Seto Kaiba
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Trelane was more powerful than usual when she did it too... Maybe the Borg assimilated the silverware drawer first?
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Robotech and REMIX by Titan Comics
Seto Kaiba replied to Old_Nash's topic in Anime or Science Fiction
Tracing happened. -
Partly, the sheer number of times helmetless people are shown operating mecha... but a favorite counter-argument to the "thinking cap" is Roy's dialog to [Hikaru/Rick] when he's patching up the VF-1D, which establishes pretty well that the controls are thoroughly conventional and that it isn't any more difficult to operate a battroid than it is to fly a jet. OK, you're crazy. You're also completely correct, though. An awful lot of Robotech fans dislike, if not outright hate, a lot of what's come out under the Robotech brand. You could swap some terms around in the Tom Lehrer song "National Brotherhood Week" and it'd be a fair description of the Robotech fandom and its various mutually hostile factions. (That's a project for later, I think.) As I used to be in the thick of it, I'll explain. The dominant viewpoint was the "Purists", the fans who saw the animated Robotech as the one true series and dismissed the comics and novels on the grounds of their poor quality and their deviations from the animated Robotech's setting. Fans of the Luceno/Daley novelization ("McKinneyists") held the novels up as a superior version of Robotech, on the grounds that it wasn't limited by the show's secondhand animation - a contention that caused a lot of fights, since the original ideas most of the fandom thought were paint-drinking stupidity were what they saw as its virtues. The comics kinda got marginalized, but the fans of the comics Bill Spangler worked on (sometimes self-described as "Spanglerists") were often at loggerheads with fans of the Sentinels comics by the Waltrips. They were the fandom of "They changed it, now it sucks" even before Tommy Yune took over and rebooted things. The purists were basically the last group standing by that point, but they were a split constituency over whether Tommy Yune's reboot and establishment of an official canon was a good thing. Some fans supported it on the grounds that it would make for more consistent work in the future. Others were against it, partly because it was a change and partly because they did not like Tommy disposing of so many cherished fan theories. (A rare few saw Tommy's work as some kind of Macross favoritism, since he did kind of kick the Southern Cross dog.) After over three decades of failures, I would be prepared to say that it is EXACTLY like they couldn't make something decent out of the franchise. Yeah, the system had a hard time distinguishing between intention and imagination, and shock could disable the system entirely. Nope, the closest they got was the new "United Earth Expeditionary Forces" emblem looking vaguely like a kaleidoscope rendering of the UN Spacy logo. Despite having a new daughter of Max and "Miriya", her background was only described as "half-alien" and they didn't use the term "Zentradi", "UN Spacy", or anything like that. They did have a Skull squadron, but that's generic, and a ship designated "SDF-#", but that's all. Tommy Yune and co. had a comic book prequel to the "movie" (really the first episode of a failed OVA project) that was entirely for the purpose of putting every non-essential Macross-derived character on a bus or in the ground. "Rick" got redesigned so that he looks like Hideo Kuze from Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex 2nd Gig, "Lisa" retired to become a diplomat, Minmei was taken prisoner and tortured then sent off somewhere for treatment, "Breetai" and all of the remaining Zentradi except "Exedore" were killed in an (un)friendly fire incident by a traitor, "Exedore" was killed testing the neutron star matter warheads, and both Max and his wife were Sir- and Lady-Not-Appearing-in-this-Film. The only ones who came out of it with their jobs and lives intact were "Rick" and "Dr. Lang". (Some of the other character reworking they did was funny by accident... [Louis Ducasse/Louie Nichols] is a white version of Geordi LaForge now.) The control responses are standardized, like on AMBAC systems in Gundam. They can be custom-tuned to a particular pilot, however, and the VFs in Macross Frontier and beyond have additional onboard systems to aid in personalizing the control responses to a given individual (tied to their EX-Gear). As someone with a bit of a background in robotics via embedded control systems, master-slave motion trace is a PAIN IN THE ASS to work with. For a four-limb trace system, they'd need to either make the cockpit prohibitively large to enable a 1:1 trace using motion capture (think G Gundam) or the controls would be incredibly sensitive because the motion trace would have to magnify the amount of movement by the pilot by a scale factor to enable the cockpit to remain small (as in Full Metal Panic!) which makes the controls incredibly finicky and a sneeze or cramp can throw the whole system for a loop (like Tessa did in "A Cat and Kitten's Rock & Roll"). There's also a fair bit of lag-time in most motion trace setups. ... so, a scaled-down version of Shredder's Technodrome?
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Initially, yeah... it all went a bit loopy in the Sentinels arc of the novels, where what we sarcastically call magic flower fuel started taking the "magic" part increasingly literally. By the end of that arc, protoculture had graduated from being an exotic fuel to being somewhere between Dune's spice and Star Wars's midichlorians... it was self-aware, semi-mystical stuff that gave people exposed to it ESP and was somehow enacting a greater destiny by manipulating its users. Where a Jedi or Sith might've said "the will of the Force", they would say "the shapings of the protoculture". This very bad idea returned briefly for the failed Robotech 3000 series concept, in which the antagonist was protoculture itself having apparently gotten sick of humanity's sh*t in the nine hundred and fifty years or so since the Robotech TV series ended and turning robotechnology against its users. There was an empathic link between the machine and pilot, which combined with the "thinking cap" helmets was what permitted the mecha to respond and maneuver with all of the fluid balance of an organic lifeform. Essentially, the mecha in the novels were semi-living when they were actively drawing power. Robotech fans loathed the idea, to the extent that it was one of the most-often mocked parts of the novels. Mostly, it was because it was a blatant contradiction of what was said and shown in the animated series. Yeah, the whole Sentinels arc, and particularly The End of the Circle, is probably the single most reviled Robotech title in the eyes of most of its fans. End of the Circle made the whole Robotech story into an incredibly stupid stable causality loop in which the SDF-3 is responsible for the disappearance of the SDF-1's fold system, they end up getting sent back in time and settling on Tirol where their children became the first Robotech Masters, with Minmei's son Zor (re)inventing robotechnology, which the first-generation Masters would then become the basis for their oppressive interstellar empire, followed by Zor sending his personal ship with the last of their protoculture to Earth and starting the whole damned thing over.
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Maybe just a fan theory? The nexus never gave anyone else space magic. I had always assumed that her species was simply one of those ones on the verge of evolving into an energy lifeform, but her official bio casts some doubt on whether she's even really an El-Aurian. One has to wonder if she isn't a former traveling companion of Q's or some similar species antagonistic to the Q and better at masquerading as a moral. They did a Doctor Who crossover comic at one point, and Guinan is implied therein to have prior knowledge of the Doctor for reasons she doesn't go into... ... 's pretty unremarkable, isn't it? This doesn't scream "main theme" to me. There's no real consistent melodic thread to it, it's just a bunch of background ambiance pieces strung together. Fitting enough for a series that's hacked together out of rejected bits, but still... There is that. She bullied Trelane in one of the novels too.
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But that would just shift the legal problem to a company they haven't finished alienating yet... the goal of doing a reimagining of Robotech from the ground up would have to be to finally shed their brand's dependency on secondhand intellectual property that they could potentially lose access to, and create a new Robotech they can develop without all kinds of restrictions or fear of a copyright infringement lawsuit from Japan. On a strictly theoretical level it's close to a best-case scenario for them. In practical terms, it's very unlikely to actually work out given that the movie is still stuck dodging all of the Macross copyright obstacles and Robotech's fandom lives for the trope "They changed it, now it sucks". ... if they wanted to sweep the Golden Raspberry awards, sure. Those books are like an itemized list of science fiction cardinal sins, and half of it would only get the movie accused of ripping off Star Wars instead. (To this day, I maintain Luceno and Daley wrote the books by subjected rejected Star Wars novel drafts to a find-and-replace.)
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Yes, they just have to stick to the concepts that were unique to Robotech and thus weren't present in the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross and sufficiently generic concepts that can arguably not be connected directly and solely to Macross. They could, for example, retain the Robotech version of "protoculture" and the whole business with Zor the inventor of all of the advanced alien technology sending his personal spaceship away and it crashing on Earth. The idea that humanity obtained advanced technology from studying a wrecked alien starship is sufficiently generic that they could get away with it easily enough since that's been done to death by everyone from Star Trek to Independence Day and features prominently in pretty much every conspiracy theory about Area 51. A lot of Macross's more iconic plot points would probably be too problematic and would need to be replaced outright with something else. Making a generic non-infringing version of the Zentradi isn't likely to happen, and coming up with a VF design that won't get them sued will be a VERY tall order considering how prolific Kawamori has been.
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If one takes Harmony Gold's public statements at face value - which is, I know, usually a bad idea - the plan of record for the live action movie proposal was always for a reimagining from the ground up. They tactfully omitted that it was a legally necessary move, however. Nay, 'tis but the groaning of a corpse long-dead mistaken for signs of vitality by those employed in the savage beating of the late and largely unlamented ex-horse. They seek to draw attention to a particularly noisome swarm of flies in the hopes that it will distract the gentle viewer from the foul smell of the brand's cadaver. ... y'know, I probably would too, 'cept for the fact that we wouldn't have Macross Frontier yet.
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You might want to look up the definition of "forward"... because this project is in exactly the same position it was in ten years ago right after it was first announced. They've got an alleged director who's pursuing other, higher-profile projects instead and a writer who is working on another story treatment to try to work around the legal problems. All we need is for Harmony Gold to re-release Shadow Chronicles on DVD and it'll be just like we've traveled back in time to 2007.
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You really have to admire the effort they're putting into trying to convince people Robotech wasn't just a mediocre and quickly-forgotten unsuccessful attempt to ride Transformers' coattails. I often wonder if the writers penning this trash are on the take, or just too lazy to check any source apart from the hilarious fiction in Harmony Gold's press packet. Ten bucks says this guy is just the latest writer to submit a story treatment because he needed a quick bit of cash. Every alleged sign of progress on the supposed film so far has turned out to be a distortion or an outright lie, and everyone supposedly connected to it has inevitably found something better to do instead of Robotech... so that's just the status quo maintaining itself. Everybody bloody knew It was planned as a duology, so I don't know why anyone thought that the Robotech movie wouldn't be immediately forgotten in the face of It's second half. Even if there was interest, it still wouldn't get made because it's a goddamn legal minefield. No studio wants a piece of that mess, no matter how well-funded their legal team is...
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Say what you will about the Tal Shiar's alleged brilliance in the field of espionage... their "onscreen" performance is somewhere south of terrible, given that they've been infiltrated and beaten at their own game by (in no particular order): United Earth Section 31, the V'Shar, the Vulcan High Command, UFP Section 31, Klingon Intelligence, Starfleet Intelligence, regular goddamn Starfleet, the Vulcan reunification movement, and the Founders. Let it never be forgotten that they wiped themselves out TWICE... once in a botched attempt to do in the Founders, and once by creating that prat Shinzon. There is no recovering your dignity after being beaten by a bad clone of Picard wearing a rainbow-tinted pleather onesie. Their ability to come up with a credible fib is somewhat suspect... though they could have been counting on the shock value of seeing someone who was a dead ringer for one of Picard's dead subordinates to throw him enough that a bad explanation would work. There is a certain irony in the fact that Armus was a black latex bag covered in liquified dietary fiber supplement dyed black with a water-soluble printer's ink. There are so many different scatological jokes I can make about that in that episode that I'm genuinely spoiled for choice. ... did they ever explain Guinan's apparent knowledge of alternate timelines and why Q is afraid of her? The other El-Aurians never displayed any special powers. She was in the Tal Shiar, I'd expect they would have at least general profiles of the key officers who served aboard the Federation flagship... including the deceased ones. It's not like Tasha's death is a state secret, though clearly nobody bothered telling her next-of-kin. I dunno, I think Vendetta gave it the good ol' college try... what with the reveal that the Borg were an ancient race, and that the Preservers had built the Planet Killers to destroy them, and that the one Kirk and co. disabled was a rough prototype that the genuine article made look like a piece of junk. It kind of became a noodle incident for the Pocket Books Star Trek: the Next Generation series, since Delcara took her still-functional Planet Killer to go hunt the Borg in the delta quadrant.
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Unfortunately, if you're looking for Messer's love interests based on his actual expression of interest in their existence in public, Chuck's kid brother Zack has a lock on first place... he's the only one to actually get Messer to make a positive facial expression. In my opinion, it's worse to make your characters bland and uninteresting from the start... but only in the event that they're in the main cast. That's one of Macross Delta's biggest problems, it has a HUGE main cast, and fully two-thirds of it is flat characters who could be tidily summed up in terms of what cliche they're ticking a checkbox for. The only characters who truly get characterization in the series are Hayate, Freyja, Mirage, Keith, Roid, Bogue, and Qasim, though that doesn't save several of them from also being flat characters: Arad: the Big Brother Mentor. Messer: the Broken Ace. Chuck: the Big Guy. Kaname: the Woobie, bordering on the Broken Bird. Makina: the Miss Fanservice, her bio tries to make her a Wrench Wench but the show forgot to. Reina: the Stoic, the show tries to sell her as the a Playful Hacker but she's no good at it. Hermann: the Team Dad. Qasim: the Token Good Teammate. Theo and Xao: purely for Twin Banter, or less wholesome activities by doujinshi authors. Bogue: the designated Fantastic Racist. Grammier: the Well-Intentioned Extremist, initially a reasonable authority figure in the manga. Heinz: the Unwitting Pawn. Berger: the Corrupt Corporate Executive. Wright: the Suicidal Pacifist by way of a Pacifism Backfire with shades of Too Dumb To Live. Valan: the Smug Snake, superficially. More a One Sane Man once you put context to him. Lady M: a one-woman Omniscient Council of Vagueness by proxy, since she never appears. For my money, she'd be a lot less disappointing if her status as the Woobie wasn't her one and only character trait. A lot of these characters had potential, but there were just too many characters and not nearly enough show to develop them properly. The only ones who really aren't save-able are Makina and Reina, since they're there purely for the fanservice and to fill out the list of standard fetishes for the doujinshi authors. The gaiden manga already did a lot to salvage the members of the Aerial Knights and King Grammier. Ouch.
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Toynami's not making one... they've gone on the record to say they have no interest in Southern Cross because they don't think there's enough interest to guarantee a decent return on investment.
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Oh yeah, the military never does anything like that without an insanely bureaucratic reason and a cheat sheet roughly the length of a CVS receipt. In this case, the cheat sheet's name is MIL-STD-709C MILITARY STANDARD AMMUNITION COLOR CODING. Macross's tech manuals apply a skewed version of it, but don't apply it or a system inspired by it on a consistent basis and the show all but ignores it. For instance, the LPP-14 laser pod has markings for an illumination round, while many others are inexplicably marked up as if they contained armor-piercing incendiary instead of HE. Quite a few of the bombs and missiles found in the VF-1 and VF-0 books are plainly copied from photos of display ordnance, since they carry blue stripes denoting inert practice ammunition. The nosecone color isn't a part of the color code system... I suspect that choice of red or yellow is mainly for "visual pop" in most Macross shows.
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My scanner is a coprolitic clunker from the bad old days of Windows XP, so the res isn't what I'd hoped... but this should be fairly sound color reference if nothing else. Looks like a gloss black nosecone over the seeker head, a reflective white body coat with a red stripe for indicating a live warhead, and a "cool" grey exposed section between the body of the missile and the engine nozzle. VFs have been using holographic technology for three-dimensional on-canopy HUD projection since the VF-1's Block 6 (movie) upgrade and some of the later models of VF used a three-dimensional holographic setup for their in-cockpit monitors as well. It's evident from the manner of her entry that Sharon coopted the existing holographic systems running the HUD to get to Dr. Neumann, and then the main display to get to Isamu.
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I am, for reasons that should be obvious, intensely curious what his voice sounds like... Morn was supposed to be an irrepressable chatterbox, and never once spoke in the series itself. (If they ever did a DS9 movie, I would expect nothing less than an epilogue in the form of a ten minute long piece to camera by Morn himself.)
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Kaname was no less one-dimensional than the rest of Walkure... she got a little more characterization than Makina and Reina, but it was purely based on pity. She got rescued from the Scrappy Heap in-universe after her idol career failed to launch because she had a fold receptor factor, then she lost de facto leadership of Walkure to Mikumo because she was a more powerful fold singer and better performer, and then she lost the one fan she actually had when Messer broke orders and got his one-dimensional self reduced to a stain on the canopy. She's the designated woobie, nothing more... like how Makina exists solely to be Miss Fanservice, Reina is there only as the Quiet Girl, Mikumo spends almost the entire TV series as the Alpha B*tch before some last minute characterization to make her into Mina Forte by way of Sheryl Nome, etc. To the best of our knowledge, it never went anywhere... she had a crush on him, that's all.
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Really? I figured the first episode of Orville would be pretty weak but my hopes for it are still higher than they are for Discovery. Two weeks away, and I'm still more enthusiastic for another godawful Enterprise relaunch novel than I am for it. It's kind of traditional for the first episode of a new Star Trek series to be dreadfully camp and awkward, so I'm taking it as read that the first episode's script wouldn't get a passing mark in a community college creative writing class. (As much as I'm expecting the show to fail miserably, I'm hoping they never stoop as low as TNG's "Code of Honor"...) Ah, I've never played Star Trek Online... I kind of burned out on MMOs back in the bad old days of Phantasy Star Online. I will admit your summary doesn't sound anything like as bad as Sela's characterization in Star Trek: the Next Generation and the novels, where her arrogance and ambition set her up to fall with all the regularity of Wile E. Coyote. From what I've gathered, the Online timeline diverges considerably from the Relaunch novels. Jack Verse mentioned to me there was already an Enterprise-F in that, so what the heck happened to the Enterprise-E? Did Picard wreck another one? If so, he's officially gunning for Chakotay's record as wrecker-in-chief. I've never been able to bring myself to like the character, and felt that she was Denise Crosby's sour grapes attempt to get a piece of Star Trek: the Next Generation after having quit it because she wasn't convinced it'd take off. What book was it where Data wasn't sure about her origins? All the more recent stuff plays her "Yesterday's Enterprise" origin dead straight.
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Yeah, the Star Trek EU has a terrible habit of trying to tie up every loose plot thread and make every minor one-shot character part of some greater scheme. A lot of the seemingly or actually omnipotent entities and energy beings with delusions of godhood get filed under "Q Continuum Shenanigans". Some got their powers from the Q (e.g. Gary Mitchell), some of them were brought into the universe from other planes of existence by Q (e.g. Gorgan, the Beta XII-A entity, "God"), and some were members of the Continuum who didn't bother to identify as such (like Trelane). She was doing pretty well for herself until Double or Nothing and Death in Winter. She always managed to bounce back from her failures and scheme her way back into power just in time to fail again and be sent back to zero. Her skills in sucking up to the People Who Matter got her the top job at the Tal Shiar, by which point the writers appear to have run out of ways to abuse her, so she promptly bungled the op to steal quantum slipstream technology from the Federation. She cocked it up so royally her own people imprisoned her and were preparing to extradite her to the Federation when she committed suicide.
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Yeah, he loooooves to try to settle the whole Kirk/Picard thing in his favor every time he has the chance. If there's a threat Picard faced, you can bet Shatner will write Kirk facing it first and doing a better job. Unfortunately, Star Trek's Expanded Universe authors don't seem to understand that happy little principle... so every plot is of galaxy-shaking import, most become a multi-book saga and the bigger ones become a multi-series crossover, almost all of them are determined to change the way the audience looks at a particular character or a past event from the Star Trek series or films, and the base level for new threats is "a threat to the whole Federation" and it only goes up from there. After a while it starts to feel like the same plot problems from superhero comics... there are so many potentially-apocalyptic catastrophes happening so often that it's flat amazing the Federation/galaxy/quadrant/universe/multiverse lasted long enough for the double handful of protagonists to come along. It's not even in "the Federation never exists if Jonathan Archer dies" territory like in Star Trek: Enterprise... this is so fiddly it's on the order of "the whole galaxy is doomed to be enslaved or destroyed if Jean-Luc Picard's tea goes cold before he can drink it". There are so many dystopian alternate realities where one little thing changed the course of the entire galaxy's history that are encountered by dimension-traveling protagonists that it's amazing the Federation doesn't have planet-sized psych wards for people suffering from apocalyptic tangent reality traumatic stress disorders. ... I have some bad news for you. They didn't write a book about it... it's a trilogy. Q is responsible for bringing a number of different malevolent entities into the universe using the Guardian of Forever, including the Beta XII-A entity from the TOS episode "Day of the Dove", Gorgan from the TOS episode "And the Children Shall Lead", and The One from Star Trek V: the Final Frontier. It at least answered why "god" needed a starship... he'd been deprived of his physical body and imprisoned behind the great barrier by the Q Continuum for his crimes, and needed a physical body to pass through the barrier.
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That ain't part of Macross, friend... Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross is a completely different show that is unrelated to Macross except in that the two shows had the same sponsor and were both at least partly animated by Tatsunoko Production. It was an absolute, unqualified disaster in Japan and was canceled for low ratings a little over half of the way through its planned broadcast run. Oh, it'd have to be fanmade... the Southern Cross series is a forgotten flop in Japan, and for The Show That Must Not Be Named Toynami has said they have no interest in pursuing a license to make Southern Cross toys because the American adaptation is almost as unpopular in the west as the original was in Japan.
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Y'know, for a while there I would have bet cash money that Michael Martin, Peter David, Kirsten Beyer, and David Mack were engaged in a perverse one-upmanship contest over who could write the worst, most cliched Star Trek story. Michael Martin got knocked out of the running by Christopher Bennett taking over the Enterprise Relaunch, but the others hit new and exciting lows for Star Trek with Destiny, The Fall, Typhon Pact, and so on...
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Yes, this is a thing that someone actually wrote and published as a series of novels... Peter David actually wrote the book where Janeway snuffs it, so you can understand why I'm reluctant to believe that the man is capable of writing that isn't garbage. Personally, I'm not so sure... in Star Trek: the Motion Picture V'Ger didn't see organic life as anything more than an infestation of vermin in its creator's universe, so it doesn't quite fit for V'Ger to have created a race of cyborgs based on organic life to be its advanced reconnaissance party. It's less dumb than the idea that V'Ger went off and spawned a race of living ships that roved the galaxy collecting samples of intelligent life as a kind of roving space-zoo. I've yet to read a Borg origin story that WASN'T stupid... but I have to admit the Borg being built on a nested predestination paradox in which the Borg are created by a race of nanotechnological hikkomori accidentally sending themselves and the NX-02 crew they were holding prisoner back in time to become the Borg and then in the future going back and causing the accident that caused them to accidentally create the Borg was a masterpiece of bad writing that managed to singlehandedly ruin almost every aspect of the Borg in one fell swoop. Nah, V'Ger is supposedly the creation of a race of sentient machines who found the probe after it fell through a wormhole and decided to rebuild it and send it home out of the goodness of their hearts. (Of course, in The Next Generation, the writers weren't exactly consistent on whether the Borg wanted to assimilate everyone or evolve past the need for organics.) If memory serves, Shatner tried to riff on that for The Return, where Kirk manages to destroy the Borg collective and its homeworld by destroying the core of the Borg collective which looks suspiciously like V'Ger's system core.
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Vice Admiral Janeway gets assimilated by the Borg and made into a new Borg Queen in Before Dishonor, part of the runup to the Star Trek: Destiny trilogy finishing Captain Janeway's abuse of the Borg in Star Trek: Voyager itself by revealing their origins, dragging them through the mud, then finally making them extinct. She's killed off by the computer virus which Geordi designed to wipe out the Borg way back in Star Trek: the Next Generation's "I, Borg" after her Borg cube developed a weird new ability to absorb stuff ala The Blob instead of assimilating it, which it used to wipe out a fleet of thirty-six Federation starships in 97 seconds and then eat a Doomsday Machine, Pluto, and its moon Charon before Geordi's Project Endgame virus was introduced to the cube and it blew up taking Janeway with it. In short, the Borg briefly turn on Godmode after assimilating Janeway because otherwise there'd be no way to take them that seriously as antagonists anymore after Voyager and First Contact, and Janeway dies when the server turns cheats off.
