Seto Kaiba

In hindsight, I have to question who exactly they think this series is for... Even most Star Trek fans won't subscribe to Paramount+, and the series doesn't exactly have a lot of kid's programming from what I can see of its catalog. Who is the target audience? The only thing I'm mildly curious about is how a random pack of alien kids finding a derelict Starfleet starship is anything other than a setup for tragedy. I mean, these kids probably don't have the necessary skills or training to maintain a starship at all... and Federation starships are not exactly renowned for their sturdiness or rugged dependability being poster children for Made of Explodium.

The existence of the supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way was proposed in 1971, and the first experimental evidence corroborating the hypothesis emerged in 1974 with the discovery of the Sagittarius A* radio source. It was effectively narrowed down to the only plausible hypothesis based on our present understanding of physics in the mid-90's (1994-1995) when studies of Messier 87 effectively ruled out the idea that such regions could be home to swarms of stellar mass black holes in close proximity. I'm not sure how much traction the idea had in the public consciousness prior to the late 90's though... esp. given popular sci-fi in the 80's and 90's made something of a bad habit out of visiting the cores of galaxies like Star Trek V: the Final Frontier and Star Wars I: the Phantom Menace. EDIT: Star Wars - especially the Expanded Universe - is an especially bad repeat offender putting dozens and dozens of planets in or very near the center of its galaxy. Not trivial ones either, but major centers of galactic power like Coruscant, Empress Teta, Alderaan, Corellia, and Hosnian.

On the list of awkward social situations, being stuck on an smallish town flying through space until question-marks with your husband and your husband's ex must be pretty close to the top. Some of those emigrant ships were out there for 10, 20, 30 years...

My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom! X is... not quite as good as the first season, truth be told. Still well worth a watch for the sheer absurdity of it, but the story arc they're doing right now feels awfully derivative of the first season's final arc but much less well-developed.

Possibly. Or it may have been something they perfected until after their civilization's collapse given that a lot of their fold quartz-rich ruins and relics are out on the edge of the galaxy where their final enclaves were before they went extinct. (and hey, we do know that they had the technology to violate conservation of matter at one point...) ... I'm going to assume the "n't" there at the end of "do" is a typo. That is the only possible explanation I could think of for it.

Yup... the Vajra use a biological/biotechnological form of gravity control called a "Bio-Gravitational Field Propeller" in their tails for propulsion. Macross Chronicle theorizes that it's powered by fold quartz (dimensional energy conversion). Perhaps due to the Super Dimension Fortress Macross: Do You Remember Love? PS1 game's mail-in gift "Minmay's Last Message", it's a popular fan theory that the Protoculture's home world was somewhere near the galactic core. It's also often assumed that the Protoculture originated near the galactic core based on the way they're described as fleeting towards the edge of the galaxy once the devastation from the war against the Protodeviln caused them to lose control over the Zentradi fleets, and the fact that the surviving sub-Protoculture that they created and the intact ruins of their final settlements are all located near the edge of the galaxy (e.g. Earth, Zola, the Brisingr globular cluster, Uroboros). Several planets with Protoculture relics depicted in previous Macross titles were also near the galactic center... most notably Lux, the planet the Macross-5 fleet discovered and started to settle on before Gigile's self-destruction destroyed it, and the Vajra planet the Macross Frontier fleet settled on which had Birdhuman relics on its surface. (Given that Varauta is not depicted as being very far from Lux, it is also likely in the general vicinity of the galactic core.)

The Protoculture controlled most of the galaxy at the peak of their power... so it's unlikely that there was another power out there equivalent to them that went undiscovered through their entire civilization and the 500,000 years that followed. If a civilization like that did exist, they would've either been caught up in the Protoculture's civil war and destroyed, caught up in the war against the Protodeviln and destroyed, or caught up in the ongoing conflict between the Supervision Army and Zentradi and destroyed.

It's not even that... we're long used to them pointing out the obvious for the people in the back, but in this case was it necessary to point out that they have no idea how it transforms? It's possible, I suppose... but I'd suspect a more plausible explanation would be that Macross Delta is already reusing a lot of art assets from Macross Frontier and the emphasis was on Walkure so there's not as much incentive to get really creative with mecha that'll be taking a backseat to the idols anyway. It was kind of expected that we'd see the return of the Cheyenne II, Nightmare Plus, and New UN Spacy warship classes like the Uraga, Guantanamo, and Northampton, but reusing the Island-1 CG model felt kind of lazy since it doesn't actually match the proportions of the ship interior animated for it or of an emigrant ship of its generation. I was less happy in the wake of learning exactly how much was borrowed or lightly reworked from AKB0048. The designs of the Aether and Hemera are a lightly reworked version of the Katyusha from that series, and the multidrone plates and other Walkure-specific gear seem to have been based on AKB0048's gear. (Oddly, they didn't copy the one thing that would've made the most sense to have... the transformable flying live stage. Pastrami before bedtime does sound like a gastrointestinal problem in the making... though not so much as my own recently acquired habit of late night curry. We've kind of already seen that particular plot idea in Macross II: Lovers Again... albeit with what was strongly implied to be the descendants of a group of Protoculture refugees. In the main Macross timeline, it seems like such a thing would be pretty unlikely though. The surviving sub-Protoculture species we've seen have all been ones created near the end of the Protoculture's Stellar Republic, or after its fall while they were clinging to what remained of their power on the fringes of the galaxy. Humanity got an unexpected leg up due to an intact Supervision Army warship literally falling out of the sky for them to reverse-engineer. You'd think if there were a more advanced power out there they'd have attracted the unwanted attentions of the Zentradi and probably been wiped out in the interim the way humanity nearly was.

It definitely does have the General Galaxy / Macross Galaxy development group's sticky little fingerprints all over it design-wise. The vibe I got was "unmanned Valkyrie" for sure... it vaguely resembles a Northrop Grumman X-47B with outboard engines and a lengthened nose. It's a pretty safe bet it's not connected to the Protoculture or Supervision Army tho, since it doesn't look like the end result of an inebriated tryst between an Elder God and an unattended houseplant or a coral reef someone decided should fly. We've seen what happens when you upgrade a VF with Supervision Army tech in Macross 7, and this doesn't look anything like the Varauta mecha that were the result of that.

I'm always bewildered by the way people instantly assume anything new or advanced looking must somehow belong to the Protoculture. Like when people assumed the VF-27 was a Protoculture mecha early in Frontier despite all evidence to the contrary, or that weird theory that Mina Roshan was a Protodeviln (as little sense as that made) because she looked slightly different thanks to having dark eyes and a bindi. This thing supposedly belongs to the new antagonist being introduced in the movie, so it's apparently not Windermere's.

... it really is kind of frustrating how some of these magazine pieces can write so much and yet say so little of actual worth. Especially for Delta, where details are painfully sparse as it is. I've often praised the VF-31A Kairos as the most beautiful of the 5th Generation Valkyries. This new thing? It does not thrill me. I'd have liked to see Kawamori try something different for the big finale of Macross Delta, especially in light of how short the TV series was on original designs and plot elements. It's kind of disappointing to get a real good look at the new enemy VF and see that it looks like a rehash of the SV-51 Battroid. Between the multi-axis thrust vectoring nozzles and conehead, both of which are basically the General Galaxy/SV Works signature, it kinda sucks all the mystery out of it too.

Hm... well, the new Robotech Visual Archive books are kind of a mixed bag. The Visual Archive books share a lot of the same issues with the The Art of Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles book. The layouts are poor and the content is sparse and padded pretty heavily to disguise the fact that a fair portion of what you're buying for your $40 is a print version of the old official website's Infopedia section. "Better than the Robotech Art books" is a pretty low hurdle to clear, and IMO the Visual Archive books do clear that particular hurdle, but in terms of content and quality they're still frustratingly short of the mark set by a lot of the nearly forty year old Japanese artbooks for Macross and MOSPEADA. The Masters Saga book is better than This is Animation 10, but that's a bar so low it's a trip hazard in Satan's wine cellar. The Masters Saga book includes a lot of concept art from the show's development, but if you have the Imai Files .pdf you've already seen all of it for free and that free .pdf does more to put the art in its historical context than the Visual Archive book does. As a history buff, I found it supremely frustrating that the book included all the Science Fiction Sengoku Saga concept art but didn't bother to explain any of it. It's all just sort of glossed over as "hey look at these weird samurai designs".

It seems a safe bet the Protoculture developed a means to synthesize fold quartz at the requisite level of purity for a given application. Humanity's noted to be researching that very topic, and they're millennia behind where the Protoculture were technologically. (Esp. if the foundations of the Protoculture ruins in the Brisingr cluster are what they appear to be... planet-spanning networks of fold quartz "tendrils".)

So... that much isn't completely clear. We know that Windermere IV has a large amount of fold quartz that they were very frustrated about New UN Government restrictions on the mining and trading of, but the quality and quantity requirements for the YF-29's Fold Wave System are pretty obscene. We're talking four 1,000ct (200g) pieces of ultra-high purity fold quartz. If fold quartz has density similar to actual quartz, those 1,000ct (200g) crystals would have to be at least 5.25cm across (for comparison's sake, a golf ball is 4.27cm across). The SV-262 Draken III incorporates a Fold Reheat system based on some of the same principles as the Fold Wave System, but entirely devoted to improving engine output. The Hs command type is noted to have a more capable version of the Fold Reheat system that uses special larger fold quartz obtained from the Windermere royal family, so they might be able to get in the ballpark at the very least. That's called the VF-31 Siegfried. The size would depend on the density of fold quartz. Mind you, we're told in the YF-29's official writeups that fold quartz of the appropriate size and purity is vanishingly rare stuff. So much so that in Macross Frontier the only known source was Vajra semi-queen and queen forms. Even on planets with extensive Protoculture ruins, crystals of that type are extremely hard to come by and worth a fortune. Even a fold quartz crystal the size of a golf ball is absolutely gargantuan compared to the size of the crystals we saw in most of Macross Frontier. The fold quartz earrings that Sheryl Nome had, based on the dimensions of the official cosplay accessory, are lozenge-cut stones approximately 2.6cm by 0.9cm. An adult Vajra soldier form has one of those crystals in its entire body, and they're only just pure enough to use in something like an inertia store converter or a dimensional warhead. The fold quartz crystal in Hayate's keepsake pendant is quite a bit larger than any other fold quartz crystal we've seen directly, that much is true. It's probably not at usable level of purity, though, given that the gaiden manga Macross Delta Gaiden: White Knight of the Black Wing shows the pendant came from a street vendor (the young Theo and Xao Jussila) selling touristy knickknacks in a farming village near the New UN Spacy garrison. They offer several pendants of the same design to Keith, Bogue, Roid, and their mentor Morris in the manga's fourth chapter. The Windermereans were well aware of the value of fold quartz at the time, so it seems unlikely that a renowned merchant family like the Jussilas was selling fold quartz crystals that were individually worth a king's ransom for pocket change in the form of tacky costume jewelry. Xaos isn't exactly lacking for experts either, so you would think someone would've examined it and told him how much it was worth. Especially once his resonance with Freyja started causing health problems.

An interesting possibility... but, if what Kawamori and co. put together for Master File is anything like accurate, that wouldn't/shouldn't work. What I've read on the matter suggests that the efficacy of fold quartz is relative to the size of the fold quartz crystal being used and that certain levels of purity are required in the fold quartz crystals for certain technologies. For instance, the YF-29's fold wave system is acknowledged to require multiple 1000 carat pieces of fold quartz at a very high level of purity... both of which mean you essentially need to go hunt a Vajra Queen or Semi-Queen to get it. Master File's description of the VF-31 Siegfried's fold wave system and fold amps talks a bit about them having been designed to minimize the amount of fold quartz needed, and to use smaller pieces of fold quartz than the YF-29 required. Theoretically, they shouldn't be able to reuse the fold quartz from the Siegfrieds in the YF-29 because the crystals aren't big enough.

Unlikely, IMO. After all, what was the Xaos Valkyrie Works VF-31 Custom "Siegfried" if not a heavily economized YF-29 equivalent? Most of its upgrades were tech pinched from the YF-29. It used a detuned version of the FF-3001/FC2 engine that was a productionized version of the YF-29's engines, and a detuned reduced capability version of the fold wave system and fold wave amplifier systems that used less fold quartz. Why go to a completely different aircraft for what you already had? The picture will no doubt clear up some once we get some info on this VF-31AX Kairos Plus and learn why Xaos seems to have abandoned its Siegfrieds and taken its custom efforts in a direction more in line with the base VF-31A Kairos.

Isn't that practically the entire Zeon Remnant/Neo Zeon playbook though? They develop a remora-like attachment to a single charismatic leader who is either a Zeon blueblood, Newtype, or both and then blindly follow them to their own destruction at the hands of some Newtype kid in a Gundam. That's your Aguille Delaz, Cima Gaharu, Haman Karn, Mashymre Cello, Glemy Toto, Char Aznable, Full Frontal, and so on. Zeon's ability to produce militantly fascist anti-government forces motivated by revenge for the defeat of the previous militantly fascist anti-government force is so uncannily consistent you have to wonder if it's an ISO 9000 certified process. (Come to that, apart from Mineva Lao Zabi's brief moment of despair at the start of Unicorn, has there ever been a self-aware moment where some Zeon sympathizer notices that this sh*t didn't work the last eight times and so is unlikely to work this time? Or some genre-savvy soul who spots the pattern and decides to pack it in and go home when the Federation rolls up to the fight in a Gundam? "Nope. Nope. Nope. That's a Gundam. I am OUT. I've have SEEN this one before. I know how this ends.") It feels slightly churlish to complain about it now when it's been the centerpiece of every UC Gundam plot since... Zeta? Mobile Suit Gundam UC was Sunrise's effort to get as many MSV designs onscreen as possible. The plot was a joke. Even more so than the usual UC Gundam series is, due to their heavy reliance on formula. Everyone in the audience who has even the slightest idea what's going on knows full bloody well that Laplace's Box won't upend the order of the Earth Federation or change the course of the Universal Century's destiny because it's an interquel and we've already seen what happens afterwards. Drama so flat you can use it as a surface to 3D print on. Hathaway's Flash Part I didn't wow me the way I was hoping. It's certainly competently produced, but it it feels like it's missing something that I can't quite put my finger on.

Apart from the first prototype the Macross Frontier fleet produced and loaned to the local SMS branch, the only known operator of the YF-29 to date has been one of the Independent Squadrons of the New UN Spacy VF-X Special Forces.

No specific date given, AFAIK. The most recent trailer we've all been chewing over says 2021年 秋 公開 ("Showing in Autumn 2021"). Given that it's in Hayate's signature sky blue, it probably wasn't sent after them... though Xaos has certainly done enough to warrant the scrutiny and prosecutorial attentions of the New UN Government, since Xaos were unlawful combatants in the Windermere conflict (being a mercenary outfit) and Mikumo is acknowledged openly to be an illegal clone that's created from religious relics stolen from Windermere IV at Lady M's behest.

As far as we know, from what's been discussed about the development of the VF-25, VF-27, and YF-30, the New UN Government has a similar technology-sharing policy to what the Earth UN Government had before the First Space War. They aren't discussed in detail, but it's acknowledged in the case of the VF-27 and YF-30 that there are laws mandating when and how a New UN Government member state has to disclose the existence of a new development program and that when it reaches completion/manufacturing readiness it must disclose the full specs to the relevant authorities in the New UN Government and New UN Forces regulatory infrastructure. The model numbers are assigned by some bureaucratic process during that initial disclosure, if requested/necessary. It's also been acknowledged, again by the VF-27 and YF-30, that there are ways to game that system. For instance, the Macross Galaxy fleet did register their YF-27 program with the relevant authorities and took pains to present a false impression of the project's potential via a series of dummy prototypes. They completed the VF-27 in secret but (illegally) did not register it and disclose its specifications to the New UN Government as the law requires so the New UN Forces consider the completed VF-27 to still be "YF-27". The SMS-developed YF-30 Chronos gamed the system legally by classifying itself as a prototype under development instead of the experimental technology demonstrator it actually was... enabling the Uroboros branch of SMS to avoid disclosing its specs and the existence of the Fold Dimensional Resonance system for as long as possible. Even corporate projects not developed for a specific government, like the SV-262 Draken III, seemingly have to disclose their existence and specs given that once the ECM wasn't being used to obfuscate their identity the Xaos staff on Ragna were able to identify the aircraft almost immediately and pull specs for it. So... in theory, it's possible. But developing something as complex as a variable fighter is EXPENSIVE and not many fleets or emigrant planets have that kind of capital to burn. Of the ones that do, it seems few are willing to make such a substantial investment when it's easier and cheaper to just buy a license to locally build whatever Earth's New Hotness is like the VF-11, VF-14, or VF-171. That's why we end up with the addition of designators for locally-produced variants and variant-derivatives from Frontier onwards like the Macross Frontier fleet's version of the VF-19E (VF-19EF) or Galaxy's custom VF-22H (VF-22HG). That, as of 2067, we're only up to 31 shows that very few entities in the New UN Government were willing or able to invest the kind of capital it takes to develop their own 5th Gen main VF. Macross Frontier and Macross Galaxy did it on their own. The twenty or so worlds of the Brisingr cluster had to band together to jointly fund it to do theirs, with the main intention of trying to scare up a boost to their economy with export sales. The New UN Forces haven't shown any inclination to skip "unlucky" numbers, so in the official setting there is almost certainly at least a YF-26 that never made it to production. Variable Fighter Master File actually acknowledges a YF-26. Its version of the VF-25 development history is a joint development project between three wealthy emigrant fleets: Macross Frontier, Macross Olympia, and Macross Galaxy. The three fleets each developed their own prototype - Frontier's YF-25, Olympia's YF-26, and Galaxy's YF-27 - with the assistance of co-development and co-supply agreements so that each fleet was involved in the manufacture of the winning design in some way with the agreement that they'd each adopt the winning design as their next main fighter. Olympia's YF-26 prototype dropped out of the competition and was not completed, and they followed through on the agreement to adopt the program's winning design: the VF-25. (In a nod to the TV series, the program was "Project Triangler".) Yes and no? It takes years to phase a new fighter into service completely, so most emigrant governments are likely operating the VF-171 or a mixture of the VF-171 and whatever their choice of new fighter is. 'cept those that went all-in on Ghosts. The Macross Frontier fleet was still a year or two from the start of mass production on the VF-25 in 2059, so even by 2067 they're probably still only partway through the process of transitioning to their new main fighter. Macross Galaxy got a head start because of their superior manufacturing capability and the fact that they cheated to complete the VF-27 by uing stolen development data from the YF-29, but even they were only deploying the VF-27 in small numbers in 2059 with most of their forces still using older craft. Likewise, per Kawamori, in Macross Delta the VF-31 Kairos is also still a year or two away from formal adoption by the Brisingr Alliance NUNS, meaning they likely won't even get to start phasing it in until 2069 or 2070. Non-setting materials like Variable Fighter Master File lean heavily into the idea that the Macross Frontier fleet made out like a bandit in export sales of the VF-25, with a variety of emigrant governments (incl. Macross Olympia and Macross-7) adopting it as their next main fighter. Official setting materials suggest at least one other operator: Sephira. The VF-31 was developed specifically with export sales in mind to bolster the economy of the Brisingr cluster in the official descriptions of its development.

Which part? The bit about Earth's 5th Generation main variable fighter being the VF-24 is indirectly stated in numerous publications including Macross Chronicle, all of which indicate that Shinsei's YF-24 Evolution met or exceeded the Earth/Central New UN Forces' criteria for their next-generation fighter program and it was formally approved for adoption by the military. (Since they stop the discussion with the acceptance of the YF-24 Evolution for mass production, they never quite get to say "VF-24" except in Master File.) That essentially all 5th Generation VFs are based on the YF-24 Evolution is something that is also in a LOT of sources including Macross Chronicle. The same line is taken by all of 'em, that the New UN Government and New UN Forces on Earth opted to circulate an incomplete or redacted version of the YF-24 Evolution specs that withheld some key technologies to ensure the primacy of the Earth/Central forces so that emigrant governments could use it as a basis for developing their own weapons to combat the Vajra. That the YF-29 was developed in secret to exceed the performance of the YF-24 Evolution comes from a GA Graphic web interview with Shoji Kawamori that was done shortly before the theatrical release of Macross Frontier: the Wings of Goodbye in February 2011. Other contemporary materials established the "familial relationship" between the YF-29 and YF-24 Evolution as it being a Frontier fleet parallel development with the YF-25 (incl. shared hardware) while the YF-27/VF-27 was also a parallel development by Macross Galaxy. Yeah, Macross 30 itself mentions the YF-30 is based on the YF-24 Evolution, that it uses certain parts originally developed for the YF-25 (incl. the airframe control AI), and that its Fold Dimensional Resonance system and engines are based on the YF-29's. Macross Delta's own publications, esp. Great Mechanics G, establish the VF-31 as an economized, mass production-ready 5th Generation main VF developed from the YF-30. The only one that doesn't have a clear direct connection to the YF-24 Evolution in its airframe design so far is the Sv-262 Draken III. However, it still includes the Stage II thermonuclear reaction turbine engines and inertia store converter that were developed for the YF-24 Evolution in its design so there is still a tangible connection.

Started The Way of the House-Husband. It's every bit as bizarre and surreal as I was promised, and more. Just this absolutely terrifying (to other characters), ridiculously obvious, tatted-up yakuza thug who still dresses and acts the part doing ordinary household-type chores in a cute apron and giving EVERYONE the wrong idea in the process.

Eh... I doubt we will ever see a true, even limited, production version of the YF-29. It's basically the Macross franchise's first Gundam in the UC sense of the word. The YF-29 is a super-prototype with capabilities far beyond what mass-production Valkyries have and a price tag to match. Its incredible performance means that it's nearly invincible on the battlefield but the staggeringly huge cost of building and maintaining one means there's an unofficial "one per warzone" limit. The military spec YF-29B Perceval from Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy was said to have improved specs compared to the original YF-29[A] Durandal. How? They don't say. What we do know is that its construction was only possible because the planet Uroboros is a former Protoculture world (poss. an arsenal world like Varauta IV was) and the rogue New UN Spacy VF-X Special Forces unit "Havamal" was able to leverage its influence there with the government and local crime syndicate to obtain the necessary materials to build a small number of YF-29B's for its top aces. As far as we know, Earth's 5th Generation main variable fighter is the VF-24... the production version of the YF-24 Evolution prototype. The 5th Generation VFs we've seen in Macross Frontier and later titles - the VF-25, VF-27, YF-29, YF-30, VF-31, etc. - are all derived from the partial/incomplete/redacted blueprints for the YF-24 Evolution that the Earth/Central New UN Forces approved to be shared with the emigrant governments due to the danger of hostile encounters with the Vajra. It has been generally implied that the VF-24 is the highest spec production 5th Generation VF by a significant margin. The YF-29 in particular is said to have been developed in secret to exceed the YF-24 Evolution's performance. That's a hell of an implication for the VF-24's abilities if the YF-29 is how far you have to go in an effort to one-up it.

Apparently not, given that cybernetics seems to be the method of choice even for things like replacing damaged/lost limbs. Why it would have such a limitation when it's designed to replicate a humanoid body in all its intricate detail is unclear. Macross Galaxy basically went full Ghost in the Shell... so not as much as you'd think. In the novelization of Macross Frontier, Macross VF-X2 antagonist Manfred Brando effectively Ghost in the Shell'd himself. A digital copy of his consciousness created before he died in battle with the VF-X Ravens in 2051 is "living" in the Macross Galaxy fleet as a purely electronic life form and is actively involved in the fleet's implant network conspiracy. Grace and a few others (incl. Manfred) make fairly liberal use of Motoko's favorite trick of remotely operating a cybernetic body from somewhere else too.

Even in the original Macross TV series, the concept of the Zentradi was that they were an inconceivably huge clone army waging an unending space war with an inexhaustible supply of autonomously mass-produced expendable clone soldiers and war materiel. It would be a few episodes before the series started to reveal that to the audience, however, and the series put more emphasis on them being "not so different" from humans where the later movie played up their alien-ness and made their origin as clones central to the movie Protoculture's downfall. As to what constitutes "retirement" in a clone army that has no concept of nonmilitary life and an ethos of "it is in battle one finds life"... your guess is as good as mine. The nicest possibility I can think of would be that the "retired" soldier is sent to the rear to train newly arrived replacement troops. More likely, it's a euphemism for euthanasia and biomass recycling similar to how a micloning system "recycles" the user's old body after transferring their consciousness to the newly grown one.