Seto Kaiba

"Chunky salsa". Though !y favorite way of putting it is "a flight suit full of gazpacho".

Not the first time that's been done by a long shot. The old FamilySoft Macross games from the 90's had a prototype VF that was cobbled together from VF-1 and Destroid parts called the VF-X3 Medusa.

IIRC, the human body's g-force tolerance is actually somewhat better in the reverse position (facing away from the direction of travel). Of course, with 5th Gen VFs capable of anywhere from 30.5-40G of acceleration, the ISC becomes very necessary to avoid G-LOC, injury, or worse.

Finished Combatants Will Be Dispatched. Not a bad series, though this one feels like it could've been made longer instead of ending where it did. It definitely has a vibe similar to KonoSuba and Chivas 1-2-3/Sorcerer on the Rocks.

Or, at the very least, an unconscious and completely useless passenger in a very expensive missile.

The figure given for the 5th Gen VFs is the ISC buffer capacity only. The structural g-load limit would have to be a lot higher since even the humblest of them can easily do 30G+ of acceleration from a standing start.

Ah, you are indeed correct. My mistake.

Xaos has a larger force than just the Macross Elysion, but in the TV series it was just the Macross Elysion and a handful of escort ships. The first movie increases the size of Xaos's available forces in the cluster to three Elysion-type Macrosses and various escort ships, though one ends up subverted by Var syndrome's mind control effects and one is destroyed, leaving just Elysion fighting on the protagonist's side. Yeah, Ragna was evacuated by Xaos and the local Ragnan New UN Forces. That's why there are NUNS-marked ships in the flotilla. That's Freyja... she has her 15th birthday in Macross Delta's 16th episode "Hesitating Birthday". In Macross Frontier, Ranka's age is given as 16 in a couple different onscreen sources like her biographical extract and Ozma saying she'll be an adult next year (2060). Quarter Zentradi, but yeah...

Presumably the Brisingr Alliance's local New UN Forces are still picking up the pieces after Xaos's bungled defense of the Brisingr globular cluster left much of their forces under Var syndrome-induced mind control and forced the uninfected to inflict a fair amount of casualties on their own side. It's not like the New UN Forces have any reason to jump to her defense either, though. Probably not, no. It's just a point about how these megacorporations have insinuated themselves into governments and are putting civilian lives at risk for their own personal gain. That the naked corporatism that drove the fold quartz "gold rush" was inherently an amoral exercise that cared not for the rights of sentient beings was part of Frontier's Aesop. No, I get it... the problem is that that doesn't logically fit with Cromwell's supposed motive. You're guessing wildly, and your guesses are rapidly devolving into incoherent nonsense. ... eh, the question that was asked to me was Ranka's age, not Freyja's.

Given how little sense it makes, I strongly suspect that the antagonist's motive is being distorted somewhat in these spoiler posts...

Eh... it sucked, past tense. Now that the legal obstacles are cleared it shouldn't be a problem. They just have to sort out whoever's got the film's distribution rights outside Japan and everything's good. That's the real point of confusion. Yeah, HG can't use the designs from Macross in new animation or live action because they don't have the intellectual property rights. They can use it in stuff in merchandise like comic books, video games, toys, etc. tho. Not that most of that stuff sells worth a damn for them anymore.

Harmony Gold licensed the merchandising rights to DYRL? c.2000-2001 as part of their effort to stop the importation of Macross goods into the US. That particular move was intended to protect Toynami's then-pending Masterpiece Collection toys from having to compete against Japanese VF-1 toys.

Not to mention cost... if you develop a bleeding edge next-generation fighter that requires vast amounts of exotic materials that can't be synthesized like fold quartz, you've just wasted your time designing something you can never actually build. If it hadn't been for the war with the Vajra, the YF-29 would likely have never seen the light of day... It's a "depends how you want to look at it" situation. The YF-29 is designed for combat, where the YF-30 is a technology demonstrator. The YF-30 is faster and more agile than the YF-29 thanks to its more powerful engines and its better thrust-to-weight ratio, but the YF-29 is way more heavily armed and possibly more heavily armored too. (The time travel shenanigans in Macross 30 were the fault of the Fold Evil that the Protoculture created, then sealed on the planet.)

Isamu's custom VF-19 from Macross Frontier: the Wings of Goodbye is a two-off (one spare aircraft) that is in most respects a downgraded monkey model. It started out as a VF-19EF Caliburn - the Frontier fleet's 2058 local derivative of the VF-19E export spec - and was progressively retrofitted to return its aerodynamics and as many onboard systems as possible to the YF-19 specification. It's noted that they couldn't go all the way back to the YF-19-2 that Isamu was so in love with, so they got as close as they could (which in many cases was YF-19-3, the first prototype to have the next-gen airframe control AI package "ARIEL"). It has a much newer engine than the YF-19-3 had, but many of its modifications are meant to undo and revert the nearly twenty years of patient performance and handling refinements made by Shinsei Industry's engineers in their efforts to address the defects that led to the VF-19 being dropped as the 4th Gen main fighter. Isamu's desire was to return the VF-19 to the unstable monster that practically nobody in the New UN Forces could control. Its performance specs aren't too much different from the Caliburn's, but it has the oversensitive handling of the original YF-19 with none of the optimization and safety upgrades that came after.

That's the stickiest wicket of all, since the distribution rights need to be sorted out. Harmony Gold has the merchandising rights only.

As I said to him in the Mecha thread, I very much doubt that the VF-31AX is able to rival the YF-29 let alone exceed it. The VF-31 Custom Siegfried was already pushing the limits of what the VF-31's airframe could handle, to the extent that Hayate's needed serious TLC from the Aether's mechanics every time it sortied due to his rough handling of it. He even got chastised for it by Makina of all people. That was with an custom airframe they had TIME to seriously retrofit and redesign to handle the greater stresses of the still-heavily-detuned FF-3001/FC2 engines and simplified Fold Wave System. The VF-31A Custom "Kairos Plus" is... As such, I'd be VERY surprised if it was actually a significant improvement over the Siegfried type. I strongly suspect the notion that the VF-31AX is the new most-uber VF is just wishful thinking on someone's part. It's definitely inconsistent across the Delta materials. In the TV series and first movie, Xaos was all but broke after being run out of the Brisingr cluster. They were so strapped for cash that they noted they couldn't afford to replenish their fuel and ammunition. I'd assume Aisha Blanchett wasn't poached from SMS at all. She was working for SMS because Richard Bilra was ready, willing, and able to put up the gargantuan sums of cash needed for her to develop her ideal next-generation VF and the Fold Dimensional Resonance system. Once the YF-30's development ended with successful demonstration of the Fold Dimensional Resonance system she wouldn't have had much reason to stay. Her reason for moving to the Brisingr cluster would be pretty obvious: her baby, the YF-30, was licensed for further development into a mass production aircraft. Elma Hoyly no doubt jumped for research funding, since Xaos was interested in researching fold songs and her area of expertise as the protege of Dr. Lawrence was biological fold waves. Why Max is half a galaxy away from the last known position of City 7 is a mystery all on its own. I assume the writers simply wanted an actually-likeable character. Oh, it absolutely is... like how Mariafokina Barnrose in a VF-1 spanked Aegis Focker in a VF-19A. Hayate's got raw talent but little experience, so he seems to be getting most of his survivability from the potentially lethal fold song bullet time Freyja's songs put him into. If he's not careful, he'll die exactly the same way Messer did... roided out on Var syndrome until his body just tears itself apart. Ranka Lee's date of birth is 29 April 2043, so she would be 25 years old at the time of Absolute Live!!!!!!.

Very likely, yes. Based on what's said of the arms export restrictions imposed by the New UN Government in the wake of the Sharon Apple Incident in Macross Chronicle and Macross the Ride, it seems likely that any VF-19 or VF-22 outside those possessed by the central New UN Forces and VF-X Special Forces is at least technically a monkey model. Performance doesn't have to be reduced across the board for a design to be considered a "monkey model". There just has to be a noticeable reduction of peformance or omission of features in some areas. For example, the VF-19P that was provided to the Zola Patrol had its weapons bays replaced with fixed micro missile launchers and the fire control system had its target discovery rate dialed back. The VF-19E monkey model specification that became the Frontier fleet's VF-19EF Caliburn had limiters imposed on various systems and the provided spec either omitted information for the airframe control AI, sensors, and other parts or the Frontier fleet felt they were substandard enough to order them replaced by new versions developed locally in the fleet. So, even if the engine output wasn't dialed back there may be omissions or reductions in performance elsewhere in the aircraft that aren't mentioned (because the whole monkey model thing is a Frontier-era retcon).

Cromwell's goal doesn't really make sense in the greater context of Macross, though... Yeah, there's plenty of characters in previous titles incl. Frontier side materials who have cybernetics and experience no issues whatsoever. The only problematic cybernetics were the ones the Galaxy fleet developed for the specific purpose of mind control and perceptual manipulation. (The entire Galaxy fleet's civilian population was basically living in an extreme version of Augmented Reality permanently, tweaking their perceptions via implants to make the industrial hellscape of Galaxy a more pleasant vista and editing their sense of smell and taste to make the harsh synthetic foods taste like actual food.) But neither of those reasons you gave here are correct or relevant... The technology that caused the so-called "Sharon Apple Incident" was already illegal before the incident occurred. It'd been banned by the New UN Government precisely because its inherent unpredictability and inbuilt self-preservation instincts made it dangerously unreliable. The problem was exacerbated by the fact that the person the Venus Sound Lab's directors chose to sample to create Sharon's computer model "brain" was emotionally unstable and had a lot of repressed psychological issues. They put an illegal processor that was known to cause crazy computers into a system running an uninhibited virtual emulation of the thoughts and emotions of a woman with more issues than National Geographic magazine. The rest of the AI technology involved works just fine. Both the Frontier and Galaxy fleets were able to field Ghosts with the same autonomous air combat AI software as the Ghost X-9 without issue (Luca's Ghosts, and the AIF-9V "Ghost V-9's" from Galaxy). Luca's family's company was also working out the issues with personality simulation as a way to make Ghosts more intuitive on the battlefield in the Macross Frontier audio dramas. It turns out, if you model the Ghost's artificial personality on someone who isn't squirting crazy out of every pore, it works just fine. Cybernetics have been used by the Zentradi for over half a million years without apparent incident. Humanity's been using them for things like limb and sense organ replacement for quite some time as well without issue. Implants only became an issue when the Galaxy fleet developed ones that were specifically designed for mind control and then put 'em to use in an attempt to hit some kind of human rights violation high score by trapping their citizens in sense-altering augmented reality or straight-up hijacking their bodies against their will. People living elsewhere have been able to use cybernetics to generally positive effect, providing functional limb replacements for amputees or even enhancing personal performance like Vanquish League champion Nicolas F. Berthier with his fiber-optic nervous system.

There's nothing stopping a fleet from building more Battle-class ships if they feel the need or desire to. The City type has docks that could support up to three of them. It may be an animation issue, but the Macross 5 fleet in Macross 7 appears to have more than one Battle-class ship in this scene from the series: http://www.macross2.net/m3/macross7/newmacross5/macross5-fleet.jpg

Granted, a first-generaton Macross is essentially obsolete on its own... but properly equipped it's still enough firepower to be a fleet flagship or conquer a lightly defended planet on its own. That said, because megacorporations have already become involved in financially-backing emigrant fleets and those megacorporations tend to wield sigificant influence in the governments of those emigrant fleets, enabling them to do all kinds of questionable things. For example, in Macross Frontier the titular emigrant fleet was sponsored by SMS's parent company Bilra Transport. That is where Richard Bilra, its founder, derived so much of his impressive influence with the Frontier Government and how he was able to ensure his company's subsidiary SMS got a government contract and was hired to test the Frontier New UN Spacy's new 5th Generation VF (the VF-25) and prototype variable warship (the Macross Quarter). The Macross Galaxy fleet is a more extreme example, because the fleet was established as a kind of flying R&D facility for General Galaxy and was actually directly governed as a corporation by a General Galaxy subsidiary company.

My apologes for the confusion caused by my grammatical ambiguity.

OK, well that really leaves the matter vague then... if you'd answered the question in the affirmative then it would've been a reasonable conclusion that the VF-31AX was actually a less capable aircraft than the Siegfried, never mind the YF-29. The Fold Reheat system is a feature of the Sv-262 Draken III... ... which is essentially a poor man's version of the YF-29's Fold Wave System that provides only an increase in maximum deliverable engine thrust instead of bolstering the VF's reactor output with energy drawn from fold space and various other features. Variable Fighter Master File presented the version of the Fold Wave System used by Xaos on the VF-31 customs as being a less capable version of the YF-29's Fold Wave System, albeit with the benefit of using less of the ultra-rare high purity fold quartz. Battle Galaxy was said to have been destroyed in both versions of the Macross Frontier story, and she was destroyed fairly half a galaxy away from the Brisingr Globular Cluster in the vicinity of the galactic core. Salvaging the ship wouldn't be impossible, and the Epsilon Foundation absolutely has the necessary resources and connections to restore a ship like that. The Epsilon Foundation previously participated in restoring and modifying a first-generation Macross on Pipure in 2062, for it to be used in research into weaponization and amplification of fold songs. It even had a similar "ring" design to it.

Wait, the VF-31AX has a... If so, that would directly answer the question about its performance relative to the YF-29's.

Unfortunately, it failed to answer my main question with respect to the railguns used by the VF-31 and Sv-262. Specifically: are the railguns "true" railguns that use purely electromagnetic force to launch projectiles or are these like the VF-25's "railgun" where there's an electromagnetic assist to a chemically-propelled conventional bullet. The YF-29, not the YF-24. It's not entirely clear what the Macross Frontier Fleet Arsenal and local branches of Shinsei Industry and Legodt & Angeloni Industries had in mind for future applications when the YF-29 Durandal's development kicked off. Maybe it was originally intended to be a Special Forces fighter like the VF-19EF Caliburn or VF-22S Sturmvogel II. Either way, the frankly impractical amount of ultra-high purity fold quartz needed to manufacture the all-important Fold Wave System that made the YF-29's incredible performance possible also left the fighter impossible to mass produce due to its scarcity. There are several interesting notes in Variable Fighter Master File: VF-31 Siegfried about the Fold Wave System. It's indicated that the originator of the theory behind the Fold Wave System was none other than Lt. Col. Gadget M. Chiba of the Macross 7 fleet. It was supposedly an outgrowth of his Sound Energy hypothesis that joined it up to unified fold theory involving using dimensionally-resonant crystals (fold quartz) to amplify fold waves. Some guidance is also offered with respect to the claim made in the extra features of the Macross Delta blu-rays that asserts the VF-31 Custom "Siegfried" is considered to be a Generation 5.5 Variable Fighter. Master File's assertion is that the YF-29 and its completed Fold Wave System constitute a 6th Generation VF. The 5th Generation VF-31 Kairos's retrofits to include that system in the Siegfried type supposedly made it Gen 5.5. Also of interest is a note that the VF-31 Custom's Fold Wave System is said to be of a somewhat different design than the YF-29's. It's said that the design of the Siegfried's Fold Wave System requires less of the ultra-high purity fold quartz needed to make a fold wave system, theoretically without sacrificing the system's performance but at the cost of it being less practical because the system cannot activate and maintain operation without an external fold wave oscillator (aka a suitably powerful biological fold wave source). It would appear that this is the reason the VF-31 Custom Siegfried type uses its fold wave system so sparingly in the series. The YF-29 is said to be able to "brute force" activate it without an external fold wave source. It's Earth's 5th Generation Main Variable Fighter, their replacement for the VF-171 Nightmare Plus. Your summation is quite correct. I just want to add one tiny note to that last sentence. Macross Galaxy began development of the YF-27 based on the YF-24 spec, but completed the project using development data from Frontier's YF-29 leaked to them by LAI. Unlikely, IMO... but I'm waiting to see actual specs rather than vague claims in potentally unreliable spoilers. Back in the Macross Delta TV series, it was noted on several occasions that the modifications Xaos made to the trial production VF-31's in Delta Flight's care were already pushing the limits of the airframe's durability. Expert handling was able to mitigate that issue, but Hayate's rougher style resulted in his VF-31 Custom Siegfried sustaining damage just by how he was flying it. Though there is some evident frame reinforcement on the Kairos Plus around the wings, I doubt that the stock VF-31 airframe could actually reach the YF-29 performance-wise without suffering a fair amount of damage from stresses beyond the design limit. There's also been a fair amount said about differences in Fold Wave System design that make the YF-29 superior as well, and the claim made in the Macross Delta series material that the YF-29 is a generation ahead of the Siegfried series and others. ヴィヴァスヴァト would be read Vi-Va-Su-Va-To (ヴィ - ヴァ - ス - ヴァ - ト), so Vivasvat should be the correct transliteration, I'd assume. My grasp of Hindu mythology is unfortunately quite sparse. This is, I think, the fourth Hindu mythology reference in Macross's technical setting. The first was ANGIRAS, the name of the original generation of airframe control AIs used in VFs. Then there was the Vajra, Surya Aerospace (makers of the VF-31), and now Vivasvat. Feels like the Macross II references are coming to a head... the Metal Siren in that OVA also had a fourth mode that deployed all of its engines for high-mobility space dogfighting. We already had the Star Singer who is basically just an Emulator, and Var syndrome which works almost exactly like the Song of Death from Macross II. My burning question is where the hell the Battle Astraea came from... because, as others have noted, that's clearly a Battle-class under all that garbage and it appears to be what remains of the Battle Galaxy.