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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    TBH, I'm not sure I'd say there's all that much artistic license being taken. Many sci-fi titles like Star Trek, Star Wars, Macross, Gundam, etc. are pretty upfront about the fact that most of space travel is boring stretches of getting from Point A to Point B in which nothing particularly exciting happens. It's one of the favorite approaches for "breather episode" stories. Star Wars doesn't indulge in it as heavily as others since it's mainly a film series, but there are prominent moments showing that the actual business of space travel is waiting to get there like Obi-wan training Luke while en route to Alderaan with Han bumming around the ship's lounge with them. So many Star Trek bottle episodes involve the crew going about their daily lives while the ship is traveling to its next port of call, never mind Voyager explicitly being the exciting moments in what was otherwise seven years of sailing back to Earth or Picard directly acknowledging the fact that space travel is mostly passing the time waiting to get where you're going. Multiple Gundam titles acknowledge the incredible tedium of interplanetary travel to even the nearest planets (e.g. Iron-Blooded Orphans and Reconguista in G) with weeks of downtime spent on training and other pastimes. Macross is more open about it than most, with both Macross 7 and Macross Frontier acknowledging that the titular emigrant ships sail for years if not decades to find a habitable planet to colonize... ideally uneventfully. They're not looking for adventure, they're trying to get a prefab city to a suitable environment in one piece without any undue "excitement" which might put the lives and livelihoods of its civilian inhabitants at risk. Everything they have is set up to preemptively detect, and avoid detection by, potential threats if at all possible. In all four of the Macross TV shows, there are weeks or months between episodes where people are aboard ship doing not much beyond getting on with daily routines... including a number of breather episodes and the like. Probably not as much as you're thinking, Macross Frontier elaborated more on how fold communications work. From the name, we'd think of something like what you're envisioning. A transmitter that creates a tiny space fold to connect two points in realspace. Instead, what Frontier established was that fold communications is more like your standard sci-fi FTL communication tech that works like radio but uses an exotic energy wave that propagates at FTL speeds. Producing these waves (fold waves) is one of the key uses of fold carbon or fold quartz, since fold waves are used for all kinds of things. The most important is controlling the heavy quantum that's used in gravity control systems and dimensional weapons, but they're also used in the FTL communications and FTL radar technology as a substitute for lightspeed-limited radio waves. Armed with that understanding, it's seems very likely that the relay satellites used in the Galaxy Network are little different to the communications satellites today... maintaining a large number of parallel frequencies at all times that are used for point-to-point communications. Just the range is much broader than geostationary orbit because the fold waves can cross interstellar distances easily and the obstacles being circumvented are things like fold faults instead of the curvature of the Earth. If we were to look for the closest real-world analog, I'd say it's probably the in-flight wifi and phone systems of modern jet airliners. Those systems use a high-powered, high-bandwidth antenna clusters in the outer skin of the aircraft that maintain connections to either ground-based towers directly when over land and to satellites that redirect to ground stations when over the ocean in order to provide a link between the wifi access points in the cabin and the internet. The antennas in the ship connect to whatever station in the network provides the best signal, and when it moves to an area where a new station has better signal it switches over to use that relay instead, as your PC or phone might in a mesh network. Long-distance emigrant ships in Macross just operate in a condition where they have to continue dropping new relay stations whenever they get too far from the previous one in order to maintain communications with the rest of the network. (Basically, if you've got a home wifi system like Netgear's Orbi, Asus's AiMesh, Linksys's Velop, etc. you can play with this principle at home as your device will seamlessly switch to whichever base station has the best signal strength and maintain the same communications sessions through a dedicated backhaul frequency that the different stations use to talk to each other. If you have Philips Hue smart lights, a similar mesh technology called ZigBee is used wherein any client on the network is also a repeater on the network so you can construct daisy-chains of clients to places well outside the range of the base station/hub that'll still be connected to the hub as long as they're connected to a client directly or indirectly that's within range of the base station/hub.)
  2. Seto Kaiba
    That's from the extra features on the Absolute Live!!!!!! Blu-ray?
  3. Seto Kaiba
    The word you're looking for there is "latency"... the delay time between an input and a response. Speed is the modulation rate of the waveform... that is to say, how quickly the transmitting micro can change the outgoing signal per unit of time on a single channel. Volume for a network is simply the speed times the number of channels. That said, I'm not sure latency is all that big of an issue c.2040 or beyond except perhaps for the farthest-flung reaches of the galaxy. Macross 7, Frontier, and Delta offer examples where people are shown to be able to access realtime or near-realtime video streams (including bidirectional video calls) for people and events that are tens, hundreds, or even thousands of light years away without cheats like fold quartz. For a conversation to flow naturally the way we see in-series, a real world video call generally needs a latency of less than 150 milliseconds. It's not quite "online pro gamer" levels of low ping but that's not much different from what you'd get browsing on a typical 4G cell phone. It depends... not every service has servers in every region, and quite often those servers are not actually located in the countries they're supposedly for. Even then, that's less about speed of delivery and more about load balancing and maximizing reliability via shortest-path-to-target. It's still perfectly possible to manipulate those applications to connect to a server other than the closest without even using a VPN. I'd expect that to be the case for a lot of consumer media, but things like communications and browsing content hosted elsewhere is still going to incur latency from the outside networks. Especially for things like bidirectional communications. I'd assume there's something very much like the border gateway protocol used to find the shortest/optimal route to the requested resource since we know they have to route the communications through various relay satellites and so on to circumvent fold faults and other problematic astrographic phenomena. That probably plays a significant role in the latency of communications the same way it does for the internet today.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... given the state of computer hardware in the Macross setting, I doubt it's anywhere close to that bad. After all, the galaxy network connecting the various New UN Government member states - be they fleets or planets - is an internet backbone that supports not just the ever-growing volume of civilian and commercial traffic but also the military's communications needs. The typical individual line in a backbone connecting networks on the internet today runs at 100Gbps, and most backbones have far more than just one line. To give everyone living in the Macross Frontier fleet basic DSL-level internet connectivity, your backbone would be running at over 36,500 Gbps to cover peak loads. Traffic across the modern global internet backbone networks is typically measured at 500 Tbps or so. Consider as well that the state of computer technology in Macross is at least several hundred years ahead of the modern day's thanks to OTM. Odds are the fidelity of things like music, movies, and the other data like blueprints for nanometer-precise engineering being sent over the network commercially is probably MUCH higher than anything we have today to support. I'd expect an emigrant fleet to have enough bandwidth in its galaxy network connection to rival the internet backbone of a far larger modern metropolis if not a small first-world nation like Japan. (Hell, considering video games today are already tens if not hundreds of gigabites in size... imagine how bloated they've become in a world where someone can walk into a store and buy a laptop with a 250GHz processor, a few hundred gigs of RAM, and a graphics card with enough shaders to render the electron orbits in a character model's hair?)
  5. Seto Kaiba
    There's no such thing as a true "top speed in space" other than speed of light. In space, the only limiting factormon your velocity is how much propellant you have and therefore how long you can sustain acceleration. The official top speed of the VF-1 is approximately Mach 3.87 at 30km. Master File adds the aforementioned ramjet and scramjet capability which is not reflected in the official spec, and also indirectly acknowledges the reality that the speed of sound decreases as your altitude increases due to the diminishing density of the atmosphere. Yeah, the boosters in the VF-4 seem to be made for less power and more endurance. The system itself is largely the same, just smaller. You and me both.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, Master File cites Mach 3 as the handoff point where the intakes for the ramjet switch from being used for engine cooling to being used as an actual ramjet engine. Ideally, no more than two engines would be active at any one time. Conceivably, no more than four at the absolute maximum. Sort of? AFAIK the official setting materials don't comment on how the VF-1's engines operate near its maximum airspeed. Variable Fighter Master File: VF-1 Valkyrie Vol.1 presents an operating scenario where the VF-1's engine switches from a kinda-sorta low bypass turbofan jet engine to a ramjet or scramjet configuration by closing the primary intake and opening a secondary intake at the knee joint and bypass inlet to allow air to flow directly into the turbine body instead of passing through the precompressor or primary compressor stages. It's said that it operates as a ramjet from Mach 2.5 to Mach 7.2, and as a scramjet above that. It switches to thermonuclear rocket propulsion at/above the atmospheric service limit where the air is too thin to support turbine/ramjet/scramjet operation. Probably, yeah.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    An interesting, but tangential, note is that the VF-4 is indicated to have kept essentially the same hybrid rocket motor design used in the VF-1's Super Pack but scaled down to fit in the VF-4's engine nacelle... including the polymer putty fuel and electric fuel heating/ignition system with liquid oxidizer.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    We don't actually know... for pretty much the reason you're asking. Unfortunately, we have no official numbers for anything except the output of the FF-2011 thermonuclear reaction turbine engines. If we go outside the bounds of official setting material, Master File offers no guidance on the in-wing thermonuclear ramjet systems but puts the compact hybrid rocket boosters at a comparatively humble 18,560kgf (182kN) apiece. In theory, there's no normal circumstance under which all three pairs of engines would be operating concurrently and in atmosphere it's supposed to be kind of an either-or where the turbines and ramjets are concerned. If we accept Master File's not-strictly-official number then the maximum possible thrust the VF-4A can produce in space flight is a hearty 65,120kgf (638.6kN). About 79.6kN more than the combined main engine thrust of the VF-11 Thunderbolt's two FF-2025 turbines or around the output of one YF-19/VF-19A main turbine.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Maybe, maybe not...
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Eh, Rome wasn't built in a day... not even the imitation version in Culture Park. I'd rather Animeigo take their time and do an exemplary job than have it ASAP.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    My group finished its watch-through of Goblin Slayer II... if you overlook the huge amount of material that was skipped, it's a reasonably faithful adaptation for better or worse. It is a bit jarring that the change in studios between seasons one and two led to such a significant visual difference. The color palette changed in season two, and the characters proportions were changed quite a bit in the case of the lizard priest and the slayer himself, so the whole thing looks slightly wrong at times.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Yes, they do. The main example - and probably the medium on which all the other options work - is the Galaxy Network. An interstellar internet linking all of the different emigrant planets and fleets together that's used for basically everything the regular internet is used for today. It's been a part of the setting since Macross Plus and Macross 7, though didn't really start being described as "the space internet" until around Macross Frontier when Shoji Kawamori started explaining the current space emigration era in Macross as being like the Age of Sail "but with internet". Xaos actually got its start as a private interstellar communications company before expanding into a conglomerate with subsidiaries in various fields like defense, entertainment, etc.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    You mean the VF-31AX? Yeah... it's actually pretty weird how low Variable Fighter Master File: VF-31AX Kairos Plus's opinion of its titular aircraft and its operators is. Normally you can count on any given Master File to talk about the VF it's covering in a highly positive light as it talks about ways the design was influential and the successes it had on the battlefield. The VF-31AX Master File presents its subject aircraft as a failure, labels its one canonical use in combat not as a win for Xaos but Heimdall tripping at the finish line due to other circumstances, and uses that as a springboard to talk about tech being developed for the 6th Generation and roadblocks faced by development and production. As I've noted previously, there are three separate explanations for the VF-31AX Kairos Plus: Battle damaged VF-31 Siegfrieds that were repaired with VF-31A Kairos parts and tweaked. VF-31A Kairos units upgraded with VF-31 Siegfried parts to replace battle damaged Siegfrieds. Battle damaged VF-31 Siegfrieds that were repaired using parts intended to convert them into a 6th Generation experimental aircraft "VF-31X". ... with the last one being Master File's new take, and the others being some kind of confusion on the part of the coverage of the movie.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Hrm... when all's said and done, I just realized I'm following 18 different titles this season. I've exhausted all the available episodes of everything except Metallic Rouge, so I've gone backwards a bit to revisit a series from years ago that I didn't get a chance to watch at the time. 2017's Saiyuki Reload BLAST is... well... more of what audiences already got in Gensoumaden Saiyuki, Saiyuki Reload, and Saiyuki Reload GUNLOCK way back in 2000, 2003, and 2004 respectively. It's got a way better translation that actually gets its historical, geographic, and religious terminology right but it's so much in the mold of previous seasons that the first three episodes are The Usual Shenanigans of the Sanzo party rolling into town and resolving local focus character A's tragic backstory before moving on, and the next three episodes are a three-part remake of the gaiden arc from the original Gensoumaden Saiyuki series from 2000 but without the violence toned down. The only thing it does to move the plot even the tiniest bit forward prior to episode 7 is have the Sanzo party finally arrive in India after 101 episodes, 7 OVAs, a feature film, and eighteen years of real world time. The animation quality's worlds better than the rather iffy animation from Reload and Reload GUNLOCK, and the translation's actually pretty good quality overall barring one typo I've seen. It must've done pretty well, since another sequel was done in 2022... Saiyuki Reload ZEROIN.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    The VF-1's GU-11[A] has had several different sets of numbers listed over the years. The official spec lists 1,200 rounds per minute as the standard rate, though sources over the years have specified various different levels. 30 rounds per minute shows up in several different iterations, along with either 500 or 800 rounds per minute, and occasionally rates as high as 1,600 or 2,000 rounds per minute.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    All in all, the Special Forces VF-19A's acceleration/mobility performance is about 1/2 of what your garden variety mass production 5th Generation VF can achieve thanks to the huge power disparity between the VF-19's thermonuclear reaction burst turbines and the VF-25/VF-31's vastly more powerful Stage II thermonuclear reaction turbine engines and inertia store converter. Controlability is also superior on the 5th Gen units thanks to EX-Gear and the next-gen ARIEL II control system. Overall survivability is a fair bit higher in 5th Gen thanks to the better engines allowing the 5th Gen VFs to run energy conversion armor on critical areas even in Fighter mode, better composite materials in the armor improving overall defensive capability, the next-generation advanced energy conversion armor used in the anti-projectile shield, fewer mechanical parts in the transformation system that can break down thanks to the linear actuator, etc. Offensive ability is also a fair bit higher, given that it's noted the VF-19 cannot wield the VF-25's GU-17 without structural reinforcement to the arms and the ability of several 5th Gen models to control multiple unmanned wingmen derived from the X-9 Ghost. Based on what little has been said on the subject of 6th Gen in Macross Delta materials - not all of which are strictly reliable as the main source is Master File - something akin to the YF-29, YF-30, or VF-31AX. The one semi-reliable point that's consistent between official setting and Master File materials is the idea that the 6th Generation will have Fold Wave Systems or some similar tech boosting performance. The addition of a Fold Wave System is seemingly enough to push the VF-31 custom from a 5th Generation to a 5.5th Generation according to extra features found in the Macross Delta TV Blu-rays. Master File is the source that talks the most about it, and being that it's the ONLY source to really talk about the VF-31AX Kairos Plus and Sv-303 Vivasvat. That book changes the context of the YF-29, retroactively reclassifying it as 6th Generation and also recontextualizes the VF-31AX Kairos Plus from the Absolute Live!!!!!! movie not as an improvised field repair/redesign of the VF-31 Siegfried but as a repair-by-upgrade of the damaged VF-31 Siegfrieds using parts intended to upgrade/convert the 5.5th Gen VF-31 Siegfried into a 6th Gen experimental aircraft codenamed "VF-31X". Only a partial upgrade was performed due to time constraints, omitting total replacement of certain structural materials and the addition of engines 3 and 4, resulting in a patchwork aircraft that was more like just a better Siegfried than the planned "VF-31X", to the extent that the developer supposedly asked that it not be referred to as "VF-31X" to avoid tarring their program with the failure of the rush job. If we assume Master File is somewhat reliable, 6th Generation's key feature is the Fold Wave System but other improvements have also been included. One of the other key ones besides yet another avionics upgrade with ARIEL III seems to be the adoption of energy conversion armor material into the aircraft's structural frame. The book describes using energy conversion armor in alternating layers that are designed to resist deformation in different directions to improve overall frame rigidity and reduce torque on the frame. The VF-31X design also suggests four-engine configurations might become the norm.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Decided to try a few more of this season's offerings... Honestly, for the first time in a while a season has me questioning the health of the whole industry. So much of what's on offer is so underdeveloped or so thinly written that it feels like they'll green light anything. Then again, I've heard that the working conditions over at MAPPA are so atrocious that there was talk of a walkout by the animators... so it might not be entirely in my head that things aren't going well. 'Tis Time for "Torture", Princess is one of those titles that has a really thin premise and one joke. Though at least that one joke isn't delivered the same way every time. The Princess has been taken prisoner by the armies of the demon lord and sells out her own nation as soon as she's offered comically small rewards like fresh toast, ramen, playing a video game, a hug, or evenjunk food from a vending machine. This gag is repeated two to three times per episode. Vilainess Level 99 is yet another one of those otome game villainess stories where a girl has a run in with truck-kun as is normal for isekai and is reincarnated as the mean girl from whatever otome game they were last playing only to wrong context knowledge their way out of the actual story and avoid their bad end. This is like the third one of these in this season alone. It can be funny as hell or weirdly compelling when it's done right. Unfortunately this seems to be more minimum effort copycatting of successful titles, with even the main character lamp shading how threadbare and cliche the story is.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    That clinches it... 4K UHD for all, and Macross II: Lovers Again is the biggest Kickstarter campaign in Animeigo's history. 😀 I definitely agree DYRL? would raise even more... not sure it would get all the way to $1M, but double Macross II's pull at least. Well, yeah... Animeigo's Macross II: Lovers Again Alus Edition Kickstarter was a crowdfunding campaign from a reputable outfit with a proven record of delivering on commitments, conducted in a professional manner, for a product that people actually want, and with sensible backer rewards. That Kickstarter for The Other Franchise was a first outing from a company with a pretty poor reputation that's infamous for not finishing what it starts, conducted in a terribly smug and arrogant manner, for a product nobody wanted or even asked for, with ill-considered backer rewards... and as if that wasn't self-sabotaging enough, it was all for a property that'd been embroiled in a years-long scandal involving misuse of Kickstarter funds by a long-time licensee who spent years lying about it and ultimately failed to deliver backer rewards and adds-ons and had its license revoked over its failure and the reputational damage it caused. Comparing the two is kicking down so far that you're in danger of having your leg repurposed as a space elevator on the other side of the planet.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    A Sign of Affection might be my stand-out drama for this season... even if it has the bloom turned up to almost comical levels and is so excessively sweet and cute that it tastes like diabetes. It's still a fairly novel approach to a romance, between a deaf girl and a linguist, that actually takes the social, societal, and safety implications of deafness quite seriously and the potential obstacles the handicap poses in a relationship seriously. It really feels like the author put a LOT of thought into this series and I'm actually quite impressed by the level of "show your work" they're operating on. I'm also REALLY weirded out that, of all this season's offerings, the one that seems to have gone viral is Mashle. The OP for season two seems to have become quite the meme in and of itself due to how catchy the song is. The series itself ain't bad either, as a semi-affectionate jab at the Harry Potter series by way of One Punch Man... or possibly Black Clover.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    There's possibly a bit of early installment weirdness going on with the Stellar Whale-type starliner. For example, it's noted that it has enough resources to go 30-60 days between port calls... but at the same time it's said to be operating exclusively over short distances (service to planets within 100ly of Earth) and that the Earth-Eden run takes it 3-4 fold jumps to complete. Instead of being set up like a cruise liner for multi-day voyages, the interior supports the idea that it's meant for short-duration flights like a particularly spaceous high-capacity airliner instead of long cruises like a cruise liner. The only explanation I can really come up with for this is that it really is just a giant airliner, and the reason it takes 3-4 fold jumps to do what every other source claims is the space fold equivalent of a milk run is this thing's got a route like a city bus and it's putting into multiple ports every shipboard day to pick up and drop off passengers and that the onboard amenities are for the folks who have a few stops between them and their destination and can't stomach another go at the catalog of inflight movies or want something to do while the ship is embarking/disembarking passengers.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    30 hours left and sitting pretty at $369,176... just a hair shy of 5x its funding goal. 😀 Loving that Macross II is now officially Animeigo's biggest-ever Kickstarter campaign.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    For the truly aggressive calorie-counters in the spacefuture...
  23. Seto Kaiba
    The Unwanted Undead Adventurer's new episode is still pretty formulaic, but there's signs of it actually attempting to do something different and interesting near the end. The Wrong Way to Use Healing Magic is increasingly feeling like isekai made for the guys who were REALLY into that one eight foot tall woman from Resident Evil 8... Tales of Wedding Rings... well... it's not a great sign that this one was marked "Mature" by Crunchyroll. That usually means "fanservice of the most shameless kind". Seems like my worry was spot on, considering there were two such incidents before the runtime even hit five minutes (three counting the OP). If the protagonist spends any more time staring at the palm of his right hand I'm going to start worrying he's gonna Shinji Ikari things up in here if you know what I mean. OK, yeah... it's almost definitely one of those. An excuse plot for an ecchi harem series. The kind where, if you take a shot every time there's fanservice, you'll be in detox before the credits roll.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Isn't it kind of the norm for a lot of properties, though? I mean, Star Trek has had what... ten movies and counting that follow on from the events of a TV series and there are supposedly two more in development. Doctor Who, Firefly, The X-Files, the 60's Batman series, a whole mess of kid's shows like Power Rangers, Pokemon, Transformers, etc. Most, if not all, wouldn't make a lick of sense if you weren't following the TV series that spawned 'em beforehand. A fair point, and well made... though my issue is less with the glowsticks themselves than the spacky twits who are usually found waving them about and making proclamations about Destiny and The Chosen One. Call me picky if you like, but to me there are few surer ways to make a character boring than establishing that they are almost literally being railroaded by Fate. It makes it less The Hero's Journey and more The MacGuffin's Sightseeing Tour. To me, a character like Mando or Cassian Andor is far more interesting because their choices actually matter. They're not some smug super who can see the future and solo a small army. They're ordinary people - well equipped sometimes but ordinary nevertheless - who can and do misjudge situations and screw up in potentially fatal ways. They're able to occupy moral shades of gray instead of the world of black-and-white moral absolutes the Jedi and Sith exist in. As a result, I'm vastly more interested in something like a Mandalorian movie than I could ever be for something like the semi-recently announced Rey movie about founding a new Jedi order.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Hrm... I don't know about that. Andor has, thus far, been refreshingly free of any members of the glowstick society and season two is likely to be the same. Rogue One IMO left it at least debatable whether that one monk was actually a force user or just working with blindness-heightened senses, and Darth Vader only shows up very briefly. IIRC, Solo: a Star Wars Story was generally free of them as well except for that brief cameo at the end. IMO, the sequel trilogy and The Mandalorian are fantastic examples of how treating the presence of force users as a narrative obligation can backfire horribly.
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