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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Variable Fighter Master File: VF-0 Phoenix kinda-sorta answers that question in the section SV-51 Last Stand: the SV-51's Final Air Battle. (Pg108) I summarized it a bit here, but the even-shorter version is that when the Anti-Unification Alliance remnants tried one of the several "Hail Mary" attempts to revive their lost cause after the Alliance itself collapsed in 2008 they got absolutely clowned on by a bunch of VF-0+'s in one of the largest VF air battles before the First Space War. Operation Scoria, an attempt to launch a surprise attack from a base in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy and capture the UN Forces Alaska Base, was foiled literally before it ever got off the ground when a mixed force of B-52s and VF-0+'s attacked their base. The story, recounted by the leader of the SV-51 unit, reads as a mounting series of "Oh cr*p" moments as what he expected would be mopping up a bunch of out-of-fuel VF-0s turned into his own forces getting stomped:
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Right here.✋ So much. What a stupid idea, making The Machine of Inexorable Horror into a kid-friendly action buddy. There is one Terminator movie. Everything else is just swamp gas or a mirage or something.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    $20 an hour sounds like a lot, but we're talking about downtown Los Angeles where cost of living is sky high.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Got a bit bored after taking down the Halloween decorations and decided to do some number-crunching on one of the data gaps on the VF-0. Specifically, the Mauler RoV-15 anti-aircraft/anti-missile laser cannon(s). Macross official setting materials don't really have anything to say about how powerful the cannons are, only that they were a replacement for a previously-intended machine gun. The VF-0 Master File book benchmarks the performance of the Rov-15 against Mauser's BK-27 revolver cannon. The BK-27's a German 27mm revolver cannon made for surface-to-air and air-to-air use. It's good for 1,000-1,700 rounds per minute and the 27mm mine rounds it uses have a muzzle energy of a hair over 157kJ. Since the performance of the RoV-15's said to be almost exactly the same, we can use that as a benchmark. (157kJ*1000rpm)/60sec = 2,621kJ/sec or approximately 2.6MW. The energy-on-target is probably a fair bit lower, but when all's said and done it suggests the VF-0's capacitor-driven RoV-15 is around 1/2 the output of the VF-1's production-intent RoV-20. Pretty darn impressive considering the generator supporting it is a pair of overtuned turbofan jet engines. Even if it needs 30s to recharge for every 3s spent firing, a 2,000kW+ class output is insane for the time period and power source.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    They clearly understand Humans are intelligent... but that doesn't necessarily mean they understand English or even care to. Most animals make a variety of noises for communication and with contextual clues a Human can easily tell the calls of a distressed animal from an aggressive one from a hungry one and so on. We make fishing lures that are designed to imitate the movements and sounds of injured prey, we make duck calls designed to imitate the sounds of the mating calls and feeding calls of various duck species. If Humans can figure that out for tons of different animal species on our own planet, a spacefaring species like the Preds can definitely figure out the context behind the sounds we make without needing to actually understand the language and imitate them the same way we do.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    The Banished Court Magician is still drunkenly stumbling through all the usual "Kicked out of my party but it's OK because I'm godly powerful" story beats. I have to wonder where it's going, because it's already doing the "humbling the jerk who kicked the protagonist out" part and it's not even halfway into the season. Normally that's for the end of the first major multi-volume story arc.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Functionally-graded materials are pretty common in nature... skin, bones, teeth, and tendons are just a couple examples. Considering the Protoculture's great fondness for imitating biology in their technology, it's surprisingly appropriate that the materials they use to do so would also imitate life. (At least, the ones that aren't out-and-out alive like the Evil-series weapons and other examples of their biotechnology.)
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... the different flavors of social media all have their own ideal use-cases. Message boards are definitely the superior option when it comes to building a community around a single specific topic or an interrelated group of topics like a specific hobby, special interest, skill, or fandom. It's easier to share large volumes of information on a message board and they're more searchable than successor formats like subreddits. The one area where the message board is still alive and well is the corporate world. So many companies with multiple internal message board systems for different operating areas... so much so that Microsoft Teams even built a message board system into itself for corporate/professional users. Facebook, Twitter, and their various imitators are mainly for online small talk and are terrible venues to try and have an in-depth discussion of anything. They're good for advertising, for gossip, and for incidental daily life nonsense but not much else. Interactions there, and on video-centric options like Instagram, Tiktok, YouTube, etc. are structured around reacting rather than discussing, so they don't really encourage conversation.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    When it comes to most forms of Overtechnology Material (OTMat), the particulars of how they are created is left unspecified except in one odd case. "Space metal" itself is not a specific material. Rather, it's an umbrella term that bordering on being a brand name that encompasses an array of different exotic alloys and composites that a firm named Dyna-Metal developed based on reverse-engineered OTM and produced in space-based factories. There were a bunch of overlapping names for this family of new materials based on Overtechnology including Space Metal, Space Alloy, Dynametal, OTMetal, and OTMaterial. Among the few details we do know is that there generally aren't any fictional exotic materials involved in their creation. They start with ordinary everyday raw materials like carbon or aluminum and they're processed into engineered nanomaterials and then those are combined into alloys or composites to achieve the desired balance of properties. The composite armor of things like ships and Valkyries and Destroids are functionally-graded composites that combines layers of a bunch of different materials with different properties to get to a balance of different attributes like structural rigidity, flexibility, weight, projectile resistance, etc. Hypercarbon is probably the engineered nanomaterial that crops up the most, used heavily as a superior analogue to carbon fiber and in various nanostructure arrangements like fullerines and nanotubes. The one material that explicitly uses exotic/fictional materials is also the only one for which we get some description of the actual manufacturing process: fold carbon. That one's pure sci-fi, being a crystalline material made of exotic particles that catalyzes the creation of exotic particles used for gravity control. Because it catalyzes the creation of the raw materials it's made from, it builds up naturally inside of running thermonuclear reactors and fold systems. Specially modified reactors are used as crystal growth furnaces to mass produce the stuff.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    The Zentradi fleet at the end of DYRL? is supposed to be the same fleet as the one that appeared in Ep27 of the SDF Macross TV series. The Boddole Zer main fleet. Macross Chronicle's Mechanic Sheet for the movie's Zentradi ships (Ai 02A) describes the Boddole Zer mobile fortress as commanding a fleet of approximately 5,000,000 ships, so the fleet being the same size does appear to be confirmed. The Meltrandi World Guide sheet in Macross Chronicle (Ai 02A) says that the Meltrandi Laplamiz main fleet was similar in size to the Boddole Zer main fleet, though the Mechanic Sheets for the fleet's ships do not explicitly state the fleet was ~5 million ships.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    If the original work and the future work were simply unrelated works by the same author that might be the case, but what we're considering here is essentially serialized storytelling. If a later installment is really awful, that can end up coloring public perception of the previous installments. Especially if plot developments or character progress in ways the audience receives particularly poorly. Looking back at older installments after the newer one stinks up the joint can be little different to thinking back to times with that public figure or family member before everyone found out about The Bad Thing. It taints your recollections. I'm not saying you have to agree with it, I'm just explaining the mental/emotional reasoning behind it. There's a really good example of this in action from just a couple years ago: Game of Thrones. The series was a massive pop culture phenomenon that seemingly everyone was talking about for seven seasons. Then Season 8 happened, and Game of Thrones vanished from the pop culture conversation practically overnight.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    It's pretty straightforward, really. It's the same principle as when a public figure or family member is revealed to have done something really heinous and unforgivable. It overshadows whatever else they might have done in the past, to the point that you can't really mention them without The Bad Thing coming up. In this case, whatever the sequel did is so awful that the knowledge the story or characters are going to lead to that overshadows what they do in earlier works. Like how people say the Star Wars sequel trilogy ruined Luke Skywalker, or Star Trek Picard ruined Jean-Luc. Same thing. I think Tron might be more susceptible to it than most, because the original was a fairly weak story wrapped around a cool concept and the sequels have relied heavily on nostalgia.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Let's Play's fifth episode is out. I know the original author's from Kansas City, but could she at least have done a little location research before setting a series in LA. I can tell I'm getting old and cynical because this has the sitcom apartment problem and my first reaction was "There is no way in hell a barista can afford an apartment that big or that nice in downtown." Sadly, the character drama was flat enough to calibrate laser levels. 🙃
  14. Seto Kaiba
    There are times when it can be satisfying to see a villain confront the consequences of their actions and have to live with them. However, that only works when the villain's offenses are comparatively minor and there's a suitably karmic form of self-enforcing retribution available. For Ben Solo, the consequences of his actions are a New Republic war crimes tribunal and a swift execution by firing squad. He was Supreme Leader Snoke's right-hand man and then Supreme Leader himself after he assassinated Snoke. His crimes are not minor. He personally murdered hundreds if not thousands of people and was an accessory to the murders of billions more as Supreme Leader Snoke's enforcer and later Supreme Leader himself. What he did as Kylo Ren was way, WAY too heinous for him to be allowed to live and walk away after the war ended. We know from The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett that the New Republic executed senior Imperial officers for their crimes. Kylo Ren's offenses are an order of magnitude or two worse than the crimes that got Moff Gideon the death penalty in a New Republic court. There's no way that letting him live and walk away from what he did would ever be a satisfying or natural conclusion to his story arc. He was a legitimate monster. It's the same deal with the Emperor and Darth Vader. The sheer scale and number of their crimes meant that death was the only acceptable way for their part of the story to end. Eh... I think Star Wars will be better off putting that Skywalker nonsense behind it. It suffers too much narratively from The Main Characters Do Everything as it is.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    My first thought, which I omitted because it didn't go much of anywhere, is that it might be numeric substitution goroawase... but none of the results I got there really seem to fit the characters. After all, who would describe Alto as nikoya (smiling, cheerful)?
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Hi and welcome! To explain a bit, Macross II: Lovers Again was made as a far future sequel to the first Macross movie Macross: Do You Remember Love?. It has a different/separate timeline from the sequels that were created afterwards like Macross Plus and Macross 7 and is officially considered a "parallel world" story separate from the other sequels. It's not "essential" in the sense that it's not part of the timeline leading up to (currently) Macross Delta, but it's still a fun installment in the franchise and it does get referenced as a sort of easter egg in some later titles anyway. Normally, the recommended viewing order is release order. So if you're just finishing up the original series your next port of call would be the movie Macross: Do You Remember Love? and then the epilogue OVA Macross: Flash Back 2012 before moving on to (optionally) Macross II and then Macross Plus.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Well, to be fair it jives with what's said in the films about how his life was basically "abducted as a kid, raised as a stormtrooper, deserted on his first combat mission" and not a lot else. 🤣 I don't really follow Star Wars's "Expanded Universe" either, but my Google-fu is strong and I know a bunch of Star Wars die-hards. Eh, he's got a "found family" in La Resistance though... he doesn't really need to go looking for the biological parents he doesn't remember or know. Not just that, it's a universe built around the idea of an unending cycle of morally simplistic Good vs. Evil conflict where the forces of Baby Eating Villainy will always rise up to threaten the galaxy so that there can be another Chosen One to lead the fight against nonspecific tyranny. It's basically a galaxy of forever war like Warhammer 40,000 because that's what's needed to keep the audience invested. Warhammer 40,000's just honest about it. 🤣 Just that one sentence makes you a better writer than most of the folks who worked on the sequel trilogy. The rest probably makes you at least as good as whoever's writing Spaceballs 2. The biggest lesson that Disney failed to learn from pre-Disney Star Wars is that pulling a Happy Ending Override on Return of the Jedi in order to drag the original trilogy cast back into action for a neverending series of battles and crises that brutalize and traumatize them and their children over and over again until they're broken down husks of the beloved characters they were onscreen is inevitably going to test poorly in the long run. The only thing Disney did was speedrun the negative reaction by skipping straight to showing the burnt-out, broken down husks of the OT protagonists first with the intention of filling in the prior traumatic events later. With literally nothing to cushion the blow, well... What Disney LucasFilm should have done - what Paramount was smart enough to do when picking up Star Trek after the end of its original series - was set the new story a lifetime or more into the future. That way the achievements of the original work's characters can pass into history and the new work can build on that legacy without stepping on any toes. Can you imagine how much less b*tching there would have been if The Force Awakens had started with: Boom. Just like that, you can do almost the exact same plot but without dragging Han, Luke, and Leia through the mud. Kylo Ren is Leia's great grandson or something and enough time has passed in the galaxy that the Empire's crimes aren't as sharp in people's memories.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Given that the song presents these as phone numbers, that's probably just part of the area code picked to fit with the song's rhyming scheme. Japanese phone numbers have an area code anywhere from 2-6 digits in length starting with a 0. Usually the first three digits denote a major city, a prefecture, or a cluster of adjacent subprefectures and the longer ones denote specific districts within those subprefectures. Hokkaido, for instance, has six separate three-digit area codes that collectively cover the 14 subprefectures of the island. Area code 013 covers Oshima, Hiyama, Shiribeshi, and the northern part of Ishikari. Hakodate, in Oshima subprefecture, has an area code of 0138. The longer the code, the more specific the subdivision of the area. An area code for a single district might be six digits. It doesn't seem to have any connection to ship number, since we know Sheryl's home was the Macross Galaxy's Mainland and Alto Saotome's family home AND the apartment he lived in after running away from home were both in Island-1 with the latter being in the Senzoku block (suggesting there's a district in Island-1 either named for or recreating Taitou Ward). That said, Alto's number is probably his business phone so it may be registered/coded for the San Francisco area on Island-1's portside where SMS headquarters and the SMS Macross Quarter are docked.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Li'l Miss Vampire Can't Suck Right really confuses me. Despite the title, it's a squeaky clean romcom. The setting is a modern Japan where various fantasy creatures like vampires are just a part of everyday life. The protagonist hits it off with a vampire girl in his class who is desperately trying to look cool because she's awful at being a vampire. But the series never really bothers to explain how she's survived if she's unable to do the one thing vampires need to do to survive, or if there's an alternative why is she always coming to school so hungry that she can barely participate? (Not much room for romance either when the female lead's basically reduced to the status of a crying infant two or three times an episode.)
  20. Seto Kaiba
    I wouldn't call it miraculous... I'd call it a difference in working conditions and staffing. Rogue One and Andor are products of studio confidence in a creative team that had a clear and consistent vision for what they wanted to accomplish, and enough non-fans in senior positions to ensure that the focus remained on telling a tight, focused story set in the Star Wars universe. IIRC, Tony Gilroy said at one point that he got all of one note from the studio on Andor and that was that Maarva couldn't drop an F-bomb in her posthumous speech. The Rise of Skywalker came out hot on the heels of two highly contentious Star Wars projects so there was low confidence on the studio side from the outset. The creative team got overhauled right before filming and the incomplete script was being constantly revised during principal photography, so the creative vision was all over the place and couldn't even settle on key plot points like Rey's origin story and the studio was watching and second-guessing everything. A bunch of Star Wars superfans on the creative team probably did not help matters either, but that seems almost trivial in comparison. I'd say the difference between the likes of The Wrath of Khan and Section 31 is about that big. There are Star Wars fans who'll defend The Last Jedi and the Rise of Skywalker. I've yet to meet a Trekkie who'll defend Section 31 even in jest. Warhammer 40,000 also has an example I'd point to with the galaxies-wide gulf in quality between the exemplary Gaunt's Ghosts novel series by Dan Abnett and the near-universally scorned Inquisition War trilogy by Ian Watson, with the latter being infamous for prose so purple it practically flies and eats people and its tendency to make extended digressions into its author's sexual frustration and creepy fetishes. As Bruva Alfabusa once put it: The only reason anyone reads that dreadful tome is bile fascination... wanting to see if it's really as bad as the rumors say. The answer is always "No, it's worse."
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Let's Play dropped its fourth episode, and honestly this series is still kind of headache inducing to watch. The story fairly screams that its creator has at-most superficial knowledge of the "gamer culture" that it's supposedly deconstructing, it does demonstrate a very clear understanding of one thing: toxic online fandom. There's actually a very good moment early in this episode where Marshall Law's YouTuber girlfriend talks him out of attempting to publicly apologize to Sam for his overwhelmingly negative review of her game and shame his fans into deleting their negative reviews. She practically recites John Gabriel's Greater Internet F*ckwad Theory while explaining to him how his fans, being anonymous and knowing their actions are largely consequence-free, will likely double down instead of doing as he asks and not only make Sam's life worse but turn on him as well. The first halfway interesting thing this series has done is show Marshall grappling with the desire to make things right and the knowledge the internet simply won't let him undo the damage, and making things worse with the person he's trying to apologize to in the process. Sadly, that moment of actually-interesting character writing is short-lived and the series quickly pivots to its usual cringeworthy nonsense.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Understandable. After all, The Rise of Skywalker was a pile of desperate corporate-dictated course corrections in a trench coat pretending to be a movie. 🫤 's kind of why I've been arguing that there's no saving The Rise of Skywalker's big bad switcheroo plot twist no matter how much setup you do. He's still an outside-context problem brought in because the studio probably felt Kylo Ren's villain cred was insufficient to carry the final third of the trilogy.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    She's a minor character in The Rise of Skywalker. Rey's group meet her and her tribe of ex-First Order stormtroopers on the ocean moon of Endor while they're looking for the throne room in the wreckage of the second Death Star. She later goes with them to Exegol to fight the Sith and brings the horses they ride on top of that one Star Destroyer. At the end of the movie, she goes off with Lando Calrissian to look for her original family... though TBH the vibe I got was that she was meant to be the daughter Lando mentions was abducted by the First Order as a toddler. Nah. Disney backed away from the idea of Rose being Finn's love interest after she got almost Jar-Jar levels of hate when The Last Jedi came out. It did seem like Jannah was going to end up Finn's new love interest for a hot minute there since they were paired up several times in The Rise of Skywalker, but nothing comes of it either.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Inexpressive Kashiwada and Expressive Oota remains cute but directionless in its fifth episode. It has exactly one joke, and that is a deadpan reaction followed by serial escalation. My Friend's Little Sister Has It In For Me has hit almost white noise levels of unremarkable.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    They've delved into his history in secondary works, based on what I can find... and his past is exactly as unremarkable as the films made it out. Basically, he was "recruited" at age 3 and raised in the First Order's indoctrination centers to be a future Stormtrooper cadet. He did well in training though got up to various comic relief-type hijinks on various assignments and the rest of his squad didn't like him so he never got a nickname. Jakku at the start of The Force Awakens was his first time in combat outside of simulations. He means Jannah, the female ex-First Order stormtrooper that Finn partners with in The Rise of Skywalker. (Yes, I had to look up her name too.) Nobody in Star Wars gets to live happily ever after. Only misery in this galaxy.
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