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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Discovery was pretty ridiculous... even from the outset, but it got worse when it got to the 32nd century and literally became Bigger on the Inside. The Constitution-class is big for her era, but Strange New Worlds seems to be doing that same thing as the Abrams movies where the ship is seemingly two or three times its listed original size.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    That is a muddier topic... as there are two separate and distinct aircraft that are both called "Variable Glaug". The former is the captured enemy Valkyrie from Macross M3 that the New UN Forces reproduced in limited quantities, and the latter bis-type is a manned derivative of the Neo Glaug with much higher performance. It does have a very basic transformation, yes.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    The Queadluun-Alma... eh... Chronicle claims it's a pre-fall design, but it's pretty obviously not given that 80-90% of it is a Feios Valkyrie.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    That's an unofficial/non-canon design done for yuks in Macross Ace. There's no data.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Seems like everyone's bailing out of this one... Alison Pill, Santiago Carbrera, Isa Briones, and Evan Evagora have all been indicated to be leaving the series as of season two's conclusion. That leaves Michelle Hurd and maybe Orla Brady as the only cast members left who are playing original characters. I kind of expect to hear Michelle Hurd is also not coming back in the next few days.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, it's not the basic structure... it's the inertia capacitor system that allows the pilot to withstand the suit's excessive acceleration and maneuvering g-forces that made it too complex and costly for true mass production in the Protoculture's era and made it all but impossible for the New UN Gov't to replicate it until they seized a factory satellite that manufactured them and studied it during its restoration. (It's implied in Master File that the primary sticking point is the fold carbon. The IVCS needs very pure, very high quality fold carbon to work. Much more so than any other reactor or system used by the Zentradi. Even humanity didn't have the means to synthesize fold carbon at the requisite purity until they captured a Queadluu-Rau production line.) The Queadluun-Rau's performance was so over-the-top that regular Zentradi pilots had severe difficulty handling it even with the IVCS. The Protoculture's solution, other than the decision to restrict it on a cost basis to certain roles analogous to special forces was to build a better pilot (the females). The Nousjadeul-Ger, on the other hand, was made for general use and while it is not as heavily armed or fast and maneuverable as the Queadluun-Rau it is a unit even average pilots can operate well and is simple enought to be mass produced in gargantuan numbers. I think that's the VA-14.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Wow. I really have to hand it to Paramount, season two of Star Trek: Picard truly surpassed season one... in all the worst ways. HEAVY-HANDED USE OF SPOILERS AHEAD. What IS it with these showrunners and having to make everybody miserable, morbid, barely-functional wrecks of human beings (or aliens) and why are they so completely and utterly opposed to Star Trek having any kind of hope, light, or joy? Seriously... the whole schtick underpinning the second season is... The one person upon whom the difference between the Even Worse Future™ and the Still Pretty Awful Future™ of Star Trek: Picard's 25th Century is conveniently one of Jean-Luc Picard's ancestors, and the man conveniently responsible for everything going wrong is Another Bloody Identical Soong. Except this Soong isn't an insane hermit like Noonin, an incredibly naive moron like Alton, or an unhinged but theoretically well-meaning eugenics-advocate like Arik. Adam Soong is just Saturday Morning Cartoon show levels of EVIL. As per the usual, anyone who's not a returning Star Trek character or a newly-created relative of same might as well have stayed home for all the use they were in the story. Even Seven of Nine's not really contributing much this time around, except to handle "As you know" regarding the Borg. The Borg Queen herself has it the worst of anyone, though. I'm actually kind of impressed by their commitment to this terrible storyline. The actors, writers, and directors are clearly out there trying VERY hard to take this seriously... which makes you wonder why nobody, at any point, put up their hand and said "Why are we doing this? This is terrible."
  8. Seto Kaiba
    There's damned by faint praise... but I guess that's more "praised by faint damning"? We aim to please. One thing I'll say for both this and DSC, the TOS-like props were pretty good.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    ... so, if I read that right, it sucks but it sucks a fair bit less than "sitting next to grandpa's corpse for hours after he violently sh*t himself and died on a family road trip" (AKA Picard) or "cornered at a social event by an increasingly drunk and aggressive bigot who won't stop trying to gaslight you and sincerely believes allegedly being a very distant relation of someone famous makes them fascinating" (AKA Discovery)?
  10. Seto Kaiba
    ... surprisingly apt, considering the plot of the game.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    I do find it rather amusing that the animation for firing the wing-glove guns on the YF/VF-19 in Macross 30 basically has the Battroid pelvic thrust at the enemy.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    ... there are no rotary cannons on the YF-19's chest. Its only weapons systems are the REB-30G laser gun on the monitor turret (head), the two cannon mounts on the wing glove that take either a REB-20G converging energy cannon or REB-23 laser cannon, the GU-15 gunpod, the internal weapons bays in the legs, and the underwing pylons.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    No, the guns mounted on the wing root of the YF/VF-19... the ones that end up on its hips in Battroid mode.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    I believe they were shown as single-shot weapons... they're definitely depicted that way in Macross 30.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    And "drunk while on duty" too... Maybe his maverick approach to tactics is enough to land him in the role of "a useful idiot" where they simply don't care if his unit is wiped out as long as they achieve their objective? I'm not sure it counts as firing, but Boddole Zer definitely had the authority to demote or promote commanders and execute them via "friendly" fire...
  16. Seto Kaiba
    In all fairness, Exsedol clearly considers Quamzin to be in the latter category. How much of an unstable mentalcase do you have to be for a warrior race that's indifferent to casualties consider you an excessively gung-ho psychopath?
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Actually, rather a lot of the older fans have seen it... there used to be a fairly brisk trade in bootleg tapes of the series back before Paramount reinstated the series into Star Trek's canon and made it available in a legitimate home video release and on streaming. All the fuss and noise they made to promote it did a lot to raise awareness of the series. That the articles covering the casting decision keep referencing TAS complete with screencaps will probably drive renewed interest in the series too. Ironically, the people dismissing it as a "nothingburger" are likely to end up convincing people it IS something via the Streisand Effect. Though considering how few Star Trek fans still follow the franchise after the messes that were Discovery and Picard, I guess it's possible it would be considered obscure by what little is left of the audience. (All things considered, the identity politics-driven fuss and noise over the casting decision will likely be the closest SNW gets to actual news coverage Paramount doesn't have to pay a shill for, though.)
  18. Seto Kaiba
    OK, so Don't Hurt Me, My Healer! is pretty lame. It's basically the same two jokes cycled ad nauseam, Alvin gets himself beaten up by a monster that is actually very friendly and quite apologetic for having hurt him and Carla is verbally abusive as all get-out and refuses to actually prove that she's a healer.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... more or less. That's Macross Dynamite 7. Its first appearance is in episode 2 of the OVA, and it also appears in episode 4. IIRC, it also puts in an appearance in Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Just imagine the rabbit that eats them... "That rabbit's got a mean streak a Macross wide!"
  21. Seto Kaiba
    ... that much was communicated pretty comprehensively in the show itself. The problem is the way it's handled makes a good chunk of the narrative come off like a misogynistic incel fantasy. Every woman is a narcissistic gold-digging social climber and the men who humor them are either desperate doormats or himbos with the intellectual capacity of a single uncooked potato. It's just... creepy. Not in a horror way, but in a "hey author, are you okay? Do you need someone to talk to?" sort of way. The main character (Leon?) being terrible seems to be pretty intentional... as in, he's consciously choosing to behave like a prat to knock some sense into the many people in the society he disapproves of. The last couple episodes he was just maximum trolling and clearly very aware that he was doing it. For now, jumped to Don't Hurt Me, My Healer!. It's definitely one of the weirder starts I've seen to a fantasy series, with the warrior/knight main character literally asking a monster to stop for a minute so he can have a sidebar argument with the healer passing by over how one properly asks for help... EDIT: Good lord, that's one articulate bear... people pay good money for counseling like that.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    The one time we see them eating, it's a roast leg of something-or-other that resembles a drumstick. Presumably if you can clone a forty-foot tall man in a matter of minutes, 3D-printing or cloning a large avian to roast would be child's play. There ARE birds that big in the setting, like Eden's giant sauro bird, which seems to be reminsicent of Quetzalcoatlus... but twice the size according to Macross Chronicle. (Picture is a statue of a Quetzalcoatlus lawsoni at the Detroit Zoo for scale, the smaller of the two species with a wingspan of about 5m. The Quetzalcoatlus northropi is around twice as big, with a wingspan of 10m, the height of an average Zentradi. The Sauro Bird is about four times the size pictured here.) Yup... the very first thing we see from them is Quamzin and his subaltern Oigul gambling with liquor rations on how many ships they'd collide with by folding out too close to the Vrlitwhai branch fleet.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Macross tends to do its anniversary stuff and especially new series announcements in the latter part of the year.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    I'm not sure it's that so much as Kawamori deciding that the events of VF-X2 were both more and less important than previously indicated. The string of armed conflicts that were to be retroactively dubbed the Second Unification War became the catalyst for the New UN Government and New UN Forces to move to a more EU-like decentralized model, while the actual failed coup d'etat itself was deemphasized somewhat and is considered more a symptom of the move than its immediate cause. Basically, those changes in how they reworked the government and armed forces were the basis for the shape of the world in Macross Frontier. Manfred, in particular, ended up being rather important because they chose to tie the "hyperspace resonance lenses" that his company developed to fold quartz, making him the retroactive developer of practical applications of the stuff and the original driver for exploration of Vajra space looking for more of that amazing substance. I don't recall seeing a Nousjadeul-Ger in the Delta movie #1, but it has been a while... Mind you, Zentradi mecha are extremely cost-effective and have a low failure rate, but they're also ergonomics and survivability nightmares. Humanity tried to solve the surviability issue, but ergonomically the Regult et. al. are still kind of a mess, and presumably kept around because some Zentradi prefer a familiar unit. So, there's a story there... The bit that made the Queadluun series hard to produce (in general) and reproduce (under human engineering) was the Inertia Vector Control System, an extremely complex form of inertia capacitor that required very pure fold carbon in order to operate. It was extremely difficult to replicate with the technology Earth had at the time, so the Queadluuns that Earth had were highly prized but rare units until the factory satellite was captured and repaired. Replicating the rest of the Queadluun series presumably wasn't so difficult, but its acceleration is such that without the IVCS the pilot could suffer some pretty nasty consequences from high g-loads (mentioned to be 18G+), so the IVCS was necessary to draw the full potential of the Queadluun-Rau out. The ISC used by 5th Gen VFs like the VF-25 is a derivative of that technology, to give you an idea of how advanced the IVCS was. So you end up in this point where reproducing the Queadluun-Rau effectively was only possible from about 2040, at which point development of a VF that exceeded its capabilities began. So there was this brief golden period where the reproduction Queadluun would've been quite good, but it's offscreen and by the time we see it a craft that surpasses it was on the way in. It's mentioned in passing in connection with Klan and Michael in Frontier that certain genetic conditions and anomalies can have serious or even fatal health consequences in the micloning process... and that keeping giants around is a huge drain on resources, so most fleets don't do it. Most models of VF tend to take a "one variant to rule them all" attitude, like the VF-4, VF-11, VF-14, and VF-171. While they are certainly more action figure-friendly, the VF models that have a bunch of different head variants are actually the exception rather than the norm in-universe.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Okay, yeah... Trapped in a Dating Sim: the World of Otome Games is Tough for Mobs can't seem to stop coming across as a bit misogynistic. To be honest, I'm not sure if that's an accidental byproduct of the way the story plays many of the worst cliches of the genre laser straight while viewing them from the outside or if the author really just has it in for independent women. Harem stories are always low levels of cringe, but this is so heavily laden with cruelty and sexism that it's actually a little bit unsettling. This goes way WAY beyond the kind of objectification you see in harem shows to the point that the women are near-universally depicted as being greedy and uncaring social climbers who are only interested in men for money, status, and appearances and have zero qualms about saying so publicly or being physically abusive. (It's like this is a training academy for Disney's evil stepmothers of something... it's really off-putting. Even the most blatantly fanservice-y harem shows aren't THIS sexist about it.)
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