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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    That's just a person in body armor. "Bioroid Terminator"... pfft... peak cringe indeed. You poor thing. Do you need a hug? Unless the "different original concept" wasn't "stealth giant land warfare robot", the original concept was just as cringy as its final form TBH. As expected, yeah... HG no longer cares about pretending the Robotech brand is commercially viable, so they haven't bothered to police the new game for quality. In all fairness, they've been calling them that since at least Robotech II: the Sentinels... The rest, however, is more or less just arse-pulls on the part of the various novel, comic, and RPG writers whose work HG officially and publicly considers to be garbage. 😉 I believe their schtick is still that the Sentinels story is basically the Macross Saga characters faffing about in the territory that used to be the Masters interstellar empire before Zor kneecapped them and the Masters picked up and left. ... researching what, exactly? There's so little official material that you could write it all on a paper napkin and still have plenty of room left over for a few artful diagrams about what a complete and total pillock Jeanne/Dana is. That's why the last publisher, Palladium Books, had to pad their small form-factor paperback Masters Saga sourcebook so like it was a menstruating firehose. It was a 256 page book with around 25 pages of actual content. (Hell, if you wanted to put ALL of the official info for the original Southern Cross together in one place you'd only really need about one postcard's worth of paper to fit it all. I should know, I've translated it. It is DEPRESSING.) I'd like to be charitable call that an uphill battle, but calling it a boondoggle or fool's errand is probably more honest and accurate. Unfortunately, you're about *checks watch* thirty-six-and-a-half years late to the party if you were hoping to salvage the Masters Saga's reputation. The Robotech fanbase's mind was made up about the Masters Saga long ago and no amount of turd-polishing is going to change their minds about it. To be frank, it's kind of a waste of effort first and foremost because the overwhelming majority of the fans who buy the RPG have no intention of ever playing it. Its utility, in the eyes of Robotech fans, has always been as a substitute for the kind of artbooks and tech manuals that successful anime properties get. FWIW, SMG showed some sense in that they made the Macross Saga the core book and combined the other story arcs so that a kinda-popular arc and wildly unpopular arc were put together into one book... the Masters Saga riding the New Generation's coattails, and the Shadow Chronicles riding the coattails of The Sentinels. That way, they at least guarantee reasonable sales for all books instead of having half the game be deadweight sourcebooks like Palladium did. (The New Generation sourcebook was basically redundant since all of its core content was in the core book, the Genesis Pits sourcebook was a glorified generic monster manual, and the UEEF Marines sourcebook was bad comedy.) The core rules aren't that long... certainly not compared to Palladium's doorstopper of a skills index... and there aren't that many mecha in the Macross Saga either. Optional bolt-ons aside, unless you go absolutely hog-wild documenting minor background designs with no bearing on the story there's really only about two dozen core designs if you include the ships.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    The VF-4 is a 2nd Gen VF, so that's a pretty good directional estimate right there. Though it's worth noting many 2nd Generation VFs were low cost models meant to be manufactured and maintained easily by emigrant fleets and planets that were only just getting established, so the numbers are probably lower than the VF-4 due to the sheer number of different models. The Varauta forces, of course, had the benefit of a factory satellite to help out... so their force was disproportionately large for what was a world settled by a 1st Generation emigrant fleet. Past a certain point it becomes difficult to even estimate, since individual emigrant fleets are building their own gear in factory ships and so on...
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Even if the timeline itself doesn't pull a But Thou Must, you can bet your bottom dollar a timecop'll show up and put right what Pike is trying to put wrong.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    It's a bum deal... but compared to some of the awful fates met by Starfleet officers over the years, spending the remainder of his life living a telepathic ideal existence is a pretty nice retirement package. (It's no Curzon Dax getting Jamaharon'd to death on Risa... but they can't all be winners, right? Talk about "going out with a bang".) In a way, that's basically the reason that Pike is predestined to end up in the chair. He's a man with principles, and he's not about to let other people die to save his own skin. Especially not a bunch of kids on an Academy training cruise. Regardless of whether fate is going to pull a But Thou Must on him, like every other Starfleet captain protagonist he's going to jump at the call anyway because it's in his nature. His fate is inescapable at least as much because of the kind of person he is as it is a preordained future he locked himself into via the time crystal. As upset as he would naturally be by the prospect of his horrific fate - not knowing he's actually destined to live out his final years in an idyllic fantasy world on Talos IV - he probably hasn't considered that he's temporally bulletproof yet.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Three of any of the AMMs on a triple-rack. Otherwise, one per pylon. The VF-31 Master File is some pretty uninspired stuff, TBH. Generally, I would not upload scans of multiple pages of a book here... though I am also not able to since my scanner died a while back and I've yet to replace it.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Nope. According to that Klingon monk, Pike's fate was set in stone as soon as he took the time crystal. He is forever doomed to suffer career-ending, life-altering radiation injuries on a training cruise that leave him confined to a life support chair talking in beeps. Breaking it a thousand years after the fact probably wouldn't do anything, since his fate would've long since run its course by then. Yup, basically the same as the Unification Wars in Macross. A ton of little conflicts that spiraled out of control into a great big global mess... just this mess went nuclear and lasted for like forty years. Which is why Talos IV was his ticket to sanity... the Talosians could at least give him a perfectly convincing illusion of health and wellbeing even while his body was an overcooked potato in high tech tinfoil.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    ... well, that is a thing I have certainly seen with my eyes now. The actual **** is that supposed to be?
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Either way, Spock's got a long way to go to redeem himself in the audience's eyes. Give it a character-focus episode or two and they should come into their own a bit. Mind you, basically anyone serving aboard a ship like the Enterprise is "strong" and "competitive" almost by default. Strange New Worlds may be set before the adventures of Kirk's five year mission made the Enterprise a legend and the most sought-after posting in the fleet, but the twelve Constitution-class ships were the apex of Starfleet's prestige in the era both in terms of their importance and their relative luxury. Only the very best got posted to them. If you weren't competitive and a real go-getter, you'd never land the posting on one. A ship full of "strong, competitive women" was a bit less understandable in the case of the Discovery, a rear-echelon science ship... though given that "strong" in the Discovery's case seems to mean "damaged and mildly psychotic", that may have been intentional on Lorca's part. 'lil bit, yeah. I'm hoping they'll be more subtle about it this time. Star Trek has always been diverse and inclusive, but it works so much better when you DON'T throw it in the audience's face all the time. It's like a Bavarian fire drill in a way. If you just act like nothing unusual is going on, it'll take the audience that much longer to really think about or question it and you'll have sent a more powerful message about inclusivity: that a better, brighter future would be inclusive enough that there wouldn't be anything remarkable about the lifestyles of these characters. It worked a treat in TOS with Chekhov, Sulu, and Uhura. A black woman in a position of high military authority? Russians and Japanese working side by side with Americans? There's nothing unusual about that here, no sir. Did pretty well in DS9 when you consider that Jadzia Dax was lowkey nonbinary, genderfluid, or trans too. Discovery flubbed it with Stamets and Culber by crowing about it well in advance and then having them remind the audience at every opportunity that they're gay. They did better with Reno, but botched it again with Tal. It's the same kind of cheap fake-out as Pike's refusal to return to service at the start of the first episode, just on a larger scale. The audience already knows it's a foregone conclusion that Pike ends up a vegetable in a space wheelchair... not just because of TOS, but because Discovery also confirmed that his fate was inescapable and his future set in stone by taking the time crystal. They're just trying to preserve exactly the vibe you got... that he might not be doomed... so the series as a whole doesn't feel like an exercise in futility. By all indications, Pike is temporally bulletproof and fate will tie itself in knots to ensure he ends up on that training mission and in that chair. Pretty much, yeah. The current line on the Eugenics Wars is that they were kind of a lowkey conflict taking place mainly in the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific region, the lingering tensions from which eventually combined with the socio-economic inequality previously depicted in DS9 "Past Tense" to explode into mass civil unrest that snowballed into a third World War. They just tied a few contemporary movements into that existing framework. I don't think Christopher Pike is the kind of man to actually live a lowkey life long-term. He seems, like Kirk, to be a bit of an adrenaline junkie who would be absolutely miserable away from "the action".
  9. Seto Kaiba
    ... the what now? There's no model of Bioroid by that name. That's basically what it'd have to be... because a technological solution is explicitly off the table in the setting, and slathering a 6m tall, 12.5t robot in radar absorbent material would do precisely jack to make it sound less like a dumpster rolling end over end down a hill the minute it started moving. I'm pretty sure this is a case of its stealth only working because the fans believe it does... the Orks, at least, have an in-universe justification for their shenanigans.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    So, Variable Fighter Master File only shows one pylon configuration for the VF-31 as a whole. There has been some inconsistency in official art regarding whether the VF-31 Siegfried custom has two pylons or four like the VF-31A does. Master File went with four, same as the military spec: one on the inner wing and one on the outer winglet. The weapons listed are mainly just slightly newer versions of weapons listed in previous books, except for the super-high maneuver missile and the Asura (basically a VF-launched cruise missile). AMM-102K/AMM-202K Asp missile (a short-to-mid range interception missile) AMM-X5K ducted rocket missile w/ ground attack capability AMM-112SQ high-speed interception missile PaCSWS-2C para-cruising stealth weapons system ACSWS-1A Super High Maneuver Missile ACSWS-1D Super High Maneuver Missile AMM-142 Asura
  11. Seto Kaiba
    A big part of the problem there... and indeed with most post-Enterprise Star Trek prior to Strange New Worlds... was that the writers seem to consistently forget that Starfleet officers have to graduate from a multi-year Starfleet Academy training program before they're even granted a commission and that command of a starship is the culmination of a decade(s) long career of exceptional service. Pine!Kirk never even properly graduated from Starfleet Academy, he just stowed away on a training cruise and somehow got made captain of the ship over the heads of nearly 500 better-qualified candidates. Strange New Worlds, at least, seems committed to presenting a less asinine version of Starfleet where the officers are actually properly trained professionals and not a pack of rowdy fratboys turned loose on the galaxy. One very smart thing to do right off the bat was establish that Pike had been April's first officer aboard the Enterprise, meaning that the reason he's so comfortable in the center seat is he'd already logged a good five-plus years aboard ship before being made her captain. Having Kirk there also makes a certain sort of sense given that it'd establish his own familiarity with the ship prior to being made its captain after Pike's tour ended. If nothing else, Strange New Worlds feels like the writers actually had to watch a few episodes of Star Trek before being allowed to write it. The same absolutely cannot be said of previous attempts like Picard or Discovery...
  12. Seto Kaiba
    The first film was... problematic. Partly because its protagonists were unlikeable bellends who hated each other and have a very unnatural character arc thereafter, but mainly due to a huge portion of the backstory in the plot being jettisoned into a standalone limited comic that you needed to read to know WTF was going on. Into Darkness was just a terribly lazy attempt to remake an iconic movie without understanding what actually made it so good in the first place... ending up a plot full of flat characters repeating a plot without the personal stakes the original had. Trekkies, maybe... I'm not sure general audiences were as put off by Into Darkness's plot problems as its general incoherency, since the movie very clearly expected us to know and care who Khan was beforehand, limiting proper understanding of the plot to Trekkies. Beyond's attempt to course-correct back towards a more Trek-like feel probably alienated no small number of casual viewers who weren't expecting such a dramatic shift in tone. Either way, the Kelvin timeline TV series ship sailed more or less right after Star Trek (2009) when it helped Pine and Quinto establish themselves as actors. Past that point, their fee was simply too high for a Kelvin timeline series with the same cast as the movies to be viable. I do think the Bad Robot/Secret Hideout folks are trying to make a Kelvin timeline series on the sly with their insistence on carrying over their work from the failed Kelvin timeline movies into the shows. I think they're hoping it'll catch on, and rescue the Kelvin movies from the fandom's sh*t list, because I doubt they're happy with the fandom mocking the movies as much as they do. (Especially the lens flares.)
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, it's way easier and cheaper to get a TV actor on the big screen than vice versa. Beyond was the coup de grace after the one-two punch that was Star Trek (2009) and Into Darkness... or the mercy stroke that put the fatally wounded reboot Trek movies out of the audience's misery, if you prefer. I'd personally argue the well was poisoned from the minute J.J. Abrams said the quiet part loud and introduced Star Trek (2009) as a reboot before being forced to course-correct into calling it an alternate universe story. It definitely didn't help that Star Trek (2009) was a mindless summer action movie and Into Darkness was an incoherent mess.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    At the time, just movies... there were no plans for any spinoffs, side stories, or such. Though when it comes to that kind of thing, having an actor who predominantly appears in feature films moonlight on a TV show tends to cost rather a lot, and is why when a movie gets a TV show spinoff they usually recast everyone rather than pay such extravagant salaries. They tried, yeah. Where things ran aground was on the subject of compensation. It's fairly standard for actors reprising a regular/recurring role to receive a pay increase for each new season or sequel. It doesn't necessarily have to be a huge one, but a higher rate is generally expected if not explicitly written into the contract itself. Robert Beltran infamously tried to use this to get himself fired from the role he so loathed on Voyager by making increasingly outrageous demands for pay increases between seasons, only for the studio to obligingly cough up each increase without so much as a word of objection. Chris Pine and others reportedly walked out on negotiations for reboot Trek 4 because they were told that they would have to take a pay cut instead of receiving a raise thanks to the first three films underperforming so badly that Beyond's failure put the trilogy as a whole in the red. If they'd planned a TV series right after the first movie they might've been able to get away with it, back when Pine and the other less-established actors were only earning in the middle six figures. Now, however, Pine's salary demands alone exceed the already ludicrously extravagant per-episode budget of Star Trek: Discovery. Never mind when you put Zachary Quinto, Simon Pegg, and the others into that equation. When your lead wants $10M just to show up and your per-episode budget's $8M, you're in trouble.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    The Greatest Demon Lord is Reborn as a Typical Nobody should really retitle itself The Most Tedious Premise is Revisited as Another Series About a Demigod with No Social Skills. Another bold entry in the broad and ever-growing category that is isekai shovelware shows. This is basically just How Not to Summon a Demon Lord, G-rated edition... except the protagonist's social awkwardness comes from having been an unassailable ruler in his past life not a hikikomori.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Well, that was the goal... so at least they got that part right. After Discovery failed to strike a chord with Trekkies due to its dismal grimdark take on the setting, they binned the planned Section 31 series that would've reused a lot of the same sets, props, and art assets. Strange New Worlds was an author's saving throw intended to get a show out there closer in feel and tone to classic Trek that Trekkies might actually accept and allow them to get use out of the VERY expensive sets, props, and art assets made for Discovery before they moved it to the 32nd century to escape the disgust the fans and audience had for Discovery's take on the 23rd century. It was intended to be equal parts return to form and oversized bottle show reusing huge amounts of stuff made for DSC. Yeah, the textbook definition of "warp core" is basically just one massive set of magnetic field coils and particle stream injectors all pointed at a dilithium crystal. They put it in a nice tube so they can dump it if things go pear-shaped, but that's really all a warp core is. One of the conditions written into their contracts was that they were entitled to a raise after movie 3... so their appearance fee would probably be pretty steep compared to what the actors working on the TV shows are getting. The current crop of Trek shows are already some of the most expensive TV ever shot, and run over budget almost constantly, adding an even greater money pit to that would not help.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    That's a big part of why Netflix is currently reorganizing and "tightening belts". They've been so trigger-happy about cancelling their original shows the minute they stop drawing large numbers of new subscribers and new viewers that they've killed off a bunch of potentially-promising properties that could've remained profitable for a regular network for several more seasons and lost themselves a lot of money by cancelling those shows before they could fully recoup their initial investment. Looking at it, I'd have to assume Resident Evil here is intended as a replacement goldfish for the recently concluded AMC series The Walking Dead. It's questionable judgement, IMO, given Resident Evil's track record and The Walking Dead existing as an exhaustive proof of the hypothesis that postapocalyptic zombie horror is incredibly boring. My bet is that Resident Evil is another two-season wonder from Netflix's department of "bored now, what else we got?".
  18. Seto Kaiba
    It looks like a pretty reasonable recreation of the TOS engine room for the era of "everything is an iPod in space". Of course, that design existed before a lot of the tropes surrounding the warp core design used in the movies, TNG, and beyond were established. Is that ball at the back meant to be the reaction chamber in this version? In TOS and TAS, the reaction chamber was in the middle of the main engineering room. Technically, an antimatter explosion is the desired result... albeit in a controlled manner... and it was magnetic fields preventing the antideuterium from coming into contact with anything except the porous dilithium and the deuterium matter stream. So, if you really wanted, you could argue that you don't actually need anything except that invisible magnetic field to prevent a warp core containment failure. Movin' up in the world! Another fifteen years of this flavorless pap and they might have something that would actually survive a season on broadcast. Oh, that's an easy one. There are two simple reasons that new Trek is so insistent that it belongs to the so-called "prime timelime" or "prime universe": Overall, the "Kelvin timeline" movies were a commercial flop. They ultimately finished in the red at the box office thanks to Beyond erasing the minimal gains from the other two films, and the merchandise lines for the movies fared little better. In the eyes of investors, it's a poisoned well. More importantly, the "Kelvin timeline" movies never gained a significant fan following of their own. They succeeded in turning Star Trek into a sci-fi action movie in an effort to broaden its appeal with general audiences, but they did such a job of it that they made Star Trek into just another eminently forgettable sci-fi action movie that audiences stopped thinking about the minute they left the theater and Star Trek fans found un-Trek-like. There's too little interest in, and too much antipathy for, the Kelvin timeline to go setting a new Star Trek series there. It'd give them a lot more narrative freedom, but the investors wouldn't be anywhere near as confident in the pitch and they'd have portions of the target audience rejecting it sight-unseen as "not real Star Trek". Probably, yeah... given that their increasing appearance fees were part of what sunk movie four after Beyond spun in. They were due for raises, and with Beyond losing money, the investors were having none of it.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    If this was in response to my remark about it being not long for this world because it's on Netflix... what I was alluding to was Netflix's tendency to aggressively cancel shows that don't meet its viewership targets or that are only starting to see a dropoff in viewership. Netflix isn't going anywhere, but Netflix is quick to cancel its own shows. In the games? The first three games had some pretty terrible writing because, y'know, CAPCOM. Resident Evil 4 went ironic retro-camp with it and actually did a pretty good job as a story largely unconnected to the first three. It reversed course again for the next two games back to playing dreadful writing laser-straight. Resident Evil 7 pivoted back towards horror and actually did a fairly excellent job of it, which 8 tried to build on but produced incredibly mixed results with some moments of genuine pants-soiling terror and an equal number of cringeworthy accidental comedy moments. (If I could recommend any one of the games, I'd recommend 7... it's the first one of the lot that can actually be a properly scary horror game.) The movies... ... ... exist. That's the nicest thing I can say about them. A lot of them, especally the first one, manage to be even worse than the games writing-wise. They're not really Resident Evil movies so much as "based on Resident Evil" in the same way you might say "based on a true story". Most of them did OK but not great at the box office, IIRC. The writing wasn't really any better than CAPCOM's, and in a lot of ways was WAY worse because it couldn't settle on what genre it wanted to be and keep oscillating between a straight horror movie, a zombie action movie, a Matrix-esque VFX extravaganza, and a cringe-inducingly bad post-apocalyptic drama. A big part of the problem was the need to keep Milla Jovovich involved, by turning her character from an action survivor into a bullet time superhuman and then a one-woman clone army, which took it increasingly in the action direction at the expense of everything else.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    I've given in to temptation and got the Ascendance of a Bookworm light novel after enjoying the anime as much as I have. Later I'm gonna start Full Dive: This Ultimate Next-Gen Full Dive RPG is Even Shittier Than Real Life.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Oh yes, that is a great one. Sadly, a few of the puns don't translate very well... especially the ones that set up
  22. Seto Kaiba
    The B-2's actually a low-reflectivity dark gray, though the F-117 was mandated to be painted black because it was intended for night flights only. The F-117 being the world's first proper stealth aircraft, it kind of set the tone. Many radar absorbent materials are dark gray because they contain, among other things, granulated iron.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... it's not weak, easily abandoned canon so much as it is a difference in enforcement based on how much HG cares about the product's quality. Back when HG was actually trying to be professional about it, their editorial policy towards the RPG license (then held by Palladium Books) bordered on draconian. They were very strict about enforcing the canon on their licensees to the point that all of the "original" designs like this one, even ones Palladium created for the game's previous edition, ended up in the trash. The reason it got a pass from the current publisher is they're not facing the same quality control measures now that HG's not trying to present the Robotech franchise as a viable property anymore. If they ever decide to get serious again, you can bet your bottom dollar designs like that'll end up back in the trash for exactly the reasons I stated in previous posts. (Expecting them to behave like the genre's professionals is... ah... asking a bit much of them. Professionals have standards and behave predictably as a result. These guys are ascended fanboy rank amateurs who desperately want to be mistaken for professionals and they're catering to a fanbase with more sacred cows than all of India.)
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Well, my hopes are not high. It's on Netflix, so it's not long for this world regardless... but seriously, why Resident Evil? Zombies have been so overdone for so long that zombies have become synonymous with a lack of imagination both in TV and gaming. Even Resident Evil has actively tried to distance itself from the zombies. Even if you're dead set on doing Resident Evil, why continue to beat the Umbrella Corporation's undead horse via remakes and loose adaptations of the plots of 1, 2, and 3 when you could go full camp horror-comedy with an adaptation of 4 or do some actual horror via 7 and 8? This just looks like we're remaking Afterlife.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    It's one thing for something to be unrealistic by real world standards... we're all used to that suspension of disbelief in ANY mecha anime. It's another thing entirely if the fictional setting's own internal rules also rule it out like it does here. Robotech had not one but two original story arcs in its official setting - Prelude and the aborted Shadow Saga - built on the premise that the only viable stealth technology available was developed by the highly secretive Haydonites, and that their technology was so far beyond what any other power had experience with that it was considered impossible and a black box by the best Human and Tirolian engineers.
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