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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Oh boy... more lifeless and unnecessary garbage from Gundam's most overrated, least capable director. 🤮
  2. Seto Kaiba
    My copy arrived today. I was surprised by how hefty the box is. Definitely not thrilled with the decision to put the discs inside of the book instead of in a separate case. The print quality of the art seems nice though.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    It's likely, given that Isamu is from Eden and never signed on with an emigrant fleet's escort detail as far as we know. (Personally, I suspect the reassignment to New Edwards was Isamu's CO trying not just to make him someone else's problem but to put him in a position where he might remove himself from being anyone's problem. By that point, the YF-19 had put two test pilots in the ICU and two more in the ground.) Variable Fighter Master File: VF-0 Phoenix takes that view. The Restored Phoenix story section mentions, in passing, a government-led cultural and technological restoration project that spent the twenty years after the First Space War combing through the ruins of pre-war Earth for any surviving cultural artifacts and technology. It was one of that project's expeditions to Edwards AFB that discovered a cargo container with two wrecked VF-0s from the Asuka II's air group and led to the reverse-engineering and restoration of the VF-0. While Battleships of the Galaxy is a doujinshi, we do at least know that the Battle-class was not limited to use by emigrant fleets. There was, of course, the second Macross 13 that was the flagship of Earth's defense forces under Gen. Kim Kabirov in the Macross Frontier novelization and more recently Battle Astraea from the NUNS's 7th Fleet that became the flagship of Heimdall in Absolute Live!!!!!!. Master File, while also not strictly official setting, does seem to suggest there weren't initially that many of them since Battle 7 was borrowed for the mission to suppress the main fleet that destroyed Spica III. Oh, absolutely. Traveling by space fold has always been a "speed of plot" way to get around. It's easier to leave the distances between places vague or undefined and have people get there when it's dramatic/necessary to do so rather than set up a bunch of detailed rules and stats that they'd then have to worry about following or breaking later on. This bit of intentional vagueness and the increasing casualness of interstellar travel is justified in-story in several ways. The introduction of fold faults as a navigational obstacle that can prevent ships from taking the shortest possible route and/or greatly increase the error in time measurement is practically a get out of jail free card for inconsistencies in presentation. Humanity's ever-advancing technology has allowed them to manufacture more precise and reliable fold systems and advances in fold carbon synthesis have made those systems more capable and efficient. They've also simply gotten better at using them through experience. Those are pretty extreme examples, though. Humanity in Macross isn't quite a monoculture, but most of the galaxy hasn't been separated for long enough to really develop their own ingrained independent cultures and traditions. The closest we can reliably get is emigrant planets that already had a native alien species living on them, like Windermere IV or Ragna. Though Macross being Macross, "not so different" is almost always in play and even these alien cultures end up being more like Human culture than they are different. Supplemental material like Macross the Ride and Master File suggest that the Macross Frontier fleet isn't quite as isolated as the series makes out and that there are several other fleets (incl. Galaxy) and some inhabited planets within semi-easy fold distance of the fleet. (~500ly, according to Master File.) The exact details are left to Macross's usual "broad strokes" continuity, but it's worth noting that both Macross Frontier and Macross Delta materials effectively treat the game's Vindirance route as the Good/True Ending of its story. Vindirance and the pro-autonomy faction triumph, the government and military are reorganized, the pro-centrists end up punished for their crimes and some become terrorists (like Naresuan) or mercenaries (like Ernest Johnson).
  4. Seto Kaiba
    This got me thinking... how many worlds within that bubble do we actually know about? As noted before, Macross doesn't often mention how far apart various planets/systems are so it's hard to know if we've actually seen any systems within that 100 light year radius bubble explored by the short-distance emigrant fleet besides Eden. Legible backwards text in the first episode of Macross Plus (during Isamu's dressing-down by his CO) describe several emigrant planets including "Planet Barnard", which apparently orbits Barnard's Star 5.978 light years from Earth. That may imply that the other planets Isamu is threatened with a dead-end assignment to (incl. Micross Minus and Banipal) are within that same zone. It's also possible that many of the planets visited in the course of Macross M3 are in that same zone. (Honestly, in astronomy terms, the idea of someone finding a planet at Barnard's star is quietly hilarious... considering how many real-world refuted arguments for a planet there have been made over the years. Sadly, it seems whatever fleet found it didn't have the sense of humor to name is Vandekamp or something like that after the late Peter van de Kamp, who argued for many years that there was a planet there.) Any space big enough to hold Battroids should be plenty capable of accommodating Zentran. You'd just have to be willing to put up with the drain on resources, which from what the Macross Frontier series implies, was a rare case indeed. Either. Quite possibly both. The Uraga-class is certainly not the only example... the Battle-class and the later Saratoga II-type are also designed for blue water operation. Probably not, considering how fundamentally wrongheaded the Earth UN Forces beliefs about an alien invasion and the strategies involved turned out to be. The Daedalus-class, Prometheus-class, and Destroids were all products of the assumption that Earth would one day face a classic alien invasion scenario with ground troops and efforts to capture terrain for resources or prisoners. That turned out to be lamentably wide of the mark. There is still some kind of blue water Navy in play though, as Isamu's service record mentions him serving about the Navy's Enterprise. Considering the disparity in munitions capabilities... probably. Largest ________ metrics are a bit muddy in real world terms thanks to several countries that play fast and loose with what counts as a military ship or aircraft. Based on officially published numbers, if you parked the Macross 7 fleet on Earth today it'd technically be the 4th largest air force in the world in terms of the total number of military aircraft, behind only China, Russia, and the United States. As of the 2050s, that's a solidly medium-sized fleet. Nothing specific... it's known that they can be artificially created by the Protoculture's technology and the Vajra's biotechnology, so presumably they understand how these things work. They're not really explained to the audience beyond essentially just being a higher-dimension navigational hazard that ranges in severity from "speedbump" to "pothole bad enough to mess up your tires/suspension/alignment", "sinkhole big enough to swallow your car whole", and finally "that's not a sinkhole that's a **** damn canyon". If we were to extrapolate from official materials, Macross Chronicle's Technology Sheet for barrier system suggests that a barrier is essentially a deliberately created fold fault: a region where the geometry of space-time is twisted into an impassible obstacle. So a fold fault is presumably a region of higher dimension space that's been warped by some (gravitational?) force (stellar gravity, black holes, stray pockets of heavy quanta?). They're one of those things that Humanity is still studying, having cheated their way to having interstellar flight via very lucky/unlucky first contact events.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    We've kinda had that three times already... in Macross II, Macross Zero, and Macross Delta. As above, we've kind of already had that too... Macross II's creators hint in-story and in interviews that the Mardook are the descendants of Protoculture refugees like the ones mentioned in DYRL?, who fled their civilization's fall to start over and lived a semi-nomadic life in space.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Crunchyroll's store has it listed at MSRP ($189.99) for non-members. The member discount takes 10% off the top automatically ($170.99) and it's eligible for a lot of their coupon code discounts too... which is how they handled the preorder discount pricing in the US, to the discontent of some. Since the coupon codes are pretty ubiquitous, the real pricing is more like $151 w/ free shipping.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Not to mention the impact of Macross Frontier and Macross Delta's favorite two-word problem and pet project of SMS parent company founder Richard Bilra: "fold faults".
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Started watching the Initial D spinoff/sequel MF Ghost... and it is so much better than the last racing anime I watched (HIGHSPEED ETOILE) that it crosses the line four times from not funny to funny to embarrassing (for HIGHSPEED ETOILE) to absolutely goddamn hilarious. This is what racing anime should be... even if it is basically another love letter to the Toyota Motor Co. So much more exciting and energetic than HIGHSPEED ETOILE's static choreography and obsession with getting the maximum number of sponsor logos into all shots. EDIT: This is the second show this season where I've picked it up figuring "Oh I'll just watch one or two" and realized hours later I'd binged the best part of an entire season in one unbroken sitting. MF Ghost is just THAT good.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Just got my shipping notice too. I'm looking forward to giving this release a thorough look.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Considering how most distances to/from emigrant planets are left intentionally vague, I'm not sure it would be all that helpful in that regard. Perhaps doubly so given that Humanity didn't expand into deep space in a uniform manner. Humanity didn't expand into space in a slowly growing sphere of influence. They sent emigrant ships out across the galaxy on a bunch of different courses hoping to find habitable planets through sheer dumb luck and determination. Megaroad-01 launched in 2012 and within four years she was out by the galactic core. Megaroad-04 launched somewhere around 2016 and by the time she found a habitable planet in 2027 she was way out on the edge of the far side of the galaxy from Earth ~60k-75k light years from Earth. (This even carries over into Master File, where "nearby" planets like Spica III can be hundreds of light years away and in no particular direction.) From the descriptions we have, it sounds like most Human-built ships have a degree of that modularity... but it's modularity of internal systems rather than bolting stuff to the ship exterior, for stealth reasons. The exception being the Macross-type ships where the individual limbs are typically separate ships in their own right. Master File's concept of improving the ARMD/ARMD II-class's capabilities by installing modules in the open space underneath the center hull could be said to be taking advantage of the fact that the ARMD-class was originally designed as a space station not a space warship. I don't think it's been stated definitively, but given that the ARMD-class design is a floating drydock turned upside down that space between the pontoons was probably meant to be a dock for a smaller space warship like an Oberth-class destroyer or some large supply ship resupplying what was designed as a sort of "space airbase". After the design was repurposed as a space carrier through the additions of engines and a bridge, it was probably only a matter of time before someone in-universe decided to fill in the gap with something. Macross 7 Trash shows a version of the original ARMD-class where that gap was filled in with what appears to be a large additional hangar. The description is quite short, noting only that the new ventral pontoons are able to be lowered into the water to let the ship float while emigrant fleets are surveying planets. There shouldn't, theoretically, be anything preventing an ARMD-class from doing atmospheric operations simply by hovering anywhere in the atmosphere using gravity control. The float module likely is intended to let it operate as an ad hoc navy ship. The original series did the same with the Unification Wars... with the exception of the opening crawl in episode 1 and the flashback in #33 (IIRC) we never really see the Unification Wars, only the generalities that matter directly to the plot are covered and any additional info is confined to supplemental materials like the short stories in Perfect Memory.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Yakuza Fiance turned out to be a highly entertaining and unconventional series. It's about a girl named Yoshino, the granddaughter of a major Kansai yakuza boss, who tries to lead a normal life until her grandfather returns from a big meet-up of the country's yakuza family heads and announces he's trying to set her up with Kirishima, the heir to a powerful Kanto yakuza boss. So she's off to Tokyo to spend a year with the family of her possible future husband. It reminds me a bit of The Way of the House Husband, in the sense that it's got a lot of over-the-top Japanese mafiosi wandering through its story alongside a Very Normal Girl(TM) and her ridiculously threatening love interest who just can't act normal for five minutes straight..
  12. Seto Kaiba
    It seems safe to assume that not every local defense force operating under the auspices of the New UN Forces was affected to the same extent, given the broad authority that the local governments have in equipping and training their forces. That said, it's also fairly safe to assume the decline in the military's morale and training is widespread to the point of affecting every regional force. The causes given for the New UN Forces' declining morale and training are events which affected the whole of the armed forces, like the reorganization of the government and military in the aftermath of the Second Unification War(s) and the military's expanding use of unmanned fighters to minimize the risk to Human life. There is also the non-trivial possibility that this trend will begin to reverse itself as 5th Generation VFs see increasing rates of adoption. They have performance that exceeds that of the current generation of unmanned fighters, and EX-Gear is designed to make operating a VF more intuitive and as a result make training faster and more productive. With the events of Macross Delta, it's also possible that PMCs will have suffered some reputational damage as a result of Xaos's fumbling the defense of the Brisingr cluster twice and the related exposure of the company's criminal activities. Volunteer Knights of Arkarelia, while not official setting, seems to be preemptively leaning that way too with its depiction of PMCs like the General Galaxy Corporate Forces as more realistically amoral war profiteers willing to participate in an unprovoked invasion if paid enough. From what's been described, there are some fleets that have gone to all-Ghost air forces... but most simply treat the Ghost like a second Main Fighter and use them in roles where the risk of loss of life is extremely high like scouting out enemy forces before sending in manned fighters. I wouldn't say they're reserve forces... more just that they're not using manned fighters for everything and there's just not a need to send human pilots for a lot of simple tasks or especially dangerous roles. Yeah, it's pretty unfair... Though the New UN Forces in Macross Delta can at least say that they're disadvantaged not because a megacorporation put its finger on the scales, but because they live in a bit of a backwater where the governments of the Brisingr Alliance simply can't afford to provide their troops with the latest weapons and the best training. Their main problem is the way Xaos only grudgingly cooperates with them and undermines them at several critical junctures in order to play hero. One would assume there are miclone systems around for the Zentradi pilots. Otherwise, it would not work out very well... or they'd need to have a supplemental module for their accommodations like what's shown in Master File decades later. EDIT: To expand on the above, because I realized I failed to explain properly, Variable Fighter Master File: VF-4 Lightning III has a section on the ARMD-class ("revised") which shows three alternate configurations of the class that have filled in the underside of the ship in various ways. One is a "float" version which is just a conversion that permits water landings by having a series of pontoons on the underside, one is a Zentradi use version which includes a large living space module for Zentradi troops, and one is an expanded hull type which just puts more hangar space and more cargo space which facilitates longer duration independent operations. I'm not sure it needs to be animated, since Macross runs on broad strokes continuity. It can still function as The Great Offscreen War, because only the most general details of it really matter to the story. It'd be great to have it, though, since it'd be pretty damned cool to watch. (Or, hell, just remaster the games for modern consoles.)
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Granted, there's little to distinguish a good actress working with a rubbish script and lacking direction from a bad one in the same conditions. Whether we think she's a good actress or a bad one (I'd call her "middling" based on her inability to spot a bad script), it's not a great look for a production that's already self-sabotaging on so many other fronts to hire an actress best known for two things: 1. starring in one of the industry's all-time biggest flops and 2. blaming "sexist fans" for said flop instead of more deserving figures like either the writers or director. They couldn't find someone with a less sh*tty reputation for a major recurring guest spot? Is this just an attempt to get out ahead of the failure with their own fan-blaming expert, or are they going to claim she brought the toxic fans with her?
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Well, that's... troubling. Paramount, who are in a bad way financially, are preemptively doubling down on an unasked-for spinoff of the Star Trek franchise's all-time least successful, worst reviewed TV series. A spinoff based on a recycled series concept that almost every producer to touch the franchise in its golden age rejected as fundamentally unsellable. And to maximize their chances of success, they cast an actress best known for her starring role in one of the most expensive and embarrassing flops in streaming history? They do know The Producers was a comedy, not a documentary, right?
  15. Seto Kaiba
    I was thinking more the intended outcome... flying it into the ground deliberately in order to run off with the investors money. 🤣
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Based on what official publications have said, I wouldn't attribute it to the fleet's politics. It's more readily attributable to two factors: the prevailing strategic thinking of the New UN Forces at the time, and the ridiculously deep pockets of SMS and its parent megacorp Bilra Transport. Macross Chronicle and other official publications explain the "morale and training" matter in two contexts: First, that the New UN Forces have seen a decline in morale and the level of training due to organizational issues. The New UN Forces were reorganized in the wake of the Second Unification War to diminish the considerable power they wielded (and abused to their own benefit), and that both hurt morale and impacted the organization's flexibility. The use of unmanned fighters to automate certain risky operational roles also led to diminished readiness as pilots were simply less experienced. Many of the troops in the Frontier fleet are simply green, having had little chance to gain practical experience in the generally peaceful fleet. Second, that the higher morale and better training of SMS's troops owes quite a lot to the deep pockets of SMS and the megacorporation that is its parent company. Richard Bilra wields enormous political, economic, and financial power in the Macross Frontier fleet becuase his interstellar shipping company sponsored the fleet's mission towards the Vajra's territory in search of fold quartz. He's also a major backer of President Glass's administration, which allowed him to steer government and military resources to his own company. His considerable influence over the government enabled him to get SMS designated as a special unit under the direct authority of the Frontier President and exempt from the New UN Forces chain of command, as well as to secure exclusive contracts for SMS to carry out final field testing of the latest cutting-edge weapons developed for the military. SMS's financial resources are also leveraged to secure cooperation with other large companies like LAI and to headhunt top talent away from the military. SMS Frontier has several key officers like Jeffrey Wilder, Ozma Lee, and Henry Gilliam who were elite, combat-hardened NUNS troops before joining SMS. It's only natural that SMS's morale and training are in better shape when they have the latest cutting-edge weapons designed to fight the foe they're fighting and are being trained by people who were once the military's most elite. The Vajra's ECM interfering with the command guidance of Ghosts from their motherships did force the New UN Spacy to use its manned fighters, yeah. That said, the New UN Spacy pilots get an unfairly bad rap from the SMS characters. They were relatively green troops who were sent into battle against a vastly superior foe. The VF-171 was not equipped to fight the Vajra. It didn't have the acceleration performance or the maneuverability to match them in a dogfight and its weapons were just not powerful enough to reliably score kills. This isn't because the VF-171 is a bad fighter. It's actually described as something of a masterpiece machine that even average pilots can perform in and the defensive and offensive power to dominate against Zentradi and other VFs. The Vajra just demand a whole other level of power, which is why the 5th Generation VFs were developed specifically to fight them on an even footing. SMS are looking down their noses at the NUNS early in Macross Frontier, but it's really hypocritical of them because the main reason SMS is doing better is because they're using weapons designed to fight the Vajra while the NUNS aren't. Once the NUNS is able to equip its forces with more powerful ammunition and improve countermeasures against the Vajra's powerful ECM, they're immediately doing MUCH better.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Still not thrilled with the Gorn designs, but looks like the next season promises to be exciting.😁
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Apt! Especially considering that film was so bad that Gene Roddenberry and the showrunners essentially declared "We shall never speak of this again." and that commandment held true until Strange New Worlds "The Serene Squall" 33 years later. Really wish season 5 wasn't the last one for Star Trek: Lower Decks. Along with Strange New Worlds, it's one of the only Star Trek titles doing Star Trek right.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    This is going to bomb so hard that it's going to cross the line twice from funny to not funny to actually pretty hilarious. It really is nice of Paramount+ to continue setting millions of dollars on fire for no gain other than helping Michelle Yeoh join that select community of actors and actresses who have both an Academy Award and a Golden Raspberry. Nicer still of them to give it a 2025 release date so it won't contest Lionsgate's Borderlands for the title of worst sci-fi film for 2024. Section 31 is the unasked-for spinoff to Star Trek's all-time lowest-rated and least succesful series starring one of its most loathed characters in-story and out. Nothing about that is a recipe for success. You'd almost suspect Paramount+ is Springtime for Hitler-ing this.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Those are definitely some interesting choices for a first wave. With Captain Jellico, Tuvix, and Weyoun in there I almost feel like they're doing it for the memes. They definitely took the time to put jokes into the slides for their presentation. Captain Garrett's special feature is "poorly placed debris"? 🤔
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Venturing into Rom Kamonohashi's Forbidden Deductions season two... and it's just as good as season one. This one's rapidly becoming a favorite.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Indictments of the show's terrible writing don't come much more damning than that. Hideo "Nanomachines" Kojima likes the writing... that's like a pat on the back from Uwe Boll and Ed Wood at the gates of filmmaker hell. I know exactly what you mean. Being a subs-over-dubs guy, my first instinct was "Gundam is anime" and so I changed the audio to Japanese and the subs to English. Then I was politely baffled when the lip flap didn't match at all and the voice casting was full of dubious choices and dodgy performances. Turns out, this one was written in English so when Netflix says "English (Original)" for the audio choice they are NOT kidding. This series was written to be watched in English, so it doesn't flow right in Japanese. Then I switchd it back to English and found that, while the voice acting flows more naturally and the casting choices are far more appropriate, the writing is still dreadful. That's because, as is typical for Gundam UC side stories, they're not the same designs we're used to seeing. They're implied or outright stated to be yet another batch of one-off custom jobs for prototyping something or other. In this case, the Gundam is a bridge design between the original RX-78 and the RX-79[G] Gundam Ground Type from 08th MS Team. Weirdly, it seems to be drawing inspiration from the Ez8 custom for the head (which is why it has that weird chinstrap). Its official designation is given as RX-78[G]E Gundam EX.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    First, the section of my post you quoted was talking about the other characters of both genders in Requiem for Vengeance... not all female characters in Gundam. That's not the counterargument you think it is because everyone else in this series is in proper uniform, which just makes Hot Topic Trooper stand out more. Second, I'd like to point out that Helena from Code Fairy there is still wearing the actual uniform... something our Hot Topic Trooper can't claim. Her tattoos aren't visible when she has her uniform jacket done up properly and I don't believe her hair color is described as a dyejob like Chara Soon's is. Third and lastly, Helena's part of a special forces unit under Kycilia Zabi's direct authority kind of like Char and thus exempt from a lot of the usual regulations. Not something our Hot Topic Trooper can claim... and even then, she's only lightly skirting the uniform regs instead of outright ignoring them. Yeah... it's actually hard to take her seriously because she looks so incredibly unprofessional and out of place compared to all of the other Zeon soldiers. The writers can try to make her badass all they want, but she's never not going to look like Zeon was so hard up for cannon fodder that they pressganged some random carnie. Interestingly, the official website for the series actually mentions that Hot Topic Trooper's appearance is a violation of regulations and that she is routinely written up for failing to comply with dress code by her superiors. That, and her otherwise being highly capable, are her only character traits.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Everyone has their own experiences, certainly. My friends and family in the Army and Marines have had almost universally negative experiences with PMC troops on the ground. They almost without exception described the PMC troops they'd met as dangerously undisciplined military cosplayers. Civilians power-tripping on being allowed to carry firearms and play soldier, who are too panicky or too trigger-happy to be relied upon to de-escalate or conduct themselves properly in combat and too eager to feel powerful to be trusted not to intimidate or harass the locals. Just massively problematic people in general. This view extends well up into the military's top brass, with many generals commenting publicly that PMC troops are stupid, reckless, poorly-trained, and generally a liability because the military has to clean up the aftermath of their gung-ho idiocy. Brigadier General Horst made some delightfully trenchant remarks about that in '05, and he was far from the only one. The handful of current- and former-PMC personnel I've met and worked with when I was doing government work weren't much different from what I'd been told. Even the ones I met who'd already retired were very toxic people who constantly sought to intimidate others in order to feel in control and who were frequently openly racist. Mind you, there's also quite a lot of documented evidence of PMC troops - yes, even US ones - being involved in both petty criminal activity and actual war crimes over many years in various combat zones. Everything from little stuff like harassment, assault, and armed robbery up to the scale to rape, torture, and murder. PMCs on average are pretty well entrenched in villainous territory in the real world... which makes the heroic PMCs in Macross feel a bit silly in hindsight. Esp. with such high-profile villainy on the part of PMCs in recent years. Xaos, at least, is authentically inept when it comes to actual military endeavors. Their crew of military washouts fumbled the bag so hard that a fourth-rate power like Windermere whose troops had never even seen live combat before was able to push them out of the entire star cluster and bankrupt them with minimal effort in the space of just a few months despite being massively outnumbered by far more experienced personnel. It's a nice touch that the series actually acknowledges the illegal nature of their participation in the war, and the other criminal misconduct of the company like its illegal cloning operation.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    No, they were not. It's unknown if they were among the crew who perished when the ship was transported into deep space by the Macross's fold jump or if they were simply off screen for the duration. To the best of my knowledge, the only time either commanding officer has appeared is in the manga Macross the First. The captain of the Daedalus is briefly seen and named in the flashback chapters. His name is John Morton.
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