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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    It was, briefly, but the hull breach they opened up with their missiles was sealed by an emergency bulkhead and (presumably) pressure was restored.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    That's a wide-open field of inquiry... because unfortunately the only VF engine we have a mass for is the FF-2001.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Sort of? From the sound of it, it's more focused on the circumstances of development than the technological nitty-gritty details of operation... the former bit definitely had overlap with the VF-19 Master File, in that it's talking about some of the pilots who got hurt testing YF-19 No.1 (the two deaths and two severe injuries Jan talks about).
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Pretty much, yeah... because the VF-19's performance makes it extremely difficult to control, even after the design was modified for easier use, and the VF-171 is pretty much the Goldilocks plane in that respect. Eh... I think a better comparison might be more like a family car vs. an Indy car. The Indy car is very, VERY fast but it's only really useful for going really fast and it's only really good for a few things... and if you lose control of it for a second, you're going to be in a bad place. The family car might not go as fast, but you COULD do most of the same things an Indy car does with it if you really wanted to, and it can do a lot of other things the Indy car can't Considering the YF-19 managed to maim two test pilots and KILL two more before Isamu got his hands on it, I think that's fair...
  5. Seto Kaiba
    This is explicitly correct for Macross... substantial airframe redesign and reinforcement were necessary to adapt older airframes to use newer, more powerful reaction engines. Otherwise you'd run the risk of the airframe simply flying to pieces.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Well... that's a question of how you want to define "better". On a lot of levels, the Shinsei Industry VF-19 Excalibur and General Galaxy VF-171 Nightmare Plus are comparable in performance... active stealth, pinpoint barrier, fold booster compatibility, etc. The key areas of difference and what made the Nightmare Plus a more attractive option than the Excalibur for a lot of local New UN Spacy forces, is in the engine output and ease of control. The VF-19 has substantially greater engine power and greater agility than the VF-171, but at the expense of pushing the limits of the human body's g-force tolerances and being very difficult to control for the average pilot. Even experienced pilots like Isamu had a hard time adapting to the VF-19's extreme maneuverability. That's why the Nightmare Plus became such an attractive option... it was much more stable, and that increase in stability combined with its detuned engines, meant that the Nightmare Plus was a much more forgiving aircraft for inexperienced and average pilots. Being easy on the pilot and highly versatile made the Nightmare Plus a very attractive prospect for next main fighter (and I'm sure its cost performance being better didn't hurt any feelings either). In terms of raw performance, the VF-19 is "better"... unless you intend to have pilots who are less than exceptional flying it, in which case the stability and ease of control of the Nightmare Plus arguably makes it the better aircraft.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Prior to Macross Frontier, my favorite Macross leading lady was Ishtar... Now, I have to admit, I'd hard a hard time choosing between Ishtar and Sheryl Nome.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Well, they haven't completely abandoned the term... it crops up a lot in Variable Fighter Master File, for instance. They just gave the acronym a slightly different meaning. It became "Fuel, Arms, and Sensors Tactical" in the VF-25 book. The most recent volume (the VF-22 book) still uses it.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    That's definitely a Nightmare Plus. Incidentally, has anyone found an online store that's actually carrying this one? I've struck out on my usual two. EDIT: Never mind, even though the book is titled in English it only shows up if you search on the book's title in Japanese on HMV.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, there are some minor differences... enhanced avionics, leg munitions bays, the deletion of the bayonet from the gunpod, etc.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Nope.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    It was a S-3B Viking. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_S-3_Viking#/media/File:Viking_S-3B.jpg <- Front view of a real-world S-3B Viking.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Er... having read Starship Troopers, my gut reaction is "almost certainly not". The two couldn't be more different, thematically. Macross is all about love, peaceful coexistence, music as a universal language, and other uplifting stuff. Starship Troopers is often accused (not without reason) of being a love-letter to militarism and fascism, where no character even considers any course of action other than annihilating the sentient Pseudo-arachnids* in the name of manifest destiny. I think the Vajra were more an attempt to provide an inscrutable adversary instead of one who was practically human, though it would appear from the concept art that their anatomy was inspired by Zentradi mecha (though in-universe it's probably the other way 'round). EDIT: Yeah, as far as the Vajra's motivations, there's something said in the final episode about the Vajra not understanding that humans were an intelligent species, and trying to "rescue" Ranka from them because she was (unintentionally) communicating the way they do... by fold waves. (Probably didn't help that her signature song produces a fold wave equivalent to a Vajra mating call...) * In the original Starship Troopers novel, the Pseudo-arachnid "bugs" were not the mindless hive-mind monsters seen in the Starship Troopers movies... they were actually arachnid in form, individually sentient, telepathic, and of comparable intelligence to a human. They also technologically at least on par with humanity, including faster-than-light spacraft, directed energy weapons, and guided missile systems.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Ah, OK. I misunderstood your inquiry. You need something mounted in the pilot seat slot, whether it's EX-Gear or a conventional pilot seat, otherwise, you'd have no stick, throttle, or pedals to operate the plane with. It is, however, worth noting that under normal circumstances the pilot would not disembark in his EX-Gear. When you remove the EX-Gear, you're essentially taking both the pilot seat and the controls with you, which is why it's normally left in the plane unless a pilot is abandoning a downed or disabled aircraft (e.g. being shot down, being disabled by the enemy, or suffering a complete loss of control as in Ep13). Though, I suppose, since the jump seat is standard equipment on the VF-25, Alto COULD in fact have operated Gilliam's VF-25F without EX-Gear, but he'd be piloting from the back seat the way Sheryl was. Yes... the Genocidas design was a Kawamori concept that predated Macross's original series, and served as an inspiration for the early transformable fighter concept designs (the "Breast Fighter") that ultimately became the VF-1 Valkyrie. I think Kawamori may have found a bit of inspiration WRT powered suits in the novel Starship Troopers, which Studio Nue did a relatively faithful adaptation of in '87.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    They are... they're mentioned on the Compendium, and Variable Fighter Master File: VF-22 Sturmvogel II even has a diagram that helpfully shows how intake air gets to those vanes and even labels them ホバー ベーン (hover vane). (It's on page 66 if anyone cares.)
  16. Seto Kaiba
    That'd be premature... and I really wish you'd stop trying to crowbar that baloney acronym in. The underside of the internal bay door right beneath the intake is where the gunpods are stored when they're mounted internally on the -22. Toys, obviously, take certain liberties. On the -21, that appears to be nothing more than a flat panel over the articulations for the door. That'd be consistent with General Galaxy's design practices, yes. Doesn't seem like it, based on the available material... the descriptions I can find in Chronicle and Great Mechanics.DX indicate the material is a new, flexible composite material. Variable Fighter Master File has a cutaway of the VF-22 wing that shows the wing's internal structure, which has a modest internal frame surrounded by 9 Y-shaped actuator arms that are responsible for bending or flexing the wing surface in different ways... four on the leading edge, four on the trailing edge, and one on the wingtip. Nah, we see Sheryl operate ("fly" might be generous considering her demonstrated skill level) Michel's VF-25G without EX-Gear in Macross Frontier's TV series. The episode is "Mother's Lullaby", about 12 minutes in. Note that while Michel ejected wearing military EX-Gear, HER seat was an ordinary control chair. As far as I'm aware, the actual inspiration for the design comes from one Kawamori's pre-Macross projects... Genocidas. Design-wise, it looks vaguely similar to the old Honda powered exoskeleton.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, the VF-4 was one of the fighters-of-choice for the first generation of emigrant fleets... alongside the VF-1, VF-5, and VF-5000. We even see them being used by training flights on Macross-7 at one point (in Trash). The New Horizon game was fun while it lasted, nice to know someone got something out of it even after its demise. Sort of, yeah... he's supposedly a great pilot, but he's always brought down by mechanical problems before he can finish the race due to his overtuned-to-the-point-of-uncontrollability fighter. Macross Chronicle does suggest there's a connection between the two, yes. Spiritia is a form of higher-dimension energy associated with super dimension space, and song energy is supposedly kind of like a fold wave, yes. (The vibe I get from the descriptions in Macross Chronicle is almost like humanity's connection to the warp in Warhammer 40,000... the human mind has an intrinsic connection to the higher dimension, and their mental and emotional state is reflected there, though super dimension space's native life appears to be benign, whereas the warp in 40K definitely fell under "Hyperspace is a scary place".)
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Fifty issues.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    The animation in Macross Plus does show the YF-19 firing its fixed-forward guns during the dogfight with Guld in the second half. I don't think we see the YF-21's coaxial gun fire, but the bits that end up on the hips are where the gunpods are stored. Exactly how energy conversion armor works is not clearly explained, unfortunately... but there are various materials in existence now that are at least similar in function (increasing rigidity and so on when exposed to a current or electromagnetic field). Nah, that's just the variable camber wing mechanism... which works a bit like an active aeroelastic wing, just turned up to 11.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, I can sort that out for you, GuardianGrey... because most of the tech specs on their wiki were written by me back when I had a character and staff position there. The SV-37 and SV-52 were what I cooked up in an afternoon or so when the game admins were asking for new designs to pad out their anti-government faction. I supplied the line art for the entry too, though only from a scan I'd found (I believe right here on MacrossWorld) years ago. Sadly, the game's pretty much a dead duck now, so I'm not surprised you weren't able to get a response from the remaining staff. Hard to say, but based on the art in the Variable Fighter Master File: VF-22 Sturmvogel II book, I would say it's probably about the size of a man's torso, maybe larger. The Shaher Femail was deliberate misdirection on General Galaxy's part, though... my guess would be that they decided not to put an inertia store converter on the VF-0 either because the airframe wasn't compatible, or because they didn't want to put an insanely expensive piece of hardware in an aircraft belonging to a civilian famous for crashing more than anything else. Could be a museum piece, or a replica VF-0 from a planet like Ouroboros... I doubt Shin's VF is anywhere anyone might find it. Yeah, Macross the Ride had a few numbering inconsistencies like that... like the SV-52 Oryol being listed as having the same engine as a VF-17, which they then list as FF-2010X (should be 2100X). Pobody's nerfect. The Schneeblume in particular is more a "what if" for a design we've ALREADY seen... specifically, "What if you designed the VF-1 during the 2000s". The Schneegans seems to have found its completed artistic expression in the YF-29 (a YF-29 in Schneegans colors can be seen in Variable Fighter Master File: VF-25 Messiah). Yeah... pretty much. I think there are actually a couple really good .5 generation designs out there. The VF-1 Plus (Block 6 and later) is arguably a Gen 1.5 VF, since the cockpit design and other refinements were nicked from the Gen 2 VF-4. The VF-4G's probably Gen 2.5 because of modernizations with tech from Gen 3. The VF-17's a sort of Gen 3.5 for reasons we already went into, and the VF-171 is arguably Gen 4.5 because of the tech it began to inherit from the 5th Gen AVFs (EX-Gear, etc.). The Macross Frontier novelization's VF-17F and so on may also qualify. The ones that are impossible to quantify are the one-offs or limited production ones like the VF-0 Custom "Zeak" and particularly the VF-9E, a trial production Gen 2 design upgraded with Gen 4 hardware.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Macross Chronicle's VF "genealogy" chart (Mechanic Sheet 01Q) offers something like a generational breakdown of VFs... You and they are on more or less the same wavelength, though they put the VF-17 in with the VF-19/22/171 instead of the 11/14. If they had ".5" generations, the VF-17 would probably be one of those, as would the VF-1 Plus variants and so on, because they were built during one generation and adopted tech from another.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    ... and 90% of the combat in Macross 30...
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Unless the pilot in question was locked on to multiple targets at the same time... which is something every VF has been able to do since the original series. They're pretty much always shown kitted out for space use in the Macross Frontier series itself... and I don't recall how they were armed in Macross 30 when you don't have a Super, Armored, or Tornado Pack on. The VF-25 has some limited passive stealth features, but it's principally an active stealth craft... IIRC, Kawamori made it with the intention of specifically getting away from passively-stealthy real world silhouettes. Most VFs seem to be more active stealth than passive, the VF-17 being the principal exception because it came out between active stealth system generations.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    It's not a size concern, but rather that there is some unspecified aspect of the designs of some VFs that make them incompatible with the ISC. The exact nature of the incompatibility is not elaborated upon, unfortunately, however the VF-0 is possibly incompatible, the Zeak doesn't have one listed in its stats. The chief issue there being the aforementioned problems the VF-11 shares with virtually every other aircraft that could potentially be upgraded to AVF tech levels... insufficient structural strength, limited internal space in the airframe (relative to AVFs), and issues with AVF-level tech. That's not quite what I said, actually... the VF-9E, etc. were unrelated efforts to upgrade existing fighters to AVF standards, a job which was generally abandoned as impractical if not downright dangerous. (e.g. the VF-9E, VF-11MAXL, VF-171EX) Their development had no direct connection (that we know of) to Project Super Nova and the solicitation for new next-generation designs. Wrong kind of "Experiment". Aircraft designated VF-X (or XVF) are literally in-universe experimental aircraft like we have in the real world. Offhand, I don't know why the Schneeblume isn't in the VF-E section... probably for want of a good, clean line art source. "VF-Experiment" is the name of the column in Character Model that the Schneeblume and Schneegans were from... it was the column that ran before VFERR. Er... not sure why these are listed as "candidate" designs... they were already AVFs when they were new, and at least the VF-19 is known to have been able to partially adopt VF-25 equipment.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Time travel's a hell of a thing.
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