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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    ... that's fine, I have long since accepted that I'm a weirdo. EVs are 100% my thing, and my day job for nearly ten years now... first as part of a gov't project, then in private sector R&D and with the SAE standards committees. Ah, yeah... there's a LOT more choice in the market now than when I was running the interoperability test center at a certain automaker. The major players haven't changed, though... 'cept that AeroVironment (yes, the UAV people) sold their EVSE division to Webasto. It's Webasto/AV, Clipper Creek, ChargePoint, and Leviton. Enel-X has been moving up in the world since Webasto acquired AV, and they make some pretty reliable stuff too. With the old, and damn near indestructible* 32A-class AeroVironment EVSE-RS-PI-25s now out of production**, it really depends whether you're looking for integration with a smart meter or not. I'm assuming you probably are, if you're the cost-conscious sort. Enel-X's 40A and 48A "Juicebox" EVSEs are solid and dependable units but somewhat hard to get since they're MOPAR's current favorite. Clipper Creek's 32A chargers (e.g. the HCS-40) is known to be a solid and dependable unit, but can be somewhat flaky depending on the brand of vehicle you're charging.*** Hyundai's preferred brand of chargers is ChargePoint, who I've always felt were middle-of-the-pack but dependable performers... but I've only worked with some of their pedistal-form units and not their newer wallboxes. They seem to be a bit forward-thinking about the whole affair, since they have a website set up to help buyers find trusted installers for their preferred ChargePoint HomeFlex units. All in all, I'd say probably go with either Hyundai's preferred ChargePoint HomeFlex or an Enel-X Juicebox. EDIT: I will say this too... avoid BTCPower like the ****ing plague. My professional experience with them would have to get considerably better to be called "appalling" with a straight face. Probably the only time I've ever been convinced a piece of test equipment was going to kill me. * I had a LOT of experience working with those as part of a gov't project, and despite the many horrible things I did to them that the manufacturer absolutely NEVER intended I only ever had one unit fail. ** But still available from some vendors. *** I had some issues with older Clipper Creek units involving the tolerances on the control pilot and proximity circuits, meaning some cars had to be unplugged and replugged several times before they'd accept the charger as a valid one. And one memorable case of a ChargePoint unit causing some minor scorching on the inlet of a test vehicle.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    That would make more sense. Not much more... but enough to not be an especially glaring bit of bad writing. That doesn't really make sense to me in practical terms. Putting aside basic practical aspects like the sheer size of starship computer cores and the fact that you'd essentially HAVE to disassemble the ship to get to them... if a starship is so badly damaged that it's judged to be beyond repair, why bother attempting to salvage parts from it? It'd be one thing if they were salvaging parts and materials that couldn't be replicated for use on other ships of the same class, but isolinear circuitry can be (and is) produced via replicator. Come to that, why reuse battle-damaged 20+ year old computer systems for a brand new ship with a completely different design? Surely technology has advanced in that time and installing computers designed for that class of ship would be much less problematic than adapting ones from another class entirely. (There's also the more practical question of how the computer cores survived whatever cripplied the Titan intact enough to use... the engineering computer core is usually placed between the warp core and navigational deflector, and the primary core or cores are typically either in the core of the saucer or towards the rear of it near the photon torpedo magazine.)
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Plato's Allegory of the Cave? Eh... maybe back in the 90's, before the internet made fansubs and information about the Macross franchise readily available to people outside Japan. Nowadays, there's nobody keeping them in the cave. They know full well what's outside and voluntarily remain in the cave out of sheer bloody-minded stubbornness.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    ... that is a strong contender not only for the dumbest thing I've heard all year, but also as an all-time "dumbest thing I've ever heard from Star Trek" in general. Those two ships have NOTHING in common appearance-wise and that's not even how registry numbers work! If the ship was refitted, it would keep the same number. The only time that a refit has led to a new registry was in Discovery when the titular 23rd century ship was refitted to 32nd century tech levels and issued a new registry to conceal that fact that the ship and its crew were unlawful time travelers that the Federation was harboring in violation of various treaties banning the use of time travel. The Luna-class USS Titan and Constitution III-class look nothing alike. At all. They have NOTHING in common. They don't even appear to be anywhere close to the same size! This explanation not only doesn't make sense, it's so transparently and obviously stupid that I'm flabbergasted ANYONE approved it to go to print. By far! This explanation is complete nonsense.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    True, but where it gets a bit hard to swallow is that Raffi somehow concealed her substance abuse problem despite working an environment that mandates frequent medical exams using technology far more advanced and precise than today's modern drug screenings. An environment where, I might add, her superiors incl. any of the medical officers which she'd have had to submit to examination by could have ordered her into therapy and would have been obligated to report her substance abuse problem. Yeah, Memory Alpha doesn't include the aforementioned additional backstory that was displaced into the official tie-in novels. The Last Best Hope is kind of a sh*tshow that gets into just how stupid the whole situation was. The Romulan government most of its time denying there was any need for Picard's aggressive evacuation measures, downplaying the problem, and having the Tal Shiar vanish anyone who talked about the actual urgency of the matter. A fair amount is depicted of the political opposition to the effort, with Picard effectively losing in the diplomatic arena to a semiliterate political shyster from a remote farming world who raised a stink about a relief effort diverting resources from Federation worlds. That Jean-Luc Picard threatens to resign if he doesn't get his way, then meekly does resign when Starfleet tells him to go pound sand is probably one of the biggest out-of-character moments related to the series... alongside him spending a decade pouting about it in France. Maybe the Romulan Free State remembers the amount of BS the Romulan senate and Tal Shiar pulled in an attempt to obstruct the evacuation that got so many people killed. Not that they're forgiving, but the Federation are simply the lesser sh*theads by comparison. You'd think they'd have at least remembered the Romulans, like the Klingons, have a massive fleet that could easily have done the job. They fought on an even footing with the Federation and Klingon Empire in the Dominion War.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Fold systems can be installed. Modular fold systems can be set up and removed as needed... the very principle behind the Fold Booster. Very large objects are typically folded by a network of small fold systems working in concert, much like how Sound Force attempted to steal Gepernich's spiritia farm using many fold boosters working in tandem. Since humanity is already mass producing fold systems for its ships, it's probably not much of a stretch to also produce fold systems to move factory satellites as needed. It's generally assumed that most, if not all, of the factory satellites captured in the 2010s were Boddole Zer main fleet assets that the New UN Government learned the location of from defectors. Later in the timeline, humanity has stumbled upon others and appropriated them as necessary.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    If anything, I find it to be the only believable part of Star Trek: Picard's character development. After two decades of high concept sci-fi life-or-death shenanigans, the crew collectively says "**** it, I'm going to go somewhere quiet for a while." Damned by faint praise seems to be the order of the day for everyone who's not on the ViacomCBS/Paramount payroll directly or indirectly. Conservation of drama. Vadic's and her ship, the Shrike, aren't quite Shinzon and the Scimitar... but they're certainly copying his homework. Going everywhere in too much leather? Check. Massive spiky warship that massively outguns the Federation ships in the story despite it stretching believability to do so? Check. An army of horror movie extra gimps in pleather with no humanizing traits whatsoever? Check. Clearly the Titan-A is going to get REKT at some point in this story similar to the Enterprise-E or the Kelvin Enterprise. I have a suspicion they're going to find themselves rescued by whatever the new Enterprise is and commendeer that. Fry: "It took an hour to write, I thought it'd take an hour to read!" It's especially glaring because they more or less did exactly that for the last person who claimed to be a relative of Jean-Luc Picard's (Praetor Shinzon). Office politics. While this version of Jean-Luc Picard may be retired, undead, and a complete arsehole, he's still Starfleet royalty. ... is a career-limiting move if ever there was one. While Captain Shaw is clearly the Only Sane Man in this series at present and has very little time for Picard and Riker's BS, he is probably career-minded enough to know that Picard and Riker could still ruin him for letting Jack die. Even if Jack is actually a wanted criminal. Now THAT'S on-brand for TNG. How many times did folks escape from the Enterprise-D's brig on Worf's watch because they failed to check them for concealed gimmicks and gadgets? The first prison break in TNG had security fail to catch that the Klingon renegades were carrying a whole-ass disruptor pistol in their clothes. Because this show runs on protagonist-centered morality. Even though any reasonable viewer would be thinking Shaw is actually a pretty reasonable, if somewhat stiff, captain we are supposed to think he's The Arsehole because he's nominally opposed to Jean-Luc Picard despite Picard lying, breaking regulations, etc. and technically not actually being Jean-Luc Picard. Because that's how ship-to-ship combat worked in the last two TNG movies. Picard's ship runs away, and the villain ship leisurely chases. Oh, it's far dumber than that... partly because protagonist-centered morality is so heavily in play, and partly because Picard has devolved into a very self-serving and manipulative person. Sure, Jean-Luc Picard was being very noble spending every last bit of political capital he'd accrued over twenty years as the captain of the Federation flagship to get that relief fleet built. But along the way he seems to have forgotten that: The Romulans are the Federation's oldest enemy. So much so that the Federation was founded shortly after the Earth-Romulan War partly to provide a common defense against further Romulan aggression. It's hardly surprising that many Federation worlds that suffered under Romulan hands would be resistant to the idea of saving their mortal enemy. The Federation has absolutely no reason to trust the Romulans. Not only had the Romulans historically sided with multiple Federation enemies including the Klingons and the Dominion, they were actively engaged in espionage against the Federation and just two years previously had attempted to murder Picard himself for his blood and only narrowly been prevented from deploying a biogenic weapon in a genocidal attack on Earth itself. The Romulan Senate was clearly and unambiguously telling the Federation that it did not want help. The relief fleet was destroyed in a terrorist attack that wiped out the Federation's oldest and largest shipyard, so Starfleet probably could not have caved to Picard's childish demands even if they wanted to. Picard's resignation from Starfleet and retirement to the family vineyard for over a decade was basically a product of him throwing a temper tantrum over being told that he can't divert resources from worlds all over the Federation (again) to interfere in the affairs of a sovereign power that explicitly and on no uncertain terms told him to get lost and that they neither need nor want his help. Of course, extra levels in stupid are taken with both Picard and Picard apparently forgetting the Romulan Star Empire is a Star Empire older than the Federation and rivaling it for size with hundreds of inhabited worlds and that the Romulans should have had no difficulty evacuating their own people without outside help via the Romulan Navy that rivals Starfleet for size and power. Losing Romulus itself should be little more than a mild inconvenience. Bonus levels in stupid are awarded for the fact that both the showrunners and tie-in novels run with the idea that the Romulan supernova wasn't natural. Like the Pakleds in Lower Decks, the Romulans accidentally destroyed their own homeworld while testing treaty-banned weaponry they intended to use against the Federation. Unlike the Pakleds, the many Romulan officials can't claim congenital stupidity as a defense for destroying their own planet. This gets dumber still in that Picard and the Federation Council are aware of this... and Picard is still somehow surprised that the Federation Council is unwilling to bankrupt countless worlds in the name of saving an enemy that was trying to genocide those very same worlds all of like fifteen minutes ago. A child, but even then it's only relevant to the plot because it's another reason for Picard to feel guilty because he feels personally responsible for the ban on the technology which could've saved the child even though the ban has no connection to his actions in any way, shape, or form and is actually something he argued unsuccessfully for years previously in "Measure of a Man". They've told us what Geordi was up to... he was a yard foreman at Utopia Planetia. Fans were understandably rather upset by this, since until the announcement that Picard had cast Levar Burton some fans assumed that Geordi had died in the synth revolt. Seven was never a Starfleet officer prior to Picard. She was just a member of Janeway's crew on Voyager in an informal capacity. Icheb's death was pointless story-wise, but the main reason is probably that Icheb's original actor (Manu Intiraymi) is more than a bit of an arsehole and they were unwilling to cast him despite Icheb being fairly integral to Seven's character. The whole bigotry-against-the-Borg thing is pretty pointless considering how well-established it is that Borg drones are victims of the most profound violation of the self. Starfleet were previously shown to be pretty darn compassionate towards ex-Borg, so this is a jarring and nonsensical shift. That seems to be the direction the showrunners are taking, yeah... that the Luna-class Titan was destroyed SOMEHOW and this fugly thing was its replacement. The main indicator is that they kept the registry number of the Luna-class version that was first used for the Star Trek Titan novel series the Luna-class was designed for. That's the thing, though... Star Trek: the Next Generation was the story of an enlightened future and more advanced humanity where everyone was able to lead a fulfilling life on their own terms in a post-scarcity society. It was very much a happy-go-lucky future most of the time. So much so that, even as the series attempted to highlight some of the problems in society, the Federation is still presented as essentially utopian with the societal problems being on the frontier where a utopian standard of living hadn't taken hold yet. This was a society where therapy to deal with traumatic experiences was not only normalized and accepted, but presented as easily accessible and highly effective too. It's why Raffi's backstory makes no sense at all. She was a Starfleet officer living on Earth and with a fairly high security clearance... but she was also a barely functioning addict whose substance abuse problems somehow went undiagnosed and untreated despite regular medical screenings required by her job? She would've had to report to the CMO on every starship she boarded as a matter of course, and she was traveling all over hell's half-acre with Picard during the relief effort. None of these highly-trained Starfleet doctors noticed Picard's aide de camp was a strung out junkie barely keeping it together amid paranoid episodes? Admiral Picard was apparently the ONLY thing standing between Raffi and a bad conduct discharge. Did NOBODY think to order her to therapy? After she's dishonorably discharged, she's absolutely miserable and so deprived now that she *checks notes* lives in a private country residence with every modern convenience that also adjoins a state park where she can grow her own drugs and indulge as she sees fit without having to hold down a job or really do much of anything. This is presented as abject misery that she blames Jean-Luc Picard for even though any sane viewer is going to look at this and say it's a product of her own actions and a fair few would say her standard of living is far higher than their own. And this is repeated over and over again. These people DECIDED to resign from Starfleet and go live in the sticks. Yet they all have to be miserable. Nobody thinks to go see a therapist? One of them IS a therapist.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Yes, I know you were. The problem is that the reality is so stupid that there's no immediate distinction between satirizing the stupidity and simply reporting on it. You may have been joking, but Riker's Luna-class USS Titan would have to have met its end in some excessively dramatic high-stakes act of derring-do for Starfleet to honor it with a new USS Titan sharing its registry number. That was an honor reserved for only Starfleet's most celebrated ships. None of the returning TNG characters are normal Starfleet officers. They were the senior staff of not one but two separate Federation flagships... Starfleet's most elite. Picard, for its part, seems to argue for exactly that... that, after the crew broke up following the events of Nemesis, they went on to have relatively normal careers and civilian lives. Jean-Luc Picard accepted a desk job overseeing humanitarian aid then resigned his commission and spent a decade or so running the family winery. Will Riker and Deanna Troi served aboard the USS Titan on an exploration mission then apparently took a promotion and retired to have a family. Geordi took a transfer to Utopia Planetia and became a yard foreman like Sisko had been before Deep Space Nine. Depending on whether they're about to retcon their own novels, Worf may or may not have briefly commanded the Enterprise before moving on to a desk job. Dr. Crusher apparently took twenty years of maternity leave to raise her bastard. By their standards, positively boring humdrum lives. While season three's writing is definitely an improvement over the previous two seasons of out-of-control dumpster fire, it's still some incredibly weak sh*t that's clearly running on protagonist-centric morality. Things are right or wrong not because there's any moral reason or logic behind them, but because it advances the agenda of the main characters. It reminds me of nothing so much as Bill Shatner's novel The Return, which was seemingly written by Shatner for no reason other than to settle the Kirk vs. Picard debate in his own favor once and for all by having Kirk brought back from the dead to one-up every member of the TNG cast.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Which is a cheap copout at best. The showrunners want every ship to be like the Enterprise... but they shouldn't. The Enterprise is special. After TOS, the Enterprise was the Federation flagship. It had the most elite crew and the best of everything and was frequently the first to charge into danger. That's why they go through Enterprises at such a terrifying rate. Seldom does the Lady E go to her rest quietly. But that was already a tired cliche by the time of Star Trek: Generations. It was shocking EXACTLY ONCE. Riker's Luna-class USS Titan is no Enterprise. She's a smaller, long-range deep space explorer and her mission was exploration not combat (Pakled nonsense aside). There's no real reason for the Titan to have been destroyed offscreen in some act of incredible valor that got a new USS Titan commissioned almost immediately. It's so fanfic. But then, all of Picard reads like a BAD fanfic. It's especially bad in the novels, where you almost suspect the writers are taking the piss. They make ZERO effort to disguise the fact that Rios is Han Solo from Wish.com, that Raffi is just a racist stereotype, and that everyone else is an idiot. Yes, but have you ever known me to miss a chance to grumble? 😛 Reviews can be bought, and frequently are. Not to mention the reviewers have had two seasons of absolute dogsh*t from this show lowering their expectations. What came before this was so bad that they're praising this season for almost achieving "basic competence in storytelling". Discovery did it first, introducing a Voyager-J in the 32nd century Starfleet. Prodigy introduced a Voyager-A, and then Picard a Voyager-B not even 20 years later. The original USS Voyager went through seven years of hell from 2371-2378, so that it was decommissioned after its return is completely expected given that she was probably held together with spit, bailing wire, and wishful thinking by that point. The commissioning of a Voyager-A by 2384 is entirely expected... but why is there already a Voyager-B just 17 years after that? There have been eleven Voyagers in 819 years... why are they burning through them so damned quick, unless the Voyager-J is actually 700 years old? But a justified one, esp. since the theme is "Family". Plus there's a BIG difference between a cartoon and a big budget live action series. That's not quite the same. Prior to the adoption of Star Trek Online designs in Picard's second season, the Excelsior-class design was justified by nothing fancier than literal decades of mass production as a major Starfleet workhorse class. The Excelsior-class had almost a century of distinguished service under its belt (2285-2378+) by the time they stopped doing 24th century Trek and it explicitly remained in service that long thanks to technological updates and refits. It's not a new class, it's just POR for Starfleet ships: Periodic upgrades to keep ships in service for decades. The tech materials conceived around TNG put the expected lifespan of a 24th century starship at over a century.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Because the showrunners are complete imbeciles. The honor of reusing a registry with a letter suffix was a signal honor for Starfleet's most celebrated ships. The Discovery showrunners went nuts with it when they jumped their show to the 32nd century (after jumping the shark) and had a bunch of lettered Starfleet ships all at once. Prior to that, there were only one other 23rd/24th century example that wasn't a ship in the Enterprise legacy: the Galaxy-class USS Yamato. The third and last (legitimate) example was the 29th century USS Relativity. Having the Luna-class USS Titan in Lower Decks was a huge coup for the Lower Decks showrunners and was near-universally well-received. Apparently Picard's showrunners have a crippling fear of money and success, and commissioned that fugly kitbash to replace it even though Riker's USS Titan would have been only slightly over 22 years old (with the life expectancy of a Starfleet ship being a century or more).
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Considering some of the things its passage supposedly caused, that doesn't seem like an unreasonable proposition to me. This thing triggered volcanic eruptions, flattened a swath of Europe, and knocked a kilometer off Everest just by passing NEAR it. It's possible its irregular-ish course was a product of its engines still operating or something of that nature. As we're told in the original series, the ship was abandoned and booby trapped to help cover the retreat of the Supervision Army from our region of the galaxy. We know nothing about the crew's motives, but given that the likelihood of it emerging in the middle of a solar system vs. the vast swathes of empty nothing that make up most of the galaxy, it seems a safe bet they deliberately aimed it at a solar system to give the Boddole Zer main fleet a wild goose to chase on the assumption that it might be fleeing towards one of their bases instead of just jumping in the general direction of "away". Nothing is said about them finding anything of the crew itself, but there was enough leftover equipment and surviving internal architecture for the newly founded OTEC to come to a number of important conclusions from.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Nope. It showed up for the first time in Frontier, but it's never even commented on.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    No definitive number has ever been put on it. It's clearly a lot, given that it's mentioned that the ship's passage through the atmosphere knocked a kilometer off the top of Mount Everest, destroyed both Stockholm and Moscow, cut a wide swath of destruction across all of Europe, Iceland, and Greenland, caused volcanoes to erupt in Canada, and generally made a mess of the South Pacific. Moscow had a population of almost 9.85 million in 1999 and Stockholm had nearly 1.2 million. Europe as a whole was over 675 million at the time. The death toll was likely catastrophic in its own right... made worse by the consequences of such massive destruction.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    I'd suspect the latter. Most of the Master File books have offered a loading table wherein the subject matter VF can carry more than one gunpod... as well as art for same. The VF-25 book offers a table that claims the VF-25 can carry THREE gunpods, and at one point we see Armored VF-1s using multiple gunpods.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    IIRC, the VF-171EX's anti-beam coating is said to be the same type applied to the VF-25. Though the earliest mention of the technology I recall is in Macross Plus. When Isamu reads the specs, an anti-laser coating is mentioned among its defensive systems.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Emigrant ships and fleets are, by the nature of their mission, designed to be as self-sufficient as possible. The New UN Government and the fleet administration take care to ensure that they leave port equipped with everything they need for sustained operations in deep space that could last years or even decades. They have onboard facilities and equipment for obtaining, processing, and recycling resources and to manufacture most anything they could require. As technology has improved, the capabilities and even the nature of those facilities and that equipment have changed.* Under law, all New UN Government member states receive periodic transmissions providing them with information on the latest technological developments and most, if not all, are linked to the Galaxy Network (FTL space internet). Upgrading equipment is largely a matter of cost in terms of time and resources. Some emigrant governments with less resources naturally lag behind others in adopting new technologies as do others that simply don't see the need. For instance, there are some emigrant governments that operate an all-Ghost air force instead of using Valkyries because the cost-performance is better and there's less risk to human life. * For instance, the 5th Generation emigrant ships transitioned from a closed-system chemical plant to an artificial and carefully managed ecosystem "bioplant" as a way of processing many types of resources.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    That's kind of the elephant in the room when it comes to the model kits and so on that give the VF-4 a gunpod. Why? By all accounts, the VF-4's pair of beam guns do the same job but won't run out of ammunition because they're powered by the compact thermonuclear reactors in the engines. The only time the VF-4 has ever been depicted in an official context using a gunpod is in the Macross II timeline's Macross: Eternal Love Song. In that story, the Prometheus II had a pair of VF-4 Sirens that were assigned to Hound Squadron and outfitted with more powerful beam guns in the form of a large beam gunpod for the final offensive against the Burado main fleet's mobile fortress and specifically intended to kill the living command computer. The only potential explanation I can think of for a main Macross timeline VF-4 being outfitted with gunpods would be for an atmospheric engagement. Master File likes to remind its readers that energy weapons suffer performance degradation in atmosphere too as energy from the beam heats the atmospheric gases it's passing through. Since most versions of the GU-11 are not reloadable, you'd have to carry two for an extended engagement.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    It's the main problem with Star Trek these days... the people in charge seem to want to make Star Trek into an action series. Not a sci-fi series with the occasional action scene or action elements, but just a bog-standard sci-fi action series like Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica. Not that this is necessarily entirely on the new guys either. There was the increased emphasis on action that began with the last few seasons of Deep Space Nine thanks to its war arc, with Voyager's last few seasons because the writers were burned out on Star Trek and the Borg made a convenient recurring threat that needed no character development by nature, and with the entirety of Star Trek: Enterprise prior to its fourth and final season as it attempted to course-correct away from Scott Bakula getting beat up by aliens every fortnight. Hmm... Star Trek '09: Abrams: 1966 Lindelof: 1973 Orci: 1973 Kurtzman: 1973 Into Darkness Burk: 1968 Beyond Pegg: 1970 Jung: ? Chernov: 1952 Ellison: 1983 Lin: 1971 So basically everyone except producers Jeffrey Chernov and David Ellison (Star Trek: Beyond) is a Gen X-er. Doug Jung's bio doesn't list a birth year. The same holds true for almost all of the producers and writers who have published biographical information from Star Trek: Discovery. There are a couple highly placed baby boomers like Akiva Goldsman, but almost all of them seem to have been born between 1969 and 1973, making them solidly Gen X. Kind of inevitable, really, given that almost all baby boomers are over 60 now.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    The painful irony there being that that's exactly what Star Trek: Picard was never supposed to become. The showrunners explicitly promised that Star Trek: Picard wasn't gonna be a TNG cast reunion. They were going to focus on the original characters. Funny how that worked out... Agreed... "All Good Things" wasn't the best final episode we've ever had, but it was a satisfying and logical conclusion to the series that really didn't NEED a follow-up. Picard only exists in the first place because Star Trek: Discovery's first season was so poorly received. It was meant to be a comparatively "safe" show driven by the star power of a franchise veteran to "win back the crowd". I guess we ended up with Jean-Luc Picard because they killed Kirk off in Generations and they felt Patrick Stewart would be more of a draw than, say, Avery Brooks or Kate Mulgrew. In all fairness, that at least can be justified fairly easily. Not only was Dr. Crusher the CMO on Starfleet's most-attacked ship for nearly 15 years (it'd be 16 but for the year Pulaski took over)... ample justification for being handy with a phaser... she's had special forces training in-series in the TNG two-parter "Chain of Command". (The botched raid where Picard gets tortured.) Because the showrunners wish they were working on Star Wars.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    I'd assume there is some mechanical retention mechanism, but I've not seen an explicit statement one way or the other on that one.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    They've never been described as such. It's possible they are a hangar complex made by adapting incomplete ARMD-class spaceframes the same way the Megaroad-class was developed by modifying a Macross-class spaceframe.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    I don't recall ever seeing a name for that one either, officially. Sometimes fanfic names become so widespread that they get mistaken for official information. There are also the occasional folks - I could name names, but won't - who make no effort to distinguish between fan fiction material of their own creation and official material to the point of vandalizing Wikipedia articles with material of their own creation. Daldhanton's organization, Black Rainbow, seems to have ended up in possession of a number of unusual mobile weapons due to amoral defense contractors selling to all takers. The man himself ended up with a Feios Valkyrie because he's a legendary top ace in his own right, hailed as the "All Kill Wizard" during his tenure in the New UN Forces. He's one of the few people who could actually use the Feios to its full potential. Probably not. I'd assume the New UN Forces have ended up in possession of a number of captured enemy designs over the years and simply don't bother recreating them because they don't have anything to offer that can't be done as well or better by the NUNS's own fighters.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    OK, so we've both never heard of it and it's almost certainly a fanfic designation. That makes sense, given that it's not a Varauta design and that designation convention is unique to the Varauta forces.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, not as such no. It seems to use similar technology to the Paladin Prophecy's lance and the VF-25G's SSL-9B Dragunov sniper rifle, and by extension the VF-31's railguns. (As in, not a true railgun but a rail-assisted chemical propellant firearm.) Assuming someone cared enough to do so, I'd expect it would not be impossible for the New UN Government and New UN Forces to seize either the design schematics or capture a few Feios units intact enough to reconstruct and reproduce one. Why they haven't... well... the Feios Valkyrie's incredible mobility performance that exceeds even the New UN Forces VF-19 and VF-22 is a worse version of the same double-edged sword that doomed the VF-19 and VF-22. It's amazingly high-spec... but as a result, it's a ridiculous airborne deathtrap to all but a tiny handful of supremely skilled pilots. It was a 4th Generation-equivalent Valkyrie and lacked any way to protect the pilot from the incredible g-forces its maneuverability could produce. The Queadluun-Alma is a somewhat different story. It's possible that the New UN Forces could reconstruct the basic design if they were to find where it was manufactured, or if the Fasces flagship Babel had been boarded and captured instead of being sunk by SMS. That said, the only Queadluun-Alma we "see" in the story is effectively a one-of-a-kind aircraft whose incredible combat ability is a product of an impossible-to-reproduce system. Its Astral System allows it to produce an incredibly resilient defensive barrier hypothesized to be strong enough to repel a Macross Cannon, but is only able to do so because it's made out of Protodeviln remains. As I'd never seen that designation before now, I'm guessing it's probably not official. @sketchley would probably know better than me on that topic. The lowercase "z" designations are used only by the Varauta Forces derivatives of captured New UN Forces Valkyries: the FBz-99, Fz-109, Az-110, etc. The Feios Valkyrie was not a Varauta/Protodeviln design. It was something cooked up by the engineers who've defected to various Zentradi rebel/terrorist/anti-government groups and seemingly built on the sly by amoral or opportunistic defense contractors. Its design was a combination of Zentradi overtechnology with a captured/stolen VF-11 prototype. Yeah, probably.... that and quite a bit of other Protodeviln technology that Fasces was using that really doesn't have a benign application. Like the mind control technology they're using on the prisoners they take while masquerading as space pirates in order to build up an army for a war against the New UN Government. Without the spiritia absorption beam, Fasces's Elgersoln Gustavs would just be a middling 3.5th Generation VF with an abnormal number of spikes.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    It's not a very good inertia control system, but yeah. Mind you, even without that almost every detail conspires to reveal what a balance-breaking character Max is. Milia was one of the Boddole Zer main fleet's top aces. Think about what it takes to be a top ace in a fleet with Seven. Billion. Soldiers. She is, by Zentradi standards, an unbeatable badass. Max is just this unassuming-looking dude who shows up to join SVF-1's Vermilion platoon in October of '09. He's got a skill ranking of A but less than 400 hours in the cockpit, the overwhelming majority of which is simulator time. Even his new commander, Hikaru, dismisses him as a "total rookie". And from that inauspicious start, Max proves to be an unstoppable force. Quamzin was probably just BS-ing at the time he told Milia that the miclones had an ace too... but when she finally bumps into him, he wrecks her sh*t so badly she not only doesn't question it she goes undercover as a miclone spy to assassinate him. Milia, a top ace clone soldier literally bred for war and piloting expertise who had years of experience and the very best equipment available, gets REKT by a rando from Planet Nowhere who's been a fighter pilot for all of like two months in what the Zentradi would consider a laughably primitive clunker. The Queadluun-Alma? There is a bit, yes. It has never appeared in previous material though, it's a unique craft that Fasces fields in the finale of the story.
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