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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    In the interest of avoiding going OT, I'll answer that ship question elsewhere... We hope, but I suspect that is a dry well.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    That would be absolutely the worst possible backstory for him. Full stop. That would be enough to make me stop watching. One of the things keeping Andor accessible and interesting is that these are ordinary people who are dealing with the Empire's oppression in their own ways. Whether that means keeping their heads down and living with it, rising up and doing something about it, or even taking the Empire's side out of the belief that the law and justice are one and the same. These are people making choices. They have agency in their stories. It's not surprising, IMO... the Star Wars galaxy has always felt pretty human-centric. Aliens were mostly comic relief or secondary characters at best. It's also really hard to make a seven foot two shag carpet who talks entirely in untranslated barks and growls or a hydrocephalic fishman into characters the audience can relate to easily. Though, in hindsight, it does make sense that the Empire's deep-seated racism would even extent to its mass incarceration too. Narkina 5 is supposed to be a nicer prison, where conditions are allegedly more humane. The prison population is 100% human. One can only imagine how much worse the alien prison population has it because they're second-class citizens at best.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    銀河帝国 (ginga teikoku, "Galactic Empire") is the one that was used first in Macross's development. That shows up in the description of the original series pitch for Battle City Megaroad that was made to Wiz/Artmic in August 1980. The actual Super Dimension Fortress Macross series does not provide a name for the Protoculture's civilization when their history is discussed in the episode "Satan's Dolls". The Macross: Perfect Memory artbook from 1984 is, I believe, the first in the franchise to use 星間共和国 (seikan kyouwakoku, "Interstellar Republic") but uses both terms interchangeably. It uses "Interstellar Republic" in the timeline on page 54, but uses "Galactic Empire" on the description of every Zentradi mechanical design. "Galactic Empire" is a very generic term that had a LOT of traction in sci-fi well before Star Wars came around, even in Japan. Star Wars is the most mainstream user of the term, but it was in common use decades before Star Wars was first conceived. Isaac Asimov's Foundation series is the oldest one I can find to uses that explicit term dating all the way back to 1942, though it wasn't translated into Japanese and released in Japan until 1968. Arthur C. Clarke's Against the Fall of Night also calls the Human interstellar civilization a "Galactic Empire", and it was published in 1948 (and again after some rewriting in 1953). There were, of course, plenty of other space empires in fiction like the Gamilas in Yamato, or the Klingons and Romulans in Star Trek as well. EDIT: I'm not sure what "AIMD" is supposed to be, but "ARMD" is a contrived acronym play on the word "Armed", because the ships were supposed to be the Macross's arms. It stands for "Armaments Rigged-up Moving Deck", officially. I doubt it. I suspect it was simply a question of conveying the appropriate scale of the Protoculture's civilization in the development of the series. An empire that spans multiple star systems would be an interstellar empire. An empire that spans the galaxy would be a galactic empire. If it is a result of pop culture osmosis in this specific case, there are quite a few more possibilities than just Star Wars, several of which are referenced here and there by the production staff and were available in Japan well before Star Wars. We know the staff were conniseurs of printed science fiction, given that they snuck nods to several sci-fi authors into the setting of Super Dimension Fortress Macross. The first two heads of state of the Earth UN Gov't are named for multiple sci-fi authors incl. Harlan Ellison, Larry Niven, and Robert Heinlein, for instance.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Sorry to hear you're unwell. I hope you feel better soon. To answer your question... yes, the Klingon death ritual first appeared in Star Trek: the Next Generation episode 01x20 "Heart of Glory" about two-and-a-half years before Nicholas Meyer and Denny Martin Flinn delivered the filming script for Star Trek VI: the Undiscovered Country. TNG Season 1's "Heart of Glory" had its broadcast debut on 21 March 1988. Exact dates are not available, but Meyer and Flinn started writing Star Trek VI in 1990 and handed in the final script by October of that year, with production starting 13 February 1991. Hard to say. "Heart of Glory" got roughly average ratings for a TNG Season 1 episode on its first broadcast (~10.7M) and it was nominated for Emmy consideration (in the editing category). Opinion of the episode among the cast and crew is pretty mixed, and later reviewers tend to point out the death ritual as one of the episode's sillier moments. I would assume its omission was probably intentional, because the film's priorities were elsewhere. Where Star Trek: the Next Generation was essentially trying to move past the use of the Klingons and hostilities with them as an allegory for the Russians and the Cold War and give them their own unique cultural identity, Meyer and Flinn's script for Star Trek VI: the Undiscovered Country went in precisely the opposite direction because it was inspired by current events. At the time Meyer and Flinn started writing Star Trek VI, the Soviet Union was creaking under the strain of the Chernobyl cleanup, the increasing internal conflicts among its member republics, and demands for governmental and electoral reforms. Since Star Trek grew, in part, out of Cold War tensions envisioning an end to the Space Cold War they had created for their story was a fitting swan song for the TOS cast. They just didn't realize how prophetic they were about it, with the film accidentally depicting the Empire's slide into collapse and a military coup against the Klingon head of state with a similar collapse and coup happened in Russia for similar reasons while the film was in production. Throwing the post-allegorical Klingon death ritual from TNG's first season into the film would probably have undermined the sledgehammer-unsubtle allegory by making the Klingons more alien.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    True. Some of the strangest discussions I've had with fellow fans came in the wake of Macross Frontier's release, when episode No.5 "Star Date" left me and a friend on an engineering tangent figuring out the physics of Zentradi clothing. It all started with her joking about the real proof of overtechnology materials being the underwire in (macro) Klan's bra, and ended with us poring over material strength metrics trying to figure out the ridiculous forces and material strengths involved in making something like high heels for a woman 9 meters tall. We ended up with a number of horrifying conclusions, including that a probable reason Zentradi are not allowed to live as giants in many emigrant fleets has to do with the sheer amount of damage sartorial decisions could inflict in key infrastructure like roads, sewers, and "underground" utility conduits. (And as a nearly 2m tall man, I can attest it's hard enough to find proper-fitting trousers as a taller miclone... Zentradi in society will certainly redefine the meaning of "big and tall" in the context of clothiers.) The VF-11 was by no means "fragile". AFAIK, I don't think they've ever been explicitly described as less durable than the VF-14. The VF-14 being so much larger than the VF-11 has a lot to do with it being designed primarily as a space fighter rather than an all-regime fighter like the VF-11. The engine technology available at the time the VF-14 was developed was the same initial generation thermonuclear reaction engine technology used on the two previous generations of VFs. That meant that, minus tuning and some improvement in materials, boosting engine power meant building a bigger, thirstier engine. That meant a bigger airframe to house it and bigger fuel tanks to feed it. Achieving the desired results when it came to space cruising range without FAST Packs meant a very large airframe with a lot of internal room for fuel. Having such a roomy airframe also made maintenance access to key systems easier and made packaging improvements and customizations a lot more forgiving. It was that combination of attributes - FAST Pack-free space cruising range, payload capacity, and ease of maintenance/upgrade - that made the VF-14 so desired by a certain type of emigrant government. It should also be noted that the "VA-14" is NOT the fighter seen in "Spiritia Dreaming". We've never seen a VA-14, and at this rate we likely never will.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    That's kind of an impossible question to answer under normal circumstances. Macross Delta couldn't realistically exist as Macross's first and only series because so much of its story and setting are built on, or borrowed from, previous Macross titles. That was, IMO, a big part of why Macross Delta was such a weak series. It made very little effort to stand on its own merits and outside of Walkure Delta's main appeal was the borrowed gloss from Macross Frontier. Quite a few of the show's characters are terribly blatant expies of Macross Frontier characters (e.g. Hayate, Freyja, Mikumo, Arad, Keith, Roid, and staff officer Malan, etc.), the plot depends extremely heavily on the events of Macross Frontier and even rips off its ending almost whole cloth, and Freyja's motive for becoming a singer IS one of the Frontier characters, the mechanics of Walkure's operations are built on material established in 7, Zero, and Frontier, and so on. You can't really separate Macross Delta from that the way 7 and Frontier could stand alone with just a little explaining from intro blurbs before the OP because Delta does such a terrible job of explaining itself. If you were to remove that skeleton of previous material and the audience's foreknowledge of it, the series would devolve into a borderline incoherent mess strung together by random Walkure songs.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    I'm not sure that follows, TBH. Putting aside the mundane reasons that an Attacker variant of the VF-14 would need a larger frame like expanded payload capacity for its role, part-Zentradi like Ernest Johnson and Ian Cromwell are statisical outliers. The vast majority of part- or full-Zentradi miclones we've seen are within Human norms for height. For example, Milia and the spy trio in the original series, Guld in Macross Plus, the rescued population of Macross 5 in Macross 7, etc. Mylene's 153cm tall, on the short side even for a Human. Nene Rora is the tallest of the Zentradi girls in Frontier and she's only 170cm in a miclone state, and part-Zentradi Michael Blanc and Brera Sterne are both about her height. Hayate's Zentradi foreman in Delta's first episode is maybe a head taller than him and Hayate's 169cm tall and Mirage is 165cm. Chelsea Scarlett, Naresuan, Angers 672, and Takeru in Macross the Ride are also normal human sized, as is Moaramia in Macross M3 and Mariafokina Barnrose and Timothy Daldhanton in VF-X2. From practically the entire body of evidence, Zentradi miclones might tend to be a bit on the tall side by Human standards but almost none of them are 200cm+ giants even when micloned.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Let's be honest, few if any of us would hold it against them if they decided to just never acknowlege this movie's events ever again. Not only was the plot a trainwreck, but they killed the most likeable character in the entire cast...
  9. Seto Kaiba
    It's unexplained, but...
  10. Seto Kaiba
    So... help a filthy casual out here. Is there any kind of in-universe reason ever given for why Stormtroopers are so bad at their one job? The only thing I can recall ever being said about it apart from the aforementioned Stormtroopers on the Death Star in A New Hope were under orders from Tarkin to let the rebels go is when, in the same movie, Luke mentions he can't see a thing in his stolen helmet. It makes sense for Stormtroopers to struggle against highly-trained rebel troops, crack shots, and guys who literally have Fate on their side... but up against regular joes they ought to give a way better showing as elite troops.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    The latter... with a further caveat. Not only do we not know what kind of Republic the (Inter)Stellar Republic was (or if it was even truly a republic and not a People's Republic of Tyranny)... it's not always referred to as a Republic either. Sometimes it's 星間共和国 (seikan kyouwakoku, "Interstellar Republic") and sometimes it's 銀河帝国 (ginga teikoku, "Galactic Empire"). The latter is more common in early works, but Macross Chronicle expressly acknowledges both terms. It's possible that both are correct and either the government changed its name or those existed concurrently as the two factions in the Protoculture's civil war.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Both old and new Macross were made by "corporate suits that see anime as a marketing tool for music sales and other products". All anime, and really all mass media, is. We call those corporate suits "producers" or "members of the production committee". They're the ones putting up the cash for the work to be produced/published in order to make money on its distribution and licensing. Anime makes most of its money from licensed merchandise, after all. Even the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross was very much driven by the sponsor's desire to sell licensed toys, model kits, character goods, and many other kinds of merchandise and reap the financial rewards. All that's really changed from then to now is Big West is no longer inexperienced with animation production they way they were in 1982, those young guys who made the original series are not so young anymore, and Macross is now a well-established property that's experimenting with its formula and chasing media trends in order to remain relevant to its target audience like any other long-running property.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... I'm with ya on the "Why bother?", but the OP pretty clearly meant "for a Macross series" not for the backstory. Yes and no. The Stellar Republic is a vanished golden age civilization, but it's not really equivalent to the Star League of BattleTech in any meaningful way. None of the civilizations depicted in the main Macross continuity were once a part of the Stellar Republic. Only two cultures encountered in the series had any kind of a significant mytho-historical association with the ancient Protoculture, the Mayan islanders on Earth and the Windermereans of Windermere IV. Neither party has any designs on restoring the Stellar Republic. The Mayan's mytho-historical "memory" of the Protoculture is not exactly positive (it centers on the Birdman's aborted attempt to destroy them) while the natives on Windermere IV were almost certainly created long after the Protoculture's Stellar Republic fell given that the Brisingr star cluster is believed to have been their final enclave late in their slide into extinction. Another key difference is that nobody is trying to recreate the Protoculture's Stellar Republic. The New UN Government's space emigration program is driven mainly by the fear of extinction at the hands of the Protoculture's rogue creations, and the Zentradi have no knowledge of cultural pursuits outside of their strictly military function. It wouldn't be much of a stretch to say the more humanity learns about the Protoculture the more it sees the Stellar Republic as a pack of irresponsible maniacs who left the galaxy absolutely littered with incredibly dangerous abandoned weapons. Nobody even really knows what the Stellar Republic's actual system of government was. Can't very well recreate a government you know nothing about. Not even close. The Zentradi may be divided into thousands of Main Fleets and each of those divided into thousands of Branch Fleets, but they're all effectively on the same side. They have no culture of their own, and the closest they have to "traditions" are the military regulations laid down for them by the long-vanished Protoculture that include a built-in prohibition on matters pertaining to culture. They're not driven by honor, or a desire for dominance, territory, or resources. They're not the least bit interested in trying to recreate the Stellar Republic and don't even have a proper concept of what it was. Their only interest is in continuing to carry out their orders to seek and destroy the Supervision Army. Naresuan's motive is not linked to any such notion of reviving the Stellar Republic or creating a new one. He's an otaku who adores Earth's culture, but his terrorist organization Fasces (subtle, no?) is a surviving remnant of the Latence faction that lost the Second Unification War and its motives and aims are the same as its parent organization. It's a fascist movement that grew out of the fear of the unknown and of imminent extinction that resulted from the First Space War and was driven to a fever pitch by the events of the Varauta conflict. It really doesn't seek to "unite all nations under a centralized government". Its actual aim is the overthrow of the New UN Government and the imposition of direct or indirect rule by the military in the name of coordinating defenses against threats to humanity.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, they had guts... the problem is they completely ruined the impact of the film's one big character moment by foreshadowing it SO heavily and SO often that throughout the film's runtime that when the blow finally landed it had no impact whatsoever.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    After a disappointing TV anime and first movie, Absolute Live!!!!!! definitely feels like an attempt to win back the fans who are there for more than just Walkure. The movie was supposed to have Ernest Johnson and the Macross Elysion, but after Unshou Ishizuka passed away they had to come up with a replacement and Max was who the team ultimately settled on because he had a pre-existing relationship with another character they could use as a story hook to introduce him. Given the way Show Hayami's Max runs away with the movie while they're busy telegraphing... ... it feels like promoting Arad to captaincy of the Macross Elysion would've been a less problematic idea. He escalated a training exercise already in progress... that he cut the number down below four so quickly is more a testament to how lacking in professionalism they are compared to a real ace pilot. Watching Max dunk on Chuck, Mirage, Bogue, and Hayate like that and then explain to them how much they suck was intensely satisfying for those fans critical of the Macross Delta series, but not a great moment for the story as a whole when the protagonists get publicly humiliated as they're preparing to save the day.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    In all fairness, they do a better-than-usual job this time around. How much of that is because of how little they're in the actual episode vs. their foes having no weapons and being able to fight from secure positions is debatable. I was... but then, I'm not exactly a Star Wars fan so maybe I'm "no one" for the purposes of that topic. During the prison arc episodes, I was looking around YouTube on the assumption that it was obvious to everyone but the non-fans and got told stuff like that it was a probe droid's chassis or a TIE Fighter wing frame.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    It's in good company. Gawking uselessly when Max takes to the field is about all Delta Flight contributes to the proceedings for most of the movie too. It's gotta suck to get upstaged in your own movie by a 75 year old retiree who hasn't been an active duty pilot since your parents were in diapers. Especally when he rubs it in by being better at your own signature moves than you are and humiliating you and your squadmates in a four-on-one fight.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Seldom have I ever been this excited for a season finale. Andor has grabbed me in a way that I really did not expect it to, having never really been more than a casual member of the audience where Star Wars was concerned. Well, that wraps up most of the plot threads from season one in a neat and tidy package. Hopefully this is the last we'll see of the Ferrix set, considering how much time was squandered there dramatically walking nowhere in particular. They neatly wove the various side stories - Vel and Cinta's, Syril and Moss's, Luthen's - together with Cassian's for the ending of the first season so there are very few loose ends still remaining to be tidied up. Notably, who the hell the new kid the camera keeps dwelling on is and why we're supposed to care about Mon Mothma. She stopped being relevant to the series just a few episodes in, and now when the story switches focus to her it feels like someones's cutting segments from a completely different series into Andor as makeweight. Switching from grounded, focused, compelling character drama about the rise of the Rebellion and the espionage speed chess Luthen and the ISB are playing to another segment of the marital and financial struggles of a family of out-of-touch 1%-ers who loathe each other on Coruscant is as jarring and unwelcome as cutting away from a Bond movie to show segments from episodes of Frasier or Days of our Lives. It almost feels like they're trying to stealth pilot a Mon Mothma series, the way Star Trek has tried and failed to do stealth pilots for spinoffs like "Assignment: Earth" or Michelle Yeoh's Section 31 series... except even more ill-advised.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Probably none. Even in the oldest version of the VF-1's development history, Stonewell and Bellcom's joint engineering team designed the first Variable Fighter digitally. Physical prototyping didn't begin until after that design - which the oldest material calls VF-X X021 - was completed in 2005. Ejection seat manufacturers Marty & Beck* probably destroyed at least a couple dummies prototyping the actual ejection seat itself, but by the time the Earth UN Forces took delivery of the first prototypes in 2007 those were solved problems. Due to extensive use of computer modeling to evaluate the design before parts or even the materials to make them were available there were relatively few differences between the VF-X prototype seen in Super Dimension Fortress Macross and the Block 1 VF-1A. (It's actually kind of surprising how little has changed in the VF-1's development history from its first version in 1984 to the present day.) * A "bland name" version of real world British ejection seat manufacturer Martin-Baker.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    More like four different ways to eject using the same system. The Sky Angels book actually describes more than that, though it's all variations in the same basic concepts like ejecting the nose in Battroid mode instead of Fighter or GERWALK or firing the ejection seat forward out of the Battroid's midsection if the head is too damaged to clear the path of the vertical ejection. Because it contains so many diagrams, the part about ejecting is actually one of the book's longer sections!
  21. Seto Kaiba
    A steel-capped stick with a contoured grip? To me, that says "trench club". Or maybe some kind of stungun/prod? Luthen doesn't strike me as the kind of guy who believes in being elegant in battle. He strikes me as a "whatever works, works" kind of guy who wouldn't hestiate to carry something to silently knock heads in should the need arise.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    As questionable as the Macross Galaxy fleet's executives can be at times, it's an understandable view. As previous posters noted, something like BattleTech's clans wouldn't fit into the Macross setting on a motive level because it's thematically incompatible with Macross. The Clans are all driven by Nietzchean will to power and not a hell of a lot else. Even the ones that profess more noble goals like reforming the Star League are really only doing it for their own power and prestige. After all, what's more prestigious than returning humanity to its golden age as the restorer and undisputed ruler of its greatest civilization? The antagonists in the Macross franchise tend to have more relatable motivations that are intended to keep them redeemable or at least understandable. Galaxy's executives are arguably chasing the polar opposite, since their endgame is not individual power but ego extinction via the creation of a unifying human hive mind. A story that's thematically all about the power of communication wouldn't work very well if the antagonist was nothing more than irrational and power hungry, y'know? That's why even when you get factions that woud ordinarily be in the very dark gray or the black like the fascist Latence movement or the Macross Galaxy fleet, they're kept clear of card-carrying villain territory by giving them a rational motive for their misguided actions. In both cases, their misguided actions were taken because they sincerely believed their chosen course of action was The Only Way to save humanity from imminent destruction... whether that destruction was external or self-inflicted. Quite possibly. I'm actually surprised it lasted this long, considering it's almost a "Vs" thread.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    That or, as @JB0 pointed out, ejecting the cockpit block as a single unit. For various reasons, the VF-1 Valkyrie came equipped with at least four separate ejection system operating modes. One for subsonic flight, one for supersonic flight that deployed an additional bit of decking below the chair to shield the pilot from the supersonic airflow, one for space flight that ejects the entire aircraft nose, and then battroid that pops off the VF's head and allows the seat to eject out the neck. TTC ejection is mainly a British thing for low-altitude aircraft. Most aircraft just pop the entire canopy off. Esp. American aircraft, and the VF-1 Valkyrie is an American-designed plane. If the fighter's blowing up around you, exiting the aircraft by the most expeditious means possible is generally recommended for your continued health and safety. At no point will the stewardess tell you to please wait until the aircraft has finished exploding to disembark.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Nobody did. Believe me, the history of medicine is quite unpleasant enough without getting into that particular pit of insanity. Macross's creators have been pretty damned clear about the fundamentally optimistic nature of the series from its inception. The antagonists in any given Macross storyline are not evil. They might be misguided, desperate, afraid, or even unaware of the harm they're causing. None of them are card-carrying villains out to dominate others or destroy things for no reason or because it makes their balls feel big like Stefan Amaris, Gihren Zabi, Sheev Palpatine, etc. That precondition of malice just isn't there in Macross. *sigh* We've been over this. Yes, Macross Galaxy uses questionable methods. The point you keep overlooking is that their questionable methods were exercised in the (misguided) pursuit of the otherwise noble goal of preventing the human species from destroying itself the same way the Protoculture did and achieving the Protoculture's definition of societal perfection. That's not quite accurate either. Todo is an extremely damaged person. He's running on survivor's guilt and trauma from the First Space War, and his goal is to go back and change history to make the First Space War un-happen and prevent the destruction of virtually every human society and culture. It does, as you say, come at the expense of retrocausally erasing the people born after the war (maybe, if that's how time travel works in this setting) but his mental calculus is probably aligned to the idea of erasing millions to save billions and ensure humanity is a good deal more prepared for the first contact event when it ultimately happens. It's misguided, sure... but it's not evil. He's not doing it to screw anyone over. He's trying to recover what was lost in the First Space War (in terms of both lives and culture) and give humanity a more peaceful existence. That's very, VERY different from the kind of thing we're talking about here WRT the BattleTech setting where pretty much everyone's motivations are sh*tty, selfish, and generally full of horribleness because it's a Forever War setting and that horribleness allows everyone to fight everyone else plausibly.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    There's no caveat on it... they just say TTC ejection is not possible because of the material strength of the OTM materials used in the canopy. Based on what's said about the strength of Overtechnology Materials used elsewhere in the Valkyrie's design I'd assume that any blast strong enough to break the canopy from the inside would probably kill, or at least severely injure, the pilot.
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