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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    We've got to be careful with our terms here. To call something "production ready" means that the design is complete, fully validated, and ready to enter mass production as-is with no further changes. A "production ready" YF-21 would yield a production VF-21 that was functionally indistinguishable from the prototype, similar to how the VF-19A is essentially identical to the final YF-19 prototype. Development of the YF-21 never reached that level, though. General Galaxy's design team took the data collected during the competitive testing phase of Project Super Nova and what they were able to learn from the loss of the YF-21-2 prototype during the Sharon Apple Incident and went back to the drawing board. They revised their next-generation VF's design extensively enough that the first prototype based on that revised design (YF-21-3 according to Master File) was issued a new design number and became YF-22 (YF-22-1) instead. It was that new YF-22 prototype that was developed to production readiness and eventually entered production and military service as the VF-22. What it takes to make the YF-21 production-ready are the changes that made it the YF-22 and then VF-22. The YF-21 didn't necessarily have the same design issues the YF-19 did. Granted, both did have issues with their thrust-to-weight ratios in excess of 10:1 putting extraordinary strain on the pilots, but the more conventional aerodynamics of the YF-21 and VF-22 make them more stable and less inclined to the kind of maneuverability control issues that plagued the YF-19 and VF-19. It also had the Inertia Vector Control System, which could to an extent protect the cockpit from high g-forces during maneuvers where it was active as a side effect of its operation. It didn't need the same kind of extensive redesign as the VF-19... and the extensive redesign it DID need it got when it made the jump from YF-21-2 to YF-22. If the issues with the Brainwave Control System that promped that redesign from YF-21 to YF-22 never existed, there wouldn't be any need for a later major rework of the design like the VF-19 got. What ultimately killed the YF-21/VF-22 in the official setting was that neither of its problems - the unreliability of the brainwave control system and the high price tag - were entirely fixable. That insane performance came with an equally insane price tag, and the brainwave control system's instability came from the fact that the human brain just isn't anything like as precise or stable as the concept required. Switching back to conventional controls was General Galaxy's only way to produce an aircraft pilots could actually rely on, but the development of a thought-based control system did continue in the form of the implant system that would be used on the VF-22HG Schwalbe Zwei and VF-27 Lucifer, which solved the reliability issues at the source by computerizing part of the pilot's brain and interfacing the Valkyrie's computer with that. Instead of the Valkyrie trying to accurately read the pilot's brainwaves through their skull, the implant could read the neural activity directly and connect to the flight control system over a more reliable short-ranged wireless data link.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Without any other changes to the story of Macross Plus? It'd just be the same VF-22 we got in Macross 7.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    For anyone interested, there's some relevant commentary on Kawamori's design process WRT the Macross Plus Valkyries and esp. the VF-11 and YF-19 in Macross Shoji Kawamori Designer's Note starting on pg284. The YF-19 initial/early design actually had a VF-11-like transformation and the wings stored on the back instead of on the hips (see pg294). By the "preparatory draft" iteration dated August '93, the wings had moved to the hips (see pg297) but it still had a relatively conventional VF-11-like transformation and appearance. Kawamori's commentary on page 359 suggests the transformation was redesigned twice to achieve the desired appearance.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Also starting The Ossan Newbie Adventurer, Trained to Death by the Most Powerful Party, Became Invincible. I am really REALLY missing the days when titles were short and punchy... that is a ****ing mouthful. OK, I thought the OP sounded familiar and kinda tokusatsu-y... that's Akira Kushida! He did the OPs for a bunch of different toku shows, and in robot anime he did the OPs for Xabungle and Godannar. This one might actually be pretty fun, if they can stick with the comedy. It's very much in the mold of Mashle and One Punch Man. I received two... haven't read either in full yet. Kinda ricocheting around the house doin' chores and setting up two more work PCs.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    There's been a few isekai titles now that've just ripped off parts of Overlord and made them their entire story. Skeleton Knight in Another World was probably the most blatant of the lot, basically just making its entire premise a copy of Overlord's Dark Warrior Momon arc. The Strongest Magician in the Demon Lord's Army was a Human seems to be borrowing a lot in little ways, the protagonist Ike being a skull-faced mage in an inhuman force who's actually human all along, hsa a big red orb on his chest, a serpent staff, hangs around with a succubus, etc. while governing a town of regular humans with his inhuman forces is basically just the immediate aftermath of Men of the Kingdom. The really blatant one is a nod to Overlord's infamous and awkward first episode grope, with Ike's commander inviting him to feel her up the same way Albedo did.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Starting Failure Frame: I Became the Strongest and Annihilated Everything with Low-Level Spells... which TBH I am getting pretty tired of shows where the title is a full sentence or a literal paragraph that explains the entire premise. Punch it up a bit guys, seriously. I think I made it all of about four minutes before I started having to pause the first episode because the characters are just so incredibly unlikeable. Making every single character except the protagonist a sh*thead is also not exactly a winning strategy. This one's clearly intended to be an underdog power fantasy like The Rising of the Shield Hero... but nowhere near as interesting.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Caught the end of Demon Slayer's Hashira Training arc... and it really impressive how consistently good this series has been. I've heard they plan to do a movie trilogy to wrap the story up, and I hope it's as lovingly animated as this season finale was because GOD DAMN. The trap Ubuyashiki lays for Muzan at the end of the season is so lovingly animated it's probably a strong contender for the most detailed, most technically impressive explosion ever animated. Just... wow. You can see individual snowflakes vaporize, that's how detailed they went with this. Just 15/10 gorgeous animation for the season finale. I'm actually a little impatient for the movies now, after a finale like that. Not finding a lot that's up my alley in Crunchyroll's Summer '24 simulcast season. Starting with The Strongest Magician in the Demon Lord's Army was a Human. Not impressed with the animation in this one. It's got that same problem Overlord had where characters (esp. monsters) switch back and forth between being relatively low detail CG models and traditional animation with all the grace and subtlety of a clutchless 8-to-1 downshift. Overlord at least kept it confined to background characters and monsters, in this one it's done for EVERYONE. It feels like it's taking an awful lot of pointers from Overlord too, come to think of it... and a couple overt references.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Y'know, thinking back on it, I think Macross 30 is the only time we've ever actually seen the YF/VF-19 use the wing root laser guns in Battroid mode.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Watching the new episode of Code Geass: Roze of the Recapture... and so far, it really is just a speedrun of the original Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion plot. It's beautifully animated. I really cannot stress enough that this is an A+ animation job... but the story is just so blatantly unoriginal and so lazy that it keeps pulling me right out of the story. They make only the most token effort to make the obvious replacement characters more than carbon copies of characters from the original. The Neo Britannians were hit especially hard with this, since they're a lot less nuanced and varied than the Britannians in the original were. Most of them are just axe crazy killers drunk on power without a reasonable authority figure anywhere in the chain of command to put a more human (or less insane) face on the regime and highlight that they're not monsters but people doing monstrous things as part of an oppressive system. Fanservice is cranked up a fair bit higher than the original too. You could count on the women in the original to mostly be sanely (if ornately) dressed... here, it's like the "when your parents walk in" half of the meme. Multiple resistance members are dressed in a manner that's more appropriate for going clubbing than fighting a war and one of the knights has an outfit I can only describe as looking like a low-budget "sexy drum major" Halloween costume.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    I don't think there's a specific purpose to it, other than accommodating the transformation designed for the YF-19. The leading edge of the wing root connects to the body at the same place the front of the intakes do, So having the wings attached to the hips just kind of worked out that way. To attach the wings to the backpack would have required someone usual stuff be done with the transformation to Battroid vecause of how the center torso is formed.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    That's right out... part of... ... is that the Jedi fundamentally can't form deeper relationships like that because their creed forbids personal attachments. As a result, ...
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Because the trilogy of Star Wars novels in which he appears as the main villain are held, by fans, to be some of the very finest writing the Star Wars Expanded Universe ever had. Having read them, I fear that says far more about the dismal quality of the Star Wars Expanded Universe than it does the quality of the so-called "Thrawn Trilogy". But yeah, zombies and mind control and Hollywood voodoo are not "Good people" powers... and they're basically the powerset of the Witches in Star Wars, so the witches can never really get past their status as card-carrying villains similar to the Sith Lords. Like, I fully expect we're going to learn, after Master Sol's big confession, that the Witches were actually up to no good and were probably allied with Smilo Ren.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    It's actually quite edible... just not to everyone's tastes. Kudzu starch noodles are a popular ingredient in several traditional Japanese desserts, for instance. Eh... I'm not sure I'd say that. It is, however, pretty inescapable that Witches in past Star Wars titles were very much in "Bad Powers, Bad People" territory to the extent that the most prominent Witches are every bit as cruel and evil as Darth Sideous. Being aware of that tends to make the entire idea of the Witches in The Acolyte are victims of the Jedi pretty laughable. It's especially silly in light of the one recurring Witch character outside of The Clone Wars being a fascist who aligned herself with the Empire, oppressed an entire city in The Mandalorian, and went on to help Thrawn create an army of Stormtrooper zombies.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Probably not. As far as we know, the only Variable Fighters in Macross that acknowledge an in-universe connection to their real world design inspirations are the VF-0 and VF-1. They still aren't truly directly connected, though. The in-universe resemblance Stonewell Bellcom's VF-0 and VF-1 bear to Grumman's F-14 is more a matter of convergent evolution than anything. Stonewell Bellcom's design proposal E303 was developed around the Earth UN Forces requirements for a Variable Fighter rather than being based on the F-14, and the must have requirements the military imposed led to the design resembling a miniature F-14. It helped that the military had put the F-14 back into service with minimal OTM-based upgrades as a stopgap during the Unification Wars, but only the unofficial development history in Master File draws a direct connection between the two (with the VF-0 development using that coincidental resemblance and a surplus of old F-14s as a starting point for physical testing). It's very likely that any non-public development records of the YF-23 Black Widow II, along with all physical parts and prototypes, were lost in the orbital bombardment of Earth in 2010. General Galaxy started their development of the YF-21 based on their earlier work restoring the Quimeliquola automated factory satellite and developing the improved-for-NUNS-use Queadluun-Rhea, so the YF-21's Fighter mode bearing a resemblance to the Northrop/McDonnell Douglas YF-23 Black Widow II is almost certainly more convergent evolution due to similar operational requirements and aiming for a Battroid that resembled the Queadluun-Rau/Rhea they were using as a starting point. That was probably true originally, given that the earliest versions of the VF development history were penned in the early 1980s before the Advanced Tactical Fighter program had even refined its requirements to the point of submitting a Request for Proposals to the various manufacturers. Sky Angels more or less treats the VF-1 Valkyrie program as being the de facto 5th Generation fighter jet and even got shockingly close to the flyaway cost of the actual 5th Generation fighter jets that wouldn't be revealed to the public for quite a few years afterwards. However, Macross did update its pre-1999 timeline (and even its post-1999 timeline) to account for real world events and technological advancements. For instance, mentions of the Soviet Union in the timeline were replaced with Russia and West Germany with Germany. Northrop and McDonnell Douglas rolled out the first YF-23A prototype in 1990 and it was tested against the YF-22 in a competition that eventually ended with the YF-22 being declared the winner in April 1991. Because the development occurred in the early 90's it would be reasonably safe to say the YF-23 probably did exist in the Macross universe. With that in mind, it's also extremely likely that all or virtually all records of the YF-23 Black Widow II were lost to history in the Zentradi 118th Main Fleet's orbital bombardment of Earth in 2010. The destruction was so complete that even then-current military developments were irrecoverably lost. Official setting materials describe the VF-4's rival program, the VF-X-3, as having been lost this way with the only surviving evidence it ever existed being some photographs and a single part contracted out to a factory in space that wasn't destroyed in the war. Macross the Ride suggests the only reason the SV-51 and "SV-52" weren't lost to history is because a few SV-51s survived the orbital bombardment due to having been abandoned in underground bunkers during/after the Unification Wars. Variable Fighter Master File: VF-0 Phoenix suggests the VF-0 was another aircraft effectively lost to history until teams excavating the ruins of Edwards AFB years after the war found two battle-damaged VF-0A's from the CVN-99 Asuka II's carrier air wing in storage there and eventually turned them over to Shinsei Industry where they were painstakingly reverse-engineered as a lead developer's passion project. (Essentially, the adjustment of the timeline for events after the original Macross series aired and their impact on the development history of VFs effectively just moved the VF-1 from being the setting's equivalent of a 5th Generation fighter to a 6th Generation one.)
  15. Seto Kaiba
    It's a common assumption to make. The US Navy tends to target around 12 planes, but they do everything in pairs. The UN forces in Macross do things in threes and fours instead.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Kudzu is a perfect metaphor for it, not just because of how it is tangled and invasive and spreads like mad in every direction while being generally unpleasant to deal with... there are also a fair number of people who happen to enjoy consuming kudzu. Having watched the tail end of the Clone Wars in parallel with the early episodes of this series, I can kind of see why the creators assumed it didn't need to be explained. The witches attempt to invoke Dark is not Evil, but anyone familiar with Star Wars knows it doesn't work that way in this setting. The dark side is, for practical intents and purposes, the Power of Evil and a coven of witches that worship the dark side would naturally be a Religion of Evil and not something defensible. The previous depictions of witches in the prequel era are very much in card carrying villan territory. The most prominent group of witches in the Clone Wars could fairly be described as a Sith Acolyte talent agency. The coven's "magic" included things like necromancy, mind control, and standard Hollywood evil voodoo. They are so heavily villain coded that the Jedi can effectively get away with being dicks to them while maintaining the moral high ground, and even then the one survivor decided to carry on being maximum evil and sides with the Empire twice. The only way they've been able to make the witches even slightly sympathetic was by having them exterminated by a greater scope villain like General Grievous in Tales of the Empire. Other force worshiping religions depicted have been either primitive superstitions or other evil cults like the witches. Sometimes both. It's actually surprising the Jedi tolerate as many of them as they do. Especially considering the traumatic history the Republic has with the Sith.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    What little information we've gotten WRT squadron organization in the Spacy has put the number of aircraft per squadron at somewhere between 15 and 24. The sample org chart from the TV series era showed 15, organized into five three-plane platoons. Hikaru's original callsign in the TV series made him Skull 23, and various tech publications like Sky Angels and the later Master File series seem to favor a larger size closer to 24. (Sky Angels suggests there were approximately 62 squadrons active in the days before the end of the First Space War, accounting for approximately 1500 aircraft... which breaks down to a bit over 24 aircraft per squadron.) What he's citing is the Operation Stargazer taskforce. (Note the "aboard Stargazer, 2046 February".) IIRC, the only time we've seen the Northampton-class deploying fighters in normal operations was Macross 7 PLUS "Spiritia Dreaming", and they're shown deploying no more than a platoon (of VF-14s) in a completely different manner (via a ventral hatch instead of through the missile launchers. (I'm not counting the Gefion, the Northampton-class light carrier variant from Macross 30 which had an arbitrarily large hangar as a game mechanic.)
  18. Seto Kaiba
    They don't mention anything, but I'd assume they probably stripped out absolutely everything they could to make room for all of that.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    The Acolyte, being produced and partly written by a megafan, has a real problem with doing that kind of fanservice bonus. Like the most recent episode, we had that completely unnecessary scene where Green Karen has to kill a bug for no real reason in the middle of a conversation just to show that she's got that lightsaber whip they haven't STFU about since the series cast was announced. It doesn't add anything to the story - it actually interrupts a scene - but they felt that they needed to tick that fanservice checkbox and get that weapon onscreen so it got a pass. Those kinds of nods can be made to work in a story, like when Yoda visits the Sith homeworld and talks to the ghost of Darth Bane in The Clone Wars, but when they're just there for the sake of being there it just detracts from the story.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    There are definitely some legit cases of that in Macross. Operation Stargazer in Macross 7 is probably the best example of that. Northampton-class stealth frigates can carry a single platoon of Valkyries normally... that's 3-4 aircraft. For Operation Stargazer, Max somehow managed to squeeze about three dozen Valkyries into the frigate Stargazer for his surprise attack. An entire Super Thunderbolt squadron, Max himself in a VF-22S, Diamond Force, Emerald Force, AND Sound Force. There's no way that physically works, let alone as spaceously as the series made out.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Hm... an interesting thought, if nothing else. To be honest, most of what I've seen in terms of reactions to Disney-era Star Wars leaves me thinking that many of the franchise's current problems can be summed up in just six words: "The Expanded Universe was a mistake." If Star Wars had just done what most other franchises did and made its licensed comics, novels, etc. non-canonical all along we wouldn't have to hear the fans kvetch about how what the writers of these shows are doing contradicts some decades old comic book or novel or fact file. We also wouldn't have to put up with stuff like The Acolyte is pulling where the story is infested with unnecessary callbacks to comics and novels that 90% of the audience never read. They struggle to deliver a series that'll satisfy most viewers because a good chunk of the audience is determined to be unhappy with everything, and a decent percentage of the rest are just ****ing lost because there's more required reading for these shows than most college classes. Imagine learning that, to properly understand the story of a series that's currently only got eight episodes, you should watch TWO HUNDRED AND EIGHT EPISODES of decades-old painfully mediocre CG cartoons?
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Well, sort of. Palpatine/Darth Sideous refers to Darth Plagueis using masculine pronouns (He/Him) when he relates "The Tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise" to Anakin. Hopefully you see what I'm getting at there WRT your hypothesis... and why that topic could very quickly turn ugly for reasons beyond simple lore ones that we shall not discuss further. By that standard, anyone with a functioning memory, any kind of attention to detail, or any inclination to use Google to look up unfamiliar key terms knows too much... Because that's all I've got here... a good memory, attention to detail, and Google for when I get confused about who Quardlo Dungleflap from Bongwater XVII is supposed to be. That's pretty harsh. Granted, perhaps not unduly harsh. It definitely seems like there's very little middle ground between the Star Wars fans saying The Acolyte sucks and the ones blatantly white knighting for it.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Huh... if we take that view, then someone like me whose prior exposure to Star Wars is basically just the movies ought to be the ideal Disney+ Star Wars viewer. That I still find most of these shows to be incredibly tedious and overdependent on fanservice is probably not a great sign. I'm probably not supposed to be rooting for the bad guy, but here I am doing it... because he's the only character in this bloody show with an actual personality.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    In methodology, it's not much different to what Palladium Books did when they gave some internal layouts for various Macross ships in the original Robotech RPG or when they got Dream Pod 9 to design whole books of internal layouts for ships in Macross II: Lovers Again. They basically just tried to fill the internal space with strictly rectangular rooms and then tried to see how many silhouettes of VFs they could fit into those spaces.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Either that or Master Sol will arrive to discover the entire coven is actually alive and well... the whole disaster that drove him to decades of grief and traumatized Mae and Osha was actually just a prank staged for an episode of Space Jackass. Oh no... I could see them actually doing that... and the absolute bedlam that would ensue not just for lore reasons but politicized ones as well. 😵‍💫
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