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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    There's one piece of art in the liner notes booklet that isn't in previous publications... but it's nothing particularly noteworthy. It's unused art for a revolver that would have belonged to Sylvie.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Granted, Star Trek: Discovery's writing leaves a lot to be desired... more so with each new season's fresh batch of poorly thought-out gimmicks and token attempts to convince the audience that it's "real" Star Trek. We're nearly at the end of the show's third season, and Star Trek: Discovery still feels like it doesn't really have a sense of what it wants to be or where it wants to go. The first season tried to go for nostalgia by having the pre-TOS Federation be at war with the Klingon Empire, but that ended up being so relentlessly grimdark that the morally ambiguous crew of the Discovery ended up looking scarcely less villainous than the Klingons did. So relentlessly grimdark, in fact, that the series itself seemed to quickly tire of it and switched gears to an equally grimdark plot involving the Mirror Universe in a bid to make the Discovery's crew look more heroic (or at least less villainous). Its second season tried to be more optimistic but its bait-and-switch with Captain Pike, Spock, and the Enterprise ended up devolving into an ill-considered ripoff of Terminator halfway through and its overwhelming focus on Burnham as Great Value John Connor meant that the rest of the cast still hasn't been properly developed. Now they're almost to the end of season three, they've jumped nine and a half centuries into the future to get away from the criticisms of their playing fast and loose with canon, they've once again fallen back on grimdarkness as a substitute for depth, and most of the cast still isn't developed because our new attempt to show that this show is drama is that Michael Burnham cries A LOT. To be honest, as we near the end of season three it really feels like a big part of the show's problem is that it never took the time to develop the rest of the cast. The ensemble cast that was the heart and soul of Star Trek for decades just isn't present in the writing of Star Trek: Discovery. Much of the bridge crew didn't even have names until the second season... something lampshaded rather cleverly by Harry Mudd in "Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad". Mirror!Georgiou was more a vehicle for various catty one-liners than a character, and has now departed the show after being visited by the Ghost of Christmas Past (whose name is apparently Carl). Saru and Tilly got an episode each in season two but haven't had anything meaningful since then. Only Michael Burnham is a fully-developed character, and she's an awful Mary Sue precisely because as the only fully developed character she has to do EVERYTHING herself in order to move the story along. We've had practically nothing for the rest of the crew... to the point that it was an obvious death flag when the show suddenly started developing Airiam. They're trying to make Sonequa Martin-Green carry this entire show and neither she nor the writers are up to the job. Now that the Discovery has found the incredibly lame source of "the Burn" and then been hijacked by Orion pirates who seem to be fixing to attack Starfleet Headquarters, they've got just two episodes to wrap this turd up and it feels like it's going to be a pretty rushed affair. Five'll get you twenty Starfleet Headquarters gets blown up and they hail Burnham as a hero anyway. He can't get much more inert than he already is... he's dead, and has been replaced by a replicant.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... that was always around in at least limited quantities. That's how the writers of previous Star Trek shows gave us gems like "Spock's Brain", "The Practical Joker", "Code of Honor", "Profit and Lace", "The Omega Directive", and "Regeneration". Apart from Voyager's "The Omega Directive", the glaringly stupid episodes never really had any consequences that lasted beyond the end of the episode or outside the scope of the planet/ship of the week. This nonsense about a guy whose psychic powers cause him to emit radiation that specifically makes dilithium inert AND NOTHING ELSE wouldn't be at all outside the spectrum of usual bad episode BS for Star Trek if it wasn't the crux of an entire season-long serialized story arc that impacted the entire galaxy. The inconsistency WRT dilithium recrystalization wouldn't be so glaring if Discovery's seasons weren't less than half as long as the seasons of previous shows either, I guess.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    IMO, the best part of this is that this statement could be sincere or sarcastic with literally no change. It's just so bloody ridiculous that the origin of "the Burn" - the catastrophe that caused the deaths of millions if not billions and effectively ended interstellar civilization in the galaxy - was caused by a Kelpien manchild's fear of a holographic fairytale creature known only as "the Kelp monster". In a way, it's the perfect microcosm of Star Trek: Discovery. Poorly thought-out drama that builds to an unsatisfying conclusion where everything revolves around an emotionally and mentally underdeveloped character whose ego must be appeased at all costs to save the universe. We'll get there. Started season one of Star Trek: the Original Series earlier today. There's a related "did not do research" plot hole in Discovery's third season where it's indicated that the galaxy was running out of dilithium in the 31st century somehow. Discovery's writers seem to have missed that the Federation developed a method to recrystalize refined dilithium back in 2286 (Star Trek IV: the Voyage Home), making dilithium an infinitely recyclable resource almost 800 years before "the Burn". It's an even more glaring oversight given that Discovery's own writers wrote TWO stories that involved dilithium recrystalization technology 30 years before Star Trek IV... one of which was the climax of the show's second season! Everyone was a bit gunshy about going back to using dilithium since nobody knew if the stuff would just spontaneously stop working again the way it apparently had during "the Burn", but it was also (nonsensically) much harder to come by which is why there are multiple plot points in the third season that involve dilithium scarcity. (The Orion pirate organization "The Emerald Chain" wants the Discovery because their dilithium stockpiles are drying up... apparently because the writers forgot that dilithium was a catalyst not a fuel.) Gary Mitchell, Elizabeth Dehner, and the other nine Enterprise crew who were affected by the energies of the galactic barrier were so affected because they were already documented powerful espers (by human standards) before encountering the barrier... and even then it still killed nine of the eleven people exposed to it. His personnel file in the episode "Where No Man Has Gone Before" showed that documented esper abilities went back at least six generations in his family and that his were good enough for him to carry on prolonged telepathic conversations. (Various Star Trek novels have suggested that Gary Mitchell's incredible powers weren't actually his... but that he was taken over by some higher dimensional entity, in one case an injured Q.)
  5. Seto Kaiba
    And my rewatch of Star Trek: Discovery's first two seasons draws to a close tonight with "Such Sweet Sorrow, Part II"... On my first go-round, my initial reaction was that season two of Star Trek: Discovery was a marked but short-lived improvement over season one. I have to reverse myself on that one. Season two of Discovery is actually the worse of the two, for one important reason. In Discovery's first season, its protagonist Michael Burnham is an arrogant know-nothing know-it-all who sincerely believes everything is always about her and always has to be right. In Discovery's second season, everything really is all about Burnham. It's obnoxious, really. She immediately gets into a dick-measuring contest with Pike's science officer that ends up getting him killed. She has to be rescued and becomes the first person to see the Red Angel after getting left behind on the Hiawatha. She has to involve herself in Spock's disappearance because he's HER brother and his psychological baggage is her fault. She has to be the one to take him to Talos IV to recover his lost marbles and reveal her shameful secret. Her dead parents invented the suit that the Red Angel wears and she takes up a new one to become the Red Angel and close a time loop, making even the episodes that weren't strictly about her into episodes about her. Even Control lampshades that everything is about her. The Mary Sue-ness of it all is just... off-putting. It was bad enough when she only believed she was the center of the universe. When the writers decided to establish it as fact that she actually was... that was just a terrible idea all around. Though the events of Discovery's most recent episode "Su'Kal" may well go down in history as the worst, most setting-breaking garbage in the Star Trek franchise's history. This show is just the Grand Central Station of disappointments.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    As is my custom, I started a rewatch of Star Trek as things at work wound down towards the start of the holiday season. Going in chronological order, I just got to Star Trek: Discovery's first episode last night. I have to say that it might actually be worse the second time around... and that's kind of impressive in its own right. One thing that really struck me this time was how very much Michael Burnham comes off as having a REALLY bad case of chuunibyou. Her establishing character moment at the very start of the series when she and Captain Georgiou are on that desert planet is her pretending to possess the same uncannily accurate predictive abilities and obsession with precision that was a signature trait of Vulcan characters like Spock, Tuvok, and T'Pol, and elevated to a high art (and running joke) by Data. She clearly believes she's a Chosen Hero of Destiny and The Only One Who Can Save Us as the episode drags on. After nearly dying from radiation damage she interrupts the treatment of her injuries to go running off to the bridge to immediately tell everyone it's the Klingons... a fact that they would have known fifteen seconds later without her input. Then she convinces herself that she has superior insight into the Klingons motives and uses that as an excuse to try to take over the ship to (in her mind) valiantly save her captain from fatally misjudging the situation. She's even more obnoxious in the second episode, when we see her in a flashback trying really hard to pass for Vulcan... by being incredibly arrogant and condescending towards Captain Georgiou. She tries to overrule Georgiou about dealing with T'Kuvma's ship, and when that goes pear-shaped she tries to claim credit for the entire war at her court martial because she's deluded enough to believe that she really was the sole cause of the war. Once you notice that, the rest of the flaws in the opening two-parter feel kind of trivial. Burnham is just flat-out delusional and it's actually kind of weird that nobody notices or comments on it. Especially when she first showed up and was acting like she was Vulcan. It kind of brings to mind that TNG episode "Hero Worship", where the orphaned kid from the Vico starts imitating Data as a really unhealthy coping strategy for his parents deaths.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Haruhiko Mikimoto Forever Coming... when it's done.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    The #1 question received by the (very irritated) Kaminar Office of Tourism. You never know... DSC might've had Klingons resort to actual man-eating, but the general impression was it was something done out of desperation but not socially unacceptable.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Yup... like 80% of Commander Saru's backstory is that his species, the Kelpiens, were/are a species that were kept as sentient livestock and routinely eaten by the dominant sentient species on their homeworld. They were also regarded as a delicacy in the Mirror Universe's Terran Empire. The first time the Discovery visited the Mirror Universe, Emperor Georgiou had a bunch of them and basically served them up "pick your own lobster out of the tank" style when she had Michael Burnham over for dinner. Fortunately this (illusory?) trip to the Mirror Universe passed without anyone eating a Kelpien onscreen unlike season one. Pretty much all of Mirror Georgiou's bad traits - which make up about 99% of her character traits - were left out of the last two episodes. I guess acting slightly less like a racist stereotype counts as character growth in Discovery. ... ... ... That would have been SO. MUCH. BETTER.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, this latest visit to the Mirror Universe was kind of a massive turd. In a way, it's pretty pathetic how far over the top Star Trek: Discovery has to go with the villainy of the Mirror Universe equivalents of its characters to make it obvious to the viewer they're the evil twins. We kind of had to take the show's word for it that Mirror Lorca (the only Lorca we ever meet) was someone so insanely xenophobic and bigoted that he was considered too insanely evil to be allowed to gain power by the incredibly evil Emperor Phillipa Georgiou, someone who cheerfully engages in cannibalism and genocide. Now that we've seen Mirror Burnham, any pretense of subtlety is gone and we're seeing levels of cartoonish villainy that even the worst writers would blanch at. Somehow, actual cannibal Phillipa Georgiou is presented as the voice of moderation in the Mirror Universe in a downright Dickensian secret test of character by the Ghost of Christmas Past "Carl" AKA the Guardian of Forever before sending her back in time. The episode even wraps with a hilariously insincere-feeling emotional sendoff to the one character everyone on the crew hated and knew better than to trust. I guess the Guardian of Forever sent her back in time in the forlorn hope that someone will agree to pay for Section 31.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    IIRC, Reed's main contribution was that he automated certain readiness functions like charging weapons and polarizing the hull plating when an alert was declared.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    So... in a continuation of what I started here and here, I'm going to delve into Variable Fighter Master File: VF-31 Siegfried to see if I can't figure out what sets the /FC1 and /FC2 engine designs used by the YF-29, YF-30, VF-31 Siegfried Custom, and Sv-262 apart from the regular FF-3001. One thing that's apparent is that the picture they used for the VF-31 Custom Siegfried's FF-3001/FC2 Stage IIC thermonuclear reaction turbine engine is almost exactly the same image used for the FF-3001A Stage II thermonuclear reaction turbine engine in Variable Fighter Master File: VF-25 Messiah. The hardware differences in the diagrams are fairly trivial. You can see they've drawn the bypass on the FF-3001A/FC2 diagram while they left it out of the original FF-3001A diagram, and there are some propellant inlets (the L-shaped bits) in later engine stages that were either omitted for clarity or omitted from the design itself. The rest is essentially identical but for the apparent misspelling of "GIC" and one of the GIC locations on the FF-3001A has been changed to "ISC Receiver". Proceeding into the actual text... the first immediately noteworthy detail is that the sidebar definition of "GIC" (Gravity and Inertia Control system) has added a clarification about the "Glenn Effect" mentioned in previous descriptions of the HamiltonX-Ash4 power generation system (H-APGS). It is, as I summarized in previous translations, the same principle as in real world thermoelectric converters (the Seebeck Effect) but applied to OTM superalloys. They even explicitly mention the Seebeck Effect this time. Apparently this new variation of the Seebeck Effect was discovered by a researcher named Steven Glenn, who worked at the Shinnakasu Heavy Industry New Materials Research Institute in 2020. The first actual paragraph tells us nothing new... just that the FF-3001/FC1 is more or less a custom made engine specifically for the YF-29 and that the /FC2 version is essentially the productionized version of it. The second paragraph has some meat on its bones... and it's more or less exactly what I suspected it'd be given the scarcity and substantial increase in power the engines displayed over the more production FF-3001A. The Gravity and Inertia Control system uses the same ultra-high purity fold quartz that's used in the fold wave system instead of synthetic fold carbon, which allows it to link up to the fold wave system and have its performance boosted by an order of magnitude. Part of the GIC system has been replaced by an Inertia Store Converter system (also synchronized to the fold wave system) to help stabilize the output. Other than that, the only noted significant hardware change is that the gear reductions in the turbine stage's transmission (on the turbine shaft at the aft of the engine) were adjusted. The fold wave system can also apparently assist with plasma confinement inside of the engine, reducing overall fuel consumption. The third paragraph notes that, like previous designs, the bypass airflow is not used to save fuel but to cool the engine housing. It also notes that the bypass airflow is pulled back into the engine and flash-heated as an "afterburner". The fourth paragraph confirms the earlier findings from previous books that the Stage II engines probably derive their name from the fact that they're basically two engines in one... a super-hot high-pressure turbine and a lower pressure turbine wrapped around it. If I'm reading this right, it looks like this setup also uses the gravitational compaction of airflow from the previous-gen thermonuclear reaction burst turbine engines. The fifth just talks about the two-layer turbine structure described above, and the transmission that connects the outer low-temperature turbine with the inner high temperature one to ensure that adequate airflow through the engine is maintained. It also mentions in passing the thermoelectric converter (H-APGS) and MHD generator inherited from the FF-3001A. The sixth and final paragraph just talks about what we already know about thermonuclear reaction engines in general being able to operate as a turbofan jet engine, ramjet, scramjet, and plasma rocket. It specifically notes that the switchover between operating modes is handled by the airframe control AI so that pilots won't have to think about it. This definitely explains why the more powerful /FC1 and /FC2 engines didn't become the standard. Because they've replaced the fold carbon in the GIC with ultra-high purity fold quartz, adopted an ISC system that also uses fold quartz, and require a fold wave system which also requires large amounts of ultra-high purity fold quartz to draw out their full potential, widespread adoption is impractical due to excessive cost or downright impossible due to the lack of sufficient supplies of that ultra-pure fold quartz. This also explains why Windermere IV was able to field a main variable fighter using /FC2 engines. Their planet is rich in fold quartz and without the New UN Government there to regulate mining of it they were free to extract enough to build a modest fleet of fighters with ISC, fold reheat systems, and /FC2 engines.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Ah, yes... you weren't the only one. I spoke to him as well. He came to a number of different Facebook groups and fan sites and told several wildly different versions of his story, none of which lined up with each other and several of which were completely contradictory. Even the Robotech fan pages dismissed him as an idiot or a crook and banned him. IIRC he was pulling the design down because he was informed that commercializing a derivative work explicitly based on the Macross IP was prosecutable as copyright infringement.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... I'm actually inclined to give them a pass on those. It's not like they invented the concept of alert status, they just applied something that had already existed for centuries to their everyday operations. Likewise, the force field tech that the Enterprise crew builds is something the episode it first appears in establishes is something Starfleet was working on for years and had almost completed, and is much more limited than incarnations of the tech from other shows. That's excusable, IMO, since it shows progression in the technology over time. Not like, say, the way Malcolm just casually breaks out a suitcase full of phasers that work just like 23rd and 24th century ones without comment or the new photonic torpedoes being the existing photon torpedo prop from over a century in the future with a matte grey paintjob instead of gloss black. It's when you get into the continuity-breaking nonsense that prequels like Enterprise or Discovery start to cause problems. Like the Enterprise crew making contact with species which weren't officially encountered until the 24th century and conveniently not catching their names (the Borg and the Ferengi, both over 200 years before official first contact), Dr. Phlox's successful invention of a way to prevent late 24th century Borg assimilation in 2151 (something beyond even late 24th century medicine), mid-23rd century Starfleet making common use of a type of holographic communications tech that explicitly wouldn't be invented for another 117 years (and a superior version of it at that), or Dr. Stamets creating a new faster-than-light drive technology that knocks every other form of space travel (warp drive, transwarp, quantum slipstream, etc.) into a cocked hat that is conveniently forgotten about after being tested ONCE. Think about that. The c.2257 vintage Crossfield-class has a more advanced propulsion system in 2257 than all of Starfleet in 3189. It was certainly more action scene-friendly.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... yeah, that's that executive meddling I mentioned. Voyager was supposed to be an even more heavily serialized story than Deep Space Nine, and it was supposed to prominently feature the conflict between the Starfleet and Maquis components of the crew. Kind of a seven season long version of "Year of Hell" and "Worst Case Scenario". It'd been almost twenty years since Space 1999 and Battlestar Galactica, and the Galactica reboot was still eight years in the future, so general audiences weren't really put off by the superficially similar premises. General audiences - and even the cast - were more put off by the way the Paramount execs turned the series into an almost literal season 8 of Star Trek: the Next Generation. The episodic formula had gotten a bit stale over 8+ years, and Voyager's premise of the Starfleet ship and crew stranded on the far side of the galaxy and having to cooperate with the hostile Maquis proved to be pretty toothless once the studio execs got done with it. Perhaps nobody was so upset as Robert Beltran. He'd signed on to play some serious drama as the hard-nosed Maquis captain opposing Janeway and got stuck playing Janeway's personality-less yes-man magic indian after the whole idea of hostility between the Starfleet and Maquis characters got abandoned. Paramount went into production on Voyager with a formula that had already started to get stale for most of the viewers. Not so much, IMO. Enterprise did suffer from the usual problems that come with developing a sequel, but unlike a lot of prequels it was set far enough from the previous stories in its timeline's future that the conclusion of its specific storyline wasn't foregone. It was 114 years distant from the next-closest Star Trek series in the timeline when it was made (though Discovery cut that down to 105). The only foregone conclusion - apart from bad ideas like the Borg episode - was that Archer's mission would instigate the events which led to the formation of the Federation. It wasn't like the Discovery plot lines where it was obvious everything was a foregone conclusion because it was only a few years distant from TOS so we knew the Klingon War was going to end in Starfleet's favor in a way that preserved the TOS status quo and that the Control plot would also end in a way that didn't upset the apple cart because its bad future overlapped with the one Agent Daniels and co. were from in ENT. If Enterprise had run long enough to run into the Earth-Romulan war, then I could concede that its plot would've been Discovery levels of foregone conclusion. For most audiences, the problem was that Star Trek: Enterprise's episodic format was too close to what the three previous shows had done to the point of staleness and that they introduced familiar Star Trek technologies from a century in the future much too quickly. The transporter's unreliability was quickly dismissed. Hand phasers were introduced halfway into the pilot episode and ship-mounted phasers were introduced halfway into the first season. Photon torpedos rolled in at the end of season two, looking virtually identical to their 23rd and 24th century counterparts. The only staple technologies that the NX-01 Enterprise was missing were shields and the tractor beam. It eroded the show's distinctive setting pretty quickly. Eh... I imagine that'd probably get samey pretty quick. TNG offered enough proof of what ineffectual villains the Ferengi make... they're comic relief at best. Romulan and Klingon territorial expansion is mostly just armed conquest and we already got a good look at how the Klingons do it in DS9. Like, what's a single Starfleet ship going to do while the Klingons or Romulans are invading less developed civilizations, massacring their governments and militaries, and enslaving the locals?
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... in all fairness to Discovery and Picard's showrunners, trying a radically different approach to the Star Trek setting would probably have been a fantastic idea twenty years ago. You see, a big part of what ultimately ended Star Trek's golden age on television was a lack of innovation. Star Trek had been back on the air for eight years, and had two of its shows (TNG and DS9) running concurrently for the last two years, when Star Trek: the Next Generation ended and Star Trek: Voyager was rolled out to replace it. Voyager's ratings suffered because executive meddling changed its premise to make it much more like the Next Generation and that decline continued when Voyager reached the end of its run and Star Trek: Enterprise started. Audiences were just burned out on Star Trek and that led to Enterprise being cancelled before its time. If they'd tried something like Discovery back then alongside, or instead of, Enterprise it would've probably been received as a much-welcomed breath of fresh air for the franchise instead of condemned as a bastardization. Discovery had the misfortune to come out at a time when audiences were craving some more lighthearted, optimistic entertainment. A return to classic Star Trek form would have been more welcome, though with audiences also burned out on prequels the idea of setting it in Star Trek's pre-Kirk past would've been a bad idea regardless.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, AFAIK the only legal issue that ever came of that was inconsistently reported. The author of the fanart that they "appropriated" as their original take on the VF-1 made several contradictory claims regarding Titan Comics' use of his art... that they had either straight-up plagiarized his design, or that they had asked if they could use it and not told him it was for commercial purposes. He claimed, on at least one occasion, that they had resolved the matter by cutting him a check.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    More or less... though I think the final nail in the coffin was probably Star Trek: Picard's first season being just as poorly-received as Star Trek: Discovery's second. Picard was supposed to be the olive branch CBS extended to the fans that Discovery drove away. The nonsensical, heavy-handed writing and the visible disrespect for Jean-Luc Picard that permeated the series only drove them further from the franchise when it was supposed to be renewing their faith in the brand. With Netflix unhappy with Discovery's performance to the point of slashing its budget and not carrying the Short Treks in most markets, Amazon Prime upset with Picard's reception, and merchandising partners upset by the Abrams Trek aesthetic they knew wasn't going to move merch, the prospect of finding the hundreds of millions of dollars needed to make Section 31, Strange New Worlds, or any of the other proposed shows must've begin to look like a fool's errand. Especially after Lower Decks came out and was similarly panned by fans... with those three collectively being the three lowest-rated Star Trek shows on RottenTomatoes and some of the worst-scoring Star Trek titles overall. Who's gonna put up the flipping great wodges of cash needed to produce a show like that, especially one with a poorly-received concept like Section 31's. TBH, I'd expect that if they'd pitched Strange New Worlds first it'd have been panned just as hard as Discovery pre-release, for messing with the continuity and visual aesthetic of TOS the same way Enterprise was often taken to task for doing. Prequels in general are kind of Star Trek's no-win scenario.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    The trademark filing in the tweets @Gerli found are for the Japanese domestic market, filed with the Japan Patent Office.1 Trademarks are generally only (fully) enforceable in the jurisdiction (country) where the mark is registered, though there are some treaties that offer a modicum of enforceability for trademarks internationally. That's why I can't really see a clear rationale behind this filing, unless this is a preliminary step towards filing for trademark registration on the transformation in other jurisdictions where Big West is now actively exercising its rights as the owner of Macross like the PRC, EU, and UK. When you refer to "the recent comics", I'm assuming you mean Titan Comics' adaptation of Robotech? I doubt this is related. Harmony Gold's existing license gives it the ability to use the VF-1 Valkyrie (TV) design in merchandise incl. comic books. Using that plagiarized fan art that Titan Comics presented as their own original take on Shoji Kawamori's VF-1 in the comic was, as far as we can tell, a deliberate (and terrible) artistic choice not motivated by any kind of legal restrictions. Robotech fans (and every living creature with eyes) hated it, so they switched to tracing the Shoji Kawamori VF-1 Valkyrie design from photos of toys and from artbooks without any explanation or acknowledgement of the craft's sudden and dramatic change of appearance. 1. Which, despite the name, is actually responsible for patents, trademarks, utility models, and designs. Copyrights are policed by a separate body, the Agency for Cultural Affairs.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    The VF-X-4's on page 110, but the production version from Flash Back 2012 seems to have been left out.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Big West appears to have filed for a Class 41 trademark on the VF-1 Valkyrie's transformation in Japan back on 17 January 2020. I pulled their trademark applications from the Japan Patent Office's search engine, and these two are the only ones of this type they've filed. Unless I'm missing something - and it's entirely possible given how sleep deprived I currently am - I don't think so. Unless they're doing this as a preliminary step towards going after bootleg toys or something.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Well... yes and no? The design reference sheets (settei) that Kawamori and co. produced for the animators working on the series did include color guides that identified what inks and paints were to be used and where on a given character or mecha. You can see several of them in the This is Animation books for the original Macross series. Whether Bandai and other manufacturers use them as color reference or just eyeball it from published art and/or the animation itself is something only they know. Hand-drawn animation and all that... y'know? Most questions have answers, though Kawamori is notorious for his "broad strokes" approach to continuity and his official position that all Macross projects are stand-alone works. Big West doesn't seem to completely agree, but they let it stand.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    TBH, I don't think the advancements in in-universe technology have anything to do with it. It's just unimaginative choreography. Macross Zero put the VFs front and center, and tried to show off what you could do with one. Consequently, it had a lot of variety in its combat scenes and they were very intense because the pilots were trying everything against each other. You had all kinds of air combat maneuvers torn from the real world and some that are only possible in fiction. Macross Delta wasn't anywhere near as interested in the VFs and the actual war story they were trying to tell, so choreographed combat sequences lacked variety in the name of keeping them easy to animate. There was very little transforming done and the only maneuver used was "The Scissors", over and over again because it's easy to animate. The lack of variety and the need to not get dark meant that there wasn't much in the way of stakes. It was more like a tokusatsu show, with brightly-colored fighters engaging in bloodless violence before both sides retreat with no harm done to anyone but mooks. It doesn't really offer much in the way of tension. If you were feeling really charitable, you could maybe attribute the unimaginative combat choreography to the inexperience of Windermere's untested pilots and the poor quality of the very remote Brisingr Alliance NUNS and the private pilots drawn from it.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    There hasn't been any substantial news about the (proposed) series since they announced it. The most likely explanation is that ViacomCBS and Secret Hideout haven't been able to secure the necessary funding to start work on the series. Even though Strange New Worlds would be reusing a lot of assets created for Star Trek: Discovery's first two seasons, the show's development and production costs are going to be significant. Star Trek: Discovery's first season was supposed to cost between $6 million and $7 million per episode, but thanks to reshoots and irresponsible overspending by Secret Hideout it ended up costing $8.5 million per episode. It looks like they coped with Netflix's reductions in their budget by making each successive season one episode shorter than the previous one. (Season 1 had 15 episodes, Season 2 had 14, and Season 3 will have 13.) If you assume Strange New Worlds will cost half as much to develop as Discovery and have a similar per-episode production cost, that's at least $235 million you have to source. Since this is direct-to-streaming, that means finding a distribution partner willing to put up a significant sum for the streaming rights. Netflix and Amazon aren't entirely happy with what they currently have, so they're not going to foot the bill. Who does that leave? Pretty much just YouTube. Hulu was owned by 21st Century Fox and they're owned by Disney now. I mean, yeah... if that big blowup on the normally tame official Star Trek subreddit is anything to go by, even the fans who liked Discovery are rapidly tiring of it. I have to wonder how much actual faith the showrunners have in their concept these days. Strange New Worlds was more or less an admission of defeat, trying to move the franchise back towards its traditional format in the hopes of recovering the fanbase the franchise had lost. It's been indicated by Netflix that CBS is unwilling to let the series die because they're upside-down hundreds of millions of dollars on its development still after planning for a seven season run. It might've been posted six days ago, but there's really nothing new there. It's the same stuff we've known since the project was first teased.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Since someone asked in the DX Chogokin VF-1 thread, I have posted an explanation of how the VF-1's variable intake ramps work there.
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