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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    It doesn't need a remake it needs something like DBZ Kai where they cut out all the filler.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    It was inevitable, given the strikes.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Since season five starts in a few months, I decided to wade back in and attempt to watch season four. One thing I've realized while watching the first three episodes of Star Trek: Discovery's fourth season is that the reason this show feels so exhausting to watch is that the stakes are always as high as they can go and there's never any relief from the tension. The survival of the Federation itself was at stake in season one's plot, and from season two onward the stakes rose to the fate of the entire galaxy. Without an opportunity to relax - a breather episode like those classic Trek followed heavier stories with - the all-consuming emphasis on the impending doom du jour just becomes suffocating for the audience. (And the writers still don't seem to have realized that adding Tilly to an already tedious scene takes it from boring to change-the-channel level agonizing.)
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Just did my part... 😄 Very happy indeed to see such a robust show of support for Macross II.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    After a particularly rough week, seeing that this jumped straight from new to past its funding goal makes for a delightful pick-me-up.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    So, I went and checked this... and @renegadeleader1 is actually correct. After consulting a number of official publications, it is quite clear that only the Principality of Zeon used nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons indiscriminately. The Federation forces are only described as using nuclear weapons, and only as a part of the attempt to prevent the Operation British colony drop during which the Federation employed both ship launched and surface launched thermonuclear weapons against Island Iffish and its escorting Zeon fleet. There's nothing I can find that suggests the Federation nuked any inhabited colonies the way Zeon did... and nuclear weapons were not used at Loum due to the issues caused by minovsky particle interference affecting guidance. EDIT: To clarify the point, this information is taken from Gundam Officials, the Gundam Perfect File, Gundam Historica, and the old Bandai Entertainment Bible books. It's indicated therein that the massive death toll attributed to nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons was almost entirely inflicted during Zeon's initial surprise attack on Sides 1, 2, and 4 on January 3rd and 4th, UC 0079. It's also stated that the Federation was caught by surprise and wasn't able to coordinate a counteroffensive or retaliate in any meaningful way during this initial offensive due to the breakdown of radio communications that was caused by Minovsky particle interference. It was, by all accounts, an entirely one-sided massacre in which the Principality's forces indiscriminately destroyed space colonies using mobile suit-launched nuclear missiles and gas bombs containing biological and chemical agents. In 40 hours of largely unopposed cruelty, Zeon massacred an estimated 2.8 billion defenseless people. That's more than half of the total estimated loss of life from the entire One Year War in terms of both primary and secondary causes... and they weren't even done at that point. There was also Operation British and then the destruction of Side 5, which is suggested to have been mostly Zeon's doing. When all's said and done, a bare minimum of 52% of the 5.5 billion lives lost in the OYW were directly attributable to Zeon's use of WMDs... and Officials suggests that number may be as high as 87% once the effects of the colony drop are counted. This was NOT a "both sides" thing. (And if I seem a bit thrown by that, it's because I am... I was not expecting the explanation to be THAT damning.)
  7. Seto Kaiba
    I had a similar experience there... it's cute, and initially it's funny, but it has exactly one joke.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Finally finished Birdie Wing the other day. It was completely insane from start to finish, but the last story arc and the ending were a series of massive copouts inexplicably freighted with Happy Gilmore references of all things...
  9. Seto Kaiba
    That's a special case, as that was allegedly a weapon that Quamzin's Zentradi renegades developed on their own after fleeing Earth and linking up with another main fleet. We do still see that the main force is battle pods, but yeah... since they made the Queadluun-Rau belong to another faction the Nousjadeul-Ger gets more time to shine. By the time the VF-4 was completed, sure... but it was in active development well before the war started. Its unusual design concept seems to have been intended to work around the limits the Battroid's then-current size imposed on space performance. Going for beam weapons instead of a gunpod is pretty logical in space, since the main limitation on the performance of energy weapons is how much power you can throw at them and how much atmospheric gas is in the way... and in space, that second one is a non-issue.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Potentially... though the main reason is a lack of places to put them, rather an a lack of inclination. Lack of space was the main driver behind the VF-1's decision to adopt laser weapons. The head-mounted gun was originally supposed to be a machine gun firing armor-piercing rounds but there wasn't enough space... so that plan was scrapped and a more compact laser system was used.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    When you think about it, it's actually kind of surprising that nobody seems to have guessed the Zentradi were a wholly mechanized force... After all, Heinlein's Starship Troopers was/is required reading for officer candidates in several different national militaries (incl. the US's) and it does depict a wholly mechanized armed force not entirely dissimilar to the Zentradi. (A thought made somewhat more entertaining by the knowledge that Kazutaka Miyatake did the art for the 1970's Hayakawa Bunko SF printing of the Japanese translation and both he and Studio Nue as a whole did a partial adaptation of the novel in 1988.) Nah, that's some authentically human terrible engineering. The Regult, and the Zentradi forces as a whole, are evidence of a genuine disdain for life that even the Soviet space program might've felt was over the top. Happy to help. It's a relatively new addition to the lore, having come in AFAIK with Macross Chronicle.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    By all accounts, they didn't have to hypothesize the existence of alien mecha... they had samples. Macross Chronicle mentions, at a few points, that the research teams studying the crashed Supervision Army gunship on South Ataria island recovered battle pods from the ship's interior and studied them. Analysis of those recovered battle pods was what allowed Humanity to develop energy conversion armor. It's also said that the data from studying the battle pods was used to decide how powerful the weapons of Earth's anti-giant robotic weapons needed to be in order to defeat that armor. (It's also highly probable that other essential technologies used in the Destroid and Battroid programs were obtained from those battle pods, like compact thermonuclear reactors, superconducting motors, megawatt-scale laser and particle beam weapons, more powerful high explosives for warheads, etc.) Why Earth didn't assume those were the standard... well... they were generalizing from self and probably assumed that the battle pods were something akin to a light tank. After all, no army on Earth puts every soldier into their own armored fighting vehicle. (Either that or the UN Forces dropped Heinlein's Starship Troopers from the curriculum.) To be fair, we see pretty much exactly that in the encounters with Zentradi small craft like the Quel Quallie scout in the TV series and the assault gunship in the movie and Earth's mecha seem to do fine. When you're building something by the millions, every little bit of unnecessary cost balloons out into a fiscal atrocity in pretty short order. It's mentioned surprisingly often that the Protoculture spared every possible expense when it came to the design of the military hardware they were producing for the Zentradi. If you don't care about operator comfort or safety - and the Protoculture didn't - you can save an awful lot by doing without little mod-cons and luxury extras like ergonomic design, redundant control circuits to protect against equipment failure, more than the bare minimum necessary system automation, escape/survival equipment, more than the minimum necessary armor and radiation shielding, and so on. It's why the Regult is said to be draining to operate... it's cramped, uncomfortable, and very little of it is automated. (Also why the battle suits like the Nousjadeul-Ger are coveted... they're a LOT easier on the pilot and have substantially better survivability.)
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Granted, I agree wholeheartedly that the shield designs that show up are seldom attractive... but they have been shown to be undeniably effective in the animation. I think the main reason the shield gets a bad rap is that the Gundam didn't really need the shield much because the OYW Zeon forces were using mainly hard rounds that its own armor was proof enough against. It was much more advantageous for the GMs, which weren't made from Luna Titanium and lacked the same bullet resistance of the Gundams they were based on. Once everyone switched to beam weapons and most new mobile suits were made from Gundarium around the time of the Gryps conflict the shield was a lot less necessary, and became little more than a plank covered in extra-thick anti-beam coating so that the MS carrying it could tank a few more hits. (The two best examples of the shield providing highly effective defense are the showiest... the GP02 using its shield to protect itself from its own nuclear bazooka in Stardust Memory and the Unicorn and Banshee tanking a hit from a colony laser in Gundam UC.) It's a different kind of shield... collapsible, and forearm mounted so it leaves both hands free. It definitely has a lot more utility than the regular model. (Though, since we were once again seeing Gundams made from Luna Titanium its main value was that extra utility.)
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Maybe, then again maybe not... I went looking in Master Archive and it doesn't mention the beam javelin at all. A bit of an odd choice I guess, but then again it doesn't mention a lot of the more niche equipment options in the series like the hyper hammer and super napalm. Interestingly, well I was looking into it, I found that there is an appearance by the classic beam javelin in the Gundam UC novel and OVA. Apparently one of the GM III units fighting at Dakar had a beam javelin that looks identical to the one used by the RX-78-2 in the original series.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    But there's exponentially more Zeon characters in her camp, morally, than in Ral's. Even in Origin, which was more even-handed than OG, Ramba Ral was still one of very few decent and honorable people on Zeon's side... and like most of them, there's an asterisk hanging over that because he's still an officer in the occupation forces oppressing people. The main reason he's remembered as "good" is simply because he has some standards where the other Zeon characters in the series are puppy-kickers for fun AND profit. Kinda what I'm getting at here... there are Zeon characters who are not horribly sh*tty people, but they are rare and being one almost invariably requires being opposed to Zeon's goals, methods, and/or leadership. Making a Zeon protagonist without that is going to be an incredibly hard sell. Weren't the beam sabers in this era each individually expandable into beam spears? That was one of the RX-78-2's lesser-used gimmicks, but still...
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Granted, that's what the Zentradi would consider equivalent to "regular infantry". The UN Forces were aware of battle pods, and even benchmarked their weapons against them, but they seem to have designed around the expectation of Zentradi soldiers on foot as being the norm given how they chose to scale the Destroids and Valkyrie Battroid.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    In all likelihood, it probably has a lot to do with the Earth UN Forces very inaccurate expectations of what a future war against aliens would look like. The Earth UN Forces assumed that a war with an alien power would take the form of a classic alien invasion scenario. Their incorrect prediction was that hostile aliens would be coming to Earth with conquest in mind, and that they would necessarily be obliged to deploy ground forces and wage a land war for control of the planet's surface. The Earth UN Forces developed their plans for planetary defenses around that assumption including the development of their anti-giant weapons. They thought they'd be squaring off against, and potentially peacefully interacting with, alien infantry for the most part so they constrained the designs of their anti-giant weapons to the approximately 10m height they were expecting the alien giants to be. Considering they were expecting such hand-to-hand engagements to occur between a heavily-armored war robot and a comparatively squishy alien infantryman in body armor, it isn't hard to see why they might have thought hands alone would do it. Considering the defensive strength of a Destroid or Battroid's armor and structural material is several times that of a main battle tank and that losing limbs or the head won't stop them, they probably figured (not unreasonably) that a hand-to-hand engagement between a flesh-and-blood alien soldier and a Human-piloted war robot would be nearly as unbalanced as any time someone tries to go hand-to-hand with a Terminator. We've seen in the original series and DYRL? that the average Zentradi can beat on a Valkyrie with their bare hands and do little to no damage, while the larger and stronger command class Zentradi still need a runup and a LOT of strength to inflict significant damage, so that expectation doesn't seem to have been that wide of the mark.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    TBH, I don't think this argument works... in the main, because it's been addressed and refuted in-series. For instance, in Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory, one of the characters (Cima Gaharu) is a Zeon soldier who participated in Zeon's gassing of defenseless space colonies during the One Year War. Not only is made explicitly clear that Cima and her troops knew what they were being ordered to do was a war crime and the worst kind of atrocity, it's also indicated on no uncertain terms that the rest of the Zeon forces shunned them for doing it. It's how Cima's unit ended up becoming pirates. They were considered a disgrace to the rest of the Zeon military and weren't allowed to join the retreat to Axis. (And they couldn't go back to the colony they were drafted from because it'd been made into the Solar Ray.) It wasn't a "my country right or wrong" thing... they knew they were being ordered to commit war crimes and did it anyway. At least a few of them (e.g. M'Quve) did it because they figured it was expedient and they'd never have to actually answer for it. It's not an accident that most of the time when we see a Zeon unit in the UC, they're not exactly sane and rational people. (Like the ones in Cucuruz Doan's Island, who are basically all axe-crazy.) Unicorn is a pretty good example too, considering how far the story had to go to give the Neo Zeon remnant some skin in the game. Take away the reveal in Laplace's Box and The Sleeves are just terrorists killing people out of spite. They've proven they can make Zeon soldiers interesting and sympathetic protagonists very rarely and only under very special circumstances... which usually involves them not really being invested in Zeon's goals or a party to its crimes like Bernie Wiseman in 0080: War in the Pocket or Oliver May in MS IGLOO. Bernie was able to be a convincing nice guy as 0080's protagonist in no small part because he was a new recruit fresh out of training on his very first assignment. He'd never taken part in a military operation before, so he wasn't carrying the guilt of Zeon's various war crimes. It also helped that, late in the OVA's story, his motivation is preventing his superiors from committing another war crime when he learns their contingency plan in the event of Cyclops Team's failure was to destroy Libot with a nuclear strike. Oliver May worked really well as a protagonist in MS IGLOO because he was similarly unconnected to Zeon's war crimes and his visible dismay with the lengths Zeon was going to in order to win the war helped keep him sympathetic as the story progressed through the One Year War. Even when he's drafted into the defenses of A Baoa Qu at the end of MS IGLOO: Apocalypse 0079, he's terrified instead of patriotic and jumps at the chance to stop fighting. Whether they can make a unit who are actively fighting for Zeon's cause anything but villain protagonists... we'll see. My hopes are not high. Historically, shields with notches or gaps like that were constructed so that you could shoot out through the shield. They were usually built as literal movable walls called mantlets... which has since become the term for the movable armor around a gunmount. Master Archive Mobile Suit suggests several models of Mobile Suit shield, including the NFHI RGM-M-Sh-AGD used by the RGM-79G GM Command, RGM-79N GM Custom, and RGM-79Q GM Quel were made to be used this way. There's also the suggestion that the GP-series RX-Vsh-023F/S-04712 shield used by the GP01 was intended to be used that way, with sliding rails for the grip so the shield could be flipped upside-down and mounted. This new Gundam's shield most closely resembles the GP01's shield, so presumably it's made to be used in siege conditions or as a brace for a heavy weapon as we see the RX-79[G] doing occasionally with its smaller collapsible shield.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    The shield looks like a derivative of the GP01's, but the beam rifle is the Guncannon's. The shoulders and head look like the Ez-8's. ... does it have three beam sabers on its left shoulder? Naturally. 👍 Oh, I know... and Gundam the Origin played the Federation's provocations up quite a bit to make it clearer that Zeon didn't declare independence for shiggles. It still doesn't excuse or justify what Zeon did after declaring independence. Their opening move was to massacre billions of people via unrestricted use of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons against the other Sides. There's disproportionate retribution and then there's that. It was Zeon's fanatical and ongoing commitment to mass slaughter and widespread destruction that created the conditions that gave rise to the Titans. Zeon's war crimes during the One Year War had already created an environment of fear and suspicion that allowed power-hungry officers like Jamitov Hymen and Bask Om to agitate for the creation of an elite anti-spacenoid force. Aguille Delaz and Anavel Gato handed the Federation's hardliners a picture-perfect and damn near irrefutable argument in favor of policing spacenoids more rigorously through Operation Stardust. That led directly to the creation of the Titans... so directly that we see the Titans being founded and the characters who'd fought the Delaz fleet joining the Titans in the ending of Stardust Memory. It doesn't excuse what the Titans did either, but it cannot be denied that they are monsters of Zeon's creation. Zeon's actions convinced the Federation the Titans were necessary... and Zeon's actions convinced the Titans that the extremity of their own actions were justified in the name of protecting the peace.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Just because it was a tight, focused narrative doesn't necessarily mean it was good or fit for purpose. Star Trek: Discovery's showrunners and writers seem to have gone into the project with a clear and consistent vision... for something almost entirely unlike Star Trek. Even now, it honestly still feels like Discovery's season one story was developed as an original IP and hastily rebranded as Star Trek when there were no takers. It's really easy to spot where Discovery's writers literally lost the plot. It's the mid-season break. For some reason, likely an executive poking their oar in, they hit that mid-season break and went "Sh*t, we're writing for Star Trek. That means we have to do Star Trek things!". And from that we got the extended digression to an even darker and edgier version of the mirror universe. Why darker and edgier? Because the regular one is a significantly nicer place than Discovery's normal setting. That was followed by the season's hastily-composed conclusion wherein the crew realize their time over in the land of evil twins has taught them the true meaning of christmas and they take the strong and controversial moral position that... *checks notes*... "genocide is bad". It isn't a moral stance they're completely committed to, though, as they still use the very real and immediate threat of genocide to force their enemies into a ceasefire... a decision that's lauded as the very model of Federation ideals for some reason. ... and the producers wondered why this left fans wanting to tar and feather them. The reason the series continues to fall apart as time goes on is because its showrunners keep making half-baked course-corrections intended to "win back the fans"... but without the courage to acknowledge that the problem lies in their concept for the series being at odds with Star Trek thematically and tonally. If they'd stuck to their original concept and run it as an original IP instead of as Star Trek, they'd probably have done OK for themselves.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... I'd disagree with your assessment. While the Earth Federation are surely no saints and the size of the moral gulf between them and the Zeon faction du jour varies from work to work, one of the constants of the UC-era Gundam titles is that Zeon can be counted upon to be substantially more evil than the Federation at any given time. The Federation might fall anywhere between "Good is not Nice" and Lawful Evil depending on the writer, but Zeon can be relied upon to start at Lawful Evil and where necessary proceed across the Godwin Line at the first opportunity. It's not "good and evil" in the sense of moral absolutes... of sainthood vs. eating babies. That said, it's still "good vs. evil" in relative terms considering Zeon's ideology and modus operandi are pretty consistently in the realm of what your average person would consider "genuine evil". There's not exactly a defensible case for unprovoked and indiscriminate nuclear bombing of civilians, gassing millions to death in order to turn their homes into an improvised ballistic weapon, or attempting the wipe out billions of people by rendering Earth ininhabitable. That's the uphill battle facing every attempt to do a story about Zeon characters. Nobody on the Federation side is a saint, but no matter how individually nice Zeon loyalists are they're still kind of inherently tainted by their association with the atrocities Zeon has committed and its abhorrent policies. The best you can usually do is make them as close to conscientious objectors as possible like they did in MS IGLOO. It's gonna be a lot harder to pull off with this new lot, given that they're a frontline unit in the Zeon occupation force and their daily business is oppressing the residents of Earth. It's not saying it's impossible, but Sisyphus has seen easier uphill battles.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Quite the opposite, in fact. Back when the UN Forces first kicked off development of anti-giant robotic weapons, both the Battroid and Destroid design concepts anticipated use in close quarters combat. In their earliest forms both concepts were essentially equivalent to a Mobile Suit. The Battroid program evolved into the Variable Fighter, while the main model Destroid remained a Mobile Suit-like design with hands for delivery of knuckle sandwiches until at least the MBR-04-Mk.I Destroid: the progenitor of the Tomahawk series. The idea endured past that point as well, finding its fullest expression in the MBR-07 Spartan series, which beefed up the hands into instruments of true day-ruining force. Hand-to-hand with a Zentradi on foot is just a somewhat different prospect to what they ended up with... hand-to-hand with Zentradi in a powered battle suit or pod. It's interesting that almost no source seems to want to comment on the VF-11's bayonet and why a similar feature wasn't available earlier or later... the closest we get is Macross Chronicle suggesting that multifunction gunpods are too expensive for widespread use.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    d'oh... you're right. Still, I'm not sure that doesn't run into the same problem or worse... the Principality of Zeon's Earth occupation forces were not exactly replete with decent human beings. They're either full-on space fascists or at least under the command of some M'Quve-type smug snake war criminal. That's not exactly a formula for a sympathetic protagonist. It's more like a formula for "watch the arsehole get what's coming to them".
  24. Seto Kaiba
    I feel like hate-watching is the only viewership Star Trek: Discovery has left. I'll be hate-watching the final season... if only because I want the satisfaction of knowing it's over and won't come back. For me, it's been all downhill from Discovery's already low starting point. Season one had a tight, focused narrative until that mirror universe plot tumor cropped up. Each season has felt progressively less like the writers and showrunners have an actual plan and more like they're just throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    You mean the 117th research fleet that was destroyed by the Vajra in 2048? No, we've been given no indication of how big that fleet actually was. We've only seen I think two ships from it.
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