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Seto Kaiba

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    Lagrange Terrace (a stable community)
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    Anime (duh), Antique Firearms, Cryptography, Mechanical Design

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Looking back over several decades of hobbyist/enthusiast media, there are several main reasons why Robotech seems to garner the lion's share of the distaste. The main one is just that Robotech hung around protesting to still be valid and relevant years and then decades after the rewriting practices that created it went out of fashion where those others shows faded into obscurity. Not only did the series continue to hang around long after rewrites came to be seen as disrespectful to the original work and original creators, its representatives outright disparaged and lied about the original shows and their creators too. Carl Macek's toxic behavior and poor industry reputation certainly didn't help, nor did Harmony Gold's not-undeserved reputation for questionable litigation against other, more popular and successful, brands like Macross, BattleTech/MechWarrior, and Transformers. Anyway... seems the OP for this thread posted this and then dipped. They don't seem to have been back to the boards since about 3 minutes after the thread was made.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    I don't think the use of an Inertia Vector Control System would meaningfully affect the choice of fuel for the thermonuclear reactor or propellant for space flight. It would enable the VF to make more efficient use of whatever propellant it was carrying and to accelerate and decelerate more forcefully. This could potentially cause the VF to exceed the g-force tolerance of the pilot's body and/or the design limits of the aircraft itself, though the IVCS does partially shield the aircraft from this while in operation. The YF-21 and VF-22 both successfully adopted the technology, though the difficulty of its manufacture was a signfiicant limiting factor in the ability to mass produce the aircraft itself. (If you take Master File at face value, the IVCS was one of several systems that forced the YF-21/VF-22 to adopt a specially designed engine with more generator output to support those systems, increasing initial and operating costs and decreasing engine lifespan.) The Quimeliquola Inertia Vector Control System is a bit different from the Inertia Store Converter. The Queadluun-series battle suits and the 4th Gen YF-21 and VF-22 had the Inertia Vector Control System, a particularly complicated bit of Protoculture technology which could manipulate the magnitude of acceleration vectors. Basically, it could amplify or shrink any directional force pushing on the aircraft, from the thrust of its engines and verniers to aerodynamic pressures and even recoil. As a side effect of its operation, it shielded the interior of the aircraft from the changes in the magnitude of acceleration forces that its operation created. (So if the pilot's accelerating at 7G and the IVCS is boosting that to, say, 25G, the pilot's only feeling the 7G.) The female Zentradi/Meltrandi are able to get the most out of the system because they also use a specially-engineered g-hardened pilot who can withstand higher g-loads. The Inertia Store Converter is a rather different device. Instead of manipulating the magnitude of acceleration vectors to boost the performance of engines and verniers, it uses more advanced applications of gravity control to temporarily displace acceleration forces on the aircraft itself into higher dimensions. The aircraft has to generate the full force needed for those accelerations, meaning it doesn't get the propellant efficiency benefits, but it can largely shield itself and its operator from the g-forces incurred by pushing the energy into higher dimensions for a bit and then slowly returning that energy to the aircraft a little bit at a time over a longer period so that it never exceeds safe levels. I guess I'm nothing if not predictable. 🤣
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Mine is saying delivery Monday, though as unreliable as USPS tracking data has become I don't trust it one bit.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    One reason I enjoy doing these translations so much... Macross's tech is surprisingly well thought-out most of the time. They put considerable effort into making most things seem fairly plausible. Like any jet engine, Macross's thermonuclear reaction turbine engines generate thrust from the thermal expansion of a high-pressure fluid heated inside the engine. The plasma from the thermonuclear reactor is a heat source, not a thrust source. In atmosphere, the thermonuclear reaction turbine engine uses the plasma from the compact thermonuclear reactor to flash-heat the highly-compressed air the superconducting ram-air pre-compressor and compressor fans are pushing into the engine. In the vacuum of space, the thermonuclear reaction turbine engine has no air flowing into it to generate thrust with... so it switches over to operating like a nuclear thermal rocket instead. Propellant sourced from internal (or external) tanks elsewhere in the airframe is directly injected into the thrust increase section of the turbine where the plasma flow is. The propellant, which is stored as a cryogenic liquid or slush, is flash-heated to a high temperature by the super-hot plasma and expands explosively out the engine nozzle. That limited internal supply of propellant is the main reason that early models of VF were dependent on FAST Packs for extended operations in space.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Pretty sure we are. Like you say, her whole plot in the first season of Andor is centered around her trying to cover her own arse because she did an inadequate job of laundering the money when she gave 400,000 credits to the Rebellion from her own accounts. She's not trying to cover up continuing contributions, just the one she's already made. Her only other involvement with the story is to complain about Luthen's team actually advancing the Rebel agenda. It doesn't present her as leading anything, really. The people actually leading the various rebel cells seem to consider her annoying. Her role, respective to Luthen, seems to be very similar to her role in other Star Wars media. That of the figurehead who is mostly just in the way or underfoot while the Rebellion's actual leaders are trying to get things done. Incidentally, I decided to pick up a copy of The Mask of Fear since it's supposed to be a tie-in to Andor and such. By the end of the first Mon Mothma section, it definitely feels like it's continuing the trend in other post-reboot Star Wars media. I don't think anyone saw that twist coming. Jar-Jar Binks, acting Republic Senator for Naboo and unwitting instigator of Palpatine's master plan to overthrow the Republic. Just cast Vin Diesel as the lead and have him talk about family like it's a Fast and the Furious sequel... nobody will notice the difference.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    One engineer to another, the raised eyebrow is completely understandable. We're talking about weird sci-fi futuretech after all. That said, Masahiro Chiba is a one thorough guy because he anticipated this concern too and prepared an explanation as far back as the original VF-1 tech manual in '84. His explanation actually starts with an acknowledgement of exactly the problem you're pointing out. The plasma coming out of the reactor may be several hundred megakelvin, but the small quantity moment-by-moment and the relatively short length of the engine means that the plasma would not be able to transfer enough heat to the propellant flows moving through it without some assistance. That assistance comes in the form of the same Gravity and Inertia Control systems inside the engine body that prevent the plasma from contacting the engine interior. The GIC systems essentially create a small pocket of super-intense artificial gravity inside the engine that compresses the propellant flows while also holding the plasma inside the engine for longer, allowing a more uniform and complete heat transfer to take place and increasing the exhaust velocity when the now-superheated propellant is released. It's described as essentially using a GIC to simulate having a larger thrust increase/burner section. This is a large part of why advances in thermonuclear reaction engine technology are generally attributed to improvements in GIC technology, in both official media and in Master File. The more precise and powerful the GIC systems in the engine, the hotter the reactor can run and the greater the compression they can exert inside the engine to increase the propellant flow's pressure and temperature. (And yes, Chiba-san is well aware this is bullsh*t sci-fi spacemagic futuretech... as a little joke, the computer controlling all this is literally named MAGIC. The Matrix of Gravity and Inertia Control.)
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, that's touched on a bit more in Macross the Ride, when they visit the Macross Galaxy fleet and witness that its public spaces are all utilitarian and barren since the actual ceature comforts in the fleet are largely products of implant-induced augmented reality and sense manipulation. That term is, I think, possibly unique to the novelization. They're referred to as just "cell phone" in the artbooks and such. Also, Ranka's phone is not a frog. It's a salamander. Specifically, the Japanese giant salamander. IIRC, Macross Ace had a joke comic showing her wearing a realistic looking life-size one as a backpack to everyone's horror. (They get quite large, close to 2m long at full size.) EDIT: I partially misremembered... it's not a single panel, it's a whole series of jokes in a comic titled "Ranka Note" in Macross Ace No.004. In it, Ranka learns that giant salamanders are real and proceeds to buy a series of increasingly terrifying realistic goods modeled on giant salamanders including a phone and backpack that traumatize Alto severely, and a full-body realistic giant salamander costume that reduces Sheryl to a gibbering wreck. She caps the experience by horrifying everyone with an (abnormally huge) real giant salamander Klan made in a lab that promptly attempts to eat Alto. That theory's been pretty conclusively refuted over the years. EDIT 2: Just for shiggles, here are some panels from the comic hastily photographed on my phone.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah... despite everything, she is still supposed to be one of the leaders of the Rebellion. Her role seems to be more political than anything, maintaining a Republic government-in-exile claim to legitimize the Rebel cause. I'm hoping they either scale her role in Andor's second season way back or that they actually give her something meaningful to do to advance the Rebel cause.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    The space politics is best left to the Expanded Universe novels and whatnot. I learned the other day there is apparently a novel released specifically as a tie-in for Andor last month - Reign of the Empire: the Mask of Fear - which gets into the political side of the early rebellion. It does, I am reliably informed, continue the rather unflattering depiction of Mon Mothma as a naively idealistic to the point of being ineffective.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Started watching The Apothecary Diaries today since the new season simulcasts haven't started yet, and this one is unexpectedly a lot of fun.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    I think there are a couple reasons we don't see that happening. First, the amount of plasma in the engine at any one time is actually quite small. Official setting resources like Macross Chronicle describe OTM thermonuclear reactors like the ones found in a VF's engines as extremely high-efficiency due to the use of Gravity and Inertia Control systems for fuel compression and plasma confinement. The reactors can run on less fuel, and run much hotter, than a modern/conventional fusion reactor that relies on lasers and electromagnets. The system used in thermonuclear reaction turbines has such high efficiency that VFs are said to have effectively unlimited range in atmospheric flight due to using intake air as propellant. A few sources say the VF-1 has enough internally-carried reactant to operate for up to 700 hours between refuelings, which means the amount of reactant consumed (and plasma produced) must be very small. Master File gives some directional guidance as to how small. Variable Fighter Master File: VF-1 Valkyrie describes the VF-1 reactant storage as being a pair of 150 liter capacity slush tanks, one in each engine nacelle. That suggests the fuel consumption rate in normal operation is a hair under 0.06ml/s, or about 214ml/hour. In more visual terms, eight hours of continuous operation would consume a bit less than five soda cans worth of reactant per engine. With such a small quantity of plasma inside the engine at any given time, the amount of exhaust is almost certainly trivial unless the turbine is actively generating thrust. Second, the usage of the plasma varies depending on mode and engine demand. The reason that many energy-intensive technologies like energy conversion armor and pinpoint barriers are not available in Fighter mode is because the heat from the plasma is also used to heat propellant (be it intake air or internally stored liquid) in order to produce thrust for flight. The Fighter-mode VF is essentially "wasting" most of the energy-generation potential of that hot plasma in order to use it to generate more thrust. Battroid mode is the opposite, prioritizing energy generation over thrust production and wringing every last bit of usable heat out of the GIC-confined plasma for that purpose. By the time the plasma held in the engine for electricity generation purposes is released, it has cooled considerably and the relatively small quantity being released at any given time is unlikely to kick up any significant debris. With just 0.06ml/s of reactant going into the engine, the volume of exhaust gas coming out is likely around 500-600ml/s... about the same as an average adult's normal exhalation.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Ameku M.D. has delivered another stinker today. I remain oddly impressed by the writing team's profound and all-consuming commitment to delivering an almost unwatchably bad "murder mystery" story featuring the most irredeemably unlikable mary sue protagonist this side of Star Trek: Discovery. I really want to see a fan supercut of this series which cuts out all of Dr. Ameku's claims of being a genius and all of her verbal and physical abuse of her colleagues. I don't think any episode would be longer than about five minutes. 😅 A Terrified Teacher at Ghoul School ended the other day too. To the very end, this series was just boring and unoriginal. It honestly felt to me like the original mangaka couldn't even think of a hook for their own story, so they just infodump about various niche yokai for a few minutes every episode. Otherwise it's a pretty standard "the token human at monster school" style premise aside from the fact that the protagonist's obsession with uniforms veers heavily into sex offender vibes. Medaka Kuroiwa is Impervious to My Charms also finished the other day. It never really went anywhere or did anything outside of the normal formula for this kind of one-sided rom com. To the very end, it read like a PG-rated version of B Gata H Kei. Not bad, but not great. A solid 6/10 basic romcom series that doesn't do anything wrong, but also doesn't do anything particularly right either.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    For the sake of comparison, this is the updated cutaway of the VF-1's original FF-2001 engine. You can see the MHD generator called out just aft of the thermonuclear reactor on the interior of the engine body.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Zzzzzzzzzzzzz... Desperate appeals to nostalgia really are all this franchise has left.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    That's a bit too complex and mature for Star Wars, which tends to favor very simple, straightforward, and kid-friendly Good vs. Evil storylines. Andor is very much the exception in that regard. That probably would've happened in Star Wars too. I'd assume the reason it didn't (or that it happened quietly and offscreen) is because the more extreme rebel factions that refused to join the Rebel Alliance (e.g. Saw Gerrera's) got wiped out during the war like we saw in Andor, Rogue One, and Rebels. Saw would absolutely have declared war on the Republic too just to spite Mon Mothma. In Rebels, he made his low opinion of her extremely clear... and the hilarious irony is he was completely correct about her. Technically, that happened in The Phantom Menace... we see a couple sessions of a peacetime Galactic Senate and the whole movie's plot was kicked off by a tax policy issue.
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