Seto Kaiba

I'm not the one who said it, though. 😆 But hey, I'm a Macross fan and an engineer... getting "too mathematical" is a fair description of my day job and my hobby. (Doubly so given that my specialism was cryptosystems, which even the computer science folks think is too much math.) 😆 On the math-y front, I am mildly frightened by the Master File's description of the VF-22's GCA-27R GIC-focused laser cannon. Not only does it allegedly dispense toxic gas during the firing process (I'm guessing another deuterium fluoride laser like the RO-2A), its range is such that a VF-22 equipped with this weapon is said to be able to hit fast-moving targets at a distance of 1.2 light seconds (that's 359,751km) and against stationary or inertial-coasting targets is 4.2 light seconds (1,259,126km). There's something fundamentally wrong about a fighter-mounted weapon that can effectively strafe targets on the moon from Earth orbit. The fact that both the GCA-27S and GCA-27R look like prototypes for the VF-27's BGP-01 is not lost on me either... 🤔 Why a fighter would need range like that is anyone's guess. At that point, just mount the gun on a freaking ship and have done with it. (Indeed, the section suggests the GCA-27S was originally developed for warship use!)

No, I'm pretty sure Michael Burnham isn't in this one... 🤔😜 I'm sure the academy curriculum has probably changed a bit since the 2370s when field study was a sophomore year activity, but all things considered if this series is going to work at all it's going to need a fantastically good explanation for why the Starfleet Academy Earth campus's first incoming class in over a century is being immediately thrown into harm's way on a poorly supervised training ship in the badlands instead of... y'know... attending classes at the titular academy. Having said that, I know it's going to be the dumbest f***ing thing I'll have seen since SNW dressed Chris Myers up like a Power Rangers villain and tried to play it laser straight.

There's only so much an education in the fine arts can do when the student is completely lacking in talent or simply unwilling to understand the assignment. And oh boy are Paramount and Alex Kurtzman unwilling to understand the assignment. Their commitment to making this unasked-for grimdark Trekslop instead of what audiences have clearly said they want is quite something. I mean, you'd think when the franchise's bottom ten seasons by review score reads like an itemized list of your efforts it'd be time to consider an alternative approach. Like maybe changing jobs to become a mime.

As a point of linguistic clarity, "three feet square" is not interchangeable with "three square feet". They mean different things. "Three square feet" is a measurement of area (any shape). "Three feet square" means a square area with a side length of 3 feet (and an area of 9 square feet). The math error I corrected was approximating a meter to 3 feet instead of 3.3 or 3.28 as one normally would depending on how fussy one is about rounding. Oh yeah, if you want biological warheads look no further than plants... there's a whole bunch of them that engage in "ballistic seed dispersal". Literally creating exploding fruit or seed pods. The sandbox tree is the poster child for this one, having earned itself the righteous nickname of "the dynamite tree" from the noise of its fruit exploding and flinging seeds as far as 100m fragmentation grenade style.

'lil bit, yeah. Variable Fighter Master File: VF-1 Valkyrie Vol.1 describes the four key overtechnologies that made Variable Fighters possible as: Compact thermonuclear reactors Energy conversion armor Superconducting drive motors Energy capacitors Two of the four are essentially the VF's power generation and distribution system, and the other two being two of the three most energy-hungry systems. Speaking as an engineer, as cool and "sci-fi" as 1 and 2 sound it's 3 and 4 that would turn the f***ing world upside-down. Mass production room temperature superconductors and lossless energy storage? The ability to send power anywhere with negligible line losses and store it until it's needed without conversion losses would revolutionize the power grid and anything/everything electronic. Even the best batteries lose about 5-7% of the power they store in the conversion process and we lose around 8% of the power we generate in the process of transmitting it to where it's going. That's not counting storage losses as chemical batteries degrade. You'd almost be able to abolish the power grid entirely for the residential user with high-efficiency home renewables. Electric cars would charge in seconds and outrange gas cars easily. Portable electronic lifespans would skyrocket. The application of superconducting motors to generator systems would be insane in its own right, with huge efficiency and output jumps from things like hydroelectric and wind farm generators. Adding clean, limitless thermonuclear power to that... well... yikes. The entire world's peak energy demand could be satisfied by just a handful of ship-scale reactor systems. Of course, most sources would generally agree that the heart and soul of most OTM is actually Gravity and Inertia Control... since that's essential for the operation of compact thermonuclear reactors, artificial gravity, fold navigation, fold communication, cross-dimension radar, active stealth, beam weapons, and a variety of other systems.

It's actually worse on a second watch. The writers are really doing a champion job of making this captain look like a complete buffoon. With so many cuts, it's hard to tell if it's the writers or the editors who are making the captain look like the galaxy's least attentive Pakled.

Moving this over from the Books topic. It'd perhaps be more accurate to say the VF-31 was seen as a solution to some of the Brisingr Alliance's economic woes. The VF-31's particular situation is heavily inspired by Japan's own domestic Next Main Fighter program (the Mitsubishi ATD-X/X-2/F-2). Another build-under-license agreement like the one they had for the VF-171 was certainly feasible, but the Brisingr Alliance was attracted to the idea of domestic development of a next-generation Main Variable Fighter to replace the VF-171 because it was a way to stimulate the cluster's economy and create jobs, to improve their defense autonomy with less dependence on outside governments and corporations for military hardware, and as a potential source of revenue via export sales to other governments. The VF-19 might have been cheaper, but it would also probably not have been as attractive an option since its performance was much lower than true 5th Generation fighters and it would be another build-under-license agreement they'd be paying another government for. Master File has some thoughts on that, though they mostly amount to a four-engine version of the VF-31AX ala the YF-29.

I'll answer the tech-y bits in a more appropriate thread. How much lore this book'll dispense is unclear right now... it seems to be light on text, so I wouldn't expect too much. Certainly not a lot in terms of new detail that we haven't got from existing sources already.

Which is itself, like most particle beam concepts, ultimately based on the "Teleforce" weapon concept that Nikola Tesla conceived in 1934 in a bid to secure funding from J.P. Morgan Jr. and later described in his 1937 treatise The Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-Dispersive Energy Through The Natural Media. Some of the only actual science to come out of the scientific community's "Death ray" craze in the 1920s and 30s. Nikola Tesla's original practical proposal for a charged particle beam weapon was for a metallic ion particle beam using mercury or tungsten vapor. Macross seems to have at least four, possibly five, different flavors of particle beam weaponry kicking around based on my deep dive into energy weapons. Macross Chronicle seems to imply there are two different kinds of charged particle beam weapon. Technology Sheet 10A "Beam Weaponry" seems to imply that there are two distinct kinds of charged particle beam weapon. It mentions that ship-based and destroid-based beam weapons fire charged heavy metal particles. The implication, supported by Master File, seems to be that VFs or battle pods do not and use charged particles from their compact thermonuclear reactors instead. It also lumps impact cannons and fluid plasma cannons under particle beams, but it remains unclear what an impact cannon is beyond not being a dimensional beam weapon. 😕 Master File poses the interesting prospect that the particle beam cannons on Zentradi ships are something akin to a laser-coupled charged particle beam cannon that serendipitously uses a laser produced by vaporizing tungsten in the compact thermonuclear reactor to help cohere the metallic particle beam after it's launched by the GICs. Possibly the weirdest thing that's come out of this deep dive has been an explanation for why the VF-31AX's container is so damn huge. It's a massive energy capacitor driving the rear-facing laser cannon and the beam gunpod.

Just think, some bright spark at Paramount thought that this mess was so impressive it would entice people to subscribe to their sh*tty streaming service for the sake of watching this extremely sh*tty-looking show. 🤔🙃 Spending millions on CG only works to your benefit if your designs look good... and the ships in this look like something nicked from a decade-plus old non-Star Trek video game. I'm getting strong Halo/Covenant vibes from the protagonist ship and PSO2/Luminmech vibes from the enemy one. The lighting is so dim that I'm left to wonder if the studio's keeping it dark to hide problems with the sets the way they did when Generations reused the TNG TV sets. But the thing that inexplicably bothers me the most is that the captain both looks and sounds like a heavy smoker. (Also, why TF is she wearing granny glasses? Federation medicine had already solved the problem of age-related vision degradation by the mid-2280s. Over 900 years ago, from the perspective of Starfleet Academy in ~3192. Complete ocular replacement was also an option from even longer, being available since at least 2256.)

Well, 3.28... but yes. It's hard to picture because people tend to think Giant Robots are inherently ENORMOUS so the scale tends to get distorted in fan art, but the head is only about the size of the pilot's chair as seen directly in DYRL?. Hell, the 12.68m (41'7") VF-1 Battroid as a whole is only a bit over 7x the height of a statistically average 1.8 meter (5'9") person.

That's old, sure... but far from forgotten. Even Macross Chronicle mentions it. Probably because it's one of the very few details ever published about the VF-XX. That's new... -ish. I think they may be riffing on a statement Masahiro Chiba made in Great Mechanics DX back in the Frontier era about how the NUNS toyed with the idea of doing an upgraded VF-19 with ISC as an anti-Vajra VF but ultimately opted to develop a new fighter for economic reasons. AFAIK, they've never actually tipped the VF-19 as a serious rival to any 5th Gen machine though. I think Master File is the only other book to expressly acknowledge the VF-24. Not necessarily. After all, the first statements that the YF-29 and YF-30 had been retconned into 6th Gen prototypes came from the Macross Delta TV series Blu-ray extra features that used such as a way to justify classifying the Siegfrieds as Gen 5.5 machines. Still... sounds like this book will be very much worth the cost of importing two or three copies. At least, for my purposes.

That's pretty unlikely. After all, the reason that the monitor turrets of Battroids are armed with laser weapons instead of conventional anti-aircraft cannons is that, back when the SDF Macross series was in development, Kawamori et. al. realized pretty early on that a Battroid's head was going to be far too small to plausibly fit a then-modern air-to-air machine gun like the F-14's M61A1 Vulcan or the Panavia Tornado's BK-27 and enough ammunition to make it remotely usable. It's been a bit of a creator's in-joke ever since... so much so that the VF-0 Master File directly references it as an in-universe design obstacle the Stonewell Bellcom team working on the VF-0 encountered in the 2000s. In a way, you could say Macross's insistence on head-mounted energy weapons is a rebuke of Gundam's infamously useless "head vulcans"... By sticking with laser or particle beam weapons, the Battroid has a coaxial gun that will never run out of ammunition and can be plausibly made powerful enough to inflict meaningful damage because their main design constraint is power availability. It also retains enough space for all the optics and other sensors the Battroid requires to go about its business.

That'll be an inexpressible comfort to my postman when I inevitably order 3 copies. He'll only get a mild hernia dragging the box to my door this time. I'm hoping they include some of the stuff from the lesser-covered games like M3... like the unconventional enemy mecha.

As far as I can tell, the moniker "Heavy Weapon type" is something that Arii came up. That said, these kits are clearly DYRL?-branded. You can see the logo next to the "Macross '84 Summer" roundel bears the movie's title 愛・おぼえていますか. They might be reusing Mikimoto's character art from the TV series but the logos are clearly movie-specific. Why there's a VF-1D in this assortment is another question entirely... since the VF-1D was entirely omitted from the movie version as it had been replaced by the VT-1. Probably just Arii milking the molds as much as possible. Well, yes... that's to be expected. After all, you won't find the terms "Strike Valkyrie" or "Strike Pack" in the film's contemporary official media. That was a bit of branding that Takatoku Toys came up with as a way to differentiate the movie's beam cannon-equipped Super Valkyrie variant from the regular Super Valkyrie configuration. Official publications from the era refer to it as スーパーパック・ビーム砲付き (Super Pack - Beam cannon-equipped). I want to say it's until the late 90's or early 2000s that the term "Strike Valkyrie" finally gained official traction. Well, then I have... *checks calendar*... thirty year old good news for you. Ever since '95 and This is Animation Special: Macross Plus, the DYRL? designs have been established to exist in the same continuity as the TV series ones. The TV version VF-1 is how the VF-1 looked in its Block 1 to Block 5 production specification, and the Movie version is how it looked for the remainder of its production run (Blocks 6-17). Officially, the "movie version" VF-1 was already entering service when things went to hell and Earth got glassed by the Boddole Zer fleet.