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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Sitting down to review this one now...
  2. Seto Kaiba
    All things considered, the Brisingr cluster seems to be the galactic boonies... as far from Earth and the New UN Government's most influential worlds as you can get while staying in the galaxy proper. Strategic Military Services seems to be a fairly influential and expensive outfit to hire, considering the apparent quality of their troops and the amount of money they're depicted throwing around in Macross Frontier and Macross the Ride. As such, I'd assume that SMS would be found mainly on worlds and in fleets that are relatively wealthy, well-established, and have strong corporate support and trade ties. Their presence very likely goes hand-in-hand with Bilra Transport controlling a fair amount of that fleet's or planet's interstellar shipping. Kaos's contract with the Brisingr Alliance suggests that it does a lot of its business out in the sticks, on relatively provincial worlds. Apart from the head office on Ragna, it seems to be extremely lightly armed. Just a very slight correction... the Uroboros SMS branch did have more personnel (not many), though the Gefion was basically left with just Aisha after her original test pilot ended up in the hospital due to a testing accident with the YF-30. The YF-30 development program had a lot more support, including that of the Uroboros factory satellite. (With the Hunter's Guild handling most of the nuisance work and the local NUNS handling the big stuff, SMS's presence could get away with being token.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    The official stats are, as the term would imply, official... and therefore tend to have the last word on the matter. So far, all we've seen from you on this is a circular set of unverifiable claims based on your particular interpretation of a scene, fan works, or toys. Oddly enough, the toy doesn't support your contention... as the scale Valkyries that come with it do in fact fit in the deck elevators and there's clearly quite a lot of space to work with. It's such a small docking port too... but then, space is awfully cold.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    It shall henceforth be known as Turret #2 for reasons that should be obvious. As indicated previously, the Battle-class has far more guns than merely those that are mounted externally on the upper hull. Also indicated previously was the fact that the number of gun turrets on the Macross Quarter-class varies from ship to ship. The third previously indicated point was that the existence of a macross cannon on both the Aether and Hemera is purely conjecture at this point. It should, I suppose, also be noted that the sheer number of guns is no guarantee of power either...and that as a PMC ship its weapons are likely less potent than the military's, given previous statements about the restriction of arms sales to emigrant fleets and non-governmental organizations. There's no indication anywhere in that scene that the Macross Elysion's macross cannon was firing at anything less than full strength. Surely it'd be a bit mental to NOT go all-in when your aim is to disable or even destroy an ancient Protoculture ship apparently many times more powerful than your own. Also, I don't believe I've ever seen an official source say that energy weapons of any type are less effective or required to operate at reduced power in atmosphere. I've only ever seen that in the Palladium Books RPG lines... which is one of their sillier NERF-ings. Use at range is kind of the point too... especially with the bigger implementations of the technology like the Battle-class's gunship or the Macross Cannon-class gunships which are essentially for destroying enemy fleets in one shot. It's only the small, comparatively low powered implementations that we see used at extremely short ranges. Arguably, the SMS Macross Quarter's first outing in the Macross Frontier series was a macross cannon shot from as close if not closer... the Knight-class Vajra ship it destroyed took a hit from its macross cannon at a range of only a few kilometers. As small as the Macross Elysion is, I would assume that it's probably not equipped with retractable guns... unless they're AA guns. (There do seem to be a pair of large slits with AA guns on the sides of the legs.) ... so you're citing a toy instead. At best that's a lateral move in terms of reliability.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Er... both SMS and Kaos are private (civilian) military contractors. As such, both are also technically private armies given that they're military forces that owe their allegiance to a corporation rather than a nation. Both are also [owned by / part of] interstellar conglomerates that started out in much more mundane fields... SMS's parent company is an interstellar shipping firm (Bilra Transport Co.), and Kaos's is an interstellar media corporation (name not known yet). The SMS force attached to the Macross Frontier fleet just seems to have been bigger and more professional than Kaos, a difference that's not altogether surprising considering the Macross Frontier fleet's SMS branch office had a clandestine purpose of being an elite force for an all-but-inevitable conflict with the Vajra and therefore needed the very best soldiers money could hire... while Kaos was essentially a bodyguard detail for Walkure and a supplemental security force for the military out in a sleepy little globular cluster where the occasional Var outbreak was the only real threat until recently.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Per Chronicle, the Macross Quarter can just barely fit the VB-6 into the taller aft hangar section normally used for battroid maintenance (this is also where they store the Queadluun-Rhea units). Even so, the available space is not wide enough to accommodate it without folding the wings.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Yes, they still exist. Like Kaos, the SMS office in the Macross Frontier series was just one branch of a corporation with locations on many different worlds and fleets. The branch office in the Macross Frontier fleet was temporarily drafted into the fleet's local New UN Spacy forces... but most of the staff legged it instead of complying, and may have regained their autonomy after the crisis was over. In the movies, we see reinforcements from SMS branches in other fleets, and the Macross 30 game's protagonists belong to SMS branches in other star systems (Leon is originally from the Sephira branch office, Aisha runs the branch office on Uroboros).
  8. Seto Kaiba
    So... a couple points here. I think you may be counting several of these turrets two or three times apiece. I've given it an eyes-on review and only found twenty-four turrets in total spread across the entire ship: fourteen on the main body, and a further ten split evenly between BASTER-L and BASTER-R. I'm not counting CIWS guns here. Just for the record, the "Quarter Cannon" is just another name for a super dimension energy cannon... there are a good dozen different variations on that theme these days, depending partly on who's using it, how the beam is aimed, how it's focused, etc. Given that a standard stealth cruiser has eleven beam cannon turrets and the Macross Quarter-class can have anywhere from ten to twenty-four, having fourteen beam gun turrets doesn't give the larger Macross Elysion much of an advantage... especially given that the ship's unusual shape of the ship builds some fairly significant blind spots in the coverage of those turrets. Also, as a side note, it's worth remembering that the Battle-class official specs give them not just the large turrets mounted on the upper hull... but also a large, indeterminate number of retractable beam cannon turrets scattered around the rest of the hull. The ones you mention are simply the heaviest guns it has, not the only ones. (These guns have been seen firing in official art, but not in animation that I can recall offhand.) That would be supposition, not a fact. It's probable, but it's not confirmed. Also, the Elysion's macross cannon doesn't seem to be particularly powerful... certainly much closer to the Macross Quarter's than the one on a Macross-class or Battle-class. We've gone over your claims about size and the unreliability of that dojinshi you cite several times, so we don't need to rehash that again.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Very much so, yes... the Macross Elysion seems like exactly the wrong kind of ship for a private military contractor headquartered out in the space boonies to be operating. Their whole operation doesn't make a ton of sense, but the Elysion seems like the worst possible combination of design features for what their day-to-day operations would be. The actual Macross Elysion itself is not particularly well-armed for a Macross, or even simply for a ship of its size. Her only actual armaments are a handful of converging energy cannon turrets mounted on the hull, and she doesn't seem to have an aircraft hangar or destroid complement of her own. Without the Aether and the Hemera she's essentially little more than an overcomplicated alternative to the New UN Spacy's stealth cruiser1, and the Aether and the Hemera don't seem to be particularly effective or capable carriers for their size either. Individually they seem to be somewhat smaller than a Guantanamo-class space stealth carrier, but combined the two are apparently carrying about half the capacity of a single Guantanamo-class or a Macross Quarter-class ship. On the whole, the Macross Elysion seems to be a much less effective warship than anything we've seen before... she's basically a less-capable Macross Quarter-class alternative at twice the size. As I noted before, what's weird in Macross Delta is that an area so densely populated by emigrant fleets seems to have had all of its Battle-class ships go walkabout. Each New Macross-class, Island Cluster-class, or whatever the Macross Galaxy was had AT LEAST one Battle-class supercarrier for its defense. They've been building variants of the Battle-class for decades, after all. It's less surprising that we haven't seen a lot of Macross Quarter-class ships, since in the Macross Frontier series that class was literally brand new and still in testing when the war with the Vajra began. (She still had that "new warship" smell, y'know?) It's supposed to be the standard for an emigrant world to have at least one transformable super-warship in orbit as the de facto flagship of the planetary defense fleet. That was still true at the end of Frontier, so we're left to wonder where all the ones in the Brisingr cluster went. The only ones that weren't supposed to have been produced in significant numbers were the old mass-produced Macross-class, because those were mostly for reconnaissance rather than for fleet defense. Certainly a fair theory, given that we've never actually seen the federal New UN Forces of the space emigration era before... the defense forces of the emigrant fleets are the local New UN Forces, which are more along the lines of national guard reservists or a state militia. Even in the Macross Frontier movie, the fleet that relieved the 55th Long-Distance Emigrant Fleet was made up of forces from other emigrant fleets. IIRC, there may be multiple Macross-13's... it being the code for a warship that doesn't officially exist. 1. The only time this class has been named is in a Circle FANKY dojinshi, which calls it the Osaka-class.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    The figure we're given is not length, it's the Macross Elysion's total height while in Storm Attacker mode... 828m, the same as the Burj Khalifa (which is the comparison made along with giving the figure). All things being proportional, that makes her roughly twice the size of the Macross Quarter, or around half the size of the bulkier Macross-class and about 1/3 the size of an initial-type Battle-class if you factor in the extra mass that came with the gunship.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    At most, it's maybe 600m long... the way the legs fold in its transformation cuts a good chunk out of its length. The Elysion's only 828m in storm attacker mode with the BASTER-L and BASTER-R included... the lower legs are almost exactly half the ship's total height, and the Aether and Hemera are significantly smaller than the legs. They're also much narrower in profile than the Guantanamo-class... so I'd say they are in all likelihood smaller than the Guantanamo-class in all respects. (That, in conjunction with the integration of a heavy quantum reaction cannon, would certainly explain why the Macross Elysion's fighter complement only seems to be about 1/2 of the officially-stated capacity of the Guantanamo-class.)
  12. Seto Kaiba
    All told, I think it's pretty evident that the city ship in question is a reuse of the Island-1 CG model from Macross Frontier and we just weren't supposed to notice. Elysion's only something like 400-500m long in cruiser mode, and the presentation of it in proximity to the dome suggests that the dome must be a good 3-4km long but only about 400-500m tall. Slightly smaller, but a lot flatter, than the typical city ship. EDIT: Confirmed, it's the Island-1 model... they didn't even remove the observation platform over the SMS Macross Quarter's dock from the top-down views.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    It was in 2010... February 11th, at some point prior to 1100 hours Macross standard time.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Honestly, the only person I've ever seen take issue with Michel and Klan's relationship is Michel himself... when he said that he couldn't date her because people would think he was doing something indecent.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Personally, I'm totally OK with everything except their proximity to an open ultra-high-voltage circuit... if that cable is carrying such high voltages that it can arc a distance of at least a dozen meters, it should've messed them up pretty bad. But that's a tiny realism nitpick in what I felt was otherwise an excellent episode.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Personally, I don't see how there couldn't be... city-ships like that only came with two classes that we know of: the New Macross-class and Island Cluster-class. Unless they retcon the established information, that kind of targeted colonization isn't done with long-range missions because it can take years to get from Point A to Point B by space fold even if the metaphorical pedal is to the metal. Logically, assuming Megaroad-04 was the first one to discover the Brisingr cluster held multiple inhabitable worlds, they would signal other large-scale long-distance emigrant fleets to converge on that area and explore it further. The Brisingr cluster is an area over 800 light years in diameter, a distance considered to be a long-range fold by even a modern 5th Generation emigrant ship. For the more primitive and less-efficient fold systems of a 1st Generation emigrant ship and its escorts (some of which may not have even had fold systems) spreading out to span an area that size would almost certainly be unsustainable and would put the newly established colony out of touch with its defense fleet for months if not years. The (New) UN Government has launched over 59 long-distance emigrant fleets... it'd be insane for a cluster that had more than twenty inhabitable planets to be controlled by a single emigrant fleet of less than 100,000 and progressively settled by small ships when you have millions of people ready and waiting to settle on planets like that. (The Brisingr cluster has a population of over eight billion... you can bet a good chunk of that is humans.) The most logical explanation, given the evidence, is that the city ship that was formerly part of Barette City is one of the smaller shell-less dome ships seen in the establishing shot of Macross-1's launch back in Macross 7.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    CG model reuse is pretty blatant in this series, but that can generally be overlooked. It's highly probable that this is meant to be the same class as seen in Macross 7, but simply looks different due to CG model reuse. If she hasn't flown in over thirty years, then it's pretty much a slam dunk that it's intended to be one of the earliest of the 3rd Generation emigrant ships... the City-type New Macross-class. Unless they're rewriting emigrant fleet history (again), this would have to be a New Macross-class ship because that was the first class to have the dome structure and it had only been around for a few years at the latest point which this ship could/should have launched. As the Ragna island ship has no shell, and we know Macross-5 had one and the whereabouts of Macross-3 and Macross-4, that leaves Macross-1 or Macross-2. It's possible it was one of the smaller domeships seen in the Macross-1 fleet, and the primary ship settled elsewhere. As evidenced by Macross-5, it's not unheard-of for an emigrant fleet with multiple city ships to apparently possess multiple Battle-class carriers. There should be several Battle-class ships spread out through the Brisingr cluster as a result of being colonized by one or more of the twenty-one inhabited planets in the cluster. Oddly, they're conspicuous by their absence... which is very odd, because they were meant to be a command ship for the colony's defense fleet. They had ships of every other class present, and yet they make no effort or mention of any other ship attempting (or being able to) dock with the city ship. I would expect that the ship was probably only meant to house (and probably still housed) the human population of Ragna... and that it wasn't really intended to evacuate the locals as well.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    You've got the spirit of it, at least. There's some deviations from the letter of the thing. Yeah, optical character recognition doesn't work particularly well on kanji most of the time. Katakana and hiragana scan just fine, but something about kanji has foxed even my own efforts at designing an OCR transcriber. Back in graduate school I tried to adapt some OCR software I'd written for an intelligent systems class from facial recognition to transcribing Japanese text but it would absolutely choke on any kanji with more than about six radicals. As far as the accuracy of the text you're translating, only that first paragraph is based on official material. The rest is fan-invented, but surprisingly plausible-sounding.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    All righty! Sitting down to watch the new one now... got AC back, so we can do this from the glorious comfort of our home theater instead of cramming into a conference suite.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    They're my favorite kind. Your initial assumption was correct... that dojinshi's "Kaga-class stealth space carrier" is indeed a fan-made design. A wicked cool fan-made design that would be a legit monster as carriers go in the main Macross universe, but a fan-made design nonetheless. Whoever told you that on /m/ was way out in left field... dunno what they were thinking. They've actually posited a doubly-impossible premise there. You see, the Daedalus II-class space assault carrier is the only new UN Spacy warship design to appear in Masaya's Macross 2036 and Macross: Eternal Love Song. If the Kaga-class HAD appeared in those games, then it wouldn't be able to have any relation whatsoever to the Guantanamo-class or Uraga-class... because those two games belong to a different Macross universe altogether. Specifically, both Macross 2036 and Macross: Eternal Love Song belong to the same parallel world continuity as the Macross II: Lovers Again OVA. They were made as prequels to bridge the gap between DYRL? and Flashback 2012's version of the First Space War and Macross II's Mardook war.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    That's my favorite kind of question. You wouldn't believe some of the stuff I've found entirely by accident while looking for answers to the tough questions. Last time, I went looking for a factoid on the ARMD-class and ended up finding a probable engine output for the QF-3000E and VF-0+. I'm not sure what the benefit of the first inlet connecting the low pressure and high pressure air streams is, except maybe that it's close enough to the engine's compact thermonuclear reactor and the two stages of the engine's generator system to be more effectively heated than it would if it were simply mixing with the exhaust stream after the turbine stage. From the look of the FF-3001A diagram, even the low pressure air stream from the bypass is heated pretty damn effectively when the engine is running at above about 80% power. (It would've been REALLY interesting if they'd given us a better look at the diverter system for that vernier ring used on the VF-14, VF-17, VF-19 2nd production type, etc., since that pulls from the exhaust stream just ahead of the nozzle to provide a combination of vernier and thrust reverser function.) On a lark, I went looking in another book and found another, less conventional example of bypass airflow for a VF's engines. I'd forgotten about Variable Fighter Master File: VF-22 Sturmvogel II's diagram of the VF-22's FF-2450B thermonuclear reaction burst turbine engines, where there's a special bypass between the precompressor and the body of the engine that's used to provide downward thrust for hovering while operating in GERWALK mode in atmosphere. (The "nozzle" for that system is the set of horizontal vanes on the underside of the engine compartment in GERWALK mode.) I don't currently have a working scanner, so I'll see if I can make Office Lens produce acceptable results on my tablet. Yep... 2.14 meters. That doesn't count the ducting or the precompressor, but that is one tiny engine... but when you consider the amount of heat energy being released by a hydrogen fusion reaction, it's not hard to see how it can produce such incredible amounts of thrust without being very large. Jet fuel's burn temperature peaks at what, about 2,200 celsius? Hydrogen fusion's around 13 million.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Really, I got nothin'... info on the YF-30's pretty sparse. If there are sub-engines there, I would assume they sit in the two black V-shapes on the trailing edge of the wing... and are probably either totally separate from the main engines or are maybe using intake air from the BLCS sub-intakes above the detached-in-GERWALK-mode main intakes. They'd have to be capable of independent operation though, since the YF-30 is as space-capable as any other variable fighter.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Actually, that's a really good question... I had to do a fair bit of digging to find an answer. Most of the diagrams I'm familiar with for thermonuclear reaction engine technology outright ignore the subject of bypass ratios... but after some research, I found two that do not. The diagram of the FF-2001 which appears in the Sky Angels tech manual on page 40 and the diagram of the FF-3001A Stage II thermonuclear reaction turbine engine used on the VF-25 Messiah on pages 58 and 59 of Variable Fighter Master File: VF-25 Messiah show thermonuclear reaction engines as a low-bypass turbofan-style jet engine (with the obvious substitution of a compact thermonuclear reactor for a burner stage). In both cases, the body of the engine shows a few sets of sub-intakes where air from the low-pressure bypass air can be drawn into the high pressure areas of the turbine and further heated by exposure to the hot exhaust stream. The FF-3001A diagram shows two sets... one in burner stage ahead of the turbine and one in the afterburner stage. It looks like, instead of injecting more "fuel" into the exhaust stream, a reaction engine's afterburner works by injecting more air into the exhaust stream to mix with the already-hot mixture of hot exhaust and plasma. On the VF-25 engine diagram, it does look like the bypass air is picking up a good amount of heat as it passes over the engine, regardless of whether or not it's then introduced into the high-pressure stream... so it does appear to be cooling the engine somewhat. Yeah, normally the main body of the engine is in the "shin" of the VF's leg... while the hip area contains a precompressor driven by a superconducting motor which is connected to the rest of the engine via a flexible duct that runs inside the VF's knee. The bypass doesn't seem to come into play until you're past the precompressor and into the fan at the leading edge of the turbine engine itself in the lower leg. I would assume that arrangement hasn't changed in later VFs. The diagram of the FF-2001 engine used by the VF-1 in the Sky Angels book gives the total length of the actual engine (which resides entirely in the lower leg) as just 2.14 meters (just a hair over 7 feet) with a mass of just 1,580kg.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Yes, I remember Major Ogotai from the Macross Frontier series. It's worth noting that the DYRL? version of the Zentradi (and Meltrandi) didn't use cybernetic enhancements purely to repair wounds. Many types of Zentran and Meltran soldier were equipped with bio-technological enhancements as a matter of standard... I don't want to say equipment, maybe their "standard physical template"? In fact, the only Zentradi commander I know of who received a cybernetic faceplate/eye to repair a wound was the alternate reality version of Quamzin/Kamujin from the Macross II: Lovers Again timeline.1 Many of the commanders we see have an eyepiece as standard, and it's mentioned in Chronicle that pilots on either side have central nervous system modifications to connect them to their mecha. The Meltrandi have been engineered to have a bio-fiber optic central nervous system and connect to their Queadluun-Rau battle suits via an implant in the optic nerve, while the Zentradi have a hard-plug system that links their central nervous system to the Nousjadeul-Ger. The Macross Frontier movie v1 blu-rays had English subs. I don't know if the v2's that came out recently do. Macross Plus's initial blu-ray release even had the English dub on it. 1. The DYRL? version of Quamzin (Quamzin 03350) comes down with a bit of "comic book death" in Macross II's parallel world continuity. Even though he "dies" in the movie fighting Roy, even having a GU-11's magazine emptied into his back and then having a VF-1 blow up in his face couldn't keep him down. Somewhere along the way, his fellows are able to resuscitate him and repair his wounds such that he's still very much alive after the war ends. He eventually flees into space with other Zentradi and Meltrandi malcontents rather than live on Earth, and becomes the chief villain in both canon video games that were made to connect DYRL? to the rest of Macross II's timeline. He comes back at the head of a second Zentradi Army main fleet in 2036, intending to destroy Earth, and in 2037 with a third one attempting to use Earth's culture as a weapon against the Meltrandi. He's defeated the first time by UN Spacy forces under Vrlitwhai 7018 (including Komilia Maria Jenius and her wingman Lott Sheen) and the second time he's technically successful in that the UN Spacy destroys the Meltrandi fleet for him... before rounding on him and kicking his butt too.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, that's true... though it's worth remembering the Zentradi didn't get involved in using cybernetics until DYRL?. In DYRL?, the implant he has seems to be part of the basic design for the commander class Zentradi. In the TV series, the production art shows a damaged, apparently useless eye under what is essentially an outlandish eyepatch. If it IS a genetic defect, it may be something that resulted from 500,000 years of neglect and automated self-repair on the factory satellite responsible for cloning him. I can't see a way it could be a battle injury since he didn't rise through the ranks... he was cloned to be a fleet commander and would've therefore spent his entire service life on the bridge of a ship.
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