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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Your recollection is correct. The first time an Enterprise was referred to as the Federation flagship was in TNG, for the Enterprise-D. Twelve, according to TOS "Tomorrow is Yesterday" and development materials for the series published in The Making of Star Trek. Mind you, Star Trek has never exactly been using the term correctly either. In its proper context, a "flagship" is a temporary designation denoting the ship an admiral in command is embarked aboard. Its more informal meaning, as the lead ship in a group of ships, also doesn't quite fit because the Enterprise - all of the Enterprises - generally operate alone. So it's pretty arbitrary, and the term has never been required to mean a unique or distinctive ship either. Flagships historically tend to be the largest classes simply because the fleet's admiral needs more room for the bureaucratic busywork of coordinating a fleet. Eh... a very definite "maybe", IMO. Her namesake, CV-6 USS Enterprise, was an Admiral's flagship at Midway... so one could argue Enterprise was probably always the nominal flagship even if the topic is never brought up prior to TNG. So, that's actually a popular misconception. StarTrek.com definitively settled the matter last year. All of Starfleet was always supposed to be wearing the Enterprise's arrowhead delta, the other emblems were a goof by the wardrobe department. (The letter is very tongue-in-cheek, with Bob Justman signing as "Chief Inquisitor" and imploring wardrobe lead Bill Theiss to ensure uniforms for future episodes used the proper emblem "Under penalty of death!", with a postscript asking for a litearlly-engraved apology.) https://www.startrek.com/article/starfleet-insignia-explained Archer's Enterprise being a retcon aside... even in its own era it didn't actually end up as the flagship. (The novelverse ran with the idea of the Enterprise getting trashed in the final battles of the Earth-Romulan War and Starfleet's first true flagship being the Columbia-class USS Endeavour.)
  2. Seto Kaiba
    You're assuming that designation was official in-universe. It was likely just the name the design had during the film's development.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    The early 2000s "2nd Edition" RPG was actually pretty good... they (involuntarily) went to some pretty considerable lengths to develop a game that is actually pretty accurate to the setting and story of the Robotech TV series. It's a massive improvement over the one from the late 80's and early 90's and systemic differences aside it's also way more accurate to the show than the new SMG game is as well. Well, if you need a whale biologist I know a guy... (no, really) One method that various content creators have historically had great success with making their content more believable and consistent has been to involve subject matter experts from various fields in their development. Star Trek was infamous for having a whole panel of consultants for that kind of thing. Macross drove its development in part with the help of engineering experts. MOSPEADA, likewise, had a motorcycle enthusiast designer behind the Ride Armor (Cyclone) whose expertise made the design more believable in terms of its presentation. Harmony Gold tried to do something similar for developing its official setting by tapping experts on the Japanese source material in the 2000s, with some hit-and-miss results due to the incomplete nature of the Southern Cross OSM and some guesswork some of them did. I got tapped for a few points related to the Macross Saga back in the day, having at the time mostly focused on Macross for my translations. I'm sure with a bit more thought a few more plausible explanations could be found. Gotta think about engineering problems like an engineer. That would make you pretty unusual as a Robotech fan. Most are still very much hung up on the incomplete Robotech II: the Sentinels series and their desire to see it completed played a pretty significant role in the failures of Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles and Robotech Academy. I was definitely well in the minority being happy to see Robotech finally mostly divorce itself from the Macross Saga characters and Sentinels arc via Shadow Chronicles, and got a lot of crap for my (admittedly lukewarm) support for the new OVA as an attempt to make a clean break with Sentinels and have the franchise get on with its life. That's padding for ya... You're drawing on materials Harmony Gold explicitly disowned and labeled as non-canonical and "Robotech in name only", so I don't think you can make that claim with a straight face.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    With the exception of the "new giant aircraft carrier", the ships used by the Varauta Forces in Macross 7 are modified versions of warships developed by the Varuata colony for their local New UN Forces defense force. We have only indirect statements on why, but it seems like the colony was pretty determined they wanted the ability to repel or outright destroy a Zentradi branch fleet and built the flagship of their defense force with a level of firepower appropriate to the task. Rather than the stealth-focused designs used by the mainstream New UN Forces, the ships that the Varauta colony designed seem to focus more on defensive ability with large amounts of energy conversion armor and on heavy firepower. Once the Varauta colony was captured by the Protodeviln that had accidentally been unsealed by the special investigative unit dispatched to the system's ice world by the New UN Gov't (in the short Spiritia Dreaming), the Protodeviln had the designs of the Varauta NUNS modified and upgraded to their standards/tastes/preferences and then mass produced to accommodate their conscription of mind-controlled colonists to expand their forces. We don't know if it was the first time... we've seen only a fraction of the total number of emigrant fleets and planets out in the galaxy. Only a dozen or so of at least 160. It is possible that Fasces has some sympathizers among the Varauta New UN Forces, but the Varauta colony itself was liberated in 2046 by the Macross 7 fleet and as far as we know has remained free ever since. The mind-controlled Varauta Forces that fought the Macross 7 fleet NUNS no longer exist, as those troops were freed from mind control and returned to their normal lives. So you could say the former Varauta Forces aren't a threat to anyone anymore. Fasces simply found and gained access to the factory satellite the Protodeviln had used to build the ships and mecha used by their mind-controlled minions, and used it to build more of the Protodeviln's modified versions of the VF-14, VA-14, and VAB-2D. The factory satellite in question is a special type that needs a special type of spiritia to work, and it isn't functioning properly without it, so its operation is very limited. Fasces is dependent on it because support for their cause dried up following the Second Unification War. Dude, stay on topic... those massive tangents unrelated to the original question just confuse people.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    On an individual level, that's a bit more mundane since that's all down to material strength and computer automation... which gets less implausible every time another carbon nanomaterial with metallic properties is invented, and the more AI-based technology integrates itself into daily living. So... slight nitpick as an engineer... running the cooling system harder would exhaust more heat, making it easier to spot. What you'd want if you intended to stay hidden while you were using a high energy demand system would be a heat sequestration system to store that heat internally in some sealed system until stealth was no longer necessary. That'd reduce the thermal profile a bit. (This can be achieved with heat pumps and various kinds of vacuum-sealed thermal vessels, though they have a finite heat capacity and you run the increasing risk of an overheat as long as you're running as a closed system.) (VFs in Macross do this in space operations, with cryogenic coolant tanks functioning as coolants and heat dumps since radiative cooling is more difficult in space.) So it's written as sort of an all-or-nothing where once you're spotted you stay spotted? A lot of the discontent was, I think, primarily just because it wasn't the Sentinels designs fans have been so attached to for so long. IMO, the new designs look a lot less distinctive.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Only when they're equipped with the FAST Packs pictured.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Optical camo is always kind of a pain to work into any setting that has mecha. Especially RPGs. It sounds cool, but mechanically it's kind of a pain in the arse to work into a RPG and in practical terms it's actually kind of a rubbish idea. Giant robots being naturally inclined to be big, heavy, noisy things, even an invisible one is going to be radiating waste heat and a modest amount of engine noise just by running its power plant. Actually moving basically gives the game away even if the cloak is visually perfect, since it's going to be making noise when it walks both from its motors and the limbs hitting the ground, it'll leave footprints in soft soil and pavement damage on roads that give away its approximate position, and any active sensors are going to give the game away immediately by emitting detectable radiation. It's more trouble than it's worth, for the most part. Great for infantry, less so for any vehicle much larger than a motorbike. Though way too many Robotech plots (esp. RTSC) involve someone or everyone grabbing hold of an idiot ball large enough to have its own atmosphere, I'd like to think that Zor or the Robotech Masters would be smart enough to realize how ineffective optical camo would be. (Especially against the Invid, who have non-conventional perception abilities and mainly [see/track enemies] via the characteristic emissions of protoculture power systems... something only the Haydonites had the technology to mask.) I wouldn't call it a hot take, but it's definitely fodder for an unpopular opinion puffin meme. When the books first dropped, I know a lot of fans were upset that they 1. hadn't used the original (legally problematic) Robotech II: the Sentinels designs and 2. that the new designs looked like the IMUs (improvised mecha/kitbashes) from the Genesis Pits book, being visibly cobbled together out of recognizable parts of the Alpha, Beta, and AGACs. The Gura Invid were better received, I think in part because many fans tend to forget the Invid mecha are piloted inorganic technology with a distinct pilot who can disembark. I was kind of ambivalent on the topic, since it wasn't really any different from regular Invid except visually.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Nope. We have only very basic info on the Lilldrakens and nothing worth mentioning on anything from movie 2.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Shouldn't you be thanking me? 😛 Though I wanna see a scenario like in the climax of the Department of Temporal Investigations novel series, where there's a three-agency pileup over who gets to arrest the person responsible for mucking with the timeline between the 24th century Department of Temporal Investigations, the 29th century Temporal Integrity Commission, and the 31st century Federation Temporal Agency. Pike tries to do a runner and finds himself hemmed in by an ever-increasing number of time-travelers popping in from who-knows-where telling him to get history back on track. (Bonus points if one of them is Jonathan Archer, since one plan for him was that he was going to turn out to be Future Guy, the one pulling the Suliban's strings.) Sorry, I'll ask my dad to turn his stereo down. 😛
  10. Seto Kaiba
    "2nd Edition" was officially branded as the Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles RPG. The title was... misleading. At the time Palladium Books re-obtained the Robotech license, the plan at Harmony Gold was for the Shadow Saga to be a 3-5 episode OVA with new episodes coming out every two years. Because the Shadow Saga was supposed to be the flagship of a revitalized Robotech franchise, Palladium Books obligingly titled their 2nd Edition of the RPG to match and built the core book around the OVA's first episode: Shadow Chronicles. In practice, only the RT2E core book was about Shadow Chronicles. Three of its five published supplements were coverage for the sagas of the Robotech TV series, one was a sort of halfhearted adventure module and monster manual/generator (Genesis Pits), and the final book (UEEF Marines) could best be called Robotech 1 7/8: In the Immediate Vicinity of, But Explicitly Not, the Sentinels. One sourcebook - a "spaceships" sourcebook - was quietly cancelled after the author working on it had a falling out with the publisher, leaving the book's manuscript unfinished. The game had been planned around regular infusions of new content for the Shadow Saga, but when Shadow Rising was cancelled they exhausted most of Robotech's official setting material by the end of the fourth book (New Generation) and the last two books (Genesis Pits and UEEF Marines) ended up being of questionable quality due to the limitations on the content and the lack of material. ... "mishandling" is an extremely charitable way to put it. It was a complete fiasco... It's worth noting that that's all from the non-canon comics and novels. One of the reasons the situation there is so vague is that the original Southern Cross never really bothered to establish how Zor society worked... and the whole bit about immortality is either a throw-it-in attempt to provide the Zor Lords with a less altruistic motivation at the end or an aborted arc that was lost to time with the show's cancellation. The original plan for the show was for a big reveal that the Zor were Human All Along and that their weirdness is a product of deliberate reengineering of their society to abolish the causes of the war that put their adopted homeworld Glorie into an ice age. In the original Southern Cross script, the elders names were Zosuma, Zosumu, and Zosumo. The Zor Lords themselves (RT: Robotech Masters) were named Dess, Dera, and Demi. (All the Zor characters follow a similar naming convention, sharing all but the last syllable of their names among all three members of a trinity.) That's one of the problems with introducing something so obviously useful... you then have to come up with a really good justification for why it isn't used all the time. (Mind you, protoculture in Robotech isn't so much a high-output fuel as a high energy-density fuel. One of the reasons given for why it's seemingly outperformed by nuclear fusion is that it's used in very small amounts, often more like a battery or fuel cell than a high output reactor.)
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Those... "eccentricities"... are from 1st Edition, the original Palladium Books Robotech RPG from the 80's that was (in HG's words) made when "nobody was minding the store" at HG. Those oddities, and the fair amount of copyright infringement in the pre-2001 comics, are why HG publicly disowned all pre-reboot licensee-made materials and insisted on the frankly draconian editorial and legal reviews of PB's manuscripts when PB reacquired the license.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    That's... not quite accurate either. Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross did actually receive some merchandising when it first aired in Japan. The reason many fans believe otherwise is that very little made it out to stores before the series was cancelled, and what did come out was a weirdly scattershot collection of apparel like rain boots and a few "adult" plamodels of the arming doublet. It ended up that way because Tatsunoko's staff didn't finalize many of the key designs until right before the start of production and didn't settle on a title until after production of the animation had started. Licensees were able to run out a few plamodels of the earliest designs to be frozen for production and some screen-printed apparel, but a lot of Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross's merchandise was still quite literally on the drawing board when the viewership numbers came back and the licensees learned the series was a massive flop. Matchbox did have a modest line of (low quality) toys based on the Masters Saga, but there was basically no interest in Southern Cross in Japan and even less awareness that the series had been shipped overseas. There was definitely not any significant importation of the American toys, which would not have been possible through normal channels as a result of the limitations on Harmony Gold's license. You can basically count the number of Japanese Southern Cross fans on one hand... even Harmony Gold will cheerfully admit that Tatsunoko itself barely remembers the show exists. Like I said here... Much like Harmony Gold itself did in that period, Palladium's "2nd Edition" Robotech RPG drew pretty heavily on the original source material for the three Japanese shows both for basic stats and for "inspiration" when it came to some of the later sourcebooks. The Gura Invit fall into that broad category, alongside basically everything in the Marines book. A number of the early Invit drafts, as well as Kakinuma's more modern interpretations of the Invit, look a lot more organic and alive than the final designs. Though really all they did was make the existing designs spiky and apply a common misconception that there is no distinction between the Invit and their mecha. (Invit mecha were always semi-alive in the original MOSPEADA though, as a result of being powered by life energy from the pilot or nearby hives.) Just remember, "civil" and "approbatory" are not the same thing. 😉 At the very least, we'll be gentler than the Robotech fandom as a whole usually is though. They can be pretty brutal. It's not a competitor, but it does invite the inevitable comparison when it comes to gameplay style and accuracy to the official setting. The former is subjective, but from what I've read thus far Palladium stands head and shoulders above SMG in terms of accuracy thanks to better sourcing practices.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    She's good at that. It's even more pronounced in the light novel. There are moments where you'd swear if Benno or Ferdinand ever suffered a papercut their blood pressure would make them a water jet cutter.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... it might not have been your intention personally, but the business rationale behind the decision is pretty damned obvious esp. given what Harmony Gold itself has said about the situation. 🙄 One of the more frustrating truisms for the Southern Cross fans is that, even among Robotech fans, the story was so poorly received that no licensees were willing to even consider merchandise for it. That only changed recently, and not by much, when Harmony Gold had to start licensing to the less risk-averse indie crowd due to a lack of interest elsewhere. It kinda says something that the last Robotech comic literally wrote the Masters Saga out of the timeline entirely. Just so you know, the first statement here disproves the second. When Harmony Gold was exercising editorial control over Palladium Books's work on the Robotech 2nd Edition RPG, they expressly forbade any reference to material from pre-2001 comics, the novels, or any of the other material they had publicly disowned as "poor quality" and "Robotech in name only". Original designs, factions, etc. were also right out. It was strictly limited to material that was in the 85 episodes of the TV series, the OSM, and the RTSC setting material. That's why the game ran into content problems so quickly after its first two books. The closest they were allowed to get to creating new designs for the game was writing background for MOSPEADA concept art and drawing new art for the legally problematic Sentinels destroids and battle pods. If they're letting you include material drawn from the novels and pre-2001 comics, or add original designs of your own creation, they are not being anywhere NEAR as strict on you as they were on Palladium when they were still taking the franchise seriously. It's been a rough couple years, hasn't it? If anyone connected to Robotech needs one, it's probably Tommy. He tried. He really tried. But whooboy did the fans eat him alive for it. Even Titan Comics took the piss out of his work before they got cancelled.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Got caught up on Kaguya-sama: Love is War. Shirogane trying to rap really is a horrorshow, combined with Hayasaka's having to combine various alter-egos she's assumed so that Kaguya's classmates won't realize that she's a Shuchiiin student herself. It ends with a surprisingly well-produced music video for the closing credits.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Sorta. The VF-4 and VF-5000 effectively jointly held the main fighter designation for a while... that whole period was basically the period of "VF-4 and _______", that ended when the VF-4 and VF-5000 were both replaced by the VF-11 c.2029. It was, variously, VF-4 and VF-5, VF-4 and VF-9, VF-4 and VF-5000, etc. That disparity was exaggerated somewhat when their ships and fighters were reworked by the Protodeviln... but their stuff seems to have been pretty different, pursuing a less conventional approach to design with a lot more high-angle beam guns than the Spacy usually used. None.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt assume you're not actually trying a No True Scotsman here and simply agree that it is more than you can say for me because I've read the SMG game and defintiely don't think that it's great or love it. ... and that's a big part of the quality problem. Not just at SMG, mind you... I'm talking franchise-wide. I've been with the Robotech fandom for a long damn time. One terribly depressing thing I realized a long time ago is that most "Robotech fans" aren't actually fans of Robotech... they are fans of their own Robotech fan fiction. So much so that many Robotech fans literally cannot differentiate between their personal headcanon and what is actually in the show. To give you an example, I know a bloke who swears blind that in the original Robotech test screenings there was a scene where Scott killed Corg execution style with a minimissile from his Cyclone. No such scene ever existed, but he is COMPLETELY convinced that it did. The few prominent Robotech fansites do more to misinform than inform, either pushing long-debunked and officially-refuted fan theories or simply being fan fiction efforts to write material from Macross sequels into Robotech's story. You can do something as a labor of love and still do it badly. When the fans - who are, let's face it, amateurs - get involved, what results inevitably sounded and looked cooler in their imaginations. It's especially problematic when those inventions don't fit with the setting and/or don't make sense in-universe or out like the so-called Stealth Bioroid or the claims in the RTSC artbook that the Alpha is a passively stealthy fighter. (And I won't pretend to be any exception. It's the reason I don't permit myself to do original designs when I work on homebrew content on my own or with others.) That was why, when HG was actually serious about Robotech's future prospects, the RPG writers weren't allowed to invent their own original material: because HG wanted the game to look professional and be reflective of Robotech's actual content. The reason SMG is being allowed to create their own original additions is because HG no longer cares about their game's quality or making the franchise look professional. They stopped caring about a decade ago, when they had to come clean that Shadow Rising wasn't getting made and their mgmt publicly switched to putting all their eggs in the "scrap it and start over" live action movie basket. I'd expect they care even less now that they've bent the knee to Big West. (IMO, licensing Robotech because you wanted to do something new sounds like one of those ironic hells from Dante's Inferno... the only franchise I can think of offhand that's more of a poster child for stasis than Robotech is Warhammer 40,000.) As someone who's been there before, I renew my offer of a sympathy hug. A similar review was why HG publicly disowned the pre-2001 licensee-created materials back in '06 and dismissed them as being so bad they'd never have been allowed to see the light of day if they had been exercising QC over the content. A review of the official setting materials only would've been a much shorter crawl. Due to the fragmented nature of the Masters Saga's writing back in '85, trying to make it internally consistent is a Sisyphean task because of all the inconsistencies caused by the writers making it up as they went. Trying to make it cool comes with the handicap that the original show was cancelled and the Robotech adaptation underperformed becasue the audience kinda hated everything about it. That's one reason HG defaults to the Japanese OSM so much. It's more consistent. Your offer is very generous, but I must decline. Work has ensured I have little space in my calendar for anything else, and I would hate for you to go to the trouble on my account if I were not able to reliably attend. I have a pretty reasonable understanding of the system itself, I just don't care for it. If it helps, you can blame it on me being set in my ways as a gamer who started on D&D 3rd Ed., the old [i]Star Wars[/i] RPG, and Palladium RT1E.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    That's just a person in body armor. "Bioroid Terminator"... pfft... peak cringe indeed. You poor thing. Do you need a hug? Unless the "different original concept" wasn't "stealth giant land warfare robot", the original concept was just as cringy as its final form TBH. As expected, yeah... HG no longer cares about pretending the Robotech brand is commercially viable, so they haven't bothered to police the new game for quality. In all fairness, they've been calling them that since at least Robotech II: the Sentinels... The rest, however, is more or less just arse-pulls on the part of the various novel, comic, and RPG writers whose work HG officially and publicly considers to be garbage. 😉 I believe their schtick is still that the Sentinels story is basically the Macross Saga characters faffing about in the territory that used to be the Masters interstellar empire before Zor kneecapped them and the Masters picked up and left. ... researching what, exactly? There's so little official material that you could write it all on a paper napkin and still have plenty of room left over for a few artful diagrams about what a complete and total pillock Jeanne/Dana is. That's why the last publisher, Palladium Books, had to pad their small form-factor paperback Masters Saga sourcebook so like it was a menstruating firehose. It was a 256 page book with around 25 pages of actual content. (Hell, if you wanted to put ALL of the official info for the original Southern Cross together in one place you'd only really need about one postcard's worth of paper to fit it all. I should know, I've translated it. It is DEPRESSING.) I'd like to be charitable call that an uphill battle, but calling it a boondoggle or fool's errand is probably more honest and accurate. Unfortunately, you're about *checks watch* thirty-six-and-a-half years late to the party if you were hoping to salvage the Masters Saga's reputation. The Robotech fanbase's mind was made up about the Masters Saga long ago and no amount of turd-polishing is going to change their minds about it. To be frank, it's kind of a waste of effort first and foremost because the overwhelming majority of the fans who buy the RPG have no intention of ever playing it. Its utility, in the eyes of Robotech fans, has always been as a substitute for the kind of artbooks and tech manuals that successful anime properties get. FWIW, SMG showed some sense in that they made the Macross Saga the core book and combined the other story arcs so that a kinda-popular arc and wildly unpopular arc were put together into one book... the Masters Saga riding the New Generation's coattails, and the Shadow Chronicles riding the coattails of The Sentinels. That way, they at least guarantee reasonable sales for all books instead of having half the game be deadweight sourcebooks like Palladium did. (The New Generation sourcebook was basically redundant since all of its core content was in the core book, the Genesis Pits sourcebook was a glorified generic monster manual, and the UEEF Marines sourcebook was bad comedy.) The core rules aren't that long... certainly not compared to Palladium's doorstopper of a skills index... and there aren't that many mecha in the Macross Saga either. Optional bolt-ons aside, unless you go absolutely hog-wild documenting minor background designs with no bearing on the story there's really only about two dozen core designs if you include the ships.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    The VF-4 is a 2nd Gen VF, so that's a pretty good directional estimate right there. Though it's worth noting many 2nd Generation VFs were low cost models meant to be manufactured and maintained easily by emigrant fleets and planets that were only just getting established, so the numbers are probably lower than the VF-4 due to the sheer number of different models. The Varauta forces, of course, had the benefit of a factory satellite to help out... so their force was disproportionately large for what was a world settled by a 1st Generation emigrant fleet. Past a certain point it becomes difficult to even estimate, since individual emigrant fleets are building their own gear in factory ships and so on...
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Even if the timeline itself doesn't pull a But Thou Must, you can bet your bottom dollar a timecop'll show up and put right what Pike is trying to put wrong.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    It's a bum deal... but compared to some of the awful fates met by Starfleet officers over the years, spending the remainder of his life living a telepathic ideal existence is a pretty nice retirement package. (It's no Curzon Dax getting Jamaharon'd to death on Risa... but they can't all be winners, right? Talk about "going out with a bang".) In a way, that's basically the reason that Pike is predestined to end up in the chair. He's a man with principles, and he's not about to let other people die to save his own skin. Especially not a bunch of kids on an Academy training cruise. Regardless of whether fate is going to pull a But Thou Must on him, like every other Starfleet captain protagonist he's going to jump at the call anyway because it's in his nature. His fate is inescapable at least as much because of the kind of person he is as it is a preordained future he locked himself into via the time crystal. As upset as he would naturally be by the prospect of his horrific fate - not knowing he's actually destined to live out his final years in an idyllic fantasy world on Talos IV - he probably hasn't considered that he's temporally bulletproof yet.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Three of any of the AMMs on a triple-rack. Otherwise, one per pylon. The VF-31 Master File is some pretty uninspired stuff, TBH. Generally, I would not upload scans of multiple pages of a book here... though I am also not able to since my scanner died a while back and I've yet to replace it.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Nope. According to that Klingon monk, Pike's fate was set in stone as soon as he took the time crystal. He is forever doomed to suffer career-ending, life-altering radiation injuries on a training cruise that leave him confined to a life support chair talking in beeps. Breaking it a thousand years after the fact probably wouldn't do anything, since his fate would've long since run its course by then. Yup, basically the same as the Unification Wars in Macross. A ton of little conflicts that spiraled out of control into a great big global mess... just this mess went nuclear and lasted for like forty years. Which is why Talos IV was his ticket to sanity... the Talosians could at least give him a perfectly convincing illusion of health and wellbeing even while his body was an overcooked potato in high tech tinfoil.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    ... well, that is a thing I have certainly seen with my eyes now. The actual **** is that supposed to be?
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Either way, Spock's got a long way to go to redeem himself in the audience's eyes. Give it a character-focus episode or two and they should come into their own a bit. Mind you, basically anyone serving aboard a ship like the Enterprise is "strong" and "competitive" almost by default. Strange New Worlds may be set before the adventures of Kirk's five year mission made the Enterprise a legend and the most sought-after posting in the fleet, but the twelve Constitution-class ships were the apex of Starfleet's prestige in the era both in terms of their importance and their relative luxury. Only the very best got posted to them. If you weren't competitive and a real go-getter, you'd never land the posting on one. A ship full of "strong, competitive women" was a bit less understandable in the case of the Discovery, a rear-echelon science ship... though given that "strong" in the Discovery's case seems to mean "damaged and mildly psychotic", that may have been intentional on Lorca's part. 'lil bit, yeah. I'm hoping they'll be more subtle about it this time. Star Trek has always been diverse and inclusive, but it works so much better when you DON'T throw it in the audience's face all the time. It's like a Bavarian fire drill in a way. If you just act like nothing unusual is going on, it'll take the audience that much longer to really think about or question it and you'll have sent a more powerful message about inclusivity: that a better, brighter future would be inclusive enough that there wouldn't be anything remarkable about the lifestyles of these characters. It worked a treat in TOS with Chekhov, Sulu, and Uhura. A black woman in a position of high military authority? Russians and Japanese working side by side with Americans? There's nothing unusual about that here, no sir. Did pretty well in DS9 when you consider that Jadzia Dax was lowkey nonbinary, genderfluid, or trans too. Discovery flubbed it with Stamets and Culber by crowing about it well in advance and then having them remind the audience at every opportunity that they're gay. They did better with Reno, but botched it again with Tal. It's the same kind of cheap fake-out as Pike's refusal to return to service at the start of the first episode, just on a larger scale. The audience already knows it's a foregone conclusion that Pike ends up a vegetable in a space wheelchair... not just because of TOS, but because Discovery also confirmed that his fate was inescapable and his future set in stone by taking the time crystal. They're just trying to preserve exactly the vibe you got... that he might not be doomed... so the series as a whole doesn't feel like an exercise in futility. By all indications, Pike is temporally bulletproof and fate will tie itself in knots to ensure he ends up on that training mission and in that chair. Pretty much, yeah. The current line on the Eugenics Wars is that they were kind of a lowkey conflict taking place mainly in the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific region, the lingering tensions from which eventually combined with the socio-economic inequality previously depicted in DS9 "Past Tense" to explode into mass civil unrest that snowballed into a third World War. They just tied a few contemporary movements into that existing framework. I don't think Christopher Pike is the kind of man to actually live a lowkey life long-term. He seems, like Kirk, to be a bit of an adrenaline junkie who would be absolutely miserable away from "the action".
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