Seto Kaiba
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Probably worth noting at this point that Zentradi body armor is made of the same stuff VF armor is... which has excellent heat resistance. "Asskicking equals authority"? Having a clear chain of command is very important for maintaining unit cohesion, especially across such a large force. Making the unit commander harder to kill necessarily means the valuable resources that go into making them are less likely to be lost and the chain of command is less likely to be disrupted. Not to mention the obvious advantages of having a commander who can literally wade in and knock heads together if the grunts get rowdy in order to remind everyone who's the boss. Having a commander who refuses to stay down is probably pretty good for morale in a pinch too. Of course, if humanity inherited the Protoculture's foibles as much as the series sometimes suggests, there may be a more mundane reason like "being tall makes you look more like a leader".
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The amount of plasma in a Valkyrie's exhaust in atmospheric operation is so small that this is not exactly something the Zentradi are at risk of. Only a very small amount of fusion plasma is needed to flash-heat the intake air to the requisite temperature for safe thrust production. (Available figures put the fuel consumption rate just south of 0.28ml/sec.) In practical terms, the Zentradi are no more at risk of being burned alive by the VF-1's jet wash than you or I are in danger of spontaneously combusting standing downwind of the jet wash from a modern jetliner's turbofans. Suitably braced, it could potentially throw a Zentradi backwards a bit as it did to Vrlitwhai, but equal and opposite reactions being what they are an unbraced Valkyrie would not be able to do that as the amount of thrust needed to move something as large as a Zentradi would push the Valkyrie away too.
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The term "cell wall" refers specifically to a rigid or semi-rigid structure surrounding a cell's outer membrane made of material like cellulose and pectin which is commonly found in plants but absent in animals. The outer boundary of animal cells is the cell membrane, a flexible boundary typically made of phospholipids. That distinction is why cheemingwan1234 was thrown by your post. Cell walls are a feature not found in animals. The exact nature of the biochemical and anatomical changes that micloning systems make based on latent genes has not been elaborated upon. However, the end result is a living being able to structurally withstand being 10m tall and bipedal, with strength and reflexes to suit and durability rivaling an armored combat robot. As tough as they are (and as physiologically impossible as MK-style "fatalities" are), it is unlikely that a VF-1 could achieve such a needlessly gory feat. Especially given that ghe Valkyrie's hands are notoriously fragile and not intended for that kind of close combat.
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Unless Lt. Meero drags him out of "retirement" to spite her rival Lt. Blevin, I doubt he'll be back. He seems like less of a main antagonist and more of a warmup boss. He wasn't evil, or even malicious. He was just an officious twit in WAY over his head. As someone with even less experience with the EU, I'm in the same boat if not worse. I have no idea what the approximate buying power of a "credit" is in usable terms. What I've sussed out from dialog is that a thousand or so credits is some serious walkin' around money. Cassian was willing to pay 700 credits to be smuggled offworld no questions asked to beat a murder rap. Luke claimed that 10,000 credits was nearly enough to buy your own ship (I'd assume that he meant used) and 17,000 for covert passage to Alderaan was apparently so good that Han dropped his demand for cash upfront on his already quite ludicrous quote. Cassian agrees to sell "the box" to Luthen for 40,000, which is clearly a HUGE sum of money in context and Cassian is totally bemused when he's offered a further 1,000 just for the story of how he got it. Luthen then offers him five times that apparently princely sum (a whopping 200,000) just to assist in the heist, which would suggest the amount they're stealing must be pretty freaking enormous for an amount that large to be unmissed. (A quick Google search suggests it's quite the princely sum indeed... twice the price of a brand new ship of the Millennium Falcon's class, or enough to buy a new X-Wing.) We've seen Saw Gererra and others in the teasers for this first season, so I'd assume there'd have to be at least one more story arc after this one just to accommodate them since they're not part of this one. -
Signs point to "Yes, we have enough episodes to have plenty of story left after the heist". Andor season one has been announced as having twelve episodes. If the series started as it meant to go on, that's four three-episode story arcs. Showrunner Tony Gilroy confirmed that the series will have two seasons with the second building up to the events of Rogue One. (Based on my research, they were originally going to do as many as five seasons but scaled it back for feasibility reasons.) We did, but it was crap. Mind you, the stakes are a lot higher in Andor than they were in Solo: a Star Wars Story. Vel's team are trying to make off with the quarterly Imperial payroll for an entire sector so the money can fund the rebellion instead.
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Harder than miclone flesh and bone, sure... but the biochemical modifications that are done to make something like a 10m tall humanoid function make them extremely durable and able to not only survive but win at fisticuffs with something like a Valkyrie.
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Eh... as I said, all that stuff was already in Macross Frontier. ALL of it. Macross Delta just half-assed the explanation, so half an explanation of an established mechanic of the setting ended up sounding like a new and ill-conceived macguffin instead. For the record, it was. Macross Chronicle goes into more detail about Song Energy being a biological fold wave. Macross 7, of course, went into a bit of detail about exactly HOW mechanical amplification is done (the amplifier being a modified fold system) and explicit connections between that and the fold amps used in Frontier and Delta are drawn in Macross E by no less a person than an all-grown-up Elma Hoyly, now in possession of a doctorate and working as a researcher studying biological fold waves and Var syndrome. (It's also noted in Frontier that the fold wave emissions of the fleet's technology were a big part of how the Vajra were able to track the Frontier fleet... not just high-intensity fold waves from fold-wave radio and radar systems, but background emissions from gravity control, running reactors, and the like.)
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Super Macross Mecha Fun Time Discussion Thread!
Seto Kaiba replied to Valkyrie Driver's topic in Movies and TV Series
When it comes to the color of Heimdall's hat, Macross Delta: Absolute Live!!!!!! has a nasty case of Protagonist Centered Morality. Heimdall does... But aside from that and some incidental property damage early in the film, the film never manages to actually construct any kind of argument (cogent or otherwise) for why Xaos's defense of Lady M is "right" and Heimdall's opposition to her is "wrong". It's actually kind of weird that they never even make a serious effort to refute Heimdall's assertions about Lady M using her influence to manipulate New UN Government policy. There really isn't any arguing Cromwell's point about Mikumo, since it's been acknowledged in the previous film that Lady M broke interstellar laws and used banned technology to create Mikumo as a de facto (and illegal) clone supersoldier. When Exsedol later summarizes Cromwell's positions for Max and Arad, what he lists is all common sense stuff like advocating for more widespread use of unmanned fighters to reduce the risk to pilots and advocating for cloning and cybernetics because they offered the potential to improve medical care for the wounded. The audience is clearly supposed to see him as some kind of well-intentioned extremist, but there's really nothing extreme or unreasonable about his views. They're only presented as "wrong" because they're at odds with Lady M's views, which Xaos unquestioningly supports. If it weren't for the lyrics of Yami_Q_Ray's songs being edgy AF there wouldn't really be much of anything to even mark them out as the film's antagonists besides the protagonists fighting them (and losing). (Considering Xaos were acknowledged to be unlawful combatants in the war between the New UN Gov't and Windermere IV, it's hard to even argue that Xaos's hat is appreciably a lighter shade of grey than Heimdall's.) Norse references all over the place, lol. Ever since Macross 30, the franchise has been doing that increasingly often. Many of the placenames on Uroboros have meaningful names drawn from Norse mythology relevant to their significance in the story, and the antagonists were named for a Norse poem conveying Odin's wisdom, guidance on proper conduct, and advice for living. Fitting for what their role is in the story. Heimdall is a similarly meaningful name. The Norse god Heimdall was the god who kept watch for invaders and for the onset of Ragnarok, who drank from the well of knowledge at the roots of the world tree and who is responsible for summoning the gods to the final battle at the end of days with the Gjallarhorn. The organization Heimdall wants to let the human race acquire and exercise the knowledge of the ancient Protoculture to guard against humanity's destruction by outside forces. (It's interesting to note that the god is also associated with the goddess Freyja. Heimdall did battle with Loki, the trickster god of chaos, to recover Freyja's torc Brisingamen... a name derived from the word Brisingr (fire) for which the star cluster the series is set in is named.) Heimdall's flagship, Battle Astraea, is a bit off-brand, since Astraea is a Greek minor goddess, but also an extremely unsubtle mission statement. Astraea was the virgin goddess of justice, purity, and innocence who once lived among humans but fled to the stars when her disgust with humanity's growing obsession with material wealth (gold) grew to be more than she could bear. It's said that she would one day return to usher in a new golden age for humanity. The BattleTech reference is a more limited one, to Heimdall's battle against Loki to recover the Brisingamen he stole from Freyja. None that I am aware of. I could write one, but it'd have to wait until at least Tuesday. I've got an indecent amount of work to get caught up on before Wednesday and way too many home repairs going on at once. -
While I agree with almost everything you wrote, I will (sort of) speak in the movie's defense on this one point if only for the sake of fairness. Macross Delta: Absolute Live!!!!!! is no different from the previous film or Macross Delta TV anime in the sense that it's not really doing much that's new or particularly novel with the franchise's setting or its technology. In fact, these "new" fold wave-based performance improvements are lifted from the ending of the Macross Frontier movies the same way that the Macross Delta TV anime lifted most of the Macross Frontier TV anime's ending. It's actually a lot worse in some ways because these technologies were also already present in Delta Flight's VF-31 Custom Siegfrieds and the Aerial Knights Sv-262s all along. In the VF-31's case, it's THE feature that sets the Siegfried customs apart from the military's VF-31 Kairos that it's based on. The long and short of it is that fold waves are used to manipulate the exotic matter that's produced and used in overtechnology that manipulates gravity. Tech like gravity and inertia control units, thermonuclear reactors and engines, fold systems, barriers systems, and dimensional weapons like macross cannons and heavy quantum beam guns. Fold quartz is a purer form of the fold carbon crystalline resonators used to produce that exotic matter, and when used in place of fold carbon it produces exotic matter that can exert more intense gravitational forces than normal (esp. if boosted by more powerful fold waves). That allows for reactors to run hotter by compressing fuel more to produce more energy and greater thrust in engines, more intense fold effects that can cross fold faults, and more powerful dimensional weapons. That is the basic principle behind the Fold Wave System that was introduced on the YF-29 in Macross Frontier: The Wings of Goodbye. (Taken to the extreme, that is also how you make MDE weapons... instead of using regular heavy quanta and fold waves produced by fold carbon, you use fold quartz and the more potent fold waves it produces and with enough of it you can produce a super-intense fold effect like a temporary black hole.) Delta Flight's VF-31 Custom Siegfrieds already had an economized and less capable version of the YF-29's Fold Wave System from the outset. The Kairos Plus just increases the amount of fold quartz available to the system to improve its output. The Sv-262 Draken III's had an even more economized system that used gravitational compression of exhaust flow as a sort of a pseudo-afterburner (that is copied on the Sv-303s) called a Fold Reheat system. All that's happened here is that Absolute Live!!!!!! is improving the economized versions of the tech already in use while Heimdall is applying the same technologies more broadly.
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Super Macross Mecha Fun Time Discussion Thread!
Seto Kaiba replied to Valkyrie Driver's topic in Movies and TV Series
Infuriatingly so! From what is said in the Absolute Live!!!!!! movie itself, Heimdall's Battle Astraea is a modern Battle-class supercarrier from one of the main fleets of the central New UN Spacy that disappeared and was presumed destroyed several years before the events of the movie. -
Spoiler tag your spoilers. There are still a lot of people who haven't seen this one yet.
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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?
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Say it out loud... it sounds like "See if I"... making the manual section "See if I Care".
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