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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    As a completionist for several other franchises, I can certainly understand why a completionist might want the Visual Archive book. For a less determined collector, I don't think it's quite worth the asking price based on the quality and availability of the same material in official Japanese artbooks. From my review of the Visual Archive books, there is a fair bit of art from the Imai Files in the MOSPEADA one that is not in the official artbooks... but, again, if you've downloaded the Imai Files you've already seen everything the Visual Archive has to show you. It'd probably have been better if they'd just published the Imai Files as-is. It was pretty disappointing (to me, at least) that they really did a terrible job framing some of that material in its historical context or didn't even make the attempt (esp. in the Southern Cross book). I'm fairly certain the art you're referring to WRT Armor Bike riding poses and indicators of what angles would cause the rider to be thrown or fall is in both of the books I mentioned.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... the only one of the three that's really worth getting is the Southern Cross one, if only because the only other Southern Cross artbook is even more embarrassingly bad and only really worth buying for the staff interviews. There's not really any point in getting the Robotech Visual Archive book if you've already got a copy of the Entertainment Archive MOSPEADA: Complete Art Works or Genesis Climber MOSPEADA File books and have downloaded the Imai Files at any point. Text-wise, you're basically just buying a printout of the "New Generation" section of Harmony Gold's website padded with a lot of little thumbnail-quality screenshots. (Consequently, because the info is mainly sourced from the old RT Infopedia, most of the info is just wrong.)
  3. Seto Kaiba
    I'm still doing some research on the topic... the aces-with-custom-paint-schemes thing was a very real thing in the Imperial German Army's Flying Corps. That much is pretty well-precedented. Having trouble finding examples of mixed-composition squadrons though.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    I mean, there is that... but that connection gets drawn more to Milia than anything, since her signature color is red and she's the enemy "one man army" top ace. There's no real world precedent I can find or recall for squadron leaders to be issued different variants of the squadron's aircraft with higher performance.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Love it! I motion to rename the Bioroid the MS-06WPP Witness Protection Program Zaku. Maybe their real origin is from all those Space Nazis who moved to Space Argentina and assumed new identities to avoid prosecution for Space War Crimes. Might be time to make an appointment with your ophthalmologist, then... because I'm pretty sure the rest of us can see it. Hell, it's not just the outward appearance. They outright used the Zaku's sound effects in their first appearance complete with iconic "glowing eye". Their color schemes related to role match too. You've got the Standard Model (the MS-06F Zaku II) and Early Type I Bioroid) in green, the improved performance model often used by unit leaders (the MS-07B Gouf and Early Type II Bioroid) in blue, and the super-tuned ace custom several times faster than the normal model that's used by the mysterious male antagonist who is a foil to the main character (the MS-06S Zaku II Command "Char Custom" and Early Type II Custom "Seifreit Weiss special"). Later types clearly ape the design of the MS-09 Dom and other Zeon mobile suits. It's stupid levels of obvious that Ammonite was ripping of Gundam, Macross, and Yamato when they were making Southern Cross.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    That's not real world, though.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Got caught up on My Next Life as a Villainess... and I'm really beginning to suspect that the series has run out of ideas. At this point, the series is literally on its THIRD back-to-back kidnapping-with-lethal-intent-via-dark-magic. It's like that's the only way the original author could add drama. Maybe by the end, everyone'll have been kidnapped and tortured with dark magic at least once. The kidnapper is always forgiven in the end too, which takes all the sting out of it. Sirius and his suspiciously similar stand-in Sora both got jobs as a direct consequence of their dark magic kidnappings. Odds are creepy girl is gonna land a government job because of this too. What little relationship drama the series had built up with Caterina finally realizing her fiance is actually serious about marrying her is obliterated within an episode or two when she's preoccupied by her adoptive brother going missing. Welcome to Demon School, Iruma-kun! has kind of petered out as well. There's some going-nowhere shipping between Iruma and his two principal love interests but it's absolutely not going anywhere because Iruma is a pathological nice guy and immune to innuendo. Couldn't get into Watamote... it's just... TOO cringe.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. It's an old comedy that's got a little bit of everything. It's got high comedy, it's got pratfalls and dirty jokes and buffoonery. It's got some bawdy bits. It's got some action and a nicely choreographed classic chase scene. Some memorable songs. Some great performances by actors like Zero Mostel, Phil Silvers, Buster Keaton, and Michael Crawford. Like the overture claims, it's got Something for everyone! A comedy, tonight!.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Funimation's improved quality of service continues to impress... though now that I'm not constantly frustrated by the poor quality of their streams I'm noticing all the other problems in their workmanship. There are translation errors all over their subtitles for Hellsing Ultimate. New releases have been pretty disappointing this season. Welcome to Demon School, Irumi-kun! has been pretty mediocre now that it's burned through the limited appeal of its fish-out-of-water "I hope nobody learns the secret that'll get me killed on sight" story line and started moving in the direction of becoming a standard shonen series similar to what happened in Rosario to Vampire. My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom! has lost a lot of its appeal too, since the first story arc was almost a rote repeat of the final story arc of the previous season and its lack of any real compelling story arc once its oblivious protagonist no longer had foreknowledge of her fate occupying her mind kind of leaves it in awkward reverse harem territory for the rest of its run without anything interesting to bring to the table.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    So, Funimation pushed an update to its mobile apps and smart TV apps today that actually goes most of the way towards fixing their previously trash-tier app performance and service quality. I am legitimately impressed by the improvement. Since Hellsing Ultimate has been on my to-rewatch list for a while now and I can't bring myself to start Phantasy Star Online 2: Episode Oracle, I'm giving Hellsing Ultimate a whirl as my benchmarking of the new app. In a rare moment of utterly unqualified positivity, the new app is performing splendidly on my QLED set and the quality is virtually indistinguishable from physical media. Just buttery smooth, once it got past the initial second or two of optimization. It is slightly irritating that Funimation's subtitles went with "Arucard" instead of "Alucard" like anyone with a goddamn brain would have... but hey.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    This is true, though there was some variance in the design concept. Some command tanks like the Russian T-54K and (Nazi) German Sd.Kfz 267/268 Tiger II sacrificed some of their magazine capacity for additional radio equipment but were otherwise no different from the standard models. Others, like the (fascist) Italian M42 and British Valentine OP, sacrificed their main weaponry to become dedicated command and control vehicles.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    It was pretty good... not great, IMO, but definitely better than a fair amount of the other stuff I've watched recently. It isn't... Mangaka-san to Assistant-san to occasionally - and not unjustifiably, IMO - gets dragged by a fair portion of its viewers because a lot of its comedy comes from its protagonist unthinkingly sexually harassing his assistant(s) and suffering violent retribution for it. (He's a massive pervert with a panty shot fetish who is so oblivious that he never seems to notice the things he's saying are INCREDIBLY creepy and offensive to the women he works with, until he's facing the threat of imminent violence.)
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Offhand, I am not aware of anything I could point to as a firm example of an aircraft squadron leader being issued a higher-performance aircraft as a matter of regulation or protocol the way Macross depicts. Military aviation's formative years in World War I did see a number of cases of squadrons composed of a number of different models or variants of aircraft, most infamously ace of aces Baron Manfred von Richthofen's "Flying Circus". That was more a consequence of the rapid pace of aircraft design development and refinement based on feedback and the preference of the experienced pilots of the era leading directly to the rapid release of iterative improvements. The Baron von Richthofen is probably the origin of the trope, since despite his fame largely tying him to his Focker Dr.I triplane he actually frequently switched aircraft based on availability as new models were introduced and/or his current aircraft's maintenance needs. (He's also the origin of the whole "ace pilot color scheme" schtick, thanks to a decision to paint his Albatros D.III bright red.) I think, all told, the closest you'll get is probably the US Army Air Force's "Flying Tigers" (1AVG) in China during World War II... everyone was flying some extensively modified Curtiss P-40's B, C, and E variants. Mind you, it's worth noting this action figure-friendly choice is the exception rather than the rule in the New UN Forces. Most main variable fighter models are "one variant fits all" types like the VF-4, VF-11, VF-171, and VF-31.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    *coughs diffidently* HG seems to have sorted out the legal issues from their licensing intermediary going belly-up... so Robotech, at the very least, is now showing up in Funimation's streaming catalog. If HG is assisting with distribution of Macross titles stateside, that means Funimation is a likely port of call too.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Pretty sure OP was serious... but yeah, everyone else appropriately saw this as an appalling joke. 😅
  16. Seto Kaiba
    lil bit, yeah.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    After the events of Macross VF-X2 - which have since become referred to as the Second Unification War - the victorious pro-autonomy faction's reforms to the organization of the New UN Government and New UN Forces granted the individual member governments more autonomy to manage their own affairs. There was also a general housecleaning to remove the members of the fascist movement that attempted to overthrow the government by force. Part of that was creating an oversight bureau that was tasked with policing the special forces to prevent the military brass from abusing their authority to suppress political dissent, in direct response to them having done exactly that in the Second Unification War by branding a variety of anti-fascist movements as terrorists or rebels and ordering the special forces in to suppress them. (Whether or not the special forces have a heel realization and join with the largest of those anti-fascist organizations is the difference between the good end and bad end in the game.) The newly formed oversight bureau was named for the leader of the Vindirance paramilitary organization that successfully prevented the coup, Mariafokina Barnrose. (Whom Macross Chronicle claims is possibly Therese Jenius operating under a paper-thin alias using her middle name and an assumed family name.)
  18. Seto Kaiba
    So... yes and no? Earth is the de facto capital of the New UN Government, but it's also an individual member government that apparently has its own local defense force operating under the banner of the New UN Forces in addition to the central/"federal" New UN Forces that answer to the supranational New UN Government directly. In theory, the local-level governments and their defense forces are semi-autonomous in a lot of ways but are also answerable to the supranational government and the authority of its armed forces respectively where laws and circumstances demand. You can kind of think of the local forces as being a bit like the national guard in that sense, able to fight independently or as a reserve element for the central forces. There is a special oversight agency specifically tasked with preventing abuse of authority by the military brass on Earth too (the Barnrose Authority).
  19. Seto Kaiba
    The backlog marathon has no brakes... I finished the entirety of The Irregular at Magic High School. Kind of an anemic series on the whole, since Tatsuya has the emotional range of a not-particularly-fresh cucumber and would otherwise fall into the category of "smug super" if he was capable of expressing emotion at all. There's some good worldbuilding going on there but it suffers terribly from the cold indifference of its main character and how quickly everyone accepts that this supposedly-substandard magician from an unknown family is an utterly unstoppable godmode sue who defies all logic, reason, and the rules of magic as they understand them. I question the sanity of Funimation's viewing recommendations too, since the site tried to fob me off with a short ONA called Bikini Warriors. It's... not quite what I expected, in that it's a parody of the kind of gratuitously exploitative crap that the title would make you think it was. It's still pretty skeevy tho. At five minutes a pop including credits the entire series lasts maybe an hour and offers a few cheap D&D-style murderhobo laughs and some forgettably gratuitous fanservice. I've started The Devil is a Part-Timer!, and it's also wildly different from what I expected. I was given to understand this series was a comedy. It's veering more and more towards the territory of action drama and has a lot more substance to it than I was prepared for. I can't but feel like this has almost the same premise as I Couldn't Become a Hero, So I Reluctantly Decided to Get a Job!.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    I'd always assumed it was because she couldn't think of a way to make it look like an accident. It's probably also a way of clawing back some money from the bootleg uploads too... if there's an official channel airing a rotating catalog of the genuine article for free, they can steal views from the bootlegs AND rake in some ad dollars while they're at it, and whatever its faults YouTube is a pretty widely used streaming service. I just wish Big West would put a little more effort in. These videos from their Macross mobile game aren't exactly great-looking or representative of the actual content of the franchise.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Avoiding spoilers for a twenty-seven year old OVA they're planning to re-release to a much wider audience in the near future? Mind you, they're also ignoring that Mikumo is Lady M's walking, talking, human rights violation... a three year old illegal clone created and brainwashed to fight by her "mother", kept as a virtual slave, and given only the bare minimum education and social interaction. Or that Mylene is frequently less interested in dancing around Basara during concerts than she is in entertaining the innocent fantasy of garroting him with his own guitar strings for being a pillock. Minimum-effort promotional material while their efforts are focused elsewhere. I'd assume eventually, once their distribution agreements are in order, we'll start seeing proper Macross promotional materials or whole episodes appearing on the official channel like Gundam's official rest-of-world YouTube channel does.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    IIRC, Lt. General Kabirov isn't the Chief of Staff of the Space Forces... she's the commander of the Earth defense fleet and its flagship, Macross-13.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    At what level? The Earth UN Forces and New UN Forces organization is, by all indications, based on the organization of the US military and Japan's SDF and we can make some basic inferences from that and from information presented in the series and supplemental material. Based on that, there are probably several different individuals at different levels of organization that you could point to as the "head honcho" depending on how technical or granular you want to get. At the very apex of the chain of command would be the Prime Minister of the New Unification Government who also serves as commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Below the Prime Minister, the cabinet's Minister of Defense overseeing the Ministry of Defense. Below the Minister of Defense, the Chief of Staff of the Joint Staff. Below the Chief of Staff of the Joint Staff, the Chief of Staff of the Space Forces. Based on Macross Frontier's Leon Mishima and Macross Delta's Lauri Malan, individual emigrant governments also appear to have their own local Joint Staff offices overseeing the local defense forces which presumably have their own local chiefs of staff for the various branches of service. So in any given location there are probably at least or seven different people with a fair claim to being "head honcho" of the NUNS depending on what level of organization you're talking about. Very little has been said about the individuals who actually hold such high offices in official Macross material, though. The only person ever explicitly identified as the commander specifically of the space forces is Vrlithwhai Kridanik, who assumed the post after the First Space War ended. We don't know how long he occupied the position, who his predecessors were, etc. General Takashi Hayase may have been one of them. Two Prime Ministers have been named, but they're both prewar old UN Government ones: the inaugural PM Harlan J. Niven and his successor Robert A. Rhysling. The military named the first and fourteenth ARMD-class ships after them (respectively). We know Bruno J. Global joined the New UN Government after retiring from the military post-war, and he may have served as term or more as the Prime Minister given that they apparently named a Uraga-class carrier after him (CV-339 Bruno J. Global) in addition to the Macross-class battleship that they'd already named after him in his military capacity (SDFN-04 General Bruno J. Global). There may be another in Macross M3, by the name of Lawrence Yun Kamal.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Both Stealth Wing X designs there are presented with an (unofficial) in-universe setting of them being stealth technology evaluation airframes that were prototyping a passive stealth VF that would operate in tandem with the passive stealth-focused VF-17 Nightmare. Presumably the Stealth Wing X would be an unrealized 3rd Generation VF since the subject of the passively (and actively) stealthy Next Main Fighter was resolved some time after the VF-17's introduction in the form of Project Super Nova (Macross Plus). Real world influences aside, the unofficial setting for the Stealth Wing X designs seems to exist in that weird developmental moment that spawned the VF-17, where radar systems had caught up to the 2nd Generation active stealth systems in use at the time and it was necessary to have greater emphasis on passive stealth technology. 3rd Generation active stealth's introduction tipped the scales back into active stealth's favor, somewhere around the time the VF-19 2nd mass production type rolled out, reducing the need for internal storage of a VF's weaponry. (3rd Gen active stealth is why we see the VF-171 and VF-25 having gone back to hanging large numbers of missiles and other hardware from the wings, though some sources e.g. Master File assert that the 5th Gen VFs also included new passive stealth design choices meant to foil fold wave radars incl. fold wave-absorbent materials.)
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Back when Macross Zero was in production, Kawamori answered basically this exact question in a column he wrote for Character Model magazine. For that column, he put forward two different designs that were his modern takes on the VF-1 Valkyrie: the SW-XA1 Schneeblume and SW-XAII Schneegans: As you can see, the SW-XA1 isn't much different to the VF-1 Valkyrie we're familiar with from the 1980's. It was nearly the same aircraft, though you can see a number of areas of its design changed to accommodate passively stealthy design changes and other more modern touches. You can't see it on this particular spread, but one of the touches was having a pair of internal missile bays in the outside of the leg in place of underwing pylons. The SW-XAII is a more radical design that is more reminiscent of Kawamori's later designs for the VF-25, VF-27, and especially YF-29. (There are hints that this is not an accidental relationship, including a YF-29 in the Schneegans's white-and-green colors on page 27 of Variable Fighter Master File: VF-25 Messiah.)
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