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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Reminds me of one of the dorms I lived in at university... They swear blind Star Trek: Discovery is in the prime continuity and a prequel to the original Star Trek... which makes the (re)use of a design meant to be the Constitution-class's successor a little odd given that Discovery is meant to occur BEFORE the original Star Trek. (IMO, it's taking "Cosmetically-advanced prequel" a little too far for comfort.) Hm... not sure if it's actually canon, per se. Star Trek as a whole normally considers only what's in the show itself to be canon. The Star Trek writer's "bible" did mention saucer separation as a possibility in some of its revisions, but the concept was never mentioned or used in-series. There were a few mentions of being able to eject the warp nacelles in TOS though. They didn't have a visual concept for saucer separation until McQuarrie drew it for the rejected Planet of the Titans feature, and again when Probert did a storyboard sequence showing a saucer separation of the refit Enterprise for Star Trek: the Motion Picture that ended up being dropped before filming. It almost happened in Star Trek III but Gene Roddenberry got overruled and the whole Enterprise was blown up instead of just the saucer. Based on what I've read in The Making of Star Trek and a few other books, the concept for saucer separation wasn't an emergency measure. It was originally drafted as a gimmick for the ship that would enable the saucer to be a separate, sublight-only starship for exploring solar systems. The later McQuarrie and Probert concepts were for a saucer that could separate to land on planets for exploration and then return to space and reconnect to the stardrive section. The idea was binned for the same reason it was in TOS... the VFX shots for landing the ship were simply too expensive. The idea of saucer separation as an emergency measure and unrecoverable landing didn't come along until late in the development of Star Trek: the Next Generation. Even the Enterprise D did not originally have the capability, it was added late in preproduction. The original plan was to have a smaller captain's yacht-style lander instead. TNG also originated the idea of it as a way to save a part of the ship from a disaster aboard the stardrive section, and the unrecoverable landing. (The first hard evidence for earlier ships having the capability is in Generations... the MSD at the back of the Enterprise B's bridge shows a battle bridge and Enterprise-D-style latches.)
  2. Seto Kaiba
    The problem is that while she's physically an adult, mentally her development is skewed such that singing is about all she knows... she has no social awareness beyond professional interactions with Walkure, to such an extent that she doesn't even know how to eat with other people in the final few episodes. That makes it bloody creepy that the show keeps trying to make her The Sexy One like Sheryl was in Frontier, when she doesn't seem to be mentally equipped to understand being provocative. It's mentally squicky in the same way that Stig Bernard's dead goldfish replacement girlfriend was in MOSPEADA. On a character level, it was doing OK until about halfway... but the actual plot was still a mess. There's no feeling that anything Xaos and Walkure did had any real impact on the outcome of the war until the last episode or two. They'd show up, get their clocks cleaned by the Aerial Knights, and either draw or get defeated, and even the draws played into Windermere's hands. The characterization took a dive the minute they tried to make Messer sympathetic posthumously. The guy was a certifiable jackass, and for Xaos to treat finding Messer's secret Diary-of-how-much-my-coworkers-suck like proof that he really cared fell so flat I don't even have a smart-arse simile for how flat it fell.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Someone at Project Aces is probably fuming quietly... considering they did exactly this as DLC for Ace Combat: Assault Horizon in partnership with Macross.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Delta, I think, had the potential to be a much better show than it ended up being. The setting was unique and interesting, the reasons for the conflict were thought-provoking, the main trio was solid, the mechanical designs were solid, the music was great... but the plot meant to string all that together was a train wreck of lazy writing and lousy pacing. The villain's plot didn't even come out until the show was practically over, the huge cast left individual characters flat and undeveloped (ironic, in Makina's case), and they reused too much from previous titles. Roid's plan being the same one Grace had in Frontier wasn't even the laziest of them... that'd have to be Mikumo. You can sum up her entire character as "Sheryl Nome by way of Mina Forte", and the reveal that she's only 3 made every piece of art they did for her retroactively creepy as hell. (Maybe the reason we haven't seen Lady M is because she got busted by Chris Hansen on To Catch a Space Predator.)
  5. Seto Kaiba
    ... trying to get into the running for Understatement of the Century? Macross Frontier wasn't perfect by any means, but it hit closer to the mark than any other Macross series to date in my opinion. If it'd been maybe two or three episodes longer to give them more time to build up to the climax, and the love triangle had been more balanced instead of favoring Sheryl so heavily, it would've beyond exceptional.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Apart from the bolt-on armor affixed to the anti-projectile shield and the armored covers for the intakes, the VF-25's Super Pack doesn't really offer any kind of tangible improvement to the VF's defensive ability. The VF-25's Armored Pack, however, offers something on the order of a 4x improvement thanks to its ASWAG advanced energy conversion armor. I think that is the key difference behind the decision to purge the Super Pack before entering atmospheric flight and Ozma's habit of retaining the Armored Pack. It's definitely not intended for flight, but the Armored Pack can brute force itself around in a limited fashion (more or less entirely in GERWALK) to be a passable heavy ground unit.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    ... they do look a bit like corn cobs, don't they? Without the addition of the large LLM-03A micro-missile pods, the TW1 Tornado Pack's armament is relatively light compared to the other FAST Pack options the VF-25 has. It's got the big damn TW1-HPC/M25 twin heavy quantum beam cannon turret, eight BLM-02S micro-missile launcher systems in the wing body (six dorsal, two ventral), and two BLM-02S launchers on the conformal fuel slush tanks mounted on its legs/engine nacelles. All told, rather a less impressively missile-spammy affair than the Super Pack or Armored Pack, but scary all the same given that it can be used in atmosphere relatively unhindered. The weird bit is that the TW1-HPC/M25 heavy quantum beam cannon is indicated to essentially be completely independent of the Valkyrie, with its own dedicated thermonuclear reactor, condenser, and coolant loop, an unusual break from previous designs where the gun was either powered externally using generator output from the VF's compact thermonuclear reactors (e.g. VF-1 Strike Pack, VF-2SS Super Armed Pack) or running off a battery or capacitor built into the pack that may or may not use a connection to the VF's power system to continuously recharge (e.g. VF-11 Full Armor, VF-25 Armored Pack, VFMF VF-25 Strike Pack). Apparently this led to the TW1-HPC/M25 having an aggressively low continuous operating time of less than five seconds at maximum output and a theoretical maximum of just 5 minutes, though it can be converted to a MDE beam weapon which dramatically increases the stopping power. Yeah, it was a pretty minimal set of upgrades focused mainly on improving the craft's existing fold wave functions, since it already had a pretty excessive built-in armament of a hundred micro-missiles and MDE beam cannon turret. The only actual fixed parts of the Super Pack are a bolt-on energy conversion armor module for the shield and the wingtip pods containing fold wave projectors and micro-missiles. The rest is all fuel tanks and disposable rockets for space use.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    To be fair, Macross Plus had some rather questionable choices in the transliteration of the character names into the Latin alphabet. The most frequently cited incorrect romanization is that Dr. Jan Neumann, whose given name is improperly transliterated as Yang. It's actually the same mistake in her case, there's no グ in her name like there ought to be if her name was "Myung". It should be something along the lines of Miyun Fan Lon. (I don't speak any Mandarin, though, and none of our China branch folks are around for me to pick their brains at time of writing.)
  9. Seto Kaiba
    According to her published bio, Myung is part-Chinese and part-Caucasian (of no specified variety).
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Yes, using the On'yomi reading of the kanji it comes out as "Kai". (改 is often mistaken for meaning "Custom", it's actually more along the lines of "Revision". If you work in an office that likes trendy BS, this is the first kanji in "Kaizen", the other one being 善.) Part of me really wants to make a joke about how there isn't a therapist's couch in the world big enough for a VF that's doing that much projecting... Still, the goal is presumably to allow for either a more targeted and direct application of fold song into specific groups of enemies, or to extend the effective range of a fold song by acting like a repeater. (This isn't necessarily mutually exclusive either.) With respect to cost, yeah... the YF-29 Durandal was a bank-breaker. That's why the Macross Frontier fleet only built the one, and even then had to rush it and reuse VF-25 parts in some areas. Fold quartz was quite expensive, and still is to a large extent, because there are very few ways to get your hands on the stuff in any usable quantity or purity apart from hunting a very large, very heavily armed Vajra for its "brain". Never mind that it's illegal, it's a distinctly unhealthy thing to do if you intend to stay alive for very long, which is why planets with the stuff in reasonably large quantities (e.g. the former Vajra planet, Uroboros, Windermere IV) would be the richest planets in the galaxy if not for the ban on trading in the stuff. The YF-29 was made possible by picking over corpses of the larger Vajra forms during the war, and the YF-30 by the deposits of the stuff the Protoculture left behind in ruins. I'd assume that the VF-31改 used fold quartz from the New UN Gov't-controlled mines on Windermere IV from before the first war. Either way, the YF-29 takes the cake in that it has no less than six large chunks of high-purity fold quartz (four in the fold wave system, two in the fold wave amp), the canopy was coated with granulated fold quartz, and the Super Packs had some smaller but still substantial chunks of the stuff. Small wonder it was too expensive to produce in numbers. The order of developments is... complicated, and it's been refined by several different sources including Macross R and Great Mechanics DX. The logical place to start the genealogy of the 5th Generation Variable Fighter is with the program inception for the original YF-24 prototype, an unseen and allegedly ugly plane that had the uninspiring nickname of "The Camel" because of the hump made by its prototype ISC. From that, the YF-24 Evolution prototype was developed in the 2050's. From there, we get to branches in the design family tree: Trunk: YF-24 → YF-24 Evolution Evolution Branch: YF-24 Evolution → Production Design Frozen (2057) → VF-24 Evolution From there, we get to what Master File refers to as Project Triangler, a joint development program between at least two (three in MF) emigrant fleets to develop a 5th Generation VF based on the redacted YF-24 Evolution prototype specs that were transmitted by the New UN Government to all member fleets and worlds. Messiah Branch: YF-24 Evolution → Project Triangler launched → YF-25 Prophecy → Paladin Pack → Production Design Frozen (2058) → VF-25 Messiah (LRIP type Block 0/1) → Super and Armored Packs Olympia Branch: YF-24 Evolution → Project Triangler launched → YF-26 → Canceled Lucifer Branch: YF-24 Evolution → Project Triangler launched → YF-27 → Development data for YF-29 covertly obtained through L.A.I. → VF-27 Lucifer (undisclosed production model) → Super Pack Galaxy Branch: (Alleged/Speculative in-universe, may have been a smokescreen for production VF-27 or just an unfounded rumor) YF-24 Evolution → Project Triangler launched → YF-27 → Development data for YF-29 covertly obtained through L.A.I. → YF-28 (alleged) → ? → Profit Durandal Branch: YF-24 Evolution → Project Triangler launched → YF-29 development type (parallel with Y/VF-25) → Tornado Pack (for VF-25) → YF-29 Durandal (Alto) → "Holy sh*t that's expensive!" → Super Pack because why not? Percival Branch: YF-29 Durandal (Alto) → Spec shared to New UN Gov't → Shinsei head office refinement → YF-29B Percival Chronos Branch: YF-24 Evolution & YF-29 Durandal (Alto) → Richard Bilra's obsession with fold faults → YF-30 → a few crashes and one borrowed YF-25 airframe control AI later → YF-30 Chronos The YF-30 Chronos, of course, because its own new starting point for the Brisingr Alliance's next gen VF thanks to a partnership between their local Shinsei Industry and LAI offices and two other companies: Bharat and Hiotori. The partnership marketed itself as Surya Aerospace. Kairos Branch: YF-30 Chronos → Spec shared to New UN Gov't → Shinsei head office refinement → YF-30B Chronos (maybe) → Simplification by Surya Aerospace → YF-31 → Production Design Frozen (2067) → VF-31 Kairos Siegfried Branch: YF-30B Chronos (maybe) → Simplification by Surya Aerospace → YF-31 → Production Design Frozen (2067) → VF-31 Kairos → Xaos Valkyrie Works customization → VF-31改 Siegfried Then there's these total smegheads... Draken III Branch: Sv-50 → Sv-51 → Sv-52 (in theory) → UN Wars end → We're only in it for the money! → VF-4 Lightning III → General Galaxy founded → SV Works founded → SHENANIGANS! for like three fighter generations → Sv-154 Svard → SV Works sold to Epsilon → Sv-262 Draken III → "Maybe selling weapons to a genocidal madman wasn't such a good idea" If you're still with me after all that, the gist of it is that the YF-25, YF-27, YF-29, and YF-26 (but only if you trust Master File) were developed side-by-side as parallel programs. YF-27 got ahead by using stolen development data from the YF-29 and beat the others into production, the VF-25 was the first to go officially into production, YF-26 got canned (maybe), and YF-29 turned out to be too expensive to produce. The VF-25's Tornado Pack was used to test hardware and flight control for the YF-29. The YF-29's Super Pack was developed because of the Vajra in the hopes of maybe finding a nonlethal alternative but carrying enough kaboom to make it out if it didn't work. The VF-27's may have been a response to the YF-29 nearing completion to help make up the difference in performance, but no definitive reason has been given that I'm aware of.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    It does, albeit nothing particularly detailed or well-drawn. The focus is principally on character drama, so the few times we see a Svard it's either from inside or flying overhead at a decent altitude. We do, however, get an introduction to the unnamed White Knight of Darwent whom Arad shows a picture of in his Ep5 briefing, who died in Windermere's war of independence and cleared the way for Keith to take the title. ... there was a lot of comedic potential in smartarse replies to this one, but I'm going to give it a miss because probably ninety percent are in screamingly poor taste. The correct, strictly un-funny answer is that they're fold wave projectors. They are, in practical terms, a pair of high-powered fold wave amplifiers intended to facilitate communication and peace with the Vajra through the usual Minmay approach of making the enemy LISTEN TO [THEIR] SONG. (In this case, by projecting said song "loud" enough for the Vajra to hear it and understand.) The large fold quartz fittings installed on either side of the airframe behind the cockpit on the YF-29, YF-29B, YF-30, and VF-31改 Siegfried are there for the same reason, as fold [wave/song] amplifiers. EDIT: Before someone asks, I flat-out refuse to call the Siegfried just "VF-31". It's not the production model, and really isn't a factory-done custom job like the VF-11MAXL, so it properly ought to be VF-31改.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Not sure what perfect ending you're referring to... Macross's original ending was pretty damned bittersweet. By the end of Ep36 the vast majority of Earth's population is dead, the planet itself is a wreck that'll take tens of thousands of years to repair, the planetary capital is in flames, the titular warship is a wreck, and Minmay gets dumped. (I know that last one's kind of "Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking", but it still counts as this is a romance series.) The adaptation takes that up a notch in darkness by having the Macross irrecoverably destroyed, most of the cast killed, and the city irreversibly contaminated to the point that they had to abandon it, but that's still small potatoes compared to what was already in the original. Granted, the bowdlerized rewrite makes that the first step in a protracted humiliation conga for Earth, but there isn't a big payoff at the end either. Earth may not be as much of a wreck as it was, but there's been a total societal and economic collapse, the only remaining government is an exclusively military fascist nightmare right out of Warhammer 40,000, the invading aliens took pity on humanity and prevented a self-inflicted genocide (or maybe just didn't want to be one-upped), the love story ends with the male lead being unable to get past a case of fantastic racism, and within hours they're at war with someone else. There's no happily-ever-after or other uplifting payoff there... the best case scenario is Mad Max with more greenery. I'm not honestly sure if the adaptation's version of Southern Cross's ending is less of a sucker punch than the original. Instead of the idiot protagonists screwing up by shooting the one guy who could land the bloody ship and causing the Zor Lords to win the war posthumously by turning everyone on Glorie into Zor, the idiot protagonists screw up and accidentally turn Earth into a paradise for a genocidal alien race who regard humans as vermin or dumb animals. (Either way it's kind of a firm "F-you" from the writers to the audience, though I guess in the latter case it's only delivered by proxy.) ... kill it with fire. Preferably napalm. Or white phosphorous if you can get it.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    I do, I've met two... both of 'em while I was working with Sumitomo Electric a few years back on a technology demonstrator. I miss being able to write off trips to SoCal and Japan as business expenses. K-A-N-A-M-E? That's not how you spell "Mirage", man.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    It's a unisex name, something that from my experience is actually fairly popular in Japan. (Hell, Macross's original leading man, Hikaru Ichijo, has a given name that's used for girls as often as for boys. Most of the Hikarus I know, in person and in fiction, are female.)
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Unfortunately, there's not really anything more to say. One of the most frustrating things about Southern Cross is that the show's creators put very little effort into developing the setting. The few magazine articles, leaflets, and the one artbook the series got explain virtually nothing, and the few things that do get explained almost never get an explanation longer than a single unqualified sentence. It's way beyond the level where some shows just say "x many missiles", only the Spartas has even the most cursory stats and the vast majority don't even have names. The line in question was a single-sentence statement in part of an advertising leaflet for the series which talked about the mecha. All it had to say, besides some very basic statements about the Logan and Auroran's alt-modes, is that the Logan was only an annoyance to the Zor. The Auroran's similarly basic description mentions only that the Logan wasn't able to oppose the Zor advance and was being replaced by the Auroran as a result. Everything else on the leaflet is a statement of the blindingly obvious, like that fighter forms are good for high-speed travel and dogfighting. (It was less disappointing than the other mecha magazine insert I worked on, which was one long series of sucker-punches for anyone hoping for info on the background mecha.)
  16. Seto Kaiba
    As a rule, no... if you want Macross on Blu-ray you'll have to import it from Japan. The prevailing legal situation being what it is, it's unlikely that there will be any Macross Blu-rays from western distributors. (In the event You-Know-Who tried to put one out, it'd only be an upsampling of their 480 DVD remaster.)
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Oh yeah, that's a bootleg. Almost certainly a fansub burned to Blu-ray, and the sheer number of episodes they're getting into six discs suggests the quality is going to be pretty poor. The only way to tell for sure of the quality would be to watch it and see what fansub was used though. The legit Super Dimension Fortress Macross Blu-rays were just the TV series, with DYRL? and Flashback 2012 as a separate set, and Macross II as another separate set, and none of 'em had English subs.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Didn't care for it, myself... but then, I've always been somewhat put off by the way The Show That Must Not Be Named keeps coming over a bit Warhammer 40,000 by turning xenophobia and blind obedience to a military-run authoritarian regime into virtues. Kind of seems insulting toward the original works, all of which were shooting for themes of understanding. The feudal thing never made any sense in the context of the show either, since we're clearly shown a modern capitalist economy rather than anything in line with a feudal society. I tend to ignore it given that the writers of the adaptation were just throwing whatever at the wall regardless of whether or not it stuck, and frequently used words they didn't truly understand simply because they thought it sounded cool. I've seen similar efforts to handwave it before, but they never quite work in the face of the operational factory satellite we're shown seven years before the events of the adaptation version. If they're so resource-strapped, why did they develop separate models of robot for each specialist group inside the army? The hybridized story of the adaptation was always going to cause a certain amount of mental calisthenics to attempt to explain away why each installment had totally separate mechanical designs, but the adaptation of Southern Cross really took it on the chin as the least technically-advanced of the three, the most obviously flawed of the three, and the only show out of the three to have its own creators identify the mecha in the show as poorly designed or inadequate. (I was rather surprised when I found that last bit while working on a translation for a fan of Southern Cross on another forum. It wasn't exactly scathing, but having the Logan's effectiveness compared to a mosquito wasn't exactly flattering either.) To be frank, I'm fairly certain that "undoing" of Leonard's backstory from the canon comics was entirely unintentional. At best, Palladium Books has only ever bothered to do the most cursory background research before writing a licensed book... and even that is only because Harmony Gold forced them to actually do research this time instead of just skimming the back of the video box twenty minutes before the book went to the printers. They probably didn't even notice the comic book in question exists. Pretty sure the comics made him into the villain because he was already a total bastard in the TV show, and most of the adaptation's fandom actively dislikes him.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Nothing I'm aware of... the interior of the engine is protected somewhat by the reactor's GIC system containing the reaction plasma, and the thermoelectrics in the engine converting some of the heat into electrical energy, but the exhaust velocity is still EXTREMELY high. 10km/s on the VF-1. Reasonably, standing near the exhaust stream of an actively running engine should be a manifestly unhealthy thing to do.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Very little of actual substance, really... the weird part is it's kind of written in two minds. On the one hand, the RPG's chronology section tries to throw the adaptation's version of the Southern Cross Army a bone by attributing the pacification of post-bombardment Earth during Macross's timeskip to an ad hoc force of survivors that became the Army later. On the other hand, it also throws the modern Southern Cross Army of the adaptation under a bus in truly spectacular fashion. In the RPG's version, the government is a de facto military dictatorship that uses a civilian parliament as a sockpuppet to keep the proles in line by rubber-stamping military decrees, the military leadership is monstrously incompetent and hilariously petty pack of morons, and caps it by explicitly establishing the Southern Cross Army's hardware is inferior-grade gear because their leadership decided the SCA should develop its own mecha because Leon/Leonard was upset that his force was a low priority for resources. It's not quite the calculated insult that the comic books delivered by rewriting Leonard's [Leon's] backstory into being a traitor and spy who tried and failed to sabotage the VF-1's development, orchestrated the hijacking of an ARMD and an ersatz-nuclear strike on multiple key military bases, etc..
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Somebody better pick up that phone... because I called it. They're using almost exactly the same format they used with their last artbook, The Art of Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles. They've got barely enough text for a pamphlet, most of which will doubtless be reprints of pages from their old website, so two-thirds of every page is given over to screen captures to pad the page count. It looks a tiny bit more professional than their last one, but it's still pretty clear Udon's phoning this one in.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    You mean the Complete Blu-Ray Box (BCXA-0719)? I've got a copy. I've had no complaints with the quality of that release. The video quality is excellent and I took a number of reference screen captures for the Macross Mecha Manual's use. I can't speak to the quality of the audio transfer from 2.0 to 5.1ch since I watched it on my desktop with kind of a weenie set of speakers instead of my home theater system, but I didn't find anything that's overtly off or upsetting. I've never actually watched the Macross Plus dub, but I'm given to understand from the Japanese fansites and the disc credits that the "International Version" (English dub) of the Macross Plus OVA episode 4 does in fact have a different cast from the first three episodes. This was apparently done to address the old English dub's use of different background music and sound effects for that episode for reasons unclear. The Blu-ray's version restores the original audio for the sound effects and music at the expense of having to commission a new English dub for the episode. While they were at it, the did a new translation for the script, though they had to change actors for the principal characters because the original actors were not available.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    For me, the nagging question left by that article is exactly how far they intend to take this new "less nice" riff on Star Trek's setting. I have no objections to, say, a Star Trek: Deep Space Nine level of ongoing conflict-driven story arc because in there they didn't sacrifice the generally optimistic Roddenberry-esque tone that is Star Trek's most iconic trait. Starfleet never stopped hoping the conflict could be resolved by diplomatic means and in the end it was. They still saw themselves as explorers, and the wars as a wasteful distraction from that primary mission. What they've given us every reason to expect, and what I DO object to, is a dumbed-down Star Trek series à la Jar-Jar Abrams that replaces the franchise's trademark introspective science fiction with a CG special effects extravaganza backed by paper-thin action movie excuse plots. That dumbing-down is a big part of what ultimately killed Enterprise and it won't endear this new series to existing Star Trek fans either.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    One has to wonder if he volunteered, or it's just a feeble attempt to drum up some enthusiasm from the ambivalent majority of Star Trek fans.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    They say the key to success is having a consistent process, and mine is: 10 START 20 ACQUIRE VF-2SS 30 GOTO 10 After that it's like a six way tie, since I have two VF-4's, two VF-171's, two VF-25's (if you count the YF-25 as one), two VF-31's, two YF-29s, and two VF-1s.
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