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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Considering what their leader's like, they may well be Vader cultists... Which makes you wonder how they'll take Kylo Ren's sudden change of heart vis a vis finishing what Vader started.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Pretty much, yeah... Isamu had to foot the bill for the project, which wiped out his savings. There are easier ways to jump in front of a firing squad, but none quite so stylish as what he did. By all accounts, all emigrant fleet forces have been working with monkey models since the introduction of 4th Generation VFs... and possibly earlier. One of the unintended/unexpected consequences of Isamu stealing the YF-19 No.2 prototype and using it to break through Earth's orbital defenses was that it caused the New UN Government to seriously reconsider its policies on exporting the latest weapons technology to the emigrant fleets and colonies. There had been a sharp uptick in anti-government activity in the latter half of the 2030s, which Millard alluded to in the briefing where Isamu was introduced to the YF-19 and YF-21. With tensions on the rise over whether the New UN Government should be a strong central government or devolve more authority to the individual member fleets/worlds, the New UN Government was understandably a little bit leery about the prospect of providing advanced weapons that were able to penetrate Earth's own defenses to the colonies where they could potentially end up in the hands of the anti-government factions and be used against the federal New UN Forces. The solution the New UN Government hit on was to retain the full spec versions of new weapons for the federal forces and sell reduced capability versions to colony worlds and to emigrant fleets. That way, if the federal New UN Forces had to step in and knock heads together to restore order or put down a fight between colonies they would always have an edge. Other restrictions that were applied were mandated limits on the performance of locally-produced parts and limits on the numbers of certain VFs that could be produced in any one fleet or colonial defense force. This also gave rise to local specifications of various fighters. Various fleets would take the export variant specification they'd licensed and would make tweaks, adjustments, and an array of customizations to make it better suit their needs. For instance, the Macross Frontier fleet made an improved derivative of the VF-19E monkey model spec that included an EX-Gear cockpit and other refinements and designated it VF-19EF Caliburn. General Galaxy's subsidiary/sponsored fleet Macross Galaxy had its own enhanced VF-19C designated VF-19C/MG21 Excalibur. (Normally, the originating fleet for the custom spec is appended after the variant letter or block number with a forward slash and the fleet's identification code.) The VF-19s and VF-22s in Macross 7 were almost certainly monkey models, though the VF-19P used by the Zola Patrol is the only one for which the reductions in performance are explicitly identified. There are tons of local variations of the VF-171 Nightmare Plus, so it's likely that it is technically a monkey model in that the Earth/Federal NUNS's ones likely benefit enormously from Earth's superior technology. Sort of? After the New UN Government and New UN Forces put the kibosh on large-scale adoption of the VF-19 Excalibur due to tightened arms export restrictions and problems with controllability that were discovered during model conversion training by the Earth NUNS, the New UN Forces submitted a new RFP for a replacement with the same advanced features but less over-the-top performance that could reasonably replace the VF-11 Thunderbolt. General Galaxy started with the proven VF-17 Nightmare design and tried to economize it for mass production while incorporating the advances in tech that were made for the 4th Generation VFs. They simplified the transformation, eliminated a few little-used options like the forearm beam guns, reworked its aerodynamics for better all-regime performance, and retooled it for better airframe versatility. The initial (Block I) VF-171 was not quite as good as the VF-17D or -S, but by the Block II version seen in Macross Frontier and Macross Delta, the VF-171's performance exceeded the original VF-17's thanks to improved active stealth and avionics. The VF-171 is noted to be incredibly versatile, able to easily be used for almost any role with minimal conversion work. The surviving ones, yeah. The Robotech II: the Sentinels novelization is generally regarded as being Star Wars Holiday Special levels of bad. "Jack McKinney" (Luceno and Daley) wrote all those books like off-brand Star Wars mockbusters, but it got especially bad when they adapted Sentinels. Nothing, AFAIK. Sharon Apple was destroyed by Isamu's final attack on the SDF-1 Macross, we see her "brain" explode when Isamu destroys the main computer. The New UN Government was understandably more than slightly put out by what Sharon did, and legislated her music off the shelves until all responsive subroutines were removed and banned self-aware virtuoids altogether. Sharon's music did make it back onto the shelves a while later with the responsive elements removed, but the damage was done and a fickle public had moved on. It'd take a LOT of work... some of the limiters are in software, some are hardware, some are simply local manufacturers not being able to produce parts at that full military spec. Dr. Neumann and Shinsei Industry improved the performance of the VF-19EF Caliburn they customized for Isamu mainly through selective downgrades... reconfiguring the airframe for the VF-19A's less stable aerodynamic profile, downgrading the integrated airframe management AI to the initial build used on the YF-19 No.3 prototype and in so doing taking out most of the stability and safety improvements, etc. Most of the fiddly stuff meant to make the VF-19 safer for average pilots was taken out so Isamu could leverage that insane lack of stability that caused the military to back down from adopting the VF-19 in the first place. I'm not getting nearly the number of boos and hisses I expected for such a dreadful joke.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    That, I think, was the idea... Isamu may have saved Earth from Sharon Apple, but he still caused a crapload of damage and broke a ton of regulations along the way. In the final analysis, he... Stole a next-generation prototype fighter from the New Edwards Test Flight Center Stole a fold booster from the New Edwards Test Flight Center Caused significant damage to the Shinsei Industry Project Super Nova hangar at New Edwards when he blew up the hangar doors Racked up quite a bill in terms of the munitions expended in the Eden NUNS's attempt to intercept him and the munitions he himself stole Destroyed several orbital weapons platforms in the Earth Defense Network Caused significant damage to a number of buildings on Earth Caused significant damage to the flying bridge of the SDF-1 Macross Caused an enormous scandal and panic when the YF-19 was demonstrated to be independently capable of penetrating the most secure NUNS defense net in the galaxy, that prompted the New UN Government to issue severe arms export restrictions on 4th Generation VFs (angering Shinsei and General Galaxy) Indirectly caused the total loss of the Sharon Apple system and AIF-X-9 Ghost prototype Indirectly caused the total loss of the YF-21 No.2 prototype and its pilot, Specialist Guld Goa Bowman Needless to say, the New UN Forces brass were NOT happy with Mr. Dyson... but were hard-pressed to punish him overtly for it since Col. Millard Johnson took responsibility for the entire incident and he had "saved the day". Chaining him to a desk under the auspices of a promotion was a way to punish him in a way that would make him sit up and take notice while dressing it up as a reward for a job well done. Arguably, yes... The New UN Government has arms export restrictions on the weapons that can be sold to, or locally built under license by, the emigrant fleets and colony planets. As a result, some of their versions of New UN Forces hardware are what are called "Monkey Models": export variants with inferior capabilities. The first example explicitly acknowledged as such is the VF-19P from Macross Dynamite 7, but the term has been used more commonly since Macross the Ride, which introduced the Macross Frontier fleet's VF-19 monkey model VF-19EF Caliburn. Yeah. The Protodeviln are energy beings inhabiting a line of prototype sentient biological superweapons... like autonomous early versions of the Birdhuman from Macross Zero. (The Evil-series bioweapons that were possessed were partially modeled on Zentradi.) They don't normally possess living beings... the seven energy beings who became the Protodeviln were accidentally drawn into the Evil-series bodies during a power test on a new form of dimensional energy conversion biotechnological reactor intended to power the Evil-series. They were, essentially victims of the Protoculture's weapons programs. Not that we know? They went for the energy that was most similar to their normal food... the mental/emotional energy (spiritia) in the minds of living beings. Ironically, Macross 7 showed that they actually learned a fair bit from their original panicky attempt to keep themselves alive by rampaging across the galaxy. Gepernich's goal was sustainable spiritia farming so they wouldn't need to attack huge swaths of the galaxy. Don't. Seriously. Macross the Ride, elsewise known as "Macross R", is a light novel that was serialized in twelve issues of Dengeki Hobby magazine in 2011. The magazine also featured custom model kits for the various VFs in the story. For all practical intents and purposes, Macross the Ride is a prequel-slash-side story to Macross Frontier. It's set in the Macross Frontier fleet a year before the events of the series (in 2058), and the plot revolves around two things: a VF air racing league called Vanquish that is a very popular sport throughout the New UN Government's sphere of influence, and an attempt by a remnant of the Earth-supremacist group Latence (the baddies in Macross VF-X2) called FASCES to hijack one of the venues. None of which I am aware. I would presume that, in typical Japanese fashion, he resigned from his post. That's what Jan said. The VF-19E was an intermediate variant between the VF-19C and VF-19F... the record is sketchy on whether the VF-19E was a VF-19 1st Mass Production-type like the VF-19A or 2nd Mass Production-type like the VF-19F and VF-19S. The only Macross title to directly feature a VF-19E is Macross 30, which showed it as a 1st Mass Production-type, though the -EF in the Macross the Ride light novel appears to be a 2nd Mass Production-type. The VF-19EF Caliburn was a customized, locally-built derivative of the VF-19E the Macross Frontier fleet built in limited quantities for its local special forces and SMS. It restored the canards and expanded the main wing, but had a number of built-in limiters on its performance. A popular theory is that Dr. Neumann has a bit of a stress disorder because of Isamu. I dunno. Probably sharing his emotions with the Vajra Queen and all. Or maybe... he likes big bugs and he cannot lie? (I'll show myself out.)
  4. Seto Kaiba
    @SkullLeaderVF-X, I found it. It's in the Macross Frontier Sheryl Nome Final Visual Collection:
  5. Seto Kaiba
    The energy beings that became known as the Protodeviln are from fold space... shooting off nukes at random into fold space is not likely to achieve any meaningful results, and they're basically harmless in their own realm anyway. The only reason they had to become predatory when they were trapped in the Evil-series bio-weapons was because the abundant energy they feed on in fold space doesn't exist in normal space. Let's never speak of this again... those novels are SO ABHORRENTLY BAD that even most Robotech fans refuse to defend them, and Harmony Gold publicly admits they're garbage. Imagine how bad something Robotech-branded would have to be for Harmony Gold to admit it was a terrible mistake... There is an artbook that has a picture of him greeting Sheryl upon returning... I'll see if I can find it for you. If Macross Delta is any indication, it's the usual mishmash of both... but between Macross the Ride and Macross Delta it seems to favor the TV series version over the movie. Berger Stone's historical presentation on "music as a weapon" shows the TV version's ending of the Vajra conflict but also shows Alto's YF-29. AFAIK, no data is available that would indicate what Sheryl, Ranka, and Alto were doing after the events of Macross Frontier, except in not-official-setting works like Variable Fighter Master File. Millard takes the blame for Isamu's little stunt in Macross Plus's climax, and Isamu is "rewarded" with a career trajectory towards a desk job in the New UN Forces because the brass can't openly punish him for saving the day even though he stole the YF-19-2 and intended to commit what amounted to a terrorist act out of sheer pigheaded stupidity. c.2057 he was a reservist who was summoned in to the New Edwards Test Flight Center to participate in the evaluation of the federal New UN Forces' latest prototype, the YF-24 Evolution. After the federal New UN Forces decided to adopt the YF-24 as its next main fighter (VF-24), Isamu seems to have taken his retirement at the rank of Major and joined Strategic Military Services to escape his impending consignment to a full-time desk job. The info is a brief blurb in Macross Chronicle focused not on him, but on the YF-24 program itself. The Mechanic Sheet for his fighter in Sayonara no Tsubasa, the VF-19EF/A "Isamu Special", indicates that he tried to illegally buy a VF-19 for his own personal use and was foiled by Dr. Jan Neumann of Shinsei Industry, who instead fobbed him off with a modded VF-19EF Caliburn (Macross Frontier's VF-19E monkey model specification) under the pretense of it being a service life extension test program in order to keep Isamu from doing anything stupid/illegal.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    You say he did it for no reason, but you gave the reason... to be more intimidating. Palpatine did the exact same thing in Empire Strikes Back, appearing as a giant hologram to Darth Vader. You have to admit they both kind of needed the help. Palpatine was an old man in a hooded robe whose face looked like a scrotum. Snoke was a deformed cripple who wore a gold glitter bathrobe everywhere. Neither was particularly intimidating in the flesh without knowing first-hand how powerful they were.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Well spotted. A +1 from me to you.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    So... I decided to give Ulysses: Jeanne d'Arc and the Alchemist Knight a go over lunch today. The original light novel is by the same author (Mikage Kasuga) who did The Ambition of Oda Nobuna, so it being full of gender-flipped historical domain characters was practically a given. This time it's in the Hundred Years War instead of the Sengoku Period. All in all, it didn't really leave much of an impression. The first episode was so scattered that it didn't really tell a coherent story.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    That, and so the audience is forced to let go of the original trio... neatly preventing other writers from dragging them back over and over again like the old Star Wars EU did to the original trilogy cast and doing what Robotech continues to do to its Macross holdover characters. Kawamori has always maintained that Hikaru, Misa, and Minmay sailed off into the proverbial sunset and their story is over. This postcard is him drawing a double underline and six exclamation marks on the word "over".
  10. Seto Kaiba
    I dunno... from what I've heard, most of the Star Wars EU was pure and unrepentant garbage. I don't think things have necessarily improved with Disney at the helm. Gonna hazard a guess and say it's probably something to do with emotional control and "practice makes perfect", since not being in control of your emotions is a path to the dark side. Nonsense, you heard the man... he is one with the Force, and the Force is with him. He might've been blind, but the man was rolling nothing but 20's on his spot checks.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    @Sailor Arashi hit on most of the answer, but there's a point that was missed. The Adventurers Guild in Goblin Slayer doesn't work like the ones in Overlord, Konosuba, etc., where guild officials were the ones who determined what an acceptable rate was, would decline to publish requests from those who couldn't pay, and policed the adventurers to make sure people didn't take quests that they had no chance of completing. In Goblin Slayer, the guild is mostly just a freelancer registry that tries to corral the riffraff, categorize them, tag them so the bodies can be identified if a quest goes wrong, and point them in the direction of work. They don't have the authority to stop a woefully underprepared party from taking a quest that's way over their skill level, nor do they have any real way to objectively measure someone's competency. The light novel doesn't beat around the bush about it, and straight-up compares the guild to a temp agency rather than the labor union-like guilds of other stories.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Oh I hope not... if the Walkure fanboys want wrist exercise they can just buy the f***ing h-doujinshi. I'd like to see something of actual substance.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    It was a postcard that you could send away for if you bought the PS1 Macross: Do You Remember Love? video game. @sketchley has a translation of it posted here. Its canonicity, inasmuch as Kawamori cares about such notions, is dubious. No new info about Megaroad-01 has been released, apart from some updates/corrections to its tech specs in Macross Chronicle. Its fate remains a mystery.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    She's not the sort of "hidden depths" person you'd expect to launch an interstellar communications startup and shepherd it until it became a interstellar conglomerate megacorporation. What you see is pretty much what you get with Minmay.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    "Capture" is a VERY strong word for what happened there... He tracked Han Solo to Cloud City literally by following the Millennium Falcon at a distance, which isn't really a great feat of skill or cunning. He didn't actually do anything on Cloud City except grumble a bit, and received Han Solo almost literally gift-wrapped for transport to Jabba the Hutt. Vader did literally the heavy lifting for him. Oh, undoubtably... that's the reason they felt compelled to give her a cape and a shiny chromed armor paintjob. The goal was to be the new faceless, intimidating badass because that worked SO well for Boba Fett even though he accomplished the square root of bugger all in the actual movies before being accidentally killed by a blind man waving a stick. Unfortunately they succeeded a little too much, and also gave Phasma Boba Fett's all-bark-and-no-bite onscreen performance as a humiliating failure who betrays all of the First Order to save her own skin and gets tossed in the garbage, comes back to get beaten up by a mook and a beepy soccer ball before falling down a bottomless pit. Rumor has it Phasma took dance lessons, but only ever learned the steps to the Masochism Tango. It seems unlikely... from what I've seen and read, Star Wars fans seem to have rather cynically spotted her for the Boba Fett ripoff she is and in conjunction with her appalling onscreen performance given her an unofficial designation as the new trilogy's chew toy.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Officially? No. The only time that I'm aware of the show's staff commenting on the matter was a piece in Newtype around the time the Macross Delta series ended, in which they indicated they never decided on an identity for Lady M and were content to leave it ambiguous for the time being. One of the fansub groups - I think it was [Deadfish] - caused a stir and an enduring fallacy by asserting in a translator's note that it was Lynn Minmay even though in-series dialog basically makes it impossible for any pre-existing character to be Lady M.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Seems a safe bet they figured it out eventually... they had fold singers and weaponized them in their war with the Protodeviln, and even built a massive mind control system around the fold receptor mechanism that works similarly to the V-type bacterium. They had to have sussed it out at some point.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    It's indicated that the ancient Protoculture revered the Vajra, and there are some fairly strong indications that the Protoculture may have based a fair amount of their military technology on Vajra anatomy.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    IMO, there's nothing really inconsistent there in The Force Awakens. Rey has been working salvage on spacecraft of every stripe from fighters all the way up to the largest capital ships for essentially her entire adult life and a fair chunk of her childhood. It's not unreasonable for her to have at least a basic grasp of how to fly the ships she's spent her entire life scrapping, and a good grasp of the underlying technology in order to identify what parts were the valuable ones. She gets around on an antigrav jetbike, IIRC, and that's not exactly a simple machine either. With respect to using the force, didn't Yoda pretty definitively establish that one of the most important factors to using the force was belief? Rey grew up hearing legends of Luke Skywalker and has been told by no less a person than Han frigging Solo that it was ALL TRUE. Luke was a grown up cynical man who hadn't grown up hearing stories of the amazing power of the force, so he had a lot to unlearn before he could unleash his full potential. Rey doesn't have that problem. She doesn't do anything complex, and it takes her several tries to get simple stuff right, but the fact that she went into it believing the force could do anything she's not working with the same limitations on her access to power that Luke was. As for the dueling... yeah, she beat Kylo Ren. A badly injured Kylo Ren who'd tanked a shot from Chewie's crossbow that previously had been knocking stormtroopers several feet backwards with every hit AND gotten several lightsaber wounds from Finn. An untrained amateur with implicit trust in the force beat a winded, wounded professional who was in the middle of bleeding out and catching hypothermia while also losing some power due to being conflicted about his alliegance to the dark side AND trying not to hurt her. It's not like she spanked him at the top of his game, Yeah, Phasma was a damp squib when you consider they put a ton of press focus on her for what turned out to be a glorified cameo appearnace... but I'm not convinced that trolling the fandom wasn't the whole point there.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    They have some... alluded to back in Macross Frontier, which mentioned that galactic law forbade an emigrant fleet to invade an inhabited planet. It's not quite the Prime Directive, but it's a start. Thus far they seem to be doing pretty good, with the Vajra being their only non-friendly first contact due to the extreme differences in communication methods. Things only went south on Windermere IV because the Kingdom of the Wind was impatient about the slow pace of its economic growth due to its relative isolation. Yeah, though they did have the Apollo Base colony and the space colony clusters, so presumably at least some of that sort made it through OK.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Imagine my amusement when a little digging revealed I was spot on about Phasma... she was added because coverage of the first table read of The Force Awakens got a lot of feedback on social media about there being too many men/not enough women. In hindsight, it adds a new and cynically amusing dimension to Phasma's character. The audience demanded the writers add a new female character purely for representation's sake, so the movie's writers crowbarred her into a few scenes that totally subvert her alleged reputation as the badass action girl the fans clamored for, showed that she is so bad at her job that Starkiller Base is lost entirely because of her, and then literally threw her in the trash. Boba Fett was a background character who the fans blew out of all proportion because he looked cool... Phasma is the living embodiment of the writers saying "Don't tell me how to do my job". Fans clamored for her to not be killed off, so they brought her back in The Last Jedi to get beaten even worse. She manages a few intimidating lines and is promptly beaten by a droid and tossed down another hole by Finn after being beaten with a riot baton. What are the odds this is some kind of self-aware act of parody?
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Keith and Roid's little tête-à-tête on the Sigur Berrentzs's upper hull suggests the ancient Protoculture engineered the Windermereans with short lifespans intentionally. The "why" is never discussed, but it seems to be something neither of them is entirely happy with since Keith openly resents them for his people's short lifespans and Roid's assimilation plot is at least partly motivated by a desire to give his people longer lives. It may be related to their greater level of physical ability and the demonstrated link between the fold receptors in their runes that give their species a level of natural empathic talent and the greater base level of physical ability vs. other sub-Protoculture species. (It seems likely that the Protoculture tried to create a species with greater natural empathy that would be less inclined to violence and built the short lifespan into them to delay their development of advanced technology as long as possible in a bid to have them solve their internal disputes before leaving for the stars.) Roid's belief that the Windermereans were the chosen heirs of the ancient Protoculture seems to be mainly by two factors: That the Brisingr globular cluster, and Windermere IV in particular, are believed to have been the ancient Protoculture's last stronghold before succumbing to extinction. That the Protoculture left behind the Sigur Berrentzs as the key to the Delta Wave System along with some clues on how to locate, activate, and use it on Windermere IV (even though the core of the system was actually on Ragna).
  23. Seto Kaiba
    I don't recall when the logo was unveiled offhand, but I remember when they first started teasing a new Macross series in the summer of '07 it was as "Macross 25". They announced the title at the 25th Anniversary Live in August of that year. It was either late October or November, IIRC, that we got our first real good look at the VF-25 and principal characters.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    If you're waiting for it to get less rapey, don't hold your breath... I'm two volumes into the light novel and that unsettling aspect of it most definitely is NOT going away.1 Moreover, goblin slaying is more or less all it's actually about, so at least it's exactly what it says on the tin. (Goblin Slayer is, for all practical intents and purposes, Medieval Batman by way of Doom Guy... and instead criminals, it's goblins that get his hackles up for reasons that'd make perfect sense even if he didn't have psychological problems beyond the dreams of psychoanalysts.) 1. TBH, I can completely understand why this series is accused of glorifying violence against women. Its author, Kumo Kagyu, seems to take sadistic delight in having Goblin Slayer's party find bands of adventurers made up primarily or entirely of women that meet terrible ends with monotonous, clockwork regularity. Apart from the man leading the party of three girls in the first chapter, the men seem to be mostly exempt from this.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    It's increasingly looking like a new series has been back-burnered or abandoned in favor of more of the Macross Delta "story". There have been a few... like the proposed live-action movie Macross: Final Outpost: Earth which was originally intended for a Christmas 1996 release, or a 3DCG series called Macross 3D that got as far as a promo video before ending up on indefinite hiatus in 2000.
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