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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    As drawn in the Macross Dynamite 7 OP, no... those engines are drawn much too large. Of course, it could easily be dismissed as artistic license either in or out of universe, since those are holograms for a public concert... not exactly a place where you'd show a true 3D representation of a state-of-the-art military aircraft engine. Let's never mention that page again. EDIT: Let's just say, it's a very bad website that contains a lot of misinformation... this space previously held a bit of a rant about my views on that matter. When you get right down to it, the standard design of the thermonuclear reaction turbine engine that has remained essentially unchanged across the ~60 years of Variable Fighter designs in-universe is largely unmodified low-bypass turbofan jet engine. The main differences being that the low-pressure compressor is decoupled from the engine body and is electrically driven, and the burner is replaced by high-temperature plasma exhaust from a compact thermonuclear reactor. Minus the pre-/low-pressure compressor stage, the entire engine resides in the lower leg in the vast majority of VF models. Externally, there isn't a lot of visible difference from a conventional engine aside from the length... though that's because, externally, there's not a lot to an engine except various feed lines for coolant, fuel, lubricants, etc. (On VFs, there's a certain degree of simplification as it's been indicated the cryogenic fuel slush is also used as a system coolant.) The amount of detail published in official setting materials has been declining somewhat, yes... though supplementary official setting publications and non-setting materials like the Master File series have seen less of a decline in that respect. Nevertheless, at the very least there has been adequate detail about how various new generations of engine tech have differed from each other. You are correct to assume the FF-3001/FC2 design changes don't affect its external appearance much... they're mostly internal design changes only to the parts of the engine that aren't moving parts, connected to the reactor, GIC, and plasma confinement. Not s'much, no. Yeah, the precompressor/low-pressure compressor is a common feature to virtually all engine designs.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, the official timeline is extremely sparse between the fall of the Protoculture and the events of July 17th 1999. The only event that's not written in extremely vague terms or about the everyday life of a character's inconsequential youth is the completion of a new space station in Earth orbit in 1995.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    It definitely wasn't well-publicized... I noticed mainly because I got a push notification from Netflix about it on my phone.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Hrm... it's a Matt Groening kind of day, isn't it? Hulu orders 20 new episodes of Futurama, and Part IV of Disenchantment dropped on Netflix today as well.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    It'd have to be... I'm pretty sure we didn't all die in an orbital bombardment twelve years ago. 😉 The creators have updated the timeline a few times to account for real world changes like the reunification of Germany in 1990 or the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1992. Older versions of the material made reference to West Germany and the Soviet Union. Those references were updated to just "Germany" and "Russia" in later versions. Unfortunately, the Macross Fandom Wiki is a very poorly curated Wiki that has a lot of issues with users posting unsourced claims and unfounded speculation as fact. It's best to not pay it any attention, as it contains a lot of misinformation. The Macross Compendium Wiki is much better in that regard. The SV-51 was definitely not a common aircraft by any standard. Like the VF-0, the SV-51 was an extremely rare limited trial production aircraft with very few units produced. There were only about 40 SV-51s in existence in 2008 and quite a few of those were destroyed fighting the UN Forces during the Mayan incident. The Anti-Unification Forces were not tied to any specific region or nation, they were a loose alliance of various regional partisan groups opposed to the formation of the Unification Government. It's not surprising that the Anti-Unification Forces would have some supporters in Poland, which had only just separated itself from the Soviet Union in 1989, since the Russians were one of the six major powers behind the Unification Government and OTEC (along with the US, UK, France, Germany, and Japan).
  6. Seto Kaiba
    It helps, but the primary anti-G mechanism in the 5th Generation Valkyries is the Inertia Store Converter (Inertia Capacitor). Essentially, the EX-Gear pilot seat acts as a movable seat that automatically adjusts the pilot's posture in various ways to reduce the tendency of blood to pool in the extremities and slightly cushion the impact of acceleration to enable the pilot to function better under g-loads. (The VF-19's pilot seat did something similar, though primarily against lateral g-forces via rotation.)
  7. Seto Kaiba
    As @sketchley noted, that'd depend on how you want to define stealth. The "stealth" ships in Macross 7 and Macross Frontier are mostly labeled thus because their hulls have been designed for passive stealth with lots of angles intended to deflect an enemy radar wave away at an angle to weaken or eliminate the radar return received by the enemy ship. A ship equipped with the same kind of active cancellation-based active stealth system could also be called a "stealth" ship, even if the design is not conventionally/passively a stealthy one, because it's using an inverse-phase radar wave to cancel out the amplitude of its radar return so the enemy radar will report seeing nothing despite receiving two radar waves back from the target.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... Passionate Walkure IS a compilation movie, so the jumbled-ness is an understandable state of affairs given that it is almost literally the Spark Notes version of the story. It certainly did not help that Macross Delta's story was already kind of threadbare and full of arbitrary and poorly-explained plot twists that shuffled a cast of undeveloped expies of the Macross Frontier cast and shallow stock characters around from one Walkure concert to the next before giving up and just stealing the entire ending of Macross Frontier whole cloth. The TV anime's lackluster writing is probably mostly the blame for the compilation movie's plot changing gears rather less fluidly than a transmission that hadn't seen oil since the Reagan administration.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    If Secret Hideout is still intent on trying to turn Star Trek into an action series, that might be a good choice. Picard's command of the USS Stargazer overlaps the Federation-Cardassian border wars in the late 2340s and 2350s.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    So... a firm date has not been given in official material. The ARMD-class (TV type) and the ARMD II-class (Movie type) were the standard for quite some time after the First Space War, apparently throughout the 2010s and 2020s. Some of the unofficial material - e.g. Master File - suggest that over two hundred ARMD-class were built in that period. The Guantanamo-class Advanced ARMD's introduction seems to have been sometime in the late 2020s or very early 2030s given that its carrying capacity is often discussed in terms of the number of VF-11s it can carry and that the Macross 7 fleet used that as their standard type from their departure in 2038. The Uraga-class escort battle carrier is noted to be newer, more expensive, and fewer in number as a result, though it seems to have also been introduced in that period given that it made up the other portion of the Macross 7 fleet's carriers. The only ones we know about are the ARMD-class, ARMD II-class, Oberth-class, and the various types of Zentradi warship. Shortly after the Megaroad-01's departure the first of the mass production Macross-class ships came off the line.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    At the very least, it explains why ViacomCBS is once again intent on talking up proposals for new Star Trek shows... they're vetting audience reactions to the pitches for Star Trek: Picard's replacement. Discovery already adapted the Final Frontier series pitch about a future where warp travel was impossible in much of the galaxy, but I see the Star Trek: Section 31 pitch that was tabled back in Discovery's second season has reared its ugly and unwanted head again alongside the old and often-revisited Starfleet Academy series pitch that's been doing the rounds every decade or so since the TOS movies.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    I dunno, per the old material I translated the ARMD-class was designed to withstand some pretty intense acceleration stresses... and being shielded from the impact by a portable immovable object made out of twisted-up space-time means the ship doesn't have to deal with any of the physical consequences of the impact. The barrier's basically a wall made of twisted space holding a relative position from the ship, so it wouldn't be pushed around by the impact because it's not a physical object.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, the Attack on Titan TV anime has been following the original manga quite closely. It seems likely that the TV anime will retain the original manga's extremely disappointing anticlimax of an ending, so bracing yourself for that is probably wise. Without spoilers, all I can really say is that the ending was a failed Author's Saving Throw that tried to address the criticism of the series for glorifying violent nationalism and thinly disguised antisemitism in a very halfhearted way and and give the final villian an unconvincing last-second redemption. In short, it's a mess. (All told, the way the final story arc built up there was never going to be a satisfying ending but watching it just sort of stumble to a halt before faceplanting into the grave is a bit disappointing as well if you don't set it to Yakity Sax.)
  14. Seto Kaiba
    That's a Daedalus II-class assault carrier, it shares some design elements in common with the ARMD-class but it's also a separate (and much newer) class of warship specifically designed to execute the Daedalus Attack. It's got a lot of little hangar gates instead of one big one, so the Monsters wouldn't be able to participate easily, but in all other respects it should work nearly as well as long as it has cover from a pinpoint barrier.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    You do, in fact, remember correctly. https://youtu.be/-c_rC1g7-_0
  16. Seto Kaiba
    All in all, that is the first (and only) source I've seen that actually explains why the ARMDs are shaped the way they are... which makes sense given that they're a floating dock turned upside-down anyway.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Interesting to note their chosen target to parody is now Discovery's much-lamented third season. I'm definitely looking forward to this one, even if the humor is kind of hit-and-miss for me.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    At the very least, we can write off the odd interior design choices as an interior design fad given that Starfleet ships are fully modular and the modules get replaced on a reasonably frequent basis as upgrades become available (the official justification for the many cosmetic upgrades over the years). I doubt we'll see anything like proper design rigor until the Abrams crew is gone from the franchise for good, but at least this Enterprise shouldn't have the "bigger on the inside" problem the Discovery has.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    https://screenrant.com/star-trek-picard-show-season-3-last-final-confirmed/ Sir Patrick Stewart has confirmed that Star Trek: Picard's third season will be its last. As has become Star Trek's new normal, the official line is "We meant to do that all along", though that doesn't quite tally with previous remarks by producer Akiva Goldsman where it was said that the show's development had considered the first three seasons as a single self-contained story but provisionally planned for 5 or more seasons depending on how long Sir Patrick was willing to continue to reprise the character as a then-80 year old man playing a 94 year old character.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    So... continuing from my previous efforts WRT the old/obsolete lore from the Prometheus and Daedalus, here's an overview of the Sky Angels take on the ARMD. OF COURSE, SOME OF THIS INFORMATION IS OBSOLETE AND NO LONGER CURRENT/CORRECT The ARMD-class space carrier was originally conceived as a space station airbase for fighters located in geostationary satellite orbit and at each Lagrange point to protect Earth and the various important space-based structures like factories, colonies, etc. In their original space station form, they were known and designated as Space Rigs. SR-01 and SR-02 were completed in April 2003 to serve as close defense for the L5 Manufacturing Station. Structurally, the Space Rig design was an armored, but only partly pressurized, complex of hangars and docks. Each side had its own hangars and docks for fighters and auxiliary craft and the lower part of the central hull was thought of as a dock capable of accommodating a space destroyer. At the time, the Macross Strategic System plan called for the introduction of a fold-capable space carrier design between 600m and 800m in length and with a displacement of 500,000t. Plans for this full-scale space carrier were derailed due to cost increases caused by inflation and technical problems surrounding the implementation of a fold system. Construction on the first ship of this class began at the L4 manufacturing station at the end of 2005, with a planned completion in mid-2010 at the earliest. Due to the delays in the planned delivery of its dedicated space carrier class, the UN Forces turned to the Space Rigs as an alternative in order to meet the timing determined for the commissioning of the Macross. The design was reworked into a support aircraft carrier based on the Space Rig structure and existing hulls under construction at the L5 Manufacturing Station were reworked according to this new plan. The revised design was dubbed ARMD - Armaments Rigged-up Moving Deck - and renovation work began in a hurry in 2006. The first and second ships of the ARMD-class were completed and commissioned in Spring 2007. The main refurbishment points separating the original Space Rig design from the ARMD-class carrier design were additional armor reinforcement, the addition of beam cannons and missile launchers, a navigation bridge and a main engine system for maneuvering being fitted to the Space Rig's existing exterior superstructure. Because it was intended to support space fighters with a short activity period, a large delta-V was required and the main propulsion system was built to have a disproportionately high exhaust speed. The SF-3 Lancer II space fighter was the standard at the time, and its tendency to burn all propellant within 1 minute made it impossible to return to the carrier on its own, so the ARMD-class was built with an operational top speed higher than the SF-3's in order to recover them properly. A docking connector for linking up with the Macross was provisionally included so that the ARMD-class could function as support for the Macross's own fighters and a semi-independent operating environment with its own power and maintenance facilities. After commissioning in Spring 2007, ARMD-01 (Harlan J. Niven) and ARMD-02 (Invincible) began to function as a unit training station for the SF-3 and QF-3000 and a test flight station for the VF-1. At the time, it was judged that its maneuverability was low but it was extremely cost effective and versatile. Based on that feedback, all remaining Space Rigs under construction were remodeled to ARMDs, and it was decided to instead form a patrol fleet in collaboration with several space destroyers. Unlike ARMD-01 and -02, ARMD-03 and beyond had additional fighter launch equipment. The spec for the first 8 ARMD-class ships is more or less as we know it from the TV series materials. Specs for ARMD-09 thru ARMD-16 are a bit different in this book... with the standard weapons being replaced by three Zentradi ship-to-ship beam cannons, 4 Bifors anti-ship missile launchers, 2 Zentradi ship-to-ship missile launchers, and 2 large anti-warship reaction missile launchers. Instead of the 270 QF-3000E Ghosts, 78 SF-3A Lancer II's, and 18 Valkyries, the postwar type is said to carry 94 Regults, 24 Super Valkyries, and 120 Ghosts, plus a few Regult variants.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    It certainly is a damn fine looking CG model.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that Overlord and In the Land of Leadale aren't two very different stories once they get going in earnest. It's that it's really, stupidly, obnoxiously, immersion breaking-ly obvious at the outset that Ceez didn't so much draw inspiration from Kugane Marugama's breakout hit Overlord as they did simply rip off its entire first couple of chapters and change the names. Even then it wouldn't have been a dealbreaker if Ceez had actually built on what they stole to take the story in some new and interesting direction. Virtually none of those "borrowed" plot points build up to anything and most are quickly forgotten altogether in the face of a dull, listless, form letter of a story and the few that are touched on end in an anticlimax. That none of it has any significance makes it all the more obvious because you're left to wonder why any of that was there or necessary to begin with, y'know? It only stands out - and irritates - because it's an entire gun shop's worth of Chekhov's Guns that never go off. Since most of my meetings today were cancelled, I got back to Komi Can't Communicate. This series really is adorable. If it weren't for the occasional moments of over-the-top humor it'd be the kind of squeaky-clean feel-good story you could show your parents. Less so with the slightly creepy geeky girl who wants to be Komi's dog, or her lesbian stalker, etc.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Past a certain point, I think spoilers are OK... it's a matter of a consensus on how old a series has to be before there's a reasonable expectation most people have seen it. Obviously spoilers for a currently-airing or recently concluded series/movie are bad. But is it really possible to spoil, say, a blockbuster movie that's a decade old? Or two? Or five? For instance, Macross Frontier is now about 14 years old. It's very difficult to discuss certain characters or mecha without inherent spoilers... but is 14 years "old enough" to consider a reasonable portion of the audience will have already seen it?
  24. Seto Kaiba
    We hear he might have a farm there...
  25. Seto Kaiba
    A fair few of them likely ended up as short-distance emigrant ships... there were supposedly a hundred or so fleets like that in addition to the long-distance ones we see more of in the animation.
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