Seto Kaiba

Macross Delta seems to have been done on the cheap, likely due to the cost of the music production, so they don't seem to have bothered making a different ordnance container CG model for the Alpha, Beta, and Gamma Flight VF-31s. At least one of the model kits I've seen for the VF-31 does give the military spec VF-31 a different ordnance container that contains micro-missiles and what looks like some kind of a camera system?

Ah, so they're taking the half-truth route... blaming the inability to release the issue now on the COVID-19 shutdown as a way to avoid discussing why it was delayed beforehand. That way they aren't technically lying and they look like they've answered the question even though they actually haven't. Oh, that's an easy one... both times Harmony Gold has tried to move the Robotech story past the end of the "original" animated series, the fans crucified them for it. Robotech 3000 was a catastrophic failure that the fans hated so much the series was cancelled after just one screening of the teaser trailer... and then cancelled again when Carl Macek unwisely attempted to revive the project as a traditionally-animated series. Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles was also a catastrophic failure that the fans hated so much, and failed so completely at its stated goal of introducing new fans to the franchise, that its failure not only got the OVA cancelled after only one episode... it also got all development of new animated Robotech works defunded. Nobody wants to try it because Harmony Gold's three failures have proved it's a high-risk no-reward scenario.

Have they actually commented publicly? I haven't seen anything from them about Robotech at all this month.

Kinda? The YF-30s that are pictured in Variable Fighter Master File: VF-31 Siegfried are the military's YF-30B specification, not the original YF-30 Chronos technology demonstrator spec that Reon Sakaki flew on Uroboros in Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy. I haven't seen anything about how they differ, though. (Same as with the YF-29B in Macross 30 that presumably inspired it... all we know is that it's a superior version.)

Shinsei Industry's VF-11 Thunderbolt was actually pretty average for its time. The (New) UN Forces were looking for an all-regime main variable fighter, a "true successor" to the VF-1 Valkyrie's all-purpose operating profile in the wake of the more specialized VF-4 and VF-5000. It's got a gunpod, a rear-facing laser cannon to cover its blind spot, four underwing pylon stations, and it may or may not always have had a weapons bay in the side of its engine nacelles as seen in Macross 7. For the time it was developed, that was a pretty respectable armament that was augmented further with a Super Pack and Armored Pack. I think a big part of why it seems under-armed is that we never really get to see it using its wing pylons outside of Macross the Ride. The all-regime focus meant that it was more dependent on the Super Pack for space operations like the VF-1 was, so most of what we see is the Super Thunderbolt spamming micro-missiles. Master File has suggested the VF-11's Super Pack is heavily modularized, so that it can be reconfigured to accept different quantities of fuel and missiles depending on operational need, allowing it to potentially missile spam at almost a VF-25 level. Its facing competition in Project Nova, the VF-14, was a much larger and more specialized variable fighter. It got passed over for main fighter status because it didn't have the level of operational versatility the military was looking for... though it still got bought by a number of governments and enjoyed considerable popularity as a highly effective space fighter that was modification-friendly thanks to its roomy airframe. Even the VF-14 wasn't really much better armed, it just kept its dangerous toys on the inside.

Macross Chronicle is firmly in the "amazing missile countermeasures" camp on this one. Modern missiles already had to contend with a variety of countermeasures like lock-on detection and warning systems, chaff, flares, decoys, electronic countermeasures, and increasing adoption of passive stealth technology. Even in the Vietnam War, it was standard practice to fire at least two missiles with different types of guidance systems to improve the likelihood of a kill because the agility of aircraft was such that at short ranges an enemy aircraft could simply steer out of the guide beam for a semi-active radar homing system so SARH missiles were often followed up by infrared seekers as a one-two punch. The introduction of overtechnology made these problems substantially worse. Variable Fighters were substantially more agile than modern conventional fighter aircraft, making it that much harder to actually score a kill on one with a missile at any range and making semi-active homing all but useless. The real killer, however, was the quantum leap in ECM made by the invention of active stealth. Now that fighters could be all but invisible to radar at range, active radar homing missiles needed powerful (and expensive) ECCM to be effective and it fell to short-range missiles using guidance systems that were unaffected by active stealth tech like laser, infrared, and TV homing to reliably engage aircraft with active stealth. Firing a large number of small, short-ranged missiles in a saturation-type attack is a way to improve the odds of scoring a kill.

I've gone back and reviewed the (paltry) official coverage of the YF-30, and I couldn't find any mention of pylon mounts for ordnance. The only items listed under its armaments are its pair of 12.7mm beam machine guns, the heavy quantum beam gunpod, an assault knife (which is my bad, it does have one), and the ordnance container which contains all of its missile weapons in Macross 30 and in the novelization is later swapped out for a MDE beam cannon turret for the final battle. The best quality art I could locate for the YF-30 is in the Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy Visual Complete Guide, and it does appear to have a pair of pylon mounting locations on the forearms like the VF-31 does, but it's not listed or mentioned or alluded to in any way. The toy has four. I think the Macross Mecha Manual's entry listing six underwing pylons is a copy-paste error from the VF-25 page... because this thing definitely doesn't have six. The biggest sticking point there is the ordnance container itself. It has 36 launchers, but we don't know how many missiles each launcher has. For the sake of argument, let's assume that the armaments we can see in print or with our eyes on the toy exist... so the YF-30 has 36 micro-missiles and four underwing pylons. The YF-30's direct derivative, the VF-31 Kairos, outguns it despite being an economy model. The YF-30 has two beam machine guns to the VF-31's one, but the VF-31 makes up for it with two 27mm railguns. The VF-31's got 36 micro-missiles carried internally and four underwing pylons, but it also has two internal ordnance bays in the legs for large munitions or racks of micro-missiles. The VF-31's got a second assault knife. They've both got heavy quantum beam gunpods. The VF-31 does all that without its ordnance container, though, where the YF-30 has to sacrifice its missile payload to equip a radome or beam cannon. Then, of course, there's the VF-31's Super and Armored Packs. The YF-29, the YF-30's facing competition in ridiculously impractical technology demonstrator-ism, doesn't have any wing pylons to speak of but it has almost 3x as many internally-carried micro missiles (100 vs. 36) outfitted with the more deadly MDE warheads, its coaxial guns are firing MDE rounds, and it's got a built-in anti-warship grade MDE beam cannon turret. The YF-30 can take a similar turret, but at the expense of its micro-missile container, giving the YF-29 a 100-0 advantage instead. The VF-25, the VF-31's facing competition, has a pair of extra gun mounts on the hips for lasers or solid-ammo machine guns, six or eight underwing pylons (depending on which book you ask), an optional 55mm anti-armor railgun, and a multitude of FAST Pack choices including hundreds of missiles like the Super, Strike, Armored, Tornado, and Paladin packs. (FWIW, the RPG stats I homebrewed for the YF-30 give its container 108 micro-missiles... partly because we usually expect a micro-missile launcher to hold 3 or more missiles, partly because it's more balanced vs. the YF-29 that way, and partly because 108 has a pleasing significance WRT the Chronos's time-related implications... 108 being the number of times the temple bells at Japanese Buddhist temples are rung at the end of the year to finish the old year and welcome the new.) The interface in Macross 30 is probably not helpful for these purposes either, since two of the three boxes on the vast majority of VFs in-game refer to the same missile system firing in two different modes... one being multiple lock-on missile spam, and the other being single lock-on high rate-of-fire missile spam. The third Box is usually a built-in beam weapon of some description, most often the coaxial laser or beam guns, but sometimes another weapon like the VF-19's wing root/hip mounted guns or the YF-29's turret. (This can get weird on a few VFs, like the VF-11, where missiles seem to sprout from nowhere because they're not modeled with pylons.)

I'm not sure a toy is a good representative sample? Sadly, there isn't much art of the YF-30 Chronos to get a proper look at the underside of the CG model's wings. All I see on the CG model there is the seam where the wings fold for storage. Oh, handily... it's an ultra-high speed dogfighter with exclusively short-ranged armaments. Kinda what you'd expect given that it was built pretty much exclusively to fight the Vajra and Macross Galaxy completed it using development data from the YF-29 that was leaked to them by LAI. It varies by missile, and Macross's creators are usually quite vague about it for obvious reasons... the one time I recall seeing ranges stated explicitly was in the old Sky Angels book, for the ones used by the GBP-1S Armored Pack which are between 2km and 5km. Those missiles appear to be coming from the ordnance container. In GERWALK mode, if the ordnance container isn't deployed the launchers are facing left and right, parallel to the wing surface. That looks like missiles firing from the container on a trajectory to ensure they clear the wing and limbs.

Honestly? With the amount of trash the industry is producing lately, a couple month breather to reevaluate their life choices sounds like exactly what the industry needs... and it'll give them a chance to get older shows back into the broadcast rotation and maybe make up some of the losses on those older shows from royalties.

I enjoyed the hell out of Reincarnated into an Otome Game as a Villainess with only Destruction Flags's second episode over lunch today. It's an isekai series, but its premise is so totally different from the usual boring "oh noes, I am teh min-maxed godmode sue in a fantasy MMORPG world" fare provided by the billion different copycat shows that it stands out twice as much.

The 8th Son, That Can't Be Right! limped in with a second lazily-written yawner. This is western fantasy anime so generic you can practically see the barcodes.

Your decimal point drifted a bit... it's $27, not $2,700.

I'd look at it more in terms of the difference between the firepower the heavy quantum beam rifle or heavy quantum beam cannon turret container put out vs. the firepower of the eight or so thermonuclear reaction warheads the VF-25 can carry.

Nope... Hikaru, Misa, and Minmay's story reached its natural conclusion with Flash Back 2012. A story that's already over doesn't need a continuation, and we DEFINITELY don't want to see them dragged back and subsequently beaten down the way The Show That Must Not Be Named has done to them over the last three decades and change. Let them be. Their story is over and they've almost literally sailed off into the sunset. It's better by far for Macross to continue focusing on moving its story forward, with new people and new places. We've already had two different animated takes on their story (SDF Macross and DYRL?), a novelization by Sukehiro Tomita, several video game adaptations, and a modern manga adaptation (Macross the First). I think we're good.

It's not hard to pick out which of its design features are intended for anti-Vajra use and why... though the reason I've argued that the YF-29 suffers from crippling overspecialization is that it has no real operational versatility. Its weapons are exclusively short-range, intended for visual range dogfighting. It has no pylons, and no optional gear that would let it mount any weapons that would give it medium- or long-range offensive capabilities. Its anti-Vajra focus also makes it impractically expensive to actually use becuase at least half of its armaments require fold quartz to operate, as does its all-important fold wave system. By the standards of 5th Generation VFs so far? Kinda, yeah. The YF-30 Chronos has a heavy quantum beam gunpod and a pair of coaxial 12.7mm beam machineguns, but other than that its armament is all tied up in the ordnance container. If it takes the beam turret container from the novel, then it's got no missiles. It lacks a built-in fixed-forward gun (a design standard since the 4th Generation and a common feature since the 2nd), wing pylons, and internal ordnance bays or micro-missile launcher systems. If you look at its military spec derivative, the VF-31 Kairos, you'll see all those features present. It has fixed-forward railguns, six internal micro-missile launchers, two internal ordnance bays, and wing pylons. It also lacks the 5th Gen's standard close combat blade. Compared to its facing competition, the YF-29B Perceival, the YF-30 REALLY seems under-armed since the YF-29B has a hundred internally-carried micro-missiles, multiple built-in beam cannons, an almost identical gunpod, a bayonet and an assault knife, and Ghost support. Yeah, the Sv-262 Draken III arguably has an even better claim to suffering from crippling overspecialization since the design is SO overoptimized as an atmospheric dogfighter that it has to resort to FAST Packs to have any missiles at all and its transformation left it with too little internal fuel to be an effective space fighter. It theoretically could counter one of the YF-29's shortcomings by having a FAST Pack with long-range or medium-range missiles instead of micro-missiles. With what little's been said about the Draken III, the transformation design seems to have been a deliberate choice to misdirect the enemy about the VF's design and capabilities. The Sv-262 was developed by a design group that, until recently, had been an operating unit of General Galaxy before it was sold to the Epsilon Foundation subsidiary Dian Cecht. The Sv-262's transformation is modeled closely on that of General Galaxy's first big seller, the VF-9 Cutlass.

Started The 8th Son? That Can't Be Right! today... it's another bloody isekai series, and it may be giving Isekai Cheat Magician a run for its money in terms of "laziest isekai story". Usually, this kind of boring minimum-effort copycat production at least bothers to establish that the protagonist died somehow and was reincarnated into a fantasy world or somehow was transported to said fantasy world via a summoning spell. This show's main character falls asleep waiting for his rice to finish cooking and wakes up a 5 year old boy in the standard issue Eastern take on generic Western Fantasy. The real killer is that there's an incredibly lazy scene right before the opening credits (in the middle of the episode) where they establish the main character is the 8th son by just having a clumsy "as you know" bit where everyone spells out their familial relationship for no clear reason. The opening bodes ill for the series as a whole, between the unmistakably cheap CG animation and art assets that very obviously were "inspired by" (read: "borrowed from") Overlord, The Rising of the Shield Hero, and possibly Those Who Hunt Elves from the look of it...

So... on a lark, decided to watch Reincarnated into an Otome Game as a Villainess with only Destruction Flags, since it just premiered. The first episode made a generally favorable impression. Instead of the standard "transported to a MMORPG world" Isekai setting, the protagonist is reincarnated into the setting of a romance genre visual novel... and not as the player character, but rather as the story's principal villain. She's left to use her memories of the game from her previous life and the genre savvy she possesses to navigate the plot in a way that won't get her killed or exiled the way the villain in the visual novel was.

Valkyries use the compact thermonuclear reactor inside their engines in order to run their engines as thermonuclear fusion rockets in space flight. While the VF's engines are not very efficient while operating like this, the main advantage to doing it is that you only need to carry one fuel material because the reaction mass is plasma produced in the same thermonuclear reaction that's also generating your electrical power. Internal space in a VF's fuselage is already at a premium, so a fuel system that makes optimal use of that internal space was a priority. An alternative method that is used extensively in Gundam's Universal Century is the nuclear thermal rocket, which uses heat from the reactor to explosively flash-heat an otherwise-inert propellant to generate thrust. That, of course, requires multiple fuel systems that are easier to pull off in a non-transforming mecha. Argon slush is a fuel intended for use in ion thrusters, which are a lot less powerful but a LOT more fuel-efficient... usually run off low-output power sources like batteries or radioisotope thermoelectric generators.

The year 20XX, eh? So right around the time Megaman is repeatedly foiling Dr. Wiley. And with that one pose they use in EVERY. FREAKING. BOOK. Seriously, even the Gundam ones.

Seems sensible enough, yeah.

Yeah, I'll likely buy two copies... one for my own personal enjoyment and one for my translation group's library. From the description on Amazon, it sounds like they intend to do something along similar lines to the Master Archive Mobile Suit: MSV Ace Pilot Log book that they did for Mobile Suit Gundam back in Autumn 2018. The book was more about the featured pilots than the mecha, discussing the military careers and One Year War service of five selected top-scoring ace Mobile Suit pilots: the Principality of Zeon's Johnny Ridden, Gabby Hazard, and Ian Graden, and the Earth Federation's Tenneth Jung and Lydo Wolf. That reminds me, I still need to order the RX-93 Nu Gundam Master Archive...

Well, that depends on how the timelines shake out... specifically, if the events of Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles recur in each instance of the history. In DC/Wildstorm's Robotech: Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles, the SDF-3 is critically damaged by a surprise attack from the traitor General T.R. Edwards and has to be basically rebuilt from the keel up over the space of a year. That was the explanation for why the SDF-3 in Shadow Chronicles looks nothing like the one in Robotech II: the Sentinels. For the most part, it isn't even really the same ship. To be honest, this is the closest I've seen to an intelligent discussion of Titan's Robotech comics as well... most Robotech fans on Facebook are either cringing constantly over the comics, bitterly complaining about their Macross-centric story that dispensed with the other sagas entirely, or just pointing and laughing at how terrible the comics are. The biggest, most active Robotech group I know of is firmly in that third category. The comics are basically a joke.

Not gonna lie... I have a bad feeling about this one. There wasn't anything special about Roy Focker's VF-1S in Macross... it was a perfectly ordinary Block 4 VF-1S that was no different from any other. This feels like we're about to descend into Robotech-isms about Roy's VF-1S being a super-special one-of-a-kind custom job or maybe the original VF-1 prototype or some BS like that. Also, this is the fifth bloody VF-1 book... I'd like to focus on something else for a while, like maybe the VF-17 and VF-171, or the VF-3000, VF-5000, and other 2nd Gen VFs.

Not quite... it means you're alert to injustice in society, be it racism, sexism, etc. Political correctness is avoidance of anything that might offend or disadvantage a particular group in society.

Another one? This is the fifth bloody VF-1 book in the series... the fourth if we don't count Squadrons. I have a bad feeling about this one. There wasn't anything special about Roy's VF-1S apart from the fact that it was Roy's.