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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Going to see this one tonight. Got tickets for my parents as well, so they can go see it too. Very excited.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    So, yeah... remember when I said this? *gestures broadly at "the Zentradi and the Invid never fought"* Let's just call that People's Exhibit A. As odd as it sounds, he actually did have a factually sound point... but because it was buried in the demented honking about other nonsense it ended up dismissed as another minor example of crazy. The only depictions of the Robotech Empire-era Zentradi fighting the Invid come from the disowned/non-canonical comics from before the 2001 reboot of Robotech. In official setting materials developed for Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles, it was established that the Haydonites destroyed the first Invid homeworld and the Robotech Masters destroyed the second one (Optera). There is no mention or depiction of those two factions ever fighting each other in official material. The Invid Regent appears to be aware of what the Zentradi are in the Prelude comic enough to taunt them about having been "slaves", but that seems to be as far as it goes. As I mentioned in another thread, the whole idea of the Zentradi fighting the Invid makes very little sense if you think about it rationally. Not just because the Zentradi near-exclusively favor ranged warfare in space while the Invid near-exclusively favor close quarters surface combat, but because the sheer difference in scale reduces it to absurdity. A statistically-average Zentradi is 10m (32'10"), while your typical Invid is 2.5m (8'2"). Even the bigger ones are only about twice that, at 4.8m (15'9"). Scaled down to human size, the Invid are only about the size of a small dog (scouts) or a statistically-average seven year old (troopers) vs. an army of 6'7" basketball players with giant robots, machine guns, and body armor. Such an authentic impression it's like he's in the room with us! That's a favorite one of his, though he tends to get rather upset if you point out that even in the original Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross the Logan was officially stated to be an incredibly ineffective fighter with a high loss rate and that the Auroran (RT: AGACs) was rushed out to replace it. He was consulted on a few minor details, but if you visit their forums you'll find him voicing a litany of grievances with what they actually put in the books after HG shot down a lot of his positions and theories.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Kaifun's something of a special case... given that he's shown to be rather hypocritical or insincere about his supposed pacifist views. The actual pacifists of the Macross 29 fleet are shown in rather a more positive light, though there are still some realistic consequences involved in that the fleet's problems were also caused by their commitment to total pacifism making them extreme doormats. In all fairness to Colonel Burton... the only civilian giving him flak was Basara, who excels at making soldiers and civilians alike lose their tempers explosively. The military was under civilian authority in each series... though in Frontier they made an unusual choice of having a military officer in the president's cabinet as his chief of staff and the coup was instigated by corporate corruption rather than from within the military. Ironically, a military coverup done for perfectly sound reasons.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    If I had to guess, I'd say partly just catching up to the real world's gradual introduction of 5th Generation fighter aircraft into actual frontline service mixed with Japan's government deciding to take a shot at developing their own 5th Generation fighter to replace their build-under-license version of the F-16. The VF-31's development history ended up kind of a whole-plot-reference to Japan's struggles and objectives there, ... I fear you may have had some very inaccurate fan material or "R-word" material mixed in there. After the First Space War, the Earth Unification Government that had been destroyed was replaced by the New Unification Government that operated along essentially the same lines as a representative democracy. The military was very influential, sure, but it was by not a military dictatorship by any means. You could say the military's influence was built upon its heavy involvement in the emigrant fleets (and as a major employer therein) and the understandable emphasis on defense in the wake of such a cataclysmic war. After all, nobody on Earth (or elsewhere) wanted round 2 to go the same as round 1. The New UN Government ran into some difficulties with its system of government as space emigration continued and emigrant fleets and planets became increasingly far-flung. Its new member worlds wanted more autonomy for practical reasons, since referring matters to the central government took a lot of time thanks to the time delays in fold navigation or fold communication, making it difficult to react quickly. So there was a small, but growing, number of little brushfire conflicts between pro-autonomy movements and the reactionary Earth supremacists who believed that governing authority needed to be centralized on Earth in order to present a united front against threats. Eventually, that sentiment boiled over when the Earth supremacists started mobilizing the military more and more to crack down on pro-autonomy movements and became the Second Unification War in 2050-2051. In the aftermath, the New UN Government adjusted its model of government to allow emigrant governments more autonomy and had become something more akin to the EU.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Almost certainly not. For a very long time - indeed, even well after Macross 7 - Kawamori claimed to have never seen Macross II. His philosophy for Macross has always broadly mirrored real world design trends. When Macross Plus and Macross 7 were on the drawing board, much fuss was being made on the subject of things like stealth fighter prototypes and stealth warships. Particularly on the competition for the USAF Advanced Tactical Fighter program between the YF-22 and the YF-23 that inspired the design of the YF-21/VF-22. He always sneaks parallels like that into his work on Macross, like the talk about the 5th Generation Valkyries being "last manned Valkyrie" similar to how the 5th Gen fighters were originally tipped to be "last manned fighter", or the VF-31 program mirroring Japan's ATD-X program. By all accounts, even stories set after Frontier have the New UN Government still quite happy with its policy of avoidance when it comes to the Zentradi... even among forces that are armed with 5th Generation VFs. You can only do so much against overwhelming numerical superiority. Macross Chronicle tends to take the lazy way out and just show size comparisons for the Fighter mode. We've seen surprisingly few emigrant fleets up close, and almost all odd-numbered ones.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Just got my tickets... I'm kinda surprised to see so few seats being taken in the theater this time around. There was a pretty respectable turnout for [i]Macross Plus[/i]. (Though part of me suspects the usual summer road work may be partly to blame, with folks opting to see showings closer to home.)
  7. Seto Kaiba
    The Birdhuman that the ancient Protoculture left behind on Earth wasn't nearly that heavily armed. None of the Fold Evils we've seen were, really. The Earth UN Forces had a rather different tactical ethos from the New UN Forces established after the First Space War. Mainly, this was because they developed their planetary defense strategy around the badly mistaken assumption that an alien aggressor would pursue a classic alien invasion scenario and were also VERY mistaken about the scale of space warfare. Once they learned the hard way that something like a Zentradi main fleet simply can't be fought on human terms, avoidance and stealth became the order of the day. Even before the First Space War, they were mostly structured around the idea of a carrier-based space force rather than a battleship-based space force like the Zentradi are used to. It was only really in Macross II where the UN Forces bothered building battleships, though their strategic focus was also predominantly defensive and relied on a mix of high-performance fighters, the firepower of the massive Macross Cannon-class gunships, and the Minmay Attack. There were around a hundred Zentradi ships left after the First Space War. The New UN Forces seem to have appropriated or built quite a few more since then... e.g. the ships of the 33rd Marines. Those Zentradi ships were implied to be used for things like short-distance emigrant fleets that looked for inhabitable worlds within 100ly of Earth, like the one that found Eden in late 2013. At least 160 emigrant fleets... it's the best estimation we can manage with the available facts, there having been approximately 100 short-distance emigrant fleets and the highest sequentially numbered long-distance fleet being the 59th. As to how many planets... we don't know. Not every emigrant fleet launched has found a planet yet, and there are some hints that suggest some found more than one inhabitable planet. Some may have been destroyed or lost before finding a planet, like the Macross Galaxy in the Frontier movies or the Megaroad-01.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Good thing Starfleet has the gold breakdown package... it wouldn't be the first time the Enterprise ended up needing a tow.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    There are rudimentary forms of inertial damping in the Macross setting in the form of inertia capacitor systems like the Queadluun-Rau's IVCS and the ISC used by 5th Gen VFs, but since Macross's warships are generally not inclined to the kind of violent high-sublight accelerations that would turn the crew into wall-gazpacho they haven't become indispensible yet. Most warships peak at less than 2G of acceleration, because sublight travel is bullsh*t and it's way faster, easier, and more resource-efficient to just fold long distances. Structurally, ships are mainly getting by on how absurdly tough hypercarbon and related composites are. The hypercarbon composites used around the First Space War were 100x as strong as an equivalent thickness of armor-grade steel according to some of the oldest technical materials. Once ships get to a certain size, sailing under sublight power seems to become a bit of a waste and they seem to just fold everywhere they need to go the way Mobile Fortresses often do.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    What I'll say for the SNW Enterprise... while I don't much care for it being made so much bigger than it ought to be, I do greatly enjoy the care that the set designers and prop masters have shown in trying to give the original TOS/TAS sets and mattes new life and an aesthetic facelift for the 21st century. There is a lot there that says "labor of love" in the prepwork. I especially love that the engine room replicated the look of the TOS/TAS Enterprise's warp core.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    As noted previously, Gene Roddenberry's favored/official explanation was that the Enterprise-A was a pre-existing Constitution-class ship that was simply renamed. That said, Gene did flip-flop a bit on when the Constitution-class was retired. Picard's USS Stargazer was supposed to be a Constitution-class ship originally, but due to production circumstances that detail got overlooked and they developed a new starship class (Constellation-class) for it. That would've pushed the end-of-life for the Constitution-class out a good sixty-plus years. (Some of the notes produced around the time TNG was on the drawing board suggested that Starfleet ships were intended for MUCH longer lifespans than the Constitution-class ended up having. We're talking a century-plus, not the ~50 years they ended up with for the Constitution-class. At the very least, we can blame the extended layovers in spacedock between five year missions and series for the Enterprise's changes in appearance. Or simply dragged out of mothballs and given the minimum amount of restoration to get her spaceworthy before foisting her on Kirk, secure in the knowledge that he'd be so busy trying to get her working again that he wouldn't be able to get up to trouble for at least a week.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Now that's closer to a hot take. 😉 Hey, if you're trying to bully an inanimate object like sand into doing complex mathematics you need to threaten it a bit first. Y'know, let it know who's boss. ... that is a depressingly safe bet. 😕 For better or worse, that small group of extremely noisy Masters Saga fans are their own worst enemy... and the saga's too. On the rare occasion they make a sound point that could gain some traction with a bit of evidence, they immediately undermine it themselves by getting all confrontational when it gets questioned. Mostly they just beat dead horses like the "Sylphid Veritech" and rail against Harmony Gold's decision to base its official stats on the Japanese OSM where possible, which tends to leave their theories at odds with established canon, the animation, and common sense. Maybe so... though then it would've looked like something from a tokusatsu hero show with a massively chunky torso and silly little limbs. Given how most of the designs in Southern Cross are pretty heavily derivative of what other franchises (read "Gundam" and "Macross") were doing at the time, I'd assume that if they considered that option it was probably vetoed for being too obviously derivative of Macross's VF-1.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    One thing you have to remember about the Varauta Fleet Flagship Space Carrier is that it is stupidly huge. If not for the Macross Cannon-class gunships in Macross II it would be the single biggest human-built warship in all of Macross at a whopping 4.32km long. Mind you, since it's not a cylinder like Zentradi ships but is instead shaped like a giant horseshoe, it's actually about 3x the size of a Nupetiet Vergnitzs-class fleet command battleship like Vrlitwhai's. The only human ships bigger than it in the main Macross timeline are the unarmed environment ships used in emigrant fleets... the City-class, Mainland-class, and Island Cluster-class. It is a completely over-the-top exercise in excess on all accounts, functioning not just as a supercarrier rivaling a Battle-class for capacity but also as a mothership for the smaller warships of its fleet, and as a massive mobile anti-fleet missile battery and gun platform bristling with massive high-angle beam cannons and eight Macross Cannons. The thing about Macross Cannons is they're big, they draw a LOT of power, and they have some pretty hardcore cooling requirements between firings. We're not entirely sure how the eight macross cannon systems aboard the fleet flagship space carrier compare to a Battle-class's gunship for firepower but with eight of them it's likely they're intended to be used in volley fire, with one or more firing while the others are charging or being cooled after firing. Since the ship is so gobsmackingly massive, it seems a safe bet it's outfitted with a truly insane number of reactor system clusters to meet the energy demands of moving such a massive ship, maintaining artificial gravity, and powering its weaponry and energy conversion armor. Macross tends to buck the sci-fi trend of ships being powered by a single large, central, reactor system like the Death Star's main reactor or a Starfleet ship's warp core. Instead, they use clusters of smaller reactors working in unison to meet their energy demand. The bigger the ship, the more reactor clusters it'll have. On the Battle-class and some other modular warships, the power grid is effectively decentralized by having a reactor complex in each of the ship's independently operable modules. Other systems, like gravity control and fold systems, are similarly decentralized on many larger warships. It's doubtful the cannons have dedicated reactor systems, IMO, but given the sheer size of the fleet flagship space carrier, it probably has a rather extensive network of reactor system clusters working in tandem to meet the energy needs of its various systems. Very few New UN Forces warships are outfitted with Macross Cannons, because as mentioned earlier they are large, unwieldy, energy-intensive weapons... and terribly unsubtle to boot. Firing something like that gets everyone's attention right away, and since they lack the numbers to confront a Zentradi fleet head-on the New UN Forces generally prioritize a strategy of avoidance based on stealth and advance detection a weapon like that is only really useful for when things have gone truly pear-shaped. Reaction weapons are also far more discreet, efficient, and scalable, so the New UN Forces have shown a definite preference for those in its predominantly carrier-based space forces. For most needs, the electron particle beam cannon technology that is the mainstay of the Zentradi forces is used on human-built warships as well for much the same reason... being extremely precise and scalable and coming in a variety of different configurations to suit various needs.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    One reason you definitely want to refer mecha repair to a qualified technician... those electric motors have to be way higher voltage than anything used today to move such huge and heavy bits of metal around so quickly and with such massive torque. Arc fault events are already pretty damn deadly with things like high voltage electric car chargers and electric rail systems, but the electical systems to make a giant robot go make those look like the humblest watch battery. We're talking the potential for "death by vaporization" here as a workplace mishap rather than an outcome of sci-fi raygun murder.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    So were all the UN Forces mecha pilots in Macross... both Valkyrie pilots and Destroid pilots. Unlikely. Harmony Gold licensing Robotech to Funimation doesn't change anything about the existing legal situation and the relationships/obligations they have with respect to their licensing partner Tatsunoko Production or Macross owner Big West. It's literally just them letting Funimation take up the reins of managing the franchise's distribution and some of its merchandise licensing. If anything, it should actually make the approvals process worse... unless they're using Funimation's legal team instead of Harmony Gold's.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Ok, I have some reading to do...
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Dial the snark back, mate... it's in under-bridge territory right now. It's not like the design staff at Tatsunoko's in-house design group Ammonite weren't trying to do a good job. Designing a mecha that transforms while still looking slick in each of its modes is ridiculously hard and requires a very specialized skill set and mindset they didn't have. It's noted in one of the few interviews they did on the series that work on designing the Spartas's transformation alone took Ammonite's three professional anime production designers a whopping THREE MONTHS to resolve despite being fairly basic. There's good reason Kawamori is one of the few designers out there who makes transformation design their specialty. It would, in all fairness, be accurate to say that the designs were not well-received either in Japan in its initial/only broadcast and abroad as part of Robotech. ... snark aside, kinda? More like driving a cheap convertible with no seatbelts. When the emigrants found Glorie, it was basically analogous to Hoth from Star Wars V: the Empire Strikes Back... albeit as the result of a nuclear winter. If you take Wookieepedia seriously, it's still mostly in Hoth territory in winter (daytime temps at the equator on Hoth supposedly reach a balmy -32C, eight degrees warmer than Glorie's winter average) and is basically in American Northern-Midwest winter mode in Spring and Autumn. In Earth terms, it's kind of like driving a convertible in the antarctic three seasons out of four. It's only in summer that Glorie really becomes a not-unpleasant place to live. That, in and of itself, is kind of rare in sci-fi. You normally see humans only attempt to settle on planets that are conveniently so Earthlike they resemble central California. 😜
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Wait, what? Since when were the other eleven Constitution-class ships lost? IIRC, the official line on the Enteprise-A was that she was one of Enterprise's sister ships that was rechristened for the purpose. Gene Roddenberry's original explanation for how the Enterprise-A was available so quickly after the original's loss was that she was a rechristened, previously-decommissioned, Yorktown. Some unofficial works claimed she was originally named Ti-Ho. EDIT: IIRC, Gene Roddenberry's original plan for Jean-Luc Picard's old command, the Stargazer, was for her to also be an old Constitution-class ship.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    There is that, yeah... though the fleet flagship that became Gepernich's home base was the centerpiece of that defensive strategy, with eight Macross Cannons and gigatonnes of thermonuclear ordnance to make branch fleets "go away".
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... according to Southern Cross's creators, it's definitely a tank: The Spartas's "Sniping Clapper" mode (hover mode) is a high speed light tank. "Walker Cannon" mode (the gerwalk-analogous mode) is an anti-aircraft piece. "Battle Sniper" mode is an infantry combat mode. One of the glaring holes in the development of Southern Cross is that it's never really explained why there is a standing army in the first place when the whole reason they had to abandon Earth was a world war that destroyed the planet's ecosystem so badly it couldn't support life anymore and why they're armed with giant robots when there's nothing on Glorie they'd need them for. Mind you, the Spartas has a multiply-referenced design flaw in that its open cockpit also lacks restraints for the crew. On at least two occasions people are flung from a moving Spartas due to clipping terrain or a nearby explosion. It also leaves the pilot and controls exposed to the weather, which on Glorie was not exactly nice. According to the show's creators, Glorie was in the closing phases of an ice age when humanity found and started terraforming it and it's actually quite nasty with the temperature hovering around the freezing point most of the year (-5C/23F in autumn, a balmy 2C/36F in spring) dipping down to -40C/F in winter and shooting up to over 40C/104F in summer. And that's at 40 degrees latitude... so imagine that being the norm in Kansas if we were talking about Earth. Robotech also acknowledged this rather glaring issue in its own material on it, but omitted the extreme weather in favor of just mentioning that weather in general tends to make the pilot's life unplesaant. It doesn't, but needs must as the devil drives... and they had to get over 65 episodes somehow. Robotech's attempt to justify it, as I've mentioned in previous posts, was that the Southern Cross Army was basically the dumping ground for the personnel its leadership felt were least likely to be missed on the front lines of an actual conflict. It was what happened to you if you didn't make the cut for the real military - the Expeditionary Forces - and got told you had to stay home and mind the house while the grownups were away. Post-2001, Harmony Gold's official setting took it even further by establishing that the leadership of the Southern Cross Army was just as inept as its rank-and-file soldiery, that the top brass were holding an idiot ball the ENTIRE war because their leader was an absolute xenophobe (and onetime terrorist), and that their equipment was entirely subpar because the brass were so salty about being left behind that they refused to use the same equipment as the UEEF and developed their own with inferior resources as a result. (Now consider that in both versions of the story, 15th Squad is considered a dumping ground for problem soldiers even by those standards... they're basically Delta House, but in uniform.) Color me surprised... normally, as in "almost invariably", it's legal holding up the show. I remember their marketing chief having to beg to be allowed to use social media so that he could get news out in a timely manner. It is. It really is. You can count the number of highly vocal defenders of the Masters Saga... well... "on one hand" might be pushing it, but you're definitely not going to need all ten fingers. Unfortunately there also seems to be a very close correlation between how vocally one defends the Masters Saga and how overall toxic they are as a fan, with a lot of that group's members having been banned from many Robotech fansites and Facebook groups for their tendency to fly off the handle at the slightest provocation. Doesn't stop me from trying to help them with their translation requests, even though I don't really get along with most of them. Mind you, they do occasionally make a good point... but even Harmony Gold generally turns a blind ear to their theories. (The UEEF is nowhere near as big as many Robotech fans believe it is, based on OSM and RTSC sources it was only ever about 600 ships in total, most being small escort warships with crews barely large enough to be a side in a football match. The entire return fleet modeled in the RTSC animation was only 395 ships, only 31 of which being large warships.) (It does not help that even Southern Cross's creators are pretty down on the Southern Cross Army as a whole, with what little coverage the series officially got typically taking the time to mention how ineffectual the Southern Cross Army's weapons were in actual combat. The Logan gets this A LOT, as one of the few things said about it officially is that its combat effectiveness barely rated as an annoyance to the Zor... and the Zor hadn't fought a war in centuries, if not millennia, to the extent of literally forgetting how.) Yes, but having your marrow flash-boiled until your bones explode like frag grenades is a fate that really REALLY ought to stay confined to the pages of grimdark RPGs, and yet it's something mentioned as a possible fate in safety briefings I have to attend. >_<
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... Robotech RPG Tactics undeniably did a bit of damage, but because it was backed mainly by the long-time Robotech and Palladium faithful and neither brand was exactly in great shape reputationally the long term damage was pretty minimal. It is believed that it hurt the prospects of Robotech Academy, but that was already kind of a cynical stinker dependent on the "do it for Carl" vibes and I'd have been stunned if it met its funding goals either way. That said, "huge"... well... this feels like a repeat of the same critical mistake Palladium Books made with RPG Tactics. Namely, judging the success or prospects of a Kickstarter purely on the total funds pledged. Kevin Siembieda was so gobsmacked by the unexpectedly huge pledge total on the RPG Tactics Kickstarter that was certain the game was an enormous hit in the making that he failed to consider that information in its proper context. He saw $1.44M and jumped to believing he had a huge hit on his hands, not noticing that princely sum was due not to widespread support but a high cost of entry and the 5,342 backers making disproportionately high pledges to secure multiple game boxes and stretch goal minis. The average pledge was nearly 3 1/2 times the cost of entry. The same is true for Minitech's new DOG FIGHT game. Yeah, they raised an impressive pledge total ($232,730 US), but due to an even more disproportionately high average pledge from a much smaller pool of backers (just 795 people, about 1/7th as many as RPG Tactics got). The average pledge was more than five times the cost of entry. When you get right down to it, the numbers don't show Robotech becoming more commercially viable... they show a smaller (and shrinking) number of fans that skews heavily to collector tendencies, willing to buy multiple copies of a game or book and willing to pledge extremely high for backer reward extras. SMG's Homefront Kickstarter had only 546 backers, 1/10th what Palladium's RPG Tactics got. That's kind of the expected result, though, given the franchise's persistent failures to get a new series launched to bring new fans in and the dissatisfaction with various sequel efforts and the like. Some people like the crunch, what can I say? Then again, I am a lousy example since I'm an engineer (math nerd) and a translator of mecha anime publications (tech nerd) so the crunch is just WHERE I'M AT. One of the most common houserule fixes to the Palladium Mega-Damage system is to address the weirdly unbalanced levels of granularity in skills. Some border on being Swiss Army skills that can do almost anything, like the pilot boats skill that lets you sail anything from a dingy to a dreadnought with equal ease as long as it's not a sailboat, or the ones that give you proficiency in operating just one system on a complex integrated vehicle like a robot or aircraft (e.g. the radar skills). Leveling that out and applying common sense there is usually the first fix a GM makes after trying to run Mega-Damage. (That said, I have seen real-world... incidents... that justify certain limits like not letting just anyone perform maintenance on heavy or specialized machinery. It is with good reason that they say the safety regulations are written in blood. There are some systems I've worked on on a daily basis where the servicing is limited to highly trained and safety-qualified personnel only because special tools and training are absolutely necessary to minimize the risk of the system you're servicing maiming you horribly or killing you messily. Even the relatively mundane appliances around your house like a microwave or TV contain components that can easily kill you if you don't know what you're doing, and heavier machinery can often be exponentially more dangerous. It's all fun and games until your workplace safety training warns about the kind of injuries you'd normally think belonged exclusively to the critical hit tables in Dark Heresy.) My good fellow, that is one of the most common opinions in the Robotech fandom as a whole. Harmony Gold actually ran a series of official polls on that topic back in the 2000s, and responses were... well... let's just say a significant majority of the fanbase thinks the ASC is basically where the United Earth Forces sends the soldiers who would be least missed on the front lines, and the leaders most likely take a "lucky" shot when the enemy forces are suspiciously far away. The idea had some canonical traction even before HG officially canonized it, with the ASC being made up of troops that didn't make the cut for the Pioneer Expedition in Sentinels and their equipment and training later being identified as subpar compared to the UEEF's. The Spartas gets some richly deserved flak for being a tank that has no protection for its driver, but the Auroran/AGACs gets a LOT of undeserved flak for being a "space helicopter" even though it isn't actually one. The "No love for Southern Cross?" sentiment extends well into the Robotech world as a result... Based on my past experiences there, it's almost certainly not him. It's legal. Because of the complex nature of their licensing situation, Harmony Gold's legal counsel gets a distressing amount of work because they have to vet everything to make sure that they won't step on any toes at Tatsunoko, at Big West, or anywhere else. Their situation might've improved slightly since they bent the knee, but it was so bad back in the day that the official Robotech website was usually the last place to have Robotech-related news because everything had to be multiply signed off on by legal first.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Two episodes in, and I have to admit... this ain't bad. It has potential. I really feel like if the writers can resist the temptation to delve into the kind of cheap drama Discovery and Picard used, this could really be what saves Star Trek.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    And more's the pity... But two and a half feet long is pretty darn small when the neighbors are doing 18m.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    I'm surprised they went so small with it, since Gundam has been beating on the 1:1 scale.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Careful, you'll be the next one the trollish types brand as "not a fan". 😉 Yeah... as I'd mentioned previously, I suspect the difference there is that Harmony Gold is a lot less serious about Robotech's future prospects now that the cat's long since out of the bag on the Shadow Saga's cancellation, the last gasp attempt to save animated Robotech failed on Kickstarter, and they've all but sold the franchise to Big West. Back in the early-to-mid 2000s, Harmony Gold was taking Robotech seriously for the first time in the franchise's history. They'd just hired a new creative staff and given them the herculean task of relaunching Robotech as a credible mainstream sci-fi/mecha anime property like Gundam or Macross. That was actually a pretty damned exciting time to be a fan of Robotech. They sat down and went through the licensee-created materials from the 80's and 90's and after much review concluded there was no way to incorporate those materials into Robotech proper because the overall level of quality of those works was too poor (and later admitted most, if not all, would never have seen the light of day if there had been editorial oversight back then), that there were too many inconsistences and contradictions, and way too much blatant copyright infringement from Macross and others. That led them to make a clean break with that old material, disowning all pre-2001 materials except the 85 episode TV series. I was on the call where they announced that, and I remember the furor that provoked. But they opted to start fresh, and we got comics at higher levels of quality than we'd ever had before. They sat down with fan translators and worked out an official setting and reference for same based on the Japanese source material and the Robotech TV series. There was the promise of a new animated title in the works (what became Shadow Chronicles), and of course the 2006 announcement that Palladium Books reacquired the RPG license with the caveats that their game had to stay firmly within the bounds of the official Robotech setting. It ended up not panning out, since Shadow Chronicles was supposed to launching point for a new era of Robotech literally and figuratively. Fans were ambivalent towards it and ultimately it never attracted the investors they needed to fund part 2. Harmony Gold tried to use the then-recent announcement of the live-action movie license to attract some investors, but that never went anywhere and eventually c.2012 they had to finally come clean that Shadow Rising wasn't happening. Management shifted its attention to the live action movie proposal, and efforts related to maintaining animated Robotech stagnated or were suspended... before ultimately being abandoned altogether with the crash-and-burn failure of Robotech Academy on Kickstarter in 2014. I don't doubt for a second that Harmony Gold is fine with what Strange Machine is doing. The difference between then and now being that Harmony Gold is no longer trying to present Robotech as a professionally-done mainstream anime property the way they were when they were working with Palladium Books. Standards are much more lax, since animated Robotech exists mainly to maintain the Macross trademark in the US and HG's focus is entirely on the proposed live action movie. I totally understand... there is a running joke that Palladium's system - esp. RIFTS - is the best game nobody actually plays for exactly those reasons. You basically play one game using the rules-as-written, and then you start houserule-ing to paper over the cracks and smooth over the speedbumps in the game system. Once you do that, it's eminently playable and quite enjoyable. It does, however, have a decidedly simulationist bent as you've noted though that seems to be what a lot of mecha enthusiasts are looking for in an RPG for a mecha anime. My own homebrews are extensively embroidered with houserules and so much errata (esp. for Macross II) that my players used to joke there was more red ink than black in my copies of the Macross II RPG. (If I had actually written my notes directly on the books themselves, they would probably be completely right.)
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