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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Just puttin' this out there, but the VF-1 Valkyrie's transformation time was approximately 1 second even in the original series (per listed spec.)... and the actuators involved have probably been upgraded several times with modern technology over the fifty or so years the design's been kicking around.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Isn't that just Big Bang Theory with musician jokes and Basara playing the role of Sheldon? Well, yes and no... we know that he continued to bum around the galaxy until at least 2060, when he recorded his tracks for Re:Fire! and sent them to the rest of the band via the Galaxy Network. So he didn't really disappear, he just chose to stay out of the spotlight. Very few of Macross's protagonists have out-and-out vanished... but there does seem to be a laudable tradition of having them get out of the way once their stories have reached a natural conclusion so they aren't bumming around the periphery distracting people from the main cast of the next series. If you don't push characters whose relevance expired with the previous series offstage when you're developing a new story, you end up with a shameful mess like the Star Wars expanded universe, revolving forever around the same handful of holdovers with progressively weaker excuses to make them the center of events.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Let's just hope the dojinshi artists didn't see you write that... I'm trying to decide if this is a euphemism or not... But either way that got a chuckle out of me.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    True, though I guess that's all down to how "main" one considers it... Aye... Percival was not a sword himself, he was a knight. (Whether his mother was a hamster and his father smelt of elderberries is up for debate, though.) Kind of a "one of these things is not like the other" situation, considering the VF-9, VF-19, and YF-29 were Cutlass, Excalibur/Caliburn/Nothung, and Durandal respectively... those being a normal sword, variously the legendary magical swords of King Arthur (twice) and Sigurd (on whom King Arthur is based), and the holy/magical sword of Charlemagne's paladin Roland. (Serial escalation? What will the VF-39 be if we're already basically up to 11?) Possibly... it wouldn't be the first time. The main gun on the retrofit Macross-class in Macross II: Lovers Again was partially built into the ARMDs that formed its arms... though was apparently so powerful that it damaged the ships considerably just by firing.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    She's saving the live rounds for the first date. That's living dangerously... who wants to be on the receiving end of a hacked-off Zentradi roughly the size and mass of four brick sh*thouses stacked together?
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Yes, he's been transported through time like everyone else... it's Basara circa 2046-7, though unlike the rest of the cast he seems to care not at all about his predicament. Nope, he's flying the Fire Valkyrie... Basara lost possession of that in 2047. The ship in the top left of the dojinshi's front cover is a fan-made design called the Kaga-class, which is sort of jumbo version of the animation's Guantanamo-class with twelve catapults instead of eight and a Uraga-style bridge tower. The art on the cover is drawn to a consistent scale, so you can see how big it's supposed to be vs. the Guantanamo-class. That dojinshi series has some interesting material, some of it mined from incredibly obscure sources, and a hearty helping of fan-made material. The Kaga-class is one of several fan-made designs in that volume, the others being mainly Northampton-class or Stealth Cruiser variants beyond the ones described in official material (like a carrier variant of the early Northampton-class, or a Stealth Cruiser with a keel-mounted quantum reaction cannon ala the Macross Quarter). I've found it to be a fantastic resource for fleshing out stats sheets for Macross RPGs, but as a reference work it has little value...
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Um... the first one was 24 years ago, mate. Delta would be the third, if it happens.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Not everyone... Messer seems to think that Hayate's a reprehensible bellend, and Mirage seems to think he's a bit touched in the head too.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Not really "new", but new to the website at least... for those who want this in print, it's also in the last issue of Great Mechanics G and the Macross Modelers pamphlet.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    She's not the only one... one of the waitresses at Ragunyan-nyan is clearly carrying a torch for him as well. (She's even shown watching him from behind one of the columns inside the restaurant in the OP. I wonder if, since it's owned by Chuck's family, that would make her his sister or something? Maybe Messer's not going for that because he respects the bro code?)
  11. Seto Kaiba
    It's not clear how much time actually passes in that training sequence, but we actually see Hayate attempt those exact same maneuvers early in the episode and the training AI keeps trying to stop him and force his aircraft back to level. Pretty sure Messer has taken it upon himself to ensure that Hayate either knuckles down or gets the hell out.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    All three modes.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    It's not just you. That evil smile of hers when she starts trolling Hayate from the comfort of her cockpit is adorable.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    ... with the smell of his lunch, anyway. You realize the implications of that, right? If Arad or Messer can't bring the bloody thing to heel, it may have a legitimate claim to being the show's top ace. EDIT: If the cat's name isn't Pugachev, I'm going to be sorely put out. EDIT 2: Or should it be Purrgachev?
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Point of order... what Hayate turned off was a training support/safety AI that was apparently built into the VF-1EX to prevent trainee pilots from crashing. The displays actually refer to it as a "Snap Guide Support" system, and it seems (entertainingly) to work much like the auto-level function in Ace Combat... overriding pilot input and pushing the aircraft back to level flight at a safe altitude if the trainee messes up and causes a stall or something else life-threatening. Had Hayate turned off the airframe control AI (presumably the same Brunhilde/ARIEL II system used by the YF-30?) then he would have crashed for sure because he would've cut off the entire control system and turned the plane into a brick. I'm actually vaguely annoyed by it, since the VF-31A is IMO far and away the better looking of the two VF-31 versions. It's always been a funny little in-joke that the -9 VFs have sword names and forward-swept wings... the sole exception being Rod's YF-29B Percival. VF-1EX apparently. VF-X was the designation of the first VF-1 prototype. Macross Pachinko Fever had some CG VF-1's animated in it, but this is the first time a proper series has done it.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    It's a cat, mate... cats are a-holes.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    The Chaos staff seem to think that Hayate has significant natural talent, and Arad's mission seems to be to round off the rough edges and beat the insubordinate attitude out of him through some intense training. Messer and Mirage seem to be his chosen instruments for said beating, though they seem to have somewhat underestimated the power of his intent to slack off on things he's not interested in. Part of it you could say is a calculated attempt to snare him by his passion for flight and use that to keep his nose to the grindstone. (To be fair, Hayate's attitude on the Elysion's deck would've disqualified him as a soldier... but Chaos isn't a military, and only dubiously a PMC. The organization spends most of its time shepherding civilians anyway, so they probably have a bit more patience than most.)
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Ok... my thoughts, recorded stream-of-consciousness style as I watch this episode:
  19. Seto Kaiba
    I admit I'm rather enthusiastic for more of Mirage myself... (Though are we not counting Sylvie Gena or Mahara Fabrio either?)
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, the VF-11D is the two-seater version... though it's worth noting that we've never seen an unmodified one. The VF-11D units seen in Macross 7 as part of the Jamming Birds tactical sound unit's equipment were customized for increased performance and for spiritia warfare, and the one in Macross the Ride was similarly but less severely customized to help it keep up with the air racers it was filming. Similarly, we've never seen an unmodified VF-11MAXL. Mylene's was heavily customized for Sound Force use, though the VF-11MAXL is a very rare, made-to-order unit built in vanishingly small numbers for ace pilots.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Thus far? We've seen five variants of the VF-11... the VF-11A, -B, -C, -D, and -MAXL, and various customizations thereof. The two most common variants are the VF-11B and VF-11C, the former being the variant that Isamu flew in Macross Plus and the latter being the cannon fodder fighter for the Macross 7 series that occasionally equipped the Protect Armor pack. The Macross Plus OVA/movie also showed some unmanned VF-11A units that had been converted into target drones for testing the Ghost X-9 (painted in high visibility orange).
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Seems like a safe bet that planet Ragna's natives are yet another humanoid species engineered by the Protoculture the same way Humanity was...
  23. Seto Kaiba
    The 991? I'm not sure you could say they're cheating their way out of the consequences... from the initial 911, they redesigned the vehicle several times and made modifications to the torque path calibrations in an effort to minimize the problem. In that sense, you could say it's more like what Shinsei Industry did when they put out the 2nd mass production type VF-19 with the redesigned airframe and reworked the control software to improve handling stability. The VF-31 is kind of like the 991 in the sense that, by the time it came out the problem had essentially been licked and further developments were focused on improving the agility and performance of the larger, more stable design instead. (Again, Porsche's not my forte... feel like I'm flailing around a bit with this comparison.)
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Sort of... well, I suppose you could say that's true of both Shinsei's VF-19 and General Galaxy's VF-22. They were their respective companies' unstable superstar designs that combined a bank-breaking price tag with skittish, overly-sensitive handling and monumental acceleration. (My brain keeps trying to go to Maserati or Viper in comparison to performance auto, but that's my day job talking...) I'm not sure there's a good comparison for the VF-31's FSW versions, since those (and, really, all 5th Generation Valkyries) are preserving that extremely agile, sensitive handling and merely cheating their way out of the consequences with inertial compensation.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    The Macross Frontier series itself glosses over the details of Mihoshi Academy's pilot training program, but the novelization of same indicates that the academy's pilots do conduct practical training using civilian market model VF-1 Valkyries. By that point, the VF-1's price through military disposal sales or direct sale to civilians had long since come down to the point where a civilian without a major corporate sponsor could potentially afford one. Considering that Shinsei's VF-19 was so expensive that even the military balked at the prospect of buying them in numbers, I doubt that even a wealthy vocational school could afford to train students with something like that. In 2058, private citizens were only just getting the opportunity to buy the VF-11 through military disposal sales (as Chelsea Scarlett did at the end of Macross the Ride, but she had to buy three to get enough parts to build one working VF-11). There was already a good deal of commonality thanks to the standardization of controls starting with the VF-4 and back-ported into the VF-1 via the Block 6 and later upgrades. EX-Gear was meant to improve the intuitive-ness and ease of variable fighter controls via a learning computer, electromyographic sensors, and force-feedback to produce the feel of "wearing" a variable fighter. More than that, the basic controls for Valkyries and other mecha has been semi-standardized for over half a century by 2067, so an operator with experience on something as simple as a Workroid or civilian-market Valkyrie could potentially apply that experience to operating something much newer without making a complete arse of themselves. A view pretty much explicitly confirmed in official sources... the difficult handling of the VF-19 was one of the chief factors in it being passed over for adoption as next main fighter. Too many smash-ups and losses of control in training. (Not helped by the price tag and tightened restrictions on arms exports to the emigrant fleets...) Almost twenty years later they're STILL tweaking the design in the hopes of making it something average pilots can handle.
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