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Seto Kaiba

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  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Good thing MacrossWorld has gotten less hotheaded with time... those would've been fightin' words back when I first joined. Ingues is mercifully not up to much, having been reduced to nothing heavier than a cough by the combined fire of his entire fleet and two Macross Cannon-class anti-fleet gunboats. Dragonball Super already beat us to the punch by bringing its purple Space Napo-Hitler back to life.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    It'd be down to their discretion if they wanted to do it themselves... the more likely outcome is that some distributor will seek to establish a working relationship with Big West and test the waters with one show, then gradually release the others to streaming and home video. Macross is, at the very least, prevalent enough despite No Export For You status that it wouldn't be flying under the radar once the obstacles to licensing were removed.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Anywhere from fifteen to twenty-four aircraft, all told. They were organized into platoons of three, so five to eight platoons. (In conjunction with the below, fifteen would appear to be the most typical size c.2009 February.) Canonically? No data is available on that score. Variable Fighter Master File: SDF-1 Macross VF-1 Squadrons indicates that the SDF-1 Macross was carrying fourteen UN Spacy fighter squadrons representing three distinct Carrier Air Wings: seven squadrons from CVW-9, five squadrons from CVW-1, and two squadrons from CVW-14. That was the 212 VF-1 Valkyries the ship had prior to her first return to Earth. (After resupply, she left the Earth carrying over 300 VF-1 Super Valkyries, so either she added additional squadrons later or a number of the squadrons aboard ship absorbed a lot of new personnel.) This would neatly divide down into fourteen squadrons of fifteen VF-1s apiece, with two aircraft going to spare. The ARMD-class and ARMD II-class carriers had similarly huge capacities of nearly 300 fighters. Only later, when the NUNS adopted carriers meant for long-haul travel across the galaxy did the number of fighters carried drop to a reasonable number. The Guantanamo-class's stated capacity would give it room enough for three squadrons and change, the Uraga-class topping out at five. The Battle-class would have room for fifty... Unknown. It's highly probable that the twelve VF-1D Valkyries that were part of the ship's original complement were used sparingly, if at all, given that they're noted as having compromised the life support/escape equipment in the cockpit block in order to make room for the student seat and all the extra control and display hardware. (They may have been converted into VF-1As by changing the cockpit block and monitor turret. Or possibly just the cockpit block, resulting in the DA type referenced in Master File on occasion.)
  7. Seto Kaiba
    That's the problem... they couldn't have acted sooner, because for the entire time Palladium Books was lying through its teeth about the state of the Kickstarter to the backers, the Michigan AG's office, and the BBB, they were also denying any and all requests for refunds from backers upset with the delays. The Kickstarter Terms of Use only enable them to go demand the refunds Palladium had promised them would be available in the event Wave 2 became undeliverable after the project is officially declared a failure. EDIT: Under the Kickstarter TOS, they would've needed to have some kind of proof that Palladium Books was not acting in good faith... something which did not materialize until this recent admission by Palladium that the project ran out of money three years ago and that every status update since had been a lie.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Granted, on more than one occasion I've compared Harmony Gold's treatment of Robotech fans to an abusive relationship... but in this unusual case, Harmony Gold isn't to blame as they had no involvement in the day-to-day business of the failed Kickstarter campaign. I'd argue this is actually a far bigger betrayal than anything the Robotech fandom has had to cope with in the past because it's coming from the one Robotech licensee that, deadline-scheduling problems aside, had consistently, genuinely tried to bring a quality product to the fans. This is the kind of terrible, excessively melodramatic, over-the-top betrayal you'd expect to come from the pen of George Lucas c.2005. The only thing missing from Harmony Gold's decision to pull the license and put an end to Palladium Books's sham operation was a declaration that they had the high ground, and a crippled Palladium clawing at the ground and shrieking "I HATE YOU!". Even more unusually, Harmony Gold is almost cast in the role of the good guy putting a stop to the abusive, deceptive practices of a wayward licensee. You can almost hear the HG staff over-dramatically telling Kevin Siembieda "It's over Kevin, I have the high ground!". One has to wonder where they'll go from here, since a number of backers have kept copies of e-mails and other correspondence in which Palladium Books either promised the backers cash refunds in the event Wave 2 turned out to be a no-go or cases where Kevin told the same lies he'd been telling to backers for ~3 years to the Michigan attorney general's office...
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Speaking as someone who's been dragged into a crapload of Facebook discussions about legal action against Palladium... I can attest that 90, maybe 95% of them are kick-the-corpse-ers. There are some who genuinely want a full refund from Palladium and are willing to go to court to get it, precisely because Palladium actually promised (in writing) cash refunds if they were unable to give backers their Wave 2 rewards. What's that old saying about doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result being the definition of insanity?
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Most of the Zentradi designs from the TV series are pretty heavily dated... the high uniform collars, the pastel colors, Vrlitwhai's weird brown smock-thing, the helmets that look more than a bit like a bellend or like a visored version of a WW2 German helmet, the chunky body armor, etc. IMO, the DYRL? designs fit much better with the notion that the Protoculture were obsessed with organic technology and organic design aesthetics. The movie version's partially organic Zentradi technology, and the techno-organic aesthetic of their leadership, meshes extremely well with the notion that the Protoculture were masters of genetic engineering and considered their Zentradi a form of [living/biological] weapon rather than people and with the later depictions of the ancient Protoculture as pursuing bio-technology extensively (later established to be due to their idolizing Vajra evolution). They look less generic, and more overtly alien... which adds impact to the reveal that they're still basically human. Let's be honest, Boddole Zer looked goofy as hell as a bald man in a robe that looked like a hand-me-down from Ming the Merciless. They look almost exactly the same... which, I gather, was the entire point when they designed the First Order equipment. It hearkens back a bit to the more streamlined Clone Trooper helmets too, back when the clones were the heroes of the Republic, which might also be what the First Order's going for aesthetically. The First Order version just looks more like it was designed for someone to actually wear halfway comfortably, where all that extra mass hanging low on the classic helmet looks like something to cause extra neck strain in the poor schmucks wearing them all day. ... are you seriously trying to argue that mechanical design is inconsequential to the guy who's best known on this and a dozen other sites for being "mecha question guy"? SERIOUSLY? My quibbles are more aesthetic, but I do like the redesigned UIs in the Zentradi DYRL? designs. The impression I got was that they were basically platform shoes.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    The game designer who attempted suicide was not actually attached to the project... he was a Palladium Books licensee and close friend of some Palladium Books staffers who was trying to launch a startup using a Kickstarter campaign for a RIFTS board game. He unwisely made a number of remarks about how he could save the RRT Kickstarter, but only if his project got funded. The RRT backers, who were already livid about RRT's state of affairs and many of whom suspected his startup was a shell company which Palladium was using to shake its fans down for more money, were extraordinarily put out by what they saw as him trying to extort backer pledges from them. They were so offended that there was a concerted effort to ensure that his Kickstarter would fail, and that any potential backers would be warned about Palladium's suspected (now confirmed) dubious behavior and his ties to them. For all practical intents and purposes, they succeeded. He canceled his Kickstarter campaign and attempted suicide soon after. It was a very messy situation, made worse by Kevin Siembieda's hamhanded attempt to blame Kickstarter backers for the way he accidentally tapped the storm of ill will that had previously directed at Palladium itself. (He essentially tried to hijack a tragic and upsetting news item to argue that the backers were bad people for being mad at him.) It's a safe bet. Harmony Gold had to be privy to the fact that Palladium Books spent three years lying to its Kickstarter backers about the state of the project's finances and that they would not be able to complete the project due to misappropriating funds from development to build up retail sale stock (that didn't sell). Nothing thus far, AFAIK... but there is at least one Facebook group devoted to the possibility of pursuing a class action lawsuit against Palladium Books over the Kickstarter's handling, and a number of individuals have stated that they're exploring their options for legal action on an individual basis.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Honestly, the best part is that Gepernich never does get around to getting that damned thing removed. It's still stuck there, screwing up the main bridge monitor, clear thru to the end of Macross 7. EDIT: Actually, the best part might be that he does the same thing to Chlore's command ship, and she has a much more appropriate reaction to someone Kool-Aid Man-ing through her bulkhead to blast rock music at her. It's actually a lot better than it's cracked up to be... you just have to take the first half in small-ish doses because there's very little musical variety in it and the plot doesn't really get going 'till about episode 22. Once it finally gets moving, it's everything Delta wasn't... an interesting story with well-developed characters.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    The first one was a damn fun movie. I'm cautiously optimistic for the sequel.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Most, including Macross's creators, would be inclined to argue the opposite... the DYRL? designs are commonly regarded as being far superior to the SDF:M TV ones, which is why they've almost totally supplanted the TV ones in new works. ... apart from a slight redesign of the helmets and occasionally showing signs of self-preservation instinct, what's the difference? Swap "photon torpedo" for "speaker pod" and you're there. Remember what he did to Gepernich's command center? Parked a speaker pod the size of a double-decker bus right through his wall.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    There's plenty of Michigan lawyers ready and willing to try and set some court precedents on crowdfunding... shouldn't be too hard to find one willing to take a class action. Likely if anything is filed it'll all go down in the Michigan 18th District Court. Not surprised that this happened, I'm just surprised that they actually got something out before the project spun in.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Pretty sure Hayate's still the main character in the story. This ain't just a music video, y'know? A big part of the story is his romance plot with Freyja and him fighting in the war with Windermere.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, it is. For a guy whose magnum opus franchise is best known for radically reinventing itself with each new installment, he's pretty damned consistent about not bringing the original cast back. Mari Iijima remarked at Super Dimension Con that she'd be open to reprising her role as Minmay but she knows Kawamori's against bringing the character back, and the idea that Lady M was someone who was affiliated with Megaroad-01 was torpedoed mere months after the series ended.1 Berger Stone was apparently just spinning a yarn. HG doesn't own the old anime, and it wouldn't get rid of the legal problems... Considering Macross the First uses the DYRL? Zentradi designs almost exclusively2, and the only TV series design that is consistently reused is the standard trooper body armor... most of them would likely be green or that chalk-white that many of the grunts were in DYRL?. There'd probably still be at least some signs of the rest of the Amazing Technicolor Population spectrum, like Quamzin being lavender. 1. In the Nov 2016 issue of Newtype. Macross Delta's creators apparently never bothered to come up with a real identity for Lady M, as she's just an Omniscient Council of Vagueness-type exposition device. 2. Quamzin was, IIRC, the only one in Macross the First to retain his TV series appearance, though he wore the movie body armor. Laplamiz got an all-new design reminiscent of Mikimoto's design for Jinna Fiaro from Macross: Eternal Love Song for the manga, and we've yet to see Milia.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    What I've heard from friends who've had the chance to see it already is that it flows better than the TV series. It's still a compilation movie, with all that entails, so whether it's told "better" would be a subject contingent on whether you feel fewer digressions from the main story is a good thing. (IMO, it is...) ... protagonist focus is a bit off lately too. Some friends of mine who were in Japan on business over the last few weeks were kind enough to bring me back some souvenirs, including three copies of the movie's booklet/brochure. The interviews with voice actors were no surprise... but the fact that they didn't bother to interview the main frigging character's voice actor was. They just did the members of Walkure and Chisato Mita, the character designer.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    If only... if you take the VF-1's cost and apply other remarks comparing its cost to that of the average Destroid, which is said to be approximately 1/20th the cost of a VF-1, your average Destroid has a price point of around $6.3 million. That's about what a M1 Abrams cost back in '99, and about $2.6 million less than one costs today. Clearly some serious advancements in manufacturing technology were made even before they got 'hold of that factory satellite. If a giant robot only costs six mil, one can only imagine how much the cost of a tank came down... (By 2059, destroids had achieved the level of glorified forklifts, so the price must REALLY have come down with automated factory tech.)
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Alien cat-people are a pretty old trope and the inhabitants of Voldor are a pretty vanilla take on the idea... they're not fleshed out enough to say they're similar to cat-person aliens from any particular series. It's mostly just an excuse to get Walkure into nekomimi cosplay and tick another item off a list of standard fetishes. Still, since they've been established to be a thing, it's a safe bet the Voldorans, Ragnans, and even Windermereans will be showing up in other parts of the galaxy in the future, much like how Zolans have sort of stealthily spread out from their homeworld in the manga and light novels. (Of course, the Zentradi are as seemingly omnipresent as you'd expect for a species that outnumbered human survivors eight to one on postwar Earth.)
  21. Seto Kaiba
    As an amusing side note to my previous post, the Sky Angels book gives the RDT&E cost of the VF-1 Valkyrie program as $50 billion... less than both the F-35 (@$55 billion) and F-22 (@$67 billion).
  22. Seto Kaiba
    To date, the only time an actual number was put to it was in Masahiro Chiba's Sky Angels VF-1 tech manual in '84. The flyaway cost for an early block VF-1A was given as $126 million (c.2008). Bear in mind, this was written and published back in 1984 when the average cost of a modern (4th Gen) fighter was $28.9 million per unit. A VF-1A was 3.3 times as expensive as the priciest modern fighter jet in service at the time (the F-14A). Nobody foresaw that, by the time calendars caught up to Macross's events, $126 million would be a pretty reasonable price tag for a conventional fighter... with the F-35B and C sitting pretty at $122 mil, and the F-22 at $150 mil. All told, around 5,500 VF-1 Valkyries were built and delivered to the military during mass production. A lot of the civilian market stuff is units that were built under license from Shinsei Industry for non-military use, though some military spec models did fall into civilian hands via disposal sales. after its retirement.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Isn't one of those where that drop-down antipersonnel gun thing is in the original trilogy? Maybe Han removed one or both of the surplus landing gear to make room for more dakka?
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Macross already tried going the Gundam route once before with Super Dimension Fortress Macross II: Lovers Again. As much as I personally love it, it was not particularly well-received in Japan. Its mechanical and character designs are the only parts of it that get consistent praise, while it usually gets sharply criticized for not doing enough differently from its predecessors in terms of story. Considering the Macross fandom's well-entrenched expectation that each new series will "mix it up" substantially, going the Gundam route is almost certainly ill-advised. Amusingly enough, given you cited Gundam 00 as an example, one of Gundam's biggest faults is a lack of innovation. It can get INCREDIBLY samey, especially in the Universal Century timeline. Improvements in animation tech have let them do more, and more impressive, fight scenes that still get old fast thanks to a lack of variety and the fact that the plots are getting progressively weaker and less interesting, with some having crossed the line all the way into Excuse Plot territory (e.g. Thunderbolt, Build Fighters). A Zentradi-centric story in the Gundam style wouldn't be able to exploit the trick Gundam uses to prevent its fight scenes from becoming bland and samey... a Monster of the Week-style constant influx of new models. The Zentradi and Supervision Army have been using the same designs for over half a million years now, with no means to develop new weapons. The one time a Zentradi fleet has been depicted as actually having developed a new mobile weapon was Macross: Eternal Love Song, where Quamzin and his cohorts used skills learned on Earth to build an original battle suit for Quamzin to use in the final offensive against the Leplendis fleet (which is totally not the colossal lavender lovechild of the Sazabi and a Nousjadeul-Ger, honest!). For a variable definition of "eye candy", that's what they've been doing starting from Macross Zero. Delta's definition of "eye candy" is the other one... As much as I love Macross, if we end up with a Macross version of Nekopara I am officially out. Like the song goes: I would do anything for love, but I won't do that.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    My understanding is that that's the number of days on which you were the member who received the greatest number of reputation points (upvotes).
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