Seto Kaiba

Eh... yeah, that's that executive meddling I mentioned. Voyager was supposed to be an even more heavily serialized story than Deep Space Nine, and it was supposed to prominently feature the conflict between the Starfleet and Maquis components of the crew. Kind of a seven season long version of "Year of Hell" and "Worst Case Scenario". It'd been almost twenty years since Space 1999 and Battlestar Galactica, and the Galactica reboot was still eight years in the future, so general audiences weren't really put off by the superficially similar premises. General audiences - and even the cast - were more put off by the way the Paramount execs turned the series into an almost literal season 8 of Star Trek: the Next Generation. The episodic formula had gotten a bit stale over 8+ years, and Voyager's premise of the Starfleet ship and crew stranded on the far side of the galaxy and having to cooperate with the hostile Maquis proved to be pretty toothless once the studio execs got done with it. Perhaps nobody was so upset as Robert Beltran. He'd signed on to play some serious drama as the hard-nosed Maquis captain opposing Janeway and got stuck playing Janeway's personality-less yes-man magic indian after the whole idea of hostility between the Starfleet and Maquis characters got abandoned. Paramount went into production on Voyager with a formula that had already started to get stale for most of the viewers. Not so much, IMO. Enterprise did suffer from the usual problems that come with developing a sequel, but unlike a lot of prequels it was set far enough from the previous stories in its timeline's future that the conclusion of its specific storyline wasn't foregone. It was 114 years distant from the next-closest Star Trek series in the timeline when it was made (though Discovery cut that down to 105). The only foregone conclusion - apart from bad ideas like the Borg episode - was that Archer's mission would instigate the events which led to the formation of the Federation. It wasn't like the Discovery plot lines where it was obvious everything was a foregone conclusion because it was only a few years distant from TOS so we knew the Klingon War was going to end in Starfleet's favor in a way that preserved the TOS status quo and that the Control plot would also end in a way that didn't upset the apple cart because its bad future overlapped with the one Agent Daniels and co. were from in ENT. If Enterprise had run long enough to run into the Earth-Romulan war, then I could concede that its plot would've been Discovery levels of foregone conclusion. For most audiences, the problem was that Star Trek: Enterprise's episodic format was too close to what the three previous shows had done to the point of staleness and that they introduced familiar Star Trek technologies from a century in the future much too quickly. The transporter's unreliability was quickly dismissed. Hand phasers were introduced halfway into the pilot episode and ship-mounted phasers were introduced halfway into the first season. Photon torpedos rolled in at the end of season two, looking virtually identical to their 23rd and 24th century counterparts. The only staple technologies that the NX-01 Enterprise was missing were shields and the tractor beam. It eroded the show's distinctive setting pretty quickly. Eh... I imagine that'd probably get samey pretty quick. TNG offered enough proof of what ineffectual villains the Ferengi make... they're comic relief at best. Romulan and Klingon territorial expansion is mostly just armed conquest and we already got a good look at how the Klingons do it in DS9. Like, what's a single Starfleet ship going to do while the Klingons or Romulans are invading less developed civilizations, massacring their governments and militaries, and enslaving the locals?

Eh... in all fairness to Discovery and Picard's showrunners, trying a radically different approach to the Star Trek setting would probably have been a fantastic idea twenty years ago. You see, a big part of what ultimately ended Star Trek's golden age on television was a lack of innovation. Star Trek had been back on the air for eight years, and had two of its shows (TNG and DS9) running concurrently for the last two years, when Star Trek: the Next Generation ended and Star Trek: Voyager was rolled out to replace it. Voyager's ratings suffered because executive meddling changed its premise to make it much more like the Next Generation and that decline continued when Voyager reached the end of its run and Star Trek: Enterprise started. Audiences were just burned out on Star Trek and that led to Enterprise being cancelled before its time. If they'd tried something like Discovery back then alongside, or instead of, Enterprise it would've probably been received as a much-welcomed breath of fresh air for the franchise instead of condemned as a bastardization. Discovery had the misfortune to come out at a time when audiences were craving some more lighthearted, optimistic entertainment. A return to classic Star Trek form would have been more welcome, though with audiences also burned out on prequels the idea of setting it in Star Trek's pre-Kirk past would've been a bad idea regardless.

Yeah, AFAIK the only legal issue that ever came of that was inconsistently reported. The author of the fanart that they "appropriated" as their original take on the VF-1 made several contradictory claims regarding Titan Comics' use of his art... that they had either straight-up plagiarized his design, or that they had asked if they could use it and not told him it was for commercial purposes. He claimed, on at least one occasion, that they had resolved the matter by cutting him a check.

More or less... though I think the final nail in the coffin was probably Star Trek: Picard's first season being just as poorly-received as Star Trek: Discovery's second. Picard was supposed to be the olive branch CBS extended to the fans that Discovery drove away. The nonsensical, heavy-handed writing and the visible disrespect for Jean-Luc Picard that permeated the series only drove them further from the franchise when it was supposed to be renewing their faith in the brand. With Netflix unhappy with Discovery's performance to the point of slashing its budget and not carrying the Short Treks in most markets, Amazon Prime upset with Picard's reception, and merchandising partners upset by the Abrams Trek aesthetic they knew wasn't going to move merch, the prospect of finding the hundreds of millions of dollars needed to make Section 31, Strange New Worlds, or any of the other proposed shows must've begin to look like a fool's errand. Especially after Lower Decks came out and was similarly panned by fans... with those three collectively being the three lowest-rated Star Trek shows on RottenTomatoes and some of the worst-scoring Star Trek titles overall. Who's gonna put up the flipping great wodges of cash needed to produce a show like that, especially one with a poorly-received concept like Section 31's. TBH, I'd expect that if they'd pitched Strange New Worlds first it'd have been panned just as hard as Discovery pre-release, for messing with the continuity and visual aesthetic of TOS the same way Enterprise was often taken to task for doing. Prequels in general are kind of Star Trek's no-win scenario.

The trademark filing in the tweets @Gerli found are for the Japanese domestic market, filed with the Japan Patent Office.1 Trademarks are generally only (fully) enforceable in the jurisdiction (country) where the mark is registered, though there are some treaties that offer a modicum of enforceability for trademarks internationally. That's why I can't really see a clear rationale behind this filing, unless this is a preliminary step towards filing for trademark registration on the transformation in other jurisdictions where Big West is now actively exercising its rights as the owner of Macross like the PRC, EU, and UK. When you refer to "the recent comics", I'm assuming you mean Titan Comics' adaptation of Robotech? I doubt this is related. Harmony Gold's existing license gives it the ability to use the VF-1 Valkyrie (TV) design in merchandise incl. comic books. Using that plagiarized fan art that Titan Comics presented as their own original take on Shoji Kawamori's VF-1 in the comic was, as far as we can tell, a deliberate (and terrible) artistic choice not motivated by any kind of legal restrictions. Robotech fans (and every living creature with eyes) hated it, so they switched to tracing the Shoji Kawamori VF-1 Valkyrie design from photos of toys and from artbooks without any explanation or acknowledgement of the craft's sudden and dramatic change of appearance. 1. Which, despite the name, is actually responsible for patents, trademarks, utility models, and designs. Copyrights are policed by a separate body, the Agency for Cultural Affairs.

The VF-X-4's on page 110, but the production version from Flash Back 2012 seems to have been left out.

Big West appears to have filed for a Class 41 trademark on the VF-1 Valkyrie's transformation in Japan back on 17 January 2020. I pulled their trademark applications from the Japan Patent Office's search engine, and these two are the only ones of this type they've filed. Unless I'm missing something - and it's entirely possible given how sleep deprived I currently am - I don't think so. Unless they're doing this as a preliminary step towards going after bootleg toys or something.

Well... yes and no? The design reference sheets (settei) that Kawamori and co. produced for the animators working on the series did include color guides that identified what inks and paints were to be used and where on a given character or mecha. You can see several of them in the This is Animation books for the original Macross series. Whether Bandai and other manufacturers use them as color reference or just eyeball it from published art and/or the animation itself is something only they know. Hand-drawn animation and all that... y'know? Most questions have answers, though Kawamori is notorious for his "broad strokes" approach to continuity and his official position that all Macross projects are stand-alone works. Big West doesn't seem to completely agree, but they let it stand.

TBH, I don't think the advancements in in-universe technology have anything to do with it. It's just unimaginative choreography. Macross Zero put the VFs front and center, and tried to show off what you could do with one. Consequently, it had a lot of variety in its combat scenes and they were very intense because the pilots were trying everything against each other. You had all kinds of air combat maneuvers torn from the real world and some that are only possible in fiction. Macross Delta wasn't anywhere near as interested in the VFs and the actual war story they were trying to tell, so choreographed combat sequences lacked variety in the name of keeping them easy to animate. There was very little transforming done and the only maneuver used was "The Scissors", over and over again because it's easy to animate. The lack of variety and the need to not get dark meant that there wasn't much in the way of stakes. It was more like a tokusatsu show, with brightly-colored fighters engaging in bloodless violence before both sides retreat with no harm done to anyone but mooks. It doesn't really offer much in the way of tension. If you were feeling really charitable, you could maybe attribute the unimaginative combat choreography to the inexperience of Windermere's untested pilots and the poor quality of the very remote Brisingr Alliance NUNS and the private pilots drawn from it.

There hasn't been any substantial news about the (proposed) series since they announced it. The most likely explanation is that ViacomCBS and Secret Hideout haven't been able to secure the necessary funding to start work on the series. Even though Strange New Worlds would be reusing a lot of assets created for Star Trek: Discovery's first two seasons, the show's development and production costs are going to be significant. Star Trek: Discovery's first season was supposed to cost between $6 million and $7 million per episode, but thanks to reshoots and irresponsible overspending by Secret Hideout it ended up costing $8.5 million per episode. It looks like they coped with Netflix's reductions in their budget by making each successive season one episode shorter than the previous one. (Season 1 had 15 episodes, Season 2 had 14, and Season 3 will have 13.) If you assume Strange New Worlds will cost half as much to develop as Discovery and have a similar per-episode production cost, that's at least $235 million you have to source. Since this is direct-to-streaming, that means finding a distribution partner willing to put up a significant sum for the streaming rights. Netflix and Amazon aren't entirely happy with what they currently have, so they're not going to foot the bill. Who does that leave? Pretty much just YouTube. Hulu was owned by 21st Century Fox and they're owned by Disney now. I mean, yeah... if that big blowup on the normally tame official Star Trek subreddit is anything to go by, even the fans who liked Discovery are rapidly tiring of it. I have to wonder how much actual faith the showrunners have in their concept these days. Strange New Worlds was more or less an admission of defeat, trying to move the franchise back towards its traditional format in the hopes of recovering the fanbase the franchise had lost. It's been indicated by Netflix that CBS is unwilling to let the series die because they're upside-down hundreds of millions of dollars on its development still after planning for a seven season run. It might've been posted six days ago, but there's really nothing new there. It's the same stuff we've known since the project was first teased.

Since someone asked in the DX Chogokin VF-1 thread, I have posted an explanation of how the VF-1's variable intake ramps work there.

I could! So... the variable intake ramp used on Variable Fighters is used in a couple of different ways. At subsonic speeds (far left), the variable intake ramp is stored up out of the way to allow maximum subsonic airflow into the superconducting ram-air pre-compressor stage in the VF's "hips". (That pre-compressor is not actually part of the engine itself, which resides entirely in the VF's leg below the knee.) At supersonic speeds (center left), the variable intake ramp can be lowered to various positions in order to deflect the supersonic intake airflow into the pre-compressor and engine body. This produces shockwaves at the intake that slow the incoming air down, dramatically increasing the air pressure at the intake. In Battroid mode or in space (center right), the variable intake ramp can be fully closed. On the ground, this is done to protect the pre-compressor and engine from ingesting any dust and debris that might be kicked up during ground ops. In space, it's done to protect the inactive pre-compressor. Variable Fighter Master File asserts that VF-1s outfitted to operate exclusively in space sometimes installed additional (removable) fuel tanks in the space between the sealed intake ramp and the pre-compressor. In the event that a Battroid should need to use its engines for something other than an electrical generator, the variable intake ramp can also open (far right) like a set of blinds to provide a modicum of protection from debris while still allowing subsonic airflow into the engine. Page 061 of Variable Fighter Master File: VF-1S Roy Focker Special has a diagram that shows how the intake ramps are used to adjust airflow in those first two cases. You can see the fourth case in this scene from Macross Zero:

Yup... and the last few episodes made the supermassive plot hole that Star Trek: Discovery's third season orbits a little bigger. Do you remember how, early in Discovery's third season, it was (stupidly) claimed that the Federation tried and failed to develop a viable warp core design that didn't depend on using dilithium to moderate a matter/antimatter reaction? How the writers conveniently forgot that the Romulan Star Empire had long since perfected a forced quantum singularity core for their warp drives when the Federation got its first good look at the D'deridex-class warbird in 2364? Yeah... "Unification III" reveals that the Romulans had reunified with the Vulcans and were members of the Federation before the burn. Not only did the 31st century Federation apparently forget that singularity cores were a thing along with all the other warp core alternatives we've seen over the years, the people who perfected the singularity core in the first place apparently did too. "The Burn" has become an idiot ball so large light cannot escape its surface. I'm left to wonder if this is Michelle Yeoh's exit from Star Trek: Discovery. It's pretty obvious that Michelle Yeoh stuck around for Star Trek: Discovery's second season because the showrunners promised her that she would get a spinoff series of her own in the near future. There wasn't a lot for her to do besides make the occasional catty remark and have fight scenes in tight pants. Now that Star Trek: Section 31 seems to have joined several other proposals on the reject pile, there's no reason for her to stay on the show as an increasingly irrelevant character. ("Better to quit than be fired", I guess.) I'm dreading it. We've already seen that the developing AI is a going-nowhere plot and we know the explanation of "the Burn" is going to be dumb.

Tech Romancer is a video game. My apologies for the earlier ambiguous wording. One thing I love about Kawamori is that he almost never throws a design or concept away and says "that isn't workable". He relentlessly polishes even his old ideas until he either finds somewhere they fit or makes somewhere they fit. Like how the plot for his aborted non-Macross project Advanced Valkyrie ended up becoming Macross Plus nearly 9 years after its initial cancellation while many of the designs he did for it became part of Macross or ended up in another project that evolved into Escaflowne and Macross 7. We even saw this at work in Macross Delta, with the Sv-262 being developed from a design Kawamori did back in 1990 that was itself reused in the series as the Sv-262's predecessor the Sv-154 Svard. It's such an iterative process that it feels like engineering AND art. EDIT: Hell, you could argue the concept of the Minmay Cannon from Macross: Scramble Valkyrie found its way into the official setting via the YF-29's Fold Wave System, which was intended to facilitate communication and peace with the Vajra.

Fun fact... Kawamori actually polished this concept art into a finished design different from the final VA-3 in another title. It became the YF-37 Rafaga in Tech Romancer.

Huh... so this is amusing. Star Trek: Discovery season three's mid-season plot twist is that... we're going back to the 23rd century Mirror Universe plotline from season one? And, like season two, the story arc's based on material plagiarized from the Star Trek relaunch novelverse? (In this case, Kirsten Beyer's Star Trek: Voyager novel A Pocket Full of Lies.) The reason the Discovery's walking, talking, cliched and more-than-slightly-racist asian stereotype and massive karma houdini Emperor Phillipa Georgiou has been a bit out of sorts in the last few episodes is that she's dying. Slowly and painfully. The cause is nicked from A Pocket Full of Lies. Because Georgiou is native to a different quantum reality, the matter her body is made of has a different quantum state than the universe she's living in. If the difference in quantum states is small, like from traveling up and down the same timeline or from traveling between two similar quantum realities, it's no big deal. Georgiou's screwed because she's from a thousand years in the past AND a different universe that had diverged a lot from the prime universe, so the matter that makes her up is being torn apart as it tries to reconcile that disparity... causing tissue breakdown and occasional bouts of intangibility. The only person that Starfleet has record of experiencing something similar was an Betelgeusian 24th century Starfleet officer named Yor from an alternate reality 2379 who traveled up to the 32nd century because of the Temporal Cold War and was left in such agonized incapacity that he was granted euthanasia. So instead of The Burn we're switching gears to a story about offloading Georgiou back to the 23rd century Mirror Universe via a convenient portal that appears for... reasons.

Well, that was a short honeymoon. RIP Rogue Squadron... you had potential, right up until they decided you had to be part of the sequel trilogy setting. So... Wedge has an assist? Or two assists? Or is the first assist Han's? How are we scoring this?

... huh? That's not right. Zamuse's Super Dimension Fortress Macross: Scramble Valkyrie has never been listed as a part of the same timeline as the Macross II: Lovers Again OVA. It's never been listed on either of Macross's official timelines, TBH. It was a standalone title that was set in its own alternate version of the First Space War. The game used DYRL? visual aesthetics for the pilot portraits and the Macross itself, but had distinctly TV series touches like Milia having defected to the UN Forces before the start of the story (to be selectable as the third playable character, for the VF-1SOL-J). The game didn't really have a story, it was just an R-Type clone that used Macross designs for mook enemies and had the usual nonsensical R-Type-esque bosses. (The final boss is particularly noteworthy as being a completely out-of-place 2001: a Space Odyssey style giant space baby in a bubble that, in its second phase, turns into Freeza from Dragon Ball Z... but with a dragon's face in the "you won" cutscene.) Prior to 1997, the only games that were a part of either official timeline were the two games Nippon Computer Systems developed specifically as tie-ins to the Macross II: Lovers Again OVA: Macross 2036 and Macross: Eternal Love Song. It wasn't until Macross Digital Mission VF-X that Macross's main timeline started including video games, starting from VF-X and expanding out to the PS1 DYRL? game, VF-X2, Macross Plus Game Edition, Macross M3, and most recently Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy. Nah, that more angular design style is just what was trendy at the time. You can see it in the work Studio Nue did for FASA's Japanese edition of BattleTech around the same time, and in the designs they did for the unrelated FamilySoft trilogy (the VF-X3 Medusa/Star Crusder, SDP-1 Stampede Valkyrie, and LDR-04 Maverick Destroid).

Looking at it as an outsider/non-fan, my assumption would be that Rogue Squadron will end up being a side story set during the original trilogy like Rogue One was... both to market it as an indirect sequel to the one good Disney Star Wars film and capitalize on the fanbase's original trilogy nostalgia. (Well, that and to avoid the antipathy Star Wars fans have for the sequel trilogy.)

Hm... a risky move. Let's see how it plays out for them. I'm surprised we reached this point so quickly, to be honest. Disney tried giving Star Wars fans a nice, safe sequel that took no risks and pushed no envelopes to give them more what they already loved (The Force Awakens), they tried subverting expectations and mixing things up (The Last Jedi), they tried doing an origin story for one of Star Wars's most beloved characters, and they tried to design a film by committee using fan responses to plot leaks (The Rise of Skywalker)... and the fans hated all of it. So they're falling back on the two things that do sell: original trilogy side stories (Rogue One) and borrowed goodwill from old Expanded Universe titles (The Mandalorean). They're on their knees, begging fans "Just tell us what you want!". If they approach this right and avoid the sequel trilogy's bad habits they might actually make good on Rogue Squadron. They proved they can make a decent film when they want to with Rogue One. If anything, I think their biggest obstacle outside of executive meddling is going to be that Star Wars fans are kind of an unpleasable lot these days.

Based on available materials, it looks like for at least the Frontier Valkyries he did do clean or almost-clean final art at a low level of surface detail as shape reference for the CG modelers and then did various focus pieces to show how he wanted key areas to be detailed and textured. There is some good, clean line art of the VF-25 and especially its Super Packs. Not s'much for the VF-27 and none that I've seen for the YF-29. The published YF-29 drawings are almost entirely Kawamori penciling in different wings and rear fuselages over the front half of a VF-25. In the case of the YF-29 and later, it looks like they got the basic design solidified in 3D and then went back and marked up printouts of the 3D models to determine how they wanted to do surface detail.

Gave the book a once-over and it seems pretty solid... a few things I haven't seen before like that unused "Prototype VF" designed for the FamilySoft game trilogy. There's one error I spotted on page 561. The thing labeled "QF-4000" isn't a draft of the QF-4000... it's an original design Kawamori did for the Spring '04 issue of Character Model as a new/original weapon for the VF-0: It's a cruise missile-like Ghost that's used as a standoff weapon, it launches like a missile but can maneuver like a fighter and attack enemy aircraft with micro missiles.

So... since my fellow mecha enthusiasts may or may not be on the fence about ordering Shoji Kawamori Designer's Note, here's a review in brief. Designer's Note is 624 pages, printed on non-glossy ISO standard size A4 paper. The print quality is quite high. Most unusually for a Macross publication, most of its text is printed in three languages: Japanese, English, and... Zentradi. (The Zentradi sections are just a symbol substitution for English though, so it reads exactly the same.) Its contents, excluding the foreword, are divided into thirteen sections: Super Dimension Fortress Macross (TV) Pages 003-186 Lots of rough sketches of the VF-1, various Destroids, and various background designs. Nothing unexpected, except passing mention of a Zentradi variable battle suit that apparently never made it past rough sketches. Super Dimension Fortress Macross: Do You Remember Love? Pages 187-210 Mostly rough storyboard sketches of different iconic scenes from the movie. Nothing unexpected. Super Dimension Fortress Macross (PC Game) - the FamilySoft trilogy of Remember Me, Skull Leader, and Love Stories. Pages 211-256 Mostly draft sketches and some finished art for the SDP-1 Stampede Valkyrie, VF-X3 Medusa/Star Crusader, and an unused Prototype VF that has a lot of design in common with the VF-5000. Super Dimension Fortress Macross: Scramble Valkyrie (game) Pages 257-283 Just the VF-1SOL-S Scramble Valkyrie. Macross Plus Pages 284-420 (lol) Nothing unexpected, mainly just larger, high-quality reprints of art from previous books. Macross 7 Pages 421-496 Nothing unexpected. Macross Digital Mission VF-X & Macross VF-X2 Pages 497-512 Nothing unexpected, mostly sketches. VF Experimental Program (from Character Model magazine) Pages 513-522 Covers the SW-XAI Schneeblume and SW-XAII Schneegans. Noteworthy for decent, high quality prints of art previously only available as grainy low-quality magazine prints. Also noteworthy for a remark at the very end of that section taken from a fax between Kawamori and the magazine staff that 1. affirms Kawamori's stance that he regards each Macross story as a parallel world and 2. indicates that the Stealth Wing X program can be considered to be official setting material! Macross Zero Pages 523-540 Nothing unexpected, almost exclusively drafts of the VF-0 and SV-51 incl. some internal stuff by Junya Ishigaki. Macross Frontier (TV) Pages 541-573 Mostly sketches and drafts showing the development of the VF-25 and VF-27. A few noteworthy pieces of art showing how Kawamori's LEGO models were transitioned into workable line art. There are two particularly noteworthy details on page 561 in this section. One is a bit of detail guidance for the CG model builders that shows how Ozma's Lancia Delta HF Integrale converts to be driven on a Milky Road system. The other is an error. Specifically, the piece labeled "QF-4000" is something that Kawamori developed for the Spring 2004 issue of Character Model. In their feature Variable Fighter Experiment Requirements Review, he designed a new weapon for the VF-0 which was part Ghost part cruise missile. (See below) Macross Frontier (Movies) Pages 574-581 Some good detail art of the YF-29 FAST Pack, but otherwise nothing unexpected. Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy Pages 582-592 Has some good shots of the untextured CG model for the YF-30. The last page is the marker sketches of the VF-31 heads for some reason. Macross Delta Pages 593-622 Somewhat surprisingly, apart from the VF-31 head sketches this section is mostly about the Sv-262 and Lilldraken. All in all, a nice book to have if you're interested in seeing the evolution of Kawamori's mechanical designs from rough sketch to finished product (or LEGO, in recent years). Not a reference book, except maybe as art reference. High quality enough to be worth the price anyway, IMO. Now... WRT the misidentified design on page 561. This is the design in question: These are from page 48 of the Spring 2004 issue of Character Model. This was an original design Kawamori did for the magazine's article Variable Fighter Experiment Requirements Review, which talked about comparing the SV-51 and VF-0 against each other prior to the outbreak of the First Space War. This thing, from what little description is given, is a standoff weapon that's basically the lovechild of an early Ghost (c.QF-2200) and a cruise missile. It's carried into battle as, essentially, a parasite aircraft that the VF-0 launches and then it will deploy wings and fly on its own and maneuver to engage targets with internally-carried micro-missiles. You can see on the image on the right that it's mounted to the same pylon the VF-0's raid specification used for dorsally-mounted orange micro-missile/fuel pods.

My copies of Designer's Note rolled in this morning... and I am pleasantly surprised by how BIG this book is. This is art with some HEFT to it. Print quality seems pretty good too. (I'm even more pleasantly surprised that FedEx managed to get it here as a next-day package... ) I did a quick skim and found mostly the expected content, though I'm rather happy to see more (and cleaner) lineart from the non-official setting FamilySoft games and Scrambled Valkyrie.

Because it popped on one of my Facebook groups, and because nobody's going to stop me, I just thought I'd share this neat photo of the VF-1 Riders custom model of Naresuan's VBP-1/VA-110 Neo Glaug bis from Macross R: