Seto Kaiba

"Metallic" hydrogen refers to a phase of hydrogen where it gains the electrical conductivity of a metal. It doesn't necessarily imply a particular state. The elemental properties of hydrogen and the pressures necessary to achieve metallicity in it (over 3.9 million atmospheres) suggest that naturally-occurring metallic hydrogen will exist as a liquid in the middle and lower atmospheres of gas giant planets. Theories regarding the possibility of metastability in metallic hydrogen (the ability for it to stay metallic after being removed from the high pressure environment) suggest a metastable or stable metallic hydrogen would be a supersolid... a sort of liquid crystal with the zero viscosity of superfluids. It'd work like liquid rocket fuel, assuming the real thing meets the properties physicists say it should. (Of course, if you're storing your fuel under 4 million atmospheres or more of compression, just releasing that pressure would be enough to get some pretty impressive propulsion... never mind burning the stuff.) As I noted, the RPG writers in question picked it purely because it sounded "Sci-Fi" without any familiarity with the material's hypothetical properties. Macross, as noted previously, uses a real world material: hydrogen slush. It's mercifully quite light so even thousands of liters doesn't add a significant amount of mass to the VF and it can pull triple duty as both fuel for the compact thermonuclear reactor, the laser and arcjet thermal rockets used for verniers, and as a system coolant for the engines in space. The rocket motors in Macross are a mixed bunch, but the ones used as boosters for VFs and so on are often hybrid rocket systems with a solid fuel putty and liquid oxidizer. The VF-25's Super Pack boosters are described as using a weird inert fuel gel that contains both fuel and oxidizer in suspension that evaporates under high voltage for combustion.

I believe that one's another one that was filed under the somewhat vague title of "Mobile Weapon".

There is something vaguely like that which appears in Macross VF-X2 and is mentioned in passing in the Macross Frontier short stories. It's officially given the more vague and nebulous classification of "Mobile Weapon", and structurally it's more like a Gundam Mobile Armor than a Destroid, but the mobile weapon "Annabella Lasiodora" is a [large aircraft/small warship]-sized mobile weapon with six arms/legs that's fought inside of Ceres Base in Macross VF-X2's 10th mission. (Why it has only six limbs when it's apparently named for a genus of tarantula, I cannot say.) The Macross Frontier short story "Wired Warrior" suggests it's a 2040s-era offshoot of Destroid development that, like the Konig Monster, is a heavy artillery platform.

An interesting thought... though not a topic I recall being mentioned in any of the writeups for the Dian Cecht Sv-262 Draken III. It honestly wouldn't surprise me, though. It seems like something almost every VF developed after the First Space War would be designed for, considering the realities of postwar reconstruction and initial settlement of emigrant planets would mean VFs would have to be equipped to operate in the absence of properly constructed dedicated runways. Their VTOL and STOVL capabilities aside, it'd be an immensely useful thing to have and existing material does indirectly suggest roadways are reinforced to support the weight of stuff like workroids and giant Zentradi. Whether Windermere IV includes such infrastructure is unclear. We only ever see the Aerial Knights operate from aircraft carriers or an airbase outside of their planetary capital of Darwent. They jumped right from a pre-industrial or early industrial agrarian society to an interstellar one and their economy's still near-exclusively agrarian, so it's not clear if they had the time or resources to redo their road system to support battroids and workroids in addition to light trucks and draft animal-pulled carriages.

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...

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.

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.

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.🤷‍♂️

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.

Well, there we have it... the delay must have been some kind of holdup at the printers or something.

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.

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.😀

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.

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.

The terms of the Big West-Harmony Gold agreement as we know them would prevent it, yes. But that's off-topic.

"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.

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.)

It doesn't need a remake it needs something like DBZ Kai where they cut out all the filler.

It was inevitable, given the strikes.

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.)

Just did my part... 😄 Very happy indeed to see such a robust show of support for Macross II.

After a particularly rough week, seeing that this jumped straight from new to past its funding goal makes for a delightful pick-me-up.

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.)

I had a similar experience there... it's cute, and initially it's funny, but it has exactly one joke.

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...