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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Welp, I hope you weren't too keyed up for it, because the liner notes have ZERO technical info for the new mecha in the movie. What a frigging letdown.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Just got mine. Very disappointed by the lack of info in the liner notes.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Full disclosure, I'm actually not very familiar with the setting at all. Most of my exposure to that franchise outside of the legal situation is the 90's cartoon. I wanted to give the OP a response since I figured the topic wouldn't draw much attention and did a fair bit of reading for research purposes while I was preparing the post. Funny story... you more or less described the premise of Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross. The "alien" Zor in Southern Cross are the genetically-modified descendants of human space emigrees bound for Glorie whose ship(s) travelled into the past due to a botched warp (ala Yamato) jump. They colonized and terraformed Glorie in the distant past, ruined the planet in a nuclear war, and abandoned it to let the nuclear winter clear up. They returned to the Epsilon Eridani system to discover that their planet had been colonized by someone else (the second wave of settlers who'd left just after their ancestors did) and launched an invasion of the planet to reclaim resources vital to maintaining their civilization. The series was cancelled before it got as far as the big reveal that the Zor were human all along, but the fact is still stated in the Japanese liner notes and one artbook the series got. Two problems there: Fold faults are spacetime disruptions that only exist in fold space (AKA super dimension space), a higher-dimension sub-universe adjacent to conventional reality that ships use to teleport by folding higher-dimensional spacetime. The realspace equivalent phenomenon, produced artificially, is just an impassible wall of warped space. The Vajra and the Protoculture's Sigur Berrentzs use them as a (better) equivalent of humanity's barrier technology. Planets can be surrounded by fold faults, and it's implied that the ancient Protoculture did this to a few planets like Uroboros and Windermere IV on purpose, but the planet isn't inside the fold fault. It works like a fence, preventing or just slowing down travel into or out of the vicinity of the planet. Fold faults slow down the subjective passage of time for ships (or other objects) attempting to cross them via fold navigation. As seen in Macross Frontier, ships attempting to cross a fold fault will see a significant increase in the disparity between the passage of time inside and outside the ship during the jump, losing dozens or hundreds of hours of realspace time as a result.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    For the most part, it didn't. Very few VF-1J's were manufacturered overall, and most materials to discuss the topic suggest almost all of them ended up out in space with the Macross during the First Space War. The crew of the Macross's usage of the VF-1J as a machine for platoon leaders seems to have been either unique to the Macross or very limited in its application elsewhere due to the comparative scarcity of the VF-1J. Presumably the crew of the Macross (TV series) decided that giving the J type to platoon leaders would be the best use of what was advertised as an enhanced armaments type. Not as such. Shinnakasu Heavy Industry developed the VF-1J as a domestically-produced rival/competitor to Northrom's VF-1A, not as a dedicated machine for platoon leaders. Some sources like Master File assert their actual goal was to actually get the Earth Unification Forces to drop Northrom's A-type for the "better" J-type as the standard model. Unfortunately, their total production capacity was low and very few VF-1J's had been delivered when the First Space War broke out. Almost all of those units ended up out in space with the Macross, and the production facilities were destroyed in the orbital bombardment. In the movie version, even fewer J-types were aboard the Macross and those were mostly assigned to special duty like deploying the Armored Pack. (In some sources, this is said to be the result of a hardware/software compatibility issue, with the VF-1J being the only unit that had native support for the Armored Pack at the time.) Probably not. The VF-1 is physically quite strong, but it doesn't appear to be significantly stronger than a flesh-and-blood Zentradi giant.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    True, though most of Delta's fanbase seems to be there for the music and not a lot else... I was more referring to the fact that while there IS detailed information out there for Delta in a few places, none of us seem to really be in a hurry to translate it because of our own ambivalence towards the series.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    The liner notes have a fair amount of info, and so does Master File for what little that's worth, but even then I've noticed a lot of us seem pretty apathetic about the series compared to Frontier.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, I'm a wordy so-and-so... 😅 Stream of consciousness rambling aside, I'm enjoying Andor enough to not only give it my full attention but to start getting invested in the fate of the characters and thinking about the setting and the bits of context I'm missing. If the goal was to get non-fans invested in the series, it's mission accomplished in my case. (Admittedly not always the characters we're supposed to be getting invested in... I'm shipping Blevin and Dedra even though it's totally the wrong genre for an ending like that.)
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, it stopped being a one-man show when it transitioned to being a Wiki.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    I would say sometime between one planck time from now and the heat death of the universe. I'm afraid I can't offer any more precision than that until I develop clarivoyant abilities. FedEx is holding my copy of Absolute Live!!!!!! for me now that it's cleared customs, so I'll be picking it up tomorrow morning. Unfortunately because I moved between the time I put in the preorder and the time it shipped, it's being held at a location nearly an hour's drive away. Ever since it went to a wiki, it's mainly been us updating it... which is why the Delta material is so sparse to begin with. The series just doesn't get us fired up enough to care. I fully expect the result to be a massive anticlimax. Goodness knows Delta has found a lot of ways to disappoint thus far, what's one more?
  10. Seto Kaiba
    All right, headed into Andor Ep4 "Aldhani"... All in all, a much better episode than the previous few. There is finally a sense of direction to the plot, and a feeling that things are beginning to move. I really hope that the next one offers more than a few minutes of actual action. This episode was mostly exposition.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    As alien as the Vajra are, it's probably pretty difficulty to determine what their exact feelings towards humanity as a whole are. They're obviously not an allied power the way the Zentradi, Zolans, etc. are. I guess you could call it something closer to "good fences make good neighbors"? The Vajra hive that the Frontier and Galaxy fleets were messing with cleared out and left humanity to its own devices, but other Vajra swarms in Macross 30 and other works seem content to at least live-and-let-live with humanity in the greater galaxy. (There are Vajra on Uroboros in 2060, and on Pipure in 2062.) Maybe they did... but probably not. The theory that Macross Delta presents for the origins of Var syndrome and fold receptors doesn't tally with any previous Macross works on the subject of biological fold waves or the properties of coexisting with the V-type bacterium. In Macross Frontier (all versions), being infected with the V-type bacterium is fatal unless the infection is confined to your entric nervous system. Sheryl was dying from having the V-type bacteria living in her brain in the series, and in her vocal cords in the movies. Macross Delta depicts the fold bacteria that live symbiotically with humans living in their brain tissue, which would be deadly if it were the same thing. Not to mention this alleged migration of fold bacteria into humans allegedly occurred in 2059, but humans with fold wave abilities existed for millennia before that (e.g. the priestesses in Zero). The ability just wasn't understood or codified until Dr. Gadget M. Chiba's Song Energy theory was proven in 2045, and was further refined by the work of other researchers like Zola's Dr. Lawrence and Dr. Elma Hoyly, and the researchers at Frontier's LAI branch.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Closer to "villains who we share a mutual enemy with". He was such a little edgelord in Rogue One, having him be happy-go-lucky would just be weird.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Still waiting on mine... I've never had a package labeled "Operational delay" with FedEx before, but it's finally at the sort facility.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    So, I see two reasons this won't work right off the bat. First and foremost, the Macross setting is a fundamentally optimistic one like pre-Abrams/Kurtzman Star Trek was. It's built on the fundamental premise that communication and mutual understanding can and will end or even prevent conflicts. Music is the franchise's chosen method for that because the series grew out of the 80's idol boom. It isn't, and it isn't meant to be, one of those western grimdark Forever War sci-fi settings like BattleTech, Warhammer 40,000, or Robotech. Secondly, the BattleTech setting was able to develop in the manner you describe for two main reasons that are not at all compatible with Macross's setting: In BattleTech, the "present day" for the story is somewhere in the mid-31st century with the furthest extent of the official timeline being somewhere in the 32nd. Humanity's been a FTL-capable spacefaring civilization for over 900 years at that point and that span of time. That's a lot of time for the limitations of the Kearny-Fuchida drive to give colonist cultures the opportunity to diverge from their roots and each other. Humanity in Macross has only been an interstellar civilization for 55 years by the "present day" of Macross Delta: Absolute Live!!!!!!. That's just not enough time for disparate and conflicting cultures like that to develop. In BattleTech, the various planets colonized by humanity were able to develop independently because the limitations of the Kearny-Fuchida drive make interstellar travel of more than 30 light years logistically difficult and prohibitively time consuming. Traveling more than 30 light years means a week's down time to recharge the drive before a second jump. Traveling just 100 light years involves 22 days of downtime in-transit to recharge the K-F drive. Crossing a distance of 800 light years? 191 days. Using K-F drives to go from Ragna to Windermere starting on January 1st would get you there on July 10th if all went well. That kind of travel limitation enables cultural distances to form from isolation, especially when faster-than-light communications are nearly as limited (not more than 50ly one-way). The space fold technology in Macross's setting hasn't got limitations like that. Humanity's emigrant fleets and planets are spread out across tens of thousands of light years and nevertheless are still linked by a faster-than-light internet called the Galaxy Network that allows for rapid communication and the sharing of information and cultural exports. Fold navigation technology c.2059 makes crossing distances of hundreds of light years in a civilian starliner no more onerous than a cross-country or transatlantic direct flight by jet airliner is today and the military's are implied to be even better. That 800 light year trip that would take a K-F drive over half a year? The work of a couple hours to a ship in Macross. Fold system performance isn't static either, it continues to improve as humanity gets better at synthesizing fold carbon at higher purities and is poised to improve by a factor of 10 via adoption of fold quartz in its place as on the Super Fold Booster LAI trialed. In short, the conditions that produced the Clans in BattleTech can't occur in the Macross setting as it's been presented thus far... both because there hasn't been enough time for humanity's emigrant fleets or planets to even begin to develop their own distinct cultures the way they do in BattleTech, and because faster-than-light technology is simply THAT much better in Macross that planets and fleets aren't likely to end up isolated enough to become clannish about it for any significant length of time. Mind you, the Human vs. Human thing has already been done TWICE. Macross VF-X2 depicted what later came to be called in-universe as the Second Unification War, where the logistical problems caused by the central government trying to exert more and more direct authority over worlds half a galaxy away led to a brief civil war. Then, of course, there was the prequel Macross Zero depicting the original Unification Wars on Earth. I guess it's more like four if you want to count Macross R and Macross 30... which respectively did plots involving a remnant of the forces that attempted to overthrow the government in 2051 attacking an emigrant fleet and a rogue New UN Spacy special forces unit teaming up with pirates to distract the military while they attempt to alter history using a temporal weapon the Protoculture left. Or five if you wanna throw Macross E on there since its plot involves a human corporation trying to weaponize Var syndrome to take over a planet. As noted above, not a problem present in Macross. Emigrant fleets take a long time between long-distance fold jumps of hundreds or thousands of light years so pilot fleets from their escort detail can explore nearby star systems for usable/valuable resources and potentially habitable worlds. Not because they have to. ... I hate to burst your bubble there, but Plus and 7 both introduced the idea of using music for more than just music. Frontier built on what was laid down in 7 and refined in Zero, and Delta only very slightly expanded upon what was set down in Frontier. There's no handwave going on, these are core mechanics the series spends a fair amount of time and exposition on.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    To be honest, I kind of suspect that the lack of likeable characters is intentional and maybe even part of the point. We know from Rogue One that Cassian Andor and Saw Gerrera both belong to rebel factions that are a lot more militant and extreme in their views. So much so in the case of Saw Gerrera that he's at loggerheads with the mainstream Rebel Alliance. These aren't the principled Original Trilogy freedom fighters firmly ensconced on the Light Side of Star Wars's rigid moral absolutes, embodying "The Revolution will not be Vilified". These are the amoral but well-intentioned terrorists whose consolation is that they (believe that they) are a Lighter Shade of the Dark Side compared to the evil Empire they're working to overthrow, embodying "The Revolution will not be Civilized". It'd be kind of weird to make these people really likeable when Cassian is basically an antihero bordering on villain protagonist territory.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    The Bad Luck Brothers, for sure. At least Gorman has the excuse that he was very carefully and deliberately set up to fail by the long and highly amoral arm of the Weyland-Yutani corporation. The chief instigator of Syril Karn's destruction was Syril Karn. His victory condition was do nothing and he still screwed it up. That's fair, though I wasn't arguing that it in any way diminished the events of Rogue One. I was just saying that, for the casual audience, it would probably have been more helpful to date it relative to the events of Rogue One since that's where we all know Cassian from anyway. I'm sure it wouldn't have been a huge dealbreaker for the die-hard fans to spell out "Five years before the Battle of Scarif" instead of "BBY5". (Is there no established in-universe calendar? I'd expect there to be something like "Imperial Year such-and-such" or "Year such-and-such of the Xth Republic".) SAAAAME. Especially with how... easily upset... the Star Wars fanbase seems to be from the outsider's perspective. (Of course, I know that's a bit skewed... bad news has a much better publicist than good news.) That's definitely a point where the flashbacks have not helped. Looking back at it, I didn't get the impression those two things were connected. Are we sure the Empire would see him as "safe"? IIRC the corporate cops mention he's got an Imperial prison record for sedition or something like that. It's not like the Imperials knew about his crime and decided to ignore it. The corporate cops discovered the crime and their own leadership decided not to report it to the Imperial authorities because, at the time, it was the soon-to-be-covered-up deaths of two corrupt cops who'd gotten killed doing several shady things at once. After Cassian and Luthen's... discreet... exit from Ferrix, I'd imagine the Imperials need no further incitement to take an active interest. Box or no box, they made enough noise on their way out of town that the corporate police won't be able to keep the Imperials from noticing.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Shipping of preorders has begun at CDJapan. I received my notice that my copy of Absolute Live!!!!!! is in transmit at about 2am local time today.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, calling the deputy inspector - who Google tells me is named "Syril Karn" - a knucklehead implies he's stupid. He's clearly not stupid. He's something much worse... he's clearly one of those weak and insecure people who joined law enforcement because he wanted to have some concrete form of power over other people. His establishing character moment shows how much he fetishizes the authority his position gives him: he had his duty uniform tailored to make himself look more impressive (and, no doubt in his mind, more intimidating). As soon as his superior is out of the picture, he takes every opportunity to demonstrate his authority over his colleagues and the populace in general. The only one of his colleagues who is shown to actually like him is a similarly-minded junior officer who repeatedly expresses his contempt for the general populace and enthusiasm for violence. (The political critique being made via these characters is super obvious...) But not one Cassian is relevant to... this is his story, after all. His definining moment is the Battle of Scarif. Prior to that battle, Cassian Andor is just some terrorist. Understood, but for the plurality if not majority of the intended audience who do not partake of the Expanded Universe to any significant degree it's a meaningless string of letters and doesn't really connect to Cassian's story regardless. It's a good demonstration of the way having Star Wars fans making Star Wars material can lock new or casual viewers out of the loop. Unpoliced, it's a self-defeating spiral that can kill entire franchises as we're seeing with the slow-motion collapse of the American comics industry. Hence my question... Rogue One presents the state of the rebellion up to the Battle of Scarif as a loose collection of anti-government militant groups with differing ideologies that were largely unwilling to agree on anything. From A New Hope, there's the suggestion of capital emphasis on "Rebel Alliance", and they're presented as a unified force without any demonstrable infighting in the movies. My read of it, as a casual enjoyer of the films with almost no exposure to the EU, is that that was the moment that made the Alliance gel to become the unified fighting force in the original trilogy.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Isn't Andor kind of before the rebellion proper? IIRC, the Battle of Scarif in Rogue One was presented as kind of the moment the rebellion became an organized thing instead of just a bunch of disparate militant dissident groups with their own separate agendas.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    I'd agree with your dissent... the flashbacks to Cassian's early childhood as a member of an inexplicably primitive tribe on Kenari serve no real purpose in the story. It doesn't add anything meaningful or interesting to Cassian's character or to the story as a whole. It's not like Cassian is a Proud Warrior Race Guy and he hasn't shown any real attachment to his birth world or its culture in the story thus far. It could be omitted entirely without subtracting anything from the story except total runtime. After a while, you start to wonder if it's a subtly racist thing... if Cassian Andor's dissolute lifestyle is supposed to be because he's a native who's left the reservation like that old racist stereotype of the First Nations folks. Really, possible racist implications aside, all it really does is leave you asking why there's a primitive tribe of explicitly-human hunter-gatherers living barely a stone's throw from a massive high-tech Imperial strip mining operation. How do you even get a half-feral human tribe like that in a setting like this? (Not being snarky, I really want to know.) Looking back at it, there is at most one 30 minute episode's worth of material spread across more than 90 minutes in the three episodes thus far. This could have literally been one episode. It definitely feels like that... they spent so much time shooting people walking purposefully down the same handful of streets for minutes at a time. If this is starting as it means to go on, I can hardly wait for Andor Kai, when they cut out all the filler and lose 3/4 of the episode count. It's also really stupid that for all Cassian's real planet of origin is supposed to be a secret, he's apparently blabbed to so many people he can't name them all. Even his adoptive mother is visibly exasperated by his stupidity. Now this, I disagree with... Andor has, thus far, lived up to its showrunner's promise to focus on storytelling and not let the show be driven by fanservice. Even weak as it is, it stands head, shoulders, knees, toes, and several banthas above the likes of The Mandalorean, The Book of Boba Fett, and Obi-Wan Kenobi in my opinion. Those shows are driven almost exclusively by fanservice. My experience has been that if you're not already fully invested in the specific fanservice they're built on, they don't really bring much to the table. For me as the filthy casual, none of those shows have really offered much in actual entertainment because they are very much "By fans, for fans". I too hope this series picks up, though my fear is that it will decay into a fanservice-driven affair like the other three shows once Cassian becomes involved with the founders of the Rebellion. Saw Gerrera and the boss lady from Return of the Jedi are already confirmed to be in this one. The more references and in-jokes they draw, the more casual viewers like me end up locked out of the loop in "Sorry, who are you again?" reactions.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    ... and for the hat trick, episode 3 "Reckoning". EPISODE 3: "RECKONING" Andor is pretty weak tea thus far... though episode three shows a modicum of promise once the series finally gets off the goddamn dime and gives up on its multi-episode walking tour of Irrelevant City A's grungiest edifaces in favor of actually moving the plot forward a little bit. I do like that, once the action finally gets rolling, there's no quipping. No smart remarks. For both Cassian and the corporate cops, the situation is a tense life-or-death affair and they look appropriately tense and anxious during the whole thing. No graceful acrobatics, no trick shots, just a bunch of panicky scrambling for cover and desperate fighting for survival. I am especially fond of the scene after the episode's climax, where nobody celebrates. The deputy inspector is so shellshocked he's left staring blankly into space and needs to be dragged away by his subordinate. The locals who assisted in the sabotage aer traumatized by having taken a life, and of course those who saw someone die right in front of them are distraught. This wasn't a bold moment of heroism for anyone, it was a violent traumatic event that touched EVERYONE... even the would-be jaded antagonists who thought they were above it all. That positive node aside, three episodes in and I'd call Andor boring. Even tedious. Over ninety minutes of footage in the can and maybe ten minutes of actual content if you're generous about it. The protagonist is an arsehole, and we know he's not going to get better because he's still an arsehole in Rogue One. We're just going to see a lot more very vicious, inhumane moments as Cassian becomes the cold killer he brags about being in Rogue One.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Alrighty then... after a first episode so bland, insipid, and lifeless that it felt like it could be dropped into any dystopian sci-fi franchise virtually unaltered and still be unremarkable at best, it's off to episode two "That Would Be Me". Thus far, I have to say I'm not impressed by Cassian's backstory either. Han Solo was a scoundrel, but at least he was a scoundrel with a good heart. Cassian Andor's seems to be just kind of a sh*thead supreme. Everyone he talks to is either intensely wary of him being a con artist, manipulative dick, or a debtor trying to skip out on repayment. Admittedly, I guess he never did claim to be a good person, but he's just kind of an unlikeable prick here and I can't imagine he gets any less difficult to tolerate once he launches his career as a remorseless terrorist. EPISODE 2: THAT WOULD BE ME Honesly, the writing on this show is so bad and so badly paced that I actually went and checked and make sure the Writers Guild of America wasn't on strike when it was filmed. Over sixty minutes of runtime between the first two episodes, and maybe four minutes of actual plot progression, all of which is at the start of the first episode. You could cut ninety percent of this material and lose literally nothing. I'll give Tony Gilroy his due. Two episodes in and Andor is very definitely NOT driven by fanservice... because it's not driven by ANYTHING. It's sixty-plus minutes of aimlessly f***ing about in a run-down industrial town. If you took the background aliens out, this could belong to literally ANY franchise. It's THAT un-distinctive (and I'm sure that's not even a word). It's padded so heavily I'm waiting for the narrator to cut into the teaser and say "NEXT TIME! ON DRAGON BALL Z!". Hell, the sheer number of wretched hives in Star Wars and the escalating dinginess of each successive wretched hive has started to make me suspect Obi-Wan's a judgemental dick and Mos Eisley's actually a nice middle-class neighborhood. It's visibly nicer and a LOT livelier than this place, or that port town on Jakku, or anywhere they visit in the new trilogy except maybe Maz's place. Why is there seemingly no middle ground in this interstellar civilization between almost-literal ivory tower luxury and squalid borderline slums?
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Eech... well, as laudable as showrunner Tony Gilroy's stated desire to keep Andor accessible by prioritizing a coherent narrative over fanservice was, Andor now has a lock on first place with a commanding lead on my personal leaderboard of franchise shows that sent me to Wikipedia to look up some critical bit of info the fastest. I had to hit pause at only one minute and thirty-nine seconds into the first episode to figure out what the actual hell "BBY5" meant, because the series clearly expected me to already know. On my way to Wikipedia, I could only think "Wow, BestBuy stock is trading super cheap in the Galaxy Far Far Away" (its stock symbol is BBY)... or if it was some weird sexual thing like "BBW" is. Nope, we're just marking time relative to an event that hasn't happened yet for some reason. Were they paying by the letter or something? Was it too expensive to have this text just say "Five years before the Battle of Scarif", the defining moment in Cassian Andor's life and the movie this is spinning off from? Why mark time from the Battle of Yavin when this series is about a guy who's been dead for days or possibly weeks by the time that battle takes place? As for the start... well, I'll just quote from an episode of Star Trek: the Next Generation for a second: EPISODE 1: KASSA As first episodes go, I'm with Captain Picard. This isn't a promising beginning. I'd call it a bad sign that the character I most identify with is the security supervisor who clearly thinks the crux of the entire plot is bullshit. It's an origin story for a character in an another origin story, so my expectations are going to stay pretty low. I know this is building to something and following multiple characters in their separate stories is helping towards that eventual intersection, but right now it gives me the same badly-paced feeling as Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Like I'm watching two or more separate stories that only coincidentally share the same sets sometimes.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Really, the thing that'd find the most use wouldn't be the Valkyries... it'd be the Ghosts. What government wouldn't want a semi-autonomous or autonomous unmanned aircraft able to loiter over an area for weeks at a time without needing to be refueled? Not just for its military potential, but for what it could do for the sciences. An unarmed Ghost would be an invaluable asset for an organization like the US NOAA for collecting data on tropical storms, hurricanes, and tornadoes. Conservationists would jump at the chance to have aircraft that could remotely monitor the populations and migrations patterns of the various endangered species (esp. ocean-dwelling ones like whales and sharks), or as an armed anti-poaching measure. Emergency services would probably love having them for search-and-rescue operations, especially maritime ones.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    No kidding... I've seen e-motors do terrible things to steel and aluminum. Science, however, marches on and there are few carbon allotropes that've been created in laboratories that are approaching the properties of the "hypercarbon" used as structural materials and armor in Macross's VFs and warships. NCSU researchers reported creating a metallic carbon allotrope that responds to magnetic fields while also being harder than diamond back in 2015. It's called Q-carbon, though their experimental results haven't been replicated yet.
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