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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Wait, what? Since when were the other eleven Constitution-class ships lost? IIRC, the official line on the Enteprise-A was that she was one of Enterprise's sister ships that was rechristened for the purpose. Gene Roddenberry's original explanation for how the Enterprise-A was available so quickly after the original's loss was that she was a rechristened, previously-decommissioned, Yorktown. Some unofficial works claimed she was originally named Ti-Ho. EDIT: IIRC, Gene Roddenberry's original plan for Jean-Luc Picard's old command, the Stargazer, was for her to also be an old Constitution-class ship.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    There is that, yeah... though the fleet flagship that became Gepernich's home base was the centerpiece of that defensive strategy, with eight Macross Cannons and gigatonnes of thermonuclear ordnance to make branch fleets "go away".
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... according to Southern Cross's creators, it's definitely a tank: The Spartas's "Sniping Clapper" mode (hover mode) is a high speed light tank. "Walker Cannon" mode (the gerwalk-analogous mode) is an anti-aircraft piece. "Battle Sniper" mode is an infantry combat mode. One of the glaring holes in the development of Southern Cross is that it's never really explained why there is a standing army in the first place when the whole reason they had to abandon Earth was a world war that destroyed the planet's ecosystem so badly it couldn't support life anymore and why they're armed with giant robots when there's nothing on Glorie they'd need them for. Mind you, the Spartas has a multiply-referenced design flaw in that its open cockpit also lacks restraints for the crew. On at least two occasions people are flung from a moving Spartas due to clipping terrain or a nearby explosion. It also leaves the pilot and controls exposed to the weather, which on Glorie was not exactly nice. According to the show's creators, Glorie was in the closing phases of an ice age when humanity found and started terraforming it and it's actually quite nasty with the temperature hovering around the freezing point most of the year (-5C/23F in autumn, a balmy 2C/36F in spring) dipping down to -40C/F in winter and shooting up to over 40C/104F in summer. And that's at 40 degrees latitude... so imagine that being the norm in Kansas if we were talking about Earth. Robotech also acknowledged this rather glaring issue in its own material on it, but omitted the extreme weather in favor of just mentioning that weather in general tends to make the pilot's life unplesaant. It doesn't, but needs must as the devil drives... and they had to get over 65 episodes somehow. Robotech's attempt to justify it, as I've mentioned in previous posts, was that the Southern Cross Army was basically the dumping ground for the personnel its leadership felt were least likely to be missed on the front lines of an actual conflict. It was what happened to you if you didn't make the cut for the real military - the Expeditionary Forces - and got told you had to stay home and mind the house while the grownups were away. Post-2001, Harmony Gold's official setting took it even further by establishing that the leadership of the Southern Cross Army was just as inept as its rank-and-file soldiery, that the top brass were holding an idiot ball the ENTIRE war because their leader was an absolute xenophobe (and onetime terrorist), and that their equipment was entirely subpar because the brass were so salty about being left behind that they refused to use the same equipment as the UEEF and developed their own with inferior resources as a result. (Now consider that in both versions of the story, 15th Squad is considered a dumping ground for problem soldiers even by those standards... they're basically Delta House, but in uniform.) Color me surprised... normally, as in "almost invariably", it's legal holding up the show. I remember their marketing chief having to beg to be allowed to use social media so that he could get news out in a timely manner. It is. It really is. You can count the number of highly vocal defenders of the Masters Saga... well... "on one hand" might be pushing it, but you're definitely not going to need all ten fingers. Unfortunately there also seems to be a very close correlation between how vocally one defends the Masters Saga and how overall toxic they are as a fan, with a lot of that group's members having been banned from many Robotech fansites and Facebook groups for their tendency to fly off the handle at the slightest provocation. Doesn't stop me from trying to help them with their translation requests, even though I don't really get along with most of them. Mind you, they do occasionally make a good point... but even Harmony Gold generally turns a blind ear to their theories. (The UEEF is nowhere near as big as many Robotech fans believe it is, based on OSM and RTSC sources it was only ever about 600 ships in total, most being small escort warships with crews barely large enough to be a side in a football match. The entire return fleet modeled in the RTSC animation was only 395 ships, only 31 of which being large warships.) (It does not help that even Southern Cross's creators are pretty down on the Southern Cross Army as a whole, with what little coverage the series officially got typically taking the time to mention how ineffectual the Southern Cross Army's weapons were in actual combat. The Logan gets this A LOT, as one of the few things said about it officially is that its combat effectiveness barely rated as an annoyance to the Zor... and the Zor hadn't fought a war in centuries, if not millennia, to the extent of literally forgetting how.) Yes, but having your marrow flash-boiled until your bones explode like frag grenades is a fate that really REALLY ought to stay confined to the pages of grimdark RPGs, and yet it's something mentioned as a possible fate in safety briefings I have to attend. >_<
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... Robotech RPG Tactics undeniably did a bit of damage, but because it was backed mainly by the long-time Robotech and Palladium faithful and neither brand was exactly in great shape reputationally the long term damage was pretty minimal. It is believed that it hurt the prospects of Robotech Academy, but that was already kind of a cynical stinker dependent on the "do it for Carl" vibes and I'd have been stunned if it met its funding goals either way. That said, "huge"... well... this feels like a repeat of the same critical mistake Palladium Books made with RPG Tactics. Namely, judging the success or prospects of a Kickstarter purely on the total funds pledged. Kevin Siembieda was so gobsmacked by the unexpectedly huge pledge total on the RPG Tactics Kickstarter that was certain the game was an enormous hit in the making that he failed to consider that information in its proper context. He saw $1.44M and jumped to believing he had a huge hit on his hands, not noticing that princely sum was due not to widespread support but a high cost of entry and the 5,342 backers making disproportionately high pledges to secure multiple game boxes and stretch goal minis. The average pledge was nearly 3 1/2 times the cost of entry. The same is true for Minitech's new DOG FIGHT game. Yeah, they raised an impressive pledge total ($232,730 US), but due to an even more disproportionately high average pledge from a much smaller pool of backers (just 795 people, about 1/7th as many as RPG Tactics got). The average pledge was more than five times the cost of entry. When you get right down to it, the numbers don't show Robotech becoming more commercially viable... they show a smaller (and shrinking) number of fans that skews heavily to collector tendencies, willing to buy multiple copies of a game or book and willing to pledge extremely high for backer reward extras. SMG's Homefront Kickstarter had only 546 backers, 1/10th what Palladium's RPG Tactics got. That's kind of the expected result, though, given the franchise's persistent failures to get a new series launched to bring new fans in and the dissatisfaction with various sequel efforts and the like. Some people like the crunch, what can I say? Then again, I am a lousy example since I'm an engineer (math nerd) and a translator of mecha anime publications (tech nerd) so the crunch is just WHERE I'M AT. One of the most common houserule fixes to the Palladium Mega-Damage system is to address the weirdly unbalanced levels of granularity in skills. Some border on being Swiss Army skills that can do almost anything, like the pilot boats skill that lets you sail anything from a dingy to a dreadnought with equal ease as long as it's not a sailboat, or the ones that give you proficiency in operating just one system on a complex integrated vehicle like a robot or aircraft (e.g. the radar skills). Leveling that out and applying common sense there is usually the first fix a GM makes after trying to run Mega-Damage. (That said, I have seen real-world... incidents... that justify certain limits like not letting just anyone perform maintenance on heavy or specialized machinery. It is with good reason that they say the safety regulations are written in blood. There are some systems I've worked on on a daily basis where the servicing is limited to highly trained and safety-qualified personnel only because special tools and training are absolutely necessary to minimize the risk of the system you're servicing maiming you horribly or killing you messily. Even the relatively mundane appliances around your house like a microwave or TV contain components that can easily kill you if you don't know what you're doing, and heavier machinery can often be exponentially more dangerous. It's all fun and games until your workplace safety training warns about the kind of injuries you'd normally think belonged exclusively to the critical hit tables in Dark Heresy.) My good fellow, that is one of the most common opinions in the Robotech fandom as a whole. Harmony Gold actually ran a series of official polls on that topic back in the 2000s, and responses were... well... let's just say a significant majority of the fanbase thinks the ASC is basically where the United Earth Forces sends the soldiers who would be least missed on the front lines, and the leaders most likely take a "lucky" shot when the enemy forces are suspiciously far away. The idea had some canonical traction even before HG officially canonized it, with the ASC being made up of troops that didn't make the cut for the Pioneer Expedition in Sentinels and their equipment and training later being identified as subpar compared to the UEEF's. The Spartas gets some richly deserved flak for being a tank that has no protection for its driver, but the Auroran/AGACs gets a LOT of undeserved flak for being a "space helicopter" even though it isn't actually one. The "No love for Southern Cross?" sentiment extends well into the Robotech world as a result... Based on my past experiences there, it's almost certainly not him. It's legal. Because of the complex nature of their licensing situation, Harmony Gold's legal counsel gets a distressing amount of work because they have to vet everything to make sure that they won't step on any toes at Tatsunoko, at Big West, or anywhere else. Their situation might've improved slightly since they bent the knee, but it was so bad back in the day that the official Robotech website was usually the last place to have Robotech-related news because everything had to be multiply signed off on by legal first.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Two episodes in, and I have to admit... this ain't bad. It has potential. I really feel like if the writers can resist the temptation to delve into the kind of cheap drama Discovery and Picard used, this could really be what saves Star Trek.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    And more's the pity... But two and a half feet long is pretty darn small when the neighbors are doing 18m.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    I'm surprised they went so small with it, since Gundam has been beating on the 1:1 scale.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Careful, you'll be the next one the trollish types brand as "not a fan". 😉 Yeah... as I'd mentioned previously, I suspect the difference there is that Harmony Gold is a lot less serious about Robotech's future prospects now that the cat's long since out of the bag on the Shadow Saga's cancellation, the last gasp attempt to save animated Robotech failed on Kickstarter, and they've all but sold the franchise to Big West. Back in the early-to-mid 2000s, Harmony Gold was taking Robotech seriously for the first time in the franchise's history. They'd just hired a new creative staff and given them the herculean task of relaunching Robotech as a credible mainstream sci-fi/mecha anime property like Gundam or Macross. That was actually a pretty damned exciting time to be a fan of Robotech. They sat down and went through the licensee-created materials from the 80's and 90's and after much review concluded there was no way to incorporate those materials into Robotech proper because the overall level of quality of those works was too poor (and later admitted most, if not all, would never have seen the light of day if there had been editorial oversight back then), that there were too many inconsistences and contradictions, and way too much blatant copyright infringement from Macross and others. That led them to make a clean break with that old material, disowning all pre-2001 materials except the 85 episode TV series. I was on the call where they announced that, and I remember the furor that provoked. But they opted to start fresh, and we got comics at higher levels of quality than we'd ever had before. They sat down with fan translators and worked out an official setting and reference for same based on the Japanese source material and the Robotech TV series. There was the promise of a new animated title in the works (what became Shadow Chronicles), and of course the 2006 announcement that Palladium Books reacquired the RPG license with the caveats that their game had to stay firmly within the bounds of the official Robotech setting. It ended up not panning out, since Shadow Chronicles was supposed to launching point for a new era of Robotech literally and figuratively. Fans were ambivalent towards it and ultimately it never attracted the investors they needed to fund part 2. Harmony Gold tried to use the then-recent announcement of the live-action movie license to attract some investors, but that never went anywhere and eventually c.2012 they had to finally come clean that Shadow Rising wasn't happening. Management shifted its attention to the live action movie proposal, and efforts related to maintaining animated Robotech stagnated or were suspended... before ultimately being abandoned altogether with the crash-and-burn failure of Robotech Academy on Kickstarter in 2014. I don't doubt for a second that Harmony Gold is fine with what Strange Machine is doing. The difference between then and now being that Harmony Gold is no longer trying to present Robotech as a professionally-done mainstream anime property the way they were when they were working with Palladium Books. Standards are much more lax, since animated Robotech exists mainly to maintain the Macross trademark in the US and HG's focus is entirely on the proposed live action movie. I totally understand... there is a running joke that Palladium's system - esp. RIFTS - is the best game nobody actually plays for exactly those reasons. You basically play one game using the rules-as-written, and then you start houserule-ing to paper over the cracks and smooth over the speedbumps in the game system. Once you do that, it's eminently playable and quite enjoyable. It does, however, have a decidedly simulationist bent as you've noted though that seems to be what a lot of mecha enthusiasts are looking for in an RPG for a mecha anime. My own homebrews are extensively embroidered with houserules and so much errata (esp. for Macross II) that my players used to joke there was more red ink than black in my copies of the Macross II RPG. (If I had actually written my notes directly on the books themselves, they would probably be completely right.)
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Your recollection is correct. The first time an Enterprise was referred to as the Federation flagship was in TNG, for the Enterprise-D. Twelve, according to TOS "Tomorrow is Yesterday" and development materials for the series published in The Making of Star Trek. Mind you, Star Trek has never exactly been using the term correctly either. In its proper context, a "flagship" is a temporary designation denoting the ship an admiral in command is embarked aboard. Its more informal meaning, as the lead ship in a group of ships, also doesn't quite fit because the Enterprise - all of the Enterprises - generally operate alone. So it's pretty arbitrary, and the term has never been required to mean a unique or distinctive ship either. Flagships historically tend to be the largest classes simply because the fleet's admiral needs more room for the bureaucratic busywork of coordinating a fleet. Eh... a very definite "maybe", IMO. Her namesake, CV-6 USS Enterprise, was an Admiral's flagship at Midway... so one could argue Enterprise was probably always the nominal flagship even if the topic is never brought up prior to TNG. So, that's actually a popular misconception. StarTrek.com definitively settled the matter last year. All of Starfleet was always supposed to be wearing the Enterprise's arrowhead delta, the other emblems were a goof by the wardrobe department. (The letter is very tongue-in-cheek, with Bob Justman signing as "Chief Inquisitor" and imploring wardrobe lead Bill Theiss to ensure uniforms for future episodes used the proper emblem "Under penalty of death!", with a postscript asking for a litearlly-engraved apology.) https://www.startrek.com/article/starfleet-insignia-explained Archer's Enterprise being a retcon aside... even in its own era it didn't actually end up as the flagship. (The novelverse ran with the idea of the Enterprise getting trashed in the final battles of the Earth-Romulan War and Starfleet's first true flagship being the Columbia-class USS Endeavour.)
  10. Seto Kaiba
    You're assuming that designation was official in-universe. It was likely just the name the design had during the film's development.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    The early 2000s "2nd Edition" RPG was actually pretty good... they (involuntarily) went to some pretty considerable lengths to develop a game that is actually pretty accurate to the setting and story of the Robotech TV series. It's a massive improvement over the one from the late 80's and early 90's and systemic differences aside it's also way more accurate to the show than the new SMG game is as well. Well, if you need a whale biologist I know a guy... (no, really) One method that various content creators have historically had great success with making their content more believable and consistent has been to involve subject matter experts from various fields in their development. Star Trek was infamous for having a whole panel of consultants for that kind of thing. Macross drove its development in part with the help of engineering experts. MOSPEADA, likewise, had a motorcycle enthusiast designer behind the Ride Armor (Cyclone) whose expertise made the design more believable in terms of its presentation. Harmony Gold tried to do something similar for developing its official setting by tapping experts on the Japanese source material in the 2000s, with some hit-and-miss results due to the incomplete nature of the Southern Cross OSM and some guesswork some of them did. I got tapped for a few points related to the Macross Saga back in the day, having at the time mostly focused on Macross for my translations. I'm sure with a bit more thought a few more plausible explanations could be found. Gotta think about engineering problems like an engineer. That would make you pretty unusual as a Robotech fan. Most are still very much hung up on the incomplete Robotech II: the Sentinels series and their desire to see it completed played a pretty significant role in the failures of Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles and Robotech Academy. I was definitely well in the minority being happy to see Robotech finally mostly divorce itself from the Macross Saga characters and Sentinels arc via Shadow Chronicles, and got a lot of crap for my (admittedly lukewarm) support for the new OVA as an attempt to make a clean break with Sentinels and have the franchise get on with its life. That's padding for ya... You're drawing on materials Harmony Gold explicitly disowned and labeled as non-canonical and "Robotech in name only", so I don't think you can make that claim with a straight face.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    With the exception of the "new giant aircraft carrier", the ships used by the Varauta Forces in Macross 7 are modified versions of warships developed by the Varuata colony for their local New UN Forces defense force. We have only indirect statements on why, but it seems like the colony was pretty determined they wanted the ability to repel or outright destroy a Zentradi branch fleet and built the flagship of their defense force with a level of firepower appropriate to the task. Rather than the stealth-focused designs used by the mainstream New UN Forces, the ships that the Varauta colony designed seem to focus more on defensive ability with large amounts of energy conversion armor and on heavy firepower. Once the Varauta colony was captured by the Protodeviln that had accidentally been unsealed by the special investigative unit dispatched to the system's ice world by the New UN Gov't (in the short Spiritia Dreaming), the Protodeviln had the designs of the Varauta NUNS modified and upgraded to their standards/tastes/preferences and then mass produced to accommodate their conscription of mind-controlled colonists to expand their forces. We don't know if it was the first time... we've seen only a fraction of the total number of emigrant fleets and planets out in the galaxy. Only a dozen or so of at least 160. It is possible that Fasces has some sympathizers among the Varauta New UN Forces, but the Varauta colony itself was liberated in 2046 by the Macross 7 fleet and as far as we know has remained free ever since. The mind-controlled Varauta Forces that fought the Macross 7 fleet NUNS no longer exist, as those troops were freed from mind control and returned to their normal lives. So you could say the former Varauta Forces aren't a threat to anyone anymore. Fasces simply found and gained access to the factory satellite the Protodeviln had used to build the ships and mecha used by their mind-controlled minions, and used it to build more of the Protodeviln's modified versions of the VF-14, VA-14, and VAB-2D. The factory satellite in question is a special type that needs a special type of spiritia to work, and it isn't functioning properly without it, so its operation is very limited. Fasces is dependent on it because support for their cause dried up following the Second Unification War. Dude, stay on topic... those massive tangents unrelated to the original question just confuse people.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    On an individual level, that's a bit more mundane since that's all down to material strength and computer automation... which gets less implausible every time another carbon nanomaterial with metallic properties is invented, and the more AI-based technology integrates itself into daily living. So... slight nitpick as an engineer... running the cooling system harder would exhaust more heat, making it easier to spot. What you'd want if you intended to stay hidden while you were using a high energy demand system would be a heat sequestration system to store that heat internally in some sealed system until stealth was no longer necessary. That'd reduce the thermal profile a bit. (This can be achieved with heat pumps and various kinds of vacuum-sealed thermal vessels, though they have a finite heat capacity and you run the increasing risk of an overheat as long as you're running as a closed system.) (VFs in Macross do this in space operations, with cryogenic coolant tanks functioning as coolants and heat dumps since radiative cooling is more difficult in space.) So it's written as sort of an all-or-nothing where once you're spotted you stay spotted? A lot of the discontent was, I think, primarily just because it wasn't the Sentinels designs fans have been so attached to for so long. IMO, the new designs look a lot less distinctive.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Only when they're equipped with the FAST Packs pictured.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Optical camo is always kind of a pain to work into any setting that has mecha. Especially RPGs. It sounds cool, but mechanically it's kind of a pain in the arse to work into a RPG and in practical terms it's actually kind of a rubbish idea. Giant robots being naturally inclined to be big, heavy, noisy things, even an invisible one is going to be radiating waste heat and a modest amount of engine noise just by running its power plant. Actually moving basically gives the game away even if the cloak is visually perfect, since it's going to be making noise when it walks both from its motors and the limbs hitting the ground, it'll leave footprints in soft soil and pavement damage on roads that give away its approximate position, and any active sensors are going to give the game away immediately by emitting detectable radiation. It's more trouble than it's worth, for the most part. Great for infantry, less so for any vehicle much larger than a motorbike. Though way too many Robotech plots (esp. RTSC) involve someone or everyone grabbing hold of an idiot ball large enough to have its own atmosphere, I'd like to think that Zor or the Robotech Masters would be smart enough to realize how ineffective optical camo would be. (Especially against the Invid, who have non-conventional perception abilities and mainly [see/track enemies] via the characteristic emissions of protoculture power systems... something only the Haydonites had the technology to mask.) I wouldn't call it a hot take, but it's definitely fodder for an unpopular opinion puffin meme. When the books first dropped, I know a lot of fans were upset that they 1. hadn't used the original (legally problematic) Robotech II: the Sentinels designs and 2. that the new designs looked like the IMUs (improvised mecha/kitbashes) from the Genesis Pits book, being visibly cobbled together out of recognizable parts of the Alpha, Beta, and AGACs. The Gura Invid were better received, I think in part because many fans tend to forget the Invid mecha are piloted inorganic technology with a distinct pilot who can disembark. I was kind of ambivalent on the topic, since it wasn't really any different from regular Invid except visually.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Nope. We have only very basic info on the Lilldrakens and nothing worth mentioning on anything from movie 2.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Shouldn't you be thanking me? 😛 Though I wanna see a scenario like in the climax of the Department of Temporal Investigations novel series, where there's a three-agency pileup over who gets to arrest the person responsible for mucking with the timeline between the 24th century Department of Temporal Investigations, the 29th century Temporal Integrity Commission, and the 31st century Federation Temporal Agency. Pike tries to do a runner and finds himself hemmed in by an ever-increasing number of time-travelers popping in from who-knows-where telling him to get history back on track. (Bonus points if one of them is Jonathan Archer, since one plan for him was that he was going to turn out to be Future Guy, the one pulling the Suliban's strings.) Sorry, I'll ask my dad to turn his stereo down. 😛
  18. Seto Kaiba
    "2nd Edition" was officially branded as the Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles RPG. The title was... misleading. At the time Palladium Books re-obtained the Robotech license, the plan at Harmony Gold was for the Shadow Saga to be a 3-5 episode OVA with new episodes coming out every two years. Because the Shadow Saga was supposed to be the flagship of a revitalized Robotech franchise, Palladium Books obligingly titled their 2nd Edition of the RPG to match and built the core book around the OVA's first episode: Shadow Chronicles. In practice, only the RT2E core book was about Shadow Chronicles. Three of its five published supplements were coverage for the sagas of the Robotech TV series, one was a sort of halfhearted adventure module and monster manual/generator (Genesis Pits), and the final book (UEEF Marines) could best be called Robotech 1 7/8: In the Immediate Vicinity of, But Explicitly Not, the Sentinels. One sourcebook - a "spaceships" sourcebook - was quietly cancelled after the author working on it had a falling out with the publisher, leaving the book's manuscript unfinished. The game had been planned around regular infusions of new content for the Shadow Saga, but when Shadow Rising was cancelled they exhausted most of Robotech's official setting material by the end of the fourth book (New Generation) and the last two books (Genesis Pits and UEEF Marines) ended up being of questionable quality due to the limitations on the content and the lack of material. ... "mishandling" is an extremely charitable way to put it. It was a complete fiasco... It's worth noting that that's all from the non-canon comics and novels. One of the reasons the situation there is so vague is that the original Southern Cross never really bothered to establish how Zor society worked... and the whole bit about immortality is either a throw-it-in attempt to provide the Zor Lords with a less altruistic motivation at the end or an aborted arc that was lost to time with the show's cancellation. The original plan for the show was for a big reveal that the Zor were Human All Along and that their weirdness is a product of deliberate reengineering of their society to abolish the causes of the war that put their adopted homeworld Glorie into an ice age. In the original Southern Cross script, the elders names were Zosuma, Zosumu, and Zosumo. The Zor Lords themselves (RT: Robotech Masters) were named Dess, Dera, and Demi. (All the Zor characters follow a similar naming convention, sharing all but the last syllable of their names among all three members of a trinity.) That's one of the problems with introducing something so obviously useful... you then have to come up with a really good justification for why it isn't used all the time. (Mind you, protoculture in Robotech isn't so much a high-output fuel as a high energy-density fuel. One of the reasons given for why it's seemingly outperformed by nuclear fusion is that it's used in very small amounts, often more like a battery or fuel cell than a high output reactor.)
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Those... "eccentricities"... are from 1st Edition, the original Palladium Books Robotech RPG from the 80's that was (in HG's words) made when "nobody was minding the store" at HG. Those oddities, and the fair amount of copyright infringement in the pre-2001 comics, are why HG publicly disowned all pre-reboot licensee-made materials and insisted on the frankly draconian editorial and legal reviews of PB's manuscripts when PB reacquired the license.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    That's... not quite accurate either. Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross did actually receive some merchandising when it first aired in Japan. The reason many fans believe otherwise is that very little made it out to stores before the series was cancelled, and what did come out was a weirdly scattershot collection of apparel like rain boots and a few "adult" plamodels of the arming doublet. It ended up that way because Tatsunoko's staff didn't finalize many of the key designs until right before the start of production and didn't settle on a title until after production of the animation had started. Licensees were able to run out a few plamodels of the earliest designs to be frozen for production and some screen-printed apparel, but a lot of Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross's merchandise was still quite literally on the drawing board when the viewership numbers came back and the licensees learned the series was a massive flop. Matchbox did have a modest line of (low quality) toys based on the Masters Saga, but there was basically no interest in Southern Cross in Japan and even less awareness that the series had been shipped overseas. There was definitely not any significant importation of the American toys, which would not have been possible through normal channels as a result of the limitations on Harmony Gold's license. You can basically count the number of Japanese Southern Cross fans on one hand... even Harmony Gold will cheerfully admit that Tatsunoko itself barely remembers the show exists. Like I said here... Much like Harmony Gold itself did in that period, Palladium's "2nd Edition" Robotech RPG drew pretty heavily on the original source material for the three Japanese shows both for basic stats and for "inspiration" when it came to some of the later sourcebooks. The Gura Invit fall into that broad category, alongside basically everything in the Marines book. A number of the early Invit drafts, as well as Kakinuma's more modern interpretations of the Invit, look a lot more organic and alive than the final designs. Though really all they did was make the existing designs spiky and apply a common misconception that there is no distinction between the Invit and their mecha. (Invit mecha were always semi-alive in the original MOSPEADA though, as a result of being powered by life energy from the pilot or nearby hives.) Just remember, "civil" and "approbatory" are not the same thing. 😉 At the very least, we'll be gentler than the Robotech fandom as a whole usually is though. They can be pretty brutal. It's not a competitor, but it does invite the inevitable comparison when it comes to gameplay style and accuracy to the official setting. The former is subjective, but from what I've read thus far Palladium stands head and shoulders above SMG in terms of accuracy thanks to better sourcing practices.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    She's good at that. It's even more pronounced in the light novel. There are moments where you'd swear if Benno or Ferdinand ever suffered a papercut their blood pressure would make them a water jet cutter.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... it might not have been your intention personally, but the business rationale behind the decision is pretty damned obvious esp. given what Harmony Gold itself has said about the situation. 🙄 One of the more frustrating truisms for the Southern Cross fans is that, even among Robotech fans, the story was so poorly received that no licensees were willing to even consider merchandise for it. That only changed recently, and not by much, when Harmony Gold had to start licensing to the less risk-averse indie crowd due to a lack of interest elsewhere. It kinda says something that the last Robotech comic literally wrote the Masters Saga out of the timeline entirely. Just so you know, the first statement here disproves the second. When Harmony Gold was exercising editorial control over Palladium Books's work on the Robotech 2nd Edition RPG, they expressly forbade any reference to material from pre-2001 comics, the novels, or any of the other material they had publicly disowned as "poor quality" and "Robotech in name only". Original designs, factions, etc. were also right out. It was strictly limited to material that was in the 85 episodes of the TV series, the OSM, and the RTSC setting material. That's why the game ran into content problems so quickly after its first two books. The closest they were allowed to get to creating new designs for the game was writing background for MOSPEADA concept art and drawing new art for the legally problematic Sentinels destroids and battle pods. If they're letting you include material drawn from the novels and pre-2001 comics, or add original designs of your own creation, they are not being anywhere NEAR as strict on you as they were on Palladium when they were still taking the franchise seriously. It's been a rough couple years, hasn't it? If anyone connected to Robotech needs one, it's probably Tommy. He tried. He really tried. But whooboy did the fans eat him alive for it. Even Titan Comics took the piss out of his work before they got cancelled.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Got caught up on Kaguya-sama: Love is War. Shirogane trying to rap really is a horrorshow, combined with Hayasaka's having to combine various alter-egos she's assumed so that Kaguya's classmates won't realize that she's a Shuchiiin student herself. It ends with a surprisingly well-produced music video for the closing credits.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Sorta. The VF-4 and VF-5000 effectively jointly held the main fighter designation for a while... that whole period was basically the period of "VF-4 and _______", that ended when the VF-4 and VF-5000 were both replaced by the VF-11 c.2029. It was, variously, VF-4 and VF-5, VF-4 and VF-9, VF-4 and VF-5000, etc. That disparity was exaggerated somewhat when their ships and fighters were reworked by the Protodeviln... but their stuff seems to have been pretty different, pursuing a less conventional approach to design with a lot more high-angle beam guns than the Spacy usually used. None.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt assume you're not actually trying a No True Scotsman here and simply agree that it is more than you can say for me because I've read the SMG game and defintiely don't think that it's great or love it. ... and that's a big part of the quality problem. Not just at SMG, mind you... I'm talking franchise-wide. I've been with the Robotech fandom for a long damn time. One terribly depressing thing I realized a long time ago is that most "Robotech fans" aren't actually fans of Robotech... they are fans of their own Robotech fan fiction. So much so that many Robotech fans literally cannot differentiate between their personal headcanon and what is actually in the show. To give you an example, I know a bloke who swears blind that in the original Robotech test screenings there was a scene where Scott killed Corg execution style with a minimissile from his Cyclone. No such scene ever existed, but he is COMPLETELY convinced that it did. The few prominent Robotech fansites do more to misinform than inform, either pushing long-debunked and officially-refuted fan theories or simply being fan fiction efforts to write material from Macross sequels into Robotech's story. You can do something as a labor of love and still do it badly. When the fans - who are, let's face it, amateurs - get involved, what results inevitably sounded and looked cooler in their imaginations. It's especially problematic when those inventions don't fit with the setting and/or don't make sense in-universe or out like the so-called Stealth Bioroid or the claims in the RTSC artbook that the Alpha is a passively stealthy fighter. (And I won't pretend to be any exception. It's the reason I don't permit myself to do original designs when I work on homebrew content on my own or with others.) That was why, when HG was actually serious about Robotech's future prospects, the RPG writers weren't allowed to invent their own original material: because HG wanted the game to look professional and be reflective of Robotech's actual content. The reason SMG is being allowed to create their own original additions is because HG no longer cares about their game's quality or making the franchise look professional. They stopped caring about a decade ago, when they had to come clean that Shadow Rising wasn't getting made and their mgmt publicly switched to putting all their eggs in the "scrap it and start over" live action movie basket. I'd expect they care even less now that they've bent the knee to Big West. (IMO, licensing Robotech because you wanted to do something new sounds like one of those ironic hells from Dante's Inferno... the only franchise I can think of offhand that's more of a poster child for stasis than Robotech is Warhammer 40,000.) As someone who's been there before, I renew my offer of a sympathy hug. A similar review was why HG publicly disowned the pre-2001 licensee-created materials back in '06 and dismissed them as being so bad they'd never have been allowed to see the light of day if they had been exercising QC over the content. A review of the official setting materials only would've been a much shorter crawl. Due to the fragmented nature of the Masters Saga's writing back in '85, trying to make it internally consistent is a Sisyphean task because of all the inconsistencies caused by the writers making it up as they went. Trying to make it cool comes with the handicap that the original show was cancelled and the Robotech adaptation underperformed becasue the audience kinda hated everything about it. That's one reason HG defaults to the Japanese OSM so much. It's more consistent. Your offer is very generous, but I must decline. Work has ensured I have little space in my calendar for anything else, and I would hate for you to go to the trouble on my account if I were not able to reliably attend. I have a pretty reasonable understanding of the system itself, I just don't care for it. If it helps, you can blame it on me being set in my ways as a gamer who started on D&D 3rd Ed., the old [i]Star Wars[/i] RPG, and Palladium RT1E.
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