Jump to content

Seto Kaiba

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    13258

  • Joined

  • Last visited

 Content Type 

Everything posted by Seto Kaiba

  1. Seto Kaiba
    OK, one open question... did anyone else feel like the movie had absolutely terrible audio editing? Due to some emergency home repair I had to watch using the 2.0 PCM audio track and any time the focus of the music changed from Walkure to Yami-Q-Ray or vice versa it didn't so much fade as just hastily drop one song for the other in mid-syllable. Is the mastering just really bad on the 2.0 or is the 5.1 similarly affected?
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Say it out loud... it sounds like "See if I"... making the manual section "See if I Care".
  3. Seto Kaiba
    To answer, in spoiler tags naturally.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    In theory. In practice, not so much. After all, he was obliged to build his film on the foundations previously laid by J.J. Abrams' underwhelming The Force Awakens using the same characters and continue the plot he'd already set in motion. He was allowed to make the Star Wars movie he wanted*... as long as it did so within very narrow guidelines, using characters and set pieces already established by someone else, to satisfy the demands of a studio that was worried after The Force Awakens was criticized for being "too safe" and too derivative of previous films. I would assume Andor's showrunners have a somewhat freer hand since only a few cast members are playing established characters and Cassian's backstory is one big blank. Given that the sequel trilogy ended up a mess because Disney tried to be hands-off and then panicked and got super hands-on, I am not sure I would be prepared to label those as mutually exclusive possibilities. * Terms, Conditions, Limitations, Waivers, Exceptions, Notes, Footnotes, Subordinate Clauses, and Managerial Because-I-Say-So's may apply.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Well, we got at least one useful detail out of the new movie. The big bad's fancy ship is NOT a reclaimed Battle Galaxy.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    OK, so... some non-spoilery thoughts now that I've watched it. Pairing Macross Delta: Absolute Live!!!!!! with Macross Frontier: the Labyrinth of Time seemed like a bold idea at the time it was announced. A little too bold, now that I've seen it. The 12 minutes of Macross Frontier: the Labyrinth of Time are WAY more memorable than the 124 minutes of Macross Delta: Absolute Live!!!!!!. Setting it up so Labyrinth of Time plays FIRST was definitely a bad idea, because Absolute Live!!!!!! feels like an afterthought in comparison. It might've been advertised as Absolute Live!!!!!! with a special extra feature Labyrinth of Time, but the reality is the other way around. The Labyrinth of Time, with special and entirely optional and not-at-all-worth-it extra feature Absolute Live!!!!!!. I was worried I'd feel ripped off if Absolute Live!!!!!! was a bad movie. I do not. After The Labyrinth of Time, I am not only content, I am HAPPY. I feel no shame in admitting I even got a little misty-eyed there for a few minutes. It is a BEAUTIFUL coda to the Macross Frontier movie storyline, like Flash Back 2012. I love how Ranka worked Alto and Sheryl's callsigns into the song she sings in this... Skull 04 and Fairy 9. That's every bit as cute as Master File having Sheryl's bodyguard detail using modexes of her birthday and Alto's. The opening song of Macross Delta: Absolute Live!!!!!! is about the most forgettable thing I've ever heard. It sounds like minimum-effort BGM from some 90's-era video game. Autotuned to hell, back, and back to hell AGAIN. Either Heinz forgot how calendars work, or the writers did. They seem to have kind of given up on the premise of Walkure and Delta Flight operating together with airshows going on during the non-combat concerts. Delta Flight's only real contribution in the first number is launching the multidrones, which then just vanish and are not visible at all in the concert. OK woah. They remind us that Windermereans have a typical lifespan of 30... but they start having or planning to have kids at the age of FIVE?! Previous material suggested Windermereans aged at more or less the same pace as humans for their first 18 or so years! THAT'S JUST CREEPY! Bogue stops just short of telling everyone to read White Knight of the Black Wing to hear his full backstory while he's pooh-poohing Hayate and Freyja's relationship. I kind of wish he'd broken the fourth wall and started doing some Gilderoy Lockhart-esque shilling of his own backstory. Walkure's songs in this really are pretty weak. This movie lacks a certified banger like Forbidden Borderline, Our Battlefield, Love! Thunder Glow, or Walkure Won't Stop. This is a two hour movie. It takes exactly thirty-seven minutes for it to stop screwing about and get to the actual plot. Considering the Aerial Knights were on the delivering end of The Worf Effect throughout the TV series, it's surprisingly satisfying to see them on the receiving end this time... and yet insubstantial all the same, because none of these characters have had more than the most basic development. Heimdall has time for random property damage, but is simply too polite to shoot down Delta Flight's Siegfrieds when they're unmanned and being summoned remotely. Captain of the Macross Gigasion, Maximilian Jenius... this is MY movie now. If the movie's big bad is supposed to be an unreasonable nutjob, the writers do a REALLY AWFUL job of making him sound anything less than justified in his views. Max clowning on Delta Flight is everything I hoped for and more. He takes on the entire augmented Delta Flight on his own and humiliates them ALL in an absolutely savage manner while wearing a smug little smile. Then he destroys them VERBALLY to make sure they FEEL the damage. The number of times in this movie Walkure has to be reminded that their gimmick is to sing DURING battles is distressingly high. At least once per battle. SEVERAL times in the last one. And some spoiler-y thoughts... TRIPLE spoiler tagged just in case someone misclicks. Well, that was certainly a thing that I watched. The Labyrinth of Time puts a magnificent cap on the story of Macross Frontier and publicly shames its successor before Macross Delta drunkenly stumbles to a long-overdue end with a well-animated but badly written, clumsily executed mess of a story full of unremarkable music and telegraphed plot "twists" where the villain's motivation makes infinitely more sense than that of the heroes and OG Macross characters show up to drive home how disappointing Delta's are with the subtlety and grace of a piledriver seating a channel marker.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Fun story. During development, the radio and climate control head unit in the DN101 Ford Taurus and Mercury Sable was called the "Central Friendly Interface". It was changed after someone noticed they'd have to file the maintenance requirements under "CFI Care" in the shop manual. I've seen (and shot down) a few at my present employer that were entirely accidental. People abbreviated variable names to get them down to the Vector CAN 32 character limit and accidentally created some foul language in the process.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Speaking as an engineer, and knowing what engineers are like, the English speakers are probably the reason it was saddled with that unfortunate acronym in-universe.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    They made it themselves. It's not a finite natural resource, it's a manufactured synthetic material. OTEC's study of Alien StarShip 1's technology extended not just to its many sci-fi gizmos, bu to the materials used to make them or essential to their operation. They studied the material and experimented with methods of reproducing it until they succeeded. The same goes for all of the fold carbon used in the thermonuclear reactors of the Valkyries, Destroids, etc. They reproduced the fold carbon they found in Alien StarShip 1's systems as best they could to make those systems work the same way.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    I'm planning to watch my copy this weekend... though, to be honest, I'm actually kind of dreading it. On the one hand, everything I've heard from my friends in Japan who saw it in theaters was broadly positive and suggested that the movie was where Macross Delta actually starts living up to the "Macross" name. I'm heartily sick of being disappointed by the lazy work on display in Macross Delta proper and the middling-at-best first movie, so I'd like nothing better than for the second movie to blow me away and leave me feeling like the slog to get here was actually worth it. On the other hand, I absolutely 200% dread the movie's "big reveal" because it's a painfully anticlimactic answer to the franchise's oldest unsolved mystery. On the other other hand, I am greatly looking forward to seeing Delta's collection of underdeveloped expies of Macross Frontier characters, third-rate washouts from Brisingr's local New UN Forces, and other assorted bush league "talent" get completely upstaged in their own ****ing movie by a special guest character from another series. On the other other other hand, could someone please pass the geiger counter?
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Considering that the VF-1's structural frame and the composite used for its armor are both made of ludicrously tough Overtechnology Materials (called "space metal" in the oldest TV series material, and "hypercarbon" from DYRL? on) said to be a hundred times as strong as armor-grade steel, I'd be inclined to suspect that structural fatigue is not high on the maintenance crew's list of concerns. Especially once you factor in the additional increase in structural strength when the energy conversion armor is active, and the VF-1D's being short-term stopgaps for the soon-to-be-delivered, built-for-purpose VT-1 Ostrich.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    I guess that would depend on what you considered "ideal". To have the cannon(s) available in all modes would be difficult given the VF-1-like transformations of the VF-5000 and VF-11. The VF-1 managed it by putting its laser cannon(s) on the monitor turret and having the monitor turret on the underside in Fighter mode. There really isn't a great placement for a gun that'd make it available in all modes like that on the VF-5000 or VF-11, since they moved the monitor turret so its gun could cover a rear-facing arc. Since the arms block the wing root in GERWALK mode and the wings fold up when in Battroid mode, the best bet would probably be sticking the gun in the nose similar to what the Sv-262Hs did, so it'd at least be available in Fighter and GERWALK modes. Either that or mount them in the vertical stabilizers like the YF-21/VF-22 did.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Of course they're gonna spin it in a "glass half-full" manner, they're promoting their own work. Glass half-empty is a much more objective way to look at the admission that they put Max in a YF-29 arbitrarily and didn't even bother to think up an explanation for a septuagenarian private citizen conveniently possessing the single most powerful prototype military aircraft in existence. (Esp. since the last character in a similar position had to invest his life savings AND get special corporate participation to get a previous-generation VF that'd been downgraded to export specification, and after establishing at length that his employer straight-up couldn't afford to build a fully-operational fold wave system.) Whether it's half-full or half-empty, someone still did a sub-par job of filling the glass. 😉 (We engineers, however, just keep 50% of our water in a redundant glass.)
  14. Seto Kaiba
    I'd prefer to keep any and all Force users at arm's length from Andor. One of the things that makes Rogue One and Andor more compelling as entries in the Star Wars metaseries is the absence of the usual iconic space wizards and all their nattering on about things they've foreseen, their destiny, and the Will of the Force. IMO, the protagonists (and antagonists) in these stories are a good deal more relatable and interesting if they're just regular people instead of space magic precognative laser sword one man armies. The characters also feel like they have a lot more agency in the story without all the Force's preordained baggage. TBH, I've never particularly cared for the way Star Wars's main films treat the Jedi and Sith like they're action figures the Force is shuffling around from one fated encounter to the next. Like, the Jedi and Sith's trust in the Force is practically kayfabe. They know their lives are scripted but try to act like there are actual stakes involved. Andor has finally started to assemble some interesting characters, but the writing needs some serious TLC. If they'd run this one out one episode at a time, they wouldn't have had an audience left by the time the story starts moving 20 minutes into episode 3. Right now, the story's kind of bloated, unwieldy, and slow. It's gradually picking up the pace but the series feels like it kind of resents the director putting the spurs to it. I'm still looking forward to episode 5, in no small part because that should prove a lot more energetic than the rest of the series thus far.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Palpatine's already promoted himself to Emperor Palpatine at this point, right? I can't see the Imperial head of state going anywhere without it being kind of a major production. If they were to throw in a big name Imperial art aficionado visitor to Luthen's gallery as an easter egg, why not someone a bit lower down like Admiral Thrawn? If memory serves, he spent quite a bit of the trilogy named for him sitting in an art gallery on his flagship. Or maybe Governor Tarkin. He seems like he'd be Wicked Cultured and they've done that kinda-frightening CG recreation of Peter Cushing's face for Rogue One.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Did anyone ever do one for the MtF J Kai head?
  17. Seto Kaiba
    What you're saying and what I'm saying are kind of distinction without difference... they fully own up to there not being an actual explanation for Max having a YF-29. It's just what they had laying around that they felt "fit". They could have given him a VF-31AX with a unique paintjob - and indeed the liner notes have a LOT to say about developing the distinct paintjobs with feedback from Tamashii - but they went with a YF-29 more or less arbitrarily. They could just as easily have given him an aircraft from their existing CG model library that he's flown before in prior official media: the VF-25. It would have been just as visually distinct, and admittedly would have invoked the same paintjob concerns regarding Max's Blue vs. Michel's Blue, so difficulty-wise it would've been a wash. It would've been a good deal easier to explain too, since the VF-25 isn't an impossibly-expensive machine only the military's super-elite special forces have and which Delta's material indicated that Xaos couldn't afford even if they wanted to. (As often as feedback from Bandai Tamashii is mentioned, it feels like they had a LOT of say in decisions regarding the mecha this time around.)
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Information about the VF-1D is surprisingly scarce. In part, this is because the VF-1D was a surprisingly short-lived variant that was improvised on short notice as a model conversion trainer. Some sources (incl. Master File) allege that the few VF-1D units produced were converted from VF-1A's rather than purpose-built. They were replaced by a purpose-built training model (VT-1 Ostrich) starting from Block 6. The origin of the two laser cannons is probably the original design having the two sections of the head pivot independently. There hasn't been, as far as I'm aware, anything like a cut-and-dry official in-universe explanation for the VF-1D having two laser cannons in its final form. There was, for a time, a school of thought that the A-type's single laser wasn't enough firepower. It's more likely that the D-type head was simply cobbled together out of "off the shelf" parts from other variants given its improvised origin. That was almost certainly the reason when the draft design allowed the two cameras to pivot independently (see @Shawn's post). The final design's explanation is a bit different. One camera is a normal Valkyrie sensor suite and the other is a wide-area unit used for recording training exercises for analysis.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    I'll admit my hopes were not high going into Andor. Being only a casual enjoyer of the Star Wars movies, I was a bit leery about Andor from the outset because the other three Disney+ series are so fanservice-heavy that I felt locked out of the loop. Andor has so far avoided that pitfall, which is a huge plus in my book. It's accessible enough to stand alone, but still fits into the bigger picture of Star Wars. Four episodes in, and once you get past the excess of dramatic silent walking there are some engaging characters. Once the story's either got a premise unusual enough to hook me or characters I can get invested in, I'm with it 'til the end. Andor has reached that point for me. I'm invested in it enough to wanna see where it ends up. (The weirdest things can hook me on a series too... I added Ya Boy Kongming! to my watchlist because the OP is just ridiculously stylish.) TBH, I think the writers probably own the lion's share of the blame for the first two-and-a-half episodes. Someone scripted a full hour of Cassian Andor walking purposefully to nowhere in particular, a space dog pissing on his droid, and the hundred other nonevents of the first three episodes. The editors can only work with what the writers write and the director shoots. At least the pace is picking up and the story's got a sense of direction to it now. (As for the Imperials fighting arseholes... yeah, this one's very much Evil vs. Evil. That was on the table going in, considering Cassian's speech in Rogue One about having done terrible things for the Rebellion. It's also probably the single biggest factor setting this apart from regular Star Wars. Nobody's a Chosen Hero of Ultimate Destiny occupying an unassailable position on the Moral High Ground against the Dark Lord and the Forces of Evil. This is a bunch of pissed-off wasters, losers, joe averages, and other randos vs. a pack of mid-level bureaucrats, functionaries, and gofers who are less Lords of Darkness than Assistant Chamberlains of that buzzing noise the office's flourescent lights make when they're going bad.)
  20. Seto Kaiba
    ... and that's where it's thematically incompatible. Macross is a fundamentally optimistic sci-fi (meta)series where love, peace, communication, and diplomacy triumph in the end.Macross could be described as a setting where there really are no "bad guys". It's not a Good vs. Evil story. There are no Emperor Palpatines, no Stefan Amarises, no irredeemable complete monster card-carrying Agent of Chaos villains waiting in the wings to make the galaxy a worse place Just Because. Macross's antagonists are people doing what they're convinced is right for them and theirs: BattleTech's Clans, on the other hand, are kind of just awful people 24/7. It's not even a shades of gray thing... it's more varying shades of black, morally. The closest they get to a non-awful motivation is wanting to reform the Star League and restore humanity's golden age, though with largely selfish motivations involving ruling it themselves. Once that's off the table, they're just kind of jerks engaged in a decades-long interstellar dick-measuring contest. The closest they get to non-awfulness is usually uniting against someone even worse than they are (e.g. the Blakists). It's very much on the same narrative model as Warhammer's various incarnations, where the setting is deliberately full of awfulness so that every faction can fight itself or any other faction.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    While I can be cantankerous at times, this is a topic suitable for those on a low-sodium diet. No added salts. "It is unknown how Max obtained the YF-29." That is a direct quotation from the liner notes. The only part of the entire paragraph that isn't about the color being blue, in fact. The paragraph this is from starts with mentioning the YF-29 being blue because it's Max's, then the commentary goes on to talk about how they were worried people might confuse it for Alto's (or Michel's) because it was a YF-29 colored blue and how they needed to make it a distinctive blue. Here's the other: That's a question asked to, and answered by, Kawamori in the liner notes. Max has a YF-29 not for any actual story-relevant reason, but because it's all they could think to give him.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Looking at it more closely, the Macross Delta: Absolute Live!!!!!! blu-ray liner notes are surprisingly light on substance overall. It's pretty much all creator commentary... but it's mostly the kind that's long on words and terribly short on substance. They have a section about the story, a very large section for the various musical numbers, a brief section about the character designs, and a section about the mecha that seems to be mostly just acknowledging that the VF-31AX has a new set of paintjobs they collaborated with Bandai Tamashii on. It's even less detailed than some of the magazine coverage we've had, which is kind of impressive in a "If only you had put this much effort into doing the job right" kind of way. To give you a basic idea, Max's YF-29 is talked about more than any other individual character's mecha and almost all of the remarks are expressing their concern that it'd end up mistaken for Alto's because the only difference was the color and that there is no actual explanation for Max having a YF-29. They literally just say it's unknown how he got it and that they gave him a YF-29 because it was the only thing they could think to give him.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Welp, I hope you weren't too keyed up for it, because the liner notes have ZERO technical info for the new mecha in the movie. What a frigging letdown.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Just got mine. Very disappointed by the lack of info in the liner notes.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Full disclosure, I'm actually not very familiar with the setting at all. Most of my exposure to that franchise outside of the legal situation is the 90's cartoon. I wanted to give the OP a response since I figured the topic wouldn't draw much attention and did a fair bit of reading for research purposes while I was preparing the post. Funny story... you more or less described the premise of Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross. The "alien" Zor in Southern Cross are the genetically-modified descendants of human space emigrees bound for Glorie whose ship(s) travelled into the past due to a botched warp (ala Yamato) jump. They colonized and terraformed Glorie in the distant past, ruined the planet in a nuclear war, and abandoned it to let the nuclear winter clear up. They returned to the Epsilon Eridani system to discover that their planet had been colonized by someone else (the second wave of settlers who'd left just after their ancestors did) and launched an invasion of the planet to reclaim resources vital to maintaining their civilization. The series was cancelled before it got as far as the big reveal that the Zor were human all along, but the fact is still stated in the Japanese liner notes and one artbook the series got. Two problems there: Fold faults are spacetime disruptions that only exist in fold space (AKA super dimension space), a higher-dimension sub-universe adjacent to conventional reality that ships use to teleport by folding higher-dimensional spacetime. The realspace equivalent phenomenon, produced artificially, is just an impassible wall of warped space. The Vajra and the Protoculture's Sigur Berrentzs use them as a (better) equivalent of humanity's barrier technology. Planets can be surrounded by fold faults, and it's implied that the ancient Protoculture did this to a few planets like Uroboros and Windermere IV on purpose, but the planet isn't inside the fold fault. It works like a fence, preventing or just slowing down travel into or out of the vicinity of the planet. Fold faults slow down the subjective passage of time for ships (or other objects) attempting to cross them via fold navigation. As seen in Macross Frontier, ships attempting to cross a fold fault will see a significant increase in the disparity between the passage of time inside and outside the ship during the jump, losing dozens or hundreds of hours of realspace time as a result.
×
×
  • Create New...