Seto Kaiba

After something like six years on Robotech.com, I can't honestly say that it surprises me in the least. It's exactly what the higher-ups at Harmony Gold want... to keep the fans in an endless loop of positive speculation so they won't give up hope that the live-action movie and/or Shadow Rising will turn things around for Robotech and haul the franchise's fat out of the fire. Granted... but who apart from Robotech fans really gives a toss about Southern Cross anymore? Being used as part of Robotech was the biggest break Southern Cross ever got, and even then it's solemnly detested. If you're looking for people who are at least nominal fans of Southern Cross, you're going to find the vast majority in the Robotech fandom. (Remember, the bit about the "undeserved bad rap" was for the Army of the Southern Cross, not the series Southern Cross, just demonstrating why Robotech fans have no interest in hovertanks, Logans, and AGACs either) Well, whether it's better than what Macek turned it into is a matter of opinion... and as insane as this will sound coming from me, I honestly think being tied into a bigger story did Southern Cross a world of good. The remastered ADV release that I have for Southern Cross is nothing short of atrocious.

IMO, the boards on Robotech.com were pretty dead even before Maverick and MEMO started indiscriminately revoking the posting privileges of anyone who criticized Harmony Gold and their handling of Robotech or dared to point out the facts of the Macross rights situation. For years, the only active part of the site was the off-topic section (The Lounge, before Steve split it into The Lounge and Small Talk because there was simply nothing new to discuss. Eh... from what I've gathered it's ALWAYS been that way with Robotech.

Ah, you've noticed that too... If you stick to challenging the content of his bullshit rhetoric, it's almost impossible to shut up long enough to tell him to stop preaching his views on Robotech and its superiority at you like they were gospel truth. Once you start in with probing questions about his reasons for thinking the things he does, the sources for the claims he makes, or just a good old fashioned serious question about Robotech itself, he clams right up. I dunno about that... he IS awfully fixated on penises, particularly where JT is concerned. To be fair, I've never heard anyone accuse Maverick_LSC of doing what he does out of a misguided belief that Harmony Gold will one day offer him a job like MEMO does. His behavior suggests that he acts like a twat because he desperately wants to be respected and admired by his fellow fans, and thus has gone to great pains to construct the illusion that he's a film industry expert who regularly gets inside information about the goings-on at Harmony Gold. Maverick may have been a mod on Robotech.com for ages, but he's a fairly recent addition to the moderator staff over on RobotechX.com. He was only added after MEMO noticed that Lobizon and SIGHUP wouldn't be relied upon to help him scourge the Shadow Chronicles-criticizing heretics from his site. He seems like a perfect fit for the tone of that site, particularly now that he and MEMO are both targeting JT for a ban (confirmed by RTX co-admin SIGHUP), and he had to re-ban Pizza the Hutt after cutting a deal with SIGHUP by agreeing to unban HappyPenguins if PTH was unbanned too. In truth, it actually went further than that... the condition for allowing me back on the site was that SIGHUP would have to agree to unban Doug Bendo as well, so I took one for the team and kept Douggie-boy and his "over 900 lessoners" in ban-land. Honestly, I doubt that's true... Remember, the original Southern Cross series was a failure even before it was licensed by Harmony Gold and used to make Robotech. The show's ratings were so poor that the show was canceled and the writers had to hastily wrap up the story as best they could in the space they had left. I've also heard that the show's merchandise didn't sell worth a damn either. What little Japanese merchandise I've seen for it has all borne the Big West logo, so I don't think there was (or is) any confusion about merchandising, and the use of Southern Cross characters pretty much unaltered in the failed Robotech II: the Sentinels project (and updated versions in Shadow Chronicles) leads me to suspect the intellectual property rights to Southern Cross are firmly Tatsunoko's. When asked about the profound lack of merchandise for Robotech's Masters Saga, Harmony Gold has always given the same answer... they don't think it will sell. As much as it will offend all six Southern Cross fans, Harmony Gold really does have sound reasons for believing that. In pretty much every poll about fan preferences, the Masters Saga is usually in dead last, popularity wise: In the last poll, "Do you feel that the Army of the Southern Cross has been given an unfairly bad rap?", only 19.8% of the 4463 respondents thought the bad reputation was undeserved. 75% said that the ASC's bad reputation was richly deserved, not bad enough to do their failure justice, or that they just plain didn't give a poo about anything Southern Cross-related. Likewise, on the occasions that Supreme Commander Leonard is a poll topic, the overwhelming majority usually comes out to blast his ass for being an incompetent toad (59.1% of the last one responding that Leonard was a moron, and in the one before that, 57.6% said he was an incompetent buffoon). In merchandise polls, at least 30% of respondents come out to say they're patently uninterested in whatever the Masters Saga merchandise du jour happens to be, and only about 3-4% of the votes go to Masters Saga mecha in mecha popularity polls, with Macross Saga mecha usually holding at least 55% of the overall votes, and frequently much more. That, combined with the reports that the Masters Saga merchandise in the Robotech.com store just doesn't sell nearly as well merchandise for any of the other sagas, builds a pretty strong support case for Harmony Gold's claim that they don't think Masters Saga merchandise will sell if they release it in America.

Ridiculous indeed... but I still thought it was a hilarious cop-out on his part, since he apparently couldn't come up with any believable rationale for banning me. I honestly find it funny as hell that even now, after they've banned me from both of their little playgrounds for HERESY!, they still see what I have to say about Harmony Gold and the Robotech franchise as such a threat to their blissful ignorance that they perpetuate this myth that I'm some kind of hybrid of Ming the Merciless and Emperor Palpatine, leading the Macross Illuminati in a sinister conspiracy to destroy Robotech from within... Chill dude... you're getting way too wound up about it. Really, I like to think of the time spent observing Maverick and MEMO's idiot antics as being like an occasional outing to a zoo's primate house. It's vaguely interesting, occasionally amusing (particularly when the inhabitants of the exhibit get to flinging crap at each other and the plexiglass partition), and you might even learn something, but ultimately it leaves you wondering at the alien motivations of those strange creatures you spent the afternoon watching, and then writing the whole thing off as inconsequential before heading out to dinner.

Eh... regardless of whether or not you find them aesthetically pleasing, it would be remiss of us not to cover them as thoroughly as humanly possible... a process that, where Macross II is concerned, usually involves Mr March doing his best to glean the necessarily details from my frothy-mouthed rantings on the various obscure sources I've spent the last few years tracking down. In any event, I'm currently muddling through the Mardook forces Zentradi-use mecha sheet in Chronicle, with the destroid sheet next in the queue... (followed, in the near future, by the GERWALKroid/VF-XX Zentradi Valkyrie sheet).

Either that or, as was mentioned earlier, they're a homage to the head-mounted 60mm vulcan guns on the RX-78-2 and RGM-79 in Mobile Suit Gundam.

I'm not a fanatical fan (or even a fan), but I just want Robotech to come up with its own designs and narrative instead of pulling, promoting, and fan-wanking from a bunch of near-30 year old cartoons. Oh yes... I don't deny that there are a fair few people who aren't Robotech fans who'd like nothing better than for the creative team at Harmony Gold to come up with their own original story and designs instead of endlessly sponging off the work of animators from nearly thirty years ago... but only the most fanatical Robotech fans actually think that such a thing will ever actually happen, and that the end result will actually be watchable.

Actually, wasn't the character's name originally "Mark Harris" before they changed the movie's setting from during the Macross Saga to somewhere in the middle of the Masters Saga? I know they originally wanted B.D.'s movie equivalent (named B.D. Andrews in the final script) to be a younger version of the character that eventually became T.R. Edwards, world's most obvious "secret villain" and serial backstabbing enthusiast. On balance, I think we can sum up the whole of Robotech as a long, tedious voyage through the painfully unoriginal creative debris left behind by Harmony Gold's practice of slapping together material licensed, borrowed, or stolen from people who actually have talent into something which only vaguely resembles a coherent narrative, then marketing it as their latest original creation. As one of the odder pieces of cinematic history, Robotech can sustain some degree of interest, and researching the licensing arrangements that allowed it to exist is a great way to learn about some of the more bizarre corners of copyright law, but only the most fanatical die-hard Robotech fans are holding out hope that one day we'll see a Robotech show that sells on its own merits rather than those of the licensed material used in its creation.

Well, either way... it's still rather unlikely that the 12.7mm antipersonnel machine guns mounted on the Tomahawk's head were intended for anti-Zentradi use. The Tomahawk is, after all, somewhat taller than your average Zentradi, which would have the 12.7mm guns shooting over the target's head unless the Tomahawk leaned forward or was firing at a target at a far off target. The gun clusters located in the Tomahawk's chest are much more logically placed for engaging both Zentran and miclone scale infantry, since the flamethrower and grenade launcher would be just as effective against infantry as the machineguns would be, and don't require you to point the barrel directly at the target, and the heavier machine gun and laser cannon would be much more effective against hard-armored Zentradi targets.

Okay, granted... it might be enough to inconvenience or annoy an unarmored Zentradi soldier, but the average Zentradi soldier takes the the field wearing a suit of body armor, and is usually located somewhere within a combat mecha made from overtechnology-derived super alloys and armored with energy converting armor. Let's also remind ourselves that Zentradi are made of somewhat sterner stuff than your average human being... the Zentradi soldier Hikaru shoots up in "Countdown" was still perfectly capable of getting out of his Regult and trying to continue the fight on foot after being hit something like a dozen times, including four times in the torso (once right below the heart), in the left shin, right ankle, both thighs, and left wrist with what (to scale) would be about a .44 caliber (~11mm) bullet.

Actually, in both the Robotech II: the Sentinels "movie" and the Waltrip comics, Jack Baker is introduced with what might be the world's least subtle bout of foreshadowing on the part of Rick Hunter and Max Sterling, who both remark on how Jack Baker is EXACTLY like Rick was at that age. You're mixing up Untold Story and Sentinels... the original protagonist of Untold Story back when it was set during the Macross Saga was literally a relative of Rick Hunter, not a carbon copy of him.

Oh yeah, I remember that... apparently better than you do, since you've forgotten it was me who called him out on his bullshit once I'd found a copy of the book. He was trying to put one over on us and frustrate me into ordering a copy of The Art of Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles from the Robotech.com store. Of course, I was the one who had the last laugh, since I disproved the arguments he and ShadowLogan were making and found a copy of the book for a dollar in a local garage sale. Unsurprisingly, I get that reaction a lot when I'm talking about Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles with people who only recently "discovered" Robotech and long-time fans who rediscovered Robotech after missing all the old comics, novels, etc. I'm used to people responding to the idea that Shadow Chronicles is actually almost entirely composed of recycled characters, mecha, settings, and plot devices with a mixture of denial and denunciation, followed by surprise, alarm, and exasperation once they look into it for themselves and see what I was getting at. When you get right down to it, Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles is a story composed almost exclusively of stuff taken from Robotech II: the Sentinels. The irony in this is that Robotech II: the Sentinels is a story which is largely made up of characters, settings, and plot elements from the Robotech TV series. Of the three new original characters in Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles, only one is actually original... Alex Romero. The other two, Maia Sterling and Marcus Rush, are watered-down copies of Karen Penn and Jack Baker from Sentinels, right down to their relationship and personalities. In true Robotech form, Karen Penn and Jack Baker aren't original either, they happen to be watered-down, simplified copies of Rick Hunter and Lisa Hayes. Everyone else is either a holdover from Robotech II: the Sentinels, a holdover from the Robotech TV series, or both. Somehow, I doubt they will... they wrote them out of the story pretty effectively in Shadow Chronicles. I think it's partially something to do with the voice actor budget, and partly that most of the New Generation support cast weren't really soldiers, so once the REF was back in charge on Earth they wouldn't have any reason to continue fighting. Only Lunk and Lancer were soldiers, and smart money says both were listed KIA after the forces they were with were wiped out. (Lunk's also a coward AND a deserter, so he has even less reason to want to go back to the military than Lancer) Yeah, I've noticed that... so far two or three people have been accused of being me in disguise by Maverick and MEMO, and banned accordingly. I find it hilarious that they're SO afraid of what I have to say and what I stand for that they're determined to label anyone well-spoken enough to raise an intelligent point as either my operative or a clone account. Calling it "baiting" might be rather generous... it was so pathetic I'm not even sure it could be called that. Oh yes... big things are happening for Robotech... the creators of Halo: Legends were inspired by Ichiro Itano and his work on Macross. Yeah, that TOTALLY has to do with Robotech. ROFL Well, the people they credited are, by in large, the ones who did all the creative legwork in writing the Infopedia, so that's probably why they were credited. I hadn't heard anything about them also doing the layouts.

Oh, that Macross-style split hull with with big honking beam cannon (Synchro Cannon) in the middle is something Tommy Yune added to the design... originally the Garfish-class troop carrier just had the one ventrally-mounted beam cannon turret and a handful of Legioss/Alpha fighters. To the best of my knowledge, nobody has yet bothered to scan The Art of Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles. I can see why too... the book is pathetic, and doesn't even live up to the aggressively low standards set by the old Robotech Art series. Just to give you some idea of how pathetic this book really is, let me give you a breakdown of some of the book's greater sins: For a 144 page book printed on a 8.5x11 paper, AoRTSC is surprisingly light on actual content. The foreword by Carl Macek consumes some 20 pages, is printed in about an 18 point font, and only the bottom third of each page is actual text... the rest of it is screen captures, box art from the Japanese originals (minus the titles, of course), a handful of Tommy Yune's "original" art pieces, and an aggressively abbreviated timeline. Carl spends most of the foreword talking about how great he is and how influential Robotech was. He neatly glosses over his failures and makes all the usual excuses for why various projects failed. Once you get into the actual book, it's divided into five sections: Worlds of Robotech, Characters, Mecha, Vessels, and Production. Generally speaking, about 2/3 of every two page spread is dominated by a massive screen capture taken from the movie, leaving the biggest pieces of concept art and line art no bigger than a 3x5" note card. An astonishing amount of space is wasted on concept art for rooms that only showed up for a few seconds in the movie itself, and the exposed structural supports in the hangars, corridors, etc.. The most detailed character pages in the book consist of a spread-dominating screenshot, a badly proportioned rough sketch, "initial concept art" reprinted from an old magazine article, a "color design draft", the final design, (all from a front or 3/4 angle) and a small text block not more than five or six sentences long. Many characters get only a single page, dominated by a large screenshot and one or two pieces of art. The mechanical design pages are, if anything, even worse... dominated as usual by a massive screenshot, and filled primarily with recycled Mospeada line art... albeit without useful things like transformation diagrams or explanation for the changes in cockpit layout. None of the new designs (Super Shadow Fighter, Synchro Beta, Super Cyclone) get more than 1/3 of a page, and the Invid stuff is squashed into the margins. The ships section is more of same, and the production section is little more than a dozen pages of shameless self-congratulation. All the information the fans expected to see... like character bios, mecha stats, and an updated glossary of terms, was truncated to fit in the minimum possible amount of space, and everything except the brief character bios were crammed unceremoniously into a four page section at the very back of the book. To add insult to injury for those fans, almost the entire section is material reprinted unaltered from the Robotech.com Infopedia, spelling errors and all.

Don't worry, that is on the to-do list... I've got the bulk of the data pulled together already, March and I just haven't sat down to go through it all, and there's the possibility that Chronicle might add to it in the immediate future. Right now, we have a more immediate concern in fixing a couple of missing pieces of art on the site proper. Nothing major so far, but I'm doing a link-by-link inspection of the whole thing to make sure everything's present and accounted for.

Uxi apparently didn't bother to check the Compendium or any other source before posting, and just assumed that the VF-17D and VF-171 use the same model of gunpod. On the one occasion where the VF-171's gunpod was shown being fired, it did have eight barrels.

Okay, that's at least halfway rational... it doesn't really work, but at least it's rational. Unfortunately, instances of original content in Shadow Chronicles are few and far between... and none of them are things you listed. In truth, the Haydonites and their leader "The Awareness" are holdovers from the old Robotech II: the Sentinels series, where they filled most of the common sentient robot stereotypes for sci-fi of the period. Under Tommy Yune, what little originality they had was traded away to make them more menacing... they all have the face of the Hal 9000, talk like Emperor Palpatine, pull dirty tricks right out of the Cylon playbook, and tool around the galaxy in generic cigar-shaped UFOs and fighters that look suspiciously like the remodeled Cylon raider flying backwards. Vince Grant's new "Super Cyclone" (apparently sticking "super" on it makes it technically a new design, lol) isn't exactly new either... it's a slightly toned-down version of a heavy weapons ride armor created for but not used in Mospeada, the lineart for which you can find in the Imai Files. Well, with Harmony Gold committed to using as much of Sentinels as humanly possible you were destined to get a pretty campy flick no matter what. Personally, I wouldn't complain about Maia's hair and eyes being purple... after all, in rare cases people can have violet eyes, and she IS the kid of two people who had blue and green hair respectively. The most troubling things for me were the hackneyed plot, the absence of most of the New Generation cast, and the fact that Janice Em2 was pretty much a cross between Data and 7 of 9 with no personality. Maybe we ought to start referring to her as DData?

Let's clarify... in the context of Macross, .50 BMG is a highly effective antipersonnel round when used against miclone infantry and light armored vehicles. It's pretty much a guarantee that it doesn't have enough stopping power to seriously inconvenience a Zentradi soldier wearing body armor, let alone a battle pod or powered armor suit. It makes precious little sense to put said machine guns up on the destroid's head if they're meant for use against miclone-scale targets and equipment. It's just a strange choice.

And on the third day, March rose again... I just completed a stress test on the server, and it looks like everything should hold up well even if we start getting huge traffic levels. About the only way I foresee any complications or problems is if traffic starts to exceed 5,000gB a month, which doesn't seem particularly likely. Since Macross2.net was largely disused while I prepared to switch my project to another hosting service and domain name, the jump in traffic caused by M3 going back online was easily measurable... over 1,000 hits in the three hours since your announcement was posted. Well, I'll do my best to make sure those updates aren't wanting for new information... I made one little change... since the M3 stuff isn't in the main directory, I changed m3-index.html to index.html so the splash page will auto-load if some visitors just type www.macross2.net/m3/ in order to prevent directory browsing. Just so everyone's aware, in the unlikely event that something goes awry with this new location for the Macross Mecha Manual, the quickest way to get it fixed will be to notify me by private message or e-mail rather than blitzing Mr March's inbox. I'm blessed with a bit more free time, so whatever's wrong I can probably get it fixed within a few hours. To be safe, I'll make sure Mr March has my cell phone number so we don't have a repeat of the service going down and the domain owner being unreachable. No dice... predictably enough, Macross Chronicle continues Macross II's fetish for the number 2 by having the VF-2SS's main engine thrust rating be approximately twice that of the VF-1S (25,600kgf as opposed to 12,500kgf) and doesn't list the thrust rating for the two sub-engines. All told, the sizable jumps in engine power in the main timeline are/were something that emerged after Macross II was made.

Um... you've scaled your comparison incorrectly. Just to put it in perspective, if we were to scale down the .50 BMG (12.7x99mm NATO) round down so that it would be the same size for humans that the normal size is for Zentradi, we'd be looking at a .102 caliber (2.59mm) bullet. That's about two-thirds the size of an average BB gun pellet (4.34-4.39mm), and less than half the size of the plastic pellets used by Airsoft pistols (6mm). That's not going to be much of a threat to something as big of a Zentradi. Something that small would be a minor inconvenience... maybe give them a bloody lip or an insignificant flesh wound, but nothing life-threatening.

Yes, it is... as you would've known had you checked the Compendium or some other reliable reference site.

Well, to be precise, it's a safe bet that what Tommy Yune was trying to accomplish by having the Robotech: Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles miniseries pick up right where Robotech II: the Sentinels Book 4 left off a decade or so before was to give the book added appeal by tying into and resolving the cliffhanger left by Academy's abrupt loss of the Robotech license. To that end, he basically did a brief recap of the last issue of Sentinels Book IV and then ran with it in an ill-conceived attempt to link the failed Sentinels series with Shadow Chronicles. All he really achieved by doing so was producing another confused, badly written story that renders the horrible old RT2 comics at least pseudo-canon... a nightmare for anyone attempting to resolve the continuity into anything meaningful. Honestly, I'm curious to know that too... I've yet to find someone who could actually explain why they liked RTSC, and not just why they think Macross Frontier is worse than it.

Now, if that's true it speaks volumes about the increasing desperation with which Harmony Gold is trying to maintain order and silence dissent in the Robotech fandom. As to why, we can only speculate. I know Tommy Yune and Harmony Gold have never responded well to criticism, though at one point Maverick_LSC tried to convince me that the reason he was cracking down on criticism of Shadow Chronicles because Warner Bros was keeping an eye on Robotech.com and Harmony Gold wanted to make a good impression. Eh, this is pretty weak tea compared to his usual antics... he's been posting some seriously juvenile stuff over on JT's blog and elsewhere. He thinks this weak crap is going annoy me and cause people to take what I have to say less seriously... and boy is he wrong. To be fair, Maverick_LSC doesn't know that much about what's going on inside Robotech either. He likes to pretend that he does, with the same old lines about how he talks to Kevin McKeever and gets all kinds of inside info that he's not allowed to share or talk about. It's bullshit, pure and simple. Like MEMO, he doesn't really know much about the Robotech story either. Eh, I suppose it should be expressed in more general terms. Instead of "Americanized", maybe just "Westernized". Of course, from my standpoint living as close to Canada as I do, we tend to think of the great frozen north as an informal 51st state.

I find their lack of Ishtar disturbing. No kidding... O_o

Eh, I'd lump that under "considering it beneath their notice".

Gee Jason, thanks for boosting the creepiness factor of Maverick_LSC's sick obsession with me and JT from "obnoxiously juvenile" to "Michael Jackson". Now I'm gonna have to mine my front yard to make damn sure he stays away. (On the plus side, the minefield should also deter my neighbors from letting their dogs use my lawn as a toilet) Honestly dude, I don't know why you're surprised. It's pretty much business as usual for Robotech die-hards to think that America is the be-all end-all of world culture and that nothing foreign is worth their notice, particularly where Macross is concerned.