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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    VF-2SS Valkyrie II... I currently have two old Bandais, six Evolution Toys (two Sylvies, three Fairy Platoon, one Nex Gilbert), and I'm looking to get at least one HiMetal.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, it's me. As JB0 already pointed out, the latter two "sagas" of The Show That Must Not Be Named are completely separate shows and the hostile factions depicted in them don't really have any kind of equivalent in Macross. The creators of Macross don't really care for the idea of direct sequels, you see. So, as a result, instead of having installments where one story follows directly on from the conclusion of the one before it (as in the "Sagas" you're thinking of), each new main Macross series is effectively a stand-alone story set in a different time and place in the shared Macross universe. There's usually very little to directly connect one Macross show to another, apart from characters showing a basic historical awareness of important events and people from previous Macross shows that are set, from their perspective, in the past. Each new series is set in a different locale, separated from the other shows by years of time and many light years of distance. There's very little in the way of characters from one show returning in another, and apart from the extended Jenius family there's even less of characters who are relatives/friends of previous characters showing up. Take, for instance, Macross Delta. It's the latest series and following on from the success of Macross Frontier, but the settings of the two shows are separated by eight years of time and a whopping 50,000+ light years. The only overt, non-historical connection between the two is that Freyja Wion is a fan of Ranka Lee's music. (The secondary works that are part of the official chronology like light novels, manga, and video games do indulge more in joining up the dots, though their favorite method is usually some flavor of Remember the New Guy. Macross R, for instance, established that several of its all-new characters were veterans of the Protodeviln conflict in Macross 7.)
  3. Seto Kaiba
    The earliest direct mention of a crystalline resonator being involved in the function of fold-based devices goes back to Macross VF-X2. The improved "subspace resonance lens" that was the basis for Critical Path's "magic flute" and Jamming Sound system is implied by the Frontier novelization to be one of the first real applications of fold quartz after its discovery. (They imply therein that Critical Path sponsored the 117th Research Fleet that was destroyed by the Vajra, and that Ozma was dishonorably discharged from the NUNS for assaulting their CEO during the debrief.) Hadn't thought of that, to be honest... but it'd certainly explain a few things. Nope. In all fairness, that beautiful VF-31A Kairos represents neither a quantum leap nor a discrete step forward. Were I forced to pick a short, pithy descriptor for it I would have to go with "economy model". It's not exactly a surprise that it would be, given that one of the few details we're told of the prevailing situation out in the space boonies of the Brisingr globular cluster is that they're cash-strapped and economically underdeveloped worlds who will still be flying the Block II VF-171 a decade after the rest of the galaxy started to broom it. (A not-inconsiderable number of the VF-31A's parts are "off the shelf" slightly newer variants of hardware developed for the Block 1 VF-25. Irritatingly, this carried over to the Master File book, which recycles a LOT of content from the VF-25 book.) The Compendium's got a modest version of the official spec (M3 articles for Delta are in the works). I did a fairly wordy comparison of the two a while back which can be found on the link below: http://www.macrossworld.com/mwf/topic/42189-avf-discussion-thread/?page=21#comment-1317676 The short version is that the trial production VF-31A Kairos in 2067 is projected to be comparable or slightly inferior to the trial production VF-25A from 2059. This is mostly because it offers an airframe oriented around low-altitude atmospheric service and short-ranged combat rather than balanced all-regime performance, and its negligible output improvement didn't offset its increase in mass from the ordinance container. It probably compares unfavorably to the current production model VF-25 in 2067.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    There's one little thing that's bothering me about the uniform... at the time period Discovery is set in, each starship had its own unique insignia on the uniform. The insignia they have there didn't become the Federation Starfleet standard until the timeskip between TOS/TAS and TMP. I'm not sure if I'd go quite that far... but The Oroville is deliberately trying to be as much like Star Trek as it can for parody's sake, where this is trying to break new ground (for better or worse).
  5. Seto Kaiba
    From the thread where the question was originally asked:
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Sure thing. Fold carbon is the synthetic crystalline material that is the heart of pretty much any device that operates on super dimension spatial physics like thermonuclear reaction power systems, all forms of fold technology (fold communications, cross-dimensional/fold wave radar, fold systems, etc.), heavy quantum beam weapons, and reaction warheads. Its main use is that it produces the impossibly high-mass dimension-straddling exotic matter known as heavy quantum when energized. Heavy quantum's impossible mass produces intense gravity, so much so that if left alone it'll collapse on itself and fuse. That gravity, properly contained, is used to provide compression and containment of fuel in OTM thermonuclear reactors, to manipulate the fabric of space-time for gravity control and space fold jumps, and its tendency to collapse on itself and fuse is exploited as the mechanism by which most beam weapons in Macross work by collecting a big chunk of heavy quantum and corralling the resulting fusion reaction into a beam (most notably the "main gun" systems, but the little turrets work the same way). Otherwise, it does all the same stuff fold quartz does (receiving, transmitting, amplifying fold waves) but less well... fold quartz is basically super-high purity fold carbon that humanity isn't able to synthesize (yet, but the Vajra and Protoculture can/could) that produces a better, even more potent form of heavy quantum and thus tends to improve any super dimension-based device when substituted for fold carbon (e.g. fold systems, beam weapons, etc.). EDIT: Because fold quartz can't be synthesized (yet), it's rare and expensive... and also a heavily regulated substance since it can be used for somewhat less benign purposes like making dimension eater bombs and MDE weaponry. "Big Waist?" Machine translating has a looooong way to go.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    With the sole exception of Walter Koenig's Ensign Chekhov, Star Trek: the Animated Series had all of the TOS regulars present and voiced by their original actors. Chekhov was cut to keep the voice actor budget down, and was replaced by a three-armed, three-legged alien named Lt. Arex (voiced by Jimmy Doohan). Majel Barrett also voiced a new character on top of returning as Nurse Chapel, a Caitian comm officer Lt. M'ress, who was Uhura's periodic stand-in. (Walter did pen at least one episode of the series though, so it's not like he was totally uninvolved.) The quality of the series is iffy... at its worst ("The Slaver Weapon", "Bem", "The Magicks of Megas-Tu") it was downright Scooby-Doo levels of silly or stupid. At its best ("More Tribbles, More Troubles", "How Sharper than a Serpent's Tooth") it was every bit as good as TOS's better episodes. Still massively camp, but good. They almost started adapting backstory events from TAS in Enterprise (the Kzinti wars), but were mercifully prevented from doing so by the cancellation of the series. Mercifully, we'll never know if the Kzinti were to be as violently in love with the color fuschia as they were in TAS. A pretty common sentiment among older fans and folks who didn't like the Abrams movies.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    If you want that exact experience, there's a Star Trek novel you should read... How Much for Just the Planet? by John M. Ford. No, really. Anything I could say about it wouldn't do it justice. (Hah! Available through Google Play Books for nine bucks...) It's turned into rather a controversy conga... first the reuse of that hideous McQuarrie Star Trek Phase II design for the USS Discovery, then the new Klingon designs, the decision to keep it exclusive to a proprietary streaming service in its home market, then the completely ridiculous (and ironic) furor over cast diversity. That's why I've got a bet on with several friends that it won't last more than one season... and that's assuming that they produced the entire season before it went to streaming. I suspect they're hoping and praying the fair weather casual fans who made the Abrams movies a commercial success are going to carry Discovery... they're about to learn the hard way that particular audience isn't all that invested in Star Trek proper and only saw Abrams' efforts as a string of half-passable popcorn flicks.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    They ARE completely daft... the core/main market Star Trek: Discovery is being targeted to is the United States, and unless they've changed their minds that's the ONLY market where it's going up on their crummy proprietary streaming service instead of going up on Netflix. Between that and all the other questionable decisions, you'd almost swear they were attempting to pull a Springtime for Hitler by flying the show into the ground. Nothing I've seen so far has convinced me the show's worth spending ten bucks a month on CBS All Access to watch it. A few friends and I have a bet on how long it'll last. I'm expecting one season and done, tops.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    One thing I have to admit always strikes me when I read the Zentradi and Meltrandi sheets is how utterly essential fold technology was to the ancient Protoculture and their proxy military... it's used in almost every essential system. The "countless" number of radar arrays is a new one on me though, as is the detail on the ship's war room on the bridge.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, it's always been Fulgrim... the fight with Alpharius was before that, and ended with "Alpharius"1 dying. The first sources to establish that Guilliman was not-quite-dead also established that the wound that landed him a permanent stasis case was being struck in the neck by a poisoned blade wielded by Fulgrim. It seems mildly likely the Heresy novels will change the type of blade that did the deed, given that... Nothing confirmed thus far... though there's a LOT of speculation.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Well, all bets are off where the Warp is involved considering that the very concept of linear time is a bit of a joke there even with the dubious protection of a Gellar field. In the Materium, that's a bit of a trickier question. The Big E has been confirmed to be a psychic gestalt intelligence created by an elaborate suicide ritual that fused together all the souls of Earth's psychically gifted prehistoric shamans into a single reincarnated existence. He himself has confirmed that he can split off parts of his mind to focus on particular tasks while the part pushing his fleshy meats around deals with day-to-day business of the realm. That's how he runs the Astronomican, soul-binds psykers, etc. while also keeping the Imperial webway closed and everything else he does. (At one point, while on the Golden Throne long after the Heresy, he notes to an Inquisitor that he's split and partitioned himself to do so many things that he's not sure a particular, seemingly benevolent warp entity called The Hydra is a part of him or not.) So, in terms of his unique perpetual physical body that's currently enshrined on the Golden Throne of Terra, only one of that can exist at a time. He could, however, have his mind in multiple places and directly controlling the bodies of multiple people at the same time. (After Magnus screwed up the Imperial webway, temporarily confining him to the Golden Throne to keep the Chaos filth out, his preferred method of interacting with his sons was to pull a Grand Theft Me on Malcador or whoever else happened to be convenient like Raven Guard ex-Librarians.) That's a very definite "maybe". If the Emperor is a true perpetual, at least as defined in the Horus Heresy books via John Grammaticus, Ollanius Pius, and others, once he died his mortal body would regenerate ultra-rapidly and he would simply come back to life in that restored body. Based on the trouble Night Haunter went to, it seems that even injuries that would put a Primarch down for good won't do much more than temporarily inconvenience a perpetual and make them take slightly longer to regenerate. Even incineration or vaporization won't keep them down for long... Vulkan literally fell from orbit stark naked and landed on Macragge as a baked skeleton, and within a day or so he was up and about and ROYALLY PISSED. That said, bring enough psychic trauma to bear on a perpetual and you can make them stay down permanently... at least in theory. So since the Emperor got the snot beaten out of him by Horus both physically and psychically, he may not be able to regenerate like a normal perpetual. The prevailing theories among the Inquisition in previous edition fluff were that the Emperor would either create a new physical body for himself using his immortal flesh-and-blood descendants known as the Sensei if the Inquisition could round them all up, or that he would transcend flesh altogether and become a new Warp God of Order. Given that the Warp's "laws" are often little more than "clap your hands if you believe", it's entirely possible that millennia of humanity's collective belief in the Emperor's divinity and that he claims their souls after death would be enough for the Warp God of Order hypothesis to actually prove out. (Weirder things have happened... they're perpetually out-of-focus, but the bizarre nature of the warp has given rise to minor warp gods devoted to things like Chaos's power being turned against itself, the embodiment of "Not as planned!", and a a warp god of atheism whose power paradoxically grows as the belief in gods diminishes... Malal, Zuvassin, and Necoho respectively.) As of 8th, The Big E seems to be attempting this by proxy. Roboute Guilliman, Primarch of the XIII Legion and perennial "well done, son" guy who spent the last few thousand years imprisoned in a stasis field at the edge of death because of the wounds he suffered fighting the Daemon Primarch Fulgrim is up and about thanks to the intervention of a 10,000 year old Mechanicum Magos named Belisarius Cawl. He was reportedly less than happy to see what the Imperium has become (or possibly not a morning person), marched on Terra to confer with the Emperor, and is now Lord Commander of the Imperium and Wrecker-in-Chief of Chaos's Sh*t as he leads a new crusade in defense of the Imperium. It remains to be seen if any other surviving loyalist Primarchs will come out of the woodwork now that Bobby G's in charge, but theoretically at least The Lion, Corax, Vulkan, Leman Russ, and The Khan are on the table. (The Imperium will probably lose its collective mind if Sanguinius, most celebrated of primarchs, pulls an "I got better"...) If the Big E finally kicks off and becomes a Warp God of Order, that might not be the best thing. The last two times he left things to a council of the primarchs it ended rather badly. The first time, Horus turned half of the Imperium against the Emperor. The second time resulted in the start of The Lion's humiliation conga with the breaking of The Lion Sword and a public dressing down from Sanguinius and Guilliman so severe he literally fled Ultramar and the post-Heresy Dark Angels invented a much less humiliating reason for the sword to be broken and lost.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    After the news from E3, it feels like I picked the right time to wax nostalgic. I've been having a blast with the 3DS's virtual console library... I'd quite forgotten how hard true old-school Nintendo Hard was. They had a sale not too long ago, so I grabbed a bunch of old Legend of Zelda games that I never finished including the original Legend of Zelda and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. They're every bit as frustrating as I remember. (Also took a whack at Bravely Default, which is almost like a rebranded remake of Final Fantasy III... damn if the gameplay didn't age like milk.)
  14. Seto Kaiba
    That's an easy one... it's because the target audience for the vast majority of anime and manga is tweens and teens. Creators want the audience to be able to relate to the characters, so the characters are often of a similar age to the target reader/viewer. This does sometimes lead to characters doing jobs that nobody of their age would realistically be qualified or trained for without some kind of special circumstances like a soldier or giant robot pilot, a live-in butler, a revolutionary leader, etc. A similar principle is in play to ensure that, even in fantasy or futuristic settings where traditional nationalities are no longer a thing or never existed to begin with there is always someone on the main cast (if not the main character him/herself) who is identifiably Japanese or part-Japanese. This is also at work in stories set in foreign countries too. They might be the only Japanese or even only recognizably asian person on the entire cast, but to keep it relatable to the audience there's usually at least one. That's not to say that shows based around more mature characters can't be successful... it's just harder for their target audience to relate. (I do have to wonder if spectacle and gunpla sales are all that's keeping Gundam Thunderbolt going, given that every character's a completely unrelatable total bastard.) If we're demanding bread and circuses, I want some proper garlic bread... none of that whole grain nonsense. Most of the time, anyway... the worst offenders in Macross are Basara and Hayate, neither of whom had any kind of formal pilot training before being dumped in the cockpit of a next-gen VF and somehow surpassing ace pilots easily. (It's especially galling in Hayate's case, since we know he didn't have a bunch of offscreen practice and couldn't even keep his lunch down in his first flight.) The vast majority of Macross protagonists are already qualified pilots when we meet them... e.g. Hikaru (a veteran stunt pilot), Hibiki (a licensed operator of civilian market VFs), Isamu and Guld (adrenaline junkies with a flight fetish), Gamlin (special forces pilot prodigy who completed 3 years of training in 2 years), Shin (a trained F-14 pilot), Alto (a 2nd year student in a pilot training vocational school), or Chelsea (a retiring NUNS soldier). Gundam used to be more circumspect about it... like having most of White Base's victories being down to the superior performance and durability of the Gundam rather than any particular skill on Amuro's part. Still, a fair few of Gundam's protagonists are fully-qualified pilots when we first see them too, like Shiro, Bernie and Chris, Kou, Uso, Garrod, Bellri, etc. (Some of that is because of rushed training (Shiro), absurdly young enlistment ages (Bellri), or questionable parenting decisions (Uso).) Still, I'd like to see a return to the protagonists in Macross being part of the actual military. The PMCs are trying too hard to make themselves seem rebellious by badmouthing the military, which falls hilariously flat when they spend the entire show at the military's beck and call. (Did nobody tell Arad not to bite the hand that feeds?)
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Yep... the Macross titles where the conflict du jour is taken seriously tend to be much more developed, satisfying stories. While Macross's signature trait is being fairly upbeat because it's a love story set in wartime, there's such a thing as too upbeat. It always did feel a bit unnatural how Basara was totally unaware of people dying around him, or how quickly Hayate gets over things like that Freyja's singing could kill him or that his dad is partly responsible for the worst atrocity in Windermere's history. No problem. It's really frustrating that they don't put worldbuilding details like that into the shows themselves... there's actually a whole faction of antagonists in later Macross titles who became antagonists because they were PO'd about the devolution of governing authority to the individual colonies and the decentralization of the military. That's Latence, from Macross VF-X2 and its splinter/remnant FASCES from Macross R. In that respect, the Macross Delta series is kind of a subversion. The gaiden manga for the Aerial Knights reveals that the cause of the 2060 war was essentially Windermere wanting all the benefits and none of the responsibilities of New UN Government membership, and even the New UN Spacy's acts that the show tries to present as villainous are revealed to be sound strategic and tactical decisions intended to avert disaster and neutralize a great threat only they knew about with the minimum possible loss of life and property. "The Man" is the show's secret, uncelebrated Big Good, while two groups of arrogant and immature hotheads screw things up time and time again. It's so weird that Kawamori and co. are fine with having the New UN Spacy be a well-organized, well-trained, and highly competent force and don't shy away from having protagonists from the military... but when the time comes to put them in a show, they're only around to be subject to the Worf Effect to show that the new antagonist is serious business. They've proved that they can still do stories where the protagonist is a proper soldier and do it well, but why they don't actually do it for TV is a mystery to me. Not entirely... "The Man", by which I mean General Hayase and the other brass, were perfectly happy to pursue a negotiated peace with the Zentradi Army. They were just determined to do so from a position of strength via showing off the firepower of a Grand Cannon before proposing peace talks. If they'd tried it earlier it might've actually worked via shock and awe, but they waited too long and Boddole Zer concluded that Earth had to be destroyed.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    I doubt it's anything to do with controversy... plenty of mecha shows, and even a fair few non-mecha shows lately, have had no qualms about depicting teenagers joining the military with all the consequences that entails. One might suspect that, considering how brutal Shingeki no Kyojin and Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans were to their teenage soldiers, more uplifting stories would be entirely welcomed. You'd think PMCs would actually be more taboo, since there are significant international legal issues surrounding the use of private security forces in a combat setting and at least 35 nations have banned the use of mercenaries in combat. With respect to military bureaucracy, the opposite is true... they actually acknowledge in Frontier that SMS is answerable both to the Frontier government and its New UN Forces because their job is to supplement the local military. That quickly gets handwaved and then ignored until late in the series when the New UN Spacy and Frontier government exercise their option to bring SMS under their direct control and essentially draft the entire SMS office into the local New UN Spacy garrison. Almost everything SMS Frontier Branch had was on loan from the local NUNS... the Low Rate Initial Production Block VF-25s they were flying, the Macross Quarter herself. Xaos in Delta also acknowleges on several occasions that they're subordinate to the local New UN Forces and the Brisingr Alliance government, and they have to resort to having Lady M wade in and exert her mysterious influence to get the New UN Spacy local staff office to back down (with disastrous results). Because the New UN Forces are out of focus in the shows themselves their organization isn't talked about much unless you go to the print sources, but they actually have a decentralized command structure. Each planet or fleet is effectively an autonomous state and responsible for raising, maintaining, and equipping its own local defense forces which operate under the auspices of the New UN Forces. The New UN Government maintains a standing military not tied to any one planet or fleet, which is the core/federal New UN Forces. The fleets/planets have treaty obligations as New UN Government members to honor requests for reinforcement or cooperation from each other and from the federal forces. Essentially, though it's not an exact comparison, the local mooks we've seen representing the New UN Forces in Frontier and Delta are the equivalent of National Guard reservists. Their organization is subordinate to the federal military, but able to operate as a stand-alone force. (One of the issues that pushed Windermere towards their 2060 war of secession was their reluctance to send the Aerial Knights to support the New UN Spacy in repelling a rogue Zentradi fleet.) As Ozma put it, the PMCs seem to be valuable mainly because their troops are technically expendable soldiers. If they snuff it, they're legally considered to have died in an accident and not combat, so it's less paperwork for the military under certain circumstances. (Considering the acknowledged Aesop of Frontier was one about corporations getting too powerful for their own good, it's an odd choice to make the protagonists corporate soldiers.) Dunno if that's necessarily true, given that the age of legal adulthood in Macross is established to be 17 and you can legally join the military as young as 15 (as Gamlin did). It's lazy writing, using the military's latest equipment not being quite ready yet to justify both using them as victims for the Worf Effect and justify having a PMC that was conveniently testing those same weapons for them do all the actual fighting. (You'd think the military would just repo the bloody things and get on with their jobs.) In Frontier, the only thing that kept the New UN Spacy out of the fight was that the VF-25 was like six months from mass production and they'd given SMS the Block 1 trial production units for testing. Same as in Delta, where the VF-31's slated to go into service in two years time and Xaos is testing it for them. With all the hoops they have to jump through to justify PMC protagonists, you'd think it'd be easier to just say "Ooo! Look! A NUNS Special Forces team!"
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, it's beautifully animated... the mechanical designs would be the standard OYW fare if not for the mountains of extraneous garbage bolted to their backs like some kind of junkyard Super Pack. The one big problem with Thunderbolt is that the story is an action-heavy but otherwise threadbare, barely-there mess that makes Delta look like Hugo Award material. Thunderbolt's story is deeply devoted to Gundam's "War is Hell" message (hence the brutality), but that's the only trick it has in its playbook so it all comes off as rather forced and gratuitous. As much as I'd like to see a Macross series that returns the protagonist focus to the actual military instead of suspiciously hypercompetent (SMS) or blitheringly incompetent1 (Xaos) PMCs, I'd find a Macross show that tried to sell itself on gratuitous violence even less watchable than Macross Delta with its apparent disinterest in the actual war being fought. That's just not what the Macross series is about... war is hell, but Macross is all about love, peace, and communication. Leave this guy's fantasies to The Show That Must Not Be Named. 1. AKA a realistic PMC, were it not for the way Macross Delta treats Xaos as designated heroes the audience is supposed to be rooting for even though they lose or at best draw every battle they fight in, botch every infiltration operation, cause civilians to get hurt by hindering a military-led evacuation, play directly into Windermere's hands for almost the entire series and make things immeasurably worse, and achieve less in 26 episodes than the New UN Spacy resistance does in part of a single episode yet still badmouth the military.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, I've had a few similar statuses show up on tracking for packages from Japan at my day job. "TOKYO INT V BAG 2" is an internal postal code for one of the international mail handling centers which process SAL and EMS packages, serving Tokyo Haneda international airport.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Depends when his birthday was, he could've been 17 at that time (which means he was a special entry candidate like Gamlin Kizaki). The one thing I keep wondering with this theory of yours is why? Leaving aside the fact that it's impossible to be in two places at once and all the other bits that don't work, what would he stand to gain from such a complex and pointless deception? Considering his service record and participation in foiling FASCES, the NUNS would jump at the chance to have him back. Why go to all the trouble of moving halfway across the galaxy and committing several different criminal acts including falsifying identity papers and committing perjury countless times by giving false information on enlistment papers and all the other legal documents he'd need to set up a life for himself. All it'd take is one halfway competent background check to land him in prison on a laundry list of felony charges and get him a dishonorable discharge. (We're almost certainly not getting a Delta sequel, Kawamori doesn't like doing direct sequels... so don't hold your breath.)
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Actually, I overlooked an even more obvious, ironclad reason that Arad Molders and Hakuna Aoba cannot be the same person... their ages. From his official profile, Arad Molders is 33 years old in 2067. That means his date of birth is 10 January 2034, so Arad would have had his 12th birthday around the middle of the war with the Varuata army in Macross 7 at the start of 2046. The youngest you can enter the (New) UN Forces by special admission is 15 years old, and normal enlistment requires the enlistee be a legal adult (age 17+). Pilot training is a three year program, though highly skilled candidates can clear it in two. We know Hakuna Aoba was already a fully-trained, experienced UN Spacy special forces VF pilot assigned to SVF-473 in 2046... something Arad Molders would've been a minimum of five years, and more realistically eight years, too young to be. They really don't look alike, either, except that they have a slightly similar facial shape. Their hair color is different, parts to a different side, etc.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    None were used in the series... I don't recall if the Aerial Knights trainees in the gaiden manga used them for their Sv-154 Svards. They always just refer to each other by name, and it seems only Keith and Hermann rate any kind of honorific (Keith-sama and Master Hermann respectively). Keith's title of "White Knight of Darwent" gets bandied about a fair bit, but it's not used like a callsign... it's a non-hereditary title passed down to each top ace of the Aerial Knights. (Since many of the Aerial Knights are nobles, but noble blood apparently isn't a requirement to join, I wonder if the title could pass to a non-noble like one of the Jussila twins?)
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Arad Molders himself establishes that he was part of the New UN Forces garrison on Windermere before the planet launched its war of secession... so he'd have to be in two places at once if he were an alias of Hakuna Aoba's, since Aoba was still active in the Vanquish League after the events of Macross R. It'd also be rather strange that nobody would recognize that they're the same guy. For one, the New UN Forces ought to notice that a decorated veteran special forces pilot1 who'd taken an honorable discharge and returned to life as a private citizen before being involved in a high-profile terrorist incident was trying to re-enlist under an assumed name. For two, it'd be virtually guaranteed to fail since Hakuna Aoba was an interstellar celebrity thanks to his Vanquish League career and Arad Molders is an interstellar celebrity as the leader of Walkure's bodyguard detail. For three, there wouldn't be any reason for him to re-enlist under an alias since Hakuna Aoba didn't have a criminal record and was highly regarded by the New UN Forces and other high profile organizations like SMS. (It'd also be rather difficult for him to serve under Ernest Johnson in the NUNS, since Johnson wasn't a NUNS officer. Ernest Johnson was, at the time, a mercenary who was being retained by Windermere's government as a military adviser. He held that position right up until the start of the war when King Grammier dismissed him so he wouldn't have to fight his own people. He even wears an Aerial Knights uniform.) 1. He was a special forces pilot attached to the 37th Large-Scale Long-Distance Emigrant Fleet "Macross 7" during the Varuata War, and was involved in the planning of Operation Stargazer and the liberation of the Varauta system colony. Oddly, his squadron's name is in French for some reason... SVF-473 Étoile Filante, or "Shooting Star".
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Since Hakuna Aoba was still active in the 2059 Vanquish season, wouldn't that require him to be in two places at once?
  24. Seto Kaiba
    I'd attempted to avoid ever starting to collect Macross merchandise beyond books and other media, and was pretty darn successful at it until just a few years ago. Then Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy came out, and I fell in love with the YF-30 Chronos. Until that point, I'd only purchased one VF, the old Bandai snap-fit VF-2SS Valkyrie II kit. I mulled it over a bit and decided it couldn't hurt to splurge a little on my favorite main timeline VF design to date, and Mr March sped the blow by adding a second one to his existing order for me. Turns out that was the top of a particularly slippery slope... especially as I had a perfect storm of factors favoring starting a hobby like that: the recession was over, I had a lucrative set of new contracts, there had been a bunch of recent releases for designs I actually like, and my girlfriend's bad influence (she collects character statues). Now I'm looking into a third Detolf to hold this year's newest acquisitions (a VF-31F, Sv-262Hs, and Sv-51y) and there's a fifth VF joining the tiny squadron based on my desk at work (Hayate's VF-31J). I'm still quite picky about what I collect though, so I've only got about twenty VFs in total. I have managed to successfully get out of the Warhammer 40,000 hobby... though that escape was only ever meant to be a temporary reprieve. When the recession was at its worst, I'd decided to give the hobby up since I'm kind of miserly by nature and was coming over a bit paranoid that our main client would end up in bankruptcy. Turns out I needn't have worried... since they were the only ones who DIDN'T take some kind of government aid. Though, as a result, I dodged an expensive redesign of the entire faction I favor and a bunch of needlessly complex edition updates that are now being simplified. I'll probably pick the hobby up again once the dust settles after the launch of 8th Edition and the new codices for my factions have been released. (I've currently got, by 5th and 6th edition standards, around 2,800 points of Necrons and 2,500 points of classic 3rd Edition Dark Eldar.)
  25. Seto Kaiba
    A thousand times NO. You'd think Hollywood would've noticed by now that every attempt to make a live-action anime adaptation in the west ends in abject failure, and usually ends up as either "our secret shame" (e.g. G-Saviour) or a standing joke (e.g. Dragonball Evolution) among the fans of the original work. At best, it's just mediocre enough to be a mainly commercial disaster like Speed Racer or Ghost in the Shell. Even the superficially flattering comparisons that were almost certainly used to pitch the idea ("like Firefly but successful") are kind of damning in hindsight.
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