Seto Kaiba

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.

One thing I'll never understand is why, of all the things in Macross Frontier, belligerent Robotech fans looking to defend Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles inevitably fixate on Michael Blanc's VF-25G and its sniper rifle. It's not unique to Macross by any means. The earliest example I can think of off the top of my head would be the massive positron beam sniper rifle used by EVA-01 in Neon Genesis Evangelion, which also takes the cake as being far and away the most impractical of the lot since it needed to tap the entire national power grid to fire. It's not alone either, the Gundam franchise has done it at least five times in recent years... the GM Sniper (08th MS Team), GM Sniper II (0080: War in the Pocket), and the Dynames, Cherudim, and Zabanya Gundams from Gundam 00. In the Full Metal Panic! series, both Kurz Weber and Sousuke Sagara use 57mm sniper rifles on their arm slaves at one point or another... and there's a host of other examples. They can't ALL be ignorant of the fact that this isn't an original idea... yet they fixate on it anyway as though it was infinitely worse than most of the malarkey Robotech has pulled over the years, like the railgun-equipped ride armor, that stupid transforming jeep, and the wonderful robot pegasus from Sentinels.

Actually, according to the official chronology for what is now the Macross II parallel world continuity, Megaroad-01 launched in 2014... but the point is, I suppose, valid. There were an unknown number of Megaroad-class ships made after it, and several Macross-class ships as well, which were being made well into the 2050s. Then you're referencing Galaxy incorrectly... the intention of Macross Galaxy was always to find and exploit fold quartz and the Vajra. They went into it with the intention of kicking the beehive, so it's not fair to compare them to the poor sods on Megaroad-13 who accidentally woke the Protodeviln up. Well, yeah... the U.N. Spacy was used to stomping all over Zentradi renegades and whatnot with the Minmay Attack and whatnot... note that the size of the fleet was still enough to give even Max pause. One could interpret it simply as their being surprised that 500,000 years of slugging it out hadn't significantly reduced the available forces of the Zentradi and Meltrandi. (not out of the question, since Macross 7 and Macross Frontier both play fast and loose with which version of SW1 is right) *cough* Over 1000 Zentradi fleets remaining... the Protodeviln and the Vajra are minor collateral damage compared to that one looming threat. Isamu was piloting a single fighter with a next-generation active stealth system... there's a bit of difference between the military response appropriate for that and the military response appropriate for a Zentradi fleet.

Or, if you prefer a direct mention of a world colonized specifically because it provided a valuable resource... the planet in Macross 7: the Galaxy is Calling Me was referred to as a mining colony by its inhabitants, who were lamenting that they'd apparently run out of whatever valuable mineral they were after.

Ugh... we're definitely not off to a good start. It's always an ominous sign when a discussion of part of the Macross universe is preceded by "I was talking about Robotech and...". And from just from my brief skim-through of your post... I've concluded you seem to have forgotten what the original goal of the emigration program was... they weren't doing it out of fear of an imminent attack, but rather to make sure that if and when that attack came, it wouldn't wipe the whole species out in one go. As the emigration program isn't unique to just the main Macross continuity, I gotta make this a two-part answer. For the purposes of the main Macross continuity, the answer is complicated. So far there haven't been any known direct attacks on Earth since Space War 1, except for Grace's Vajra raid in 2059. There have, however, been encounters with rogue Zentradi (and Meltrandi) forces elsewhere... including the events in "Fleet of the Strongest Women". We don't know if there've been other encounters that haven't been listed in the timeline, but there are still a thousand or so fleets of Zentradi out there, plus whatever's left of the Supervision Army... so I'd say it's justified on the grounds of "it's better to be safe than sorry'. For the purposes of the alternate universe continuity surrounding Macross II, the answer is a definitive yes. The program was proved justified time and time again, with a host of minor Zentradi skirmishes through the 2010s and the 2020s, and major Zentradi offensives in 2036, 2037, 2054, and 2082... some of which encountered Earth by accident, some by design. There's also the little matter of the Mardook encounter in 2092 to vindicate the program still further, though they never did anything quite so extravagant as the Island Clusters... just mass-produced Macross-class ships and Megaroad-class dedicated emigration ships. Let's see... we've got the Supervision Army, a good thousand or so Zentradi fleets left, and god knows what else out in the galaxy waiting to kick humanity's teeth in. Insofar as where the money's coming from, let's recall that at least some of these fleets are privately funded... Macross Galaxy was funded in large measure by General Galaxy, and the Macross Frontier was funded by Richard Birla's interplanetary shipping empire. Use of factory satellites and the like probably cut manufacturing costs way down, and asteroid resource mining probably helps cut costs still further. Considering the above-stated list of threats still roaming the galaxy, I'd rather hedge my bets than get complacent. Also, Earth isn't exactly the center of the universe... they'd probably want to beef up the colonial defense forces too. Yes, but as we saw in SDF Macross, the Zentradi would still have overwhelming numerical superiority if it came to something like Space War 1 again... a few extra ships in Earth orbit isn't going to make much difference when they're all outnumbered tens of thousands to one. Also, there would (assuming there was no interim class) be 30 Megaroads, not 29. Macross-1 would be the 31st overall fleet in order for Macross-7 to be the 37th as stated in Macross 7. That'd make 55 known long-range fleets, plus an unknown number of short-range ones mentioned by Kawamori. Also, there were reportedly only 12 SDFNs. Who's to say they wouldn't have happened anyway? Recall that the U.N. Spacy encountered the Vajra for the first time long before Macross Galaxy. Humanity would've run into these hazards anyway during galactic exploration, so it's just silly to point the finger at the colony fleets as the root cause. Humanity's always had a big fetish for space exploration, so once they had the means to explore it'd be stupid to expect them not to. The Vajra were non-hostile until provoked anyway...

Not necessarily... we've already seen one prominent example of a fighter less advanced and powerful than the VF-25 that was perfectly capable of flying itself to pieces and killing the pilot in Macross Plus. Kawamori made it no secret that what was holding the VF-25 and VF-27 back in atmospheric flight performance was the fuselage's limited resistance to the heat caused by atmospheric friction at high velocities. Given the information available, we know even fighters designed to handle those stresses have enough engine power to destroy themselves under the right circumstances. It's simple logical inference that an older design not intended to handle those stresses wouldn't hold up nearly as well as a design that was. Kawamori rarely does anything completely illogical with his designs for Macross, so I find the idea that he might say the VF-1 could handle the stresses imposed by the VF-25's engines somewhat silly...

's no big deal... I've got a lot more storage space and bandwidth than I need, so it doesn't hurt my feelings any to donate some of the excess to a worthy cause. Sweet...

Oh good grief... this is easily one of the most asinine attempts to defend Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles I've ever encountered. Is he honestly deluded enough to think people will take an assertion like that seriously? He's gone from living in a fantasy world to being full-blown padded-room loony. Okay, I'm game... in what way was the plot of Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles cerebral? The story has no depth, subtlety, or nuance. It's a bland, samey little jaunt through recycled events, characters, settings, and plot devices which didn't explain squat. For the viewer to be aware of and understand the motivations of the Haydonites, they would've had to read the limited edition Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles comic miniseries. There's nothing cerebral about not explaining anything and throwing the viewer into the story in medias res. Unless the viewer was already familiar with the original series, they would have no idea who any of the characters were or why they should care. In no way is RSTC's story "cerebral"... it's just weak. Okay, I'm game... what does it mean when the people who have masters degrees think the movie has a weak, badly written story backed up by pathetic CG, spotty dialogue, embarrassingly bad voice acting, mediocre music? Maybe it's the other way around, and just the painfully ignorant and uneducated either can't spot a turd for what it is. His claim doesn't hold up... I've got a BS in Computer Science and a MS in Computer Security and I still think RTSC is a turd. Somehow, it seems a bit rich of him to criticize these elements, neither of which is unique to Macross or really all that absurd, when Robotech's central plot point is that everyone in the universe is fighting over pseudo-magical flowers with inconsistent properties. Be careful... Maverick_LSC probably thinks that's the wittiest idea in the world. Unsurprisingly, many of the intellectual fans were banned for "enjoying suffering" or "being disruptive" because they were criticizing Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles... and they were banned by Maverick and MEMO. Nope... Shadow Chronicles was written by Tommy Yune, Tom Bateman, Steve Yun, Ford Riley, and Frank Agrama, with credit to Carl Macek for the "original series".

Awww... that's a shame. I would've liked to read it. I'm always up for an expert's opinion. Considering the VF-25 and VF-27 are both canonically quite capable of flying themselves to the point where they burn up due to atmospheric friction (the VF-27 can compensate somewhat using its pinpoint barrier, but only temporarily), sticking those ridiculously powerful engines onto something neither aerodynamically nor structurally designed to handle them is a disaster waiting to happen. With thrust like that, and without an inertia store converter, there's a good chance of the pilot being pancaked into his chair if he opens the throttle up all the way too... Basically, what happened to Guld's YF-21 at the end of Macross Plus, but to a slightly more extreme degree...

Well, by way of an update, the old Macross Mecha Manual location (http://66.49.161.243/Index2.html) is now 100% inaccessible... it says that account's been suspended. The new location is just waiting on Mr March to finish uploading everything to it. Once he does, either he or I will post a link. If all goes to plan, the new location will be available for around six months until I get my new site set up, and once that's done we'll have a new permanent home for M3. I'll maintain the interim location he's uploading to right now for about the next six months or so in any case. Right now, all that's uploaded is the main portal to the site. I think he's still doing housekeeping and updates on his working copy.

Okay, one question. Why on earth would you want to do something like that? It's pointless. It's practical enough to keep a robust design in service longer with incremental systems upgrades if the role it was intended to fill hasn't changed, but to drag an antique like the SV-51 back into service by upgrading every onboard system is just pointless. Even if you can strengthen the airframe and cram all the new and updated technology into it, there's absolutely no guarantee that you'd get performance comparable or even close to fighters designed to accommodate those systems. The SV-51 was simply never designed for the sort of speeds or g-forces that would be imposed on it, which will make it much more difficult (if not impossible) to control at the higher velocities the improved engines are capable of. For that matter, it wasn't built to use things like pinpoint barriers, so there's the potential to mess with the weight distribution of the airframe, which could make it even harder to control. 3. Crash and burn after pushing the fighter well beyond the speeds and thrust ratings the airframe was aerodynamically designed to operate at. Offer really lucrative contract terms and scout for gullible pilots to compensate for the firey-crash-induced high rate of pilot turnover, and/or invest in a REALLY good ejection system.

Unless destroid armor also caught it in the shorts when Kawamori rolled up and added energy converting armor to the mix, something like a Molotov cocktail should be no cause for disquiet on the part of a destroid pilot... they were, after all, built for combat against ten meter tall aliens and their mecha. Eh, swapping the paired gun clusters out for something a little more versatile and, more importantly, a bit closer to the target... like the groin-mounted Gatling gun on the French C3-5 Mistral II arm slave from Full Metal Panic (bottom left mecha in the image below), or the chin-mounted antipersonnel machine gun on the MSER-04 Anf in Gundam 00. There are more examples of this, I'm just too lazy to dig them out. (EDIT + NB: The nominal destroid and "Poor Man's Valkyrie" known as the GERWALKroid has the same sort of chin-mounted cannon arrangement as the Anf... they even look somewhat similar...) Oddly enough, the Tomahawk's 12.7mm antipersonnel machine guns are mounted on top of the head where they won't do a damn bit of good against infantry at close ranges. (Can you imagine the Tomahawk running around bent almost double trying to sweep infantry with that thing?) The chest-mounted gun clusters are pretty clearly anti-giant weaponry... a laser cannon, a flamethrower, a 25mm machine gun, and a 180mm grenade launcher. No doubt they have practical applications against miclone targets too, such as destroying conventional armored vehicles and mopping up squads of infantry with napalm and/or shrapnel, though their placement would seem to indicate the intent was to be used against something about the same size as the Tomahawk itself (~11m).

Just from what I've heard about the early years of RobotechX, the site used to almost respectable as a venue for fans to express a broader spectrum of opinions without the tedious restrictions on content foisted on Robotech.com by Harmony Gold's corporate management. It was really just a safehaven for fans exiled from Robotech.com, and only started to go downhill in earnest once the nutjob contingent from RDF HQ and other such sites started migrating there with their crap about "true fans" and "Macross purist trolls". It went into freefall once MEMO got sick of his absurd claims about the Macross rights situation and Robotech's future being refuted and started banishing dissenting opinions to an invisible part of the boards. Um... MEMO is the owner of RobotechX. So yeah, that's how the people who own the site want it run. MEMO owns it, and SIGHUP does all the actual work. In my experience, the reason most fans blame Tommy Yune for the current state of affairs rather more than they do Carl Macek is the way he approached the task of expanding Robotech's story. Carl Macek's attempts to continue Robotech's story might've amounted to nothing more than a series of embarrassing failures, but he never had to stoop to rewriting the established continuity to make his stories fit. Tommy Yune catches a lot of flak because the first thing he did once he assumed the creative director position was to lay in with the retcons like they were going out of style. Substantial portions of the universe were deleted or significantly altered, and while he succeeded where Macek failed, his success came at the expense of additional retcons, further distorting the story and the setting. Tommy has basically Macross-ized Robotech a fair bit, excising protoculture fuel from the first two generations, majorly rewriting parts of the pre-Macross Saga history to something more in line with Macross, and deleting pretty much everything else that made Robotech separate and distinct from Macross, Southern Cross, and Mospeada. Basically, Tommy catches most of the flak for it because he fell into the same trap Paramount did with Enterprise. He invoked nerd rage in the fans by dicking with the established continuity and setting.

Who knows? Moreover, who cares? Pretty much everything in the "Robotech Sourcebook" is horribly off-model, and most of it looks like it was drawn by artists trying to "reimagine" the original designs in new styles... many of which just look lousy. (The little kid Minmei art gives me the creeps... it's a vaguely recognizable Minmay head hovering vaguely over a body that looks wrong in proportion and far too round to be human...) 's not quite the worst (or dumbest) thing in the so-called new comics... that would definitely be the "Mars Base One" short published in Robotech: Invasion, where they explain that the reason Mars Base Sara is deserted is because it was attacked by the Zentradi years before Breetai's fleet showed up, and that the last survivor (Lisa's BF) decided he couldn't get off-planet and went for a walk across Mars's surface looking for evidence of life until his oxygen ran out and he died.

Silly, isn't it? It's weird how when people jump to conspiracy theories and start pointing fingers, they start by pointing them at those least likely to be involved in whatever conspiracy they think is going on. Oh well... things are going to get REALLY interesting now that UEG has come out and denied the allegations of the other sources involved while claiming they're not going to talk about it or offer their version of why they received a cease and desist letter from Harmony Gold. If anything, that tells us something was going on that was rubbing Harmony Gold the wrong way. Despite their reputation for asinine behavior, even Harmony Gold wouldn't go so far as to start sending cease and desist notices without provocation. Even if the other sources are lying, they did SOMETHING to hack Harmony Gold off... Gettin' multiple, contradictory accounts here... gonna go get confirmation on the details from the other side of this later tonight.

I think so... though it's hard to tell. So much of the art in the so-called Robotech Sourcebook is either heavily HEAVILY stylized or just plain badly drawn that it's frequently hard to tell what's what. You should see the drawing of Minmei in there... it's kind of creepy.