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Seto Kaiba

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  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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?"
  4. 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.
  5. 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.)
  6. 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).
  7. Seto Kaiba
    There have been a number of those... could you be more specific?
  8. 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?
  9. 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.
  10. 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.
  11. 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.
  12. 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.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Essentially, using a fold system to fold jump into or out of a planetary atmosphere can be done in a "safe" manner but is still generally frowned upon except in emergencies because the process swaps the volume of space inside the fold effect for an equivalent volume of space at the destination... an unfortunate consequence of which means either way you're creating a large vacuum implosion that won't do anyone's hearing any favors, and may be teleporting chunks of atmosphere into space. As such, it's usually easier and safer to just fly up to orbit first.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Yes. It was originally just "VF-4 Lightning" but they added the III a few years later once the name "Lightning II" started to be bandied about as a possible one for the Joint Strike Fighter. As "Draken" can be translated "Dragon", I have a cunning theory there... I suspect it's "Draken III" in honor of the real world J 35 Draken and the F203 Dragon II the UN Forces used in the Unification Wars. (Either that or there's an unknown VF model out there named Draken II.) Named in honor of the fighter-bomber variant of the Me 262. A later variant of the VF-22 with a cybernetic BDI and other enhancements was named in honor of the straight fighter version of the Me 262, being designated VF-22HG Schwalbe Zwei. The YF-21 was just "YF-21". "Sturmvogel II" was the official name of the production version. An official name usually gets assigned after a design is approved for production, though developers may have nicknames for the design that get adopted as the actual name later.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Apart from noting that strong gravitational fields will increase the disparity between the subjective and objective passage of time, the only evident difficulty seems to be requiring greater precision in calculating the fold jump. Done wrong, you either end up grabbing a chunk of your surroundings and drag it with you through fold space (e.g. the SDF-1 Macross's first and only space fold), or a botched calculation potentially destroys your ship, throws you off course, or traps you in the higher dimension of fold space with insufficient power to return to normal space. Folds into and out of atmosphere are shown on many occasions, though usually they're done over short distances if the ship is folding into the atmosphere. Granted, most other science fiction franchises depict using faster-than-light stardrives in or near a planet's atmosphere as either impossible or irresponsibly dangerous. Admittedly, in most cases, a prohibition on using those drives like that stems from one of three things: Using the FTL drive technology in the setting means the ship will be moving through normal space at speeds above, near, or just below light speed. Examples of this include Star Trek warp drive and impulse drive technology, Star Wars hyperdrive technology, and most other generic faster-than-light drives in fiction involve somehow bending the laws of physics to move the ship through normal space at speeds either close to c or above c. Whether this is a prelude to ramping off into another dimension or the main operating mode of the drive, either case presents the danger as "running into sh*t". Either crashing into a planet at faster-than-light speeds with predictably apocalyptic results (as happened intentionally to Coridan, Draylax, and Galornden Core in Star Trek) or by having the ship ablated away by high-velocity particle impacts (e.g. "if I don't tune the navigational deflector, the first piece of space dust we run across will blow a hole in this ship the size of your fist" from Star Trek: Enterprise's first episode). The FTL drive technology employs a method to achieve faster-than-light travel that can cause collateral damage to the ship's surroundings if used to travel into or out of an atmosphere. Examples include the warp drive technology from Space Battleship Yamato and Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross, the "slipspace" drive in Halo, the singularity drive in Event Horizon, and (used improperly) Macross's space fold systems. The reason this is usually seen as dangerous in-universe is the drive's means of achieving FTL involves creating a gravitational singularity, spatial rift, or other negative space wedgie to circumvent distances or travel into a universe where the normal laws of physics no longer apply. In most cases, this is not a contained phenomenon, so anything near the negative space wedgie gets blasted to atoms, torn to flinders, dragged along for the ride, or sucked into some other dimension because Hyperspace is a Scary Place. The unique physics of the FTL drive technology making attempting to engage the drive either impossible or suicidally dangerous in or near an atmosphere. I'll admit I can't think of many examples of this one. Star Trek's warp drives SHOULD be in this category because they depend on force fields to protect them from particle ablation, but the big one is Warhammer 40,000's warp drives. Stardrives in this category either will straight-up not work or will run with a greatly increased chance of catastrophic failure, almost invariably because the unique physics of their operation can be thrown off by the gravity wells of things like planets and stars. Macross's fold systems are somewhat unusual among science fiction's FTL stardrives in that it's not actually moving the ship. In practice, it's folded (sub)space teleportation that exchanges a volume of space containing the fold system for an equivalent volume of space at the target destination via bridging the two locations in higher dimension space. It's a bit like traveling by tesseract from the novel A Wrinkle in Time, or the jump drives in Dune.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Not honestly sure which generation that is... I'm slightly younger than that other show we don't talk about here. In a timely save, IT manifested themselves in my office with a reminder of exactly why it'd slipped the net about 20 minutes after I'd posted that. Bloody hard to stay on top your fun time task list when you've had eight separate laptops in the last calendar quarter. Gonna be nine over the long weekend, and hopefully call and end to the game once and for all. Found my translation and the scans on the network drive after a few minutes of looking. Definitely need to get back on that one. The YF-19-3 described in the booklet for the toy is described as a structural test unit, while the one in Master File is an avionics test unit. The weird bit is that YF-19-3 is mentioned in passing in connection with the VF-19EF/A Excalibur Isamu Special... but as an avionics testbed plane like Master File's. Officially, YF-19-3 is the highest-numbered prototype, but Model Graphix included descriptions for numbers up to 6 and Master File bumped it to 8. The VF-19A was such a gorgeous plane, it's a shame they had to come up with a simplified version for Macross 7's animation budget.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    That was from the Blue Moon Showcase, right? I'm guessing you were looking at the left two monitors, which were showing the opening of Super Dimension Fortress Macross II: Lovers Again (specifically, its main character Hibiki Kanzaki) and a excerpt from Macross FB7. That was my introduction to the music of Daft Punk, courtesy of a fellow Macross fan from Oz.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    ... wut? Those screens are all playing excerpts from existing Macross titles. Where are you getting this "a new Basara" and VF-19 stuff?
  19. Seto Kaiba
    No problemo... despite its obscurity in Macross proper, the VF-4 seems to be a favorite of most of the people who've worked with me on various Macross projects, so we're always happy to dig into it. (Enough so that I keep an Arcadia VF-4G done up to look like Hikaru's VF-4A-0 on my desk at work.) Weirdly, while the VF-4 has had a few high-profile appearances, I don't think it's ever had a canon appearance where it was actually using its pylons for something. The VF-4A-0 in Flash Back 2012 was running in the "naked" configuration, so was Mahara Fabrio's VF-4G in Macross 7 Trash, and Maximilian Jenius's VF-4G in Macross M3. We've seen the beam cannon-less version in the Macross R materials though, and one with a colossal Zeta Gundam-esque beam gunpod in Macross: Eternal Love Song... (... and I've just realized I still have to finish that translation of the YF-19-3 manual for cypherzero. I dunno WTF is wrong with me these days, I've become so forgetful...)
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Pretty much, yeah... that's why they probably won't bother with a cameo or anything like that, with the compression of Macross Delta's already weak story into a two-hour film while leaving time for a dozen Walkure music videos is going to leave a barely-there plot with no time to develop the many characters already present in the series (who were already underdeveloped in the series format). To those who want to properly calibrate their expectations for Macross Delta: Passionate Walkure, I would suggest watching Leiji Matsumoto's Interstella 5555: the 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem. It's essentially a 60 minute long music video for Daft Punk's album Discovery and probably similar to the content balance we can expect from Macross Delta: Passionate Walkure. Of course, it may give you false hope for Passionate Walkure... as Interstella 5555 is actually good.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, sorry... I ended up a little distracted last night. Had to clean the lizard terrarium, and that's not a task for the faint of heart. So this is the image I was talking about. The pairs of circles are the attachment points for the pylons, at least according to Master File. The positioning of the inboard pylon attachment points are more or less in line with the model kits WRT the placement of the pylons dead-center between the center body and nacelles. There's some variation in how far forward they're depicted as being, I'm inclined to suspect the two pairs of attachment points shown here are another Master File attempt to rationalize most versions. In the art in Master File itself and the few kits that actually support pylon attachments, the most commonly used position is either the forward pair shown in the art here or one that's directly between the two positions shown (on top of the cover plate for the hip joint actuator). Six pylons is the official number, but I confess I rather like this eight pylon configuration idea. It wouldn't work with large ordnance on the inboard pylons, but something smaller like triple racks of AMM-1s or Mk-82 bombs would work fine.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Oy vey... it was awful nice of them to remind me right off the bat why I decided this series wasn't even worth pirating. Saves me a lot of trouble down the road. This just feels like they've admitted that casual viewership can keep the show afloat but that they'll need the support of the die-hard fanbase once its gritty, substance-less, action-centric writing starts to get old and are trying to draw them back by pandering to that demographic with one of the standard Star Trek episode plots. Having Frakes direct it was a cheap ploy to get their attention. By that point in history, they'd already built their own.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Essentially, each of the VF-4's three main propulsion systems is suited for a particular job: Its FF-2011 thermonuclear reaction turbine engines are the all-purpose main engines meant to operate at all altitudes and in space. As their output isn't much improved over the FF-2009s in the VF-1, their ideal operating conditions are in traditional atmospheric service where they can leverage the monstrous fuel efficiency of the gravitationally-moderated fusion reactor. The wing-integral ramjet engines exist to supplement or stand in for the VF-4's thermonuclear reaction turbine engines in atmospheric service to achieve higher speeds or operate at higher altitudes where the ramjets are more efficient and capable of achieving greater thrust than a conventional turbofan jet engine and with significantly greater endurance than a rocket. The rocket boosters in the engine nacelles are for use in space and fulfill much the same role that the rockets in the VF-1's FAST packs did. Thermonuclear reaction turbines consume fuel orders of magnitude faster in space because they're using plasma siphoned off the reactor for propellant in the absence of the air they'd be flash-heating in atmosphere. Those rockets are there principally to extend the fighter's maximum operating time by reducing thrust demands on the thermonuclear reaction turbines and thus reducing fuel consumption. Left without the rockets, a VF-4 could eat through its onboard fuel stores at maximum thrust in under half an hour. Basically, the VF-4 has such variety in its engine systems because it's trying to be as fuel-efficient and versatile as possible.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    This image from the old Musasiya 1/72 VF-4A Lightning III kit is accurate for the placement of the outer wing pylons. The pylon stations inboard of the wings are a little different from what's shown there in more recent works, which show one pylon inboard of the nacelle instead of two, positioned centrally between the centerline and nacelle just in front of the thrust-vectoring nozzle for the in-wing ramjet. Variable Fighter Master File: VF-4 Lightning III shows that placement appropriately (will grab a pic when I get home) but also has an unofficial extra pair of pylon stations directly fore of that official one.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Watched the first episode of New Mobile Report Gundam Wing over lunch today... I'd quite forgotten how weird the space colony designs in the After Colony era are. What's up with that weird double-Stanford torus thing they've got going? (Every time I hear that opening narration I can't help but mentally replace it with "IN AFTER COLONY ONE NINE FIVE, WAR WAS BEGINNING".) I'm also so used to the gags about Heero being an emotionally-vacant stoic that it came as a bit of a shock to see that evil laugh he does when he finds he has the opportunity to attack an Earth Sphere Alliance military transport on the way down. Almost as jarring is his reaction to Relina having taken off his helmet... he's genuinely pissed, but his dialog is something more like what you'd expect from an angry standard anime girl-next-door when her crush accidentally saw up her skirt. What was that explosive packet on his chest meant to actually do anyway? (Come to that, who are the other four talking to when they're doing these dramatic self-introductions?) Gotta hand it to OZ and the Romefeller foundation... their dedication to dressing up their soldiers like they've got a sideline modeling for the decorative art on cigar boxes is truly inspiring. Also Treize's subtle burn on that other foundation member for valuing war machines more than the men who're piloting them. (And you know Treize is wicked cultured right off the bat, the man owns his own pair of opera glasses.) Relina's a girl with strange tastes... she's reintroduced to the strange man who she found laying half dead on the beach, who blew up part of his spacesuit and then mugged half a dozen paramedics for their ambulance, and her first impulse is "gee he's dreamy, I'll invite him to my birthday party". There's the famous "I'll kill you" at the end too, the line that launched a thousand snarky responses to her constant shouting for him to come and kill her...
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