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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

"Operates like a mercenary unit" doesn't mean "is a mercenary unit".

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?

Black Rainbow is not a PMC. Like Vindirance, it's a paramilitary organization established by New UN Forces personnel to oppose Latence's efforts to suppress emigrant governments by force. Latence's manipulation of information branded it a terrorist organization and led to the VF-X Special Forces being deployed against it. After suffering a few defeats in their fights with the 727th Independent Squadron they more closely aligned themselves with Vindirance and were ultimately the ones who first clued the 727th in to Latence's existence in the VF-X Special Forces chain of command. Probably.

Given how successful Fire Bomber was, he probably has Scrooge McDuck-esque amounts of money with which to console himself.

That probably wasn't a hugely difficult feat, all told... the Macross Frontier fleet government developed the VF-25 with an eye towards export sales to other emigrant governments like the Brisingr Alliance did with their VF-31. More than anything, that kind of depends on what the Wind Valkyrie started life as. Basara's Fire Valkyrie was originally a military spec VF-19F. Elma's Wind Valkyrie was probably something newer, but also likely a more restricted monkey model since Elma was just an employee of a civilian corporation. Given her origin, I kind of suspect it was probably a VF-19P originally.

Probably not... Basara wasn't allowed to take the VF-19 with him when he left the fleet in 2047, so he's been bumming around the galaxy without it ever since. That's why he had to "borrow" (without permission) the Zola Patrol's shiny new VF-19P in Macross Dynamite 7. Fire Bomber itself also kinda broke up around that point, IIRC from the Re:Fire album where they did a reunion of sorts Mylene went off and had a solo career, Ray became a producer or a manager, and I completely forgot what happened to Veffidas. I know Basara was still bumming around the galaxy at the time and sent his recorded tracks in via the galaxy network.

Naturally, though you'd expect the fleet arsenal to maintain a reasonable stock level of replacement parts for routine servicing of aircraft. Basara's VF-19 Custom "Fire Valkyrie" is an extreme case, as one of the few true "Ace Custom" units that has well and truly been modified to exceed the performance (and likely the design tolerances) of the aircraft it started life as. (Macross Chronicle suggests Basara's VF-19 started as a VF-19F.) Same basic deal as in Delta, when Makina and co. complain that Hayate's inexperience is putting unnecessary stress on the custom VF-31 "Siegfried'. By the time of Macross Dynamite 7, the VF-171 was only just entering production for its earliest adopters (e.g. Earth). Even there, the process of phasing in a new model of Valkyrie takes years to complete and would only have just been starting in 2047. Once the aircraft are available the pilots and ground crews have to stand down from combat-ready status for months of retraining to familiarize themselves with the new model. That's done in waves to prevent the number of groups in retraining at a time from significantly reducing the combat readiness of the force as a whole. This has to be repeated, one or two squadrons at a time, across dozens and dozens of squadrons and the hundreds of mechanics and other support personnel. Then, of course, it also takes a while for the designs to trickle out to the emigrant fleets where the local government and local New UN Forces evaluate them and potentially submit modifications to the design before local production begins and then years more for them to gradually phase those new fighters in. Odds are the Macross 7 fleet hadn't even seen the specs for the VF-171 yet at the time of Macross Dynamite 7. They were only just starting trial production of small numbers of the VF-19 and VF-22 in 2046-2047, ~5 years after those designs were adopted by the central New UN Forces and Earth. Diamond Force is a special case in the most stringently literal sense. They were THE elite special forces unit in the 37th large-scale long-distance emigrant fleet and probably would have been the first recipients of the VF-19 if they hadn't been seconded to the City 7 government as a defense unit under Milia's command and temporarily replaced by the newly-established Emerald Force. Diamond Force and Emerald Force would have been first in line for any upgrade or new model because they were the fleet's Best of the Best. I suspect not. Kawamori's said in the past that he wanted to avoid having Zentradi ships and mecha shown among the New UN Forces to avoid any confusion about who was on what side. We're also kind of past them at this point, with the original Variable Glaug having been a 3rd Generation-equivalent Valkyrie and the manned Neo Glaug bis being a 4th Generation-equivalent. The Queadluun-Alma was a 4.5th Generation-equivalent, but it was also one-of-a-kind thanks to the unique components of the Astral System and it was still beaten by a YF-25. Well, maybe among the 37th fleet... with Max being the ranking officer of the fleet's New UN Forces and Milia being the fleet government's head of state. They managed to secure for themselves a pair of VF-22s before they were even available for Diamond Force. But then, who's going to argue? It's MAX AND MILIA. Two absolutely legendary Ace of Aces pilots who are the most respected pilots and flight instructors alive. Just irritating them is probably a career-ending move even outside the fleet. Would any career-minded officer want to have "reassigned after pissing off a living legend" on their resume? We're not exactly sure when they were made... so they may or may not be connected to General Galaxy. The New UN Forces were producing Zentradi hardware from their factory satellites from shortly after the First Space War. As a New UN Forces issue, they're pretty much guaranteed to be upgraded versions intended for better overall survivability and reliability on the battlefield. I doubt they're made that high-spec though. The Queadluun series needed special, expensive, hardware to achieve the performance it did. It's more likely that these are more subdued models which existed in the interim between the end of the First Space War and the introduction of the Queadluun-Rhea, with performance closer to their original models. There is, unfortunately, no detail on them as of yet.

One I've been getting back to recently is The King in Yellow, by Robert W. Chambers. It was one of the main inspirations for H.P. Lovecraft's particular style of "cosmic horror", and it has the great virtue of being in the public domain and available for free from many of the usual ebook services.

It's interesting to note that the New UN Government seems to have mandated various forms of detuning on certain export variants... particularly where the VF-19 is concerned. The New UN Forces in the Frontier era also seem to be fans of detuning in general, apparently just to reduce operating costs. The FF-2550F engines adopted by the VF-171EX and VF-171-III are detuned almost 20% compared to the ones used on the VF-19. The VF-171's FF-2110A engines seem to be detuned versions of the FF-2100X, also by about 20%. I guess even the New UN Forces of the wealthiest emigrant fleets are still fundamentally cost-conscious. EDIT: Apparently this post pushed me to "Super Dimension Member"?

Eh... it's not as cut and dry as all that. It varies heavily based on the property, the character, and the circumstances. If a character's too important to the story to lose, they'll recast them without hesitation. If the character's important but their presence isn't strictly required, they'll often be replaced by a new, suspiciously similar, character in the same role like how Beltorchika Irma's role was taken by Chan Agi in Char's Counterattack. If the character isn't actually important, they might find themselves removed from the story outright or remain but be reduced to a non-speaking role like what happened to coach Todoroki in Silver Spoon after VA Kenji Utsumi passed. As the "author" of an original TV anime, Kawamori's got more freedom to work around characters whose voice actors are unavailable in new developments. (He hasn't exactly shied away from recasting characters for video games where necessary, like how Macross 30 cast Kenji Nojima as Hikaru.)

For now, basically nothing... assuming it's even true to begin with.

I guess it's a matter of perspective there. Tuning isn't so much enhancing performance as it is adjusting calibratable tolerances to reduce the safety margins put in place to protect the hardware. You can't tune past what the hardware is physically capable of, but you can make it run closer to the red line at the expense of increased maintenance requirements, reduced part lifespan, etc. Usually it goes the other way, detuning engines and so on to make those expensive parts last longer at the expense of reduced performance, reduce waste byproducts, etc. There's nothing quite so stimulating in a game as an underdog victory.

Didn't Chiba do most of the Frontier-era Great Mechanics interviews? I took it more as another way of endorsing the YF-29 as The Strongest Valkyrie... Its specs are so far beyond what any other contemporary Valkyrie can offer that only a SSR Ultra Rare Legendary Ace of Aces can draw out its full potential. If they'd said Hayate I'd have taken it as a dig at the pilot because Hayate is criticized in-universe as an unpolished raw talent who is unnecessarily rough on his plane and has yet to come into his own. Alto, on the other hand, was skilled and experienced enough to explicitly draw out the full potential of the VF-25 and be frustrated by the lower specs of the VF-171EX. It's become more of a slow drip of information, which is fine as long as it gets to a reasonable level. The problem is that slow drip is distributed across so many fronts that getting all the info together becomes a huge pain in the arse. It's tuned differently, but it's still running all-stock parts. I've always tried to avoid that kind of thing. When you give players access to an uber-mecha it sucks all the tension and challenge out of combat. Gundam or Macross, I prefer to stick 'em in mass production mecha because being the Unchosen One instead of the ultimate plot armored hero of ultimate destiny makes for more engaging storytelling. It's not at all similar. In Gundam, having Newtype abilities means you've got a slightly more durable body, faster reflexes, telepathy with other Newtypes, and even a limited form of precognition. In Macross, having a fold receptor factor means you're... slightly less susceptible to falling into an uncontrollable roid rage when exposed to certain kinds of biological fold waves?

Exactly... hell, Roy's VF-1S is probably the single most distinctive design in the franchise and it's only real difference from any other unit is its paintjob. There are settings where it's justified - like Gundam's Universal Century - but it doesn't really fit in a series like Macross where there are no superhumans, nobody's got hyper-evolved super-reflexes or precognition, nobody's legally recognized as a one-man army, etc. These are regular joes working with regular military procurement. Even Gundam can't hide how stupid and impractical its obsession with ace custom mecha is, and has to lampshade it every now and again to stop the writers from going completely mad. It can be compelling when it's done well (e.g. Macross 7), but if the people in the ace customs don't really live up to it then you just wonder what the point of the ace custom even was... Was it? Yeah, he does have to boil it down and he does have the writers there to turn his ideas into something more palatable to general audiences... but even then, you could tell Delta was struggling to make the PMC idea work. Especially since the story basically had a PMC with maybe twenty planes to its name going up against an entire national military all on their own and somehow at least coming to a draw despite hilarious incompetence on all sides. Y'sure that's all Kawamori and not Masahiro Chiba chipping in? Like I said WRT ace customs, it can work if it's well thought-out... and Sound Force was well thought-out, though it was technically a unit of Irregulars inside the NUNS rather than a private orgnaization. SMS worked pretty plausibly too because it was working in concert with the NUNS rather than trying to do things solo, and even when they went rogue it was for narratively sound reasons and it was shown that even their hypercompetent forces can't really fight something like a government. Xaos was just poorly thought out, and seems like it was mainly just there so the characters could talk sh*t about the NUNS even though the writers seem to have been a bit wishy-washy on that point and show the NUNS doing way more actual work than them. Can I get back to you on that one? Still waiting for actual specs... and starting to suspect we won't get any until the Blu-rays drop.

A bit over 9 years ago... (Macross FB7). We're about due for one. ... Netflix'll sponsor anything, then cancel it right away if it doesn't perform up to their expectations. Eh... there's hero mecha and then there's hero mecha. You can make a protagonist's mecha distinctive without having to make it a separate model of mecha entirely. Gundam has certainly proven you don't need to have ace customs all over hell's half acre in order to sell toys and kits, you just need a distinctive paintjob for a main character. The YF-29's already basically become Macross's Gundam and you can tell they're wearing that idea out pretty badly. Kawamori-san still has to answer to the production committee, though... and it's pretty clear from Macross Delta that the writers were struggling pretty hard to make the PMC idea work in the story this time around. There's a moment near the end of the Macross Delta TV anime that borders on an ignored epiphany on the writers part where it gets brought up that PMCs can't actually fight in wars the way Xaos was doing even in Macross's fictional universe. Kawamori's been putting a rather blunt anti-corporate theme into Macross stuff since Frontier, focusing on the abuses of unchecked capitalism and amoral war profiteering. The writers also started trending towards Xaos being morally rather in the grey too. I don't think he's so lacking in self-awareness that those two lines of thought won't meet in the middle sooner or later. You could do the same thing with Special Forces units easily enough... he's already done that one twice before with the VF-X Special Forces. PMCs seem to be a thing just because they can write the characters edgy and rebellious. Personally, my suspicion remains that Bandai saw the VF-31A was an unexpectedly popular option and appealed for opportunity to milk that mold more. Ordinarily, you'd expect the Next Movie to offer a new and improved mecha rather than a hastily improvised one that looks far more like the grunt mecha than the previous batch of ace customs and even shares their name.