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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    I keep my expectations for Kurtzman-era Trek low and I am still constantly disappointed. It's actually weirdly impressive in its own way. On the one hand, it's nice to see that someone working on this mistake of a series has finally noticed most of their audience doesn't care for the design aesthetic from the Abrams movies and is actively trying to pivot to something less awful-looking. On the other hand, it's still pretty ugly and it has that same kludgey feel the season 2 armada of "new" ships that were actually just TNG-era designs with different warp nacelles did. Between the Enterprise refit-style saucer and Excelsior-looking front half of the engineering section, it just feels like someone dragged another TOS movie-era draft design out of the rejects bin and slapped a new set of nacelles on it. That said, my hopes are not high for the writing. Season one had the excuse that a (deluded) Picard was off on a personal (and very stupid) crusade to save Data's "daughter" (no relation) that ended up endangering all sentient life unnecessarily. Season two could be blamed on Q being Q (and the writers being hacks). Season three has a lot of heavy lifting to do to sell the idea that there's a threat to the Federation that a pack of depressed and out-of-shape retirees on a ship that looks to be over a century old that couldn't be solved a lot more efficiently and effectively by a real Starfleet crew? Come to that, why is Seven of Nine suddenly a senior officer? She's never been to the Academy and never showed any interest in becoming a Starfleet officer. That was Icheb's interest. Is Starfleet so hard up for personnel that they'll give a field commission of command rank to alcoholic vigilante simply because she showed up? What happened to her earlier insistence that Starfleet won't take ex-Borg? Season one was Nemesis II, season two was a low-rent version of First Contact, and season three's redoing Insurrection?
  2. Seto Kaiba
    In general, Macross series tend to end that way... immediately after the conclusion of the story's central conflict and without an epilogue of any significant length. Macross Delta: Absolute Live!!!!!! is something of a unique case, as Macross has never done an all-original feature film before. Normally, Macross's feature-length films are treated as separate from their respective TV series because their format has always been an alternate version of part or all of the TV series (or OVA) story. Macross Delta's first movie, Passionate Walkure, was much closer to the industry's standard compilation movie format and didn't really change much in the actual story. It didn't really introduce any new mechanical designs to speak of and the narrative changes were mainly just a few minor details like the circumstances of Messer's death. For that reason, there really shouldn't be much in the way of obstacles to seeing it as a sequel to the series if you really wanted. The few distinctive touches movie 1 had are things that could/would reasonably exist anyway, like the VF-31's Armored Pack or its ability to dock to the drones.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Not directly in the shows, anyway. Supplemental material does delve into that topic a bit, but as expected the maintenance issues you'd expect from such a complex mechanism are largely handwaved due to the vastly superior materials and more precise engineering enabled by the alien overtechnology and humanity's growing understanding of it. Even then, it's still acknowledged that in-universe VFs are still a fair bit more maintenance-intensive and a lot more expensive than conventional aircraft and that the complex moving parts involved in transformation and the complex articulations of the hands can be quite fragile. In what's going to be a theme... "Not directly in the shows, anyway". Stories in other media formats like manga, light novels, and supplemental materials for the animation do get into those details too. Sometimes in surprising detail. Some of it has been surprisingly consistent across almost forty years of material. The UN Forces, and later the New UN Forces, draw pretty heavily on the US armed forces models with a few distinctly Japanese touches here and there. (Many of the more prominent named squadrons in official materials for the first few titles are just Macross equivalents of famous real world units like the Navy's Black Aces with the same names and unit numbers or mishmashes of famous units like the Spacy's demonstrator squadron being the Angel Birds, a mashup of the Navy's Blue Angels and Air Forces Thunderbirds.) Not to mention a fair amount of it would be simply impossible with today's science. VFs only really work in-setting because overtechnology yielded huge advancements in the material sciences, computing, and various branches of physics. The flyaway cost alone would be astronomical*, and the maintenance demands and costs would be ruinous even compared to notorious hangar queens like the Harrier
  4. Seto Kaiba
    ... I'm pretty sure that was listed as a motivation by some of the production staff, TBH.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    As an engineer, I'm glad to see they're being cautious about this launch and opting to abort the test and reschedule rather than risk losing the test article and the opportunity to log and study potential hardware or workmanship defects as they emerge. It beats the hell out of literally picking up the pieces after your experiment undergoes an "unscheduled rapid disassembly". I can only imagine the legendary scale of Artemis 1's DFMEA... "the test article goes cartwheeling off into space in an uncontrolled manner" and "the test article explodes in a massive fireball" are a good deal more exciting (in a bad way) than the usual failure modes.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, it's pretty easy to tell that "The Game" was rescued from the Season 4 rejects bin as makeweight for Season 5. Rewatching Star Trek: the Next Generation without skipping any episodes has really reminded me of just why Star Trek fans loathed Wesley so much when TNG was still airing. The way the crew treats Wesley varies wildly from episode to episode, seemingly based on nothing more than what the writers think would make Wesley look better when he ultimately saves the day. Sometimes the crew dismiss him as an annoying kid who's only ever underfoot. Other times, he's this amazing wunderkind they can't stop gushing about. That the writing goes to such lengths to make Wesley look good without him really doing anything to justify it really makes him come off as a Marty Stu at times. (I'd say "The First Duty" is probably the only actually-good Wesley episode, in no small part because those two approaches to the character finally meet in the middle in a story where Wesley got to be good, but not amazing, and screwed up in a believable way that the crew were subsequently disappointed by for mundane and believable reasons.)
  7. Seto Kaiba
    No, Jeri Taylor and Brannon Braga have both gone on the record to say that it was a jab at how kids were supposedly "addicted" to video games at the time. It originated with writer Fred Bronson's own fondness for playing Tetris to unwind. As Jeri Taylor put it: "Through an evolutionary process – without really intending to ape that movie* – this insidious spread of a game had its origins in kids being addicted to video games now, and what happens to them. That was the original intent and that's what drove the final story and script. That insight followed the development." * meaning Invasion of the Body Snatchers The only episode I recall being an explicit allegory of STDs was in Enterprise, the second season episode "Stigma" that was a really unsubtle allegory for being HIV positive (which was shot all to hell by Pa'nar syndrome later being retconned from an incurable telepathic disease to an easily curable injury caused by untrained telepaths.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Oy. This one. Star Trek's go at "Video games are bad for you"... brought to you by the same Star Trek series that introduced the concept of the holodeck, the ultimate virtual reality game system that the characters use for every imaginable genre of gaming from children's edutainment and fitness/sports all the way up to immersive role-playing, true-to-life combat sims, and even erotic games (thanks Quark). The one thing I really remember from the staff remarks on this one was how upset the production staff were with the VFX for the Ktarian game... they were promised an incredible digital effect, and what they got was "tubas on a checkerboard".
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Even in the Macross setting, the organizational model for units of Variable Fighters isn't even the same between the different branches of the armed forces. In the real world, you'd end up with a hundred subtle variations just based on differences between national navies, air forces, and so on. Not to mention different organization for the different types and mission profiles different models of VF have. The US armed forces, for instance, have aviation arms in each of the five main branches of service, though only three of those five (the Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force) operate fighter aircraft and have their own respective organizational models. Realistically, I doubt Valkyries would find much use in any branch of service in the real world. They're only ubiquitous in the Macross universe because the Zentradi justify having giant robots. Without the overtechnology materials that makes them possible in the story, they would be a maintenance nightmare fit to make the Harrier seem reliable, so costly that nobody would ever field one, and so complex they'd spent far more time on the ground being repaired than in the air. If the overtechnology materials and other technological advancements were in play, they'd be better suited to conventional weapons like tanks, helicopters, and conventional aircraft for warfare against other humans. (That aside, the price tag alone would ensure that Valkyries would never displace conventional tanks. Given what's said about the flyaway cost of a single VF-1A, the Army could field two whole companies of conventional main battle tanks for the cost of a single VF-1.) If we were to ignore the practicality aspects, I'd expect to see them simply replace conventional aircraft in existing Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps organizations... but mainly or only in strike fighter or attacker squadrons where their air-to-ground capabilities and high-caliber machine guns could be leveraged to their best advantage.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Minor, but maybe worth sharing... YouTuber Turbo, a popular-ish channel that does Eurobeat remixes of music, just dropped a Macross Delta song:
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Like a lot of stuff in Delta, that's just copied whole cloth from Frontier. Alto uses that same trick on Brera in the final battle of The Wings of Farewell.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    I guess Hermann and Qasim weren't photogenic enough to appear on this one? Also found these two, fan made posters from Kyle Dunn's fan comic Macross Elysium.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    I found the other one in a pile of old Newtypes while I was unpacking, which is probably why my brain jumped to Newtype. Still, shame on me. 😅 I found a bunch of stuff i'd never even unpacked after the last SD Con I attended... even a Macross Delta wallscroll I don't even remember buying!
  14. Seto Kaiba
    D'oh... I unfolded 'em real quick to snap those pics while I was cleaning and completely missed that "Macross Ace" is literally written right on them. Failed a spot check real hard there. XD
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Got my most recent posters back from the frame shop today. I think they did a pretty good job. Found two more unframed ones while I was unpacking earlier. Old ones from Newtype, IIRC.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Ejection seat failures are pretty upsettingly lethal... what happened to Goose in Top Gun is truth in television.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    So, there are typically a couple different modes of ejection for a Valkyrie... ones using just the ejection seat itself, and one that punches the cockpit block off as a lifeboat of sorts. On the VF-25, the orientation of the cockpit in Battroid mode puts it on the Valkyrie's back with the canopy facing outwards. Battroid mode ejection is not described in detail, but it seems fairly likely that the ejection path is horizontal or a horizontal kick backwards through the ejected canopy and then up using the boosters in the EX-Gear. The Sv-262 has a fairly similar orientation, so its ejection is likely similar. (It's possible this involves explosively separating the plate holding the wings on as well.)
  18. Seto Kaiba
    I don't believe a connection has ever been mentioned there. The Valkyries that HAVE been influenced by the Nousjadeul-Ger are, Variable Glaug excluded, all in the Macross II parellel world timeline.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    We don't know... the only factory satellites under New UN Government control that have been identified, discussed, or visited in-series are the first factory satellite captured (in the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross) that manufactured Regult battle pods and the one described in the Queadluun-Rhea's backstory that was a Queadluun-Rau factory the New UN Government captured and moved to the Eden system in the 2030s. It's a fairly safe bet that the twenty or so factory satellites relocated to the Sol system are a mixed bag of different types. (In Macross II's timeline, Earth had two factory satellites and the other was identified as having manufactured the Nosjadeul-Ger battle suit and been the basis for the improved Valkyries in that setting.) As far as we know, the ones mentioned in that Macross Chronicle sheet were all relocated to the Sol system. They were seized over a six month period starting with the one seen in the series and ending before the launch of the Megaroad-01. The Quimeliquola factory satellite that was captured later was relocated to Eden's orbit. IIRC, Chronicle has a remark about emigrant governments keeping any factory satellites they discover and capture on their voyage.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Unfortunately, Wilford Brimley is no longer with us...
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Didn't Jim Carrey announce his retirement back in April, though? Are they recasting?
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, that would have been nice. I know it wouldn't have been entirely possible, but I'd have jumped at the chance to get a DX Chogokin poster for the YF-25 Prophecy and Chelsea Scarlett. Found a couple more posters while I was unpacking. Gonna have to make another run to the frame shop later. Found a Newtype poster of Alto, Sheryl, and Ranka, and the old Macross Ace one of Hikaru's VF-1J from that manga.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Just dropped these two off to be framed... Looking forward to having those hanging in my new office.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    In Star Trek. One of the few good lines in Lower Decks: "And for your information, many Orions haven't been pirates for over five years!".
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Yup... and then there's the sticky question of whether units stationed on the planet from the regional command or central command answer to the local government partly or at all. Yeah, the factory satellite dock and the two Megaroad-class ships being built there blew up in 2029. But giant revolts like the one that blew up in Macross City in 2030 don't come out of nowhere. That was the single biggest battle Earth had seen in decades, to the point that there were multiple pilots who scored enough to become aces in a single afternoon (or in Timothy Daldhanton, could've qualified as an Ace of Aces in a single afternoon if he wasn't one already.) At the very least, the New UN Government took this as a fair indication that Protoculture ruins contain some stupidly dangerous stuff and adopted more appropriate stances when later examples turned up, like the ones on Uroboros or Windermere IV. The ruins on Uroboros were heavily restricted and eventually guarded by the 815th Independent Squadron from the VF-X Special Forces (though they had an ulterior motive) and they decided to straight up destroy the ones on Uroboros with a dimensional warhead rather than risk them being activated. Considering that most VFs at that point incorporated some Zentradi overtechnology it likely wouldn't have been anything strange for a New UN Forces pilot. General Galaxy's VF designs just incorporated more of it, and more unconventional designs, than the more conservative models by Shinsei Industry that the New UN Forces favored. As to what the Zentradi would do culturally... that would probably be an eclectic mix of whatever aspects of Earth's cultures they absorbed while living on Earth. Several prominent Zentradi leaders, but most notoriously Naresuan in Macross R, were such unapologetic Earth culture otaku that they even adopted human names for themselves. (In a way, it's like that over-the-top patriotism you sometimes see from recent immigrants to the US or the recently-naturalized.) Having seen both, I'm prepared to lump them under "acceptable losses". Though some supplementary materia like Master File has alleged that there was a massive cultural recovery program instituted after the First Space War with dedicated teams of researchers and preservationists scouring the ruins of military bases, cities, and so on for any surviving cultural artifacts. (This was, in the VF-0 Master File, how they recovered a number of damaged but mostly-intact VF-0 airframes that would be painstakingly restored in the in-book story about the Phoenix's reconstruction.) Engineers being naturally inclined to nerdery, it's only natural that engineers armed with spacefuture technology would start replicating gadgets from their favorite sci-fi. (Robots being an easy one, with population centers using robots for things as mundane as vending machines, litter-picking, and public phones even during the First Space War...)
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