Super Dimension Fortress Macross, or Macross Delta's entire backstory being set up in side story manga titles. Perhaps... perhaps not. CBS's boasts about Star Trek: Discovery not needing the existing Star Trek fandom to succeed didn't last very long once the series went to "air". Pride cometh before the fall, and all that. By the show's mid-season break they were almost literally begging Star Trek fans to watch the show, and Netflix's management ended up rather unhappy with the ROI on the season. The second season looks to be shaping up to the film equivalent of standing outside a girl's bedroom window begging her to take you back, with Discovery going well out of its way to reference classic Star Trek as much as it can as if to say "we're a real Star Trek show, honest!". Standard industry practice is to dump expanded universe content that hasn't been pre-vetted by the franchise creative staff... not necessarily ALL expanded universe content. One thing that sets the Star Trek relaunch continuity apart from the standard EU material is that there's a rigid set of controls on content instead of unfettered silliness like what went on in the Star Wars EU that Disney tossed. Yeah, but that's comics... with one or two exceptions, those have never been regarded as canon by even the relaunch novelverse. Also, it's the Mirror Universe. As long as it's stupidly grimdark and gritty nobody really cares. There isn't even really a guarantee that the same mirror universe is being visited between different shows, thanks to the quantum nature of alternate realities in Star Trek. Much more likely than it would otherwise be, given the presence of a relaunch writer on the show's staff AND the recent renewal of Pocket Books's license.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    We know literally nothing... not even the title. That state of affairs will likely persist until at least late September, possibly late October, when they'll give us the title and maybe a teaser trailer if the pattern holds. You could've saved yourself some typing and stopped after six words!
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, I was unsurprised when CBS announced that Star Trek: Discovery season two was going to redesign the Klingons again. I have a feeling the Discovery Klingons will be written off one of two ways: As with the TNG Trill, they'd be written off as an ethnic minority on their home world... presumably, in this case, one given to extremes of religious fervor. (I'd expect CBS to go this route, and only notice that it turns undercover Voq's casting into fridge racism after people start biting their heads off for it again.) Another species or subspecies of Klingon that evolved in parallel with the modern Klingons, ala Neanderthals or the Menk from Enterprise. Since the writers seem to be trying to take Discovery back towards TOS territory, my money's on a cosmetically advanced version of the TOS and TNG Klingons with familiar uniforms but more advanced prosthetics. They've brought in a relaunch writer to help sort it out, and it's to be set four years after the "present day" of the relaunch novels (2386) and one year after the prime universe events that precipitated Star Trek (2009). They've got room to maneuver. Maybe what's keeping Picard from a retirement job in the diplomatic corps or from an admiral's desk is the lingering stigma of his involvement with Section 31's coup against President Zife... especially since the truth would be fresh in everyone's minds in the wake of the op against Uraei and the publication of most of Section 31's database in 2386.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    They're on South Ataria island, at the airbase adjacent to the training center the UN Forces set up there to train the crew of the SDF-1 Macross in January 2007. The whole flashback involves Roy and Claudia meeting there after she's assigned to the new training center. The island is only called "Macross island" in that other show we don't talk about here.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Flight testing on the non-transformable VF-X and transformation-capable VF-X1 prototypes in 2007 was carried out at the UN Forces airbase on South Ataria island. I don't recall, offhand, if any source has said where the prototypes were built.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Well, it's not like we're going to get anything particularly substantial for a while anyway... especially since most of what we'll have will be the official website. The official info on macross.jp was painfully sparse for Macross Delta. Hayate's bio was one of the longest, at a whopping three sentences on top of his age, birthday, and height. The longest page given to any mechanical design had all of two sentences on it. Just watch... VF-171s, but this time they're light green instead of light brown! EDIT: Or maybe Barbie Pink, like in Macross E.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Quark did it better. That's fair. I just can't get past how so many of the later ones seem to be Shatner trying to settle the "Kirk vs. Picard" thing in Kirk's favor every time. Q-Squared was interesting, I haven't read much of his other stuff tho.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Just as well, I was running out of unread Star Trek relaunch novels. All I had left was the Star Trek: Prey trilogy, the TNG relaunch novels Headlong Flight and Hearts and Minds, the DS9 relaunch novels Force and Motion, Enigma Tales, and Original Sin, and the Voyager relaunch novel Architects of Infinity. I'll probably be through that lot by the end of August. I shot through about half of the first book of the Prey trilogy last night while I was doing some computer maintenance. Yeah, why not? I'm probably never going to read them, since I find the Star Trek: Discovery crew so hopelessly unlikeable.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    With Kirsten Beyer onboard, they'll probably go one of two routes that've both been done in the Star Trek relaunch novels: Picard will have become Admiral Action and refuse to let his rank trap him behind a desk on Earth or at some starbase, and will instead insist on leading from the front by taking command of a Starfleet taskforce and screw up horribly over and over again. Picard will commit some heinous act that will be covered up, forever disqualifying him from promotion or a retirement post with the diplomatic corps. They could go the Indiana Jones route and turn Picard into a Starfleet academy instructor who moonlights as an adventurer xenoarchaeologist. ... really? Most of them, like The Return, were Mary Sue-tier fanfiction that's been banned from even the expanded universe's main timeline. Yeah, I have copies as well... but they are BAD movies. Not Star Trek V: the Final Frontier bad or Star Trek: Into Darkness bad, but to try and turn Star Trek's most cerebral captain into a one-liner-dispensing action hero was a big mistake. First Contact was a weak but passable Star Trek zombie movie, Insurrection was an idiot plot start-to-finish, and Nemesis definitively broke the odd-numbers bad, even-numbers good trend with Picard facing off against a clone of himself in a oiltone pleather onesie. Don't forget brainwashed Kirk beating up most of the TNG crew singlehandedly, including beating Worf in hand to hand combat and outwitting Data and Geordi combined. Oh, and brainwashed Kirk's hot Romulan girlfriend and the brand new edgelord-tier all-black super-powerful (temporary) Defiant-class USS Enterprise that destroys Romulan flagships from the inside and doesn't afraid of anything. "Being set on fire in a skid full of hospital waste is still better than several types of inoperable cancer."
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Ugh... so they've tapped the All-Stars of Suck for this? Kurtzman lost any right to be involved with Star Trek when he cowrote the crap-awful mess that was Star Trek: Into Darkness. Akiva Goldsman is the hack behind both the worst-ever Batman films and the terribad Lost in Space movie. If not for Shatner and Mack, Kirsten Beyer would be the worst novelist in Star Trek history as the author of the completely unreadable Star Trek: Voyager relaunch. I'm not saying this new Picard series is being set up to fail, but I'm absolutely getting shades of Springtime for Hitler... Did you watch Nemesis or Insurrection? The answer is "Very". With Beyer, Goldsman, and Kurtzman on board, bad is a foregone conclusion. The question to ask is how early one can get on the class action lawsuit to sue CBS for giving you cancer. If Beyer is involved, Picard will probably turn out to be a bipolar sociopath who flies from star system to star system destabilizing whole civilizations for failing to live up to his hypocritical standards inbetween sessions of crying about how traumatic his past is. Why? Because that's exactly what she did to Janeway.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Well, that's the clearest indication yet that CBS doesn't think Star Trek: Discovery will last after the mess its second season turned into in production... I can only hope that they won't permit anyone who works on Discovery to pull double duty on this new show. "Gritty Action Picard" was an obviously stupid idea the last couple times they tried it (e.g. Insurrection, Nemesis), and I expect time will have done little to make the idea less stupid.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, I saw that same image a few days ago when the author of that tweet also posted it on Facebook. That said, I've been familiar with the VF-4 Siren design for over fifteen years now. It's something I first ran across when I expanded the focus of my Macross II research from just art books to contemporary magazine articles, video games, etc. The VF-4 Siren was the late-game upgrade for the main characters in the PC Engine TRPG Super Dimension Fortress Macross: Eternal Love Song. That game was one of two1 Macross video games released for the PC Engine as a tie-in to Super Dimension Fortress Macross II: Lovers Again. The VF-4 Siren in Eternal Love Song came equipped with Super Packs that included funnels (filling in for R-Type's additional gun units) and a very large beam rifle similar in proportion to the VF-27's but bearing a striking resemblance to the MSZ-006 Zeta Gundam's. They were used the for the last chapter or two, when Hound Squadron's Daedalus II-class carrier Prometheus II is used to launch a decapitation strike against the Zentradi Army Burado main fleet's mobile fortress similar to the one the Macross used against Boddole Zer. Until that picture was posted, though, I had no idea that line art of any of the VF-4 Siren's other modes had been published. Steps are currently being taken to secure copies of the relevant publications identified by Yui's friend who clued her in to the design's existence. I'm fairly certain Yui's tweet is incorrect for several reasons... above and beyond the usual reason that Yui's claims most often have less grounding in reality than Harry Potter: The VF-4 Siren has never been so much as mentioned in any collection of Shoji Kawamori's works. It was presented as a New design in Macross: Eternal Love Song when it came out in 1992. Neither Shoji Kawamori nor Tatsunoko Production were involved in Macross II project. The VF-4 Siren is based on the VF-4 from Macross: Flash Back 2012... a design Tatsunoko doesn't have rights to. Kawamori's published sketches show that his concept for the VF-4 battroid looked a LOT like the final one we got in Macross Digital Mission VF-X as early as 1990. This design is clearly drawn in an early 90's art style (that looks suspiciously like Kazumi Fujita's) and in a pose which is not typical of Kawamori's work but IS typical of the Macross II promotional art. Yui is probably confusing the VF-4 Siren from Macross: Eternal Love Song with Kawamori's design studies in a transformation for the VF-X-4 design that appeared in Super Dimension Fortress Macross (as a scale model only): That unused transformation was, according to the VF-4 entry in Shoji Kawamori Macross Design Works, further explored as the VF-X-7 Ghost Valkyrie in July 1985... another unused design from the mid-80's (see page 52 of the aforementioned book) that falls into his "Game and Advanced Valkyrie" category. Yui's confusion may have been instigated by Variable Fighter Master File: VF-4 Lightning III inventing a few extra intermediate VF models in the VF-4's development. It included the ambiguous art from page 68 of Macross: Perfect Memory's feature "The Lost Two Years" as "XVF-4" and asserts there was a tweaked version of that design that went into limited production under the name "VF-4 Siren"2 prior to the start of mass production on the familiar VF-4 Lightning III. 1. The other being Super Dimension Fortress Macross 2036, which was a side-scrolling shooter in the style of R-Type. 2. See Variable Fighter Master File: VF-4 Lightning III pages 23 and 27, and Macross: Perfect Memory page 68.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Macross Chronicle Mechanic Sheet ALL 01B "VF Masterpieces as seen from their Development History" points to the VF-19改 being a modified VF-19F. Variable Fighter Master File: VF-19 Excalibur unhelpfully asserts the VF-19改 was a much less extensively modified VF-19E, which it contends was the first of the 2nd mass production type variants and that the VF-19改 head was a stock VF-19E part. (Master File's account contradicts the other VF-19E depictions that lean towards it being the last 1st mass production type variant as with Maj. Blanchett's VF-19E in the Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy game... which was a reskinned VF-19A.)
  15. Seto Kaiba
    That box set contains nothing apart from disappointment and a grainy, washed-out, poor quality transfer of Robotech's "Macross Saga" in English. There is no "Japanese with subtitles" option. To add insult to injury, it's the broadcast cut... so it's censored. It has the R-word on the cover, so you know it's not worth buying. DO NOT pay money for this. Don't accept it for free. Don't steal it. It's like a dybbuk, if you let it into your home it will bring you nothing but grief. Its only practical use is for leveling a table with a particularly short leg, and it's not even very good at that. None of the ADV Films Robotech releases had Japanese audio. They were strictly Robotech. The original shows were released separately under their original titles, and of those only Macross had an English audio option... a gag dub-level nightmare that is downright cringeworthy except for the fact that they got Mari Iijima to to reprise the role of Minmay in English.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Try that kind of thing in real life, and it all ends up on the evening news with the headline "Bride kills two at local wedding". Now if Misa were really vindictive, I could see her requisitioning some giant tin cans for the back of the Megaroad-01 and putting Minmay IN one after telling her she could absolutely take part in the wedding. Beware the quiet ones.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Here's hoping the happy couple were smarter than their Americanized counterparts and didn't invite her to sing at their wedding.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    This is probably an issue with the latest Chrome for Android build rather than the site, but typing has become very laggy on mobile devices and will sometimes outright cause the browser tab to lock up.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    More or less, yeah. Yup... They do say Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Maybe Misa's just that determined to send a message. (It is from Macross Graffiti btw... Page 75.)
  20. 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.
  21. 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.
  22. 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.
  23. 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.
  24. 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.
  25. 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.)
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