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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... in terms of his prior experience handling a Destroid Work, there's a pretty big skills gap between driving a 50 year old glorified forklift and a next-generation high-performance fighter jet. Controls-wise... it's not a universal standard, no. On a very basic level, the physical control layout of a Valkyrie has been more or less standardized since the Block 6 update to the VF-1 Valkyrie back in ~2009 though there's a lot of variation in the details between models. The Destroid Work's controls seem to be loosely based on that basic setup. The software's also going to be very different. I'd expect the Destroid Work there to be running a cut-down civilian market version of ANGIRAS, the original generation integrated control AI. The VF-31s (and apparently even the VF-1EX) are using a derivative of the military's state-of-the-art 3rd Generation ARIEL II integrated airframe control AI. Of course, credit where credit is due, Hayate does suffer Reality Ensuing in the series version when he tries to fly without a support AI holding his hand and repeatedly loses control of his aircraft to stalls and barf-inducing instability. Not as such. Alto's PS/ML-21 EX-Gear was a high-performance civilian model that was specifically made to be compatible with the military's EX-Gear standard because it's intended for use in pilot training. Mihoshi Academy issues them to the students in their Space Flight pilot training program because it's set up to prepare students for careers in commercial aviation or military service. You could think of it as almost being a prep school for the New UN Spacy's flight school... to the extent that they train on real Valkyries (the VF-1C type).
  2. Seto Kaiba
    ... more than a bit, if we're being honest. I tend to think of the start as when my job went fully remote in April '20. Looking back, preorders started August-ish 2020? So about a year and a half since I filed the original order? I hope the quality was good.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Looks like, yeah. I guess they must have changed their Private Warehouse hold policy at some point not long after the pandemic really got going, since the original limit was not more than 60 days. I wonder if it had something to do with the Japan Post and other normal carriers not handling international mail at the time? I had legitimately forgotten that I'd ordered it, and apparently the Private Warehouse status emails about it have just been going to my spam folder this entire time.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    I completely forgot I'd ordered the Premium finish back around the start of the pandemic... HLJ sent me a... gentle but stern... note asking me to please ship the bloody thing earlier today.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    True that. One can imagine the New UN Forces probably understand the Birdhuman's distress only too well after dealing with Xaos's unwillingness to cooperate in any meaningful manner until it's way too late. The title of CAG (Commander, Air Group) in Macross is used mostly how it was used circa World War II. Put simply, it's a title and an accompanying administrative role given to the squadron leader with the highest rank (or the most seniority, if two or more have the same rank) among the squadrons embarked on an aircraft carrier. The CAG serves as the overall leader of all of the embarked squadrons and as a administrative department head for the squadrons who reports directly to the ship's captain. (Basically, if you're the most experienced squadron leader you get rewarded with extra paperwork and meetings.) Arad Molders is presumably the CAG of the Macross Elysion, or occupies some similar title since Xaos seems to organize its forces as an Air Force rather than the fleet-based Space Forces of the NUNS. Even if he didn't have experience beforehand, he logged over 300 hours of simulator time before being assigned to the SVF-1 Skulls Vermilion platoon. Normally, the flight school is like three year program IIRC. (Kinda makes it shocking how undertrained Hayate is, with less than a month of combined training not just for flying a Valkyrie but hand-to-hand combat, tactics, and everything else...)
  6. Seto Kaiba
    No, we know what happened to it... it's space junk. It'd already suffered enough battle damage to disable it in the fleet engagement that caused it to crash on Elysium in the distant past. If you look at its sprite in-game, the mobile fortress's command section is mostly just straight-up missing and the rest of the hull is liberally pockmarked by city-sized breaches. It was barely able to lift off after millennia of self-repair and some TLC from the Zentradi terrorists, and its defenses were mostly inoperable. Once its living command computer was killed by the VF-X Special Forces pilot player-character, it was little more than an elaborate and extremely large paperweight. It was already a wreck... there was enough of it missing that, if the fold system clusters were running amok and teleporting chunks of the ship into fold space, you'd never know by looking at it with all the battle damage it already had beforehand. Who's gonna notice a few extra dents in a car that already looks like it went ten rounds with the MythBusters? Or it's considered such a minor event that it hardly bears mentioning. After all, it wasn't a major threat or even a major incident. It was a high-profile civilian kidnapping by a minor terrorist group that was cleaned up quickly and discreetly way out in the galactic boonies by a single VF-X Special Forces team with barely enough manpower to field their own side in a baseball game. Or, alternatively, it was covered up in part or in full by the New UN Government and/or New UN Forces like the official setting Sharon Apple incident or the non-canonical "Spica Shock" from the VF-19 Master File.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, they were originally colored red in the Super Dimension Fortress Macross series and changed to yellow starting in Macross: Do You Remember Love?.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Fair enough, it looks like they've done quite a faithful job of it.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    ... I have a bad feeling about this. That the comic book quote about "using their expectations against them" in the Instagram post feels like the very worst kind of tempting fate for an already failure-prone franchise. The choice of replacement director feels less like tempting fate and more like actively courting failure. Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah don't have much of a filmography, and what they do have in that regard is pretty underwhelming outside of Bad Boys for Life. The costume... eh... I don't do superhero comics as a rule so I don't know about how authentic to the comic it might be, but is it supposed to look like someone took an off-the-shelf women's leather motorcycle suit and hastily painted it purple? (Given that Keaton's set to play Batman again, we should probably just be thankful Schumacher-era bat-nipples are a thing of the past.)
  10. Seto Kaiba
    It's not the same technology... the fold amps used by the Tactical Sound Units are an outgrowth of Dr. Lawrence's research into dimensional resonance, developed by his protégé Elma Hoyly. You could say they're related technologies, but they're not the same.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Really, any engineering discipline at all. I am endlessly floored by the number of people with college degrees who can't do basic math. It's pretty well established the Zolans are a sub-Protoculture species like all the other humanoids in the galaxy. Eh, those two things don't even necessarily have to be linked. We're talking about a crazy civilization with total mastery of genetic science and an endless fascination with the Vajra that Macross Chronicle suggests was the true origin of their advanced technology. It may have been nothing more than a desire for a fancy designer pet intelligent enough to not sh*t all over the place. Goodness knows irresponsible breeders today spend terrifying amounts of effort creating designer pets with little or no regard for the consequences. As wildly inaccurate as your posts have been, there really isn't anything to respond to... like the quotation below. 😉 And no, I don't trust thirdhand reports about Japanese audiences opinions of the movie either. To quote Luke Skywalker: "Amazing. Every word of what you just said was wrong." ... did you forget that rank, seniority, and the chain of command exist? Max's record as a squadron leader is exemplary. He commanded a New UN Spacy Special Forces squadron for a decade before moving on to commanding escort warships in a relatively typical trajectory for a modern fighter pilot. Roy Focker - and yes, the correct spelling is "Focker" - was the commanding officer of the SVF-1 Skulls because he was the ranking officer. His rank was Major (OF-3). He was also Commander of the Air Group as the most senior officer among the embarked squadrons from his airwing. Hikaru Ichijo also outranked Max for pretty much the entire original series. When Max and Hayao were assigned to the SVF-1 Skulls they were both Corporals (OR-4) and Hikaru was a Sergeant (OR-5) who had just been granted a commission and the rank of 2nd Lieutenant (OF-1) and command of Vermilion Platoon. He had been promoted once more to 1st Lieutenant at the time Roy died and was assigned to lead the squadron based on seniority and availability. He was later promoted to Captain (OF-2). Around that time, Max also got a commission to 2nd Lieutenant (OF-1), so he was still outranked by Hikaru and under him in the chain of command. Even if they were the same rank, Hikaru's greater seniority due to his longer term of service at that rank would have put him above Max. It's a popular fan theory, though there are a LOT of people ahead of him in the chain of command given that he finished Macross 7 at the rank of Captain (OF-2). He's got another three ranks minimum and a lot of seniority to accrue before he could attain a posting like command of a Battle-class or a New UN Forces defense force. (Max himself seems to have been on the low end there, commanding the fleet as the most senior Colonel. Most of them seem to be Brigadier Generals or higher.)
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Presumably.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Officially, it's the former... except it's way more than just one factory satellite of each type. According to the official encyclopedia Macross Chronicle, the Regult alone has several million factory satellites devoted to its mass production scattered across the galaxy. Each of the smaller fleets that makes up a Main Fleet has a logistical backbone of anywhere from twenty to fifty factory satellites producing its men and materiel. Over the millennia, some types of factory satellite have been targeted as strategic objectives and destroyed such as the plants producing thermonuclear reaction ordnance and the ones producing the Glaug Battle Pod, so the number varies a bit more than it did at the height of the Protoculture's civilization. To give you an idea of the scale at work here... if we assume Vrlitwhai's branch fleet of 1,213 ships and its parent Main Fleet of 4,795,122 ships were average sizes for the Zentradi, and that each branch fleet had just one factory satellite providing it with Regult battle pods, there were potentially TWENTY MILLION fully automated plants producing the Regult in the Protoculture's golden age.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Not gonna lie... I've had workdays like that too. ... and just like that, I'm sympathizing with a giant biotechnological horror's disappointment in humanity.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Honestly, I see Basara ending up more like Ozzy... an aging rocker who just completely and categorically fails to give a damn at any given point. To be completely fair, the Protoculture had a lot less time to be high-minded about it with the Protodeviln's unchecked rampage threatening them with extinction. Basara was lucky enough to encounter Gepernich after he developed the idea of "farming" spiritia as a renewable resource. According to Macross Chronicle, the Sound Energy System was a modified super dimension converter taken from a fold system. It would have contained high quality synthetic fold carbon. Macross Chronicle does state that spiritia is a type of biological fold wave... so presumably yes. Given that humanity had only just started looking for people with these abilities among the regular population a few years before, I'm inclined to wonder if it isn't more a matter of humanity getting better at identifying individuals with these abilities using medical testing instead of discovering the incredibly rare ones who land themselves in a position where their abilities expose themselves. ... scratch the "seemingly". The Macross 7 LD liner notes and Macross Chronicle both assert that Gubaba's species (Gyararashi) have empathic abilities. Whether it's something they evolved naturally or something they were engineered with is unclear. Personally, given that they're shown to be pretty darn low on the food chain on their home planet, I'm inclined to suspect they're either naturally evolved with that ability or maybe an invasive species of engineered pet the Protoculture created that turned out to be easy prey for the local predators.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Probably a lot... though because they can self-repair to a certain extent, the value of "broken down" probably varies a fair bit. We all have our favorites. I'd assume so. The factory satellites in the New UN Government's custody produce all kinds of things. Essential defensive munitions seem like a pretty logical step there. Though I'd imagine they're just producing the hardware. Heavy quanta apparently has a shelf life of sorts, so those can't be stored indefinitely. They're probably manufactured and stored without any hydrogen or heavy quanta and only charged when they're needed.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    In DYRL?, the alternate version of Protoculture history and their civil war has the Protoculture divide along gender lines after cloning becomes the dominant form of reproduction and each side using that cloning technology to create giant clones to fight their war for them. As the Minmay Attack starts, Vrlitwhai and Exsedol muse on the possibility that they could regain culture after 500,000 years without it. Granted, it seems like the Protoculture buried the products of their mad science under every other tree... but, if anything, we've seen that the New UN Government is getting more and more genre savvy about the threat they pose and simply bombing them out of existence with dimensional warheads rather than take the chance. I wonder... would he end up a dried-out Keith Richards rock-and-roll mummy or a bedraggled-and-confused ex-rocker type like Axl Rose or Ozzy? Those are two different clone bans. One was a blanket ban on cloning for military purposes. The other was a permanent discontinuation of a widespread cloning program intended to shore up the human population because of increased incidence of recessive genetic disorders. This, of course, assumes Berger drew his visuals from historical records somehow and not the popular dramatizations of historical events mentioned mere moments earlier. Or that there was only one emigrant ship of that type. You're drawing a very specific conclusion from impossibly vague evidence. Two problems with your hypothesis. First, time. The Protoculture went extinct hundreds of thousands of years ago. The Birdhuman's previous activation that became the basis for the Mayan myth happened only tens of thousands of years ago according to Macross Chronicle. Second, it's noted that the Birdhuman is capable of independent thinking... and that it decapitated itself. Because their ancestors were a purpose-built lineage of priestesses designed and genetically-programmed by the Protoculture to maintain and operate the Birdhuman. As noted in my last post, there is a vague implication in Kawamori's interview that the Kingdom of the Wind's royal family and the families of the hereditary priesthood were made along similar lines to operate the Star Shrine. Gepernich literally got defeated the first time by a group of Protoculture who could do that exact thing. He was excited because he found one he could potentially harness for his spiritia farm project.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    That much is pretty much directly stated in the series itself. It's also a point explicitly touched on by Kawamori in his interview in Great Mechanics G's Winter 2016 issue. As he explained it, the Protoculture intended to use the massive delta wave system they constructed across the Brisingr globular cluster to direct their own development towards a Vajra-like state. That much is also covered in the interview. Per Kawamori's answer to the question, the throne in the Temple of the Stars was the control center of the network and would normally have been occupied by the King. He goes on to note that Roid was able to occupy the throne instead because he was from a family of priests. The way the answer is structured seems to suggest that the Protoculture may have tailored certain bloodlines of Windermereans to maintain and operate their overly-complex gizmo the way they did for the Birdhuman they left on Mayan. Given that the ancient Protoculture are said to have put aside their internal conflicts to present a united front against the Protodeviln and Supervision Army, that distinction likely hadn't been a thing for millennia by the time the Brisingr cluster became the last enclave of the Protoculture. The Brisingr globular cluster is theorized in-series to have been the last place the Protoculture settled before going extinct, which could potentially put thousands or even tens of thousands of years between those two events. The problem is, it's all literal ancient history. The Evil series were meant to be game-changers. Superweapons to break the virtual stalemate between the two factions in the Protoculture's Stellar Republic dissolution conflict. They're overkill deliberately, but then... they were intended to fight whole Zentradi fleets and win. Given the extent of the Cold War parallels, think of them as being any of the lots and lots of completely ridiculous game-changers that were intended to secure victory in our Cold War. Eh... there is and there isn't? With few exceptions, each new Macross title has added a little bit to the Protoculture's lore. Looking at it in reverse order for clarity's sake: Macross Delta established what the Protoculture's ideal societal endgame looked like - evolving into a Vajra-like state of harmonious existence through a group mind - and how they intended to achieve it. Macross Frontier established where they got the idea in the first place - the Vajra - and where they acquired the means to achieve it. Macross Zero established the Protoculture's overwhelming fixation on how their civilization collapsed and their determination to prevent history from repeating itself by any means necessary. Macross 7 established the historical factors and circumstances surrounding the internal schisms that would ultimately cause the Protoculture to destroy themselves. Macross II established that the Protoculture's veneration of their own culture and traditions made them dangerously self-obsessed and fueled their desire for war. Macross: Do You Remember Love? established that the Protoculture weren't immediately wiped out, and that some of them survived and fled their civilization's collapse and tried to start again and learn from their mistakes. Super Dimension Fortress Macross established that the Protoculture were an ancient race who liked to play god and were ultimately destroyed by their own creations due to their hubris. It doesn't really seem to be building to anything in particular... we're just getting an ever-closer look at how this race of ancient abusive precursors destroyed themselves and tried to amend their mistakes before dying out. (Which makes them smarter than like 80% of sci-fi abusive precursors simply by realizing they absolutely bollocks'd up.) Those two things happen in different versions of the past... so not really, no? That's the problem with broad strokes continuity leading to a multiple choice past. It wouldn't be the first possibly-Protoculture lifeform left lying around... Mina Forte's still around, for one. If you buy DYRL?'s take, all Zentradi and Meltrandi are genetically Protoculture.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Given the ferocity of the debate over the topic at the time...? None of which I am aware. That said, it's a very safe bet the heavy missiles on the Regult's heavy missile variant are nowhere near the firepower of the Spacy's RMS-1 thermonuclear reaction missiles. To the Zentradi, thermonuclear reaction weaponry is a lost technology. They lost access to it around 380,000 BCE when the Supervision Army destroyed the factory satellites that were producing thermonuclear reaction munitions for the Zentradi forces. The Regult heavy missile variant's missile may have a blast yield equivalent to hundreds or maybe even thousands of kilograms of TNT... but even the lightest reaction warhead used by the UN Spacy had a yield of 500t.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Nah... Milia Jenius and Airi Masaki have nothing in common except green hair and the extremely common cliché of a "middle aged" woman being sensitive about her age. Considering Macross 7 PLUS, we should probably be thankful he didn't just show up so Walkure (and maybe Messer and Arad) could squee over him... Not just like her grandparents... the Jenius family has a reputation, and it's more than just Max and Milia holding it up. It's anyone's guess if Komilia joined the military the way she did in the Macross II timeline. There's the adopted daughter Moaramia who became a New UN Spacy Special Forces top ace and Therese who is alleged to have operated under a paper-thin pseudonym as the leader of the paramilitary organization Vindirance that won the Second Unification War and became the founder of the regulatory bureau that oversees the Special Forces. Then, of course, there's Mylene and her fame as a member of Sound Force. It's real easy to feel bad for Mirage. Her famous grandparents aren't just basically military royalty, they created several major military institutions and all but founded the New UN Spacy Special Forces as a whole, and were the top scoring aces of the biggest space war ever. In modern terms, it'd be like joining the Air Force if your grandparents were Tetsuzō Iwamoto and Ilmari Juutilainen. At least two, more likely three or more, of her sisters are war heroes and ace pilots. People would expect great things. It's not surprising that she cracked under pressure like that.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Probably the best example would be the long-running Lupin III franchise. Despite a desire to maintain the same voice cast across as many titles as possible, most characters are on their second or third long-term voice actor and anywhere from their third to their fifth voice actor overall. (Thanks to projects like The Fuma Conspiracy which couldn't afford to bring the normal voice actors in.) Of course, Macross is somewhat lucky in that Kawamori's belief in a broad strokes continuity and tendency to move on after the end of any given story means that there's rarely the demand for older voice actors to reprise their roles. It's a great soundtrack as you'd expect from a Macross movie. My hopes for the film story itself are not so high, though. Well, yes... though I guess you could say she didn't want to be called "obaa-san" until she'd earned it? (Macross 7 Milia ran with a lot of standard-issue clichés about middle-aged Japanese women, like an obsession with getting her kids married off and an aversion to being addressed in terms that explicitly or implicitly suggest she's old.) ... yeah, no. Let's leave mixing unrelated properties to that other franchise we don't talk about here. It's pretty much always a bad decision, and is usually a sign that a property has exhausted its creative potential and is desperate for something to keep its audience invested.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Let's be honest, we'd probably ALL get sticker shock seeing what it costs to mobilize a private army for a high-risk rescue mission...
  23. Seto Kaiba
    It's kind of a scary thought. Sheryl Nome debuted as an idol in 2057, and in less than two years had amassed a fortune vast enough to have an elite private military contractor mobilize a brand new, state of the art space warship and multiple squadrons of the latest Valkyrie with her personal credit card. (Granted, there's official art of her jaw dropping when she sees the final invoice... but still...) Yeah, there are some fun accounts of stuff like that in Master File as well... the "Streak Valkyrie" and the Project Trapeze Valkyrie that was used for long duration space flight testing, for instance. True, though there are limits. Remember Gamlin's wonderful experience in Milia's old Super Valkyrie? He was fumbling around and getting frustrated by how low the performance was compared to the VF-11C he'd trained on and the VF-17D that was his normal duty unit. Then he spends a fair amount of time getting increasingly angry standing outside the hangar being repeatedly and politely told to go away by the security guards. He's definitely no music buff... remember his reaction to Dr. Chiba's office? If anything, that's a ringing endorsement of how intuitive the ANGIRAS integrated airframe control AI is... that it was able to turn having him bonk levers with his guitar into something other than a high velocity crash.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    "Operates like a mercenary unit" doesn't mean "is a mercenary unit".
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Given that it's noted that the Three Star-type factory ships were used to produce most things an emigrant fleet needs - from daily necessities and bulk goods for export all the way up to new fighters and warships for its local New UN Forces - I'm not sure it's necessarily an issue of available resources so much as it is allocating resources between the economy and the military. It's been said that the Three Star-type acquires its raw materials from a variety of places including mining of asteroids and planetoids, cosmic dust collection, and so on. There are some scenes in Frontier showing the titular emigrant fleet taking asteroids in tow to mine them for resources. That said, one would imagine the military wields a fair amount of economic power on its own. Macross Chronicle's comments on the matter suggest an emigrant fleet's local New UN Forces employ 10-15% of a fleet's total population on average. (It certainly explains why Macross 29 is in such dire economic straits... they abolished one of an emigrant fleet's biggest job creators.) Well, inasmuch as the New UN Government permits... Arms export restrictions on the VF-19 and VF-22 in the 2040s and beyond likely mean that "full spec" to an emigrant fleet is VERY different to "full space" for the central New UN Forces. Even the Frontier fleet had to resort to developing replacements for some performance-limited systems locally in order to achieve the desired level of performance from their locally-built derivative of the VF-19E. It would've made him a lot less conspicuous at least... remember Gamlin slowly losing his sh*t trying to figure out who the pilot of the red VF-19 was when the fleet's military didn't even have the VF-19 yet?
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