Seto Kaiba

It's actually worse on a second watch. The writers are really doing a champion job of making this captain look like a complete buffoon. With so many cuts, it's hard to tell if it's the writers or the editors who are making the captain look like the galaxy's least attentive Pakled.

Moving this over from the Books topic. It'd perhaps be more accurate to say the VF-31 was seen as a solution to some of the Brisingr Alliance's economic woes. The VF-31's particular situation is heavily inspired by Japan's own domestic Next Main Fighter program (the Mitsubishi ATD-X/X-2/F-2). Another build-under-license agreement like the one they had for the VF-171 was certainly feasible, but the Brisingr Alliance was attracted to the idea of domestic development of a next-generation Main Variable Fighter to replace the VF-171 because it was a way to stimulate the cluster's economy and create jobs, to improve their defense autonomy with less dependence on outside governments and corporations for military hardware, and as a potential source of revenue via export sales to other governments. The VF-19 might have been cheaper, but it would also probably not have been as attractive an option since its performance was much lower than true 5th Generation fighters and it would be another build-under-license agreement they'd be paying another government for. Master File has some thoughts on that, though they mostly amount to a four-engine version of the VF-31AX ala the YF-29.

I'll answer the tech-y bits in a more appropriate thread. How much lore this book'll dispense is unclear right now... it seems to be light on text, so I wouldn't expect too much. Certainly not a lot in terms of new detail that we haven't got from existing sources already.

Which is itself, like most particle beam concepts, ultimately based on the "Teleforce" weapon concept that Nikola Tesla conceived in 1934 in a bid to secure funding from J.P. Morgan Jr. and later described in his 1937 treatise The Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-Dispersive Energy Through The Natural Media. Some of the only actual science to come out of the scientific community's "Death ray" craze in the 1920s and 30s. Nikola Tesla's original practical proposal for a charged particle beam weapon was for a metallic ion particle beam using mercury or tungsten vapor. Macross seems to have at least four, possibly five, different flavors of particle beam weaponry kicking around based on my deep dive into energy weapons. Macross Chronicle seems to imply there are two different kinds of charged particle beam weapon. Technology Sheet 10A "Beam Weaponry" seems to imply that there are two distinct kinds of charged particle beam weapon. It mentions that ship-based and destroid-based beam weapons fire charged heavy metal particles. The implication, supported by Master File, seems to be that VFs or battle pods do not and use charged particles from their compact thermonuclear reactors instead. It also lumps impact cannons and fluid plasma cannons under particle beams, but it remains unclear what an impact cannon is beyond not being a dimensional beam weapon. 😕 Master File poses the interesting prospect that the particle beam cannons on Zentradi ships are something akin to a laser-coupled charged particle beam cannon that serendipitously uses a laser produced by vaporizing tungsten in the compact thermonuclear reactor to help cohere the metallic particle beam after it's launched by the GICs. Possibly the weirdest thing that's come out of this deep dive has been an explanation for why the VF-31AX's container is so damn huge. It's a massive energy capacitor driving the rear-facing laser cannon and the beam gunpod.

Just think, some bright spark at Paramount thought that this mess was so impressive it would entice people to subscribe to their sh*tty streaming service for the sake of watching this extremely sh*tty-looking show. 🤔🙃 Spending millions on CG only works to your benefit if your designs look good... and the ships in this look like something nicked from a decade-plus old non-Star Trek video game. I'm getting strong Halo/Covenant vibes from the protagonist ship and PSO2/Luminmech vibes from the enemy one. The lighting is so dim that I'm left to wonder if the studio's keeping it dark to hide problems with the sets the way they did when Generations reused the TNG TV sets. But the thing that inexplicably bothers me the most is that the captain both looks and sounds like a heavy smoker. (Also, why TF is she wearing granny glasses? Federation medicine had already solved the problem of age-related vision degradation by the mid-2280s. Over 900 years ago, from the perspective of Starfleet Academy in ~3192. Complete ocular replacement was also an option from even longer, being available since at least 2256.)

Well, 3.28... but yes. It's hard to picture because people tend to think Giant Robots are inherently ENORMOUS so the scale tends to get distorted in fan art, but the head is only about the size of the pilot's chair as seen directly in DYRL?. Hell, the 12.68m (41'7") VF-1 Battroid as a whole is only a bit over 7x the height of a statistically average 1.8 meter (5'9") person.

That's old, sure... but far from forgotten. Even Macross Chronicle mentions it. Probably because it's one of the very few details ever published about the VF-XX. That's new... -ish. I think they may be riffing on a statement Masahiro Chiba made in Great Mechanics DX back in the Frontier era about how the NUNS toyed with the idea of doing an upgraded VF-19 with ISC as an anti-Vajra VF but ultimately opted to develop a new fighter for economic reasons. AFAIK, they've never actually tipped the VF-19 as a serious rival to any 5th Gen machine though. I think Master File is the only other book to expressly acknowledge the VF-24. Not necessarily. After all, the first statements that the YF-29 and YF-30 had been retconned into 6th Gen prototypes came from the Macross Delta TV series Blu-ray extra features that used such as a way to justify classifying the Siegfrieds as Gen 5.5 machines. Still... sounds like this book will be very much worth the cost of importing two or three copies. At least, for my purposes.

That's pretty unlikely. After all, the reason that the monitor turrets of Battroids are armed with laser weapons instead of conventional anti-aircraft cannons is that, back when the SDF Macross series was in development, Kawamori et. al. realized pretty early on that a Battroid's head was going to be far too small to plausibly fit a then-modern air-to-air machine gun like the F-14's M61A1 Vulcan or the Panavia Tornado's BK-27 and enough ammunition to make it remotely usable. It's been a bit of a creator's in-joke ever since... so much so that the VF-0 Master File directly references it as an in-universe design obstacle the Stonewell Bellcom team working on the VF-0 encountered in the 2000s. In a way, you could say Macross's insistence on head-mounted energy weapons is a rebuke of Gundam's infamously useless "head vulcans"... By sticking with laser or particle beam weapons, the Battroid has a coaxial gun that will never run out of ammunition and can be plausibly made powerful enough to inflict meaningful damage because their main design constraint is power availability. It also retains enough space for all the optics and other sensors the Battroid requires to go about its business.

That'll be an inexpressible comfort to my postman when I inevitably order 3 copies. He'll only get a mild hernia dragging the box to my door this time. I'm hoping they include some of the stuff from the lesser-covered games like M3... like the unconventional enemy mecha.

As far as I can tell, the moniker "Heavy Weapon type" is something that Arii came up. That said, these kits are clearly DYRL?-branded. You can see the logo next to the "Macross '84 Summer" roundel bears the movie's title 愛・おぼえていますか. They might be reusing Mikimoto's character art from the TV series but the logos are clearly movie-specific. Why there's a VF-1D in this assortment is another question entirely... since the VF-1D was entirely omitted from the movie version as it had been replaced by the VT-1. Probably just Arii milking the molds as much as possible. Well, yes... that's to be expected. After all, you won't find the terms "Strike Valkyrie" or "Strike Pack" in the film's contemporary official media. That was a bit of branding that Takatoku Toys came up with as a way to differentiate the movie's beam cannon-equipped Super Valkyrie variant from the regular Super Valkyrie configuration. Official publications from the era refer to it as スーパーパック・ビーム砲付き (Super Pack - Beam cannon-equipped). I want to say it's until the late 90's or early 2000s that the term "Strike Valkyrie" finally gained official traction. Well, then I have... *checks calendar*... thirty year old good news for you. Ever since '95 and This is Animation Special: Macross Plus, the DYRL? designs have been established to exist in the same continuity as the TV series ones. The TV version VF-1 is how the VF-1 looked in its Block 1 to Block 5 production specification, and the Movie version is how it looked for the remainder of its production run (Blocks 6-17). Officially, the "movie version" VF-1 was already entering service when things went to hell and Earth got glassed by the Boddole Zer fleet.

As far as we know, the only weapon mounted in the VF-31J's monitor turret (head) is the obvious one: its Mauler ROV-127E 12.7mm multi-band fiber laser cannon. The barrel-like structures on the VF-31J, as well as similar ones found on other VFs, have not been identified. It's possible that it's some kind of structural component used to hold the monitor turret in place in Fighter and GERWALK modes or that it's related to one of the many sensor systems packed into the monitor turret.

On the one hand, why wouldn't you take advantage of such a grotesquely OP technology for stimulated emission? On the other, I'd be very worried if one of my colleagues came to me and said "Remember that time we tried to make a wildly impractical nuclear bomb-pumped x-ray laser cannon to shoot down ICBMs? I think I know how we can make it work and put it on a plane now." That's not to say that there haven't been similarly bonkers weapons tossed out in newer material. The VF-22 Master File introduces a Strike Pack beam cannon for the VF-22 that's a scaled-down version of a Zentradi warship's guided focusing beam cannon. It uses a dedicated compact thermonuclear reactor to vaporize heavy metals in order to use launch that vapor as a high-velocity particle beam with an output power in the hundreds of megawatts.

Finally watched Wotakoi: Love is Hard for Otaku... and in Ep4 Koyanagi and Kabakura name-drop Ranka and Sheryl from Macross Frontier during a lover's spat (with Koyonagi running out of a drinking party insisting she'll never be like Kabakura's "beloved Ranka", only for him to question if she's trying to say she's more like Sheryl... and then catch a shoe to the face.)

My exploration of energy weapons in Macross turned up a few more interesting oddities. First is that Master File actually made the beam cannon confusion worse since apparently its version of the VF-4 has not one, not two, but four different forearm-mounted guns for the VF-4. Three of which look virtually identical. One being a version of the same ROV-20 laser cannon used by the VF-1, the next being a charged particle beam cannon powered off the reactors, and the third being a charged particle beam gun powered by "beam cartridges". Interestingly, it seems to imply that the VF-27's beam gunpod is NOT a beam cartridge type. Second, Master File didn't come up with the idea that the VF-1's RO-X2A Strike pack cannon was a laser weapon. They got that from Sky Angels. Instead of being a safer and more conventional gas dynamic laser cannon, the original version is an inertial confinement fusion-pumped x-ray laser cannon. Essentially, a less insane but repeatably usable version of Project Excalibur's heinously bonkers nuclear bomb-pumped x-ray laser system concept.

Potentially. It would depend on whether the TV/Movie continuity also includes the Aerial Knights moonlighting as mercenaries. IMO, the series doesn't quite align to that since it treats the Aerial Knights as having been the Windermere NUNS before the secession and there's no mention of them having used the Sv-262 in live combat prior to the attack on Al Shahal in 2067. There is a section in, I think, the VF-31 Master File that talks about the Sv-262 so there may be some detail in there. It's easy to be consistent when there are barely any details to get wrong. 🤷‍♂️ Kind of feels like an unusual "reality ensues" moment. A senior developer under contract and subject to a bunch of NDAs quits and goes to a competitor and leads their development of a derivative of the product she was developing at her old company? There have been a LOT of lawsuits like that lately over GenAI technology with senior devs leaving to found startups or join rivals and getting sued for allegedly stealing trade secrets.