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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Being the only one in control of your own destiny probably leads to contempt for all the people who are letting the Force blindly steer them through life...
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Are we sure about that? Most of Star Trek's woes from the J.J. Abrams soft reboot on stem from those new Star Trek developments being unable to sustain themselves with just casual viewers. The Abrams TOS soft reboot movies eventually tanked at the box office because they just didn't make any impression or create new fans, and both Star Trek: Discovery and Picard have found themselves facing slashed budgets and the prospect of imminent cancellation because the fans don't like them and they're not generating merchandising revenue because Star Trek's merchandising partners correctly predicted the fans wouldn't like them and didn't bother licensing them. They've tried mocking the fans (Discovery S1) and largely ignoring the fans (Discovery S2 and Picard) aside from in-jokes, references, and cameos... but they haven't really tried making something that actually appeals to the fans yet. The fans are voting with their wallets, and Star Trek is on the brink of going under because of it.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah... to say that it was not an enjoyable viewing experience would be putting it mildly. To be frank, the main problem with Star Trek: Picard is that it isn't a Star Trek story. It would probably have been a much better series if they took the Star Trek elements out of it, to be honest. The execution reminds me a lot of Ridley Scott's Prometheus. One of those occasions where a creator pitched an original science fiction story and was told that it wasn't good enough or interesting enough to be a success, but instead of polishing the concept a bit more they just pitched the same story again almost unaltered under the name of an established sci-fi franchise in the hope that sequel power would cover its deficiencies as a stand-alone work. It's not like Star Trek is the only property where Patrick Stewart plays a crotchety, manipulative old man on the verge of death (see Logan). They need to stop doubling down on J.J. Abrams's mistake. Let Star Trek be Star Trek, a vision of a brighter and more hopeful future for humanity, and let the dystopian sci-fi be its own thing. Each have their own merits, but all you get for trying to mix oil and water is a mess and possibly a bill from the EPA if you do it on a big enough scale. Abrams's soft reboot, with its action-centric dystopian future, produced a few serviceable but ultimately forgettable popcorn flicks that barely broken even at best and at worst lost millions at the box office. Star Trek: Discovery copied those same mistakes, and while it briefly scored some points with the Twitter and Reddit SJW crowd for crowing about its diversity it was so poorly received that the network had to do a major rework of the series after season one, season two was carried mostly by a pre-existing character (Pike) and ending with the TV series being thrown out of the Star Trek setting entirely and an in-universe promise that we never speak of this again on pain of death, and the sponsors and licensees were so very unhappy with it that the network had to threaten to sue its own sponsor in order to secure greatly reduced funding for the third and possibly final season. Now we've got Picard, a poorly-paced, wandering mess of a series that seems to have undergone a similar rework to Discovery's... but in the middle of production, forcing the original characters that were meant to carry the series into the background in favor of increasing the importance of legacy characters the audience might actually like and then restoring the setting's optimism retroactively and offscreen in the literal last minute of the final episode in a desperate author's saving throw. Like, it's nice that Picard's writers seem to realize the magnitude of their error at the last minute and tried to end on a proper Star Trek note... but it's so much of an afterthought it doesn't do much to fix the rest of the show. If they'd done this a few episodes in, when it became apparent the Romulans were behind everything, it'd have worked a lot better... especially if it got more attention instead of coming out of basically nowhere. "Oh by the way, remember that policy that was central to our entire plot? Yeah, we reversed that but it wasn't worth mentioning until ten seconds before the credits roll." IMO, Star Trek: Enterprise season 4. Thanks to executive meddling, it took some time for Star Trek: Enterprise to find its feet and start feeling like a proper Star Trek show again after they tried to action-ize seasons 2 and 3 with the nonsensical Temporal Cold War schtick. Season 4 had a lot of promise, but unfortunately general audiences were burned out on Trek after fifteen years of continuous episodes and the less-than-stellar writing of seasons 2 and 3, so the show never got to build on that promise in season 5. The unproduced stories for season 5 contained some interesting ideas, a few really terribly cringeworthy ones, and a few that could honestly have gone either way. Some of the stuff that was planned for season 5 and 6 went into the Star Trek: Enterprise relaunch novels, and were actually quite enjoyable reads.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Originally, yes... the heavy losses the UN Forces incurred in the Unification Wars convinced the brass to go heavy on the unmanned fighters, so the original plans for Earth's defenses in space prominently featured the QF-3000E Ghost as the majority of space-based fighter aircraft. The original writeup of the ARMD-class's fighter complement calls for a whopping 270 QF-3000E Ghosts supported by 78 manned SF-3A Lancer II's and 18 VF-1 Valkyries. Postwar, the ARMD-class airwing composition changed somewhat due to the massive attrition suffered by the QF-3000s in the First Space War. The writeup in Sky Angels indicates they scaled back to 120 QF-3000E Ghosts in favor of Regults and more Valkyries. VERY unlikely... the QF-3000E uses the initial-type first generation thermonuclear reaction turbine engine (FF-1999). It's even less efficient and powerful than the FF-2001 engine that was developed for the VF-1 Valkyrie, and that thing consumed fuel 4,200x faster in space than in atmosphere. Even if the QF-3000E's internal tanks were comparable to the capacity of a VF-1 Super Valkyrie's internal and conformal tanks combined, that's half an hour of maximum output at best. I'd expect they'd probably be coming back fairly regularly to refuel, rearm, and receive basic maintenance since they were known to have cooling system issues thanks to their early model engine. Their semi-autonomous AI suite is noted to have been a bit flaky, but serviceable... though not quite up to the task of being a viable replacement for manned fighters. As a result, the Ghosts aboard the Macross were mostly used to scout out and delay incoming enemies until the Valkyries could get there and mop them up. They took heavy losses in that role, and by the time the war ended there were only around 100 units left in the entire UN Forces inventory.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Tonight on See? BS All Access... what we fondly hope will be the series finale of Star Trek: Picard, the Star Trek show so bad even Star Trek: Discovery fans can't stand watching it. At the very least, I can rest somewhat easy after tonight knowing that the series has flown into the ground so hard that Star Wars writers will use it as inspiration for their next lightspeed ramming attack sequence. The Good... haha like there's any of THAT to be had here. The Bad... and getting worse all the time. The Ugly... facing the reality that Star Trek is very dead, and its corpse is being puppeted by someone's bad Mass Effect fanfic. Well, that was AWFUL. Please, Amazon... don't renew this one. Let it die. Kill it if you have to. No Star Trek fan wants more of this.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... yeah, I know it's a Star Wars standard trope. IMO, it's a really bad trope that is detrimental to the rest of the Star Wars story. It robs the heroes of any sense of agency and sends a rather nasty message in general. You can only make a difference in the world if you're born into the right family, and anyone who isn't and tries anyway is just wasting their time. They have no control over their destiny, and they apparently can't refuse the call either. They have no control over their fate or the choices they make, the Force is dragging them bodily from place to place like a parent dragging a reluctant child who doesn't want to play piano to their first piano recital. Maybe that's the real story here. Star Wars, and especially the Expanded Universe, has always been very heavily anti-democratic and pro-authoritarian. The Dark Side users are people who want to be in control of their own destiny, while the Light Side users always seem to be content to be blown along at the whims of fate. Be a good little drone and mind your place or you'll become EVIL in the minds of the people who don't think for themselves seems to be the moral they're going for here. Let's be honest here, the Finn x Poe bromance was the best (and only) love story in this trilogy.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    That was the thing that I was most disappointed about in The Rise of Skywalker... they had an amazing opportunity to run with the idea that you don't HAVE to be the Chosen Hero of Ultimate Destiny to save the world, just someone pissed off enough to want to make things better, but they subverted it horribly by having Rey turn out to be space satan's granddaughter.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    It would, admittedly, have made more sense in context if Southern Cross hadn't been cancelled 16 episodes short of completion. That said, the Robotech fandom also seems to find the Bioroids as uninteresting as the rest of the Southern Cross mecha. Their unusual control system is all they've really got going for them, and other than that they're so weak that several are shown being taken down by small arms fire. That may be a viable in-universe explanation, though the truth is the writers just weren't on the same page... because multiple episodes were being rewritten concurrently and nobody had the time to check the work of their colleagues to ensure they were producing a consistent product. That's also why a number of characters are referred to by incorrect ranks in the early Masters Saga episodes. Maybe, but this is Robotech and good lord does it ever have a complexity addiction.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, the easy way to do it is to just bring a temporal agent in and announce that those were "bad future" timelines created by the temporal cold war that no longer exist. They did that in one of the DTI novels, as a way to take cheap shots at several of the incredibly stupid Star Trek pitches that just wouldn't die.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Just finished rewatching Skullfaced Bookseller Honda-san and started up a rewatch of Charge! Cromartie High School. If there's one thing to say for getting to work at home, I can shoot through enormous amounts of anime while I work.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah... it was such a mess even Carl Macek washed his hands of it. It was kind of surprising to see Titan Comics referenced it in their last Robotech series, however briefly. Especially since Harmony Gold doesn't have any rights to Megazone 23 anymore and that could be considered copyright infringement. They seem to have left all of those dreadful cameos in the previous series, thank goodness. Literally nobody wanted a reminder that Robotech 3000 was a thing.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    That gets less true every day, unfortunately. It's not for nothing that Star Trek lost licensees over Star Trek: Discovery and suffered a near-total licensee walkout over Star Trek: Picard. With ViacomCBS doubling down on every one of the bad decisions that allowed those two shows to be shat into existence in the first place and even making a token effort to resuscitate the fourth movie in the horribly ill-conceived soft reboot Star Trek movie series, it's clear they're not learning. It'll take a gargantuan effort to repair Star Trek once they finally oust the idiots responsible for the current mess. Then again, it's also possible they'll keep doubling down on their mistakes on the basis of a sunk costs fallacy and fly the franchise right into the ground. At this point, who does? His work is about as welcome in the average viewer's home as dry rot. At some point, the networks need to start writing failure-severance clauses into the contracts with these studios. Y'know, a nice trapdoor clause that lets them get out if the studio just f*cking flies their franchise into the ground the way Secret Hideout and Bad Robot did to Star Trek.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Between Sky Angels and Macross Chronicle, I don't think I've ever seen them actually give a reason for the QF-3000E Ghost being so large... they mention various difficulties which were encountered during development, most prominently cooling, but nothing specifically about why it's such a big bird. My educated guess would be that, given that the QF-3000 was developed as an all-regime unmanned fighter, the airframe's unusually large size is a product of being designed for all-regime and all-purpose use with a first-gen thermonuclear reaction turbine engine. They needed to package the FF-1999 thermonuclear reaction turbine engine with a robust-enough cooling system to keep it from overheating in combat operations, enough fuel to sustain combat operations of a reasonable duration (which is like 4-5x as much fuel as in the VF-1's internal tanks), and then all the relevant hardware for the semi-autonomous AI and all the sensors it needs to operate properly. Then, of course, there's the weaponry... having six 55mm cannons and 12 internal multipurpose missiles is going to take up a fair amount of space too. (Some write-ups, like Macross Chronicle's first edition, copied an older version of the development history that cited it as having started out as a conventionally-powered unmanned fighter/attack drone that was later converted into an all-regime unit with a thermonuclear engine.) A pressure casing and booster system intended for underwater launches. Northrom likes its drones thicc.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    The original Southern Cross's take on Bioroid pilots would certainly have been way too dark for Robotech's intended audience... it's more palatable to have our heroes gunning down an army of unliving robots than a bunch of captured and brainwashed civilians from their own side. Nah, smart money says the single biggest factor is Mikimoto's inability to meet deadlines... he's overcommitted.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Doug Jones (Discovery's Saru) tweeted something similar about Star Trek: Discovery's next season a while back... and then tweeted out a clarification that the cast hadn't even been contacted about a possible season 4 despite CBS's claims that they'd renewed the series for season 4 and 5. The talking heads at CBS seem to be trying to pull off the Tomino Maneuver to protect their investments in Star Trek: Discovery and the Star Trek: Picard series. Promising a product that isn't even approved, let alone funded, in the hopes of using public pressure to secure funding that wouldn't otherwise be granted. CBS's announcement that Star Trek: Discovery had been renewed for season 3 was inevitably undermined by the news that it actually wasn't for quite a few months after the announcement, since they had quite a difficult time convincing Netflix to cough up a budget and had to resort to threatening a lawsuit over their lost investments if the series wasn't renewed. Their strategy now seems to involve announcing new seasons before the current season even airs, though word from the inside is that Discovery season 3 was filmed as a series finale in case it didn't get renewed and I expect Picard's will also end on a note that could be used as a series finale in case it doesn't get picked up for a second go. The audience doesn't seem to have a ton of love for Star Trek: Picard, and as with Discovery CBS is mysteriously not publishing the viewership numbers for totally unrelated reasons, honest.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, the VF-11D Thunderbolt wasn't introduced until late in Macross 7 alongside the Jamming Birds... I don't recall ever seeing an unmodified military spec version, just the Jamming Birds custom version and the civilian custom "Thunder Focus" news Valkyrie.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    I think they probably did, since they introduced an android character in the main cast of Robotech II: the Sentinels... who was meant, originally, to be a tie-in to Robotech: the Movie as a mechanical body for EVE from Megazone 23. That connection got dropped after Tatsunoko torpedoed the idea of making Robotech: the Movie a Macross Saga sidestory. (T.R. Edwards was originally supposed to be the same character as B.D. from Megazone 23 as well.)
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Not that I am aware, offhand... Apart from the obvious presence of VF-11B's, the only readily identifiable non-prototype VFs we see are the "hostage" VF-1J being used on the firing range, a pair of VF-17T Nightmare trainers, and an aircraft most fans generally agree is the Macross 7 PLUS type VF-14 Vampire from the episode "Spiritia Dreaming". The Macross Mecha Manual additionally lists the VF-5000B and VA-3, but in their case it's because they're first documented in This is Animation Macross Plus despite not actually appearing in the OVA. There are one or two background aircraft that do not match any known configuration as well, including one that looks like a relative of the VF-X-11 from Advanced Valkyrie.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    That's why it's not on Disney+ yet. They want to make as much money as they can off digital library sales through Amazon Prime, Google Play, etc. before they put it up for "free" on their own streaming service.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    CBS announced their intention to make a second season of the series before the first episode even "aired", but AFAIK there's been no word on if Amazon agreed and as they're holding the project's pursestrings theirs is the say that matters.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Well, as we've indicated many times before, your tastes are somewhat unusual. I know a lot of Robotech fans find the Robotech Masters (SC: "Zor") rather dull as antagonists go. This is, in no small part, due to the fact that they're humanoid but they don't react to things in a human-like way. Their extreme stoicism, combined with the very poorly planned and paced original story, meant that they only really react to things two ways: bland smug "we knew that was going to happen" or DULL SURPRISE. It isn't until the very end, right where Southern Cross's writers had started to panic and realize they hadn't developed them or their motivations at all yet, where they started to behave in a less robotic manner but by then it was WAY too late. The fact that Robotech's rewriters couldn't settle on whether a lot of them were clones, androids, or both didn't help. That, I suspect, is why Titan Comics seems to have been trying to make them more like the closest Macross equivalent... the Mardook.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    I'd pay real money just to hear it read by the intense voice guy from Honest Trailers.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Post. They were part of the space defenses conceived alongside the ARMD-class.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Honestly, the biggest problem with Star Trek: Picard's original characters is that they're all blatantly designed-by-committee. Not an intelligent committee either... that kind of tone deaf, out-of-touch, diversity-minded committee that produced cringe-worthy garbage like Marvel's new superheroes "Snowflake" and "Safe Space" or the SJW robot in Solo: a Star Wars Story. Cristóbal Rios is a citizen of the Republic of South American Stereotypes, a cigar-smoking, hard-drinking, unkempt, shady, roguish sort of character with a troubled past and nothing left to lose who speaks in an exaggerated accent, curses awkwardly in Spanish, and reads Spanish philosophy books just in case the audience forgot he's South American over the last week. Raffaela Musiker is a down-on-her-luck Sassy Black Woman™ who developed multiple substance abuse problems after losing her job and her family, who's just trying to go straight and get her kid back. Dr. Agnes Jurati is a standard-issue Socially-Awkward Nerd Girl whose main character traits are that she's naive, trusting, painfully shy, and more than slightly autistic. Elnor's not just a McNinja, he's an effeminate prettyboy, an orphaned kid who sees Picard as a surrogate father, a rebel against his native culture, the exposition magnet whose naive ignorance makes everyone explain things, and a comic relief character whose social awkwardness is played for unfunny laughs. Fleet Admiral Clancey is the foulmouthed professional woman who is trying too hard to be taken seriously and can't abide having her authority questioned for a second. Soji is the everywoman, a painfully generic character with no distinguishing traits to speak of except for the fact that she's good at everything... which they try to justify as her being an android. She's brilliant, skilled in multiple scientific disciplines, speaks multiple languages, is an instant expert on alien cultures, possesses superhuman strength, speed, durability, and reflexes as an android despite being made of flesh, and is instantly liked and accepted by everyone she meets and even gets a man who's been trained from a young age to hate and fear androids to fall in love with her while on a mission to investigate her. She's a Mary Sue.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    More like a space attacker, if we're being honest... it's essentially a manned missile with a VERY powerful but very short-lived thermonuclear rocket engine, a pair of VERY powerful beam guns, and six powerful but very compact thermonuclear reaction missiles. It's built for hit-and-run attacks on enemy ships with that powerful weaponry, then it coasts for recovery on its next orbit. The cockpit's equipped with a cold sleep system just in case things go a bit Tango Uniform. It kinda does (see above)...
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