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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    That's going to be the tricky bit... Rian Johnson pulled a 180 on a fair few subplots from The Force Awakens in The Last Jedi, so Jar-Jar Abrams is gonna have to decide whether he's going to have to abandon those orphaned plot threads or try to unpick the Gordian knot Rian Johnson left him. Considering the First Order basically already won in The Last Jedi, having reduced armed resistance to their agenda to barely enough people to form their own baseball team, it's going to be hard for them to come up with a credible way for the Resistance/Rebellion to turn it around in the space of just one movie.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    It's a factoid that makes some other details given about later-model VFs using heat-sequestration techniques to reduce their visible IR profiles during combat make a bit more sense. The last thing you'd want to do when the standard short-range missile is an imaging infrared seeker is go about emitting heat from every bloody surface... especially since that's a technology intended to make a missile less vulnerable to flare countermeasures. Honestly, when I first started researching 'em I figured they were probably using a mixture of infrared and command guidance since the effective range is so short and thus the possibility of friendly fire is remote. It was inevitable radar would be right out when Macross started making more of a meal out of active stealth technology in Plus and Zero... and, sure as sure, Macross Chronicle indicates that using active radar homing is for medium-range missiles and up since they need powerful ECCM onboard to cope with VF-mounted ECM and active stealth systems.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    MODEX numbers are a tiny bit wrong in the UN Forces vs. what's used by the US today... given that they start at 000 instead of 100. They also seem to include multiple squadrons in a single bracket of MODEX numbers, given that we have some ships with as many as 750 fighters aboard and we have yet to see a four-digit MODEX. (It doesn't help that art for the original series didn't include MODEX numbers, which may have ended up a bit jumbled anyway when the influx of new recruits ended up expanding the Prometheus's squadrons with every spare airframe that was on hand.) It's only books like Master File that show MODEX numbers for the TV series versions... Roy's is given as the standard 001, Hikaru's as 023, Max's as 111, and Hayao's as 112 in Variable Fighter Master File: VF-1 Valkyrie Vol.1. (For Hikaru's, they're drawing on his callsign from his first sortie, where he went by Skull 023.) It's probably better/easier/safer/saner to use their DYRL? MODEX numbers of 001, 011, 012, and 013 for Roy, Hikaru, Kakizaki, and Max respectively. The one time an example squadron organization has been given in an official publication, it was a squadron composed of 15 VF-1's divided into platoons of 3 aircraft apiece. Dialog from the series proper suggests a UN Spacy VF squadron is 15-24 fighters. DYRL? shows the same squadron with platoons of 4 aircraft instead. (It's worth noting that the numbers of variants given in that chart do not jive with the numbers of all the variants aboard the Macross. They have way too few VF-1J's and too many VF-1A's to create the sample disposition. Assuming a DYRL-like composition with a greater number of A-types makes more sense. The numbers in the Sky Angels book shake out almost perfectly for a DYRL?-style squadron and support Master File's contention that the Macross was home to 14 squadrons.) Later Macross titles, starting with Macross: Do You Remember Love?, have variously shown the (New) UN Forces and other organizations using platoons of either 3 or 4 aircraft: SVF-1 Skulls, Skull Platoon in DYRL? was 4 planes Fairy Platoon in II was 4 planes Diamond Force and Emerald Force in 7 were 3 planes apiece Sound Force was 3 planes SMS Skull Platoon was 4 planes (only 3 actual combat models tho) SMS Pixie Platoon was 3 battle suits Alto's NUNS Sagittarius Platoon was 3 planes Macross 30's SMS unit fields a 3 plane platoon Roy leads the squadron's command platoon, which shares the name of the squadron. In DYRL?, Hikaru, Max, and Kakizaki are the other three members of Skull Platoon.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Macross Chronicle suggests that the majority of micro missiles use imaging infrared homing and preset guidance data to independently track targets after launch. Some may equip active laser homing or optical seekers. ("Expanded universe" sources like Variable Fighter Master File have occasionally suggested guidance systems are modular and that this is simply the most common guidance configuration.) Radar homing is noted to be greatly diminished in overall effectiveness due to how prevalent active stealth and ECM systems are on VFs. Consequently, practically all missiles in Macross are of the active or passive self-guided "fire and forget" variety and guidance tech like semi-active homing has fallen out of favor. Most missiles in the Macross universe seem to use at least two guidance technologies. The larger missile types do often use ECCM-equipped active radar homing in addition to both infrared and optical homing.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    If you mean the Thrawn trilogy, I could perhaps agree. The rest... eeech... ... but Kylo's grandad was also a sullen, testy, angsty little emo drama queen who dressed in rather too much leather, had stupid hair, and was stalking an obnoxious girl. Maybe Episode IX will give us Rey chopping off a bunch of his extremities, setting him on fire, and assuming some nearby lava will finish the job so he can come back as a 7'2" asthmatic robo-gimp just like grandpa (but not as cool or menacing). Protip... they're not really the ancient founding texts of the Jedi order. Luke is upset because Rey ran off with his porn stash.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    The Kelvin timeline's Constitution-class USS Enterprise left port ahead of her planned maiden voyage on (or shortly before) 11 February 2258 with a crew of cadets under Captain Christopher Pike. All of the advances gleaned from study of the Narada likely slowed down plans for the Constitution-class's construction to the point of making Pike her first captain. The Prime timeline's Constitution-class USS Enterprise was launched on her maiden voyage on 4 July 2245 under Captain Robert April, who had supervised her construction and testing. The production staff for Star Trek (2009) did confirm the Admiral Archer in question was Jonathan Archer from Star Trek: Enterprise... so we can presume the advances in technology that led to USS Enterprise launching thirteen years later also extended his life at least 12 more years given that he was still alive to ream Scotty for losing his beagle in a transwarp beaming experiment in 2257. (I wonder if that means medicine in the Kelvin timeline found a way to reverse transporter-induced systemic damage? Archer was said to be suffering from peripheral nervous system degradation as the result of overusing the NX-01 Enterprise's primitive transporter. I guess he lucked out on not getting a full-blown case of transporter psychosis.)
  7. Seto Kaiba
    I'd say roughly 0%, but that may be tainted a bit by my complete dissatisfaction with his work on the new series of Star Trek movies... They've done such a good job of making [Ben Solo/Kylo Ren] an unlikeable little b***h, appropriate to his role as a major villain who jumped off the slippery slope feetfirst, that I really don't see a way for them to wrap up his arc short of Redemption Equals Death like they did for Vader. Trying to go any other route, like having him see the light and repent, would just feel like a karma houdini for a guy who's got multiple counts of mass murder on his CV.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    15 June 2010, in Variable Fighter Master File: VF-19 Excalibur, AFAIK. It was included in Macross the Ride's description of the VF-19EF Caliburn the following year. I'm fairly certain that's not it. We're shown a paint scheme for the ARIEL system demonstrator, which includes a logo for the ARIEL system itself. The logo is a sylph, which is the class of air spirits that the character of Ariel in The Tempest arguably belonged to. (Ariel was, admittedly, referred to with male pronouns in The Tempest, even though the character was frequently played by women and the common image of a sylph for centuries has been that they're uniformly female. I blame von Hohenheim.)
  9. Seto Kaiba
    A few side notes with respect to the ANGIRAS, ARIEL, and ARIEL II airframe integration management control systems... ANGIRAS was originally described in the Macross Journal Extra: Sky Angels VF-1 Valkyrie Special Edition doujinshi by Masahiro Chiba. The first mention of ANGIRAS in official setting material was in Macross the Ride, in the official specs for Anthony Clemens' VF-11C Thunderbolt Interceptor. Its airframe control AI was given as the ANGIRAS-GFW204, said to be a high-end version for the VF-11. As with modern control systems, there are individual versions of ANGIRAS, ARIEL, etc. for given models, variants, blocks, etc. of variable craft that customize its performance for that vehicle or add/remove functionality. Only a few have been explicitly named, like the high-end ANGIRAS-GFW204 control AI for the VF-11 mentioned above, the ANGIRAS-AD3 control AI used by the VF-1X (and VF-4?), and the ARIEL II build codenamed "Brunhilde" that was used by the YF-25, VF-19ACTIVE, VF-25, and YF-30 with various adjustments.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, they'll totally stick with it. Archer passing away the day after the TOS Enterprise was commissioned is just too perfect for jerking the fandom's heartstrings. Sato had a pretty sizable hatedom, so they'll likely leave hers alone simply to avoid discussing her. (I'm betting they work it into the Discovery novels about the hunt for Kodos.) EDIT: Esp. in Archer's case, since they established that he was apparently alive around the time the Enterprise was launched in the Kelvin timeline.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    One of the pitfalls of academia... you end up learning a lot of superficially polite-sounding ways to say one of your colleagues is full of crap. Once you've got tenure, the foul language flows a good deal more freely. His paper certainly ticks all the usual checkboxes for a study aimed at grabbing the attention of the mainstream media's sensationalist side. It's a small independent study with a sample size that's far too small to be taken as entirely reliable and a vague conclusion that can be easily reinterpreted by omission to sound far more incendiary. "The Last Jedi haters are all trolls or Russian influencers" sounds a lot more impressive and headline-worthy than "assuming this tiny sample population is a perfect scale representation of the entirety of the Star Wars fandom, that my poorly-explained and highly subjective methodology for determining what constitutes 'trolling' is perfectly valid, and that there are some resemblances on a few accounts to Russian election year social media trolls, I conclude that the hate for The Last Jedi is a secret, evil Russian political campaign intended to undermine our democracy... no, stop trying to take away my tinfoil hat". It's marked as Preprint status, so it hasn't been accepted by any scholarly publication at this time... let alone actually put out for comment. That's the biggest hole in the paper... at no point does Dr. Bay consider that there might have been other motivations for the malicious behavior, like people just being a-holes. He leaps directly to a conclusion that it's part of a sinister social media influence campaign aimed at triggering some kind of sociopolitical upheaval. Seems a bit hyperbolic for angry fans raging about a movie full of angsty space wizard-monks with laser swords. Honestly, as poor as the quality of this study was, I suspect that may have been the point. Dr. Bay does seem to have gone into it with, if not a goal of then a vested interest in, smearing The Last Jedi's critics. Weirdly, thinking back on this, I have to admit I think I might see why the Star Wars fans on the far right seem inclined to hate Disney for brooming the old Expanded Universe to make way for this new trilogy. The old Star Wars EU seems to carry a fairly overt Aesop that democracy doesn't work and that authoritarianism is the only way to get crap done or form a functioning society. There are some shades of this in The Last Jedi vis a vis the commentary on how useless the New Republic is, but it's not nearly on par with the books showing them as an ineffectual and hopeless corrupt bunch of total bunglers who go barely last a century of chaotic democratic rule before the Empire takes over again.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    I've often wondered... high-powered searchlights like the one used for the Bat Signal can easily draw ~7kW in operation. That could get expensive pretty fast. Does Bruce Wayne covertly reimburse the Gotham P.D. for the cost of operating it? Ironic that you'd notice the term in the VF-19's Master File book... the Shinsei Industry VF-19 was the first production VF that didn't use it. ANGIRAS was the first-generation airframe control AI technology that was used on the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Generation Variable Fighters. It's basically the VF's equivalent of the learning computer that the titular Mobile Suit had in the original Gundam series... an AI-based control system that functions as the intermediary between the pilot and the mecha's various systems.1 It's the computer running all the various systems in the VF's "glass cockpit": interpreting control inputs and feedback commands for the digital fiber optic fly-by-wire system2, managing sensor integration and prioritization for the cockpit displays, and overseeing all the various essential systems that would otherwise require a lot of the operator's attention so the pilot can focus on flying. 4th Generation VFs like the VF-19, VF-22, and VF-171 used the next-generation airframe control AI system that was introduced to replace ANGIRAS: ARIEL.3 5th Generation VFs are using an upgraded version of the ARIEL AI system called ARIEL II. 1. In this sense, "ANGIRAS" counts as a punny name or an obscure reference. Angiras was a Vedic sage in Hinduism who was famed in scripture as, among other things, a mediator between men and the gods. 2. The oldest versions of the technical materials mention an AMBAC system as one of the flight control systems it oversees. "Fly" might be a misleading term too, since the same control system (and physical controls) are used for maneuvers in the air and on the ground in the other modes as well. 3. This acronym has not been explained, AFAIK. I suspect it is a reference to the character of Ariel in Shakespeare's The Tempest, an all-seeing spirit of the air who is based on a spirit from renaissance demonology that is described as an Archon of the Winds, Spirit of the Air, and Wielder of Fire.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    On a skim of the paper during a particularly tedious and unnecessary meeting I just escaped, I have to say I find his conclusion specious. Dr. Bay's sample size is vanishingly small at just 967 tweets collected over a 219 day period, focused exclusively on ONE Twitter account (Rian Johnson's). Actual description of his methodology is short and vague, and points to a highly subjective filtering approach beyond the most basic distinction of positive vs. negative commentary. For much of his analysis section he's drawing conclusions based upon circumstantial or insufficient evidence, particularly in connecting Russia to the 33 accounts he categorized as malicious actors based on highly general conditions common to disposable "burner" accounts. While it's true that 3 or 4 of the accounts he examined were purged by Twitter in one of its periodic purges of sockpuppet accounts, he doesn't seem to have even considered that people creating new accounts specifically to behave like jackasses and post inflammatory material is not a hard and fast indicator of an account being part of a Russian influence campaign. It feels rather bizarre that the doctor, a research fellow at the Center for the Digital Future at USC's Annenberg school, would be overlooking or completely discounting the rather more obvious possibility that many of these bad actors are just ordinary trolls and butthurt misogynistic fanboys covering their asses by creating a disposable secondary account. We do live in a time where employers are terminating people over things they post on social media, after all. For the TL;DR crowd... this chap's conclusion feels a bit like McCarthyist paranoia. There's a vague possibility he's onto something, but it feels more like he's jumping at shadows.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Seems like practically everyone wants to take "Russian cyber-interference" as a get-out-of-jail-free card these days... Anyway, an abstract from an unpublished doctoral student's essay with a premise based on vague, highly subjective criteria and with an unnecessarily hyperbolic conclusion hardly seems like a news-worthy topic. I can practically hear his advisor's eyes rolling.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Dunno if anyone saw this already... it looks like the theoretical potential for UEFI malware is no longer quite so theoretical. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/10/first-uefi-malware-discovered-in-wild-is-laptop-security-software-hijacked-by-russians/
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Once I finish the last couple of novels in the Star Trek relaunch continuity I'm going to take a whack at the Discovery novels... I've gotta get SOMETHING out of the series, even if I can't stand the crew of the titular ship.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Ah. Think I'll take a miss on that one. Season one was such an unholy mess that I honestly doubt I can be arsed to bother pirating season two, let alone actually paying for it on CBS All Access. It's a very strange feeling for a lifelong Trekkie to hear there's a new season of Star Trek about to start in the near future and feel no enthusiasm whatsoever. I just hope Star Trek's chuniibyou phase passes swiftly and we can replace Discovery with something more befitting the Star Trek legacy in the near future.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    You'd have to look at her character-specific page. The details do show up in the graphics for that episode, but the episode article doesn't give the bios in full. It's mentioned in the third-to-last paragraph in the Background section of Hoshi's memory alpha article.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Use a VPN to spoof your location?
  20. Seto Kaiba
    It's actually from the ENT two-parter episode "In a Mirror, Darkly". When Mirror!Archer and Mirror!Sato are going through the USS Defiant's main computer looking at the Federation historical database, the later details of their respective prime timeline service records are visible onscreen (and discussed in part). The biographical data for those onscreen displays were what showed when Prime!Archer and Prime!Sato died, and in Sato's case the circumstances of her untimely demise. That's really all there is, though. We might get more in one of the Discovery novels that's about the manhunt for Governor Kodos.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Or at least grounds for an inconsistencies drinking game. More about the mini-episodes they're planning, I assume?
  22. Seto Kaiba
    I don't believe the Northampton-class has ever been described as being inspired by, or based on, any Zentradi designs... but I can see where you're coming from there. Like its contemporary, the Guantanamo-class stealth carrier, the Northampton-class stealth frigate is basically an example of structural purpose shaping taken to its logical extreme as a countermeasure for radar detection. Fortunately space warships don't have to worry about aerodynamics, so they've neatly ducked the problems the Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk had in doing the same (being unflyable without a computer-aided fly-by-wire system). Since active stealth technology is once again ascendant in the late 2050s and 2060s, I'm inclined to wonder if the switch back to less passively stealthy warship designs is a product of that.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    One of the more unusual touches in Macross II: Lovers Again's continuity was that the UN Forces were quite blatant in their application of Zentran and Meltran overtechnology. Their new warship classes have acquired Zentradi and Meltrandi aesthetics, they use the space warfare tactics they've learned from their Zentradi and Meltrandi defectors, and their mecha have obvious Zentran and Meltran-inspired design touches. The New UN Forces in the ongoing Macross timeline supposedly do, but you'd never know it outside of being told... except maybe on the YF-21/VF-22.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Not unless he can time travel... because his stated disinterest in revisiting the story and characters of the original Macross series goes back to shortly after Macross: Flash Back 2012 was released when he considered the Macross story to be definitively concluded, and Harmony Gold didn't start to become the legal impediment they are to Macross today until ~2001. "The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined that time travel is impossible." Macross Zero was, put simply, a prequel made during a period where prequels were trendy and the story doesn't really touch on Super Dimension Fortress Macross at all. The gist of it was "Hikaru, Misa, and Minmay's story is over. They've sailed off into the sunset, so let them go."
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Among the improvements identified were enhancements to thermonuclear reaction power systems and actuator technology derived from the capture of a factory satellite specializing in battle suits. All of the Macross II VFs are basically hybrids of the Nousjadeul-Ger and VF concept.
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