Seto Kaiba

Either that or, as was mentioned earlier, they're a homage to the head-mounted 60mm vulcan guns on the RX-78-2 and RGM-79 in Mobile Suit Gundam.

I'm not a fanatical fan (or even a fan), but I just want Robotech to come up with its own designs and narrative instead of pulling, promoting, and fan-wanking from a bunch of near-30 year old cartoons. Oh yes... I don't deny that there are a fair few people who aren't Robotech fans who'd like nothing better than for the creative team at Harmony Gold to come up with their own original story and designs instead of endlessly sponging off the work of animators from nearly thirty years ago... but only the most fanatical Robotech fans actually think that such a thing will ever actually happen, and that the end result will actually be watchable.

Actually, wasn't the character's name originally "Mark Harris" before they changed the movie's setting from during the Macross Saga to somewhere in the middle of the Masters Saga? I know they originally wanted B.D.'s movie equivalent (named B.D. Andrews in the final script) to be a younger version of the character that eventually became T.R. Edwards, world's most obvious "secret villain" and serial backstabbing enthusiast. On balance, I think we can sum up the whole of Robotech as a long, tedious voyage through the painfully unoriginal creative debris left behind by Harmony Gold's practice of slapping together material licensed, borrowed, or stolen from people who actually have talent into something which only vaguely resembles a coherent narrative, then marketing it as their latest original creation. As one of the odder pieces of cinematic history, Robotech can sustain some degree of interest, and researching the licensing arrangements that allowed it to exist is a great way to learn about some of the more bizarre corners of copyright law, but only the most fanatical die-hard Robotech fans are holding out hope that one day we'll see a Robotech show that sells on its own merits rather than those of the licensed material used in its creation.

Well, either way... it's still rather unlikely that the 12.7mm antipersonnel machine guns mounted on the Tomahawk's head were intended for anti-Zentradi use. The Tomahawk is, after all, somewhat taller than your average Zentradi, which would have the 12.7mm guns shooting over the target's head unless the Tomahawk leaned forward or was firing at a target at a far off target. The gun clusters located in the Tomahawk's chest are much more logically placed for engaging both Zentran and miclone scale infantry, since the flamethrower and grenade launcher would be just as effective against infantry as the machineguns would be, and don't require you to point the barrel directly at the target, and the heavier machine gun and laser cannon would be much more effective against hard-armored Zentradi targets.

Okay, granted... it might be enough to inconvenience or annoy an unarmored Zentradi soldier, but the average Zentradi soldier takes the the field wearing a suit of body armor, and is usually located somewhere within a combat mecha made from overtechnology-derived super alloys and armored with energy converting armor. Let's also remind ourselves that Zentradi are made of somewhat sterner stuff than your average human being... the Zentradi soldier Hikaru shoots up in "Countdown" was still perfectly capable of getting out of his Regult and trying to continue the fight on foot after being hit something like a dozen times, including four times in the torso (once right below the heart), in the left shin, right ankle, both thighs, and left wrist with what (to scale) would be about a .44 caliber (~11mm) bullet.

Actually, in both the Robotech II: the Sentinels "movie" and the Waltrip comics, Jack Baker is introduced with what might be the world's least subtle bout of foreshadowing on the part of Rick Hunter and Max Sterling, who both remark on how Jack Baker is EXACTLY like Rick was at that age. You're mixing up Untold Story and Sentinels... the original protagonist of Untold Story back when it was set during the Macross Saga was literally a relative of Rick Hunter, not a carbon copy of him.

Oh yeah, I remember that... apparently better than you do, since you've forgotten it was me who called him out on his bullshit once I'd found a copy of the book. He was trying to put one over on us and frustrate me into ordering a copy of The Art of Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles from the Robotech.com store. Of course, I was the one who had the last laugh, since I disproved the arguments he and ShadowLogan were making and found a copy of the book for a dollar in a local garage sale. Unsurprisingly, I get that reaction a lot when I'm talking about Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles with people who only recently "discovered" Robotech and long-time fans who rediscovered Robotech after missing all the old comics, novels, etc. I'm used to people responding to the idea that Shadow Chronicles is actually almost entirely composed of recycled characters, mecha, settings, and plot devices with a mixture of denial and denunciation, followed by surprise, alarm, and exasperation once they look into it for themselves and see what I was getting at. When you get right down to it, Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles is a story composed almost exclusively of stuff taken from Robotech II: the Sentinels. The irony in this is that Robotech II: the Sentinels is a story which is largely made up of characters, settings, and plot elements from the Robotech TV series. Of the three new original characters in Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles, only one is actually original... Alex Romero. The other two, Maia Sterling and Marcus Rush, are watered-down copies of Karen Penn and Jack Baker from Sentinels, right down to their relationship and personalities. In true Robotech form, Karen Penn and Jack Baker aren't original either, they happen to be watered-down, simplified copies of Rick Hunter and Lisa Hayes. Everyone else is either a holdover from Robotech II: the Sentinels, a holdover from the Robotech TV series, or both. Somehow, I doubt they will... they wrote them out of the story pretty effectively in Shadow Chronicles. I think it's partially something to do with the voice actor budget, and partly that most of the New Generation support cast weren't really soldiers, so once the REF was back in charge on Earth they wouldn't have any reason to continue fighting. Only Lunk and Lancer were soldiers, and smart money says both were listed KIA after the forces they were with were wiped out. (Lunk's also a coward AND a deserter, so he has even less reason to want to go back to the military than Lancer) Yeah, I've noticed that... so far two or three people have been accused of being me in disguise by Maverick and MEMO, and banned accordingly. I find it hilarious that they're SO afraid of what I have to say and what I stand for that they're determined to label anyone well-spoken enough to raise an intelligent point as either my operative or a clone account. Calling it "baiting" might be rather generous... it was so pathetic I'm not even sure it could be called that. Oh yes... big things are happening for Robotech... the creators of Halo: Legends were inspired by Ichiro Itano and his work on Macross. Yeah, that TOTALLY has to do with Robotech. ROFL Well, the people they credited are, by in large, the ones who did all the creative legwork in writing the Infopedia, so that's probably why they were credited. I hadn't heard anything about them also doing the layouts.

Oh, that Macross-style split hull with with big honking beam cannon (Synchro Cannon) in the middle is something Tommy Yune added to the design... originally the Garfish-class troop carrier just had the one ventrally-mounted beam cannon turret and a handful of Legioss/Alpha fighters. To the best of my knowledge, nobody has yet bothered to scan The Art of Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles. I can see why too... the book is pathetic, and doesn't even live up to the aggressively low standards set by the old Robotech Art series. Just to give you some idea of how pathetic this book really is, let me give you a breakdown of some of the book's greater sins: For a 144 page book printed on a 8.5x11 paper, AoRTSC is surprisingly light on actual content. The foreword by Carl Macek consumes some 20 pages, is printed in about an 18 point font, and only the bottom third of each page is actual text... the rest of it is screen captures, box art from the Japanese originals (minus the titles, of course), a handful of Tommy Yune's "original" art pieces, and an aggressively abbreviated timeline. Carl spends most of the foreword talking about how great he is and how influential Robotech was. He neatly glosses over his failures and makes all the usual excuses for why various projects failed. Once you get into the actual book, it's divided into five sections: Worlds of Robotech, Characters, Mecha, Vessels, and Production. Generally speaking, about 2/3 of every two page spread is dominated by a massive screen capture taken from the movie, leaving the biggest pieces of concept art and line art no bigger than a 3x5" note card. An astonishing amount of space is wasted on concept art for rooms that only showed up for a few seconds in the movie itself, and the exposed structural supports in the hangars, corridors, etc.. The most detailed character pages in the book consist of a spread-dominating screenshot, a badly proportioned rough sketch, "initial concept art" reprinted from an old magazine article, a "color design draft", the final design, (all from a front or 3/4 angle) and a small text block not more than five or six sentences long. Many characters get only a single page, dominated by a large screenshot and one or two pieces of art. The mechanical design pages are, if anything, even worse... dominated as usual by a massive screenshot, and filled primarily with recycled Mospeada line art... albeit without useful things like transformation diagrams or explanation for the changes in cockpit layout. None of the new designs (Super Shadow Fighter, Synchro Beta, Super Cyclone) get more than 1/3 of a page, and the Invid stuff is squashed into the margins. The ships section is more of same, and the production section is little more than a dozen pages of shameless self-congratulation. All the information the fans expected to see... like character bios, mecha stats, and an updated glossary of terms, was truncated to fit in the minimum possible amount of space, and everything except the brief character bios were crammed unceremoniously into a four page section at the very back of the book. To add insult to injury for those fans, almost the entire section is material reprinted unaltered from the Robotech.com Infopedia, spelling errors and all.

Don't worry, that is on the to-do list... I've got the bulk of the data pulled together already, March and I just haven't sat down to go through it all, and there's the possibility that Chronicle might add to it in the immediate future. Right now, we have a more immediate concern in fixing a couple of missing pieces of art on the site proper. Nothing major so far, but I'm doing a link-by-link inspection of the whole thing to make sure everything's present and accounted for.

Uxi apparently didn't bother to check the Compendium or any other source before posting, and just assumed that the VF-17D and VF-171 use the same model of gunpod. On the one occasion where the VF-171's gunpod was shown being fired, it did have eight barrels.

Okay, that's at least halfway rational... it doesn't really work, but at least it's rational. Unfortunately, instances of original content in Shadow Chronicles are few and far between... and none of them are things you listed. In truth, the Haydonites and their leader "The Awareness" are holdovers from the old Robotech II: the Sentinels series, where they filled most of the common sentient robot stereotypes for sci-fi of the period. Under Tommy Yune, what little originality they had was traded away to make them more menacing... they all have the face of the Hal 9000, talk like Emperor Palpatine, pull dirty tricks right out of the Cylon playbook, and tool around the galaxy in generic cigar-shaped UFOs and fighters that look suspiciously like the remodeled Cylon raider flying backwards. Vince Grant's new "Super Cyclone" (apparently sticking "super" on it makes it technically a new design, lol) isn't exactly new either... it's a slightly toned-down version of a heavy weapons ride armor created for but not used in Mospeada, the lineart for which you can find in the Imai Files. Well, with Harmony Gold committed to using as much of Sentinels as humanly possible you were destined to get a pretty campy flick no matter what. Personally, I wouldn't complain about Maia's hair and eyes being purple... after all, in rare cases people can have violet eyes, and she IS the kid of two people who had blue and green hair respectively. The most troubling things for me were the hackneyed plot, the absence of most of the New Generation cast, and the fact that Janice Em2 was pretty much a cross between Data and 7 of 9 with no personality. Maybe we ought to start referring to her as DData?

Let's clarify... in the context of Macross, .50 BMG is a highly effective antipersonnel round when used against miclone infantry and light armored vehicles. It's pretty much a guarantee that it doesn't have enough stopping power to seriously inconvenience a Zentradi soldier wearing body armor, let alone a battle pod or powered armor suit. It makes precious little sense to put said machine guns up on the destroid's head if they're meant for use against miclone-scale targets and equipment. It's just a strange choice.

And on the third day, March rose again... I just completed a stress test on the server, and it looks like everything should hold up well even if we start getting huge traffic levels. About the only way I foresee any complications or problems is if traffic starts to exceed 5,000gB a month, which doesn't seem particularly likely. Since Macross2.net was largely disused while I prepared to switch my project to another hosting service and domain name, the jump in traffic caused by M3 going back online was easily measurable... over 1,000 hits in the three hours since your announcement was posted. Well, I'll do my best to make sure those updates aren't wanting for new information... I made one little change... since the M3 stuff isn't in the main directory, I changed m3-index.html to index.html so the splash page will auto-load if some visitors just type www.macross2.net/m3/ in order to prevent directory browsing. Just so everyone's aware, in the unlikely event that something goes awry with this new location for the Macross Mecha Manual, the quickest way to get it fixed will be to notify me by private message or e-mail rather than blitzing Mr March's inbox. I'm blessed with a bit more free time, so whatever's wrong I can probably get it fixed within a few hours. To be safe, I'll make sure Mr March has my cell phone number so we don't have a repeat of the service going down and the domain owner being unreachable. No dice... predictably enough, Macross Chronicle continues Macross II's fetish for the number 2 by having the VF-2SS's main engine thrust rating be approximately twice that of the VF-1S (25,600kgf as opposed to 12,500kgf) and doesn't list the thrust rating for the two sub-engines. All told, the sizable jumps in engine power in the main timeline are/were something that emerged after Macross II was made.

Um... you've scaled your comparison incorrectly. Just to put it in perspective, if we were to scale down the .50 BMG (12.7x99mm NATO) round down so that it would be the same size for humans that the normal size is for Zentradi, we'd be looking at a .102 caliber (2.59mm) bullet. That's about two-thirds the size of an average BB gun pellet (4.34-4.39mm), and less than half the size of the plastic pellets used by Airsoft pistols (6mm). That's not going to be much of a threat to something as big of a Zentradi. Something that small would be a minor inconvenience... maybe give them a bloody lip or an insignificant flesh wound, but nothing life-threatening.

Yes, it is... as you would've known had you checked the Compendium or some other reliable reference site.

Well, to be precise, it's a safe bet that what Tommy Yune was trying to accomplish by having the Robotech: Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles miniseries pick up right where Robotech II: the Sentinels Book 4 left off a decade or so before was to give the book added appeal by tying into and resolving the cliffhanger left by Academy's abrupt loss of the Robotech license. To that end, he basically did a brief recap of the last issue of Sentinels Book IV and then ran with it in an ill-conceived attempt to link the failed Sentinels series with Shadow Chronicles. All he really achieved by doing so was producing another confused, badly written story that renders the horrible old RT2 comics at least pseudo-canon... a nightmare for anyone attempting to resolve the continuity into anything meaningful. Honestly, I'm curious to know that too... I've yet to find someone who could actually explain why they liked RTSC, and not just why they think Macross Frontier is worse than it.

Now, if that's true it speaks volumes about the increasing desperation with which Harmony Gold is trying to maintain order and silence dissent in the Robotech fandom. As to why, we can only speculate. I know Tommy Yune and Harmony Gold have never responded well to criticism, though at one point Maverick_LSC tried to convince me that the reason he was cracking down on criticism of Shadow Chronicles because Warner Bros was keeping an eye on Robotech.com and Harmony Gold wanted to make a good impression. Eh, this is pretty weak tea compared to his usual antics... he's been posting some seriously juvenile stuff over on JT's blog and elsewhere. He thinks this weak crap is going annoy me and cause people to take what I have to say less seriously... and boy is he wrong. To be fair, Maverick_LSC doesn't know that much about what's going on inside Robotech either. He likes to pretend that he does, with the same old lines about how he talks to Kevin McKeever and gets all kinds of inside info that he's not allowed to share or talk about. It's bullshit, pure and simple. Like MEMO, he doesn't really know much about the Robotech story either. Eh, I suppose it should be expressed in more general terms. Instead of "Americanized", maybe just "Westernized". Of course, from my standpoint living as close to Canada as I do, we tend to think of the great frozen north as an informal 51st state.

I find their lack of Ishtar disturbing. No kidding... O_o

Eh, I'd lump that under "considering it beneath their notice".

Gee Jason, thanks for boosting the creepiness factor of Maverick_LSC's sick obsession with me and JT from "obnoxiously juvenile" to "Michael Jackson". Now I'm gonna have to mine my front yard to make damn sure he stays away. (On the plus side, the minefield should also deter my neighbors from letting their dogs use my lawn as a toilet) Honestly dude, I don't know why you're surprised. It's pretty much business as usual for Robotech die-hards to think that America is the be-all end-all of world culture and that nothing foreign is worth their notice, particularly where Macross is concerned.

So, death by alcohol poisoning within the first 30 minutes? Otherwise known as "drink the whole bottle before the opening theme finishes". Not surprising... I've heard similar remarks from other people who attended those screenings. Oh, is that what that was supposed to be? If he was trying to parody me, he did a pretty pathetic job of it... I don't think anyone actually got what he was trying to do without being told, and even then the only person who thought it was clever or funny in any way was MEMO. All told, when you stop to consider his behavior on JT's blog, his own podcast, and the forums he visits, this latest pathetic dig at me is a good deal more mature than his usual fare. I guess we could say it's a step in the right direction that he hasn't started in with the "how many dicks did you have to suck to get respected on MacrossWorld" again. Honestly, the way Maverick_LSC acts makes it extremely difficult for me to believe he's supposed to be a grown man who's trying to start a family. Between his penis fixation and his internet tough guy routine, I'd have a much easier time believing he was a petulant 14 year old. It wouldn't surprise me at all if this sort of behavior is the real reason his wife treats his anime habit as something shameful. She's probably afraid that if he starts talking about it in front of their friends he'll start acting like he does online. Dammit Jason... now I'm gonna be afraid to go to sleep tonight...

Honestly, I didn't... it seemed like a logical enough step, while the U.N. was devoting a lot of its resources, and likely a substantial part of its shipbuilding, to the emigration program. But also, we have to think of the assets they would also come across... being able to harvest necessary materials from planets and asteroids, and Kawamori's mentioned that the fleets also incorporate any old factory satellites they run into... so the expense could be said to pay off over time... Ah, my bad. And your evidence that the emigration program was limited in Macross II's parallel world continuity is what? I'm certainly not familiar with any. Granted, the known fleets are somewhat smaller in scale than the enormous fleets in the main continuity, but there's no evidence at all to suggest that the program was any less prolific than the pre-New Macross-class emigration program in the main continuity. We can say with absolute certainty that they were still launching colony ships as late as 2050. Also, as far as the whole "bumping noses" with other Zentradi fleets goes... remember that several of the major encounters were not coincidental. The encounter with the Zentradi Neld fleet in 2036, and the 2037 battle with the Burado fleet were instigated for various reasons by Quamzin, who had prior knowledge of Earth's location. We can't really call the Space War 1 encounter with the Zentradi and Meltrandi, since in those cases one fleet was chasing the other, and the Boddole Zer main fleet was chasing the Meltrandi gunship that became the Macross. I'm adding context here... in the dialogue in question from Macross 2036, Vrlitwhai is referring to one specific installation in Earth orbit, which was the only one they had at the time, and the objective of Quamzin's final assault. Not necessarily applicable to the parallel world continuity I was talking about... but interesting nonetheless.

For some reason this reminded me of a scene from Five Star Stories, where Amaterasu is watching an one of his old prototype mortar headds (the Auge Arusqull go into battle for the first time, notices it has an active binder (a low-grade energy shield) and remembers that he had originally installed it to protect the MH from what he saw as the inevitability of Molotov cocktails being thrown at it because of its disreputable original pilot Dougulus Kaien. Actually, I think Five Star Stories did something like that on a few occasions, in addition to putting all kinds of little antipersonnel lasers on the frame with enough of a field of fire to shoot straight down around the mecha's feet if need be. Dunno... it works well enough in Gundam, Full Metal Panic, and the other shows where the robot's head is sufficiently mobile to let it target units on the ground. I can't see it working quite as well on the Tomahawk, since that thing's head is fixed.

Actually, that reminds me... now that we have a canon thrust figure for the VF-2SS Valkyrie II we need to get that added onto the T/W ratio chart. Guess that's one more item to the to-do list... It just seemed right... particularly since "heresy" is pretty much what I was banned from Robotech.com and RobotechX for... (made all the more amusing and ironic by some of their number starting to refer to me as "the fact god". I haven't quite convinced them to chant "Facts for the Fact God! Books for the Book Throne!" yet... but I'm working on it)

Actually, that's not correct... In the parallel world continuity, the U.N. Spacy captured at least one factory satellite prior to 2036. Exactly which one isn't mentioned, since it's simply referred to as "the factory satellite", but it looks more or less identical to the one they capture in Super Dimension Fortress Macross. The U.N. Spacy captured another one shortly after defeating the massive 2054 Zentradi invasion force, which provided the technological advancements that led to the development of the mecha seen in Macross II: Lovers Again. Indications are that the U.N. didn't get big into building new ships until after their fleet took a real pasting repelling the 2054 Zentradi invasion, and prior to that spent most of their resources refitting existing Zentradi ships to handle VFs. Not-so-salvageable Zentradi ships were landed and remodeled into commercial and residential areas to facilitate planetary reconstruction efforts. Also, let me reiterate that the parallel world continuity DOES have a colonization program which was still running as late as 2054, when the Zentradi attacked a Macross-class colony ship 1.8ly from Earth. How many ships were launched isn't known, but they WERE launching them.