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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Assuming they're handling announcements the same was as the last two shows, I'd expect them to confirm they're working on something sometime this month, but we won't get any actual news until September or October, and no premiere until around Christmas.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    In hindsight, maybe that laughably halfhearted effort to memorialize Messer in Ep11 was a warning we all missed. Half an episode wasted trying to pretend a guy who did nothing but badmouth, and then avoid, his coworkers was a beloved friend and mentor figure strained believability well past its breaking point and left him hovering between Jerk Sue and Sympathetic Sue status. That sudden plummet in writing quality was just a sucker punch. Up to that point the show was so good I was thoroughly invested in all three main characters and was quite eager to see where they were going to take it. Then we got to Ep17, the bottom fell out, and watching the series became a chore. If he is getting burned out on Macross, I'd hope he has someone he can pass the torch to, if even only temporarily. Maybe Tenjin. As long as they don't use the same writers from Delta, he could probably do pretty well. The next series definitely needs a plot that can keep its momentum and avoid digressing into suspension-of-disbelief-puncturing BS like the "Walkure goes undercover" episodes. Maybe he was just giving the producers what they wanted - a platform to promote Walkure - and was just kinda halfassing the rest? (He didn't halfass the mechanical designs, for sure... the VF-31A's the most beautiful 5th Gen VF in my book. I'm hoping to see it come back as a NUNS VF in the future.)
  3. Seto Kaiba
    My apologies, I admit I'd quite forgotten Tochiro was one of the ones who worked on it. (Due to circumstances, I missed all but about the last six minutes of your SDCon panel.) That does raise an uncomfortable problem in that my defense of the series to a number of its vocal detractors on here is no longer valid. If Kawamori was carefully scrutinizing every aspect of Delta's development it would be fair to assign the blame for the various writing-related issues that plagued the show's second half to him after all. Oh well... Knowing he signed off on scripts full of serious plot holes and contradictions and approved dumping all the antagonist faction's character development into a gaiden manga doesn't exactly fill me with confidence about the quality of the forthcoming series either. Great music is all to the good, but it takes more than just great music to make Macross. Just as well, it's one of the best songs in the show. Hindsight makes its in-show debut a bit creepy...
  4. Seto Kaiba
    It's one possibility... there are a number of modern shape memory alloys and composites that will reverse any deformation they're subjected to (within limits) when subjected to electric current or heat. I was pretty disappointed with the Variable Fighter Master File explanation for the YF-21's variable camber wing. They depict it as a rigid central frame with a dozen or so finger-like actuators which connect to the edges of the wing surface and flex in different directions to adjust the camber of its flexible composite skin. Supposedly it's so expensive that it was only ever used twice: on the YF-21 and VF-19ACTIVE. Dunno! We've never seen a Zentradi child, apart from ones who are either explicitly indicated or implied to be natural born. We know Zentradi cloning and micloning systems are able to copy an individual right down to their memories (via Macross Chronicle, etc.), so it seems highly likely the standard practice would be for Zentradi to emerge from cloning in a state approximating physical maturity and combat-ready fitness, pre-loaded with at least basic knowledge like the language or basic combat training. Assuming their combat roles aren't set from inception, they might need to undergo training for whatever their assigned task is... at least based on the original series, where Boddole Zer promised the lolicon trio a promotion to a command position should their undercover operation be a success.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... while I don't doubt that Kawamori is exercising broad oversight over the Macross franchise, I just have a hard time believing he's micromanaging things to the extent you're implying here. I'm not saying I don't think he could pull it off, but the idea of him having approved and signed off on some of the stuff in Delta's second half just doesn't mesh with the commitment to originality or attention to detail that are practically his calling cards in Macross. You'd think if he were watching the development like a hawk he'd have noticed an exposition dump in episode 19 that reduces the show's core mechanic to a massive plot hole. It'd also be really out of character for him to OK the writers of Macross Delta blatantly copying Grace's endgame from Macross Frontier like that. Suspiciously convenient? Maj. Bartlow's got a nice character design and all, but what's convenient about her?
  6. Seto Kaiba
    There were rumors that he'd left Delta early to pursue the project that is, IIRC, Juushinki Pandora... nothing substantiated, AFAIK. Can't honestly say I recall seeing that one raised before. Usually when it comes down to Plus vs 7 it's all about tone... whether expectations calibrated by SDFM, DYRL?, II, and Plus made them think it was either loads of lighthearted fun or impossible to take seriously. It used to be a subject of great acrimony here, less so now. It basically came down to whether one could disengage from the expectations set by SDFM, DYRL?, II, and Plus to simply enjoy the spectacle that was Macross 7 or not. (Which became a bit of a complication for folks who couldn't or wouldn't get through it, since a LOT of later titles built on story elements first introduced and explained in Macross 7.) One thing I missed in Delta that was present in both 7 and Frontier were those little pre-episode blurbs that explained anything immediately relevant to the setting that you'd need to know that hadn't already been covered. There wasn't any required extra reading or anything like that. I really hope they bring those back.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    That, or possibly that fold quartz that's being charged with fold waves glows pink in mecha or as an item of jewelry but is inexplicably glowing blue-green when part of an active V-type infection. (That or maybe that's just all the water in the human body scattering the shorter wavelengths of light from the glow?) Hypercarbon is a synthetic carbon allotrope with metallic properties which is harder than diamond, lighter than steel, has a high magnetic field saturation point, and has excellent heat resistance.1 In the very oldest sources, it's suggested to be 100x stronger than an equivalent thickness of rolled homogeneous steel armor. Basically, it's kissing cousins with carbon nanomaterials like fullerine, graphene, carbon nanotubes, and so on. A number of synthetic carbon allotropes check off multiple items on that list, though its closest real-world relative would have to be the recently-discovered Q-carbon, which ticks off most of those properties including the metallic behaviors and being 10-20% stronger than diamond. It's made by nanosecond pulse-heating carbon with high-intensity lasers and then rapidly quenching it. 1. Making it a bit more exotic than Gundam's Luna Titanium/Gundarium... which, funnily enough, is just an exotic cemented carbide composite made using (in part) titanium dioxide harvested from lunar regolith. Gundams are basically armored with the same kind of material that's used mainly for the cutting edges of power tools and mining equipment.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    There's definitely a lot of older fans who are keen on the idea of a revisit/do-over of the original TV series ala Space Battleship Yamato 2199 or Mobile Suit Gundam: the Origin, esp. in light of how we had (and are now starting over with) Macross the First. It's kind of unlikely though, given Kawamori's aversion to the idea of revisiting the story of the main trio from the original series. I suspect he probably wasn't altogether happy with the way Delta tried to imply a Megaroad-01 connection for Lady M, possibly motivating that Newtype piece to say there was no identity determined for Lady M by the show's creators shortly after it ended. I don't think I'd object too loudly as long as they kept in stuff like the 4th Defensive Battle of South Ataria Island from Vol.6, which at least showed us some unambiguously NEW stuff like Roy Focker sortieing for the first time in a VF-1 while Sv-51s and VF-0+'s duel in the skies over the city and an autonomous Sv-51 is sicced on him... or the CVN-99 Asuka II's sister ship CVN-100 Graf Zeppelin II.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Thus far, almost every piece of fold quartz that has appeared on screen in Macross has been colored a faintly pink-tinged deep purple. The only noteworthy exceptions are the shot of the V-type bacterium in Macross Frontier that looks more pink than purple, though the shot of the same bacterium in Delta makes it the same color the larger samples are, and the raw stuff we very briefly see the Vajra mining from stellar debris in the final episode of Macross Frontier, which is almost a pastel pink and faintly glowing. A lot of fans mistake the polarized covers over the sensor lenses on the noses of 5th Gen VFs for a fold quartz fitting. Those are just protective covers for various infrared, laser, lidar, and other high sensitivity sensors, and have been depicted in green, a few different shades of blue, red, pink, and purple. The only models of VF with externally-mounted fold quartz fittings are the YF-29 and the Siegfried custom VF-31. The protective covers over the fold quartz on the YF-29 (all versions) are the same deep purple as the fold quartz itself, though the covers over the secondary fold quartz fittings that act as fold wave amps are blue on the YF-29 Isamu, Ozma, and Rod versions. The VF-31's covers are tinted more along the lines of a dark pink.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    The mechanical stresses of making something that big walk, run, or swing a punch alone would be pretty extreme. Given their typical placement, shear stresses would be much more likely... bending, rather than twisting, of the surfaces. That's probably why most VF designs tuck the sensitive parts away when they transform, even though the hypercarbon composites they're made from are super Tonka tough stuff and energy conversion armor beefs that up further. There is the question of how, exactly, energy conversion armor works that may be a factor in this. We know it's a layered, laminated armor material but I haven't found a decent explanation of how precisely it achieves greater defensive strength when pumped with electromagnetic pulses. Is the hypercarbon composite material becoming more rigid and resistant to deformation? Are laminate layers being rendered more elastic and able to spread impact force? Is either layer gaining some ability to reversibly deform under load? It's still a topic I'd love to close.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Wing was my introduction to Gundam... and G Gundam one of the last pre-00 Gundam shows I saw in full. What the bloody hell happened between 1994 and 1995? Gundam went from a veritable buffet of well-written, hotblooded manliness to five effeminate young men who are legitimately prettier than most of the girls in the show morosely debating the politics of one naive straw pacifist who looks manlier than they do between bouts of killing more people than smallpox for no particular reason.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Turn A and Reconguista in G are considered the far end of the Universal Century timeline, yeah. At least technically, since they make explicit reference to coming after the UC era even though they're set under different calendar systems (the Correct Century and Reguild Century, respectively). Completely understandable. Gundam's Universal Century has some pretty serious issues with that, and the unrelenting war-is-hell stuff in the original, Zeta, the second half of ZZ, Victory, etc. can really drag at you. Reconguista in G is straight up WEIRD on that front, in that it actively rebels against the grimdark and instead remains bizarrely cheery.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Are you planning to go all the way to the far end of the Universal Century with Reconguista in G? I know it wasn't well-received, but I found it different enough from standard Gundam fare to be actually pretty interesting. Especially the setting, which manages to be both horrifying and also weirdly optimistic at the same time. The art style gives it kind of a Eureka Seven flavor. Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn was a beautifully animated OVA that was saddled with an excuse plot best be summed up as "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing". It's one of those side stories in which the plot revolves around a macguffin that the characters all insist [could/will] turn the world on its ear, but the audience knows that's a load from the outset because there are pre-existing TV series in the franchise set after it. (Y'know, the Macross Zero problem.)
  14. Seto Kaiba
    It's not exactly built for comfort... and being hunched over like that in inflexible plate armor would be pretty darn uncomfortable. Some art, like the cutaways, show it as even more cramped, with a lot of equipment hanging off the interior walls of the cockpit. The Roiquonmi Glaug's got a somewhat roomier cockpit, but it's no more ergonomically sound than the Esbeliben Regult is: If reincarnation is a thing in the Macross universe, I'm pretty sure the ancient Protoculture's top military engineers were reincarnated as the guys who design passenger airplane seats. The New UN Spacy Marine Corps' Zentradi troops seem to have become something of a fixture in the last few Macross titles... so at the very least we can probably expect the next series to have some at least making a cameo appearance again. They never do seem to get the posh assignments though... guarding an uninhabited planet on the arse end of nowhere (Gallia IV), or a single-biome desert planet so deep in the space boonies you hear banjos on the fold jump in (Al Shahal). Delta can be appreciated for at least vastly expanding their inventory with the Regult Types 104 and 106, and the Super Glaug. (It'd be nice to see them in action as friendlies tho... instead of as victims of the Worf Effect in 7 or as baddies in Frontier and Delta.)
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Eh, I dunno... I had lunch with a friend of mine who's a corporate lawyer for the company currently retaining my services as a tech specialist, and he seemed to think the backers had about a 50-50 chance of finding someone willing to take the case pro bono at least as a class action. He suggested they try looking for a lawyer who's looking to run for a judicial position, since they'd jump at the chance for an easy one in the wins column on what's technically white collar crime. I've known a few who've done pro bono work for pubicity's sake, but they're mostly notorious ambulance chasers who are friends of my grandmother's. As most of the backers are out of state, yeah... the GoFundMe is probably their safer option, though he bet me that he AG gets to them first since there's now proof that Palladium lied in their responses to previous complaints filed with the AG. The ABA and the state bar associations have different criteria for recommended pro bono work, but AFAIK there's no hard and fast rules on tha front here in MI. You can get 'em on deceit/fraudulent misrepresentation pretty easily what with them having admitted their last three years of status updates (incl. responses to inquiries about the project funds) were all blatant lies.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    As we've established on a few previous occasions, you're rather atypical as Macross fans go. For most, the ancient Protoculture's role as a race of vanished precursors who shaped the sentient races of the galaxy in their own image is reason enough. The facts of their lives are less important to the story than the impact of their legacy. Putting aside for a moment that the Halo novels are some of the worst-written science fiction ever committed to print, prominently featuring the Protoculture in a series dedicated to them would suck all the mystery and allure out of them. Like the various races of vanished precursors in other sci-fi properties, much of their allure is that what little is known about them comes from painstaking study of what they left behind. Once they're featured prominently as living people they're no longer mysterious... and in a lot of stories, they end up being thoroughly unlikeable, like the Forerunners in the Halo "Forerunner Saga". The pods are where the more flexible suit would do the most good. You HAVE seen how tightly they have to pretzel themselves into the cockpits of those Regults, right? Having a smart cloth counterpressure suit is gonna be a LOT more comfortable than hardshell body armor under those circumstances. The far roomier cockpits of the Nousjadeul-Gers would be better suited to the hardshell armor. He's always been Mr. Exposition, that's his entire schtick in every depiction except 7... where he briefly pulls double duty as the deadpan snarker and the dirty old man. (In an amusing bit of irony, he's literally a "talking head" for most of the series.) That's a thing we gotta make sure they don't do in the next show... those infuriating episode-long exposition dumps. Whatever happened to "Show, don't tell"? Macross the First author and longtime Macross character designer Haruhiko Mikimoto has always been very fond of the designs he did for Macross II... and has snuck them into a lot of his work for main continuity Macross. He basically reused the II variant of the DYRL? Zentradi body armor for that shot. The other staffers seem to be equally fond of the DYRL? designs, hence their having supplanted the TV designs in almost every instance... and the handful of exceptions being cases like the VF-1 or Exsedol, where BOTH versions are "true".
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Granted, the concept of anime and some of its fundamental tropes and stereotypical habits is something that has gained more commonplace recognition... but Joe and Jane Average off the street likely won't be able to name more than a handful of titles, almost certainly being ones I identified above that they would've seen as kids when they were kids shows. It has a long, LONG way to go before it achieves the kind of acceptance that'd make it a mainstream art form in the US. That's why the industry runs on razor thin margins with semi-regular spates of bankruptcy and reorganization. It's gained a lot of ground thanks to the 90's kids who grew up on shows like Dragonball being in their late 20's and early 30's now, enough to sustain dedicated streaming services, but those cater mostly to the hardcore hobbyist. That's why Macross's creators don't really have an incentive to aggressively pursue conflict over the limits of their distribution capabilities... they've cornered the best market already, the rest is chump change.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Socks now? Now, more than ever, I'm convinced they only discuss merchandising while drunk. It's not nearly as obscure as it used to be, but it's still pretty niche... the general public's only really aware of the old school stuff that they only found out was anime decades after the fact1, the stuff the 90's kids grew up watching2, the kids shows with blatant merchandising tie-ins3, and the weeb stereotype fodder4. The dubbing and distribution industry here still runs on pretty thin margins. 1. Localizations like Speed Racer, Star Blazers, Battle of the Planets, Voltron, Gigantor, etc. 2. Dragonball, Dragonball Z, Sailor Moon, Knights of the Zodiac (AKA Saint Seiya) 3. Pokemon, Digimon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, etc. 4. Almost exclusively Naruto.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    No, that's just them trying to get their money's worth out of the idol group they manufactured for the series. They're makin' a mint on Macross in Japan, and tie-ins and cross-promotion of other Macross titles is everywhere. Macross Delta: Passionate Walkure's movie booklet from the theaters devotes its very first page after the introduction to a production timeline of previous Macross features. The last few pages are advertising a variety of goods, including from the original SDF Macross series, the DYRL? movie, Flash Back 2012, and Frontier. The novelization of Macross Delta makes explicit references to both Macross the Ride and Macross VF-X2. The gaiden manga Macross E has characters and mecha from Macross 7 and Dynamite 7 as well as an original generation Macross-class ship in it. If anything, they're upping the level of interconnection between Macross titles as time goes on. They'd still have problems with other terms and so on that HG trademarked like "UN Spacy".
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Macross II fans have been waiting ages to finally get our due... unfortunately, the VF-2SS Valkyrie II's design is such that we'll never get a toy that's faithful to the proportions of the fighter in the animation AND have a removable Super Armed Pack. With the Macross II Blu-ray apparently having gotten Evolution Toy's attention, and then Bandai's, hopefully we'll have at least a modest number of toys in the future. I'd like to see at least the big three (VF-2SS, VF-2JA, VA-1SS) and Feff's custom Gigamesh. You'd be hard-pressed to find a fan who didn't think Macross Delta was an unbalanced series to its own detriment. There was something of a recurring joke coined a while back that the show was pretty open about its intentions... "Welcome to Walkure World", all Macross content strictly incidental. Macross Frontier is pretty much the new gold standard for Macross. No previous series was quite as successful as Frontier, and most fans would agree that the balance in that series was damn near perfect with maybe some problematic pacing in the last few episodes. It created a whole new, more diverse generation of Macross fans. The next series really does need to be something with the same kind of "Something for everyone"1 appeal that Frontier had. You can't have a series where 80% of the cast are flat stock characters2 or focus on one aspect of the iconic formula to the exclusion of everything else without sacrificing a big chunk of the franchise's appeal. Walkure's music is great and all, but Freyja's the only one of the lot who got enough character development to have a bio that wouldn't fit neatly on the back of her business card. Half the main cast had less characterization than some of the background characters. You gotta develop these characters as people if you want the audience to give a toss, y'know? 1. A comedy tonight! 2. Unless you're working for Sunrise on a new Universal Century-era Gundam series.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Yep, I know... it's been about fifteen years for me via their Macross II game and my insane quest to fix it, long enough to know full well that the only people who play a Palladium game rules-as-written are the ones who've never played using their system before. The more experience you have as a GM, the more (or more far reaching) your house rules to streamline things are. Helped immensely by the fact that Palladium conveniently, if inaccurately, statted a bunch of Macross mecha already. That's why so many use their books as a starting point, and why almost every online reference stats in Palladium's system. It's become the common denominator for Macross RPGs. It's a long way from great, but it's the only one with Macross content baked in. (Unless you count the Mekton stats that occasionally showed up for Macross mecha in periodicals like Mangazine.) A lot of them that I know and have spoken to at considerable length on Palladium's forums and elsewhere went into it knowing full bloody well what Palladium is like when it comes to deadlines and Kevin's bad habit of promising way more than he can deliver. In many cases, they were resigned to it being late because Kevin always delivers late... but he usually does deliver in the end, barring a few noteworthy occasions where projects ended up shelved indefinitely or a finished manuscript was left unusable after a falling out with the writer (as in the case of Jason Marker's departure). For the most part, the people who backed this were the Palladium faithful. The folks who, despite everything, still supported Kevin and the company. To some of them, that Kevin lied to them for years about the state of the project while they were investing their time and energy into trying to build the promotional infrastructure to help the game take off was almost a personal betrayal. I've got a few friends among that number, and most of them are not so much angry as disgusted. Others, who were harassed by the volunteer mods on Palladium's website are indulging in a bit of... what's that long german word... Schadenfreude(?) watching the fans who'd been White Knight-ing for Kevin seethe in barely suppressed outrage.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Not marketing, their very crude breakdown of spending flags the expense as "advertising" costs. They didn't do any advertising for the game that anyone's seen. RIFTS is still a fairly well-regarded game in the industry despite Palladium's system being outdated and a bit clunky. Pinnacle Entertainment's got their project of converting RIFTS to their own more streamlined Savage Worlds system. Robotech fans hold - or at least, used to hold - Palladium Books in high regard both for Robotech's licensed RPG being the closest the franchise has ever come to an official guidebook with tech spec and character bio information, and for their brief role in Robotech home video distribution. Also noteworthy is the fact that most fanmade Macross RPG resources use Palladium's Megaversal system, using their Robotech or Macross II RPGs as a starting point. sketchley's RPG stats stuff from Macross RPG Galaxies is all Palladium-based, for instance. I actually got my start translating Japanese Macross publications in an effort to fix the sh*t-awful job Palladium did with the setting material and stats in the Macross II RPG. The people who backed this Kickstarter back in 2013 were people who didn't think Palladium was a worthless company, and some would probably have debated the "awful reputation" part too. These were people who, by in large, supported Palladium and actually wanted the game to take off and become a success. Overnight, the project's status changed from "ready to start manufacturing Wave 2, getting quotes for production costs" to "lol jk we haven't done sh*t in three years and the money's gone". It's understandable they'd want to see Palladium punished for a dick move of that magnitude. I have a sneaking suspicion a fair amount of that is less a belief that delivery was guaranteed from the outset and more that the last few official status reports before Kevin dropped this bombshell in the Kickstarter Updates page all said that they were in the final phases of preparation and getting the Wave 2 casting work quoted by prospective manufacturers. It was a pretty swift reversal from "it's practically a done deal" to "never happening and never was". I can't speak to what the average Kickstarter backer is like, since I've never backed one that failed.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Unlikely, given that Palladium Books hasn't exactly been acting in good faith for most of the project lifespan. They'd still be under fire even if they'd come clean about the program budget being depleted three years ago when it first happened, because a big part of why it happened was that Kevin took a fair sized chunk of the development budget and spent it on inventory meant for retail sale. They'd be flaying him for that until the cows came home, but three years of lying about it on an official basis and having promised cash refunds only to renege on the promise only made them madder and it'll make it easier to nail Palladium to the wall in court. EDIT: There's also the awkward and still-unanswered question of how a game project that didn't have any advertising spent $31,700 on advertising.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Kind of a poor fit, IMO... considering the ancient Protoculture were somewhere in the vicinity of the "Crystal spires and togas" category of advanced alien culture, and they considered their Zentradi to be little more than disposable military equipment. These days, the Protoculture have progressed all the way to full-blown "sufficiently advanced aliens". The DYRL? armor looks more like it's meant for an actual mecha pilot, which is what 99% of them are. I can only imagine how uncomfortable it'd be to be scrunched up in a Regult wearing a huge suit of inflexible plate. The movie version has far fewer hard segments, which would make it a lot more comfortable to wear long-term, and it's more organically contoured, which fits better with all the Zentradi organic design aesthetic that was present in their ships and mecha even in the series. The broccoli joke's been done by a few fan artists over the years... Still, DYRL? Exsedol looks a lot more like what he's supposed to be: a designer organism created to be a living data bank and walking, talking encyclopedia to assist a fleet commander. He's not made for hand-to-hand combat or operating mecha, he's made for storing vast amounts of data... so he's built with high-precision manipulators instead of big beefy arms, a robe instead of body armor, and the organic computer that is his mind is a disproportionately huge, periodically glowing brain that's almost exploding out of his head. The SDFM TV design just looks like a runty little guy with a bad haircut and a cape who likes purple too much. It works better if character traits aren't just "informed ability". It's only a DYRL? remake if they're telling the DYRL? version of the story. If they're telling the SDFM TV version of the story, then it's a remake of SDFM even if they're using the designs from DYRL?, as in the case of Macross the First. Can't honestly think of a reason to have those weird, squared off fake pecs on the breastplate. It makes more sense to have the uncontoured one, which would be structurally simpler to cast/press (however those are made in-universe) and it'd also make it easier to make the armor unisex, since the First Order seems to recruit women for combat roles too. (Maybe Joel Schumacher is an emigree from the Galaxy Far Far Away?) None taken... I was more bemused than anything. Bandai already did a HiMetal R VF-2SS... maybe we'll get there eventually There are a lot of fans hoping the next series will be a more balanced one than the Macross Delta series was. One of the biggest criticisms of it was the lack of attention on the mecha.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    People suspected they'd blown through the entire development budget... nobody could prove that the money was gone until Palladium finally admitted it the other day. The reason people are very, VERY angry about this has less to do with the Kickstarter campaign failing than the fact that Kevin Siembieda and his staff lied to them about it for three solid years. (There's also the question of whether Kickstarter funds were used to hire Scott Gibbons to do the lying once Kevin's credibility deteriorated completely.) You never know. The subject of crowdfunding, and e-commerce in general, is one where you have a LOT of lawyers looking to make a name for themselves by establishing precedents. I wouldn't be surprised if they found a lawyer willing to work pro bono on the case for the exposure a ruling on a controversial topic like crowdfunding would bring. That said, there is also a GoFundMe to finance a lawsuit against Palladium being run by a Facebook group for disgruntled backers which is getting a LOT of attention now that they've suddenly been proven right-all-along. For most of the angry backers I've spoken to or sat in on conversations with, pursuing legal action against Palladium Books is less about getting their pound of flesh and more about punishing Kevin Siembieda and his staff for three years of fraudulent misrepresentation. Many of them are furious with Kevin's conduct to the point that they're quite willing to launch litigation against him even if it ultimately nets them little or no reward, simply to watch Palladium burn. That probably isn't something the backers are thinking of, but that's the kind of thing that'd motivate lawyers to take the case pro bono in hopes of achieving prestige setting important precedent, or the Michigan attorney general's office (for similar reasons). Since a number of backers have copies of letters Kevin sent to the Michigan AG's office that contain things now proven to be lies, I suspect punitive action from the AG will occur... if only halfheartedly. Yep... and the backers know it. I've seen no evidence of anyone wanting to sue Kickstarter for the misconduct of Palladium. They know, like Kevin himself assured the Michigan AG's office, that PB isn't a fly-by-night startup operating out of a PO box... they're an established company with a well-known brick-and-mortar location in Westland. They can, and intend to, go right to the source and sue Palladium. They're well-acquainted with the risks of backing a Kickstarter. Like I've said, what's got them up in arms isn't so much that it failed... but that, between Kevin and Scott, there's 3+ years of fraudulent misrepresentation about the Kickstarter finances and project's progress, that Palladium reneged on its promise of refunds if the project should fail, and that Kevin had the gall to insist people willing to take Wave 1 overstock (made with misappropriated funds) in compensation for unproduced Wave 2 goods pay for shipping and handling on goods they'd already paid those on once already.
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