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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Safe bet it's Harmony Gold. After all, Catalyst and Piranha submitted that motion to dismiss alleging that Harmony Gold didn't have the rights under license that it claimed to and thus didn't have the standing to bring the suit against them and this is arguing the opposite. I suppose I can't definitively rule out that they might be so stupid they'd refute the entire premise of their own motion to dismiss though, in light of the fact that they keep getting caught trying to commit precisely the same crime over and over again like they're an even less competent Team Rocket.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    You mean context about the document itself, or the mentioned project?
  3. Seto Kaiba
    10g+ is the figure that keeps cropping up in connection with the need for Inertia Store Converter technology. The VF-19 and VF-22's high thrust-to-weight ratios and exceptional maneuverability made them naturally inclined to subject their pilots to g-forces in excess of 10g, which ultimately resulted in frequent crashes after loss of control. The New UN Forces naturally invested no small amount of effort into trying to improve the g-force endurance of their pilots. Better g-suits, seats that adjust the pilot's posture to optimize the blood flow, even a biological anti-g system that used EMPs and infrared to stimulate metabolic responses to stress. It still eventually got to the point where they needed to resort to displacing the g-forces entirely... first with the YF-21's inertia vector control system, then with the Inertia Store Converter developed for the YF-24. Pretty much a necessity for the 5th Gen, since above sustained loads of around 12-17g you're looking at injuries and death and the VF-25's rated for acceleration of 30.5g without its FAST packs on.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Not a perfect fit, but it did an OK job of getting the basic idea across. As I noted previously, this conclusion pulls from a number of different sources. It's not spelled out in its entirety in any one book. The explanation of how destructive interference produces the stealth effect is all me. As noted previously, Macross the Ride's glossary provides a description of the active stealth system as analyzing incoming electromagnetic (radar) waves and transmitting its own back to create false results. Great Mechanics DX #9 describes it as "deceiving" the radar waves rather than disrupting them. There's only one ECM-based (per Macross Chronicle) active stealth technology which works that way... active cancellation. Variable Fighter Master File has a longer explanation on page 54 of the VF-19 book, and its brief remarks on postwar retuning of the VF-1's active stealth system in the Space Wing book does fit neatly with the active cancellation method, noting that it needed software updates to cope with Zentradi Army radar systems that use different sweep patterns and modulations. If this were a jamming based technology (DRFM jamming, for instance) this upgrade wouldn't be necessary. It does explicitly state that the radars have been enhanced. What's pointed to is more along the line of radars being improved AND supplemented with various other sensor systems like optical and infrared cameras, LIDAR arrays, fold wave sensors, and so on... full sensor integration was, IIRC, a major bullet point for the YF-24 and its descendants. (Master File also, naturally, supports the idea of radars continuing to improve.)
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Y'know, I don't think I've ever seen an explicit in-universe rationale for all the missile spam. VFs would be pretty hard to land a hit on with their high maneuverability, weapons able to intercept missiles, active stealth and other forms of ECM, and conventional countermeasures like chaff, flares, smoke, fiber optic towed decoys, and what have you. Then again, there's that old joke about there being a reason they're not called "hittles"... I suppose quantity has a quality all its own in situations like that. "There's a missile here with your name on it and I'm going to keep firing them until I find it!"
  6. Seto Kaiba
    That was my effort to tidily sum up the way the available data points to the effectiveness of active stealth systems going up and down as technology advances. They do actually mention that radar and other detection systems are improving/evolving on page fifteen... but in passing. (Never mind books like Master File gushing about every little update the radar tech went through.) Taken in context with relevant statements from other publications like the Mechanic Sheets for the VF-171, the picture it paints is of the effectiveness of active stealth systems gaining or losing some effectiveness as active stealth and radar technology advance. By the time 4th Gen VFs were being drawn up in the late 2030s, 2nd Generation active stealth's effectiveness had degraded to such an extent that it became necessary to start designing passively stealthy VF designs that mounted the majority of their weapons internally or conformally to reduce the risk of detection. A couple years later, 3rd Generation active stealth comes into use and the need for passive stealth is reduced via the more capable system, so we start seeing less stealthy designs and greater use of wing pylons again. The nature of the technology means that they're not likely to ever be truly effective against a ship or ground-based radar installation at anything other than long range, it's much better suited to the kind of roles the DX article points to it being effective in... concealment from missile guidance radars and other aircraft, which are smaller, less powerful radars. Macross Chronicle's VF-171 Mechanic Sheet does also point to anti-fighter use as the motivation for improving the VF-171's active stealth system from 2nd to 3rd Gen. (In the "Fighter Mode" section.)
  7. Seto Kaiba
    The source with the greatest density of relevant information would probably be Great Mechanics DX 9. It talks a bit about active stealth technology, mostly focusing on how the "arms race" between active stealth and radar systems tipping in favor of radar in the runup to 2040 and Project Super Nova, prompting a greater emphasis on passively stealthy designs until the next generation active stealth systems became available. Some of the details are repeated in Macross Chronicle mechanic sheets like the ones done for Macross Frontier's VF-171s. There are brief descriptions of how the system functions in Great Mechanics DX 9, Macross Chronicle's VF Defenses technology sheet, and Macross R's chapter four glossary... which describe the active stealth technology in use as being one that deceives a hostile radar system by analyzing the incoming radar sweep and transmitting its own electromagnetic waves back to the hostile radar to mislead it into displaying incorrect data. That's a pretty textbook definition of how active cancellation works, and they'd even correctly cited its achilles heel of losing effectiveness as the power of the hostile radar system increases.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    As @sketchley said, the presence of active stealth systems on earlier models of VFs is something that emerged as a result of the VF-0 (and Sv-51) establishing that this technology was in widespread use on VFs from the word "go". This was later finessed into an explanation that radar technology and active stealth technology are in an arms race of sorts. The technique used to achieve the stealth effect is active cancellation, a destructive interference-based approach in which the VF has to generate a radio wave or pulse at the same frequency and amplitude as the enemy radar but with an opposite phase, by which the net amplitude of the returning radar wave/pulse is reduced to zero (or as close to it as possible if the antiphase transmitter can't match the amplitude of the enemy radar). The more powerful the radar, the harder it is for an active stealth system to effectively zero the radar return. As a result, when VF radars exceed the capabiities of active stealth systems, VFs are built with more passively stealthy designs (e.g. the VF-17, YF-19, YF-21), and when active stealth systems have enough power behind them that they can't simply be overpowered by VF-mounted radars then VF designs become less passively stealthy. The VF-17, YF-19, and YF-21 were developed in a period where 2nd Gen active stealth systems had fallen behind radars in terms of power, and so needed to rely more on passive stealth to make up the difference. Once the VF-19, VF-22, and VF-171 reached production readiness, 3rd Generation active stealth systems entered the picture and reduced the need for passively stealthy airframe shapes, allowing more wing-mounted ordnance to be used without compromising stealthiness. I'm not sure "less advanced" is necessarily the right way to put it. The precision of the system is a factor, but it's got a lot to do with raw transmitting power. Active cancellation is very much a brute force approach to stealth, the system has to be able to match the amplitude of the radar wave/pulse. The more juice they can put into generating an antiphase wave/pulse, the more powerful the radar they can hide from.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, that kind of wishful thinking has been showing up increasingly often as new documents from the lawsuit become publicly available. Even overused terms like "fake news" hardly seem strong enough for the kind of coverage that sites like Sarna give to nonevent documents like this, which come freighted with excited, heavily hyperbolic declarations that most any activity is a sign that the tyranny of Harmony Gold will soon be overthrown in court. It's become so absurd that I'd be prepared to bet they'd try to spin the judge calling a ten minute recess because he needed to take a piss as a sign of an imminent ruling against HG that will free the Unseen. The BattleTech/MechWarrior fanbase really ought to know better by now. The owners of the franchise have tried to bring back Unseen designs like half a dozen times now, and every sodding time it ends the same way... Harmony Gold threatens to sue for violation of their exclusive license to the designs in the west, and BT/MW's owners either do the smart thing and back down, or stupidly take the issue before the courts and make fools of themselves before settling out of court to avoid an inevitable ruling against them. It's like the legal version of a Looney Tunes Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner short. That the roadrunner wins is a foregone conclusion, the only question is how the coyote will hurt and humiliate himself in the attempt to challenge it. A ruling in Catalyst/PGI's favor wouldn't materially change anything... it'd just mean that the new designs Harmony Gold alleges were based on Macross designs are different enough that they aren't judged to be derivative of the Macross designs, and would therefore be freely usable without violating the exclusivity of Harmony Gold's license agreement with Tatsunoko. It's not gonna change anything WRT Harmony Gold's license, or the shenanigans they get up to with Macross trademarks or threatening to sue companies like Hasbro.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    The propaganda angle wasn't really related to the TV series... it was that the DYRL? in-universe version played up the threat of the Zentradi (as if such a thing were necessary) by showing two fleets instead of one. @Talos put forward a fun theory about the Macross Frontier movies that they were also in-universe propaganda, with the changes in the story being meant to throw all the blame on the civilian Galaxy Fleet executives and exonerate the New UN Forces personnel who'd directly or peripherally played a role in furthering Galaxy's plot. (e.g. Leon Mishima, Grace O'Connor) Almost invariably the official chronologies favor the "series" version of a given story. My guess would be that will probably hold true when we get the next official Macross chronology in, say, Macross Chronicle 3rd edition?
  11. Seto Kaiba
    No, this doesn't set any precedent. This document is just a statement, for the court record, that the two parties named (Harmony Gold and Harebrained Schemes) have mutually agreed that HBS is not a party to this lawsuit anymore and that they won't become a party to it again based on the specific set of claims Harmony Gold enumerated in this specific lawsuit. In short, it just says that HG and HBS agree HBS is off the hook for this very specific set of claims. It wouldn't prevent Harmony Gold from suing HBS for something else, if they found something else to sue them for in a future or current BattleTech/MechWarrior release. This is not a "slap upside the head" by any stretch of the imagination... for HG or anyone else. It's more or less standard legal practice to name all parties that might be involved in the lawsuit, and then later dismiss any who prove not to be involved/liable. That's what happened here. HBS ended up a party to the lawsuit because they were a business partner of PGI and Catalyst's, and HG is now dismissing them... presumably because they were able to demonstrate that they weren't involved in the development of the offending designs. It's great news for HBS, who no longer have to spend flipping great wodges of cash on lawyers and can get back to business. It doesn't really mean anything for the other parties. Depends how the hypothetical agreement between Big West and Tatsunoko is drawn up. This issue with BattleTech/MechWarrior is principally to do with the exclusivity of the merchandising rights, and BattleTech/MechWarrior's unlicensed use of designs covered by those rights. Unless Tatsunoko sold or licensed those rights to Big West, it'd be Tatsunoko's beef... unless the offending designs were in something marketed in Japan, then it'd be Big West's turn at bat.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Really, I'd think the VF-1 would sell itself beautifully well even without that. It's the aircraft equivalent of the slogan they had for the Henry repeating rifle back in the American civil war... it's the plane you fuel on Monday and fly all week long. (Well, more like all month long, but hey.) Plus having an air-to-air gun that doesn't use bullets, high supersonic cruise capabilities, SSTO capability, and an active stealth system that makes it effectively invisible to search radars on modern conventional fighter jets... I could go on. Between Facebook and here, variations on this one usually pops up about once a month if not more often. "Canon" is probably not a word we should be using when it comes to Macross. Shoji Kawamori has little use for the idea of a firmly defined canon, and prefers to connect Macross works with a broad strokes continuity. His view is that all (official) versions of a given Macross story are equally "true", which he has occasionally expanded on by suggesting that all of them are dramatizations of a true history. Big West, the owners of Macross, tend to go a bit firmer on the subject of continuity and favor the TV versions and certain endings in stories with multiple endings when it comes to order of events shown in official timelines. That said, things from the movie versions will usually still be a thing in the Macross universe accompanied by an explanation of how they fit. More on that in a moment. So... the TV series is, you might say, the First Among Equals when it comes to order of events for the official Macross chronology. DYRL? exists as both an alternate version of those events and as the in-universe movie Do You Remember Love? that came out in 2031. The in-universe version is not exactly the same as the one fans have seen though, scenes in Macross 7 suggest that it had a Max-Milia wedding scene and a few other things that weren't in the real world movie. Yep, there's an explanation for that. The SDF-1 Macross wasn't exactly in great shape before the end of the Super Dimension Fortress Macross TV series, having been shot up pretty bad fighting the Zentradi Boddole Zer main fleet in orbit and surviving the explosion of Boddole Zer's mothership. Ep36 didn't help its state of repair, taking a direct hit from the main converging beam cannon of Quamzin's salvaged gunboat, it also suffered a complete structural failure of its own main converging beam cannon after firing it once, and subsequently took a fair amount of turret fire from Quamzin's ship before losing the right arm entirely to Quamzin's suicidal ramming attack and being caught in the ensuing explosion. The New UN Government decided to completely overhaul the Macross after the battle, and bring it up to the same technological standard as the mass production Macross-class ships that were being constructed in its factory satellites at that time. The DYRL? appearance is essentially the design of the mass production version which the SDF-1 was upgraded to during its ~8 month refit in 2012, being completed shortly before the launch of SDF-2 Megaroad-01 in September 2012. The DYRL? VF-1's different appearance has a similar explanation... the TV and Movie versions were simply different production block variants, making both versions correct. The TV VF-1 Valkyrie was representative of VF-1s produced in Block 1 thru Block 5, and the Movie VF-1 Valkyrie was how the VF-1s looked from Block 6 onwards. EDIT: That said, the creators do seem to vastly prefer the more detailed movie SDF-1 to the TV one. These days, even when a scene calls for showing events from the TV series they usually use the movie version. The one exception that I recall is the model on Ernest Johnson's desk aboard the Macross Elysion, which was VERY badly drawn.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Back when the Sky Angels VF-1 technical manual that cost figure comes from was written, even the newly-launched ATF program wasn't projecting per-unit prices anywhere near that high. A modern fighter jet typically cost ~$28 million per unit back then. The estimated unit cost for the ATF sat at $35 million until a program review in 1990. I think what they were getting at back then, before the movie Macross: Do You Remember Love? came out, was that the VF-1 was supposed to be a vastly more expensive aircraft than anything in the air, at four and a half times the average fighter's price tag.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    A canon is something authors stand behind... a cannon is something you shouldn't stand in front of. In any event, publications like that generally aren't canon in and of themselves. They do make use of production materials that were made for particular episodes but not directly included (e.g. specs for the Enterprise-J), material that was drafted for a series but not filmed (e.g. the NX-class retrofit developed for ENT Season 4's finale and Season 5 prior to its cancellation), and some info that was gleaned from creator commentary/Q&A with long-time staffers like Mike Okuda, Doug Drexler, and Andrew Probert. In some cases, it's simply the only place that info was published outside of blogs run by the respective creators. (The reason the relaunch novels merit special mention is they're the closest thing to an officially-recognized Expanded Universe that Star Trek has... as a coordinated, shared-universe effort that spans post-series continuations of all five Star Trek series with at least some official guidance.)
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Originally, the VF-4 was just "VF-4". Best Hit Series: Macross Flash Back 2012 Graffiti refers to it at one point as "VF-4 Valkyrie" (pg25, in the bottom right corner) but otherwise refers to it only as the VF-4. IIRC, the first time the VF-4 was given a proper name was in Masaya's 1992 TRPG and Macross II: Lovers Again prequel story Macross: Eternal Love Song. The name it was given for that game was VF-4 Siren. (Prior to 1994, new VF designs were principally given mythological reference names as in the case of the VF-X3 Medusa from Macross: Remember Me, or the VF-2JA Icarus from Macross II: Lovers Again itself.) I'm not sure when precisely the "Lightning" name was first applied to the VF-4. The oldest book in my collection that refers to the VF-4 as "Lightning" rather than "Lightning III" is This is Animation Special: Macross Plus (OVA ver.) from 1995. The earlier Bandai Entertainment Bible volumes (#27 and #51) don't name the VF-4 at all. The Variable Fighters Aero Report article in the book briefly covers the VF-4 and refers to it only as "Lightning". The "Lightning III" version of the name came in with Macross Digital Mission VF-X in 1997, which was the debut of its Kawamori-designed transformation as well. The reason for the name change was a real world development, but it wasn't because of the Joint Strike Fighter program. It was Lockheed's YF-22 prototype in the US's Advanced Tactical Fighter program in the early 90's. Presumably the Lockheed YF-22. It was semi-officially known as the Lightning II during testing in 1990 until the rollout of the first few F-22A and F-22B units in April 1997 when they were formally named F-22 Raptor. The VF-4 would probably be Lightning II if only Macross Digital Mission VF-X hadn't come out a bit over a month before the F-22's rollout and official naming. I don't know if the question was ever directly addressed, but it ought to have. Macross's version of Earth history is basically the same as ours until mid-July 1999. The US's ATF program kicked off in 1981 and had competing prototypes in 1990-1991, and trial production models were already flying by the end of 1997. Whether anyone else got their 5th Generation fighter jet development off the ground before OTM made it irrelevant is anyone's guess... but it seems unlikely. Apart from some failed programs the Russians had going in the 90's that were all superseded by the PAK FA program in 2001, no other country even started their 5th Generation development prior to 1999. Presumably widespread adoption of 5th Generation fighter jets was scrubbed in favor of adopting OTM updates to existing 4th Generation models after the formation of the Unification Government and the kickoff of the 1st Generation Variable Fighter development that led to the VF-0, Sv-51, VF-1, and Sv-52.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, Doug Drexler and Mark Rademaker really knocked it out of the park... though considering the other stuff that was on tap for Season 5 like trying to reuse the Kzinti from the Star Trek cartoon or revealing that T'Pol's emotional control problem is down to her dad being a Romulan sleeper agent, it's probably for the best it never got used. The refit NX-class does feature prominently in the Star Trek: Enterprise relaunch continuity though, as the first new starship class of the freshly-founded UFP. The writers contradict the 2011 Ships of the Line calendar by asserting NX-01 was too badly damaged in the Romulan War to be upgraded, so in that version it's the last surviving NX-class (NX-06 Endeavour) that is the first Columbia-class ship and the Federation's first flagship under Captain T'Pol. (Much fuss gets made over both some of the design compromises like moving the launch bay to make room for the "neck", and getting a number of alien systems like Andorian shields, Vulcan tractor beams, etc. to play nice with each other.)
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, that's a different user (yui1107). This, at least, is purely a Macross petition. This one's addressed to Kawamori, intended to persuade him to revisit and redo the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross series with modern animation technology and techniques (ala Gundam: the Origin?).
  18. Seto Kaiba
    They both link to the same change.org petition.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    D'you reckon there's any kind of contractual language preventing Zachary Quinto from reprising his role as young Spock in Paramount's Star Trek movie reboot trilogy? Seems a waste to recast when there's already a prominently known "young Spock" actor out there.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Wherever that's going, it can't possibly end up weirder than Dan Abnett and Ian Edington's Pike-centric Star Trek: the Early Voyages comic. They did come up with some interesting stuff in that series before it got canceled though, like the USS Enterprise stumbling onto a surviving colony of pre-Surak Vulcans who still had starship-grade psionic weapons (like the anti-personnel one in TNG's "Gambit"), or the TOS-styled version of the Miranda-class.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Just in case this wasn't confusing or frustrating enough, available records indicate that commercial first aired in 1985... after Hasbro and Toei/Sunbow redesigned and reintroduced Jetfire as Skyfire "for legal reasons" (in "Fire in the Sky", which aired on 8 Dec 1984). EDIT: Which, in hindsight, would tend to rule out the theory that Hasbro went into it with foreknowledge that they couldn't use the Jetfire design in animation.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    During the One Year War, as long as your surname wasn't "Zabi" Char/Casval was depicted as a reasonably honorable, competent, and caring commander in the Principality's armed forces. He cared enough about his subordinates to not only try to prevent them from making potentially fatal errors, but also to at least try to rescue them when possible. Unlike a LOT of Zeon soldiers he treated civilians and even enemy soldiers with respect and dignity, he never engaged in the kind of gleeful killing of noncoms that the Zabis did, and he was forthright enough to even basically give Kycilia a warning as to his intentions. (Grudge notwithstanding, he seemed to actually genuinely like and/or respect the few Zabis who were decent people like Garma and Dozle.) He was still a bad guy, but he was a bad guy with some actual standards in a series where most Principality soldiers were cackling puppy-kickers or at least the kind of a-hole who'd hit a woman. It's not a petty grudge, he goes straight-up thermonuclear when he discovers Haman is using Mineva as a puppet in the hopes of rebuilding the Principality of Zeon. That's one of the signs that Char/Quattro hasn't jumped off the slippery slope yet like he does in Char's Counterattack. He spends almost the entire first two-thirds of the series trying to advise people in ways that will prevent them from repeating his mistakes as Char. His treatment of Mineva is basically a "oh come on, this one hasn't even DONE anything don't turn her into another one I'll have to do away with!". Yeah, by Char's Counterattack Char has jumped off the slippery slope completely thanks to his frustration with the Earth Federation's corruption and his kooky dad's ideals being held up by biases against spacenoids. He's reached his personal despair event horizon, and is basically crafting one elaborate do-or-die scenario where either his ideals triumph or he's put out of his misery by Amuro. You get the feeling he knows he's suffered moral decay to the point of acting like Gihren Lite, and wants someone to stop him.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Does anyone else hear that noise? The one that sounds like terrified screaming?
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Tatsunoko's actual stated grievances in the arbitration that the lawsuit spun off from were more to the tune of Tatsunoko thinking Harmony Gold was shorting them on royalties owed for the usage of Macross, Southern Cross, and MOSPEADA in the home video and streaming markets. (Harmony Gold counterclaim being that they were actually allowed to deduct legal fees from the various brand protection lawsuits from royalties owed.)
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Perhaps not an actual lawsuit in court, but it's possible there was a sealed arbitration or an exchange of cease-and-desists. The "production bible" used by the staff of the Transformers cartoon mentions that Jetfire's design was changed for "legal reasons", but no specifics are given as to what the "legal reasons" were for redesigning Jetfire in the eleven month period between HG acquiring their license to the SDF Macross merchandising rights and Jetfire/Skyfire's first appearance in the cartoon. It's a popular theory among Transformers fans that the change was to avoid a legal fight with HG, but nobody aside from one staffer has commented, and only to affirm that there were "legal reasons" for the change.
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