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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    One would imagine they would court Big West first for that purpose... deeper pockets, y'know? In the unlikely event that Tatsunoko were to go bankrupt and have to liquidate assets, they wouldn't have to wait until 2021. I'd have to check how Japanese contract law is written to see if selling their Macross rights would invalidate HG's license outright, or if the new owner would be obligated to continue honoring that license until its term ended. I suspect the former.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    The Best is yet to come!
  3. Seto Kaiba
    That's not much of a loss, TBH. Round-number figures for per-episode anime production costs on a typical late-night anime series c.2016 were cited at approximately ¥19.23 million1 (~$174,300 USD), with ¥250 million (~$2.27 million USD) being the typical going rate for a 13-episode series. In perspective, that ¥50 million net loss that Tatsunoko posted for FY2017 is about what they would spend on production for 2 1/2 episodes of a weekly TV anime. (Or, more depressingly, what they'd spend on the annual salaries of 16 animators at the industry average compensation of ¥3.1 million per annum.) Animation is a hard business to turn a profit in, since so much of it depends on merchandising and events. I'm sure they're used to the occasional lean year if they don't have a hot property on deck at the time. One has to wonder how much of that red ink is Harmony Gold's fault, from the arbitration over the issue of royalties and legal fees, and getting stuck with HG's court costs and attorney fees on top of their own because of it. 1. https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/interest/2015-08-13/anime-insiders-share-how-much-producing-a-season-costs/.91536
  4. Seto Kaiba
    The track is "Nostalgia". It's #30 on Disc-1 of the soundtrack CD set Macross the Complete.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    You misunderstand. I'm saying the preview is torture, and I want to know what I need to do to send the cenobites inflicting it on us back to their hell-dimension.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    The UFP wasn't in a declared war with anyone when the Constitution-class was upgraded to have an automated bridge defense system. Also, for a nominally non-confrontational galactic power, the United Federation of Planets seems to be at war more often than not. Just in the overlapping TNG-DS9-VOY era, you had: The Cardassian War (2347-2367) The Galen Border Conflict (mid-2350s, vs. the Talarians) One or more wars with the Tzenkethi (mid-2360s for the most recent) The Second Klingon War (2372-2373) The Second Borg Invasion (2373) The Dominion War (2373-2375) The Borg-8472 War (2374) The Reman Invasion (2379) Precious few were the years when the Federation Starfleet wasn't fighting a war with someone in the galaxy between 2332 and the present day... which gets worse when you factor in events from other sources (the Relaunch timeline): The Parasite Crisis (2376) The Iconian Gateway Crisis (2376) The Tezwa Conflict (2379) The Third Borg Invasion (2380) The Fourth (and Final) Borg Invasion (2381) Skirmishes with every Typhon Pact power (2381-?) Paramount abruptly reversed course on Star Trek: the Animated Series around 2004-2005. Up to that point, the series had been non-canon. From that point on, it's considered to represent years four and five of the Enterprise's five year mission. Surely it was only a coincidence that The Powers That Be decided to canonize TAS at exactly the same time they announced plans to release the series on DVD while Star Trek: Enterprise season five development (pre-cancellation) had an episode under development under the working title of "Kilkenny Cats" that featured the Kzinti and was explicitly billed as a prequel to TAS's "The Slaver Weapon". (The episode proposal got as far as concept art for the 22nd century Kzinti ship when cancellation killed Season Five.) Yes, surely there was no ulterior motive at play...
  7. Seto Kaiba
    It feels like this cover is trying to copy that iconic scene from Macross Plus when Isamu and Guld narrowly avoid crashing into each other and Guld sees Isamu through the canopy of his VF-11 in mid-transformation. (Right before Guld's BDI system goes down.) What puzzle box do we have to solve to banish the preview from this plane of existence? "WTF" sums up the entire series. Hell, it sums up the entire franchise.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    They're not doing a very good job if they are. But the UFP has used them... that's precisely the reason it came up. One of the less prominent additions to the USS Enterprise in TAS was an automated bridge defense system that took the form of a computer-controlled bank of phasers in the bridge's ceiling that would automatically subdue unauthorized personnel during an intruder alert. They show up again during DS9's Dominion War arc as an anti-Founder countermeasure in Starfleet Headquarters disguised as a wall decoration intended to sweep rooms with a stun force beam for the purpose of detecting changeling infiltrators. (A lot more benign, and a lot less versatile, than Dukat's replicator-based phaser units that could pop up anywhere a replicator was and deliver continuous phaser barrages at any setting up to disintegrate.) I guess the real reason that Starfleet ignores the technology is that it'd make so many Star Trek plots impossible if Starfleet actually had interior defenses on its ships.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    ... and several hundred other Star Trek stories, to be sure. For all their virtues, the UFP Starfleet is absolutely TERRIBLE at matters of internal security... brilliantly lampshaded by Worf on Deep Space Nine when he complained to Odo that his quarters being broken into wouldn't have happened on the Enterprise, and Odo immediately lists (from an apparently pre-prepared PADD no less) a bunch of different times that, on his watch, there were either robberies or hijackings of the Enterprise and Worf has to cut him off in mid-list to save face. Automated defensive emplacements would go a LONG way towards fixing that, esp. since bridge chairs seem designed to make it hard to stand up and virtually guarantee the first one who tries gets shot. Dukat's Counterinsurgency Program on Deep Space 9 proved precisely how brutally effective the idea is, having automated defensive weapons emplacements that can engage to keep attackers occupied or wipe them out entirely.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    As far as I know, the Discovery production staff haven't given that question a definitive Yea or Nay yet... but considering they went to the trouble of doing a largely faithful recreation of the exterior and the Shenzhou interiors (apart from the bridge) were pretty similar but without the eye-searing primary colors everywhere, it's certainly a possibility that's on the table. Considering that Star Trek: Discovery is a troubled production that's done a 180 from mocking the existing fanbase to laying on the fanservice with a trowel in the hopes of drawing them back, that may come back to bite them given that multiple previous shows and the relaunch novel continuity play the TOS aesthetics dead straight... the farthest apart of them being over 37 years after TOS. If they're dead set on courting the existing fanbase to keep the show (and CBS All Access) afloat, the visual reboot idea would definitely be counterproductive. It was screwing around with many time-honored Star Trek visual effects that drove many of them away in the first place. Ex Astris Scientia probably has most of it. Most of it was fiddly exterior details and cosmetic polishing. TAS was the biggest interior one, with the bridge gaining a second turbolift, a ceiling-mounted automated phaser turret for defense of the bridge against boarding parties, and a pseudo-holodeck recreation room complete with a strangely prescient the-holodeck's-broken-again episode. They were pretty consistent until Discovery poked its oar in. Such are the problems of doing a cosmetically advanced prequel in a franchise with a purely visual canon. I suppose it could always be argued that the Discovery refit ultimately tried something that didn't work out structurally and they had to put it back. It would hardly be the first time that Starfleet's engineers made a modification that nearly (or actually) managed to destroy the ship it was being installed on. (Paging Dr. Daystrom. Dr. Richard Daystrom, please come to the red courtesy communicator.) If they were smart, they would've made Discovery a parallel universe and then nobody would have had anything to bitch about visually... but they got gunshy after the hostile reaction fans had to the J.J. Abrams parallel universe (now officially the "Kelvin timeline").
  11. Seto Kaiba
    The original Constitution-class USS Enterprise went through a bunch of refits over the years... which were the studio's way of explaining away the various modifications and refinements that were made to the Enterprise studio model and other alterations made for TAS. The Star Trek: Discovery "Will You Take My Hand" CG model is now arguably the first refit that the ship was subjected to, since the pre-2254 Enterprise and post-2264 Enterprise look similar but not identical thanks to refinements made between the TOS pilot and series proper. Launch Spec (2245): TOS "The Cage"/"The Menagerie" spec. (First Pilot) 1st Refit (~2255): DIS "Will You Hold My Hand" spec. 2nd Refit (~2265): TOS "Where No Man Has Gone Before" spec. (Second Pilot) 3rd Refit (~2265): TOS "The Corbomite Maneuver" spec. (First regular episode) 4th Refit (2269): TAS "Beyond the Farthest Star" spec. 5th Refit (2270): TMP spec. "Explosive Remodeling": ST3 "Get out of there!" spec. This DIS refit would be one of the more severe ones, right up there with TAS's major refit, but it's nowhere close to the scale of the 2270s refit having taken Enterprise all the way down to the bare spaceframe and totally rebuilt her. Any classic Enterprise is light-years ahead of Jar-Jar Abrams' "a terrible transporter accident fused an Apple Store with a wastewater treatment plant" Enterprise. I'll be really interested to see what they do with the Enterprise's interior... since the producers INSIST Discovery is part of the prime continuity and several prior shows including TNG, DS9, and ENT have showed the TOS aesthetic really was the style of the era.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    We don't know yet... the USS Enterprise shows up in the last couple seconds of the Star Trek: Discovery season finale. Whatever's going on is sure to be a bombastic VFX extravaganza, given reports that production of Discovery's second season opener exceeded its budget by a significant margin and may have adversely affected subsequent episodes in season two's first half. All we know at the present time is that, after the USS Discovery successfully escapes from an unplanned detour into the Mirror Universe that was one massive and badly thought-out Writer's Saving Throw intended to make the crew look more heroic - or at least less like a pack of Villain Protagonists - by showing us their Evil Twins from the Mirror Universe being so cartoonishly villainous that even Lord Voldemort would agree they're overselling it, a distress call from the Enterprise is received and shortly thereafter the Big E herself sails into view. (Seriously, if they hadn't tried to play it dead straight it would've felt like one of Voyager's The Adventures of Captain Proton segments with suspiciously high production values... that's how far over the top it was.) That's some kinda heresy right there. Plus it doesn't really look that modified... the only real structural differences are they changed the shape of the nacelle pylons and the impulse engines split in half.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    It really is. There are a lot of Star Trek novels that have the usual Expanded Universe problem of feeling a lot like fan fiction. The Left Hand of Destiny isn't one of them. It really should've been a movie or at least a miniseries. The Qo'nos it depicts is a lot more varied than anything in the shows, from the less glamorous regions outside the capital like Martok's old digs in the Ketha lowlands, to a bigger cross-section of the Empire's population including the farmers and the poor right on up the social hierarchy to noble houses and would-be emperors. You really get a good sense for Martok as the Klingon Empire's folk hero, like what Gowron and co. alluded to in DS9, and for the Klingons as a diverse people instead of a pack of foamy-mouthed blood knights like they so often were on TV. T'Kuvma from Star Trek: Discovery reads a lot like a less compelling version of The Left Hand of Destiny's antagonist Morjod, who manages a pretty amzing level of magnificent bastardy on his own, never mind what his mother achieves by manipulating him. The original proposal for a Klingon Arthurian legend built around Chancellor Martok came from the Pocket Books editor (Marco Palmieri) working their Star Trek license, and he was the one who was able to get J.G. Hertzler involved in writing them. He put in over two years on them and all of the actual story is his work, though Pocket Books brought in another writer (Jeffrey Lang) to do some cleanup on Hertzler's manuscript before it went to publication.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    There are a couple really good Klingon-centric story arcs in the relaunch novels continuity that touch on Klingon culture and the impact various galactic events had on it. J.G. Hertzler did a really good duology called The Left Hand of Destiny about a(nother) civil war in the Klingon Empire that started shortly after the Dominion War's end when the newly-installed Chancellor Martok started to address the rampant corruption that'd set in when less-than-honorable career politicians like Ja'rod, Duras, Kmpec, and Gowron took over most of the high council using underhanded methods like assassination and subterfuge. It's a very Klingon take on the Arthurian mythos, with Martok in the role of King Arthur, Kahless (II) as Merlin, Worf as Lancelot, Ezri as the Lady of the Lake, etc. It sets off a sort of Klingon Reformation that persists through the rest of the relaunch novels. There's also a really good follow-up to the Klingon Augments duology in the Enterprise relaunch that deals with the sociopolitical fallout of the Augment virus outbreak that created the TOS Klingons as a B-plot in Rise of the Federation. It revolves around how the High Council's efforts to exterminate or disenfranchise the virus's victims who had lost honor because of their deformity and become outcasts in Klingon society. (In so doing, it also explains why the TOS Klingons ended up being the only ones which the Federation had contact with in the TOS era... the Empire put them out on the border and the frontier where they wouldn't have to look at them on a daily basis.) There's also a three-parter I haven't read yet about Kruge's relatives, who held his house together after his death without a heir on the Genesis Planet in Star Trek III seeking revenge on the Federation.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    He's what, 0 for 4 now... or is it 5? K'Ehleyr was stabbed and left for dead by Duras, Jadzia Dax was magicked to death by Pah-wraith!Dukat, Jasminder Choudhury was captured by the Breen and later painfully vaporized to motivate LaForge and Dr. Soong, the Vulcan councilor who'd replaced Troi was getting close to him before she helped lead a mutiny on the Enterprise-E and was killed by blast effects from the Borg's orbital bombardment of Vulcan while on leave there... and I could swear I'm missing one... They touched on that briefly in TNG and ENT, and more in-depth in the Relaunch novels. Klingon society has a caste system, apparently built on the expectation that a son would follow in his father's career. Dr. Antak in season four of Enterprise noted to Phlox that he was from a warrior caste house and that his father disowned him for defying the family tradition to become a healer instead. When Archer is arrested and tried in a Klingon court, his lawyer indicates to him that the warrior caste's rise to dominance in Klingon society was a relatively recent development that'd occurred during his lifetime. With the warrior caste largely running the show, the Klingon Empire's great and good are the Great Houses and nobility, who are apparently obligated to pursue military service in defense of the Empire. Pretty much every Klingon we've seen has belonged to either the head family of a Great House (e.g. Worf, Kurn, Martok, Gowron, Duras, Kmpec) or a noble family (e.g. Kor, Kang, Koloth).
  16. Seto Kaiba
    It's a confidential settlement, so likely we'll have to wait a year or two for the next time that either BattleTech or MechWarrior screw up and get sued to find out precisely what they agreed to. What we know for a fact, from the non-confidential documentation is that: Catalyst and Piranha abandoned their argument that Harmony Gold's license was not valid and withdrew their demand for a letter rogatory. The terms of the confidential settlement permit them to continue using the disputed designs. Catalyst and Piranha are prohibited from discussing the terms of the settlement. What we can surmise based on the available facts is that Catalyst and Piranha were likely the ones who threw in the towel, given that they withdrew their challenge to the validity of Harmony Gold's exclusive license to those designs when negotiations began1. That the settlement permits them to carry on using the disputed designs - in a sharp contrast to the original binding settlement - would suggest that they've probably agreed to pay royalties to Harmony Gold over the designs allegedly being based on designs from Super Dimension Fortress Macross. It's probable that they ended up footing part of Harmony Gold's legal bills as well. It means sod-all to Macross... Harmony Gold's rights under license inevitably survived their latest legal challenge, meaning Harmony Gold have nominally prevented infringement of Big West's and Tatsunoko's copyrights. For BattleTech and MechWarrior, it means they can carry on using the new designs for the Unseen and don't have to design a new round of replacements. If it hadn't taken a year and cost both sides a significant sum of money, you could call it win-win... but it's more like a Phyrric victory for Catalyst/Piranha/HBS and a moral victory for Harmony Gold. The BattleTech/MechWarrior partnership technically won in that they can continue to use the new designs, but they're apparently under HG's thumb now and spent flipping great wodges of cash in court for over a year to get that far... a victory essentially as bitter as defeat. Harmony Gold didn't succeed in stopping the use of those designs, but they did manage to make sure those designs are used on their terms, also having spent rather a lot of money to reach that conclusion. 1. Given that Catalyst's predecessor FASA tried that same tactic when Harmony Gold first sued them back in '96 in Harmony Gold v. FASA with no success, it's highly doubtful they actually suspected it to work. My suspicion is that, as everyone knows Harmony Gold is on lousy terms with the owners of Macross, it was a calculated move intended to get Harmony Gold to back down by forcing them to repeatedly nag Tatsunoko and Big West for documentation.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Y'know what would be badass? Since Master File only really glosses over starships in the most vague, general way... get Circle FANKY in there and have them collaborate with GAGraphic on a Master File for starships in Macross.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    AFAIK they stopped after four volumes... the history book, and three "Battleships of the Galaxy" volumes. They've done LOADS for other series, like Space Battleship Yamato though.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Wouldn't an explanation of the principles of its operation (how the beam is formed) by definition be "how the weapon functions"? In principle, it functions no differently from any other heavy quantum reaction beam weapon... it's just a LOT bigger. I'm not aware of any explicit technical description of the effects of preparing to fire (and firing) a heavy quantum reaction beam cannon on that scale. Based on the animation itself, there may not actually be any... apart from the power requirements involved in charging the weapon, compensating for the recoil of the beam's discharge, and cooling the barrel after firing. We've seen in SDF Macross, DYRL?, and a few other titles that ships can continue firing their other, smaller dimensional beam weapons while a main gun-class system charges, so the ships that stop firing may simply be trying to charge their biggest guns at top speed. The recoil's been shown on several ships to be pretty intense, enough to push a Macross-class or Battle-class ship backwards, which presumably requires engine output to increase to compensate for. The need to cool off the weapon's barrel is kind of understandable considering it's containing and focusing a heavy element fusion plasma beam.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Those are 100% fanmade, but fun nonetheless... esp. since they take the time to cover a couple of variant designs that officially exist, but have never been drawn like the Northampton-class's radar picket, air defense, and enhanced armaments types. I've been using them partly to refine stats in my homebrew Macross RPG.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    That'd be more interesting than what the rumors are about... as long as they stay away from the same shenanigans the Relaunch got into. Worf's girlfriend getting killed is almost as common as "O'Brien must suffer" plots.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Maybe one of them will buy the other out and change its name to Weyland-Yutani just to get the point across. I think I may well be the only Comcast customer who doesn't have one of their own. Everyone else I know who uses them, as @Roy Focker said, because they're either the only real ISP in the area or at least the only one capable of feigning competence has had a pretty frustrating time of it. Me? Somehow I've escaped ALL of the Comcast customer service stereotypes except getting accidentally disconnected a few times by new-hire level-1 support techs. It's a bit like having Lord Voldemort leave you a plate of fresh scones in the morning just because he knows nobody'll ever believe you if you tell them about it. If anything, it's gotten slightly worse since Disney is actively digging in its heels over the subject of paying its employees a living wage instead of having them live on food stamps... and is not happy about being called a leech on the welfare system.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    There really isn't a lesser evil here... that's kind of the problem. On the one side you've got a faceless megacorporation that treats its customers like garbage and is actively trying to destroy consumer protections, and on the other side you've got a faceless megacorporation that treats its employees like garbage and is actively trying to destroy employee protections. It's like the tagline from Alien vs. Predator... "Whoever wins, we lose". Maybe if it were a corporation that is actually doing something worthwhile and beneficial for the human race, like SpaceX... this is more like deciding to root for one of two competing serial killers.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Marginally. They self-disclaim as "not official setting material", but with Masahiro Chiba and Shoji Kawamori chipping in here and there, cross-pollination between this and "canon" official setting material is basically inevitable on at least a small scale. It's already happened a few times, amusingly even crossing over into explanations that originate in Macross II's setting materials. The remarks on fuel system endurance are one area where Master File is just expanding on what more official materials have had to say, so I'm rolling with it for the sake of satisfying my inner engineer... especially since it largely jives with what Masahiro Chiba set down back before DYRL?.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Given what Variety's supposed "anonymous sources" said, it's more like CBS is revisiting the same tired list of bad ideas, parts of which have been doing the rounds since at least the late 90's: The multiply-rejected fan un-favorite Star Trek: Starfleet Academy proposal - which started back in 1991 as one of several proposals for what eventually became Star Trek VI under a working title Star Trek: the First Adventure (meant to be a Kirk-Spock-McCoy prequel) and ultimately cannibalized into the first quarter hour or so of Jar-Jar Abrams' Star Trek. (The other attempts to do Starfleet Academy-centric series were unsuccessful as well, the best lasting only 19 issues at Marvel comics before being canceled.) CBS's own self-rejected proposal for a grimdark Star Trek cartoon - initially developed under the working title Star Trek: Final Frontier in 2006, and set in the 26th century after someone rendered vast swaths of the galaxy impassible with omega particle weapons during a major war between the Federation and Romulan Empire, leading to the Federation splitting in two, the Romulans conquering the Klingons, the destruction of Andoria, and the Vulcans quitting the Federation to reunify with the Romulans. The idea was so terrible that CBS pulled the plug after paying for just five story treatments and a few pieces of concept art. The Eugenics Wars miniseries proposal - another idea that just won't die, despite constantly getting rejected for the fairly basic reason that it's not really Star Trek anymore if there's no space travel (no "star trekking"), it's set entirely on Earth, and everybody is awful. Having occurred between 1992 and 1996 doesn't help matters, nor does Voyager having gone back to 1996 and shown things really weren't as bad as Kirk and co. made out. "TNG 2.0" - really self-explanatory. The network has wanted to make the TNG lightning strike twice since TNG went off the air, hence all the executive meddling in Voyager that changed its format from a gritty slog back to the Alpha quadrant (ala DS9's last three seasons) to a rather inexplicably fluffy episodic high adventure series. The skeptic in me is not at all inclined to believe that CBS is seriously pursuing any of these series concepts from the Isle of Misfit Story Treatments. I think this is just some noise intended to draw attention away from Star Trek: Discovery's ongoing woes. Between the fan backlash against just about every part of the series (made worse by Jason Isaacs taunting fans by saying the new Star Trek didn't need them and that they shouldn't watch), the reviewers tearing the latter half of the first season several new orifices of indeterminate purpose, Netflix allegedly being unhappy about their return-on-investment for Season One, a budget crunch caused by overspending on Season Two's premiere, and the recent departures of three of Star Trek: Discovery's executive producer-showrunners under allegations that the working relationship between the production and writing staffs had reportedly deteriorated to the point of shouting matches, namecalling, and even overt threats, leaving Kurzman and Fuller to run the show alone, things are pretty frigging awful for the series. That Discovery is a deeply troubled production is beyond dispute... and lately, it seems like it may well be on course for a premature ending as the shortest Star Trek live action series. This stuff about other proposed series is, I think, an attempt to say "Nothing to see here folks, move along" when it comes to Discovery's issues. Discovery boomeranged from "we don't need the fans" to "Baby I'm sorry, please come back" so fast it was actually pretty funny... the appearance of the classic Enterprise was a pretty blatant attempt to bring back some of the fans who'd stopped watching (or in some cases never started), and this feels like another one. Maybe a time travel cameo, or something like Brent Spiner's role in Star Trek: Enterprise playing an identical ancestor.1 (Maybe that's their Out at the end of Season 2... Star Trek: Discovery is all just a holoprogram that Picard was running, just like Enterprise's final episode was a holoprogram of Riker's.) Certainly not Goldsman, Halberts, or Berg... they've all left CBS. 1. Background material created for Star Trek: Generations indicates one of Captain Jean-Luc Picard's ancestors, Georges E. Picard, was a senior officer in the United Earth Space Probe Agency during the Earth-Romulan War and an aide to the first Federation President... maybe one of his kids, I guess.
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