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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    There's very little information available on the operations of the VE-1 ELINT Seeker and the other VF-1 variants developed for AEW and recon use. The technical publications that go into detail on things like squadron organizations focus almost exclusively on the combat variants and neglect the support variants... and the oldest documents predate the VE-1 being a thing. Based on the minimal available evidence for that period of Macross history, the VE-1 units were organized into dedicated Space Airborne Early Warning squadrons (SVAW). The only one I can recall that actually had an identified squadron affiliation appeared in Variable Fighter Master File: VF-1 Valkyrie Vol.2... a unit from the SVAW-12 Praerie Dogs, a unit stationed on the ARMD-213 Altamira.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    I know, right? I've made some of my weirdest finds that way, like looking for the comment about the VF-2JA's vernier count and stumbling across a bore for the Strike Valkyrie's beam cannon. Engrish can be a cruel mistress at times...(But here's me wondering why the UN Forces were apparently so invested in the idea of having ties to the Navy's Black Aces that they founded a Spacy equivalent squadron TWICE... once in the years leading up to the First Space War, and again after they copped it in said war along with the ARMD Ranger.)
  3. Seto Kaiba
    I actually found the ship's name completely by accident a moment ago... CV-339 is identified in the back of This is Animation: Macross Plus as being the B.J. Gloval (sic.) (should be "Global"). The book has a VF-11C Super Thunderbolt from the SVF-41 Black Aces as the representative squadron from that ship.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Thank the machine god for small favors... They'll have to succeed or fail on their own merits... but since the music was Delta's single strong point, they at least have a good platform to launch from. I have a feeling the merchandise for the series isn't going to sell particularly well now that it's over, due to the mecha being more an afterthought than a proper part of the series.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    What would I want a Macross Delta movie to be? 3. Cancelled. Seriously, the second cour of the series was such a train wreck that Macross Delta just doesn't DESERVE a movie. If I had my way, I'd quietly scrub the series from the continuity and pretend it never happened, like Sunrise did to G-Saviour. The only way I could consider them doing a film would be if they fired the writers of the series and hired someone else who could clean up the mess the current mooks made. Under new writers, I'd prefer to have a compilation-type movie in the hopes that an alternate version of the story by another writer wouldn't leave me wanting a refund.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Depends on how official you want to be there... Variable Fighter Master File has shown the GBP-1S-equipped VF-1 Valkyrie with three gunpods. One mounted to each forearm, and one handheld. (It's in the Operation Bullseye portion of the second VF-1 volume.)
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Maybe... though the normal VF emphasis on speed and evasion is more Dark Eldar territory. Perhaps that's why I like them so much... Now, whether the VF-31's forearm guns are actually in the same firepower tier as a proper gunpod isn't clear. The caliber of ammo they take (27mm on the military model, 25mm on the Xaos custom) is below what the nominal minimum gunpod caliber is (30mm), though since Ek still equals 0.5MV2 they could compensate with additional muzzle velocity... Your main point is bang-on correct though. The VF-31 may seem somewhat under-armed, but its weapons are actually pretty typical for a 5th Generation VF. It's got a gunpod, a pair of fixed-forward rapid fire cannons for fighter mode, coaxial guns on the monitor turret, and a fair amount of missile capacity. It's got less versatility in missile options than the VF-25, but the VF-25 kind of dominates in that respect by design with twice the number of pylons as any other 5th Generation VF. Yeah, but he had to stay in GERWALK mode or ditch one because he didn't have anywhere to put two.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    I doubt "Make it Orky" is part of the average VF's design plan... (Well, unless we're talking the VF-X3 Medusa or SDP-1 Stampede Valkyrie... they both look like they're cobbled together from whatever was laying around, and the former actually was...)
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Mostly that first one. Yeah, that's from The Show That Must Not Be Named... or, to be precise, the comic books that were produced for same. Those comics depicted some of the Zentradi characters as being quite old, hundreds or thousands of years old and effectively immortal barring combat injury.Vrlitwhai wasn't exactly ancient in the original Macross series... IIRC he was 38.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    The range of movement of the ordinance container is somewhat limited... being handheld clears that problem right up. How many gunpods does one fighter need?(The current official recordholder is the VF-2SS Valkyrie II, which can carry three gunpods without resorting to hardpoints. Pseudo-official loadings also give the VF-1's Armored Pack and VF-25 the ability to carry three gunpods at once.)
  11. Seto Kaiba
    It's been a while since last I saw Macross 7, but IIRC they say that a Zentradi is hardier than a human... not longer-lived. Milia had simply never caught a cold before and leapt to the illogical conclusion that she was dying, when all she had was the space equivalent of the common cold. By 2067 they probably have started to get a handle on what the Zentradi average lifespan is... but in 2045 that was probably still unknown. We've seen several Zentradi still hale and hearty enough to go about their business in 2059 while still being First Space War veterans... but that doesn't mean they're necessarily longer-lived than the humans they're virtually identical to on a genetic level. Nah, Max and Milia are actually probably one of the best parts of that show.The only real bad parts about Macross 7 are Basara's personality (he's an a-hole, no two ways about it), the repetitive use of the same handful of animated sequences in the combat, and the repetitive use of the same couple songs in the first half. (The budget wasn't huge.) The rest is actually watchable.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    The emigrant ships are mostly self-sustaining, but not completely... and they aren't possessed of infinite endurance. Endurance has improved as ships have gotten larger and the recycling technology has gotten better, but the Megaroad-01 should be well over its planned service lifespan by 2067. So... a couple things...First, the loss of communication in July 2016 is what prompted the UN Forces to conclude the SDF-2 Megaroad-01 had gone missing, and the ensuing coverup... so they clearly don't have a cavalier attitude about ships going silent. Second, the time between the Varauta system being conquered by the Protodeviln and the start of Macross 7 is only two years (2043-2045). Third, I don't believe it's said that the Varauta system went silent after being conquered. The entire population was brainwashed, so it wouldn't have been any real challenge to fake routine communications to ensure the UN Government was convinced all was well.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    The reason that Max and Milia look young is kind of an in-joke on the part of the show's creators. Namely, Max is a genius (or Jenius)... and growing old is a state of mind for normal men.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    It's complicated. Fold waves are basically the fold space equivalent of electromagnetic waves... they're produced as an unintentional consequence of operating overtechnology systems that use super dimension spatial physics like thermonuclear reaction power systems, gravity control systems, space fold systems converging beam cannons, dimensional warheads, etc. They're also produced intentionally for technologies that leverage the faster-than-light propigation of fold waves in radio and radar applications. The Fold Wave System on the YF-29 and select later aircraft has two functions: By harnessing and amplifying fold waves using fold quartz, it enables the VF to draw energy directly from super dimension space in the same manner that the Vajra do. This enables the VF to use energy-intensive technologies which would otherwise be unusable in fighter mode like pinpoint barriers or energy conversion armor.It's not clear if the boost to engine power is from the engines not needing to divert energy from the reaction to the generators, or if it's the fold waves themselves changing the reaction inside the engine. The former seems the more likely one. The VF gains the ability to receive, jam, or amplify fold waves from other sources... e.g. singers with a fold receptor factor or v-type bacterium, Vajra songs, etc.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    A Uraga-class escort battle carrier.After 2041, considering there's a VF-19A. In the water. They didn't get much of a cooldown before the Ghost showed up to ruin the moment. There's a lot of Alaska west of Macross City... almost all of it, in fact.The maps in Macross Chronicle are not super-precise, but we know Macross City was built within eyeshot of Grand Cannon 1/Alaska Base. The Grand Cannon technology sheet shows a rough location for Grand Cannon 1 that puts it either due north of Central, AK and due west of Circle, AK, or due east of Fort Yukon, AK. Officially, the dogfight in the city took place in the outskirts of Macross City, AK.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Probably not, normally when there's a capacitor system involved in a beam weapon's operation it's mentioned. I'd assume that's just the reaction chamber portion of the barrel where they produce the superheavy quantum that the gun excites with a resonance fold effect to produce the dimension eater effect it projects outward as a beam.The VF-171EX is using a pair of detuned VF-19 engines, so those may be tuned to reserve more plasma for power generation as a way of making the most of having to reduce the thrust output to respect the Nightmare Plus's structural limitations. The catch is that it only benefits the weapons of the YF-29, YF-30, and possibly VF-31 Siegfried.The YF-27-3, YF-27-5, and VF-27 didn't have a fold wave system, and the poor man's fold wave system (the reheat system) in the Sv-262 Draken III is focused on increasing engine thrust. Maybe, maybe not... we've seen in previous titles that some ships in Macross don't keep their entire hangar pressurized.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Considering the Zentradi Army's 118th Main Fleet pretty comprehensively razed the surface of the Earth, there probably aren't too many abandoned towns out there. Macross Chronicle indicates the dogfight took place in the outskirts of Macross City, Alaska. The battle scene in the final episode of Macross Plus (either version) was definitely on Earth. There was a mocked up training area that was used for testing on Eden, including response time trials with paint ammo and also live-fire testing with gunpods, which appeared early on in the OVA and movie.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Presumably he just looked for a sufficiently large chunk of one of the satellites that Isamu shot down to cover his descent and took shelter in that. Myung actually explains this one herself... Sharon's personality runs on a computer model of the human brain, and prior to gaining sentience via illegal technology her emotions were all built on emotional data scanned from the brain of Myung Fang Lone.Initially, Sharon was attracted to Isamu because Myung was and Sharon's incomplete system was being operated by scanning Myung's emotional state in realtime. After being illegally upgraded/completed with banned technology by Marj, Sharon internalized the recorded emotional data from Myung as her own... forming a twisted mirror of Myung's own feelings for Isamu. (Remember, her final monologue to Myung has her state that she loves Guld but she loves Isamu more.) She tried to kill Isamu out of love, because she knew (via Myung) that Isamu's an adrenaline junkie always chasing that next reckless high and therefore tried to give him the ultimate experience in that regard. Exactly what she intended to do with the Macross isn't clear, though since she was tied into the ship's computers it probably shortly became her physical body.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Do you honestly think Big West would let go of a cash cow like this?At most, Kawamori might take a powder and leave the franchise in the hands of Hidetaka-san, whom he's been working with a lot since Frontier. If I had to guess, I'd say that he checked out of Delta early because it wasn't the show he wanted to make in the first place.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    A few notes on this:By 2067, most of the New UN Forces warship designs we've seen are closing on four decades old if you don't count modernizations like the ones which the Northampton-class has so visibly benefitted from. Like variable fighters, warships often employ energy conversion armor to beef up their already considerable defensive capabilities. I'm not sure it's so much a question of weapons tech advancing faster as it is a case of a few bleeding-edge 5th Generation VFs mounting beam weapons which have the ability to operate as both a rapid-fire beam machine gun and as a high powered anti-ship beam cannon. Like the Vajra, these few fighters can sometimes dispense capital ship-level firepower at the expense of greatly reduced rate of fire and/or increased cooldown times. The smaller, more compact heavy quantum beam rifles seem to be smaller and preserving existing firepower in an attempt to dodge the problems inherent in the YF-27 and VF-27 gunpods... which were so large that they unbalanced their aircraft or even impeded the function of the landing gear. (Yes, really.) ... I don't honestly recall the VF-171EX having ever been mentioned as having any kind of capacitor system for its weapons. Are you perhaps confusing that with the VF-25's Armored Pack or Tornado Pack? But they've never said that...In point of fact, the 5th Generation VFs only use ASWAG for the antiprojectile shields on their forearms because the stuff's so ruinously expensive. Even the YF-29 opted to double the thickness of the regular armor instead. The only bit of equipment that fully adopted ASWAG advanced energy conversion armor is the VF-25's APS-25A Armored Pack... The Armored Pack itself was never really meant for fighting other VFs. What it was built for was more on the order of anti-warship operations where an excess of firepower and armor would serve better than ultra-high mobility. The VF-25 Armored Pack is kind of a "Why not both?" approach achieved through adding an incredibly powerful set of rocket boosters. A few other points of order...The Heavy Soldier Vajra are shown to have the firepower to destroy a cruiser in one large blast, but they're basically lugging around the same kind of gun the VF-27 is... a heavy quantum beam cannon. It would not be unreasonable to assume they can fire a "charged shot" the same as any VF with a gunpod that's able to use beam grenade mode. Brera destroyed a wrecked Guantanamo-class carrier with a shot from his gunpod's beam grenade... effectively shooting it with an anti-capital ship heavy quantum beam weapon. The vessel wasn't in fantastic shape either, after being sunk by the Vajra it couldn't exactly power its armor or repair all the existing hull breaches. (Plus he shot the ventral stern, probably intending to help the process along by detonating the ship's fuel tanks which are located there... undetonated ordinance left laying about may also have helped.) Keith destroyed a Guantanamo-class by firing in through one of the elevators to the hangar deck, meaning the half-dozen or so missiles he fired into the ship detonated under the armor in an area where there was already a generous supply of unexploded live ordinance, fuel, and oxygen. Master Dex explained this one succinctly enough... the New UN Gov't has a law requiring the disclosure of the specs for newly-developed weapons. Some, like SMS' Uroboros branch, have tried to game the system by designating trial-production VFs as "YF" instead to avoid having to make full disclosure, while Macross Galaxy basically blew the whole process off until they couldn't deny they'd completed the VF-27 anymore.The Frontier fleet would've been obliged to divulge the specs to the YF-29 to the New UN Government, the same as SMS had to do with the YF-30. Luck probably had very little to do with it, considering each of those micro-missiles was probably carrying the equivalent of several hundred kilograms of TNT and were going off in an enclosed, airtight metal box full of oxygen and volatiles. Weapons that use fold quartz aren't using it for a power source, they're using the stuff to produce the "superheavy quantum"... the distilled nastiness which makes dimensional weapons so destructive. Its mass is far greater than that of the normal heavy quantum used to induce fusion or fired from heavy quantum beam rifles, which invariably means it's being used in MDE weaponry and thus being used to produce microsingularities which pull matter out of realspace. It's only fold wave or fold dimensional resonance systems that provide energy to the VF from fold space. All told, it sounds more like it's the specific brainwaves and fold receptor qualities that do the trick... so it's unlikely that he would lose his wind singer abilities as he aged unless his runes weakened with time.Technically, I suppose you could have a tone-deaf wind singer and it'd work just as well. The songs are probably to help the wind singer generate the correct emotional wavelengths and brainwaves.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    That much profanity would swiftly earn me the ire of the moderators. I'm of the school of thought that it's better to get something you're dreading out of the way as soon as possible. I can honestly say I haven't been quite so dissatisfied with an anime series since Talos talked me into Stratos 4. The one good thing to come of Macross Delta for me is that it's made Macross 7 a much more appealing series by comparison. 7 might have had a main character who was a complete and utter pillock, but it had a reasonably logical plot progression that felt like the show was building to something (and it did). Macross Delta doesn't feel like it's building up to anything except an unseemly rush to tie up loose ends before the episode count runs out. I suppose if one went into Macross Delta with no prior experience with Macross adjusting their expectations, the series could be mistaken for an utterly mediocre idol anime. If you've calibrated your expectations based on previous Macross shows, then it's just a train wreck. I think that may depend on the distinction between:"The series will end." and "The story will end." We know that we're in the home stretch in terms of episode count, so we know the series will end. Will they manage to scrape together a natural and satisfying conclusion for the story in the time they have left? I'm betting "No". So the series will end, but the story will probably just sort of stop.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Recent sufferers of drill-related head injuries is an awfully niche market to target...
  23. Seto Kaiba
    OK, time to wade into Episode 25 of Super Dimension Disgrace: Macross Delta.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Well, I've put it off as long as I usefully can... time to slog into Macross Disappointment episode 24. Once again, we open on Arad demonstrating that he is really, REALLY bad at his job. Whining about Hayate and co. getting captured, and getting snuck up on by a goddamn civilian wearing enough jangly metal crap on his person to be legally reclassifiable as a wind chime... and Arad doesn't notice until he's practically on top of them. Either the writers are taking the piss, or Berger is engaging in deadpan sarcasm. How lovely that Xaos's most senior operatives had no idea most of their gear was made by the guy supplying arms to the enemy... Roid's menacing Mikumo with one of those knives that looks more like a potato peeler than any kind of serviceable blade. Points to Heinz for at least making a show of fairness in the Windermerean kangaroo court... though even our clueless protagonists are sharp enough to notice this is a show trial before the execution. Dunno why they even let Bogue in the room though, he's got all the decorum of a colicky baby. ... wow, Windermerean Judge #1 finally said the thing I've been waiting for someone to say in this series. Because they're civilians playing soldier dressup and waving guns instead of the actual military, Xaos's staff are not elligible to be treated as prisoners of war. Finally, a character who gets how stupid it is for a PMC to be the protagonist side. The VF-22 in Darwent Castle was conveniently tuned and fueled last night? Talk about a very convenient move on Berger's part... all to extort from Xaos. It really is sad how stupid the show's protagonists are, that even this late in the series they're being played for fools by everyone. Even now, they're getting a "The reason you suck" speech from Windermere... and it really is funny how completely on the mark it all is. (Even funnier is how they're obviously gonna fail at their "tactical live".) The longer this drags on, the more I'm cheering for the bad guys in the hopes that they just kill everyone and end this farce. I know they won't kill Makina, but for a minute there I had hope that we'd finally jettison some of the deadweight from this series. That's a LOT of blood though. She was only shot a few seconds ago and there's already a freaking lake of it. Hey, I called it way back at like Ep13! Freyja's burning up her lifespan every time she sings.. and now she's finally starting to experience accelerated aging as a result. The mecha parts of this were just a freaking joke... so short as to be barely worth mention, and mostly recycled footage. Yep... givin' this one a richly-deserved negative vote. Of late, it's been a lot easier to cheer on the Aerial Knights. At least they're competent.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Okay, rewatching this one before I start my slog into 24 and 25... It STILL bugs me that there's no obvious source for those searchlights on the Sv-262 CG model... I only hope they fix that in the Blu-Ray. The longer this series drags on, the more I loathe the 2nd OP for the lie that it is. It has much, MUCH more mecha in it than the show itself. 'course there's the problem of Arad saying that Windermere intercepted them with much greater force than expected... apparently forgetting that they were only intercepted by two or three Drakens. These are the worst tacticians in Macross history, bar none. In a way, I'm kind of bothered by Freyja being a Ranka fan since she's basically just a new version of Ranka that isn't a whiny useless doormat. (Hell, I'd go so far as to say Freyja's wasted on this series, and should have been in Frontier instead... whereas Makina and Reina are clearly just wasted screen time.) Wow, the railgun holes Bogue gouges in the landscape are bigger than I remember... some of the hits have to be six or seven feet across. O_o I love how it never occurs to Arad that 2/3 of their team, including the only two members of Walkure who are worth a damn, being captured is a problem or might reflect that their whole infiltration plan was a stupid idea. I have to admit, the only good part of this episode is the reveal of WHY Bogue is so goddamn butthurt about humanity... he lost family in the destruction of Carlyle. At least one of his sisters.
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