Seto Kaiba
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Everything posted by Seto Kaiba
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Yeah, the Star Trek EU has a terrible habit of trying to tie up every loose plot thread and make every minor one-shot character part of some greater scheme. A lot of the seemingly or actually omnipotent entities and energy beings with delusions of godhood get filed under "Q Continuum Shenanigans". Some got their powers from the Q (e.g. Gary Mitchell), some of them were brought into the universe from other planes of existence by Q (e.g. Gorgan, the Beta XII-A entity, "God"), and some were members of the Continuum who didn't bother to identify as such (like Trelane). She was doing pretty well for herself until Double or Nothing and Death in Winter. She always managed to bounce back from her failures and scheme her way back into power just in time to fail again and be sent back to zero. Her skills in sucking up to the People Who Matter got her the top job at the Tal Shiar, by which point the writers appear to have run out of ways to abuse her, so she promptly bungled the op to steal quantum slipstream technology from the Federation. She cocked it up so royally her own people imprisoned her and were preparing to extradite her to the Federation when she committed suicide.
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Yeah, he loooooves to try to settle the whole Kirk/Picard thing in his favor every time he has the chance. If there's a threat Picard faced, you can bet Shatner will write Kirk facing it first and doing a better job. Unfortunately, Star Trek's Expanded Universe authors don't seem to understand that happy little principle... so every plot is of galaxy-shaking import, most become a multi-book saga and the bigger ones become a multi-series crossover, almost all of them are determined to change the way the audience looks at a particular character or a past event from the Star Trek series or films, and the base level for new threats is "a threat to the whole Federation" and it only goes up from there. After a while it starts to feel like the same plot problems from superhero comics... there are so many potentially-apocalyptic catastrophes happening so often that it's flat amazing the Federation/galaxy/quadrant/universe/multiverse lasted long enough for the double handful of protagonists to come along. It's not even in "the Federation never exists if Jonathan Archer dies" territory like in Star Trek: Enterprise... this is so fiddly it's on the order of "the whole galaxy is doomed to be enslaved or destroyed if Jean-Luc Picard's tea goes cold before he can drink it". There are so many dystopian alternate realities where one little thing changed the course of the entire galaxy's history that are encountered by dimension-traveling protagonists that it's amazing the Federation doesn't have planet-sized psych wards for people suffering from apocalyptic tangent reality traumatic stress disorders. ... I have some bad news for you. They didn't write a book about it... it's a trilogy. Q is responsible for bringing a number of different malevolent entities into the universe using the Guardian of Forever, including the Beta XII-A entity from the TOS episode "Day of the Dove", Gorgan from the TOS episode "And the Children Shall Lead", and The One from Star Trek V: the Final Frontier. It at least answered why "god" needed a starship... he'd been deprived of his physical body and imprisoned behind the great barrier by the Q Continuum for his crimes, and needed a physical body to pass through the barrier.
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That ain't part of Macross, friend... Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross is a completely different show that is unrelated to Macross except in that the two shows had the same sponsor and were both at least partly animated by Tatsunoko Production. It was an absolute, unqualified disaster in Japan and was canceled for low ratings a little over half of the way through its planned broadcast run. Oh, it'd have to be fanmade... the Southern Cross series is a forgotten flop in Japan, and for The Show That Must Not Be Named Toynami has said they have no interest in pursuing a license to make Southern Cross toys because the American adaptation is almost as unpopular in the west as the original was in Japan.
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Y'know, for a while there I would have bet cash money that Michael Martin, Peter David, Kirsten Beyer, and David Mack were engaged in a perverse one-upmanship contest over who could write the worst, most cliched Star Trek story. Michael Martin got knocked out of the running by Christopher Bennett taking over the Enterprise Relaunch, but the others hit new and exciting lows for Star Trek with Destiny, The Fall, Typhon Pact, and so on...
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Yes, this is a thing that someone actually wrote and published as a series of novels... Peter David actually wrote the book where Janeway snuffs it, so you can understand why I'm reluctant to believe that the man is capable of writing that isn't garbage. Personally, I'm not so sure... in Star Trek: the Motion Picture V'Ger didn't see organic life as anything more than an infestation of vermin in its creator's universe, so it doesn't quite fit for V'Ger to have created a race of cyborgs based on organic life to be its advanced reconnaissance party. It's less dumb than the idea that V'Ger went off and spawned a race of living ships that roved the galaxy collecting samples of intelligent life as a kind of roving space-zoo. I've yet to read a Borg origin story that WASN'T stupid... but I have to admit the Borg being built on a nested predestination paradox in which the Borg are created by a race of nanotechnological hikkomori accidentally sending themselves and the NX-02 crew they were holding prisoner back in time to become the Borg and then in the future going back and causing the accident that caused them to accidentally create the Borg was a masterpiece of bad writing that managed to singlehandedly ruin almost every aspect of the Borg in one fell swoop. Nah, V'Ger is supposedly the creation of a race of sentient machines who found the probe after it fell through a wormhole and decided to rebuild it and send it home out of the goodness of their hearts. (Of course, in The Next Generation, the writers weren't exactly consistent on whether the Borg wanted to assimilate everyone or evolve past the need for organics.) If memory serves, Shatner tried to riff on that for The Return, where Kirk manages to destroy the Borg collective and its homeworld by destroying the core of the Borg collective which looks suspiciously like V'Ger's system core.
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Vice Admiral Janeway gets assimilated by the Borg and made into a new Borg Queen in Before Dishonor, part of the runup to the Star Trek: Destiny trilogy finishing Captain Janeway's abuse of the Borg in Star Trek: Voyager itself by revealing their origins, dragging them through the mud, then finally making them extinct. She's killed off by the computer virus which Geordi designed to wipe out the Borg way back in Star Trek: the Next Generation's "I, Borg" after her Borg cube developed a weird new ability to absorb stuff ala The Blob instead of assimilating it, which it used to wipe out a fleet of thirty-six Federation starships in 97 seconds and then eat a Doomsday Machine, Pluto, and its moon Charon before Geordi's Project Endgame virus was introduced to the cube and it blew up taking Janeway with it. In short, the Borg briefly turn on Godmode after assimilating Janeway because otherwise there'd be no way to take them that seriously as antagonists anymore after Voyager and First Contact, and Janeway dies when the server turns cheats off.
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Wobuffet! Heh. The various Star Trek Relaunch series suffer from so many different nonsensical kudzu plots that the thing with Ezri doesn't even make the top twenty, and the thing with Trill's government and the thirty conspiracy pileup only barely charts thanks to the multi-train wreck of Star Trek: Destiny, Star Trek: the Fall, Star Trek: Typhon Pact, the post Destiny part of the Voyager relaunch. It's a safe bet the Star Trek: Discovery novels will very swiftly climb that unenviable ranking given that their first author is set to be Kirsten Beyer, the author responsible for making the Star Trek: Voyager relaunch the worst of the relaunch series. If they're tapping an author whose idea of brilliant writing is a Starfleet that's lost over 40% of its strength having USS Voyager restored to factory spec and lead a fleet into the delta quadrant for no goddamn reason, Janeway coming back from the dead to prevent the omega molecules from ending a few billion years early for some reason that isn't properly explained, the Klingon devil being a real thing and ripping off the Andorian reproductive crisis for the Klingons, and Species 8472 coming back for no reason. I don't mean to imply the Star Trek: Voyager relaunch's Project Full Circle arc is only fit for use as emergency toilet paper... I mean to say it quite plainly as an honest fact.
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Hm?
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New Macross TV Series in 20xx (sometime this decade)
Seto Kaiba replied to Tochiro's topic in Movies and TV Series
Maybe, maybe not. Kawamori did say in his Otona Anime #9 interview that a trip from Earth to the most distant emigrant fleets would take ten years. Presumably that's accounting for the navigation problems inherent in traversing regions with either significant fold fault activity or impassible faults. I admit, I think the problems that fold faults cause for interstellar communication and travel make a good set of obstacles for writers to work with. It prevents the writers from falling back on many of sci-fi's lamer cliches for SF war stories... especially the tendency to have the same group of heroes charge to the rescue in EVERY interstellar crisis (I'm lookin' at YOU, Star Wars Expanded Universe). -
It would've been, had it actually been the focus of a story... but it's treated as a mildly interesting background event during the USS Defiant's postwar survey of the gamma quadrant since, like the crew of Riker's USS Titan, the Prime Directive seems to have slipped the minds of Vaughn's whole crew on the USS Defiant. With the crew destabilizing, then meddling in the development of, each and every alien culture they meet, Ezri's personal problems are completely overshadowed by their cause... the Prime Directive violations she's meddling in... and by the problems they cause for her relationship with Bashir. They're then completely forgotten by the time she and Bashir are conveniently on Trill when all of the Trill government's eleventy billion dirty little secrets come out, nearly toppling the government via a popular uprising against the Joined, causing an attempted genocide of the symbionts that is mostly successful, and nearly getting Trill kicked out of the Federation after it's revealed that they were responsible (albeit semi-indirectly) for the parasite crisis from TNG's "Conspiracy" and all of their subsequent shenanigans , as they'd created the damn things in the first place, attempted to exterminate them on Kurl, and tried to keep it covered up by assassinating high-profile infected using stolen Federation personal stealth equipment.
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New Macross TV Series in 20xx (sometime this decade)
Seto Kaiba replied to Tochiro's topic in Movies and TV Series
An increase in the standard of writing is a must... Macross Delta was so weak and scattered on that front that the music was practically all that was propping the series up by the end. Lucky for them it's good music. Nods to earlier mecha, sometimes retroactive, are so standard there's no fear of not getting that... every bloody Macross series and OVA since the original has thrown in at least a few. Some of 'em are admittedly obscure or hidden-in-plain-sight like the nod to the VF-4 in Macross II, since almost nobody remembers that before it was named "Lightning III" it was named "Siren". The 90's did a LOT of "remember the new guy" nods, where they'd introduce a mecha as old, and then go back decades and show what it was like when it was new (e.g. VF-5000, Variable Glaug, VF-14). Ship to ship combat would definitely be nice... that was something that really ought to have been present in Macross Delta but wasn't, presumably because the writers would've had to find ways to get around the fact that Windermere's not actually equipped all that well and is working with what could charitably be called a monstrous numerical disadvantage. Essentially, yes... and as the available fold technology in humanity's possession is implicitly limited to fold jumps of at most a few thousand light years at a time by the exponential increase in the energy required, the New UN Government had to take a decentralized approach to governance and defense because it can take years of fold travel to reach its furthest flung colonies. It took over a decade for the Megaroad-04 fleet to reach Windermere IV from Earth, for instance. -
In my experience, Star Trek's actors usually do a pretty poor job writing... especially ones who are writing books about their own characters. Bill Shatner can't seem to resist trying to use his books as soapboxes to settle the Kirk vs. Picard thing in his favor like in The Return. J.G. Hertzler turned Chancellor/General Martok into a Klingon King Arthur when he wrote a duology for the Deep Space Nine Relaunch. Remember how annoying all those early episodes of Deep Space Nine that harped on the Bajoran religion with all that not-allegory-for-middle-eastern-religious-fundamentalism-honest writing? That's basically Kira's entire story arc until the end of Unity when Sisko comes back and Bajor finally joins the Federation. There was some kind of aggressively-enforced "one character trait per character" limit in the DS9 relaunch prior to Unity, so everybody's lives revolved around one particular trauma or psychological problem. (The first rule is that, if there was any kind of important event in the last 300 years, a Dax was bloody well there for it and critically involved. Even the Enterprise Relaunch isn't safe from the tyranny of Dax.) Ezri Dax's arc is one of the few that actually make a modicum of sense. She never had any kind of training to be Joined, so she doesn't know how to balance all of her past lives with her current existence. Once circumstances force her to start drawing heavily on her past lives for experience and skills, it all starts to run together for her to the point that she starts calling herself by the wrong name and her personality starts to change as her wilting violet self gets overwhelmed by more assertive former hosts like Curzon and Jadzia. Since there isn't a way to separate her from the symbiont without killing her (until the Worlds of DS9 books) she just has to make peace with the changes to her personality.
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Ah, you're right. My bad. Greater field of fire while it's attached to the ordnance container... effectively letting it work like the beam gun turret on the VF-25/TW1 and YF-29. The VF-31 can engage with both railguns AND the beam gunpod simultaneously while it's mounted like that.
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I'm not a big Star Wars fan, but several of my friends are... and I'm fairly certain the Thrawn Trilogy's big draw is Thrawn himself. The actual plot is a fairly mediocre Star Wars form letter plot, but Thrawn himself carries the series by being a wicked cultured magnificent bastard who puts the New Republic and all of the principal characters on the ropes and keeps them there for the whole series with little more than a keen grasp of psychology and psychological warfare. He's not The Chosen One or an evil space wizard... he's just crazy smart. It's like space villain Batman. Seriously? Having read a fair sampling of his Star Trek work for the Pocket Books TNG series and Star Trek: New Frontier, I have a really hard time believing anyone could regard him as a writer at all... let alone a great one. The only Trek authors whose work I'd rank below his are Bill Shatner (for The Return), David Mack (for Star Trek: Destiny), and Kirsten Beyer (for her role in the Voyager relaunch). I can kind of see how a lot of the stuff he tried with New Frontier would be more at home in superhero comic books though... especially the fricking space kaiju. Maybe being locked into a comic book mindset would explain why so many of his Trek novels are so bad they stand out in an expanded universe justly famous for terrible writing. (One reason I'm dreading the Star Trek: Discovery novels... they're being written by someone even worse than him.)
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Nah, there are some Star Trek Expanded Universe works that read like merely bad fan fiction rather than the very worst kind of fan fiction. I've noticed the Relaunch novels tend to be among the very worst of a bad lot much of the time, but the Star Trek: Enterprise Relaunch seems to be working quite hard to reach "least bad" territory and has had a few installments that were significantly less awful than the franchise average. The quality of any given Enterprise Relaunch novel seems to be dependent on a linear relationship between the number of reused TV series characters and the number of bad fan-fiction tropes resulting from their presence. Readability increases in direct proportion to the percentage of the cast that didn't appear in the TV series, marking a pretty noticeable jump in quality beginning with the change of author at the start of the Rise of the Federation miniseries and the ensuing benching of almost the entire TV main cast. I'm still wading through that particular literary sewer... I'm currently three books into the Rise of the Federation series, and I have a nasty suspicion Christopher Bennett's about to stumble HARD with Uncertain Logic. That's not to say the all-original ones are automatically better... the Star Trek: New Frontier novels are some of the worst tripe to be committed to paper, but that's mainly because they're written by an author (Peter David) who is responsible for some of the cringiest moments in the Relaunch and clearly doesn't know a pen from a hole in the ground. ... I'll let you know as soon as I find one I'd consider "good". Among the ones I would consider "least bad" would be several of the Pocket Books Star Trek: the Next Generation novels including Masks and Gulliver's Fugitives, and the Department of Temporal Investigations books (which may be "least bad" because they're less Star Trek than they are a very thinly veiled parody of Doctor Who and The X-Files). There's also something to be said for the completely ridiculous, almost to the extent of self parody, How Much for Just the Planet?. It was funny, initially, how much effort The Good That Men Do put into bashing the series finale of Star Trek: Enterprise... but oh my god what followed it was a million, billion times worse than almost anything Enterprise had. Trip Tucker, space spy? Their Romulan War arc was so bad I'd rank it as some of the worst SF I've ever read, next to the Luceno/Daley Robotech novelization. They've announced a series of tie-in novels to Star Trek: Discovery written by Kirsten Beyer, the clueless hack behind the Star Trek: Voyager Relaunch from the end of Star Trek: Destiny on... a choice that bodes ill for their quality considering how much of that reads like it was written by a person coming off the anesthesia after having their wisdom teeth out. I'm not sure if planning a novel series this early in the game is going to make for early installment weirdness, or if there'll simply be so much weirdness that it won't matter. The third trailer for the TV series certainly is not encouraging me... Sarek seems to be kind of a racist prick in this one, which is odd for a guy whose day job is in Vulcan's diplomatic corps, and they're playing up the VFX so much it's almost like we're about to get an expensive, vapid, CGI action series rather than science fiction. I've read very few Star Wars EU novels, but most of the ones I've read didn't impress me any... I'll say the Thrawn trilogy was definitely the best of the lot, and miles better than anything Trek has fielded in EU books by my estimation. It was nice to have an antagonist who was good at what he did rather than simply being appointed-by-fate due to Space Magic.
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You mean Chuck's sister? Messer was so busy stalking Kaname that he showed more interest in her kid brother than he ever did in her despite her practically throwing herself at him... ... ... ... oh hell, that sounds even wronger than it was meant to.
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Nah, I think Chuck needs a partner with more emotional range than a cress sandwich... maybe one of the bridge bunnies (or more than one, since Chuck seems to be a bit of a xenophile). You could replace Reina with a cardboard standee in 99% of her scenes like Fire Bomber used to do and nobody would notice. An awful lot of fan fiction and doujinshi authors seem to agree with you on the first part... though, really, if Mirage wants Hayate all to herself all she has to do is wait a couple years. Super creepy... Mikumo is THREE and has minimal social awareness. Besides, Arad spent all of his time bonding with Kaname over snack food and secrets, so there's going to be the pitter-patter of tiny ginger feet on the Elysion in the near future. Never would've... even if he hadn't snuffed it. Messer wasn't Kaname's love interest, you could make a decent case for calling him her stalker though. Kind of a "reality ensues" moment that a brooding, antisocial arsehole doesn't get the girl.
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Nah, Arad was Mikumo's partner when it came to Walkure's battlefield operations and it was his VF-31S she used as a mobile stage in the first episode. Messer was shown to serve as Kaname's support, Chuck had Reina, and since Hayate and Freyja joined at the same time that leaves Mirage and Makina. Mirage did occasionally end up as Mikumo's minder when Walkure was operating undercover in the field like they did on Al Shahal and Voldor, presumably because she was the most junior member of Delta Flight until Hayate joined and presumably Arad and co. had better things to do than try to shepherd little miss Attention Deficit Disorder.
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New Macross TV Series in 20xx (sometime this decade)
Seto Kaiba replied to Tochiro's topic in Movies and TV Series
Granted, but the New UN Spacy isn't a space law enforcement or regulatory branch... it's the space warfare branch of the New UN Forces, and among its jobs is the space equivalent of sea control for protecting colonized worlds and fleets. They have no reason to be shy about using the big ships... and we know they had to have several. ... I'm pretty sure, in the final analysis, cost becomes a non-issue if the alternative to mobilizing the fleet is being conquered and having your democracy overthrown by an alien monarchy that takes a dim view of humanity in general, openly uses mind control to carry out terrorist attacks and control civilians and soldiers alike, and is widely suspected of having ended their last war with the New UN Gov't by committing a huge friendly fire incident with banned WMDs. The federal New UN Forces, maybe... but the local boys were shown to be taking Windermere IV's threat to the rest of the cluster quite seriously, especially after they conquered the first couple of planets. (Near the end, they were serious enough about it to order the destruction of the whole goddamn planet with a dimensional warhead.) This is nothing like that, though... Windermere IV was so hopelessly ill-equipped to deal with any kind of actual counterattack in force that Macross Delta is less real-world Cold War and more The Mouse that Roared. Even the handful of local NUNS troops who escaped mind control were able to wreck Windermere's sh*t so badly they were begging their homeworld for reinforcements all across the cluster. The only reason the show didn't end around Ep7 with Walkure and a huge NUNS flotilla showing up over Windermere to say "We heard you were talking sh*t" was because the writers had to inflict an enormous amount of author-induced stupidity on the cast to make the plot work and enable Xaos's crew from the Island of Misfit Soldiers to play at being heroes. I'd like to see a standard of writing in the new series that is at least good enough that we don't have a plot that depends on literally everyone being either suicidally insane or inexplicably on holiday as a way of making an otherwise laughable antagonist intimidating. Edit: Y'know, I like that comparison enough I'll likely start calling Windermere "The Duchy of Grand Windwick" from now on... -
New Macross TV Series in 20xx (sometime this decade)
Seto Kaiba replied to Tochiro's topic in Movies and TV Series
Retrofitting something that big with zero-time fold system clusters would require an astonishingly huge amount of fold quartz. L.A.I. only managed to harvest enough to build a couple super fold boosters and one YF-29 during the Vajra conflict. Given that energy requirements for a space fold grow exponentially as distance increases, and it's implied they grow linearly with the volume of space to be exchanged, the maximum range of any fold system is limited chiefly by the ship's ability to generate large amounts of energy quickly and store that energy for long periods of time. I'd assume it'd probably be capable of jumps of up to ~1,000ly either way, though with a zero-time fold system network it'd probably be able to make much more efficient use of that 1,000ly range. (It'd also get there a LOT faster, since they say a zero-time fold system reduces travel times to a tenth of what they were with conventional space fold systems.) -
I've got no idea... I'd guess the term is probably something like five to seven years, though there's some circumstantial evidence to suggest that HG didn't have the license finalized when they first announced that the license was transitioning from WB to Sony.
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None that I can find... from their uniforms the trio on the left seem to be hangar deck crew from the SMS Macross Quarter and the ones on the right are a boy from Mihoshi Academy and a girl from St. Maria's.
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Why? They've the ones with the least stake in Robotech's connection to Tatsunoko Production. I mean, we've known for over a decade now that the proposal for a live-action Robotech movie is for a reimagined Robotech using only the portions of the IP that Harmony Gold owns free and clear. It's the one thing Robotech has going for it that wouldn't be impacted by a falling-out between Harmony Gold and Tatsunoko.
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Unfortunately, Macross Delta's creators declined to give a decent explanation of it beyond calling it an "optical camouflage system". That said, both the YF-27-5 and Sv-262's optical camo were both described as hiding the fighter's markings and paintjob rather than altering them, which suggests it was achieved by some means independent of the paint itself. I'd assume it's holographic in nature, projecting a matte stealth surface over the paintjob. (Given that the paint itself is an ablative anti-beam material, I'd imagine they'd want to keep its cost and complexity down as much as possible. Unfortunately we never see the fighters suffer damage while operating in that stealth mode, which would tell us for certain if it was paint or a projection on top of the paint.) That is the most likely explanation, IMO.
