Seto Kaiba

Well, as far as the energy demands of the pinpoint barrier go it seems fairly safe to assume that reactor output and/or efficiency would've improved over the 30 years since the VF-1. Of course, how much they've improved isn't clear, since the only other VF with a known, canon reactor output is the alternate universe's VF-2SS Valkyrie II, at a whopping three times that of the VF-1 (so just shy of 4,000MW, or about 38x the output of the A4W reactors on the Nimitz-class supercarriers). In that context, it doesn't seem unreasonable at all. As far the fold system, that's not part of the airframe at all, that's a sizable external module (FBF-1000A? fold booster) with an aggressively limited range (rated for not more than 20ly, one-way). If you wanna see bullshit stats that make no goddamn sense and explain nothing, borrow (do not buy) a copy of The Art of Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles, possibly the most cringe-worthy artbook ever printed. I never thought I'd see an explanation for a technology that would make the U.N. Spacy's application of spirita seem reasonable... I didn't factor HG's shoddy writing into the equation. What flies for one universe does not necessarily fly for another, and there is ample evidence that the cockpits are in fact pressurized, like Hikaru, Misa, Hibiki, Ishtar, and many other characters riding in valkyries without wearing a properly sealed spacesuit (or indeed, a spacesuit at all). Bandai did their homework just fine, actually... most of the main continuity's fighters that were introduced in the 2040s and later were capable of reaching orbit over an earth-type planet without the need for a booster system. That's what "unlimited combat ceiling" means. They can (and occasionally do) boost into orbit under their own power, without any external booster elements. There are indications that this capability may have been available as early as the VF-4, though it supposedly drains the fighter's fuel tanks dry in the process. Indeed. That's where MEMO dumps anything that might not show him to be the supreme authority on all things RT, and any thread where anyone dares to criticize him, RT, or HG. Check anywhere you've posted recently... odds are Maverick and/or MEMO decided to ban you for what you've been saying here, and are keeping it quiet.

Actually, you could make a fair case for Robotech being one of the best things to ever happen to Southern Cross, since it now enjoys far greater exposure than a show of its standing would/should have normally gotten. Sure, the RT fans hate it too, but you can't win 'em all. I don't think anybody (except maybe Pizza/Ghost Maker) would hold that against you. Like so many of the Robotech die-hards, dougbendo drastically overestimates Robotech's popularity, its relevance to the anime industry, and its relevance to western popular culture. He doesn't want to accept the simple truth that Robotech is a mosty-forgotten, much-reviled, anachronistic piece of 80's esoterica, so he's convinced himself that Robotech is every bit as popular and influential as Gundam and Macross. So instead, he perpetuates a fantasy so he can hold Robotech up as being Macross's equal, something anyone with even a passing familiarity with the anime industry can tell is about as far from reality as it gets. The debate between Macross and Robotech is not a contest of equals. It never was. It never will be. Holding Robotech up as an equal to Macross in terms of its popularity and its industry and cultural relevance is rather like claiming a grade-school bully is just as good with his fists as a heavyweight prize fighter. It's pretty much standard practice for Robotech fanatics to accuse anyone who doesn't completely agree with everything they have to say of being a "Macross purist".

Wait, they actually gave a minor mecha like the Gnerl decent coverage? O_o If they follow the pattern, they'll make a whole new set of sheets for the movie. For great justice! That is EXACTLY what I wanted to hear! Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit... now I have to actually get off my duff and order that issue! If they actually give the Gloria a size, I will be entirely floored. The lack of decent size data for the Macross II ships has been driving me bonkers for ages now, and they didn't throw me a bone on the Heracles, but I'm hoping they'll at least do the Gloria, since that thing was pretty important. Eh, I rather like the VF-2 series too, but yeah, the VF-1 Valkyrie Refit/Kai is pretty damn awesome. Somewhere I've got a big model magazine spread of a 1/72 VF-1SR in Komilia colors that I think was a conversion kit. I wish that mecha had got better coverage than just a brief color spread in B-Club 79, a brief color spread in Entertainment Bible 51, and an all-too-brief mention in one issue of Mecha Press.

I didn't say they were good reasons, just that they were the most common themes in explanations of why fans like Robotech.

I disagree... there are Robotech fans out there who can (and do) present well-reasoned arguments to defend their love of Robotech. They're incredibly rare, and becoming rarer by the day as Maverick_LSC, MEMO1DOMINION, and their fanclub do everything in their power to destroy the Robotech fanbase from within, but they DO exist. Generally speaking, the responses you'll get from most Robotech fans when you ask them why they're fans of any Robotech adaptation you care to name all boil down to one (or more) of these three basic responses: #1. Nostalgia. Easily the most common response, most fans will give some flowery statement that essentially says that their devotion to Robotech springs from rose-colored memories of their childhood, teenage years, or a simpler, more optimistic time in their lives. We really can't fault them for this one, though it is a poor reason to overlook the flaws inherent in Robotech and the way its handlers have thoroughly mistreated it over the years. #2. Ignorance of real anime. Quite a few Robotech fans cling to Robotech simply because they're totally unaware that there's better stuff out there in the same genre. These fans are fewer with each passing year, but they keep clinging to Robotech possibly because they're afraid trying a new series and liking it more will somehow invalidate their rose-tinted childhood memories of Robotech, or they simply have no clue how to go about getting the good stuff. Usually once these people are enlightened, they usually ditch Robotech altogether or pay it minimal heed. #3. An avid dislike of real anime. The most belligerent Robotech fans often display an active hatred of real, unedited anime titles. Quite a few of them just can't be arsed to sort out the cultural context of various scenes, so they prefer to avoid them altogether. Others find the Japanese cultural references offensively foreign, and prefer to stick to Robotech because virtually all of the Japanese cultural elements have been excised from the component shows. A great many of these folks are usually motivated by ignorance of real anime, and prefer to rant about and bash shows they've never seen before. This is where a LOT of the Macross-bashing ones come from.

Yeah, I was kind of perplexed when he said something similar to me in a private message, accusing me of hiding behind HappyPenguins, who is at least the right gender to be wearing skirts. Never worn a skirt myself, but I have worn kilts on one or two occasions. It sort of makes you wonder if he's not some kind of automated trolling program that assembles obnoxious dialogue using a random number generator and one aggressively long IF-OR-ELSE statement. I'm not gonna dig too deeply into what he really does for his day job. He claims to have once been a prison guard, and I recall him mentioning his current (or is it former now?) job is one of those generally unpleasant hourly jobs of the sort a high school kid normally does, though I forget if it was food service or something else. I'll wager that's where a lot of his hostility ultimately comes from... a genuinely unsatisfying, thankless, unstimulating, soul-crushing bore-fest of a job.

Yeah, most sites have some kind of catch-all provision for banned users coming back under new screen names or using another member's account to post. It typically calls for a permanent ban for their new/borrowed account too. Of course, RobotechX is, at least on paper, a kinder, gentler fansite that doesn't believe in heavy-handed moderation of the boards. Instead of banning him outright once he confirmed the obvious, they decided to wait until he started with his old behavior again. It's not like MEMO doesn't have an account here too... and it IS a public forum. I think MEMO unbanned him because he's the only regular member who actually believes MEMO's insane, faith-based argument that Harmony Gold has full control of Macross and can use it as they see fit. Everyone else, including newbies who were new to the issue, were able to see right through it.

Let's be clear here, Pizza wasn't reinstated on RobotechX, he was perma-banned and had to make a new account to get back onto the site. He outed himself pretty quickly, but the guys who run RTX believe in second chances, but he put his second account in jeopardy almost right away. I have it on excellent authority that he's pretty close to earning another perma-ban. Maverick_LSC denies reinstating him on RT.com, but it doesn't take a genius to figure out who did... MEMO.

I confess I'm somewhat curious as to why (Pizza the Hutt / Ghost Maker) is so hung up on MEMO. He put an awful lot of effort into toadying up to him and trolling with the "you got owned!" and "you got served!" stuff in the various discussion threads about the Macross legal situation on Robotech.com and RobotechX, and he gets all irate whenever anyone insults or criticizes MEMO. He doesn't show the same sort of devotion to Maverick_LSC. Don't forget me in there... you're pretty much automatically demonized for being on good terms with me. Nah, I'm pretty sure I've never fathered any illegitimate children... and if I did, I'd like to hope they'd inherit my writing skills. If what PTH/GM has told me about his life is true, he's probably in his mid-to-late 20s. He claims to have once been a prison guard. Yeah... it's kind of... out there... that he thinks we actually care who he is here. I've told him that we don't on several occasions, but he's openly admitted he's afraid of being flamed if he reveals what his account name over here is.

* you've introduced most of your anime-loving friends to Macross. * you've converted a good dozen Robotech fans into Macross purists. * you've spent a fair bit of time and money chasing back-issues of old magazines just because they contain early concept art of stuff from your favorite Macross production. * one of more of your girlfriends has cosplayed a Macross character for you.

Meh, they can milk her for sheets indefinitely, just like they're doing to Mylene. She's up to what, G? There's only VF-1A sheet I really want to see, and I know full well they'll never cover the VF-1AR from Macross 2036.

Eh, the artbooks would have us believe that Mash is very popular with the ladies... though he does make a few leading remarks that give ample cause to suspect that he's bi, rather than straight. Definitely not hard gay though. And now the discussion reaches a whole new level of awkward.

Two things... First, while I agree with you that Bobby fills a similar role in Macross Frontier to Claudia's role in DYRL and Super Dimension Fortress Macross, I don't think we can say the same for Mash, because his role is just too small. Second, Mash isn't gay. Bisexual, maybe, and certainly an effeminate dresser, but they never fail to mention that he's just friends with Hibiki, and attracts lots of women on his own. The dub sort of played it up a bit by giving him a feminine voice, but the original voice cast gives Mash a very masculine tone. Not to mention that when Hibiki calls him at that bar early in the OVA, he's literally surrounded by women...

That's pretty much everyone's assessment, actually. The movie IS billed as a "reimagining". There are some rumors that they're going to have a few familiar names, but all-new designs. Except that the "Rick Hunter" factor is still very much in play, and if that draft is anything else to go by, Rick will NEVER die. He'll be there as the main selling point of whatever Robotech sequels they sell from now until the Robotech franchise finally shrivels up and dies. Y'know, there was a time when I would have agreed that some parts of Robotech were more watchable than Macross 7. After listening to many of the vocal albums, my chief complaint with the series shifted from Basara being a pillock to them NOT using a shitload of good music that would've made the series infinitely more watchable. You're hoping in vain, I'm afraid. From what I've seen a lot of the people who jump ship from Robotech over to Macross are the casual RT fans who hear about more material in the same vein as their favorite saga, and the readers of the novels and comics, who are more open to trying new things. The purist faction of the Robotech fanbase are the ones who are militantly anti-Macross for the most part. I guess you could interpret it that way... though it's a lot easier (and probably more accurate) to write it off either as a psychological clusterfart resulting from combining a persecution complex, an inferiority complex, and some good old fashioned delusions of grandeur.

Actually, according to the few publications that mention him in any detail, Mash is in fact a stylist at that salon (and quite possibly its owner).

*sigh* Still no Macross II-related materials, and yet another VF-1A mechanic sheet and Lynn Minmay character sheet? At least this issue has two articles I can muster some enthusiasm for.

To say that Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles stands independent of Macross is probably reaching more than a little bit... after all, one of the biggest (if not THE biggest) selling points of the Prelude comic and the movie itself was the return of the Macross Saga characters who'd left Earth on the Sentinels mission. Hell, "learn the fate of Rick Hunter" was easily the most common part of the pre-release hype. Yes, his appearance was changed such that he's Rick Hunter in name only, but he's still Rick Hunter. Prelude certainly didn't stand independent of Macross... not with Rick Hunter, Lisa Hayes, Breetai, Exedore, and Dr. Lang all figuring prominently into the story. There's no denying that Shadow Chronicles relies rather heavily on the one major Macross tie-in to sell itself, and that the remainder of the trilogy (as planned) is also driven mainly by Macross tie-ins. As much as they can legally get away with, yeah. Of course, the primary selling point of the Shadow Saga is, as I illustrated above, also Macross. Actually, it was a voice actor (the guy who voices Vince Grant) who leaked that the Shadow Rising movie was on hold as far as he knew, and that none of the actors had, as far as he was aware, been called in to do any recording.

Despite the downright abysmal quality of the art and writing in most of the old Robotech comics, they're probably the Robotech medium most deserving of respect... if only because they contain the most original material of any of the various Robotech adaptations and continuations. Of course, even though the Robotech comics are far and away the medium with the most original material, they still contain a lot less original material than the comics/manga of any respectable, well-run franchise, since flagrant tracing and outright theft of characters, mecha, and even whole plots from other, more successful anime and sci-fi shows seems to have been standard practice for all of the publishers of the old Robotech comics. Well, strictly speaking the TREAD/Beta was created for the express purpose of extending the Legioss/Alpha's range in space and giving it the ability to reach orbit from the planetary surface. The guys claiming otherwise are pretty much throwing a temper tantrum because the powers that be haven't figured out a way to fix the fact that Robotech's technological continuity seems to evolve backwards, with more advanced mecha at the beginning, steadily becoming more and more primitive, blocky, and slow. Seems kind of like the degeneration of human technology in Warhammer 40,000... in the grim darkness of the not-so-far future there is only protoculture? No matter how many times I tell you, you never seem terribly convinced that Wanzerfan is in fact a Macross fan. He was one of the very first contributors to my site project back in 2003 when we were first getting started.

According to relatively recent Robotech convention panels, the Maia Sterling VF/A-6ZX Shadow Fighter MPC is going to be re-released probably early next year, though in a startling case of faulty pattern recognition, it will be produced in the same factory that dropped the ball the first time. That's anybody's guess... they're running out of things to screw up. To be honest, if you go take a good, long look at the current state of affairs on Robotech.com, you'll see that this sort of behavior is pretty much par for the course. The sad part is that it's been that way for years. On more than one occasion, I've been sorely tempted to point psychology majors towards the Robotech fanbase as a classic example of a large-scale persecution complex. Even before the fandom went online in the 90's, Robotech fans had developed an unpleasant habit of lashing out at anyone who didn't like same parts of Robotech that they did, and then proclaiming themselves to be the victims of an elitist clique hell-bent on stopping them from enjoying those parts of the series, as though that somehow justified their crass, and often asinine, behavior. It wasn't just the non-fans who were targets of this, this is what ultimately caused the various fan wars that led to the purist faction of the fanbase (the fans of the "original 85") ostracizing the fans of the novels (McKinneyists) and the comics (Spenglerists). As far as the whole "questioning the official answer" thing goes, that's really the only sort of discussion they have left. In the absence of new material, all they can really do is continually rehash the same tired old topics ad nauseam and question the official stance on parts of the series whenever it clashes with what they personally want to believe. Just to give some examples, there's a ~300 post thread in Series & Stories over there trying to concoct an explanation for the SDF-2 problem (where it was) despite the presence of an official FAQ that completely answers the question in less than 200 words. You could also see the VF-1 vs Alpha thread in Hardcore Robotechnology, where one member continues to bang his head on the wall insisting that his particular application of moon logic to the footage proves that the official tech specs are wrong and the Alpha (Legioss) can reach orbit unassisted.

And what's REALLY odd about that is Haruhiko Mikimoto professes to prefer the movie version. It's certainly possible... though the few artbooks that cover him in any depth insist that he's straight, though his in-series dialogue leans more towards "bisexual but prefers women".

They already did that once... they rebooted the entire continuity to get rid of Sentinels, the novels, the old comics, and all of the other crap. A full reboot would probably kill the Robotech franchise, since ties to the "original 85" are about all that's keeping the rest of the franchise alive.

You're asking if we can make out any other classes of ship in those scenes apart from the Nupetiet-Vergnitzs refit and Megaroad-class colony ship? There's something at the bottom edge of the frame that looks vaguely like an Oberth-class guided missile destroyer, but I don't think the artbooks actually mention any other new types of ship apart from those two. They're just vague blobs in the background for the most part. It looks to me like a low-detail background character with a similar haircut, not a clone of Minmay. It's not exactly uncommon for animators to fill background crowds with simple variations on existing character designs.

It's just goes to show you that nothing gets people's attention faster than controversy and drama. Perhaps as a function of their other, abundant faults, Robotech and its fanbase have never had a shortage of drama and controversy.

If he thinks like that in this day in age, he never had one to begin with.

That's exactly why we have good reason to suspect that he came here spoiling for a fight (or was unwittingly sent here by someone who wanted to start a fight by proxy), rather than being motivated by a desire to talk technology. To be fair, judgments of Robotech's value as a form of entertainment are entirely subjective. You can't really form a cogent argument that a show is "bad" or "good", because those judgments can vary from person to person based on the subjective viewing experience. If you look hard enough, you'll find someone who likes just about anything. If you want to build a strong case against Robotech, you have to go beyond whether the show is "good" or "bad" to actual critique of the material and its production... there's certainly more than enough there to make an exhaustive case for Robotech being inferior to most modern anime titles. You could, for example, point out that Robotech is, in the final analysis, nothing more than a hastily-assembled amalgam of three unrelated shows with post-facto pretensions of epic storytelling and originality. A strong case could also be made that Robotech has little-to-no artistic integrity, as the show is entirely composed of preexisting animation and stories created by other authors, strung together with a few weak excuses for the sole purpose of making Super Dimension Fortress Macross long enough to syndicate. It's also no stretch to say that their first sequel attempt was more of same, and the ones that followed were little more than attempts to continue profiting from someone else's work (specifically, Macross) without even giving the original authors proper credit. It's also no exaggeration to say that the vast majority of modern anime enthusiasts consider Robotech, and rewrites in general, to be largely without any significant redeeming virtues that would justify the disrespect to the original author's work. We could also take the obvious route and point out that unlike Macross, which has thrived and acquired a sizable fan following despite Harmony Gold's attempts to keep it out of the hands of western audiences, Robotech is a largely forgotten, anachronistic piece of 80's esoterica that few recognize and fewer respect. As you can see, it's quite possible (and frankly, easy) to verbally demolish Robotech without having to insult anyone or resort to subjective value judgments.