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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    For what it's worth, I much prefer this early version of the Borg over what they eventually became after Star Trek: First Contact. There was so much more power and mystery surrounding the Borg back then. They were a dark mirror of the Federation, a species far advanced over humanity that had taken the Federation's ideals of equality, the free exchange of knowledge and ideas, and using advanced technology to raise quality of life to their logical extremes. A race of cyborgs who'd adopted an extreme form of collectivism in the form of a literal groupmind that allowed for the instantaneous sharing of thoughts and knowledge, who addressed their biological needs by increasingly replacing their biology with technology as they age, and who quite innocently believe they are doing everyone a favor by sharing their philosophy with other, less advanced, species. There was nothing that could really equal the menace they projected as a literally faceless antagonist with the voice of legion. I hate what First Contact turned the Borg into... a race of cyber-zombies whose collective mind was ruled by an evil queen who, despite her protestations, behaves exactly like she's an individual and inverts the Borg's original intention by regarding the galaxy as biological and technological resources to be harvested to improve the Borg. The Borg Queen was a mistake.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    To the best of our knowledge? Only one operational Battle-class in-system, though it may be possible to obtain others by prematurely activating ships under construction or asking for reinforcements from nearby systems. Variable Fighter Master File: VF-19 Excalibur mentions the Battle-7 having been appropriated for such a purpose before its formal launch, to destroy the Zentradi main fleet that glassed Spica III. By all accounts, the VF-1 had a K/D ratio of about 12 in the First Space War. Master File has suggested that number has increased quite a bit with subsequent models. The VF-25 Master File presents a story where VF-25s fought against a Zentradi force that outnumbered them more than 24 to 1 without any significant damage or losses. Yup. It's an odd touch of horror for what is otherwise an optimistic series... humanity is using emigrant fleets to spread itself throughout the galaxy precisely because the threat of planetary-scale annihilation at the hands of a Zentradi fleet is a remote but ever-present possibility. It's all about preserving the species from extinction at the hands of an uncaring clone army. That's Ushio Todo from Macross 30 right there... he was so traumatized by the events of the First Space War that he orchestrated the events of Macross 30 in the hopes of using the Fold Evil sealed on Uroboros to travel back in time and make the First Space War unhappen. In Macross II's timeline, Earth was lucky in that most of the time they were caught between Zentradi and Meltrandi fleets and were able to tackle them while they were distracted by each other. The occasions where they were fighting a single main fleet on its own were considerably more fraught, with the 2054 invasion leading to a year-long war that ended with the Spacy decimated but victorious.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Since he wouldn't have had any way of knowing about the Grand Cannon systems, I doubt much of anything would have dissuaded him once he decided Earth's culture was a threat. Even in the scenario we saw in the series and movie, there were over a hundred Oberth-class missile destroyers in orbit armed with thermonuclear reaction warheads and the single largest deployment of thermonuclear weaponry in human history was a practically beneath Boddole Zer's notice thanks to the sheer size of his main fleet.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    At the very least, the overwhelming majority of them did not live long enough to regret the error in judgement. The VF-0 Master File is one of the better installments in the series. It offers insight not only into the VF-0's development but also its brief postwar operation period between the end of the Unification Wars and the First Space War. Macross the First threw it a nod too with the other VF-0 test carrier, CVN-100 Graf Zeppelin II being at South Ataria island for a final retaliatory attack by the Anti-Unification Alliance on Christmas 2008.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Almost certainly, yes. Something THAT killy as a planetary defense weapon of the last resort? They'd have been insane not to. Grand Cannon 1 wiped out close to 800,000 Zentradi ships in ONE SHOT. If they'd been able to fire all five, Boddole Zer could've found himself losing most of his fleet. That's OK, based on what's said in Master File and other publications, the New UN Forces kinda forgot the VF-0 existed for a while too. As to why they didn't start producing the VF-0 in large quantities... the VF-1 had more new technology, and was designed around fighting Zentradi infantry. The bias towards a ground-based defense made the VF-1's fuel issues less important. Not very. Master File mentions that a modified VF-0 was used for the initial space testing of variable fighters while outfitted with the QF-3000E Ghost's FF-1999 thermonuclear reaction engines. That was the VF-0-NF. There is also the VF-0+ that is mentioned in some side story material that was a VF-0 retrofitted with the FF-2001 engine from the VF-1. Plus the replica versions from Uroboros c.2060 that were equipped with engines from the VF-5000.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Definitely not. While we might gleefully poke fun at the Harmony Gold staff's many inadequacies and moments of idiotic behavior, one thing that can be said in their favor is that they have a very clear understanding of what rights they do and don't have (even when deliberately doing a bad job of explaining it to fans) thanks to their many experiences in court defending the Tatsunoko license over the last twenty years. You can bet your bottom dollar that all appropriate disclosures regarding their rights under license and the limitations thereof were made while negotiating their deal with Sony. Now, you can probably safely assume that Sony didn't pay very much for the rights... given their limitations and the extremely limited value they have outside of maintaining the now-defunct Macross embargo. Really, that'd depend on which version of the NUNS's origin they decide to go with. Technically, the NUNS has existed since the original series 2 years after arc. One of two competing stories regarding the insignia change is that it was brought in as a result of the reorganization of the New UN Forces following the Second Unification War, while the other holds that it was like that almost immediately after the First Space War and only certain particularly hidebound planets like Earth and Eden retained the old markings out of pride until the Second Unification War (which explains why Ozma is shown flying a VF-171 that has the Frontier-era NUNS markings in the 2040s). That's the problem with a multiple-choice past.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    I suspect they'd still have had the Destroids, but they'd be more focused on the air defense role for space warships. Possibly replacing the Tomahawk with something along the lines of the Maverick from the FamilySoft games as a complement to the Monster. The Earth UN Forces were pretty serious about completing the Grand Cannons... they had problems because some of them had only recently been started when the Zentradi first arrived, and at least one was damaged in the Unification Wars. I'd imagine there is a more immediate interest in the military applications of fold faults... that being generating dimensional faults for use as a barrier the way the Vajra do and the Protoculture ship Sigur Berrentzs did. Surrounding planets with artificial fold faults would have some pretty awful consequences for interstellar commerce and travel until humanity can mass-produce fold quartz and super-fold drives. That's the VF-0 or VF-3000, basically. The VF-3000's issue was that they basically tried to just scale the existing VF-1 design up without respect for its greater mass, etc. Being purpose-built at a specific size, the way the VF-0 was, eliminates the issue.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    ... and finished Deaimon: Recipe for Happiness. It's cute and fluffy and generally a feel-good sort of series with enough emotional weight to it that it doesn't feel substanceless like some of the other offerings from this past season. On the whole, I think I'd recommend it, though it's definitely too short and the ending doesn't really offer any closure.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    It's not a bad idea in theory. It's just not a theory that'll hold up in practice because it's built on too many hideously unrealistic assumptions. Basically, for that theory to become practical, Sony Pictures (fmrly. Warner Bros) would have to be willing to sink hundreds of millions of dollars into developing and producing an all-original giant robot movie AND unnecessarily pay Harmony Gold license fees and millions upon millions of dollars in royalties on distribution and merchandising for the film in order to use the title of an incredibly obscure and generally unsuccessful 1980's cartoon series dogged by an enormous amount of bad press for their totally unrelated all-original film and any sequels, spinoffs, etc. that come of it. In short, only a crazy person would expect anything to come of that. It's a ridiculous pipe dream in which Sony is willing to do all the actual work and give Harmony Gold millions of dollars for essentially no reason because they can't actually adapt Robotech for legal reasons.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    All in all, I don't think it would have made much difference in the course of the war itself. An enemy force the size of the Boddole Zer main fleet simply isn't something you can prepare for with resources on the level of a single planet. There would have been some minor differences. The Valkyrie would likely have been a much larger aircraft closer in size to the VF-0 and SV-51 so that its internal fuel tanks could hold enough fuel for extended operations in space without FAST packs. The space forces would likely have invested much more heavily in the QF-3000 series Ghost than they did in the SF-3 Lancer II space fighter. It's possible they might've rushed out the fold systems for the first few ARMD-class space carriers and had a more mobile space fleet, but they wouldn't have been able to build nearly enough of them to make a difference against the sheer size of the Zentradi forces arrayed against them. I think the most effective thing to do would probably have been to simply build absurd numbers of thermonuclear reaction warheads and either try to mine high Earth orbit with them or establish clusters of missile batteries in orbit to rapidly target enemy ships en masse since you don't even necessarily need a direct hit to sink an enemy ship with one due to the huge amount of heat energy a detonation produces.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    By their terms (see the PlayingWith tab), they've already got it listed correctly as a deconstructed trope because the Zentradi had no interest at all in Earth itself or invading it until they decided to destroy the planet from orbit. The Earth UN Government and Earth UN Forces, however, spent ten years being Wrong Genre Savvy with a massive military buildup aimed at resisting a classic Alien Invasion with huge underground command bunkers, giant anti-orbit beam cannons, and plans for five planetary defense fleets centered on Daedalus-class and Prometheus-class warships and the hundreds of mecha they carried.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    It's too damned hot to work in my study, so I spent part of today watching Deaimon. The series is localized by Crunchyroll as Deaimon: Recipe for Happiness. It's a cute little slice of life drama about a carefree 30-something who moves home to rejoin the family business (a traditional Japanese confectionary shop) after his music career bombs and discovers his family have taken in a girl named Itsuka whose father abandoned her at the shop and have been raising her as their successor. It's cute, but a bit weird, as the episodes seem to revolve around solving a character's personal issues through some metaphor vaguely involving traditional Japanese sweets. The foreshadowing involving the identity of Itsuka's father is as subtle as a half-brick to the head.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    That much was given away in the initial announcement that Big West and Harmony Gold had struck a deal. Last year's joint announcement by Big West and Harmony Gold talks quite a bit about what Big West got from the deal. Big West got a clear path to distribute Macross worldwide and gained partial control over Robotech's distribution in partnership with Harmony Gold, but the only thing it mentions Harmony Gold receiving from the agreement besides a pro forma acknowledgement that its license from Tatsunoko is valid (which wasn't in dispute anyway) was a promise from Big West that they wouldn't obstruct the release of a future live-action Robotech movie should one be made. That, combined with what we know of the prevailing legal situation right before the deal was struck, fairly screams that Harmony Gold was (justifiably) feeling cornered by rulings against them and gave away a lot in the negotiations to protect the proposed live-action movie. Harmony Gold themselves told us the "why" of it back in '07-'08. After RSTC spun in, their management shifted its focus to the live action movie as a way to reboot Robotech again and make a clean start with all-original IP.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Hard to say... but my inclination would be "probably not". The Earth UN Forces built their planetary defense strategy around the belief that a war against aliens would take the form of a classic alien invasion scenario with troops landing to seize territory and resources. Those theories turned out to be pretty wide of the mark when the Zentradi rolled up and revealed that their approach to dealing with enemy planets is right out of Ellen Ripley's playbook of "nuke the whole site from orbit, it's the only way to be sure". After the war, the newly-reorganized military did reestablish a traditional Air Force and a blue-water Navy, but the main burden of defense seems to have shifted to the space forces as part of a space-oriented overall defense strategy. (We know part of this due to remarks in Isamu's service record as seen in Macross Plus, including a notation of him having served a brief period aboard the (New) UN Navy ship Enterprise.) Something like a ballistic missile submarine might have some limited use in planetary defense as a surface-based platform to deploy high-yield thermonuclear reaction missiles to orbital targets, but it's nothing a space-based ship couldn't do faster and better. The only submarines that've appeared in the story after the Unification Wars are unmanned ones in the Critical Path corporation's security force protecting its facility on Eden 3. Five of them are wiped out in pretty short order by the Ravens VA-3M, so they don't seem to be all that effective.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    It would've been a hell of a shake-up to the show's status quo, if nothing else. Not only would it have shaken up or destroyed the "Will they or won't they?" holding pattern the writers kept Captain Picard and Dr. Crusher in the entire run of the series, it would've offered a much better explanation for how Wesley was treated on the Enterprise. Think about it. One of the first thing we learn about Picard is that he doesn't like children, to such a degree that he all but begs Riker to deal with them for him early in the series. Yet Picard not only tolerates Wesley's presence, he very quickly gives Wesley an extraordinary level of privileged access aboard the Enterprise. Wesley almost immediately goes from being barred from sensitive areas like every other civilian to having the run of the ship, including key operations areas like the bridge and main engineering. The entire senior staff follows Picard's example and dotes on him. He gives Wesley an acting Starfleet rank well below the age where he should be able to, and then gives him a field commission. It's all very unnatural and a big reason Wesley is seen as a Marty Stu... but if Wesley were secretly Jean-Luc Picard's illegitimate son, it would all make a lot more sense. Instead of being given such huge latitude "just because", it could all be reframed as Picard using his position to find excuses to spend time with his son in a way that wouldn't reveal his past indiscretion. Having Wesley find out would also have been a pretty big character moment for Picard. Wesley practically hero-worshipped him as a paragon of Starfleet virtue. He and the rest of the crew would have to cope with the reality that Picard is a fallible human being like everyone else. It would've been a way more interesting plot twist than Wesley dropping out of Starfleet Academy and bumming around the galaxy with the Traveler.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    It's very much on-brand for them, though. If there's one word that has been synonymous with Robotech from its inception, that word is "ineptitude". The annual Robotech convention tour is invariably a public display of that reality, whether they're getting heckled by their own fans over the latest embarrassing failure to resuscitate the animated series or simply brought nothing to show for another year of "work". It's an annual self-inflicted public humiliation. I can imagine they probably didn't want to announce a HD remaster of the original Macross series at the same time Big West was announcing all of those other Macross licenses, since it'd give their audience the (entirely accurate) impression that Robotech is basically nothing but a footnote in Macross's history now. Yup... and because it's not a new acquisition, they won't even announce it except on the weekly blog post noting which pre-existing licenses have been migrated from Funimation's service to Crunchyroll's. It probably won't draw much attention at all until the Macross sequels land and the comments section proceeds to rip the Robotech version of the original series apart the way Hulu's comments section did to Shadow Chronicles.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Gates McFadden is a trained dancer... just not that kind. (She's an experienced tap dancer, and did the choreography for the tap dancing her character taught Data herself.) She got married to Jack Crusher and had Wesley while she was still at Starfleet Academy, and he passed away in unspecified circumstances on the Stargazer a few years after she graduated. So definitely Lifetime movie material. (Would've been even moreso if the writers hadn't chickened out on making Wesley Picard's secret son via an affair with his best friend's wife. That idea got tossed around a few times, but got veto'd every time.)
  18. Seto Kaiba
    So... when all was said and done, the Harmony Gold AX panel was the usual nonevent full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Just another hour or so of quiet desperation as they try to feign relevance to an industry that had already decided they and their series were a joke thirty years ago, accompanied by some wishful thinking and deliberate misdirection as they report having spent fifteen grand to have someone successful pen another disinterested story treatment for a movie that has been in development hell for 15 years so far, and a single announcement that would almost have been newsworthy if it hadn't already essentially been announced four months ago by Crunchyroll and over a year ago by Funimation. (Seriously. Funimation announced they had the streaming rights to Robotech and related materials back in June 2021 and that their entire streaming catalog was moving over to Crunchyroll on March 1st, 2022. It takes no great feats of deductive reasoning to figure out that stuff was coming to Crunchyroll in the near future. Esp. after Funimation stated they'd put the brakes on streaming all but new titles on their service while things were migrating to Crunchyroll.)
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Eden's such an upscale place, I doubt it'd be Subway... they've gotta have at least a DiBella's or a Firehouse Subs. Like I said, the VA-3M is a special case... being essentially the only known model of VF actually intended to operate underwater. The few VFs with submergence ratings are rated to only 30-100m underwater. Even a World War II-era submarine could go almost three times as deep, and modern classes like the Los Angeles-class and Seawolf-class have an official test depth of almost 500m and a theoretical maximum operating depth of somewhere around 750-900m. Imagine what overtechnology-based submarines could do with the far-superior materials like hypercarbon and energy conversion armor. A VF would be a pretty awful choice in anti-submarine warfare unless they were either dropping depth charges or attacking a sub near the surface with guided missiles. (Even the Octos, a Unification Wars-era light submarine-slash-destroid, could submerge to 375m... almost 4x as far down as a VF could go.)
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Why would there be? While VFs can operate underwater to very limited depths for short periods of time, they are by no means intended to do so. The VA-3M is a very specialized exception to that rule and the only known craft of its type. Anti-submarine warfare wasn't exactly a concern after the Unification Wars ended and the First Space War revealed the shape of wars to come was all about space-based defense. Air-to-surface and anti-submarine missiles had already largely replaced air-launched torpedoes in almost every role decades before the Unification Wars too, for that matter. The only ones using submarines are humans, come to that, so a hostile submarine is a vanishingly rare thing on its own.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Gene Roddenberry, like George Lucas and several other noteworthy creators, was a good concept guy and a terrible terrible hack of a writer. He needed minders. A group of other, more grounded, creatives around him to hold his leash and refine his wild ideas into stuff that could actually be filmed. He had that in Gene Coon, Dorothy Fontana, and others on the original Star Trek series. Predictably, he wasn't always happy with the final shape of the rough concepts he originated or how others built on those ideas with or without his input. Star Trek: the Next Generation had such a rough start thanks to Gene leveraging his screen credit as Star Trek's creator to obtain full creative control. Armed with the last word on all creative decisions and with nobody holding his leash, a lot of terrible ideas that would not have survived a proper editorial review made it into shooting scripts and his draconian set of rules for the series nearly caused him to end up without writers altogether. It's not that listening to Gene was necessarily bad in and of itself... it's that listening to him directly without his minders meant the writers got all his ideas, not just the highly polished good ones that'd been carefully vetted for workability.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    ... and now you've got me rewatching TNG, damnitall. The writing in the first season really is pretty preachy... I feel like every time I watch it I block out a bit of how bad it really is once I'm done, and don't remember until I watch it over again. Several of Picard's early speeches are less dignified and more just temper tantrums.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Flying it into the ground so hard HG stops funding it internally counts as finishing it, right? In the Mortal Kombat sense of "finish". Because having something come out, even if it's obviously of poor quality like this Blu-ray release, is enough for the remaining die-hards to validate their continued faith in it. With the average quality level being so low, even the bare minimum improvements like rereleases in a new format can superficially look like improvement.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    The rights were a problem when it was new... now that it's a twenty year old series the music rights ain't so pricy.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    TBH, I'd bet on their panel being as useless as ever. I remember AnimEigo's Robert Woodhead mentioning the thing holding up the boat on releasing DYRL? outside Japan was that nobody knew who owned the distribution rights from that awkward time of Clash of the Bionoids and the like. It's not my favorite series, but you'd can bet your life I'll buy at least one copy. I've waited for this for too damned long to take half-measures.
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