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Seto Kaiba

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  1. 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.)
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Unfortunately, Wilford Brimley is no longer with us...
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Didn't Jim Carrey announce his retirement back in April, though? Are they recasting?
  6. 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.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Just dropped these two off to be framed... Looking forward to having those hanging in my new office.
  8. 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!".
  9. 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...)
  10. 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.
  11. 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".
  12. 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...
  13. Seto Kaiba
    There it is... Miles O'Brien sowing the seeds of his own DS9-era misery.
  14. 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.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    In all fairness, after ~150 episodes running out of ideas is pretty understandable.
  16. 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.)
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Well, I guess that depends how you want to define "garrison". If the laundry list of potential reassignments Isamu's CO threatened him with at the start of Macross Plus is any indication, the various branches of the New UN Forces have quite a few dead-end postings at various resource stations and other remote bases that they can send the troops they feel would be least missed to. Since the New UN Forces are implied (by Isamu's service record) to have inter-branch mobility more akin to the JSDF, it's possible such postings could come with a transfer to a different branch of service if necessary for logistical purposes. (Isamu has served stints aboard Spacy warships, Navy warships, and at Spacy Air Force bases thanks to his being "regifted" to other postings more often than an especially undesirable fruitcake.) Macross-5 is the only fleet of that type to be depicted or properly described to date. One would assume that it's a reaction to the New UN Government's crackdown on having full size Zentradi on Earth after the major rebellion at the end of the 2020s that ended in yet another attack on Macross City and the destruction of several emigrant ships being built over at the factory satellite. Gallia IV's not a single biome planet... we just only ever seen one very small region of the planet immediately around the wreck of the SDFN-04 General Bruno J. Global. Varauta 3198XE's fourth planet, well, that's not a natural phenomena. That's a direct product of the ancient Protoculture setting up an entropy control field to make the planet an uninhabitable iceball so that nobody would try to live there and accidentally dig the Protodeviln up. The planet in the Macross 7 movie was not quite a single biome planet, but it was a pretty tedious place to live that was mainly inhabited for the resources it offered.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Maybe that's how that'll end... Raffi is one of those soul eating monsters Janeway maybe-hallucinated in the Delta Quadrant and it's all just a hallucination meant to make Picard give up on life.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    IMO, the Star Trek relaunch novelverse's take was better. The writers of that shared universe had Uhura join Starfleet Intelligence after the Enterprise A was decommissioned and eventually be promoted to Admiral and leadership of the agency. (Not that the relaunch novelverse was great for every character... Jean-Luc Picard got a Kirk-esque punishment of being a Forever Captain for his unwitting peripheral involvement in the removal-by-assassination of a Federation president by Section 31.)
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... it makes reasonable sense that Sony is going to want to have the major Macross sequels under its banner now that they indirectly hold the license to the original. That said, Sony's not actually doing anything with Robotech. At this point, it may well exist for no reason other than to maintain the SDF Macross license.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    While it's not one of TNG's strongest episodes, "Devil's Due" is one of my all-time favorites because of how hammy Ardra's delivery is... and how much FUN Patrick Stewart is clearly having in the end.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Well, I would be amazed that this out-of-control landfill fire of a series succeeded in limping to a third and final season if it weren't for the fact that the sunk costs fallacy is about all that's currently keeping the lights on at Paramount+ and the Star Trek franchise as a whole. In a way, it's oddly appropriate that Picard is going to finish its mercifully brief time as the very thing its showrunners swore it would never become: a TNG cast reunion. While it is nice to know that the writers didn't murder Geordi offscreen the way they'd initially appeared to after establishing that he was assigned to Utopia Planetia when it was destroyed, I can't say I'm at all looking forward to seeing the entire TNG cast as depressed and miserable senior citizens. (Five'll get you twenty Worf's found a way to get discommended and exiled from the Klingon Empire at least two or three more times in the intervening years.)
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Paramount. Voyager was originally going to be a much more serialized story with persistent problems and damage to the titular ship a bit like the "Year of Hell" two-parter. UPN wanted a more episodic series like the recently concluded Star Trek: the Next Generation, and they won out over the showrunners in the end. (This was a major part of Robert Beltran's discontent with the series, having signed to play Janeway's rival opposite Geneviève Bujold before cast changes and retooling of the story at UPN's behest left him playing Janeway's lifeless yes-man.)
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Frontier is probably the best Macross series to date. It had everything. Engaging characters, amazing mechanical designs, a fascinating and incredibly detailed setting, fantastic music, and a lot of references and nods to past titles while remaining completely accessible to new viewers. In my book, its only major flaw was that its love triangle was pretty uneven. Ranka got almost no play in the series version, and in the movies they had to make her a childhood friend of Alto's so that they didn't have to introduce her AND Sheryl in the space of the same movie. Ranka got so little screen time compared to Sheryl, and spent most of it just complaining at Alto, that it felt like a bit of a foregone conclusion that Alto chose Sheryl in the end.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    That's one of the main problems of episodic storytelling. Each episode is developed more or less independently of the others, which means the ending of every story has to reset things to the status quo or there will be problems with subsequent stories. That's why there's very little episode-to-episode continuity most of the time. It wasn't until Star Trek: Deep Space Nine that the showrunners were able to transition to a more serialized format that allowed for more episode-to-episode continuity without the requirement to reset things to the status quo every time a story ended. (That was undermined in Star Trek: Voyager by executive meddling.)
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