Seto Kaiba

... and if you just go through the motions and do the bare minimum to make the story feel Star Trek-like as in Picard's third and final season, you might score some brownie points with the die-hard fans through fanservice but it won't make it an engaging or interesting series for the casual viewers who make up the majority of the audience. ... and this is why ever single origin story given for the Borg in Star Trek's 100% non-canonical "Expanded Universe" has been absolute garbage. First Contact already ruined the Borg by turning them from an inscruitable alien race who evolved into a symbiotic relationship with their technology and a completely alien set of priorities and benevolent (in their view) intentions into boring cyber-zombies led by an incredibly hammy and openly malevolent B-movie villain called the Borg Queen. The whole idea was incredibly stupid and they knew it, since it required them to repeatedly deny that the leader they'd created for the Borg was the leader of the Borg. It just got worse each time the Borg appeared, hitting its nadir in Picard's second and third seasons where the Borg Queen - who is definitely a personification of the collective and not at an individual being with its own agency according to the writers - is basically the last, lonely, pathetic survivor of the Borg collective. The last thing we need is another sh*tty origin story like Star Trek: Destiny to come in and reveal that humanity is responsible for creating the Borg. Yes, you read that right... in the relaunch novelverse the Borg were created as a result of something humans did. Specifically, the crew of the NX-02 Columbia. Ref. Star Trek (2009), Star Trek: Into Darkness, Star Trek: Beyond, Star Trek: Discovery, Star Trek: Picard... All attempts to make Star Trek into something un-Star Trek-like... and all, notably, massive failures for the studio and the franchise. Best known in this franchise as "the crew of the USS Discovery".

One thing that Star Trek fans have that I consider an advantage over the Star Wars fans is we've always understood that our expanded universe is pretty awful and that most of us are pretty grateful that it's all non-canon and always has been. License novels, comics, video games, and so on never get great writing and honestly the stuff that does get put down in those has no business being in the TV shows because it's mostly awful fan service garbage. The Borg are a great example of that because a couple of different explanations for their history have been tabled over the years, and all of them are incredibly stupid. Without exception. Strange New Worlds would tend to disprove your argument by virtue of its very existence. The problem is what you're proposing here is, of course, that spin-offs focusing on all of the different alien races wouldn't really appeal to anyone except die hard fans. To have a successful series on streaming you need broad appeal. And, to be frank, you need a cast that the audience finds relatable and interesting. That's why the main characters of Star Trek are inevitably human. It's much easier for the audience to relate to them if they are either humans or human-like aliens with allegorical relationships to human culture. The only thing that was standing between the franchise and renewed success when the first new TV shows were being planned was their obsession with making everyone into a miserable bastard. Everyone on Discovery is miserable. Everyone on Picard is miserable. Everyone in the galaxy is miserable. They made things so dark and so bleak and so very unlike what audiences expect from Star Trek that nobody wanted to watch it. It says an awful lot that as soon as they put the optimism back in, all of the sudden people were tuning in in droves and lauding Strange New Worlds as a wonderful installment in the franchise. If the writers working on Picard had kept TNG's trademark optimism instead of bowing to Discovery's obsession with bleak and dark, the series would probably have been much better received... and likely would have joined SNW as one of the higher ranked shows instead of being the second worst by audience rating. That would have been harder to work with, since at the end of DS9 he had ascended to a higher plane of existence and gone to live with the prophets. They're pretty powerful, and it would take an awful lot of tension out of the series if the protagonist could simply stop time or teleport anywhere at will or step outside of linear time whenever something inconvenient happens.

I prefer to take the view that, in his prime, Picard was such a consummate diplomat that he just never made any mortal enemies. To me, this moment right here is peak Jean-Luc Picard. He never had any big bad who could come back in Picard and just try to ruin his life since 90% of his encounters with hostile aliens ended like that. So instead, most of his issues in the Picard series are self-inflicted.

Oh my, the Borg got it way worse than our boy Worf ever did. It's a hell of a downgrade to go from being the franchise's second-biggest threat to the Federation behind Q to being an enemy that could conceivably have been defeated by the Pakleds in a stand-up fight. That's why TNG's writers conceded that the Borg were simply Too Awesome to Use. When they were introduced, their technology was so far beyond what the Federation's best that a single Borg cube destroyed a fleet of 40 Starfleet ships at Wolf 359 without even breaking a sweat. That really hadn't changed by the time of First Contact either. A single Borg cube once again flew right through Starfleet's best defenses without issue and was right on Earth's doorstep before Starfleet brought it down using a weakness detected through Picard's link to the Collective. In order to be a recurring antagonist on Voyager, they had to be MASSIVELY downgraded and it got worse the more they showed up. They didn't just lose the mystique they had prior to First Contact, they were straight-up jobbing and by the end one rinky-dink Starfleet science ship that left BEFORE the events of First Contact had killed the entire Borg collective. Q should've been warning his kid not to provoke Janeway instead of not to provoke the Borg. The Borg got between Janeway and coffee, and Janeway removed the obstacle. I don't disagree... just, y'know, there's that very human tendency to link the protagonists to the most iconic of their antagonists as "their" villain even if the same enemy is fought by multiple crews/characters. The Borg Queen might've been introduced in First Contact, but Janeway's the Starfleet captain the Borg Queen absolutely hated and even feared. Jean-Luc was less a mortal foe than an old flame who dumped her. So, to me anyway, it really doesn't feel like season three's antagonists were an appropriate plot. The Changelings were always a DS9 thing, the Borg Queen was Janeway's archenemy not Picard's. Really, it's more an issue with TNG having not produced a signature antagonist for Picard due to it bouncing back and forth between several weak ideas.

Bringing back Jean-Luc Picard would have made a lot more sense either as some kind of political thriller with Ambassador Picard and his staff getting up to some kind of high stakes shenanigans, or Starfleet Academy Commandant Picard overseeing a training ship. Of course, any of that would depend on the creative staff being able to write compelling original characters... and as Discovery and Picard both attest, they just couldn't. S3 of Picard was less awful, but it's still a pretty weak exercise driven mainly by fanservice and a cast reunion IMO. Better by far than the previous two, but a terribly low bar to clear even on a bad day. Pretty much, yeah... I've watched a bit of S4 and it's less dreadful than S3 but not by much. Inscruitable aliens is definitely way better than Green Space Karen as an antagonist... but the main issue is still that the cast are just unlikeable and Burnham has too much Main Character Syndrome. In absolute terms I'd agree with you, but to many fans there's a certain sense of propriety involving which character a particular antagonist is most involved with. We've gone over that in previous posts, so I won't rehash it. The thing you have to remember about why the Borg are really more a Voyager villain than a TNG one is that as iconic as "Q Who" and "Best of Both Worlds" were, those were what set the Borg up as Too Awesome to Use in the minds of TNG's writers. They couldn't become a recurring nemesis because there was no way for the Enterprise's crew to plausibly win. That's why they only show up five times in 176 episodes and 4 movies with only three of those being actual confrontations. Compare that to Voyager, where 26 of the show's 172 episodes have appearances by the Borg (essentially one entire season) and across which the Borg are repeatedly humbled and outwitted by a much less elite and much less heavily armed Starfleet ship than the Enterprise-D or Enterprise-E. It's what took them from their status as The Dreaded in TNG to just another recurring Trek villain in Voyager, and the epilogue of Voyager is what put them at death's door in time for Picard. The Borg set some kind of all-time record for most profound Villain Decay, going from bodying whole fleets of Starfleet ships without breaking a sweat to having Janeway repeatedly outwit and defeat them with a tiny science ship and then in a one-two punch to being SO RONERY and just wanting friends before being revealed to be down to a single ship populated mainly by the corpses of cannibalized drones that gets destroyed by a bunch of elderly retirees in their restored classic car. No other antagonist in Star Trek - and few others in fiction - have gone through such profound villain decay. The Borg were THE DREADED in TNG, but by the time Voyager finished with them they were bordering on a lethal joke enemy, and when Picard rolled in they were on the brink of dying out on their own before Jean-Luc rolled up to take them off of life support.

Well, that's what happens when you launch a second series as a "saving throw" built around the Star Power of a single returning cast member because your original series flopped. Not Viacom/CBS/Paramount's finest hour. Especially considering the finale of season three is basically nicked from The Rise of Skywalker... which was not exactly a great moment for writing either. "Somehow, Palpatine returned" "Somehow, the Borg Queen returned and assimilated everybody" It's the same picture. No you would not. That is pretty much exactly what Star Trek: Discovery is starting from its third season to the end of its fifth and final season. That was their solution for the second time they retooled Discovery due to its poor viewership and worse reception among fans. They moved the whole affair almost 1,000 years into the future (from the mid-23rd century to the end of the 32nd century). It is even dumber than Discovery already was. Bruh, Star Trek has ALWAYS been political. ALWAYS. From the very start. And it was NOT subtle about it. Saying you want Star Trek with "no politics" is saying you want Macross without VFs and music or Gundam without Newtypes and Mobile Suits. ... that actually sounds worse. Like, "an original Star Trek novel by William Shatner" worse. Nearly as bad as that one time Shatner wrote a self-fic about how the Borg and Romulans brought his ass back from the dead post-Generations and he solo'd the entire TNG cast before defeating the Borg forever and dying a second time. I'mma take a hard pass, esp. since the Borg have already suffered so much villain decay that they were practically a joke by the end of Voyager. This was just an undignified end to an enemy that had already begun to feel like less of a real threat than the Pakleds. (Which makes it all the weirder that the Borg Queen's got it in for Picard when Janeway's the one who wrecked her sh*t.) In the future, they might retroactively write Discovery's 3rd-5th seasons out of the timeline as a parallel world but I think we're stuck with Picard. If only because it seems to mark the end of a brief dark period in the Federation's history that presages a more hopeful and positive era now that the Borg are officially done-for, the Federation's post-Dominion War isolationism is breaking down, and they've finally given civil rights to artificial life forms. Enterprise was doomed from the start and its showrunners knew it... its biggest opponent wasn't the network, it was that audiences were suffering fatigue from more than a solid decade of Trek on the air and losing interest. The franchise needed a break, but the network wasn't having it. Picard was also doomed from the get-go because it was built on the faulty premise that Patrick Stewart's star power would be enough to win back the fans even if all they did was start a second series using the same formula as the failing Discovery series and swap their OC out for a beloved established character. They didn't realize that forced Picard to be so wildly out of character most of the time that he hardly seemed like the same person.

Master File certainly seems to lean that direction... or at least, the at-the-time unsubstantiated fear that this problem would be widespread and affect Zentradi and part-Zentradi was used as part of the justification for passing on the YF-21 in favor of the X-9 Ghost. That borders on an Obi-Wan Kenobi "Certain point of view". The most doggedly literal interpretation would be that Project Super Nova was officially a response to the increasing frequency of armed incidents between emigrant populations and the central military including civil wars, rebellions, and anti-government terrorist activity. A big part of the Advanced Variable Fighter concept involves making stealth attacks behind enemy lines to sever the chain of command and end conflicts with minimal casualties. The fear that the advanced technology of the VF-19 and VF-22 might be used in an attack on Earth by those anti-government elements also spurred arms export restrictions that contributed to the development and deployment of the VF-171.

I'm headed into a ten day "Death march" type release period, so I figured I'd relax and knock a bit more out before things go to pot. So... when Variable Fighter Master File: VF-22 Sturmvogel II finally gets down to the actual fighter itself... it kind of skips right to the prototype phase, mentioning in passing that the General Galaxy design team produced thirteen experimental testbeds (XVF-21) before completing the initial YF-21-1 prototype in early 2038. The prototype was completed around three months ahead of Shinsei Industry's YF-19-1, and had its maiden flight on Earth at the General Galaxy headquarters before being sent to the New Edwards Test Flight Center over on Eden for evaluation. Its test pilot at the time was New UN Forces Cpt. Holks Benetosch. YF-21-1 had a completely conventional control system, and was used to test the prototype FF-2450A engine, the aerodynamics of the prototype aircraft, and the stealthiness of operations with a fold booster. It was the primary test aircraft until the BDI-based YF-21-2 was rolled out on 17 June 2039. YF-21-2 was ferried to Eden by a Uraga-class space carrier. On delivery, Guld Goa Bowman assumed the role of primary test pilot after two weeks spent conferring with NUNS Cpt. Benetosch on the progress of YF-21-1. The reason a civilian like Guld was made the primary test pilot is because the introduction of the radical new control system was beyond the expertise of any existing pilot and Guld was considered the only one who understood the system well enough to operate it in testing despite the evident dangers of having the team's lead developer also serve in a potentially fatal capacity as test pilot. The YF-21-2's BDI was specifically tuned to Guld's brainwaves for testing, so it was considered too dangerous to allow anyone else to operate it. Testing went so well that it was considered to be progressing almost too smoothly, and with the YF-19 program at a standstill after the loss of the YF-19-1 in a testing accident, it's said that the General Galaxy team believed that they had the Next Main Fighter contract in the bag and that soldiers on the base were betting that General Galaxy's YF-21 would win in the end. It's then briefly mentioned that what ultimately screwed the YF-21 out of what seemed a sure victory was that the BDI system's stability was dependent on the stability of the pilot, Guld Goa Bowman... The subsequent section "Fatal Error" gets into the circumstances of the Macross Plus OVA itself with the gunpod accident that disabled the YF-19-2 (on 6 February 2040). It's said that the official reason cited for the accident was an issue with the ammunition management program resulting in the accidental explosion of the YF-19's gunpod. The case is said to be officially resolved, but without a clear explanation for how the YF-19's gunpod came to be loaded with live rounds considering that the test plan only called for paint rounds. It's conjectured, based on testimony and the loss of log files from the YF-21 shortly before the accident, that it was intentional sabotage on the part of Guld Goa Bowman. (Which was the case in the OVA.) General Galaxy knew that General Gomez, leading the investigation, was a part of General Higgins's pro-Ghostbird faction and lobbied to have the investigation dropped before they could be implicated, reasoning that if the Ghost X-9 became the next main fighter the YF-21 would still be adopted as manned support. It's mentioned that, ultimately, uneasiness about the reliability of the BDI came about as a product of Guld's increasingly erratic behavior. There is an interesting discussion there about the issues Guld was experiencing. Master File rolls with the idea that Guld's issue was less psychological and more a consequence of his heritage. The Zentradi are said to have heightened aggressive impulses as a part of their design, and some peace children born after the First Space War essentially suffered from a sort of impulse control disorder caused by their Zentradi genes. It's said that, in the 2040s, this was treated with medication while the modern approach is gene therapy. The belief that this innate characteristic common to the Zentradi was causing the unexpected behaviors from the BDI system was ultimately what scuttled plans to adopt the BDI on a production basis... though it's also mentioned the whole question was arguably academic, as the New UN Forces had decided to go with the Ghost X-9 by the time these problems were uncovered. The next section deals with the Sharon Apple incident...

It's more detailed than Macross Chronicle's version, but if you discount the parts about the motivations behind Project Super Nova being phantom enemies and the Spica Shock, it's not exactly contradictory. Ludmilla Blackwood is a non-canon character invented for Master File, but General Higgins's role as the #1 supporter of the Ghostbird project is a part of the official setting as is Guld's educational background and the nature of his pilot license. Argus Selzer is also an official setting (mentioned only) character.

Assuming they get that far, probably. If ~100 chapters = 1 season or 1 Saga = 1 season, we're looking at the possibility of Brook in season 5 or thereabouts? Season one is a cut-down version of the East Blue Saga, so presumably next season will be the Alabasta Saga with Baroque Works as the Big Bad (which they teased in this season), then Sky Island, then Water 7, then Thriller Bark, the Summit War, Fishman Island and the timeskip, Dressrosa, Whole Cake Island, Wano, and the Final Saga/Laugh Tale assuming they go all the way. I'd assume Brook will probably be changed quite a bit if they get far enough to adapt Thriller Bark since his signature line (besides singing Binks's Sake) is just sexual harassment... which probably won't go over well.

Yeah, I saw a lot about that when the news dropped that Games Workshop was discontinuing a whole bunch of legacy Firstborn kits.

I covered this one a while back based on the trailers. It looks like season one is a pretty condensed adaptation of the East Blue Saga, the first six story arcs and approximately the first 100 chapters of the manga. The first four story arcs (Romance Dawn, Orange Town, Syrup Village, and Baratie) are where Luffy acquires Zoro, Nami, Usopp, and Sanji respectively. The fifth, Arlong Park, is the fight against the fishman pirates, and the sixth (Loguetown) is the windup to Luffy and his crew actually entering the Grand Line where the main story kicks off. (Basically, this entire season is prologue.)

Gettin' caught up on a few titles... Jujutsu Kaisen has started running again, and I have to say that I enjoy this series so much more when it forgets about the supernatural action and is just the main trio messing about as ordinary teenagers. It's just so relentlessly grim otherwise that I have a hard time caring what happens to the joyless, unlikeable characters infesting the story. Undead Girl Murder Farce is speeding into its first season's final story arc, with the team now going after werewolves who appear to be behind a string of murders in an isolated village. Still interesting, still entertaining, I'm hopeful it'll end on a high note because I've enjoyed the hell out of it so far. Classroom for Heroes... isn't worth anyone's time. It is a form letter exercise in the standard "the ultimate hero is reincarnated, tries to lead a normal life, fails to be even slightly inconspicuous, and gets a harem" storyline that has been garbage every time it's been done. My Tiny Senpai is devolving into similarly form letter ecchi fanservice with little semblance of an actual story and less of character development. I feel like I've insulted the writer of My Senpai is Annoying after initially thinking it was a copycat of that series with the genders flipped. Probably gonna start The Legendary Hero is Dead!, season two of the gun-eatingly insane sports anime Birdie Wing, Yuri is My Job, or go back a bit and watch Ai Tenchi Muyo! or Tenchi Muyo GXP: Paradise Starting.

So... continuing from where I left off... The VF-22 Master File skims over the actual creation of General Galaxy and talks instead about how the newly founded General Galaxy made a habit of scouring the population of Zentradi left on Earth to find individuals with particularly high aptitude for the sciences and engineering. It's noted that while the Zentradi are little different to humans in terms of intelligence, that most first-generation Zentradi immigrants to Earth were of the combatant types who were more inclined towards/interested in physical activity. Those who had been assigned to headquarters and logistics type roles were apparently had an easier time transitioning to research and development work. General Galaxy's dev team ultimately ended up with less than twenty engineers initially, many being individually-tutored Zentradi recruited personally by Kurakin. Argus Selzer, formerly known as Toran 825, is said to have been Alexei Kurakin's top student and inherited leadership of the company and the position of the company's chief engineer after Kurakin's untimely passing in a flight test accident in 2026. That section wraps up with the mention that, as "peace children" born after the First Space War began entering the workforce one particularly noteworthy half-Zentradi by the name of Guld Goa Bowman was considered the most promising new recruit to General Galaxy's VF Development Division. The next section goines into Guld's own history a bit. It's noted that, while he was enrolled in the Aeronautical College of Engineering on Eden, he obtained a Valkyrie pilot license through the New UN Forces internship system. On graduation, he moved to Earth to take a position at the General Galaxy head office in the VF Development Division as a flight control systems researcher, where he caught the eye of Argus Selzer. When Project Super Nova was initiated, General Galaxy held an internal review of independent research to select systems best able to meet the military's need and Bowman's proposal for a radical new man-machine interface (the Brain Direct Interface) was adopted. It's noted that it wasn't entirely accurate to refer to Guld as the YF-21's chief engineer, but General Galaxy made a concerted internal effort to credit him with more involvement in the project out of respect for him after his unfortunate passing in the Sharon Apple Incident. They also note that, out of respect for him and his contributions, the development base "Guld Works" was named in his honor. There's mention of a large number of experimental aircraft including a number of modified VF-9s and VF-14s that were used to evaluate various aspects of the YF-21's proposed design including the deformable wings and the adoption of the Inertia Vector Control System. Two are described in some detail... a unit codenamed GG-103 that was used as a test platform for the YF-21's deformable wing and a unit GG-106 that was used to evaluate the YF-21's battroid mode body plan after testing revealed significant issues with the introduction of the inertia vector control system to older models on an experimental basis. There are some mentions of how the New UN Forces mandated that various parts be used, occasionally from third-party or rival corporations, and that there were some attempts at sabotage by supplying defective parts to the parts pool the New UN Forces assembled that were then randomly sent to either Super Nova developer. It's mentioned that there was apparently some dispute among the design team working on the YF-21 whether to adopt a three-hulled/trimaran design similar to the VF-4 and VF-14 and accommodate the military's armament requirements by increasing the space between the engine nacelles or to adopt a more radical design that focused on internal storage to focus on better stealth performance combining passive and active stealth. Bowman was a champion of the latter proposal that ultimately won out. Guld supposedly missed the completion of the YF-21-1 because he was busy at Eden Aeronautical Institute of Technology completing the prototype of the BDI for Unit 2. There's mention of Dr. Ludmilla Blackwood, a frequently recurring character in Master File, having been one of the lead developers of both the next-generation airframe control AI ARIEL used on the VF-19 and production VF-22 and the self-learning AI used on the Ghost X-9 and Sharon Apple system having been potentially in communication with both Guld Goa Bowman and Jan Neumann of the YF-21 and YF-19 teams respectively and helping resolve the issues of making the airframe control AI play nicely with Guld's BDI system.

Never been a Space Marine player myself, but I've always liked the Mk.VI helmet. It's iconic of the older editions of WH40K, and now particularly of the Horus Heresy since the Mk.VI was introduced by the loyalists during the Heresy. I'd like to see JOYTOY do some Heresy-era stuff so I can maybe get a Garviel Loken, a Sigismund, or maybe someone like Aeonid Theil... the Ultramarines had way more character in the Heresy than the boring pack of starcharses they are in modern 40K, even if the entire galaxy was actively taking the piss out of them in 30K.

As it's a holiday, and for once I'm not being dragged into the office anyway, I decided to spend some quality time with Variable Fighter Master File: VF-22 Sturmvogel II. This is definitely one of the less-good Master File books and it takes a lot of weird liberties with the VF-22 design... but there are still some interesting tidbits here and there, esp. as it's written from a point around 13 years after the in-universe publication of Variable Fighter Master File: VF-19 Excalibur. Like the VF-19 book, the VF-22 book spends a fair amount of the introduction praising the VF-11 as an extremely capable multirole VF that was overwhelmingly superior to Zentradi battle pods one-on-one to the extent that the New UN Forces considered it unthinkable that they would lose in an even fight. This VF-22 book goes a bit farther and asserts that the VF-11 had no noteworthy drawbacks and that as a result development stagnated somewhat because the only perceived needs for other/newer models were to cover roles that the VF-11 wasn't designed for. Unlike the VF-19 book, the VF-22 book walks back the idea that the "Spica Shock" - the incident in which a Zentradi main fleet appeared and destroyed the colony on Alpha Virginis III in 2037 - was the prime motivation for Project Super Nova. Instead, it paints a picture of both Shinsei Industry and General Galaxy lobbying the New UN Government to approve development of new model VFs on two points: Preventing the stagnation of technological development. The existence of "unknown threats" in the galaxy. In the former case, there's an interesting take on the subject of an unmanned (all-Ghost) air force in which it's presented as being proposed by Shinsei and General Galaxy as a far future ideal that was fundamentally unworkable at present. The reason? Employment. Due to the size and nature of emigrant fleets, the military was one of the largest employers of young adults who'd grown up in the aftermath of the First Space War and they couldn't feasibly switch to an all-Ghost airforce without tanking the economy. Nevertheless, that idea was carried forward by a faction in the military headed up by General Higgins while an opposing faction championed the continued development of manned fighters through the Super Nova project. The latter point carries an interesting implication on its own. Namely, it suggests that the New UN Forces may have been aware of at least two specific threats before they were officially encountered. The first mentioned is the Protodeviln. The VF-22 Master File suggests that the New UN Forces were at least partly aware of a possible energy lifeform on the Varauta system's ice world for years before they were accidentally released by the Blue Rhinoceros Corps. The other unknown-at-the-time threat mentioned is the Vajra, who the book asserts have (at the time of the book's writing in 2063) come to be regarded as potentially responsible for a number of unexplained incidents in which survey fleets had lost ships and carrier-based aircraft without explanation. The Spica Shock was apparently the coup de grace that convinced the New UN Government and New UN Forces that, in all likelihood, the two defense corporations had a pretty good point. After dinner, I'm gonna dig into the next section, that seems to be about Alexei Kurakin's founding of General Galaxy and his training of handpicked Zentradi students to become General Galaxy's core development team.

The MEP prototype that was sold at auction on eBay would have been, had it been completed and green-lit for production and sale. I'm not sure how selling the .stl files would be classified... esp. if the licensee they were made for is getting out of the franchise. 🤷‍♂️ It was one-of-a-kind... but now that the .stl files used to prototype it are in the wild, well, I wouldn't be surprised if the person who paid over two grand for the poor-quality physical prototype that anyone can now recreate for about $40 between the cost of the .stl and printer filament feels a bit scammed. That's the great advantage of model kits... they can be a lot more screen accurate since they don't have to make most of the concessions that come with transforming.

I would. That's kind of the pattern we've been following for the last 23 years and counting. The toy licensee in question will do all of the VF-1 variants, then they either give up or move on to the MOSPEADA mecha. Then they give up. They never ever move on to Southern Cross. It has been thus ever since Toynami had the license and refused to even consider doing the Southern Cross designs because the expected return on investment was much too low. With no Japanese toys to copy, anyone doing Southern Cross mecha toys is going to have to invest a lot more time, money, and effort into designing the toys from scratch. That will naturally have implications for quality and cost, but it's also going to make it significantly harder to turn a profit. Southern Cross is the basis for Robotech's least popular saga, and with sales already falling precipitously when they transition from Macross to MOSPEADA the expectation would be the sales will slip even further when they switch to Southern Cross. Selling a large number of toys will almost certainly be impossible, so they can do one of two things: raise the price or reduce the quality. The problem is that doing either to the extent that it makes the toy profitable effectively precludes production. And if the licensees Harmony Gold had 23 years ago couldn't find a way to make the toy profitable when interest in Robotech was peaking, they're sure as hell not going to find it now a good decade after the franchise curled up and died for the second time. This toy prototype that ended up being sold at auction is a product of failing to look before one leaps.

Not surprised. I guess the folks who were bidding on it have a proper understanding that there will probably never be an official commercially available transforming Spartas toy. It really is a one of a kind collectible. And with the amounts some of the robotech fans have pledged to things like kickstarters, this isn't even that much.

You're building your argument on the basis of a nonscale 3D model from a video game and a fanmade doujinshi. Those aren't exactly reliable sources. Especially given how many liberties the doujinshi takes and how it ignores a number of design choices that we know were made in-series. I'm not going to get into this with you again... I just do not believe your argument has a sound evidentiary basis. This, however, is potentially food for thought and fodder for productive discussion. If you think about it, there is actually a pretty good reason for this disparity to exist... though it probably wouldn't occur to people who haven't spent an indecent amount of time in and around old warship museums. Indeed, a fair amount of this would not have occurred to me at all without spending a rather lengthy day rummaging around in the guts of an old Forrest Sherman-class destroyer in parts that tourists would not normally be allowed to visit. Quite a lot of the weight of a traditional ocean-going warship is tied up in design features that are necessary for an ocean-going warship but not really needed in a dedicated space warship like the Northampton-class. The keel, the armored conning tower, the waterline armor belt, the heavily armored magazines for gunpowder and other explosives... and so on and so forth. These are, for the most part, substantially thick chunks of extremely heavy armor-grade steel scattered throughout the ship's structure. A space warship has no need of a weighted keel for stability or as a primary structural member. The armor belt and armored conning tower are not particularly useful since attack can come from any direction and quite frankly no amount of armor protects from some of the weapons being used. There's no need for heavily defended magazines because the main armaments are energy weapons and reaction warheads that contain no explosives and cannot be set off by enemy fire. So with the benefit of not needing all of that heavy defensive equipment and the benefit of being able to build the ship out of fictional supermaterials that far exceed the structural strength and damage resistance of humble armor-grade steel, the ship can be a lot lighter and a lot roomier without compromising on defense. It's particularly important that the ships can (and do) cheat up their armor strength using the same energy conversion armor technology used on VFs making the thinner but much tougher layered laminated armor more resilient by pumping it with electromagnetic pulses produced using electrical power from the thermonuclear reactor(s). Unlike a modern fission reactor, the reactors in Macross's ships can be made very small thanks to the advanced alien technology that allows for practical aneutronic fusion via gravity control and power generation using high efficiency thermoelectrics, so a huge chunk of the mass of a modern nuclear warship made up of shielding and steam systems is simply unnecessary. Then, of course, there's the question of the size of some of this equipment thanks to alien futuretech. The compact thermonuclear reactor in the VF-1's engines is about the size of a beach ball and it can still generate 650MW+. If you can get a gigawatt out of a power system roughly the size of a large suitcase, the actual reactors for these ships are probably not much bigger than a minivan. Not to mention a lot of space can be saved by colocating the reactors with the engine nozzles, since the main propulsion system uses plasma from the reactor as the primary propellant. So... yeah, you aren't exactly wrong when you accuse these ships of being big empty boxes. That's what they canonically are. It's even in the name of an entire category of ships, the ARMDs. They're a box full of fighters with some crew quarters, fuel tanks, guns, and engines grafted on. They can be light because the structural requirements to build them aren't the same as oceangoing ships, the materials are lighter and stronger, and the systems needed to support them are extremely compact thanks to alien technology and some savvy design. These ships are acknowledged to be made structurally simple in order to be highly versatile and easy to mass produce, after all. Macross Chronicle is a compilation of previously existing materials, for the most part. Reconsidering the official stats was not a normal part of its objective.

They're doing one for the Grey Knights baby carrier?

TBH, kinda disappointed that all the Space Marine JOYTOYs have been Primaris marines. Kinda wanna get a Beakie for old times sake. I ended up getting their (Primaris) Marneus Calgar and an Ultramarines standard bearer to go on the shelves where I keep the WH40K books. Dark Eldar line when? (I know we always get the short shrift but c'mon...)

Let's be honest, if someone developed an actual usable transforming robot for the military we would all absolutely be clamoring for models of it. Even though the Northampton-class is ostensibly a dedicated space warship it can probably make a water landing the way many other ships in Macross can. There are likely quite a few exterior hatches for taking on supplies and munitions that could be used to embark and disembark crew under those circumstances. I suppose that, since the ship's missile launchers are large enough to launch a VF though, they could also use those as a hatch for loading/unloading. Of course, the official answer would have to be that the Northampton-class has an internal hangar with an odd sort of ramp on the underside that's only seen in Macross 7 PLUS's episode "SPIRITIA DREAMING". They apparently have enough space to hold a few VFs (they're shown launching VF-14s) so presumably there's space up there for a small launch or two to transfer personnel and supplies. Strictly speaking, only one of those is an actual shuttle... the one Walkure uses as an orbit-to-surface transport in Macross Delta. Sheryl Nome doesn't have a private transport. She gets around using Galaxy Starliners: the fold-capable spacefuture equivalent of commercial passenger jets. She arrives in the Macross Frontier fleet as one of many passengers aboard a regular commercial flight from wherever her previous tour stop was, and the Frontier gov't later charters a flight on a Galaxy Starliner to take her to Gallia IV in order to suppress the discontent among the Zentradi troops stationed there. (It let them reuse the same starliner CG model.) The Konig Monster has a mode called shuttle but it isn't really one. It can't carry passengers in its stock state. The reason it can in Macross Frontier is because SMS upgraded its Konig Monster in various ways including the installation of a modern EX-Gear flight control system. Thanks to those upgrades, operations that previously required a pilot and two gunners can now all be managed by a single pilot, leaving the two gunner seats free in the cockpit. Presumably the modern New UN Forces have some kind of compact launch used for casual transport of personnel and supplies between ships that we just haven't seen. There were quite a number of specialist auxiliary craft shown in Macross 7 including police patrol vehicles, transports large enough to move Valkyries and bulk cargo, etc.

That's not just true, and an astonishingly low bar to clear, it was also essentially my point. 99% of the time, the answer to "Why is it like that?" in Southern Cross is "because nobody thought this through." "Why do the almost exclusively Western European space colonists wear impractical samurai-inspired body armor?" Because the armor was designed for another series concept that didn't get green-lit and the show's staff were pressed for time and couldn't be arsed to design something that actually fit with the final product's design aesthetic. "Why is the Spartas's crew compartment exposed in two of its three modes?" Because the studio massively underestimated the difficulty of designing a believable transforming robot. etc.

Golly, those goalposts moved quick once I demonstrated there were actual explicit artistic and symbolic reasons rather than just "Rule of Cool". I'd point out that the pilots aren't Stormtroopers, they're Navy personnel not Army. The other examples are from films made over thirty years later by a completely different set of filmmakers so it's not exactly surprising that the new team may have their own artistic vision separate from that of the original creators. Stormtroopers of other colors might be running on "rule of cool" rather than an intentional artistic statement, potentially because the stormtrooper armor itself has become symbolic of fictional fascism. The aforementioned fascist symbolism is specific to Star Wars's Stormtroopers. There doesn't seem to be any real artistic statement behind the Arming Doublet in Southern Cross. It's a holdover from an earlier series concept that Tatsunoko recycled to save time as they rushed Southern Cross into production to meet the network and licensee deadlines. It was originally sci-fi ou-yoroi armor for a Sengoku period drama IN SPACE but due to that concept being dropped in favor of chasing the trend set by Gundam and Macross it was imported into a setting that doesn't have a strong Japanese cultural bias the way a space fantasy version of Japan's warring states period did. It'd make sense in context of Glorie had a large Japanese population or something along those lines, but the series has only one minor asian character and the rest of its design aesthetic lacks any overtly Japanese stylistic touches. The Arming Doublet and its samurai-inspired design aspects don't make sense in context, it's obviously impractical, there's no in-universe explanation to justify it. This is potentially a political topic, so I want to avoid making it political by keeping it in abstract terms. Research costs money, which is why researchers look for corporate backing, for investors, for grant money, and so on. The more you fund research in a field the more that field will advance and produce usable results. Military technology produces the most, and most visible, results because that's the field developed nations throw the most money at by literal orders of magnitude.