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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Crunchyroll appears to have the whole thing, or at least everything produced thus far for the 2012 JoJo's Bizarre Adventure series. We just finished the first story arc, "Phantom Blood", a few minutes ago. This was f*cking weird. The art style itself doesn't really do anything for me, but the way it's executed is so damned stylish that it doesn't end up being any impediment to enjoying the ride. It's completely over the top in a way that feels almost like a tongue-in-cheek parody of the shonen genre. If Frank Zappa were to make an anime, he would make this. It's weirdly captivating in a way I can't quite describe. Somewhere in the JoJo-verse there is a knob marked Drama that someone turned up to 12 and then broke. Even boring things become entertaining when everything has to be executed with maximum flamboyance. Not sure what to think of that news. It's been weird, but the idea didn't feel like it had that much life to it.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Yup... the "space aliens" angle isn't something that's taken seriously in investigation of UFO reports by government authorities. When the government looks into UFOs they mean one of three possible explanations: Unidentified and undetected foreign aircraft operating in US airspace (BAD) A leak in OPSEC surrounding testing of some classified new aircraft or technology (Bad, but not as bad as #1) Misidentification of something normal (Annoying and a waste of time, but the answer they want to reach)
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Most UFO sightings, particularly those in the "impossible maneuvers" category, almost invariably turn out to be stationary or slow-moving objects or weather phenomena which only appeared to be moving quickly or in an impossible manner for an aircraft due to the observer's shifting perspective, the technological limitations of camera equipment, and the local atmospheric conditions. One of my favorite examples of this is a cryptid called an "Air Rod", "Skyfish", or "Solar Entity", which is not visible to the naked eye but shows up on old-model cameras and still photo cameras with a slow enough shutter speed. Conspiracy theorists had it that these were either surviving early flying insects from the Devonian period or aliens. They turned out to be a simple imaging artifact caused by interlaced video recording. The hyperfast Air Rods were perfectly ordinary moths and flies being lent the illusion of amazing speed by the interlaced recording process being slightly too slow to capture them in one static position during the creation of a frame, causing them to appear in the video as a fast-moving streak rather than the relatively slow moving insects they actually were. Human eyes can produce similar illusions in rapid eye movements (called saccades), because the way our brains actually process vision is not at all dissimilar to digital video compression. Your brain even fudges the data to hide the visual effect of rapid movements of your eyes from you (saccadic masking), and the ensuing spatial update when your brain draws a fresh frame after a saccade can lend objects the illusion of rapid motion or even sudden disappearance. TL;DR, the fast moving objects tend to be (accidental) camera tricks or failures of the sh*tty codec your brain uses to process vision. Congrats on being a wetware computer running a ~3 billion year old spaghetti code kludge of hacks that "just worked" at the time.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Macross the Ride. Macross the Ride Visual Book Vol.2 has a lovely illustration of one on page 75.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    @BlackRose and I started watching JoJo's Bizarre Adventure today. Four episodes in, and certainly can't argue the show has a non-indicative title. It's about a man named JoJo, it's an adventure for sure, and it is most definitely bizarre. Watching this series is like a bullet time mugging by a gang of burly male fashion models in costumes stolen from the set of a Tim Burton/Johnny Depp movie during a catastrophic fire in a warehouse full of fireworks and theatrical glitter. I not 100% certain what's going on, but it's certainly stylish in an incredibly flamboyant and eccentric sort of way. EDIT: I'm starting to think this series might be Abridged-proof... surely abridging it would only make it more coherent, not less.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    This kind of briefing isn't actually an infrequent occurrance whenever someone makes enough noise about a defense-related topic. It doesn't in any way, shape, or form indicate that the government is suddenly taking extraterrestrial theories seriously, just that a spike in reporting of this kind of thing merits another round of the same old same old investigatory panels like Grudge, Blue Book, and so on. The reports get declassified a decade or so later and the whole thing turns out to have been a total doss. Usually when someone gets persuaded to "drop it", it's because what they saw was related to a classified military project... like the high altitude balloons that were being used to spy on Soviet nuclear testing, or night flights of prototype or classified aircraft such as the U-2, SR-71, F-117, or captured enemy aircraft like the ones tested as part of Project Constant Peg. The truth always comes out in the end, but OPSEC is OPSEC while the project's going on.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Dunno, but there's at least a few out there with shark mouth decals officially... which looks SUPER WEIRD.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    The US military has been actively monitoring and investigating reports of unidentified flying objects in US airspace since the 1940s. The most famous study was the one undertaken from 1952-1969 called Project Blue Book, but there were others that preceded it like Project Sign (1947) and Project Grudge (1949). The most recent was the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program that ran from 2007 to 2012. Long story short, UFO sightings are invariably people misidentifying natural phenomena or aircraft due to distance, lighting, prevailing atmospheric conditions, and/or the function of their camera equipment. A fair few UFO sightings get reported when people accidentally spot aircraft that aren't public yet or aren't properly lit, like the slew of reports triggered by a collection of nuclear test detection balloons or the test flights of the Have Blue and Senior Trend prototypes of the F-117. The U-2 spyplane was another craft frequently misidentified as a UFO due to its extreme operating altitudes. The military naturally keeps an eye on these kind of reports to see if anything has leaked about secret programs or take action if they find something that might be an undetected foreign aircraft. Where the conspiracy nuts come in is the theories about UFOs really being alien spacecraft come to do weird stuff like mutilate cattle or abduct people for anal probing... because a metal probe where the sun doesn't shine is a great way to meet and greet new species, right? (The idea that there was a vast coverup of the existence of alien visitations has never looked sillier, given how bad our government is at keeping secrets nowadays.)
  9. Seto Kaiba
    The Rising of the Shield Hero is limping towards its end... and unless they deviate from the light novels it's going to end with more of a whimper than a bang. The Cal Mira breather arc is such a weird place to decide to end the series, since Naofumi doesn't actually win that battle, L'Arc Berg and co. just sort of get bored of beating his ass and go home while the other three heroes start whinging themselves inside-out about being substantially weaker than Naofumi. It offered some pretty good action this time though, so maybe they'll make more of the fight than the novel did.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Ja, on 18 September 2005 c.1800 UTC when the Mars Return Fleet was ambushed by the hijacked UN Spacy destroyer Tsiolkovsky.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    That was one of the things I couldn't quite put my finger on when I was watching the first episode... the dialog felt weirdly unnatural in a lot of places. To me, the impression wasn't one of excessive seriousness so much as a feeling that something was off about the translation itself. There's this odd cadence to the dialog that reminds me a lot of the translations I've seen at work where the English translation was done by a native speaker of the document's source language. It left me wondering if Netflix produced a new translation themselves or if they'd delegated the translation to the Japanese studio they licensed the show from and just recorded whatever they were handed. Y'know, I'm not sure if that means they've lost touch with the original meaning of Neon Genesis Evangelion or if they're getting back in touch with it. I'm inclined to suspect the latter. Evangelion wasn't supposed to be enjoyed, it was supposed to be a stinging rebuke of otaku culture and scathing deconstruction of all the tropes that surround the socially withdrawn heroes the otaku identify with. It's like a furious, hate-filled rant being mistaken for a really harsh stand-up comedy routine.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    When you think about it, this line of reasoning doesn't quite make sense. The cost part does, but not the low cost option being the VF-1. These emigrant fleets would have left Earth or Eden with a New UN Spacy defense force attached that was armed with whatever current-gen variable fighter was the standard at the time. The vast majority of them were launched after the VF-1 Valkyrie was supplanted by newer models meant specifically for low initial cost and excellent cost-performance on emigrant planets that were just getting established like the VF-5, VF-6, VF-7, and VF-9. The first couple emigrant fleets would've launched with a mix of VF-4s and VF-1s, but those cheaper emigrant-focused VFs were already being mass produced by the time Megaroad-05 was ready to leave Earth. These VF-1s would have to be something that these emigrant fleets built themselves or imported in addition to the fighters they already had, which is added cost not cost reduction... especially when you're decreasing standardization across your forces. The oldest fighter you'd expect them to have would be the VF-4 or VF-5. (The obvious answer is that this is a fact-checking failure on Master File's part... they didn't know about the raft of low-cost VFs that were built specifically for that niche.) On that note, I suspect that's more a legacy of the original materials the VF-1 was designed for. It was likely overengineered a bit because the engineers weren't 100% sure what the stresses it would encounter in actual operation would be like so they did the sensible thing and made the safety margin wider than it actually needed to be. It didn't start to really benefit from that until late life iterations like the VF-1X+ started implementing modern materials that were much tougher than what it was originally designed for, so it gained disproportionate toughness because the design wasn't adjusted to account for the changes in actual material strength. Sort of... but not to the same extent. There are limits to what it can adopt due to the limits on its powerplant. A Zentradi fleet is not what I would characterize as a low threat environment? Cost performance, because the actual threat posed by an enemy whose equipment amounts to Cold War-era small arms, rusted out 1990s Toyota T100 pickup trucks, and assorted sharp objects is so minimal that the fuel costs of dispatching a modern aircraft to flatten them with guided munitions is hideously expensive for the results achieved. Basically, they aren't worth the expense. But the Valkyrie's K/D ratio against the Zentradi was pretty lame (about 1/12 IIRC), so it's not the kind of thing you'd want to depend on in a pinch if you had something better on hand... never mind fighting against other VFs, which the VF-1 wasn't all that great at. (Which, I must concede, justifies Master File's characterization of it as 'nonthreatening' at the least.) That has to be one of my favorite bits of lore from recent Macross. It's from Macross the Ride, referring specifically to the VF-1X++ Valkyrie Double Plus. Some blessed soul in the New UN Forces realized that Shinsei Industry's civilian market sales of VF-1 Valkyrie derivatives had been so successful that the phrase "inconspicuous giant robot" could be used with a completely straight face, and conceived of a Special Forces VF-1 Valkyrie variant for covert operations that could be blend in with the crowd. The whole idea of a giant robot for covert operations is so bizarre that it brings a smile to my face for its sheer oddity. Like anecdotes of Orc rogues in D&D who max out intimidate instead of stealth and just bully everyone who sees them into pretending they didn't. Considering they're basically elaborate space stations, I'd assume there's at least a modest defense force stationed there. Isamu's bad behavior started a lot earlier than that... he started a career as the New UN Forces' regifted fruitcake in 2035 when the Spacy punted him to the Navy for being a naughty boy. Yup. Salla Base on Mars was manned by the UN Forces from 2003-2005, at which point the UN Forces pulled out of the base and the returning fleet was ambushed by an Oberth-class destroyer hijacked by the Anti-Unification Alliance and wiped out. The Zentradi were able to effectively booby-trap the base during the First Space War because it had been abandoned for years, and in such haste that its supplies were still in place, making it a tempting stop for the Macross. Yeah, but who's going to tell Global his island is illegally parked? Or, come to that, good luck finding a towing company willing to tow that thing to the impound.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Jeez... if that's true, then Studio Khara screwed the pooch so hard I'm contemplating calling the ASPCA on behalf of a strictly metaphorical animal. Between the terrible casting decisions and the Robotech-isms, this Netflix dub of Neon Genesis Evangelion feels less like a modern production than it does a thirty year step backwards for anime dubbing. I gave up after one and a half episodes and gave the series a firm thumbs-down on Netflix.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    I hate how they've pulled a Robotech and added new dialog to scenes that didn't originally have any...
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Headed up by the Macross-13 under General Kim Kabirov, c.2059. Ja, like Apollo Base. Hikaru was stationed there for a bit during the timeskip, IIRC. Gamlin's a Martian boy, born and raised, so yeah. H.G. Wells City, represent! @sketchley has a reasonable list on the RPG section of his site. http://sdfyodogawa.mywebcommunity.org/Stats/Locations/Locations.php ... several. Twenty or so of the bloody things have been relocated to the Sol system, there's one orbiting Eden, one orbiting Uroboros, and one or two others I'm sure I've forgotten.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Logistically, that doesn't make a ton of sense... by the time the VF-1X+ and VF-1Z are a thing, the New UN Forces have 2nd and 3rd Gen VFs that are being phased out. Why keep a squadron of museum pieces around and combat-ready at that point? I'm not sure that's a great example, as the Super Turcano is a modern aircraft in every respect except for the turboprop engine it's using. Bringing VF-1s along in the regular armed forces would be like bringing a platoon of old M4 Sherman tanks in your brigade of M1 Abrams MBTs, or having a squadron of old P-80 Shooting Stars in your carrier air wing alongside F/A-18F Super Hornets. Yeah, allegedly as a mixture of refurbished early block machines and new builds.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    As far as we know, Destroids in general seem to have fallen out of favor with the (New) UN Forces in the decade or so following the First Space War. Apart from a unit or two that end up in enemy hands in April 2030, the only times we see a Monster outside of the later VB-6 Konig Monster is when a Mk.II unit was used as a static target for live fire testing of the YF-19-2's optional weapon packages in 2040 and a unit that'd been surplussed out of service and given to its now-elderly former crew in Macross 7. (Unless you want to count the Gjagravan Va and Annabella Lasiodora from Macross VF-X2, there don't seem to have been any new Destroid designs developed after the First Space War... just some ad-hoc upgrades and modernizations of 50 year old designs like the Cheyenne II and the Macross Galaxy fleet's Super Defender.) Apart from the vanilla VF-1X - allegedly a 2018 vintage service life extension update - those were essentially Special Forces-only limited updates to the VF-1 Valkyrie or units built specifically for the civilian market. They weren't what Master File is talking about in the Battroid Valkyrie book WRT the VF-1 remaining in frontline service as a main variable fighter for... reasons. Master File flipflops a bit on that, like a bunch of the VF-1P's having allegedly been made by updating mothballed VF-1's. Mass production of the VF-1 Valkyrie ended in late 2015. Existing units were modernized over time and limited numbers of new units were built to order thereafter. Shinsei Industry delivered the VF-1X+ in 2047, which is the latest one we have a firm date for in official setting materials. The VF-1X++ is supposedly an aftermarket improvement of the VF-1X+. Master File added a VF-1Z in the Battroid Valkyrie book that is apparently a further improvement on the VF-1X+, which also serves as the basis for conversion into the VF-1EX type seen in the Macross Delta series in its version of things. Whether that's applicable to the official setting is unknown. We don't know if the VF-1EX was used by the New UN Forces, but if it was and it was a factory build rather than an aftermarket modification, it would bump that from 2047 into the 2060s. Shinsei is, however, still building the VF-1 Valkyrie for civilian markets - like the VT-1 Ostrich and VF-1C Civilian Valkyrie - apparently well into the 2050s if not beyond. The VB-6 Konig Monster, which entered production in 2032. None that we've seen... the last model we know of was the Mk.II that came into service prior to the First Space War. The only ones we've seen used in actual combat were the retirees decommissioned unit in Macross 7 (2045) where they failed miserably at hitting anything and downed a large-ish building in the process, and the pair of units deployed by terrorists on Bellfan in 2030 which had been upgraded with barrier systems which were downed by the prototype YF-11-2.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Well, it does help that Master File is not official setting material... they can take more liberties because anything they say about the timeline may or may not actually apply depending on Kawamori's mood and/or what they were serving for lunch in the cafeteria at Satelight that day. That particular factoid is actually from the VF-25 Master File rather than the VF-1 Battroid Valkyrie one. Apart from clearing up one or two vague bits from the official setting line art like the "sensor" on the leading edge of the wing glove, the VF-11 Master File was mostly an unremarkable book that didn't push any particular envelopes and didnt do anything to rock the boat. That it contained art of the VF-11 with both the old and new markings was not surprising given that the VF-11 Thunderbolt is known to have still been in the process of being phased out and decommissioned c.2058 even in the wealthier fleets like Macross Frontier (MtR).
  19. Seto Kaiba
    That's a question with a fuzzy answer... because the story isn't altogether consistent on when the "New UN" markings became a thing. Variable Fighter Master File treats the New UN Forces as having come into existence at the same time as the New UN Government was inaugurated back in 2010. Their version of the story has it that, when the New UN Government decided to update the New UN Forces' markings, Earth and the oldest emigrant planets dragged their heels on adopting them to hold onto the old UN Forces kites as long as possible out of a sense of patriotic pride. They finally achieved universal adoption of the new markings in the 2050s, in the wake of the Second Unification War and the military reorganization that followed. Official setting materials are a bit less consistent on that score. Macross the Ride posits that the New UN Forces didn't exist until the military reorganization in 2051 after the failed Latence coup later referred to as the Second Unification War (Macross VF-X2). This reasoning doesn't quite work because Ozma is shown flying a VF-171 with NUNS markings in 2048. (Kawamori himself seems to have repeatedly forgotten that the New UN Government existed in the original series... which doesn't help.) Variable Fighter Master File: VF-1 Battroid Valkyrie, from whence this image comes, contends that large numbers of VF-1s were kept in military service for various reasons and were, over time, updated for compatibility with newer models of weaponry to streamline logistics. Since that had never been alluded to before, the answer would technically be "When this book came out".
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Frankly, my bet is on CBS trying to brazen it out and pushing Star Trek: Picard as-is rather than reversing course and either tactly or explicitly admitting that the entire direction they set for the Star Trek franchise five years ago was a massive mistake. They've got Amazon's money already, so they're not going to want to give it back and take a second substantial loss on development costs for a Star Trek show. (Rumor has it they're upside-down $200M on Discovery right now.) I think there's something to the idea that was used to poke fun at a bunch of the rejected Star Trek series pitches in the DTI novels... treat it as a bad alternate timeline that was created by hostile powers in the Temporal Cold War and retroactively prevented by the intervention of temporal agents from the Temporal Integrity Commission and/or Federation Temporal Agency. (The DTI novels attributed a few bombed Trek pitches, like the 25th century cartoon proposal about a galaxy where omega particle weapons destroyed subspace and left most of the galaxy un-navigateable, to the work of Future Guy from Enterprise... listed when FTA agents read the charges against him during his arrest.)
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Yup.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Well, that is what happens when you let Jar-Jar Abrams and his hangers-on run your franchise... but Hollywood never learns. Now that Kurtzman and Bad Robot are apparently out of Star Trek, I wonder what'll happen to Star Trek: Picard and Star Trek: Discovery. Netflix seems content to let Discovery languish in de facto cancellation without a budget, but CBS is in a weird spot with Star Trek: Picard thanks to audiences hating it in test screenings, a distributor who's suffering buyer's remorse, and a lot of cash sunk into ongoing production. I'm wondering if they're going to plow ahead with the Kelvin-esque aesthetic or they'll try to rework it now that they're free of Bad Robot and Kurtzman.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    A loose partnership of fan translators, collaborating on the creation of a comprehensive Macross official setting reference. Our goal is to do full translations of a lot of the books that've only been tackled in a piecemeal fashion and host the translations directly alongside the articles referencing them. We're keeping the group name under wraps until we've got the domain registrations sorted out. Not yet. Our site's still under development. When it launches, we'll create a thread in the Homepages section of the forums here.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Nope. It's on my group's to-do list but it'll likely be a while yet before we get to it.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    There might be a hinge at the base, but what you're seeing in that picture is a T-tail similar to the ones on the Gloster Javelin or F-104 Starfighter. Though, from the line art, it seems to differ from the F-104's in one crucial regard: the tail appears to have a conventional horizontal stabilizer and elevator configuration instead of stabilators like the F-101 Voodoo or the F-104 Starfighter (where the whole horizontal stabilizer itself moved as a control surface). As a whole, the design is inspired by the F-104. That's probably where the two legs join to form the engine nacelle.
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