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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Hm?
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Maybe, maybe not. Kawamori did say in his Otona Anime #9 interview that a trip from Earth to the most distant emigrant fleets would take ten years. Presumably that's accounting for the navigation problems inherent in traversing regions with either significant fold fault activity or impassible faults. I admit, I think the problems that fold faults cause for interstellar communication and travel make a good set of obstacles for writers to work with. It prevents the writers from falling back on many of sci-fi's lamer cliches for SF war stories... especially the tendency to have the same group of heroes charge to the rescue in EVERY interstellar crisis (I'm lookin' at YOU, Star Wars Expanded Universe).
  3. Seto Kaiba
    It would've been, had it actually been the focus of a story... but it's treated as a mildly interesting background event during the USS Defiant's postwar survey of the gamma quadrant since, like the crew of Riker's USS Titan, the Prime Directive seems to have slipped the minds of Vaughn's whole crew on the USS Defiant. With the crew destabilizing, then meddling in the development of, each and every alien culture they meet, Ezri's personal problems are completely overshadowed by their cause... the Prime Directive violations she's meddling in... and by the problems they cause for her relationship with Bashir. They're then completely forgotten by the time she and Bashir are conveniently on Trill when all of the Trill government's eleventy billion dirty little secrets come out, nearly toppling the government via a popular uprising against the Joined, causing an attempted genocide of the symbionts that is mostly successful, and nearly getting Trill kicked out of the Federation after it's revealed that they were responsible (albeit semi-indirectly) for the parasite crisis from TNG's "Conspiracy" and all of their subsequent shenanigans , as they'd created the damn things in the first place, attempted to exterminate them on Kurl, and tried to keep it covered up by assassinating high-profile infected using stolen Federation personal stealth equipment.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    An increase in the standard of writing is a must... Macross Delta was so weak and scattered on that front that the music was practically all that was propping the series up by the end. Lucky for them it's good music. Nods to earlier mecha, sometimes retroactive, are so standard there's no fear of not getting that... every bloody Macross series and OVA since the original has thrown in at least a few. Some of 'em are admittedly obscure or hidden-in-plain-sight like the nod to the VF-4 in Macross II, since almost nobody remembers that before it was named "Lightning III" it was named "Siren". The 90's did a LOT of "remember the new guy" nods, where they'd introduce a mecha as old, and then go back decades and show what it was like when it was new (e.g. VF-5000, Variable Glaug, VF-14). Ship to ship combat would definitely be nice... that was something that really ought to have been present in Macross Delta but wasn't, presumably because the writers would've had to find ways to get around the fact that Windermere's not actually equipped all that well and is working with what could charitably be called a monstrous numerical disadvantage. Essentially, yes... and as the available fold technology in humanity's possession is implicitly limited to fold jumps of at most a few thousand light years at a time by the exponential increase in the energy required, the New UN Government had to take a decentralized approach to governance and defense because it can take years of fold travel to reach its furthest flung colonies. It took over a decade for the Megaroad-04 fleet to reach Windermere IV from Earth, for instance.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    In my experience, Star Trek's actors usually do a pretty poor job writing... especially ones who are writing books about their own characters. Bill Shatner can't seem to resist trying to use his books as soapboxes to settle the Kirk vs. Picard thing in his favor like in The Return. J.G. Hertzler turned Chancellor/General Martok into a Klingon King Arthur when he wrote a duology for the Deep Space Nine Relaunch. Remember how annoying all those early episodes of Deep Space Nine that harped on the Bajoran religion with all that not-allegory-for-middle-eastern-religious-fundamentalism-honest writing? That's basically Kira's entire story arc until the end of Unity when Sisko comes back and Bajor finally joins the Federation. There was some kind of aggressively-enforced "one character trait per character" limit in the DS9 relaunch prior to Unity, so everybody's lives revolved around one particular trauma or psychological problem. (The first rule is that, if there was any kind of important event in the last 300 years, a Dax was bloody well there for it and critically involved. Even the Enterprise Relaunch isn't safe from the tyranny of Dax.) Ezri Dax's arc is one of the few that actually make a modicum of sense. She never had any kind of training to be Joined, so she doesn't know how to balance all of her past lives with her current existence. Once circumstances force her to start drawing heavily on her past lives for experience and skills, it all starts to run together for her to the point that she starts calling herself by the wrong name and her personality starts to change as her wilting violet self gets overwhelmed by more assertive former hosts like Curzon and Jadzia. Since there isn't a way to separate her from the symbiont without killing her (until the Worlds of DS9 books) she just has to make peace with the changes to her personality.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Ah, you're right. My bad. Greater field of fire while it's attached to the ordnance container... effectively letting it work like the beam gun turret on the VF-25/TW1 and YF-29. The VF-31 can engage with both railguns AND the beam gunpod simultaneously while it's mounted like that.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    I'm not a big Star Wars fan, but several of my friends are... and I'm fairly certain the Thrawn Trilogy's big draw is Thrawn himself. The actual plot is a fairly mediocre Star Wars form letter plot, but Thrawn himself carries the series by being a wicked cultured magnificent bastard who puts the New Republic and all of the principal characters on the ropes and keeps them there for the whole series with little more than a keen grasp of psychology and psychological warfare. He's not The Chosen One or an evil space wizard... he's just crazy smart. It's like space villain Batman. Seriously? Having read a fair sampling of his Star Trek work for the Pocket Books TNG series and Star Trek: New Frontier, I have a really hard time believing anyone could regard him as a writer at all... let alone a great one. The only Trek authors whose work I'd rank below his are Bill Shatner (for The Return), David Mack (for Star Trek: Destiny), and Kirsten Beyer (for her role in the Voyager relaunch). I can kind of see how a lot of the stuff he tried with New Frontier would be more at home in superhero comic books though... especially the fricking space kaiju. Maybe being locked into a comic book mindset would explain why so many of his Trek novels are so bad they stand out in an expanded universe justly famous for terrible writing. (One reason I'm dreading the Star Trek: Discovery novels... they're being written by someone even worse than him.)
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, there are some Star Trek Expanded Universe works that read like merely bad fan fiction rather than the very worst kind of fan fiction. I've noticed the Relaunch novels tend to be among the very worst of a bad lot much of the time, but the Star Trek: Enterprise Relaunch seems to be working quite hard to reach "least bad" territory and has had a few installments that were significantly less awful than the franchise average. The quality of any given Enterprise Relaunch novel seems to be dependent on a linear relationship between the number of reused TV series characters and the number of bad fan-fiction tropes resulting from their presence. Readability increases in direct proportion to the percentage of the cast that didn't appear in the TV series, marking a pretty noticeable jump in quality beginning with the change of author at the start of the Rise of the Federation miniseries and the ensuing benching of almost the entire TV main cast. I'm still wading through that particular literary sewer... I'm currently three books into the Rise of the Federation series, and I have a nasty suspicion Christopher Bennett's about to stumble HARD with Uncertain Logic. That's not to say the all-original ones are automatically better... the Star Trek: New Frontier novels are some of the worst tripe to be committed to paper, but that's mainly because they're written by an author (Peter David) who is responsible for some of the cringiest moments in the Relaunch and clearly doesn't know a pen from a hole in the ground. ... I'll let you know as soon as I find one I'd consider "good". Among the ones I would consider "least bad" would be several of the Pocket Books Star Trek: the Next Generation novels including Masks and Gulliver's Fugitives, and the Department of Temporal Investigations books (which may be "least bad" because they're less Star Trek than they are a very thinly veiled parody of Doctor Who and The X-Files). There's also something to be said for the completely ridiculous, almost to the extent of self parody, How Much for Just the Planet?. It was funny, initially, how much effort The Good That Men Do put into bashing the series finale of Star Trek: Enterprise... but oh my god what followed it was a million, billion times worse than almost anything Enterprise had. Trip Tucker, space spy? Their Romulan War arc was so bad I'd rank it as some of the worst SF I've ever read, next to the Luceno/Daley Robotech novelization. They've announced a series of tie-in novels to Star Trek: Discovery written by Kirsten Beyer, the clueless hack behind the Star Trek: Voyager Relaunch from the end of Star Trek: Destiny on... a choice that bodes ill for their quality considering how much of that reads like it was written by a person coming off the anesthesia after having their wisdom teeth out. I'm not sure if planning a novel series this early in the game is going to make for early installment weirdness, or if there'll simply be so much weirdness that it won't matter. The third trailer for the TV series certainly is not encouraging me... Sarek seems to be kind of a racist prick in this one, which is odd for a guy whose day job is in Vulcan's diplomatic corps, and they're playing up the VFX so much it's almost like we're about to get an expensive, vapid, CGI action series rather than science fiction. I've read very few Star Wars EU novels, but most of the ones I've read didn't impress me any... I'll say the Thrawn trilogy was definitely the best of the lot, and miles better than anything Trek has fielded in EU books by my estimation. It was nice to have an antagonist who was good at what he did rather than simply being appointed-by-fate due to Space Magic.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    You mean Chuck's sister? Messer was so busy stalking Kaname that he showed more interest in her kid brother than he ever did in her despite her practically throwing herself at him... ... ... ... oh hell, that sounds even wronger than it was meant to.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, I think Chuck needs a partner with more emotional range than a cress sandwich... maybe one of the bridge bunnies (or more than one, since Chuck seems to be a bit of a xenophile). You could replace Reina with a cardboard standee in 99% of her scenes like Fire Bomber used to do and nobody would notice. An awful lot of fan fiction and doujinshi authors seem to agree with you on the first part... though, really, if Mirage wants Hayate all to herself all she has to do is wait a couple years. Super creepy... Mikumo is THREE and has minimal social awareness. Besides, Arad spent all of his time bonding with Kaname over snack food and secrets, so there's going to be the pitter-patter of tiny ginger feet on the Elysion in the near future. Never would've... even if he hadn't snuffed it. Messer wasn't Kaname's love interest, you could make a decent case for calling him her stalker though. Kind of a "reality ensues" moment that a brooding, antisocial arsehole doesn't get the girl.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, Arad was Mikumo's partner when it came to Walkure's battlefield operations and it was his VF-31S she used as a mobile stage in the first episode. Messer was shown to serve as Kaname's support, Chuck had Reina, and since Hayate and Freyja joined at the same time that leaves Mirage and Makina. Mirage did occasionally end up as Mikumo's minder when Walkure was operating undercover in the field like they did on Al Shahal and Voldor, presumably because she was the most junior member of Delta Flight until Hayate joined and presumably Arad and co. had better things to do than try to shepherd little miss Attention Deficit Disorder.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Granted, but the New UN Spacy isn't a space law enforcement or regulatory branch... it's the space warfare branch of the New UN Forces, and among its jobs is the space equivalent of sea control for protecting colonized worlds and fleets. They have no reason to be shy about using the big ships... and we know they had to have several. ... I'm pretty sure, in the final analysis, cost becomes a non-issue if the alternative to mobilizing the fleet is being conquered and having your democracy overthrown by an alien monarchy that takes a dim view of humanity in general, openly uses mind control to carry out terrorist attacks and control civilians and soldiers alike, and is widely suspected of having ended their last war with the New UN Gov't by committing a huge friendly fire incident with banned WMDs. The federal New UN Forces, maybe... but the local boys were shown to be taking Windermere IV's threat to the rest of the cluster quite seriously, especially after they conquered the first couple of planets. (Near the end, they were serious enough about it to order the destruction of the whole goddamn planet with a dimensional warhead.) This is nothing like that, though... Windermere IV was so hopelessly ill-equipped to deal with any kind of actual counterattack in force that Macross Delta is less real-world Cold War and more The Mouse that Roared. Even the handful of local NUNS troops who escaped mind control were able to wreck Windermere's sh*t so badly they were begging their homeworld for reinforcements all across the cluster. The only reason the show didn't end around Ep7 with Walkure and a huge NUNS flotilla showing up over Windermere to say "We heard you were talking sh*t" was because the writers had to inflict an enormous amount of author-induced stupidity on the cast to make the plot work and enable Xaos's crew from the Island of Misfit Soldiers to play at being heroes. I'd like to see a standard of writing in the new series that is at least good enough that we don't have a plot that depends on literally everyone being either suicidally insane or inexplicably on holiday as a way of making an otherwise laughable antagonist intimidating. Edit: Y'know, I like that comparison enough I'll likely start calling Windermere "The Duchy of Grand Windwick" from now on...
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Retrofitting something that big with zero-time fold system clusters would require an astonishingly huge amount of fold quartz. L.A.I. only managed to harvest enough to build a couple super fold boosters and one YF-29 during the Vajra conflict. Given that energy requirements for a space fold grow exponentially as distance increases, and it's implied they grow linearly with the volume of space to be exchanged, the maximum range of any fold system is limited chiefly by the ship's ability to generate large amounts of energy quickly and store that energy for long periods of time. I'd assume it'd probably be capable of jumps of up to ~1,000ly either way, though with a zero-time fold system network it'd probably be able to make much more efficient use of that 1,000ly range. (It'd also get there a LOT faster, since they say a zero-time fold system reduces travel times to a tenth of what they were with conventional space fold systems.)
  14. Seto Kaiba
    I've got no idea... I'd guess the term is probably something like five to seven years, though there's some circumstantial evidence to suggest that HG didn't have the license finalized when they first announced that the license was transitioning from WB to Sony.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    None that I can find... from their uniforms the trio on the left seem to be hangar deck crew from the SMS Macross Quarter and the ones on the right are a boy from Mihoshi Academy and a girl from St. Maria's.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Why? They've the ones with the least stake in Robotech's connection to Tatsunoko Production. I mean, we've known for over a decade now that the proposal for a live-action Robotech movie is for a reimagined Robotech using only the portions of the IP that Harmony Gold owns free and clear. It's the one thing Robotech has going for it that wouldn't be impacted by a falling-out between Harmony Gold and Tatsunoko.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Unfortunately, Macross Delta's creators declined to give a decent explanation of it beyond calling it an "optical camouflage system". That said, both the YF-27-5 and Sv-262's optical camo were both described as hiding the fighter's markings and paintjob rather than altering them, which suggests it was achieved by some means independent of the paint itself. I'd assume it's holographic in nature, projecting a matte stealth surface over the paintjob. (Given that the paint itself is an ablative anti-beam material, I'd imagine they'd want to keep its cost and complexity down as much as possible. Unfortunately we never see the fighters suffer damage while operating in that stealth mode, which would tell us for certain if it was paint or a projection on top of the paint.) That is the most likely explanation, IMO.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Weirdly, persistent login is still working for me on some devices, but not others... my laptop doesn't seem to be having any problem with it, but all my mobile devices won't stay logged in. I'll second what everyone's saying about themes though, the only one that seems to be working correctly is the Default theme. Both MWDark and MWDefaultWhiteBlue have a lot of missing images and incorrect formatting now.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Yes. Yep... the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross series had some problems as a result of its animation workload being farmed out to a bunch of different studios, not all of which were up to snuff quality-wise. The chief offender is generally agreed to be the Korean studio StarPro, who had been engaged by Tatsunoko Production to help animate the series. (Other studios involved included AnimeFriend, AIC, Artland, and the forerunners of Gainax.) Without spoiling anything, that will be cleared up in dialog only... the scenes where the SDF-2 was supposed to appear were cut in the storyboard phase due to runtime concerns. The ship does appear in Macross: Flashback 2012 and put in cameos in other shows.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Had to sign in again today myself, and now the text alignments are all wonky and there are some missing background colors, like on the "back to [Category]" buttons in the mobile view.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    To the best of our knowledge, there are six official variants of the VF-4. Three of those variants have actually appeared in Macross titles, and the other three are "technical materials only" ones. They are: VF-4A: First mass-production type, seen in Macross Flashback 2012 VF-4B: Two-seater version of VF-4A, used for training and attack roles. VF-4C: Improved VF-4A intended to be convertible for regime optimization. VF-4D: Modified VF-4C customized for UN Navy use. VF-4S: Economized version of the VF-4D for UN Navy use with unnecessary equipment removed, salt damage resistance measures added. Disarmed version "VF-4SL" seen in the Macross R light novel as an air racing unit. VF-4G: Final variant, with upgraded armor, avionics, engines, weapons, etc., seen in Macross Digital Mission VF-X and Macross M3 Close... the VF-4G's first appearance was in Macross Digital Mission VF-X, a couple years before Macross M3 came out. Both Yamato and Arcadia branded their transforming VF-4 toys as VF-4Gs from Macross Digital Mission VF-X. Officially, VF-4A, but just "VF-4" implies the [A]. I'd assume SVF-1 Skulls markings, if it's a FB2012 model... or maybe some of the other VF-4A paint schemes from This is Animation Special Macross Plus.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Not really... songs didn't acquire any kind of supernatural power in Macross until the Macross 7 series, which retroactively established that song energy was there all along even though it had nothing to do with Minmay's achievement in the First Space War. The impact of Minmay's songs was cultural and psychological in the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross, and it didn't change in Do You Remember Love?... but it had a helping hand in that it was a Protoculture song and triggered some kind of genetic memory of their civilization in the Zentradi and Meltrandi (who, in that version, were genetically-modified Protoculture). Retroactively establishing that Minmay's songs also contained song energy was kind of an attempt Macross 7 made to keep her relevant after they established that Basara's songs could free people from brainwashing and give space kaiju a nasty headache. Otherwise Basara would've become the new most-important singer against whom everyone measured themselves.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    When you get right down to it, that's a false equivalency. The Macross metaseries introduces a new antagonist and new setting in every major installment. Barring a couple of the Expanded Universe, the Star Wars metaseries has always used the same antagonist faction that just gets a change in pseudonyms and minor facelift between trilogies. All the "classic Imperial stuff" is more readily available because Star Wars only has the one antagonist and they use the same gear in multiple titles. Macross mixes it up more, and kind of has to since the Zentradi are kind of an impossible enemy to beat on any realistic scale.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Among western fans, that's so far from atypical that I'd almost call it The Standard Response to Basara Nekki. The usual (weak) defense of the character's overwhelming flaws is that he was more plot device than protagonist, meant to bring about character development in others rather than develop himself. Essentially, that he is The Mentor to Mylene and Gamlin, though that's a line of reasoning that doesn't quite work because he's demonstrably the main character. He's not actually a hero, he's just the Designated Hero. Kiichi Goto from Mobile Police Patlabor basically summed up what's wrong with Basara in one of his rants: "What do you think you're piloting? Great Mazinger? Dangaioh? For Pete's sake, this isn't some robot cartoon whose main character is an autistic kid or some punk." It feels rather tasteless to have to say it, but Basara is precisely the kind of autistic protagonist Chief Goto was talking about. Literally, it's very probable Basara is high-functioning autistic, considering his interests are restricted pretty much entirely to music and piloting for the entire course of the series, and he has so much trouble with social interactions. Well, it was a weekly anime series made on the cheap that veers into tokusatsu territory more than a bit... that much was probably inevitable. Ever since my second watch-through, I've always tried to discourage people from attempting to marathon Macross 7 the way I did on my first time through. The show is much easier to get through if you only do one or two episodes a day, and quickly becomes intolerably repetitive if you try to do more. There was definitely way too much show left at the end of the plot most of the time, and feels like it should've been a two-cour series. You have to remember, Macross might be a space opera but it isn't quite a Star Wars-type setting like Outlaw Star where there is actual goddamn space magic. The impact of music was never unquantified or unquantifiable in the Macross metaseries, they just had to come up with new reasons for it to be relevant starting from Macross Plus because they couldn't continue getting away with every alien species in the galaxy having no concept of music or positive emotion. That's why Minmay's songs messed with the Zentradi's heads... as clone soldiers that were engineered and educated for a life that consists purely of warfare and military duty, they didn't have the emotional or social framework to understand and process the concepts and feelings the songs were evoking. The only thing their leadership could equate the effect to was mind control, which is why they nuked Earth for it. From Macross Plus on, they constructed a variety of nested explanations for why songs had the power to sway emotions and mental states... starting with Sharon Apple manipulating the audience's brainwaves through her songs via biofeedback, and on to sort of a mild and generally benign form of the same kind of psychic shenanigans from Warhammer 40,000, with the "biological fold waves" essentially being a mild form of psychic ability communicating emotional states and other things. Kind of fitting, if you think about Macross's recurring themes of music as communication. For me, the bit that was infuriating wasn't necessarily that Fire Bomber was The Only Hope... but rather, that after establishing that it was equal parts natural ability and confidence, they proceeded to make everyone else with the ability either a disinterested spectator or running joke to prevent Fire Bomber from being upstaged. I loathed what the did to the VF-19, and how they treated the VF-11... for my money, the VF-11's one of the best looking main continuity planes, and it's the show's buttmonkey until Gamlin and Kinryu get in them.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Unsurprising, though I hope whatever he's moved onto is something he's significantly more knowledgeable about. He absolutely did more harm than good with that badly misinformed video of his about Harmony Gold's lawsuit against Catalyst Game Labs, Piranha Games Inc., and Harebrained Schemes LLC. The BattleTech/MechWarrior fans are all stirred up with false hope that the lawsuit is going to blow up spectacularly in Harmony Gold's face1 and thinking that soon "The Unseen" will be able to return to their original (copyright-infringing) designs. It's also got a lot of Robotech and Macross fans returning to wild and baseless claims like that HG's license is not legal/legitimate. Curiously, there's very little speculation out there about Harmony Gold suing Tatsunoko even though that has potential implications far more wide-reaching than BattleTech's latest cockup. Hm? I'm not upset about it. I'm amused by it. It's not every day you get promoted to being a Boogeyman without having to actually do anything. Plus I got to meet some really awesome people as a result of their unfounded accusations. Those guys from UEG Productions did professional animation work for the National Museum of Serbia, and a LOT of really awesome Star Trek fan art. It's a shame they got it in the shorts over their Robotech fan film, since they were really passionate about it... but legalities are legalities, and it's pretty easy to understand why HG would want them to surrender the rights to the film in exchange for endorsement. (Otherwise, if they wanted to use something out of it they'd be stuck in the same mess Games Workshop was with the minor Chaos Gods, or Paramount and the character of [Nic Locarno/Tom Paris], where they would get screwed on royalties and extra approvals.) 1. It actually might, but not for that reason. I've been looking at it, and I'm pretty sure the designs Harmony Gold contend are ripoffs of the Armored Valkyrie and Regult are actually the Dougram and H8 Roundfacer from the Fang of the Sun Dougram series and the Chiram Ishkick from Super Dimension Century Orguss.
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