Seto Kaiba

Eh... either way, I think anything that severs ties with all the pants-on-head retarded stuff in the Robotech novels can be called a step in the right direction. Sure, Maia Sterling was nothing more than an unnecessarily curvaceous cardboard cutout love interest for Marcus (who some accuse of being an author self-insertion fantasy persona for Tommy), but at least she wasn't jabbering on about the shapings of protoculture. Trying to develop an important character out something from Dana's acid trip "protoculture-induced hallucination" was always a stupid idea. But she WAS blonde in Robotech II: the Sentinels... which is what this turd is drawing on anyway. There wasn't anything they could do about the change in hair color between their adaptations of Macross and Southern Cross, but once they were animating their own trash they could aim for a little consistency. There shouldn't have been anything hindering them from creating a character who vaguely resembled Dana's delusion the same way they created that thing that looked vaguely like Louis Ducasse.

If only... if only... In the past he's taken credit for a lot of the decisions that occurred way over his head... I'll dig out a few after I've finished de-virusing my brother's laptop. Been at it for six hours already and there's no end in sight. Admittedly, that's not the most outrageous or outlandish claim I've ever heard Macek make... that Robotech II would've revolutionized how Americans view animation. The worst that I've heard from him is that the original creators of the Macross TV series thought his version was far superior to their own and had hastened to copy what he'd done with Robotech by de-emphasizing the power of music/song in their own sequels... y'know, just some little shows like Macross 7. The man talked out of his ass so frequently its a wonder his whole digestive tract didn't pull a 180... Nah, Jack and Karen had pretty much the same arc of character development that Rick and Lisa did back in the Macross Saga, which was what was lampshaded by Max in the first few issues of the comics and in the failed pilot/"movie". Admittedly, you've got a point about the failed tie-in to Robotech: the Untold Story. Wasn't there also supposed to be one with regard to the character who eventually became T.R. Edwards? (Orig. B.D. Andrews) Actually, I think they've shot that one down explicitly... Aurora Sterling never existed, Maia isn't meant to be her replacement. One would assume that if she WAS meant to be the girl in Dana's hallucination, she'd have bright blue hair like the novels character Aurora did instead of purple. She doesn't exactly fill the same niche Aurora did either.

To be fair... nothing Tommy Yune has done with Robotech really qualifies as "original material" either. The only real difference between what Carl Macek did during his tenure as creative director and what Tommy Yune is doing in that position now is the show(s) they chose to rip off when working their respective Robotech sequels. Carl wanted to imitate Star Wars and Star Trek, while Tommy wants Robotech to imitate the rest of Macross and the new Battlestar Galactica. Passing over the laughably sucktastic failure that was Carl Macek's sole attempt to actually do something completely original, all Robotech's creative directors have ever tried to do is take existing characters, mecha, plot devices, and set pieces from the original shows and put them together in slightly different ways in the faint hope that it'll be mistaken for something new and different. Outside of Robotech 3000, the closest they've ever come to creating an original character has been their occasional practice of making shallow copies of existing characters and giving them new names and faces. Jack Baker was basically Rick Hunter in miniature (even lampshaded as such in Robotech II: the Sentinels), while Karen Penn was basically Lisa Hayes all over again. The same goes for the "original characters" created for Shadow Chronicles... Marcus Rush is a shallow clone of Scott Bernard, Maia Sterling is a shallow clone of Rook Bartley, and Alex whatshisface is basically Ben Dixon. Whenever they need to introduce a new character, they drag out a cookie cutter clone of one the fans already know. The sad part is... this actually works pretty well for Harmony Gold. They can keep peddling stories that appeal to the nostalgia of their core demographic (30+ year old fans) while simultaneously minimizing the actual creative work that needs to go into producing new material. I guess it's a great racket if you can get in on it.

Decidedly so... and his unfortunate habit of claiming credit for the hard work of others and decisions he had nothing to do with got worse as time went on. Initially, he was at least mildly open about the fact that many of the creative decisions that made Robotech what it is were not really his ideas, and were forced on him by circumstance, contracts, and the network's executives. It wasn't until after Robotech: the Untold Story and Robotech II: the Sentinels fell apart on him that he started seriously trying to convince people that everything in Robotech was his doing and the end result of his grand artistic vision. He didn't even let the failure of Robotech 3000 and his subsequent replacement by our good pal Tommy Yune stop him, though he did change his tune slightly to claim that Macross's creators felt his version was far superior and had hastened to imitate it in subsequent Macross titles by de-emphasizing the importance of music and all that jazz. In the end, he had his pattern... everything that went right was his doing and the result of his genius, while everything that went wrong had failed due to forces beyond his control and/or whatever studio/sponsor they were partnered with at the time. Ordinarily, there wouldn't be... but if the editor kept most of the audience in the dark about the origins of the work he'd edited and released, he could claim to be its creator and get kudos for the work they thought he'd done, rather than his actual paltry contribution. He gets a lot of credit he doesn't deserve because he put twenty-odd years of work into lying about whose work it was, to the point where it seems that he succeeded in blurring the line between his contribution and that of the actual creators in the eyes of the gullible.

Just wanted to bring an odd error to the staff's attention... In the private messenger system, I noticed that if you're posting a message in an open conversation that has more than, say, five or six QUOTE tags, when the message is posted the quote tag functionality breaks and will display the raw BBcode for the message instead of breaking out the quote blocks like it should. At the bottom of messages where this occurs, the system vomits up a statement saying: The following errors were found Array

It does, at least tangentially... an attempt to account for the VF-4 being relatively unsuccessful (in the main continuity) despite it having been the main variable fighter of the U.N. Spacy for something like a decade, and supposedly having also been the fighter of choice for an entire generation of colony missions. As (sketchley?) pointed out earlier in the thread, with the production numbers we've been given, there's a bit of a disparity between the statements about the VF-4 and its use on the Megaroad missions given the relatively low number produced. "The Beauty of Recycled Footage"?

Just my two cents, but doesn't the Macross Compendium use the term "new Unity Government" to describe the reestablished U.N. Gov't? In that context, I would go with "Unified Forces/Military". I'd say, given the various examples of strife between some of the colonies and the Unity Government, and the later reformation of said government into more a loose coalition of states instead of a strong central authority justifies the nuances you're talking about.

Somehow, I can't see them having any reason to object to opening the panel via skype if they're already cool with public performance to the panel audience. Still, I imagine it would probably go over poorly to discuss the Macross legalities issue there when they wouldn't be able to directly shoot it down with more vague answers. Personally, I think that Mrs. Macek would probably be intelligent enough to realize that people are bound to wonder these kinds of questions since she's affiliating herself with a sleazy outfit like Harmony Gold and they've already shown they're ready, willing, and able to hijack any commemoration of his life to push their shitty products. "If" is also an excellent way to define a conditional statement in basic, logical terms. For example: If you weren't a self-righteous troll belaboring a point you raised because of a silly mistake you made, then I wouldn't have to report your post as the trolling that it is. See? Isn't that simple? All I've said is that if Svea Macek is knowingly permitting Harmony Gold to use her husband's death to promote products that he had nothing to do with and/or accepting money to help them do it, then I would be offended on the man's behalf. Regardless, while I feel that Macek's methods are still very much open to criticism even after his passing, there are some things that even I find to be objectionable or out-of-bounds. One such thing is the way Harmony Gold has made a habit of trying to attach an advertisement for their live action movie to most every commemoration of the man's somewhat dubious achievements. I'm frankly astounded that Mrs. Macek isn't similarly offended by the way they're using his death to plug a project he had nothing to do with. I know that if someone were using the death of someone in my family to plug their products, I'd have a summons on the desk before their words were even cold.

Not as such, no... the Macross Chronicle mechanic sheet for the Queadluun-Rhea (MacF Civ 07A) does say that General Galaxy got the contract to develop an improved version of the Queadluun-Rau in 2035. The sheet doesn't explicitly say when the Queadluun-Rhea ended up being introduced, but it does seem to imply that mass-production of the initial version of the Queadluun-Rhea (presumably Rhea/40) at the newly restored Quimeliquola automated factory satellite located at Eden's Lagrange 4. The wording of the mechanic sheet used to describe the Queadluun-Rhea seen in the series identifies it as the latest version/type, which seems like a pretty cut and dry statement that it isn't the original model. Based on its designation (Rhea/56), it seems reasonable enough to assume that it was probably introduced in 2056. Indeed... the Rhea does appear to have been around a while, though the version we see in Macross Frontier appears to be said upgrade, and a recent one at that.

Okay, what we have here is a clear failure of basic reading comprehension skills on your part here, terry. At no point did I say that's how it was, all I said was that it'd be a truly disgusting thing IF she was taking advantage of her husband's death to make a buck by helping Harmony Gold exploit his death to advertise what they're doing with the Robotech franchise. Even if she's not an active participant in Harmony Gold's exploitation of Carl's untimely death, you'd think she ought to be outraged that they're cheapening his death by using it to promote a project he had nothing to do with. In the future, please make sure that you actually understand what you've read BEFORE you start needlessly accusing people... not after.

Other than the "Stealth Regult" seen in Macross Digital Mission VF-X, I don't think that there are any upgraded Regult versions in the main continuity. Macross II and its parallel world continuity do offer some such designs... though not so much "upgraded" models as simply a different unit produced by a different factory satellite... the examples being the Mardook versions of the Regult (which is legless and gets around in atmosphere with a small gravity control system), and the Nousjadeul-Ger (which has a set of engines similar to those of the Queadluun-Rau), and the Neld and Burado fleet's versions of the powered suits and Glaug with different weapons setups and the like. Is it really any surprise? The U.N. Spacy puts a great deal of emphasis on operator survivability in their mecha, a concept that's the polar opposite of the usual Zentradi expendable clone soldier tactics. Aside from the renegade power suit from Macross Plus, it does look like the only unit the U.N. chose to improve was the Queadluun series powered suits. Obviously the uncultured Zentradi military forces are still using the tech they've had for aeons. I'm not aware of anything that says that the U.N. continued to use the Gnerl fighter pod after the war. The Variable Glaug is a notable exception to the U.N.'s general preference for their own technology, since they did go out of their way to produce a version of it that sported a miclone cockpit, which features prominently in Macross M3 as the primary fighter of adopted Jenius sister Moaramia Jifon. As seen in Macross Frontier, the Zentradi males serving in the U.N. Marines use the Queadluun-Rhea, which is several decades newer than the Variable Glaug by that point (the designation would make it a very recent design, circa 2056). There's a reason for that... the exemplar initially encountered was a Zentradi-produced prototype of a transformable Roiquonmi Glaug operated by Moaramia Jifon, who was only 6 years old at the time. Presumably the mass-production model would've had a cockpit laid out for use by a normally proportioned adult. The U.N. developed their own version, and fitted it with a normal VF cockpit suitable for miclones, which was later also piloted by Moaramia Jifon once she was a teenager.

Neat graphic... I've never seen that one before. The scale on the pilots is a little bit off, but on the whole it does seem to fit rather well. Where'd you find that one, if you don't mind telling me? None that I'm aware of, I'm afraid... were such a piece to exist, it would most likely be found in a comprehensive publication like Perfect Memory, the Gold Book, or the art book that came with the remastered edition of DYRL. I've checked a few of my more obscure old books and found nothing like what you're looking for. I'll do a bit more digging after I get done with breakfast, but I don't expect to find anything. Ah, now THAT has a straightforward explanation... you're right to think that the legs on the apparently U.N.-designed Queadluun-Rhea are incapable of fitting the operator's legs in the fashion the Queadluun-Rau appears to. What little we see of the Queadluun-Rhea's interior in the animation seems to suggest that the Queadluun-Rhea's cockpit is modeled on that of the Regult, and located entirely inside the mecha's torso with the operator in a sort of hunched-forward sitting position similar to the one seen here. This is presumably one of the design changes made to improve operator survivability (along with beefing up the armor around the cockpit). The Rhea's a whole different creature from the Rau.

Unfortunately, if such a diagram does exist then I'm not aware of it. The best I could find on perusal of the Macross: Do You Remember Love? Data Bank book (the "Gold Book") and Macross: Perfect Memory is the art we already have available on the Macross Mecha Manual. I'll check Entertainment Bible 27 and Macross Chronicle in just a second though. EDIT @ 05:10: No, neither Entertainment Bible 27 nor Macross Chronicle offers a better view of the cockpit than what was already available. Sorry. From what I've been able to discern based on this and this, it looks like the way it's handled is exactly the way you've visualized it... improbable as it seems. It looks, for all the world, like the pilot is situated with their shoulders roughly level with the center of the mecha's shoulders, and control both the arms and general flight maneuvers using the control banks inside the torso. The leg articulations look to be controlled by the movements of the pilot's legs inside them. I doubt the leg of the pilot goes all the way down, but it looks the hip and knee articulations ought to be controlled by the corresponding joints on the pilot's body, though the foot obviously will not reach all the way down to the mecha's foot, and is in all likelihood either operated automatically or on a pedal of some kind manipulated by the operator's own foot. To get a good picture of how the pilot shapes up compared to his craft in size, here is a size comparison for the DYRL versions of the Nosjadeul-Ger, Queadluun-Rau, VF-1S Strike Valkyrie, Zentradi, Meltrandi, and human pilots (also courtesy of the Macross Mecha Manual): GO.

One would imagine that if the idiots in charge at Harmony Gold were decent people (a longshot, I know) they would at least pay her travel expenses while they drag her out to various conventions in their ongoing use of her husband's death to promote Tommy's shitty Sentinels fan-films and the live action movie that doesn't look like it will ever happen. Really, I think it would say worse things about her AND them if she WAS getting paid to eulogize her husband over and over again as part of Harmony Gold's ongoing use of his death to promote the franchise. I can't imagine many things sleazier than using someone's death as an advertising tool, and for her to help them use her husband's untimely death to promote that hackneyed mess is just disgustingly disrespectful.

Oh, it's simple enough... there are two basic reasons why Harmony Gold can't do squat to these guys. You see, unlike copyrights, which are respected around the world under international law, trademark laws only apply in the jurisdiction of the country where the trademark was filed and registered. In short, there's really no way to register a trademark once and have it apply all around the world like you would a copyright. You would need to register your trademark in every country you wanted it to apply in. Not to say that there aren't some means to internationally enforce trademarks, but really they have no grounds for a complaint anyway... the Robotech "brand" literally has no presence there, and is contractually prevented from having a presence there by the terms of their license agreements and copyright law. They could hop up and down and make a fuss all they liked, but they can't do a damn thing about the expo's name. Not that I'm aware, no... the salient points of the court opinions have already been summarized several times over. It's a twitchy thing, posting full translations of the court rulings, since in some states (notably California) court documents and the like are considered copyrighted property of the government body that generated them, so an online, unauthorized translation could be problematic depending on where it's hosted. I think you and I actually discussed this before. ^^;

Eh... to be honest, I think their bizarre tendency to view the Robotech RPG books as tech manuals instead of game books has more to do with the truly underwhelming nature of Harmony Gold's official coverage of the characters, mecha, and story than an entirely justifiable loathing of the game system itself. Regardless of the sizable body of incorrect and author-created information they contain, the Robotech RPG books are still the closest that Robotech fans have ever come to having a reasonably detailed and comprehensive guide to the series. Outside the RPG books and their manifold errors, all they have are the teaspoon-shallow coverage in Robotech.com's Infopedia section and a modest assortment of fansites whose contents are generally even less accurate than then RPG books. Despite having been around for a good 25 years now, Robotech has never really had anything on par with the old This is Animation series of books, or any other official artbook. The best they've ever done on that note is the old Robotech Art books and Tommy's Art of the Shadow Chronicles, which is "Robotech Art 4" in everything but name. Those were hardly informative, as they were made up primarily of an overlong explanation of the production process (and how it went so badly awry), with a few badly copied pictures of the mecha and, if you were lucky, a glossary of key terms. Oh, I'm no stranger to Palladium's many inaccuracies... after all, my research into the Macross II OVA and its supporting continuity started as an attempt to sort out a few of the more obviously-incorrect things set down in the Macross II RPG books. To be fair to them though, the old Robotech RPG's inaccuracies can largely be put down to a lack of support from Harmony Gold that forced them to pay for translations of what little they could obtain in the way of artbooks, and to frequently fall back on the tried-and-true practice of freeze-framing the animation to count beam weapons, missiles, and the like.

Oh, there's no doubt that there are still a few determined dimwits out there in the vast hinterlands of the internet who are trying to have fun with Robotech that doesn't involve endless reminiscences and long-unresolved plot threads. Their efforts don't meet with much success... but at least they're trying, right? Here's a brief rundown of those I'm familiar with: Earlier this month, an enterprising thread necrophile by the name of eihwaz tried to build interest in restarting the long-dead Robotech MUSH by reviving the tired old proposal first tabled by Brooklyn Red Leg back in 2005. Needless to say, he's having no luck whatsoever. There's no mystery as to why, since most Robotech fans seem to be under the impression the RPG books are tech manuals instead, and most are too apathetic to invest time in such a game. Last I checked, there were also one or two modestly sized groups playing the old edition of the Robotech RPG on RPOL. I know they were still trying to recruit new players via advertising on Robotech.com, but I don't think they met with any success. I'm fairly sure one of the old Robotech RPG groups founded in the 2003-2005 period is around and active still... though I would hesitate to call it a proper Robotech game, on the grounds that apart from the setting the game's story has more in common with the old Outlaw Star spinoff Angel Links than with Robotech, and many of the mecha are stolen from various Macross titles incl. Macross Flashback 2012, Macross 2036, Macross Digital Mission VF-X, the videogame version of DYRL, Macross: Remember Me, and Kawamori's Macross Design Works book. Also on the RPG front, I had the great displeasure of being subjected to a fan-made RPG for Robotech based heavily on shamelessly ripped-off from D20 Future. The author (Jeebers) is still working on the game, as I understand it, though he may have finally given up on it due to everyone telling him to shut up about it and hearing that Palladium took a dim view of such things and might come after him for it. There has also been some noise from robotech.com user Jono and imbecilic moderator MEMO1DOMINION about their own Robotech Wiki projects, both of which seem to have been roundly ignored, though the latter seems to have only drawn attention (and of the malicious sort) from 4chan's /m/, whose acts of vandalism have been the Wiki's only actual contributions to date. One could also argue that when JT isn't being bogged down by the clouds of drama given off by jealous wannabe-rivals, he rather enjoys his work on the Protoculture Times podcast, though that falls into a gray area of your definition since it's technically also just reminiscences about how great Robotech was back in the day. What, don't tell me you expected actual SUBSTANCE from them this time around? After all, twenty-five is just a number... so is zero, and zero happens to be the number of people with working brains who expected the twenty-fifth anniversary to be anything other than another damp squib. Of course they're repeating the same old garbage... that's all they know how to do, because it's all they've ever done in twenty-five years of wallowing in mediocrity and failure. If their estimates here are the same kind of estimates they made back when they started work on Shadow Chronicles, we can expect to see it sometime in 2012 or 2013, tho that's assuming it doesn't die early on like most of them did.

Oh, naturally... though I wouldn't put it past them to attempt to duck the questions it would prompt later with their habitually vague responses. The exact extent to which the mooks at Harmony Gold itself are paranoid about negative feedback is unclear, though it certainly looks like their volunteer moderators THINK they are. Back when Maverick_LSC and MEMO1DOMINION were banning people left and right for asking awkward questions about Harmony Gold's (in)ability to use Macross designs, they justified a lot of what they did by claiming that Warner was keeping an eye on robotech.com and that HG didn't want them getting a negative impression of the franchise. Whether or not that's actually the case is certainly open to debate, but at the time I interpreted it as a blatant ass-pull on Maverick's part, since he was (and still is) a habitual liar prone to telling any tall tale to make it appear that he's an insider. Not just "us", mind you... quite a few of the more devoted Robotech die-hards are firmly convinced that it's an organized conspiracy of MacrossWorlders headed up by yours truly. I'm told that some of them even attribute events like the cease and desist letter sent to UEG Productions and the gradual decline of the robotech.com community section to the influence that shadow cabal of Macross purists and me in particular. I guess it helps them feel like the heroic underdog if they make us strawmen to rail against in the defense of the dying Robotech brand. (Personally, I find the whole affair extremely amusing. It gives me all the street cred of a supervillain without having to actually do anything overtly evil, and I don't have to worry about being beaten up by an overmuscled guy who wears his underpants outside a spandex bodysuit every alternate tuesday) Crap... now I want to attend one of their panels just to see if they'll try.

Is it bad that my first thought on seeing the title "Macross Trial Frontier" was a Macross-themed version of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney? (No joke, it's a bizarre mental image) Still, looks awesome. Shame I don't have a PS3.

Good question... can't answer it because this machine only has the one user account.

*sigh* Oh well, I suppose a ballpark figure based on a completely unreliable source is still better than nothing at all. I would be inclined to stick with the 15 fighters per squadron number though, since that at least comes to us directly from Macross's creators. Eh, if they had enough time to refit and upgrade Britai's command ship before the launch of the Megaroad-01 in 2012, it doesn't seem at all unreasonable that they would have had the time to outfit the ship with VFs. Britai's ship didn't seem to have any significant problems deploying Super Valkyries once it'd joined the U.N. forces in the original TV series, so I don't see any reason why the refit couldn't after they'd already had a go at upgrading it and clearly had enough time to staple some kind of command tower to the top of it. Now, if this latest news about the Megaroad missions using the VF-5 came from one of the unambiguously canon publications it would be big news. Unfortunately, it's from a source that reiterates a not-inconsiderable amount of material from an unambiguously non-canon doujin published before DYRL came out. We can say with some certainty that the Megaroad missions did employ the VF-5000 side-by-side with the VF-4 (thanks to Macross M3) and it logically follows that the VF-1 should have filled the role the VF-5000 did back before there was a VF-5000, but there's no evidence the VF-5 was ever involved. Granted, it's certainly a plausible theory that the VF-5 might've been involved in the Megaroad missions as a potential low-cost substitute or partner for the VF-4, but we've never had anything to suggest that it was actually used in such a capacity. It would've been nice if Chronicle had touched on some of the "budget Valkyrie" models made for the colony market, but I suppose we can't have everything.

Yeah... each and every one of 'em. The only one that generated results was disabling the on-download virus scan altogether in about:config. Oddly, I've noticed that it only does this "file goes missing" malarkey to the first file downloaded in each session... others downloaded after it seem to stay put just fine. This would seem to be an issue unique to Firefox-on-Vista, since I tested it on one of my other systems running the same antivirus program and the same browser version and add-ons, but on Windows XP, and it didn't have any issues.

You got my permission, feel free.

So, it's just business as usual then? Harmony Gold makes a big fuss over how many people attended their panel, and most of the people at the convention barely noticed that they were even present. Something like that... I remember Tommy saying something about the reason they wanted to redesign all the characters was so they'd be able to market it in Japan without getting sued six ways to Sunday. Eh, they cared enough to try to make some money on it again a while back... it didn't pan out well.

Okay, gotta ask... brand new legitimate copy of Microsoft Office Pro 2010? Is it a student license? An OEM license? If it's the retail version then I gotta ask... what's the catch?