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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    This is what, the second time they've done that? It's more merciful than what they did to her in the old Sentinels material, where she went from borderline stalking "Rick" at and after his wedding to being a homewrecker preying on his subordinates. It looks like the goal was exactly what we thought it was from the word go... to write the Masters Saga and New Generation out of existence so they could pursue a Macross-derivative ongoing story.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    As far as a smartarse answer to the original question goes... the size of Boddole Zer's fleet just goes to show Minmay's much better than Helen of Troy, right?
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Macross II: Lovers Again's timeline seems to draw on Sukehiro Tomita's novelization of Macross: Do You Remember Love? more than any other iteration of the First Space War story... the novelization cuts a dash between DYRL? and the TV series for events. The Macross II timeline's Quamzin lived among humans for a while like he did in the TV series, but instead of that death or glory run against the Macross that was supposed to precede a return to deep space and ended up killing him he just legged it for deep space.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    As far as we know, there isn't... not anymore, anyway. The Main Fleets were the highest level of organization, overseen directly by the Protoculture while they were still around. The Fulbtzs Berrentzs-class motherships even include artificial parklands and so on for the Protoculture's use, though the Protoculture are no longer around to make use of the facilities and haven't been for nearly 500,000 years. Even then, there were ~3 million ships of the Boddole Zer main fleet that were able to successfully withdraw from the combat zone after the Macross sank Boddole Zer's mothership. If they did tell anyone, they may have come to the conclusion that humans were the Protoculture and therefore to be avoided or that the ancient Protoculture had ordered them to leave miclones the hell alone for good reason and resolved to not push the issue further. The Macross II parallel world timeline does have cases where Zentradi who had fought in the war and fled into deep space to find other fleets and attempt to finish what they'd started. That wacky Quamzin manages to lead a whopping THREE main fleets into our solar system after the First Space War in that timeline... and it never ended well for the Zentradi. He led the Neld Main Fleet into our solar system first in an attempt to finish with Boddole Zer had started, and despite doing some pretty decent prep-work, promptly got his sh*t and Neld's sh*t wrecked by Vrlitwhai's counterattack spearheaded by none other than Komilia Jenius. This apparently convinced him there was something to Boddole Zer's plan of using Earth's culture against the Meltrandi as a weapon, because he tried again by leading the Burado Main Fleet to Earth in the hopes that the UN Spacy would sort out the Meltrandi Leplendis Main Fleet that was hounding Burado's forces. To his credit, this actually worked pretty well despite not cluing the Spacy in or in any way cooperating with them. After a few skirmishes and some fact-finding undercover work by her troops, Leplendis was so convinced she was dealing with the Protoculture that she ordered her fleet out of the system and was in the process of leaving when the Spacy and Zentradi delivered a one-two punch that crippled her fleet during their retreat. Quamzin's forces then turned on the Spacy, and in the ensuing final dustup the Spacy took out Quamzin's flagship AND Burado's mobile fortress. There are still so many leftover Zentradi forces in the vicinity of the Sol system that the Spacy has an average of one war with them every ten years clear into the 2090s. After five main fleets met their ends on in one solar system, the Zentradi and Meltrandi don't seem to be all that eager to start sh*t on a grand scale. (The Spacy in that timeline has technically racked up 3 Main Fleet kills and 2 assists in eighty years.) The main timeline seems to have fairly infrequent contact between the New UN Gov't and Zentradi, if only because stumbling on a fleet with another fleet is like trying to hit one grain of sand with another grain of sand from across a football field. That said, there are several references in books like Master File to emigrant fleets going so far as to self-destruct ships with dimensional warheads to prevent them from falling into Zentradi hands, or main fleets stumbling on the occasional emigrant planet and glassing it out of habit. Other, more official works tend to mention smaller conflicts where branch fleets are wiped out after stumbling into the New UN Government's territory.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Really, I don't think HG would consider us flaming the old comics to be anything but a rare bit of common ground with us... they're not keen on them either, having publicly disowned them as garbage back in '06.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    I'm not sure it's a question of them being enamored of absurdly large fleets as the scale of Boddole Zer's main fleet drawing a line under how hopelessly screwed humanity was, and how amazing the miracle achieved by Minmay's song was. It's one thing to win a fight against overwhelming but not impossible odds... it's quite another to win a fight against odds that left no chance of victory otherwise. The ancient Protoculture's Stellar Republic spanned much of the galaxy at its peak, but their reasons for creating such a colossal military have been lost to time. It may have had something to do with their political tensions on the home front, or potentially the possibility of armed conflict with Vajra hives, or simply because they could. They started building their Zentradi forces about 400 years before their civil war broke out, and had something like 5,000 main fleets in operation by the time the war began in earnest. Between the devastation of the last few years of the conflict when the Protodeviln emerged and both sides joined together in the hopes of defeating the Supervision Army and the 500,000 years of warfare that followed, the Zentradi forces are down to around half strength... which is to say, between 2,000 and 3,000 main fleets still operating. Even then, virtually everything in service with the Zentradi forces was built 200,000 years or more after the war ended as replacements for battlefield losses sustained in their ongoing conflict with the remnants of the Supervision Army. So it's kind of a "yes and no" sort of answer... the Protoculture had such massive Zentradi forces before the war ever started for... reasons... but they've had half a million years of attrition and the slow, grinding replacement of mass manufacturing to at least sustain their numbers in the face of a foe who, many generations ago, used to be a significant chunk of the entire galactic population.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, that was a new wrinkle to the tech added in Macross Frontier. Instead of the single-use fold boosters rated for a one-way trip of at-most 20 light years seen in the 2040s (Macross Plus, Macross 7), modern fold boosters c.2059 were capable of multiple short-ranged fold jumps. Yes. Fold systems are large, energy intensive devices. It's unlikely that we'll be seeing one compact enough to fit into a VF's airframe anytime soon. It takes an astonishing amount of energy to tie space-time in knots to teleport interstellar distances. Even large emigrant ships can require weeks or months to store enough energy for long-range fold jumps without compromising their normal operations despite having dozens of massive fold reactors. Mainly, fold quartz is used to produce fold waves or heavy quanta... it's the application of those individually or together that produce the dynamic effects that've underpinned several key advances like the Inertia Store Converter, Heavy Quantum beam gunpods, MDE munitions, zero-time fold systems, and fold wave systems. Generally, its benefits are simply more potent versions of effects produced by its lower-purity synthetic substitute: fold carbon.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Earl from Toejam and Earl in Aquaman cosplay? (Honestly, what gets me is this isn't even colored correctly... it's supposed to be red.)
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Even right after Robotech finished its broadcast run, prospective licensees weren't exactly beating HG's door down looking for the rights... the comics were always an amateurish-looking mess because it was only the little indie publishers that were ever actually interested in it, and most of them weren't giving it their A-game either.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, all 4th Gen and later VFs have miniaturized pinpoint barrier systems. The inclusion of pinpoint barrier systems on a VF was a major design goal/requirement in the Advanced Variable Fighter program that produced the first 4th Generation VFs (in Macross Plus, the YF-19 and YF-21 prototypes for the VF-19 and VF-22 respectively). Other design goals for the 4th Generation included a 3rd Gen active stealth system, thermonuclear reaction burst turbines, next-gen super AI avionics (ARIEL), and native support for fold boosters. The VF-25 adopted ASWAG advanced energy conversion armor for its anti-projectile shield to improve the robustness of the shield itself in the event it needed to stop a shot that powered through the barrier (or the barrier was committed elsewhere). On screen in Macross Frontier, the VF-25 mainly used its barrier offensively to reinforce its combat blade... though Alto did use it defensively in several high-visibility scenes in Macross Frontier: Itsuari no Utahime when equipped with the Tornado Pack. Very prominently, to the extent that I'm actually a bit befuddled that you asked. It's probably the most prolific user of pinpoint barriers onscreen since the VF-19s in Macross 7. Hayate's VF-31 loses a number of arms to shots from the heavy quantum beam gunpods of the Draken IIIs when his barrier can't absorb all the energy of the shot, and there's that very drawn-out scene in Hayate's first real combat sortie where we see him tank fire from a Var'd VF-171 on his barriers and watch the strength indicator for the barriers tick down on his cockpit display. Not ASWAG'd, the YF-29 achieves comparable defensive capability to the ASWAG-based Armored Pack for the VF-25 by applying a double thickness (vs. the VF-25) of conventional energy conversion armor and operating it at twice the power. It also makes rather extensive use of its pinpoint barrier in combat.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Nothing says cheap late 80's comic like eye-searing gradient fills, right?
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, do one better and edit him into every shot of the film.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, the VF-22's bay doors basically absorbed the YF-21's FAST Packs... so if you look at the production version's underside you'll see the same gunports present on the YF-21's FAST Pack but built directly into the fighter.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Eliminated between the prototype and final production design. With the exception of the forearm shield, they were basically integrated into the airframe.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Really, I think that says all that needs to be said on that score... standardized hardware. The VF-22 has connection points for things like fold boosters and the like, so it wouldn't be all that surprising if other things could be connected to those stations. Yeah, Isamu's VF-19EF/A is a custom job... it probably wasn't in Milia's case, since her swiping those Sound Boosters was a spur of the moment thing when she thought (for rather dumb reasons) that she was dying.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Just finished episode 3 of Lost Universe, and so far I'm having a lot of fun with it. Like Slayers, it doesn't really take itself all that seriously. Millie even looks a bit like Lina Inverse, TBH. I did enjoy the low-profile gag where Kane is shown to have an entire closet full of identical mantles as a justification for why he's always wearing one. There's the retro charm of the old school hand-drawn animation working in its favor as well, even if it is rather unmistakably on the cheap side. Despite that, it still feels like a close cousin to both Slayers and Outlaw Star... as if Gilliam, Jim, and Melfina were all the same person. The show's early CG animation for the Swordbreaker has NOT aged well... but the biggest visual bugaboo is that the transition from interlaced to progressive scan when what was clearly an old DVD release was converted for streaming was very poorly done. There are a lot of pan shots with stuttering problems as a result... which is irritating but not a deal breaker.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    They've been doing THAT for ages... Robotech II: the Sentinels had two original main characters who were literally just transparently obvious bad copies of Hikaru and Misa, with precisely the same relationship and precisely the same problems right down to Karen having an overbearing dad among the military brass. By Shadow Chronicles it'd reached the point of recursion, with Marcus Rush and Maia Sterling being bad copies of Jack Baker and Karen Penn. Well, they kind of are... via Harmony Gold's license to the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross. Still, it is rather a dick move on their part to constanty trace his work and claim it's their own. It really is beyond rude of some Robotech fans to bring their bastardized work for autographs from Macross's creators.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, that's one of a number of Gundam touches in Macross II's timeline. The VF-4's beam rifle looks suspiciously like the Zeta Gundam's, and Feff is basically a Char clone with Ishtar as his Artesia. He's even got a bright red custom mecha with a command horn.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Since the current season is so disappointing, I'm starting an older show I've had on my docket for-bloody-ever... Lost Universe. I've heard it's set in the same multiverse as Slayers, in that there's some connection between the sci-fi setting here and the gods of the Slayers setting. EDIT: Jeez... early deinterlacing shows his this release with a brick.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    The Macross II: Lovers Again timeline's version of the VF-4 did have funnels. Well, Macross: Eternal Love Song called them funnels... but they were computer controlled like the GN Fangs of Gundam's Anno Domini era rather than being controlled by the thoughts of the pilot. The VF-2SS had bits, as noted previously. The distinction between the two is the same as in Gundam. The VF-4's funnels needed to reconnect to the fighter to recharge while the VF-2SS's bits had built-in generators so they didn't need to dock with the fighter for power. No "e" in Spacy. How else are you going to fight an enemy that will ALWAYS outnumber you thousands if not millions to one? The Spacy had a strategy that worked, that was repeatable, and that kept the loss of life on both sides to a minimum while also kicking open the door to turning their enemies into new allies in the near future.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Honestly, the most terrifying thing in this new trilogy is that Kylo Ren looks a little bit like emo Doomcock.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Well, they have to up spending a little since this comic is ending with a whimper rather than a bang anyway... But I doubt it's all that expensive, given that they're just having him write a little mini-comic. Bingo. Part of it is helped by the fact that manufacturing has become cheap enough for them to do many types of merchandise as on-demand small batch orders instead of having to stock a lot of merchandise at any given time. Things like the two artbooks they've printed in the last 15 years were helped by the fact that there wasn't really much new content, and they had the option of padding the books without mercy. The Udon "Macross Saga" artbook is mostly just a bad reprinting of portions of Macross Perfect Memory with reprinted material from the old website's "Infopedia" warts and all. They padded the The Art of Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles artbook like a menstruating firehose by giving over more than half of each 2 page spread to a large, low-resolution screenshot from the "movie" to stretch about 20-30 pages of content to 144 pages and then charge a premium for it even though a fair chunk of that new art had already been printed in the halfhearted Newtype USA article they tried to use to promote the project. Two of their toy licensees (now one, as one has gone out of business) were literally toy bootleggers using the cheapest Chinese factories available to run out knockoff Macross toys and Transformers merchandise.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Probably not, since VFs rely heavily on thrust vectoring for their extreme maneuverability and the VF-24's got a LOT more engine power to play with than the VF-25. Quite the opposite, the close-coupled canard delta is a design feature aimed at mitigating the disadvantages of the delta wing design by stabilizing the airflow over the wing to help improve stability and maneuverability by manipulating the airflow over the main wing. Well, there are limits to what the Χάος Valkyrie Works can do... Χάος Valkyrie Works aren't building new aircraft from scratch, they're taking trial production VF-31A Kairos airframes and modifying them to create the VF-31 Siegfrieds. They can't simply ignore the structural safety limits of the VF-31's design, or they'd create an aircraft that would literally fly itself to pieces. Likewise, cost is an unavoidable limiting factor for a custom VF's development. Χάος's Brisingr globular cluster branch headquartered on Ragna isn't exactly flush with cash, and while 5th Generation VFs are quite expensive already, a lot of the high-performance hardware they need for the upgrade to the Siegfried spec is EXPENSIVE. The ultra-large, ultra-high purity fold quartz they need to make the fold amps and fold wave systems go is EXTREMELY expensive due to its rarity. The advanced energy conversion armor used by the VF-25 is also noted to be very expensive, to the extent that the only part of the VF-25 that actually uses it is the anti-projectile shield and the Armored Pack that makes more liberal use of the material is restricted to squadron leaders and/or ace pilots due to the enormous costs involved. Even the YF-29 is apparently extremely sparing with its use of ASWAG, achieving the same defensive capability across most of the airframe by doubling the thickness of its regular energy conversion armor and then doubling the power supply to that double thickness of armor for 4x the defensive capability... approximately rivaling the Armored Pack's defensive strength. Yeah, the VF-31 was really misleading out of the gate since what we originally got specs for was the Siegfried and that was not a production aircraft. The Kairos and Messiah are on very similar levels, despite the Kairos being developed a decade after the Messiah. Very much so, yes. Macross II: Lovers Again's "parallel world" continuity is rather Gundam-like, which may have something to do with several of its creative staff having come from Gundam projects like Char's Counterattack. The increases in flight performance are more gradual but other technologies advance at a much faster pace... and platforms that became legacy weapons in the main Macross timeline stuck around because they're constantly fighting the same enemy. (The Spacy has a war with rogue Zentradi fleets an average of once a decade, and has gotten so good at it that they're thoroughly used to tabling the Zentradi in round one and taking their sh*t.)
  24. Seto Kaiba
    As far as we know? No. When did a VF-22 appear with Super Packs? It doesn't have any, outside of Master File or that one time Milia stole Sound Boosters designed for a VF-11.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Most FAST Packs are designed to be comparatively simple and inexpensive precisely because they're designed to be purged on the battlefield in combat conditions if they're damaged or if sacrificing them can prevent damage to the much more expensive aircraft. Once the later generations of thermonuclear reaction turbine engine improved fuel efficiency to the point that FAST Packs were no longer strictly necessary for VFs to have reasonable operating times in space maneuvers, FAST Packs switched their focus from augmenting and reducing the burden on internal fuel stores to offsetting the addition of increasingly large amounts of weaponry and armor. Consequently, FAST Packs became more complex and expensive and we started to see packs that could be ejected and reattached in the field, and packs that would bunch magnetically up for easy recovery if ejected like the SPS-25 Super Pack used by the VF-25 in Macross Frontier. The first three generations of VF (e.g. VF-1, VF-4/5000, VF-11/14/17) had cheap, disposable FAST Packs that were little more than rocket boosters and slush tanks with some verniers and the occasional missile launcher slapped on. The 4th Generation designs mostly didn't have FAST Packs because engines had reached the point where they didn't need the large external tanks (e.g. VF-19, VF-22, VF-171). It was the 5th Generation (VF-25, VF-27, YF-29, VF-31) where we started to see these increasingly complex, feature-heavy FAST Packs designed to be easily recovered.
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