Seto Kaiba

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.

One detail I'm unaccountably glad the translation here gets right... the spelling of ARIEL. A lot of people misspell it "AERIAL", but it's meant to be a reference to the fairy/spirit from Shakespeare's The Tempest. Come to that... Xaos certainly aren't hiring the best people. Kind of a "You've tried the rest, now try us!" situation. The omake jokes about Messer being demoted to pizza delivery boy suddenly land a LOT harder. We literally cannot even mention Makina in the story without having to acknowledge her huge... personality. Tell us the character exists for one reason without telling us the character exists for one reason. They really do like to remind the audience that every woman in this is meant to be very attractive, huh? Ernest seems to be taking strategic advice from Zap Brannigan of all people, advising everyone to just fire wildly into the sky without aiming. Xaos really doesn't get any respect from anyone in this, do they?

I've heard it's rather more than a "relative snooze fest". What I've been hearing is that the animation in One Punch Man S3 is so bad folks are calling it "One Frame Man" and talking about boycotting the studio. Even One Piece is catching flak this season, though over accusations that the animation team are using generative AI. Fun series. Way more tied to Tenchi nowadays than it was when it was new. I ended up having to explain that connection in part to my watch group while we were doing Tenchi OVAs 4 and 5. Not just because Seina is the new/current owner of Zinv since GXP's last few episodes, but D is kicking around Tabletop Island during Paradise War and OVA 5 with a cabbit body.

While Frontier-era materials did establish that the raw/least pure grade of fold ore is sometimes called fold coal, I don't think any source has connected it to the supposed coal mines on Banipal that Isamu was threatened with in Plus. EDIT: The reason some have speculated that Banipal might be a fold coal mine is that it wouldn't really make any sense for a civilization that possesses room temperature superconductors, lossless energy storage, high-efficiency wind and solar power, ultra-high efficiency thermonuclear generators and a mindset VERY focused on preserving the biospheres of planets would bother mining fossil fuels. EDIT 2: Of course even then it doesn't really make sense, since there isn't a need to mine the raw materials for fold carbon when it can be synthesized in industrial quantities using existing technology.

Fold carbon and fold quartz were both officially introduced to the Macross setting in Macross Frontier. Fold carbon was introduced to the setting and story partly as a way to explain how fold quartz can be "dropped in" to improve the performance of existing OTM rather than needing to develop new versions of technology around it and concoct new explanations for how key technologies work. It was effectively retconned into having always been a part of OTM from the very beginning as a key component in the Gravity and Inertia Control tech that underpins most OTM. Prior to that point, there wasn't an explanation for exactly how a GIC system goes about creating artificial gravity. Supplemental technical material like Master File subsequently went absolutely ham tying this into everything from explaining why the early fold systems Humanity built didn't work very well to why there are such massive leaps in engine performance between certain generations and even why some fold boosters are single-use. As with several other late additions, one might say this was foreshadowed in an earlier work. Specifically Macross Dynamite 7, where it was noted that crystalline galactic whales were hunted because their bodies contained materials used in the construction of fold systems. The Frontier novelizations similarly turned a macguffin from Macross VF-X2 into foreshadowing of fold quartz's existence and potential. It would be fair to say that, at least in post-Frontier publications, the ASS-1/SDF-1 Macross was fairly packed with fold carbon since it's used in the GIC systems of thermonuclear reactors, gravity control systems, inertia control systems, fold navigation, fold communication, cross-dimensional radar, particle beam cannons, holographic projection systems, thermonuclear reaction warheads, the ship's main gun system, active stealth tech, and any/all of the same found on the battle pods and auxiliary craft found aboard the derelict ship.

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: