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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Not quite. The Macross Chronicle World Guide sheet in question uses the term "remote planet" specifically to refer to planets on the fringes of their star's habitable zone. Essentially, what it says is that because Class A habitable worlds (Earth-like planets) are so rare some emigrants have had to settle on worlds that are only marginally habitable. Whether it's a result of extreme weather, hostile terrain, or the planet just being on the edge of the star's habitable zone, those worlds are less-than-lovely places to live and are only lightly inhabited by those who are there to exploit their resources. They're mentioned to be used for things like mining, agriculture, and livestock farming. It never says that the New UN Government lacks influence there. What it does say is that the inhabitants of those worlds often have a bone to pick with the New UN Government because of the harsh conditions they live in, and that as a result those planets become hotbeds of anti-government sentiment and potentially breeding grounds for new terrorist organizations. EDIT: One would imagine Uroboros is a pretty good example of that, given its excessive problems with piracy and the whole "planet of floating rocks" terrain making it problematic enough to get around that many people have privately owned VFs for the purpose.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    RPG Real Estate defied my pessimism a bit. It's not as aggressively cutesy as I had feared, though it does devolve from a sort of biting satire of the real estate market in Japan to just a regular sort of sitcom about fantasy world real estate sales and the perils associated therewith. It's eminently watchable, but it's only so-so in my opinion. It's also kind of weird that every character is drawn with gradient-fill eyes. That's probably where a lot of the budget went.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Ah, yes... it'd be far more accurate to contextualize that not as an actual emigrant fleet but as a bunch of Zentradi malcontents running as fast and as far as they could to avoid armed retribution after staging a terrorist attack on Macross City. They had good reason to run. They attacked the capital of the New UN Government and got mercilessly thrashed by the Earth New UN Forces. Zentradi New UN Forces ace Timothy Daldhanton was decorated for scoring an incredible fifty confirmed kills of rebel aircraft during that engagement. It'd be a terribly foolish thing to do if anyone were insane enough to make the attempt. Emigrant fleets and planets are dependent on each other for all manner of things, with the New UN Government acting as a sort of top-level mutual defense pact, trade agreement, and source of international law under which emigrant governments also formed smaller power blocs for mutual defense, trade, etc. to cover their own shortcomings and provide for the common good. Going it alone means cutting off trade, being locked out of the loop on technological progress, and having nobody to call on for help should your fleet fall under attack, among other things. When you hear mention of the "Brisingr Alliance" in Macross Delta, that's what they're talking about. Because the twenty or so worlds of the Brisingr globular cluster are located fairly close to each other in galactic terms - separated by a few dozen to a few hundred light years at most - but also partly isolated from the rest of the galaxy by the sheer remoteness of the cluster itself on the far side of the galaxy from Earth, they banded together under a local defense pact and trade partnership to protect and stabilize their local economy and also provide defense against the Zentradi and other threats. (One of the factors that contributed to Windermere IV's war of secession in 2060 was the Kingdom of the Wind being upset about having to send its troops to support its neighbors when there was an encounter with rogue Zentradi.)
  4. Seto Kaiba
    That's a very narrow topic, considering the only emigrant "fleets" we know of having done so were some renegade Zentradi who took off into deep space without any of the planning or preparation that normally goes into an emigrant fleet launch... and also without the flotilla of escorts and support ships necessary to sustain long-term operations in deep space. For better or worse, they are almost certainly dead. If not by their own hubris, then by the hands of their fellow Zentradi or New UN Forces pursuing them for their involvement in terrorist activities on Earth. As far as we know, no actual emigrant fleet has ever cut ties with the New UN Government. Emigrant fleets are big, resource-intensive, vulnerable things. They're autonomous to a certain extent, but as emigration into deep space has expanded they've become economically and militarily dependent upon each other for survival. An emigrant fleet attacked by a rogue Zentradi force is going to want to be able to call on other, nearby emigrant fleets for reinforcements rather than risk destruction. Likewise, inter-fleet and interplanetary trade enables fleets to acquire things they couldn't independently produce. Trying to cut ties with the New UN Government wouldn't be entirely synonymous with suicide... but on the list of dumb*ss stunts it'd rank pretty close to the top. There's only been one "emigrant" planet mentioned to have seceded from the New UN Government, and that was Windermere IV. They were New UN Government members in good standing for a bit over 30 years before things blew up (some literally) and they withdrew. All they really did there was reject their membership in the New UN Government and went isolationist. They kept their trade ties and diplomatic relations open. If they actually cut ties, they'd get nothing... because they'd have cut themselves off from the mandated technology-sharing policies of the New UN Government, as well as from all forms of trade with other governments. Cultural and technological exports are handled mainly via the Galaxy Network - the space internet connecting all the New UN Government's fleets and planets - and severing trade agreements and treaties means other fleets don't have to honor your fiat currency, engage in trade of real goods with you, respect claims your government makes on resources, or treat your soldiers as prisoners of war in the event of a conflict. You'd also be forfieting the New UN Government's protection in the event your fleet found a Bigger Threat or were attacked by another emigrant fleet. This is why Windermere IV's departure from the New UN Government in 2060 was a rather halfhearted one at best. While they rejected their membership in the New UN Government and its authority on their world specifically while withdrawing into self-imposed isolation, completely cutting ties with the New UN Government was completely unrealistic. They had cut off travel unrelated to trade and banned cultural imports, but there was no way to completely suspend trade with the New UN Government's member nations because they were dependent on that trade to keep their economy going and for all kinds of essentials. Windermere IV essentially jumped straight from a late medieval period civilization with absolute monarchies and knights dueling as mounted cavalry to a participant in a vast interstellar civilization in a single (30 year) lifetime. They skipped huge chunks of normal development and as a result lack the advanced industries necessary to maintain a modern standard of living. They were dependent on other New UN Government worlds for technology, medicine, weaponry, and the training to use it all. Without interstellar trade, Windermere IV's economy would've collapsed, they would've been unable to maintain their standard of living, and that would likely have led to another round of civil unrest that might've seen the Kingdom of the Wind's royal family overthrown. (You've no doubt seen in the news the havoc that a severance of even a majority of a nation's trade ties can cause in the nation losing the trade, with precipitous drops in currency valuation, nationwide supply shortages, and a near-total loss of access to information and new technology.) The Kingdom of the Wind was able to last as long as it did by keeping trade open with its New UN Government neighbors, and legally purchasing the needed technology through corporations in the New UN Government sphere of influence.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Y'know, I don't think I ever thought about it properly before... but most of this movie has the audience watching Kirk watch things on a succession of different viewscreens. We watch him watch things on the bridge viewscreen, on the recreation deck viewscreen, on the massive viewscreen in his office, etc. basically from the minute they leave spacedock until their encounter with the Voyager 6 probe at the movie's end. ... ... ... It would be amazing for someone to edit it to recreate the "You're looking at now, sir" scene from Spaceballs. I wonder how many episodes of TOS you could get through by inserting an entire episode every time the camera cuts to a viewscreen? I'm guessing at least a season.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Maybe so, but Gene was veeeeeery good at self-sabotage... not as good as his freaking lawyer, but he could still have taught a master class in it. IIRC, I've always heard the movie's writing and pacing problems were down to two main factors unconnected to the release date: The script was a retooled rescue from the unproduced Star Trek Phase II pilot project... leaving the original 48 minute story spread painfully thin across two-and-a-quarter hours of feature film and necessitating nearly-daily rewrites that left the cast and crew barely aware of where the film was headed. The production's overspending on special effects making the director and studio execs hesitant to leave any of those extravagantly expensive shots on the cutting room floor. To be fair, that's gotta be the second or third time they've tried that for that one movie. It's just going to make them look silly if they can't scrape up the cash to meet Pine, Quinto, et. al.'s demands... which was the original problem after their financial backers pulled out in the wake of 1-3's underperformance.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Starting a series called RPG Real Estate now. The premise sounded suitably odd... the trials and travails of an urban real estate agency operating in the capital of a standard JRPG fantasy kingdom. On actually watching it, I've got a sneaking suspicion this is gonna be my first hard drop of the season. It's aggressively cutesy, and the introduction to the main characters involved one of them (some kind of demihuman) not wanting to get dressed. (Oddly, this is the first time I can recall a fantasy series establishing an exchange rate between yen and gold pieces... presumably for the sake of the cheap shots they're about to take at Tokyo's actual real estate market.) Cutesyness aside, as a satire of Japan's real estate market it's pretty on the nose so far. The thus-far unnamed (or did I forget her name?) witch moving into the city is looking for a house on a laughably small budget (equivalent to ¥36,000 / $283 US) and once the real estate agents are done feeling immense pity at her cluelessness they show her some pretty typical unpleasant cheap housing with a fantasy twist: The highrise apartment conveniently close to town that inconveniently has no elevators... in this case, being inside of a giant tree that is also a dungeon and full of slimes. The inexplicably windowless rental... in this case, a townhouse formerly owned by an elderly witch that had no windows "for black magic reasons". The one with no privacy AND the suspiciously nice one... in this case, a lovely flat in the city center that comes with the condition that adventurers are allowed to search your room for items at any time, JRPG style. The apartments catering to foreign expats... in this case, a tower in the city center used by the sentient monster population who can't or won't speak the local language. That last one is a bit surprising as a nod to the subtle racism that so often occurs in housing, but that's the one the protagonist ends up going with. And they end that little journey with the witch revealing she's the real estate agency's newest hire.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Just imagine what Roddenberry could've achieved if he'd spent less time on petty beefs and perving on actresses and female colleagues alike.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    ... 60 foot "miniature". That's 18.28m! A shooting miniature the size of the 1-scale Gundam statue in Yokohama! Positively gargantuan, considering the shooting miniature for the Enterprise was a "mere" 8 foot 4 (2.54m). No wonder they didn't have time to complete it. That would have taken ages. Wasn't the Enterprise herself CGI in this one? There was that big presentation at the start about the process of compiling the 3D model for it based on an earlier CG model and an up-close examination of the original model.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Skeleton Knight in Another World is really making my hope that we'll soon be free of the tyranny of the isekai genre once and for all. So much of that genre feels like mockbusters and shovelware that it's really worn out its welcome, IMO. Skeleton Knight stands out a bit by at least not being offensively bad. It's just incredibly derivative and makes only the most token effort to hide it. The first few minutes are pretty Goblin Slayer with the attempted rape scene and such, but the remainder feels like it occupies the middle of a venn diagram between Overlord's first few volumes and KonoSuba. Arc is basically just an actually-benevolent version of Momonga's knight alter ego Raven Black Momon (appropriately wearing white instead) who decides to engage in actual heroism instead of engineered heroics, but all with the same tone you'd find throughout KonoSuba. It's so OK it's average... which actually makes it upper-tier for the genre these days, which mostly has a few good titles and a LOT of trash.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    There is a bit of racism on display towards the Zentradi among older folks, like what Guld experiences from General Gomez in Macross Plus. Kind of understandable from those who lived through the aftermath of the First Space War and the hard years that followed given how traumatic that experience must've been. Colonel Todo of the NUNS Special Forces VF-X unit "Havamal" is basically motivated entirely by the traumas of his youth incurred during that period to try and change history in Macross 30. The younger folks in society don't seem to carry the same biases, though, so to them having Zentradi, Zolans, etc. living among humans is normal and nobody really bats an eye. There's already no shortage of weird sh*t going on, so your neighbor being a ghastly pale seven footer's nothing to write home about in the grand scheme of things. Mind you, given that the Zentradi are a persistent threat that is not going away anytime soon - or likely ever - using Zentradi mecha in training exercises is pretty justifiable. That's the vast majority of what soldiers are likely to end up shooting at if an actual war breaks out, after all. That's been going on for ages... the first working production-intent VF, the SV-51, was made using stolen development data from the VF-0. Some companies are only too happy to get a leg-up anyway they can. Like Macross Galaxy arranging to have the YF-29 specs leaked to them by LAI and using that data to finish their VF-27.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    It was a safety matter... having giant Zentradi around poses all kinds of logistical and resource issues, since they draw over a hundred times the resources and are significantly more dangerous in a public setting since you're talking about a living being that is as strong and resilient as a workroid. The inherent dangers in even something as minor as a drunk and disorderly call are exponentially greater when giant Zentradi are involved simply because of their scale. Then of course, you have to factor in that a percentage of Zentradi inevitably fail to adjust to living a civilian lifestyle and either fall in with similarly ill-adjusting folks and begin to gravitate towards violence or develop substance abuse problems like the lolicon trio in the original series did. Not all of them have the benefit of a loving spouse wiling to assist them in getting through that kind of challenge the way Roli did. That's why it's rare for even emigrant fleets and planets to permit giant Zentradi around. The Macross Frontier fleet was a rare exception to that, and like its retro aesthetic city areas, played it for the sake of tourism. If those ships didn't want to remain in contact, it's very hard to keep track of them. Fold faults obstruct fold navigation and fold communication, and it's very easy for even fleets or ships intending to remain in close contact to find themselves cut off. Quite a lot of the maladjusted Zentradi seem to want to go back to a warrior lifestyle, and so I'd suspect a lot of them probably didn't actually get too far before getting wiped out by their own kind, the Supervision Army, or the New UN Forces somewhere they attacked. War profiteering absolutely did not die when Earth's surface was glassed... just like in Gundam, there are companies willing to sell weapons to anti-government militias, terrorists, etc. in order to conduct illegal tests of products meant for sale to governments later. Critical Path and General Galaxy both indulged in that. A lot of their testing on the YF-27 was done in the form of black ops.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    This sounds AMAZING(ly bad... but in a hilarious way). I am going to see this, just so I can say that I've seen it, because it is THAT wrong.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Master File offers alternative explanations for a number of things... it's just like that.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Largely defenseless Tirolians, mind you... in what little of the Sentinels story remains canon, the Masters basically stripped Tirol of its defenses and fuel reserves when they went tearing off into space after Zor's battlefortress. Practically my trademark. XD
  16. Seto Kaiba
    AKA "the plot of Macross 2036".
  17. Seto Kaiba
    You mean this old thing? This came with This is Animation 10: Southern Cross. It's the aforementioned official org. chart for the Southern Cross Army (as it says in the top right). Here's the breakdown in English... Up at the top right are the three most important people on Glorie: Chief of Staff Rolf Emerson, the Deputy Commander of the Army. Prime Minister Moran, who also bears the title of Field Marshal of the Army. General Claude Leon, Supreme Commander of the Army. Up at the very top of the org. chart, you've got Prime Minister Moran (Field Marshal) in overall command of the planet. Below him and to his left, his cabinet. Below him and to the right, General Leon, the Supreme Commander of the Army. Below him, you have Chief of the Military Police below them the Glorie Military Police Force (in blue). Also below him is Chief of Staff Emerson and his direct subordinates Colonel Yazawa, Colonel Antoine, Lt. Colonel Green, and Lt. Colonel Krieger. They collectively manage the two administrative divisions of the Army: the Land & Sea Bureau, and the "Sky" (Aerospace) Bureau. (Glorie has a fair bit less surface water than Earth to begin with, and most of it is ice, so they don't appear to have a Navy of any description... just the Army and its Flying Corps.) Note that the term "corps" used liberally here uses the kanji for an administrative corps, meaning the size is not fixed. "Squad", in this case, uses the kanji for an infantry squad, the level of organization below a platoon and above a fireteam. The Land & Sea Bureau (in pink) encompasses: The Tactics Corps (kanji: "Strategic Corps") - your "regular army" with ground troops and mechanized/robotic infantry supported by various specialist units including... The Reconnoitering Party (kanji: "Reconnaissance Squad") The Cold Squad (kanji: "Cold Regions Squad") The Desert Squad (kanji: "Desert Squad") The Mountaines (sic) Squad (kanji: "Mountain Squad") The Forest Squad (kanji: "Forest Squad") The March (sic) Squad (kanji: "Wetlands Squad") The Navy Division (kanji: "Ocean Squad") The Alpha Tactics Armored Corps (kanji: "Strategic Armor Corps") - the armored cavalry/artillery, consisting of fifteen squads (all the way in the bottom right). Assuming the 15th is typical in size, the whole Corps is only about 300 people or so. The Cities Defense Unit (kanji: "Defense Corps") - analogous to reservists or a militia The Supply Corps The Medical Corps The Sky Bureau (in green) encompasses: The Tactics Air Forse (sic) (kanji: "Air Corps") - the Army's flying corps The Cities Defense Flying Corps (kanji: "Defense Air Corps") - the Army flying corps reserve The Tactics Space Corps (kanji" "Space Corps") - the Army's space flying corps The Tactics Armored Space Corps (kanji: "Space Armor Corps") - the Army's space robot corps The Transport Corps - airborne logistical transportation The Interstellar Transport Corps - spaceborne logistical transportation So, in practical terms, there are only twelve administrative corps comprising the Army... eleven if you don't count the Military Police who don't technically answer to the Army Chief of Staff. Three surface combatant corps, two air flying corps, two space flying corps, one medical corps, one supply corps, and two transport corps. Everything on the bottom row is an element of something on the row above it, not a standalone operating group. I know that was long, and I'm a wordy son of a so-and-so, but I hope that was what you were looking for. As it's put in the Macross Saga when the idea is first introduced, it's more a swift decapitation strike to deprive the Masters of their ability to wage war and THEN diplomacy once they're no longer a threat. It got flanderized a bit in Sentinels to a heavily armed diplomatic mission first. Yes and no. The numbers used are the accurate specs from the animation's creators, not the badly inflated fanfic numbers from the uRRG that don't match the material. Infantry are carried by the assault landers, not the escorting space warships. Each of the 10 Ikazuchi-class carriers holds 144 Legioss armo-fighters (10*144=1,440). Each of the Garfish-class high speed transports holds 9 Legioss armo-fighters (9*40 = 360). Each Horizont-class descent shuttle holds 12 ground troops in each landing pod (24*160=3,840) and one Legioss+TLEAD combiner with one pilot apiece (160), the 200 independently operating Legioss+TLEAD combiners means either 200 or 400 pilots depending on whether both are crewed, for a grand total of 6,000-6,200 personnel on the ground when all is said and done. The problem being, as noted previously, it sounds cool on the surface but once you start to think about it you realize any such battle would be an embarrassing one-sided turkey shoot to the Zentradi's advantage... which doesn't really count as "fought" in my book, since only one side is actually fighting and the other side is just one-sidedly dying.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    That's really just under the standard approach for rogue Zentradi... "avoid where possible, destroy where not". Hardly noteworthy. Those occasional Zentradi who try and fail to acclimate to polite society tend to be a bit more interesting... but they're also a lot more rare. Black Rainbow contained a number of former New UN Forces soldiers - like its leader Timothy Daldhanton - and was really not a threat to anyone except Latence. Odds are they've been stomped on by some VF-X unit in the background somewhere.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Probably, though they also supposedly have much closer ties with Earth in general due to the shorter distance and more established nature of those settlements. (Master File offers an alternate explanation for the inconsistent depiction of the NUNS emblem as Earth and its closest partners keeping the old UN Forces roundel while more recent governments more readily adopted the newer postwar emblem until the Second Unification War saw the old one abolished entirely in the name of unity.) The goal of them was to explore the volume of space within 100ly of Sol, so they'd stay in that volume due to not being outfitted for a more extended trip.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    There are some weird moments for quality in this one thanks, I think, to that split-focus diopter setup they used so liberally. In the meeting in the observation lounge near the end McCoy looks like a thumb in a suit because his face temporarily goes all blurry.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    One thing to remember there is that that old content is... well... playing fast and loose with the setting, story, etc. due to Harmony Gold not exercising any creative control over its licensees. That's why HG disowned that old material and excluded it from consideration in the official setting. "Tiny" and "small" are relative terms. This is an issue that the Robotech fanbase has debated heavily over the years... with a lot of inflation of numbers going on. Neither the Southern Cross Army in Southern Cross nor the Mars Colony forces in MOSPEADA were particularly large forces. To give you some examples: In Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross, the military has only one branch of service in the official org chart published... it's an Army with its own Flying Corps. There is no separate air force or space force and many of the groups that are often mistaken by Robotech fans as branches or divisons are actually individual specialist units inside the regular infantry (Tactics Corps). The Alpha Tactics Armored Corps, for instance, is a specialism in the Tactics Corps and consists of just fifteen tank squads in total. That's only about 300 people if you assume the 15th was at full strength. The Southern Cross Army was so small it had only a handful of flag officers and most of the actual work running it was being done by Colonels and below. In Genesis Climber MOSPEADA, the 2nd Earth Recapture unit at the start of the series was by all accounts a very large force of... 10 Ikazuchi-type carriers, 40 Garfish-type transports, 160 troop landers, and 200 independently operating fighters. Excluding the crews of those ships and shuttles, the actual force being landed was about 6,000 combat personnel in total. For Mars Colony, that was an ENORMOUS force that contributed hugely to resolving their post-invasion overpopulation problem. The above has some amusing implications for Robotech. Taken in stride with RTSC, that force accounts for approximately 12% of the UEEF's available forces in the 2040s, meaning that whole force is somewhere around 50,000 men + ship crews. If you apply the same math to the fleet in RTSC's opening scenes, you're looking at around 7,200 fighters if every ship participating in the fight is loaded for bear. The whole UEEF fleet seen in RTSC, supposedly almost the entirety of the UEEF, was only 395 ships, 364 of which being small escorts. Remember, the UEEF wasn't planning to fight fair and square... their original mission was a sneak attack. 😉
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, we intend to. They've been Trekkies since TOS so they're extremely stoked for this. This'll be my first time seeing a TOS-era movie in theaters. When I was a kid, the first Trek movie I got to see at the box office was Generations, so I've never seen Kirk on the big screen unless you count... ahem... a bridge on the captain? Kinda jealous that Fathom Events seems to have WAY better representation where my folks live. Their nearest venue is barely a block away. I gotta drive about 30min to mine.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Not "low tech" by any means. In both the original and Robotech versions of the story, those were advanced ersatz nukes - thermonuclear reaction weapons in Macross, "reflex" weapons in Robotech - based on alien technology. In Robotech, the Zentradi were floored that humanity had something like that and in the original Macross version they were straight-up lost technology from the age of the Zentradi's creators that humanity reinvented based on the principles they discovered reverse-engineering the ship. It's much more explicable when you remember that that "massive fleet of clam ships" has no interstellar capability in Robotech's official setting. They are strictly sublight craft and their range is basically limited to ferrying troops between orbit and a planet's surface. The Invid were dependent on the Regess's teleportation and the Regent's small number of fold-capable ships to travel interstellar distances, both of which required vast amounts of protoculture... a resource that was in short supply for the Invid after the Masters were done glassing Optera. They didn't have the ships or the resources to sustain an extended raiding campaign. They could barely manage a halfhearted occupation of a handful of largely defenseless planets before being ousted by a force a tiny fraction of the size of, and far less advanced than, anything the Zentradi or Masters would've mustered.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Y'know this isn't a R-word site, right? We really don't wanna look at something even that franchise considers part of an embarrassing past best forgotten.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    It's a pretty straightforward issue, IMO. The Masters destroyed Optera's biosphere after pillaging it for the resources - the protoculture - they would use to develop the weapons and technologies (like the Zentradi) that they would use to establish their interstellar empire. The Invid, for their part, remained on the devastated Optera until the events of Robotech II: the Sentinels when the Regess became too wrapped up in hunting for the Flowers of Life and her evolution experiments to hold the Regent's leash and he took off to take revenge on the Masters by invading their homeworld shortly before the UEEF arrived there. The ones with guns didn't pop up until partway thru the 3rd Robotech War. So really, just the claws. Mind you, they're only shown to be effective against human ships... explicitly the weakest, least advanced ones in the setting. Even if they had the guns, those are exclusively visual-range weapons and the Zentradi are a foe that can (and do) flatten planets from orbit or as far away as a light second with impunity in the series. A war where one side has to get within a few feet of the enemy to hurt them while the other side can destroy them and the entire planet they're on from 280,000km+ away isn't going to last very long, y'know?
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