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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Hard to say, since we know very little of the VF-171's gunpod compared to others. The best-understood set of armaments belongs to the VF-1 Valkyrie, so they're usually the most reliable metric.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Well, it is just a story treatment not a shooting script... those are usually pretty rough, since they're meant more to set the direction of the film's future development and provide an outline for a writer or group of writers to build on for creating the actual shooting script. It's definitely bad, but as treatments go it's a lot less bad than ones I've read for big-name science fiction properties that went on to be wildly successful after much polishing. Star Wars had a rough treatment penned by George Lucas that was so bad Harrison Ford told him "George, you can write this sh*t but you can't say it!". Star Trek's story treatments are always a hoot. Quite a few of the worst moments in TNG (many of them "Wesley" moments) were brought about by a writer's strike forcing the staff to use story treatments that had previously been rejected after minimal polishing and even several stories that had initially been earmarked for consolidation into a single episode. The legendarily bad first season was the result of giving Gene a free hand to both submit his own story treatments and rewrite those by other writers. EDIT: I have a copy of the Star Trek Voyager Season 1 writer's "bible" that makes this rough draft look like goddamn Shakespeare.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    The term "micro-missile" covers a LOT of ground in Macross... the term applies to most any small, short-range, high initial velocity missile meant for visual range-use. They're theoretically meant to be used in numbers for saturation attacks, but beyond that there's a lot of variation. If one takes Macross Chronicle as a guide, the (New) UN Forces seem to benchmark the firepower of weapons against the energy conversion armor of the generation of VFs the weapons are meant for. One or two documented in Master File seem to almost be medium-range missiles with a less powerful rocket motor, but most seem to have scaled-down warheads to go with the reduction in rocket motor. Zentradi mecha being more lightly armored, one or two seem to be sufficient for destroying one of them, though from what we've seen two or three striking more or less at the same time seem to be enough to inflict potentially-disabling damage on a VF.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    To be entirely fair, Max and Milia were dodging bog-standard Zentradi Army ordnance designed to engage relatively slow-moving targets. Guld might've done it in a newer fighter, but what was being fired at him was the UN Spacy's state-of-the-art air-to-air high-maneuverability missile intended to bring down high-performance VFs. Guld's qualifications weren't anything to sneeze at either. He had a Special A qualification from the UN Forces as a civilian operator.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    All told, I think Macross finally became properly mainstream starting with Macross Frontier, which really increased public awareness of the metaseries to unexpected levels. The long intervals that usually occur between Macross series are more down to the eccentricities of its creators than the property not being well-regarded. Kawamori has always been resistant to the idea of doing direct sequels, so every new Macross is inevitably set in a different place and time with as little direct connection to previous shows as he thinks he can get away with. It's kind of like a one-man equivalent of a shared universe. I guess he isn't interested in getting caught up in a by-the-numbers sequel production rut like the Mobile Suit Gundam franchise has been for ages... he seems to prefer maximum creative freedom to the idea of a clockwork gunpla meal ticket, while leaving the more traditional sequels and side stories for the hands of the light novel authors, mangaka, and video game developers. I can't say that part hurts my feelings any. It feels like Kawamori's kind of pulling away from the metaseries again, and there were rumors a while back that he was quietly grooming Hidetaka to take over as Macross's top dog. Either way, I think he's probably feeling the pressure now that there've been two recent high-profile Macross successes. The sponsors probably feel that there's enough of a hungry audience to go to more frequent releases.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Pretty much, yes. One of the panels from the final issue of the Comico Macross Saga comic shows the ship in greater detail. It was essentially the unused SDF-2 design from the Super Dimension Fortress Macross animation model sheets, but scaled back down to the same size as the SDF-1. I suspect someone working on it had a copy of Perfect Memory. Their rationale for the three plateaus from Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross was that they were containment structures built to contain the wreckage of the SDF-1, SDF-2, and the Zentradi medium-scale gun destroyer that rammed the former. Even the post-reboot comics continued to regard them as such, and even showed them being constructed and buried. This new series will likely not get that far, since IIRC Titan Comics indicated they were only doing twelve issues that would span the Macross Saga's story. (I suspect an awful lot of stuff will get left on the cutting room floor, considering they barely got through one episode's worth of material in issue 1.) Draugs?
  7. Seto Kaiba
    's a bit before my time... I was all of about five years old when that show was canceled. That was, IIRC, the inspiration for The Simpsons "Who shot Mr. Burns?" thing tho, wasn't it? I certainly understand frothymug's attitude towards the "it was all just a dream" thing, but as the Macross Delta series didn't so much jump the shark as ramp off the shark's burning carcass while dressed like extras from Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon and emptying dustbins of useless exposition into the horrified upturned faces of the audience it could hardly make matters worse...
  8. Seto Kaiba
    They still did a pretty terrible job with 'em. The art for Comico's Macross Saga comics is so bad it's the subject of several memes due to frequent art inconsistencies like Gloval's pipe teleporting from one hand to the other between panels or coloring errors making him look like he has a harelip. (They also attempted to "fix" several issues created by their bad dub, like drawing a second SDF in the lake in Ep36, which created a persistent fan myth that there was animation showing a second ship there that was cut for some reason.) Clone was, IIRC, one of a large number of short-lived comic spinoffs that mostly got canceled. The comic book adaptation/continuation of Robotech II: the Sentinels started out based on what'd been drafted for the Sentinels TV series before its early production cancellation. It diverged into a loose adaptation of Luceno and Daley's godawful novels that skipped the vast majority of the Star Wars-ripoff1 stuff (to its credit) and largely stayed that way until the series met its premature end after Academy Comics lost the license in 1996. The successor, Antarctic Press, opted not to bring the comic's staff onboard and launched their own unrelated comic, Sentinels: Rubicon which was such an unholy mess it's almost a work of Dadaist art. Antarctic Press were, hands down, the worst offenders in terms of copyright infringement. They had several comics with entire plots stolen from other anime series like Ghost in the Shell, and in many of their comics they had characters and mecha stolen from other shows including a couple different Macross titles, several big-budget Hollywood movies2, and TV shows.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Somehow, I think that would end badly for Messer too... emo boy literally lives to protect Kaname. "No, Messer. It wasn't a dream. You're still in high school, and this is the greatest misdirection play of all time." The next hour and a half of the movie are a generic coming-of-age sports anime. EDIT: At least it'd explain why he goes through the entire series wearing kneepads... ... I think he just wants to see her in the shower. Or maybe he wants to see Hayate in the shower. I dunno.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Brigadier General Bruno J. Global's name has, on a few occasions, been transliterated incorrectly as "Bruno J. Gloval" even in Japanese publications. ("Global" is the official/correct form.) Obviously the highest-profile example of this mistake is The-Show-That-Must-Not-Be-Named, but you can also find an example of it in This is Animation Special: Macross Plus. The Variable Fighter Squadron Marking section the starts at page 83 at the back of the book has, on page 92, a VF-11C from the SVF-41 Black Aces that is marked up as being from CV-339 B.J. Gloval. Other publications have affirmed that this is a misspelling and that the Uraga-class CV-339 is the Bruno J. Global. (Exactly why he merits two ships named for him is unclear, but may have something to do with the mass-produced Macross-class ships carrying the names of the UN Forces' top brass like the SDFN-1 General (Takashi) Hayase or SDFN-8 General Vrlitwhai Kridanik while the New UN Government carries on the tradition of the government's chief executive having carriers named for him e.g. ARMD-01 Harlan J. Niven and ARMD-14 Robert A. Rhysling. Global did go into government after retiring from the UN Forces.)
  11. Seto Kaiba
    ... and probably not even that. Delta's story was pretty fundamentally broken in that respect.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Personally, I'm inclined to disagree that the characters could cultivate interest... most of them are so painfully underdeveloped that their bios on the official website actually offer more detail than the show itself does. Most of them are playing to very simple cliches. Mikumo, instead, is simply a combination of two existing characters: she's Sheryl Nome by way of Mina Forte. IMO, both she and Makina could be removed from the story outright without changing a damn thing. They're both only there to tick off some arbitrary checkboxes on the standard fetishes checklist. They don't even live up to the minimal promise of their official bios on the website. Makina's allegedly the crew chief on the Aether, and yet the only time she's ever shown to do anything is the first OP and is otherwise just a transport and life support system for a pair of gag boobs (while somehow also managing to be even less plot-relevant than Nanase, who filled that role in Macross Frontier). Reina's supposed to be some kind of elite hacker, but the only times she ever succeeds at it are when the enemy wants her to break in. Every other time she gets busted right away, which is how she ended up working for Xaos in the first place. Their elite super-hacker couldn't beat a single electronic door lock and one dozy rent-a-cop. It's actually even less complex than that. She tried to hack Xaos for some reason, got busted, and was given the standard cliche "work for us or go to jail" ultimatum.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    I've never really been one for American comic books, but really? Most everything I've seen come out of both major publishing houses has every woman look like a lingerie model or porn star in spandex, where the men who aren't gonk all look like bodybuilders. Then again, I grew up in Liefeld's dark age, so you know what my first exposure to comics was like. Well... putting aside the fact that the military in question wasn't a navy in the original or the American adaptation this is based on... I do know a few who would if they thought they could get away with it. That was your first mistake, having high hopes for something that had the R-word on the cover. For all practical intents and purposes, the R-word is practically a warning label indicating the product is of depressingly poor quality, painfully stupid and/or lacking in originality. FFS, this is a brand with a "creator" whose name has literally become industry slang for screwing up so hard that the adaptation is a mockery of the original work. That was your second mistake, because Covers Always Lie. Robotech comics adhere to a very similar rule... usually it's "awful cover paintings, atrocious interior art". The few that bucked that trend followed the Dark Horse model you identified. As a rule, the content will ALWAYS suck. Never, NEVER underestimate the power of laziness. They weren't quite THAT blunt about it, but the meaning was absolutely there when they dismissed all the pre-2001 licensee-created works. They dismissed them on the grounds that the pre-2001 licensees were churning out poor quality work that was riddled with both internal inconsistencies and inconsistencies with the Robotech setting (tactfully omitting that they'd also frequently committed copyright infringement), and indicated that they would never have seen the light of day if the Harmony Gold staff at the time had been on the ball and exercising an appropriate level of creative oversight instead of ignoring the franchise entirely. They felt that made it Robotech in name only, and indicated it would not be counted as part of the official continuity in any way. In all honesty, having read virtually everything covered by that proclamation except Robotech: Clone, I felt that was a pretty good call. The vast majority of it WAS garbage even by the low standards of the day and the bush league comics publishers they were dealing with, and the copyright infringement by several publishers didn't help. I thought it showed a moment of rare integrity on their part when they admitted the root of the problem was Harmony Gold's brand management and pledged to change that aspect of their corporate culture in the hope that it would enable them to deliver a more consistent product instead of taking the Macek way out by laying all of the blame for ruining a perfect creative vision on their licensees and business partners.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    ... not sure I wanna know how you arrived at that theory. The impression I've gotten from the pages that've done the rounds as "teasers" and "previews" is that Titan Comics is doing an awful lot of tracing for this series, which would explain many of the awkward poses that look more at home in a fashion magazine, out-of-place facial expressions, and several characters seemingly having totally different faces panel-to-panel. I would assume her adaptational change in attractiveness is probably the result of whatever they traced her from. (Their take on her dress makes me suspect a wire-fu movie.)
  15. Seto Kaiba
    It's not like they're under any obligation to post the much greater number of reviews that say "this book is shite"... that's marketing. You pick and choose the bits that make you look good to customers and potential customers and refuse to acknowledge the rest, sometimes to the extent of sticking together unrelated sentence fragments of criticism to make them look like praise out of context.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    I'd kind of expected them to do that in the TV series... since she started going all crusty right before the end, I figured we were going to be left with a decisive Walkure victory at the expense of Freyja self-crystalizing into a statue. It would've been a more poigniant end than her short-lived romantic victory, but probably too dark for Macross. That's one of the show's problems. While it created this huge playground for itself in an attempt to out-Frontier Macross Frontier with its own rendition of what was basically the exact same plot, it neglected the hell out of said playground. Twenty-something inhabited worlds and we only see a handful of them, most of which look exactly the same. The setting development is wonderful, especially if you're in Macross RPGs which it almost seems to be for, but they could've made do with a less huge setting to give their story more focus. Kind of develops the Star Wars problem of "a million worlds, but only four that matter". In the case of Delta, it's Ragna, Windermere IV, Voldor, and Al Shahal.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Macross Delta's writers didn't seem to quite grasp that, if you want the audience to care that you've killed off a character, the character has to actually be somewhat developed and likeable first. Messer Ihlefeld was a flat, stock character in a series that was overrun by flat, stock characters on both sides. Worse still, the stock role he filled was the Broken Ace and it was almost impossible to like him in what little characterization he got because he treated everyone like dirt. His send-off in the episode after his death fell comically flat. "Oh look, Messer kept a secret diary of how much he thinks we all suck! See, he really did care!" My eyes just about rolled out of my head watching that shabby mess. The cast is packed with undeveloped stock characters the writers could kill with no more impact on the audience than knocking over a cardboard standee: Arad, Messer, Ernest Johnson, any member of Walkure who isn't Freyja Wion, Theo, Xao, Hermann, Uroh, and any among the multitudes of background characters on the Macross Elysion or in Darwent Castle. Maybe they can kill that bloody catfish from Ragna. He had more characterization than most of the characters I just named. ... ... ... the world can be a cruel place for one such as you. It'd help, but I fear we're in for another feeble attempt to pass a knockoff of Frontier's plot off as new. Maybe they'll mix it up by eliminating the pretense. Hayate will grow his hair out into a big ponytail, Freyja will dye her hair green, Roid will start wearing a skirt... this is veering dangerously into territory fangirls might actually go for. Oh sweet and salty machine god NO. NO NO NO NO NO A THOUSAND TIMES NO. This show already has SIX sodding "ace custom" machines, seven if you count Hayate converting Messer's plane into a second VF-31J, we do NOT need another one. Even covering the series mechanical designs has become a joke because the differences are cosmetic, making the different designs POINTLESS. They should've been different paintjobs on the same design, but even then it's pointless because the series shows Delta Flight sucks at its job. I'd call them "Prat customs" but it might get mistaken Pratt & Whitney's handiwork. The YF-29 was BS, but it was at least plot-critical BS that ended almost as soon as it began since Brera's plane outperformed Alto's. They don't have that excuse this time!
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Their reluctance to simply re-issue the Comico stuff probably has something to do with the company denouncing all of the pre-2001 licensee-made material as low-quality garbage back in 2006.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Whether he'll stay that way is another matter entirety...
  20. Seto Kaiba
    They used to be much better, but GA Graphic seems to have totally phoned the last couple books in... the VF-22 book was kind of lazily done but still workable, the VF-4 book was an utter mess that ignored most of the official info outright, and the VF-31 book is basically only good for the pictures. The VF-31 book may have suffered from the relatively anemic writeup on the VF-31 in official sources. All we're really told about the Howard LU-18A beam gunpod is that it's a high-powered (heavy quantum) beam gun that can be deployed as a turret or handheld. Then again, we haven't been given explicit outputs for the other heavy quantum beam gunpods so this is only frustrating instead of surprising. For the weapon that's used the most in the series, the railguns are actually the least detailed. Master File outright skips them in the armaments section, and the official specs only mention caliber, model number, and manufacturer. The production model uses a LM-27s 27mm railgun while the Siegfried custom uses a LM-25s 25mm railgun. Given the presence of a conspicuous ejector port on the gun itself in the art and CG models, I have little recourse but to assume it's the same kind of "railgun" that the SSL-9B Dragunov is... namely, a chemical propellant machinegun with a railgun "assist" to further accelerate the round while it travels down the barrel. Half or more of the forearm seems to be a box magazine feeding the gun. The ROV-127E beam machinegun on the monitor turret hasn't changed much from the ROV-127C the VF-25 uses, so I'd assume it's still ~10MW-class. The six Bifors CIMM-3B missile launchers (3 per nacelle) have a total missile capacity of 36 micro-missiles (so 6 missiles per launcher). The nacelle bays are given over to a pair of multidrone racks, each leg bay's rack holds 8 MDP-001W Cygnus multidrones able to maneuver at up to 200kph while onboard power lasts. The SPS-31A Super Pack has some reasonably good data, but only for its flight performance. It's got a mass of about 12,600kg on its own and when fully fueled and armed and docked with a VF-31 that's likewise fully fueled and armed the craft weighs ~38,000kg. The main booster packs each contain 2 Bharat SLE-6B booster rockets for forward thrust, 1 Bharat SLE-3B rocket for braking, and 6 Bharat SLE-1F rockets for maneuvering. Each booster is armed with five Bifors CIMM-5A micro-missile launchers. The leg packs each have 3 Bharat SLE-1F rockets for maneuvering and two Bifors CIMM-5A micro-missile launchers. The shoulder pack array has a pair of Bifors HMM-7C CIWS missile launchers each holding 15 micro-missiles. The last two packs on the dorsal body are standalone SLE-3B booster rockets. The combined output of the four Bharat SLE-6B boosters is 2,194kN (or 548.5kN/ea), providing 15.75G of acceleration at full combat loading approaching 30G on propellant and armament exhaustion. It can sustain that maximum thrust for 125 seconds before fuel depletion. (These are all throttleable hybrid or liquid rocket motors, so they can dial the output power up or down to conserve fuel.) I'd assume anywhere up to 6 missiles per CIMM-5A, so that's potentially 102 micro-missiles. Not as much as Master File alleged were in the incredibly capacious VF-25 launchers, but hey... these packs are also a lot smaller. Master File provides art but not specs for alternative Modular Multipurpose Pack configurations including an extended range pack with extra fuel for the SLE-6B's, and two different Double Strike variations. It feels like they have the labels backwards on those last two, since the one that is very clearly a converging beam cannon or heavy quantum beam cannon is marked up as a laser and the one that looks like a laser cannon is marked up just as a beam cannon.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Ah, I don't recall anything where it's like that the entire time. Usually for drama's sake they cut back and forth between the cockpit and external view. Can't say I've ever found the official explanations of what the mecha were for any impediment to enjoying them as display pieces. I didn't especially like Macross Delta, and I still have a DX VF-31J on my desk at work alongside my VF-2SS, VF-4G, VF-171, and VF-25F. Still, I can completely understand the disappointment with the explanation. The first set of specs we got made the VF-31 look like a huge step forward for 5th Generation VFs instead of no improvement at all, and having five different ace customs in the same series kind of dilutes the special-ness of the ace custom idea... even if Macross doesn't usually do ace custom fighters. It really was a bad idea to have five ace customs dramatically different from the actual production model. (Especially when the actual production model is better looking than all five.)
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Not just the variant monitor turrets, it treats the Xaos Custom Siegfried configuration as an alternate production version of the VF-31 Kairos also destined for NUNS service. The bits that aren't simply copied from the VF-25 Master File put a lot more emphasis on the Siegfried than the Kairos, and make the Siegfried out to be a lot more than the aftermarket custom job it actually was in the official setting.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, it definitely felt like Macross Delta often forgot that there was more to the war than Walkure's singing... and occasionally seemed to forget that Walkure and Delta Flight achieved the square root of bugger all for almost the entire series, and only made gains at the very end when Heinz was out of the picture. They weren't the heroes because they were saving the day... they were heroes because the story said "this is the designated hero". That said, the music from Macross Delta was exemplary so at least they didn't drop the ball after making music almost the exclusive focus of the series.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    I don't doubt that the reactions here have a fair amount of built-in bias because we're all Macross fans... but if the independent reviewers are any indication, bias didn't result in a different conclusion. The independent, non-fan reviewers seem to be mostly united in saying this is at best a thoroughly mediocre comic with a disjointed narrative that assumes that the reader is already familiar with the Robotech story and thus is making little-to-no effort to be an ambassador to the non-fan. Thus far, the only difference I've seen between non-fan and fan unpaid reviews is that the fans seem to think all the things that were dealbreakers to the non-fan are positive traits, and that the lack of innovation is something laudable. The few gushingly positive professional reviews reek of bought-and-paid-for. The general consensus on the current round of Harmony Gold legal actions against Piranha Games, Catalyst Game Labs, and their various partners is rather dangerously close to spurious. I got the chance to have a friend of mine who is a corporate lawyer specializing in patent and trademark law look over Harmony Gold's filing and claims. He did ask that I indicate that he was not acting in any official capacity on this and his impressions should not be interpreted as legal advice. That said, his impression of Harmony Gold's filing against Catalyst et. al. given the publicly-available documents was that there is very little chance of a judgement in Harmony Gold's favor unless Catalyst/Piranha/etc. did something incredibly foolish like using Unseen designs as the starting point for the new designs in their development process (and retained papers showing they did that could be subpoenaed). He reckons they're hoping Catalyst and co. will panic - either because those designs are illegal derivatives of the Macross designs or because the project can't afford the litigation - and will opt to settle out of court on Harmony Gold's terms. (It's likely a "brand protection" lawsuit, since Harmony Gold thinks the Robotech brand is worth something again and want to put the kibosh on anything that looks similar, possibly to show Sony they're taking custodianship of the series seriously.) Legally speaking, no... the comic is not representative of what a Sony-made movie would entail. Harmony Gold USA cannot use or authorize the use of the Macross designs and various key terms and story elements from Macross in new animated or live-action cinematic works. They can only use those things in merchandise, comics, novels, and video games all being merchandise. A movie by Sony would look nothing like this, for reasons of copyright. Well, there are still fans of that nonsense who will pay for overpriced trash, which is how the monstrously expensive Kitz Concepts stuff sells out of its ultra-low volume limited editions. Well, if they're targeting anyone who reads comics boy have they cocked it up...
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Given what a mess the TV series turned into, unless they have different writers attached my only reaction is "DO NOT WANT". The director's commentary on the Blu-ray better be two hours of Kawamori apologizing for this awful mess.
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