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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, I was a bit thrown by that too... though more because there was some timeline problem there. It seems that Andor did a bit more retconning of Cassian's background than it first appeared to. His homeworld being listed as Fest was retconned to being a cover story, but it looks like his birth year changed a bit too. The official website says that Cassian was 9 when he was taken off Kenari and that the flashbacks occur before the start of the Clone Wars. Rogue One material says Cassian was 26 when he died. With the Clone Wars starting 17 years before the series and 22 years before Rogue One, Cassian would have to be at least 31 for that timeline to work. If it was prior to the official outbreak of the Clone Wars, Maarva may have been mistaken about who the crew actually were. Maybe she assumed they were Republic because they were crewing a stolen Republic ship or something of that nature.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    One of them (YF-19-4) is day-glo orange? The rest are fairly subdued, with various camo patterns, mattes with bright trim, black-and-whites, and a few canonical paintjobs like Emerald Force and Basara's VF-19 Kai.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    I'm just skimming for now, but it's tipped as arguably the first official combat operation the VF-19 was used in. Long story short, in December 2041 a ferry carrying Zentradi workers from a resource asteroid in the Parkington system went missing. Four days later, the system's fourth planet Roger (yes that's the name of the planet) was attacked by a rogue Zentradi branch fleet that employed unusual tactics specifically targeting weak spots in the New UN Spacy's defenses. The prevailing theory for why being that the Zentradi workers who had gone missing had defected to the branch fleet attacking the system. The enemy fleet employed an extremely odd and unconventional strategem of dividing itself into three and rotating fresh forces onto and off of the front lines constantly. The defense fleet called for help from Earth as soon as the enemy were first sighted, and fearing another Spica incident the central NUNS dispatched forces immediately. The force dispatched included four VF-19As from the SVF-440 Dullahans fresh out of model conversion training aboard the Uraga-class carrier Grand Forks. Arriving 4 hours and 20 minutes after the battle started (nice?) the Grand Forks deployed the four VF-19s via fold boosters under active stealth concealment to fold into the midst of the three different enemy taskforces and destroy their command ships with reaction weapon strikes to sever the enemy's chain of command. Within nine minutes of deploying, the pilots from the Dullahans had identified the enemy command ships and the order was given to attack. Once the enemy command ships were downed, reinforcements folded into the battle area and a decisive fleet action resulted in the Zentradi branch fleet being decimated and eventually surrendering. The crews of the Zentradi ships that surrendered reported that they failed to detect the VF-19s attacking them until after the opening salvo (of reaction weapons) had been fired.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    As with all of the Master File books, they're not official setting material and carry a disclaimer to that effect but they are written under Kawamori's supervision and with the involvement of Macross mechanical setting coordinator Masahiro Chiba. Every now and again, the official setting materials pillage a detail here or there from 'em.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    It has one. It was released back in March of '19. For bonus points, it was the 11th book in the series... and while informative, was not quite up to the exceptionally high water mark set by the first five books, the Battroid Valkyrie book, or the VF-1S book. Backordered, but apparently still available, via CDJapan: https://www.cdjapan.co.jp/product/NEOBK-2323838 There are currently twelve Master File books for Variable Fighters: Variable Fighter Master File: VF-1 Valkyrie Vol.1 "Stratospheric Wing" Variable Fighter Master File: VF-19 Excalibur "Trail of the Holy Sword" Variable Fighter Master File: VF-1 Valkyrie Vol.2 "Space Wing" Variable Fighter Master File: VF-25 Messiah "New Messiah" Variable Fighter Master File: VF-0 Phoenix "Phoenix of the Beginning" Variable Fighter Master File: SDF-1 Macross VF-1 Air Corps Variable Fighter Master File: VF-22 Sturmvogel II "Invisible Bird" Variable Fighter Master File: VF-4 Lightning III "The Start of the Revival" Variable Fighter Master File: VF-31 Siegfried "The Dragon-Hunting Knight" Variable Fighter Master File: VF-1 Battroid Valkyrie "Soaring Giant" Variable Fighter Master File: VF-11 Thunderbolt "Galactic Lightning" Variable Fighter Master File: VF-1S Roy Focker Special "Hero's Trail" Book 13, Variable Fighter Master File: VF-31AX Kairos Plus, is currently slated for a late December release after being delayed... I wanna say twice so far? It was originally positioned for a release alongside the home video release of Macross Delta: Absolute Live!!!!!! but got delayed to "early December" and then again to "late December". (I've got multiple copies on preorder, naturally... that's just how the Historica Project rolls.)
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Since the sudden change in the weather has me feeling too cruddy to do the work I'd planned to, I decided to poke around a bit at the Variable Fighter Master File: VF-19 Excalibur on the off-chance it might provide more information about Groombridge 1816 since it was also curiously specific about other planets e.g. Spica. No such luck, but I did turn up some fun details I thought I'd pass along. Master File's take on the backstory of Macross Plus is interesting, and a bit different from what the OVA would lead one to expect. It presents an order of events where the Macross Concern's Ghost X-9 was already almost complete when the Zentradi destroyed the surface of Spica III in the Alpha Virginis system in 2037. Project Super Nova was, according to this history, green-lit in large part because the New UN Forces top brass were highly skeptical of the Ghost X-9's ability to make the highly situational judgement calls needed to capitalize on enemy weaknesses in an offensive. The requirements for the Project Super Nova Valkyries were based on benchmarking the Ghost X-9's capabilities with a number of extra concessions to survivability and operational flexibility. The upper management at both Shinsei Industry and General Galaxy were aware of the Ghost X-9 program, but kept the dev teams in the dark about the true nature of the program because there was some concern (on both sides) that one project or the other was really just a stalking horse there to justify the other. (Also interesting is that Dr. Jan Neumann's biographical extract suggests someone re-founded both Purdue and MIT after the First Space War. Jan's definitely a kid genius, noted to be a graduate of Neo Purdue and MIT with degrees in quantum mechanics at age 10 before joining the Aeronautical Institute of Technology on Eden and then taking a position as a lead design engineer with Shinsei Industry at age 15. Another interesting mention is that Toran 825 AKA Dr. Algus Selzer was personally scouted for General Galaxy by Alexei Kurakin, who co-founded General Galaxy and founded the SV Works.) They also put a round number estimate to the number of VF-11s that were produced during its mass production run. THIRTY THOUSAND. That's enough to equip all seven emigrant fleets with New Macross-class ships and leave over 17,000 left.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    And so, you understand my struggle... and why I'm shelving my pride and going to ask someone on the astronomy faculty at MSU or U-M.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Granted, I have not yet gone any farther with that investigation than confirming that Groombridge 1816 is a real star described in Stephen Groombridge's A Catalog of Circumpolar Stars. I'm planning to refer the matter out to the Astronomy department at one of the state universities I have ties to, though I haven't had an opportunity to do so yet due to some work complications.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Bear in mind, those measurements were taken in 1806-1816 using purely analog equipment so they're not going to align well with modern digital measurements taken two centuries later. Like I said, obscure... that one fan blog assumed, like you did, that the star didn't exist based on mainstream search engine results and nothing else. Eden's not in a binary system, so it's definitely not Groombridge 34AB.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    No, it's not a typo. It is Groombridge 1816 not 1618. You won't find much about it on Google or Wikipedia because it is a relatively obscure star, but it is a real star noted/codified on page 53 of Stephen Groombridge's A Catalog of Circumpolar Stars (1838). EDIT: It should be noted that only a tiny handful of Groombridge catalog numbers are well-documented under their original catalog numbers. Groombridge's catalog covers 4,243 different stars. Exactly two of them have Wikipedia pages.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    In a completely non-serious tribute to my childhood. "Trukk not munky". Who'd have thought the Transformers movies would be going on long enough to start mining Beast Wars and/or Beast Machines for content? XD
  12. Seto Kaiba
    ... I feel like this is one title that really won't make the transition to live-action gracefully. Kinda like Dragon Ball.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    "Hold on, it gets dumber" seems to be the theme for The Witch from Mercury. The entirety of the show's 7th episode can be summed up as Miorine pulling a K-2SO and saying "Congratulations, you are being employed. Please do not resist." At least when Wing and my boy Heero are involved, events have causes and consequences. In The Witch from Mercury, things just... happen. There's no rhyme or reason to it.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Now THAT is something I wasn't expecting! I guess now that Maurice Leblanc's works are in the public domain we can actually have the Arsene Lupin (the First) in Lupin III.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    The best part of "Rascals" isn't even in "Rascals"... It's in DS9's "Bar Association": Not only is "Rascals" the first TNG episode Odo references... Odo had that PADD just sitting there. WAITING. In case Worf came in to complain about security!
  16. Seto Kaiba
    I'm not sure interconnecting those two would work... they don't really have any themes in common except having been horror episodes. The parasites from "Conspiracy" were originally a part of a larger story arc, but they ended up orphaned from it because the budget wouldn't stretch to doing proper insectoid aliens and the idea was workshopped into the Borg. The aliens from "Schisms" were just this weird one-off thing that shows up, menaces a few crew members on the Enterprise, and then disappear and are never mentioned again.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Has rumor said what it's reportedly about? I can't imagine anyone wants to see a post-sequel-trilogy story.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Best news I've had all day.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... he's had his turn at it a fair few times. It mainly happens in the RPGs like the Paper Mario series and Mario & Luigi series. It was at its most blatant in Paper Mario: the Thousand Year Door thanks to the sheer quantity of irreverent comedy in that game. Luigi just gets hit with it a lot harder since the Paper Mario games often made him out to be the hero of another, much lamer, story and then he got a solo series devoted to his ghost phobia (Luigi's Mansion).
  20. Seto Kaiba
    ... there's really nothing explicit there to censor. I have no idea why people keep acting like there is. 🙄 Crunchyroll does not censor the shows they license for streaming. Granted, there are titles in Crunchyroll's library that are censored but that censorship was done by the studios that produced the shows to make them suitable for broadcast in Japan. There either isn't an uncensored version available or Crunchyroll hasn't yet upgraded the version of the show that they have in their streaming library to the uncensored home video version.
  21. Seto Kaiba
  22. Seto Kaiba
    The most likely (in-universe) reason that countermeasures aren't used more often is that many types of missiles used in the series have multiple guidance systems. Especially the long-ranged missiles, which often have three separate guidance systems working in concert... usually radar (bolstered by powerful ECCM to overcome active stealth), infrared, and TV. Flares would be the most useful countermeasure, since micro-missiles tend to be exclusively infrared-guided.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    While they're seldom shown being used, VFs do have countermeasure dispensers for things like chaff and flares. The one instance that sticks out in my memory most clearly is in Macross Plus. During Isamu and Guld's dogfight on Earth, there is a shot of Isamu using chaff containers against some missiles Guld launches. Tech manuals like Master File and Sky Angels do mention countermeasure dispensers for chaff and flares as a standard feature. The VF-1's countermeasure dispenser is in the fighter's "backpack", while other VFs keep theirs in the legs.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Five'll get you twenty they forgot the fleet exists.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    "Schisms" was a weird one. One of the few times Star Trek has tried to do more or less straight-up horror. They never figure out who the aliens are, why they're capturing people and subjecting them to all of those invasive medical experiments, or really manage to stop them from carrying on. In a way, it feels like they should've come back to that one at some point. Kind of like those parasites from TNG season 1 that were teased as a continuing threat and then were never mentioned again.
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