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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    That was the plan... to come away with as little plot-contextual information as humanly possible and just get a read on what people thought of the film without succumbing to any spoileriffic reviews.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    I've tried to avoid reading reviews, so I thought I was fairly safe taking in the TVTropes page with Spoilers off... I'm a bit worried by the fact that its Narm and Too Dumb To Live entries are whole pages in their own right, and that there's frequent mention of setting a particular action sequence to Yakity Sax. I'm still gonna see it, but I'm a little worried now.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    As noted previously, Paramount was actively developing content for a Kzinti story arc for Enterprise Season 5 before word came down that the ratings plummet had prompted the network not to renew it at the end of Season 4, so they seem to have at least believed they could use make free use of the Kzinti concepts Niven put forward in "The Slaver Weapon". (Probably with less of a "Petting Zoo People" look, the way they did with the CG Gorn for the Mirror Universe episode.) That was one of a bunch of plots that ended up in the dustbin, along with a post-facto "fix fic" episode to explain that T'Pol was so emotional even early in the series because her dad is a Romulan deep-cover operative. Still, Spock's original accolade of "First Vulcan in Starfleet" keeps taking hits... prequel writers can't seem to resist having a Vulcan around for deadpan snark. T'Pol got 'round it on a technicality, but what about this new girl who's basically ripping off Spock's entire half-Vulcan schtick? Star Trek's already got several different species of felinoid kicking around the Federation and its neighbors... which, since Paramount reversed themselves on TAS's canonicity to the prime timeline, includes the Kzinti. (This, sadly, means tons of other Scooby-Doo level BS is also canon, like "BEM" and that one episode where the Enterprise's computer goes nuts and starts handing out dribble glasses and screen-printing insults on Kirk's uniform.) Actually, in hindsight, I'd love it if Discovery did that. It'd lend sort of a Red Dwarf feel to the show. We always see the Federation's shiny new toys with the best crews boldly going wherever, we never see the poor sods who are stuck with the old clunkers Starfleet keeps in service for aeons because they can't be arsed to scrap them (like all those old Miranda-class, Excelsior-class, and Oberth-class ships). Yeah, they were pretty explicit about that in the dialog... the Kzinti psychic decidedly did not enjoy the experience. That new alien in the Discovery trailer who was raised to sense the approach of death... that may be replacing the Kzinti as the new apex of narm in the Star Trek franchise. They'd better hope the show lasts, otherwise the jokes about sensing cancellation will be unending.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Eech... you... haven't seen the TAS episode "The Slaver Weapon", have you? The Kzinti from Star Trek: the Animated Series are from a Star Trek screenplay adaptation of Larry Niven's The Soft Weapon, and the episode's screenplay was written by Larry Niven himself. As they've already paid for them, they shouldn't have a problem using them (and indeed were considering making the Kzinti the Enterprise season 5 main antagonist before the show was canceled). They're not Niven's Kzin though. The politest way to describe them would be "too dumb to live". A more honest assessor might consider them, based on their behavior and their history as explained by Sulu, "the cruelest prank evolution ever played". They are the polar opposite of being "hardcore", and they make the Pakled look like geniuses. (It didn't help matters that the episode was directed by Hal Sutherland, who was red-green colorblind, so everything the Kzinti have is an interesting shade of pink.) Star Trek's version of the Kzinti were gag villains, who'd fought four wars against humanity in the 21st century and lost all four of them so badly that they were forbidden by treaty from having any weapons other than stun-only phasers, and only then for their law enforcement. They steal a stasis box containing a Slaver spy's multitool from Spock, Sulu, and Uhura, and proceed to be serially outsmarted by all three, their attempted psychic interrogation is foiled by Sulu remembering what eating a salad is like (it drives the Kzinti psychic practically hysterical), and they're outsmarted by the tiny computer in the Slaver weapon and are quickly tricked into blowing themselves and their stolen police ship up. It's not hard to see why the network would consider Star Trek's producers and writers wanting to bring the Kzinti back as a sign of serious shark-jumping malarkey in Enterprise. Let's just hope Discovery, if it lasts long enough, decides to stick with Klingons and Romulans instead of revisiting Niven's pink pussycats.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Parallel universe/alternate timeline stories aren't the problem with time travel in Star Trek... it's the inevitable continuity problems that occur when time travel is used (or abused) gratuitously in the bounds of a single timeline/universe. Star Trek: First Contact is a prime example of how the fallout can negatively impact other stories. It was a fairly benign time travel example on the surface, since only a handful of people in past-Earth had any contact with the 24th century Starfleet crew and their influence could be covered over with a handful of lies at most. It still caused one of the worst idiot plots in the Star Trek: Enterprise series. "Regeneration" somehow had Zefram Cochrane try to warn people about cyborgs from the future attacking Earth and not get written off as a crazy person, and the plot entailed 24th century Borg who'd had Starfleet's 24th century finest and their state of the art flagship on the ropes defeated by a 22nd century Enterprise for which phasers were still a new technology and the supposedly nigh-irreversible-by-24th-century-medicine assimilation that doomed almost the entire crew of the Enterprise-E is bested by a single 22nd century doctor via nothing fancier than exotic radiation therapy. (This, after a Voyager episode where a Borg based on future technology was seen as CIVILIZATION-ENDING GALACTIC DOOM if it got loose...) (Of course, there was also the timey-wimey ball question of Enterprise's Temporal Cold War resolution... Daniels said the timeline was resetting itself, so does that mean all the crap in the first three seasons just un-happened? The events of the pilot that changed the circumstances of Earth's first contact with Klingons and Enterprise's launch were Temporal Cold War shenanigans. Did Trip's sister and millions of others get un-killed when the Xindi attack un-happened? Did the Paraga II colony come back to life? Daniels did say "History didn't record it".) At times like these, all I can think of is a line from Red Dwarf about the future... "Poppycock! It will be happened; it shall be going to be happening; it will be was an event that could will have been taken place in the future. Simple as that. Your bucket's been kicked, baby."
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Actually, that's why they're so reluctant to move forwards in the timeline... because, thanks to Voyager and Enterprise, they can't jump very far into the future without landing in the period of the franchise's future history where Starfleet really should be called Timefleet. That's what I've usually seen its failure attributed to... the writers being compelled to throw in continuity-violating shenanigans and then using time travel to excuse it, until time travel-related timeline-screw became a plot arc in its own right. (Creative bankruptcy brought about by formula, so much so that before the show was canned they were considering tapping the Kzinti from the Star Trek cartoon as a new main antagonist... which officially promoted the show's cancellation to a Mercy Kill. When your first choice for a new main antagonist is a joke antagonist who can be defeated by remembering your side salad, it's time to take a break and regroup.)
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Really, I'm not so sure it's the fandom that's the reason for Star Trek's lack of innovation. Ever since the original Star Trek series, the studio and the network have had an established formula for the franchise that they were very comfortable with and resisted deviating from as hard as they possibly could. Their light, bubbly, moralistic format was a perfect fit for the audiences of the late 1960s, but it didn't play so well when the franchise was revived in the late 80's for a new series that became Star Trek: the Next Generation. The ratings were garbage, and from then on it was a fight between the studio wanting to take Star Trek in new directions while there was pushback from Gene Roddenberry and the network. They had to fight to be able to depict the Federation personnel as anything less than saints who roved the galaxy sermonizing to the backwards aliens about superior human morals. They had to fight to be able to include darker, more serious stories and to have actual story arcs instead of just planet/anomaly of the week stories and two-parters. They had to fight to be allowed to tackle certain social issues. They had to fight to set stories somewhere other than a starship named Enterprise. The network's intransigence was ultimately what flew Star Trek into the ground in the first place. Ratings were solid once TNG grew the beard and DS9 got rolling in earnest, but when TNG ended and Voyager was on the drawing board the network flatly rejected pretty much the entire premise of the series because it didn't follow Trek formula... resulting in a massive change in the project's tone from a season story arc-driven series like DS9's latter half to a lighter, exploration-focused episodic format like TNG. That was when the ratings started to fall... when the audience started to reject Star Trek's stagnation. Enterprise had the same problem. Despite being deliberately set before Star Trek and even omitting "Star Trek" from the title, the formula was king and they were quickly forced to ditch the stylistic suck and become a cosmetically advanced prequel, which combined with the insistence on continuity-breaking shenanigans in the name of tie-ins and references to previous shows, flew the ratings right into the toilet. The network attributed the reduced ratings from DS9's crappy timeslot as the fandom's indictment of its formula-breaking format, and killed innovation stone dead.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Ain't personal teleporters grand? (Once you get past that whole "having your atoms sucked through a soda straw that just happens to pass through actual Hell" part...) Still, half the fluff text and fieldable characters in Warhammer 40,000 get weirder things for free with their breakfast cereal than were in that clip... and for the ones in the Inquisition, it's just about mandatory. A shame Dan Abnett hasn't been able to finish the third trilogy in his Inquisition trilogy of trilogies, if he started as he meant to go on the Bequin trilogy had a couple canon immigrants on the way in from the Cthulhu mythos and the books that inspired it. (Much ado about The King in Yellow...) After so many years of plot stasis, I'm kind of flummoxed at the sudden reversal the Imperium's having in 8th Edition... Guilliman's finally decided to get off his duff and fix his family's mess, someone put a boot up the Mechanicum's arse and got them developing new tech again, Cadia's gone to the dogs, and Abaddon may have finally become as competent as he was in the 31st Millennium again... as long as my Dark Eldar don't end up back in "glass cannons that are more glass than cannon" territory again, I'll be satisfied.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Ugh... I had a bad feeling about Star Trek: Discovery when I heard it was going to be an exclusive for CBS's proprietary streaming service in the US. That trailer did nothing to diminish my premonition of Discovery discovering what it's like for a Star Trek series to get canceled after just one season. Both my parents are Trekkies and I was raised on Star Trek, and not even my profound affection for the franchise is going to compel me to get a CBS All Access membership to watch THAT shabby mess. (At least this trailer did one thing for me. I can finally put names to my sense of ill-fitting designs. The Klingons look like they mugged the Remans from Nemesis and stole their wardrobe and overall design aesthetic, and the Discovery herself looks downright Klingon from the outside and inside looks more like the USS Relativity from the 29th Century than a pre-Constitution-class ship.)
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Chapter 1: "Deep Space Warbird"... they don't show up much outside that chapter, being military models rather than customized air racers (or 5th Generation prototypes).
  11. Seto Kaiba
    The (New) UN Army does still exist... but they're kind of a rear-echelon security sort of affair, since VFs are the default currency in an era where the most common enemy faced are 10m tall giants. (They're the poor sods with the Beatrice tanks in Frontier, which do precisely bugger-all against the Vajra.) Macross Chronicle has some images of the New UN Army soldiers seen in Macross Frontier, like the mooks who were part of Sheryl's escort and who tried (and possibly failed) to gun down Grace O'Connor near the end of the series. There's some line art in a few of the art books too, particularly the ones for the movies. Barring the cutouts for cat ears, the troops on Voldor in the Macross Δ series are wearing the exact same uniform as the ones in Macross Frontier. sketchley has a partial pic at the bottom of this page that shows the standard New UN Army mook with their H&K G36 rifle knockoffs. (There may also be pics in the back of the Tenjin Hidetaka third Macross artbook.)
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Ah, yeah... it was kind of a pain in the butt to find a copy. Based on my quick skims I've found that some of the Macross Chronicle revelations and stats are actually drawn from it, such as the meaning of "ARMD" and the spec for the QF-3000 and SF-3A. Master File copied a few problematic statements from it as well, like the assertion that the SDF-3 was Vrlitwhai's ship, which the coverage in Macross Chronicle contradicts by way of Frontier's first episode showing SDF-3 is Megaroad-02. I decided to take a whack at it because I've never done an entire book before, and the lure of a pre-sequels look at Macross's technical lore is just TOO good...
  13. Seto Kaiba
    What I meant is I wasn't (until your most recent post) sure what precisely you were looking for... if you were just looking for confirmation of some story point or bit of technical trivia, or if you were looking for a full translation of the books. Yeah, unfortunately for Macross the Ride the few translators working the seemingly unending stream of Macross publications (myself included) focused almost entirely on the mecha since the story was serialized in Dengeki Hobby and accompanied by all those custom model kits representing the mecha of the story. The details of the story itself kinda got lost because there's only one or two who focus on translating actual stories, and they mostly go for the really old out-of-print stuff. Like most side stories, Macross the Ride's plot has very little in the way of impact on the story of the main (Macross Frontier) series. It's got some tenuous connections to the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross series, some fairly strong connections to Macross 7 and Macross VF-X2, and a lone connection to the novelization of Macross Δ, but it doesn't really have a very noticeable impact on anything that came after (chronologically). Many of the Macross Frontier cast are present, but aren't really involved in the story. SMS's Skull Platoon (w/ Ozma, Michel, and Luca) is present, Alto puts in a brief appearance as a fresh transfer to from entertainment to pilot training at Mihoshi, Ranka's an unremarkable junior high student, Sheryl's mentioned every now and then as the #1 idol in the galaxy, Brera has a bit part as the test pilot of the YF-27-3 Shahar ♂, etc. The only one who's arguably involved in the goings-on of the plot is Col. Grace Godunowa (alias Grace O'Connor) of the Macross Galaxy Corporate Army intelligence service (because isn't she always?). I'll work up a detailed plot summary and PM it to you, but the short version is that the two volumes are almost two separate story arcs. The first six chapters concern themselves with the protagonist (Chelsea Scarlett) transitioning from a retiring idol singer to SMS pilot, and SMS pilot to air racer before taking on kind of a "enemy racer of the week" format where the story's only conflict is between elite air racers competing for a spot in the League's most elite race... the Seiten Cup. The second volume concerns itself with the Seiten Cup itself and the venue being attacked by the remnants of Latence, the Earth-supremacist organization who staged the coup attempt in 2051 in Macross VF-X2. Connections-wise, the strongest ones are to Macross 7. Both Chelsea and the main villain Naresuan used to live in the Varauta system, and were involved in the Protodeviln conflict. The Latence splinter group Naresuan leads even uses old and upgraded Varauta mecha, and the venue for the entire second half is a ship design introduced in Macross 7. One of the minor characters new to the story is a Zolan doctor. Naresuan himself sports some ties to SDF Macross, being one of Vrlitwhai's subordinate commanders during the First Space War, though what he pilots in the end is a nod to the Macross Plus video game (a manned version of the Neo Glaug drone, the Ghost X-9's rival program). His organization, FASCES, is a surviving splinter faction of Latence, the villains from Macross VF-X2. The only real ties that go FORWARD in the continuity are that Chelsea and her mentor Angers 672 made some substantial contributions to the completion of the YF-25 prototype that became the VF-25 used in Macross Frontier, and that Chelsea herself apparently went into government after she retired as a Vanquish League racer. The novelization of Macross Δ indicates she's a representative in the New UN Government parliament in 2067.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Was there something in particular you wanted to know from those? I've read them, though I haven't published a translation of same because they're in print still. No kidding. Have you ever looked into doing the old Sky Angels book? I'm taking a whack at it now that my day job workload has slackened, and was wondering if you've done anything with it (or would be interested in proofreading).
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, I know... the animation is never infallible, and the animation of the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross series was off-model almost as much as it was on because of how it was done so cheaply. The animation model sheets, official art materials, and published specs are much more reliable and consistent, which is why they're the resource the Macross Compendium and Macross Mecha Manual use as reference instead of the animation. The animation inconsistencies diminish as budget and production quality increase, but they still crop up in unexpected places (like Klan Klan's mysteriously variable height of anywhere from 10m to 16m in Macross Frontier). So the Master File writers were left with a choice between the official spec that says 12 per booster and 3 per arm, and the toys which have 20 per booster and 3 per arm, and decided to turn it into a fix fic to explain why both should be a thing... which is fine, since in '94 Macross's creators totally did the same thing for the TV and Movie VF-1's. (If you look at it from Kawamori's perspective, Max and Milia's impossible missile stunt from the series is dramatic license on the part of whatever schmuck was handling special effects for that Space War 1 docu-drama... like how Hellsing's Alucard tends to fire well upwards of a dozen rounds from the Jackal before reloading, even though the gun only holds six shots.)
  16. Seto Kaiba
    None that I recall, no... but Master File has been kind of cheating on that front ever since Variable Fighter Master File: VF-19 Excalibur. Master File's writers have been pretty vague on the subject of FAST Pack missile counts in all but the VF-1 Valkyrie books, really. The VF-1 books were the only ones to really get specific on that front, since the writers were using the book as a fix fic for the different missile counts in the line art and the various toys and model kits. Their take was that the missile count shown on the FAST Pack in official art (12 per booster, 3 per arm) is representative of the version used during the war, and the variant with twenty missiles per booster used in many kits and toys was developed after the war and uses a newer and slightly smaller micro-missile. The VF-4 and VF-22 books kind of ignore the subject altogether, while the VF-19 and VF-25 books dodged that question entirely by presenting a modular FAST Pack concept where the internal space of the booster had a bunch of partitions that could be used for either missiles or additional fuel tanks... allowing the propellant capacity and ordnance load to be dialed up or down according to the needs of the moment. The VF-25 book just cited a typical count, though the count didn't match a eyes-on count of the missiles in the art.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    ... huh, is anyone else flashing back to the old Aliens vs Predator 2 PC game from 2001?
  18. Seto Kaiba
    That's kind of a shame, really... I'd rather hoped that Ghost in the Shell would be the one to buck the trend of western live-action adaptations of anime being commercial disasters. Shōnen titles like Dragonball Z and Mach GoGoGo don't really lend themselves well to that kind of adaptation, but I thought Ghost in the Shell was mature and sophisticated enough that the source material's fundamental quality would shine through mainstream Hollywood's explosion-induced clinical inability to comprehend subtlety and the inevitable questionable judgment that casting would show by prioritizing ability to fill out a latex catsuit above everything else. More fool me, I guess, though what I gathered from the summaries of the box office take is that it actually did reasonably brisk business in Japan before falling flat in the West.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    ... so does this mean the reason Bishop and the later synthetics were fully Three Laws-compliant was because Weyland-Yutani switched to Intel/NVIDIA? "Caution: Always operate your David-8 or Walter series synthetics with adequate cooling! Overheating may lead to shutdown or failure of ethics coprocessors." (Gotta hand it to Michael Fassbender tho... he manages a certain distant look that's perfect for playing a robot. It almost borders on the uncanny valley and he's a certified human.)
  20. Seto Kaiba
    It'd make a certain amount of sense if they did, given that the Varauta Army got its start with the Nazi Germany-inspired transformable fighters with suspiciously Germanic-sounding names developed for the villain faction in Air Cavalry Chronicles (the ZaiBach Empire, who went on to be the baddies in The Vision of Escaflowne.) The designs even came with insignia that look suspiciously swastika-like. The fighters the Blue Rhinoceros Spec Ops unit use are even made by a company that's a reference to Messerschmitt.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Actually, while both of the model aircraft Hikaru is shown with are the same aircraft, neither of them is a VF-4G. They're both the VF-X-4 prototype... the design of the production VF-4 Lightning III wasn't finalized until about three years after Macross: Do You Remember Love?, and debuted in Macross: Flashback 2012 in 1987. The production VF-4 didn't exist in-universe at that point in time either, the design wasn't finalized and approved for mass production until after the First Space War ended. (The VF-4G came along even later, being a later variant of the VF-4 that first appeared in the video games of the late 90's and early 2000's.) Nobody really mentions that models in Hikaru's quarters in DYRL? because they're kind of a blink-and-you'll-miss-it thing, like the XB-70 Valkyrie model in the foreground.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Duly noted... I looked at that name and went "Wha...?". Mauer, I figured, was a sane surname, but I wasn't getting any joy with Autol/Outoru on Wikipedia or Google. (At one point I considered it might be a bizarre effort at "Otto Mauer" or something like that, since Macross 7 did have a fair bit of "Engrish as she is spoke" kicking around the background, and would fit with Mauer being a Polish/German surname. The only other thing that kept coming to mind was "But he doesn't look like tuna meat...".)
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Can't answer that, it's against the rules to link to (or ask for links to) pirated material. Please support the original creators whenever possible. Twice, that I can recall... both in the Macross 7 PLUS short "Spiritia Dreaming". The first enemy soldier captured in the main Macross 7 series, Irina Hayakawa, refers to him by name in the short. He's Captain [Autolmauer/Otorumawa]. I'm undecided how to actually spell that name, since it doesn't seem to conform to any known existing surname I can find. It's spelled オートルマウワー, which suggests the former at least.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Now that's putting it mildly... Prometheus set the bar so low it's a trip hazard in Hades' wine cellar. Huh. I was kind of watching Covenant's development out of the corner of my eye for fear that we'd get Prometheus Mk.II. This made me sit up and take notice more than any previous trailer or teaser for the film. If the movie fails to live up to the promise this shows, I'll be doubly upset. Garnishing a monster horror movie with a little existential dread? Please sir, can I have some more?
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Dunno why there's selective enforcement on that... but the mods seem to come down a lot harder on pirated media than pirated goods. Second verse, same as the first... at least with respect to price. The movies only run about $45, but even when you're looking at collected Blu-ray box sets like the ones for Macross 7 you can expect to pay almost exactly $63.50 per disc. Macross 7 was 8 discs, sold as two 4-disc sets for $254 apiece.
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