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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    It's legit... part of her Glossary entry in Macross Chronicle. See Glossary Sheet 24.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Well, that depends on the nature of the upgrade... if upgrading an existing design results in increased maintenance downtime and cost as a result of pushing an older design past its limits or including new capabilities it wasn't designed to support, it could end up more expensive to maintain the fleet of older aircraft than to replace them with a newer design that requires less maintenance. Pretty much, yeah... the same basic arrangement as most other tandem cockpit Valkyries. My point is that there really isn't a way to achieve that result without effectively destroying the colony... which takes the "long term" portion out of the equation. This isn't a single-point-of-failure system. An emigrant fleet is one or more emigrant ships and a military escort detail with anywhere from dozens to hundreds of fold-capable warships. Each and every one of those fold-capable ships has at least one fold communications system. So your typical planet on the frontier could have anywhere from 70 to 500 ships chilling out in orbit... assuming they don't also have a factory satellite or two kicking around the Lagrange points the way several are known to. To lose contact with the greater galaxy, you'd need all of those fold communications systems to fail simultaneously... dozens, or hundreds, at once. Even if there's a fold fault or something that's interfering, you just send a ship back to drop relay satellites like we see in Frontier... or just send a ship or two out as messengers requesting assistance the way Macross Galaxy did. Anti-government groups haven't exactly gone away in the aftermath of the government reorganizing (in which many of them got exactly what they were after), but in the 2050s they seem to be less of an issue... and as many of them seem to be content with using existing hardware. A custom Super Pack, yeah... because the Thunder Focus is equipped with a pair of stock VF-11 Thunderbolt engines (FF-2025G), and almost every racer has twice that or better in engine output. Difficult to say, but my suspicion would be "probably not"... at least, not for more than a couple minutes. FAST packs aren't really meant for continuous burn... they've only got enough fuel to yield maximum thrust for a couple minutes. I believe the VF-11's are rated for 5 minutes at full power. The capacitors that drive the VF-25's Armored and Paladin pack equipment might work short-term. We don't know anything about their endurance, but if they're anything like the ones in the VF-11's Armored Pack, then their endurance without being recharged in flight by the fighter's engines would probably be pretty short.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    In a VERY limited fashion, yes... the VF-11D Custom's only real AVF-tier modifications were the installation of the same verniers the VF-19 uses, and a pinpoint barrier system. Otherwise, the modifications were relatively minor... like enlarged canards and uptuned (11%) versions of the VF-11's regular engines. Normally, AVF level technology only finds its way into 3rd Generation or older VF's on a one-off basis. Personally, I don't think that scenario is at all likely... even fold faults can't completely obstruct communications between fleets, and with the galaxy network playing a significant part in inter-fleet and inter-world commerce (cultural exports and so on), the complete loss of communication is likely to raise some eyebrows sooner rather than later and prompt an investigation. Every ship with a fold system has fold communications capability... so losing ALL long-range communication would generally mean you've misplaced the entire fleet (and therefore they're probably dead) or some malicious third party is interfering (which is likely to end with either losing the fleet or the enemy losing theirs, which likewise isn't likely to last all that long). Developing a new fighter takes a significant input of capital and an awful lot of time... there are a few cases where anti-government groups or criminals have obtained AVF-level craft, but they don't seem to go in for modification. Obtaining the UN Forces' fighters through illegitimate channels seems to be easier by far (e.g. the poachers in Macross Dynamite 7, who were able to obtain VF-17 Nightmares and reaction weaponry through intermediaries). On the rare occasion where they've had original mecha, they've had help from crooked defense contractors... but developing all-new craft seems to be easier.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, one lot of 20 craft... a special run for the Jamming Birds unit the Macross 7 fleet garrison established. That's because they didn't change a hell of a lot about them... most of the alterations, barring the engine change, had little or no effect on performance. That's... not really ambiguous. That's explicitly confirmed by the very first sentence of Macross Chronicle's description of the YF-29. Possibly... though that only really seems to have become a factor in the 2050s and on, after the core (New) Unified Forces stopped sharing the latest toys in an unaltered form. It's probably more likely to occur in fleets or emigrant planets that are more distant from Earth... like Frontier and Galaxy, which were basically a galactic radius away from home. On that level, the fleets that had a population of ~1 million of less seem to have favored breaking out support functions into other ships like those seen in Macross 7. It seems like, as time went on, more and more of those functions were incorporated into the central colony ship itself as the ships and their populations got larger. So, for this very specific purpose, I guess you could say that a "small" fleet is maybe 1 million or fewer emigrants and ~200 ships... while a "large" fleet is multiple millions of emigrants (like Frontier's 10 million) and more ships. Well, the SDF-1's situation was unique in that it wasn't really launched for exploration or emigration (in practice). It had to make do with the modest factory it had aboard. I would assume that the Macross-class SDFN's would have a more advanced and robust factory in response to the needs of operating further from Earth, advances in technology, and having less than 1/5th the number of people aboard.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Well, brace for a merge into the Newbie and Short Questions thread... Dunno! The most honest answer is "When (or if) Kawamori decides that the YF-29 should show up as a production aircraft in a future Macross title". As of 2060, it's still a YF. The YF-29B Percival is described as "a state-of-the-art aircraft which improves upon the YF-29 Durandal" in Macross Chronicle. It's said to be issued to Havamal ace pilots, which means it's probably technically in limited (but entirely off-the-books) production... so may fall under the same situation as the VF-27 technically did in Macross Frontier. (In which the Macross Galaxy fleet never disclosed the VF-27 plans to the New UN Gov't, so it's classified YF-27 by them.)
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Officially, the answer is "No"... in the 2050's. The UN Government doesn't seem to have been particularly troubled by emigrant fleets having the same level of military hardware as the core UN Forces until emigrant discontent with the government took a sharp uptick in the late 2040's and early 2050's, which culminated in some armed conflicts between the UN Forces and anti-government rebels equipped with AVF-level fighters. Beyond that point, we start to see a proliferation of "monkey model" specs and the UN Forces withholding details of newly developed tech from the emigrant fleets... leading to the VF-19EF, VF-19C/MG21, VF-25, VF-27, etc. As far as we know, yeah... though the modifications were almost entirely spiritia warfare-related. In other respects, the Jamming Birds were using mostly stock VF-11D's. Those, like the other Sound Force birds, were limited production aircraft too... practically one-offs built for special duty. Pretty much, yes... though it's worth noting that that appellation is actually used even for fighters that were (almost) entirely developed in the emigrant fleets... not just for locally produced monkey models or customized variants like the VF-19EF or VF-19C/MG21. In most cases, there's some kind of design firm or defense contractor with an office aboard the emigrant fleet or on the emigrant planet that handles the actual design and production. Macross Frontier had a local Shinsei office and LAI collaborating on design work for the VF-25 alongside the fleet arsenal. Macross Galaxy was already a subsidiary of General Galaxy. Not sure who was administrating the Macross-7 fleet's Three Star factory ship. The smaller emigrant fleets have separate factory ships like the Three Star-type, which are more or less a one-stop shop for the fabrication of anything from daily basic commodities to variable fighters and starships. They're basically agglomerations of both refineries and factories strapped haphazardly to a large central reaction furnace. If there's a need, odds are they've got at least one area to fill it. Larger emigrant ships apparently internalize their factories and so on, within the sublevels of the ship.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Yep... heat from the thermonuclear reaction's plasma stream is used to provide propulsive force, replacing combustion for heating intake air. As Master File has it, the VF-1's engines can also be run as ramjets at high altitude, increasing the service ceiling before they need to cut over to pure space-based propulsion modes. 's more of an "Edge of space" thing... getting over 100km is possible with internal fuel, but if you want satellite orbit, you'd better be prepared to bring a booster. All told, there WERE supposedly limiters installed in the YF-19 and YF-21... it's just that, even with them preventing the pilots from pushing the airframe to the point where the g-forces could kill or incapacitate the pilot, it was still perfectly possible for the pilots to push the airframe to the point where they themselves could lose control of the plane and then crash from a loss of control on their part. Possibly... though he was probably operating with full knowledge that the updated controls would be swiftly adopted by the majority of VF-1 production blocks. Allegedly, many of the fold accidents had to do with mis-calculating the power requirements for a fold (and getting stuck in fold space as a result) or running into impassible fold faults.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Nobody'd buy that... it's several thousand pages of largely illegible handwriting. It's GERWALK without the arms deployed... it's not really used any differently from regular GERWALK mode. (Which doesn't really preclude its impromptu use as a jet with extreme thrust-vectoring, as seen on more than one occasion.)
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Admittedly, it was probably a lot easier to ID an enemy pilot based on their style or a particular paintjob when there were only a few dozen operational, combat-worthy VF's in the entire world, and only a handful of people truly proficient in their use. The task of identifying an enemy pilot by his style or paint would be a lot harder when there are thousands or tens of thousands of virtually-identical fighters kicking around.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    *Coughs* Survey says "Yes, it totally does". Unlikely... if anything, the reverse was probably true. The YF/VF-19 program's difficulties are generally attributed to the prototype's excessively high performance, and particularly the g-loads pilots were subjected to as the result of its exceptional maneuverability... the issue was that the airframe was hard to control because it was programmed perhaps a little too well, requiring special training to handle an aircraft that was much more responsive than any previous design. I've read a couple different explanations for that one... the one that made the most sense being that, at the time the VF-0's had been retired before being pushed into service due to delays in VF-1 mass production, they had been evaluating refinements meant for the VF-1's later production blocks and successors. (Probably wasn't so much a case of "train like you fight" so much as "Our enemy has a combat-worthy VF in the air, get a transformable fighter combat-worthy YESTERDAY".) What you're thinking of here is the VF-25+EX-Gear, where the EX-Gear's learning computer learns the habits of its user and uses that data to improve control response. The VF-0 is also described as having a learning computer, but it's only really mentioned in connection with the Ghost Booster... due to the complexity of the aerodynamics involved, the learning computer had to sort out the handling on its own in actual flight due to gaps in the simulated data it was "Trained" with.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Robins don't normally whip through the air at hundreds of kilometers an hour though... (it'd be freaking scary if they did, the birds in my yard keep getting blitzed on fermenting berries and dive-bombing each other). Camera systems in Macross are undeniably very VERY good, but I don't think they're quite THAT good... to pick a single enemy out of a crowd and mark it as the commander based solely on visual cues. An identifying mark one can eyeball if you get sufficiently close for a long enough time... from the dialog in Zero it sounds more like D.D. recognized Roy from his distinctive flying style as much, if not more than, his paintjob. (On the other hand, Roy seems to spot D.D. because of his distinctive all-black paintjob and fanged skull-and-crossed-swords... so it could go both ways.) ... okay, you absolutely have me there. Most of the main character dogfights certainly occur at ranges close enough for the pilots to exchange profane hand gestures. The same appears to be true for elite units later on too... where everyone's pretty much painted the same. If Master File was anything to go by (and it may or may not be!), units where the aces engage in "combat peacocking" are the exception rather than the rule... Well, that may actually be a definite Red Baron-type situation... in the series, Milia was renowned even among the male portions of Boddole Zer's gender-segregated fleet for her amazing combat prowess. Macross 7's unaired episode, "Fleet of the Strongest Women" seems to affirm that that she was notorious among other fleets as well... and that she wasn't the only notorious ace the women had either (Chlore). The Macross II prequel games ran with this too... with the Leplendis fleet in 2037 also having its own notorious top ace who went out of her way to paint her machine differently from everyone else.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    A good memory for detail, and notes... pages and pages and pages of notes. Seriously, it's like an open-notes college exam over here. The screencap? That's not from the Macross Frontier series. It's one of the early scenes in the second movie. Talos screencap'd it for me ages ago, and until this thread it was collecting digital dust in my Skype received files folder.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Hence the first point in my last post.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Well, that rather depends on whether the fighters with single-axis thrust vectoring are truly single-axis or whether, like the picture above, they've actually got some range of motion in another axis. (I think it's likely that many do.) The SV-51, SV-52, YF-21, VF-22, and YF/VF-27 all use X-31-style multi-axis/three-dimensional arrangements of three thrust-vectoring paddles. The YF/VF-27 and YF-29 also use axisymmetric three-dimensional vectoring nozzles for their outboard engines. Most of the others use pitch-axis thrust vectoring nozzles, though the VF-17/VF-171 have yaw-axis thrust vectoring nozzles instead.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Bingo... especially if, as in the VF-171's case, the single-axis thrust vectoring is actually multi-axis via the present of multiple, stacked sets of nozzles as in this instance.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Unlikely, IMO... as just about every VF which has had detailed coverage has ailerons and either a V-tail or X-tail configuration in which the stabilizers function as ruddervators. (The VF-22 is the only notable exception, being that its wing is essentially one colossal variable cant, variable camber control surface.) The only ones that don't appear to have flaps and ailerons are the VF-5000, VF-9, VF-17, VF-22*, Fz-109F, and VB-6... and in many of those cases, it may be because the line art is at a relatively low detail level and doesn't show any control surfaces. The VF-17 likely has the same control surface arrangement as the VF-171 (which did have ailerons), the Fz-109 likely has the same as the VF-14 (same story), the VF-22 has independently mobile sections of wing that roughly correspond to both but are not distinct from the entire mechanism of the wing, etc. EDIT: The VF-2JA from Macross II: Lovers Again definitely doesn't have ailerons, but its configuration is roughly analogous to the F-14's, being that it has six stabilizers... four vertical/canted, and two horizontal/taileron.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Well, they still carry liquid oxygen because the verniers and other onboard rocket motors (if any) also draw on the hydrogen tanks... but yes, hydrogen-hydrogen fusion moderated/catalyzed by gravity is based on something very concrete. It's also one of several candidates for aneutronic fusion for power generation.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    I'll see about accommodating that after I get home. HLJ has it for about $22 (USD), not counting shipping.
  19. Seto Kaiba

    Just one Macross Blu-Ray left to go, then I'll have them all!

  20. Seto Kaiba
    Some folks like to get directly to the important bits, and cut out the bits that aren't directly relevant to their response and dozens of image uploads... makes it easier to read, y'know? Based on Master File and the scenes of the YF-21's paint burning off in Plus, to be a sort of medium grey color... either a warm grey (6% yellow) or a cool grey (6% blue), that seems to vary scene-to-scene and image-to-image. It's highly probable that there is no one uniform color or shade in which energy conversion armor is found in its unpainted form, since that would vary based on the composite materials used in the armor's construction. But they had to get to impractically close quarters to recognize each other... and even then, Roy's paintjob only stood out because the VF-0's in question were from an evaluation unit that didn't have any kind of uniform heraldry at the time. Things got more uniform with the VF-1 (circa DYRL) and on later VFs, where there might only be a colored stripe to distinguish one pilot's machine from another... and often not even that much. After that, completely individualized paint schemes seem to be the domain of the irregulars (e.g. Sound Force) and mercenaries (SMS).
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Yep... two dead, and two giving the health plan a whirl. Fortunately, Episode Archive is about one of the luckier ones. ... okay, so I'm not the only one who noticed that her "tracts of land" were drawn much bigger in this. Good to know I'm not (completely) crazy.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    The easiest way would be to use a player like VLC to play back the discs, and run a separate subtitle file in the player at the same time.
  23. Seto Kaiba

    Finally updating my Macross DVD collection to blu-ray!

  24. Seto Kaiba
    More of a Hall-effect magnetohydrodynamic thruster, but yes... We got a few real-world examples as I indicated via that link... but, yes, sort of. To be precise, it's a sort of a hybrid of fusion rocket and magnetohydrodynamic plasma ion thruster system... which will seem uncannily familiar if you're at all familiar with the technology of Star Trek, because impulse engines work on the same basic principles. The plasma stream produced by the engine's reaction power system powers (and is further accelerated by) the MHD plasma ion thruster near the rear of the engine. More or less, yeah... the diagrams in Sky Angels and Variable Fighter Master File show cutaways of thermonuclear reaction engines that look like variations on a low-bypass turbofan jet engine, just with the thermonuclear reaction power system situated directly behind (or partly overlapping with) the high-pressure stage of the compressor, so that plasma is bled directly into what would be the combustion chamber. Later engine designs show the "combustion" stage as having a few concentric "rings" of heat-exchange surface area. The MHD system is usually situated in or near the tail end of the turbine shaft. By all accounts, the preferred fuel is hydrogen slush for a hydrogen-hydrogen reaction... one of the benefits of the thermonuclear reaction overtechnology is it's easy to maintain reactions like that in the plasma state, and they don't produce harmful radiation.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Probably not as severe an issue on a smaller craft like a VF... esp. if, as in Macross, the "paint" is also fulfilling other functions... and this neatly ties into the next bit: Actually, according to the descriptions in Macross Chronicle and Great Mechanics.DX, the two are actually one and the same. The ablative anti-beam coating is an added function of the passive stealth coating applied to the airframe. The material we see is pretty darn tough stuff... though that's a recurring theme in Macross where material science is concerned. The paint on the YF-21 survived pretty much everything that was thrown at it, until pushed the YF-21 to the limit at too low of an altitude and the paint burned off from the friction heating at some ungodly high velocity below 30km. (Mind you, there's some art that suggests Mylene hand-painted the Gubaba on her VF-11MAXL... and that's shown to have been tough enough to withstand reentry heat.) That's... not exactly accurate. Quamzin just said that there was an ace aboard the Macross that was as good (or better) than Milia, and at the time Max was not flying an "elite" craft either. Not to mention Milia's exploratory attack had her killing mooks at random because she had no idea what to look for. Now THAT part is true... though the VFs in question needed to get VERY close to each other in order for the pilots to recognize their opposite numbers... and they needed to be on fairly intimate terms to recognize the other's personal markings. The IFF and HUD actually are shown to cheerfully tag nearby units with not only their type, but their unique identification if they're friendlies... you might call it an aid to visual recognition that removes any ambiguity. Actually... the descriptions associated with the VF-25 suggest that it's actually storing its waste heat somewhere insulated that won't show up on infrared detectors, and then radiating it out after combat ends using the wings as a heat sink.
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