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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Your recollection is accurate. The circumstances behind that are somewhat involved and off topic, so I'll answer by way of spoiler tag. I was actually able to discuss that with the very people who made that decision back in the mid-2000s, so I've got firsthand knowledge as to the why. It was indirectly inspired by the Macross setting's use of thermonuclear fusion as the default power source for any kind of giant robot though...
  2. Seto Kaiba
    It's aerodynamic enough to work in atmosphere. It's a lifting body design. It's not going to win any prizes for speed or making tight turns, but then bombers seldom do. In principle, it's a medium bomber that is also a self-delivering artillery piece capable of firing guided and unguided long-range munitions. It's a more situational weapon than a normal VF but it is supremely good at making enemy fortifications and warships go away. Especially since it can be outfitted to deliver thermonuclear reaction weapons en masse. It's just not particularly relevant to this line of inquiry because it's not really a destroid in the strictest sense of the term. The main niche they seem to have carved out for themselves is the workroid... a non-military utility robot for all kinds of different heavy machinery applications. That they make them literally nimble enough to dance is kind of impressive in a way. It's probably not necessary for a giant robot forklift to be so agile, but one can only imagine that it's probably pretty multi-purposeful if it can clear a modern dance class while handling large cargo containers.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    In all fairness, the mass per unit of volume of hydrogen slush is not exactly huge... 0.085 kilograms per liter (about 0.71 pounds per gallon), a bit more than 1/10th what the same volume of JP-5 weighs (0.81kg/L or 6.76lb/gal). The full internally-carried fuel load of a VF-1 weighs only about 1.5x what the pilot does. (1,410L @ 0.085kg/L is 119.85kg or 264lb.) Weight isn't the problem for a VF, it's more a matter of consumption rate and available internal tank capacity. The other beautiful thing is that the supplemental thrusters for maneuvering are pretty darned simple. The thrust vectoring nozzle aside, it's basically just a channel for propellant and either an electrically-driven laser diode or just an electrical arc across the propellant stream to flash-heat it. Simple, lightweight, and effective.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    To be fair, the OP has a pretty good point about the (in)validity of the VB-6 as an argument. The VB-6 Konig Monster is a Variable Bomber. Its Heavy GERWALK mode resembles an old model Destroid and its Battroid mode is somewhat counterintuitively named "Destroid" mode, but as a Variable aircraft it's technically part of the rival Battroid design lineage and not truly a further development of the Destroid concept. By the definition Macross Chronicle gives us, a Destroid is a non-transformable, heavily armed, AFV-equivalent walker for land warfare. Macross Chronicle does, somewhat charitably, describe the Konig Monster as an offshoot of the Destroid concept that emerged after Destroid development died out in its glossary entry but I don't think that's quite the direction the OP was looking for.🤷‍♂️
  5. Seto Kaiba
    VFs have thrusters all over the place independent of the engines in the legs... around two dozen of 'em, in most cases. The vernier thrusters used for attitude control in space and, in some cases, in atmosphere. The low-thrust verniers used for most maneuvers don't have huge output on their own, but when you can throw a dozen of them at the problem it adds up. The high-thrust verniers used for braking and roll control on the VF-1 Valkyrie can put out up to 24.5kN apiece, around a quarter the total engine output of the Harrier (105kN). They're not fixed nozzles either, they can ALL thrust vector.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Well, there we have it... the delay must have been some kind of holdup at the printers or something.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    All in all, the Fall 2023 season felt like a really weak collection to me. There was never any doubt Spy x Family's second season was going to be good, and it did not disappoint. For me, there was also never any doubt that Goblin Slayer II was going to be a turd. Much of the attention the first season got was because of how graphic the violence in the first episode was, and much like the first season the story has to skip around a fair bit in the light novel in order to get to the bits with goblins because the light novel suffers the Tomb Raider problem of having exhausted its premise's limited utility very quickly. Tearmoon Empire showed some initial promise but devolved into an incredibly generic and tedious reincarnation comedy. I'm Giving the Disgraced Noble Lady I Rescued a Crash Course in Naughtiness was cute but ultimately lacking in substance and rather unsatisfying as a result. The Saint's Magic Power is Omnipotent limped to a pretty weak finish as well, with a chunk of the final episode being a clipshow. Haven't gotten to start Overtake! yet.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Well that improved my mood immensely. I woke up just in time to snag the last of the available prominent patron level upgrades that were added.😀
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Excessively broad requirements from the VF-X program. Going as far back as the first VF-1 technical writeup by Masahiro Chiba, the newly-founded Earth UN Forces had two separate camps when it came to development of anti-giant alien robotic weapons. The UN Army championed the Destroid as a fairly straightforward walking weapon for land warfare. The UN Air Force, UN Navy, and UN Marine Corps were looking for something more versatile, and the intersection of their interests produced the Battroid program and then the VF-X program. The Battroid program was absorbed into the VF-X as it'd already been doing some useful work in terms of a robot system meant for use in extreme environments like underwater, in air, or in space.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Mine just arrived a few minutes ago. EDIT: The only thing I can see in the book that might potentially be of issue to HG is the VF-1EX... so I doubt it was any holdup from their side.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    The terms of the Big West-Harmony Gold agreement as we know them would prevent it, yes. But that's off-topic.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    "Art evolution" is a natural part of a long-running work, though. Taking that away, and making it more homogenous, can rob a series of some of its charm. That said, a remake is almost always a divisive title in a franchise's fanbase no matter its quality... this might end up an unintentional bit of self-sabotage.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    In spirit, maybe. This is a full-on remake of the entire series from scratch. They're going back to the source material for a new adaptation and are (probably) going to leave the anime-original filler arcs out in the process because the manga's far enough ahead that they don't need to stall for time. What the One Piece anime actually NEEDS, IMO, is not a remake. It needs a team of editors to go back through the thousand-plus episodes of already-produced animation and cut out the filler like was done for Dragon Ball Z in the DBZ Kai version. Not just the episodes composed entirely of filler, but also the excessive padding in the non-filler episodes. It's true that One Piece has an extremely low percentage of episodes composed entirely of filler (about 8.7%) compared to its contemporaries (who average over 40%). However, it's not because One Piece has less filler than other shounen titles... it's because they changed how they do filler partway through the anime's production. They initially had up to five chapters being condensed into a single episode and did filler seasons with original stories whenever they started to outpace the manga. They then changed methods to put more and more padding into the adaptation of the manga's story such that the ratio of chapters per episode collapsed from 4:1 or 5:1 to 1:1 or less. (Basically, they went from having around 45-75 pages of material per episode to around 15.)
  14. Seto Kaiba
    It doesn't need a remake it needs something like DBZ Kai where they cut out all the filler.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    It was inevitable, given the strikes.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Since season five starts in a few months, I decided to wade back in and attempt to watch season four. One thing I've realized while watching the first three episodes of Star Trek: Discovery's fourth season is that the reason this show feels so exhausting to watch is that the stakes are always as high as they can go and there's never any relief from the tension. The survival of the Federation itself was at stake in season one's plot, and from season two onward the stakes rose to the fate of the entire galaxy. Without an opportunity to relax - a breather episode like those classic Trek followed heavier stories with - the all-consuming emphasis on the impending doom du jour just becomes suffocating for the audience. (And the writers still don't seem to have realized that adding Tilly to an already tedious scene takes it from boring to change-the-channel level agonizing.)
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Just did my part... 😄 Very happy indeed to see such a robust show of support for Macross II.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    After a particularly rough week, seeing that this jumped straight from new to past its funding goal makes for a delightful pick-me-up.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    So, I went and checked this... and @renegadeleader1 is actually correct. After consulting a number of official publications, it is quite clear that only the Principality of Zeon used nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons indiscriminately. The Federation forces are only described as using nuclear weapons, and only as a part of the attempt to prevent the Operation British colony drop during which the Federation employed both ship launched and surface launched thermonuclear weapons against Island Iffish and its escorting Zeon fleet. There's nothing I can find that suggests the Federation nuked any inhabited colonies the way Zeon did... and nuclear weapons were not used at Loum due to the issues caused by minovsky particle interference affecting guidance. EDIT: To clarify the point, this information is taken from Gundam Officials, the Gundam Perfect File, Gundam Historica, and the old Bandai Entertainment Bible books. It's indicated therein that the massive death toll attributed to nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons was almost entirely inflicted during Zeon's initial surprise attack on Sides 1, 2, and 4 on January 3rd and 4th, UC 0079. It's also stated that the Federation was caught by surprise and wasn't able to coordinate a counteroffensive or retaliate in any meaningful way during this initial offensive due to the breakdown of radio communications that was caused by Minovsky particle interference. It was, by all accounts, an entirely one-sided massacre in which the Principality's forces indiscriminately destroyed space colonies using mobile suit-launched nuclear missiles and gas bombs containing biological and chemical agents. In 40 hours of largely unopposed cruelty, Zeon massacred an estimated 2.8 billion defenseless people. That's more than half of the total estimated loss of life from the entire One Year War in terms of both primary and secondary causes... and they weren't even done at that point. There was also Operation British and then the destruction of Side 5, which is suggested to have been mostly Zeon's doing. When all's said and done, a bare minimum of 52% of the 5.5 billion lives lost in the OYW were directly attributable to Zeon's use of WMDs... and Officials suggests that number may be as high as 87% once the effects of the colony drop are counted. This was NOT a "both sides" thing. (And if I seem a bit thrown by that, it's because I am... I was not expecting the explanation to be THAT damning.)
  20. Seto Kaiba
    I had a similar experience there... it's cute, and initially it's funny, but it has exactly one joke.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Finally finished Birdie Wing the other day. It was completely insane from start to finish, but the last story arc and the ending were a series of massive copouts inexplicably freighted with Happy Gilmore references of all things...
  22. Seto Kaiba
    That's a special case, as that was allegedly a weapon that Quamzin's Zentradi renegades developed on their own after fleeing Earth and linking up with another main fleet. We do still see that the main force is battle pods, but yeah... since they made the Queadluun-Rau belong to another faction the Nousjadeul-Ger gets more time to shine. By the time the VF-4 was completed, sure... but it was in active development well before the war started. Its unusual design concept seems to have been intended to work around the limits the Battroid's then-current size imposed on space performance. Going for beam weapons instead of a gunpod is pretty logical in space, since the main limitation on the performance of energy weapons is how much power you can throw at them and how much atmospheric gas is in the way... and in space, that second one is a non-issue.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Potentially... though the main reason is a lack of places to put them, rather an a lack of inclination. Lack of space was the main driver behind the VF-1's decision to adopt laser weapons. The head-mounted gun was originally supposed to be a machine gun firing armor-piercing rounds but there wasn't enough space... so that plan was scrapped and a more compact laser system was used.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    When you think about it, it's actually kind of surprising that nobody seems to have guessed the Zentradi were a wholly mechanized force... After all, Heinlein's Starship Troopers was/is required reading for officer candidates in several different national militaries (incl. the US's) and it does depict a wholly mechanized armed force not entirely dissimilar to the Zentradi. (A thought made somewhat more entertaining by the knowledge that Kazutaka Miyatake did the art for the 1970's Hayakawa Bunko SF printing of the Japanese translation and both he and Studio Nue as a whole did a partial adaptation of the novel in 1988.) Nah, that's some authentically human terrible engineering. The Regult, and the Zentradi forces as a whole, are evidence of a genuine disdain for life that even the Soviet space program might've felt was over the top. Happy to help. It's a relatively new addition to the lore, having come in AFAIK with Macross Chronicle.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    By all accounts, they didn't have to hypothesize the existence of alien mecha... they had samples. Macross Chronicle mentions, at a few points, that the research teams studying the crashed Supervision Army gunship on South Ataria island recovered battle pods from the ship's interior and studied them. Analysis of those recovered battle pods was what allowed Humanity to develop energy conversion armor. It's also said that the data from studying the battle pods was used to decide how powerful the weapons of Earth's anti-giant robotic weapons needed to be in order to defeat that armor. (It's also highly probable that other essential technologies used in the Destroid and Battroid programs were obtained from those battle pods, like compact thermonuclear reactors, superconducting motors, megawatt-scale laser and particle beam weapons, more powerful high explosives for warheads, etc.) Why Earth didn't assume those were the standard... well... they were generalizing from self and probably assumed that the battle pods were something akin to a light tank. After all, no army on Earth puts every soldier into their own armored fighting vehicle. (Either that or the UN Forces dropped Heinlein's Starship Troopers from the curriculum.) To be fair, we see pretty much exactly that in the encounters with Zentradi small craft like the Quel Quallie scout in the TV series and the assault gunship in the movie and Earth's mecha seem to do fine. When you're building something by the millions, every little bit of unnecessary cost balloons out into a fiscal atrocity in pretty short order. It's mentioned surprisingly often that the Protoculture spared every possible expense when it came to the design of the military hardware they were producing for the Zentradi. If you don't care about operator comfort or safety - and the Protoculture didn't - you can save an awful lot by doing without little mod-cons and luxury extras like ergonomic design, redundant control circuits to protect against equipment failure, more than the bare minimum necessary system automation, escape/survival equipment, more than the minimum necessary armor and radiation shielding, and so on. It's why the Regult is said to be draining to operate... it's cramped, uncomfortable, and very little of it is automated. (Also why the battle suits like the Nousjadeul-Ger are coveted... they're a LOT easier on the pilot and have substantially better survivability.)
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