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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    As an addendum, outside of the main Zentradi designs of the Super Dimension Fortress Macross TV anime and Super Dimension Fortress Macross: Do You Remember Love? movie, I believe there's only been one other named class of Zentradi warship added... and that was in a canon game in the Macross II timeline. That was Quamzin's Oktii Granduraa flagship from the PC Engine games.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Its description in Macross Chronicle's Technology Sheet for it mentions that the uppermost conical section of the Grand Cannon's barrel contains a deflection field generator that is used to skew the beam's firing angle by up to 120 degrees. Presumably it's something similar to the spatial distortions that are used to corral the beam of the Macross-class's main gun or the ones used to aim the "high angle" beam guns of certain Zentradi and Human ships by locally warping space similar to a pinpoint barrier. Nope. There are a number of designs that are thrown in for just one specific shot or cut that have no official information.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    I guess it depends what she means to you. There are some fans who are just excited about "Lady M" raising the theoretical possibility of more legacy characters returning than just Max and Exsedol. There are others who are annoyed with "Lady M" because one of the franchise's most enduring mysteries got an incredibly lame anticlimactic answer. And, of course, there are still more who are considering the narrative implications from Absolute Live!!!!!! and saying "Wow, that doesn't make sense AT ALL." That's also the problem with her role in the narrative of Absolute Live!!!!!!, she wields too much power. It's just ridiculous if you think about it even a little. There's no reason for anyone to listen to "Lady M" at all, never mind take direction from her. They could maybe salvage the whole mess if they avoided the Delta movies entirely and built on the TV series version of "Lady M" who was just an enigmatic CEO of unknown and dubious origin who existed mainly as a one-woman(?) Omniscient Council of Vagueness.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    I'd suggest you take the disingenuous strawman arguments somewhere else. Nobody's interested. In Macross Zero, the Anti-Unification Alliance forces are the remnants of an anti-government militia whose armed opposition to the Earth Unification Government and UN Forces had frequently crossed the line into large-scale terrorist activities. Just two years previously they had destroyed the city of St. Petersburg in Russia with a thermonuclear weapon. In the OVA they deployed a thermobaric bomb on Mayan island. They are NOT people who would have followed a government ban on researching certain technologies or types of artifacts. The fundamental fact that you keep missing here is that a government ban on a type of research or a particular technology doesn't magically remove that from existence or place it out of reach for everyone. Blanket bans only work on the pathologically law-abiding. That research will inevitably still happen and those technologies will still be used because there will still be people for whom the benefits outweigh the risks, who believe they're above the law, and/or who refuse to acknowledge the ban because they find it unjust. Cromwell and Lady M are perfect examples of that. Lady M violated the ban on cloning because she believed she was above the law and that her cause was more important than adherance to it. Cromwell likewise violated the ban on AI research because he views the ban itself as unjust and argues that the technology has highly beneficial legitimate uses. A blanket ban achieves little besides depriving the government of the ability to properly regulate that research or technology's application and preventing any beneficial applications of that research/technology from being used for the common good. Of course, because the movie's whole plot makes no sense in context it's worth noting that past works have already effectively established that Cromwell and Heimdall's viewpoint is objectively correct. I'm not going to dignify your political strawman with a response, but if you keep trying to inject politics into this I will report your posts and have you removed. From a basic engineering standpoint, it is preposterously unlikely that Mikumo was the only clone constructed. It took Lady M YEARS to recreate a viable Star Singer from the genetic material her agents unlawfully removed from Windermere IV. There were doubtless many tests conducted to create a viable clone as they reconstructed the degraded DNA of the Star Singer. There are probably quite a lot of terminated prototypes that were created before Mikumo. It's also rather implausible that there wouldn't be a backup or two, considering Mikumo Guynemer was created to be a frontline soldier. A fundamentally quite dangerous role which lends itself to violent and messy death, especially for an unarmed, unarmored person on a battlefield dominated by things like uncontrollable rioters and soldiers driven mad by Var syndrome. There's that strawman again. Pack him up or clear out. No, nobody here is saying that the Epsilon Foundation are "good guys". They're pretty clearly and consistently amoral, but the only thing you're accusing them of that was actually a crime is Sydney Hunt's theft of a Star Singer relic. The rest is distortions of the facts or blaming them for the actions of their clients. Macross Galaxy's corporate government was a questionable undertaking in hindsight but it was a recognized New UN Government member state. There is nothing inherently wrong with doing business with them, especially since said business would've had to occur BEFORE their ulterior motives became known. Similarly, there was nothing inherently wrong with selling weapons to Windermere IV because the Kingdom of the Wind is a recognized government and former New UN Gov't member that the NUNG still openly trades with. Their involvement with Heimdall is more questionable in strictly legal terms, but as Heimdall's goal was to overthrow a despotic oligarch who secretly controlled the government their decision to assist him isn't exactly card-carrying villain stuff either. Even the Epsilon Foundation is not significantly worse than Xaos, who violate the laws of war and collude in illegal cloning and slave-trafficking.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Three more. It would have been four, but Grand Cannon II was destroyed in the Unification Wars... so the coverage had a pretty big hole in it. Unfortuantely because of how long it took for the Grand Cannon systems to charge up, it's unlikely they would have ever got the first shot off... which is probably why the idea was dropped after humanity moved out into space.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    True that! Had a "where do I know that voice from?" moment when Eve's teacher started getting actual dialog... he's voiced by Shuuichi Ikeda. Eve learned golf from Char Aznable.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Wow, Birdie Wing just never stops being completely insane. This episode started out with underground betting on golf matches (already pretty weird) to city council members being assassinated on the freeway with rocket launchers over a casino construction project. It never fails to blow me away how this whole series goes above and beyond the normal insanity of Japanese sports anime to treat golf not only like it's the biggest sport EVER but such serious business that drives a frenzy of gambling and an entire criminal underworld. It's just so surreal, especally for someone who used to play the sport, to see it as a thing the world revolves around instead of entertainment for the elderly and one of the few public settings where it's acceptable for upper middle-class twits to go day drinking. EDIT: Not to mention the occasional incredibly gratuitous plugging of Gunpla like they're highly valuable collectibles instead of relatively inexpensive plamodels. EDIT2: A training montage that involves jogging and meditating with a stack of books on one's head... EDIT3: OMFG the bad guy's tee shot was so hard HER HAND FELL OFF AT THE WRIST! What drugs is this show on?!
  8. Seto Kaiba
    The shape of the airframe changed a bit, and the wing got thicker, so I think it's a safe bet to say that they did.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    The only kind of implants that posed any risk were networked brain implants. There is no risk whatsoever from ordinary limb or organ replacements, and indeed we see several characters in past works who had such limb replacements with no issue whatsoever. The problem every single one of your arguments is going to run into is that for every one misuse of the technology in question there are a thousand legitimate and beneficial uses. You also keep making this strawman argument about Cromwell pushing for total deregulation... he only advocated for legalization of those banned technologies. That's a load of bull, and you know it. Even in the movie, literally nobody attempts to defend what Lady M did. They even say Lady M is at least as bad as Cromwell. How do you know she didn't? How do you know there isn't some laboratory somewhere with ten, twenty, a hundred Mikumos waiting to be activated should something happen to the one we see like Gendo's tank full of Reis in Evangelion? Maybe Mikumo is just the prototype. Maybe she's not even the first Mikumo. Maybe Mikumo is just the first one that worked, and there's a laboratory full of failed clones that were terminated because they didn't meet requirements like Ripley-8 in Alien: Resurrection. Because Lady M created her clandestinely and illegally, there is potentially a LOT of shady stuff that could be going on there. You keep saying that, and it's still not accurate. ... wow, you really haven't been paying attention at all have you? Did you forget that the events of Macross 7 happened because one of those government-appointed "responsible and morally right" people decided to try to monopolize the finds from the site on the Varauta iceworld for their own gain? Then those finds and that research would be subject to the New UN Government's technology-sharing laws, meaning research like that would not be able to proceed in secret and threats like that would be much harder to create with many more eyes on the situation.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    True, though it also helps to not have your story start with the characters having spent a decade-plus beaten and miserable and living in isolation. Without those breaks to reset the tone, if you start your story in a place of doom and gloom there's little opportunity to significantly lighten the mood when the bleakness begins to pall. The Jean-Luc Picard of Picard bears little resemblance to the one in Star Trek: the Next Generation because he's spent over a decade letting his misplaced guilt over the whole Romulan situation turn him into a bitter and self-hating old man and he never really gets a chance to get noticeably better because he just jackknifes from one guilty topic to the next. TBH, I think it probably owes a LOT more to simply starting from a much brighter, happier place and largely staying there.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    So if we get a video explaining where Lore's apparently been since he was dismantled in the TNG season 6/7 two-parter does that make the video Lore lore? Not a bad looking ship, I guess... she doesn't quite have the charm of the Sovereign and looks a bit too much like an oversized Nova-class, but she's a damn sight prettier than that trainwreck called the Titan-A.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Huh... I have to admit, that was quite a bit less exciting than I was expecting. Rather like episode 3, it was mostly buildup with the actual action confined to the episode's latter half. I have to admit I was expecting things to go wrong a lot sooner in the heist. This played out like a garden variety bank robbery for the most part... which, I guess, is kind of what it was. It's also really weird how that one rifle that keeps doing the rounds of Vel's rebel group is just a totally unmodified Kalashnikov. Yeah, it's a laser gun like all the others but it's just... an AK. At least tart it up a little bit, guys?
  13. Seto Kaiba
    It'd be interesting, but I suspect the lukewarm reception of the Chogokin Macross Quarter may have soured our chances of that.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    This argument of yours was already refuted in previous posts. It is mildly entertaining that you accidentally made a fairly compelling case for Lady M being the real villain though. You realize this is refuted right in the movie itself, right? "Evil people or organizations" with the resources and desire to do something like that are going to do it regardless of whether the technology is legal or not... like the criminal Lady M did. That is debatable at best, considering you're repeatedly misrepresenting what the Siren Delta System even was. Like Lady M did? It's worth noting the New UN Government does consider clones to have the same fundamental rights as a natural-born being, and the vast majority of humans in the setting are the descendants of clones. This is a legitimate concern... but only for one very specific type of cybernetic technology. As noted previously, this ignores the fundamental reality that non-networked medical cybernetics can greatly improve quality of life for people needing limb replacements and the like and allow them to live full and unrestrained lives. This also ignores some pretty important facts. The Sharon Apple incident was triggered by the last-minute addition of technology that was known to be dangerously unreliable and which had not been a part of the Sharon Apple system up to that point. To a lesser extent, it was also caused by sampling emotion data for Sharon's AI from a person with a hideous amount of psychological baggage. It wasn't a flaw in the underlying AI technology being developed, it was an issue of methodology in developing the Sharon virtuoid. That same AI technology is later used without incident in multiple models of unmanned fighter. Stable personality emulation AIs have also been created by LAI, based on people who weren't nuts. Not all of it... there have been a few big disasters caused by buried Protoculture weapons, but humanity has also used a lot of captured Protoculture-built tech to considerably positive effect like the factory satellites that underpin mass-manufacturing in the New UN Government and the genetic engineering technology that was used to keep Earth a habitable planet after the First Space War.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Seems unlikely, given that Macross is a fundamentally optimistic series. In 2051, the New UN Government went through a reorganization to give individual emigrant governments more autonomy in the wake of ousting a fascist group that was trying to concentrate all governing authority on Earth. Kawamori has compared the current form of the New UN Government after that reorganization to the European Union in terms of its balance of power. If anything, I'd say the opposite is far more likely as fold technology continues to improve and travel and communication between planets and fleets continues to get faster, easier, and more reliable. Once "super" fold tech based on fold quartz enters the picture, fold faults stop being obstacles to all of that and the galaxy itself becomes a much smaller and easier-to-navigate place. The reason we have a regional power bloc in Macross Delta is that the Brisingr globular cluster is still a remote and relatively inaccessible place thanks to the fold faults around it and its position on the edge of the galaxy almost as far away from Earth as you can get. Windermere IV's decision to withdraw from the New UN Government is for some rather... unique... reasons tied to the unusually short lifespans of the planet's inhabitants.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    This is true, but Star Trek: the Next Generation was an almost exclusively episodic series. The crew faced hardships and personal losses and the like, but they coped with those hardships and losses and for the most part moved on. Almost like they had regular access to some kind of highly trained mental health professional who could guide them through the grieving process and assist them with developing healthy coping strategies. It didn't leave them beaten and broken shells of the people they used to be like the backstory of Picard did. A few of them had lingering issues, but it didn't dominate their characterization. People watch Star Trek to give them hope for the future. When that previously bright and optimistic future is substituted for a bleak one filled with misery and despair and all of the indomitable heroes have given up hope themselves, that future is a joyless place and tedious beyond belief. It might've been fine if it were just one character, but EVERYONE in Star Trek: Picard is either broken and defeated and miserable at the start or gets there very quickly after their introduction. If TNG had had a plot where Picard meekly accepts defeat in some scenario where billions of lives are on the line, abandons his principles, and f*cks off back to France after quitting Starfleet you'd expect the episode to end with the reveal it'd been a fake Picard created by aliens to mess with the crew or something. It's not just Picard either. Riker, Troi, Hugh, and Seven of Nine got hit with it too, and even the new kids all came pre-broken. It was inevitable that every plot was going to have to have a personal tie to Picard himself. The series was launched as a saving throw after Discovery bombed, and when it bombed too they doubled down on the fanservice in the hopes of getting fans invested. That's why we went from "Picard will not be a TNG cast reunion" to "Season 3 is a TNG cast reunion and we've put all but one of the original characters on a bus."
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Unknown. You'd think there'd be pretty considerable turmoil since the movie implies a fair chunk of the New UN Government and New UN Forces sided with Heimdall against Lady M. Considering that Macross movies tend to be their own separate thing and only little bits and pieces make their way into the next TV anime, there's a better than even chance that it gets completely forgotten by the next series. Hell, considering the Brisingr cluster is almost as much of a non-place as Jakku in Star Wars, I'd be unsurprised if the next series completely ignores Delta or treats it as an obscure historical footnote at best. Me too, and thankfully that's the most likely option.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Subjective assessments of talent aside, Tony Gilroy definitely stands out among Disney Star Wars showrunners for his creative integrity and insistence on putting storytelling above fanservice. I'm pretty impressed by how thoroughly he's stuck to his guns on what I was so sure was an impossible promise. VERY excited for tomorrow's episode.
  19. Seto Kaiba
  20. Seto Kaiba
    It's not a d*ck-measuring contest. Your impression is very mistaken. I'll chalk this ad hominem up to the fact that you're simply not familiar with the community. You've created a lot of problems for yourself here by making inaccurate statements and trying to dismiss valid criticism of the film as "hate". Nobody's going to take you seriously like that. (The hilarious irony is that when all is said and done, I've been one of Delta's more vocal defenders in the English-speaking fan community.) One unusual aspect I have noticed in Macross Delta is that it seems to have polarized its viewer base in Japan and abroad into two groups: fans of the real idol group Walkure, and fans of the Macross series. There is some crossover between those two groups, but they have very different priorities and views of the series. The fans with the most positive view are Walkure's fans, who are mainly interested in the new songs and the portion of the story that involves Walkure directly. Fans who are there more for the Macross aspect of it are much more likely to find the series and movies disappointing because of their weak writing, the lack of development for many characters, the very poor dogfight choreography that dominated the TV anime, and it being so heavily derivative of Macross Frontier. In that last point, you could say a lot of people are dissatisfied with Delta because it is a very UC-like sequel that stays so close to the story of the previous series. Because this is a Macross fan community, you're going to find a lot of fans here who are here more for the story than for the music, and therefore find Macross Delta disappointing. Nobody here arbitrarily hates it because it's Delta. People are criticizing the many areas where the movie's execution is problematic, inconsistent, or simply incoherent. Those are two completely different things. Macross Frontier's two movies are two parts of a single story, adapting and modifying the story of the TV anime. Everyone already knew about Grace and the Cyber Nobles from the TV anime, so nothing was spoiled. Macross Delta's first movie was a condensed adaptation of the TV anime, but the second was an original story separate from the TV anime. Having it spoil its own ending barely 30 minutes in and then reminding the audience about it every ten minutes until the movie's over is a VERY big problem with its writing. Um... did you miss that characters in this movie on the protagonist side make the same observation about Lady M being the same kind of villain as Cromwell? One of the major problems with the writing in this film is that it's heavily dependent on protagonist centered morality. That Cromwell and Heimdall are "bad" is left almost entirely to the say-so of the film's main characters, and even the protagonists are unable to refute any of Cromwell's actual arguments when they're brought up. It crosses the line into being a pretty silly argument if you're familiar with previous material. That cloning and cybernetics can significantly improve quality of life for people with life-altering injuries was already a proven fact in Frontier-era materials, and that extensive use of unmanned weapons can save lives is a truism with the Frontier fleet using Ghosts extensively as first-response units and for high-risk recon missions and some emigrant fleets being established to use all-Ghost air forces. Not only are Cromwell's arguments reasonable on the face of it, but several previous Macross works have already established that he's completely and objectively correct. It's to the point where, if you're at all familiar with previous work, that Lady M's positions make NO SENSE and Cromwell sounds like a pretty reasonable dude. I'm not sure how you can kid yourself that Lady M has any kind of high ground when both movies explicitly confirm she's objectively a criminal. She broke the laws she herself forced the New UN Gov't to enact by carrying out illegal cloning experiments, then compounded that crime by falsifying documents to hide the fact that Mikumo is an illegal clone, violating all kinds of human rights laws by keeping Mikumo as a slave and child soldier, etc. Made worse by the fact that she arranged for those laws to exist in the first place. That's not to mention her culpability for Xaos's other criminal activities like their illegal participation in the war between Windermere IV and the New UN Gov't. (That Xaos, as mercenaries, are unlawful combatants gets mentioned when Hayate, Mirage, and Freyja are put on trial and are denied prisoner of war protections guaranteed to soldiers for that reason.)
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Get real, the writing in Absolute Live!!!!!! engages in such absurdly heavy-handed foreshadowing that it all but completely spoils its own ending within the first half hour. They are "elderly police sergeant the day before retirement" levels of unsubtle about spoiling the ending. Made infinitely worse, IMO, by the way the movie goes to such extraordinary lengths to spoil its own ending. I'm bothered almost as much by how obsessed the writers are with depicting Kaname as a miserable failure. Her own coworkers apparently like her so little that they carry photographic evidence of her failed solo idol career at all times to remind her how much she sucked. Come to that, it's actually kind of worrying how many times this movie stops to remind one (or all) of the characters that they suck. Sure, it's objectively true that Xaos, Walkure, and Delta Flight are all small-time operators at best but there are a few points where it feels like it crosses the line to actual ill-intent on the part of the speaker. Which really just draws a line under how incompetent the staff of Xaos are. Coordinating operations like that is a flight controller's job, not a platoon or flight leader's. Not to mention their Valkyries all have dedicated software specifically for coordinating operations and assisting unit leaders with command and control. There is literally no reason for Mirage (or anyone) to be barking overly-specific directions like that while sitting still making a perfectly vulnerable target of themselves.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    I dunno, I kind of doubt it. Starfleet has never exactly been shy about doing major, strip-the-ship-down-to-the-frame-and-start-over refits on its starships before. Especially on their largest, most prestigious, multi-mission explorer classes. Given the changes in the Enterprise-E's appearance between movies, we can safely assume she underwent a major refit after First Contact to take out all the Borg hardware and upgrade her firepower and we know she had another after Nemesis to address her battle damage. The latter is four years after the Dominion War's end. Almost all of the ones we see are from the 29th or 32nd centuries. The only legitimate ones to appear in the 23rd or 24th centuries were the USS Enterprise (-A, -B, -C, -D, and -E) and the one-shot Galaxy-class USS Yamato (NCC-1305-E). Other than those two, there's the 29th century USS Relativity (-G) and the 32nd century's Excalibur (-M), Tikhov (-M), and Voyager (-J). The 32nd century USS Discovery (-A) doesn't count because it's the original USS Discovery with a fake registry number to conceal its true identity as an illegal time-traveler from the 23rd century. The USS Dauntless (-A) similarly doesn't count because it wasn't actually a Starfleet ship, but rather an alien one faked up to look like one as a trap.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    The Grand Cannon concept didn't really do so great in the First Space War. It fundamentally assumes the enemy's going to achieve orbital supremacy, and at that point you're very likely already hosed, as was the case in its only use.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    The ancient Protoculture seem to have tried that in a way, protecting planets like Uroboros and Windermere IV by surrounding them with artificial fold faults. Its viability as a defensive strategy is... questionable.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    To be frank, that's more a symptom of the underlying problem. The problem in Star Trek: Picard is that not that we're seeing a lot of new starship classes. After all, Starfleet had a rough time in the 2370s and the deficiencies in the many older classes of ship leftover from the late 23rd century were thrown into sharp relief in the Klingon War in 2372, the Borg invasion in 2373, and the Dominion War from 2373-2375. The actual problem is more that what we're seeing here in the season three trailer is needless replacements for ships that were still practically new. Destroying the Enterprise was shocking the first time it happened in Star Trek III: the Search for Spock, but it'd already lost practically all of its sting when the Enterprise-D ended her extremely brief service life jobbing in a match against an obsolete Klingon Bird-of-Prey. It deteriorated to a meme when First Contact was incredibly blase about self-destructing a brand-new Enterprise-E. Learning that the Enterprise-E didn't even make to 30 years in service and there's already a new Enterprise-F is just the very definition of anticlimax. That's made worse by the fact that Picard's final season is set on the Titan-A. There was NO REASON to replace the USS Titan design already being used in Lower Decks. NONE. It was incredibly well-received by the fans and the Titan would only have about twenty years of service under her belt at the time of Picard's final season. Starfleet ships are designed to last for a century or more. Riker's USS Titan somehow got blown up very shortly after being launched but somehow also acquitted itself so well that a new ship with a registry suffix was commissioned in her honor. That's a thing reserved for Starfleet's most celebrated, most accomplished starships. So instead of the gorgeous USS Titan design fans waited a literal decade to see onscreen, we have this fugly kitbash that looks a good century older than it allegedly is. Nah, we saw a BUNCH of Inquiry-class ships in the first season. An entire fleet, in fact. But it was such a lulzily awful scene because of bad writing and terrible CG that left the low-poly, low-detail "fleet" looking like exactly what it was: blatantly copy-pasting one ship model and texture fifty times.
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