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Seto Kaiba

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  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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...
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. 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?"
  11. 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.
  12. 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.)
  13. 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).
  14. Seto Kaiba
    There have been a number of those... could you be more specific?
  15. 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?
  16. 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.
  17. 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.
  18. 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.
  19. 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.
  20. 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.
  21. 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.
  22. 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.
  23. 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.
  24. 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.
  25. 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?
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