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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Officially, yeah... what they've printed there is pretty much a straight pronunciation of the katakana. Gamlin's one of those unlucky characters who practically lives the Spell My Name with an "S" trope. Even the Macross 7 PLUS episode that features him joining the New UN Forces in the 37th Large Scale Long Distance Emigrant Fleet has a different variant spelling (the episode title being "TOP GAMRIN").
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Han made it sound like running into a physical object would be a "instant death" type thing, but I think The Force Awakens kind of nixed the idea that hyperdrives in a gravity well would have any major impact on space-time when the Falcon came out of hyperspace only a couple hundred feet above the surface of Starkiller Base. I can't shake the feeling that all that's really changed is the names... like a UC Gundam series, the space nazis are calling themselves something different this time around but it's the same old card-carrying evil. But "Only a Sith deals in absolutes" is an absolute... Hate is a path to the Dark Side, and prequels Obi-Wan does a suspicious amount of vocally hating things... One of the few EU titles I'm familiar with. KILL IT WITH FIRE. WITH. FIRE. (Wasn't she the one who built her lightsaber wrong and it blew up in her hand?) I know they jettisoned the old EU, but haven't they been releasing new tie-in comics and novels? I remember reading something about them creating a big, detailed backstory for Phasma that ended up being jettisoned into a novel rather than having any part in the films.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    As someone who doesn't consider themselves a Star Wars fan, I thought Return of the Jedi was a pretty solid flick. Not the most exciting of the original trilogy (that would have to be A New Hope) because it spent about half of its length aggressively tying up all the loose ends left behind by the conclusion of Empire Strikes Back, but still a respectable film and a worthy payoff for the end of a Hero's Journey story archetype. The fact that there was a very definite ENDING to the Star Wars story arc is a big part of why I've never been able to bring myself to like any of the Star Wars expanded universe and why I felt the new trilogy's offerings were both decidedly mediocre. You had a classic story capped with a solid, satisfying ending that the new work utterly invalidates. There is no great rebirth of democracy in that galaxy far far away, all that noise about a great destiny restoring balance to the force was a load, and the forces of darkness and oppression are at best momentarily inconvenienced by their efforts. ... if so, why did they sh*t a brick when Luke levitates C-3PO and start worshipping him as a god? This came up in a thread on MechaTalk a while back. What was said there was that the interdictor field (which I only remember from X-Wing vs TIE Fighter) doesn't actually prevent ships from using their hyperdrives... it's just creating conditions that trigger built-in safety features in hyperdrives to force ships back into realspace. If the safety features are disabled or removed, it's only creating a potentially injurious navigational hazard, which would be a non-issue for a ship hell-bent on suicide anyway.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Did they indicate that it's moving to another streaming service? Since today's a holiday and I don't have to work, I took advantage of the extra free time to watch more New Mobile Report Gundam Wing over breakfast. After the 13th episode I'm increasingly convinced that either OZ or the United Earth Sphere Alliance hit on a surefire way to detect seditious behavior: they outlawed internal monologues. Every sodding character in this feels compelled to announce their inmost thoughts to the world regardless of whether or not their thoughts are contextually appropriate. I left me thinking of the Leela musical episode of Futurama where the Robot Devil takes to the stage to complain about the writing, declaring "You can't just have your characters announce how they feel! That makes me feel angry!" The Alliance commander of that base in Mogadishu announces OUT LOUD "I had no idea this fortress was so fragile" when it comes under attack by just a handful of mobile suits and is collapsing around his ears, and every time Zechs is using the Tallgeese he's muttering to himself constantly. Then there's this perplexing tendency of Gundam pilots to commit suicide. Heero tries to off himself at every opportunity, to such an extent that he's done about fifty times more damage to himself than any enemy has. I can only imagine what he could manage as a Gundam pilot if he turned that frightful urge for self-harm to hurting others instead... it's probably make those ZERO system-induced rampages later in the series look like a blank round exercise. Last episode, it was Trowa's turn to try to kill himself for no reason, apparently instigated by Heero. The only reason he manages to put his plan into motion is that security on OZ airbases is apparently on the honor system... absolutely nobody noticed the huge tractor trailer with the one-of-a-kind mobile suit wanted by every authority on the planet even when said mobile suit was standing in the big top with them. Not sure if OZ troops just all need corrective lenses, or if hundreds of trained elite soldiers all failed a spot check together. (How the circus staff didn't notice Trowa installing a giant mobile suit in the circus tent is another matter entirely...)
  5. Seto Kaiba
    I'm not really sure how that would work. I mean, there's loads of precedent for refits and variant subclasses within a class of starships that change its outward appearance like the Constitution-class refit or the Enterprise-B subclass of the Excelsior-class. I don't think we've ever had a case of a ship of one class being upgraded or retrofitted into a whole other class of starship. The creative staff for the Star Trek: Discovery series recently attempted to explain the difference in appearance of the Constitution-class wireframe for the Defiant vs. the classic Constitution-class as a retrofit carried out by the Terran Empire. I suppose it's theoretically possible that the Oberth-class was really an older class of starship from some point prior to the Constitution-class's development, but to accommodate the unusual registry number on the Grissom she'd have to be a contemporary of the Antares-class freighters from the early 2200s. That'd make the Oberth-class hands down the oldest class of ship in the Federation Starfleet by at least half a century. The non-canon Galaxy-class technical manual suggests a design lifespan of approximately one hundred years for a modern (c. 2360) Federation starship, but the Oberth-class would be approaching double that if they're still in service around the events of Nemesis, and they probably weren't built with an eye towards lasting even that long. (Mind you, some of the Relaunch timeline novels suggest the Starfleet Corps of Engineers have bandaided a few truly ancient ships such as Daedalus-class ships into continuous use, and those would be even older as the class is a relic of the Romulan War.)
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Well, if the pattern continues and it's just a matter of preptime... the First Order should be done in by an army of Porgs led by Chewbacca in the next one.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Eh, people were grumbling LOUDLY about "forced diversity" even before that... look at the fuss that was thrown over having a black main character in The Force Awakens. When you think about it, shouldn't the point effectively be moot regardless? I mean, if the character is there solely to tick off a "we have one of those" ethnic checkbox that means that their ethnicity is not relevant to the story. If the character could be played equally well by an actor or actress of an arbitrary ethnic background without any material change to the role or story, then what's to complain about? Unless you're a racist, there's no material difference between the role being played by the actor they picked or any other random actor or actress. (Not saying anyone here is... but I really can't see any other reason to get good and mad about those casting decisions when the character could be just as easily replaced by another CGI abomination like Jar-Jar Binks with no appreciable difference.) Didn't they? I mean, they wiped out a solid division of Imperial ground troops including multiple armored fighting vehicles using nothing fancier than napped-stone weapons, arrows, and logs tied to ropes. They had the advantage of numbers and the element of surprise, and they seemingly did enough damage to the Empire's forces on Endor to start repurposing captured Imperial kit as household items.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Macross Δ Gaiden: Macross E declines to give the vessel's original name, but does confirm that it was a Macross-class SDFN that was part of the emigrant fleet that settled Pipure. Ivan Tsari, the series antagonist, dubs it the Macross Extra after taking possession of it and relaunching it.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Somehow, I doubt the Epsilon Foundation will end up becoming the final boss... Berger Stone was more an opportunist than any kind of card-carrying villain like Grace O'Connor or the Galaxy Executives. All the Frontier movies did was transfer the blame a bit higher up the chain of command in the same faction, whereas that would be more like substituting a different faction. (It'd also be a poor fit for Windermere's anti-human racism to be puppets of a human-owned corporation.) Well yeah, but that's because the planetary government was looking to offload an obsolete warship and they had an ulterior motive for buying it and gifting it to Ivan Tsari... they wanted to field test the use of fold song to control Var syndrome.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    I feel like you're kinda missing the trees for the forest with respect to the point I was making. Yes, people go to the movies to be entertained. A big part of the entertainment of a movie is immersion, and what helps with the immersiveness of a movie and thus its entertainment value, is having characters you can relate to. Being unable to relate to the cast can damn an otherwise good movie, and being able to relate to the cast can save an otherwise mediocre one. That's why, back then, the roles of Leia and Lando were a pretty big deal. A princess who was an ass-kicking take-charge leader instead of a naive, defenseless piece of arm candy, and a black man who was successful and respected businessman and civic leader rather than a criminal or a butler. It's much the same reaction that Whoopi Goldberg related having when she found Star Trek while channel-surfing as a kid... "there's a black woman on TV and she isn't a maid!". Do I even want to know what that means? Still, it was a huge, HUGE step forward from your standard film industry princess or ladies role in an action movie as The Load, the Damsel in Distress, and/or the Plot Coupon. Yeah she's not a super-complex character, but then nobody in Star Wars is... it's built onto your standard Hero's Journey tropes, and the public's familiarity with all the associated tropes helps gloss over a lot of really severe issues with the writing. I mean, hell, Disney didn't have a princess who wasn't The Load until what? 1998? Back then, the audience would've gone into Star Wars expecting Leia to behave more like Willie from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Kinda my point... it's not like the civil rights movement magically cured inequality, and even today there's still a pretty big struggle for minorities in film to escape being typecast into racial stereotypes. Good luck finding a black man in a police movie who isn't either the partner, the guy who's two days from retirement and dies, a shrieking ninny like every character Chris Rock has played, or some kind of drug-dealing thug gangster pimp. Actresses with large breasts get typecast as the sexpot or the femme fatale, and there's a standing point of frustration that women over 40 get offered an anomalous number of roles as witches. My point, it's an ongoing problem. George Lucas just wanted to make his spacy fantasy movie... Gene Roddenberry was a man on a social progressive mission to give every last one of the network censors an ulcer. Mind you, Gene could only push the network censors so far before they started pushing back. His original vision of Spock was as someone who looked "Satanic"... as in bright red, with horns and a goatee. The network were also the ones who killed the idea of having a female first officer on the Enterprise, and Gene and William Ware Theiss played all kinds of merry hell with the standards and practices on wardrobe. There was considerable frustration expressed that shows like I Dream of Genie could get away with a costume where the actress's breasts were one good sneeze away from falling out but you couldn't show a belly button. The huge topic of pushback was the interracial kiss, so much so that the network insisted on shooting an alternate "hug" take that they had intended to force the show to use instead of the kiss... and were only stopped by Bill Shatner deliberately flubbing every take that was shot for the hug variant by making absurd faces at the camera. (The political adversaries part was a representational issue that Gene himself admitted was a massive oversight, resulting in the addition of Chekhov, and with Khan recognizing him in Star Trek II despite "Space Seed" having been shot before Koenig's additiont o the cast, a famous joke about Khan and Chekhov having met in the bathroom, earning Khan's eternal enmity for using all the TP.) It could be argued that defining "forced diversity" is the very heart of the discontent about casting in The Last Jedi and The Force Awakens. To some, any minority representation in the main cast is "forced diversity". To others, that minority representation isn't forced... it's just a reflection of modern society. To an academic, it might be the writers predetermining a character's race even when the character's race has no situational or contextual relevance to the plot or their role in it. To most, it's "shut up and watch the film you smegheads". (Really, IMO Ridley Scott and co. had the right idea on casting when they were writing the original Alien... wrote all the characters without any references to race or gender, and then just cast whomever they felt best for the role.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Somethin' like that, yeah... I would've compared it to VIN numbers, but it's the same basic principle. It'd explain why there are multiple classes of starship mixed together in the same numerical range, like how there are Daedalus-class and Intrepid-class starships, and Antares-class freighters all mixed together in the same number series. There are still some weird aberrations, like the Oberth-class ships that look to be on par, technologically, with the Constitution-class refit and Excelsior-class yet have registries that were only three digit numbers initially.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Back then, minorities were happy for any representation they could get that wasn't a blatant racial stereotype or an extra in a background shot. That lack of representation in leading roles is literally the reason blaxploitation movies became a thing in the 70's. There's not a lot of fish-people living among us, so they're not exactly a category that screams for some representation in film... but from everything I've read, Leia was a pretty big deal being an action-oriented woman in a highly visible leadership role and Lando was as well thanks to a largely stereotype-free role as a civic leader-slash-respected businessman who got an actual character arc of sorts. (Mind you, after the whole gold bikini thing, you'd be hard pressed to find a man who DIDN'T care that Leia was a woman...) Yeah, though diversity was arguably the lesser of Gene's controversial progressive agendas...
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Granted, Starfleet did give ships in the "runabout" classification their own registry numbers as befitting their status as independent short-to-mid range warp-capable craft... but the "runabout" classification itself was a relatively new introduction to the Starfleet inventory in the second half of the 24th century. By that point the Starfleet registry number system had already long since reached the high five digit range. The Danube-class used extensively in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and on occasion in The Next Generation was Starfleet's first design in the runabout classification and that was commissioned in 2368. Like I said, there are a number of theories to explain why there are such large skips in registry numbers. The one I find most plausible, and which has a fair amount of support in Expanded Universe material, is that the first few digits are a kind of "contract number" and the last few digits refer to the individual vessel itself. A contract might be for X vessels from a given class design, with those having sequential numbers, while other ships of the same class built under a different contract will have numbers in a different range. That'd explain why there are cases of especially old classes still in service having ships with three, four, or five digit registry codes like the Oberth-class, Excelsior-class, etc. A contract may not actually use the full range reserved for it. Seems to be the attitude of a lot of American viewers... $9.99 wouldn't be objectionable price-wise if it wasn't essentially just for Discovery. The people watching it on Netflix outside the US are much happier with the arrangement because the streaming service carrying it there has enough other content to be worth the investment.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, but the Macross Valiant (NMCV-16?) from the 46th Large Scale Long Distance Emigrant Fleet is not official setting material... it's from Variable Fighter Master File.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    As a fun side note, the appearance of the SDF-5 Megaroad-04 marks the first time an even-numbered emigrant ship and fleet have directly appeared in Macross's official continuity and only the second time an even-numbered fleet was involved at all in a plot (the previous case being Macross-4, which settled on Sephira). The fleets that've actually been depicted or directly connected to a story thus far are: Megaroad-01, Megaroad-13, Macross-1, Macross-5, Macross-7, Macross-9, Macross-11, Macross-13, Macross-17, Macross-21 (AKA Macross Galaxy), Macross-23, Macross-25 (AKA Macross Frontier), and Macross-29. Assuming the City-class (although a scaled-down reuse of the Island Cluster-class Island-1 model) on Ragna was the ship that colonized it, it would have to have been either Macross-1 or Macross-2. The ship has no Shell, which means it cannot be from the Macross-5 and beyond, and Macross-3 and Macross-4 are all accounted for on Eden 3 and Sephira.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Been peeking in the kitchen at Imperial Hunan, have we? Then again, the Ewoks are a stone age tribal culture... their shamans probably have some pretty good hallucinogenic plants to explain away the stuff post-RotJ. "Hey Luke, now that the Emperor's dead we oughta go reestablish the Senate and restore democracy to the galaxy." "Yeah but we gotta go into the Falcon for that and have you SEEN the dragons in the kitchen there?"
  17. Seto Kaiba
    The Blu-ray liner notes do identify the fleet that discovered Windermere IV as the 4th Large Scale Long Distance Emigrant Fleet led by SDF-5 Megaroad-04 (in 2027). As far as I am aware, no identification has been made of fleet that discovered Ragna.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Why not go for the gusto there and have the whole prequel trilogy, sequel trilogy, and expanded universe turn out to be a nightmare Luke had after one too many plates of Ewok tartere on Endor? I'm just disappointed we'll not be getting the big reveal that Leader Snoke is Jar-Jar Binks after cosmetic surgery. (This is a joke. Only a joke.)
  19. Seto Kaiba
    They were supposed to be on a roughly comparable level, technologically, so one would assume that the Terran Empire had around a dozen Constitution-class knockoffs c.2255 like the UFP had. All told, even in the Star Trek expanded universe it's basically an article of faith that there are huge gaps in the Starfleet registry code system. It's lampshaded quite amusingly at one point that even starship captains have no sodding idea what "NCC" actually stands for... even when they were still using at most triple-digit registries. There are a bunch of theories as to why they skipped so many numbers, but even in pre-Federation days there were HUGE gaps. The NX-class has registry numbers that are double digits starting with zero, then there's a jump of over 60 numbers to the next known starship class (the Intrepid-class), and another huge jump of over 100 to the next (Daedalus-class).
  20. Seto Kaiba
    There have been a number of those... could you be more specific?
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Well that's beyond lame... I can understand wanting to not give the full HD experience when you're trying to sell Blu-rays, but still... Come to that, I need to get on that Blu-ray train. What's the word on quality for those releases?
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Seems that way, yeah. We'll keep trying to rustle up interest on other sites and Facebook groups (discreetly, naturally, to avoid attracting They Who Must Not Be Named). So far, not much luck. The fandom for Southern Cross seems to overlap almost entirely with The Show That Must Not Be Named, and a lot of the fans from that lot are burned out on crowdfunding after getting screwed six ways to Sunday by Palladium Books over a tabletop game Kickstarter.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, I'm well aware that Gundam Wing was made at a time when 4:3 was still very much the standard for displays of all sizes. After all, I grew up in the 90's. What I'd expected in this case was that, like most older shows, Crunchyroll's video stream would be either pillarboxed (with black bars to the left and right of the 4:3 image) or enlarged and cropped such that it fits the 16:9 aspect like they'd done with many of their older shows like Lupin III, Mobile Fighter G Gundam, etc. What they've actually done is windowboxed it: (Yes, I had to look the correct terms for this up on Wikipedia...) ... which is super bloody annoying if you're watching it full screen on something like a 4K display, a big TV, or a tablet. They could've at least taken advantage of the windowboxing and moved the subs below the image. Honestly, the best part of Heero is the reactions other people have to him. Duo's having a conniption over Heero's antics, and Heero's so expertly winding him up further that you'd swear he's grinning like a loon off-camera.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    So, three episodes into New Mobile Report Gundam Wing and I gotta say I am quite spectacularly annoyed with Bandai and Crunchyroll. For reasons unclear, the video isn't stretched to fit the player. It's centered, so the effect is that it's horizontally and vertically letterboxed. They didn't even have the good grace to move the subtitles down to below the picture to take advantage of that extra space. The subs themselves are a whole other problem, since the subtitles they're using are the ones from the first DVD release... the ones with the blind idiot translation. Someone please reassure me that the Gundam Wing blu-rays have had proper subtitles done, because this is only one step better than the frigging Hong Kong sub job for Macross 7 over a decade ago. The show's still pretty enjoyable if you don't mind it trying to be seriously highbrow. Heero's still a hardcore mental case... yanking his arms out of restraints with untreated bullet wounds, setting a broken leg with his bare hands, repeatedly trying to commit suicide, laughing maniacally while he's blowing sh*t up. You really have to admire Quatre and Trowa's musical ability. They're SO GOOD on the flute and violin that they not only summon an invisible orchestra for accompaniment, their music goes back in time to make their parts audible before they even pick the instruments up! Now that's talent, ladies and gentlemen! Wufei... oy. Dude has ISSUES (well, they all have issues, but his are BAD). Thank goodness he blew up that cheesy disco in the Victoria Base barracks. I don't think my brain could take much more cognitive dissonance from seeing two officers dressed like they're about to go give that lad Napoleon a good seeing-off at Waterloo hanging around a room with multicolored disco club lights everywhere. (Plus I kept getting this incongruous memory of Stephen Fry playing the Duke of Wellington in Blackadder the Third... can you imagine Zechs, or Treize, voiced by him?) I swear, Heero's best moments are his deadpan troll ones. Like telling Duo he'd have no problem being ready for an attack op the next day, but that Duo would... then flying off before Duo could discover that Heero'd stripped the Deathscythe for parts overnight.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    We don't, really... the fold system aboard the SDF-1 Macross was compromised on multiple levels by that Supervision Army booby trap. That said, the Zentradi still react like attempting a fold at such a low altitude was the act of either an incredible daredevil tactical genius or a suicidal moron, which is a strong argument that they were doing it wrong already even when the compromised fold system said "hold my beer" and proceeded to make things a million times worse. EDIT: In the context of the below, even the fold system wasn't exactly working incorrectly... it just got VERY enthusiastic about its job. Since it's relevant, I'll throw this bit in too... Even when a fold system is in perfect working order and is making a properly calculated jump, that exchange of space between the ship's position and destination still occurs. It's just normally not as visible or bombastic because the fold effect is kept as small as possible in order to minimize energy consumption unless the ship is deliberately trying to carry something else (e.g. other ships, VFs) in the fold with it. In Macross 7's 13th episode, the crew of the Battle 7 were able to use debris from the City 7's destination that'd been transported to its point of origin by the fold jump's exchange of space to identify where the "vampires" had taken the ship and dispatch Diamond Force to stop the hijackers from folding the ship again.
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