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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    More a question of Macross II: Lovers Again and its tie-ins being developed by a creative team with more than a few Gundam franchise veterans and no Kawamori around to inject his passion for realistic aerospace engineering. Very much so, yes... especially since Macross II's timeline has the introduction of things like beam gunpods decades before Valkyries in the main timeline got them, as well as Gundam-inspired additions like funnels (on the VF-4) and bits (on the VF-2). There are some points in common, like the adoption of increasing amounts of Zentradi overtechnology or the inclusion of a support armature in the cockpit to enable the pilot to hold up better under high g-force loads. Generator output seems to have been considered more important than thrust, so the Macross II Valkyries are generating three times as much from their engines as a VF-1 and using it to power things like railguns and particle weapons.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Pretty much, yeah... the official Macross timeline is quite light on detail prior to July 1999, when the ASS-1 defolded in the Sol system and promptly crashed on Earth. The few times the official Macross timeline has been updated for that specific period, it's been to account for significant real world events like the interrelated dissolution of the Soviet Union, the establishment of the Russian Federation, and the reunification of Germany. Otherwise, it's been to make a few things slightly less specific like removing the mention of the fictive "People's Republic of Garalia" in favor of just saying that the disputes and internal conflicts that are collectively known as the Unification Wars started in the Middle East.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    No, it does not... and for good reason. Macross II's technical setting is more influenced by Gundam than by real world technological progression in fighter aircraft. As such, there's not really a good, clear, and explicit generational progression one can point to as we can with Kawamori's main timeline. Like the generations of Mobile Suit in Gundam's Universal Century, you've got a reasonably clear 1st Gen and 2nd Gen and past that point you're counting to potato because incremental upgrades and radical leaps in technology come in at the same time and the sharp distinctions disappear. You've got the VF-1 and VF-4 more or less the same as the main timeline's family tree... but then there's the VF-1 Kai "Refined Valkyrie"/"Attack Valkyrie" from the late 2010s and VF-4S Siren from the 2030s that don't quite fit being enhanced versions of their originals with significant new capabilities and technologies. Then you've got the events of 2054 which led to a second Overtechnology renaissance and Valkyries in Macross II that are either a single generation or potentially three generations depending on how you want to look at them. It starts with the VF-XX Zentradi Valkyrie in the 2060s, then the original VF-2 series in the 2070s, the regime-optimized versions in 2081 and 2086 (VF-2SS and VF-2JA respectively), then the VA-1 Metal Siren. Basically, it's hard to list them in any terms other than chronological order because it's not super clear whether there are generational divides or simple incremental enhancement and it's not really clear what the defining traits of a given generation ARE. The only really explicit point there is the pre-2054 Valkyries vs. the post-2054 Valkyries, the former being based on human reverse-engineered Overtechnology and the latter being based on a combination of human, Zentradi, and Meltrandi overtechnology with particular design emphasis explicitly drawn from powered battle suits.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Nope. All we know is that it was an evolutionary upgrade to the VF-1 Valkyrie introduced c.2018 to improve its capabilities and that it was in widespread use c.2036 for the events of the Super Dimension Fortress Macross 2036 game where they were used by the game's main characters: Komilia Maria Jenius and her wingman Lott Sheen. It's equipped with the Super Pack II, a semi-fixed augment pack more along the lines of the VF-2SS's Super Armed Pack that has boosters, missiles, and beam guns like the VF-1's Strike Pack. There are three flavors like the standard VF-1... the VF-1AR, JR, and SR: The exemplar in the pic @Bolt posted is Komilia's VF-1SR. The one on the left here is Lott Sheen's VF-1JR, which he has in Roy Focker colors.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, and every now and again they go back and make some corrections for major historical events. For instance, the oldest versions of the Macross timeline published after the original SDF Macross series and DYRL? make mention of the Soviet Union and West Germany among the major powers that founded the Earth Unification Government and OTEC. Those references were later updated in newer iterations of the timeline published after the Soviet Union fell in 1991 and now read "Russia" and "Germany". The Macross the First manga that modernized the original story also modernized its setting, giving the characters things like cell phones. ... it was in the real world too. The remark you're citing doesn't mention practical fusion power, just that an experimental fusion reactor surpasses the critical temperature point. "Achieving fusion" and "making fusion a sustainable source of energy" are two very different things. That timeline entry is the former. Technically, the first fusion experiment to reach the critical temperature for fusion occurred in 1958. The first controlled release of fusion power was the Joint European Torus reactor in '91. (There's a real world experiment that lines up almost perfectly with that arbitrary timeline entry... the 1997 JET experiment that achieved 16.1MW of fusion power generation.) It's all about how you want to define that delightfully vague statement.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    That's what the Ghost X-9 was supposed to be... but it turns out Terminator, 2001: a Space Odyssey, and a few other films were just plain lost in the First Space War and everyone up and forgot that fully autonomous AIs are memetically associated with going snooker loopy and trying to kill you. (Or maybe Stealth exists in-universe, and the brain bleach needed to forget it made everyone wrong genre savvy for a bit.) Yeah, Detroit.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    The OVAs seem to get slightly different treatment on that front... it's less Bandai and more the secondary licensees that jump on that, like Arcadia, and they seem to be more willing to take risks on that kind of thing too. That's the million dollar question. When we get a new Macross series, it's almost certainly going to go forward in time rather than backward, so what'll the Main Variable Fighter be? From the 2060s on, the 5th Gen are the new emerging standard and they're gonna be around for a while. So they either have to skip forward quite a ways (20 years or so) to a point where the 5th Gen are the grunt only mecha or consider something more like the original series or II where the main characters actually use the standard mecha just with different paintjobs. Absolute Live!!!!!! kind of gives the vibe that Bandai was a bit surprised that the VF-31A proved to be more appealing as a toy than any of the Delta Flight versions, and may have put in a word about wanting stuff for the movie to use THAT mold as a starting point instead of the Siegfried type. I'd like to see the franchise get away from Hero Mecha Syndrome a bit. Especially since the novelty of the super-elite PMC has worn off quite a bit since Frontier thanks in part to the real world war crimes charges against PMCs. Not "could be" so much as "is"... Macross Chronicle, and really the Macross 7 series itself, is pretty clear on the subject. The amplification system used in the Sound Boosters is explicitly noted to be a modified fold system. Unfortunately, Macross Delta's attempt to draw a connection between the V-type bacterium and Var syndrome is really poorly done and not thought out at all. It asserts (as a theory) that humanity acquired fold receptors and biological fold wave abilities when the Vajra left the galaxy in 2059. This ignores the fact that biological fold waves were first documented decades earlier, with the first demonstrated instance being half a century earlier. It's one of a number of things that Delta appropriated from previous titles but tries to pretend it invented... like the holographic costumes, the gas jet rockets, etc. It also kind of ignores that, in Macross Frontier, being infected with the V-type bacterium was only survivable if it set up shop in your entric nervous system like it does on the Vajra. If the bacteria infect your brain instead, you get an incurable cough of death(TM) and other unfortunate consequences.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    ... nope, tho there was a brief period when people abbreviated my handle to "SK" and caused some confusion as a result. (That's what I get for being stuck with a screen name I picked back in my freshman year of HS and used across multiple sites, lol...) But no, I'm too tall, too white, and too from Detroit to be him... and too many people have met me at Super Dimension Con to think otherwise. 🤣 An interesting thought. Master File focuses mostly on the regular New UN Forces version(s) of the VF-19, but it would make a certain amount of sense for Project M to have been inspired by an event like that where a Zentradi fleet of considerable size proved extremely difficult to repel even with massive amounts of reaction weaponry and the latest Battle-class flagship. It would've been a very Max thing to do, since he lived through the First Space War and saw the original Minmay Attack firsthand. (It's also interesting to note that this non-canonical anecdote has the Battle 7 participating in combat the year before it left as part of the 37th Large-Scale Long-Distance Emigrant Fleet... one has to wonder if Max was in command then, or someone else?)
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, the planet's name is actually Spica III... it's the third planet orbiting the star Spica, also known as Alpha Virginis, approximately 260 light years from Sol. It's mentioned in an anecdote related in Variable Fighter Master File: VF-19 Excalibur, which is not part of the official Macross setting. (So nothing of what I'm about to say is in any way canon.) Essentially, Spica III was - according to Master File's unofficial history - the ungentle reminder to the New UN Government that the Zentradi were still out there and still a significant threat to humanity. The planet had been settled by an early generation emigrant fleet and had a population of around 60,000 and an average defensive strength for the period with about 600 3rd Generation VF-14A Vampires, 48 destroyers, 16 cruisers, and 9 space carriers. In September 2037, the planet was discovered by ships of the Zentradi 1,534th Main fleet and after a brief but furious holding action involving heavy use of thermonuclear reaction weaponry in which the New UN Forces were able to evacuate approximately a third of the planet's population before being overwhelmed. The 1,534th Main Fleet bombarded the planet from satellite orbit and its surface was reduced to a barren wasteland as had happened to Earth in the First Space War. Reinforcements were unable to reach the planet in time to save it, so the New UN Forces mustered a retaliatory strike force of every ship that could be spared from within a 300ly area and 120 squadrons of Valkyries to destroy the 1,534th Main Fleet before it could threaten any other planets. The battle is noted to have been incredibly fierce, and through a sustained bombardment with the Battle 7's Macross Cannon and the expenditure of 90% of the New UN Forces total reaction weapon stockpile the fleet was repelled. The whole incident was subsequently covered up by the New UN Government to avoid a panic, but the effect it had on the New UN Forces and New UN Government officials (which became known as the "Spica Shock") led to a major rethink of the military's approach to defense and the initiation of Project Super Nova to develop a 4th Generation Variable Fighter with much greater offensive and defensive power than the 3rd Generation VF-11 Thunderbolt and VF-14 Vampire. (Of course, none of that is part of the official setting... but as you know from Macross Plus, the outcome of Project Super Nova was the events of the OVA followed by the brief attempt to adopt the 4th Generation VF-19A as the next main fighter before issues forced them to abandon it in favor of the less extreme VF-171 Nightmare Plus.)
  10. Seto Kaiba
    ... on a couple of levels.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    There are more... those are just some of the ones that've been mentioned onscreen or visisted during various stories. The Brisingr cluster alone supposedly has around twenty inhabited planets at various levels of development, some with native life and some without. Only a handful - Al Shahal, Ragna, Voldor, Alfheim, Windermere IV, etc. - are visited during the course of the Macross Delta TV series.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Whether the VF-24 has technologies that other 5th Generation production or production-intent Valkyries don't have is unclear... due to nobody but the Earth/central NUNS having a complete picture of its specs. It is, however, implied to have better versions of the key technologies used in the 5th Generation production and production-intent Valkyries we've seen so far. If it is truly as OP as it's been implied to be - with the YF-29 supposedly being an attempt to exceed its specs - it'd be a bit of a gamebreaker for any conventional war. Like the VF-25 and VF-27, it was developed around the idea of having to potentially go to war against the Vajra with their incredible abilities. Now that that's not a concern anymore, no other threat we've seen quite measures up except something like a Zentradi main fleet. (As for another Master File... maybe if it's a good one. I'm still a little salty about the half-arsing of the VF-4, VF-22, and VF-31 books, even if the VF-31 book's copy-pasting from the VF-25 book was technically justified. I'm still waiting for a VF-171 Master File. That thing was the main fighter of the NUNS for at least two decades and counting.)
  13. 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.
  14. 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).
  15. 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.
  16. 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.
  17. 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.
  18. 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.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    That's how the Zentradi did it in the original series, yeah.
  20. 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.
  21. 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.
  22. 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.
  23. 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.
  24. 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.
  25. 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.
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