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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Well, I wouldn't rule out the possibility that it was an in-joke either... after all, 4,795,122 (the actual number cited in the series) is such a weirdly precise figure that there may have been some hidden in-joke or reference there that we just aren't getting. Perhaps less so for an alien race whose mastery of cloning technology enabled them to duplicate individuals down to the level of creating identical copies complete with all the skills, training, and memories of the original in a matter of hours... and the factor in that these people had facilities for such en masse cloning that they could field a clone army somewhere on the order of almost 4 trillion fighting men (and women). Humanity leveraged this ancient knowledge and technology to provide personnel for the early emigrant fleets... duplicating individuals with vital skills and training to provide for the various essential roles emigrant fleets needed without access to adequate levels of trained personnel. It's been confirmed that the Protoculture admired and imitated the Vajra, to the extent that quite a bit of their tech may be reverse-engineered or copied from Vajra biotechnology. From the sound of it, the goal of creating the sub-Protoculture species was to essentially prepare habitable planets for future Protoculture colonization. There hasn't really been any indication of the New UN Government's emigrant fleets having to "tiptoe between Zentradi patrols". The nature of traveling by space fold means that a chance meeting between two fleets is like hitting a grain of sand with another grain of sand from across a football field... while blindfolded. You have to get stupidly unlucky for that to happen. (It has happened in both timelines, but it requires apocalyptic levels of bad luck.) That said, the New UN Government has - at least by the time of Macross Delta - acquired a healthy sense of caution regarding surviving Protoculture constructs and structures. The remnants of the Protoculture civilization that have survived the ravages of time into the modern era have a distressing habit of turning out to be ancient doomsday weapons or the containment facilities for ancient doomsday weapons the Protoculture felt were too dangerous to keep around with distressing frequency. That their immediate reaction to finding out what was buried on Windermere IV was to try to drop a dimensional warhead on it and wipe it off the face of the universe before it could end all life in the galaxy shows that, if nothing else, the NUNS staff officers are the Only Sane Men in Macross Delta. The ancient Protoculture themselves seem to have started to understand that the stupidly dangerous sh*t they were burying everywhere was, in fact, stupidly dangerous late in the collapse of their civilization. On Uroboros, they installed self-replicating biotechnological insectoid killing machines all over hell's half-acre to keep the lookey-loos out, and in their final settlements in the Brisingr Cluster they dumped the dangerous stuff into another dimension entirely. The closest we're likely to get is probably Macross 30, which includes a LOT of messing around in Protoculture ruins.
  2. Not sure how you're determining that it was way too many to destroy the planet's surface... most of the fleet was actively bombarding the planet for a couple minutes and they still didn't get everyone. It might've been overkill if they still had thermonuclear reaction weapons in their arsenal, but they were doing it the hard way with their standard beam cannon turrets and the heavy converging beam cannons of their medium-scale gunboats. Considering the scale of the Zentradi forces and the war they'd been fighting for the last 500,000 years, the only reason it looks like overkill is because humanity put up much less of a fight than the Zentradi were used to or expecting. To Boddole Zer and his senior commanders, it likely looked like an entirely reasonable level of response to contain and annihilate an enemy base. (Macross 7 put a bit of perspective on Boddole Zer's response to the situation, via Exsedol's instinctive fear of the Protodeviln and how the effects of culture shock on the Zentradi may have looked like the Supervision Army's mind control.)
  3. Yes. They basically referenced every Robotech property they could except for Robotech Academy.
  4. They're from the failed Robotech 3000 series concept.
  5. They already did a subs-only release of Delta, the first Delta movie, and the two Frontier movies.
  6. Seems unlikely, given that most English language anime localization is done in the US.
  7. 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.
  8. 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?
  9. 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.
  10. 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.
  11. 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.
  12. 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.
  13. 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.
  14. 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.)
  15. 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.
  16. 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.
  17. Nothing says cheap late 80's comic like eye-searing gradient fills, right?
  18. 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.
  19. Eliminated between the prototype and final production design. With the exception of the forearm shield, they were basically integrated into the airframe.
  20. 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.
  21. 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.
  22. 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.
  23. 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.
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