Seto Kaiba

Okay, I'm having a bit of trouble untangling your wording there, so if I reach any wrong conclusions about your intended meaning, please don't hesitate to correct me. It's one thing for the powers that be on Harmony Gold's creative staff to be tinkering with the technological continuity of the series in an effort to impose a sense of technological progression on the disparate parts of the Robotech TV series. After all, perpetuating the illusion that all the various stories of RT fit into something that at least resembles a unified whole is their job. When the fans start intruding on it with the sort of logic we normally reserve for recent victims of cranial drill intrusion, latching onto awkwardly structured lines and dialogue errors with the single-minded desire to see a deeper meaning that simply isn't there, and then tout that view as though it were anything other than wild speculation, it really says something about the fandom as a whole. There are so many fans who just don't want to accept that Robotech is a hastily assembled amalgam of three unrelated shows, and that because the amalgamation process was done on the fly it's shot through with errors. While I do respect Brooklyn Red Leg rather more than the average Robotech fan, I have to say in this instance I'm really finding his logic to be more than a little on the screwball side. The argument he's proposing has the same chain of logic as the following, simpler, example. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that we have a hypothetical scene in Robotech where Rick Hunter is sitting in his little modular house eating an apple when Minmei calls. The narrator then says that Rick set down the orange he was eating to talk to her. Was Rick eating an apple or an orange? A sensible viewer would say "well, he's clearly shown to be eating an apple, so it must be a dialogue error". Brooklyn Red Leg's argument is that regardless of what's shown on the screen the dialogue overrides it even in the absence of corroborative evidence, so Rick was eating a nice Florida orange that just happened to be hard, red, and oblong instead of soft, orange, and round.

Internet... serious business. Speaking of Robotech and "lol serious business", I received another private message from our esteemed (or rather, steamed off) friend Brooklyn Red Leg expressing his displeasure with my summation of his argument for the Shrewfield's alleged transformation capability. He had the following to say: Ah, my mistake... instead of just the line from an ambiguous line from a nameless background character this pet theory also has some degree of support from the least reliable character in the entire series... the narrator... whose dialogue is frequently at odds with what is actually being shown on screen. Considering what we know of the writing process which produced these scripts, I suppose it's no surprise that such errors would be made and reiterated when multiple episodes are being worked on at once and nobody's comparing notes with each other. In the interest of completeness, we would do well to note that nobody in the original Southern Cross dialogue ever refers to the Shrewfield as transformable, directly or indirectly. The key points of circumstantial evidence he cites are: Let's start with the obvious... the similarities between the Shrewfield's ventral gun mount and the head turret of a VF-1 are superficial at best. Unlike the Valkyrie and Legioss, which both have head turrets that couldn't possibly be mistaken for just a protrusion from the ventral airframe, there is nothing to suggest that the Shrewfield's gun mount is anything other than a gun bolted to the underside of a fixed fuselage. By this logic, any aircraft with visible panel seams is a robot in disguise... apart from the panel seams which do not line up in any meaningful way with elements which could potentially facilitate transformation (and in fact differ between the Shrewfield's few appearances), the airframe design itself seems designed to confound a transformation, with a lack of any obvious structures which could become the arms or feet, and fixed wings as wide as the aircraft is long (which are connected directly to the side of the engines)... it should come as no surprise that there is no evidence whatsoever that Southern Cross's creators ever intended the Shrewfield to transform in the first place... so the counterarguments that "it looks like it can" and "they might've been planning to have it transform but we'll never know because the show was cut short" don't hold water. Considering that transformable mecha were the exception rather than the rule in the Southern Cross series, the most likely explanation is that the aircraft was simply never intended to transform, given the total lack of evidence to the contrary. Okay... are you shitting me? I did a triple-take before I actually believed he was serious about this one. Aside from the fact that the unused VTOL design from Robotech II: the Sentinels bears only a superficial resemblance to the Shrewfield (note the under-wing engines with obvious foot structure, etc.), citing an unused, non-canon design from an aborted TV series as evidence that a vaguely similar-looking background mecha from a canon saga of the original series is transformable is about as inane as it gets. Considering the tone of this paragraph, it seems like he does care what those of us who don't like Southern Cross think and say about the series... despite claims to the contrary. Of course, since there were only ever a handful of fans who actually liked the Masters Saga, and most of them have pretty much abandoned the fandom altogether, I really do not doubt that the majority don't care what we say... as they're never around to read it.

I can't speak for the content of the novels on that particular note as it's been a dog's age since I bothered to read any of them, but in the planned Robotech II: the Sentinels series and the current "Yune-ified" Robotech continuity, the United Earth Gov't (or whatever was left of it after the Zentradi were done with it) did have a space colonization program which was at least tangentially related to the Expeditionary Force's Pioneer mission. Whether the colony program actually had any measure of success remains unknown, something which is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future. Thus far, nobody's mentioned any colonies outside our solar system, and it's doubtful the SDF-3 established any colonies while they were busy being shot at on virtually every planet they visited (at least in the comics). Given that in Prelude they REF has converted a bunch of old colony ships into weapons of mass destruction (the neutron-s missiles, to be precise), I'd guess their colonization program was either suspended or didn't pan out after yet another apocalyptic war rolled in to thin the population out. The new generation of colony ships, the Ark Angel-class, seem to have had even worse luck, as Vince Grant absconded with the only spaceworthy one (the Ark Angel) and her half-complete sister ships were destroyed in drydock when Captain Grant destroyed Space Station Liberty with a neutron-s missile.

None that I'm aware of... when it comes to the Robotech universe, your mileage may vary in the most literal fashion imaginable. Exactly how big the universe is depends on a number of things, like how you interpret the various conflicting remarks about the location of Optera and Tirol in the TV series, and whether or not you consider the "expanded universe" stuff accurate or not. Whether many of these exotic locales are even in our galaxy or not is unclear at best. The one thing that has remained generally consistent through all the various depictions is that the world occupied by the Invid prior to their invasion of Earth was in another galaxy. Tirol and the other Sentinels worlds are placed alternately in the Milky Way and in another unspecified galaxy, and can vary between episodes and depictions. Generally, the only thing which is established when it comes to alien worlds is that they're very far away from Earth... which is not particularly helpful.

Nah, I doubt Brooklyn Red Leg would be so arrogant as to claim overall responsibility for the various unsupportable assertions that the Shrewfield is a transformable fighter... some of the blame must be laid at the doorsteps of Rhade and the handful of other overly vocal sadists who actually enjoyed the Masters Saga. Like so many other debates of unclear or inconsistent elements of Robotech, the argument that the Shrewfield is transformable relies almost exclusively on taking what little evidence exists out of context and imagining connections where none exists. Essentially, the resulting argument consists entirely of assertions which use other, questionable assertions as their basis, resulting in a chain of "logic" that would only appear sound to someone who believed the initial argument was true in the first place.

Odd... Brooklyn Red Leg/1st Border Red Devil always struck me as one of the more levelheaded Robotech fans, as well as a fairly knowledgeable person about Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross. I wonder what he did to lose his posting privileges here... Nitpick train comin' in to the station... that fighter's real name is the "Shrewfield", or at least that's what the Southern Cross artbooks call it. Its two Robotech names, "Specter" and "Sylphid(e)" were both pulled out of thin air, the former by Palladium's writers, and the latter by Peter Walker and company. Like pretty much everything in Southern Cross, the artbooks offer only a name and a picture, and decline to offer any actual information. The business about Robotech's version of the Shrewfield being transformable is based entirely on a single line of dialogue and rather substantial amounts of conjecture... the favorite being that the ventral gun mount looks vaguely like a backwards VF-1 head. You weren't the only one this time... I made the initial assumption that Admiral DMC McKeever and Kevin McKeever were one and the same... who knew Robotech could have two such outspoken suckups with the same name? Wrong Sylphide... Nice tho, FlamingGuantlet did a three-mode transforming FFR-31MR/D Super Sylph, and a FRX-00 Mave too. That'd be from Yukikaze, actually... the Sylphide referred to above is the name Peter Walker and co. came up with for the Shrewfield non-transformable fighter from Southern Cross, which was referred to as the Specter in the old Palladium RPG.

Honestly, considering the sheer quantity of reused material and Harmony Gold's subsequent failure to continue the story, I'm rather inclined to write Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles off as yet another false start, despite the fact that the movie did actually get released. It really does speak volumes about the quality of Harmony Gold's work when their only means of maintaining the fanbase's interest in continuing the "Shadow Saga" is to keep the fate of Rick Hunter, the only character the fans still care about, up in the air indefinitely with a sequence of cliffhanger endings. They did it in Prelude, leaving his fate uncertain after the SDF-3 was caught too close to a neutron-s missile detonation, and again in Shadow Chronicles with the SDF-3 stuck in orbit of a black hole and under attack by Haydonites. Eventually they'll run out of mortal peril for the guy to be in and they'll have no choice but to string fans along with whether or not he'll make it to the toilet in time.

Yeah, Rem is just one member of the modest legion of Zor clones who seem to come out of the woodwork whenever the story needs a technological deus ex machina or just someone with a logorrhea-like compulsion to recite vast quantities of inane technobabble to cover for weak writing or a plot hole/twist the writers couldn't figure out a way to fix. Amusingly, it isn't a cop-out limited to Luceno, Daley, and the Waltrips anymore. The leaked draft of the "Shadow Saga" plot synopsis includes yet another Zor clone, whose grand plan to save his homeworld from the Haydonite menace is to... wait for it... build a really big cannon! Clearly, this is the work of the razor-sharp intellect of robotechnology's creator, a man whose all-too-frequent tendency to take drastic action without thinking things through seems to be the root of all the universe's evils.

Edit: I know this's gonna sound rather frustrated, but I think after the most recent batch of sheets I have good cause to be. Oh you're entirely correct... Macross II isn't getting the shaft the way some people thought it would. In fact, it's been getting the shaft in a way most of us simply didn't expect. Yes, it's gotten a fair bit of coverage, more than any of us really expected it would, but the content of that coverage is virtually worthless... a mixture of internally inconsistent and blatantly incorrect information which varies in obnoxiousness from merely annoying to genuinely facepalm-worthy. If they're getting readily-available information wrong on a consistent basis, what's the bloody point? Just for example, the recent Macross II Zentran mecha sheet's size comparison is completely incorrect, making the mecha substantially larger than the plethora of available sources (one of which is an official size comparison published in Macross II's This is Animation book and reprinted in several other publications) indicate they are. We're not talking splitting hairs over a foot or two, we're talking some of the mecha being represented at as much as 1.5x the size their original designers intended. Somewhat more excusable is their goof with the Giant Monster, inadvertently referring to it as the "Monster II" instead... though where they got the sizes for that is anybody's guess...

But what's REALLY interesting is who wrote the letter... McKeever.

Granted, dragging along a substantial body of ground combat mecha in a long-range colonization fleet is probably not the most efficient use of a defense budget, but with the possible exceptions of the Spartan and Tomahawk series, most of the destroids do have relatively practical defense applications. While the Defender and Phalanx fill the obvious roles as mobile point-defense units to supplement the ship's built-in defenses on an as-needed basis (the greatest point in their favor being their mobile nature, so they can be retasked to wherever the enemy forces are most numerous), the Monster fills in as a self-propelled, somewhat more versatile battleship turret... we've seen just how brutally effective the Monster series was against smaller Zentradi attack craft in DYRL, and the Konig Monster's effectiveness against the Battle Galaxy, so we can't write that off completely. The Tomahawk's not really geared for AA, and the Spartan's a brawler, so the former really is useless except for short-ranged defense, and the Spartan's only real application would probably be construction, a job that could be done just as well by a Valkyrie. That aside, I suppose the real value in them, aside from their obvious point-defense applications, would be planetary/colonial defense once the colony has started to establish itself on a planet.

You'll find you've inadvertently answered your own question as to why Robotech fans are so down on the idea of McKinney's "thinking cap"... because it doesn't jive with the animated series, and for both Harmony Gold and the vast majority of the rapidly dwindling Robotech fanbase, the animated series is the "true" Robotech. To them, the comic books and novelizations Harmony Gold's various licensees were churning out through the late 80's and early 90's were generally no better than bad fan-fiction, due to their frequent and often senseless departures from the established canon, and were only legitimized as a means of keeping the franchise on life support while they waited for Carl Macek's latest failed attempt to resuscitate the brand. Once the continuity had been rebooted and new, canon material started coming out that at least superficially lined up with the story of the "original 85", the old comics and the McKinney novels lost the only thing that made the fans accept them (however grudgingly)... their status as the only thing apart from the "original 85" with the name Robotech on it. With that gone, and some small body of replacement canon side stories, it was inevitable the fans would tear the comics and novels to flinders over their many departures from the TV series.

Actually, the core argument against thinking caps is a line from one of the first episodes of the Macross Saga, where Roy says that "if you can fly a jet, you can operate a battloid" (the exact wording may differ slightly, but the meaning is there), which pretty firmly establishes that the controls provided are adequate to control the battloid without significant additional complexity... all in all ruling out the idea that a whole secondary control system is necessary to execute the maneuvers seen in the show. There's also the abundance of evidence in the series itself where the "thinking cap" concept falls on its face due to either someone operating the mecha without the benefit of a "thinking cap" helmet, having more than one person present in the cockpit without a helmet (ruling out a non-contact system by means of potential interference), and having someone else wear the helmet in the cockpit (ruling it out by having someone other than the pilot wearing the helmet which ostensibly includes the "thinking cap" hardware without affecting the aircraft's maneuvers at all). Basically, the argument against the "thinking cap" is that the dialogue in the series establishes that such a thing is largely unnecessary, and that a large body of circumstantial evidence suggests it CANNOT possibly exist or function as McKinney says it should.

It's a MacGuffin... a cheap excuse to tie the three shows together despite their totally unrelated stories. I don't think they ever really had a rationale for it. Now there are three words that automatically invalidate pretty much anything that comes after. I've honestly lost track of the number of times I've said this over the years, but nobody should ever cite a Palladium publication as an authoritative source of information. Palladium's licensed works are invariably so wildly inaccurate that it's far safer to assume that any information that's actually correct is the product of coincidence rather than intent. Palladium's MO is generally to sacrifice accuracy in the name of game balance, making things fit the previously-established rules, and of course, applying "more dakka" with the sort of enthusiasm an Ork would be hard pressed to match. Which is... for the purposes of the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross TV series AND Robotech's Macross Saga... completely wrong. The ship in question is 1,210m long and 18,000,000 metric tons. Strictly speaking, in Macross the titular ship was shortened to 1,200m during the 2012 refit (or was always that size as per the alternate universe/DYRL).

Or you could examine the bigger picture and take note that your argument about the evils of science is centered around an obviously faulty assertion... that the lack of modern science and technology was ever a serious obstacle to good old fashioned murder and genocide at any point in humanity's history. We, as a species, were gleefully butchering the living hell out of our fellow man, often on religious grounds, long before modern science rolled around and made it somewhat more convenient. A lack of poison gas, nuclear bombs, and machine guns didn't stop people from having a go at each other armed and wiping whole cities off the map with nothing fancier than torches, pointy sticks, and chunks of sharpened metal or stone. The only thing science did was distance man from the act itself so he (usually) doesn't get viscera all over his shoes. As I illustrated above, it's reaching pretty damn far to point the finger at science as the cause of the Protoculture's collapse. Science facilitated things, but the ultimate cause was a good old fashioned failure to communicate and take stock of what the other party is thinking/feeling. If you want to dumb it down rather a lot, one of the core themes of Macross has ALWAYS been "See! We didn't NEED to shoot the crap out of each other! We could've talked it out!". The Protoculture failed to talk it out and so (depending on the universe) they either turned their existing weapons on each other or had a new trial weapon run amok and wipe them out. In short, their fall was facilitated by their use of advanced science and technology, but the ultimate cause was a simple failure to communicate. Now if you play this from the altogether more slapdash Robotech angle on "protoculture", the whole thing is just a fuel source that everyone is too lazy to try to find an alternative for, so they shoot the everloving hell out of each other for a bit, then humanity wins by a narrow margin and enslaves the survivors of their enemies (and any newly liberated allies) to fuel their war machine to defend against the next attempt to take their magic flowers away. That's nothing with a moral, that's just a weak excuse to justify several large wars (which is suppose is somewhat more realistic XD) and the sort of obnoxious "humanity is inherently morally and spiritually superior to aliens" malarkey that was so often the butt of jokes in the original Star Trek series.

Possible... but very unlikely IMO. I think the best potential candidate for such a thing would've been the Daedalus II-class space carrier/ramship from the Macross II prequel games, but nobody ever attempts to dock any to one of the Macross-class ships that were around at the time (that we know of). The Daedalus II-class is the only ship I'm aware of in Macross that was actually purpose-built to execute the Daedalus Attack without the support of a larger ship, so that would make it the best possible candidate. Not to dig a colossal hole in this particular argument, but what's practical and logical on the modern-day battlefield doesn't necessarily hold true for science fiction... especially not where giant fighting robots or other unconventional things abound... after all, one of our biggest American sci-fi franchises is centered around a bunch of space monks who fight with laser swords, and possibly the most iconic robot show of all frequently features giant robots fighting with swords of both the physical and laser persuasion. Would a long-range Daedalus Attack really be less practical or believable than, say, dogfighting with giant knives like we saw in Macross Frontier?

Eh, what makes you think they haven't already done so? This is MEMO we're talking about... there's a very real possibility they already snubbed his project and he was either too busy sucking up to Tommy to notice or too dense to realize that he got shot down. Either way, the odds of his "Robotech Codex" ever actually getting published are virtually nil, since he just doesn't know enough about Robotech to participate in any meaningful way in the franchise's official forums, let alone write a book. Even with help he's up poo creek without a paddle... his one avowed helper is none Doug Bendo(ver), who, if anything, knows even less about Robotech than MEMO does and just wants to impose his own views on the show and have them mistaken for canon. It really is a shame... if this project wasn't completely doomed from the get-go and was left in the hands of someone halfway capable, it could probably easily eclipse Art of the Shadow Chronicles, which is why it'll probably never see daylight. With a reputation like his it's amazing he has anything to do at all.

But who among us is actually surprised by this particular piece of news? Nobody. What a sad yet painfully predictable turn of events... Harmony Gold launches its big 25th anniversary convention tour with nothing to show for 25 years of mismanagement, ineptitude, failure, and a punishing lack of originality but a single direct-to-DVD movie that most of the anime industry ignored and the vague promise that there might be a live-action movie and another direct-to-DVD animated movie at some undefined point in the future. Their big plan for the 25th anniversary tour seems to be to trot out the same old guests they've been using since time immemorial, accompanied by a clip show everybody's seen before. Oh I don't doubt that CAPTAIN CAPSLOCK and the rest of his band of merry morons will be all over this like flies on poo (a very apt analogy, don't you think?) as soon as they notice it... probably by reading it here. I'm sure they'll read a lot into it that isn't there... how soon d'you reckon we'll all be hearing all about how Tobey Maguire dropped out on the last Spider-Man movie to work on Robotech? Or that the cancellation of Spider-Man 4 is proof positive that Tobey's putting a higher priority on Robotech? I, for one, expect no end of horseshit claims from them based on this.

Granted, it's not exactly easy to listen to all the tales of the outrageous injustices Harmony Gold is happily perpetrating against the Robotech fanbase (most of whom are guilty of nothing more than being ignorant or a bit too nostalgic) and, to a lesser extent, the Macross fanbase. At the very least, it's pretty much guaranteed to evoke a mixture of pity and disgust in the listener, if not outright dislike of the offending company. An admirably succinct summary of the situation, yes... even after being essentially forced to own up to the fact that their grand epic and its great creative vision was in truth a hastily slapped-together rewrite done on the fly using shows which just happened to be lying around unused in Harmony Gold's catalog of licensed works, they still desperately want to say that their show is better, so they trot Carl Macek out to talk about how he "improved" Macross, and try to write the originals off as essentially a second-class story whose only real value is that it became part of Robotech. Yes, the people running Harmony Gold are habitual liars and, yes, easily classified as thieves... but we all knew that already. Don't say that until you've actually had the displeasure of working with (or for) them... we don't call them the "Evil Empire" for nothing. That add-on to make the Windows Search Bar support Firefox was, if memory serves, the result of a court order stemming from the various monopoly proceedings against them in the EU. I don't think it was voluntary. They spun it as such, that's for sure...

Oh yes... I solemnly detest their casual practice of simply publishing their assumptions and speculation as though it were fact instead of doing any research. It set the trend for the decades to come, with crazy, ignorant Robotech fans who don't want to be arsed to actually watch the show (or any show) simply asserting "this is how it is, and it's no use telling me otherwise".

I can't imagine whoever told you it was a collection of "short stories and vignettes" had ever actually seen a copy of the Fate/hollow ataraxia visual novel... because that's not what it is. It's a nominal sequel to Fate/stay night, that involves a magically-induced stable time loop created by Avenger (Angra Mainyu) after the 5th Holy Grail War. It's a bit messy, story-wise, but it is supposed to be canon.

Not entirely accurate... they establish in Fate/stay night and Fate/hollow ataraxia they establish that the reason the Holy Grail isn't "as advertised" in the 4th and 5th Holy Grail Wars (depicted in Fate/zero and Fate/stay night respectively) is because it was tainted during the 3rd Holy Grail War when the Einzbern family accidentally summoned the only known instance of an "Avenger" servant, Angra Mainyu. Having the embodiment of all worldly evils and seething hate dumped unceremoniously into the holy grail at the war's conclusion is what screwed it up in the first place... both allowing magi to summon servants with an evil alignment and turning the grail from an impartial wish-granting engine into a fairly malevolent object that interprets all wishes in the context of destruction.

You'll probably find the magic in Fate/stay night tends to be relatively unobtrusive on the whole, with most of the magic being simple low-key stuff like Shiro's habit of using the only kind of magic he doesn't suck at to fix things, and Rin's occasional ineffectual projectiles. The only showy magic is the magical macguffin they're fighting over (called the holy grail, but is for all practical purposes just a magical wish-granting machine) and the battle magic employed by the "servants", who are themselves magical constructs created in the image of and bearing the souls of well-known ancient heroes and the like, created to do battle to both fuel the holy grail and determine who gets to actually use it for a wish. Odds are if the sort of shonen manga stuff you saw in Bleach didn't mortally offend you, the battle magic used in Fate/stay night won't either. Well, you won't have any issues with Fate/stay night on that front, as the whole thing is set in modern-day Japan. Agreed, though the "knight outfit" is for... well... combat purposes. Eh... personality like Asuka from Evangelion... and tsundere as the day is long. Probably because it's licensed in the west... I forget who holds the license, but it's out on slimpack DVD for like thirty bucks. I think there're torrents of the high-def version on BxT too.

Actually yeah... he claims he just doesn't like reading and that he prefers "visual media" instead. (Basically, he's an illiterate couch potato) All the same... funny stuff. Poor bastard's living in a fantasy world. He's REALLY butthurt about a number of things where I'm concerned, and is making all kinds of wild accusations.

Oh god... I got e-mails from a lurker on Bendo's show telling me to take a listen to his latest offering, which is apparently a two-hour attempt to get under my skin because I dared to offer to devote some space on my server to a RT site for the good people who've been displaced from RT.com and RTX by MEMO and Maverick's serial idiocy. Amusing enough he's accusing me of being in it only for personal gain (he literally accuses me of trying to reshape Robotech in its entirety) while he does what he does for impartial, honest motives (if your bullshit meter isn't pegged by now, it should be). He also accuses us all of being "dumbass liberal white people" elitists who think all Robotech fans are retarded and need to be educated... All that and I'm not even twenty minutes in... to paraphrase Megatron/Galvatron: "Podcast, Bendo? This is bad comedy." EDIT: Oh, and he categorically denies that he is Orguss_Prime, even though it's obvious to everyone and their dog that he is.