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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Speaking as an engineer, and knowing what engineers are like, the English speakers are probably the reason it was saddled with that unfortunate acronym in-universe.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    They made it themselves. It's not a finite natural resource, it's a manufactured synthetic material. OTEC's study of Alien StarShip 1's technology extended not just to its many sci-fi gizmos, bu to the materials used to make them or essential to their operation. They studied the material and experimented with methods of reproducing it until they succeeded. The same goes for all of the fold carbon used in the thermonuclear reactors of the Valkyries, Destroids, etc. They reproduced the fold carbon they found in Alien StarShip 1's systems as best they could to make those systems work the same way.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    I'm planning to watch my copy this weekend... though, to be honest, I'm actually kind of dreading it. On the one hand, everything I've heard from my friends in Japan who saw it in theaters was broadly positive and suggested that the movie was where Macross Delta actually starts living up to the "Macross" name. I'm heartily sick of being disappointed by the lazy work on display in Macross Delta proper and the middling-at-best first movie, so I'd like nothing better than for the second movie to blow me away and leave me feeling like the slog to get here was actually worth it. On the other hand, I absolutely 200% dread the movie's "big reveal" because it's a painfully anticlimactic answer to the franchise's oldest unsolved mystery. On the other other hand, I am greatly looking forward to seeing Delta's collection of underdeveloped expies of Macross Frontier characters, third-rate washouts from Brisingr's local New UN Forces, and other assorted bush league "talent" get completely upstaged in their own ****ing movie by a special guest character from another series. On the other other other hand, could someone please pass the geiger counter?
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Considering that the VF-1's structural frame and the composite used for its armor are both made of ludicrously tough Overtechnology Materials (called "space metal" in the oldest TV series material, and "hypercarbon" from DYRL? on) said to be a hundred times as strong as armor-grade steel, I'd be inclined to suspect that structural fatigue is not high on the maintenance crew's list of concerns. Especially once you factor in the additional increase in structural strength when the energy conversion armor is active, and the VF-1D's being short-term stopgaps for the soon-to-be-delivered, built-for-purpose VT-1 Ostrich.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    I guess that would depend on what you considered "ideal". To have the cannon(s) available in all modes would be difficult given the VF-1-like transformations of the VF-5000 and VF-11. The VF-1 managed it by putting its laser cannon(s) on the monitor turret and having the monitor turret on the underside in Fighter mode. There really isn't a great placement for a gun that'd make it available in all modes like that on the VF-5000 or VF-11, since they moved the monitor turret so its gun could cover a rear-facing arc. Since the arms block the wing root in GERWALK mode and the wings fold up when in Battroid mode, the best bet would probably be sticking the gun in the nose similar to what the Sv-262Hs did, so it'd at least be available in Fighter and GERWALK modes. Either that or mount them in the vertical stabilizers like the YF-21/VF-22 did.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Of course they're gonna spin it in a "glass half-full" manner, they're promoting their own work. Glass half-empty is a much more objective way to look at the admission that they put Max in a YF-29 arbitrarily and didn't even bother to think up an explanation for a septuagenarian private citizen conveniently possessing the single most powerful prototype military aircraft in existence. (Esp. since the last character in a similar position had to invest his life savings AND get special corporate participation to get a previous-generation VF that'd been downgraded to export specification, and after establishing at length that his employer straight-up couldn't afford to build a fully-operational fold wave system.) Whether it's half-full or half-empty, someone still did a sub-par job of filling the glass. 😉 (We engineers, however, just keep 50% of our water in a redundant glass.)
  7. Seto Kaiba
    I'd prefer to keep any and all Force users at arm's length from Andor. One of the things that makes Rogue One and Andor more compelling as entries in the Star Wars metaseries is the absence of the usual iconic space wizards and all their nattering on about things they've foreseen, their destiny, and the Will of the Force. IMO, the protagonists (and antagonists) in these stories are a good deal more relatable and interesting if they're just regular people instead of space magic precognative laser sword one man armies. The characters also feel like they have a lot more agency in the story without all the Force's preordained baggage. TBH, I've never particularly cared for the way Star Wars's main films treat the Jedi and Sith like they're action figures the Force is shuffling around from one fated encounter to the next. Like, the Jedi and Sith's trust in the Force is practically kayfabe. They know their lives are scripted but try to act like there are actual stakes involved. Andor has finally started to assemble some interesting characters, but the writing needs some serious TLC. If they'd run this one out one episode at a time, they wouldn't have had an audience left by the time the story starts moving 20 minutes into episode 3. Right now, the story's kind of bloated, unwieldy, and slow. It's gradually picking up the pace but the series feels like it kind of resents the director putting the spurs to it. I'm still looking forward to episode 5, in no small part because that should prove a lot more energetic than the rest of the series thus far.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Palpatine's already promoted himself to Emperor Palpatine at this point, right? I can't see the Imperial head of state going anywhere without it being kind of a major production. If they were to throw in a big name Imperial art aficionado visitor to Luthen's gallery as an easter egg, why not someone a bit lower down like Admiral Thrawn? If memory serves, he spent quite a bit of the trilogy named for him sitting in an art gallery on his flagship. Or maybe Governor Tarkin. He seems like he'd be Wicked Cultured and they've done that kinda-frightening CG recreation of Peter Cushing's face for Rogue One.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Did anyone ever do one for the MtF J Kai head?
  10. Seto Kaiba
    What you're saying and what I'm saying are kind of distinction without difference... they fully own up to there not being an actual explanation for Max having a YF-29. It's just what they had laying around that they felt "fit". They could have given him a VF-31AX with a unique paintjob - and indeed the liner notes have a LOT to say about developing the distinct paintjobs with feedback from Tamashii - but they went with a YF-29 more or less arbitrarily. They could just as easily have given him an aircraft from their existing CG model library that he's flown before in prior official media: the VF-25. It would have been just as visually distinct, and admittedly would have invoked the same paintjob concerns regarding Max's Blue vs. Michel's Blue, so difficulty-wise it would've been a wash. It would've been a good deal easier to explain too, since the VF-25 isn't an impossibly-expensive machine only the military's super-elite special forces have and which Delta's material indicated that Xaos couldn't afford even if they wanted to. (As often as feedback from Bandai Tamashii is mentioned, it feels like they had a LOT of say in decisions regarding the mecha this time around.)
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Information about the VF-1D is surprisingly scarce. In part, this is because the VF-1D was a surprisingly short-lived variant that was improvised on short notice as a model conversion trainer. Some sources (incl. Master File) allege that the few VF-1D units produced were converted from VF-1A's rather than purpose-built. They were replaced by a purpose-built training model (VT-1 Ostrich) starting from Block 6. The origin of the two laser cannons is probably the original design having the two sections of the head pivot independently. There hasn't been, as far as I'm aware, anything like a cut-and-dry official in-universe explanation for the VF-1D having two laser cannons in its final form. There was, for a time, a school of thought that the A-type's single laser wasn't enough firepower. It's more likely that the D-type head was simply cobbled together out of "off the shelf" parts from other variants given its improvised origin. That was almost certainly the reason when the draft design allowed the two cameras to pivot independently (see @Shawn's post). The final design's explanation is a bit different. One camera is a normal Valkyrie sensor suite and the other is a wide-area unit used for recording training exercises for analysis.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    I'll admit my hopes were not high going into Andor. Being only a casual enjoyer of the Star Wars movies, I was a bit leery about Andor from the outset because the other three Disney+ series are so fanservice-heavy that I felt locked out of the loop. Andor has so far avoided that pitfall, which is a huge plus in my book. It's accessible enough to stand alone, but still fits into the bigger picture of Star Wars. Four episodes in, and once you get past the excess of dramatic silent walking there are some engaging characters. Once the story's either got a premise unusual enough to hook me or characters I can get invested in, I'm with it 'til the end. Andor has reached that point for me. I'm invested in it enough to wanna see where it ends up. (The weirdest things can hook me on a series too... I added Ya Boy Kongming! to my watchlist because the OP is just ridiculously stylish.) TBH, I think the writers probably own the lion's share of the blame for the first two-and-a-half episodes. Someone scripted a full hour of Cassian Andor walking purposefully to nowhere in particular, a space dog pissing on his droid, and the hundred other nonevents of the first three episodes. The editors can only work with what the writers write and the director shoots. At least the pace is picking up and the story's got a sense of direction to it now. (As for the Imperials fighting arseholes... yeah, this one's very much Evil vs. Evil. That was on the table going in, considering Cassian's speech in Rogue One about having done terrible things for the Rebellion. It's also probably the single biggest factor setting this apart from regular Star Wars. Nobody's a Chosen Hero of Ultimate Destiny occupying an unassailable position on the Moral High Ground against the Dark Lord and the Forces of Evil. This is a bunch of pissed-off wasters, losers, joe averages, and other randos vs. a pack of mid-level bureaucrats, functionaries, and gofers who are less Lords of Darkness than Assistant Chamberlains of that buzzing noise the office's flourescent lights make when they're going bad.)
  13. Seto Kaiba
    ... and that's where it's thematically incompatible. Macross is a fundamentally optimistic sci-fi (meta)series where love, peace, communication, and diplomacy triumph in the end.Macross could be described as a setting where there really are no "bad guys". It's not a Good vs. Evil story. There are no Emperor Palpatines, no Stefan Amarises, no irredeemable complete monster card-carrying Agent of Chaos villains waiting in the wings to make the galaxy a worse place Just Because. Macross's antagonists are people doing what they're convinced is right for them and theirs: BattleTech's Clans, on the other hand, are kind of just awful people 24/7. It's not even a shades of gray thing... it's more varying shades of black, morally. The closest they get to a non-awful motivation is wanting to reform the Star League and restore humanity's golden age, though with largely selfish motivations involving ruling it themselves. Once that's off the table, they're just kind of jerks engaged in a decades-long interstellar dick-measuring contest. The closest they get to non-awfulness is usually uniting against someone even worse than they are (e.g. the Blakists). It's very much on the same narrative model as Warhammer's various incarnations, where the setting is deliberately full of awfulness so that every faction can fight itself or any other faction.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    While I can be cantankerous at times, this is a topic suitable for those on a low-sodium diet. No added salts. "It is unknown how Max obtained the YF-29." That is a direct quotation from the liner notes. The only part of the entire paragraph that isn't about the color being blue, in fact. The paragraph this is from starts with mentioning the YF-29 being blue because it's Max's, then the commentary goes on to talk about how they were worried people might confuse it for Alto's (or Michel's) because it was a YF-29 colored blue and how they needed to make it a distinctive blue. Here's the other: That's a question asked to, and answered by, Kawamori in the liner notes. Max has a YF-29 not for any actual story-relevant reason, but because it's all they could think to give him.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Looking at it more closely, the Macross Delta: Absolute Live!!!!!! blu-ray liner notes are surprisingly light on substance overall. It's pretty much all creator commentary... but it's mostly the kind that's long on words and terribly short on substance. They have a section about the story, a very large section for the various musical numbers, a brief section about the character designs, and a section about the mecha that seems to be mostly just acknowledging that the VF-31AX has a new set of paintjobs they collaborated with Bandai Tamashii on. It's even less detailed than some of the magazine coverage we've had, which is kind of impressive in a "If only you had put this much effort into doing the job right" kind of way. To give you a basic idea, Max's YF-29 is talked about more than any other individual character's mecha and almost all of the remarks are expressing their concern that it'd end up mistaken for Alto's because the only difference was the color and that there is no actual explanation for Max having a YF-29. They literally just say it's unknown how he got it and that they gave him a YF-29 because it was the only thing they could think to give him.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Welp, I hope you weren't too keyed up for it, because the liner notes have ZERO technical info for the new mecha in the movie. What a frigging letdown.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Just got mine. Very disappointed by the lack of info in the liner notes.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Full disclosure, I'm actually not very familiar with the setting at all. Most of my exposure to that franchise outside of the legal situation is the 90's cartoon. I wanted to give the OP a response since I figured the topic wouldn't draw much attention and did a fair bit of reading for research purposes while I was preparing the post. Funny story... you more or less described the premise of Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross. The "alien" Zor in Southern Cross are the genetically-modified descendants of human space emigrees bound for Glorie whose ship(s) travelled into the past due to a botched warp (ala Yamato) jump. They colonized and terraformed Glorie in the distant past, ruined the planet in a nuclear war, and abandoned it to let the nuclear winter clear up. They returned to the Epsilon Eridani system to discover that their planet had been colonized by someone else (the second wave of settlers who'd left just after their ancestors did) and launched an invasion of the planet to reclaim resources vital to maintaining their civilization. The series was cancelled before it got as far as the big reveal that the Zor were human all along, but the fact is still stated in the Japanese liner notes and one artbook the series got. Two problems there: Fold faults are spacetime disruptions that only exist in fold space (AKA super dimension space), a higher-dimension sub-universe adjacent to conventional reality that ships use to teleport by folding higher-dimensional spacetime. The realspace equivalent phenomenon, produced artificially, is just an impassible wall of warped space. The Vajra and the Protoculture's Sigur Berrentzs use them as a (better) equivalent of humanity's barrier technology. Planets can be surrounded by fold faults, and it's implied that the ancient Protoculture did this to a few planets like Uroboros and Windermere IV on purpose, but the planet isn't inside the fold fault. It works like a fence, preventing or just slowing down travel into or out of the vicinity of the planet. Fold faults slow down the subjective passage of time for ships (or other objects) attempting to cross them via fold navigation. As seen in Macross Frontier, ships attempting to cross a fold fault will see a significant increase in the disparity between the passage of time inside and outside the ship during the jump, losing dozens or hundreds of hours of realspace time as a result.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    For the most part, it didn't. Very few VF-1J's were manufacturered overall, and most materials to discuss the topic suggest almost all of them ended up out in space with the Macross during the First Space War. The crew of the Macross's usage of the VF-1J as a machine for platoon leaders seems to have been either unique to the Macross or very limited in its application elsewhere due to the comparative scarcity of the VF-1J. Presumably the crew of the Macross (TV series) decided that giving the J type to platoon leaders would be the best use of what was advertised as an enhanced armaments type. Not as such. Shinnakasu Heavy Industry developed the VF-1J as a domestically-produced rival/competitor to Northrom's VF-1A, not as a dedicated machine for platoon leaders. Some sources like Master File assert their actual goal was to actually get the Earth Unification Forces to drop Northrom's A-type for the "better" J-type as the standard model. Unfortunately, their total production capacity was low and very few VF-1J's had been delivered when the First Space War broke out. Almost all of those units ended up out in space with the Macross, and the production facilities were destroyed in the orbital bombardment. In the movie version, even fewer J-types were aboard the Macross and those were mostly assigned to special duty like deploying the Armored Pack. (In some sources, this is said to be the result of a hardware/software compatibility issue, with the VF-1J being the only unit that had native support for the Armored Pack at the time.) Probably not. The VF-1 is physically quite strong, but it doesn't appear to be significantly stronger than a flesh-and-blood Zentradi giant.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    True, though most of Delta's fanbase seems to be there for the music and not a lot else... I was more referring to the fact that while there IS detailed information out there for Delta in a few places, none of us seem to really be in a hurry to translate it because of our own ambivalence towards the series.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    The liner notes have a fair amount of info, and so does Master File for what little that's worth, but even then I've noticed a lot of us seem pretty apathetic about the series compared to Frontier.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, I'm a wordy so-and-so... 😅 Stream of consciousness rambling aside, I'm enjoying Andor enough to not only give it my full attention but to start getting invested in the fate of the characters and thinking about the setting and the bits of context I'm missing. If the goal was to get non-fans invested in the series, it's mission accomplished in my case. (Admittedly not always the characters we're supposed to be getting invested in... I'm shipping Blevin and Dedra even though it's totally the wrong genre for an ending like that.)
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, it stopped being a one-man show when it transitioned to being a Wiki.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    I would say sometime between one planck time from now and the heat death of the universe. I'm afraid I can't offer any more precision than that until I develop clarivoyant abilities. FedEx is holding my copy of Absolute Live!!!!!! for me now that it's cleared customs, so I'll be picking it up tomorrow morning. Unfortunately because I moved between the time I put in the preorder and the time it shipped, it's being held at a location nearly an hour's drive away. Ever since it went to a wiki, it's mainly been us updating it... which is why the Delta material is so sparse to begin with. The series just doesn't get us fired up enough to care. I fully expect the result to be a massive anticlimax. Goodness knows Delta has found a lot of ways to disappoint thus far, what's one more?
  25. Seto Kaiba
    All right, headed into Andor Ep4 "Aldhani"... All in all, a much better episode than the previous few. There is finally a sense of direction to the plot, and a feeling that things are beginning to move. I really hope that the next one offers more than a few minutes of actual action. This episode was mostly exposition.
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