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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    In principle, a VF's compact thermonuclear reactors operate like toroidal magnetic field pinch reactors (e.g. the tokamak) except the magnets and magnetic fields have been replaced with artificial gravity produced by a gravity and inertia control system. Inertial confinement fusion is pulsed fusion in a solid fuel pellet. This is a continuous reaction using a gaseous fuel stored in the slush state.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Which makes it even cooler when modern science starts catching up and even outright defictionalizes parts of the technology... That translation's still a WIP, I'm afraid... but I can tell you the GU-11[A]'s 1,450kg with 180 rounds and the AMM-1 only weighs about 1/2 what an AIM-7 does (125kg vs. 230kg).
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Which, tellingly enough, is why it has substantially greater quantities of plot holes, inconsistencies, and dialog errors than the rest of the series. What's insane is the parts of Southern Cross they kept virtually unaltered... like all that out-of-nowhere stuff at the ending about immortality. That, right there, is almost certainly a major part of why there has been exactly zero forward motion on making a live action movie... if all you've got is the title, a few names, and one or two key terms, why not just make an all-original movie from scratch instead and not have to pay royalties to a washed-up real estate company from LA?
  4. Seto Kaiba
    In Robotech's version, there was a world war underway when the ship crashed and humanity had its collective "oh crap" moment and opted to throw down their weapons just long enough to form a token unified front against a potential invasion before some parties resumed shooting only with bigger and shinier guns and the whole thing almost immediately imploded into a kakistocracy run by a military autocrat, then a slave society split between official slave labor for alien invaders and de facto slave labor for the militantly xenophobic army trying to "liberate" them. In Macross, Earth was more or less at peace when the ship crashed and humanity had that collective "oh crap" moment that set the stage for six of the G8 nations (the US, Russia, UK, France, Germany, and Japan) to collectively conclude that not being massacred was something everyone could enjoy and start twisting arms to replace the United Nations with something that actually worked to forestall fighting World War III over possession of the alien ship and form a unified front against a potential invasion that became a functioning democracy after the political opportunists all conveniently died.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Yes, that would be consistent with the remarks made by Tatsunoko's counsel in their arbitration over royalties owed with Harmony Gold. Honestly, it IS all-or-nothing... but from Harmony Gold's end. If they can't get the rights to Macross back, Robotech is done. Harmony Gold knows full f*cking well that, for all practical intents and purposes, Macross is Robotech's only real draw. Its holdover characters are what has kept fans coming back for each of Robotech's failures and false starts, and it's the heart and soul of Robotech's merchandising. Take it away, and they don't have enough left to keep the lights on. MOSPEADA's characters and designs aren't well-liked enough to be a viable replacement, and Southern Cross is viewed with a mixture of antipathy and indifference by most fans. That's why they've invested so much time, money, and energy in maintaining their deathgrip on the Macross rights and doing everything the law permits to keep Macross shows and merchandise out of the west. Lose Macross, and there's no point in renewing the licenses for the other two... the staff might as well clean out their desks and start looking for new employment elsewhere.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    No more so than, say, running a technically illegal business selling unlicensed toys for a "big fish" IP like Transformers. I'm more inclined to suspect that they actually do have a license, but were expecting to engage in a bit of loophole abuse by running the crowdfunding campaign from their own site until their first go at it turned into a huge mess. Now they're probably approaching HG, hat in hand, to beg for special permission to use Kickstarter because their own fans screwed them when they tried to go it alone. (I still think the entire reason they decided to license Southern Cross designs was because nobody had ever made proper toys for it, so they could break into legit toy manufacturing without being compared to any prior licensee's work.) Second.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    If you highlight text in someone else's post and put your mouse over the highlighted section, the forum will offer you a context button that says "Quote text" that will generate a quote block containing only the highlighted text with all the appropriate formatting. Frankly, I just assumed the Titan Comics staff was either going through a VERY late chuunibyou phase or were so utterly uninterested in making it that literally anything gets a pass when they're brainstorming new material and Googling stock photos to trace. ... have you, by chance, recently solved any puzzle boxes leading to dimensions of eternal suffering that would cause you to mistake that schlock for a good time? Tatsunoko Production owns Genesis Climber MOSPEADA free and clear... it was their in-house (failed) attempt to make the Macross lightning strike twice. They're believed to have a similarly free hand with the Big West-sponsored Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross due to having funded its development themselves. If they're going to borrow animated material for a live action movie, they'll use MOSPEADA... Southern Cross is too unpopular with Robotech fans for them to touch it. That's why the only appearances by Southern Cross stuff in new Robotech material have been taking the piss out of the story (though admittedly some of it coincidentally overlaps to the creators of the animation taking the piss out of their own creation).
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Seconded. She's much more entertaining than Stamets, even if he has lost a couple levels in arsehole since the second season started. That seen-it-all, not-impressed-with-your-space-voodoo-bullsh*t attitude of hers is like the quintessential suffering Starfleet engineer. It's like having Montgomery Scott or Miles O'Brien back, but without Miles's horrid wife. In a way, she might be a more convincing engineer than O'Brien was since she gives zero f*cks what the non-engineers think and has a demonstrated tendency to "wing it" building the tools she needs to get the job done. (If her attitude towards starship repair includes duck tape, I can only imagine what she'd do given some club soda or bondo.)
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Your understanding is correct. Please take care to note that the (hilariously awful) comic from Titan Comics is an adaptation gone off the rails, where the live action movie proposal that Warner Bros and now Sony Pictures have been studiously ignoring for over a decade now is for a rebooted-from-the-ground-up reimagining of Robotech. "Robotech in name only", if you will. It's something of an apples and oranges comparison. All of the above, really. Granted, quality-wise the difference between pre-Yune Robotech and post-Yune Robotech in overall quality is the difference between laying down in an overflowing septic tank and standing up in that same overflowing septic tank... but gains are gains. The quality of the writing in the 90's was so bad even Harmony Gold couldn't stomach it, and we know that their standards set the bar for quality so low it's a trip hazard in Satan's sub-basement. (When the licensees weren't committing serial copyright infringement, anyway...) As we've noted before, your tastes are... well... "atypical and highly specialized" might be a polite way to put it. That's kind of why nobody has tried making Southern Cross merch for Robotech before. The professional toy companies took one look at the estimated return on investment from such a small area of interest and wrote it off as a bad job. It's only now that they've whittled down the licensee pool to naught but little indie outfits that someone is finally willing to gamble on it, with the decline in quality you'd expect in switching from pros to grey marketeers and "one guy in a garage" outfits. If Harmony Gold is looking to convince Tatsunoko their brand is still viable enough to justify a license renewal, making toys that look like they were salvaged from the Matchbox era probably isn't the way to do it.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Well, come way may I hope that they can hang on to Anson Mount to play Captain Christopher Pike in season three. Discovery's original characters don't really have anyone who's ready to step into the big chair besides Commander Saru, and you know they'll always have a human in the center seat. Captain Pike has really become the heart and soul of the series, as the most likeable character on the series with only the new engineer Commander Reno coming close. Burnham will likely never escape that onus of "designated hero" that colors her actions and puts her in danger of Mary Sue status when everything she does is always right no matter how stupid or immoral/illegal.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    And yet, Tommy achieved more concrete success in the first few years of his tenure than Macek ever did and had a much higher average quality level... Folks romanticize the "good old days" until they look back without the rose-tinted glasses and realize that Macek was the man with the reverse-Midas touch and virtually all of what came out before 2001 was of comically poor quality. Somehow, deliberately producing poor-quality products strikes me as an extra-risky strategy for a brand that was already known for the poor quality of its... everything.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    ... so MAAS Toys is waiting on a company that is death on all things Kickstarter to approve their plans for a Kickstarter? Glorious. I can only assume this entire misadventure started with someone at MAAS Toys saying "I have a cunning plan".
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Well, to be ruthlessly precise, it's 29 days and 4 hours (700 hours) of operating time in atmosphere with a fuel consumption per engine of a hair under 0.28mL/s. Or thereabouts... (it's more like 45 1/2 minutes at maximum thrust with the First Space War-era Super Pack based on Master File's numbers). Those hybrid rocket boosters are supposed to extend operating time even further by reducing the demand for thrust production from the thermonuclear reaction turbine engines. To be fair, he didn't manage to empty his tanks so much as hit the safety limit that'd been set in his fighter's support AI. Propellant budgeting is a big part of space operations in a VF, even though Super Packs have mostly reached the point where they're more about adding maximum armament without compromising performance rather than adding a boatload of fuel garnished with a few weapons. Yeah, it was a couple days... but he was able to operate his fighter's engines in their more efficient atmospheric mode because he was on Earth.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    That's one thing I wish Master File would cover... actual weights for various weapons and pylon weight limits. Sky Angel did it. Yeah. I really wanna know how that half-helical magazine system works.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    If true, that bodes ill for Star Trek: Discovery's longevity. The Short Treks were occasionally entertaining but rather light on substance. They work well enough as a teaser for a new season of the show but I don't think there's enough to them to stand on their own. (We'd have to ask why they'd walk away from doing full-length episodes, and none of those questions are pretty.)
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Gave Dying: Reborn a go today... and this is one of the worst-designed games I've ever had the displeasure to play. I don't know if this game was developed by NEKCOM Entertainment's office in Wuhan, China and crudely localized via Babelfish or if the team in Los Angeles decided to farm the dialog out to an illiterate hobo. I'm two chapters into this game and I've legitimately got no idea what's going on except that some guy is in some... place... looking for his missing sister(?) and it's an escape the room type puzzle situation. Despite being a horror-themed puzzle game ala Zero Escape, it's impossible to feel any sense of dread when the dialog brings the protagonist's reaction to being kidnapped, locked in a decaying building full of traps, and repeatedly knocked out across as mild annoyance rather than fear. I don't know what this guy's deal is, but either this is an epically bad translation or this guy has less emotional response than a pre-Star Trek: Generations Commander Data. It's also rife with typos... my favorite so far being the game's loading icon, a cheerfully bouncing Jeep (because why not?) atop the word "LOADYING". The game design is appallingly bad. There's this weird oval filter over everything like you're wearing a pair of goggles that block out the corners of the screen, your footsteps are so loud it sounds like you're wearing tap shoes, and the interface is so fussy it's rather like this fellow is less man and more inebriated moose. The physics engine has some interesting, downright Aristotlean, ideas on the subject of inertia and motion. They couldn't be bothered to render a player model, so every time you walk in front of a mirror there's nothing reflected and any object you may be holding is just hovering in midair like you're a freaking poltergeist. I'm not sure why they apparently believed a guy in a leather jacket wearing what appears to be a Big Mouth Billy Bass on his head would be an intimidating enemy figure either. Dying: Reborn's scenery is supposed to be a creepy, dilapidated hotel... but unless conditions in China are even worse than I'd been led to believe, the structure they designed for the game looks a good deal more like a prison, a police station, or a really old YMCA.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Mainly Macross Chronicle, but it comes up in a number of sources... Frontier had a LOT of artbooks and magazine coverage. Granted, the exceptional fuel-efficiency of thermonuclear reaction turbine engines in atmosphere removes the main issue with a STOBAR-based approach to carrier operations... but the CATOBAR approach is friendlier to taking off from stationary carriers, to operating with heavy loadings, and to launching and recovering large numbers of aircraft in less time. With VFs being the default troops on the field, getting large numbers of aircraft in the air as fast as possible would be a must for the New UN Forces. With six to eight catapults, a carrier can get two platoons airborne more or less simultaneously and repeat the feat every couple minute or so since linear catapults apparently have trivially short reset times. (Also, with the excessively high exhaust velocities produced by thermonuclear reaction turbine engines, I'd be a bit worried about anyone or anything standing downwind even with jet blast deflectors up on a STOBAR carrier.) GERWALK recovery is easier in zero-g, whereas standard arrested recovery makes life easier on everyone in atmosphere and even in space where facilities permit, because at some point you gotta get it back into fighter mode for storage. The Guantanamo's lack of utility in atmosphere is kind of a non-issue, since the New UN Forces generally expect to do all of their fighting in space (if the Zentradi reach the surface of your planet you've pretty much already lost) and they're substantially more cost-effective than the more expensive and complex Uraga-class escort battle carriers.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    It would've been a lot better than what season one turned out to be. Well, duh... but we're looking at in-universe, in-continuity explanations here. Unless, of course, the Red Angel turns out to be Gene f*cking Roddenberry come to straighten out CBS's sh*t. (There are a couple similarly weird moments, the most glaring of which being the end of the Temporal Cold War where Daniels implies the events of last couple seasons just un-happened when the timeline reset...) That's not as dramatic or funny/awkward, though... Sybok's arguably worse than an outcast nut... being somewhere between a religious heretic and a counterculture hippie cult leader, he's basically a Vulcan Charles Manson. Burnham... well... what I question is why the entire Federation apparently blames her for starting the Klingon War. It's realy weird when you think about it, given that she didn't actually DO anything to provoke the Klingons into shooting (Georgeau prevented her from firing first) and the Klingons were quite open about having always intended to start a war. The only thing she did that had a measurable impact on the war was she shot T'Kuvma after the war had already started. All she's really guilty of is assaulting her superior officer, attempted mutiny, and attempting to commit an unprovoked act of war. It's like she irrationally blamed herself for the war out of survivor's guilt and the court martial just rolled with it in defiance of the evidence to the contrary. If we were looking only at Discovery and TOS, maybe... and maybe the Enterprise relaunch, since Sarek's parents figure relatively prominently in some of those books. It's not like Spock and his family dominate the story of 99% of the canon, after all.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Anything said on why they mysteriously went silent for almost two months with no warning? I wonder if they got cold feet now that even Harmony Gold is admitting they might not be able to secure a renewal of their license, or if Harmony Gold said crowdfunding of any type is right out so they have no way to fund it.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    "Slightly better than what we had in the 80's" is all we can fairly expect from Robotech-branded merchandise... the franchise hasn't really progressed since '86 anyway.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    The approach used in Macross: Do You Remember Love? and Macross II: Lovers Again is the proverbial odd man out, where those VFs are launching strictly under their own power... albeit with either significant supplemental engine power or simply a massively increased onboard fuel capacity and four built-in thermonuclear reaction engines. Macross Frontier establishes right in its first episode (16:40 in the Deculture edition) that carriers are using linear catapults, a high velocity non-contact electromagnetic catapult system using essentially the same principles as a coilgun. The holograms that the ship projects over the deck are apparently to denote the boundaries and directionality of the catapult's electromagnetic field, and warn personnel not to cross into that active catapult lane. (After all, nobody wants to get pasted by an accelerating VF or have a heart attack from wandering into a superintense electromagnetic field.) Well, catapults are advantageous in atmosphere because they can quickly accelerate an aircraft to takeoff speed and in space the catapult saves a modest amount of reaction mass by accelerating the fighter during takeoff. Flattop designs enable ships to operate as carriers in atmosphere or in space, but in space they have a unique advantage in that they have a highly versatile recovery approach... by throwing an artificial gravity field over the carrier deck, fighters can gently fall onto the deck for regular arrested landing or vertical landing. In the event that they need to, or it is otherwise advantageous to do so, they can also exploit that gravitational field to keep aircraft out on the deck even in space. IIRC, the standard is 0.5G over the carrier deck to facilitate landing.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, they've had it up for ages... CDJapan were the ones who were late to the party. They have it marked as Order Stop though, which means they won't take any more preorders until after it comes out. https://hlj.com/variable-fighter-master-file-vf-11-thunderbolt-sof60030
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Spock could have lied on his Starfleet application to avoid being given special treatment because of his father's status as one of the Federation's most accomplished diplomats. He wouldn't be the only character in Star Trek to have lied to get into Starfleet... Simon Tarses in Star Trek: the Next Generation lied about his ancestry to get into Starfleet because he was part-Romulan, and Dr. Julian Bashir in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine applied under an assumed name (his real given name is Jules, not Julian) and he lied about his genetic status on the application. (Spock also operated under a false identity when he used the Guardian of Forever in TAS to resolve a time paradox involving his younger self's untimely death.) Maybe Starfleet background checks are just on the honor system until you screw up badly enough, or maybe they have a section where you can opt out of identifying your family like you can opt out of stating your race on job applications today. IF they knew. As far as the high priestess who presided over that ritual, even over a century later (in Voyager) Vulcans are noted to be extremely taciturn and prudish about anything involving Pon Farr, so Kirk and co. may not have known that was anything unusual. Yeah, the chancellor of the Klingon High Council knows... and she's from House Mo'kai, who have intelligence-gathering and covert operations as their hat. Either that or they're going to dig even deeper into the relaunch novels for material and this incarnation of Section 31 will end up being destroyed to cover up the organization's existence the same way the one from Archer's era was. (Discovery has made at least a few references to Control, the AI from the novels that founded and oversees Section 31, destroying it whenever it gets exposed and refounding it when it's needed again.) Isn't that more or less what Discovery was supposd to have been initially?
  24. Seto Kaiba
    People talking isn't the problem... it's the impersonal records maintained by the Federation and its rival powers. Intelligence organizations have very long memories and obsessively write EVERYTHING down. Submerging won't make those records go away. Particularly not ones held by hostile foreign powers like the Cardassian Union, Klingon Empire, Romulan Empire, etc. Koval's dismissal of Section 31 as a fiction created by Luther Sloan to justify a rogue intelligence operation to take revenge for Vice Admiral Fujisaki's supposed assassination would not stand up under examination if the Romulans had any kind of records indicating Section 31 was a real organization barely a century ago. The Cardassian Obsidian Order, which was generally acknowledged to be the finest covert intelligence organization in the quadrant, had no idea Section 31 existed at all. The Founders, who had infiltrated Starfleet at its highest levels, were also completely clueless as to Section 31's existence even though the agency almost succeeded in wiping them out. Oh, absolutely... and they practically wrote themselves a blank check to do it back in Enterprise with the Temporal Cold War. Sadly, the only title to ever actually take advantage of it was the Department of Temporal Investigation novel series, which mainly used it to take potshots at the various terrible ideas that had been unsuccessfully pitched for new Star Trek shows by referencing them as "bad future" timelines created by Future Guy that were retroactively prevented by the temporal agents of the Federation Temporal Agency (31st century) and/or Temporal Integrity Commission (28th century). I was going to argue that there was no reason Burnham would list Sarek as her father on her papers when Sarek doesn't acknowledge her as his daughter publicly... but last night's episode torpedoed my argument. Burnham's status as Sarek's ward/foster daughter is apparently well-enough known that she's able to use it to get permission to land her shuttle directly at the ambassadorial residence from Vulcan's air traffic control.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    ... that's one way to look at it, yeah. Though with one or more books coming out a year, we won't gain much ground! Oh, it was all but inevitable Max and Milia would feature in the book. They are, after all, the first ones to take a VF-11 into live combat and the reason the VF-11's production spec includes the canards. (Plus Milia also had a VF-11C in Macross 7 Plus episode "TOP GAMRIN" (sic)). If they give us a good cutaway of the gunpod like they did for the GU-11 and GU-15, I'll be THRILLED. You mean themes like the ones here? That's what those are... cascading stylesheets (CSS). We're looking to do a more modern CSS1&2 page design that displaces most, if not all, of the layout information into the CSS so the impact on the individual pages will be zero or close to it if we decide to start tweaking the appearance of the site later. The learning curve is nasty, but it'll save us loads of work down the road by turning page-building into a glorified fill-in-the-blanks exercise.
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