Seto Kaiba

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.

As far as we know, the only weapon mounted in the VF-31J's monitor turret (head) is the obvious one: its Mauler ROV-127E 12.7mm multi-band fiber laser cannon. The barrel-like structures on the VF-31J, as well as similar ones found on other VFs, have not been identified. It's possible that it's some kind of structural component used to hold the monitor turret in place in Fighter and GERWALK modes or that it's related to one of the many sensor systems packed into the monitor turret.

On the one hand, why wouldn't you take advantage of such a grotesquely OP technology for stimulated emission? On the other, I'd be very worried if one of my colleagues came to me and said "Remember that time we tried to make a wildly impractical nuclear bomb-pumped x-ray laser cannon to shoot down ICBMs? I think I know how we can make it work and put it on a plane now." That's not to say that there haven't been similarly bonkers weapons tossed out in newer material. The VF-22 Master File introduces a Strike Pack beam cannon for the VF-22 that's a scaled-down version of a Zentradi warship's guided focusing beam cannon. It uses a dedicated compact thermonuclear reactor to vaporize heavy metals in order to use launch that vapor as a high-velocity particle beam with an output power in the hundreds of megawatts.

Finally watched Wotakoi: Love is Hard for Otaku... and in Ep4 Koyanagi and Kabakura name-drop Ranka and Sheryl from Macross Frontier during a lover's spat (with Koyonagi running out of a drinking party insisting she'll never be like Kabakura's "beloved Ranka", only for him to question if she's trying to say she's more like Sheryl... and then catch a shoe to the face.)

My exploration of energy weapons in Macross turned up a few more interesting oddities. First is that Master File actually made the beam cannon confusion worse since apparently its version of the VF-4 has not one, not two, but four different forearm-mounted guns for the VF-4. Three of which look virtually identical. One being a version of the same ROV-20 laser cannon used by the VF-1, the next being a charged particle beam cannon powered off the reactors, and the third being a charged particle beam gun powered by "beam cartridges". Interestingly, it seems to imply that the VF-27's beam gunpod is NOT a beam cartridge type. Second, Master File didn't come up with the idea that the VF-1's RO-X2A Strike pack cannon was a laser weapon. They got that from Sky Angels. Instead of being a safer and more conventional gas dynamic laser cannon, the original version is an inertial confinement fusion-pumped x-ray laser cannon. Essentially, a less insane but repeatably usable version of Project Excalibur's heinously bonkers nuclear bomb-pumped x-ray laser system concept.

Potentially. It would depend on whether the TV/Movie continuity also includes the Aerial Knights moonlighting as mercenaries. IMO, the series doesn't quite align to that since it treats the Aerial Knights as having been the Windermere NUNS before the secession and there's no mention of them having used the Sv-262 in live combat prior to the attack on Al Shahal in 2067. There is a section in, I think, the VF-31 Master File that talks about the Sv-262 so there may be some detail in there. It's easy to be consistent when there are barely any details to get wrong. 🤷‍♂️ Kind of feels like an unusual "reality ensues" moment. A senior developer under contract and subject to a bunch of NDAs quits and goes to a competitor and leads their development of a derivative of the product she was developing at her old company? There have been a LOT of lawsuits like that lately over GenAI technology with senior devs leaving to found startups or join rivals and getting sued for allegedly stealing trade secrets.

One detail I'm unaccountably glad the translation here gets right... the spelling of ARIEL. A lot of people misspell it "AERIAL", but it's meant to be a reference to the fairy/spirit from Shakespeare's The Tempest. Come to that... Xaos certainly aren't hiring the best people. Kind of a "You've tried the rest, now try us!" situation. The omake jokes about Messer being demoted to pizza delivery boy suddenly land a LOT harder. We literally cannot even mention Makina in the story without having to acknowledge her huge... personality. Tell us the character exists for one reason without telling us the character exists for one reason. They really do like to remind the audience that every woman in this is meant to be very attractive, huh? Ernest seems to be taking strategic advice from Zap Brannigan of all people, advising everyone to just fire wildly into the sky without aiming. Xaos really doesn't get any respect from anyone in this, do they?

I've heard it's rather more than a "relative snooze fest". What I've been hearing is that the animation in One Punch Man S3 is so bad folks are calling it "One Frame Man" and talking about boycotting the studio. Even One Piece is catching flak this season, though over accusations that the animation team are using generative AI. Fun series. Way more tied to Tenchi nowadays than it was when it was new. I ended up having to explain that connection in part to my watch group while we were doing Tenchi OVAs 4 and 5. Not just because Seina is the new/current owner of Zinv since GXP's last few episodes, but D is kicking around Tabletop Island during Paradise War and OVA 5 with a cabbit body.

While Frontier-era materials did establish that the raw/least pure grade of fold ore is sometimes called fold coal, I don't think any source has connected it to the supposed coal mines on Banipal that Isamu was threatened with in Plus. EDIT: The reason some have speculated that Banipal might be a fold coal mine is that it wouldn't really make any sense for a civilization that possesses room temperature superconductors, lossless energy storage, high-efficiency wind and solar power, ultra-high efficiency thermonuclear generators and a mindset VERY focused on preserving the biospheres of planets would bother mining fossil fuels. EDIT 2: Of course even then it doesn't really make sense, since there isn't a need to mine the raw materials for fold carbon when it can be synthesized in industrial quantities using existing technology.

Fold carbon and fold quartz were both officially introduced to the Macross setting in Macross Frontier. Fold carbon was introduced to the setting and story partly as a way to explain how fold quartz can be "dropped in" to improve the performance of existing OTM rather than needing to develop new versions of technology around it and concoct new explanations for how key technologies work. It was effectively retconned into having always been a part of OTM from the very beginning as a key component in the Gravity and Inertia Control tech that underpins most OTM. Prior to that point, there wasn't an explanation for exactly how a GIC system goes about creating artificial gravity. Supplemental technical material like Master File subsequently went absolutely ham tying this into everything from explaining why the early fold systems Humanity built didn't work very well to why there are such massive leaps in engine performance between certain generations and even why some fold boosters are single-use. As with several other late additions, one might say this was foreshadowed in an earlier work. Specifically Macross Dynamite 7, where it was noted that crystalline galactic whales were hunted because their bodies contained materials used in the construction of fold systems. The Frontier novelizations similarly turned a macguffin from Macross VF-X2 into foreshadowing of fold quartz's existence and potential. It would be fair to say that, at least in post-Frontier publications, the ASS-1/SDF-1 Macross was fairly packed with fold carbon since it's used in the GIC systems of thermonuclear reactors, gravity control systems, inertia control systems, fold navigation, fold communication, cross-dimensional radar, particle beam cannons, holographic projection systems, thermonuclear reaction warheads, the ship's main gun system, active stealth tech, and any/all of the same found on the battle pods and auxiliary craft found aboard the derelict ship.

A lot of the titles I'm following continue to be pretty bloody tedious. Mechanical Marie, Pass the Monster Meat, Milady!, and May I Ask for One Final Thing? are all still a lot of fun. Bland-a-thon isekai shovelware series A Gatherer's Adventure in Isekai decided now (its 9th episode) was the time to actually lock in and do something new and different. What it did is something so far out of left field that it caught me completely flat-footed and I still have a little trouble believing they went there. Of all the "the Elves are a dying race" fantasy takes I've heard over the years... that is a new one and not one I would ever have seen coming. It's like something the dwarves would write.