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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    I doubt it... the VF-31's Super Pack doesn't seem to be even as big as the VF-25's despite being five times as heavy, but I can't quite see the VF-31 equipping an ordinance container that weighs as much as the plane itself.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    I'm not sure mass is necessarily a factor in classification... after Macross Frontier screwed the usual convention of an Armored Pack being a big, bulky chunk of bolt-on armor that prevented transformation, the "big and bulky" part seems to be all that's left. Stylistically, the VF-31's FAST packs appear to be a Super Pack, and to the best of my knowledge that's what Bandai is calling it in their model kits... so I guess it'd be SPS-31, even though they never actually use the term Super Pack during the show. The terms used as "Protection units" for the bolt-on armor segments (said in English) and MMP Booster Pack for the actual boosters we most commonly associate with a Super Pack. Edit: I noticed one interesting detail while I was reviewing the scenes in Ep6 for the dialog relating to the VF-31's FAST pack. As expected, the packs contain a fair amount of additional fuel for the fighter to use to extend its operating time in space... but what's unexpected is that they appear to be taking a leaf from the VF-1 and VF-19's books by repurposing part of the boundary layer control system and active airflow management system as a fuel tank. They've capped the BLCS intakes on the dorsal fuselage with conformal fuel tanks. If they're actually filling the BLCS intake with a fuel bladder, that could potentially add several hundred to several thousand more liters of fuel.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    I've just finished a rewatch of the entire series, and I have to say I noticed something I didn't see the first time 'round. The Macross Delta series is a really poorly-executed riff on the plot of Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy. A small, elite military outfit goes rogue and tries to seize control of a remote part of the galaxy in order to unseal and take control of an ancient, forbidden technology the Protoculture originally built in an effort to undo the series of horrible mistakes that ruined their interstellar civilization... and it's up to an understaffed, undercapable private military contractor's branch office to stop their plan and prevent the activation of that technology to save the lives of billions. Naturally, activating that lost technology requires the input of a mysterious young girl who is a singer and is initially sheltered by the PMC and later captured by the evil jackass-in-chief... and is rescued from the freshly-activated evil techno-doodad shortly before it gets blown up by the heroes in a daring last ditch assault. Hell, the key planets involved are even both conveniently isolated from the rest of the galaxy by all-encompassing fold faults. I can never un-know this realization... but at least know I know why it felt like I'd heard this story before.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    OK, so... Super and Armored Pack masses. The VF-25 w/ SPS-25S/MF25 Super Pack has a standard operating mass of 28,000kg... that's including all of the fuel in the packs and the fighter, all of the ordinance carried in the Super Pack, etc. Take out that 15,000kg of weapons and fuel in the packs, and you're left with an 8,450kg fighter and 4,550kg of extra mass attributed to the fighter's fuel, the gunpod, and the empty mass of the booster elements of the NP-FAD-23 FAST pack. The fuel used in variable fighters has a very low mass of just 0.085 kilograms per liter (hydrogen slush), so I'd wager the VF-25's internally-carried fuel mass is probably only around 455kg of that 4,550kg of excess mass (equivalent to the full fuel capacity of the VF-1 Super Valkyrie with conformal tanks). The VF-25's standard operating mass with the APS-25A/MF25 Armored Pack is 52,000kg. We know 40,000kg of that is the pack itself... 9,000kg of ordinance, 15,000kg of fuel, and 16,000kg of the actual body of the pack itself. That, as you say, points to a VF-25 "naked" operating mass of around 12,000kg (3,550kg of which is fuel, other consumables, and weapons). For the VF-31's Super Pack, they're giving a standard operating mass of 38,000kg, and they're citing that 16,875kg of that is the pack's fuel and ordinance. That means that the actual pack is a surprisingly weighty affair much closer to the VF-25's Armored Pack in mass than its Super Pack. I doubt the VF-31's carrying much more fuel than the VF-25 in its internal tanks, so I'd wager there's probably around 450-500kg of that is fuel carried internally. Take out a ton or two for the gun pod and you're left with around 10,000-11,000kg of pack mass once you've subtracted the VF-31's 8,525kg from the equation. So, as it stacks up by estimate: VF-25 Armored Pack: 16,000kg VF-31 Super Pack: ~10,000kg VF-25 Super Pack: ~2,000kg The VF-31's Super Pack really must be layering on additional armor, otherwise it must be really badly designed to weigh THAT much.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, absolutely. There's a reason most of us never bothered to level Basara and his VF-19 Custom in Macross 30... he's bloody useless in an actual stand-up fight. Well, yes... it is written, black on white, though IIRC the stats pamphlet from the 1/72 Sv-262Hs Draken III was actually a four-color print job. The Sv-262's limbs being packed closer together than ever, while making up almost the entire central body of the aircraft, is actually the problem. Normally one of the main fuel tanks is located inside of the engine nacelles (lower legs), and the wings being articulated and structurally reinforced to be attachment points for the Lilldrakens reduces the amount of fuel that could be stored in there as well. The Draken III hasn't got any really big, immobile sections where fuel can be stored in large quantities the way most other VFs do. One of the most important factors to remember when you're talking about variable fighters and fuel is that a thermonuclear reaction turbine engine is a good three orders of magnitude more efficient in atmospheric flight than it is in space operations. I really cannot stress that enough. The VF-1 Valkyrie's FF-2001 thermonuclear reaction turbine engines could run 3,600 times longer in atmosphere than in space on the exact same amount of fuel. We're talking a difference between 2,350mL/s and 0.6527mL/s. A variable fighter optimized for atmospheric service can reasonably cut back on the amount of fuel it's carrying and devote all of that extra space and mass to things like armor reinforcement while still carrying enough fuel to operate for weeks between refuelings if need be. Since the Sv-262 was intended for hit-and-run attacks, having a more limited fuel supply wasn't really a significant design flaw. Because they don't have numbers on their side, if they don't get in and out quick they're dead either way.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Simply put, it was to give the VF-25 the level of all-regime performance the Frontier fleet NUNS was so insistent upon. At the time the VF-25 was developed, most of the VFs in service were optimized for use in space, like the VF-171 Nightmare Plus or the VF-19 2nd production type. The Frontier fleet put a great deal of importance on all-regime performance, so much so that when they developed their own local variant of the VF-19 they retooled the design to make it better suited for an all-regime role. The VF-25's design reflects that same philosophy which places atmospheric performance on an equal footing to space performance. When I say "optimized" I mean that the fighter was literally optimized for one regime to the extent that its performance in others actually suffers. We first saw this with the VF-4, the first of the 2nd Generation VFs that was so heavily optimized for space combat that it was a rather mediocre fighter in atmosphere and had to be supplemented with a fighter optimized to fight in atmosphere (the VF-5000). The VF-19 2nd mass production type is another example, an all-regime fighter that was retooled into a space fighter... its canards were removed, wings were truncated, the aerodynamics were simplified, and many new verniers were added. Yes, but he noted that the designs are functionally identical except for the fact that those small design changes moved the aerodynamic center further back. They didn't for instance, go in and strip out the space-use equipment or change the body styling for better aerodynamics, or anything like that. Just a wingtip and canard change to adjust the fighter's balance to make it more agile at low altitudes. Considering Basara's VF-19 Custom was almost completely unarmed for most of its service life, that isn't exactly a close-run contest... The fold wave system isn't mentioned as one of the hallmarks of the 5th Generation, no doubt because the system is too prohibitively expensive for widespread deployment.With respect to the Sv-262's transformation method and fuel capacity, the published stats for the Sv-262 Draken III do clearly and unambiguously indicate that its transformation design is to blame for it having less internal space for fuel and therefore reduced endurance and short cruising range in space. I'm not sure how you're getting the opposite out of an article which doesn't even talk about the Draken III's transformation or performance.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Either that or a way for the Daedalus's deck crew to cook a couple hundred breakfast burritos all at once...
  8. Seto Kaiba
    My theory on this is that the gun ports themselves are a relic of the central body being carryover VF-25 parts... and the actual ammunition/generator feeds being cut off by the armor reinforcement that was done. I think this may be another lost-in-translation moment... because the Great Mechanics DX 9 article "VF Evolutionary Theory" doesn't say the VF-25 is a VF optimized for atmospheric service. It just says the VF-25's designers opted for variable sweep wings to improve the airframe's performance in atmosphere.The VF-25 is, fundamentally, an all-regime variable fighter like the VF-1 or VF-11. Even that article in Great Mechanics DX you're referencing has established that the VF-25's FAST packs are all about adding extra armor and weaponry rather than fuel, and that the boosters are there to offset loss of maneuverability from the extra weight rather than extend range. I think you may be reading too much into it there as well... Kawamori says the VF-31 stock model and VF-31 custom are functionally identical except for their wingtips and canards. Whether or not the VF-31 is still an all-regime plane is unclear at this point, but the changes made by Xaos are to improve agility at the expense of stability. The YF-29 is a 5th Generation VF... it's one of the parallel lines of fighter development that emerged from the dissemination of the YF-24 specs.The YF-29 was developed at the same time as the Project Triangler AVFs (YF-25, YF-26, YF-27), and Macross Chronicle even refers to it as the VF-25's "sibling". We have yet to see any inkling of a 6th Generation VF... all of the VFs with sequential numbers above 23 have been part of the same development chain and generation. The YF-24 Evolution spec is the common ancestor of them all, and directly gave rise to (meaning the YF-24 blueprints were used as the basis for development of...): The Earth/Federal VF-24 The Frontier fleet Y/VF-25 The Olympia fleet YF-26 The Galaxy fleet Y/VF-27 The Frontier fleet YF-29 The Uroboros YF-30 The only ones that aren't technically in that group are the YF-29B, a further development of the YF-29, and the VF-31 which was a further development based upon the YF-30. Based on what's said in this quarter's Great Mechanics G, the Sv-154 is a 4th Generation equivalent, and the Sv-262 is a 5th Generation equivalent, in technological terms. The only hallmark of the 5th Generation that the Draken's missing is EX-Gear. It's sound speculation, given that the YF-24 Evolution is said to have been approved for mass production. Well... you could argue that specs are, in some ways, used to define what the current generation means. The defining traits of the 4th and 5th generations have been predominantly technical capabilities... rather than performance in flight.The 4th Generation's distinctive traits are identified as the adoption of the next-gen thermonuclear reaction burst turbine engines, fighter-scale pinpoint barriers, an emphasis on combining active and passive stealth technologies in airframe design, the ability to advance to satellite orbit unassisted, and to have native support for fold boosters. Later technical publications added the additional point of having an ARIEL airframe control AI... the next-gen core control system replacing ANGIRAS. The 5th Generation's distinctive traits were identified as the adoption of a next-generation engine design (Stage II thermonuclear reaction engines), the adoption of ARIEL II airframe control AIs, inertia store converters, EX-Gear HMI systems, and the linear actuator technology. Things get a little muddier with the 2nd and 3rd generations, since most of their definining traits are operational instead... the 2nd Generation being mostly low-cost regime-optimized VFs intended for emigrant world production and/or fleet escort duty, and the 3rd Generation being a diversification of Variable Fighter design into roles like bombers and attackers. I think that there's one sticking point... whether or not there's a "Zero Generation" in there to separate improvised aircraft like the Sv-51 and VF-0 from the true full-capability VFs of the 1st Generation... which would give rise to a 0.5 Generation fairly swiftly. There are a few really good examples of .5 generations... the VF-17 and the VF-171 have perfect ones. The VF-17 made the jump from a 3rd Gen VF to a 3.5 when the -D and -S variants came out with initial type thermonuclear reaction burst turbine engines and an improved avionics suite that supported fold boosters. The VF-171 jumped from a 4th Gen to 4.5 when the EX/IIIF upgrade was done, giving it an EX-Gear HMI and anti-beam coating technology borrowed from the VF-25. Aaaaactually... I'm pretty sure the NUNS would say the VF-171 is a better VF than the VF-19 precisely for the reasons you identified. Greater versatility, lower cost of operation and maintenance, and easier handling. It was the 4th Generation VF that even an average pilot could use to the fullest, whereas a VF-19 was a nigh-uncontrollable monster fit for only the very best pilots in the New UN Forces, and was promptly benched as a result... leading Shinsei to spend at least a decade desperately trying to make it less of a bear to use without sacrificing too much of its performance. The VF-25 is most definitely a 5th Generation VF.All indications are that the Sv-262 is as well, given what's said about it and the Sv-154 in Great Mechanics G and what technologies it's explicitly identified as possessing, like Stage II thermonuclear reaction engines, ISC, railgun and heavy quantum beam gunpods, etc.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Whoops-a-daisy... I accidentally type it as "Sv-252" with annoying frequency when I'm on my tablet. Quite... wouldn't mind one here either, a few months from now.Maybe that's their punishment duty... being demoted from flying the Draken III to the slightly less feared Snöplog. IIRC the fire effect for the railguns was red on the Draken... so it may be that.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Your guess is as good as mine... it's not exactly small, so I'd assume repair would be the preferred option. We'll never know, because Xaos' management was apparently either unable or unwilling to do anything about the damage to the Macross Elysion. I honestly don't recall. No, there's no caveat here... you've kind of missed the reference point that's being used in the comparison.The Draken III's atmospheric design focus and unique transformation resulted in the fighter having more limited onboard fuel storage and endurance than average in its generation... but they're not comparing it to a VF with a Super Pack. It comes up short compared to a "naked" 5th Generation VF. The Lilldrakens are the Draken III's equivalent of a Super Pack, and similarly extend its endurance in space. No, we shouldn't... becuase the Lilldrakens are akin to a Super Pack. They're not permanent parts of the fuselage the way the YF-29's engines are. When you oversimplify, looks can be deceiving. For one, the stock Sv-262Ba doesn't have the laser machine guns built into the nose/monitor turret. For two, the YF-29's got three times the number of heavy quantum beam guns... two of which are the even nastier MDE beam weapons. For three, the coaxial guns and micro-missiles the YF-29 is carrying are also using MDE warheads. Lastly, the Draken III seems to be carrying a lot fewer missiles than what the YF-29 is carrying... several dozen, as opposed to 100+. Just a quick point... the YF-29 doesn't have hip guns in its stats. The machine guns are mounted on the monitor turret. There are two engines in each wingtip pod on the Tornado Pack... the engine is described as a combination jet/rocket engine (a designation that makes pretty much zero sense to me... since a standard thermonuclear reaction engine fits that description nicely anyway.) D'you remember who was firing? If it was the forearm guns of the Draken III, those were 27mm railgun rounds. Transformation-wise, it's more a descendant of the VF-9 than anything... but based on what's said in Great Mechanics G it seems more like a totally separate school of design thought.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Those seem to be a larger version of the BASTER-L and BASTER-R Mobile Battery Warships which were part of the Macross Quarter-class... which would make them basically a small-ish destroyer or frigate docked to the core block of the ship. They're basically a small frigate or destroyer with a disproportionately large engine cluster and a couple large anti-warship converging beam cannon turrets.(While both the Quarter-class and Elysion-type are explicitly modular warships made up of multiple warships stuck together, Elysion is the only one shown using that fact to its advantage.)
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Nope. As Macross Chronicle has it, the QF-2200D-B that was used for the Ghost Booster on the VF-0 cannot be operated independently. The reason given is that its avionics and some sensors were removed to make the Ghost lighter and connect it to the VF-0's controls.For all practical intents and purposes, it's just an external engine and fuel tanks inside an aerodynamic casing.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    It is carrying a lot of fairly powerful radar and radio equipment, so I wouldn't be at all surprised if it possessed that capability. The Aegis Pack used on the RVF-171 and RVF-25 was already a fold wave radar system before the EX upgrade was done, so it seems highly probable it possessed that capability all along. Its Macross Chronicle mechanic sheet identifies the RVF-171 as filling electronic warfare roles. As a fun quasi-related tidbit, the Phalanx destroid was a rare implementation of electronic attack in its most literal form... its radar was so powerful it could be used as a weapon in its own right.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    It was an innovation, all right... but not one made by the Dian Cecht SV Works.The Macross Galaxy Guld Works beat them to the punch on that one by about eight years... the VF-27's Super Pack included a QF-5100D Goblin II UCAV mounted dorsally that could similarly detach from its mothership VF and operate independently (or be remotely controlled using the pilot's BDI).
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Having four engines provides a greater maximum instantaneous thrust and thrust-to-weight ratio, which generally translates to a faster top speed in atmosphere and better climb rate. (Unless the engines themselves rotate, the actual gain in maneuverability isn't that huge... that's more a function of verniers.) Having twice the usual number of engines means the fighter has twice the usual number of reactors. The practical upshot of this is that the fighter's thermoelectric and MHD generators are producing more energy above and beyond what's actually necessary for flight than what a two-engine configuration is going to produce. This enables the usage of certain energy-intensive systems that would not normally be available in fighter mode without a fold wave or fold dimensional resonance system, like running the energy conversion armor at full power or using the pin-point barriers. The loss of an engine isn't a crippling problem for a four-engine VF, as the total loss of power is more like 1/4 instead of 1/2. Of course, having four engines also comes with the downside that you're using fuel twice as fast... which reduces the fighter's operational endurance, esp. during space combat where the reactors are consuming fuel exponentially more rapidly than usual to produce the plasma the engine expels to provide thrust. Nope... the Sv-262 is noticeably better than a standard production-level 5th Generation Main VF like the VF-25 or VF-31, but it still falls short of what the VF-27, YF-29, and YF-30 are capable of.(In practical terms, Windermere is shelling out for a much more expensive VF with the expectation that quality will cover numbers.) Goodness no.In terms of raw engine power and thrust-to-weight ratio the Sv-262 is behind the VF-27, YF-30, YF-29, and probably VF-24 (which we don't have stats for). You could make an excellent case that the Sv-262 is every bit as flawed as the VF-27... it's over-specialized. Where the VF-27 focused on dogfighting ability to the exclusion of pretty much everything else, and became a fighter with low operational versatility, the Sv-262 shows an exaggerated emphasis on combat in atmosphere. As a result of its atmosphere-centric design, its fuel capacity is low and it has aggressively limited operational endurance in space compared to other 5th Generation VFs. To maintain its streamlined profile its weapons were integrated directly into the airframe, which greatly limits is versatility and effectively precludes equipping it with long-range weaponry. It's a fighter very well-suited to the kind of war Windermere expected to be fighting, but it'd probably fare poorly in massed combat against the NUNS or Zentradi without the Wind Singer there to disorient or subvert the enemy. (Which is, of course, exactly what we saw near the end of the series... when Heinz took a powder, all the sudden the Drakens were being shot down by NUNS pilots flying previous-generation fighters.) As expected, the Sv-262 has no fold system. It can only fold by using a fold booster, riding along inside a starship's fold effect, or utilizing a point-to-point fold effect generated by a Protoculture relic. For much of the series, they appear to be using fold gates produced by the Sigur Valens to get around. (Those who've been on the thread from early on will remember I predicted precisely that about ten episodes before it was revealed, because there was similar technology in widespread use over on Uroboros.)
  16. Seto Kaiba
    More or less, yeah... there's some concept art for it in one of the art books, but not much.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    It's a (politically incorrect) in-universe nickname... one inspired by the way the VEFR-1's radome is positioned over its head in battroid mode, in a manner reminiscent of the conical hats in many east Asian cultures including the Chinese douli and Japanese kasa.(Not sure why it's Chinese, except maybe that the douli made for farmers that I've seen tend to be almost flat with a wide brim.) Edit: I suppose a little casual racism may be in play, since Japan and China are not exactly on pally terms...
  18. Seto Kaiba
    I don't recall it actually rotating the engines a full 180 degrees, but since the Tornado Pack on the VF-25 was the proof of concept for the YF-29's engine arrangement, I don't see why they wouldn't be able to.I doubt it's going to catch on in a mainstream fighter though... seems like kind of a pain in the butt to implement. It seems like the kind of thing we'll see on ultra-agile low-volume production dogfighters...
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, it was a neat touch... I mean, it's a lot easier to fit 5 million people into a space roughly the size of downtown San Francisco if you have two equally large areas of highrises underneath it.I don't believe it's discussed in depth anywhere though.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    It has a "blink and you'll miss it" appearance in Ep27 of the original series... in that pan shot of the hundreds of fighters flying in front of the Storm Attacker-mode SDF-1 Macross.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    I doubt it, since that's also where the wing folds for high speed maneuver mode... but if so it'd give the VF-31 an advantage over the VF-25 in terms of total ordinance capacity.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Pretty sure there isn't... since Big West/Studio Nue own the Macross IP hands down, and plenty of material has continued to use the original UN Spacy roundel and "UN Spacy" markings.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    All things considered, I'd have been floored if they weren't... even the VF-1 could do that.(I still suspect the VF-31A Kairos is supposed to have four hardpoints, though I've noticed the printed stats ignore the existence of the hardpoints altogether but consistently say the Kairos has missile containers where the Siegfried Custom has multidrone racks.)
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Just a note, but in the novelization of Macross Frontier the VF-9 was still being used by Macross Galaxy in 2059. As the VF-9 isn't that much older than the VF-11, and the VF-11 was finally being retired from service in 2058 via disposal sales (noted in Macross R), it's possible those VF-9s are relatively recent acquistions sold off by the Spacy when the fighter finally was withdrawn from service. That, my friend, is putting it MILDLY.Max and Milia were the top aces of the First Space War, founded the UN Spacy's equivalent of TOPGUN, trained innumerable pilots, saved the galaxy a couple of times, helped General Galaxy make a name for itself in VF design and decided the final form of Shinsei's first few big sellers, and their romance is quite literally the stuff of history. The mark they made is arguably second only to that of Minmay herself.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    That would be consistent with the published material, yeah... though it's worth remembering that the UN Spacy was not actually a space navy organizationally-speaking. "Spacy" is short for "Space Military" (Space Forces) or "Space Army". They just nicked Navy-style hull class symbols and squadron designations. That probably has a fair bit to do with the UN Spacy not having a proper space-capable ELINT or AEW/AWACS craft in its formative years. It had the ES-11D Cat's Eye recon plane, which is hinted to be a conventional aircraft converted for space use, but that clearly didn't cut it and they were forced to come up with something better suited to space combat... and, in that period, the gold standard was the VF-1. The VEFR-1 "Funny Chinese" from the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross series was every bit as improvised as the Cat's Eye, and the VE-1 refined the concept into a more production-worthy and modular form that meant with a little time and the right bolt-ons, a fighter could be converted into an AEW/AWACS/ELINT platform should the need arise. (Though, in the Macross II parallel world timeline, the VE-1 was ALSO an improvised design invented aboard the SDF-1 during its return flight to Earth created as a modification of the VT-1 Ostrich.)
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