Seto Kaiba
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Robotech and REMIX by Titan Comics
Seto Kaiba replied to Old_Nash's topic in Anime or Science Fiction
Now that you mention him, it really bothers me that I can't tell which row of teeth that's supposed to be... it looks like he has a wicked underbite. -
Berger Stone's claim that the fold bacteria that cause Var syndrome migrated into humanoids from the Vajra doesn't hold water for a couple different reasons... then again, most of what he says has similar problems. His claim that the Vajra left the universe doesn't hold water because we know that the Vajra hives were still present in multiple regions of the galaxy even after the events of Macross Frontier, as seen in Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy and the Macross Delta gaiden manga Macross E. It also doesn't work on the level of what we know regarding the effects of the V-type bacterium the Vajra carry. Macross Delta tells the audience that everyone has fold bacteria living in their brains and that they're not dangerous in and of themselves. But in Macross Frontier it's a major plot point that a V-type bacteria infection in the brain is an incurable lethal illness that'll end you in a matter of at most a few years without treatment and treatment just delays the inevitable. Given that the Vajra are still around and even present on several New UN Government-settled worlds in the 2060s, and that the galaxy's population rather visibly hasn't been wiped out by an incurable fatal disease or even incurred the V-type bacteria's signature Incurable Cough of Doom, it seems fairly safe to say Berger Stone is either spinning a yarn or he's suffering from author-induced stupidity.
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I was literally just watching Alien a few hours ago. He had a good long run, checking out at 91. Still, he'll be missed.
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Totally... and that's why Harmony Gold is so determined to make a mountain of every molehill in the "news" about the proposed Robotech movie. If they can get the ball rolling on that movie then they would have a potentially viable property to exploit and keep the brand alive with even if they lost all their rights obtained under license from Tatsunoko.
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My secret insider sources tell me the Robotech movie is going to come out on February 32nd, 2021. So, the short version... The above-linked page on PacerMonitor describes a petition, accompanying documentation, a couple requests to keep certain disclosed contract and settlement details secret, and the judge's final ruling on Harmony Gold's request for the California Central District Court to enforce the binding settlement from a previous legal dispute with Tatsunoko Production that was resolved in arbitration. That prior settlement was about money owed to Harmony Gold as recompense for court costs and legal fees it incurred while pursuing legal action against various entities violating its (and Tatsunoko's) rights to the original Japanese shows. HG requested to keep some bits of the contracts and settlements from publication in the court record where anyone could see it, some of which was granted and some wasn't (which is how we know what was in the previous settlement). Simpler version... a not-so-long time ago in a galaxy pretty much right frigging here, Harmony Gold went to Tatsunoko and said "dude, you owe me money for protecting our sh*t outside Japan", and Tatsunoko said "No way, plus you still owe ME money". Some legal posturing ensued and it ended up in arbitration instead of in court (WAY cheaper). Tatsunoko couldn't prove Harmony Gold owed them money, so Tatsunoko got stuck with the bill for the previous legal matters AND the arbitration. Skip forward a bit, they still haven't paid, so HG is asking the courts to please make them pay what they owe. The bits about Harmony Gold's license expiring are pretty tangential to the whole thing... Harmony Gold apparently believed that the license was drawn up in such a way that, even if it expired, they had permission to continue using the stuff they'd created based on the original shows forever. An examination of the license proved that was bullsh*t, and the courts told HG so. So now everyone knows Harmony Gold's license is basically a ticking time bomb. If they lose their license from Tatsunoko, Robotech is effectively 100% dead because they will not only lose all their rights to Super Dimension Fortress Macross, Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross and Genesis Climber MOSPEADA, they'll lose the ability to exploit all the material they've made based on those shows too... like Sentinels, Untold Story, Shadow Chronicles, Love Live Alive, Robotech Academy, and all the novelizations, comic books, video games, and so on. Robotech 3000 will be all they've got left. It'll kill all their merchandising too, so they'll be left with mountains of unsellable crappy merchandise they'll have to either surrender or destroy, and so will their licensees. (Palladium Books might go under if they lose the license before they deliver Wave 2 of Robotech RPG Tactics... they're in hock like half a mil to backers on that one due to undelivered rewards to Kickstarter backers, and if they lose their license in the dustup they won't be able to deliver those rewards and could potentially be forced to issue refunds.)
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But did you do the little dance first? You think it's bad just having to witness it, imagine how frustrating it is to be "Macross answer guy" and have to explain it on a dozen different sites and groups. I'd give years off my life for the bloody news websites to actually get the details completely correct just once... ANN opened their mouths to quash the rumor and made things WORSE.
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Yeah, AnimeNewsNetwork and a few other sites have picked it up too, and attempted to quash the rumor that Harmony Gold lost the Macross license already.
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That's a more recent development. Robotech's fans were giving each other hell over preferences in media long before the internet, but the flame wars they had over it on Usenet were what drove lots of Robotech fans away from the franchise. The whole "Macross purist" thing came along in the 2000s, when the Robotech fandom was looking for something to distract itself from the way Robotech's second coming turned out to be something of a damp squib. It was fueled by the "Macross Saga" dominating Robotech merchandising and by some Macross fans observing that Robotech was pretty much just coasting on Macross's popularity even in its new developments. Once Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles and Macross Frontier came out less than a year apart, it turned into a full blown witch hunt over the obvious disparity in talent, skill, and quality between the two. Even in the Macross Saga novels they took a LOT of liberties... like the "thinking caps" and the VFs having energy shields, or Dr. Lang becoming a genius-level technological savant and having visions of the Invid after coming into contact with the SDF-1's main computer. The Sentinels novels were just where it abandoned all pretense and didn't so much jump the shark as ramp off a stack of burning sharks in a tutu while on fire and singing Asia's "The Lie is Over". I still maintain they were just replacing terms and names in drafts of Star Wars novels that Lucasfilm decided to pass on. The books lost the plot so hard that making a movie based on them would be sheer, gun-eating insanity that would make Plan 9 from Outer Space look like Academy Award material. As seen on several occasions in Super Dimension Fortress Macross and Macross Frontier, pilots can also take direct, manual control of a limb or multiple limbs if a particularly delicate task is required. The TV version of the VF-1 had dedicated joysticks just for the arms. What I'm given to understand WRT hand/arm maneuvers is that they're sort of "flying" the hand through three-dimensional space and using the buttons in the grip on the joystick or throttle lever to control the position of the fingers and palm. Slinging a rifle, I would imagine is probably an automated routine for "stow gunpod" in battroid mode without returning it to the hardpoint.
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Based on the renewals I can see in TESS, at least two years. The trademark that's up for renewal first is 76385551, which would come eligible for renewal around mid-December 2021 (~9 months after the license expires) and would expire 26 December 2022. On the others, we're looking at actual trademark expiration on 30 November 2023. (Unless challenged in court on the basis that HG can no longer use the mark in commerce legally.)
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Well... sort of. This is phrased in a way that is practically guaranteed to mislead and it's from a source that's known for having a poor command of the facts, but there is a tiny nugget of truth at its core. The reason you won't find any official announcements about this is that it's not news, we've known for a long time now. It's also not really about copyrights, it's about the expiration date on Harmony Gold's license agreement with Tatsunoko Production and nothing more. The license that Tatsunoko sold Harmony Gold has an expiration date in 2021, and Harmony Gold will lose the distribution and merchandising rights to the Super Dimension Fortress Macross TV series that it obtained via that license unless it is renewed. This has no direct implications for Macross, really, since those rights will simply revert back to their owner Tatsunoko Production if the license is not renewed. It would still take several years for HG's trademarks on the Macross name, logos, and key terms to expire, and those are the key obstacles for Macross's licensing outside of Japan. (The Japanese companies have ALWAYS held the copyrights on Macross... Big West and Studio Nue on the IP, and Tatsunoko on the footage of the original series.)
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Trelane was more powerful than usual when she did it too... Maybe the Borg assimilated the silverware drawer first?
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Robotech and REMIX by Titan Comics
Seto Kaiba replied to Old_Nash's topic in Anime or Science Fiction
Tracing happened. -
Partly, the sheer number of times helmetless people are shown operating mecha... but a favorite counter-argument to the "thinking cap" is Roy's dialog to [Hikaru/Rick] when he's patching up the VF-1D, which establishes pretty well that the controls are thoroughly conventional and that it isn't any more difficult to operate a battroid than it is to fly a jet. OK, you're crazy. You're also completely correct, though. An awful lot of Robotech fans dislike, if not outright hate, a lot of what's come out under the Robotech brand. You could swap some terms around in the Tom Lehrer song "National Brotherhood Week" and it'd be a fair description of the Robotech fandom and its various mutually hostile factions. (That's a project for later, I think.) As I used to be in the thick of it, I'll explain. The dominant viewpoint was the "Purists", the fans who saw the animated Robotech as the one true series and dismissed the comics and novels on the grounds of their poor quality and their deviations from the animated Robotech's setting. Fans of the Luceno/Daley novelization ("McKinneyists") held the novels up as a superior version of Robotech, on the grounds that it wasn't limited by the show's secondhand animation - a contention that caused a lot of fights, since the original ideas most of the fandom thought were paint-drinking stupidity were what they saw as its virtues. The comics kinda got marginalized, but the fans of the comics Bill Spangler worked on (sometimes self-described as "Spanglerists") were often at loggerheads with fans of the Sentinels comics by the Waltrips. They were the fandom of "They changed it, now it sucks" even before Tommy Yune took over and rebooted things. The purists were basically the last group standing by that point, but they were a split constituency over whether Tommy Yune's reboot and establishment of an official canon was a good thing. Some fans supported it on the grounds that it would make for more consistent work in the future. Others were against it, partly because it was a change and partly because they did not like Tommy disposing of so many cherished fan theories. (A rare few saw Tommy's work as some kind of Macross favoritism, since he did kind of kick the Southern Cross dog.) After over three decades of failures, I would be prepared to say that it is EXACTLY like they couldn't make something decent out of the franchise. Yeah, the system had a hard time distinguishing between intention and imagination, and shock could disable the system entirely. Nope, the closest they got was the new "United Earth Expeditionary Forces" emblem looking vaguely like a kaleidoscope rendering of the UN Spacy logo. Despite having a new daughter of Max and "Miriya", her background was only described as "half-alien" and they didn't use the term "Zentradi", "UN Spacy", or anything like that. They did have a Skull squadron, but that's generic, and a ship designated "SDF-#", but that's all. Tommy Yune and co. had a comic book prequel to the "movie" (really the first episode of a failed OVA project) that was entirely for the purpose of putting every non-essential Macross-derived character on a bus or in the ground. "Rick" got redesigned so that he looks like Hideo Kuze from Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex 2nd Gig, "Lisa" retired to become a diplomat, Minmei was taken prisoner and tortured then sent off somewhere for treatment, "Breetai" and all of the remaining Zentradi except "Exedore" were killed in an (un)friendly fire incident by a traitor, "Exedore" was killed testing the neutron star matter warheads, and both Max and his wife were Sir- and Lady-Not-Appearing-in-this-Film. The only ones who came out of it with their jobs and lives intact were "Rick" and "Dr. Lang". (Some of the other character reworking they did was funny by accident... [Louis Ducasse/Louie Nichols] is a white version of Geordi LaForge now.) The control responses are standardized, like on AMBAC systems in Gundam. They can be custom-tuned to a particular pilot, however, and the VFs in Macross Frontier and beyond have additional onboard systems to aid in personalizing the control responses to a given individual (tied to their EX-Gear). As someone with a bit of a background in robotics via embedded control systems, master-slave motion trace is a PAIN IN THE ASS to work with. For a four-limb trace system, they'd need to either make the cockpit prohibitively large to enable a 1:1 trace using motion capture (think G Gundam) or the controls would be incredibly sensitive because the motion trace would have to magnify the amount of movement by the pilot by a scale factor to enable the cockpit to remain small (as in Full Metal Panic!) which makes the controls incredibly finicky and a sneeze or cramp can throw the whole system for a loop (like Tessa did in "A Cat and Kitten's Rock & Roll"). There's also a fair bit of lag-time in most motion trace setups. ... so, a scaled-down version of Shredder's Technodrome?
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Initially, yeah... it all went a bit loopy in the Sentinels arc of the novels, where what we sarcastically call magic flower fuel started taking the "magic" part increasingly literally. By the end of that arc, protoculture had graduated from being an exotic fuel to being somewhere between Dune's spice and Star Wars's midichlorians... it was self-aware, semi-mystical stuff that gave people exposed to it ESP and was somehow enacting a greater destiny by manipulating its users. Where a Jedi or Sith might've said "the will of the Force", they would say "the shapings of the protoculture". This very bad idea returned briefly for the failed Robotech 3000 series concept, in which the antagonist was protoculture itself having apparently gotten sick of humanity's sh*t in the nine hundred and fifty years or so since the Robotech TV series ended and turning robotechnology against its users. There was an empathic link between the machine and pilot, which combined with the "thinking cap" helmets was what permitted the mecha to respond and maneuver with all of the fluid balance of an organic lifeform. Essentially, the mecha in the novels were semi-living when they were actively drawing power. Robotech fans loathed the idea, to the extent that it was one of the most-often mocked parts of the novels. Mostly, it was because it was a blatant contradiction of what was said and shown in the animated series. Yeah, the whole Sentinels arc, and particularly The End of the Circle, is probably the single most reviled Robotech title in the eyes of most of its fans. End of the Circle made the whole Robotech story into an incredibly stupid stable causality loop in which the SDF-3 is responsible for the disappearance of the SDF-1's fold system, they end up getting sent back in time and settling on Tirol where their children became the first Robotech Masters, with Minmei's son Zor (re)inventing robotechnology, which the first-generation Masters would then become the basis for their oppressive interstellar empire, followed by Zor sending his personal ship with the last of their protoculture to Earth and starting the whole damned thing over.
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Maybe just a fan theory? The nexus never gave anyone else space magic. I had always assumed that her species was simply one of those ones on the verge of evolving into an energy lifeform, but her official bio casts some doubt on whether she's even really an El-Aurian. One has to wonder if she isn't a former traveling companion of Q's or some similar species antagonistic to the Q and better at masquerading as a moral. They did a Doctor Who crossover comic at one point, and Guinan is implied therein to have prior knowledge of the Doctor for reasons she doesn't go into... ... 's pretty unremarkable, isn't it? This doesn't scream "main theme" to me. There's no real consistent melodic thread to it, it's just a bunch of background ambiance pieces strung together. Fitting enough for a series that's hacked together out of rejected bits, but still... There is that. She bullied Trelane in one of the novels too.
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But that would just shift the legal problem to a company they haven't finished alienating yet... the goal of doing a reimagining of Robotech from the ground up would have to be to finally shed their brand's dependency on secondhand intellectual property that they could potentially lose access to, and create a new Robotech they can develop without all kinds of restrictions or fear of a copyright infringement lawsuit from Japan. On a strictly theoretical level it's close to a best-case scenario for them. In practical terms, it's very unlikely to actually work out given that the movie is still stuck dodging all of the Macross copyright obstacles and Robotech's fandom lives for the trope "They changed it, now it sucks". ... if they wanted to sweep the Golden Raspberry awards, sure. Those books are like an itemized list of science fiction cardinal sins, and half of it would only get the movie accused of ripping off Star Wars instead. (To this day, I maintain Luceno and Daley wrote the books by subjected rejected Star Wars novel drafts to a find-and-replace.)
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Yes, they just have to stick to the concepts that were unique to Robotech and thus weren't present in the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross and sufficiently generic concepts that can arguably not be connected directly and solely to Macross. They could, for example, retain the Robotech version of "protoculture" and the whole business with Zor the inventor of all of the advanced alien technology sending his personal spaceship away and it crashing on Earth. The idea that humanity obtained advanced technology from studying a wrecked alien starship is sufficiently generic that they could get away with it easily enough since that's been done to death by everyone from Star Trek to Independence Day and features prominently in pretty much every conspiracy theory about Area 51. A lot of Macross's more iconic plot points would probably be too problematic and would need to be replaced outright with something else. Making a generic non-infringing version of the Zentradi isn't likely to happen, and coming up with a VF design that won't get them sued will be a VERY tall order considering how prolific Kawamori has been.
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If one takes Harmony Gold's public statements at face value - which is, I know, usually a bad idea - the plan of record for the live action movie proposal was always for a reimagining from the ground up. They tactfully omitted that it was a legally necessary move, however. Nay, 'tis but the groaning of a corpse long-dead mistaken for signs of vitality by those employed in the savage beating of the late and largely unlamented ex-horse. They seek to draw attention to a particularly noisome swarm of flies in the hopes that it will distract the gentle viewer from the foul smell of the brand's cadaver. ... y'know, I probably would too, 'cept for the fact that we wouldn't have Macross Frontier yet.
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You might want to look up the definition of "forward"... because this project is in exactly the same position it was in ten years ago right after it was first announced. They've got an alleged director who's pursuing other, higher-profile projects instead and a writer who is working on another story treatment to try to work around the legal problems. All we need is for Harmony Gold to re-release Shadow Chronicles on DVD and it'll be just like we've traveled back in time to 2007.
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You really have to admire the effort they're putting into trying to convince people Robotech wasn't just a mediocre and quickly-forgotten unsuccessful attempt to ride Transformers' coattails. I often wonder if the writers penning this trash are on the take, or just too lazy to check any source apart from the hilarious fiction in Harmony Gold's press packet. Ten bucks says this guy is just the latest writer to submit a story treatment because he needed a quick bit of cash. Every alleged sign of progress on the supposed film so far has turned out to be a distortion or an outright lie, and everyone supposedly connected to it has inevitably found something better to do instead of Robotech... so that's just the status quo maintaining itself. Everybody bloody knew It was planned as a duology, so I don't know why anyone thought that the Robotech movie wouldn't be immediately forgotten in the face of It's second half. Even if there was interest, it still wouldn't get made because it's a goddamn legal minefield. No studio wants a piece of that mess, no matter how well-funded their legal team is...
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Say what you will about the Tal Shiar's alleged brilliance in the field of espionage... their "onscreen" performance is somewhere south of terrible, given that they've been infiltrated and beaten at their own game by (in no particular order): United Earth Section 31, the V'Shar, the Vulcan High Command, UFP Section 31, Klingon Intelligence, Starfleet Intelligence, regular goddamn Starfleet, the Vulcan reunification movement, and the Founders. Let it never be forgotten that they wiped themselves out TWICE... once in a botched attempt to do in the Founders, and once by creating that prat Shinzon. There is no recovering your dignity after being beaten by a bad clone of Picard wearing a rainbow-tinted pleather onesie. Their ability to come up with a credible fib is somewhat suspect... though they could have been counting on the shock value of seeing someone who was a dead ringer for one of Picard's dead subordinates to throw him enough that a bad explanation would work. There is a certain irony in the fact that Armus was a black latex bag covered in liquified dietary fiber supplement dyed black with a water-soluble printer's ink. There are so many different scatological jokes I can make about that in that episode that I'm genuinely spoiled for choice. ... did they ever explain Guinan's apparent knowledge of alternate timelines and why Q is afraid of her? The other El-Aurians never displayed any special powers. She was in the Tal Shiar, I'd expect they would have at least general profiles of the key officers who served aboard the Federation flagship... including the deceased ones. It's not like Tasha's death is a state secret, though clearly nobody bothered telling her next-of-kin. I dunno, I think Vendetta gave it the good ol' college try... what with the reveal that the Borg were an ancient race, and that the Preservers had built the Planet Killers to destroy them, and that the one Kirk and co. disabled was a rough prototype that the genuine article made look like a piece of junk. It kind of became a noodle incident for the Pocket Books Star Trek: the Next Generation series, since Delcara took her still-functional Planet Killer to go hunt the Borg in the delta quadrant.
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Unfortunately, if you're looking for Messer's love interests based on his actual expression of interest in their existence in public, Chuck's kid brother Zack has a lock on first place... he's the only one to actually get Messer to make a positive facial expression. In my opinion, it's worse to make your characters bland and uninteresting from the start... but only in the event that they're in the main cast. That's one of Macross Delta's biggest problems, it has a HUGE main cast, and fully two-thirds of it is flat characters who could be tidily summed up in terms of what cliche they're ticking a checkbox for. The only characters who truly get characterization in the series are Hayate, Freyja, Mirage, Keith, Roid, Bogue, and Qasim, though that doesn't save several of them from also being flat characters: Arad: the Big Brother Mentor. Messer: the Broken Ace. Chuck: the Big Guy. Kaname: the Woobie, bordering on the Broken Bird. Makina: the Miss Fanservice, her bio tries to make her a Wrench Wench but the show forgot to. Reina: the Stoic, the show tries to sell her as the a Playful Hacker but she's no good at it. Hermann: the Team Dad. Qasim: the Token Good Teammate. Theo and Xao: purely for Twin Banter, or less wholesome activities by doujinshi authors. Bogue: the designated Fantastic Racist. Grammier: the Well-Intentioned Extremist, initially a reasonable authority figure in the manga. Heinz: the Unwitting Pawn. Berger: the Corrupt Corporate Executive. Wright: the Suicidal Pacifist by way of a Pacifism Backfire with shades of Too Dumb To Live. Valan: the Smug Snake, superficially. More a One Sane Man once you put context to him. Lady M: a one-woman Omniscient Council of Vagueness by proxy, since she never appears. For my money, she'd be a lot less disappointing if her status as the Woobie wasn't her one and only character trait. A lot of these characters had potential, but there were just too many characters and not nearly enough show to develop them properly. The only ones who really aren't save-able are Makina and Reina, since they're there purely for the fanservice and to fill out the list of standard fetishes for the doujinshi authors. The gaiden manga already did a lot to salvage the members of the Aerial Knights and King Grammier. Ouch.
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Toynami's not making one... they've gone on the record to say they have no interest in Southern Cross because they don't think there's enough interest to guarantee a decent return on investment.
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Oh yeah, the military never does anything like that without an insanely bureaucratic reason and a cheat sheet roughly the length of a CVS receipt. In this case, the cheat sheet's name is MIL-STD-709C MILITARY STANDARD AMMUNITION COLOR CODING. Macross's tech manuals apply a skewed version of it, but don't apply it or a system inspired by it on a consistent basis and the show all but ignores it. For instance, the LPP-14 laser pod has markings for an illumination round, while many others are inexplicably marked up as if they contained armor-piercing incendiary instead of HE. Quite a few of the bombs and missiles found in the VF-1 and VF-0 books are plainly copied from photos of display ordnance, since they carry blue stripes denoting inert practice ammunition. The nosecone color isn't a part of the color code system... I suspect that choice of red or yellow is mainly for "visual pop" in most Macross shows.
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My scanner is a coprolitic clunker from the bad old days of Windows XP, so the res isn't what I'd hoped... but this should be fairly sound color reference if nothing else. Looks like a gloss black nosecone over the seeker head, a reflective white body coat with a red stripe for indicating a live warhead, and a "cool" grey exposed section between the body of the missile and the engine nozzle. VFs have been using holographic technology for three-dimensional on-canopy HUD projection since the VF-1's Block 6 (movie) upgrade and some of the later models of VF used a three-dimensional holographic setup for their in-cockpit monitors as well. It's evident from the manner of her entry that Sharon coopted the existing holographic systems running the HUD to get to Dr. Neumann, and then the main display to get to Isamu.
