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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    A bit, yes... one has to wonder if he's having a case of "that sounded cooler in my head" when it came to the direction Star Trek: Picard ultimately took. Alternatively, maybe there's some truth to the rumor that Star Trek: Picard's first season was supposed to end with Jean-Luc Picard dying and subsequently carry on without him and it fell victim to the panicky course-corrections that beset much of the season's second half. Neither of those things is all that odd in the broader context of the clusterf*ck Secret Hideout has turned Star Trek into. CBS put a lot of its eggs in the Star Trek: Discovery basket when they sank ~$250 million into its development and made it the flagship of their unasked-for streaming service. They're not going to let Discovery die until it's either made back that investment - which ain't happening with the show's near-total lack of merchandising support - or Netflix calls CBS's bluff and makes the show's third budget cut a total one. CBS's finances are in the toilet in the wake of their re-merger with Viacom. They literally can't afford to post a $200 million loss on what was supposed to be a sure thing. The shareholders will eat them alive if they do. (One has to wonder how much truth there is in the claims from inside CBS that part of Picard's budget was redirected to Discovery's third season after Netflix slashed Discovery's budget for the second time.) Strange New Worlds might have been pitched as a Star Trek: Discovery spinoff... but what it is is damage control. It's the concept of a bottle episode taken to its logical extreme. An entire series of bottle episodes made with the already developed and paid-for art assets, sets, props, costumes, and effects developed at great expense for the unsuccessful Star Trek: Discovery series. The goal is obvious: create a new Star Trek series that fans might actually watch without spending any more money on development, so that any profit made from it repays the massive investment CBS made in developing Discovery. Mind you, that's assuming ViacomCBS can find someone willing to put up a production budget for Strange New Worlds. They've kind of poisoned the well twice over, possibly thrice now that Star Trek: Lower Decks has come out to surprisingly little fanfare and quite a bit of carping. Discovery performed so poorly that Netflix took a hard pass on Star Trek: Picard, and there have been reports that Amazon Prime is similarly unhappy with how Star Trek: Picard fared. Nickelodeon may be joining that unhappy club if Lower Decks doesn't improve considerably in the near future.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    That is what a number of different entertainment news outlets are reporting... that Patrick Stewart is reluctant to return to Star Trek: Picard for a second season because he's unhappy with the show's reception and with the treatment of his character in the previous season. Ironically, in a better-written Star Trek show, what happened to Picard could be the basis for a very interesting story. Since Picard was unconscious when his brain was scanned into Soong's golem, we don't know if he actually had continuity of consciousness or not during the transfer. That leaves open the interesting question of whether this android is still the real Jean-Luc Picard or if Jean-Luc Picard is dead and what Soong did was make a copy of his memories and personality. Would Federation law legally consider him to be the same Jean-Luc Picard or a new instance of Jean-Luc Picard like what happened with the transporter duplicate of Will Riker? Really, you guys are just mincing words here... the point is that, regardless of how you want to classify it, Star Trek was always political and always pushing a "social justice" agenda. It just usually did a much better job of working that job into its narrative in the past instead of bludgeoning its audience across the head with it. Recent Trek also has the problem of its writers being massive hypocrites about its message too, like This is it, precisely. This is why new Trek tests so poorly with general audiences and long-time fans. It's the polar opposite of what we expect from Star Trek.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Nobody knows... but the likely explanation is that it was a last-ditch attempt to fix what they'd broken and achieve their societal ambition before going extinct, or perhaps to find a way to haul themselves back from the brink of extinction. Either way, they never activated it so they may have been afraid of the same "your head a'splode" consequences that humanity was when they discovered the damned thing. "What, this? No no no... this is my healing shiv. Sterile, you know?"
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Safe bet they did... in Macross Frontier: Sayonara no Tsubasa, we see a Zentradi mobile fortress that was destroyed by the Vajra. It's mentioned in a few places - most notably in a discussion of fold faults - that the Zentradi tend to ignore anything that can't be neatly pigeonholed into the categories of "enemy" or "ally". They knew fold faults were a thing, but they didn't think too hard about them because they didn't fit the "is it an enemy" mindset.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    The ancient Protoculture did acquire the ability to technologically synthesize fold quartz, an advancement they definitely developed based on their findings from their long-term study of the Vajra's biology and bio-technology. If the diagram of the ruins in the Brisingr cluster shows what it appears to show, the ruins on any given planet are just the tip of the iceberg covering a massive network of fold quartz "roots" that span the better part of a hemisphere. Admittedly, poking around in Protoculture ruins has proven to be a decidedly unhealthy pastime given how often said ruins seem to be concealing or sealing stupidly dangerous tech that the Protoculture created and almost immediately regretted... like the Protodeviln, the time-traveling Fold Evil, or a means for galaxy-wide mind control that could accidentally kill all sentient life in the galaxy by burning out their brains. Hunting the Vajra isn't exactly safe either, given that the bugs know how to shoot back and are REALLY good at it. Not quite... what Grace was getting at was that the ancient Protoculture studied the Vajra extensively, based a fair bit of their advanced technology on what they learned from their analysis of the Vajra's biology and biotechnology, and came to revere them for possessing a perfectly harmonious society devoid of internal strife. There's never been a suggestion that the Protoculture dabbled in transhumanism. The Birdhuman in Macross Zero is a Protoculture construct - a biotechnological mecha - that the Protoculture made in the image of a Vajra queen. The Protoculture left it behind on Earth to monitor humanity's development and, if necessary, exterminate the human species if they failed to become a harmonious society before acquiring space travel. The Mayan priestesses were created with fold song abilities to maintain it and activate it if necessary, and apparently activated it once in the distant past before aborting the activation through having it detach its own head. The delta wave system in the Brisingr cluster is pretty definitely a Protoculture effort to imitate the Vajra's hive mind tho. Nah, the official timeline and the Macross 7 series point to the genesis of the Protoculture's civil war being socio-political. Except in DYRL?, where the civil war was caused by social issues stemming from the segregation of men and women after cloning replaced biological reproduction. The Protoculture didn't create the delta wave system in the Brisingr globular cluster until their civilization was already basically gone. The Brisingr globular cluster is reckoned to be the Protoculture's last bastion before they went extinct.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    All the fans have really asked for is for Star Trek to actually BE Star Trek... an optimistic look at the future. Even Patrick Stewart, who turned Star Trek: Picard into his personal political soapbox, seems to be having buyer's remorse when it comes to the current state of the franchise. Word is he's unhappy with how the series turned out and how it was received, and is reluctant to return for a second season.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Eh, it's easy to miss... that bit only really comes in at the very end of the series. The Protoculture ruins in the Brisingr globular cluster were built specifically to be a massive fold wave amplifier that could broadcast biological fold wave emissions from fold songs to the entire galaxy, in order to link the minds of humanoids into a collective consciousness. Yeah... it had a strong first half, but kind of fell apart after the heroes very clearly lost the damn war halfway into the series and the conclusion was just ripping off Macross Frontier.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    One of the problems with CBS/ViacomCBS is that they've announced a lot of projects that don't seem to actually be approved or funded. Strange New Worlds seems to be in the same limbo state as other pitches like the untitled Section 31 series that was to star Michelle Yeoh, the Starfleet Academy series, and the Khan miniseries. I think Strange New Worlds has a much better chance of getting made than the others, though, since the casting, set design, etc. are already done. It's practically an entire series of bottle shows, which is appealing to the cash-strapped ViacomCBS and it's at least nominally giving the fans what they want... Star Trek that actually looks and feels like a Star Trek series. I think it's probably a bitter pill for ViacomCBS and especially Secret Hideout, since the warm reception the Strange New Worlds pitch got is a stark contrast to how a lot of fans greeted Discovery, Picard, and now Lower Decks.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Let us speak of that no further... for politeness's sake. Pretty screwed... but, luckily, actually doing that is impossible without incredible levels of mechanical amplification that are only possible with the most advanced overtechnology that the ancient Protoculture could muster. The Delta Wave System the Protoculture built for that purpose was so massive that the individual amplifiers/resonators occupied a significant portion of the crust of multiple planets in the Brisingr globular cluster and the completed resonator was nearly a thousand light years across. The whole thing depended on the Star Shrine on Ragna, and that was taken out of action in the Macross Delta series shortly after being activated, so actually Var-ing the entire galaxy or even a small portion of it wouldn't be possible anymore. Ideally... but it's probably impossible. For one, the ultra-high purity fold quartz necessary to produce the fold wave amplifiers that the Tactical Sound Units use is prohibitively expensive due to its scarcity. You either have to dig it out of Protoculture ruins or hunt Vajra semi-queens for it, and neither of those things is what you'd call a healthy lifestyle choice. For two, individuals who have fold receptors and are able to activate them and produce sufficiently powerful fold waves to have an effect are vanishingly rare. Xaos is an interstellar megacorp and despite holding frequent open auditions for Tactical Sound Unit membership they've only been able to turn up about 10 people with usably-strong fold receptors in the eight billion-strong population of the Brisingr globular cluster: the three members of Tactical Sound Unit Thrones and the seven members of Tactical Sound Unit Walkure. Two members of Walkure quit due to stress, one only joined under duress (Reina was given a choice between prison or service), and of the two that were actually powerful enough that they could manage the weaponized Var syndrome on their own (Mikumo and Freyja) only one was actually recruited while the other was a weaponized clone of a Protoculture bio-android. One person out of eight billion was a powerful-enough fold singer to actually combat Var syndrome. Yup... the biological fold waves in fold song that trigger or alleviate Var syndrome only have a short range unless mechanically amplified. Heinz used the shrine aboard the Sigur Berrentzs and various other mechanical aids to amplify his fold songs enough to reach the other worlds in the Brisingr globular cluster. Even then, he was only able to reach one planet at a time and the effort involved was such a strain on him that it significantly shortened his lifespan by depleting his runes to the point he was bedridden by the story's end. (Fun fact, there's a Macross VF-X2 reference in the additional equipment that Berger Stone mentions. Part of the amplification system that the Epsilon Foundation provided was Die Zauberflöte - the fold quartz-based communications system created by the Critical Path Corporation as the basis for the Sound Jamming System in Macross VF-X2.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Over the last few years, there's been a sharp increase in that kind of thing... it's an extension of the same attempt to control the conversation about their work that led the studios to buy out many of the major entertainment news websites and turn them into self-hagiographic propaganda outlets. Bad reviews hurt the bottom line directly, especially now that subscription-based streaming services are such a big part of the entertainment landscape and everyone's trying to launch their own with just a handful of "flagship" titles. Entertainingly, CBS can't seem to make its usual argument that the critics are racist sexist trolls work for Lower Decks the way they thought it did for Picard. The criticism's all focused on how derivative it is of Rick and Morty and how forced the humor is, instead of having anything to do with the characters.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Which means there's no reason to get the ADV version... because the English dub is freaking awful.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    None that I've seen... it's only been about four years since the last re-release of Macross Plus: Movie Edition on Blu-ray.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    We're all kinda hoping that the success of the Macross Delta releases with the official English subs is going to lead to the next round of re-releases will have official subs. Well, the quality on the Blu-rays is at least as good if not better than the DVDs most of the time... but admittedly if you want English subs it's usually a one-horse race for any given title except Super Dimension Fortress Macross. For that one, IIRC the Animeigo release is generally preferred.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Are you sure? There's some uncertainty on that point.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Not the Japanese blu-rays... for that, you'd have to get one of the old licensed releases like Animeigo's or ADV's.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Macross Delta's TV series and movie have English subtitles, and one of the box sets of the Macross Frontier movies does as well.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    The Goblin Slayer movie is apparently now on Crunchyroll... gonna give that a whirl later. Monster Musume no Oisha-san is pretty middling stuff still. It's pretty disappointing, because it occasionally shows something resembling actual promise when it focuses on the actual medicine side of things but it slips back into ripping off Monster Musume no Iru Nichijou at every opportunity.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    A detail more or less stated outright in the TNG Season 1 writer's bible... 24th century computer automation is so good and so far-reaching that it's perfectly possible for even a ship as large as the Galaxy-class USS Enterprise to operate with a one-man crew in the short term. A significant portion of the crew exists primarily to maintain the ship's systems (or the other members of the crew). IMO, a big part of the problem was that Rios's La Sirena was conceived as a non-Federation freighter design that'd been retrofitted with Federation mod-cons and luxury extras... and the non-Federation freighter designs in previous Star Trek shows tended to be rather uninspiring designs that were little more than boxes with engines on 'em: Etc. etc. Incidentally, Star Trek: Lower Decks dropped its first episode the other day and the reviews are not pretty. CBS is in damage control mode, filing takedown requests at the YouTube reviewer crowd in a bid to silence the unfavorable opinions of it. It currently has an audience score of 31 on Rotten Tomatoes. That's significantly worse than even Picard's debut.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Er... um... I don't know how to tell you this, so I'm just going to kind of blurt it out. You're about a year late. Macross Plus's 25th Anniversary was back in 2019... as the first episode of the OVA was released on VHS and LaserDisc in Japan on August 25th, 1994.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, they did that because the fan "expert" they consulted fobbed 'em off with their headcanon instead of the official info... same reason HG thinks the Ikazuchi is twice the size it actually is.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Roy outranked Misa the entire time he was alive. Misa Hayase was a 1st Lieutenant at the start of the Super Dimension Fortress Macross TV series. Her position was the chief air traffic controller. She was later promoted to Captain after escaping from the Zentradi fleet and finished the series as a Major. In Macross: Do You Remember Love?, she starts the story as a Captain in the same position and is promoted to Major after her escape from the Zentradi. It's not explicitly stated who the Macross's executive officer was, IIRC but the circumstantial evidence points to Colonel Maistroff. Yeah, that's @Falconkpd playing Roy Focker. I don't recall if Annika has a handle on here.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, that was a Robotech-ism. IIRC, the idea that different variants had different amounts of armor originated in the Robotech RPG published by Palladium Books in the late 80's. I don't recall the idea having a lot of traction until Robotech: Battlecry came out in 2002, though it reversed the RPG's take by giving the higher-performance variants less armor instead of more. I know the so-called "2nd Edition" RPG ultimately discarded the idea altogether and gave the different variants the same armor. Yeah, that why I'm keen to find out if what I've been told about this is true. Whatever the original stance was, the VF-1J was pretty quickly written into the role of being a Japanese manufacturer's competing proposal for the UN Forces' main VF-1 variant with enhanced armament that never really caught on due to Shinnakasu's low production capacity. The double handful of VF-1Js that were stationed aboard the Macross were almost the entire production run, though it was only in the TV series that they were used as platoon leader machines. They were kind of demoted to a heavy weapons type in DYRL?, deploying the Armored Pack (supposedly due to native compatibility since they're made by the same company). He absolutely had a lot of authority aboard the Macross... but it wasn't due to his veteran status, it was due to his position in the ship's administrative hierarchy. Roy was the Macross's CAG: the Commander of the ship's Air Group. Commander of the Air Group is a position held by the most senior officer in the embarked aircraft squadrons, who functions as the aviation department head in the ship's command structure. All of the squadron leaders report to the CAG, while the CAG reports directly to the captain. Roy had a gargantuan amount of authority as CAG, considering the Macross had at least fourteen squadrons embarked at any given time. He was also perfectly positioned to offer his kouhai special treatment given his level of authority and the fact that Hikaru was already a highly qualified pilot. The VF-1S had engines tuned for greater thrust. I don't recall them saying anything about more generator output.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    By World War II, national militaries could afford to be a bit choosier about their pilots... since the hardware had improved enough to give pilots a reasonable expectation of not dying messily as a result of their own aircraft's hardware in normal operation. Enlisted pilots were usually pilots who'd been civilian-certified for things like crop dusting, airmail, etc., while officer pilots usually attended military flight school to learn to handle fighters, bombers, etc. The rank of Flight Sergeant was abolished by the US in 1942 with the Flight Officer Act of 1942, which promoted all enlisted pilots to a new warrant rank of Flight Officer and discontinued the rank of Flight Sergeant, and after 1945 the warrant position ended up being abolished because there were enough officer pilots around that it wasn't necessary anymore. Ah, that'd do it... lol Well, Max did have the VF-1A as a Sergeant and 2nd Lieutenant too, which gives him a bit more latitude... it wasn't until after he'd been promoted to 1st Lieutenant that he finally got the VF-1J. Max was also a former Destroid driver in Macross the First too, so they'd have reason to listen to his input regardless. I dunno, he is pretty serious on the job... DON'T TAKE YOUR EYES OFF THAT MONITOR! *coughNEPOTISMcough* I mean, it helps that he's besties with the CAG...
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Let's be honest, abandoning a disabled ship for a death or glory charge is the most Zentradi thing ever... Unrelated... does anyone out there have the Super Dimension Fortress Macross novelization by Inoue Toshiki from 1983? Specifically, I'm looking for the second volume (ISBN 978-4-09-440003-8). I've been told that it contains some interesting information on the subject of the VF-1J in the postscript. Specifically, what I've heard - and cannot presently verify - is that in that 1983-vintage bit of lore it talks about the VF-1J was tentatively intended to replace the VF-1A. Since I'm working on the Sky Angels doujinshi, I've been on a bit of a VF-1 kick lately. There was an interesting bit in Master File that caught my attention in connection with the above, about how the reason Hikaru was issued with a VF-1J from the outset instead of a VF-1A in the TV version was Roy "gifting" Hikaru with a spare aircraft that'd been prepared for his use when his VF-1S was having issues.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    This is becoming a bit of a trend, recently... maybe we ought to put auto-lock on any thread old enough to have a learner's permit and a part-time job? Anyway, all ranks translated Army-style as per the onscreen English text in practically every Macross title... Only at the end... Hikaru, Max, and Kakizaki all started the film at the rank of 2nd Lieutenant. Max got promoted all the way up to Captain offscreen after Roy, Hikaru, Misa, etc. got captured. Hikaru and Misa both got promoted on their return, Hikaru became a 1st Lieutenant and Misa a Major. Hikaru was a Staff Sergeant when he joined the Spacy in Super Dimension Fortress Macross. He got promoted to 2nd Lieutenant after "Bye Bye Mars", which is where he picked up Max and Kakizaki as subordinates, then to 1st Lieutenant around the time Roy died and to Captain after the First Space War ended. Max and Kakizaki were Corporals when they were added to Vermilion Platoon in episode 8. Max was pretty quickly promoted to Sergeant, then 2nd Lieutenant around the time Roy died and 1st Lieutenant and given his own platoon during the resupply of the SDF-1 Macross in "Paradise Lost". I don't recall if he gets promoted to Captain before the end of the series, but IIRC he is one at the start of Macross M3 a few years after the end of the series. Like @Roy Focker said, enlisted flyers were a thing during World War II and Max himself is a walking World War II reference. They dropped enlisted fliers from the Macross setting starting in Macross: Do You Remember Love?. Thereafter, all pilots are officers and the lowest rank we see for one is warrant officer (which in the Japanese style is more an officer candidate rank.)
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