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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    ... the what now? There's no model of Bioroid by that name. That's basically what it'd have to be... because a technological solution is explicitly off the table in the setting, and slathering a 6m tall, 12.5t robot in radar absorbent material would do precisely jack to make it sound less like a dumpster rolling end over end down a hill the minute it started moving. I'm pretty sure this is a case of its stealth only working because the fans believe it does... the Orks, at least, have an in-universe justification for their shenanigans.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    So, Variable Fighter Master File only shows one pylon configuration for the VF-31 as a whole. There has been some inconsistency in official art regarding whether the VF-31 Siegfried custom has two pylons or four like the VF-31A does. Master File went with four, same as the military spec: one on the inner wing and one on the outer winglet. The weapons listed are mainly just slightly newer versions of weapons listed in previous books, except for the super-high maneuver missile and the Asura (basically a VF-launched cruise missile). AMM-102K/AMM-202K Asp missile (a short-to-mid range interception missile) AMM-X5K ducted rocket missile w/ ground attack capability AMM-112SQ high-speed interception missile PaCSWS-2C para-cruising stealth weapons system ACSWS-1A Super High Maneuver Missile ACSWS-1D Super High Maneuver Missile AMM-142 Asura
  3. Seto Kaiba
    A big part of the problem there... and indeed with most post-Enterprise Star Trek prior to Strange New Worlds... was that the writers seem to consistently forget that Starfleet officers have to graduate from a multi-year Starfleet Academy training program before they're even granted a commission and that command of a starship is the culmination of a decade(s) long career of exceptional service. Pine!Kirk never even properly graduated from Starfleet Academy, he just stowed away on a training cruise and somehow got made captain of the ship over the heads of nearly 500 better-qualified candidates. Strange New Worlds, at least, seems committed to presenting a less asinine version of Starfleet where the officers are actually properly trained professionals and not a pack of rowdy fratboys turned loose on the galaxy. One very smart thing to do right off the bat was establish that Pike had been April's first officer aboard the Enterprise, meaning that the reason he's so comfortable in the center seat is he'd already logged a good five-plus years aboard ship before being made her captain. Having Kirk there also makes a certain sort of sense given that it'd establish his own familiarity with the ship prior to being made its captain after Pike's tour ended. If nothing else, Strange New Worlds feels like the writers actually had to watch a few episodes of Star Trek before being allowed to write it. The same absolutely cannot be said of previous attempts like Picard or Discovery...
  4. Seto Kaiba
    The first film was... problematic. Partly because its protagonists were unlikeable bellends who hated each other and have a very unnatural character arc thereafter, but mainly due to a huge portion of the backstory in the plot being jettisoned into a standalone limited comic that you needed to read to know WTF was going on. Into Darkness was just a terribly lazy attempt to remake an iconic movie without understanding what actually made it so good in the first place... ending up a plot full of flat characters repeating a plot without the personal stakes the original had. Trekkies, maybe... I'm not sure general audiences were as put off by Into Darkness's plot problems as its general incoherency, since the movie very clearly expected us to know and care who Khan was beforehand, limiting proper understanding of the plot to Trekkies. Beyond's attempt to course-correct back towards a more Trek-like feel probably alienated no small number of casual viewers who weren't expecting such a dramatic shift in tone. Either way, the Kelvin timeline TV series ship sailed more or less right after Star Trek (2009) when it helped Pine and Quinto establish themselves as actors. Past that point, their fee was simply too high for a Kelvin timeline series with the same cast as the movies to be viable. I do think the Bad Robot/Secret Hideout folks are trying to make a Kelvin timeline series on the sly with their insistence on carrying over their work from the failed Kelvin timeline movies into the shows. I think they're hoping it'll catch on, and rescue the Kelvin movies from the fandom's sh*t list, because I doubt they're happy with the fandom mocking the movies as much as they do. (Especially the lens flares.)
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, it's way easier and cheaper to get a TV actor on the big screen than vice versa. Beyond was the coup de grace after the one-two punch that was Star Trek (2009) and Into Darkness... or the mercy stroke that put the fatally wounded reboot Trek movies out of the audience's misery, if you prefer. I'd personally argue the well was poisoned from the minute J.J. Abrams said the quiet part loud and introduced Star Trek (2009) as a reboot before being forced to course-correct into calling it an alternate universe story. It definitely didn't help that Star Trek (2009) was a mindless summer action movie and Into Darkness was an incoherent mess.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    At the time, just movies... there were no plans for any spinoffs, side stories, or such. Though when it comes to that kind of thing, having an actor who predominantly appears in feature films moonlight on a TV show tends to cost rather a lot, and is why when a movie gets a TV show spinoff they usually recast everyone rather than pay such extravagant salaries. They tried, yeah. Where things ran aground was on the subject of compensation. It's fairly standard for actors reprising a regular/recurring role to receive a pay increase for each new season or sequel. It doesn't necessarily have to be a huge one, but a higher rate is generally expected if not explicitly written into the contract itself. Robert Beltran infamously tried to use this to get himself fired from the role he so loathed on Voyager by making increasingly outrageous demands for pay increases between seasons, only for the studio to obligingly cough up each increase without so much as a word of objection. Chris Pine and others reportedly walked out on negotiations for reboot Trek 4 because they were told that they would have to take a pay cut instead of receiving a raise thanks to the first three films underperforming so badly that Beyond's failure put the trilogy as a whole in the red. If they'd planned a TV series right after the first movie they might've been able to get away with it, back when Pine and the other less-established actors were only earning in the middle six figures. Now, however, Pine's salary demands alone exceed the already ludicrously extravagant per-episode budget of Star Trek: Discovery. Never mind when you put Zachary Quinto, Simon Pegg, and the others into that equation. When your lead wants $10M just to show up and your per-episode budget's $8M, you're in trouble.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    The Greatest Demon Lord is Reborn as a Typical Nobody should really retitle itself The Most Tedious Premise is Revisited as Another Series About a Demigod with No Social Skills. Another bold entry in the broad and ever-growing category that is isekai shovelware shows. This is basically just How Not to Summon a Demon Lord, G-rated edition... except the protagonist's social awkwardness comes from having been an unassailable ruler in his past life not a hikikomori.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Well, that was the goal... so at least they got that part right. After Discovery failed to strike a chord with Trekkies due to its dismal grimdark take on the setting, they binned the planned Section 31 series that would've reused a lot of the same sets, props, and art assets. Strange New Worlds was an author's saving throw intended to get a show out there closer in feel and tone to classic Trek that Trekkies might actually accept and allow them to get use out of the VERY expensive sets, props, and art assets made for Discovery before they moved it to the 32nd century to escape the disgust the fans and audience had for Discovery's take on the 23rd century. It was intended to be equal parts return to form and oversized bottle show reusing huge amounts of stuff made for DSC. Yeah, the textbook definition of "warp core" is basically just one massive set of magnetic field coils and particle stream injectors all pointed at a dilithium crystal. They put it in a nice tube so they can dump it if things go pear-shaped, but that's really all a warp core is. One of the conditions written into their contracts was that they were entitled to a raise after movie 3... so their appearance fee would probably be pretty steep compared to what the actors working on the TV shows are getting. The current crop of Trek shows are already some of the most expensive TV ever shot, and run over budget almost constantly, adding an even greater money pit to that would not help.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    That's a big part of why Netflix is currently reorganizing and "tightening belts". They've been so trigger-happy about cancelling their original shows the minute they stop drawing large numbers of new subscribers and new viewers that they've killed off a bunch of potentially-promising properties that could've remained profitable for a regular network for several more seasons and lost themselves a lot of money by cancelling those shows before they could fully recoup their initial investment. Looking at it, I'd have to assume Resident Evil here is intended as a replacement goldfish for the recently concluded AMC series The Walking Dead. It's questionable judgement, IMO, given Resident Evil's track record and The Walking Dead existing as an exhaustive proof of the hypothesis that postapocalyptic zombie horror is incredibly boring. My bet is that Resident Evil is another two-season wonder from Netflix's department of "bored now, what else we got?".
  10. Seto Kaiba
    It looks like a pretty reasonable recreation of the TOS engine room for the era of "everything is an iPod in space". Of course, that design existed before a lot of the tropes surrounding the warp core design used in the movies, TNG, and beyond were established. Is that ball at the back meant to be the reaction chamber in this version? In TOS and TAS, the reaction chamber was in the middle of the main engineering room. Technically, an antimatter explosion is the desired result... albeit in a controlled manner... and it was magnetic fields preventing the antideuterium from coming into contact with anything except the porous dilithium and the deuterium matter stream. So, if you really wanted, you could argue that you don't actually need anything except that invisible magnetic field to prevent a warp core containment failure. Movin' up in the world! Another fifteen years of this flavorless pap and they might have something that would actually survive a season on broadcast. Oh, that's an easy one. There are two simple reasons that new Trek is so insistent that it belongs to the so-called "prime timelime" or "prime universe": Overall, the "Kelvin timeline" movies were a commercial flop. They ultimately finished in the red at the box office thanks to Beyond erasing the minimal gains from the other two films, and the merchandise lines for the movies fared little better. In the eyes of investors, it's a poisoned well. More importantly, the "Kelvin timeline" movies never gained a significant fan following of their own. They succeeded in turning Star Trek into a sci-fi action movie in an effort to broaden its appeal with general audiences, but they did such a job of it that they made Star Trek into just another eminently forgettable sci-fi action movie that audiences stopped thinking about the minute they left the theater and Star Trek fans found un-Trek-like. There's too little interest in, and too much antipathy for, the Kelvin timeline to go setting a new Star Trek series there. It'd give them a lot more narrative freedom, but the investors wouldn't be anywhere near as confident in the pitch and they'd have portions of the target audience rejecting it sight-unseen as "not real Star Trek". Probably, yeah... given that their increasing appearance fees were part of what sunk movie four after Beyond spun in. They were due for raises, and with Beyond losing money, the investors were having none of it.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    If this was in response to my remark about it being not long for this world because it's on Netflix... what I was alluding to was Netflix's tendency to aggressively cancel shows that don't meet its viewership targets or that are only starting to see a dropoff in viewership. Netflix isn't going anywhere, but Netflix is quick to cancel its own shows. In the games? The first three games had some pretty terrible writing because, y'know, CAPCOM. Resident Evil 4 went ironic retro-camp with it and actually did a pretty good job as a story largely unconnected to the first three. It reversed course again for the next two games back to playing dreadful writing laser-straight. Resident Evil 7 pivoted back towards horror and actually did a fairly excellent job of it, which 8 tried to build on but produced incredibly mixed results with some moments of genuine pants-soiling terror and an equal number of cringeworthy accidental comedy moments. (If I could recommend any one of the games, I'd recommend 7... it's the first one of the lot that can actually be a properly scary horror game.) The movies... ... ... exist. That's the nicest thing I can say about them. A lot of them, especally the first one, manage to be even worse than the games writing-wise. They're not really Resident Evil movies so much as "based on Resident Evil" in the same way you might say "based on a true story". Most of them did OK but not great at the box office, IIRC. The writing wasn't really any better than CAPCOM's, and in a lot of ways was WAY worse because it couldn't settle on what genre it wanted to be and keep oscillating between a straight horror movie, a zombie action movie, a Matrix-esque VFX extravaganza, and a cringe-inducingly bad post-apocalyptic drama. A big part of the problem was the need to keep Milla Jovovich involved, by turning her character from an action survivor into a bullet time superhuman and then a one-woman clone army, which took it increasingly in the action direction at the expense of everything else.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    I've given in to temptation and got the Ascendance of a Bookworm light novel after enjoying the anime as much as I have. Later I'm gonna start Full Dive: This Ultimate Next-Gen Full Dive RPG is Even Shittier Than Real Life.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Oh yes, that is a great one. Sadly, a few of the puns don't translate very well... especially the ones that set up
  14. Seto Kaiba
    The B-2's actually a low-reflectivity dark gray, though the F-117 was mandated to be painted black because it was intended for night flights only. The F-117 being the world's first proper stealth aircraft, it kind of set the tone. Many radar absorbent materials are dark gray because they contain, among other things, granulated iron.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... it's not weak, easily abandoned canon so much as it is a difference in enforcement based on how much HG cares about the product's quality. Back when HG was actually trying to be professional about it, their editorial policy towards the RPG license (then held by Palladium Books) bordered on draconian. They were very strict about enforcing the canon on their licensees to the point that all of the "original" designs like this one, even ones Palladium created for the game's previous edition, ended up in the trash. The reason it got a pass from the current publisher is they're not facing the same quality control measures now that HG's not trying to present the Robotech franchise as a viable property anymore. If they ever decide to get serious again, you can bet your bottom dollar designs like that'll end up back in the trash for exactly the reasons I stated in previous posts. (Expecting them to behave like the genre's professionals is... ah... asking a bit much of them. Professionals have standards and behave predictably as a result. These guys are ascended fanboy rank amateurs who desperately want to be mistaken for professionals and they're catering to a fanbase with more sacred cows than all of India.)
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Well, my hopes are not high. It's on Netflix, so it's not long for this world regardless... but seriously, why Resident Evil? Zombies have been so overdone for so long that zombies have become synonymous with a lack of imagination both in TV and gaming. Even Resident Evil has actively tried to distance itself from the zombies. Even if you're dead set on doing Resident Evil, why continue to beat the Umbrella Corporation's undead horse via remakes and loose adaptations of the plots of 1, 2, and 3 when you could go full camp horror-comedy with an adaptation of 4 or do some actual horror via 7 and 8? This just looks like we're remaking Afterlife.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    It's one thing for something to be unrealistic by real world standards... we're all used to that suspension of disbelief in ANY mecha anime. It's another thing entirely if the fictional setting's own internal rules also rule it out like it does here. Robotech had not one but two original story arcs in its official setting - Prelude and the aborted Shadow Saga - built on the premise that the only viable stealth technology available was developed by the highly secretive Haydonites, and that their technology was so far beyond what any other power had experience with that it was considered impossible and a black box by the best Human and Tirolian engineers.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    As I noted previously, that is basically all stealth means in Robotech. The problem with that, as also noted previously, is that the technology to actually achieve that stealthiness was explicitly the exclusive domain of the Haydonites and not shared with any outside power until the 2040s. Even then, it was beyond the understanding of the top Human and Tirolian engineers and they literally had to take it on faith that it would work as described when it was given to them by the Haydonites (both times). It wasn't something the Masters had.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    There are two basic kinds of stealth: Passive stealth, what most people think of when they think of "stealth technology", relies on a combination of specially-designing the shape of the craft so that as much of the energy from a radar wave is deflected away from the sending radar as possible and metallic powder-based paints that absorb electromagnetic waves in radar frequencies and convert them into heat. It's absolutely not suitable for use on something like a giant robot, and is reaching the limits of its capabilities on conventional aircraft. Active stealth, which currently exists as an impractical experimental technology and in the realm of sci-fi, is a broad term for various technological macguffins that can be turned on or off that interfere with detection. Macross's relatively realistic take involves active cancellation, the same basic principle used in noise cancelling headphones applied to radar waves. More commonplace, but exotic, takes are things like cloaking devices, invisibility screens, thermoptic camouflage, and the like that render a craft invisible, warp space to make sensor beams pass around or through the craft, etc. Basically, the entire idea of a "stealth" giant robot is pretty ridiculous on the face of it. Giant robots are big, heavy things. Even if you can literally turn one invisible like the Arm Slaves in Full Metal Panic!, it's still going to give its presence away the minute it moves because even if you discount motor noise a multi-tonne armored fighting vehicle walking, running, and jumping makes a LOT of noise. Slathering one in radar-absorbent material won't do much because that's designed for active and semi-active anti-aircraft radars, which don't operate at altitudes of just a few meters, and it won't do a damn thing against beam-riding radar guided munitions launched by infantry. There's no hiding a giant robot's approach either... a 6-18m tall man-shaped war machine walking around is going to be visible. Over clear and level ground, visibility tops out at 4.5km for ground-level objects. A giant robot is going to be visible much farther away to the naked eye at ground level, never mind elevated observers. It's like having a building walk around, and painting it dark gray will only make it more conspicuous against the skyline and terrain. A groundbound "stealth" giant robot like this supposed stealth Bioroid is like Grand Galactic Inquisitor from The Venture Bros... its approach to "stealth" is functionally equivalent to walking down the middle of the street screaming "IGNORE ME!" at everyone who looks at you. Your at-best token attempt to be inconspicuous makes you MORE conspicuous, not less, y'know? Then, of course, there's the problem that stealth technology wasn't a thing in Robotech until Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles when it was introduced as an ultra-advanced alien technology analogous to a REALLY limited cloaking device that didn't work in the visible spectrum. Nobody had it except the Haydonites, who only shared it with humanity as a part of a secret test of character that humanity absolutely ****ing failed immediately, prompting the Haydonites to decide humanity had to go. Throw-it-ins like this are basically telegraphing that the company making the new Robotech RPG is massively phoning it in.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    The difference between this and Discovery is like night and day. The Strange New Worlds crew are gathered around the captain's chair comfortably, and they're smiling. So many of Discovery's promotional photos are of the crew standing stiffly or sitting awkwardly together, oozing the misery and discomfort of the show's plot as they stare into the middle distance with a neutral expression like they're trying to remember whether they turned off the stove before they left home that morning and would rather be anywhere else. Discovery's crew look like sulky teenagers reluctantly posing for a photo on a family vacation they didn't want to come on. Anson Mount's Pike and his crew for Strange New Worlds look like they WANT to be there and are having FUN. Like night and day. This picture alone feels more like Star Trek than any damn thing that Kurzman, Chabon, et. al. have done since taking stewardship of the franchise.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Posting is SUPER slow. Like "let me go boil an egg and see if it posted after" slow.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    That's not peak fanfic cringe, but it's up there. Painting a 6m tall robot dark gray doesn't make it stealthy. Nor does painting it black, or slathering radar-absorbent coatings onto a fundamentally unstealthy design. You see this kinda thing a lot in fanmade designs, inevitably made by people who don't have a freaking clue how stealth works. Stealth variant = dark paintjob seems to be a trope HG is really fond of, I guess. They approved a "Stealth" paintjob for Battlecry that was just black, they had a "stealth" VF-1 toy that was also just a regular VF-1 painted black, and they tried to present the Alpha as a passively stealthy aircraft to the amused derision of almost everyone.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    It's possible the individual locations jumped the gun on announcing it... that's a pretty common way for leaks to occur these days.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Q's real lesson apparently being "give your first edible a bit of time to kick in before you decide to have another, or you're in for a bad trip". I could absolutely believe Star Trek: Picard is actually a bad trip Jean-Luc is having after the replicator accidentally served him a steak with "non-regulation" mushrooms... Seriously though, what a mess. I thought the Borg couldn't possibly suffer more "badass decay" than they had by the end of Voyager, when Janeway and Janeway all but wiped out the Collective. Now Starfleet is just making the Borg clinically depressed by giving them Dr. Jurati.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Considering the showrunners for Picard spent a lot of their time promoting the series as focusing on the original characters and would absolutely NOT become a TNG cast reunion... that the series has had the actors of all but two of the original characters leave and are turning the third season into a TNG cast reunion is a pretty damning indictment of the show's concept, creative staff, and direction. Now we have one final season of Patrick Stewart directing the Federation Starship Titanic's dance band as the show slowly sinks without trace and they draw his curtains for good. Eh... personally, I didn't find Great Value Han Solo from the United Federation of Latinx Stereotypes all that engaging TBH. Why build a diverse cast if the characterization is mostly racial stereotype-tied tropes? The problem with Q in this season is that Q is a top tier threat. He is A-plot material. You don't involve Q in your story unless Q is central to your story because he is just THAT big of a presence in Star Trek. If he's trying to teach Picard and his crew a lesson, he's up in their faces about it and the stakes are as high as stakes can go. What they did is the same thing Discovery's second season did with Spock. They dangled him in front of the audience as the bait in a bait-and-switch, with him throwing Picard and his merry band of Great Value-brand ethnic stereotype stock characters into a scenario that he was all but completely uninvolved with. The end, where he reveals his motivation and the "lesson" he was supposedly trying to convey with this season-long plot tumor is an embarrassing excuse that had NOTHING to do with the story arc at all. It feels almost like an excuse, a last second "throw it in" because the writers forgot to come up with an actual coherent motive for Q's behavior. I get the feeling that she was intended to be another "strong female character" like Dahj and Soji, but they couldn't work in any way to justify her being superhuman without outing Soong as a rogue geneticist immediately in a way that'd result in him being thrown in prison until doomsday. The whole season is a plot tumor that has nothing to do with what is ostensibly its main plot, and this is just a plot tumor ON the plot tumor. It's metastasized. I'm wondering if season three will follow suit, and the writers will forget or "Threshold never happened" their way out of the events of the past two seasons. It wouldn't be the first time... like when the ENT relaunch spent the entire introduction taking the piss out of "These are the voyages".
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