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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    It's possible, I suppose. There's been at least one previous model that's had the cockpit in the head itself... the VA-3 Invader. That'd be kinda boring, IMO... the enemy being a drone fighter in Macross Plus only worked because there was an insane AI directly controlling it. Dogfighting against a robot is so impersonal. It does a bit, which would play with the VF-4 resemblance since the Variable Glaug was developed from a stolen VF-4.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Put together a quick analysis of the design in the Mecha Discussion thread for the curious:
  3. Seto Kaiba
    So, first thoughts... As with the initial promotional art from last year, this new Valkyrie's design fairly screams that it's a General Galaxy product... and likely from the SV Works design team. One of the bigger giveaways in that respect is that its Battroid mode has the prominent "conehead" configuration common to almost all of General Galaxy's major VF projects. The 2nd Generation VF-9 Cutlass, the 3rd Generation VF-14 Vampire and VA-14, and the 4th Generation VF-22 Sturmvogel II all have it. It's also something that was present in the work of General Galaxy cofounder Alexei Kurakin before the company's founding (the SV-51 and VF-4 Lightning III) and in the works of the design team he established at General Galaxy to pursue his vision of anti-VF VFs (the Sv-154 Svard and Sv-262 Draken III). Only the VF-17 Nightmare and VF-171 Nightmare Plus really buck that trend, and they were GG's least radical VF designs. (The VF-27 was developed by a subsidiary, Macross Galaxy, based on rival Shinsei Industry's YF-24 Evolution, and so doesn't conform to this norm either.) The actual design is strongly reminiscent of the VF-4 and VF-14. The monitor turret appears to be stowed near the rear of the aircraft in Fighter mode similar to the VF-4, whereas on the VF-14 it was on the underside of the nosecone. The big monoeye design of the monitor turret is strongly reminiscent of the SV-51's, as is the apparent slenderness of the limbs we can see in the second image. The forward fuselage structure in Fighter mode is reminiscent of both the YF-27-5 Shahar Female type and the VF-14. It's difficult to make out on the original image, but in @no3Ljm's brightened pics we can see something that looks like a gun port immediately adjacent to the canopy similar to the main fighter-mode guns on the VF-17 Nightmare and VF-171 Nightmare Plus. There are two areas on the nacelle closest to the viewer that have surface detail that appears to be the mostly-standard stretched hexagonal shape used for internal micro-missile launcher firing ports. You can see one very clearly on the outboard side of the port nacelle right near the leading edge and there looks to be another right near the border of light and shadow smack in the middle of the nacelle. I don't see an obvious rear-facing gun despite that having been a standard feature for quite some time. That doesn't mean one isn't there though, it may be a pop-up type or just a gunport we can't see. The base of the engine nozzle is sporting something that's either a thrust reverser collar similar to the ones on the VF-27, VF-27, YF-30, and VF-31 or a vernier ring similar to what General Galaxy pioneered on the VF-14 and carried over to the VF-17 and VF-171. Given the structural similarities to the VF-4 and VF-14, I am inclined to suspect it's actually the vernier ring, esp. since those VFs it's most similar to were also VFs intended primarily for use in space combat. Instead of a canopy, it appears to have a cluster of polarized sensor covers similar to the VF-27 or Sv-262 but much larger for some reason. I suspect this is still a manned VF, but similar to the VF-27 or Sv-262 they've traded away the visibility of a canopy for the greater survivability of an electable energy conversion armor canopy cover and full 360 degree wraparound monitors.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    So, courtesy of @Tochiro on Twitter, we have our first real look at the new Valkyrie for Macross Delta: Absolute Live!!!!!!. @no3Ljm did a bit of color-tweaking on the image to make some of the surface detail more visible: The original promotional piece from last year, for reference:
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Who'd have thought rewriting Star Trek: Discovery into a Bad Future where interstellar travel is all but nonexistent would make it difficult to hide the painfully underdeveloped characters behind exciting space action? Especially when the entire Bad Future hinges on a plot hole so large it was literally an interstellar empire for centuries.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Haruhiko Mikimoto Forever, coming "When it's done".
  7. Seto Kaiba
    To answer the question with some helpful context and without the ridiculous faux-academic posturing... In DYRL?, Minmay had already had her big break and become a famous idol singer before she ever met Hikaru. The reason that Hikaru drops, and then unknowingly treads on and breaks, the flashlight from his VF's emergency kit is that he's stunned rigid by the revelation that the girl he'd just rescued was the Lynn Minmay. He is, as he confesses to her a minute or so later, a huge fan of hers. So much so that he develops a nervous stutter when she talks to him directly. Minmay's status as an idol is something that doesn't translate well for western audiences. Western celebrities might end up on a pedestal as a result of their fame as a singer, an actor, an athlete, or what have you... but for idols, be they Japanese, Chinese, Taiwanese, or Korean, being put on a pedestal is what makes them famous and their career is mainly devoted to staying up there. Idols are celebrities who trade on their image, their physical attractiveness, and their personality more than anything else. Their careers are built on a dedicated, some might say slightly cult-like, fan following to whom they market escapist entertainment. An idol is marketed as a kind of ideal person, someone who is accessible in the sense that you can find them on TV or even shake their hand at an event, but also unattainable. They sell a fantasy of fame and success and themselves as the perfect girl (or boy) that any fan would want as their significant other. Their job is, essentially, to maintain a fan following that worships them from afar. Hikaru is a self-confessed big fan of Minmay's. He's stunned and nervous to even be in her presence because he's essentially looking at his unattainable ideal girl in the flesh.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Unfortunately, the new paradigm for TV shows these days that emphasizes visual quality over all else means that they just don't have enough time to spread these things out... the season's fourteen episodes tops, instead of the more comfortable thirty-plus. An optimist might look at it as the sudden reappearance of someone who's paying more than lip service to Federation ideals reminding these folks of how it used to be in the good old days and prompting them to return to a more idealistic mindset themselves. Eh... past performance being a pretty reliable indicator of future results in most cases, I'd be prepared to bet a nontrivial sum that the crew working under Kurtzman and co. simply didn't think that far ahead. As indicated at length in one of my previous posts, we KNOW they didn't think that far ahead when it comes to "the burn" and warp drive technology. Dilithium's only necessary for warp drive if the reactor powering your warp drive is a matter/antimatter reactor. The Romulan Star Empire's entire fleet had gone to quantum singularity-based warp cores in the 2360s and beyond, and if you want to take unproduced plots from Enterprise's fifth season at face value the Romulans may have been using variants of that technology since the Earth-Romulan War in the late 2150s. The Federation absolutely knew how that technology worked by the 2370s, with Starfleet crews assisting in repairs to Romulan ships on at least a few occasions in TNG. Even if they were entirely dependent on conventional warp drive, "the burn" should have been no more than a mild inconvenience once you got past the initial loss of life. (That's not even getting into why the faster, more energy-efficient, and all-around superior quantum slipstream technology Voyager brought back with it from their time in the Delta quadrant ought to have supplanted it entirely centuries ago... or all the other alternative propulsion and energy generation technologies that we know exist in the time between 2257 and 3189.) TBH, that Discovery survived even one quantum torpedo strike is kind of unbelievable. She's a ship of the 2250s, and quantum torpedos would've been a one-hit kill on most ships of the 2370s.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Yes, and Macross Chronicle indicates those are "Unmanned Stealth Submarines that are owned by the Critical Path Corporation [...]". (Ref. Macross Chronicle Mechanic Sheet Other 7A) Which doesn't actually contradict my point, as we have another very prominent "evolved Zentradi design" that is explicitly a product of the General Galaxy corporation: the Queadluun-Rhea battle suit used by the New UN Spacy Marine Corps and SMS. Incidentally, we now have a third conflict WRT the Annabella Lasiodora mobile weapon. Macross Chronicle described it as having been manufactured by the Critical Path corporation (Mechanic Sheet Other 06A). Though I suppose we could not rule out that it was developed by General Galaxy and manufactured under license by Critical Path, or codeveloped by the two. Is it? All but one of the references I can find in Macross Chronicle just call it 民間企業 - "private enterprise" or "private sector company". It's described as manufacturer of the Annabella Lasiodora and developer of the Jamming Sound System in Macross Chronicle, which wouldn't be consistent with the company being a PMC. (It's possible that, like Bilra Transport and Xaos, the Critical Path Corporation simply owns and operates its own PMC division.) I wonder if they meant to write 民間の軍需産業 instead of 民間の軍事会社? Apart from the short story "Wired Warrior", the Macross Frontier TV and Movie novelizations also draw that connection. Two separate instances of Manfred Brando are connected to General Galaxy and the Macross Galaxy fleet in the novels, with a pre-death Manfred Brando having been involved in the 117th Research Fleet and investigation into its loss and post-death a copy of his consciousness is among the "cyber nobles" who run the Macross Galaxy fleet. Yes, I know... it is operated by the majority-Zentradi anti-Latence paramilitary/terrorist group Black Rainbow. At the very least, we know that the Pheyos Valkyrie was a semi-original development made by dissident Zentradi from stolen New UN Gov't military technology (like its predecessor, the Variable Glaug). Exactly who manufactures it is unclear. It may be an under-the-table product of General Galaxy or Critical Path, who do appear to be guilty of doing the Anaheim Electronics thing and selling to both the government and anti-government forces. (It's worth noting the reproduction Variable Glaug and its later derivatives were General Galaxy products too.)
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Ah, interesting. Thanks for your work in sourcing that.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    When it comes to the Annabella Lasiodora, either interpretation of its provenance would rule it out as a specifically-Zentradi mobile weapon IMO. Either it was developed by Critical Path corp. - an Earth-based defense contractor with close ties to General Galaxy and one of the backers of Latence - or it was developed by the Earth branch of General Galaxy and operated by agents of the Critical Path corp. as part of their collusion with Latence. The way the Gjagravan Va is written up suggests the latter case, since Black Rainbow were the operators of that weapon and its developer was unknown in-game. (They were a majority, but not exclusively, Zentradi paramilitary group.) "Mobile Weapon" or "Walking Weapon" might've been used in their cases since they're not easily pigeonholed into the existing categories of "Destroid", "Valkyrie", or "Warship" due to their unconventional forms and size. The Annabella Lasiodora was a lot bigger than the average VF and its six-legged pseudo-warship configuration makes it hard to classify, and the Gjagravan Va had a similar problem as a four-legged walking tank several times the size of a VF. There may be a design lineage of sorts between those weapons and the Zentradi mecha, given that General Galaxy is noted to have strong Zentradi influences in its designs due to the influence of prominent Zentradi engineers like Algus Selzaa. The Gjagravan Va's design recalls the structure and movements of a water strider. Destroids are mainly designed for surface operation, so they wouldn't need better radiation shielding than a VF's. It'd have to be some insanely high winds to make flying impossible for a VF, to an extent that buildings wouldn't remain standing and Destroids would be blown over.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    The Macross Frontier short story "Wired Warrior" by Ukyo Kodachi has this as a General Galaxy (Earth branch) development, not a Zentradi mobile weapon.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    This is headed more towards the territory of the Super Macross Mecha Fun Time Discussion Thread, but it'd be nigh-impossible for environmental conditions to make it impossible for a VF to fly and still be survivable for a Destroid or living beings in general given that VFs are designed to handle the stresses of high-hypersonic flight, pulling dozens of G's in maneuvering or just straightline acceleration, and so on. Destroids use the same power generation technology that VFs do, so anything that would disable the compact thermonuclear reactors of a VF would also render Destroids inoperable. The only exceptions would be the early models from the Unification Wars that were powered by gas turbine combustion engines, fuel cell stacks, or diesel generators like the ADR-03-Mk.III Cheyenne and Octos. Those require atmospheric oxygen or stored oxygen in tanks to operate. While some of the initial-type Destroids of the First Space War were more heavily armored than the VF-1 Valkyrie, they're not really able to call themselves heavily armored anymore due to improvements in the composite materials and the energy conversion armor used by VFs. They just don't have the generator output to run the powerful energy conversion armor used by VFs so they have to make do with heavier composite plating. Improvements in VF armament arguably also stole the Destroids role of being more heavily armed too. The only mobile weapon that really outclasses VFs in armor and armament anymore is the General Galaxy large-scale urban mobile weapon Annabella Lasiodora, though even one of those occupying Ceres Base was destroyed by the VF-X Ravens in 2051.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Well, it's not like it wasn't tried. In Macross VF-X2, the anti-Latence paramilitary group Black Rainbow possessed a mobile land weapon called the Gjagravan Va that was deployed during their occupation of Hyde City on Sephira in November 2050. The Gjagravan Va was arguably a next-gen Destroid, though the term is never used in connection with it and its design is a four-legged "walking tank" sort of affair that maneuvers like a water strider. Despite being heavily armed with a converging beam cannon turret, a gatling plasma blaster, a laser vulcan, and a battery of high-maneuverability missiles, it was nevertheless destroyed on 14 November 2050 by the VF-X Ravens during their operation codenamed "Singin in the Rain". Even a more mobile, next-generation land weapon like the Gjagravan Va just couldn't compete with the greater mobility and tactical flexibility of then-current generation special forces VFs like the VF-17 Nightmare... never mind next-gen offerings like the VF-19 or VF-22.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Unfortunately, they were designed for land warfare based on the incorrect assumption that a space war would work similarly to a modern war with the focus being on capturing and controlling territory. The Earth UN Forces prepared the planet to resist an alien invasion. What they ended up fighting (and losing to) was an alien clone army that was only interested in the complete extermination rather than territorial matters. Surface-based Destroids were wiped out without ever firing a shot in anger, and the space-based ones found themselves in an extremely narrow niche on the largest of warships as a supplement to existing anti-aircraft defenses. They were able to maintain a niche in Macross II because of how large the UN Forces space warships were, but on the smaller warships of the main Macross continuity they fell victim to cost reduction and were replaced by more cost-effective stationary anti-aircraft gun emplacements and missile launchers before being surplussed out to be converted into heavy construction machinery.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... it wasn't that united. The fledgling Earth Unification Government was, at least on paper, sharing all advances made through overtechnology equally with the assistance of the international overtechnology research institute OTEC. It did lean rather heavily into exploiting the natural highly competitive nature of capitalist industry to produce innovative solutions from OTEC's findings and theories. That led to some unconventional expressions of that competitiveness like developers selling advanced weapons to the Anti-Unification Alliance forces in order to gather more data on practical performance in real combat conditions, out of genuine support for their cause, or because the UN Forces passed on their product in favor of a different solution.
  17. Seto Kaiba
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Not really, no. Your first sentence is complete nonsense. Your second is dead-on how the ancient [alien/astronaut] hypothesis is actually applied in the faux-scholarly works of those who push that particular pile of preposterous pseudoscientific piffle. The usual presentation of the ancient [alien/astronaut] hypothesis is in the form that "primitive" culture X must have received extraterrestrial assistance to accomplish their <great cultural achievement> as the alternative would be that they actually knew more about <subject matter> than their white contemporaries of European descent. The whole theory is rooted in racism and cultural imperialism, as it functions to reinforce the idea that western European culture is inherently superior by diminishing or dismissing the achievements made by nonwhite, non-European cultures as a product of external assistance from a more advanced alien society. That's one reason among many to be glad Macross doesn't truly entertain any aspect of the ancient [alien/astronaut] hypothesis. Instead, it goes in for something that could be better described as a laser-guided take on directed panspermia broadly similar to what was referenced in the Star Trek: the Next Generation episode "The Chase" or the 1930 Olaf Stapledon science fiction novel Last and First Men. It'd be helpful if he knew anything about any of the subjects he insists on discussing, really.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Not in Macross, anyway. In Macross, the ancient Protoculture had no real involvement in humanity's development outside of having used their genetic engineering technology to instigate the evolution of anatomically modern humans. Their records of Earth and the local species that they'd reengineered there were lost when the survey ship that'd discovered Earth was destroyed while en route back to its home port. The Protoculture never came back to interfere in the natural development of human cultures, religions, societies, science, or technology the way that the various incarnations of the ancient aliens/astronauts hypothesis posit. Everything humanity achieved (or didn't) was entirely on its own merits (or failings) for the next half-million years until the Supervision Army accidentally gave modern humanity a thousand year-plus technological jumpstart when one of their abandoned gun destroyers crashed on Earth. The pseudoscientific ancient aliens/astronauts hypothesis involves more direct interference in the course of human affairs like: Anatomically modern humans supposedly being a hybrid species created by interbreeding between aliens and late pre-human homonids Various religions and myths being mythologizations of historical contact between humans and extraterrestrials "Primitive" societies with comparatively advanced scientific knowledge (e.g. Mayan or Celtic astronomy) being knowledge acquired from extraterrestrials instead of from centuries or millennia of observation and recordkeeping.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Four episodes in, and Iwakakeru - Sport Climbing Girls still has a painfully threadbare plot.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Giving Iwakakeru - Sport Climbing Girls a whirl... the poster makes it look like it'll be skeevy fanservice, but the possibilities inherent in a sports anime that's so radically outside the norm has me genuinely curious. I wonder if this was inspired by climbing being introduced as an Olympic sport for the first time (planned) in the 2021 Olympic games. The story has a definite "barely there, hitting just the obligatory plot beats for a sports anime" sort of feel. I was worried it'd be an excuse plot to justify a lot of fanservice... and I feel like that was right for the wrong reason. Instead of an anime where high school girls are forced into compromising poses and make vaguely sexual noises it's more like technique porn for rock climbing enthusiasts. So far, nothing to really grab the audience's attention unless they're hardcore into rock climbing.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, but even they mainly marketed it mostly as a glorified DVD extra feature... entertainingly as "new" and "never before seen" for something that'd been fansubbed on YouTube for like fifteen years by that point.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    That girl needs to be written out of the goddamn show. Her existence is something I can't understand. CBS had literal decades of audience feedback from previous Star Trek shows that should have left no room for doubt that this kind of character is cancer as far as the audience is concerned. Tilly manages to seamlessly combine the wide-eyed chirpy naivete of Kes, the total lack of growth and overwhelming whininess of Harry Kim, and the near-total social obliviousness of Neelix. That's the worst traits of three different characters Voyager's showrunners attempted to write out of the series with varying degrees of success.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    So was the tax avoidance scheme that Frank Agrama got convicted of... selling the rights to shows to shell companies he and his partners owned in tax havens at a huge markup, writing it off as a loss, and pocketing the proceeds. Eh... almost nobody really counts that as a new production, because all they really did was dub over the original MOSPEADA: Love Live Alive with a minute or two of new animation and then market it as a glorified extra features disc with a re-release of Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles. At this juncture, I'd like to point out that MOSPEADA: Love Live Alive predates Macross: Flash Back 2012 by two years. Love Live Alive came out in 1985. Flash Back 2012 came out in 1987. So it's not that Love Live Alive wants to be Flash Back 2012... Flash Back 2012 was Love Live Alive: but Better.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    We'll see if they can keep it up... Star Trek: Discovery's production crew ran into a lot of trouble with Netflix in the previous two seasons because Kurtzman doesn't know what "fiscal restraint" means. The previous two seasons both went way over budget because of his spendthrift attitude towards production management and all the reshoots they needed, and that led to the budget being slashed by Netflix. Easier, for sure... but it'd undermine one of the few things about Discovery that's keeping at least some die-hard Star Trek fans paying for CBS All Access. Namely, that Discovery is (on paper) a part of the "prime" universe that all of the pre-Abrams Star Trek shows and movies belong to. Kurtzman's Star Trek has enough trouble getting fans to watch it as it is even with the borrowed goodwill of the prime timeline. Take that away from it, and viewership will just drop further because it won't even technically be real Star Trek anymore. (Even now, a lot of fans refuse to watch Discovery because they insist it's part of the Kelvin timeline based on its tone and aesthetic choices.) Dialog with Tilly? HARD PASS.
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