Seto Kaiba

If anyone is exhibiting supernatural levels of chill, it's Ray. Either that man is on every controlled substance known to man and several that aren't, or he knows things about finding and maintaining inner peace that Zen Masters haven't even begun to ponder. That man raised Basara and, for some frothingly insane reason, decided to continue living with him and working with him after he grew up.

It's directly stated multiple times in the Macross Chronicle Mechanic Sheets for Boddole Zer's and Laplamiz's mobile fortresses as well as the Character Sheets for Boddole Zer and for Milia (Laplamiz is an extra note on hers) that Gol Boddole Zer and Moruk Laplamiz are computers that form the core of their respective mobile fortresses. In keeping with their faction's particular aesthetics, Boddole Zer is an "Ultra-large living command computer" while Laplamiz is an "Ultra-large holographic computer".

Well, yeah... that's the kind of design usage you can only really get away with in media being marketed to existing fans. Like the other games, Macross VF-X2's writing assumes the player has done a certain amount of prerequisite reading/watching and is familiar with a lot of the set pieces the game's story is playing with. The main TV series titles are all intended for both new and existing fans, so the creative team pursues a certain "visual clarity" in the proceedings to ensure that each faction is made distinct for the viewer's benefit and that the "hero mecha" are distinct from the cannon fodder as well. That's why we don't see any Zentradi ships among the New UN Forces in the later titles, why Macross Galaxy and Windermere IV use a completely separate set of ship classes from the New UN Forces, and why the VF-19 got the axe as main fighter because it looked too "hero mecha-y".😆 Well, that's not exactly fair... or entirely accurate. Zentradi technology doesn't really need improving in a technological sense. It's not the fanciest or most feature-rich hardware out there but it's not meant to be. The Protoculture equipped the Zentradi with the most rugged, dependable, and economical military hardware they could. Their ships and mecha are basically Ragnarok-proof and will run pretty much forever if not for battle damage. Klan even boasts about this to the Macross Quarter crew at one point. Overtechnology improves Human technology in visible ways because Human technology was hundreds if not thousands of years behind the mass-produced lowest-bidder military hardware the Protoculture designed for their Zentradi forces. About all that Human engineers can do is try to improve on the areas the Protoculture deliberately neglected: safety and survivability. So improvements like the Queadluun-Rher's focus mainly on things like beefing up armor, improving pilot awareness with better sensors and a BDI, and preventing single-point failures with redundant control circuits. I don't think that's necessarily true in most titles. Guld certainly gets hit with that awfully hard but that's his past trauma combined with Isamu being a master button-pusher. Other prominent Zentradi characters are often shown as simply being eccentric. Sylvie is a quarter Meltran and a soldier, but the main focus on her is normally that she's a dutiful soldier (or just really attractive) and it's actually her entirely Human boyfriend Nex Gilbert who's a gung-ho fighter jock. We see several other Zentradi in that OVA who are basically Earth culture otaku. Milia c.2045 is depicted mainly as a stereotypical Japanese middle-aged mom worrying about getting her daughters to wed into good families, gossiping, and the like. Mylene stands out not in being predisposed to violence but in her being the realist opposite Basara's idealism and Veffidas is just there to be weird. Ranka doesn't have a violent bone in her body and the focus on her is her devotion to culture and music, and Richard Bilra's just a train otaku and Minmay fan. Mirage and Ernest Johnson almost fit the bill, but in both cases they stand out because they're rubbish as warriors... Mirage having quit the Spacy because she couldn't live up to the family legacy of Awesomeness and Johnson is presented as a commander who can't seem to win. Outside of the original series where the first-ever generation of Zentradi adapting to Earth's culture struggled, the only time we really see that is with the 33rd Marines in Frontier. Even then, the 33rd Marines are noted to be a unit of problem children that even other Zentradi regard with scorn and whose bad behavior was being exacerbated by a Macross Galaxy-aligned plant. The marine unit in Shalal City can't be blamed for what happened because they fell victim to Var syndrome and had no control of their actions. They were perfectly peaceful and getting by just fine prior to that. As we saw in Frontier, there are some Zentradi who are either more recent inductees into Earth's culture or simply weirdos fetishizing the Zentradi's warrior heritage for their own purposes (like Lyle in Macross: Eternal Love Song). They're basically space versions of swedeaboos who fetishize a wildly inaccurate version of Norse culture for its alleged macho-ness.😆 Given that Exsedol's enhancements are also said to be tied to his genetic makeup and a part of his basic design, it's doubtful that Vrlitwhai's implants are due to injury. Other Zentradi commanders have similar body modifications. They can't all be losing exactly one eye. Like a lot of Macross titles, the Macross II prequel games cut a dash between versions of events. In some of the backgrounds, you can see things like the Macross with its main gun missing ala DYRL? but with the Daedalus and Prometheus attached like in the DYRL? novelization. He was designed and constructed as an integral part of the ship. The DYRL? versions of Boddole Zer and Laplamiz are not really people, per se. In short, they are the self-aware AI computers that were constructed as essential components of their respective mobile fortresses. They exist as both the ship's main computer and the de facto commander of the fleets supporting the mobile fortress. They are the ship's brain and it is their body in a very real sense... to such a degree that destroying them "kills" the ship, as happened to Boddole Zer at the end of DYRL?.

One more minor nagging thought occurs... On page 172, when Mirage is making her case to support Messer's final sortie she mentions that her and Hayate's VF-31s have no missiles left, but that their machine guns and optical weapons (yes, she says "optical weapons", kougaku heisou 光学兵装) still have enough ammunition to meet combat regulations. I wonder if that is an endorsement of the Master File take on the VF-31's beam rifle. That it has actual physical ammunition that it uses to produce charged particles in addition to the operating power it receives from the Valkyrie's energy capacitors.

Just to clarify, the VF-31B is not a Master File variant. It's an official setting variant that IIRC was first mentioned in Great Mechanics G's Spring '16 issue. We've never seen it (as far as we know), but it's one of two variants mentioned as the mass-production "standard type" VF-31. Per Kawamori, the VF-31A/B types that Xaos has are the same in all respects as the ones that will eventually be delivered to the Brisingr Alliance NUNS. It's unclear if the VF-31B is meant to be a tandem cockpit training version of the VF-31A similar to how Master File describes the VF-19B and VF-25B, or if it's an improved single-seat production type like the VF-11B. Weird that this makes the third different explanation of the Siegfried's origins though. The TV series materials say it's a modified VF-31A, the Master File says it's a separate VF-31 based off a prototype, and the novelization says it's derived from the VF-31B. Macross Delta's cast is just too big for the length of the series. Macross Frontier had 25 episodes, and the important main and secondary cast amounted to nine characters: Alto, Sheryl, Ranka, Ozma, Michael, Luca, Nanase, Grace, and Leon. Macross Delta had only one more episode than Frontier but its core cast was more than twice the size at 21 people. You had the five members of Delta Flight, five Walkure idols, Ernest Johnson, Roid, the six Aerial Knights, King Grammier, Prince Heinz, and Berger Stone. The story was simply not long enough to give most of them more than the absolute minimum of development.

Most of the Meltrandi designs got reused in "Fleet of the Strongest Women". Beyond that, there really aren't many designs that are unique to the movie version. The Moruk Laplamiz mobile fortress is the big one, literally and metaphorically. The others are mainly little, incidental designs. Mostly utility and support craft like the Spacy's RC-4E Rabbit, the Zentradi transport, and the Golg Gants Charts light attack craft. Macross has always used its music side as a main selling point so that part is actually pretty logical in hindsight. Leaving other primary characters unnamed, well... I suspect part of that is to enforce the player projecting themselves onto the nameless ace pilot saving the day since it IS meant to be a simulation game. That seems unlikely to happen for a couple reasons. First and foremost, the creative team tries to avoid having any visual confusion WRT who the protagonists and antagonists are. This has been cited in the past as a reason that the Zentradi's ships and mecha generally do not show up in mixed forces alongside the regular New UN Spacy. Second, in a more in-universe perspective, the New UN Forces use of Zentradi mecha in the immediate aftermath of the war was a pragmatic decision. They had a lot of Zentradi volunteers for the New UN Forces and military service was an adequate sort of "halfway house" to help Zentradi who were struggling to adapt to life on Earth make the transition gradually and at their own pace. Zentradi mobile weapons also fall short in the survivability, safety, and ergonomics areas and so would not be particularly attractive options to a non-clone Zentradi or the New UN Forces brass. Zentradi born into culture would probably gravitate towards Variable Fighters as well, since those are the iconic weapons of the New UN Forces and prominently depicted as heroic in the media. Third, well... Earth's technology is great but it's not quite up to the same standards the Protoculture had for Ragnarok-proofing, so Human-made Zentradi mecha aren't likely to be as durable or reliable as the genuine article. Plus the more different varieties of mecha a fleet has the more complex its supply chain becomes. That seems likely. Zentradi mobile weapons in general eschew transparent canopies and such in favor of armoring the cockpit and getting by with monitors. He doesn't say anything besides remarking about an old hand who's on the brink of retirement, and how "old men" tend to have trouble with their aim. (His excuse for breaking orders and directly hitting the Macross with what was meant to be a warning shot.) The only time I can recall Zentradi forces mentioning medical treatment for the wounded even in passing is in Macross 2036, a Macross II timeline game where Quamzin turns out to have been Not Completely Dead and leads a new Zentradi fleet to attack Earth. (No mention is made of how his injuries were repaired but he does have a prosthetic eye in that story.)

Not a lot of blood in that scene though, all things considered. That probably owes a bit to the fact that most of the violence is inflicted with laser weapons. Most sci-fi tends to go with the idea that laser weapons cauterize the wounds they make because lasers inflict damage by burning the target rather than piercing it with kinetic energy, though this is not entirely realistic...

Plot-wise, I feel like this chapter lands flat the same way that its TV and Movie equivalents did.

Either that or someone's been digging around in that storage facility where Quamzin got his. IMO, the stealth pods in VF-X are almost certainly Human-designed and built. Well, it was used by a predominantly Zentradi anti-Latence faction (Black Rainbow) so it would make a certain amount of sense for it to accommodate a giant pilot. Doubly so given that it seems to be built as a four-legged battle pod and shares a lot of design similarities with the Golg Gants Charts heavy attacker. Oh, no there's only one of the Quimeliquola factory satellites in Human hands as far as we know... which was placed in orbit of Eden, and restored by General Galaxy in the 2030s to satisfy the New UN Gov't demand for a way to maintain its Queadluun battle suit units.

Hmm... a few errors in this latest one. Both of the noteworthy ones being connected to some of the chapter's most interesting and unusual points. The first one is that this chapter makes the Macross Delta novelization one of the few publications to acknowledge the existence of the VF-31 Kairos's B variant. More interestingly, the novelization presents the VF-31B as the predecessor to the Siegfried custom rather than the VF-31A as is generally assumed and implied by the Macross Delta animation. This seems to have unintentionally been changed to VF-31A in the translation, though? The second is the very unusual mention of the VC-19V VIP-Calibur. This is one of the even rarer moments of official setting materials acknowledging something that originated in the Master File books. Normally when they tap those books for info they're doing it for technological key terms like ARIEL/ANGIRAS, the meaning of acronyms, etc. This might be the first time they've brought in an original design from Master File. There is another translation error here though, it's written VIPカリバー not VIPカリバーン, so the name should be "VIP Calibur" as in the Master File book not "VIP Caliburn". Interestingly, what Messer describes is a little different to the VIP Calibur in Master File. The aircraft he describes must be a newer/later variant of the VIP Calibur specification as he describes it as possessing an Inertia Store Converter to protect the VIPs from high g-forces. The original version of the VIP Calibur (c.2050) predates the availability of the ISC and just has five g-force seats in the passenger compartment. Unfortunately, this nod to Master File comes at the immediate price of the story having to engage in some spectacular pants-on-head imbecilic reasoning to try explain why such an incredibly useful thing isn't being used. Why? Because the New UN Government - who are A-OK with Xaos having a Macross-type warship, a full squadron's worth of the latest 5th Generation main VFs, and five Gen 5.5 ace custom machines with Fold Wave Systems - considers it too dangerous to sell this 20+ year old, previous-gen, unarmed transport aircraft to a private company. The Macross Galaxy Corporate Army can field an entire squadron of VF-19C's just so their parent company can flex on Shinsei Industry and SMS's forces can have dozens of VF-19E's for combat use, but this unarmed VF-19C that can't transform... no that's much too dangerous for Xaos to have.🤣

Macross M3 gets almost no coverage in art books and the like outside of Kawamori's designs for the VF-3000, VF-9, and VF-14. I don't think I've ever seen the line art for the game's final boss mecha published. It must be in some doujin or some game magazine from the period. The game's old official website on shoeisha.co.jp does not credit any other designs besides Shoji Kawamori but AFAIK it's never been covered in any of his official art books. Which is doubly odd, since he does acknowledge the other Zentradi mecha he's designed in them. Which was rather surprising, given that the factory satellites producing the Glaug were destroyed 280,000 or so years before the original series... making them quite rare as a result. One has to wonder if the so-called "Super Glaug" in Macross Delta is a modified First Space War-vintage Glaug chassis or a Human-made reproduction. Oh no, there are lots. The mission to capture a factory satellite that we see in the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross series was just the first of many. Macross Chronicle's Mechanic Sheet for the Factory Satellite mentions that "more than 20" factory satellites were seized and relocated by the New UN Forces in the following months. Exactly when they came into possession of a factory satellite capable of producing Queadluun-Rau battle suits is not clearly stated, but seems likely to have happened somewhere in the early 2030s given that General Galaxy was commissioned to restore the facility in 2035 in response to the New UN Forces diminishing stock of Queadluun-Rau battle suits.

Zentradi (and Meltrandi) Battle Suits aren't true powered armor. Officially, they're described as being something like a hybrid of powered suits and a battle pod in the sense that they are humanoid in configuration but the operator's body is situated almost entirely in the battle suit's torso and head and the limbs are mostly controlled indirectly. As such, you wouldn't see any blood from damaging the suit's arms or its legs below the knee because none of the pilot's body is in those parts. They're entirely mechanical. You probably wouldn't see blood from one even if you did hit the pilot, though. The cockpit's pretty close quarters but not skintight and the pilot inside it is also wearing an armored space suit. So if the pilot is injured, blood is likely to end up either inside their suit or inside the cockpit rather than leaking out of the battle suit itself. The one exception that sticks out in my memory is from the opening of Macross Plus, where Isamu is fighting against rogue Zentradi and stabs one of their battle suits with his VF-11's bayonet. That gets a LARGE amount of something reddish-orange that might be the pilot's blood. There has been no word on if the New UN Forces have captured a factory satellite that manufactures the Nousjadeul-Ger battle suit. The New UN Forces must have at least a few that are still in good working order, though. The in-universe version of DYRL? was shot with real ships and mecha to an extent, so several Nousjadeul-Ger battle suits were likely used in the filming of the movie c.2030. New Edwards Test Flight Center on Eden seems to have at least two working Nousjadeul-Ger units that we see used in simulated combat testing with paint rounds. Whether they belong to the base proper or were borrowed from a squadron stationed nearby for aggressor duty is never stated. We do know that the New UN Forces captured factory satellites making the Regult battle pod and Queadluun-Rau battle suit, and that those facilities have been used to develop and produce improved versions like the Regult Type-104 and Type-106 and the Queadluun-Rhea/56. The gradual breakdown of the New UN Spacy's captured Queadluun-Rau suits was supposedly part of what prompted the mission to seize and restore the factory satellite that had been making the Queadluuns for the Boddole Zer main fleet. (This also led to the development of the YF-21 and VF-22.)

Yep... machine translation has a ways to go before it's ready to properly take over for humans. It's way better than it used to be, but there are some definite context whoopsies and so on in there as well.

What kind of detail in particular are you looking for? Markings? Equipment placement?

I've been using a bit of my vacation time to catch up on some of my translations and chase a few nagging open points in what I've translated about overtechnology. In this case, in the descriptions of energy weapons as part of an effort to provide some in-depth explanations of how they work. Laser weapons in Macross have thus far all been presented as real world laser technology that has simply had its performance enhanced by the inclusion of OTM. Master File has made VF-mounted laser weapons out to be a mix of fiber lasers (mostly on the monitor turret) and free electron lasers (nacelle/body mounts). The VF-1's Strike Pack gets identified as a gas-dynamic laser in Master File, and there's also passing mention of research into a Project Excalibur-style reaction bomb-pumped laser missile. Macross Chronicle has shot down my hypothesis that impact cannons are dimensional weapons. Nothing has been forthcoming as of yet about how the plasma cannons of the setting work (since there's all of one of the bloody things, IIRC, on the Nousjadeul-Ger). Particle beam weapons are where things get a bit contradictory. Macross Chronicle seems to imply that particle beam cannons are just juiced up linear accelerators, with mention of them injecting opposite-charged particles into the beam to neutralize the charge so it doesn't diverge due to repulsion forces. Then again, there are other books that mention using Gravity and Inertia Control for beam focusing and acceleration. There's mention of the beams using ionized heavy metal particles in some books, and plasma drawn from the reactor in others. Some mention both and switch between them situationally. So I have a crazy-ish hypothesis to get these seemingly contradictory explanations aligned. Macross's particle beam weapons may be something like plasma wakefield accelerators. Those work by using lasers to create a charge imbalance in a neutrally-charged plasma that creates an ion channel and "wave" of charge imbalance that pushes the lighter electrons out at high velocities. I think both of the above-described cases can be true if they're using a GIC instead of lasers to manipulate the plasma and create the charge imbalances. That only leaves the question of where the plasma is coming from... be it tapped from the compact thermonuclear reactor, or a "beam cartridge" like those described in the VF-31 Master File.