Seto Kaiba

The reason I think he managed to break the nose off the plane is that the camera/LIDAR modules are a part of that nose block and they're visibly still on the aircraft in that shot.

The Acshio/Akusho district is never given a proper official explanation. Officially (in-story), the district is an environment ship that isn't registered with the 37th large scale long-distance emigrant fleet's administration. It attached itself to one of City 7's portside docking ports and has accessed power, oxygen, and other resources from the City-class ship without authorization. Somehow, this state of affairs was either not noticed or not corrected before the fleet departed Earth and apparently nobody has bothered to do anything about it in the seven years since then. While there are surely laws prohibiting an emigrant fleet from simply abandoning an inhabited environment ship in deep space, that it seems like nobody has even tried to take any action on it gives it the distinct ring of a cover story. There's a neglected environment ship the fleet government has no jurisdiction over conveniently attached directly to the fleet's capital and flagship, with a hangar and airlocks capable of supporting next-generation VFs, and it just happens to be home to the unwitting subject of a secret military program? Macross 7 Trash at least makes it feel a little less implausible with the revelation that there are at least a few districts in the fleet that would count as "rough neighborhoods". It seems to work a little differently, series to series. When it comes to the Megaroad-class as seen in Macross: Flash Back 2012 and Macross M3, the artificial sky appears to be projected directly onto the ship's transparent hull sections. In Macross 7, City 7's sky is presented as being a hologram or other image projected from the interior of the shell onto the exterior of the dome. This is demonstrated in the show's first episode when one of the operators mistakenly begins powering down the shell's artificial sky projection instead of lowering the shell the way Max ordered. The Akushio district has an artificial sky too, though it isn't clear if that's projected from the shell or something projected locally. In Macross Frontier, the titular emigrant ship seems to be using both approaches simultaneously with the sky of Island 1 being a projection from the shell and the skies of the various Island modules seem to be projected directly onto their domes since they use retractable armored shutters instead of a shell and most of them are tens of kilometers away from the rear end of the Island-1's shell.

That's at a bit after 31 minutes into the movie, after the test montage and the first Sharon Apple concert. The scene where Isamu finds Dr. Neumann hiding out in what looks to be a either a supply closet trying to "kidnap" Sharon Apple. There's no clear event that led to the YF-19-2 being in such a state in the movie version, due to events being reordered.

Specifically, I was thinking of Macross Plus: Movie Edition and the wreck of Isamu's YF-19. When we see it being brought in for repairs, it's in pretty bad shape. The nose and left wing have broken off and are sitting on the hangar floor, the canopy is cracked, the canards are bent 90 degrees, there are several external panels and control surfaces that are entirely missing, the landing gear cover is deformed, the rear-facing laser cannon is bent, at least one of the dorsal intakes is crushed, etc. All of that and Shinsei Industry still has her flightworthy again in short order. The YF-29 we see at the end of Sayonara no Tsubasa (we get a clean view in Tenjin Hidetaka's Valkyries: Third Sortie) isn't exactly in fantastic shape itself, but the damage is a lot more limited. It's covered in grass stains, the horn on the monitor turret is bent or broken, the starboard wing and canard are both broken off about halfway along their length resulting in the loss of the No.4 engine, the port stabilizer is completely sheared off, and the port wing is bent with some nozzle damage on the No.3 engine, but that's about it. (Which I guess is just what you'd expect from a VF with twice the armor and four times the armor strength of the VF-25 or VF-27 with no mode limitation on energy conversion armor usage. It won't bounce, but even an uncontrolled crash landing after a bailout at Mach no-thank-you isn't going to wreck it. They just have to go find whatever hillside the No.4 engine ended up in and they can probably just replace the wings and fly it again.)

IIRC, the reason that the Likes are anonymous is that the Reaction pane/Like button is the last surviving piece of a long-since-deactivated upvote/downvote karma system that's built into Invision's board software. It was originally a pure upvote/downvote system, and Invision later expanded it to include custom Facebook-style "reactions". The admins disabled the upvote/downvote feature back in the 2010s because people were abusing it to harass and bully each other. So now the Facebook-style reaction pane, bereft of any custom reactions, is all that's left of it.

Yes. Initially, anyway. A year or so later there it's no longer a one-off and is in some kind of semi-official limited production. No. The YF-29's weapons are powerful, sure... but they're only impressive by the standards of an average Valkyrie's normal firepower. Yeah, it has a heavy quantum beam gunpod that can theoretically sink a small escort warship in a single hit in beam grenade mode. So does the VF-27. That's about on par with a warship's charged particle beam gun turrets. Its next heaviest weapon, the TW2 beam turret, is said to be the same type used for point defense on aircraft carriers. Its missiles and built-in guns are formidable because they have the same MDE ammunition used on the VF-25 and VF-171. In a way, this broadly mirrors the original RX-78 Gundam. Its beam rifle was an extremely powerful weapon by the standards of Mobile Suits-carried weapons at the time, but the firepower was comparable to a single warship-mounted beam cannon and the rapid proliferation of the technology meant that it went from "extremely powerful" to merely above average in a matter of months. Just five or so large chunks in specific places. Unclear... he does let the YF-29 crash after abandoning it, but there's nothing saying it's unrecoverable. We've seen worse.

FWIW, I enjoyed it clear through to the end. Scarlet is so delightfully free of the usual restraint and timidness of so many other female leads in her genre, and I promise the punching does not stop until the very end.

"Transitional" feels like the wrong word for it. After all, real(istic) robot anime didn't exist as a genre before the original Mobile Suit Gundam series. They were defining what it meant to be a non-super robot anime as they went and everyone that came after built on that concept. Mobile Suit Gundam made a clean break with a lot of iconic super robot tropes. The titular robot was a military prototype built for a morally ambiguous war between humans and a weapon based on explicable, reproduceable, practical technology meant for mass production. Its capabilities were impressive, but finite and limited by its specs. Its weapons were only what you could see and did not exceed the capabilities of more conventional platforms. It wasn't Earth's sole defender or even necessarily involved in many key conflicts. Super Dimension Fortress Macross went a fair bit further with the idea by having the Valkyries and Destroids already be mass produced weapons before the war started and by putting more detail into the designs themselves that emphasize their practicality and both "real" vehicles and military hardware. In his Macross Design Works book, Shoji Kawamori talks a bit about how the design of the VF-1 entered unprecedented territory by including realistic details emphasizing its practical use like its aerodynamic control surfaces, landing gear, or the way various parts of it fold or open for maintenance and storage. They went further than simply putting a giant robot into a realistic setting and emphasized trying to make the robot itself feel more grounded and believable as a practical weapon of war. That same unusual attention to detail shows up in Miyatake's designs for the Destroids too. Not only did they prioritize having a clear design lineage and show common platforms in use for different purposes, they went as far as figuring out things like how the various joints should be articulated, where the ammunition for certain weapons are stored and how the feed systems work, and even giving them realistic military bumper codes and bumper numbers based on US military formation markings. (That same attention to detail even extends to the Zentradi mecha, where Macross's creators even bothered to sit down and figure out how the Zentradi forces markings would work and even how they would record kill marks.)

I suppose so! Of course, when I think of "super robots" I tend to fall back on how Japan likes to define the term. A super robot is in the most stringently literal sense a robot that is functionally the same as a comic book superhero. A larger-than-life figure that gets its power from unexplainable or unscientific sources, is impossible (or nearly impossible) to duplicate, is the Last Line of Defense against some evil that the military just can't handle despite being piloted by some random civilian, requires a lot of flamboyant posing and Calling Your Attacks, manifests new powers or weapons as the plot demands, and responds to the operator's heroic willpower or some other special quality in a way that causes it to exceed its specs, and exists to fight Evil in a fairly straightforward Good vs Evil-type narrative. Gundam doesn't usually indulge in those tropes. There are a few titles that flirt with some super robot-adjacent tropes like Gundam Wing having each Gundam be made by a single genius scientist working alone, or G-Reco and G-Witch having a Gundam that can only be piloted by a specific person... but those are usually paired with extensive subversions of the rest. IMO, the main sign of super robot "DNA" in the OG Gundam series was the Gundam's garish paintjob that Tomino so bitterly opposed. Macross's creators were even more gung-ho about realism, which is why they went to the trouble/effort of ensuring the designs included things like aerodynamic control surfaces, the feed systems for bullets, and how the powertrain actually worked to drive a walking robot. (And of course they put a lot of that same energy into GUNSIGHT, which provided an ex-post-facto explanation for same for Gundam.)

Nah, we'll get full-on Terminators. Human-scale bipedal robots armed with conventional weapons. Probably supported by other drone weapons platforms. Back in April 2017, Russian robotics firm Android Technics caused a bit of an uproar when they published a video of their multipurpose humanoid robot prototype FEDOR conducting a target shooting exercise as a demonstration of its precision and dexterity. Android Technics strenuously maintains that the FEDOR prototype was designed for rescue operations and absolutely not intended to have any military application, but the Russian deputy prime minster at the time still felt compelled to make a public statement in response to the demonstration that Russia was on no uncertain terms absolutely NOT developing a Terminator. (Which, I am certain, reassured exactly nobody.)

Eh... back when the OG Mobile Suit Gundam series was made real robot tropes had yet to be codified so it did have some leftover elements of "super-ness" to it. That said, most of the traits that are now said to be emblematic of super robots are generally absent from Gundam. The exceptions being, of course, those Gundam installments that unapologetically cross that line into super robot-ness like SD Gundam and Mobile Fighter G Gundam. A "super prototype" and a "super robot" are two different things... though their key distinction is usually whether they're handled like a practical weapon or a superhero.

TBH, I think that impression was probably made literal years before Kawamori actually began his career at Studio Nue. After all, he started attending SF Central Art's monthly meet-up "The Crystal Convention" during his first year of high school in 1975. SF Central Art got its start as a fan group for SF Magazine doing illustrations, analysis, and theory-crafting based on the magazine's publications of domestic and translated western sci-fi stories. They turned that into a business in 1972 when they formed Crystal Art Studio (later Studio Nue) and were doing illustrations for translated western SF as well as developing setting materials and doing some outsource mechanical design for SF and mecha anime works. He basically spent the last 3-4 years of his pre-professional life regularly hanging out with detail-obsessed SF design artists and illustrators whose passion and profession was analyzing and crafting highly detailed science fiction settings. He joined Studio Nue the same month that Mobile Suit Gundam started airing (April 1979) and got wrapped up in SF Central Art's analysis and theory-crafting about that series that spawned GUNSIGHT and then Gundam Century while working on The Ultraman and Diaclone. I don't think any criticism of giant robots hit Kawamori badly. He was already the kind of person who'd ponder the implications and ask probing questions about a SF setting and he had spent four years with pros learning how to build, analyze, and critique detailed sci-fi settings. He was one of the ones making the criticism of giant robots while he was watching and discussing Gundam with the other members of SF Central Art and those criticisms and observations about how Gundam's story was put together informed his own work on what would become Super Dimension Fortress Macross.

It's OK, as shounen anime titles go. It feels a lot like Bleach at the start between the art style, tone, and the basic premise. It loses that sense of fun and adventure after the first few story arcs and starts leaning a lot more heavily on horror. Especially almost Junji Ito-esque body horror. Past the Shibuya arc it kind of devolves into audience alienating levels of unstinting darkness and misery. That's right about where it lost me. IIRC when the manga ended the fans were pretty upset with the ending too... saying that the main villain kind of goes down like a chump. (IMO, it's a real shame because when the series was screwing around doing anything BUT advance the main plot, that was when I had the most fun with it.) I think so. YMMV, of course. It's not great or doing anything groundbreaking in its genre, but it's at least pretty good as a romcom goes and I had fun with it to the end. A lot more so than most of the other titles I watched this season. The ending is abrupt AF. It's car crash levels of sudden and out of nowhere. Not bad, but just very... "that escalated quickly". Yeah, I get the feeling they're kind of hitting the limits of the premise at this point. Right up 'til the end I was convinced they were going to try to announce a fourth season by dropping one of the other successful isekai titles into the mix like Ascendance of a Bookworm.

So there's a bit of a story there too... but a shorter one. Y'see, before Studio Nue was founded as Crystal Art Studio in 1972 its founders collaborated together in a science fiction doujinshi circle called SF Central Art and published a science fiction fanzine called Crystal and ran a monthly fan get-together called the Crystal Convention. They continued to publish doujinshi under the SF Central Art name for years after they formed the company and began doing science fiction planning and illustrations professionally and Studio Nue employees were able to get involved in that in their spare time. Shoji Kawamori attended the Crystal Convention as a student and got involved in SF Central Art around the time he joined Studio Nue in 1979 where he was involved in their newest publication GUNSIGHT, a Mobile Suit Gundam fanzine. That project would ultimately be responsible for a LOT of the familiar lore and worldbuilding that now makes up the foundation of Gundam's Universal Century. Despite being credited now as the founder of the Real Robot genre of mecha anime, Gundam at the time was still pretty much seen as a Super Robot anime because there were a lot of gaps in the original show's worldbuilding and technical setting. SF Central Art's GUNSIGHT saw a lot of dedicated adult SF writers and artists put their heads together to come up with what they felt were plausible and cogent explanations for everything from what the colony drop actually did to Earth to why Mobile Suits exist and how a lot of the technology works (including how Minovsky particles function). Shoji Kawamori was a part of this effort (and threw a nod to it into Macross with the Macross's bridge callsign being "Gunsight 1". They took it from the realm of Super Robot unexplained science-is-magic to more of a hard sci-fi angle. Kenichi Matsuzaki, a Studio Nue member who'd been a writer on Gundam, was able to organize this fan effort into the original official Gundam setting publication Gundam Century. One of the things that Kawamori et. al. were a bit bothered by when it came to Gundam's worldbuilding was that the series never really established the why of the story's iconic giant robots. Other than "it's the space future", why are 18 meter giant robots the new standard of warfare? Why 18 meters? Why giant robots at all? GUNSIGHT, and later its successor Gundam Century, had to figure all that out after the fact and explain what in-universe contrivances could make such a weapon practical. There really wasn't any clear reason or justification for why a giant humanoid robot would exist AT ALL. So when Shoji Kawamori was working on his own giant robot anime project at Studio Nue, he made a point of ensuring that he had a clear and cogent explanation for his show's setting containing giant robots built directly into its story. That being that Humanity had developed giant robots in anticipation of possible hostilities with a race of similarly sized giant aliens. Presumably the size was finessed a bit in development, but I'd expect they probably stuck to nice round numbers given that the Flight Suit was around 4m tall (twice human size) and the final result was 10m tall (five times human size).

Glad you like it. The reason I ended up going into so much detail is I really wanted to capture a proper explanation for why horizontal stabilizers don't seem to have ever been a part of the concept, from the first drafts in late '79 and early '80 clear to the finished product in '82, despite it being based on a real aircraft. (For a lot of its development, it was a VERY different aircraft that seems to owe a lot to the X-24B, Gundam's FF-X7 Core Fighter, and the G-Fighter.) EDIT: In his designer's note book, Kawamori notes he was very fond of Thunderbird-2 and built in in papercraft as a kid... which is also, perhaps not coincidentally, a lifting-body design with an unconventional twin boom tail.