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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Oy. This one. Star Trek's go at "Video games are bad for you"... brought to you by the same Star Trek series that introduced the concept of the holodeck, the ultimate virtual reality game system that the characters use for every imaginable genre of gaming from children's edutainment and fitness/sports all the way up to immersive role-playing, true-to-life combat sims, and even erotic games (thanks Quark). The one thing I really remember from the staff remarks on this one was how upset the production staff were with the VFX for the Ktarian game... they were promised an incredible digital effect, and what they got was "tubas on a checkerboard".
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Even in the Macross setting, the organizational model for units of Variable Fighters isn't even the same between the different branches of the armed forces. In the real world, you'd end up with a hundred subtle variations just based on differences between national navies, air forces, and so on. Not to mention different organization for the different types and mission profiles different models of VF have. The US armed forces, for instance, have aviation arms in each of the five main branches of service, though only three of those five (the Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force) operate fighter aircraft and have their own respective organizational models. Realistically, I doubt Valkyries would find much use in any branch of service in the real world. They're only ubiquitous in the Macross universe because the Zentradi justify having giant robots. Without the overtechnology materials that makes them possible in the story, they would be a maintenance nightmare fit to make the Harrier seem reliable, so costly that nobody would ever field one, and so complex they'd spent far more time on the ground being repaired than in the air. If the overtechnology materials and other technological advancements were in play, they'd be better suited to conventional weapons like tanks, helicopters, and conventional aircraft for warfare against other humans. (That aside, the price tag alone would ensure that Valkyries would never displace conventional tanks. Given what's said about the flyaway cost of a single VF-1A, the Army could field two whole companies of conventional main battle tanks for the cost of a single VF-1.) If we were to ignore the practicality aspects, I'd expect to see them simply replace conventional aircraft in existing Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps organizations... but mainly or only in strike fighter or attacker squadrons where their air-to-ground capabilities and high-caliber machine guns could be leveraged to their best advantage.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Minor, but maybe worth sharing... YouTuber Turbo, a popular-ish channel that does Eurobeat remixes of music, just dropped a Macross Delta song:
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Like a lot of stuff in Delta, that's just copied whole cloth from Frontier. Alto uses that same trick on Brera in the final battle of The Wings of Farewell.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    I guess Hermann and Qasim weren't photogenic enough to appear on this one? Also found these two, fan made posters from Kyle Dunn's fan comic Macross Elysium.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    I found the other one in a pile of old Newtypes while I was unpacking, which is probably why my brain jumped to Newtype. Still, shame on me. 😅 I found a bunch of stuff i'd never even unpacked after the last SD Con I attended... even a Macross Delta wallscroll I don't even remember buying!
  7. Seto Kaiba
    D'oh... I unfolded 'em real quick to snap those pics while I was cleaning and completely missed that "Macross Ace" is literally written right on them. Failed a spot check real hard there. XD
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Got my most recent posters back from the frame shop today. I think they did a pretty good job. Found two more unframed ones while I was unpacking earlier. Old ones from Newtype, IIRC.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Ejection seat failures are pretty upsettingly lethal... what happened to Goose in Top Gun is truth in television.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    So, there are typically a couple different modes of ejection for a Valkyrie... ones using just the ejection seat itself, and one that punches the cockpit block off as a lifeboat of sorts. On the VF-25, the orientation of the cockpit in Battroid mode puts it on the Valkyrie's back with the canopy facing outwards. Battroid mode ejection is not described in detail, but it seems fairly likely that the ejection path is horizontal or a horizontal kick backwards through the ejected canopy and then up using the boosters in the EX-Gear. The Sv-262 has a fairly similar orientation, so its ejection is likely similar. (It's possible this involves explosively separating the plate holding the wings on as well.)
  11. Seto Kaiba
    I don't believe a connection has ever been mentioned there. The Valkyries that HAVE been influenced by the Nousjadeul-Ger are, Variable Glaug excluded, all in the Macross II parellel world timeline.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    We don't know... the only factory satellites under New UN Government control that have been identified, discussed, or visited in-series are the first factory satellite captured (in the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross) that manufactured Regult battle pods and the one described in the Queadluun-Rhea's backstory that was a Queadluun-Rau factory the New UN Government captured and moved to the Eden system in the 2030s. It's a fairly safe bet that the twenty or so factory satellites relocated to the Sol system are a mixed bag of different types. (In Macross II's timeline, Earth had two factory satellites and the other was identified as having manufactured the Nosjadeul-Ger battle suit and been the basis for the improved Valkyries in that setting.) As far as we know, the ones mentioned in that Macross Chronicle sheet were all relocated to the Sol system. They were seized over a six month period starting with the one seen in the series and ending before the launch of the Megaroad-01. The Quimeliquola factory satellite that was captured later was relocated to Eden's orbit. IIRC, Chronicle has a remark about emigrant governments keeping any factory satellites they discover and capture on their voyage.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Unfortunately, Wilford Brimley is no longer with us...
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Didn't Jim Carrey announce his retirement back in April, though? Are they recasting?
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, that would have been nice. I know it wouldn't have been entirely possible, but I'd have jumped at the chance to get a DX Chogokin poster for the YF-25 Prophecy and Chelsea Scarlett. Found a couple more posters while I was unpacking. Gonna have to make another run to the frame shop later. Found a Newtype poster of Alto, Sheryl, and Ranka, and the old Macross Ace one of Hikaru's VF-1J from that manga.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Just dropped these two off to be framed... Looking forward to having those hanging in my new office.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    In Star Trek. One of the few good lines in Lower Decks: "And for your information, many Orions haven't been pirates for over five years!".
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Yup... and then there's the sticky question of whether units stationed on the planet from the regional command or central command answer to the local government partly or at all. Yeah, the factory satellite dock and the two Megaroad-class ships being built there blew up in 2029. But giant revolts like the one that blew up in Macross City in 2030 don't come out of nowhere. That was the single biggest battle Earth had seen in decades, to the point that there were multiple pilots who scored enough to become aces in a single afternoon (or in Timothy Daldhanton, could've qualified as an Ace of Aces in a single afternoon if he wasn't one already.) At the very least, the New UN Government took this as a fair indication that Protoculture ruins contain some stupidly dangerous stuff and adopted more appropriate stances when later examples turned up, like the ones on Uroboros or Windermere IV. The ruins on Uroboros were heavily restricted and eventually guarded by the 815th Independent Squadron from the VF-X Special Forces (though they had an ulterior motive) and they decided to straight up destroy the ones on Uroboros with a dimensional warhead rather than risk them being activated. Considering that most VFs at that point incorporated some Zentradi overtechnology it likely wouldn't have been anything strange for a New UN Forces pilot. General Galaxy's VF designs just incorporated more of it, and more unconventional designs, than the more conservative models by Shinsei Industry that the New UN Forces favored. As to what the Zentradi would do culturally... that would probably be an eclectic mix of whatever aspects of Earth's cultures they absorbed while living on Earth. Several prominent Zentradi leaders, but most notoriously Naresuan in Macross R, were such unapologetic Earth culture otaku that they even adopted human names for themselves. (In a way, it's like that over-the-top patriotism you sometimes see from recent immigrants to the US or the recently-naturalized.) Having seen both, I'm prepared to lump them under "acceptable losses". Though some supplementary materia like Master File has alleged that there was a massive cultural recovery program instituted after the First Space War with dedicated teams of researchers and preservationists scouring the ruins of military bases, cities, and so on for any surviving cultural artifacts. (This was, in the VF-0 Master File, how they recovered a number of damaged but mostly-intact VF-0 airframes that would be painstakingly restored in the in-book story about the Phoenix's reconstruction.) Engineers being naturally inclined to nerdery, it's only natural that engineers armed with spacefuture technology would start replicating gadgets from their favorite sci-fi. (Robots being an easy one, with population centers using robots for things as mundane as vending machines, litter-picking, and public phones even during the First Space War...)
  19. Seto Kaiba
    The role of gigantic evil corporation that treats their employees like trash has been filled by Macross Galaxy... so fortunately we'll never see the Macross Orlando fleet.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    I'm not sure that was necessarily their motive... especially since the casus belli of the Second Unification War was the dominant political faction in the New UN Government at the time wanting to maintain the emigrant governments as states subordinate to the central government rather than autonomous nations. Also, given that in several cases the aesthetic choices surrounding how various emigrant fleets are "themed" are indicated to be deliberate choices with economic motives... such as Macross Galaxy's corporate government being obsessed with efficiency and not caring about the comfort of their citizen-employees, or the Macross Frontier fleet deciding the upper levels of Island-1 and other areas should deliberately imitate parts of pre-Space War 1 Earth for the sake of tourism. Not really... most any fleet with senior citizens would have veterans of the First Space War among its population. Most of the New UN Forces top brass in the 2040s were soldiers who had been new inductees or junior officers in the First Space War like Col. Millard Johnson, Col. Maximilian Jenius, Gen. Gomez, etc. They're never indicated to be a significant portion of the population though, and we only ever really see five that they bang on about: Max, Milia, and the three-man Monster crew. Evidence from pretty much every Macross series suggests nearly everyone is actually speaking English most of the time (esp. the soldiers) and that most of the Japanese is just a translation convention for the benefit of the Japanese audience. Virtually all of the on-screen text is in English, and there is a fair amount of conspicuous actual English in DYRL?'s opening and Frontier. Fire Bomber is one of the very few exceptions, as they are specifically noted to be a j-rock band whose work was appropriated by an "American" cover band. Macross 11 is not noted for being English speakers, they're noted for being an American-themed emigrant fleet similar to how Frontier themed its habitat areas after San Francisco, Shibuya, and a few other areas. It's "American" in a vaguely exaggerated, caricature-ish, theme park-y sense. Al Shahal is "Arabic" the same way Macross 11 is American. Meaning "superficially". The only thing vaguely Arabic about it is that the locals - well, most of the locals - dress like they live in the desert. Because they live in the desert. For these "themed" locales, it's important to remember these are superficial reconstructions conceived and built by people who have had little or no actual contact with that now-extinct culture. It's as authentic as the Epcot World Showcase at Disney... which is to say, "Not very".
  21. Seto Kaiba
    I was talking more in terms of whether you consider a planet or emigrant fleet's New UN Forces defense forces to be a garrison force as well, since they are nominally answerable to both the local government and the central New UN Government and its New UN Forces. It's an easy detail to miss, since Isamu's service history is only onscreen for a few seconds and mainly touched on in the liner notes. The 2030 Zentradi rebellion was a major uprising and, well, things don't just explode for no reason...
  22. Seto Kaiba
    There it is... Miles O'Brien sowing the seeds of his own DS9-era misery.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Like I said... Quite a few Trekkies will watch it to the end simply because they want to see how this trainwreck ends... and to witness its ending in the hopes that it stays dead. Of course, a fair few will resort to what we'll call "Orion business practices" to watch this much-loathed series end rather than give ViacomCBS the satisfaction. I know I sure as hell won't be giving ViacomCBS a dime for NuTrek.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    In all fairness, after ~150 episodes running out of ideas is pretty understandable.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Worf definitely seems to have won the "Aging gracefully" contest. That said, count on Picard's final season taking a massive crap on the returning TNG characters. Because Patrick Stewart felt the only way to make his sociopolitical point was for his character to have spent the time between Nemesis and Picard as a sad, broken old man living an empty life in his miserable sinecure before being called back into action for one final adventure, the writers seem to think that has to apply to EVERYONE. The justifications started out flimsy, out-of-character, and positively reeking of an entitled senior citizen's self-centered mindset and deteriorated into the comical almost right away. (Really, the only one who was miserable with good cause was Dr. Maddox. His life's work was invalidated and banned by Starfleet's ban on artificial life form research, forcing him to either give up what he'd devoted his life to or become a renegade.) Nah, there are still sane Trekkies watching NuTrek out of a sort of bile fascination... some just want to see how this train wreck meets its long overdue end. Not a lot of folks defending it, outside of the usual Facebook white knights accusing the show's critics of various -ism's. It already has. NuTrek as a whole was propping up the bottom of the franchise's scores on review agregators back during season two. Season 3 bringing back the entire TNG cast is a hilariously transparent "Hail Mary" attempt to get fans to actually watch them finish pinching this especially odious loaf. It isn't even the first such major retooling aimed at getting fans to actually watch. The only reason NuTrek lasted more than one season for ANY show was that these were direct-to-streaming. If they'd been on broadcast or cable, they'd have been lucky to last even one season. Until someone at ViacomCBS decides to "multiverse" it because the fans don't like it and it doesn't move merchandise. They've already done it once before, to the Kelvin timeline movies, and Discovery from season 3 on is set up to allow them to do the same at a moment's notice. It would not be the first time a Trek title was kicked out of the canon... (For the record, it would be the third, preceded by TAS and Final Frontier.)
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