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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Yep, a little late in the year for an April Fools' joke... though anyone not suffering a recent head wound could be forgiven for thinking it really was one. Put bluntly... because Robotech is a much-maligned virtual non-entity with an unbroken track record of abject failure, owned by a company that treats it like a hobby because it's a money pit with a minimal return-on-investment under the best plausible working conditions and accordingly won't throw any more than the absolute bare minimum budget at it. None of those things are going to attract any professional who's actually qualified to do the jobs they need done. That's why Harmony Gold's Robotech staff is made up on ascended fanboys with largely irrelevant skill sets... because nobody who isn't already a fan would be foolish enough to think that was a career with ANY future potential. People go into a business like cinema hoping for fame and fortune, not ridicule and a paycheck that barely covers SoCal's cost of living. If this is, in fact, a case of Frank Agrama having no confidence or faith in the "creative staff", who could possibly argue that lack of faith is unwarranted?
  2. Seto Kaiba
    No problemo. I was a little disappointed that they didn't throw the Macross II valks in as an extra, or the VF-4 at the very least. I could cheerfully do without the other M3 valkyries. Still, it was nice that they cheerfully threw in a bunch of designs from the 1st and 2nd Macross Frontier movies and even made the Macross Frontier version of the Ghost a (technically) usable craft. All in all, I thought it was a great game. (It's the whole reason I own a PS3.)
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... it was, on paper anyway. The Shadow Chronicles "movie" was supposed to be the first episode of what would be either a 3- or 4-part OVA, but the development and production of the second episode was put on indefinite hiatus almost right away because they convinced themselves that the proposed live-action movie would make Robotech a hot Hollywood property and land them an actual budget via outside investors. Didn't work, as you probably guessed, so the second episode probably won't ever come out.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Nope... they seem to have skipped a few where convenient, because the characters are drawn from specific time periods and they're flying what are roughly appropriate mecha from those points in their respective home storylines. The Macross M3 character mecha and VF-17 were apparently left out because Max, Milia, and Gamlin are from the late Macross 7 period, after which point all three are flying VF-22s.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Alas, no... none of the mecha that Max and Milia had in Macross M3 are available in-game. The table jumps from the VF-1 Valkyrie right on up to the VF-11B Thunderbolt. Consequentially, that means no VF-3000, VF-5000, VF-4, VF-9, or VF-14. They also left out the VF-17 Nightmare, though they included a few VF-17 paintjobs (Diamond Force, Milia's VF-17S) as paint options on the VF-171 Nightmare Plus. The VF-19F/S Super Pack is also MIA.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Oh for pity's sake... When people suggested that Harmony Gold try funding more Robotech via Kickstarter, they were being sarcastic. It's one thing to have Harmony Gold's own staff tell people that their management thinks Robotech is such a wasted investment that they won't even put their own money behind it unless they absolutely have to, and then to see proof that they've given up hoping that someone else would come along and agree to fund their mess. It's quite another to see that they've finally given up any pretense of that godawful mess being successful and are now begging fans to fund the next wretched abortion because they can't even make a sound business case to themselves. I wonder if the remaining Robotech fans are really gullible enough to fund that mess, since the Robotech tabletop game kickstarter's turned into a goddamn fiasco. They probably are, and that's just tragic. Also, a 2015 target release date? Pfft... yeah right. These clowns missed their own release target for their last planned sequel by... seven years and counting?
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Dunno... but they certainly offer some practical benefits when it comes to handling large livestock, wouldn't you say? A hippocow's bunny-sized to them. They probably have other uses in terms of heavy labor that would otherwise have to be done by destroids or heavy and cumbersome construction equipment.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    You could call it a question of degree... when I said the SW-XA I Schneeblume was built around a VF-1 airframe, I did mean it quite literally. Take out all of the external passive stealth refinements to the skin and various system improvements and what you're left with is a bog-standard, almost entirely unmodified VF-1 airframe. If the Schneegans is based off a VF-1 airframe too, at least that saw some significant modification. The Schneeblume is basically just a VF-1 with a coat of black paint and some extra panels stitched on.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    *nods* I've run across a little bit about the aftermath of the Sharon Apple incident... apparently she really managed to turn people against virtuoids, to the point that her music was banned for a few years and responsive virtuoids were legislated out of service.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Kawamori's VF-Experiment column in Character Model magazine... the (explicitly non-canon) fluff provided indicated that all the Stealth Wing X work was done to create a companion craft to operate alongside the VF-17 Nightmare as an air superiority and defense fighter to complement the long range attack-oriented VF-17. The SW-XA I was built around a VF-1 airframe, while the SW-XA II was... not. (Yes, slowpoke.jpg, but I hope the little clarity I can lend to this helps somewhat.) If its role was, as indicated, air superiority and area defense, it probably wouldn't need to worry about active or passive stealth as much as the Nightmare with its long range attack operational profile.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Well... what little I've been able to turn up suggests that Marge Gueldoa was, in addition to being Sharon's lead developer, at least a little in love with Sharon (or what Sharon represented). He drops a hint about his motives earlier on, when he first receives the chip and comments on how he takes exception to Aristotle's view that the mind (Aristotle's treatise Peri Psyche actually called this the soul, though the actual meaning is more like the fundamental essence of a living thing rather than a separate spiritual body) could not exist independently of a body. (Aristotle actually goes further, suggesting that the soul is the fundamental condition to truly be alive, and that it's impossible to have a soul without a body, a body without a soul, or a body with the wrong type of soul.) In that light, the reason Marge was so determined to see Sharon's system completed by any means necessary is he probably felt he was about to prove that the self (or "soul") could be an existence independent of a body. Sharon would be, by Marge's terms, a truly living being that possessed a soul but no true body. Thematically, it has a lot in common with Ghost in the Shell's notions of whether or not the human self can exist once the body is no longer actually human at all... or is entirely absent.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Initially, yes... Unless, of course, the surviving elements of the lost fleets manage to contact other fleets and request reinforcements... At the end of the first space war, Boddole Zer's fleet had fractured and fled in all directions, with around three million ships still in service. While it doesn't seem that any of them managed to secure reinforcements and return to attack again in Macross's main continuity, it did happen TWICE in Macross II's parallel world continuity. (Both times because our boy Quamzin escaped death's embrace in a previous conflict and led reinforcements back to Earth.)
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Might be... not "is". Not an original notion by any means... Max's alleged infidelity is a core plot point of the entire Macross 7 Trash manga, for one, and as Max is quite popular with young women even into his fifties (see Macross 7) I can see plenty of reason for Milia to be at least a little hacked off with him. Eh... it makes sense to me. Adopting Moaramia, a Zentradi, would give both of them some perspective on Milia's situation trying to adapt to human familial norms and provide a stable family life. They did kind of rush into a wedding, after all... and during the period between their wedding and when they adopted Moaramia, they were not exactly leading a laid-back life.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Actually, isn't it mentioned/implied in Macross Chronicle's Zentradi Worldguide sheet that Zentradi is a tonal language like Chinese? "Deculture" could, then, have several separate, distinct meanings depending on the intonation. EDIT: Yep, looks like... the sheet has a section devoted to intonation markings for Zentradi words, so with the negative prefix De- and karucha being roughly analogous to "wonderful", "magnificent", or "amazing", with one intonation it could be "outrageous!" or "unbelievable!", and with another it could be the more negative version seen in DYRL, etc. where it means "disgusting" or "unthinkable". "Protoculture" is just a near-miss coincidence between Zentradi and English, according to the glossary on the sheet. The Zentradi word literally just means "(the) old/ancient culture". "Yakk deculture" is simply a more emphatic and specific... making the meaning more like "such a disgusting thing" or "such an outrageous thing".
  15. Seto Kaiba
    There's a backhanded acknowledgement of that in Variable Fighter Master File: VF-25 Messiah... page 27 has a YF-29 shown in exactly the same paintjob as the SW-XA II.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    The amount of inaccurate information going into Chronicle's coverage of Macross II is kind of upsetting (for me, anyway)... the Metal Siren that Sylvie flew was never described as a prototype in the animation materials. I'm not sure how they decided that it was, since the production art was captioned "Metal Siren Replica".
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Not that I'm aware, no... but with the overwhelming tone of "Make love, not war" in Macross, I'd wager that the UN Forces aren't exactly fussy about first contact as long as the local pointy-eared space girls are cute. (Admittedly, the UN Forces have only really encountered a few alien races in their exploration of the galaxy... so the Zolans being the only ones who were friendly from the word "go" isn't as far in the minority as it sounds.)
  18. Seto Kaiba
    "Better" is a rather subjective term... the improvements made between the UN Spacy's use of the Queadluun-Rau and their new Queadluun-Rhea are principally improvements in the area of survivability rather than performance. The Queadluun-Rau was, in what the official material tells us, such an effective battle suit that the UN Spacy quite cheerfully continued to use them after the first space war ended. It's occasionally worth reminding ourselves that the Zentradi Army may have been in a de facto state of technological stasis, but that they went into that period of stasis armed with the best weapons and equipped with a mass-production infrastructure which the Macross Chronicle mechanic sheet for the Factory Satellite tells us is capable of developing and incorporating some design improvements into the weapons it produces over time. So, after 500,000 years of being cut off from "new" developments, the Zentradi Army is tooling around the galaxy with weapons that were built for them by the galaxy's most technologically advanced species, which have been undergoing constant, patient, automated refinement for several times longer than human civilization has been a thing. We're shown pretty clearly on several occasions that the Zentradi mecha might not necessarily be as high-performance as the human-built mobile weapons when it comes to flight or armor, but they're still perfectly capable of wrecking a VF or five when the chips are down... even into the 2050s.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, that's an art error... though I don't think the decorative art on that (or any other) sheet is meant to be taken as gospel. The title for the portion of the VF-11B's mechanic sheet says "30mm 6-barrel gun pod", and the line art for the VF-11C's shows the six barrel arrangement. As far as gun pods with 5 barrel arrangements go, the GU-17 is the only one that leaps to mind in official material... though the unofficial art in Variable Fighter Master File: VF-19 Excalibur shows the GU-15 with a five-barrel arrangement.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Dunno... but didn't Macross 30 use that, in English no less, for the fighter pods that appear in-game? EDIT: Yes, yes they did. To confirm, I started up the game and flew over to at rock formation just north of Jurgen in the Siera desert where they congregate, and sure enough they're labeled "GNERL".
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Aaaaaaaaaactually... I can think of a few cases where there are explicit comparisons drawn between human and alien mecha in Macross. One moment that leaps to mind was Klan Klan passing some remarks about how Zentradi mecha compare quite favorably to human equipment in some respects early in Macross Frontier. Macross II sources contain a number of remarks about how Zentradi mecha and VFs compare, including a few specific notes about where efforts were made to address those areas of deficient performance in subsequent designs. When main timeline official sources talk about how VFs compare with Zentradi mecha, they're usually speaking in pretty general terms... like Chronicle's assertion that the Regult is pretty rubbish when it comes to atmospheric flight and thus needs support from Gnerls for planetary invasion operations. Non-canon sources like Master File do spare a thought for those kind of comparisons as well... though the specific example I recall offhand refers to VFs having difficulty coping with Zentradi tactics. I think it's as much a matter of raw performance as it is humanity's attempts to improve their ability to fight the Zentradi on the Zentradi's terms. Well, the Regult is established to have better performance in space than atmosphere... and the VF-1 is described as having a couple significant issues with its flight performance in space, so we're halfway home already. I think part of the reason you don't see that play out explicitly on screen is most of battles in Macross take place in space, and the few that don't are usually fought between VFs and the Zentradi's best flight-capable mecha, the Queadluun-Rau. (You could take Macross 30 as throwing this a bone, since the Regults in that are pretty awful in the air... though the actual game mechanics of a canon game are never reliable.) Not initially... remember, for a decent span of time (most of the series!) they thought that humans might, just might, be their long vanished creators. They were basically subjecting the Macross to just enough pressure to make 'em sweat so the Zentradi had something to draw conclusions from. Once they concluded the Macross was an actual threat... well, things went to hell VERY quickly and everybody had cause to regret it.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... the VF-1's got a few officially-acknowledged deficiencies in space flight, the biggest being that its small airframe size limits the amount of fuel it can carry, and thus the maximum acceleration and sortie range. One of the bigger points mentioned with the VF-4 was, IIRC, something like a 40% improvement in space combat capability over the VF-1. Actually, a lot of the mecha which followed the VF-1 in either universe have some form of mention of "the VF-1 was deficient in X, Y, and Z, which were remedied on the new design". Nah, the UN Spacy was basically being subjected to the gentlest of love taps from the mostly curious Zentradi for the bulk of the war. The few times someone on the Zentradi side (usually Quamzin) got serious were the few times the Macross's crew were on the ropes and were often only saved by circumstances like the detonation of Salla base's reaction furnace, or a senior Zentradi commander ordering Quamzin to back off (sometimes at gunpoint). The Macross was barely surviving when Vrlitwhai and other commanders were sending just one or two ships at them at a time just to see what those wacky miclones would do next... In short... because the Zentradi were busy satisfying their curiosity about these strange miclones, and weren't earnestly trying to rub them out. Remember, wasn't one of Hikaru's first comments to Minmay after joining the military to point out that the internal announcements about how the last battle went were a load? When the Zentradi finally decided to take the kid gloves off, it ended badly for six billion people in just a few minutes.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    I think JB0 has the right of it... these mecha were, by in large, developed for space combat and a "quantity has a quality all its own" philosophy of warfare. The UN Spacy might achieve a ten or twelve to one kill ratio over the Zentradi, but the Zentradi do tend to show up with a few thousand of their mates whenever they decide to start trouble.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    They can fly in a planetary atmosphere.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    *wince* Oh gods no... please no... at least they should wait a few more titles before they throw out another edition. My poor bookshelves can't take the strain!
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