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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    There are others... it's noted on the Factory Satellite Mechanic Sheet in Macross Chronicle that emigrant fleets that find factory satellites on their voyage capture them and take them along to supplement their manufacturing capabilities. The SMS branch on Uroboros is noted to have access to a small one, which is what permits them to produce new Valkyries on the fly.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    That's not how that works... both in terms of hull numbers in general, and how Battle-class ships are designated. Ordinarily, if a ship is sunk you do not reuse its hull number for a new ship. You might reuse the name later on, but the hull number is a serial identification number that, along with its hull classification symbol, forms a unique serial identification number for that specific ship and no other. The Battle-class hull numbers are something of a special case because the number actually stenciled on the hull is only a part of it... the part that shows its fleet affiliation. The full designation of a Battle-class goes BATTLE##/FLEET-HULL. Battle Galaxy's full designation was BATTLE21/MG21-01 Battle Galaxy. If a replacement were built, that replacement for the sunk Battle Galaxy would also be named Battle Galaxy to denote its affiliation with the Macross Galaxy fleet and its desigantion would be BATTLE21/MG21-02. Theoretically, if a fleet had multiple Battle-class ships as Macross 5 appears to, they would all have the same name and hull number and only that last digit would change. That the Battle Astraea has a hull number indicating its affiliation with the Macross Galaxy fleet but is not operated by the Macross Galaxy corporate army and is not named Battle Galaxy is a pretty strong indicator this ship is not a replacement... it's salvaged. If Macross Galaxy built a replacement for the Battle Galaxy, it'd be named Battle Galaxy and operate with Corporate Army troops under the designation BATTLE21/MG21-02. Apparently Heimdall's leadership are not sticklers for tradition, because naval tradition holds that it's very bad luck to rename a ship after it's been christened. EDIT: Also, as a point of order, Macross Chronicle indicates that the Battle 7 was badly damaged but not destroyed... so we're not seeing them build a new one, they're repairing the existing one. Macross 13 is another special case, because that is not an official designation... it's a codename for a ship that does not officially exist (i.e. its existence is classified).
  3. Seto Kaiba
    They do. The Sharon Apple Incident in 2040 soured the New UN Government's view of fully autonomous unmanned fighters, but unmanned fighters have been a fixture of the New UN Forces since the Unification Wars. Their limited autonomy meant that they were often limited to scouting and picket/patrol duty where the first indicator of an enemy attack was often an aircraft being shot down. The QF-2200 was a fixture of the New UN Forces in the Unification Wars, and the more powerful thermonuclear-driven QF-3000 was used for those same sorts of roles in the First Space War and beyond. The Ghost X-9 was simply seen as the next logical step in unmanned fighter use... as a fully autonomous replacement for manned fighters, rather than a supplement to them. The idea was well received by the New UN Forces and New UN Government until the Sharon-type AI demonstrator "Sharon Apple" went berserk and used its designed ability to integrate with New UN Forces defense systems to hijack the fully autonomous unmanned fighter prototypes and go on a rampage. After the incident, the New UN Government imposed harsh restrictions on fully autonomous unmanned fighters precisely because of their exceptionally high performance and the risks inherent in losing control of such a weapon. While this decision essentially "saved" manned fighters, the use of high-performance semi-autonomous unmanned fighters that were derived from the Ghost X-9 prototype became widespread as well. Some emigrant governments adopted all-Ghost air forces, and most emigrant governments adopted that next-generation semi-autonomous Ghost in the same capacity as previous models for scouting, picket/patrol, and first response duty to sound out the enemy before committing manned fighters to the fray. (We see this in the first episode of Macross Frontier.) Some companies - like LAI - were researching ways to reproduce the unpredictable human-like behavior of the X-9 without the risk of loss-of-control incidents using personality emulations based on real people (in the Macross Frontier audio dramas). Others simply flaunted New UN Government law and deployed fully autonomous unmanned fighters anyway (e.g. Macross Galaxy at the end of Macross Frontier). Essentially, the main thing holding Ghosts back from becoming the main fighter is that their limited, semi-autonomous AI makes them somewhat predictable on the battlefield... despite being 1/3 the cost of a contemporary Valkyrie like the VF-171. Unmanned Variable Fighters unfortunately suffer from the same drawbacks, and the first prototype for a fully autonomous unmanned Valkyrie was reworked into a manned VF following the Sharon Apple incident (becoming the Neo Glaug bis). EDIT: It should be noted the reason Guld had his hands full with the one Ghost was that the X-9 was a fully autonomous type with a Super Pack fitted... rivaling or exceeding the performance of even the prototype 4th Generation VF and achieving unpredictable combat behaviors. If it'd been something like the later AIF-7, Guld probably would've won with much less of a fuss.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Finished Lost Universe. It's... eminently skippable. It's tedious and has very little to offer besides cheap slapstick and borrowed lore from Slayers. If you've ever wondered what Stroheim from Jojo would be like as a girl, it's Millie. She insists she's number one in the universe at <BLANK> as often as he screams German science is number one in the world. It seems to be about the only line she actually has besides excusing her repeated detonations of Swordbreaker's kitchen every time she attempts to so much as boil water. I can definitely see why funding for the planned second season never materialized. It's not quite Angel Links levels of unwanted sequel, but it gets up there at a few points. Especially around the point when they take a job that involves visiting a planet where they end up caught in sectarian violence between a religious group whose holy symbol is a ridiculous horned headdress and one whose holy symbol is a chicken suit. Loads more "I've been isakei'd into a MMORPG world" shows this season. Skipping pretty much all of those.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Assuming it's in something resembling good working order and small enough to be moved, sure. After all, it's been running autonomously for half a million years give or take a week all on its lonesome. If it's big enough to manufacture factory satellites - installations that are on the order of hundreds or thousands of kilometers in diameter - it's probably so massive that it couldn't be transported back to human-controlled space by space fold without a huge investment of time and energy or without attracting a LOT of attention with repeated very large space folds. For now, even one of the smaller factory satellites that's just a few hundred kilometers in diameter is a massive force of automated industry that almost certainly exceeds any need that any one human settlement could come up with. Possessing dozens, even at low or reduced capacity, gave humanity more than enough engineering muscle to launch massive emigrant fleets of hundreds of ships on a yearly basis and make even things like Valkyries cheap enough that a civilian can afford one.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Millions, according to Macross Chronicle... a product of fully-autonomous production of everything, including factory satellite. Yeah that could take a while, especially with the factory satellite that makes factory satellites still out there.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    That's how the Zentradi did it in the original series, yeah.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    ... which is out at a Lagrange point and not a part of Eden's orbital defense network, so it's not relevant to the question. While factory satellites do possess some limited armament for defense, their weapons are indicated to only really be for protecting the installation from potentially-damaging collisions with space debris and not for fending off an actual attack. A main test site. Point of order, only the final demonstration of the completed YF-24 Evolution prototype is noted to have been carried out at the New Edwards Test Flight Center. Some might've been lightly crewed, though some were almost certainly ships belonging to Earth's own defense fleet. Given that Sharon Apple had already infiltrated the military's computer network at the time, their lack of response may have also had something to do with Sharon hijacking their systems.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Eden's planetary defenses have never been depicted, though are likely less extensive and less advanced than Earth's given that Earth's orbital defense network is supposed to be a bleeding edge system with no equal. (So much so that the events of Macross Plus led to the New UN Government's decision not to allow widespread use of the VF-19 or VF-22 as a result of the prototypes independently penetrating the network in 2040.) All we've seen is in Macross Plus: Game Edition, where space testing of the YF-19 and the YF-21 is conducted from an old ARMD-class space carrier.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    It was the first exoplanet humanity discovered that was capable of supporting human life and the first tangible success of New UN Government's space emigration program. Eden was discovered in 2013, between the launches of Megaroad-01 and Megaroad-02, by one of the short distance emigrant fleets a mere 11.7 light years from Earth. Because it was the first inhabitable planet found and very close to Earth to boot, it is very likely the most developed emigrant planet in the New UN Government's territory.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Given their hypothesized status as the last of the Protoculture's creations and their short lifespans, the Windermereans were more likely the Protoculture's last shot at creating a sub-Protoculture species who absolutely could not screw up the way the Protoculture did. They locked their world behind a fold fault to prevent them from being exposed to the massive mess the Protoculture'd made of the rest of the galaxy, they made empathy mandatory by giving them empathic abilities, and kept their lifespans short to slow their development by as much as possible so they'd have their sh*t together before they made it into space. Well, no... that's not correct. Like the Meltrandi mobile fortresses, Zentradi mobile fortresses are commanded by an AI. The only difference is that the Zentradi use a biotechnological living command computer where the Meltrandi use an optical holographic living command computer. Boddole Zer in the movie is no more a Zentradi than Moruk Laplamiz is a Meltrandi. They're both very talkative pieces of computer hardware. Macross Galaxy went all-in on cybernetics not out of any transhumanist sentiment, but because it made for easy mind control and provided the necessary level of combat ability to actually fight the Vajra on an even footing. (It's also worth noting the Protoculture toyed with, but did not actually attempt, networking the minds of sentients together on a large scale for fear of causing a Your Head A'splode outcome. It's not really a reprise of the Unification Wars though... the motivations are completely different. The only thing similar about them is the name.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    More like the version of Hammond in Michael Crichton's original novel... the self-obsessed "visionary" whose unshakeable belief that he is in control, that nobody is in any real danger, and insistence that everything was the fault of someone else rather than admit his vision was flawed ultimately got him and almost everyone else killed.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, that's easy... the rich text editor these forums use will automatically break up quote blocks for you if you poke it just right. If you quote a whole post, or just a large block of text, and you want to break it up... just go to where you want the break to be and add line breaks (hit ENTER) until you have the part where you want one quote block to end and the part where you want the next one to begin separated by a row with no text. Then go to that row, and hit ENTER one more time. The rich text editor'll automatically split it into two quote blocks with identical headers. I'm not grabbing each quote block one at a time, I'm grabbing the whole post, breaking it up, and deleting the bits I don't need/want. Much faster. My impression is more along the lines of the Protoculture being either naively optimistic or so carried away with their own cleverness that they just never conceived that failure was a possibility. Like the Sparks (mad scientists) in Girl Genius, they seem to have been so caught up in the rush of exerting their brilliance to create that they never stopped to consider how what they just made might go Horribly Wrong, the probability of it doing so, or how quickly it might do so and whether they'll still be in range when it happens. As a species, they seem to have never invented the Design Failure Mode Effects Analysis.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Humanity is in NO position to point fingers there...
  15. Seto Kaiba
    For basic continuity and setting purposes, every subsequent Macross title except Macross II: Lovers Again treats the Super Dimension Fortress Macross TV series as the "truer" of the two takes on the First Space War. Macross II: Lovers Again treats the DYRL? movie as the "truer" of the two. Neither is completely in one camp though. Aesthetically, the more polished DYRL? designs mostly replaced the TV ones in all the sequels. Sometimes justified in-universe (e.g. the movie VF-1 being a later production block that coexisted with the TV version), sometimes not. The creators just seem to like the DYRL? designs more. In DYRL?, the role of the Zentradi's ancient enemy was taken by the Meltrandi (female Zentradi). That version of the story presents the civil war that destroyed the Protoculture's interstellar civilization as being a result of society becoming divided along gender lines after their development of cloning technology removed the need for the opposite sex in reproduction. The male faction created the Zentradi, and the female faction created the Meltrandi, and when the fighting started it consumed the Protoculture's entire civilization. What can we say, he is voiced by Show Hayami... what lady could resist that majestic baritone? (As in the TV series, he and Milia were so impressed with each other as the top aces of their respective factions that they hit it off VERY quickly.) The Macross had an onboard factory that could recycle material to a certain extent. It was intended for producing repair and replacement parts for the ship and its complement of fighters while away from port, but it could be turned to other purposes too. The precious illusion of normalcy provided by the Macross's engineering crew maintaining the city and even providing features like an artificial sky were a major factor in keeping the ship's civilian population calm and distracted during the long flight back to Earth. They outnumbered the ship's crew almost three to one, so if they got well and truly p*ssed, the ensuing riotous mob would be extraordinarily difficult to contain safely. (Plus the crew probably felt a little bad about having accidentally involved civilians in their fight when South Ataria island was accidentally transported into deep space by the sabotaged space fold system.) (In DYRL?, this was less of an issue as the city was there intentionally due to the ship having been outfitted for long-duration space exploration and colonization.) Macross is a love story, first and foremost. It'd be a pretty short love story if nobody was ever indecisive or uncertain about their feelings, or if nobody ever had things get in the way of their figuring things out. It's drama! Kaifun was there partly to be a rival for Misa's affections, owing to his resemblance to her long-dead beau Riber Fruhling, and partly to provide an opposing viewpoint for all the soldiers in the main cast as someone fundamentally opposed to violence. Killing him off would've defeated the point of him. It's usually recommended to go in production order... since that gives you the organic building-up of the concepts underpinning the series. Especially when it comes to all of the mythos surrounding the Protoculture and the occasional bouts of one title setting up the next (e.g. Zero setting up Frontier). Frontier is often hailed as the best of the sequels, though.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    It seems to be a pretty common reaction among those who saw the TV anime first... having to force themselves to watch. It really a masterpiece of cringe comedy. Poor Alex Hassell's out there trying SO hard to be an edgy villain, but amidst everyone else's campy B-movie delivery it comes off like he's a cosplayer who wandered onto the set. In the show's defense, Faye was a no-win scenario. The showrunners could either be flayed alive for anime Faye's sexualization and down-on-her-luck bad girl behavior early on that set up her development later or jettison it to make her a more socially-acceptable Strong Female Protagonist™ at the expense of most of her original characterization.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Perhaps if their civilization had lasted a bit longer before its collapse. They likely had the means with their massive industrial base of autonomous mining and factory operations. They probably never had a reason to make the attempt, though. They had only been spacefaring for around 500 years when their civilization was wiped out by the Supervision Army. The first 300 years of that was using sublight generation ships for interstellar travel. The remaining 200 years was done with fold-capable emigrant ships. It's doubtful their population or utilization of the inhabitable planets available to them had ever reachd the level of an ecumenopolis (planet-city), never mind needing to make something like a dyson sphere, before their own creations destroyed them leaving a handful of survivors on the edges of the galaxy to slowly go extinct.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    To be honest, I feel like that early nugget of lore has long since been tossed since it's not mentioned in any other resource besides the Official Fan Book. It doesn't quite make sense for Macross Galaxy to be nearly ten years older than the Macross Frontier when the launch rate for these fleets is supposedly 1-2 per year and there's the whole matter of it explicitly being a generation newer than the City-class that was the standard in the 2030s. The City-class were 3rd Generation emigrant ships. Macross Galaxy is a 4th Generation emigrant ship, an intermediate generation between the City-class and larger Island Cluster-class. Logically, there should only be at most 4 years between having Macross Galaxy launch and Macross Frontier's own departure. WRT being "closer to a Megaroad design in philosophy"... so is most of the accommodation in the Macross Frontier fleet. Unlike the City-class, the Island Cluster-class has most of its population living in the "underground" sublevels while the area of open "sky" on top is essentially a massive public recreation area that borders on being a pre-war Earth theme park (no, really, it's said this is done for tourism reasons) that is frequently remodeled to keep it appealing and is also where the fleet's wealthiest citizens and those directly involved in its theme park-y upkeep and attractions live. (We see those sublevels in the first movie, when Ranka performs down there to promote transformable VF toys.) Nah, we know there are later fleet numbers than 7... Macross 9 is the setting of a radio play, Macross 11 is mentioned in Dynamite 7 and seen in Frontier, etc. etc. One of the new Macross Quarter-class ships in the 2nd movie shows up from Macross 17, and another is supposedly from Macross 23. It's a problematic bit of lore that was mentioned once and never again, meaning they probably realized they goofed.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Nope, AFAIK the only surface features on Zentradi ships that've been identified besides gun ports, engines, and launch bays are the communication beam emitters on the bow of the Nupetiet Vergnitzs-type. It has been theorized, though not based on anything firm, that the yellow blisters are sensor clusters and the grey are fuel tanks.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    If you figure it out, let us know... we don't know either. I'd assume the Battle Galaxy docks to that concave bit on the front.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    I'm not saying it's a bad show... IMO, it just didn't do enough to stand out among the dozen or so other isekai shows with the very similar permutations on "overworked wage slave gets reincarnated to lead the slow life". In hindsight, I'm not sure I'd even say that's a fault in that specific show so much as an issue with Isekai being massively overrepresented as a genre with an increasing number of low-effort copycat releases leaving everything feeling a bit samey. Nothing on the Winter 2022 release schedule so far really catches my interest, so I'm going to have another go at Lost Universe. The last two times I've tried to get through it, I just give up around episode 10 out of boredom. Not Hajime Kanzaka's best work by a long way. Crunchyroll's Winter 2022 offerings are pretty sad. The same old shounen stuff (One Piece, Boruto), shoujo stuff (Pretty Cure), yet more Case Closed (which will run forever into eternity), an OVA for The Irregular at Magic High School, Blade Runner, a reverse harem thing featuring the shinsengumi, and that's about it. All that really stands out from ANN's list is yet another Saiyuki Reload series, season two of Realist Hero, and the painful mess that is Attack on Titan final story arc limping to its long overdue end.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    IMO, the slow build-up in the prologue was a good call. Unlike so many dead parent backstories, this one actually gave the audience enough time to get properly invested in Blood, Gus, and Mary as characters to give their demise more of an impact than your standard "here to die" dead parents whose death is the only way they're remotely significant to the story (e.g. Thomas and Martha Wayne Syndrome).
  23. Seto Kaiba
    I'm not surprised... this one was cutesy and feel-good enough that it was at least inoffensive for an isekai series. Now that I've finished the season, I definitely share your position on it. First seven episodes? Gorgeous. Glamorous. Tight, compelling storytelling with an unusual setup. When you end your story's prologue with the protagonist repeatedly defeating a god - an actual, literal, cosmological deity rather than a powerful person with delusions of grandeur - anything they do afterwards is an anticlimax. Come episode 7.5, Will has defeated the God of Undeath in single combat TWICE and he hasn't even left home yet to start on his hero's journey. Going directly from that to spanking half-starved bandits and the odd wyvern?
  24. Seto Kaiba
    On the rare occasion that a planet turns out to be unsuitable, the emigrant fleet that settles it just picks up and leaves. Elysium was abandoned by its settlers in 2041. The implication, at least in Macross Frontier, seems to be that if an emigrant fleet is destroyed or so badly damaged that it must be abandoned the populace are treated as refugees and taken in by other emigrant governments as appropriate. There are probably a fair number of interstellar treaties and laws governing it. Macross 29 was an emigrant fleet that was something of a magnet for people fleeing internal and external conflicts like that. AFAIK, there's no mention of the Varauta 3198XE system being abandoned after the war. One would imagine that a fair number of people - like Chelsea Scarlett - wouldn't want to live there anymore after what happened, but there would also naturally be a fair amount to be gained from excavating and studying the Protoculture ruins on the system's 4th planet. Especially for advanced technologies like the entropy control field that keeps the 4th planet an ice world despite its orbit. The Macross 5 fleet's ships were destroyed by the Protodeviln and their brainwashed Varauta forces, so as a fleet they've ceased to exist. The surviving population of the Macross 5 fleet is noted to have been rescued from Gepernich's Spiritia Farm and the Varauta forces by the Macross 7 fleet. What became of them thereafter is unknown. Some of them may have joined the Macross 7 fleet, and others may have opted to stay on Varauta or join other emigrant fleets. Chelsea's circumstances were... unique and difficult. I'm not sure if she actually lived on Macross 9 or just visited there while touring as an idol singer. Macross 9 was the site of the incident where her rare Sophia Spiritia went out of control and caused a hundred people in the audience to black out during a performance. In the TV version, the concerns were somewhat more general in nature. Namely, that the damage to Island-1 and the loss of half a dozen or so Island-class environment ships had compromised the ship's bioplant functions badly enough that it couldn't restore the environmental balance on its own anymore. That led to, among other things, a decline in air quality and oxygen levels that led to them issuing oxygen masks to civilians. An emigrant fleet that decides its target planet is unsuitable could just pick up and go back to sailing the stars in search of a new one. If the fleet is destroyed, then the surviving population are refugees. If Frontier hadn't been able to force a landing on the Vajra planet they would probably have eventually been forced to abandon their battered emigrant ship and become refugees aboard the ships of the fleet's military contingent.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    I don't believe they were ever shown being used in the original series. They might have been if the series had been produced at its originally intended 49 episode length, plans for which included a number of other gimmick weapons for the SDF-1 Macross that were cut from its specs when the sponsor pared the run down to 27 episodes before re-extending it to 36 based on strong ratings performance.
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