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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    So... like this? (That's the Oracle mothership from Phantasy Star Online 2... a massive propulsion system built around the sentient planet Xion.) If Uroboros in Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy and Windermere IV in Macross Delta are any indication, the Protoculture's preferred method to being left alone or ensuring that things they left behind were left alone was to construct intense artificial fold faults around the planet so severe that fold travel becomes impossible. (Like the Uroboros Aurora, the fold fault that cuts the planet Uroboros off from the rest of the galaxy for months or years at a time.)
  2. Seto Kaiba
    ... and the defections/captures from subsequent Zentradi encounters. Shipbuilding isn't much of a priority when fresh warships practically deliver themselves to you complete with crews every couple years. They had other original ships prior to that, like the Daedalus II-class. It's more like the pace of development was distributed differently... some technologies advanced faster than in the main timeline, while others advanced more slowly or not at all. For example, while the Macross II timeline may not have inertia capacitors and the power of thermonuclear reaction engines grew much faster in the main timeline the Macross II timeline developed beam gunpods much faster (back in the 2030s) and had applied drone technology to create funnels and bits when the main timeline was still working on making drone fighters able to fight effectively on their own. It's somewhat unhelpful to say it like this... but the Varauta forces are the Varauta forces. Most of them were/are the UN Spacy defense force maintained by the Megaroad-13 emigrant fleet after it colonized the third planet in the Varauta 3198XE star system. The others were members of the UN Spacy's Blue Rhinoceros special forces who'd accompanied the investigation of the system's fourth planet and were the first ones to be spiritia drained by the Protodeviln after they were accidentally released (see Macross 7 PLUS: Spiritia Dreaming). Midway through the conflict, the Varauta forces "drafted" the survivors of Macross 5's defense forces to bolster their numbers. The Varauta forces under Protodeviln control continued to use the same ships and equipment they had used before the system was taken over, which were modified somewhat to improve their performance and add capabilities related to harvesting spiritia. The only new weapon introduced after the colony was taken over was a dedicated aircraft carrier the Varauta system's defense forces had previously lacked (having gone for a Zentradi-style battleship/carrier hybrid setup previously). None, save for the picture of the pre-crash Supervision Army version of the SDF-1 Macross in the Macross Model Hobby Handbook and the picture of the derelict from Ep30 of the original series, which was presumed to be the same type. Eh... only partly. Macross Chronicle asserts that a fair amount of the fleet the Protodeviln mobilized for Gepernich's spiritia farm project - including Gepernich's own flagship - were pre-existing ships from the Varauta colony's UN Spacy defense force that were modified after being captured. The only one that was explicitly new was the dedicated carrier they'd introduced late in the war. Eh... I'm not sure I would agree with that assessment, since the only portions of Earth we see in Macross II are heavily developed urban areas and cultivated parklands. In the main timeline, the only part of Earth we really see on a regular basis is the center of Macross City in Alaska. (The Macross II UN Spacy doesn't really have a ton of choice about having more experience with the Zentradi... you can't fold a planet away from an approaching fleet the way you can an emigrant ship.)
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, the arrival of a Zentradi (or Meltrandi) main fleet is still absolutely 100% "fetch my brown trousers" time for most if not all of the Macross II parallel world timeline. Unlike the main timeline, in Macross II's timeline Earth is attacked by Zentradi fleets of various sizes with downright monotonous regularity in the wake of the First Space War. The Minmay Attack strategy got a lot of polish and refinement in that period, to the point that dealing with small Zentradi forces like branch fleets became somewhat routine. On those rare occasions when something larger showed up it was still a major crisis. The 2036 attack on Earth by the Neld main fleet saw the UN Forces pushed to the breaking point, and victory was only achieved by the tried-and-true tactic of using the Minmay Attack as a diversion and going after the command ships to force the larger fleet to withdraw once their command ships were sunk. 2037's run-in with the Burado main fleet saw humanity basically lose the war because the Burado forces initially appeared immune to Minmay Attack tactics (actually a product of salvaged Protoculture communications tech encrypting the fleet's comms). Humanity's bacon was saved by the Burado fleet not being hell-bent on destruction, and having actually come to let Earth do the heavy lifting against the Meltrandi Leplendis fleet that was chasing them. Leplendis concluded humans were a surviving enclave of the Protoculture and ordered her fleet out of the area, and Burado's forces got taken down in the standard manner afterwards. The 2054 invasion saw most of the UN Forces wiped out in a conflict that lasted the better part of a year. It wasn't until the early 2080s, when humanity had made major strides in weapons technology that dealing with large Zentradi fleets became manageable. That was when they'd introduced massive gunships that could one-shot branch fleets and so on. (That's right around the point where the UN Forces start becoming complacent, which Sylvie complains about to Exegran at the start of the OVA.) Of course, you also have to wonder if the 2082 victory was really THAT easy... since the general public (e.g. Hibiki) only saw the sanitized press reels and not the unredacted war photography like what Hibiki got to shoot himself in 2092 when the Mardook invaded.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Well, not in any direct depictions in the official setting... there have been remarks about the New UN Forces occasionally bumping into other Zentradi, and the Master File books have made a few mentions to that effect involving near misses or abject losses to other main fleets.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    That's the thing with Macross stories... nobody's evil. The antagonists are generally decent people doing what they believe is right in their own specific context. (Contrast with Gundam, where everyone's a bastard...) Maybe. What becomes of them after the events of Macross 7 aren't really clear... they just take off for parts unknown, announcing they have no further need of this galaxy because they've found a "spiritia paradise" by learning how to self-generate spiritia. Nah, they're still very much around... In Macross's very first episode, Vrlithwhai notes that the Supervision Army forces should've been withdrawing from the space around Earth eight terms (approx. 40 Earth years) ago when they trace the Supervision Army gunship's fold jump to Earth. In episode 30, the crew of Vrlitwhai's ship stumbles on a Supervision Army derelict on their way to capture a factory satellite. Exsedol examines it and notes that it appears to have been destroyed very recently, most likely after the remnants of Boddole Zer's main fleet scattered (meaning "in the last year and a half"). Remember, the galaxy is a VERY big place and fold navigation is an absolutely terrible way to explore it. The only way to communicate is the equivalent of long-range radio which anyone listening can hear and trace, and getting around is basically teleportation. You don't get to see what's between Point A and Point B... you can only see what's immediately around you once you pop out at Point B. (This is why emigrant fleets deploy large advance scouting forces, so they don't accidentally blunder into anything, fold into the path of something like a comet, or a Zentradi fleet, etc., like what happened to Macross Valiant.) Long term, the Protodeviln probably did intend to find what remained of the Supervision Army and link up with it... if only to bring it under control again. But they were weakened from their defeat by the anima spiritia and their long imprisonment and were likely trying to keep a low profile until they could build up enough of a force to be sure they wouldn't simply get stomped by the first Zentradi main fleet they ran into. The Supervision Army's a massive force like the Zentradi, so it wouldn't exactly have made for a believably winnable fight if one of their main fleets had been present when the titular Macross 7 fleet was struggling with a force only a few times larger than itself.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Most of it. The Supervision Army's leaders - the seven Protodeviln - were energy beings from fold space who were accidentally drawn into and trapped inside the bodies of the seven Evil-series bio-weapon prototypes being developed for the Protoculture's de facto cold war. The Evil-series were something like an early version of the Birdhuman mecha from Macross Zero, and used an early version of the same fold dimensional energy conversion power system that was what accidentally sucked up those energy beings when it glitched during a test. The energy beings who became known as the Protodeviln were understandably a bit shocked about the whole accident, and panicked because the dimension they'd just been yanked into had none of the natural higher-dimension energy they needed to survive except in the minds of sentient beings. So the Protoculture's bungling handed them the unwanted New Objective: Survive that led to them draining the spiritia from everyone they ran across in a desperate attempt to not starve to death and using their victims as soldiers to secure more victims vampire-style. 30 GOTO 10 until the Protoculture were mostly wiped out and finally discovered a way to essentially give the Protodeviln food poisoning and stuff them into stasis.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Sort of. The Supervision Army was, at least originally, an ad hoc force made up of the Protoculture and Zentradi who had been captured, drained of their spiritia, and then brainwashed to fight for the Protodeviln during their rampage across the galaxy ~500,000 years before the series.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Happy to help. Like I said, if you have questions we have answers... the subject of fold waves is just a complex one since its importance expanded past the last major effort to put together a One Book to Rule Them All type reference.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    "Fold waves" is a very broad topic that covers a LOT of territory. They're broadly analogous to electromagnetic waves, but in higher-dimensional spacetime where they propagate at faster-than-light speeds. Mechanically-generated fold waves are used in a variety of technologies. They're the basis for FTL communications (fold communications) and FTL radar systems (fold wave radar). The interaction between fold waves and a specific type of exotic matter called Heavy Quantum forms the basis for a bunch of other technologies including thermonuclear reactors, thermonuclear weapons, gravity control, fold navigation, and heavy quantum beam weaponry. Heavy Quantum's an exotic particle that straddles the border between normal space and fold space, with most of its mass being on the fold space side. Fold waves are used to manipulate how much of that mass is on the fold space side, allowing for precisely-controllable gravity modification using the super-high mass of the heavy quantum. Biological life forms can also create fold waves on their own, in much the same way that the brain creates weak electromagnetic field activity (brainwaves). It borders on the idea that the conscious mind has an intrinsic connection to higher dimensions. Some individuals have the ability to create specific types of biological fold waves that are strong enough to be detectable by others or even influence others. Song energy in Macross 7 was humanity's first real understanding of biological fold waves, with the anima spiritia being able to tune theirs in ways inimical to the higher-dimensional life forms called the Protodeviln. The Vajra hive mind is essentially a form of distributed computer network created using biological fold waves. Var syndrome in Macross Delta is an illness caused by exposure to specifically-tuned biological fold waves meant to interrupt their conscious thought process in much the same way that you could interfere with a person's thoughts using focused electromagnetic interference. (Fold Quartz, a purer form of the dimensional oscillator fold carbon, can be used to create stronger fold waves that can bypass dimensional faults and other disruptions.) There is a fan translation of Macross Delta: White Knight of the Black Wing floating around... I'd recommend checking your preferred manga agregator. The new movie isn't going to offer much help to characterizing the Windermereans. As far as I've heard, the Aerial Knights show up just long enough to get Worf'd and are promptly forgotten about except for Bogue.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Not as such. As you know, most Macross publications are not available in English. Macross Chronicle, the official encyclopedia, did have some articles on the Protoculture's history but those were only current up thru the end of the Macross Frontier movies, and they're in Japanese. If you have specific questions, this is the place for 'em and the fan community here is always happy to help. ... nah, Macross Delta just wasn't very well-written compared to Macross's usual level of quality. IMO, the series did a poor job of laying out its additions to the setting... especially when it came to the Windermereans, who had most of their backstory presented in a gaiden manga rather than in the series proper. (They're much more in line with Macross's sympathetic antagonists if you've read it, but if you haven't they're just kind of arbitrarily bastards.)
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Jojo's Bizarre Adventure VI: Stone Ocean is supposed to start airing soon, I believe. That should be wild.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Unlikely, IMO... I have never seen any mention of the F-111 in connection with the VF-1's design. He's referring to the angle of the underside of the nosecone... which is similar to the VF-1's, but using that as the basis to claim the VF-1 is based on the F-111 is pretty silly when the aircraft is literally a scaled-down F-14. It's not inconceivable that the F-111 might find itself pressed back into service during the Unification Wars, though after the first couple years there wouldn't have been much in the way of utility for older planes as newer models upgraded with or built around OTM like the F-14++, MiM-31, or F203 were being introduced.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Nothing's been said about Super Dimension Fortress Macross or Do You Remember Love? yet, AFAIK. I'd assume any news about Super Dimension Fortress Macross would have to come at HG's discretion since they still hold the distribution rights in their partnership with Big West. The rights to DYRL? are a bit muddled, as I understand it, though through no real fault of Harmony Gold's as it's supposedly confusion originating with whoever they originally gave the international rights to.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    To the best of my knowledge, no. It's always been well-understood that Kawamori's design for the VF-1 Valkyrie was based on the Grumman F-14 Tomcat. Publications that discuss the development of the series rarely fail to mention that Kawamori's inspiration for the VF-1 was the US Navy's Grumman F-14 as on page 22 of Kawamori Shoji Design Works, page 28 of Shoji Kawamori Macross Design Works, the 30th anniversary "special appendix" Document of Macross, Kawamori's interview in the 2018 Autumn issue of Great Mechanics G magazine (pg31), and so on. The only other aircraft typically mentioned in connection with it are its namesake, the North American XB-70, and the McDonnell Douglas F-15C's FAST Pack capability inspiring the VF-1's FAST Packs. The connection is drawn in-universe as well, with even very early versions of the technical setting (e.g. Sky Angels) indicating the VF-1 was literally based on the F-14 in-universe and that F-14s were used to evaluate some systems being developed for the Valkyrie. This relationship only got closer post-Macross Zero. Variable Fighter Master File: VF-0 Phoenix has some remarks about how the first VF prototypes that preceded the VF-0 were quite literally modified F-14s. EDIT: It's also fairly well-known that Roy's VF-1S color scheme and the SVF-1 Skulls are modeled on the colors of the US Navy's VF-84 Jolly Rogers, who gained fame on film two years before Macross came out flying their F-14s in the 1980 movie The Final Countdown.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    For a number of reasons, I doubt that's the intended connection... There's no real connection between the SV Works and the Anti-Unification Alliance ideologically. Also, thus far Kawamori has used German references for most of the enemy VFs in the franchise so far. The name of the Sv-303 is another Hindu mythological reference... though there is some confusion as to which mythological character the name is actually referencing. It's either a reference to a premodern Hindi rigvedic deity by that name, to Surya once the many different solar deities all got conflated into a single being in modern Hinduism, or to Vivasvata, a descendant of either of them who in Hindu cosmology is the progenitor of humankind in the current iteration of the world. It could also potentially just be the adjective for "brilliant" or "shining brightly". (At least it's not as bad as the ones in Macross the Ride, where two obscure references were misspelled.) Whether the SV-52 ever actually existed is an unresolved topic... depending on which publication you ask, it was either a planned successor to the SV-51 that never materialized due to the Anti-Unification Alliance falling apart in the wake of its self-destructively moronic bombing of St. Petersburg and the Mayan incident or that the airframes were at least partly built but never completed as intended due to the engine being unavailable. It's worth remembering that, much like the VF-0 and VF-1, the SV-51's development was an international effort involving companies from many different regions including Russia, Germany, and Israel. It's also worth remembering that the Alliance was not a governmental organization but a loose confederation of various anti-government groups, militias, and other violent partisans receiving the clandestine support of various regional governments even while the national governments of those regions supported unification. The one known surviving developer - Alexi Kurakin - was Eastern European. He was also apparently not particularly invested in the Alliance's political goals and defected to the UN Government shortly after the Mayan incident. By the time the First Space War started, he was working for Stonewell and Bellcom on the VF-X-4. He cofounded the General Galaxy corporation in the wake of the war. (He, like most of the Sukhoi-IAI-Dornier team who worked on the SV-51, was busy being dead at the time the Sv-154 and Sv-262 were drafted.) Not "Anti-UN affiliates"... just "people who once worked for companies that sold arms to the Anti-Unification Alliance under the table". Magdalena makes a few dubious claims... like that the heavily modified SV-51 she calls a SV-52 (but, under the hood, is mostly a VF-17) was her grandfather's aircraft that he flew during the First Space War, which doesn't quite tally with it being recovered from an underground bunker. Assuming, of course, that the pre-war and post-war Mikoyan are the same corporate entity... Mikoyan collabored with General Galaxy on the design of the VAB-2 and VA-14, the UN Forces aircraft that were captured and reworked into the FBz-99 and Az-130 when the Varauta colony defense forces fell under the control of the Protodeviln. For the Sv-262 project specifically... the General Galaxy SV Works were established by Alexi Kurakin after the formation of General Galaxy and were supposedly active the whole time between then and now (2067). The Sv-154 Svard is one of theirs, and was Windermere's main fighter in the 2050s apparently including Grammier's tenure as a pilot during the 2050-2051 Second Unification War, meaning it was developed in the 2040s. Exactly how many models they've developed over the fifty or so years since their inception. The Mayan incident itself was heavily classified, the VF-0 and SV-51 were simply obscure because most of their data and most of the aircraft produced were lost. The SV Works Valkyrie designs are not direct successors to the Sukhoi-IAI-Dornier SV-51 in a direct sense. They're more like successors to its design philosophy of "a variable fighter to fight variable fighters". General Galaxy and SV Works founder Alexi Kurakin felt that there would eventually be a new era of VFs fighting VFs and created the SV Works inside the newly established General Galaxy to prepare for that eventuality. Also, remember that many (2/3) of the developers of the SV-51 were not Russian and were from countries ideologically aligned AGAINST Russia during the Cold War: Germany and Israel. (There's also not really an ideological link between the Anti-Unification Alliance forces of the early 2000s and the anti-government forces of the 2050s and beyond. The groups who are causing trouble in the late 2050s and 2060s we've seen so far are mainly the remnants of the Earth Supremacist fascists who were ousted from power in 2051.) The Epsilon Foundation subsidiary Dian Cecht has been buying the rights to build and sell designs developed by General Galaxy's SV Works.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Which magazine would that be?
  17. Seto Kaiba
    I'd assume everything is or will be shortly...
  18. Seto Kaiba
    ... hey now, get the guys who did Potter Puppet Pals and/or If The Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech Device on it and that could actually be pretty good.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    ... that is legitimately hilarious.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    ... wasn't Shadow Chronicles produced in 720p, though? Did they downscale it somehow?
  21. Seto Kaiba
    That's likely to be Discovery's next port of call if the viewers who were previously following the series on Netflix prove as unwilling to pay for yet another streaming service just so they can watch Star Trek as their American counterparts were/are. Possibly all of new Trek, given that they were dependent on more cashflow-positive financial backers to provide funding for production of the new Trek shows. Based on the incomplete picture we have of their situation, this feels like a very strange move for ViacomCBS to make. If Amazon Prime and Netflix are withdrawing their support of the Star Trek shows they were previously sponsoring, it would certainly explain the stock price-cratering decision to try to raise $3 Billion for streaming development by selling shares back in Q1 2021. They've also seen a steady decline in pre-tax profits over the last few years and the company's debt is over $21 Billion. For them to suddenly decide they're gonna go all-in on the global launch of the proprietary streaming service that's been operating in the red since its creation has a sort of do-or-die "Hail Mary" vibe to it. Either that or there was something major missing from the Q3 Earnings Call earlier this month that's making them much more confident than they would ordinarily be. (It's enough to make you wonder if we'll be seeing Star Trek next to Simon & Schuster and CBS's old headquarters building on the auction block in the near future. I gather they were really hoping to make bank selling Simon & Schuster to the parent company of Penguin Random House, but the UDOJ stepped in and stopped it with an antitrust filing earlier this month.)
  22. Seto Kaiba
    I guess the show's viewership on Netflix in the global market slipped to the point that Netflix isn't willing to fund it in exchange for the rest of world rights anymore. That would definitely explain the huge stock selloff a year or so ago... with their cashflow problems, they didn't have the available cash to fund it on hand without Netflix. (Alternatively, you could think of it as ViacomCBS doing everything it can to protect people from being exposed to this series...)
  23. Seto Kaiba
    According to Macross Chronicle, the reason the larger and longer-ranged missiles have multiple guidance systems is because radar guidance really took it on the chin when OTM introduced active stealth technology to fighters. Radar-guided missiles lost a lot of their reliability when aircraft gained the ability to use targeted destructive interference to make themselves effectively invisible to radar systems. Hence the need for either powerful ECCM on the missiles themselves and/or multiple guidance systems to prevent any single type of countermeasure from diverting the missile. Active stealth also led to engagements becoming much closer-ranged, fought with infrared, laser, and TV-guided missiles that were not vulnerable to active stealth measures. (Prior to active stealth becoming a part of this explanation, "powerful ECM" was mentioned in its place.) On the rare occasion the missiles have been talked about in detail, they're usually described as blast fragmentation warheads (though there are mentions of flechettes in some warheads, apparently to beef up armor penetration). One version of the AMM-1 is mentioned in Master File as having a Munroe effect (HEAT) warhead instead.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Sounds about right. It's not like Funimation was going to spend a lot of money on digital cleanup for a high-def re-release of a series with an expected sales volume of only a couple thousand copies worldwide. I'm actually kind of surprised they went to the trouble of doing a new transfer from source instead of just upscaling the last DVD release. Reminds me of the first few Robotech DVD releases, which were a grainy, faded, occasionally blurry mess. (IIRC, wasn't that a transfer from VHS tapes rather than from source?) Somewhat surprisingly, it's mostly the other way around these days. Many of the remaining Robotech fans rewatch the series on a regular basis, but they've proven to be a lot less willing to open their wallets for the franchise the way they used to. The recent Robotech RPG Kickstarter attracted less than 550 backers, and only reached the funding level it did because most of them were collectors buying multiple editions of the book. Interest in Robotech on home video kind of dried up after Remastered, since the new audio was poorly received and subsequent editions didn't add any new content of note. Plus it's been slumming its way around the streaming services for most of that time too.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Chronicle is the official encyclopedia. You may be thinking of Variable Fighter Master File, which self-disclaims as not "official setting" material.
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