Seto Kaiba

Yup. You might recall back in Macross Plus, Shinsei Industry's Dr. Jan Neumann attempted to puncture Isamu's inflated opinion of himself by pointing out what happened to the other very confident test pilots who'd boasted they could handle the YF-19's incredible performance. Four were hospitalized with injuries from test accidents and the other died, one YF-19 was totaled and the other needed some serious TLC from the hangar crew before it could be flown again. The YF-19's airframe could absolutely handle the output of its next-generation engines and the kind of high-g maneuvers the pilot could make it pull. The pilots themselves? Not so much. And, of course, you might remember they never did really manage to fix that problem... leading to the New UN Forces, with the number of loss-of-control accidents in training being one of the major factors that killed the New UN Forces' plans to adopt the VF-19 stone dead. Same deal with the VF-27, really... even with an inertia store converter the aircraft's performance exceeds what a flesh-and-blood human can withstand and therefore it needs to have specially hardened cyborg pilots. One has to wonder if the Sv-262 crossed the line into that territory, necessitating the setting's most-powerful ISC to date. Well, given that heavy quantum is almost certainly what a ship's gravity control system is using to produce gravitational effects... one could argue they very probably already are using the stuff for reactionless flight. I'd expect that using it /as/ a fuel would be problematic since it a fusion detonation in the stuff is so violent that it straight-up vaporizes whole starships. Kind of like a more extreme version of the problems we'd have with the Project Orion concept (which used nuclear pulse-detonation thrust for high-acceleration spaceflight). It also supposedly has a somewhat limited "shelf life", moreso than hydrogen which can be stored indefinitely with a suitably good magnetic trap.

First, stop calling Japanese people "Japs". That's racist. Second, the mecha have never been the main selling point of Macross. Never. Macross has always been, first and foremost, a character drama. If you ask Macross's creators, they'll be only too happy to tell you Macross is - and always has been - a love story set against a backdrop of space warfare. Not a space war story with a love subplot, a love story with a space war subplot. The mecha are not the main selling point. They're entirely incidental and it's perfectly possible to have a Macross story that lacks them entirely (e.g. Macross the Musiculture). Frontier isn't Macross's roots. Frontier is a show that didn't stray far from Macross's roots... Super Dimension Fortress Macross for the love triangle and Macross 7 for the emphasis on music. All in all, I think that's more a "time will tell" sort of question. There's more marketing emphasis on live concerts for Walkure because, if you assemble an idol group that's your main profit mechanism and an idol group is not cheap to maintain. I think the telling part will be whether Walkure is still a hot ticket item with the fans a decade or more after the ending of the Macross Delta series the way Sheryl Nome/May'n and Ranka Lee/Megumi Nakajima are. (TBH, I don't think they will be. Idol groups tend to split up past a certain point, as individual members start looking towards solo careers. Walkure also got a lot less development as characters in Macross Delta than the very-memorable Sheryl and Ranka did.) It's harder to use sales figures to make that determination since digital downloads have muddied the picture somewhat.

One of the many reasons I love Kawamori and Chiba's collaborative efforts into technology porn is that so much of the futuristic-sounding technology used in VFs is actually very real... just obscure, or experimental. Even really out-there stuff like the YF-21's variable camber wing are directly lifted from real world experimental or production technologies. They show their work in a big way... and the engineer in me loves that. If we ever get a proper description of how it works, it'll be interesting to hear how. If I had to guess, I'd suspect they're using the superheavy quantum produced by the fold quartz in the reheat system for exhaust flow compression... similar to what's done inside of the turbine's thrust production stage, but on a more aggressive level. It'd be interesting to see which would happen first... the loss-of-control accident or significant airframe damage. Even properly reinforced airframes that have aerodynamic profiles that weren't designed for the amount of thrust they're being given can become incredibly unstable and prone to loss-of-control accidents. Hakuna Aoba in Macross R got his reputation as the "Uncrowned King" because his VF-1X++ custom is using engines rated for nearly three times what it was originally designed to take and further supplemented by rocket boosters... turning it into a nigh-unflyable mess that's one accident away from being a carbonized smear and a spray of shrapnel all over the nearest course hazard. The VF-9E supposedly had similar problems after General Galaxy tried to drop a VF-22 engine into it. (Surprisingly, the VF-11MAXL is never described as having issues despite being upgraded with engines a generation newer and substantially more powerful... but then, those were one-of-a-kind made-to-order ace custom units for the elite of the elite... so skill and custom engineering may be bailing them out there.)

Now there's an absurd statement. For the record, Macross Plus wasn't even a Macross series for most of its development and neither Plus nor Zero were particularly well-received by Macross's core audience in Japan. If you asked Macross's intended audience what the roots of Macross are they'd point you to the romance story in the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross series and the emphasis on music from Macross: Do You Remember Love? or Macross 7. Delta was fairly close to those roots in terms of the importance of music.

TBH, even that doesn't pass the BS "sniff test". Tatsuya deliberately flubs his entrance exam for First High to avoid outshining his prospective-heir-to-the-family sister... then takes every available opportunity to show off his skills while his sister loudly, obnoxiously, and almost literally sings his praises and gushes about how much more amazing than her he is to anyone and everyone who will listen? It's just bad writing. By the Nine Schools Competition his excuses have become so incredibly flimsy that it's completely unbelievable everyone's eyes aren't constantly rolling at his absurd attempts at false modesty. That's the premise... for sure. But it's so unbelievable that it crosses the line twice from "actually pretty funny" to "cringe inducingly stupid". That anyone believes Tatsuya is a nobody is ridiculous on the face of it. For one, the girl he's bodyguarding is clearly an incredibly powerful magician whose abilities and status have already gotten her recognized as being more or less top in her year in First Year Course One. On its own, that'd be enough to assume she was part of the country's magical elite and probably at least from a branch family of one of the Numbers. That would mean she's a Living Weapon... and you don't send a powerless nobody to guard someone like that. You send a Person of Mass Destruction who can paint the walls with any threat that could tangibly threaten someone like that. For two, they're open about being siblings... meaning it's also obvious HE'S the scion of a powerful magical family, and since magical ability stems from a decades-long process of eugenics and genetic engineering that makes it the safest possible bet that he's similarly powerful. Throw in his effortlessly beating up groups of more experienced battle mages and undefeated expert combatants, and the whole thing crosses the line into silliness. The fact that his own father bullies him despite knowing that he's a walking strategic weapon boasting the kind of firepower that can make a nuclear warhead look like a squeaky fart shows that everyone around him is too dumb to live. On a quasi-related note, I've noticed that fantasy isekai anime seem unable to resist throwing in increasingly elaborate homages to Overlord. Yojo Senki had advertisements for the light novel series in Tokyo in the opening. Goblin Slayer has the side story Hero facing off against a lich who is very clearly a non-infringing Ainz Ooal Gown. Now The Hidden Dungeon Only I Can Enter has its protagonist visiting an environment in the titular dungeon that is clearly a copy of the 6th Floor of the Great Tomb of Nazarick.

Yup... this little design feature, called Vortex Flow Control, has been well attested-to in coverage of the YF/VF-19 and later VFs over the years. It's explained in some detail in Variable Fighter Master File: VF-19 Excalibur and there's a diagram showing how it works in Variable Fighter Master File: VF-25 Messiah on page 30. Long story short, this is a form of attitude control via negative pressure where gas in injected directly over the airframe surface to change the flow of vortices across the airframe and cause the nose to be pulled in the opposite direction of the gas injection. Kawamori's inspiration for including this feature was the same experimental aircraft that inspired the YF-19's design in general: the Grumman X-29. Grumman's X-29 was a USAF/NASA technology demonstrator used to evaluate a bunch of different technologies including triple-redundant digital fly-by-wire, forward-swept wings, supercritical airfoils, aeroelastic tailoring, close-coupled canard control surfaces, and attitude control via vortex flow control.

I'd be pretty surprised... given how that thing is pretty obviously still a stock VF-31 at its core. This, to me at least, feels more like the kind of upgrade that would get a special variant letter and maybe a different name, but not an entirely different model number. More like the VF-19EF Caliburn, VF-19ACTIVE Nothung, VF-22HG Schwalbe Zwei, or YF-29B Perceval. I really want to make a mean-spirited joke about its most likely pilot, but it just wouldn't be appropriate.

Probably a fair amount of reinforcement would be necessary. The FF-2999/FC2 engines used by the Sv-262 Draken III are more powerful than the derated FF-3001/FC2 engines used by the VF-31 custom "Siegfried" as-is (1955kN vs 1875kN), and the fold reheat also produces a greater performance increase than the fold wave system does (25-30% vs 15%). The end differential is a ~18% difference in the engine's total deliverable thrust when all is said and done. The Siegfried type's derated FF-3001/FC2 engines are already apparently more than the stock VF-31A airframe can handle, given that Hayate gets gently scolded by Makina about the amount of extra maintenance work his rough handling makes for the hangar crew. The better ISC from the Sv-262 would be a nice improvement though. The increased size of the forearm guns marks an odd reversal too. The Siegfried type previously downgraded its railguns to a smaller caliber than the military spec, presumably for less possibility of collateral damage, and now they're wielding these outsize cannons? All told, it shouldn't be too different from what the /FC2 engines are already doing in their primary accelerator stage... so it shouldn't be a huge additional burden on the airframe control AI or existing hardware. It might have some nasty implications for frame stability though. In the trailer, it appears to have a normal transparent canopy similar to previous VF-31s.

... yeah, that's just blatantly bad writing. Thus far, there's been nothing in the story that would remotely justify Tatsuya arbitrarily deciding to make everyone underestimate his Mary Sue-tier powers even more than they'd be doing if he were passing himself off as a normal but capable Bloom. Quite honestly, it's absolutely ridiculous that it'd take anywhere near that long for his classmates to notice. Arbitrary skepticism can be a useful storytelling tool if applied sparingly, but Tsutomu Sato has the entire rest of the cast lay it on with a f*cking backhoe. It'd be one thing if he went out of his way to avoid displaying any unusual abilities or amazing proficiencies, but he makes only the most token effort to disguise his incredible prowess and he shows off his incredible repertoire of near-impossible advanced techniques at every turn and everyone still dismisses him as just another Weed. The very first thing he does on campus is out himself as someone with incredible abilities when he reveals he can read the magic formulas of others while they're casting them. He follows that up by revealing a pair of custom CADs by an incredibly reclusive master craftsman hailed as The Best Ever, and proceeds to one-shot one of the best fighters in the school in a formal duel that nearly baffles the upperclassmen in the more advanced Bloom course... all in the same day. At that point, any pretense that he's a normal Weed is completely absurd. That's BEFORE anyone found out he was a master engineer who could finetune CADs by hand to make competition-grade ones perform as well as military-grade custom equipment and started inventing spells on the fly the way he did in the competition.

On my third attempt, I'm about seventeen episodes deep into The Irregular at Magic High School. As I recall being told last time I attempted it, the protagonist's inner monologue is basically plot-critical and wasn't included in this series. The lack of that critical context is definitely an aspect of the TV anime that comes across even if you don't know it's not there. Tatsuya reacts to absolutely everything with unnatural calm and his abilities are so over-the-top in practically every respect that the entire idea that he was assigned to the second-class program at his particular magical vocational school rings incredibly false. This level of blatantly overpowered doesn't normally happen outside of isekai stories. I just watched him one-shot a guy famed in-universe as a magical one-man army, and it's already been revealed he's actually a genius magical engineer hailed as the greatest of his craft. Like come on guys, there's no drama or tension here when the protagonist is basically indestructible and nearly unstoppable.

Says a lot about the movie that I legitimately couldn't remember and had to look it up. Both Hayate and Mirage were shot down in the dogfight on Al Shahal midway into the movie, but it's never made clear if their respective VF-31 Siegfrieds were destroyed or simply disabled. Hayate's VF-31 is shown crashing at a relatively low airspeed and should be basically intact. However, sloppy editing later in the film implies that Hayate had ejected from his VF-31 and that it exploded in midair due to having reused the scene from Macross Delta Ep13 where Hayate's VF-31 was incinerated by the detonation of a reaction weapon the NUNS used to try to destroy the Protoculture ruins on Ragna. Looking back at it, it's actually pretty weird that the Aerial Knights only recovered one of the three downed Siegfrieds for study. None of them were heavily damaged, but for some reason they only recovered Messer's which was missing its ordnance container and apparently ignored the other two? During their escape, Hayate took Messer's VF-31 and Mirage made do with a Sv-262Ba Draken III after changing its transponder codes. EDIT: Actually, it's even weirder if you think about it... Hayate and Mirage stole two fighters from the hangar of an Aerial Knights warship WHILE THE SHIP WAS AT BATTLE STATIONS. What's more, NOBODY noticed. That's a level of failing a spot check above and beyond even the worst blunders of the Imperial Stormtroopers in Star Wars.

@azrael? Can you give us a bit more to go on? Like what was the approximate vintage of this particular anime? Was it all 80's stuff? A mix of 80's and early 90's?

It's almost certainly another Xaos Valkyrie Works custom job, so whatever variant letter it's given is unofficial and for Xaos's internal convenience only... same as the VF-31C, E, F, J, and S. I'm wondering if they'll still call it a Siegfried, or if they'll pick another name for it since it's a different custom spec.

It's all about carrying on with the gimmick Hayate introduced with Messer's VF-31 Custom in the first movie... where he mounted Lilldrakens like that. It's a poor man's Tornado Pack.

For those looking to compare it to the VF-31A it so closely resembles, I made this real quick.

For those looking to visually compare like to like, I hastily slapped this together in MS Paint. I've also done an analysis on the Mecha thread in Series and Stories.

Does he have any without the reflected light from overhead lightning blurring the text? Sorry for the potato quality, I hacked the below image together real quick from the above and some published VF-31A line art from an old pamplet that did the rounds around the time the Macross Delta TV series first premiered. Had to do it in MS Paint since I'm on my work computer and don't have access to Photoshop. So... it's another custom VF-31 that more closely follows the design of the VF-31A? All in all, I am unimpressed. If I didn't know better, I'd have dismissed this as someone's fan art or a rejected Master File design rather than promotional material. The differences from the stock VF-31A Kairos don't seem to be very significant either. The canopy now tapers to a point on the nose and the sensors there have been rearranged to accommodate it. The canards have been redesigned slightly, and the winglets of the double delta wing have been stretched forward a little bit to more closely resemble those from the Sv-262Hs Draken III command spec. The mounts for the fold carbon/fold quartz inserts have been redesigned a bit too. The only other noteworthy changes are the railguns on the VF-31's forearms have been enlarged significantly to almost gunpod size, the beam gunpod itself has also been enlarged, and the ordnance container has grown a spike with no immediately evident purpose. It looks like it's largely unmodified, otherwise. All the existing design features of the VF-31A are still present, including all of the weapons systems barring the enlarged railguns and larger gunpod. There are some slight changes to panel lining in the part of the wing where the arms are stored, but otherwise this looks to be a less extreme modification than the five existing (four surviving) Delta Flight VF-31 Customs. One thing I will say is that I feel like the winglets give the game away... this VF-31 was designed with a Windermerean pilot in mind. Probably whoever's the new White Knight now that Keith and Roid have contracted a bad case of dead. That would, by literal process of elimination, mean that this VF-31 belongs to Bogue Con-Vaart unless some new pilot will be introduced. It won't be the twins because writers are loath to break up a set and Hermann's too old. If this is a collaboration between Xaos and Windermere, I wonder if it has the same derated FF-3001/FC2 engines used by the Siegfried customs or if it'll use the Draken III's more powerful FF-2999/FC2 engines.

I doubt such a thing exists, to be honest. Even if it did, that'd be pirated media and not something likely to be widely advertised or to stay online for very long due to copyright enforcement. Usually when Robotech fans are talking about that kind of thing it's them misrepresenting the animation made for the pachinko machine Macross Pachinko Fever as a high-definition remake of Robotech's "Macross Saga"... usually dubbed over with Robotech music instead of the original Macross soundtrack. Or, more rarely, incorrectly describing the remastered ADV Films DVD releases of the original shows (still in standard definition) as "HD".

Give it time, I'm sure they'll get there. I'm sure it'd make for a more compelling backstory than "sociopathic noblewoman expelled from school for drinking ink gets into a loveless marriage to indulge her fetish for fur clothing", or whatever they're trying to reinvent that (the backstory from the children's novel) into for this film. On watching this trailer again, I can say I am honestly not sure if replacing Emma Stone with Jared Leto in drag would improve this or not. I should probably just content myself with being surprised they didn't cast Helena Bonham Carter, since "crazy chick with messy hair" is basically her thing.

Sadly, the perfect actress is no longer with us... Bea Arthur. Who else in Hollywood specializes in playing "bitter and cantankerous" these days? Call it a Vote of No Confidence in Disney's writers after the Star Wars sequel trilogy, Solo: a Star Wars Story, Mulan, etc. Let's just say their track record for live-action adaptations and origin story prequels is not exactly good... (Cruella wasn't exactly a complex character either, even before the 1956 children's novel was cut down for the Disney animated adaptation... she was just a sociopath with what could only be called a fur fetish.)

Yes and no. It doesn't work quite like you describe, but it's absolutely possible to convert a heavy quantum beam gun or heavy quantum reaction beam gun to use dimension eater technology. Micro Dimension Eater (MDE) beam weaponry basically produces a particle beam made of micro-singularities. It's not necessarily more powerful than an equivalent heavy quantum reaction beam cannon of the same class/scale, but you could say it's the last word in armor piercing since those micro-singularities that make up the MDE beam cannon's output draw the matter they come in contact with into fold space. They were extremely effective against the Vajra, who had evolved their natural energy conversion armor to become resistant to thermonuclear reaction weapons and low-powered heavy quantum beam weapons late in the Macross Frontier TV series. To date, we have not seen a large-scale application of MDE beam weaponry along the lines of a warship-mounted offensive weapon. The VF-27 Lucifer's heavy quantum beam gunpod was upgraded to the MDE specification late in the Vajra conflict (TV ver.) to address its diminishing effectiveness against the highly adaptive Vajra. The YF-29's improved version of the VF-25 Tornado Pack's TW1 heavy quantum beam cannon turret (the TW2) was built as a MDE beam cannon turret which is noted to also be used by aircraft carriers (presumably as a point-defense gun). The novelization of Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy also gave the YF-30 an ordnance container that was outfitted with a twin-barrel MDE beam cannon turret. (In the game, this option is not present and the YF-30 is only ever armed with the missile container.) The VF-171EX's new gun pod was a combination unit that combined a 30mm machine gun with MDE shells with a larger MDE beam cannon.

Pretty sure the answer is "money". I'd originally thought about making a dig at how absurd Cruella de Vil's motivation is, but after some research I discovered that it wasn't until the early 2000s that the US and UK finally banned fur farming of cats and dogs and the imports of fur clothing made from cats and dosg and that they're STILL a common source for "faux' furs made in Asia. Gonna go down the history rabbit hole on this one, because now I'm actually genuinely curious if Cruella de Vil's particular taste would've been socially acceptable at the time Dodie Smith penned The Hundred and One Dalmatians back in 1956. I guess they're not sticking with her origin story from the book, though... where she was kind of an odd bird who was expelled from school for drinking ink, was a broke noble who married a furrier simply so she could get access to his unsold inventory as her personal wardrobe, and was basically completely batsh*t. At least there's room to do something interesting with Maleficent. She's a fairy, and a powerful one at that. Definitely agree there were better options to work with... Scar, Jafar, Shan Yu, the witch from Beauty and the Beast. Actually, no. I know what I want. I want an origin story for Kronk and Yzma from The Emperor's New Groove.

Disney... WHY?! I mean, I get that they're reluctant to gamble on original properties when the parks are hemorrhaging money and reluctant to risk antagonizing theater chains by releasing new films direct-to-streaming while theaters in many areas are shut down, but this is... this... I don't have a word for what this is. Did we really need an origin story for Disney villain whose one and only ambition in life was apparently to own a dogskin windcheater? This is like doing an origin story for the poacher McLeach from The Rescuers Down Under. He doesn't have or need a complicated origin. He's just an arsehose who's cruel to animals professionally. ... they already made Maleficent 2... it was called Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, and it came out back in 2019. It barely broke even, and got decidedly mixed reviews from critics.

Yup. It's also worth noting that, unlike a conventional thermonuclear reactor, this is why it's absolutely possible to turn a thermonuclear reaction furnace (AKA "fold reactor") into an ad hoc thermonuclear bomb as Misa did to the reactor underneath Mars Base Salla in "Bye Bye Mars". The reactor uses a Gravity and Inertia Control system to produce and control the heavy quanta needed to compress fuel and achieve fusion, so all you need to do to make the reactor into a bomb is put a LOT of fuel into the reaction chamber and produce a lot of heavy quanta, and then excite the heavy quanta all at once.

Thermonuclear reaction weapons are a practical form of pure fusion weapon. Put simply, a modern thermonuclear weapon (a hydrogen bomb) uses a uranium or plutonium-based nuclear fission warhead as a "primary" explosive to create the temperatures and pressures needed to induce fusion in the hydrogen isotopes that are the secondary warhead filler. This use of a smaller fission-based nuke to kick-start the fusion reaction that makes the H-bomb go is also why hydrogen bombs still leave behind hazardous radioisotopes. A thermonuclear reaction weapon omits that fission-based primary explosive and replaces it with heavy quantum. By exciting the heavy quantum with fold wave resonance, the heavy quantum's huge mass suspended in higher dimensional space drops into realspace and the intense gravitational force crushes the hydrogen fuel until a runaway fusion reaction starts and you get a thermonuclear explosion where almost all of the energy is released as heat and light. Because there's no fissile material involved, they produce little-to-nothing in the way of neutron radiation and no lingering radioisotopes to contaminate the blast area.