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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Because the Zentradi have been off the proverbial leash for 500,000 years. In order for them to effectively fight against the newly-emerged Supervision Army, the ancient Protoculture had to rescind the directive "Do not interfere with the Protoculture" and were not able to successfully reissue/reinstate the directive after the Protodeviln sealing operation due to the massive losses they had sustained. The Zentradi haven't had actual contact with a Protoculture authority in half a million years, to the extent that the Protoculture's directives are considered literal ancient history, legend, or rumor. Even if emigrant fleets could convince a Zentradi fleet they were the Protoculture or the Protoculture's chosen successors, there's no guarantee the Zentradi would feel any obligation to obey new orders issued by that emigrant government because the directive "Do not interfere with the Protoculture" hasn't been in effective for 500 millennia. If they don't buy the emigrant fleet's bluff, then the emigrant fleet is likely to be lost with all hands. If they really don't buy the bluff, the fact that humanity's signature warship designs are partly based on an old Supervision Army warship class could REALLY come back to bite the entire galaxy if the Zentradi conclude that humans are a resurgent Supervision Army. (Master File has an account about the Macross Valiant fleet that suggests the New UN Gov't has a VERY aggressive policy intended to prevent the latter case. The New UN Forces go to extraordinary lengths to prevent the Zentradi from capturing any human-manufactured starships or anything that might give them information about human settlements and the scope of human space exploration. To such a degree that, in said account, the New UN Forces stage a daring rescue mission to evacuate a residential ship that botched their emergency fold away from a Zentradi fleet and then destroy the ship utterly with dimension eaters so that there was no chance of the Zentradi acquiring any information from its wreckage.) (Both sides of this coin occur in Macross: Eternal Love Song, in which a Zentradi main fleet enters the solar system to use Earth as a weapon against the Meltrandi fleet that's pursuing them. The Zentradi Burado main fleet, albeit motivated by Quamzin, has no real issue with getting Earth caught up in their battle. The Meltrandi Leplendis fleet, however, still respects the directive "Do not interfere with the Protoculture" and actually withdraws from area after concluding that Earth is a possible Protoculture world. leaving them open to a counterattack as they withdraw.)
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Ascendance of a Bookworm's new season has finally started, after dropping two compilation episodes on us first. It picks up pretty much exactly where Ep26 left off, with Myne getting ready to move into the cathedral for the winter season. Her self-appointed mission to drag the fantasy world she lives in into the age of bulk-printed literature proceeds apace, with the first new episode featuring an apprentice blacksmith who seeks her out to become his patron, with her almost immediately hitting on the idea of having him make the parts for a mechanical printing press. Her DIY projects are also stirring up some drama among the trade guilds her work is stepping on the toes of. There's some excellent worldbuilding going on here, even if most of it comes in the form of Benno or Ferdinand explaining at length how Myne's latest brainstorm is rocking the proverbial boat.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    I'm not sure it'd be entirely accurate to say it loses the ability... they're just pointed in a less than helpful direction (i.e. pointing at the Valkyrie's body or wing surface due to being fixed-forward launchers situated near the knee rather than the hybrid clamshell type the 29 uses).
  4. Seto Kaiba
    By specs, I'd have to say it's probably the YF-29... since GERWALK mode frees up all of its weaponry at once except for the coaxial machine guns, and it has overall the highest total maneuverability performance and heaviest armor thanks to its top-tier ISC and the wingtip reaction engines.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Not really sure what to make of this question, TBH... do you mean in terms of specs, or just presentation in the anime?
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Maximilian Jenius is unstoppable... the YF-29 is just window dressing.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    It's a mystery... as others have said, all we're told is that the YF-29B is a higher-performance New UN Spacy Special Forces version of the YF-29 produced on a limited basis for the 815th Independent Squadron HAVAMAL's aces.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Oh. Yeah that's just paint.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Because Ernest Johnson's voice actor passed away... so they needed to replace him.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    He was at least a Colonel in the NUNS when he retired... very likely a Brigadier General or even higher. Not that that has any actual bearing on his rank in Xaos, which is a private civilian outfit. That said, Ozma's YF-29 in Macross 30 was basically a cosmetic difference and the Spacy's version (YF-29B) exceeded its performance and used the Alto-type head.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    After missing the last two years due to COVID, I'm definitely going to try to attend.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Movie Xaos definitely seems to be a much larger, more established organization than their TV counterparts... who had the one Macross Elysion-type ship, a handful of frigates, and not much else. (Of course, given how badly they get rolled by the Aerial Knights I'm not sure that actually makes their situation any better. If anything, it makes the curbstomping they receive less excusable even if the Elysion-type seems to be an older model Macross than the Quarter-class.)
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Thanks to a moderately slow day, I got to start watching this season's offerings. Started with Science Fell in Love, So I Tried to Prove It r=1-sinθ, the second season of Science Fell in Love, So I Tried to Prove It. This show is just as weird as I remember it being, equal parts edutainment program about the scientific method in general and occasionally biochemistry in particular, and a love comedy about two of the most willfully oblivious people around. The second season started more or less exactly where the first season left off, though the first episode has a lot more fanservice than I remember it having. The new characters, Chris and Suiu, are a couple and VERY showy about their relationship and public displays of affection that border on public indecency... to the dismay and bewilderment of Himuro and Yukimura. The whole mess - involving measuring oxytocin levels using saliva tests - very quickly winds up a pastiche of Dragon Ball Z complete with a backdrop of a barren wasteland full of plateaus and rock formations. It's just weird enough to draw you in if you let it, and just absurd enough to keep you watching to see what nonsense they'll get up to next.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    It's more a concern for fleet size in general... the 1st Generation and 2nd Generation emigrant fleets that used the Megaroad-class emigrant ships were small, with populations in the tens of thousands and only a few dozen ships in total. A fleet like that can't realistically expect to fight a Zentradi branch fleet even with the advantage of surprise, so for that period evasion was basically the only option. (Mind you, the Megaroad-class was far from defenseless... it just wasn't a warship in and of itself. They had Valkyries of their own, but were mostly dependent on escort ships for anti-warship defense. Some of those early fleets were able to bolster their forces somewhat with one of the twelve mass-production Macross-class ships.) Later fleets using the 3rd, 4th, and 5th Generations of emigrant ship had much larger populations and were consequently much better defended. Those fleets were built for long-term operations with plenty of breathing room for population growth. The 3rd Generation City-class could support 350,000 people all on its own and the exemplar Macross 7 fleet (37th long-distance emigrant fleet) had a total population of approximately 1 million and almost 200 escort ships. Its successors went even bigger, with the 5th Generation Island Cluster-class (e.g. Macross Frontier) supporting 10 million while operating at only a fraction of their maximum capacity. (Some of the emigrant fleets from that same period in the non-official setting materials like Master File are alleged to have ~900 warships in their escort details.) Newer generations of Valkyrie, stealthier and higher-performance warships, and simply way more forces in general made having to actually fight a Zentradi force a bit less untenable, but avoidance was still the normal because hey... why take chances with that many lives? There isn't one... that's a translation problem. In short, the same kanji (移民 imin) is used for both "immigrant/immigration" and "emigrant/emigration". Which one you use is dependent on a contextual reading of the sentence and/or situation it's used in. Properly, in this case it should be "emigrant/emigration" since these fleets are departing Earth (nominally a nation) to go establish a new nation on an uninhabited planet somewhere. You're only an immigrant (or immigrating) if you're moving into an existing nation with the intent to take up residence there. Most machine translations just go with whatever Definition #1 for a word is since they're not sensitive to context, so they tend to default to rendering it as "immigrant/immigration" rather than the proper, contextually-correct "emigrant/emigration". (This tendency is a big part of why those translation apps tend to produce Engrish and cases of My Hovercraft is Full of Eels, especially with tonal languages.)
  15. Seto Kaiba
    That's basically what I described... the cast was so huge that most of them ended up as specific, but undeveloped, character archetypes that the audience was expected to project onto instead of relate to. They did an OK job developing Hayate, Freyja, etc., but IMO too many characters on the protagonist side were expected to float on by on their resemblance to Frontier characters who were properly developed. Arad being a suspiciously similar substitute for Ozma, Mikumo for Sheryl, etc. In the late series, Roid for Grace and Keith for Brera.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    "This End Towards Enemy".
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Xaos, but yeah... it's shocking how Xaos was basically living paycheck-to-paycheck in the TV series and ran out of money almost immediately once they were ousted from Brisingr, but in there and the movies they seem to have an infinite bank account to fund expensive custom Valkyries. Hm... maybe those two things are connected. Maybe the reason Xaos is flat broke is because they're spending their entire operating fund on these super-expensive ace custom Valkyries.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Normally the DX Chogokin toys have at least a brief bit of specs in the manual, but apparently that got left out of the Kairos Pluses and other later Delta designs. But yeah, the YF-29 is a fun case of parallel development using shared, jointly-developed hardware... the Frontier Government kept costs down by having the YF-29 share parts with the VF-25.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Well, that's what happens when you decide to have a main cast easily twice the size of other Macross shows... you don't have enough time to develop them all. It's pretty clear they were planning to clean up on character goods, though. The members of Walkure cover the standard harem anime character archetypes, and the Aerial Knights following the reverse harem character archetypes so closely that their promotional art feels like it was drawn with an Ouran High School Host Club crossover in mind.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    That part is a carryover from the VF-25. On the VF-25, that's a gunmount where the 25mm beam machine guns or 25mm high-speed machine guns are located. The grille is presumably there to facilitate the gun's cooling system. On the YF-29, that part seems to be one among many that is shared with the VF-25 as a result of their parallel development and common hardware. There is no gun there, per the YF-29's stats, but the housing seems to have been carried over as a shared part.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Delta is basically Frontier 2 by way of Macross 7... its plot borrows a LOT from Frontier, to the point of straight-up ripping the entire ending off, but thematically it's much more like the Macross 7 series.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Finished Miss Kuroitsu from the Monster Development Department. For a series with such a strong start and unconventional premise, the ending was pretty disappointingly weak and predictable. A story that satirizes Japanese corporate culture via a tokusatsu superhero style evil organization's corporate front ending on a plot involving a potential hostile takeover by a foreign investment firm? The second half feels like a rush to include every (quite real) regional tokusatsu hero/mascot group connected to the series... and oh boy are there A LOT of them. It kind of stops being a parody and starts playing itself razor-straight right at the end... only reverting back to from after the fight is over and tokusatsu hero is asked to help Kuroitsu remove the (malfunctioning) toku hero outfit she's wearing, ending in his nominal defeat via explosive nosebleed as a response of overthinking her request to help her take it off. All in all, maybe 7/10? A really enjoyable start and some terribly relatable plotlines about corporate idiocy, with a weakish ending.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    The remnants of the Koper fleet were also in that position where avoidance wasn't really an option... it was either try to subdue them and risk failure, or play it safe and wipe them out to avoid putting the ~10M people aboard the emigrant ship at risk. The Macross Valiant situation described in Master File seems to be more typical, with a Zentradi main fleet being detected along the emigrant fleet's path and the fleet taking an emergency fold to avoid being detected at all.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    About time... I really hope this'll be accompanied by some official publications. The dearth of information for Absolute Live!!!!!! is kind of upsetting. For Macross Delta as a whole, really. The Blu-ray liner notes are about the only decent-quality publication about it.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    You, my friend, have come to the right place to satiate that curiosity. Sort of? The UN Forces in Macross II's "parallel world" continuity do make fairly liberal use of the Minmay Attack to deal with the Zentradi fleets of various sizes that wander into their territory on a semi-regular basis. That said, there's still very much an element of "kill it with (thermonuclear) fire" in their strategic outlook that becomes increasingly vital as the size of the enemy fleet increases or if the enemy shows resistance to the Minmay Attack. The Macross Cannon-class gunships were essentially Plan B in the event that fleet couldn't be thrown into disarray using the Minmay Attack, with four of them having enough firepower to effectively one-shot an entire 1,000+ ship branch fleet. After a couple of disastrous incidents in the 2030s (see Macross 2036, Macross: Eternal Love Song), the UN Forces weren't exactly going to take it as read that the Minmay Attack was going to be effective the first time, every time. In many cases, the Minmay Attack worked best as a way to distract enemy forces long enough to decapitate the command structure of those larger fleets, triggering a retreat. Eh... you could say it depends who the Zentradi encounter, and how big the Zentradi fleet is. One major limiting factor is that emigrant fleets and emigrant planets are not so overblessed with armed forces that they can risk engaging the larger Zentradi formations. Most have a few dozen to a few hundred warships and a couple hundred to a couple thousand Valkyries at their disposal. They usually practice a policy of avoidance, since one of the signature strategies of those branch fleets when they encounter more resistance than expected is "Summon Bigger Fish"... which means they may come under threat from larger branch fleets or even a main fleet if they draw too much attention to themselves. Since the Minmay Attack is not 100% effective on every Zentradi, the only way to ensure that no retreating forces give away your fleet or planet's position and come back with seven billion of their best mates to have another go is to kill them all before they can escape. If the fleet is small - a few dozen or maybe a hundred or so ships - then an emigrant fleet or planet can potentially absorb that without overstretching their logistics. Trying to integrate millions of Zentradi into your population is an invitation to trouble, like Earth found out the hard way with 8 million Zentradi refugees after the First Space War. While I don't recall any (canonical) instances of the Minmay Attack being used in that specific time period, it's worth noting that time period is also largely a blank space on the timeline.
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