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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Maybe, but if you're starting from zero why bother slapping the name of an existing property on it and paying royalties to someone who contributed basically nothing to the movie's development or production? Why indeed? Mind you, it's not just the designs. They can't adapt the original story either. Under copyright law, Harmony Gold's copyright on the story in their Robotech TV series only extends to the new material they created in the adaptation process. That's basically just some character names they changed and some minor plot points. The studio would need to negotiate for and obtain separate license agreements from the Japanese owners of the intellectual property rights to the original shows if they wanted to adapt the story used in the TV series. So not only can't the studio use the original designs or make new designs based on them, they can't use the original story or base their story on it either. Small wonder the movie has never been more than a pipe dream, eh? Of course, when it comes to Robotech, "iconic designs" means "Macross designs" and nothing else... especially in the eyes of the Robotech fanbase itself. Harmony Gold's inability to use or authorize the use of those designs outside of merchandise, has played a contributing role in the failure of practically every attempt to continue the Robotech TV series (most overtly in Robotech 3000). 😉
  2. Seto Kaiba
    The Gundam and Yamato influences are a lot more overt too... Quamzin in particular basically just looks like Purple Garma.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    In Macross Perfect Memory. There is a section The Making of Macross that starts on page 203 and has concept art for many characters and some of the mecha, and some info about the original episode counts for the series in development.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    "Kill it with gobsmackingly huge amounts of thermonuclear fire" is a surprisingly simple and straightforward strategy... and it's undeniably effective. That was the special investigation unit, which was from (New) UN Forces staff headquarters. *gestures broadly in the direction of the VF-9, VF-17, and VF-171* Not all of 'em... The Varauta folks were a mix. Macross R protagonist Chelsea Scarlett is a Zentradi former resident of Varauta, though it's worth noting that not all Zentradi have that same ghastly pallor too... their ability to blend in among standard humans varies pretty widely. By the Galaxy fleet only... though the New UN Gov't and New UN Forces don't officially recognize it as a production version because the Galaxy fleet never disclosed its specs to the central government and military. Precisely. The same style of designation is also used for the VF-25 and its gear, presumably in anticipation of export sales. It does, though it stands out as something of an aberration... if it'd just been a local spec VF-19E it would've been VF-19E/MF25, but it's heavily customized to the extent of being its own variant. Most planetary defense is space-based, so its less-than-optimal atmospheric performance would not be a deal-breaker to most. Cruising range, armament capacity, passive and active stealthiness, and cost-effectiveness made the VF-14 a very tempting prospect for emigrant governments.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Emigrant governments seem to adopt the name of whatever they've decided to call their planet once they settle there rather than continuing to refer to themselves by their fleet name or number. They also seem to have had a reasonably free hand to decide how to arm their local New UN Forces defense forces, even before the Second Unification War greatly expanded the freedom emigrant governments had to make their own policy decisions. While the VF-11 was the winning design for Project Nova, the VF-14 Vampire enjoyed considerable sales among the emigrant fleets as a space-optimized 3rd Generation VF with high frame versatility and lots of room for onboard customization. Some emigrant fleets went extremely cost-conscious and adopted all-Ghost air forces instead. The Varauta government seems to have been EXTREMELY focused on the idea of repelling a Zentradi attack, with their development of their own warship types that were more focused on the idea of directly confronting a branch fleet in open combat. The Protodeviln simply appropriated and then upgraded the designs they were already using when they took over the system. (Yes, even Gepernich's flagship, which was basically a MASSIVE floating missile battery and gun platform intended to unleash seven shades of thermonuclear hell on any Zentradi fleet unlucky enough to enter the system.) It's definitely confusing, that's for sure. Though the Caliburn itself is even worse in that it's a 4.5 Gen VF that incorporates certain technologies developed for the YF-25 Prophecy on a trial basis rather than being a mostly-stock 4th Gen VF like the regular VF-19. The VF-19 suffered from its own success. Its excessive maneuverability and over-the-top performance made the g-load on the pilot too excessive for most pilots to handle, the peaky handling made loss of control accidents common, and the cost was outrageous. (Though its main sin in production terms was looking too much like a hero mecha.) The New UN Government and Earth New UN Forces shared the YF-24 Evolution spec, with redactions and omissions as appropriate to arms export restrictions and Earth's various proprietary developments, to the emigrant governments. If an emigrant fleet decided to build their own VF-24 instead of developing a new design from it, I'd expect it to look very close to the base design with most of the changes "under the hood". There is a provision in the designation system for local specification variations below the variant level.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Well, there's autonomous and there's "autonomous"... if they're still a New UN Government member they're not actually truly autonomous since they're subject to the supranational government. Eh... we have, and we haven't. It's more an issue of the VF-19E being inconsistently presented. For instance, Aisha Blanchett's VF-19 is indicated to be a VF-19E in Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy and follows the design of the VF-19 1st Mass Production type. The same design family as the YF-19, VF-19A, VF-19C, and the Master File-exclusive VF-19B and VF-19D. Master File incorrectly lists the VF-19E as the first 2nd Mass Production type styled after Basara's VF-19 Custom. Basara's VF-19 Custom was, in the official setting, derived from a trial production VF-19F. Then, of course, there's the Frontier fleet's local take on the VF-19E designated VF-19EF Caliburn, which is a 2nd Mass Production type like the VF-19F/S but has a wing that sort of cuts a dash between the 1st and 2nd type and canards. That, of course, muddies the water because we don't know how much of that craft corresponds to the original design and how much is the Frontier fleet arsenal and local Shinsei branch's customizations. Somewhere along the way, that ended up being selectively downgraded to the VF-19EF/A which Isamu flies in Macross Frontier's 2nd movie, which is a VF-19EF retrofitted to return it to something close to YF-19-2 specs. So one of the unresolved questions of the VF-19 series is whether the VF-19E was a 1st Mass Production type or 2nd Mass Production type. Macross Chronicle would seem to lean in the former direction, with the F type being presented as the base model for the 2nd Mass Production type. So, that's a whole other kettle of fish. We've never seen a VF-24, but we know it exists because the Earth/central New UN Forces adopted the YF-24 Evolution as their next main fighter in 2057. The "Evolution" isn't a nickname for the YF-24, it's actually a separate model of YF-24. The original YF-24 was a failed prototype with the early/initial prototype ISC that wasn't up to the military's requirements and was ultimately cancelled. The YF-24 Evolution was Shinsei Industry's independent revival of the YF-24 design with more mature technologies which was successfully demonstrated to the military. We've only ever seen that one in line art form in Macross Frontier and Master File. Presumably the VF-24 looks just like it, or at least very similar. The original YF-24, informally nicknamed "Camel", has never been seen in art or anywhere else.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Miss Kuroitsu from the Monster Development Department was an office comedy about a girl who works in the R&D division of one of the evil organizations looking to take over the world by defeating various local tokusatsu-style superheroes. I found it pretty amusing, in a relatable sort of way, given that a fair amount of it is jabs at corporate culture until the end of the series. Ah, that sounds problematic. I know I had a lot of issues with So I'm a Spider, So What? because of how much they cut out of the story to make the anime... which made the B cast of reincarnated humans even less likeable and interesting after cutting out a lot of their character development. I hope the cuts in Love After World Domination aren't that severe.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Possibly, but I doubt it. One of the main challenges the emigrant governments faced was cost-performance in their military hardware. A lot of the 2nd Generation Valkyries were developed to maximize their cost-performance for emigrant governments that had limited resources. The VF-5000 was a standout in that regard and stuck around in the Zola Patrol's arsenal to the late 2040s as a result. With so many major obstacles to achieving widespread adoption of the VF-19 even without considering the arms export restrictions that were imposed in the wake of the Sharon Apple incident like the VF-19 and VF-22's excessive manufacturing and operation costs or the training issues and accidents caused by their excessively high performance would have made it difficult or impossible for emigrant governments to adopt even without the export restriction. (If anything, the sheer unviability of the VF-19 and VF-22 ought to have provoked a "How much of our tax money did you waste on this unflyable garbage?" reaction... or a "Wow, dodged a bullet there" reaction in those who were on the fence about upgrading. It says a lot that Shinsei was still trying to make the VF-19 flyable 18 years later.) Some of it, like what we heard about on the VF-19EF Caliburn, seems to have been more in the type of "we're omitting this, fill in the gaps as best you can" while others were just legally-mandated restrictions on certain systems. Exactly how severe the restrictions were is unclear, since we've never seen the specs for an Earth/central New UN Forces variant.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Most of them probably weren't all that remarkable... there are a few standouts like Divide - basically Space North Ireland - but it'd be difficult to throw into a series since the enemy was the New UN Forces who'd been (knowingly or otherwise) used by the conspirators to suppress movements pushing for greater emigrant autonomy. It's unclear. The first model of VF specifically identified in its writeup as intended for export was the VF-19P also used by the Zola Patrol, so it's not an unreasonable assumption that the VF-5000G may have been an export "monkey model" variant too. It's not outright identified as such, but the way it's described in Macross Chronicle suggests the Patrol's VF-5000Gs are modified and not original spec. since they're referred to specifically as the G-model Patrol Corps specification. Of course, that would also mark the earliest case of a dedicated export model, since the first major case of the New UN Gov't cracking down on arms exports was caused by the Sharon Apple incident in 2040 and involved 4th Generation VFs only. That event having been a part of what contributed to the VF-19 losing its position as next main fighter to the less over-the-top and far more cost-effective VF-171.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    I'm not sure what we're doing is hate-watching... there is an element of schadenfreude to it, but by in large it's like when you see a disaster and you can't look away? We already have doomscrolling and doomsurfing... I guess this is doomstreaming? It's like when you're watching a horror movie and a character acts with that horror movie lack of a sense of self-preservation and goes off on their own. You know they're doomed, they're telegraphing the hell out of the fact that they're doomed, so you're just waiting to see how their inevitable demise is going to arrive. Hate would require me to still have an attachment to this mess or the people in it. The best I can muster is a sort of dispassionate disgust like discovering your coffee's gone cold while you were distracted.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Exactly. The proposed Robotech live action movie - or at this point, perhaps we should call it the alleged Robotech live action movie - has been making announcements like this with monotonous regularity for over fifteen ****ing years now. Taking "news" like this seriously was considered silly a decade ago. Nowadays, even the Robotech fandom sees believing this kind of "news" as a confession of the most incredible gullibility. Like every previous alleged director, if Rhys Thomas was approached about Robotech at all it was almost certainly strictly informal and six months to a year from now we'll read about him committing to a project with actual prospects like James Wan, Andy Muschietti, et. al. did. That's exactly what the alleged live-action movie was announced as originally... a "reimagining" of Robotech with all new everything because they couldn't legally use the designs of the Super Dimension Fortress Macross series in it, or base new designs on them, for legal reasons. That was also the first really obvious clue the movie was never going to happen, because without the Japanese source material all that's left of Robotech is the localization names for various characters and a handful of original minor plot gimmicks. (Literally, in a legal sense.) Under those conditions, the studio's making an all-original robot movie... so why waste money paying royalties to Harmony Gold just to stick the name of a mostly-forgotten and largely unsuccessful 80's cartoon on it? Especially a name that's freighted with a legacy of failure and a LOT of hate. The studio could stick an original title on it and keep all the money for themselves.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    It's purely a stylistic point on my end, but I really love how the Origin art style meshes so well with the Master Archive Mobile Suit technical drawings. To me, at least, it really makes it feel like a labor of love on the part of both the design staff and the artbook creators.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    I'm kind of unsurprised that, in the wake of the Kirk announcement, they've had to trot Anson Mount out for a few interviews to assure fans that he's not going to be a one-season wonder like Lorca.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Kaguya-sama: Love is War's third season is proving to be as good as the previous two, which is pretty damned impressive IMO. It was a really solid story as a manga, and it translated really well to a TV anime. I'm gonna start Love After World Domination in a bit... the premise seems sort of similar to Miss Kuroitsu from the Monster Development Department in terms of being a send-up of tokusatsu superhero shows.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Good grief, are we really doing this again? You'd think by now people would've learned that any news about the supposed Robotech live-action movie is virtually guaranteed to be fake news. 🙄 Every two years or so we go through this. Some third-rate entertainment "news" outlet publishes a claim that some influential Hollywood personality is absolutely, definitely, one-hundred-percent for sure signed on to [write/direct/star in] the live-action Robotech movie in development at [studio]. Some time passes, and we learn that the "news" was either totally overblown (e.g. Harmony Gold claiming for 5+ years that writers whose involvement was limited to writing one story treatment were on the project full-time working on its screenplay) or completely false (e.g. the many directors allegedly set to direct it, many of whom seem to have never even been formally approached about the project). Given how "news" like this has turned out in the past, I suspect the reality of this report is likely closer to "HG left an unsolicited voicemail on Rhys Thomas's office phone".
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Given that Macross's Oberth-class is more or less a box full of ballistic missiles, you could easily argue it's way more consistent with Oberth's actual contributions to rocketry than Star Trek's.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Emigrant fleets - the large-scale long distance ones anyway - have been steadily growing in size over the years and have gone through at least five generations of emigrant ship design by the time of Macross Frontier. The earliest fleets using the 1st Generation emigrant ships (Megaroad-class) were small affairs of a few dozen ships centered on a single Megaroad-class emigrant ship, with around 80,000 people in total (25,000 resident on the Megaroad). Master File at one point puts the typical emigrant defense force for planets colonized in that period at around 60 ships... Spica III's defense force being 48 destroyers, 9 carriers, and approximately 700 Variable Fighters. Those early fleets initially used captured Zentradi ships, supplemented with Earth-manufactured space warships like the ARMD-class and Oberth-class, with later fleets using increasing amounts of Earth-manufactured warships from the L5 Manufacturing Station and later the captured factory satellites. By the time of Macross 7, the exemplar emigrant fleet was 194* ships strong... with the 3rd Generation City-class and its attendant Battle-class supercarrier supported by a fleet of 120 stealth frigates, 45 advanced ARMDs, 20 escort battle carriers, and at least six auxiliary ships providing various kinds of support and supplemental living space. Fleets continued to grow as time went on, with the 4th and 5th Generation emigrant ships supported by ever-increasing escort fleets of hundreds of warships. Macross Valiant - AKA Macross 16 - was composed of approximately 900 ships according to Master File. Odds are those things are happening concurrently, since even with factory satellite support it still takes years to complete the construction of such a large vessel... never mind the post-construction outfitting of the living areas and so on. The latter would be especially important for the 5th Generation Island Cluster-class, which uses an engineered artificial environment (bioplant) to maintain its living conditions and provide better long-term sustainability and resource-efficiency than previous-generation ships. Construction of such complex interdependent artificial ecosystems probably takes a fair bit of doing. The mass-production Macross-class (SDFN) were originally used to scout ahead of the early-generation emigrant fleets... and their fate afterward seems to have varied a bit. Their role was eventually taken over by the Battle-class, and larger escort fleets of stealthier warships. After that, it seems some were either retired (e.g. SDFN-08 General Vrlitwhai Kridanik) or seconded to long-term deep space research projects (e.g. SDFN-04 General Bruno J. Global). There is a popular theory that SDFN-01 General Takashi Hayase was the ship that stood in for the SDF-1 Macross in the filming of the in-universe movie Do You Remember Love? (and possibly the Master File-alluded prequel Booby Trap). It seems like the more remote and isolated the world their emigrant fleet found was, the less likely the New UN Government was to ask for the ship back. (Uroboros and Pipure are both way out in the galactic boonies, and Uroboros is periodically isolated from the rest of the galaxy by intense fold fault activity.) One of us! One of us! One of us! We don't know that's actually the case for Pipure... only for Uroboros and the SDFN-08 General Vrlitwhai Kridanik, which became Vrlitwhai City. Pipure's government sold off their Macross-class ship to a private corporation... we don't know its actual provenance or its name, only that it was dubbed the Macross Extra by its new owners. Walked right into it and promptly got trapped in the revolving door. Probably... though Macross-13 was also a code for a ship that did not officially exist... as in "that's on a need to know basis, and you don't" in-universe. The palpable irony is that, for the most part, those events are indicated to be pretty darn uneventful even in-universe. There were a bunch of itty-bitty "wars" on emigrant planets over various minor matters that were the eventual seeds of the Second Unification War, and some terrorist movements popping up here and there, but for the most part is was a period of recovery without any major threats or events that would be cause for serious alarm. * The reason for the notation is that certain works like Macross 7 Trash depict additional ships not covered in the animation. The aforementioned manga depicts at least one ARMD-class space carrier (TV series type, modified) and an additional auxiliary ship that functions as a dedicated spacegoing cemetery.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Yes, but we're terribly pedantic and will take literally any excuse to exposit.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    I'm referring to the Frontier-era Otona Anime #9 interview... in which it was indicated that the farthest-flung emigrant fleets/planets are around ten years from Earth by fold. I'm not sure it's even necessarily a difference in meaning... since Kawamori never specified which emigrant fleets/planets were the furthest away and where they were when he said the farthest were ten years from Earth. Frontier's course was taking it into the core. Even in Frontier itself, there were likely fleets farther away from Earth like the ones going around the outer perimeter of the galaxy (e.g. Macross-11).
  20. Seto Kaiba
    ... I don't think that follows, logically speaking. For one, the Critical Path corporation's research into potential applications of the newly-discovered material "fold quartz" was highly confidential at the time and Die Zauberflote and technologies derived from it were Manfred Brando's ace in the hole for his support of Latence. How would King Grammier VI, ruler of a hilariously unimportant rural planet on the farthest fringes of both the New UN Government's territory and the galaxy itself know about those top secret developments? For two, King Grammier VI's main beef with the New UN Government was the slow rate of economic growth and development on his hilariously unimportant rural planet out on the arse end of nowhere. If he'd known that he was sitting on a gargantuan stockpile of one of the most valuable substances in the galaxy and the key to multiple technologies that could be considered game-changers for military and civilian technology, he would almost certainly have thrown his lot in with Latence. For three, people who knew King Grammier VI closely (e.g. Ernest Johnson) were pretty clear on the point that Grammier was an Honor-Before-Reason meathead. He almost certainly sided with Vindirance for no reason other than to preserve his planet's governmental autonomy.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Because fold faults are just as big a problem for fold communications as they are for fold navigation, one-week delivery is most assuredly not guaranteed. Indeed, based on Kawamori's remarks in Otona Anime #9, it can take as much as an entire year for fold communications to travel from Earth to the farthest-flung reaches of humanity's fledgling interstellar civilization. It really puts the Second Unification War's casus belli in perspective. It just wasn't realistic or sane to have Earth try to micromanage the affairs of emigrant fleets and planets when the turnaround time for news to be sent to Earth and a decision sent back could potentially be upwards of two years!
  22. Seto Kaiba
    So is what I referenced... I think we're probably actually both citing the same source. Kawamori didn't specify that it would take ten years for someone to get from Frontier to Earth. Rather, it was ten years from the most distant emigrant fleets to Earth... but I guess you could day the value of "most distant" may have changed a bit when the Delta series was being written, though they kept the ten years.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    IIRC, what was said was that it was ten years to/from the farthest-flung emigrant fleets/planets... which tallies with Macross Delta, given that Megaroad-04 needed ten years to reach the Brisingr globular cluster.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Well, yes and no... The New UN Government is building emigrant ships at a downright blistering pace and launching them at a rate of one or two a year. One detail revealed in Macross Frontier is that Earth is no longer the only planet doing so. Eden's shipyards are also engaged in the business of producing emigrant fleets. Of course, like any major government undertaking - especially one with such extensive military involvement - the construction and launching of emigrant fleets is shot through with involvement from special interests. Not only do you have to build the emigrant ship and the dozens or hundreds of escort warships and auxiliary ships that support it, and select a population to inhabit it on its voyage, you also have to establish a working government on that emigrant ship, a functioning economy, etc. to provide for the ship's population while the fleet is in transit. In the larger emigrant fleets, this inevitably means large corporations and other such entities get involved and establish presences aboard, and wield at least some influence over the government. The Macross Frontier fleet, for instance, was constructed and launched with the extensive support and involvement of the interstellar shipping firm Bilra Transport. The company wields a lot of influence within the Frontier Government and deliberately charted a course into Vajra space to pursue the company's own ambitions regarding securing a source of fold quartz. Macross Galaxy, on the other hand, was constructed and launched as a corporate entity itself... existing as a sort of flying R&D facility for its parent company General Galaxy. Its corporate government exploited its governmental autonomy to engage in all kinds of amoral bullsh*t. Because the fleet's population determine how the government in their fleet will function to an extent, there can be some pretty significant differences in government models, economic philosophies, and so on between fleets. For example, in the Macross 29 fleet, the population contains a large number of refugees from wars elsewhere in the galaxy and has disbanded its armed forces after adopting a governmental policy of total pacifism. Macross 11 got a bit weird with it as a USA-themed emigrant fleet... in a theme park-y sort of sense. (And believe it or not, it's not actually alone in doing that kind of thing...) Eh... Megaroad-01 was the only one that was really launched to substantial in-universe fanfare. Afterwards, emigrant fleets were launched with such regularity that it became a lot less special. Possibly a collection of smaller interests, rather than one large megacorporation, given that there is no evident corporate influence over the 37th fleet government and the 59th's economy has collapsed to the point that it's impossible to tell... though they were counting on switching to cultural exports (entertainment industry) to revive the fleet's economy towards the end of Macross the Musiculture. It is and it isn't... the various worlds colonized by the New UN Government's emigrant fleets are spread across a huge volume of galactic space, but it's not like the New UN Government has control over the space inbetween. They're so spread out because the galaxy is a VERY big place, worlds capable of supporting human life are few and far between, and traveling by space fold is actually a pretty rubbish way to explore large volumes of space because it's basically teleportation. Convenient FTL sensors which can identify habitable planets from light years away don't exist in Macross and ships can't survey the space they're circumventing while folding, so the only way to find habitable planets is to fold into a likely area and spread the fleet's escort out to investigate the nearby star systems before folding to the next likely area and doing it all over again. Lather, rinse, repeat for years or decades until you find a suitable planet. Some early fleets like Megaroad-04 sailed all the way to the far side of the galaxy before finding a planet, while others found ones only a short distance from Earth. They actually have gone to the other side of the core, though... the Brisingr globular cluster is on the galactic rim on the far side of the galaxy from Earth.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Nope, there has never been anything like a proper map of the setting in any official media.
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