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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    If it's not the weirdest, it's gotta be in the top five. There's just nowhere that those two things meet in the middle. Robotech is a largely forgotten cartoon from 1985 and the Supra's a sportscar from 2020. Rick Hunter was an American stunt pilot turned fighter pilot who got around by taxi and bicycle when not flying and the Supra's a German-Japanese sportscar. It's not even a car that could have plausibly existed in Robotech, since Earth's surface was destroyed in 2010 and this Supra's a 2020. Robotech's not exactly known for cars either, with the few motor vehicles in the series being heavy duty trucks, jeeps, and motorbikes. Rick is wearing his pilot suit rather than a racing suit or casual clothes and he's saluting as sportscar drivers so often do*. The background art in the packaging's a Queadluun-Rau, which has nothing to do with any of those things. It's not so much Initial D as Initial F: See Me After Class. *Well, with more than just the middle finger...
  2. Seto Kaiba
    What even... why with a car? Why a Toyota Supra? Why is the background image a Queadluun-Rau? Why is this? *exasperated sigh* Like, I'm looking for an ObviousPlant logo or something, because this gives off insane levels of that "off-brand Chinese knockoff toy from a non-chain drugstore toy aisle" energy. Go home Robotech licensing, you're drunk.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, the torque conventional emotors with a few hundred volts of power behind them can produce is impressive but pretty limited for moving something that big around. Macross benefits from things like room temperature superconductors and power supplies with output voltages in the gigavolt range. That's a LOT of get-up-and-go for an emotor.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Your real-world summary is spot on, but one important detail you have to remember is that Star Trek was created in the 1960s and the member of its production staff who had military experience were World War II veterans. This manifested in many different ways, like the twelve Constitution-class ships being named for infamous American carriers in World War II and in Starfleet using the rank of Commodore for its O-7s instead of having two grades of Rear Admiral. That did not change even after the US Navy changed what they called their O-7s to Rear Admiral (Lower Half). It remained consistent from TOS all the way to present shows like Picard (with Commodore Oh in season 1). That's a fair argument, but in existing Star Trek material that kind of promotion seems to be exclusive to Captains being promoted to the admiralty... and only then for captains who are main characters. For all the sh*t we give Harry Kim the Forever Ensign, it's actually pretty rare for main characters to get promoted in Star Trek shows. Probably because most of the cast are senior officers and don't have a lot of upward mobility while remaining on the same ship. It usually happens offscreen between seasons or between a series and a movie. It's basically always single-rank promotions too. The TOS cast got most of their promotions between movies. TNG had the most, I think. Geordi got promoted twice during the series, starting at Lieutenant (JG) in season 1 and getting promoted to Lieutenant for season 2 when he became chief engineer, then season 3 made him a Lieutenant Commander where he stayed. Worf landed a promotion to Lieutenant after Tasha died, and another to Lt. Commander in Generations before DS9 bumped him up to a full Commander. The only other character who landed a promotion there was Troi, IIRC, who got promoted from Lt. Commander to Commander near the end of the series. On DS9, Sisko, Bashir, and Dax get one-rank promotions which mostly occur between seasons. Kira goes from a Major to a Colonel, but that's the Bajoran militia and they might not have a Lt. Colonel equivalent. When she got her Starfleet commission for the mission to Cardassia she was made a Commander. Tuvok and Paris were the only ones who got promotions on Voyager, though Tuvok's was one rank and Tom's was a reversal of a previous demotion. I'd disagree with the witticism, since most of the characters who get promoted actually have fairly clear rationales for when and why they get promoted and their promotions are single-rank ones except for the main character captains who get promoted to admiral. Geordi's promotions coincided with his becoming department chief of the Enterprise-D's engineering department. Worf's first one coincided with his assumption of the Chief of Security role, his second was a term-of-service promotion, and his third was for assuming a new office as DS9's strategic ops officer. Troi's was because she specifically took a promotion exam and had been a Lieutenant Commander since the start of the series. I could go on, but I think the point is made? They're not getting merit-based promotions on a regular basis, they might get promoted once or at most twice in the course of a seven year tour between merit promotions, required promotions to fill operational vacancies, and term-of-service promotions.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Very true, but they would at least be on the ship... and nominally a superior decisionmaking authority to the Captain(s) present. Incidentally, while I was poking around I noticed something related. Jean-Luc Picard is another case of an admiral in direct command of a Starfleet starship. I'd very nearly forgotten Star Trek: Picard made the same mistake the failed Abrams movies did and put most of its (fairly important) backstory in a limited run licensed comic. Picard left the Enterprise-E upon his promotion to Admiral and assumed command of a new ship, the USS Verity. In hindsight, it's interesting for a few reasons. The Verity is the first case, chronologically, of Picard borrowing designs from Star Trek: Online. The comic presents the USS Verity as an Odyssey-class ship in 2381, when that class in STO didn't enter service even on a trial basis until 2409. Also interesting is that Jean-Luc Picard apparently skipped three ranks and was promoted directly from Captain to a full Admiral. Come to that, does everyone important just skip the rank of Commodore entirely? Robert April was promoted from Captain to Commodore after his tour of duty aboard the original USS Enterprise ended, but Kirk was promoted directly from Captain to Rear Admiral (a double promotion) after his tour as the Enterprise's Captain ended, Kathryn Janeway landed a triple promotion from Captain to Vice Admiral after getting Voyager back to Earth*, and now Jean-Luc Picard got a quadruple from Captain all the way to a full Admiral after taking charge of the Romulus evacuation effort. If Sisko comes back and doesn't get a promotion to Fleet Admiral, I'll be terribly disappointed. *The relaunch novel 'verse and a few staff comments suggested Janeway was "kicked upstairs" into a borderline sinecure as Vice Admiral because Starfleet and the Department of Temporal Investigations were alternately impressed and horrified by the things she did on her way home and decided to take her off a starship and put her somewhere where they'd have little difficulty keeping an eye on her. Voyager wasn't decommissionined in that timeline, but the DTI did drydock her and seize all of the future tech Janeway got from her future self.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, that plus Star Trek and Star Wars cementing in the public consciousness the idea that a space fleet is a space navy, makes things real frustrating for other franchises which take a more realistic approach. (Oh so many questions sent my way by people who can't or won't believe that the Captain of the Macross has the title of Captain but holds the rank of Brigadier General...) I wonder how much of that is just the average civilian's popular conception of naval operations and how much was dated knowledge on the part of the showrunners who served in the military during the second world war. In any event, there would not technically be anything wrong with Seven being in command of the Titan-A as a Commander. Not to mention an admiral or two... since many of the largest surface combatants and carriers were taskforce or fleet flagships as well. Weird, in hindsight, that Starfleet has always depicted promotion to Commodore or above as an assignment to fly a desk at some shipyard, starbase, or at Starfleet Command on Earth. The only non-insane admiral I can recall ever actually commanding a ship or a fleet in Trek is Vice Admiral Hanson, who commanded an unnamed starship (one the script and reused sets indicate was Galaxy-class) at Wolf 359. ... out of the most morbid curiousity, I googled it. I am spoiler-tagging the rest because this is INCREDIBLE pedantry. To bring that bit of insanity back around to actual Star Trek... this actually leads to an interesting point that historian Jean-Luc Picard screwed up the 19th century Royal Navy uniforms in Worf's promotion ceremony in Star Trek: Generations. EVERYONE except Worf is wearing two epaulettes. Everyone who's not Riker or Picard should be wearing only the one.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    She definitely retained a lot of technological knowledge and expertise from her time as a Borg drone, but her storage capacity is finite. I doubt the collective stored more than the essentials she needed to do her job in local storage in her noggin. When she tried to push the limits of her onboard storage in "The Voyager Conspiracy" it ended up giving her an awful case of paranoid psychosis. When she (unintentionally) gained access to stored personalities in "Infinite Regress", it gave her multiple personality disorder. Command division definitely does feel out of character for her, though. On Voyager, she was always more of a follower and spent most of her time either working in engineering with B'Elanna or in the astrometrics lab she designed. It's happened a few times. Jean-Luc Picard commanded the USS Stargazer as a Lt. Commander and then a Commander after the Battle of Maxia as a result of the ship's captain and first officer dying. Data commanded of the USS Sutherland in "Redemption II" for Picard's blockade of the Klingon-Romulan border as a Lieutenant Commander. The USS Defiant had a revolving door of THREE different officers ranked lower than captain as her commanding officer: Benjamin Sisko commanded the Defiant while holding the rank of Commander from her introduction in S3E1 "The Search" to his promotion to Captain in S3E26 "The Adversary", a year of in-universe time later. Worf also served as commanding officer of the Defiant while holding the rank of Commander after joining DS9 as strategic operations officer during the war with the Klingons and for a bit after until the Dominion War kicked off in earnest. Jadzia Dax served as commanding officer of the Defiant while holding the rank of Lieutenant Commander during the penultimate year of the Dominion War after Sisko was "promoted" to Admiral Ross' staff, in part because Worf was acting as liaison officer to the Klingon forces at the time. (This is a problem with English, really... there is "Captain" the rank and "Captain" the title. You don't have to hold the rank of Captain to hold the title of Captain... Nog and O'Brien discuss that topic overtly in one episode of DS9 after he receives a commission to the rank of Ensign. There used to be alternative titles that were less ambiguous, but the usage of "master" and "shipmaster" fell out of use at the end of the 19th century, though still survive in a vestigial form in licensing for civilian sailors.)
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Another f***ing time-travel plot? Let me guess, they're gonna do a crossover with Strange New Worlds? Under Kurtzman, this franchise has become such a f***ing joke. Sean Tourangeou's USS Titan design that was used for the novel series and Lower Decks is amazing. Having it show up in Lower Decks was HUGE for the fanbase. Not just using that existing, incredibly well-received design is a huge missed opportunity. On reflection, Seven's new circumstances feel far more in line with the Seven of Nine from Star Trek: Voyager than her presentation in I-Can't-Believe-It's-Not-Star-Trek: Picard's first two seasons. I wonder if this counts as character re-railment, after they derailed Seven hard by writing her as a painfully generic threat-growling, hard-drinking, "badass" action girl who'd become a cringeworthy space vigilante for no good reason. A Starfleet crew is probably the closest Seven has to a "safe space" given that Voyager's crew were essentially her family and the basis for her being re-socialized after leaving the Borg. She had about three years of service as a member of Voyager's crew before the ship returned to Earth successfully in 2378, the same tenure Wesley had as an acting ensign before Picard granted him a field commission. The only thing that's really unreasonable about her joining Starfleet is that her rank is way too high for someone who never received most of the essential training needed for starship command. If she had been a lieutenant or lieutenant commander and a chief engineer, it would have passed without queston. (It's a worse version of the same problem Michael Burnham had, where the writers were so desperate to make the character "awesome" that they had her skip the academy entirely and go from a new recruit to the verge of promotion to Captain in just a few years.) For the record, you don't actually have to be a Captain to have command of a starship. Sisko had command of the Defiant for a good while before his promotion to Captain.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Like I said, Macross Delta: Passionate Walkure is much closer to the industry's standard format for a compilation movie. It's a cut-down, streamlined version of the story from the TV series that dispenses with a lot of the story's tedious exposition, breathers, and filler in order to proceed to the main plot as expeditiously as possible. The basic assumption behind a compilation movie is that they can skip a lot of the tedious expositing because you're already familiar with the story of the series and they can get down to brass tacks without having to explain it all to you again. A few new bits get thrown in, a lot of unnecessary side trips and divergences get cut, so the main plot can flow with a minimum of distraction in order to tell a story that was spread across ten and a half hours into just two. It's for that reason, along with the fact that Macross Delta: Absolute Live!!!!!! is telling an original story, that you can probably view the second film as a sequel to the TV series or the first movie. Instead of a wildly divergent alternate version of the story that radically changes the significance of characters, plot points, etc. that leaves the movies a self-contained and separate story, the first film was a straight compilation movie and the second is an original story.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    I keep my expectations for Kurtzman-era Trek low and I am still constantly disappointed. It's actually weirdly impressive in its own way. On the one hand, it's nice to see that someone working on this mistake of a series has finally noticed most of their audience doesn't care for the design aesthetic from the Abrams movies and is actively trying to pivot to something less awful-looking. On the other hand, it's still pretty ugly and it has that same kludgey feel the season 2 armada of "new" ships that were actually just TNG-era designs with different warp nacelles did. Between the Enterprise refit-style saucer and Excelsior-looking front half of the engineering section, it just feels like someone dragged another TOS movie-era draft design out of the rejects bin and slapped a new set of nacelles on it. That said, my hopes are not high for the writing. Season one had the excuse that a (deluded) Picard was off on a personal (and very stupid) crusade to save Data's "daughter" (no relation) that ended up endangering all sentient life unnecessarily. Season two could be blamed on Q being Q (and the writers being hacks). Season three has a lot of heavy lifting to do to sell the idea that there's a threat to the Federation that a pack of depressed and out-of-shape retirees on a ship that looks to be over a century old that couldn't be solved a lot more efficiently and effectively by a real Starfleet crew? Come to that, why is Seven of Nine suddenly a senior officer? She's never been to the Academy and never showed any interest in becoming a Starfleet officer. That was Icheb's interest. Is Starfleet so hard up for personnel that they'll give a field commission of command rank to alcoholic vigilante simply because she showed up? What happened to her earlier insistence that Starfleet won't take ex-Borg? Season one was Nemesis II, season two was a low-rent version of First Contact, and season three's redoing Insurrection?
  11. Seto Kaiba
    In general, Macross series tend to end that way... immediately after the conclusion of the story's central conflict and without an epilogue of any significant length. Macross Delta: Absolute Live!!!!!! is something of a unique case, as Macross has never done an all-original feature film before. Normally, Macross's feature-length films are treated as separate from their respective TV series because their format has always been an alternate version of part or all of the TV series (or OVA) story. Macross Delta's first movie, Passionate Walkure, was much closer to the industry's standard compilation movie format and didn't really change much in the actual story. It didn't really introduce any new mechanical designs to speak of and the narrative changes were mainly just a few minor details like the circumstances of Messer's death. For that reason, there really shouldn't be much in the way of obstacles to seeing it as a sequel to the series if you really wanted. The few distinctive touches movie 1 had are things that could/would reasonably exist anyway, like the VF-31's Armored Pack or its ability to dock to the drones.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Not directly in the shows, anyway. Supplemental material does delve into that topic a bit, but as expected the maintenance issues you'd expect from such a complex mechanism are largely handwaved due to the vastly superior materials and more precise engineering enabled by the alien overtechnology and humanity's growing understanding of it. Even then, it's still acknowledged that in-universe VFs are still a fair bit more maintenance-intensive and a lot more expensive than conventional aircraft and that the complex moving parts involved in transformation and the complex articulations of the hands can be quite fragile. In what's going to be a theme... "Not directly in the shows, anyway". Stories in other media formats like manga, light novels, and supplemental materials for the animation do get into those details too. Sometimes in surprising detail. Some of it has been surprisingly consistent across almost forty years of material. The UN Forces, and later the New UN Forces, draw pretty heavily on the US armed forces models with a few distinctly Japanese touches here and there. (Many of the more prominent named squadrons in official materials for the first few titles are just Macross equivalents of famous real world units like the Navy's Black Aces with the same names and unit numbers or mishmashes of famous units like the Spacy's demonstrator squadron being the Angel Birds, a mashup of the Navy's Blue Angels and Air Forces Thunderbirds.) Not to mention a fair amount of it would be simply impossible with today's science. VFs only really work in-setting because overtechnology yielded huge advancements in the material sciences, computing, and various branches of physics. The flyaway cost alone would be astronomical*, and the maintenance demands and costs would be ruinous even compared to notorious hangar queens like the Harrier
  13. Seto Kaiba
    ... I'm pretty sure that was listed as a motivation by some of the production staff, TBH.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    As an engineer, I'm glad to see they're being cautious about this launch and opting to abort the test and reschedule rather than risk losing the test article and the opportunity to log and study potential hardware or workmanship defects as they emerge. It beats the hell out of literally picking up the pieces after your experiment undergoes an "unscheduled rapid disassembly". I can only imagine the legendary scale of Artemis 1's DFMEA... "the test article goes cartwheeling off into space in an uncontrolled manner" and "the test article explodes in a massive fireball" are a good deal more exciting (in a bad way) than the usual failure modes.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, it's pretty easy to tell that "The Game" was rescued from the Season 4 rejects bin as makeweight for Season 5. Rewatching Star Trek: the Next Generation without skipping any episodes has really reminded me of just why Star Trek fans loathed Wesley so much when TNG was still airing. The way the crew treats Wesley varies wildly from episode to episode, seemingly based on nothing more than what the writers think would make Wesley look better when he ultimately saves the day. Sometimes the crew dismiss him as an annoying kid who's only ever underfoot. Other times, he's this amazing wunderkind they can't stop gushing about. That the writing goes to such lengths to make Wesley look good without him really doing anything to justify it really makes him come off as a Marty Stu at times. (I'd say "The First Duty" is probably the only actually-good Wesley episode, in no small part because those two approaches to the character finally meet in the middle in a story where Wesley got to be good, but not amazing, and screwed up in a believable way that the crew were subsequently disappointed by for mundane and believable reasons.)
  16. Seto Kaiba
    No, Jeri Taylor and Brannon Braga have both gone on the record to say that it was a jab at how kids were supposedly "addicted" to video games at the time. It originated with writer Fred Bronson's own fondness for playing Tetris to unwind. As Jeri Taylor put it: "Through an evolutionary process – without really intending to ape that movie* – this insidious spread of a game had its origins in kids being addicted to video games now, and what happens to them. That was the original intent and that's what drove the final story and script. That insight followed the development." * meaning Invasion of the Body Snatchers The only episode I recall being an explicit allegory of STDs was in Enterprise, the second season episode "Stigma" that was a really unsubtle allegory for being HIV positive (which was shot all to hell by Pa'nar syndrome later being retconned from an incurable telepathic disease to an easily curable injury caused by untrained telepaths.
  17. 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".
  18. 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.
  19. 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:
  20. 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.
  21. 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.
  22. 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!
  23. 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
  24. 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.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Ejection seat failures are pretty upsettingly lethal... what happened to Goose in Top Gun is truth in television.
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