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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    It's a video game, bro... I guarantee you the dev team literally did not care about making anything in true scale. 🤣 What Artdink's dev team did care about was picking a design for the Gefion that plausibly fit with the premise of the game's story. The SMS branch on Uroboros is not there to provide PMC services to Uroboros's government. They're not even really meant to be a combat unit at all. They're a well-funded, but minimally staffed, R&D unit led by an eccentric senior researcher. Their mission is to study the intense and widespread fold fault activity around the planet and work on ways for fold faults to be traversed safely. The minimal staffing and remote location make secrecy easier to maintain. In practical terms, that meant the Gefion needed to be: An escort warship large enough to plausibly hold 3-4 Variable Fighters for the main cast. Small enough to not dominate the area map in any of the game's zones and plausibly be operated by a handful of people. Lacking in offensive power to the point that SMS cannot plausibly overpower the other factions in the game using it. Visually communicate that SMS Uroboros is a small operation lacking the resources of a dedicated combat unit. The Northampton-class was a pretty ideal choice there, since it was a design used in Macross Frontier and its movies, it's a very small and lightly armed stealth warship, and it has been shown to carry ~3 Variable Fighters in normal operating conditions (in Macross 7). They just slapped some catapult decks on the side because that linear catapult launch in the Macross Frontier series is so dang satisfying. The scale's off a bit, sure, and once you've got a dozen or so support characters you start to wonder where they're putting everyone... but that was a lower priority than finding something that fit the bill, looked nice doing it, and worked naturally with the game. The only other pre-existing design that would have fit the bill would be the Valhalla III-type from Macross Digital Mission VF-X... which would've been kind of badass in its own right but the catapult launch on that one would've been much more complex and possibly induce motion sickness. Using one of the larger carrier classes was right out. They're too big, they imply too much power at SMS's disposal, and the player is naturally going to wonder why a ship that was designed to hold multiple squadrons of Variable Fighters only has one other pilot - who is also the ship's captain - aboard at the start of the game.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Naturally. Even the very finest actors cannot save a production with a garbage script and lackluster direction. Ms. Ridley herself is not the problem. She can only do her best with what she's given. The problem facing New Jedi Order is that they're trying to sell another movie based on a character whose audience reception hovers somewhere between total ambivalence and general antipathy. The writers of the sequel trilogy did a very poor job with Rey as a character and it's going to be very difficult, potentially impossible, for her to win over the crowd now. The kind of writing that works for stories like Andor doesn't really work for something like a Jedi-centric story. The Jedi and the Sith exist in a simpler, more child-friendly context where morality is reduced to a simple matter of Good vs. Evil, where the villains are melodramatic evil sorcerers and blood knights, and where the Chosen Hero of Destiny saves the day every time. You can't have that AND do grounded, morally complex, realistic writing like Andor's... they're antithecal premises. A lot of classic fantasy stories started out as folk tales... little bits of oral mytho-history, fairy tales, and folkloric explanations for the weirdness of the natural world. They're short and to the point because they exist to teach a simple moral lesson, to teach children what not to do, or just explain weird sh*t that happens naturally. Sequels, prequels, all that hot nonsense has existed for a long time too. One could argue that Homer's Odyssey was a sequel to his Iliad. Those existed more in the realms of complex, bawdy, and bloody mytho-history meant for the theatergoing adult. Commercial sequels... it's hard to say how old those truly are. Shakespeare did at least one, that being Henry IV Part II, but even that wasn't really making stuff up off the cuff to keep a story going past its end. They do imply that the war we see in the OT is only one that's happened, so it's justified even without showing another. I think moving far enough down the timeline that everyone from the originals is long dead would be a good move. They don't want to because they want to lean on all that residual goodwill audiences have for the existing cast. Developing new factions, a new main cast, and new designs all from scratch is a hard and a big investment... something they were burned by in the sequel trilogy. They can try to maintain stasis, much like how The Acolyte looks essentially no different to the "modern day" despite being 100+ years apart, but that's unsatifying in its own way. Kind of a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't situation IMO... but at this point they have little to lose now that Andor's over and the best they have in the pipe is more unintentionally sexist displays of girl power putting the entire galaxy in danger in Ahsoka season two.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, absolutely... and that was a cycle LucasFilm and its licensees had already gone through several times over more than twenty years before LucasFilm was acquired by Disney. That was the Star Wars Expanded Universe, where the fighting just never bloody stopped and which was on its seventh galactic government (and the fifth post-Empire one) in 21 years of realtime and about 130 years of in-story time when Disney and LucasFilm decided to pull the plug in the runup to the sequel trilogy. As I understand it, the official Happy Ending Override was Heir to the Empire in '91. Disney LucasFilm is just doing exactly what pre-Disney LucasFilm was already doing... milking the franchise until everything that made it likeable or interesting has run dry.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Thank you for the heads up. I got one as a gift for my nephew, and will pass along word to my brother so he doesn't get caught by that rather odd issue. 👍
  5. Seto Kaiba
    The real question is even more direct than that... "Does warfare change after the sequels?" With Dave Filoni still firmly in charge of Star Wars, the obvious and extremely safe answer is "No". Part of it is that LucasFilm CCO Dave Filoni clearly does not like to leave his creative "safe space" (Star Wars: the Clone Wars), but to a large extent the lack of any real change will be easily attributable to the fact that the two confirmed post-sequel projects in development are only set a few years after the Rise of Skywalker. It's unlikely that war will change, both because it hasn't meaningfully done so in the 68 or so years of time encompassing the Skywalker Saga despite three major wars and because technological improvements are a main driver of change in how wars are fought and technology in Star Wars seems to be almost entirely stagnant across at least the 168 years of onscreen time we've seen thus far. Given that both of the announced post-sequel movie projects are supposedly set only about 5-15 years after the events of the Rise of Skywalker, I think it's safe to say that we'll be seeing the scattered remnants of the First Order harassing the reconstituted New Republic or whatever successor state replaces it in the same way we see the scattered Imperial forces harassing the New Republic in the time between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens. Like what we see in The Mandalorian and Ahsoka. A very cynical part of me is inclined to suspect they'll try to go for an EU-esque approach to the period similar to what the previous work titled New Jedi Order did. That situation likely suits Dave Filoni's creative process just fine. He won't have to develop a new antagonist faction for either project. He can just rebrand the Empire again, and if he wants a dark sider for Rey's crew to fight he can just have some forgotten Sith apprentice come out of the woodwork the same way Order 66 Jedi survivors have been doing for decades. Starfighter's so close to the previous film he doesn't even have to come up with new designs, he can plausibly continue to lean on the existing designs from the previous film which were themselves just the classic designs from the OT with minimal facelifts. It's a near-perfect setup to play it extremely safe with future projects. The one risk I feel like they're taking is basing another movie (New Jedi Order) around Daisy Ridley's character Rey. Even excluding culture war nonsense - and a directoral choice seemingly intended to provoke culture war nonsense - Rey is a polarizing character to the target audience. She wasn't handled well in the sequel trilogy, so a lot of the audience is seemly rather ambivalent about her return.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    To be honest, the direction I feel like they're going with Nyan is that she's the person who's been swept along by events her entire life without any real means of control. What little exposition we've gotten about her paints the picture of someone who's been on her own and at the mercy of others from a very young age. She's from Side 2, and she lost her home and her entire family in the One Year War... likely in the One Week Battle, where Zeon's unprovoked attack on Sides 1, 2, and 4 with nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons wiped out approximately 1/2 of the Human population at the time. She was 10 or 11 at most when she was orphaned and made a refugee. She lived on her own in an illegal tenament in Izuma colony's illegal refugee district and worked as a black market courier to make ends meet, always fearing arrest by the Side 6 military police. When she meets Machu, she basically ends up under Machu's thumb and dependent on Machu's earnings in Clan Battle. Then she's dependent on Shuji for escape, and finally on Xavier's kindness and Kycilia's use for her to make any kind of life for herself. One has to wonder what will happen when she finally gets a measure of control... like her own Gundam. She unflinchingly killed two elite veteran soldiers in her only prior combat outing and she didn't hesitate to vaporize Miguel either. One has to wonder what she might do if unrestrained for the first time.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Does she? This is just my read of it, but she doesn't seem to do anything voluntarily. She gets involved with Machu because Machu tracks her down. She gets involved with Shuji because Machu attaches herself to him. She hangs around Shuji because he's Machu's partner. She pilots the GQuuuuuuX only because Machu isn't available. She supports the plan to rob the Pomeranians and flee to Earth because it's what Machu and Shuji want. When that goes to pot thanks to the Titans and Shuji ghosts her by rapturing himself and the Red Gundam away to parts unknown, she accepts Xavier's invitation to go to Zeon only because she's a wanted criminal with nowhere else to go. She becomes the pilot for Kycilia's GFreD not because she wants to, but because that's the assignment Kycilia gives her and it's currently the only way she can earn any kind of a living for herself. She's a passenger in her own story, for the most part. The first thing I think she really does for herself is activate the GFreD's Omega Psycommu from outside and vaporize Miguel with a bit's beam cannon... though even that is only because he's actively trying to murder her. To each their own, I suppose... it's clear you have some very strong feelings on the matter. I quite enjoyed IBO, but I'm in no denial that it was a very polarizing title. A lot like G-Reco, which I know a LOT of Gundam fans didn't like but which I enjoyed. (Kinda suspect that my liking that one borders on a "hear me out".)
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Probably fighting the remnants of the First Order, the same way the New Republic spent years fighting the remnants of the Empire. X-Wings, TIE fighters, things blowing up... should be a decent popcorn action flick at the very least.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Call me a huge literary nerd if you want, but the actual literary definition of a main character/protagonist is the character whose actions are central to the plot and move the story forward through their interaction with the antagonist(s) via the story's central conflict. What you're describing there is a POV character. You can have multiple of those, and they need not be the story's main character, but in general at least one of them spends their time in the story observing the main character whose actions move the plot forward. To give a Gundam example, Reconguista in G shows events through the perspective of Bellri Zenam, Luin Lee, Noredo Nug, and others... but it's principally the actions and views of Bellri that move the story forward making him the Main Character. Framing Machu, Shuji, and Nyan as the show's main characters definitely looks like a mistake at the present time. Shuji, I agree, he's a walking plot device not a character. He has no personality. He's had no real character development. What little we've seen of him suggests that he's basically a sockpuppet for the disembodied consciousness inhabiting the Alpha Psycommu of the Red Gundam and getting raptured out of the frigging story two episodes ago didn't really change anything about the story. Nyan, no... if any character is totally lacking in agency it's her. She is just kind of involuntarily caught in Machu's orbit from the get-go because Machu was sharp enough to notice Nyan had slipped the black market installer device into her bag and spot the tracker on it. The only time she ever really takes action is when Machu can't... when Machu's stuck in that locker with Xavier and will miss their Clan Battle while Shuji's sick, or when Machu needs to rob the Pomeranians to fund their escape to Earth. She only goes to Zeon when things go pear-shaped because Xavier insists on it and she only becomes a test pilot for the GFreD because Kycilia insists on it. She only ever reacts to what other characters do around her, never moving on her own. Machu... well... Machu's problem is just a lack of character development that leaves her actions feeling knee-jerk or motivationless a lot of the time. She's making decisions, but because the writers are much more interested with the background drama surrounding the Zabi family power struggle, the choices she makes don't really influence the story in any meaningful way. Not that Komori or Xavier are any better off than Nyan, really. I'd have to disagree with you there. I don't think good Gundam writing is dead. Gundam: Reconguista in G had an unusual story that went in a very different direction from usual Gundam stories, but in many ways it was a refreshing change of pace and it brought some engaging and likeable characters like Bellri. Mobile Suit Gundam: the Origin was a retread of old ground, sure, but it had its fair share of extremely powerful moments especially surrounding its depiction of Operation British. I remember watching the episode where Iffish is prepared for the drop over a lunch break at work and being disturbed by it the entire rest of the day because it was such an unflinching display of Zeon's willful malice. Iron-Blooded Orphans was so heavy I completely understand why people dropped it because of its unrelenting grimness, but it had a lot of powerful moments in its writing that I think make it more than worthy to be counted among the great Gundam shows. Hathaway's Flash Part 1 was pretty solid too, just like the novel. The only thing wrong with Cucuruz Doan's Island was that they took a story meant for a 23 minute TV episode and stretched it 5x longer than it was meant to be so it feels thin as a result. I think we've had a couple of lazy titles in the last few years... but nothing that was unfixable with a little polish. The Witch from Mercury's had solid, if unremarkable design works and an interesting premise. Its main flaw was just that its protagonists were so wealthy and so privileged that the writers struggled to come up with believable conflicts for them, ending up repeatingly creating and then breaking arbitrary rules in the setting to inject tension. SEED Freedom was a lazy rehash of Destiny, but even that could've worked if they'd picked a new direction to go in with the characters. Requiem for Vengeance may have been a glorified tech demo, but the only thing really holding its story back was the way that the writers inexplicably decided to awkwardly dance around the fact that Zeon were 100% the Bad Guys in the One Year War. Making Iria Solari a villain protagonist or having her struggle with the demands of country vs. her morals would've made her a much more interesting character. Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans: Urdr Hunt has the same writing team as the main series, so I have a pretty good feeling about that one.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    If only the technology were that advanced... instead it's just autotuned algorithmic slop. Potentially uncopyrightable slop, depending on how several pending court cases go, which may make this a poor business decision in the long run.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    There are no official specs for the Gefion-type, so while we can reasonably assume she's a derivative of the Northampton-class everything else is purely an assumption. It's also a video game, where things are not necessarily represented at true scale. It's doubtful Artdink's developers even considered the relative sizes of the ship vs. the VFs. (Hell, given the relative size of Vrlitwhai City, we can be pretty damn sure they didn't.)
  12. Seto Kaiba
    For me, that's exactly the part that makes the series so disappointing. GQuuuuuuX seems to be painfully uninterested in its own main characters and, at times, its own main story. Machu, Nyan, and Shuji are supposed to be the main characters, right? Not only has the story generally avoided any kind of character development for Shuji or Nyan, the actions of the main trio are never more than peripheral to the course of the show's story. The role of a main character is to be the perspective the audience views the story through as well as the driving force behind the story's progression as they navigate the conflict central to the plot. None of that is really happening with Machu, Shuji, or Nyan. It's really clear that the story of those three is not the story the writers care about telling. Nothing the main trio do has done has meaningfully affected the course of events in the story and the writers of the series keep having other characters like Challia and Kycilia remind us that the real story is something else entirely that's going on behind the metaphorical curtain where we're not allowed to look. It's kind of frustrating because not only does that other story sound WAY more interesting, but it's like... why not just show us that story instead of this one you're clearly not feeling? More than anything, I show up to Gundam for the character writing. It's a franchise that's had some of the strongest character writing in the industry. GQuuuuuuX could have been something really interesting, but the character writing in it is so thin that it's barely there at all. Engage with the characters and let us see what makes them tick, y'know?
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, this is merely boring... not nauseating. Probably would've been better to give it an actual title instead of a literal placeholder though. Never mind little technical matters like actually developing the characters, having the story focus on them, making the designs visually appealing, etc.... What GQuuuuuuX has is a theoretically interesting concept that is massively, MASSIVELY let down by sloppy and lazy execution.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Not by choice, though... that's kind of important. Her family sold her into indentured servitude in the brothel, and she's a prisoner there until she works off that debt or someone pays it off for her like Char did in the prime timeline. There's plenty of kinds of love in the world. Not all love is romantic love.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    That would present its own problems... not just in terms of how the system translates the inputs and outputs from the living neural tissue into usable machine commands, but in terms of what a massive pain in the arse it is to keep living tissue alive and healthy outside of a body. It'd be a real mess if your car stopped working because its computer got hypothermia, or heat stroke, or just plain died due to lack of maintenance. One of the virtues of inorganic computing is that the hardware can continue to operate for extended periods in environments that would kill a human. (Regular consumer cars are tested in hot and cold cells for extended periods at temperatures that would be fatal if you were in there with it for the duration of the test. I actually used to spend a lot of time in one of those labs... got powerfully ill repeatedly going from the -40 degrees C cold cel to the 50 degrees C hot cell.)
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Hm? Well, I guess that clears her of the allegations since she didn't do either. 🤣 Lalah Sune didn't fall in love at first sight with Char, she developed feelings for him after he rescued her from her frankly horrid living conditions... which vary by story. Her feelings for Amuro are more vague, but they seem to be generally platonic even if Amuro's aren't necessarily platonic. To her, Amuro and Char are probably the only two people in her life she's ever had a profound connection with. She's a powerful Newtype and pretty much THE poster girl for the aspirational idea that Newtypes are meant to be a new breed of humanity who can experience a deeper level of mutual understanding and communication rather than being the super soldiers that Zeon and the Federation believe they are. She was able to communicate and connect with them on a level that normal humans can't comprehend, which is likely why they're both still haunted by her death years later in [i]Zeta Gundam[/i] and [i]Char's Counterattack[/i], and why even Char's echo in Full Frontal is still haunted by her in [i]Unicorn[/i]. Granted, I probably should've expected an anticlimax from this series since it really hadn't delivered much in the way of excitement...
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Who would've thought getting food poisoning today would end up not being the most nauseating thing to happen to me today? I caught the latest episode of GQuuuuuuX and I am so done. Take the pen away from Hideaki Anno. Take the whole goddamn studio away from Hideaki Anno while you're at it. My opinion of this latest episode can best be described as " a strangled noise of unmitigated general disgust". I've often said that the Multiverse is the last refuge of the creatively bankrupt. Its introduction to a franchise is almost always an admission of creative defeat... that the studio is officially Out Of Ideas and can only keep the lights on with hack-tier writing that relies on recycling familiar characters they don't have to develop through tweaked versions of the same old familiar stories. Now that's a bit rude and more than a bit unfair... Her background is never specified in the original Mobile Suit Gundam TV series or Encounters in Space. It's just implied that she had a rough life before she met Char. Tomino's original Gundam novelization made her a refugee from Side 5 (Loum) who ended up living in the slums in Side 6 before being found and taken in by Char and then the Flannigan Institute. In Mobile Suit Gundam: the Origin, she's a girl from a poor family in India who's been taken in by a gang of criminals who use her Newtype precognition to help them cheat while gambling. It's only in Tomino's 1997 Gundam TV series novel Secret Meeting - Amuro and Lalah .. ... that Lalah's background is given as being a young lady from India whose family sold her into indentured servitude in the exclusive Kabas brothel frequented by the military elite. She absolutely wasn't there voluntarily. She was a de facto slave until she repaid the debt she owed to the brothel's owners. In the novel, and implicitly the OG Gundam series, Char met her in the brothel while bumming around Earth after being reprimanded for Garma's death. He was so taken with her (and in awe of her Newtype powers) that he spent his savings to buy out her indenture (pay off her debt) and took her to be educated at the Flannigan Institute in Side 3. Since Char never had to go to Earth in this Alternate UC, he never met her and thus never freed her from Kabas... so she's still there (against her will) trying to work off her debt in UC 0085.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    That's actually borrowed from NASA. They have a list of lovely euphemisms for when things go horribly wrong on rockets. I think my favorite is either "engine-rich exhaust" (part of the engine melted and/or was ejected from the craft unintentionally) or "lithobraking maneuver" (it hit the ground).
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Misinformation and exaggeration plays a big role in public perception of AI as being a lot more capable, powerful, efficient, and scalable than it actually is. It makes for a fantastic example of the true, rather embarrassingly primitive, state of AI technology though. Not only is an Artificial General Intelligence like Sharon Apple, Skynet, Commander Data, or any other sci-fi AI not "just a few years away" like the toxic techbros like to claim, the AI technology we actually have amounts to a coked up and hilariously inefficient techno-parrot blindly repeating strings of words it's heard frequently with no understanding of what they mean, robot cars that can barely manage to drive certain ringfenced city streets in carefully controlled conditions, and slightly better autotune. Of course, it probably also does not help that we keep societally moving the bar on what constitutes "AI". A lot of convenience features that use machine learning and so on like autocorrect, auto-focus, automatic red eye correction, etc. were once considered AI, but aren't really though about as such because they've become mundane and people have realized they're not actually "intelligent".
  20. Seto Kaiba
    There are some features on some cars (mainly EVs) where it is possible/practical or even advantageous to move computation out into the cloud... but those are mostly things that go on while the vehicle is stationary and thus are not critically time-sensitive like rate-conscious "smart grid" charging of EVs. (A project I worked on with the Argonne National Lab back in the day.) To be fair, most OEMs have been reasonably upfront about the actual capabilities of their ADAS and related autonomous vehicle features. The commercially available autonomy features (mainly ADAS ones like adaptive cruise control and smart lane stay) work well and are exhaustively tested for safety. They're just not self-driving. Likewise, robotaxi companies like Waymo (who I've worked with directly), Baidu, and Pony.ai are quite open about the fact that their robotaxi services are essentially an open beta of an evolving technology that's "good enough" to be safely tested by the public under controlled conditions but isn't ready for widespread consumer adoption yet. The sort of "AI" technology we'd need to create a car that can drive anywhere as flexibly and safely as a human driver doesn't exist yet. It's a hugely complex undertaking to create a system that can respond to road conditions and hazards as flexibly as a living driver and be able to drive anywhere the way a living driver could. There are still a lot of unresolved/unsolvable questions that need to be figured out for us to create a self-driving program that can autonomously operate on any public road, never mind one that can operate anywhere as the goal of a true Level 5 autonomous vehicle can... never mind doing so on hardware compact and efficient enough to fit inside of a car and cheap enough to actually include on a mass production basis. People don't appreciate just how much of the heavy lifting in driving a car is done by the brain meat of the human in the front seat. To really pull it off a computer needs to not only be able to follow the rules of the road and make snap decisions about safety to prevent collisions and such, it also needs to be able to understand what terrain is safe to drive on, to identify unsafe conditions on the road and respond accordingly, and make snap decisions based on emerging safety risks as well. That level of tech just ain't here yet. A lot of misconceptions about the completeness and road-readiness of "Self driving" cars comes from one bad actors: Tesla Motors. Mainly their dippy CEO, who keeps pushing the claim that Tesla will have full Level 5 autonomy figured out "in the next few years" as a way to sell idiots on an overpriced self-driving "beta" (actually just their Level 2 system) with the vague promise of a future update to unlock true self-driving capability coming "when it's done". Like most of the company's claims, it's hogwash and allegedly (based on court filings) done with intent to defraud.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    WRT the previous and how it applies to drone aircraft. Remotely operated or semiautonomous aircraft like the MQ-9 typically operate at altitudes and in areas where there are few to no collision risks. These more forgiving conditions allow drones to adopt default behaviors like autonomously circling over an area or returning to base in the event that the control signal is lost. They're typically low enough that a possibility of collision with another aircraft is minimal outside of intentional attempts to collide, but high enough that terrain, buildings, and foliage pose no risk either. Being able to maneuver in three dimensions to avoid any possible collisions also makes matters far more forgiving. Using dedicated base stations and military satellite networks helps the network congestion and latency issues too.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    It's possible in theory, but you absolutely wouldn't want to attempt it in practice. Even in perfect conditions, the additional latency involved in offboard control would be a major safety risk. You typically have between 0.7 and 1.5 seconds to react in the event of a potential collision. Cellular data networks are not the fastest, and you'll typically see a ping of around 50-500ms depending on how good your signal is, how contested the local network is, and what network you're on. The car would not be able to send sensor data to the cloud and get a reaction back fast enough to avoid collisions in a lot of cases. Toss in issues with network disruptions due to weather, distance to the nearest tower, noise, jamming, etc. and it becomes a nightmare scenario. Local control is much faster and more reliable, with an end-to-end communication and reaction time faster than what humans are capable of in most circumstances. That's one of the problems with limited onboard computer hardware... even with advanced radar, optical cameras, and LIDAR, autonomous vehicles can end up stuck when having to deal with flesh and blood drivers that dont' follow the rules of the road as rigidly as the machines do. It's particularly bad when there are unclear markings on the road, or road markings just aren't visible due to weather or wear and tear, since they depend on those to orient themselves. There's a prank that's sometimes pulled by drawing a do-not-cross double line in salt or spray paint around an autonomous vehicle, trapping it with its own refusal to disobey traffic laws... and this is some of the most advanced autonomous AI we have. We're a long, LONG way from something like Sharon Apple. Teslas are even more prone to such issues since they lack LIDAR arrays and try to get by purely with ultrasonics, radar, and optical cameras. They often completely miss signage, fail to identify obstacles, and run into stationary objects they failed to see when visibility's poor or their camera lenses get dirty.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Rudimentary flight control using dry electroencephalographic sensors is technically quite possible. There were a number of gimmicky children's toys based on the idea of using an EEG headset to control a simple motorized toy back in the 2000s.. Star Wars even got in on it in 2009 with a toy called the force trainer, which used an EEG headset to control the PWM of a fan that would levitate a plastic ball. The fad didn't last very long, in part due to those very basic sensors not being capable of complex control, but it's proof of concept at the very least. As in Macross, it would be an absolutely terrible way to try to control an aircraft. The YF-21 brain direct interface had realistically unforgiving design tolerances when it came to keeping the sensors aligned with the pilot's head. Even a few millimeters of slip in that sensor hood was enough to greatly reduce the system's accuracy. As such, the YF-21 ended up needing a pilot seat that almost totally immobilized the pilot to prevent that sensor hood from shifting. (This is why, in real EEG testing, they stick the sensors directly to your scalp with gel and even that encourage you not to move.) Supplemental technical publications also suggest that, in a realistic turn, the BDI system would also need hundreds of hours of training and data collection in order to build up a translation database to allow it to convert the pilot's brainwave data into usable machine instructions. Even then, a sharp shock or strong emotion may result in a loss of control over the system due to creating noise in the recorded brainwave, much like we see happen in the OVA. The system was ultimately much too finicky and unreliable to be practical in combat and was scrapped. Attitude control via wing warping is technology that goes all the way back to the earliest powered aircraft. The modern version of the concept is called the adaptive compliant wing. It's something the US was testing back in the mid '80s. Testing using a modified F-111 revealed that the concept has durability issues, and it is rather more expensive than conventional wing surfaces. Flaws that are echoed in the Macross universe's YF-21. There is an EU funded research group called flexop which is currently looking at ways to apply the technology to jet airliners as a way to save fuel through drag reduction.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... while is partially correct, the actual amount of time it took is quite a bit longer than just "a few years" and owes a lot to the switch from vacuum tubes to transistors to your modern integrated circuits. The pace of advancement has also slowed down quite a bit in recent years because we have effectively hit the limits of what we can reasonably do with silicon in terms of improving packaging density and clock rate. (That's actually why high-end chips like Intel's 13th and 14th gen have been burning out. The push for ever-faster clock rates while nearing the limits of silicon's performance led to simply overclocking the chips until they started burning up.) Some of it is mentioned in passing in Macross Plus... the Macross Concern is also the party who provided the bio-neural chip to the Venus Sound Factory team working on Sharon, and the same group who also developed the Ghost X-9 around the same AI technology. The project's goal was to produce a next-generation unmanned fighter that could operate more flexibly on the battlefield and exhibit humanlike levels of unpredictability in combat maneuvers. That same research is still ongoing in Macross Frontier's drama CDs, with LAI working on a next-generation Ghost that complies with the post-Sharon Apple Incident regulations on AI but can nevertheless still exhibit humanlike responses due to personality modeling AI. (Luca's questionable judgement led him to model the prototypes on his crush and his two best friends from school.) If the government were working on something like Sharon, we would know about it. That kind of development involves hundreds of thousands of people and billions if not trillions of dollars in investment... and the government is absolute rubbish at keeping secrets at the best of times. These are NOT the best of times when it comes to secrecy. 🤣 We know that what they are doing with AI is trying to make unmanned wingmen for manned 5th and 6th Generation fighters like what we see with Luca's Ghosts in Macross Frontier and the Lilldrakens and Super Ghosts in Macross Delta. It's not going great, but it could be going a lot worse. They're kind of at the "well at least it's not cartwheeling across the sky like a SpaceX rocket" phase. (I can only assume conspiracy theorists are kids who never had to do group projects in school... and therefore have a very exaggerated and beautifully optimistic belief in how well people work together in groups. 🤣)
  25. Seto Kaiba
    She's probably operating the Ghost herself. According to her Macross Chronicle Character Sheet, the Sharon-type AI was developed for the military by the Macross Concern's Palo Alto II Research Institute. It was designed to be a fleet supervisory support AI for use in emigrant fleets. Its job was twofold: to assist with managing stress among the populations of early emigrant ships (which were on the spartan side in terms of living conditions) with entertainment and subliminal audiovisual hypnosis where necessary, and to take over control of the fleet on its own should its human commanders be incapacitated during an emergency. The career of the virtuoid idol singer "Sharon Apple" was essentially a covert test of the incomplete Sharon-type AI's entertainment and population management systems disguised as a music company's avant garde tech demo. When Sharon Apple went crazy rampage nuts as a result of being rushed to completion with an illegal and dangerous bio-neural processor and having her emotion data sampled from a woman with more baggage than Delta Airlines, she used the command and control functions she was designed with to seize control of the Macross, the Ghost X-9, and all networked defenses on Earth. She wasn't able to break into the YF-21's systems the way she broke into the YF-19's because, as noted earlier in the OVA, half of the YF-21's computer is the pilot's brain.
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