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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Thus far, I don't think we have any evidence to suggest that it's based on the movie version. On the one hand, it is a neat idea. On the other hand, I can kind of see why it probably isn't as commonplace as we'd think. One of the main use cases for such a force would be policing giant Zentradi citizens, but there are precious few places in the galaxy where Zentradi are allowed to live as giants. An armed revolt by giant Zentradi in 2030 led to Earth banning its Zentradi residents from living as giants. Macross Frontier materials describe the titular fleet as very unusual for allowing Zentradi citizens to live as giants and even setting aside a dedicated residential area for them. It probably wouldn't be unfair to describe that concession to giant Zentradi as a massive and showy display of wealth on the Frontier fleet's part, no doubt for the convenience of its fabulously wealthy Zentradi sponsor. Giant Zentradi in New UN Gov't territory are mainly going to be soldiers, policed by the military, so a separate force isn't likely to be necessary in most places. Civilian-owned Valkyries would potentially be a reason to have a small force like that. We've only had a few stories with true civilian-owned Valkyries in them, so it's hard to know what the norm for those. Macross the Ride's presentation of civilian Valkyries suggests that not only is there is a license requirement for operating a Valkyrie in general, but also that civilian-use Valkyries are generally not permitted to carry live weapons. Macross 30 makes it explicit that arming a civilian-use Valkyrie in Uroboros's jurisdiction, where that kind of thing is actually allowed, requires special permits/licenses/insurances only obtainable via registration as a mercenary with the Hunter's Guild and passing an exam. The Guild can presumably just slap a bounty on any badly behaved individuals and as we see in the game the guild chairwoman is not above wading in with her own ultra high-spec Valkyrie a (VF-27γ). So the one place we know of where it's legal to most people to have an armed civilian Valkyrie is also the one place where there's a substantial presence of civilian VFs used for security services by Hunter's Guild mercs. So most places, I feel like there probably wouldn't be a ton of call for a police-use giant robot. Anything in space is going to be the military's business, and unarmed models in an emigrant ship can probably be brought down fairly quick with adhesive rounds from man-portable missile launchers and light tanks similar to what the Zola Patrol uses on their VF-5000s. It was probably inevitable once the NUNS figured out exactly how good the VF-19 was... they were bound to run a test of it against their own defenses at some point during the phase-in process. Isamu just preempted that test in the showiest way possible.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    While Macross Dynamite 7 is set a few years after the New UN Government really started restricting arms exports to the emigrant governments in the wake of the Sharon Apple incident, it's probably not a major factor in the Zola Patrol's use of VF-5000s. Zola's a remote and unimportant planet in the New UN Government's sphere of influence. Its Zola Patrol is basically an anti-poaching law enforcement unit rather than a military force. They don't need bleeding edge VFs because they're only squaring off against civilians with black market weapons intent on poaching galactic whales. Getting a bunch of secondhand VFs on loan from Earth instead of investing a huge part of the planet's GDP buying a bunch of state-of-the-art export models makes a lot more sense for their less extreme needs. The export restrictions that gave rise to New UN Forces monkey models were a direct result of the Sharon Apple incident. It was only after Earth's next-generation fighter proved it could break through the defenses of the most heavily defended planet in the galaxy solo, the New UN Government started having second thoughts about letting everyone have it. They were having little regional tiffs as humanity expanded into the galaxy, but the prospect of everyone having access to such powerful weapons able to stealth past planetary defenses and drop reaction bombs likely felt like opening Pandora's box.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, I'll wait for more info before I decide if I'm going to say "duck this" to G-Quacks... but if the "leaks" about the show's premise are true I am kind of already not feeling it. They're so out of ideas for AUs that, according to the "leak", we're doing UC Elseworlds now. Bandai Namco and Khara allegedly settled on that oldest and most overused cliche for doing an alternate history story: "What if the Nazis won the war?". The alleged leak from the official site claims the series is set in an alternate UC 0085 in which the Principality of Zeon won the One Year War after Char captured the Gundam. I'm really hoping that's fake, because they already handled one Zeon story badly this year and this premise is even easier to screw up than Requiem for Vengeance's. Now, in all fairness, there is absolutely no practical reason that a giant robot has to have the same rotational limits to its joints that the Human body does. The main reason they do is it's easier to consider choreography if the robot is treated like a giant person. The only series I can think of that actually does anything with that idea is Full Metal Panic!, but it's still a valid point. There shouldn't be anything, mechanically, stopping a Mobile Suit or other giant robot from spinning its head and windmilling its arms like a cartoon character or having the flexibility of a contortionist. It's not like the pilot has to match that flexibility inside the cockpit. That "action pose" would probably look a lot more impressive with a model that isn't quite so visually busy. The G-Quacks is covered with so many differently-colored and oddly-shaped bits and bobs that it has very few clean lines, and thus when posed like that it's just a visually indistinct blob until you start processing the fine detail and figuring out what patch of color belong to what extremity. I feel like the increasing visual complexity of the designs is an escalating problem that's only getting worse. As much as I love the IBO designs, they got busier and busier as the series went on until they lost all their visual punch. The Aerial had the same problem, it had to have a trillion panel lines and TRON lines and curves everywhere, which must've been hell to draw but just make it look cluttered. The Quacky here is just the newest and most severe example. If they took the top two or three layers off it in Photoshop it might be presentable, but any charm the design might have is lost under the layers of extraneous surface detail.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah. According to Macross Chronicle, the Zola Patrol's fleet of VF-5000s (c.2047) are retired aircraft on loan to the Zolan government from the New UN Forces. They're old military aircraft that've been refurbished and modified for non-military use, so they're not technically an export variant. The VF-19P, VF-19EF, VF-19C/MG21... those are in the "monkey model" category as export variants with deliberately reduced capabilities.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    *impressed whistle* You were not kidding... that is way worse than I thought. My brain honestly struggled for a minute to reconcile what this pose even was... ... and for a hot minute I was honestly wondering if it'd gone full starfish like that one Gundam Athrun had in SEED.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Gack... it's even uglier in profile view. This design is so incredibly busy that it's honestly hard to tell where some parts of it begin and end. Lose the weird pods hanging off the upper arms and lower legs, give it some proper feet, ditch the weird ring hanging off its hips and the second one on its waist, lose that wing thing on the back, and dial back the V-fin a bit it and could be pretty cool. As it is, it feels visually cluttered like a JRPG protagonist wearing far too many belts.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Wow... that looks awful. I thought it was ugly when I could only see bits and pieces of it in the trailer, but seeing the whole thing at once is just 🤮. Does it have three arms in this picture? And what the hell is going on with its feet? I can't tell if it has elf shoe-style feet or it's got spiked stiletto heels like something out of Five Star Stories. Its name is "G-Quacks"... I guess it invites the inevitable joke that the production team certainly are. In development since 2018 and this is what they decided was showready? Yeesh.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    The Macross 5 fleet's population is predominantly, if not entirely, Zentradi. A proud people with a refined appreciation for firepower. As to the Neo Nupetiet Vergnitzs-class battleships, I doubt their firepower eclipses the anti-fleet capabilities of a Battle-class with its Macross Cannon. They probably have a pretty plausible claim to being the most powerful regular warship available to the NUNS at the time though between their size and Earth's ability to properly equip their missile launchers with anti-warship reaction munitions like the Protoculture did in the distant past. I'd assume the reason the production side didn't do remodeled versions of all the ships is that Macross 5's role in the story is relatively small, and that just the most recognizable Zentradi ship alongside the Zentradi-styled Earth ships sufficed as visual shorthand for an Earth-Zentradi fleet. We do see in later titles that the New UN Forces operate most of the familiar classes of Zentradi ship. My guess would be they'd retain whatever designation the original emigrant fleet that settled the planet had... barring some weird corner case where multiple planets were settled by a single fleet. It possibly wouldn't apply to something like the Zola Patrol's VF-5000s and VF-19, as those were supposedly export models.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Honestly, my biggest problem is that this teaser makes it sound like we're just recycling the same premise they did in the previous show, The Witch from Mercury. "Students gamble on Mobile Suit fights for no adequately explored reason beyond boredom and because the plot says they have to."
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Macross Chronicle does state that the Macross 5 fleet had multiple ships of the same type as its flagship Macross 5... so the answer does appear to be that a fleet can have more than one. It also, interestingly, notes that the underside of each City-class has a large dock that is able to accommodate two Battle-class ships side by side. So there seems to have been some basic provision for the possibility of multiple Battle-class ships in every fleet even if actually having more than one is not practical. The Battle Frontier's Mecanic Sheet in Macross Chronicle also vaguely suggests provision for more than one in their designations. Battle Frontier is described as BATTLE25/MF25-01.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Hmmm... it's been so busy at work I legitimately forgot this series was releasing this week! It is, in a very strange way, unaccountably nice to see that the Galaxy Far Far Away actually does have a Nice Place to Live. The whole "space suburbia" thing has this wonderfully 80's retrofuturism to it. Half the walls are at a 45 degree angle for no reason, there's lots of leatherette and wood paneling, the alien neighbors are walking alien pets, and the neighbor's robot lawnmower is just a droid pushing a regular pushmower. The care that went into the visual design for really does a lot to make At Attin feel truly lived-in. Or I guess it's lived-on? The bus driver even looks to be the same model of droid from the old Galaxy Tours attraction. All in all, not a bad start at all. I'm interested to see where it goes.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    As we saw in Luthen's visits to Saw Gererra, he doesn't need political capital to rally rebel cells to his cause. He has the respect and trust of a bunch of rebel cells because he's out there providing them with intelligence, with money, and with the logistical support they need to continue the fight against the Empire. He's able to get the infamously intractable Saw Gererra to agree to work with a rebel cell he's ideologically opposed to with minimal arm-twisting thanks to being respected as someone they can't do without. That's more than any other rebel leader could claim, since all of the other rebel factions had failed to get Saw on-side as of Rogue One. The Rebellion would eventually need a political leader, but that day is still a ways off as of Andor. Her main contribution to Andor's story is screwing up. She's supposed to be the rebellion's financial backer but she half-assed the money laundering, so her entire subplot is her trying to cover her arse before she gets audited and the Aldhani heist is green-lit because the rebels need alternate sources of funding because she dropped the ball. If they're gonna do a story with Mon Mothma, do a story about Mon Mothma instead of just making her the rich idiot everyone else has to work around.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    As others have noted, that's not going to be in-scope for Andor Season 2. Cassian's story ends with his death on Scarif during the mission to steal the plans for the first Death Star. I'm honestly not sure what she would have to do with the theft of the second Death Star's plans, since that was done by Bothan spies. An incompetent figurehead... that second word is important to my point. Mon Mothma not using a blaster or a lightsaber isn't what makes her an incompetent figurehead. What makes Mon Mothma an incompetent figurehead of the Rebellion is that, from what we see in Andor and Rogue One, her "leadership" is actively detrimental to the Rebellion's cause. Luthen and other rebel leaders have to go behind her back to actually get anything done because she's so naive, sheltered, and out-of-touch with reality thanks to the ivory tower lifestyle she's lived as a senator that she's offended by the day-to-day necessities of running an effective resistance movement. She wants to make a principled stand, but she doesn't seem to understand that most of the galaxy is too busy trying to make ends meet to have any interest in her high-minded ideals. If the rebels had actually listened to Mon Mothma, the rebellion would've failed early on... either because they would never have grown their forces without needless Imperial cruelty like the post-Aldhani crackdown driving public discontent with the new order or because they'd have scattered their forces upon learning of the Death Star and been picked off one cell at a time instead of going on the Scarif raid that directly set off the events of the original trilogy. What Luthen Rael understands, and Mon Mothma clearly doesn't, is that anger will motivate the normal workaday people of the galaxy to take up arms against the Empire where idealism never could. The Rebellion is made up of people who are pissed. The Empire has taken something from all of them, whether it's their livelihoods, their liberty, their loved ones, etc., and they're angry enough about it that they've decided the Empire has to go. That's why Luthen goes around the galaxy acting as a go-between for the various cells of pissed-off people getting them to support each other despite varying priorities and alliegances and focusing their anger onto targets that will benefit the cause as a whole. Mon Mothma's real role seems to be little more than being the Rebellion's token Senator, there to lend credibility to their stated goal as the Alliance to Restore the Republic and not just the Alliance to Burn the Empire Down.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    So far, it's all sounding pretty good... breaking it up into mostly self-contained story arcs worked for the previous season, both the Gilroys and Willimon delivered solid writing in the previous season too. IMO, the main concern is going to be leaving the all-important task of sticking the landing to Bissell. I'd like to see a little less focus on Mon Mothma in the second season. Genevieve O'Reilly's a very talented actress, but Mon Mothma only really seems to be in this story to be the incompetent figurehead that Stellan Skarsgard's Luthen Rael has to circumvent to Get Sh*t Done and occasionally rebuke when she starts in with her ivory tower pearl-clutching.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Most of them, anyway. The "new giant carrier" type was an original development by the Varauta forces late in their conflict with the Macross 7 fleet, and Gigile's assault ship is indicated to be something developed from the Varauta standard battleship so that may also be an original design of theirs. Exactly what they looked like before has of course never been revealed, but all things considered it seems likely that many of them were transitional designs used after the First Space War but before the introduction of the classes we're familiar with accompanying 3rd Generation and later emigrant fleets. Varauta 3198XE was discovered and settled by the Megaroad-13 and its accompanying fleet in 2025. (Soon, isn't it?) As far as we know, they didn't have any factory satellites until the colony was taken over by the Protodeviln eighteen years later in 2043. Building ~500 hundred new warships between 2025 and 2043 while also building up colony infrastructure and exploring other worlds in the system strikes me as a bit much for the ~80,000 people of the colony to do. That they departed Earth with most of those ships strikes me as a lot more likely, since Earth DID have the manufacturing muscle to casually build something the scale of the Varauta fleet flagship... one of the largest human-built ships in the setting. Macross Chronicle notes that mass-production of the standard battleship made it economical to produce, but that suggests that the individual unit cost is probably quite high if the only way to do it economically is in bulk. It's also a much more complex design than the Guantanamo-class Advanced ARMD, given its combination of battleship and carrier functions. Given that the Earth UN Forces and New UN Forces use a hull classification symbol system that's either a direct continuation of, or heavily inspired by, that of the pre-war United States I would agree that it's likely that the battleships would be BB-something under the Spacy's system. Older lore had the ARMD-class ships interchangeably using ARMD-## and SCV-##. Macross 7-era lore has revised that to ARMD-## and CV-##, with other carriers shown to use CV-## and frigates shown to use FF-##. Frontier-era screencaps show that they've started sticking mission letters onto them too. The Northampton-class ships are marked with FFM-##, while the Guantanamo-class ships are CVR-## and the Uraga-class CVS-##. Those don't have a clear interpretation. I doubt those frigates are minelayers, which is what the now-disused M mission letter normally meant, though it would make sense for the Guantanamo-class ships to be considered part of the fleet's radar picket. That wouldn't really make it analogous to a Quiltra Queleual-class ship. The Quiltra Queleual is basically an aircraft carrier for reentry pods. It has the means to move the very many battle pods stored in it around and get them to the target. The Varauta battroid carrier doesn't seem to have that, to the extent that it's described as being inferior as a carrier to all the other Varauta ships, which are already noted to be pretty bad in that regard. The Varauta flagship is a whole different kind of beast. It's made to be something equivalent to a Battle-class, with the firepower to engage an enemy fleet solo and the fighters to back it up. It's built to be a carrier, and a mothership to smaller warships similar to a Zentradi mobile fortress. It's also so big it can't rapidly move into or out of combat, making it unsuitable for raiding.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, that's the one. It's basically just a bonus TV episode, but it's classified as a movie because it was screened in cinemas as a special feature. The key word in that description is "dedicated". Most ships in Macross, even those which are not strictly speaking aircraft carriers, carry at least a few combat mecha for defense purposes. The ships of the Zentradi forces are mainly considered to be classes of battleship, and yet they still have hangars supporting units of battle pods and battle suits for defensive and offensive use. The New UN Spacy similarly deploys small numbers of Valkyries aboard its Northampton-class frigates and stealth cruisers like the Algenicus as seen in Macross 7 PLUS and Macross M3. Where the New UN Spacy from the 2030s and beyond seems to favor a reasonably strict division of roles between escort warships and dedicated aircraft carriers, the Protodeviln-controlled forces of the Varauta fleet follow the earlier and more Zentradi-like model of multipurposeful ships. Most of their fleet is made up of cruisers and battleships that are a good deal larger than anything in the New UN Spacy's regular forces, in order to accommodate having the heavy armor and weapons of a space battleship while also having room for a modest fighter complement. The Varauta standard battleship has a fighter complement roughly comparable to a Guantanamo-class stealth carrier, but it's more than twice the size, much more expensive, and nevertheless still nowhere near as effective as that much smaller carrier. With only four catapults that must be fired one at a time, the Varauta battleship needs a lot longer to get its 40 aircraft in the air compared to the Guantanamo and its ability to operate eight catapults in parallel. It's why Macross Chronicle notes that the Varauta need to field 2-3 of the standard battleship to achieve the same operational capacity as a single NUNS carrier. The same is true for the larger ships too, like the assault ship Gigile favored. It was nearly 900m long, cost ten times as much as a regular battleship, and still couldn't rival the carrier performance of a single Uraga-class despite a similar aircraft capacity. The large Battroid carrier is kind of that idea taken to its logical extreme. It can carry a hundred Valkyries, but it can't deploy them efficiently or effectively because it's simply not set up to handle that many aircraft. Despite its enormous capacity, it's worse off than smaller ships of the line in terms of carrier performance and a lot more vulnerable for it. Faced with the Spacy's ability to get a crapton of aircraft in the air quickly, the Varauta realized they needed similiar capabilities and thus the new giant carrier was born. It was that lesson taken to its logical extreme... a ship that had one job: get the maximum possible number of fighters in the air all at once. The ship is basically a massive hangar complex and eight three-plane scramble catapult decks strapped to an engine. It's noted that it can launch 24 aircraft simultaneously and be ready to launch 24 more in two and a half minutes, allowing it to get its entire complement of 200 aircraft in the air in just 20 minutes. That is an insane pace that says that the Varauta were absolutely not messing about when they designed the thing. Luckily for the Spacy, the Varauta forces were late to the realization and only managed to build three of the bloody things before the war ended.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, that's the conclusion I would've reached as well based on the similarities in the bow's design... that this was an early draft of the Battroid Large Transport Carrier that made its appearance in Macross 7: the Galaxy is Calling Me!.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    As much as I love pre-Kurtzman Star Trek, I have to admit the TNG movies were definitely a mistake. The first six Star Trek movies with the TOS cast were made well after the series ended and for all their uneven writing they were pretty impactful. Not just because they were bigger in scope as Star Trek stories went at the time but also because they functioned thematically as a coda to the series. For all their uneven writing, each installment had the crew take on part of their issues about getting older. The Voyage Home aside, the other five movies effectively mirror the five stages of grief. The Motion Picture is Kirk's denial that his glory days are behind him, The Wrath of Khan is Kirk and Khan raging at each other over what they've lost, The Search for Spock is bargaining as Kirk tries to find a way to cheat death for himself and those he cares about, The Final Frontier is depression as the crew is forced to confront their unprocessed traumas, and The Undiscovered Country is acceptance as the crew finally comes to terms with the end of their era as the hostilities with the Klingons that defined their careers ends. The four TNG movies don't really have a consistent theme like that and scale-wise they're more like long TV episodes. "Passing the torch" in Generations didn't work very well since there had already been a far more poignient torch-passing moment at the end of The Undiscovered Country, and thanks to the Nexus's timey-wimey BS Kirk is passing to torch to a fellow captain who's older than he is. It's also a terribly anticlimactic death for James T. Kirk twice over, dying in a hull breach on someone else's ship vs. having a bridge dropped on him or getting shot in the back by a crazy scientist. Probably why Shatner tried to give Kirk a more dignified death in his own novel The Return and why Star Trek: Picard tried to quietly unkill him by revealing Section 31 has him somehow alive and in stasis in their safe deposit box of insane bullsh*t. The same could be said for the Enterprise-D's defeat, going down to an obsolete Klingon Bird of Prey in a handful of shots at the hands of the Duras sisters, who ever never better than C-list villains. First Contact was the best of the lot story-wise, but I'll never stop hating on it because it ruined the Borg. When they were introduced in TNG, the Borg were an awesome and quite intimidating dark mirror of the Federation. A civilization that had taken equality, cooperation, and scientific advancement to their illogical extreme by using technology to link their minds together into a collective consciousness devoted to its definition of utopia and societal perfection. The Borg in "Best of Both Worlds" are shown to be genuinely confused that Humanity doesn't WANT to join the Collective, as it sees itself as a benevolent entity trying to make people's lives better. First Contact sh*t all over that by making the Borg a bunch of mindless space zombies mindlessly spreading their space zombie infection at the behest of an evil AI in a pretty uninspired zombie movie A-plot. The Borg Queen is a terrible idea that makes the Borg less alien and intimidating by replacing the faceless anonymity of the Collective with a clear leader who acts like a B-movie femme fatale and is constantly chewing the scenery with Shatnerian gusto. Putting a human face on the Borg made it easier to write for them, leading to them becoming recurring villains in Voyager and the galaxy's biggest threat taking L after L on its own turf from a lost little science ship with nowhere near the resources and firepower of the Enterprise until they became a joke and were killed off for real.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    To add, prior to DYRL?, the instances we see of Zentradi text onscreen are typically just perfectly legible English written in the Zentradi alphabet rather than alien words. For instance, the interior of the Quel-Quallie recon pod has the English words "ESCAPE POD" written over the escape pod hatch in the bottom right corner there.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    They're either coming up with the names themselves or they're using names they've found while researching on Robotech fan sites. There is writing on a number of the pieces of line art for various Zentradi mecha, but they're mostly unit numbers. For example... Using the official guide on Zentradi language from Macross Chronicle, none of them that have writing on them in the line art appear to have anything recognizable as a word. The writing on them, according to Macross Perfect Memory, are unit markings and other identifying marks. The letters under the camera eye are the pilot's initials (L.O.), the numbers written on the side above the leg are the platoon number (T-25, the circle and symbol is the number 20 not 2), and the writing on the hip joint itself is an identification number for that aircraft (appears to be C and then 1025D6). The chevrons on the back of the knees (not seen here) are identified as rank insignia. Similar markings for the same purpose are found on the Nousjadeul-Ger, Queadluun-Rau, etc. The Quel-Quallie appears to have a identification number written on its underside. Neither the Gnerl nor the Recovery Craft have any writing on them in their art.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    回収機 (Kaishuu-ki, lit. "Recovery craft" or "Retrieval craft") is the only label ever applied to it in the art books. I don't believe it's been given a name in the Zentradi language, officially. There are several designs that were not given a name in the alien language. Like the medium scale gunboat that Quamzin used at the end of the series, the Zentradi picket/scout ship, or many of the non-battle pod small craft.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Hmm... it's a lovely piece. Kind of reminds me of a piece that Shatner himself wrote into one of those novels he penned where Spock visits Kirk's grave on Veridian III. The deepfake faces are a little unsettling to me, though.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Nope. It repeats info from Perfect Memory and other books that the two models of space suit are the Type 6 armored space suit (worn by Quamzin and others) and the Type 8 general-use space suit. The Type 6 armored suit is noted to be used by unit leaders and for armored units fighting in close combat. The Type 8 suit is the standard one that we see most Zentradi pilots use, incl. the Regult pilot who transports Exsedol to the Macross in Ep26 of the original series. Quamzin's Type 6 suit is noted to have different colors from the regular model, which has the same color palette as the Type 8 suit. Yeah, it's in a few artbooks. This is Animation #3 page 69, for instance.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    "It's showtime!" Anyway... I'm assuming this is with respect to the toy pictured on the previous page. Those colors are very wrong indeed. Using Macross Chronicle SDF:M TV Zentradi character sheet 03A and some accompanying screenshots as reference, the flexible material at the suit's joints is meant to be black which this toy got right. Where the toy has dark purple, there's meant to be dark gray. That weird maroon is supposed to be lavender. The hip pouches and shoulder pads are meant to be brown not red, and the pouches themselves as well as the straps of the harness across the chest are meant to be a slightly blueish white or very light gray. That little rectangular bit under the main part of the breastplate is meant to be the same color as the harness straps and belt pouches. Those white patches on the shins and shoulders are not in the animation reference either.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    I had a bit of an epiphany about this as I was getting ready for dinner. Gundam SEED's characters mostly look the same because Hisashi Hirai's one of those designers who can only draw like six or so designs. But at the same time, there's also an in-story explanation for why everyone looks the goddamn same. Most of these characters are Coordinators. Designer babies whose parents handpicked most, if not all, aspects of their genetic code. They all look the same because the Coordinators, like the global elites who perverted the gene-repair tech used to cure reproductive harm from NBC weapons to create the first Coordinators, insist on engineering their kids to be good looking and the Lego Genetics way Coordinator gene tech works likely means all of them have the very same genes for generic good looks. If everyone's a designer baby whose looks were tailored to the same beauty ideal at the genetic level, everyone's gonna look very similar as they grow up. That's also likely the real world reason behind the fertility problems Coordinators have. It's glossed-over as issues of "genetic compatibility" between individuals... but Coordinator society is full of people who were extensively genetically engineered using the same templates for desirable traits, Coordinator genetic diversity must be in the freaking toilet. It's entirely possible that many coordinators who aren't related in familiar terms are genetically close enough to be third or fourth-degree relatives. Coordinators have fertility issues that get worse with each successive generation because they're technically massively inbred. That might even explain why second and third generation coordinators like Shinn have volatile tempers and overall poor emotional control. Even the Naturals have been subjected to much more limited applications of the same gene editing technology to repair the reproductive harm caused by the use of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons in the world wars before the start of the Cosmic Era. So that might explain why even they don't look too different. So it's bad design, but it's also unintentionally brilliant in a fridge logic sort of way. I'm not a dubs guy by any means, and with the quality of the SEED dub I'm tempted to make a smartarse remark about how no audio is the opposite of a problem... Anyhoo... yeah, Kira is a very polarizing character. The accusations that he's a godmode sue are not without good reason, and the reason Shinn failed to supplant him as the main character in Destiny has a lot to do (according to the creators) with Shinn being wildly unpopular. That said, a lifetime of emotonal scars or death is par for the course for a Gundam character so I'm not sure he's necessarily any worse than anyone else in that regard.
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