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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    ... and just like that, now I just want The Rise of Skywalker to be a What We Do In The Shadows-style mockumentary narrated by Kylo Ren, continuously expressing his incredulous disbelief over how this sh*t turned out.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Can we just blame everything on the Jedi, like a Star Wars-specific version of A Wizard Did It?
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Not yet, but working on it.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Quite. The relatively wealthy Macross Frontier fleet restricted the Armored Pack on the basis of its high cost... the comparatively broke Brisingr Alliance would probably balk at the cost of the ASWAG that made the pack so expensive in the first place. That may be a big part of why the VF-31's ugly-AF Armored Pack is almost exclusively offense-focused. That said, the VF-25 was likely off the table anyway because the Brisingr Alliance's underdeveloped economy needed a shot in the arm that buying export model VF-25s or a license to locally produce the VF-25 wouldn't help one bit.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Economics. In some respects, the Brisingr Alliance's decision to domestically develop their own next-generation main variable fighter broadly parallels Japan's own course of action with regard to its attempts to acquire a 5th Generation fighter for its defense forces. Arms export restrictions prevented them from acquiring the New Hotness (the VF-24 in Macross, the F-22 in the real world) and purchasing an export variant from elsewhere was economically and politically unattractive, so they opted to develop their own next-gen main fighter domestically as a way to create jobs and stimulate their economy while filling that particular military need. On completion, it would also offer additional potential economic advantages in terms of the ability to sell their own design as an export to other governments. Like the Mitsubishi X-2, the process still ended up involving codevelopment partnerships with foreign companies to reach completion... Surya Aerospace being a joint venture of four different companies including Shinsei and LAI, and building on a design that had originally been designed and built elsewhere (like Northrop Grumman's proposal to turn the X-2 into an improved YF-23). If we're being honest, this is the main reason. Bandai needs new designs.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    It'd make for the happiest ending... the First Order and the incompetent idiots in the Resistance wipe each other out along with all the Jedi and dark side users, leaving the galaxy to finally experience peace without a bunch of space monks trying to rule the universe with magic. Approximately 100%. Even though Rise of Skywalker is the end of the so-called Skywalker Saga they're absolutely going to leave a sequel hook or twelve. Speculation has it, based on the way Rose is allegedly being systematically deleted from promotional art, that J.J. Abrams and co. are largely writing her out of the story because of how wildly unpopular she is. The blue check marks on Twitter will rage and storm about it but I doubt anyone else will particularly care if she's demoted to a background character and/or killed off unceremoniously the way they offed Ackbar and others in The Last Jedi. I find your faith in the Hollywood creative process disturbing. Well, I'm officially baffled then... how do you blow up a construct almost the size of Saturn's moon of Phoebe orbiting at an altitude of only a few hundred kilometers over the moon's surface without utterly devastating the surface of the moon? Especially if the explosion was from a highly energetic reactor system capable of producing enough power to reduce an entire planet to rubble. On its own, that should've been an extinction event-level disaster... never mind the subsequent debris strikes from armor-grade hull materials making reentry at extremely high velocities as a result of the detonation.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Personally, I think there's something to the theory Snoke was one of the kids Vader massacred in the Jedi Temple who kept himself alive through tapping into the dark side and didn't heal from his wounds as prettily as Kylo Ren did.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    A bunch of different news sites are reporting that it's the Death Star II, but the only reference I've found is to a Disney blogs post that doesn't actually specify anything except that the moon's name is Kef Bir. I think everyone's assuming it's the Death Star II because Palpatine's involved.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    I think I was kinder to it in theaters... but then, I wasn't entirely sober when I watched it in theaters. (Honestly, theaters with liquor licenses are a godsend considering how awful much of what makes it to theaters is.) Duly noted. My assumption was that this was another moon also orbiting the same gas giant as the Endor... gas giants do tend to have an awful lot of those. (Jupiter has 79 of the damn things, for instance.) To be entirely fair to Star Wars, this problem exists in the real world too. For instance, Jupiter and Saturn both have moons (Ganymede and Titan respectively) which are larger than Mercury and Jupiter's moon Callisto is only slightly smaller. There are 7 moons in the solar system bigger than Pluto, which is variously considered a planet or dwarf planet, including Ganymede, Titan, Callisto, Io, Luna, Europa, and Triton. The only real distinction there between moons and planets is whether they orbit the star directly or orbit an object orbiting the star. An arrangement like Endor or Yavin IV could conceivably exist in the real world and would be considered a moon rather than a planet because they orbit a gas giant planet not the system's star(s). This wouldn't be outside the bounds of what I can find on the subject from Star Wars sources... apparently tractor beams in this setting are, in fact, gravitational in nature. What I'd assumed artificial gravity worked like was an artificial gravity well, presumably created by manipulating gravitons. It wouldn't have a sharply defined edge, unless there was some amazingly precise technology in play. Are we certain they're firing energy bolts and not solid shells? Some propelled types of shells could conceivably produce that kind of curved trajectory... though the million dollar question then becomes why solid-ammo cannons? It wouldn't be the weirdest thing we've seen done with laser technology in Star Wars... the Jedi and Sith heroes wield laser swords made by somehow causing a laser beam to pull a hairpin 180, which is all kinds of impossible normally. Or put it in an orbit where it had plenty of time to spin... gravity is a harsh mistress, but also frequently a surprisingly patient one. Perhaps plot armor... or are we still calling that The Force?
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Given that the launch mechanism is essentially a coilgun... they kind of did. Really, the whole thing was a stupid idea intended to cash in on Star Wars's not-terribly-subtle "space warfare is World War II but IN SPAAAAAAAAAAAACE" aesthetic. The magnetic guidance thing is, however, a terribly stupid idea since that would just cause the bombs to clump up into a big ball and probably set themselves off rather than falling in nice orderly lines. Kind of emblematic of the new trilogy's persistent problem with talking too much in some places and not nearly enough in others.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, I know... if the dreadnought's artificial gravity field extended beyond its hull by accident or design, that could explain why gravity bombs would be workable. (That said, a quick spot of research turned up an official assertion that the bomber's deployment mechanism is essentially a low-powered coilgun not a passive gravity drop system and that the bombs themselves were also using electromagnetism to accelerate towards their target. The latter part of this explanation has its own, worse, problems regarding exponential magnetic field decay with distance... but the former part would be enough to make it halfway defensible I suppose.)
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Well, they did essentially have an explosion powerful enough to vaporize most of a moon-sized space station made of armor-grade materials... so it wasn't exactly an M80. That said, the Death Star wreckage is on a different moon orbiting a different planet? Not another moon orbiting the same planet? It'd be easy if it was another moon orbiting the same planet... but another planet entirely? Depending on how artificial gravity is achieved, it wouldn't be entirely unreasonable for it to extend beyond the inner hull of the ships creating it... to facilitate repair and maintenance work, for instance. (Macross does this deliberately for the various space flattops to recover fighters... throwing a 0.5G gravity field up over the deck. WH40K has a similar situation, albeit by convenient accident, where the exteriors of large ships not only have appreciable but low gravity but also a very thin atmosphere being held in place by the artificial gravity generators and the ship's shields.) Honestly, I'd be more put out that blowing up something the size of a moon and made of blast-resistant armor material in the forest moon's orbit didn't essentially destroy the moon's entire surface with debris strikes.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Might be for the best... I'm not sure what it says about them that they couldn't even succeed at crime.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Anyone who didn't already know the VF-2SS Valkyrie II is my favorite from my long time here would be able to jump to that conclusion pretty damned quick after seeing my collection... I've got six Valkyrie II's from Evolution Toy (a full Fairy Platoon of a Sylvie and three yellows, a Nex Gilbert, and a spare Sylvie for my office), three Bandai Hi Metal R's (two Sylvies and a Nex), and two of the Bandai 1/100 plastic kits (Placross?) for the Nex Gilbert custom... plus a few of the 1/250 scale minifigs too. After that, I think the next model I have the most of is VF-31's (DX VF-31A, F, and J, and a plastic C kit).
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Well, if nothing else, it's got the YouTube rumor mill and accompanying gutter snipes all riled up... Doomcock is on form tonight.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, the comic was always gonna be an alterniverse story like Robotech vs. Voltron... because the continuity of the animated TV series is a sacred cow to Robotech fans, and woe betide anyone who dares tamper with it. HG learned THAT lesson from the fan backlash over Robotech 3000 and later Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles. Demonstrably so... but most of its collapse has already occurred, so what we're seeing these days is small numbers of ultra-hardcore Robotech fans finally becoming disillusioned with the franchise and walking away. The pace of deterioration isn't nearly as brisk as when HG and its volunteer mods were banning and harassing anyone who spoke critically of Shadow Chronicles, or when the massively toxic fandom was driving away casual fans by the hundreds in the flame wars over comics vs novels vs TV. This decline is most evident in the decline in the quality of Robotech's licensees... thanks to the diminishing returns caused by the slow shrinkage of the fanbase. Back in ~2001 when Robotech was riding high (relatively) on its reboot plans, their toy partner was Toynami and they were making a variety of different toy lines for the franchise. They had TDK Mediactive and Vicious Cycle making video games. They had new comics coming from DC's imprint WildStorm. There was a new RPG coming from Palladium Books. It isn't much, but it was still coming from well-established and reasonably respectable (at the time) manufacturers and publishers. Nowadays, their home video releases are print on demand due to low demand, and everything else is coming from small-time and indie manufacturers and publishers if not actual bootleggers. Their one and only comic series is by a smaller, specialty publisher leaning heavily on alternate covers for collectors to inflate sales. They have no video game licenses, only a few cheap cardstock board games from indie publishers and a quick and dirty RPG rushed out by another indie publisher. Their toy partners are small time indie operators and East Asian bootleggers, one of which was in such dire straits it literally went out of business before it could produce anything. Instead of partnering with a professional anime industry (tweening) studio with a serious portfolio for future development like DR Movie, the development of Robotech Academy was done by a small-time CG animation house in South America at quality levels appreciably worse than many Source FilmMaker solo artists and DeviantArt amateurs. HG's survival strategy for this merchandising extinction event is to focus exclusively on Macross and visibly brand everything they're putting out as Macross as well as Robotech. They're wishing and hoping and praying that enough Macross fans will cross the line and buy Robotech-branded Macross merch from them to keep the brand's head above water. They are in full-on survival-at-any-cost mode right now with no sign of a live-action movie or animated feature on the horizon.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Granted, but it still came out of left field waaaaaaaaaaaaay before he was revealed to have been the architect of the Clone Wars themselves. Bringing him back now, after spending two movies on his tacky replacement goldfish Snoke, is definitely a cheap trick though. Oh, they could have been... but they weren't. There were sidequests here and there, but pre-Disney Star Wars continued to prominently feature the remnants of the Empire and the Sith as a main antagonist faction for decades after Return of the Jedi. Disney's Star Wars is little different to what LucasFilm Star Wars was doing with the Expanded Universe, it's just got less time to beat the same dead horses the Expanded Universe had been determinedly tenderizing for decades. About the only respect in which it materially differs from its EU predecessor is that it's the new kids doing all the heavy lifting instead of Luke, Leia, Han, Chewie, and their closest friends and family members solving every galactic crisis for three decades without so much as an afternoon off.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    To be entirely fair, the same was true of the old Star Wars Expanded Universe... and the Star Wars fanbase LOVED that sh*t. The Empire stuck around for ages after its defeat, remained a threat,and even briefly reconquered the galaxy before being taken over by the a new Sith Lord. Our boy Palpatine engaged in some downright memeworthy shenanigans to make death into an almost-literal revolving door and came back from the dead multiple times... never mind the Empire's ongoing fixation with apocalyptic superweapons. The Jedi return, only to nearly get wiped out by one of their own on several different occasions... one such Jedi-turned-Sith Lord who essentially toppled the Republic was even Han Solo's son. So... exactly like the pre-Disney Star Wars continuations? This was inevitable. The series is called Star Wars. Star Stable Government, Peace, Diplomacy, and Rational Thought goes by the shorter, rather punchier title of Star Trek. Any kind of a continuation of Star Wars inevitably means a Happy Ending Override for the conclusion of Return of the Jedi. The only way to have a resurgent Empire threaten the galaxy once again in thrall to the Dark Side of the Force is for our heroes to have failed utterly in the wake of Return of the Jedi's events. Keeping that action going means the Star Wars Galaxy Far Far Away needs to be a grim, hopeless place semi-perpetually mired in hopeless wars against genocidal totalitarian powers puppeteered by devotees of the Dark Side. There will never be a true and lasting victory for the forces of light. The best they can hope for is to briefly hold the darkness at bay before it once more overwhelms the forces of light and drowns the galaxy in darkness, oppression, and misery so the next generation of plucky rebels can fight the exact same good fight and briefly triumph before evil sneakily triumphs again while they're busy resting on their laurels.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Unfortunately, not a belief founded in reality. The ATM shut down over a decade ago, which is why the "Shadow Saga" OVA was cancelled after producing just one episode. The Agramas put up a minimal (<$1 million) budget for development and producton of the OVA's first episode on the condition that any subsequent episodes would be bankrolled by the sponsors that Tommy Yune promised this new series would attract. After RTSC's embarrassing debut and lukewarm-at-best fan reception, sponsors were lining up none deep to put their money into Robotech. The inevitable result was that a budget for Parts II thru IV never materialized because there were no sponsors willing to foot the bill and the Agramas were true to their word in refusing to fund further development. This is why Tommy and Kevin spent so much time insisting that Shadow Rising really wasn't cancelled, that they were just waiting for the live-action movie to attract sponsors to the brand. That was the only way they were going to get the funding to make parts II-IV. It's also why, when Tommy tried to pitch Robotech Academy, they had to try to bankroll the project through Kickstarter. There was no money forthcoming from the Agramas or Harmony Gold itself. Yeah, probably. The only thing that's going to finally kill Robotech will be when the fanbase shrinks to the point that there's no money to be made in merchandise licensing. That point isn't all that far off anymore... they've got one comic series going, and the only licensees willing to touch the brand are bootleggers and indie outfits. Harmony Gold can't even count on the distant possibility of extorting licensing money from the Macross franchise anymore now that their network of trademark registrations on the Macross name, logos, and key terms is being dismantled piece by piece by a series of legal challenges from Big West.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Unfortunately, I can't really capture my true reaction in plaintext... that noncommittal "ecch" noise in the back of my throat. This didn't really do anything to make me want to see the movie when it comes out.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Four episodes into Jojo's Bizarre Adventure Part V: Golden Wind and holy sh*t I am ALL IN. Golden Wind doesn't just remember that Jojo is supposed to be an action series, Giorno seems to be on track to claim the coveted title of Most Hardcore Jojo. Four episodes in and there's already a body count! The apple didn't fall far from either tree, between Dio's attitude that the wittiest reaction to opposition is murder and the Joestars belief in awesome justice and punching things really fast while yelling a lot. I'm not sold on the art style yet... Gold Experience in particular has this creepy, androgynous look to it that I find vaguely unnerving... but I guess it was named for a Prince album so a certain androgynousness is to be expected.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    The sarcasm's so thick on that post you could cut it into blocks.
  23. Seto Kaiba

    Hi-Metal R

    Seto Kaiba replied to joppewo's topic in Toys

    ... I'll take eight!
  24. Seto Kaiba
    The most recent venture in the Robotech franchise was actually released by Lionsgate Home Entertainment, not FUNimation... the bastardization of MOSPEADA: Love Live Alive. They're also the ones who were handling the last couple rounds of print-on-demand DVD re-releases. FUNimation got sick of Harmony Gold and dropped them after Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles came out to a decidedly chilly reception even among Robotech fans and dropped them entirely after a few years when Parts II thru IV of the OVA turned out to not be coming after all. I doubt Crunchyroll would be interested in Robotech... they're more about simulcasts and streaming cult classics with lapsed licenses. I dunno, FUNimation has (bad) history with Robotech and Harmony Gold...
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Oh my, no... if this were Harmony Gold's idea of retaliating against Big West, that'd be absolutely f*cking hilarious. This is nothing more or less than the latest round of the Robotech streaming rights changing hands like the regifted fruitcake that license is. Harmony Gold goes through this every few years, when whatever streaming platform the show is currently on informs Harmony Gold that they don't intend renew their license because its average viewership and ad performance isn't meeting expectations. Harmony Gold cuts its asking price for the streaming license and shops it around until they find another service to carry it for a few years. Lather, rinse, and repeat. If nothing else, this is a pretty good indication of how desperate Harmony Gold has become in the face of increasing pressure from Big West and Macross. That Harmony Gold ended up back at FUNimation's door is some pretty hilarious karma, given that HG acted like they were too good for FUNimation back when FUNimation had the license to Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles a decade ago. Robotech was a D-list property whose owners made demands like the franchise was a AAA property, and that arrogance was part of what caused FUNimation to drop the license after a few years. Now Harmony Gold is crawling back to FUNimation after breaking up with garbage-tier streaming services like Crackle because nobody else will have them like a bad ex-girlfriend sending desperate texts at 3am. I bet FUNimation took them to the cleaners on the cost of the license. This is Robotech down on its knees, pleading with tears in its eyes that it's still relevant honest!
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