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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Only the Draken III and Kairos... the Siegfrieds had forward-swept winglets.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    The 8th Son? That Can't Be Right! is proving to be the painfully generic sleep-inducer I suspected it was going to be. Fantasy at its most generic, to the extent that I literally cannot tell you what the protagonist's name is, and I literally just finished the most recent episode. Reincarnated into an Otome Game as a Villainess with only Destruction Flags is proving to be a surprisingly lighthearted and entertaining series, in no small part because Catarina (the show's main character) has so thoroughly derailed the plot of the otome game setting she was reincarnated into that she's not only stolen the role of main character from the otome game's main character Maria, she's accidentally turned it into a reverse harem series with a harem of both the original male capture targets AND the rival female characters.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    So, probably from Comichron... albeit indirectly. ... there are still Robotech fans who think Harmony Gold is going to one day go back and finish Robotech II: the Sentinels. I wouldn't take their blind optimism seriously. Like Voltron, they keep coming back to the one and only part of the series that was actually well-liked by its audience. They literally can't move on from it, because it's the only part of the franchise that makes money and that's mainly just from nostalgia.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    That wouldn't be a spoiler... that'd be a warning sign that someone divided by zero and reality is starting to unravel. ... 22 July 2014 must've been a slow news day on io9. Their list is just a list of every failed/cancelled Robotech project except Robotech: the Untold Story, plus one that never even existed outside of Carl Macek's fevered delusions of Robotech being relevant and popular. Given that even Robotech fans don't seem to actually like Titan's take on the series, and that it's officially an AU, I think it'd probably fail to make the cut.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Do you have a source that actually gives an official sales figure? Or are you just using Comichron's approximation based on the Diamond Comic Distributors index ranking? I know in the latter case, the projected sales based on the index value was less than 4,500 total copies sold. (4,486) Thus far, there has not been an announcement from the distributor that the series is cancelled by the publisher. Titan Comics has not, AFAIK, made any statements of any kind as to the status of Robotech Remix. We may learn more from Diamond's cancellations list once they officially resume operations on 20 May. The only news I've received WRT the status of the publication is that Brendan Fletcher came down ill in late March and was bedridden until mid-April. Some Robotech fans who didn't work out the dates attempted to point to this as the reason for the delays, though the comic was already 47 days and two monthly deadlines late when he came down sick on March 24th (based on his own statements). Correction: Remix began on 16 October 2019, and Issue 5 was supposed to be released on 6 February 2020. When Remix #5 missed its 6 February release date, it was rescheduled to be released on 11 March before missing that date too and then falling off the radar altogether shortly before the UK went to stay-at-home orders on 23 March. It was 45 days overdue when Titan Comics temporarily suspended operations in accordance with the stay-at-home order. As I see it, the problem will eventually resolve itself. Robotech is a functionally-dead property, and Macross is thriving. Eventually, we will simply run out of Robotech fans due to simple attrition.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Well, you'd have to ask Egan Loo... that statement was ported over directly from his original Macross-class article on the old Macross Compendium website. What I can say with some confidence is that this statement was based on a later chronology, since the earliest versions of the chronology put the events of the first episode in October. For what it's worth, it generally agrees with what Macross Chronicle has written about the subject in the "Within the Macross" Worldguide sheet (No.07). That sheet has a diagram that indicates the city was built into internal compartments throughout the main body of the ship (everything aft of the main gun) and the engines/legs.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    My understanding is that the city occupied a number of different portions of the ship including a fair portion of the core block and was stacked five or six layers deep in places. There are a number of shots that clearly place at least part of the city inside the ship's core block, most particularly the immediate aftermath of the ship's first return to Earth. There are also a few shots that depict the city as actually existing in several distinct layers of town inside the ship, stacked vertically. The population density should be higher than what we see in the series, but it's possible the folks who lived in the highrise buildings we saw in the first episode were displaced to more space-efficient cabins in the rest of the ship and the actual "city" was mostly the suburbs with low-rise buildings that could be efficiently packed. (That said, 58,000 civilians is almost six times the Macross-class's long-term sustainable population if the Macross-class SDFNs are any indication... so it's not surprising the ship had so many problems accommodating them.)
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Or something similar, yeah. I can honestly say that's a new one... the Macross was originally going to have a lot more weaponized gimmicks back when the original series was being drafted, and most of them ended up cut from the concept.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, Dyaus nests are all over the world maps for the three regions in the game and their eggs are a collectible item. Some of the early City-class ships were a bit weird. Macross 1's City section, for instance, had no shell. The alternative is that it's maybe something like one of the supplementary habitat modules that were sometimes docked to the city ships.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    The Windermereans in Macross Delta are actually a much better example of that... right down to the Protoculture connections, song priestesses, and using songs to boost the combat performance of their troops. There were/are more virtuoids like Sharon Apple in the galaxy at one point... one of the characters in the stage musical Macross the Musiculture was one. The technology to make them truly alive/sentient/self-aware was illegal though, because it had a tendency to result in developing self-preservation behaviors and a case of crazy robots. The Dyaus are bio-technological, and are shown in the story to have the ability to reproduce biologically. How intelligent they truly are is anyone's guess, but they definitely react to intrusions into the Protoculture ruins in a coordinated way that suggests they're fairly intelligent. Yes, both Ragna and Voldor are New UN Government member planets and members of the Brisingr Alliance. Windermere IV was too, before the Kingdom of the Wind withdrew from the New UN Government in 2060. The Brisingr Alliance is a mutual defense pact and trade agreement uniting the New UN Government member planets in the Brisingr globular cluster. The cluster is so remote that it would be problematic to get reinforcements from outside the cluster should a world in it come under attack, and its remoteness also hindered the development of its economy. The practical solution to these problems was to form a united front where the various planets in the cluster would reinforce each other if one should be attacked and would support each other's trade to bolster their economies. The VF-31 Kairos is the Brisingr Alliance's economic brainchild, a locally-developed 5th Generation main Variable Fighter that they could sell as an export instead of having to spend money to import fighters or licenses to locally build fighters from outside the cluster. Nope. It's a reuse of the Island Cluster-class CG model from Macross Frontier but it's clearly MUCH smaller and landed on Ragna about 30 years ago (2037?). I have, in the past, speculated that it was meant to be an early 3rd Generation emigrant ship - one of the first City-class emigrant ships - possibly being the City-class component of the Macross 2. We know that the City-class had gained the "Shell" portion of its design by the time Macross 5 was built, and we know the fates of Macross 3 and Macross 4, which is enough to narrow it down to just the Macross 1 or Macross 2, and it doesn't match the pictured configuration of the Macross 1. This is, however, just speculation. Its identity hasn't been confirmed.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Hard to say... mostly for the lack of quantifiable data on the energy consumption of those weapons. Presumably the amount of energy that the heavy quantum beam gunpod can accept as input power is significantly less than the combined generator output of the VF's engines. There is the existing tradeoff between using reaction heat for thrust production vs. energy generation that caps the total available system energy in any given mode, but defensive systems on VFs are extraordinarily energy-intensive as well. A VF's energy conversion armor used to be the #1 draw on its generator output, consuming as much as 90% (on the VF-0) of its energy output in Battroid mode. The pinpoint barrier systems introduced on 4th Generation VFs displaced energy conversion armor as the new top dog, drawing 60% (on the YF-19/VF-19) of the VF's available generator output. Active stealth would be another big energy consumer given its complex processing requirements and the need for high-powered EM transmission to fool enemy radars, but it's not usually explicitly mentioned as a top consumer of energy. Once you subtract all that stuff out, as well as the power needs of the joint drive actuators and so on, that's what's left for something like a heavy quantum beam gunpod. The Compact Thermonuclear Reactors at the heart of thermonuclear reaction turbine engines produce astonishing amounts of power, so even a seemingly small percentage like 10% could still be a gargantuan amount of energy by today's standards. The VF-1 Valkyrie's two FF-2001A engines were rated for 650MW/ea (with a max of 1,700MW/ea in older material). 10% of that is 130 (or 390) megawatts. The only other VF to have explicit statements about its generator output - the VF-2SS Valkyrie II - had three times the VF-1's generator output (1,950-5,100MW/ea). 10% of that is still a freaking gigawatt, and in performance terms (given the relationship between generator output and thrust production) the VF-2SS is only on about the VF-11's level performance-wise.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Well, there's a few more... before Macross Delta rolled in and added the Ragnans, Voldorans, and Windermereans, Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy introduced two more. One is the biotechnological insectoid species called the Dyaus that that ancient Protoculture created to keep people from messing with the protective measures they built to seal away the Fold Evil they built that had the power to alter time, and the other being the possibility of a sentient bio-android that we later saw realized in Macross Delta in the form of Walkure's Mikumo Guynemer. I'm not sure I'd count the Protodeviln as a race or species, given that what we know as the Protodeviln are the seven Evil-series bioweapon prototypes that were manufactured during the Protoculture's civil war and were accidentally possessed by extra-dimensional energy lifeforms due to a buggy biotechnological fold dimensional energy conversion system they'd created to power their amazing combat abilities. It's not clear if they have the ability to reproduce, and by the time the dust settled over the second war against them there were only three left: Gepernich, Sivil, and Gavilgula. It's not clear if they're capable of reproducing, before or after becoming a species with the ability to sustain themselves by generating their own spiritia. I'm not sure those first three count as distinct variations of Zentradi, since the DYRL? versions of Zentradi tech have largely replaced the TV series versions from Macross II onwards... and the titles that followed don't treat them as distinctly different from each other. Are Galactic Whales sentient in the conventional sense? As to AIs, the technology to create a self-aware/sentient AI was illegal even before it was used in Sharon Apple... and IIRC didn't that ban get even stricter after Sharon Apple went berserk?
  13. Seto Kaiba
    On a more serious note, I've often wondered what kind of native lifeform the ancient Protoculture genetically modified to create the Windermereans. If you line Macross's timeline up with the understanding of the fossil record at the time it was made, the ancient Protoculture's intervention modified one of the early hominid species like Homo heidelbergensis into anatomically modern humanity. The Zolans seem to have originated with some kind of pseudo-marsupial mammalian lifeform. The Voldorans seem to have almost certainly been some species of large cat-like creature. The Ragnans are an interesting anatomical puzzle since the modern sub-Protoculture Ragnans have both mammal and piscine traits, which makes one wonder if they were all-fish before the Protoculture's intervention or if they were some kind of marine mammal with gills. The Windermereans are the ones that defy categorization. Their planet's signature animal is a gigantic bird the size of a small passenger aircraft, but they have weird anglerfish-like prehensile tentacles which act as light-up sensory organs. Were they an avian species, primate-like, or something else entirely? Did the ancient Protoculture create their runes entirely, or did they just adapt an existing organ? It's a fascinating and bottomless rabbit hole to head down if you're bored.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    I meant with respect to the Block IIIF only. (TL;DR: I misremembered something.) The VF-171EX has the metaphorical "complete package", with the upgrade to VF-19 engines (type FF-2550F), a redesigned canopy and forward fuselage, EX-Gear, and the MDE weapons package. The VF-171-IIIF in the movie only got some of the upgrades of its TV counterpart. It didn't get the redesigned fuselage and canopy, and it did get the MDE weapons package. What I misremembered was whether it got the engine update and EX-Gear. I got them switched around in my head, and foolishly didn't grab my copy of Chronicle to check before posting. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Sorry, I got my upgrades backwards... the IIIF had the VF-19 engines but not the EX-Gear.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Yes, all of the Windermerean VF pilots are Aerial Knights. The Aerial Knights are the planet Windermere IV's aerospace force, and the "knights" part isn't fanciful... they're an actual order of royal knights in service to the King of the Kingdom of the Wind. Organizationally, they're a continuance of the pre-contact knights who fought siege battles from the backs of giant birds. They've just traded the birds for something a bit more modern thanks to the introduction of human overtechnology following Megaroad-04 landing on their planet in 2027. They graduated from airborne cavalry to an aerospace force. As seen in Macross Delta Gaiden: the White Knight of the Black WIng, the introduction of modern technology hasn't changed their traditions or chivalric mindset much. Their ranks seem to contain a lot of highborn folk, the sons of nobles, religious officials, and wealthy merchants. Qasim's the only one of Keith's squadron who is lowborn, the son of an apple farmer who joined up as an adult instead of joining as a child. Their top ace still bears the title White Knight of Darwent, with two of the last three encumbents being members of the royal family. Keith's squadron seems to be the most elite squadron in the Aerial Knights. Yeah, we've seen three distinct versions of the VF-171 (four if you count Master File's take on certain Frontier content). The VF-171 Block II that is the standard model we see for most of Frontier and Delta, the Block III from the movies that was updated with VF-19 engines and MDE weapons but not much else, and the more extreme VF-171EX that got new engines, airframe design changes, and other major upgrades like EX-Gear.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    I know the Vajra Worldguide sheet (24A) mention the ancient Protoculture eventually mastered the manufacture of synthetic fold quartz. I recall reading at one point that the New UN Government was researching the creation of synthetic fold quartz, but there wasn't any indication in the text that they'd succeeded in producing fold crystals pure enough to cross the line separating the fold carbon they were already synthesizing for fold reactors and so on from true fold quartz. The size and purity of fold crystals is the make or break point for their usability, with granular fold quartz being usable for MDE weapons and larger, purer crystals being usable in things like ISCs or fold wave systems. Given Macross Delta's backstory, I'm inclined to suspect that nobody has succeeded in producing synthetic fold quartz by 2067. If a synthetic substitute were readily available, Windermere IV's plan to pin its economic growth on mining fold quartz wouldn't make sense. Fold quartz is presumably what they were paying Berger Stone's Epsilon Foundation with in 2067.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Well, it's not beyond the realm of possibility that one or more of the undisclosed technological advancements in the YF-24 Evolution was something along those lines... but we can't say that the VF-24's superior performance isn't simply due to more advanced conventional technologies and a better-designed ISC. Even I occasionally get details mixed up if I don't have my notes on hand. That's one of the reasons I'm taking advantage of this work-from-home situation to get back to work on my website project. It's an opportunity to organize and systemize my notes and get 'em up for the world to view at their leisure. The YF-24 program was kicked off shortly after the New UN Government's first contact with the Vajra in 2040. Whatever the incident entailed, it was enough of a shock for the New UN Government to conclude that even its latest main VFs were probably not up to the task of combating the Vajra and launch development of the next generation of variable fighters with a goal of being able to successfully oppose the Vajra if there should be a hostile confrontation. The Brisingr Alliance's next-generation main fighter program started with Uroboros's YF-30 Chronos, which was a derivative of the YF-24 Evolution and YF-29. They economized the hell out of it, to the point that it's down to around the VF-25's level and could reasonably be mass produced. Yeah, they're not using fold boosters when they attack Al Shahal in Macross Delta's first episode. The fold effect we see them emerge from is the distinctive one that's used for the ancient Protoculture ship Sigur Berrentzs, so presumably that ship is creating the space fold they're using to get around... possibly an extension of its ability to connect to and regulate the fold network in the ruins throughout the Brisingr cluster. Yeah, the Aerial Knights standard model used by Hermann, Bogue, Qasim, and the twins is the Sv-262Ba while Keith, as leader, has the Sv-262Hs. This arrangement is likely something they inherited from the New UN Forces in the ~33 years they were a New UN Government member world. One of those trends that comes and goes in VF design is whether or not to have a specific "command variant" with enhanced communication capabilities for squadron leaders or platoon leaders. The members of a unit other than the commander wouldn't need the extra capabilities, so it wouldn't make sense to have an entire unit made up of just command variants if it meant depriving other units of the additional communications/coordination ability. On the Sv-262, the actual difference in performance between the regular and command variant isn't very large. There's a 5% better output from the fold reheat and some additional weaponry in the form of a pair of lasers, but other than that they're largely identical aircraft.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, it's absolutely possible to use fold quartz to boost a thermonuclear reaction turbine engine's performance. The first instance of this that was depicted was the YF-29's Fold Wave System in Macross Frontier: the Wings of Goodbye, which enabled the fighter to draw energy out of fold space to supplement its reactor output. The YF-30 Chronos has an improved version of this technology called the Fold Dimensional Resonance System. The VF-31 custom Siegfrieds inherited the YF-29's Fold Wave System, albeit apparently with reduced application of fold quartz and seemingly a less extreme performance boost. These two systems improve more than just the engine output though, they also provide additional power to run things like energy conversion armor and pinpoint barriers in fighter mode. The Sv-262 Draken III is, as far as we know, the first production aircraft to include a fold wave performance-enhancement. Its Fold Reheat is a different, more focused application that exclusively improves engine output... but provides up to twice the percentage improvement in engine performance provided by the Xaos custom VF-31's Fold Wave System (25-30% instead of 15%). The Fold Reheat is present on both variants of the Draken III, though the Sv-262Hs command specification offers 5% more improvement in output vs. the version on the standard Ba model. Actually, it's one of the longest development cycles in Macross... it took something like 15 years to mature and miniaturize the technology from the start of the YF-24 program in 2040 to the rollout of the Evolution prototype in 2055. It's a pretty impressive jump, all told. From 2G for 5 seconds to 27.5G for 120 seconds. Thus far, there hasn't been any mention of a YF-23. There is a mention of a possible YF-28 in Macross the Ride in connection with the YF-29 development data Macross Galaxy illicitly obtained from the Macross Frontier fleet via LAI... though ultimately the data was used in the completion of the VF-27.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Not just at the tip... in episode 17 when Brera is explaining the Vajra's adaptive abilities, his VF-27's gunpod has what appears to be two rows of fold quartz inserts on either side of its split barrel. The scene in question is about 17:30 in the episode. I'm writing on my tablet, so I can't take a screencap right now (because I can't figure out how to screencap on this thing). Given what we know about the (military) applications of fold quartz, that's presumably to generate the heavy quantum or produce the fold waves are used to excite/manipulate the heavy quantum. If it's the former, with such a long barrel then its beam grenade ought to be much larger and more powerful than that of smaller beam gunpods. As far as we know, that doesn't appear to be the case. Earth, as the economic and political center of the universe, simply has the most resources and therefore the best toys. They likely have an Inertia Store Converter that's much more advanced and powerful than the ones emigrant fleets can produce, and the cash and manufacturing power to go all-in on redonkulously powerful Stage II thermonuclear reaction turbine engines of the type which gave the YF-30 a thrust-to-weight ratio in excess of 50:1. With their more advanced technology, there's no telling what other highly advanced bells and whistles the VF-24 might have compared to the redacted YF-24 Evolution spec that was shared with emigrant governments. Kinda? The period of unrest in the late 2030s and 2040s between the central New Unification Government and the various member worlds and fleets, combined with Isamu and Guld's little stunt in 2040, led to arms export restrictions aimed at ensuring the central NUNS would remain The Biggest Stick. That's part of why the VF-19 and VF-22 never achieved widespread adoption and instead a third design (the VF-171) became the next (manned) main VF of the NUNS. The Earth/Central New UN Forces shared an incomplete version of the YF-24 Evolution spec with the emigrant fleets and planetary governments under the New UN Government's technology-sharing mandates... the parts they left out are the parts which made the YF-24 Evolution and VF-24 so incredibly powerful. The emigrant governments have the general picture, but had to fill in the various blanks with their own versions of certain technologies... which is how we got the VF-25, YF-26, VF-27, YF-29, YF-30, and VF-31. Not leaked... deliberately shared, albeit in an incomplete form. All 5th Generation VFs are derived in one way or another from the YF-24 Evolution spec, including the VF-25, YF-26, VF-27, YF-29, YF-30, VF-31, etc. You may be thinking of the VF-27, which was based on the YF-24 Evolution but completed using development data leaked from the Macross Frontier fleet's YF-29 program by LAI. Bleh... after much grumbling and arguing with my webhost, I've got the new domain(s) for my new project set up and secured. They dragged that out for WAY longer than was necessary or sane. Now I can finally start uploading test versions of the pages.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Very... but we don't have the necessary information to put an actual number to it. The heavy quantum beam gunpods used in Macross Frontier and Macross Delta are quite shockingly destructive, with the charged "beam grenade" shot being able to inflict significant damage on small warships (or defenseless medium-sized ones). Without quantitative measurements of the various beam gunpod outputs, we can't really say how they compare with certainty... IIRC, it's never really properly established why the VF-27's beam gunpod is so large. It's practically all barrel too, the actual body of the gun doesn't seem to be much larger than those of the other beam gunpods. If I had to guess, I'd assume it's probably meant to facilitate higher-powered discharges more than anything, though the regular shots don't seem to have any more stopping power than those of the more compact models that followed it. The VF-31's beam gunpod seems to lack a beam grenade mode though.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Usually, if something makes its debut in a movie version it's usually established to also be a thing in-setting... though its context may end up being slightly different. For instance, the obvious visual differences between the TV and Film versions of the VF-1 Valkyrie and the Film version becoming the standard going forward was reconciled as the TV version being representative of the VF-1's earliest production blocks (1-5) and the Film version being the production standard for most VF-1's produced starting late in the war and beyond (in Blocks 6 and later). The SDF-1 Macross's design changes between the TV and Film versions were likewise reconciled as being (respectively) the ship's appearance at the outset of the war and what it looked like after it was repaired after the war ended. Exsedol got similar treatment, with his TV appearance being what he looks like in his miclone form and his Film appearance being what he normally looks like as a giant. By all accounts, the YF-29 Durandal absolutely does exist outside of the Macross Frontier movies. Its context may be different, but it definitely exists. Macross the Ride, a prequel to the Macross Frontier series, mentions the YF-29 and we know the Macross Galaxy fleet illicitly obtained YF-29 development data and used it to complete the VF-27. Likewise, SMS's YF-30 Chronos technology demonstrator was based on the YF-24 Evolution and YF-29 Durandal, with its Fold Dimensional Resonance system being a derivative of the YF-29's Fold Wave system, and the YF-30 was the starting point for the development of the VF-31 as well. At least one issue of Great Mechanics G (Autumn 2016) promoting Macross Delta also explicitly places the YF-29 in the VF-31's family tree. No he doesn't... the TW-1 Tornado Pack only exists in the Macross Frontier movies. Alto's final fight in the Macross Frontier TV series has him flying his VF-25F with an APS-25A/MF25 Armored Pack. Kawamori's stance aside, there's also a valid in-setting answer to the question that bears stating.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Well, it probably helps that everyone from space in Genesis Climber MOSPEADA seems to wear a leotard. Genesis Climber MOSPEADA suffered from some executive meddling, but not to the extent that I'd call it a "troubled production". I suspect you might be thinking of Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross... Tatsunoko Production's other attempt to make the Macross lightning strike twice, which did so poorly that the series was earmarked for cancellation after just 16 episodes and ended prematurely 23 episodes into a 39 episode run.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    The impression I always had was that they wore the Riding Suit over their normal clothes.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    There are only two base insignia seen in the official materials... Mars Base's triangle-M logo: and the much less commonly-seen Jupiter Base's heart-J logo that is only seen on the art for the VR-038 and AFC-01Z:
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