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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Assuming the unit is not tragically lost in combat or given a major refurbishment or customization, the typical service life of a variable fighter is averaging about thirty years before the technology in any given VF design becomes outdated enough that it's no longer viable as a frontline unit. That's not quite the same as the actual structural design lifespan, which can exceed fifty years under the attentions of a properly trained maintenance team. At least in the short term, Valkyries can operate for days or possibly weeks without maintenance... but generally don't, since an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. The 5th Generation VF designs aim to improve overall durability and reliability by using linear actuator technology in place of the small, fragile moving parts that previously governed transformation. Zentradi mecha pay a price for their extremely low maintenance requirements, though. They have very low survivability, being that they were designed to be cheaply mass-produced for the Zentradi Army and the Protoculture saw their clone soldiers as expendable. There's very little automation of control, and even less redundancy providing a shield against systemic failure, so the burden on the operator is high. They also have a very low operational versatility. Humans attempted to address some of these issues, particularly improving survivability with better armor and defenses, and with the addition of system redundancies to prevent single-point failures from disabling the mecha. On the whole, the only Zentradi Army mecha that really stood the test of time in the New UN Forces was the Queadluun-Rau, which was good enough that the NUNS kept operating them as-is until the capture of the Quimeliquola automated factory satellite and the plan to improve their survivability and performance that produced the Queadluun-Rhea.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    The Eugenics Wars was a weird one for sure, but it's not the first Trek to reference the ISS... IINM Sisko had a model of it in his office in Deep Space Nine. That's not entirely fair... I mean, they had some more traditional Trek-style exploration episodes in Season 1, 2, and 4, and they were on course for a more traditional Star Trek formula before the show got canned while Season 5 was still on the drawing board. The show would presumably have gotten to the Romulan War and the actual founding of the Federation eventually... something which the relaunch novels picked up and actually did a better job with. Unfortunately the relaunch fell off the wagon soon after, with the whole "Trip Tucker: Secret Agent" schtick, this weird complexity addiction, and one of the most cringeworthy attempts at forced diversity Star Trek has ever had via a transgender recurring character that read like the author stole it from Tumblr.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Enterprise's OP had a kind of logical continuity to it... not s'much an exploration angle as a "lineage" thing leading up to the titular NX-01 Enterprise even before the show adopted the Star Trek title in full. Nice of them to invent a few to pad the pictures out for that opening too... IIRC they completely forgot to draw the portraits for Archer's room until the day before shooting was due to start and the artist had to make a mad scramble to get at least pencil sketches ready for framing. (One of the relaunch novels offers some more details on some of the original predecessor designs made for that OP, esp. the one with the ring structure... apparently a human attempt to imitate the Vulcan coleoptaric warp drive.)
  4. Seto Kaiba
    There is no difference... they're the exact same plane. One of the things that sends me 'round the twist about that design is that there are three separate names for the darn thing in the official publications. The Macross Frontier: Sayonara no Tsubasa artbook calls it just "VF-19 SMS Ver.", the movie novelization has the fighter down as "VF-19ADVANCE", and the Macross Chronicle mechanic sheet for it has it as "VF-19EF/A Isamu Special". The Macross Chronicle sheet at least acknowledges the "VF-19ADVANCE" thing by making it the name of the VF-19 modernization project that spawned the VF-19EF/A.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Y'know, I looked into that claim... and the person who made it (the ever-unreliable Yui) couldn't provide ANY supporting evidence to back it up. When I inquired, all she could give me was a single link to an almost completely unsourced Wikipedia article that didn't even support her claim. After the last time you asked me to find corroboration for one of her claims, I'd think you would know better than to take her word for anything. I'm not sure where she got the idea that Popy went bankrupt... they were in financial trouble in 1983, sure, but all that came of that was they were absorbed back into their parent company Bandai 11 months before Southern Cross aired. Popy wasn't disbanded, it continued to operate as Bandai Popy and support its existing toy lines until at least 1988. At the time that Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross was in final development and production, Bandai Popy was on the rebound thanks to the reintegration with Bandai and the licensing of their GoLion, Dairugger XV, and Arbegas lines to the American Voltron franchise and Machine Robo to GoBots. Because, as you know, I happen to rather like the Sikorsky X-Wing-based Auroran design. Just because I don't like the story doesn't mean I'm obliged to hate everything about the series. I'm also rather fond of Private Charles and Sgt. Slawski, as I've told you on a number of previous occasions you've dusted off this ad hominem. ;-) Oh, I'm sure there are some old fans who remember the series from the 80's, but it's not something you see being re-aired or seeing any kind of new merchandise for it. It's a forgotten property as far as the industry is concerned. (If you talk to HG staff, Tatsunoko almost needs to be reminded they actually own that series when HG comes to them for approvals.)
  6. Seto Kaiba
    The Mauler RÖV-20 is a "laser machinegun", not a particle beam weapon. On the other hand, the Mauler RÖ-X2A on the Strike Pack is a proper particle beam cannon. All told, the most likely factor in making beam gunpods viable was that Stage II thermonuclear reaction turbine engines finally had the excess generator output to enable them to deploy a heavy quantum beam weapon that was more powerful in sustained firing than a projectile gunpod. Generator surplus was always an issue in VFs, which is why energy conversion armor is not enabled in fighter mode and on at only a low level in GERWALK. Macross has never, to the best of my knowledge, shown a VF on the verge of running out of fuel except in Macross Zero... where the fuel consumption rates were MUCH higher because the VF-0 and Sv-51 were using conventional turbine engines for thrust and as a generator. On each occasion, the VFs in question returned to their mothership for refueling and rearming before they ran out. That's much less of a problem for VFs with thermonuclear reaction turbine engines, which have an operating time of hundreds of hours in atmospheric service between refuelings. (This is, per NASA, actually pretty realistic.) It is an odd touch, but it seemed to be fairly effective despite how HUGE the adapter was, and the fact that they had to give up a spare gunpod magazine to carry it. Powerful by modern standards, not s'much by Macross standards. Even for the time, the VF-1's coaxial laser cannons were fairly low powered... mainly because they were a compromise in the design when the scale of the VF-1 made it impossible to fit a small bore machinegun in the head that would fire the same kind of high-explosive anti-ECA shells as the gunpod. The VF-1's lasers are pretty middling for the era, the most powerful energy weapon mounted on a fighter in the First Space War had 150x the output of the Mauler RÖV-20. (It was an anti-ship beam cannon, mind...) Yeah, as noted above the YF-27-5 needed a separate thermonuclear reactor module slung on one wing to drive its beam gunpod because it was only a twin engine design. Three seems sufficient to fire at full power, though, based on Macross Frontier. It's worth noting that one of the reasons VFs don't spam beam weapons in atmosphere is that any way you shake it, flying in fighter mode is a HORRIFICALLY inefficient system... much of the energy is never used to generate electrical power becuase it's wasted as heat or high-energy plasma in the exhaust stream. That's why energy conversion armor is off in fighter mode, and on at a low level in GERWALK mode. Progressively more reactor output can be diverted to power generation as the demands for thrust are reduced, though most of that goes to defensive systems like energy conversion armor and pin-point barriers.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    's more an anti-Vajra fighter than anything, but that capability to rival the Vajra in close range combat makes it a pretty damned effective dogfighter in general even if it is rather gun-centric. As far as I am aware, it does not... and I've never been clear on what, precisely, the granulated fold quartz coating on the YF-29's canopy was meant to accomplish. At the very least, the initial YF-29 spec as developed by the Macross Frontier emigrant fleet and the New UN Forces upgraded type designated YF-29B. For reasons unknown, the official spec for the YF-29 lists the canopy as being coated in fold quartz... Macross Chronicle confirms this rather bizarre factoid on Mechanic Sheet MF Movie SMS 04A. The YF-29 implements fold quartz in, as far as we know, eight distinct locations (not counting FAST packs). The T022 inertia store converter located in the airframe nose. As a coating on the canopy. The two fold wave amplifiers located behind the cockpit (on the chest in battroid) The four "Philosopher's Stone" 1,000ct class fold quartz pieces that make up the fold wave system, which are located on the leading edge of both wing roots and on the leading outboard edge of each outer engine nacelle. Variable Fighter Master File: VF-31 Siegfried, while useless, suggests the fold quartz in the VF-31's fold wave amplifiers is pulling double duty as the core of its fold wave system. It's unclear where the YF-30's fold dimensional resonance system core was. Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy has several other YF-29s in addition to Rod's and Alto's... though their existence is somewhat debatable given that their pilots (and in one case, the person doling them out) are temporally displaced folks thanks to a seriously messed-up fold fault. The game had a playable generic YF-29 Durandal for its main character Reon Sakaki, Rod Baltemar's NUNS Havamal YF-29B Percival, and character-specific YF-29 upgrades for Alto Saotome, Ozma Lee, and Isamu Dyson. (This does not count the DLC YF-29 that was available to Japanese buyers of the Limited Edition. The 30th Anniversary one is, IIRC, the only YF-29 color variant that doesn't show up in-game.)
  8. Seto Kaiba
    This right here is why my keyboards only last about six months on average... The New UN Government and New UN Forces go back and forth on whether specialized VFs or a jack-of-all-trades all-regime VF is better with every new generation of variable fighters. The odd numbered generations always end up with the all-regime multirole ones, and the even numbered generations get the specialized ones. (Funnily enough, this is a habit they appear to have inherited from Macross II: Lovers Again, who beat them to the punch on that little trend by a couple years.) It does, for the most part... though there are some cases of development teams carrying out their own pet projects and experiments independent of major military procurement programs. General Galaxy had a whole team devoted to that, and later sold it to an Epsilon Foundation subsidiary by the name of Dian Cecht, which is responsible for the Sv-154 and Sv-262. By design, a VF kind of bucks the idea of excelling in one role since every single one of them was designed to function as a combat aircraft, VTOL attack craft, and ground warfare robot. But that's only true as an absolute fact for one of those three... the VF-17 Nightmare, which was intended as a long-range strike fighter. The YF-19 and YF-21 were supposed to be very good at long-range decapitation strikes against high priority targets, but it must be remembered that the both of them were developed to be the VF-11 Thunderbolt's replacement and fill the role of main variable fighter of the New UN Forces. Those are a small number of exceptions to the general rule of multipurposefulness though. Ironically, the technical writeup of the VF-4 puts its atmospheric utility chiefly in roles where it would be projected airpower (interceptor and attack roles) and the VF-11 was supposed to be a fighter that was to fill an assortment of strike fighter roles including long-range and anti-ship attacks. The VF-17 was supposedly meant to address its shortcomings in that regard. Hm? The VF-171, VF-25, and VF-31 are all multirole strike fighters intended for fleet (and planetary) defense roles, the YF-29 is a cripplingly overspecialized ultra high performance dogfighter meant for anti-Vajra work and nothing else, and the YF-30 is a technology demonstrator that would be pretty much exclusively an air superiority fighter if its whole raison d'etre wasn't exploration of the Protoculture ruins on Uroboros and evaluating the Fold Dimensional Resonance system.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Y'know, I would've disagreed... then I found a commentary-free plot summary of "The Vulcan Hello", and seeing it all laid out in a neatly worded, objective summary of the episode was a bit of a shock. As long as you don't actually think about what's going on, the pilot for Star Trek: Discovery feels on the weak side but not untenably so apart from the fact that Commander Burnham is dumber than a Pakled and clearly the worst cretin to ever don the uniform. Once you actually examine it... oy... And I haven't even SEEN the second half... but already, I have a feeling Michael Burnham is shaping up to be every bit as obnoxious as Wesley.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Starfleet has pretty consistently agreed on that score ever since Star Trek: the Next Generation... which shows, if nothing else, that Starfleet at least learned SOMETHING from all those times that Kirk's Enterprise sent the CO, XO, and CMO down together and they all got captured. Discovery's set during those cowboy days of exploration, so it's less surprising that they'd send the ship's two ranking officers into danger like that. (Even less so, given that we've known since the earliest of Discovery's teaser trailers that Michelle Yeoh's character was earmarked for death in the pilot.) (IIRC, when Picard was speaking at Riker's wedding in Nemesis, he jokingly complained that Riker leaving to take command of the USS Titan left him stuck with a first officer who was a "tyrannical martinet who will never, EVER allow [him] to go on away missions".) Unfortunately, that's just one drop of piss in the septic tank of bad writing in the Discovery pilot...
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... I'm not so sure it's every Protodeviln who reacts positively to Fire Bomber. Gigile, Gavil, and Glavil didn't seem to have much love for it, especially when it started to make Gavil shrivel up like he'd started aging super-rapidly and Glavil would only make that horrible shrieking noise. Gigile's attitude seemed to be pretty much in line with Gamlin's initial reaction "This is awful, I'll only put up with it because the girl I like (Sivil) is peripherally involved". (Still better than Zomd and Goram's ojou laugh... "What if Naga the Serpent were twins, and a fifty meter tall space monster?") Well, maybe in the chest area... most of her is squeezed into what looks like a pleather catsuit, but that hardly diminishes her fetish fuel look. Espionage model indeed... if that look was supposed to go unnoticed, one can only imagine what Protoculture fashion of the period looked like.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    It's never been established what exactly was leaking from the battle damage on Kakizaki's VF-1A in that scene where Hikaru goes over Misa's head to send him back to the ship. Given the location of the damage, I'd assume it's probably hydraulic fluid from the landing gear. Hayate was warned about conserving propellant, presumably because he'd never trained in spaceflight before and his extravagant flying style would burn propellant like mad. It'd be rather lethal to run out of fuel in mid-dogfight for all kinds of reasons, including being unable to maneuver and the complete loss of power to defensive systems. Well, arguably the VF-1 Strike Valkyrie beat the VF-4 to the punch there... Anyhoo, one of the main advantages that more traditional projectile guns had over beam weapons for most of Macross history is that OTM armor materials have exceptionally good resistance to heat and ablation, which is boosted by energy conversion armor technology and ablative anti-beam coatings. Consequently, a beam weapon needs to overcome those by brute force, where your solid rounds from a conventional gunpod are only working against the physical strength of the armor (and specialized AP ammo can defeat energy conversion armor). The gunpods also had the advantage of requiring very little power to operate compared to beam weapons, being more resistant to EMP attacks, and being more versatile as different types of shell can be employed... like how the VF-25's gunpod was upgraded from a high-explosive anti-ECA round to a more powerful HEACA round, and then to MDE rounds. The limiting factors on beam weapon deployment were available surplus reactor power while in flight, and the maturity of human laser and particle beam technology. Most fighter-mounted beam weapons are light, high-precision energy weapons meant to be secondary weapons. To put it in perspective, the VF-1's ROV-20 laser cannon transferrred slightly more energy to the target on a per-second basis than one GU-11A round. What finally promoted beam weaponry to gunpod level was a series of dramatic increases in generator output brought about by new generations of thermonuclear reaction turbine engine technology that enabled them to switch to more killy flavors of beam weaponry... specifically, dimensional weaponry. It started on the YF-19 and YF-21, with the option to mount dimensional beam weaponry on the coaxial gun mount and wing root gunmounts. They used heavy quantum reaction beam technology, so those guns were essentially tiny Macross Cannons. When generator technology improved again in the Stage II engines, they had the surplus power to employ the somewhat simpler heavy quantum beam weapons as a gunpod-scale rapid fire weapon, and later advances enabled those to be upgraded to MDE beam weapons when sufficient quantities of fold quartz were available. That series of advances finally put the brute force approach to overcoming the ever-improving energy conversion armor of VFs on a practical, workable level.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Nope, it's a single-fuel system. The thermonuclear reaction turbine engine concept produces its thrust in atmospheric flight by pumping some of the heat from its compact thermonuclear reactor into the air flowing through the engine, that heat exchange works as a substitute for a combustion process in a normal turbine engine and cools the reactor in the bargain. When operating in space, the engine works much like Star Trek impulse drive technology... that is to say, a fusion plasma rocket. The thermonuclear reaction turbine engine uses its cryofuel slush as coolant as well as reactor fuel, and the propellant is a plasma stream bled off the compact thermonuclear reactor. That's an enormous boon to logistics, but because the reactor is consuming fuel at an exponentially greater rate its continuous operating time is greatly reduced in space. That's why many VFs employ FAST packs with high powered booster rockets and high-capacity conformal fuel tanks. The throttle-able hybrid rockets let them put less of a burden on the main engines, and thus decrease fuel consumption to extend their operating time. Later versions of the technology, like the 4th Generation's thermonuclear reaction burst turbine engine and the 5th Generation's Stage II thermonuclear reaction turbine engine improved fuel efficiency, heat exchange efficiency, and power generation ability considerably, reducing the need for FAST packs. By the 5th Generation, FAST packs were more to carry huge amounts of weaponry without compromising performance than to extend operational endurance by a significant amount.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    So is Kaifun's romantic preference. Despite the references to the VF-11 as the first "true successor" to the VF-1 as an all-regime multirole variable fighter, I don't think it really made it all the way there. We never saw a dedicated trainer variant, or anti-ship hardware like a Strike Pack, etc. It was just a dogfighter. For my money, the VF-14 was actually the superior main fighter in its generation. General Galaxy seemed to get that all the combat that was likely to go on for an emigrant fleet was going to be in space, and they designed for that appropriately in their VF-14. A nice big space fighter with a lot of room for onboard fuel, optional hardware, and future upgrades that had good passive stealth design and internalized weapons. IMO, the VF-11's Achilles heel is that they made it too small... so it was dependent on the extra propellant and thrust from FAST packs to have a sustainably long operating time in space. The designation for what you're thinking of is EVA-3, but yeah that's a thing.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Being a one-and-done would be an amusing bit of karma considering how dismissive they've been of the existing fans... In the short term, maybe... it's all down to whether or not they can present more content that will actually keep people there, and whether Star Trek: Discovery will be enough of a draw to keep the ones who took out trial subscriptions there long term. They wouldn't be the first network to try a streaming service and massively overestimate the potential audience for same. There's been a lot of back-and-forth about whether Disney was going to pull its content from other streaming services, and last I heard they had backed down on that one... so we'll see if anything is going to actually come of that.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Granted, that Star Trek: Discovery would be a highly pirated show was pretty much inevitable the minute CBS announced it would be carried only on CBS All Access. I just wasn't expecting pirates hitting it so hard right out of the gate, seemingly as a rebuke to CBS for their idiotic move. I had figured we'd see a spike in piracy around the time the third episode was set to "air". Between CBS's aggressively viewer-hostile handling of the pilot and that complete idiot Jason Isaacs challenging the established fanbase not to follow the series, one has to wonder if Discovery will end up a "one and done" Star Trek series for the first time in the franchise's history. As unimpressive as the pilot was, I'd say fifteen episodes and out would almost be preferable.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Seeing as the closest we had before was the Macross Delta Mecha and Technology thread, and that has outlived its usefulness... I can't see them objecting too loudly (if at all). For my money, "best" would have to be measured by a mixture of performance and operational versatility... which leaves the contenders as the VF-171 Nightmare Plus and VF-25 Messiah, both of which had enough modular option components to be quickly converted into most any role from fighter to bomber to reconnaissance plane... "Most stylish"... well, my love for the VF-2SS Valkyrie II is well-known, but I have a fondness for the VF-31A and VF-4A as well. Depends how you want to measure service life. Longest tenure in actual service belongs to the VF-1 Valkyrie, which is still used as a training plane a whopping fifty-nine years after its introduction and was still in use with the New UN Spacy's special forces into the mid-2050s. The VF-4 Lightning III also hung in there like a champ, still being used by the Special Forces at thirty-five years in service (2012-2047). We know, via Macross R, that the VF-11 was retired and being sold off by the Frontier NUNS in 2058, so its run appears to have lasted just about thirty years exactly. Longest tenure as Main Variable Fighter is no longer an easy thing to measure, since the individual emigrant fleets retire and replace their equipment at their own pace. Best data suggests the VF-11 Thunderbolt's stint as main variable fighter was almost exactly twenty years (introduced 2028, with its replacement introduced 2048), and the VF-171 is narrowly edging it out by still being used in an isolated part of the galaxy with a replacement not slated to go into production until 2069-2070 (so, twenty-one to twenty-two years).
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Given the success it'd had in Japan, I'd say you'd probably find a fair number of folks who'd argue that Macross Delta is one of the stronger installments... though it definitely favored the music over the actual plot. Still, I think that's more down to different tastes and different introductions to the Macross franchise. Frontier and Delta have brought a LOT of new blood into the fandom, so their expectations are built on those shows rather than the older stuff. I know, but it's this weird thing people do where there's this automatic assumption that a creator of a story is somehow responsible for everything in the final version... as if it'd sprung from his (or her) mind fully-developed and in its final form. It's something we see a lot with Gene Roddenberry and George Lucas, both of whom were great idea men but whose ideas needed a lot of filtering and no small amount of revision and rework before they became something watchable. (The Star Wars prequel trilogy and the first season of Star Trek: the Next Generation are the kind of thing that happens when you let that kind of person have more creative control with less oversight.) I'm not sure if DYRL? was necessarily darker than the original SDF Macross series... it dwells on the dark bits for a little longer than the TV series did in Ep1-27, but it also skips over a bunch of darker moments from the TV series like Kakizaki's drawn out death sequence and actually seeing Earth get pasted. It also plays the optimism card a bit more strongly too, what with the temporary truce that Earth gets with the Zentradi, etc. Macross is always going to be a relatively light and soft war story. Power of love and all that jazz. Even at its darkest, it'll never get anywhere near the kind of soul-shredding, I-need-a-stiff-drink depression of Tomino-style Gundam.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/09/star-trek-discovery-is-getting-pirated-a-lot/ It seems the tech-savvy public is expressing their feelings about CBS All Access rather clearly...
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Practically zero... Macross is, as Kawamori has said, a love story first and a mecha series second. It simply isn't compatible with classic Gundam's bleak, dark, hopeless outlook or the lame over-the-top gritty tryhard nonsense in Thunderbolt that crosses the line into accidental self-parody. Plus, y'know, Kawamori ain't too keen on the idea of direct sequels and remakes. ... eh, I dunno if that's entirely true. I mean, Guld and Isamu did exchange a few "Say My Name!" moments in Plus, and in 7 Gamlin had a couple mild temper tantrums and a modest character arc devoted to being pissed off that Basara is a better pilot than he is... though that was far milder than anything in Gundam, and at least part of it was played for laughs at Gamlin's expense. So far, Titan Comics is having exactly the problem I outlined above for Gundam Thunderbolt... Titan Comics' staff is trying SO HARD to rework the story into this grim, dark, gritty mecha/action series it became unintentionally hilarious. You can tell it's a dark, serious story because everybody grimaces 24/7, and you know it's an action series because everybody strikes poses like they're modeling for a movie poster in every panel. It's right up there with the Doom comic for unintentional silliness. (The only difference is Gundam Thunderbolt doesn't quite manage unintentional hilarity... it only got as far as feeling like a Tite Kubo-style "Take That!" aimed at Gundam fanfic writers.)
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Just a little... enough to really throw his lack of character development and personality into sharper relief. Her one-dimensionalness distracts from his. Like the world's hardest working, but most-disadvantaged, xenomorph... Y'sure that's what that is? To me, it always looked like she was fighting a wicked sneeze.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Pretty much, yeah... though from what I understand, even before Enterprise came along and reduced the laser pistols from the Star Trek "The Cage" pilot to Canon Discontinuity, the Star Trek staff just sort of ignores the problem. Later episodes of TOS reused the laser pistol prop (e.g. "What Are Little Girls Made Of?", "The Man Trap") and explicitly identified it as an older model phaser pistol in the final draft of the script. By the time Star Trek: Discovery is set (2255), the Constitution-class USS Enterprise (NCC-1701) would've been in service for about ten years. We know Spock served under Captain Pike for over 11 years on Enterprise, and we know his successor Kirk's five year mission was 2265-2270, so the captain of the Enterprise during the events of Star Trek: Discovery ought to be Christopher Pike at about a year into his tenure in the big chair. Or, even worse, why would the show attach itself to the Prime Continuity when they're going to play fast and loose with canon and continuity? We've only had the two episodes, and they've already got technology showing up in Discovery over a century before it's supposed to have been developed in prior Prime Continuity stories... never mind the whole "sister Spock never spoke about" thing. Playing fast and loose with canon in prequels already bit them in the ass once in Enterprise... did they not learn their lesson? Eh, I dunno... it's highly probable that this Klingon cult's personal artistic interpretation of Kahless the Unforgettable will resemble their distinctive appearance, in much the same way the mental image the augment virus-affected Klingons in TOS had of Kahless was as a fellow TOS Klingon instead of as a historically accurate TNG Klingon. (Kahless is a religious figure after all, and without getting unduly specific we know that in the real world it's quite common for artists to "reinterpret" the ethnicity of mythical and/or mytho-historical individuals to suit their patrons and/or personal tastes.) It may simply be that the Discovery Klingons are a minority ethnic group or something, like the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine relaunch did with the Trill in Worlds of Deep Space Nine... establishing that the TNG version of the Trill were a racial minority among the Trill who coexist with the DS9 Trill majority.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Well, I'm genuinely unsure which was less impressive... the opening title on its own, or the actual first episode. Considering it was supposed to sell us on the idea of paying for CBS All Access, I'd call the first episode of STD a resounding failure. It wasn't as bad as I'd feared, but it wasn't anything like good either. It has established a firm foothold in the bleak, cloying void of ambivalence by having less substance to it than Prelude to Axanar. I feel I might have been kinder to it if it didn't have Star Trek in the title, because it really doesn't feel like a Star Trek series. Put some laser swords in it and I'd be prepared to accept it as a bad Star Wars prequel flick tho...
  24. Seto Kaiba
    A lot of western fans hold Plus up as the example of the kind of Macross they want... which is odd to say the least, since that series is pretty much the un-Macross. I think the fact that the two Macross sequels to actually make it out of Japan were both more dark and serious than is typical for Macross probably did a lot to skew people's expectations of future developments in the metaseries. It's rather ironic that western fans blast Macross 7 and Macross Delta while singing Kawamori's praises, when both of those are much closer to the ideal Kawamori was talking about when he identified the love story aspect as the most important, and the space warfare part as merely a backdrop for it. Another thing a lot of western fans do is dramatically overestimate Shoji Kawamori's direct involvement in the creation of Macross stories. He's mainly confined his contributions to series concept and storyboarding in the last several titles. Macross II was a story that followed religiously in DYRL?'s footsteps, the thing that made it seem so out of place was that it was made darker and grittier, and they even hired staff from the Gundam franchise to make it so. It is, essentially, exactly what all the people who want Macross to be more of a gritty war story are asking for, but they don't realize that fact. It is, in a largely literal sense, Macross viewed through the filter of Universal Century Gundam. From a mecha standpoint, Delta definitely disappointed... but it was pretty evident that they were expecting Walkure to carry the show from a very early stage, so at least they hit the nail on the head. From what's been said on the subject, he wanted to do a series about competing flight demonstration teams... essentially a Macross series without a big space war. "In life, each man gets what he deserves!" (Admittedly, plaintext lacks a lot of the punch compared to hearing that line delivered by BRIAN BLESSED! in Blackadder.) This ain't Gundam... Macross is an expensive advertisement for MUSIC, and Delta blatantly so.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    's not exactly a new position of his... he's been maintaining for ages that the original trio will not be coming back, since their story arc is over and they've sailed off into the metaphorical sunset. Somehow, I suspect if she didn't age herself out of the role in the meantime, they'd cast her as Linn Feichun... Minmay's aunt (and Kaifun's mom), who had been an idol singer before retiring and getting married to the head of her fanclub. That's because Shakespeare was shooting for a lowest common denominator... dirty jokes, saucy situations, and depictions of the Great and Good behaving badly know no boundaries of class for entertainment value.
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