Seto Kaiba

A lot of the titles I'm following continue to be pretty bloody tedious. Mechanical Marie, Pass the Monster Meat, Milady!, and May I Ask for One Final Thing? are all still a lot of fun. Bland-a-thon isekai shovelware series A Gatherer's Adventure in Isekai decided now (its 9th episode) was the time to actually lock in and do something new and different. What it did is something so far out of left field that it caught me completely flat-footed and I still have a little trouble believing they went there. Of all the "the Elves are a dying race" fantasy takes I've heard over the years... that is a new one and not one I would ever have seen coming. It's like something the dwarves would write.

That's a bit of a disservice to them. The Neo Zentran political movement in the Macross 29 fleet advocates for rearmament for economic reasons not a desire for warfare. Yeah, but these are minor incidental level affairs that are cleared up by a single special forces unit. It's not like these groups represent a majority of Zentradi or even a significant minority. They're basically the spacefuture version of the militant wackos that every developed country produces in some small numbers. (The Zentradi may be overrepresented simply because their natural fight-or-flight response is stuck on "fight" due to genetic engineering.) I don't think that's it. There haven't been any ships with explicitly Zentradi names thus far, excluding the SDFN-08 General Vrlitwhai Kridanik (which is named for a person), and this looks to be structured like a masculine given name in Roman Latin. The suffix -icus normally means "of/from" or "belonging to" or "pertaining to". It's almost like "genticus", which would be "belonging to a gens (family)"... which would definitely fit the theme of Moaramia's journey. Eh... that depends. Master File contends that the VF-24/25/26/27 already use the highest-quality fold carbon that could be reliably produced for the various systems and features that require it (e.g. reaction engines, certain beam weapons, active stealth, EFAM, the Aegis pack's fold wave radar, etc.). It's not pure enough to make a working Inertia Store Converter, which is why fold quartz is necessary in the first place and the scarcity of it is why it's used as sparingly as the New UN Forces and various defense companies can get away with. The best you can do with very high purity fold carbon is to make the Queadluun-Rau's inertia vector control system, which is a similar technology that isn't quite as fit for purpose because its main focus is optimizing propellant consumption. Master File suggests the Earth New UN Spacy is experimenting with using the latest ultra-high purity fold carbon as a substitute for fold quartz in a Fold Wave System. Its account suggests that it does work, but only about 1% as well as the Vajra Queen-level fold quartz used in Alto's YF-29. Fold quartz is just purified fold carbon. There's nothing really supernatural about either of them... not any more than, say, dilithium in Star Trek is. It's multipurposeful, but all of the things it can do are treated in a purely scientific context. They both produce fold waves in various applications, produce heavy quantum in GIC systems, etc. Fold quartz is a purer form that simply does everything fold carbon can do better. Between Master File's above-mentioned assertions WRT using ultra-pure fold carbon in a Fold Wave System in exchange for greatly reduced performance and Fire Bomber's Sound Energy system and Sound Booster being built around a modified fold system, it seems a safe-ish bet to say that fold carbon can be used to resonate with/transmit songs.

Based on the descriptions we have, the fold quartz isn't the particle source in a direct sense. The particulars of how a Gravity and Inertia Control system creates heavy quantum are not given, but fold carbon (or fold quartz) is said to be a key component of the system that serves to somehow catalyze the creation of heavy quantum and produces fold waves used to control the heavy quantum's gravity. It's not consumed in the process. Oh, it definitely is. As far as we know, fold quartz is either not a naturally-occurring substance or if it does occur in nature it is almost impossibly rare. The Vajra use an unknown biological process to refine raw fold ore (fold coal) into fold carbon and fold quartz. The ancient Protoculture studied the Vajra extensively and were eventually able to develop a technological means of synthesizing fold quartz. Humanity is still more or less at the point of picking over Protoculture ruins and old Vajra carcasses and nests for leftover fold quartz, so fold quartz of a usable purity for many essential purposes is quite rare and incredibly valuable. Humanity is noted to be working on a means of synthesizing fold quartz the way they do fold carbon, but there is no indication that the process has borne fruit so far. (Master File suggests that the answer is "probably not" in the 2060s.) Master File has yet to devote a volume to a craft that was equipped with Heavy Quantum or MDE beam weaponry as standard like the VF-171EX, VF-27, or YF-29, or YF-30. The brief description of MDE weapons and the VF-171EX's MDE beam cannon in the VF-25 Master File is very much in line with the previously-stated description from the official setting materials. Fold quartz particles are used in the trigger mechanisms of MDE bullets and missile warheads in order to provide the fold waves that activate the super heavy quantum and cause the "fold bomb" effect, while the MDE beam weapons are firing particle beams made up of the super heavy quantum produced by a fold quartz-equipped GIC. There's no mention of a "beam cartridge" system like the one found on the VF-31's LU-18A gunpod writeup in the VF-31 Master File. Potentially. It might raise some awkward questions about the VF-27's beam gunpod if true, since it's not 100% clear if the VF-27's beam gunpod was a charged particle gunpod that was upgraded to a heavy quantum and later MDE beam specification or if it was a heavy quantum one from the jump. If the VF-27 could pull off getting the necessary particles from the engines to the gunpod, it'd make one wonder why the VF-31 couldn't.

I'm not sure how laser weapons work in Star Wars, so I can't say much about that. Generally speak, though, since many lasers depend heavily on mirrors to collimate the beam you wouldn't want a laser weapon to be so powerful that it can damage itself with its own output. When it comes to particle beams, the beam never touches the interior of the accelerator because doing so would be akin to the structural failure of a gun's barrel during firing... it'd wreck the weapon. By definition, yes. Well, yes and no. As I touched on in my previous post, the explanation(s) we've gotten about how most (non-dimensional) energy weapons in Macross work presents them as weapons that can be operated indefinitely as long as the mecha's reactors continue to run. They get any charged particles or plasma they need from the reactor itself. That's why Mirage's comment in the novelization is so odd. It implies the VF-31 has a beam weapon (the gunpod) for which that is not true. That's a whole different animal. Two, really. You're potentially conflating two different weapons. MDE shells and warheads are essentially a miniaturized version of the Dimension Eater bomb that destroyed Gallia IV. They use fine particles of fold quartz to create fold waves that "activate" the super heavy quantum in the shell/warhead so that its immense gravity tears adjacent matter apart as a short lived pseudo black hole before it drops back into fold space. MDE beam weapons use fold quartz as a catalyst to generate super heavy quantum and manipulate its gravity with fold waves so that the weapon fires a particle beam made up of short lived pseudo black holes that pull the matter they come in contact with into fold space. As far as we know, the beam version doesn't consume any fold quartz. True... as the actual definition of "optical weapon" implies the weapon is firing collimated electromagnetic radiation, which particle beams aren't.

Wear and tear on the gunpod's hardware wouldn't be considered "ammunition", and thus wouldn't fit the dialog of the novel. That's not to say that it's not a concern, though. Macross's Valkyries need maintenance and have parts that require inspection and/or replacement at specified intervals the same as any real world aircraft. Keeping on top of those inspections and scheduled replacement intervals is the ground crew's job, but no component would have a service lifespan so short that it can wear out mid-sortie and anything near end-of-life would be replaced (if possible) by the ground crew before takeoff. Laser and particle beam weapons have few if any moving parts so they seem unlikely candidates to have significant part degradation. After all, humanity copied the technology from the Supervision Army and Zentradi and theirs hold up basically forever. Conventional gunpods and railguns are going to suffer barrel wear from the explosive propellants and/or the ablation of electromagnetic rail material under high currents and voltages and will need periodic replacement. Master File mentions the GU-11's barrels were rated for replacement around 20,000 rounds. Since the gunpod could only hold 200 rounds at any given time, it wasn't in any danger of wearing out mid-battle.

Okie-dokie, copied this over from the Macross Delta novelization topic so I can answer it without derailing that other topic too badly. So... yeah, as noted over there it's a bit odd that Mirage would use such a specific term as "optical weapons" to refer to her Valkyrie's energy weapons. What's weirder and more out of place is the implication that beam guns have finite ammunition. Most energy weapons - lasers, particle beams, plasma guns, impact cannons - are built into the mecha and are able to draw power from the mecha's internal power distribution system. It's all buffered output. The various power generation systems tied to the reactor (the thermoelectric converters and MHD generators) supply power to a network of energy capacitors that then distribute power locally to various systems. Laser weapons like the "head lasers" of Battroids are powered by an energy capacitor in the Battroid's head that is replenished by the energy from the generators in the engines. Particle beam guns are said to get their charged particles from the reactor itself and the energy for their operation comes from the capacitors. Plasma guns are implied to be in the same boat. Because of this setup, a beam weapon of any stripe ought to have essentially infinite ammunition as long as the mecha's reactor or reactors continue to replenish its energy capacitors and provide charged particles or plasma for relevant applications. Mirage and Hayate's VF-31 Siegfrieds only have two types of energy weaponry equipped: the ROV-127E laser cannons on the monitor turret and the LU-18A charged particle beam gunpod. So apparently Mirage is implying that the LU-18A has a finite internal ammo source. Kodachi must be referencing Master File for that one. The VF-31 Master File's explanation of the LU-18A describes it as getting the necessary electric power for its operation from the Valkyrie but having an internal magazine of "beam cartridges" that are vaporized and ionized to produce the charged particles the weapon fires. (This is a bit odd, in that it seems to go against what previous titles suggested about beam gunpod operation, with the YF-27-5 drawing what it needed for its beam gunpod to run from a third reactor mounted on the wing, suggesting it COULD get its charged particles from the mecha.)

You'd think they'd just say "beam" since Macross Chronicle uses that as the umbrella term for pretty much all non-dimensional energy weapons. "Optical weapon", at least as it is presently defined, only extends to lasers... though it would be on brand for Mirage to be pompously using a technical term for no real reason. Not really? I'll explain this over on the Mecha thread so I don't derail the thread.

The space cruiser Algenicus (アルゲニクス, Arugenikusu) is one of those few proper nouns in Macross that I haven't yet been able to come up with a definitive explanation for. (It doesn't help that it's intermittently referred to as a battleship (戦艦 senkan) instead of a cruiser (巡洋艦 jun'youkan... sometimes within the same entry, e.g. the game manual.) Normally, Macross's Earth UN Forces and New UN Forces give easily explicable names to their ships, fighters, and so on. A lot of the earlier Variable Fighters are named for pre-existing aircraft (e.g. XB-70 Valkyrie, P-38 Lightning, A-10 Thunderbolt, etc.) and later ones (particularly in the Kodachi era) have Meaningful Names that reference their role in the story and/or their faction. A lot of the earlier ships are named for pioneers of space flight (e.g. Oberth, Goddard, Tsiolkovsky), famous warships (Invincible, Enterprise, Ranger, Akagi) or the heads of state (Harlan J. Niven, Robert A. Rhysling, Bruno J. Global). Later military ships are predominantly named for places (Uraga, Guantanamo, Northampton), for other ships (Bluenose, Stargazer, Saratoga II, Valhalla III), or the occasional in-joke (Lucy). Civilian ships tend to have theme names tied to their purpose and/or owners, a tendency that got more blatant in Kodachi's era (the entertainment ship Hollywood, the seaside resort ship Riviera, the agriculture ship Sunflower, the Polish bank-owned transport Twardowski, etc.) with the occasional punny name thrown in (factory ship Three Star, a pun on Mitsubishi Heavy Industries). There are a couple that have issues or just aren't clear at a glance because the romanization is wrong, unintuitive, or the reference is just weird or obscure. You've seen me chew over the problem of unclear romanization/meaning behind the Macross Galaxy Riviera-class resort ship Evna's name. The YF-27-5 Shaher is another example, as the English spelling of the intended name is wrong in the visual book (it's supposed to be Shahar). There's an older and more unintuitive example in the Macross 7 fleet's West Point-class training ship. Its name is romanized "Beginhill" in every artbook that has a romanization but is actually meant to be "Biggin Hill", being named for the RAF station at Biggin Hill during the world wars. Algenicus, though... I've been unable to find anything on that one. It's such a specific name, and they went to the trouble of spelling it out in English... I get nothing for any possible spelling of it, and the kana doesn't produce any results in the Japanese wiki either.

The in-game text seen during each mission briefing uses "Algenicus" as the English spelling of the ship's name. EDIT: Seen here:

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.)