Seto Kaiba

Contrary to my expectations, Chronicle's been paying a lot of attention to Macross II lately. Color me surprised. I figured that issue 21 was gonna be a one-shot, but they've had one or more Macross II pages in each issue since (except #22). Sylvie, the VF-2SS, the Mardook fleet, the U.N. Spacy officers, Hibiki, and now Ishtar...

Not at all... the time-consuming job is trying to keep an IT consulting business afloat while the local economy spirals toward oblivion. There's so little activity on Robotech.com these days that it rarely takes more than five or ten minutes effort to break up all but the worst of the fanwankery threads. Occasionally there's someone who asks an intelligent question, or someone who starts an intelligent debate, and on those rare days it doesn't feel much like a job at all.

Nah, far from it. All I've become is one of several volunteer zookeepers in the primate house.

Dimensions? I already got at least part of that. The only dimensions I've seen for them are their lengths, which are repeated over and over again in multiple publications. (There's something to be said for their consistency, I guess...) As far as weapons, we're gonna get "many x guided beam cannons", and for a few ships, converging beam cannons. I'd love to find out how many mecha those ships are carrying, but odds are we won't get that much. At least the Gigamesh article cleared up the vague statements about Feff's being one of a kind. My guess would be the sheet will cram all four main classes of Mardook ship onto a single sheet, though I wouldn't be terribly surprised if Feff's scoutship and Ingues's mobile fortress got mecha sheets of their own. Are you EVER going to get my name right? Seriously, just call me "Mike" if it'll help you remember.

Yeah, but that's really more like marching into the cage to stop the monkeys from trying breathe water... Treiz is one of those special children who believes that Robotech is a wildly successful and popular sci-fi franchise to rival Star Wars or Star Trek, and he usually tries to support his arguments with some pretty tortured logic that usually relies on throwing the "canon" sources aside and creatively reinterpreting a bunch of disjointed scenes out of context. No such luck, I'm afraid. Turns out even that "Art of the Shadow Chronicles" book reprints P. Thomassen et. al.'s OSM-derived mecha specs word for word... even the spelling and transposition errors. I don't think we'll have to worry about Chronicle translations being pilfered to bolster RT, they seem content with what they already have, and what they can steal from RobotechResearch and SteelFalcon where the VF-1 is concerned.

I know, I know... but hope springs eternal, even for this jaded Macross II fan. Since I'm really not too enthused about the current offerings in #22-24, I'm probably gonna wait 'till #25 before I order again.

Nah, most of the ones who enjoyed screwing with me seem to have all gotten the banhammer at one time or another and haven't been back to vex me since. The only one left is Treiz, who really isn't specifically targeting me, he's just using the message boards as an outlet for his stupidity. Oddly enough, there are quite a few members there who respect and value my opinion... made even stranger by the fact that many of them even LIKE me, despite my best efforts to offend them. I'd take umbridge at that remark about me being a know-it-all jackass who likes to toy with Robotech fans... I most certainly do not like toying with Robotech fans! I prefer to regard them from a distance... like watching monkeys fling poo from behind the plexiglass windows at the zoo.

I really find it hard to get worked up about this one... there's really not a lot worth saying about the ships, and what little worthwhile information there is, I already have. What's got my attention is the Hibiki Kanzaki character sheet... which will hopefully confirm some of the details about how he got hired into SNN (reportedly he covered a BIG scandal, but they don't say what) and maybe even mention the 2082 Zentradi invasion that inspired him to become a reporter.

Nah, these days they've gone back to the old standby of trying to divorce Robotech from its origins. Just look at that damn fool Treiz... trying to claim that even Harmony Gold's official line on the mecha of the series is wrong because it's based off of the Japanese specs. Wait, they were reliable once? Eh, it's pretty much common knowledge that Steve and Tommy select moderators based not on who was best suited to the job, but who kissed the most ass and toed the company line the closest. Really, between the asinine behavior of most of the moderators, the complete and utter lack of anything like new content, and the increasingly restrictive Terms of Use, it's no wonder the intelligent and knowledgeable people abandoned the site in droves starting in 2003. These days, if you take me out of the equation, you're left with a few occasional contributors who know what they're talking about, and a lot of frothy-mouthed baboons like Treiz, who couldn't spell his own name if you spotted him the T and the Z.

Eh, it's bound to start repeating itself a little bit eventually... usually they're not shamelessly ripping each other off, it's just repetition of common themes and plot devices, some of which have existed in stories since before we even had a written language.

Illogical it may be, but that didn't stop the U.N. Spacy from giving Misa Hayase command of a ship and its escort fleet at the rank of Major...

Oddly... no, my account is still fully active. Oh, the moderators there haven't kept it a secret that they want to get rid of me. Seifrietti Weisse told me flat out that he considers me the site's worst troublemaker, and that he thinks the site would be a lot better off without me. I'm fairly sure Maverick_LSC is in the same camp, which means the only moderator who's really not actively looking for an excuse to ban me is MEMO1DOMINION.

The article doesn't say anything about copyrights... all it says is that Harmony Gold wasn't affected by the outcome of the lawsuits over the intellectual property rights to Macross. Since they never had those rights to begin with, that's actually a true statement... the lawsuit did not affect the film distribution rights or the merchandising rights. So long as they have the film distribution rights, they can release it outside of Japan and edit it at their discretion. I'm sad... they locked my post after I got in my parting shot at Maverick_LSC.

As far as the VF-1 goes, the cockpit was significantly changed, the hexagonal three-panel main screen was replaced by a single-panel main screen, the controls were simplified (including eliminating the two extra joysticks for battroid mode, moving the transformation controls onto the throttle lever, etc), the HUD went from being a projection on transparent panels to being a holographic projection on the canopy, the hands were redesigned, etc. etc. etc.

Oh yes, I've no doubt that the more deluded fans will make a huge fuss that I've dared to inject common sense and fact into the proceedings, and Kevin McKeever will probably try to publicly chew me out for daring to question the legitimacy of his claim that Harmony Gold flat-out owns Macross.

Ladies and gentlemen... open your umbrellas, because the poo's about to hit the fan.

Eh, that's not really a discussion... the whole thing was started as a pineapple salad joke. Now it's just an excuse for two guys who hate each other to take potshots at each other. The few remaining mods there are too apathetic to do anything. You want full-on nonsense? There's a thread in their tech debates section where a bunch of frothy-mouthed nutjobs are trying to prove that the AFC-01 Legioss/VFA-6 Alpha is superior to the VF-1 in every way, mainly by making up "facts" as they go. I still maintain that the long wait between the "original" series and the Shadow Chronicles movie unhinged most of the Robotech fanbase.

I rationed it to two episodes a day... with lots and lots and lots of extra-strength Tylenol.

I'm in the clear... I've seen it all (yes, even all of Macross 7).

According to his staff bio on Robotech.com, Steve's only prior experience in anime was a brief stint as a digital animator, after which he earned his BA in Creative Writing at U of C Riverside. It makes no mention of him having any role in the development of Robotech.com. Tommy's staff bio mentions that he got admitted to UCLA to study engineering, but he dropped his enrollment there to attend the ArtCenter College of Design, and says that he "helped design" Robotech.com, though it's unlikely he had any real involvement in the development of the software (maybe he specced out the layout or did the graphics). Robotech.com itself wasn't designed in-house, the whole thing (including the store) was farmed out to a studio in West Hills, CA, called Bold New World. It's fairly likely that Bold New World also handles site maintenance and developed the few new features that've popped up since 2001. It looks like their domain registrar's a low-cost choice... NetworkSolutions. The IP resolves to a NS-owned server farm in Boise. Their choice of meta keywords was pretty shameless too... it includes Macross, Southern Cross, and Mospeada. Don't go giving them credit, because (as usual) it looks like Harmony Gold's taking credit for work they didn't do. Hell, don't even give the writers and editors credit... Sentinels was a Star Trek clone without shame, and the only thing that changed between Sentinels and Shadow Chronicles was the name of the show they're ripping off... (namely, Battlestar Galactica)

That's what the ridiculously advanced computers are there for...

He isn't... as far as anyone has been able to ascertain, he's a glorified moderator responsible for posting news articles and policing the message boards. The only education his profile mentions is a BA in Creative Writing. By the look of things, all the actual site hosting and design is contracted out. Well, Robotech's creators would certainly like to imagine the show is a mid-to-top tier franchise. The reality of the matter is somewhat different.

There's something to be said for that... but it may be even simpler than that... the VF-17's gunpod doesn't have a cartridge ejection port... it's probably using caseless ammunition. I don't think it's a dedicated beam rifle or a beam gatling... the former didn't come into semi-common use until the VF-27. Glad you liked it. Yeah, it looks like the "beam adapter" fits over the barrels of the gatling cannon, which makes me wonder if it's not just doing that as a means of sharing the gunpod's trigger.

"The beauty of recycling footage."

I only glanced over the sheet briefly when it arrived, but the gunpod sheet's got the gunpods sorted by type... and the VF-17's gunpod was put together with another field-reloadable gatling cannon, so odds are Chronicle says that it's a gatling cannon. All the art of it that I've ever seen has it down as a gatling cannon, even going so far as to show the barrel assembly without the magazine in place.