Seto Kaiba

The Macross 7 TV series just seemed like the first logical place to look... both Ep10, where Basara's VF-19 is brought in for servicing by the New UN Forces, and Ep20 when the actual military spec VF-19 makes its in-series debut. No dice in either episode. I've checked the usual suspects - This is Animation, Macross Chronicle, etc. - and come up dry, so this may be one from one of the more technical books like Master File. (It'd make sense if it were Master File, since that asserted the VF-19改 was a lightly modified VF-19E... the variant the VF-19F/S type was derived from. In the official setting, it's the other way around, with Basara's VF-19改 being a modified trial production VF-19F.)

I am so, SO glad that shipping is by package volume and not by weight with most carriers... Just had mine shipped out FedEx Express.

HLJ seems to finally be filling its orders for the Kawamori book. I got my payment confirmation today.

Unless he was drawing a paycheck for it, he was only an exceptionally talented amateur pain in the arse. It really would... especially why he has such trouble in his interactions with others. (Esp. why he has such trouble with his bandmates, even though they share his interest in music. I don't recall that being mentioned directly in the episode, but it would make sense. That the VF-19 had a next-gen airframe control AI is part of the official setting these days. That kind of detail was originally confined to the tech manuals, but Macross R brought it into the official setting and Macross Delta official materials have also made repeated reference to it. So if they really were pulling the data from the ARIEL airframe control AI in Basara's VF-19, it's a safe bet it'd be used to make refinements to the military spec VF-19s that the 37th fleet was building for Emerald Force. (I'm rather glad they brought this stuff into the official setting, the references are so far outside the norm that it's quite fun. Like the original generation airframe control AI ANGIRAS used on the first three generations of VFs being named for a vedic sage known as a mediator between man and the gods and who is said to have originated the fourth veda's hostile sorcery and pursuit of harm unto others. Or the next-gen replacement ARIEL being named for Prospero's servant, the spirit of air and fire from Shakespeare's The Tempest. Given that Basara is a volunteer on a top secret military project, one has to wonder if they even consider him to be a civilian since they basically form a unit of irregulars around him later in the show. They seem to have pretty excellent healthcare overall c.2040... it'd be rather shocking if there were no psychologists. (It'd also be the kind of thing you'd probably want to send with your first-generation space colonists as they adjust to life on the colonies on the moon or the O'Neill cylinders that were built at the lagrange points before the First Space War. Gonna have a LOT of folks coming down with something approximating cabin fever. It wouldn't be too surprising that a fair number of Arabic people would have survived given that there are several Arab nations in northern Africa and Africa was one of the sites of Grand Cannon construction. It'd be only to be expected for them to have had a number of those well-established Arabic construction companies from that region involved in the Grand Cannon project, as well as UN Forces drawn from those nations crewing it. It'd be harder to explain the Saotome family, but not by much... all that it'd have to take would be for a Saotome to be on the Macross after moving to South Ataria.

If you step back and think about it, it's really easy to feel bad for Col. Burton. All he really expected from Basara - a man who purports to be a professional musician - was for him to behave professionally. To treat the sorties like professional performances. Follow a set list. Y'know, the absolute bare minimum expected of any professional musician. His expectations were so painfully low, and Basara still managed to disappoint. Fortunately for Basar's career and those of his bandmates, very few people are actually exposed to him and that isolation prevented his personality from impeding his fame. Poor Col. Burton was left high and dry and had to try and find someone who could do the same job without behaving like a prat... but didn't really account for the way civilians are a little bit afraid of getting shot at. As bad as Basara is with anything resembling a social cue and with his very narrow, highly specific interests, I really think that boy was living with undiagnosed autism.

Indeed. Ironically, the man who is most likely responsible for the development of that VF-19 and its being assigned to Basara is Col. Burton... a man with whom Basara found it quite impossible to be civil, never mind professional. That alone probably makes it rather advantageous that Basara never seemed to question where Ray had come by the New UN Forces' latest top class variable fighter. Either he didn't care enough to question, or knew he wouldn't like the answer and decided ignorance was bliss. That he was shocked and upset when the New UN Forces came to collect it to handle repairs and maintenance suggests the former, IMO. Basara was used not just to evaluate the soundness of the theories and experimental technologies advanced by Dr. Chiba, but to test the fitness of the VF-19 itself prior to the military's official testing. Basara's VF-19 was, as obviously implausible as it sounds, treated as a civilian aircraft until the public announcement of Sound Force's formation. Only some real military clout could make an obviously bogus assignment like that stick. "Need to know" can be a funny thing... and given how unusual the thinking behind the Fire Valkyrie and the various technologies that'd been developed for Project M were, keeping it as secret as possible would've been one way of protecting the unconventional program from being scrutinized in detail until it could provide some results.

None whatsoever! Ray Lovelock served in an "elite" fighter squadron, and retired from the New UN Forces because he felt responsible for his friend Stephan's death in battle with the Zentradi c.2030. Ray didn't orchestrate any of that, BTW. He was cooperating with a top secret military program called Project M that aimed to develop ways to refine and enhance the Minmay Attack that was headed up by some true blue believers in Minmay's legacy incl. the prodigy (and Mao Nome student) Dr. Gadget M. Chiba. By luck or good judgement, Ray rolled into City-7 with a damn near ideal test pilot for what Project M was developing. So Ray was prevailed on to act as Basara's handler and pass the heavily customized VF-19 that had been built for the project to him.

*sigh* This season really does know how to disappoint. Of the five shows I was following, there's only one I'd still rate as watchable... Jujutsu Kaisen. There is so much lazy writing on display that I'm a little taken aback. Attack on Titan's final season started airing today too. If nothing else, it'll be fun watching that hot mess of a series go up like a fire at a Chinese fireworks warehouse. I know that it's meant to be serious, but I am going to have an INCREDIBLY hard time keeping a straight face as the entire cast loudly voice their surprise that a nice young boy like... It's less an action/horror series and more an accidental comedy once you realize that the entire cast really are THAT level of horror movie stupid. That and the final story arc makes everyone into such objectively awful people that it's impossible to feel anything but satisfaction when they die bravely for no reason or reinvent suicide as a group activity.

I dunno... anyone familiar with Basara would know that thing isn't armed. Most of the time, it almost seems like the Akusho district isn't occupied by anyone other than Basara, Ray, and Veffidas... and maybe the occasional visitor like Rex's biker gang.

Yup... Macross the Musiculture's plot revolves around a reform movement called the Neo Zentran that emerged out of anti-government rioting five years before the story's start. (The main character, Vigo, was an aspiring dancer who abandoned his dream to infiltrate the Neo Zentran movement to get revenge for a fellow dancer who lost a leg in the rioting, ended up reforming it into a legitimate political movement in opposition to the current pacifistic administration, and became its candidate for mayor.) At least Macross 29's extreme doormat approach to diplomacy only left it in economic ruin instead of literal ruin. Whether the fleet can actually recover is another matter entirely... since the ending kind of ignores the actual causes of the fleet's problems in favor of trying to revitalize the fleet's economy via the entertainment industry. (Kind of missing the fact that a Miss Macross contest is not exactly an innovative idea, entertainment-wise, since many fleets seem to have at least one analogous contest.)

Still waitin' on mine from HLJ too.

Nah... as far as we know, most emigrant fleets are reasonably nice places to live like the titular fleets in both Macross 7 and Macross Frontier. Macross Galaxy is an unpleasant place to live because the Macross Galaxy corporation that serves as the fleet's de facto government doesn't really answer to the fleet's populace. Their policies prioritized efficiency over quality of life, so they converted support ships producing natural foodstuffs into factories for synthetic food, the habitat sections have little in the way of unutilized space for recreation, and extreme adoption of labor saving technologies led to high unemployment and homelessness. Macross 29 was originally a nice place to live, and might be one again one day if they're lucky. The residential areas were damaged by gravitational wave activity, but its main problem was that reality ensued after its government went full Relina and adopted a policy of unarmed total pacifism. It turns out that being an extreme doormat when you're negotiating trade agreements with neighboring nations is a Very Bad Idea and they ended up with an economy-crushing trade imbalance. It had A "ghetto" part... which, in all fairness, wasn't actually a part of the City-7 or the 37th large-scale long-distance emigrant fleet. The Akusho district was a separate 300m-long Island-type habitat ship that had attached itself to one of the City-7's docking ports without authorization and was allowed to remain for reasons that are never given. It wasn't a registered part of the fleet. Even though its buildings were in disrepair, it's worth noting that all the public utilities still worked (incl. purely cosmetic ones like the holographic sky) and there was no evident crime. Basara's home might've been an abandoned apartment building that had holes in the walls and at least one floor, but it still had power, light, heat, clean running water, access to the fleet's communications network, and appliances including a stove w/ cooktop, refrigerator, and a positively gargantuan TV.

Nah... by all indications, the emigrant fleets actually got a pretty sweet deal. Emigrant fleet populations are volunteers. They're leaving the still-desolate dustball called Earth to live in a newly built, state-of-the-art city ship while it sails the stars looking for a pristine new planet for them to settle on. The only ones that've been depicted as not being fairly nice places to live even by modern standards are Macross Galaxy and Macross-29, the former being bad because the government is an amoral corporation with no oversight and the latter because the government is incompetent and ran the economy into the ground. They leave their home ports with sizable defense fleets armed however the fleet government chooses to equip its forces... which usually means with current-gen variable fighters and warships. It's not logistically feasible for them to get new tech from Earth directly but they get specs for upgrades and advancements sent to them to manufacture on their own and they also get to commercialize any advancements they develop themselves. All in all, it sounds like they've got it made in the shade to me. When is your game set?

Yup... so far, we've had at least four known cases of 5th Generation VFs being original developments by emigrant governments and private corporations. Plus the Macross Frontier fleet and Macross Galaxy fleets are known to have both created their own local versions of the VF-19, and in the novelization the Galaxy fleet had done major updates to older GG VFs to keep them frontline fit like the VF-17 and VF-9. True... though he was never interested in the VF-19's production ARIEL airframe control AI. When he twisted Dr. Neumann and Shinsei's arms into building him a VF-19 for his personal use, he wanted the prototype's build with none of the safety fixes, control refinements, or performance optimizations. If Shinsei's legal dept. hadn't already been well and truly involved after that nutjob tried to buy VF-19 parts under the table, they would've been getting panicky calls from development saying "you won't believe what this nutty test pilot wants THIS time".

Ah, OK... I had not seen that one referred to as "VF-1C" before. IIRC, Kawamori revisited that style in one of the draft versions of the VF-0B/D head. Not an exterior one. I think there might be an interior picture of the cockpit in Macross Ace? It's described as being a vanilla VF-1A that's been detuned for civilian use. Still haven't been able to get my hands on that EXPO book... if you know anyone who's selling one, let me know.

Yeah, that little tidbit first emerged in Macross Dynamite 7 with the reduced capability export variant VF-19 that planet Zola was operating. It didn't really get discussed in depth until the Macross Frontier setting materials started talking about why the New UN Forces were using the VF-171 instead of the VF-19, though it was Macross the Ride that really dug into it by starting to refer to them by the real world term "monkey model". Sadly, designation conventions for 'em are a bit inconsistent across the different models with most appending a special designation after the block number, some using a special block number, and some applying a different variant letter. Several of those local specifications were absolute necessities, since the New UN Government had withheld entire systems from the available specs like the VF-19E's airframe control AI and sensors.

I dunno, he's shown on one or two occasions that he's not afraid to throw hands if you push him.

Eh... you'd probably be pretty disappointed by that one, TBH. We've had info on the VF-1C for a bit over twelve years now. It debuted in the first volume of the novelization of the Macross Frontier TV series back in July 2008 and was referenced again in the Macross Frontier short story Actor's Sky in Macross Ace magazine in 2010. It's a detuned VF-1A built for the civilian market. Looks exactly the same as a regular old DYRL? VF-1A brownie. Mihoshi Academy's flight school has a number of them that are used for practical flight training. Akira Kamishima, the actor who played Shin Kudo in the Macross Frontier fleet's movie "Birdhuman" trained on one for the role. I'm looking forward to a few things that're not so well documented that have already been confirmed to be in the book... like the VF-1SOL-S Valkyrie from Scrambled Valkyrie.

Yeah, that's the case for pretty much all modern fighter aircraft... and a fair few non-fighter aircraft that have highly unconventional aerodynamic profiles like the B-2 Spirit flying wing bomber and the F-117A Nighthawk attacker. There's no indication that the New UN Government and/or the central New UN Forces had any ulterior motives like that behind their redaction of key technical details from the YF-24 Evolution spec shared with the emigrant governments. Locally-developed variant specifications were an inevitability long before the New UN Government enacted its new restrictions on arms exports to emigrant governments in the wake of the Sharon Apple incident. Emigrant fleets were headed out into the great wilderness of space with every expectation that it would take years to find a habitable planet to settle on, and they were equipped with the manufacturing facilities needed to maintain themselves and their defense forces. It was never going to be a logistically sane proposal to ship hundreds or thousands of new VFs to a fleet that might be ten years away from Earth by space fold. Instead, the emigrant governments would manufacture those new VFs themselves under license from the manufacturer. With variances in the technical capabilities of some of those fleets and access to raw materials, that not every emigrant government would be able to manufacture them to the same standard was inevitable. Similarly, once emigrant governments became more established and emigrant fleets got large enough to have their own self-sustaining economies, it was equally inevitable that some of them would opt to tweak the new designs they received to incorporate their own technical advancements or to fit different requirements from their local defense forces... similar to how Japan tweaked the build-under-license F-16 into the Mitsubishi F-2. The arms export restrictions intended to preserve the superiority of the central New UN Forces and Earth's NUNS were the reason the specs for the YF-24 Evolution were redacted, but there's a strong possibility most emigrant fleets wouldn't have been able to replicate Earth's most advanced overtechnology even if they'd shared it. TL;DR: Even if the New UN Gov't had shared the unredacted YF-24 Evolution specs it would've been inevitable that many different local variations were built because of differences in local manufacturing capability, resource availability, etc. There would've been no need to instigate it, it would've happened naturally. It's related... the Draken III is a different kind of delta wing design called a tailless cranked arrow delta wing. By having two different levels of sweepback in the wing, it's able to overcome the problematic loss of performance at low airspeeds in exchange for needing a larger wing surface. Like the Saab 35 that inspired it, the Draken III provides this by having a blended wing body design so the entire underside of the plane functions as wing surface. By going tailless and using airfoil shaping combined with using the trailing edge of the wing as elevons, instability could be induced in the otherwise stable delta wing design to make the aircraft more agile. Combine that with thrust vectoring on multiple axes, and considerable agility can be acheived. What little exists in terms of official writeups for the Sv-262 haven't mentioned any fuel in the micro-missile pods. (Presumably they'd want to keep them as compact as possible to avoid compromising the aerodynamics of the blended wing body.) The Draken III is a 5th Generation VF, it uses Stage II thermonuclear reaction turbine engines. I did a summary of the different generations of engine technology here back in September. The TL;DR version is that the first three generations of VF used the initial-type thermonuclear reaction turbine engine. That was replaced by a more efficient design, the thermonuclear reaction burst turbine, starting on the Gen 3.5 VFs like the VF-17D/S type and 4th Gen VFs like the VF-19, VF-22, and VF-171. That, in turns, was replaced by an even more powerful engine design called the Stage II thermonuclear reaction turbine engine on the 5th Generation VFs. With each generation of engine tech, there's just about a doubling of maximum thrust and improvements in heat-exchange and gravity control system tech. As far as relevance beyond engine power, the thermonuclear reaction burst turbines combined with enlarged airframes to effectively remove the need for FAST Packs or conformal fuel tanks for most short-to-medium duration space operations. The later Stage II thermonuclear reaction turbine engines greater power and efficiency flipped the FAST Pack equation around such that the point of them became using boosters to offset the weight of massive amounts of additional weaponry instead of adding a couple weapons to improve the survivability of a booster system.

It's an aerodynamics issue. Specifically, it's because the delta wing design that the VF-4 adopted to improve its internal fuel capacity and its payload capacity is has comparatively high aerodynamic stability for a fighter. Fighters get a lot of their maneuverability from being inherently unstable. The VF-4's long fuselage and large delta wing airframe gives it excellent performance in high speed straight-line flight but its high drag at low speeds and large wing area made it less able to turn quickly. That's not a problem for it in space, where there's none of that pesky air to get in the way of turning by vernier power, but in atmosphere it's more suited to interceptor and attacker roles.

Ugh... well, at least Oscar Isaac will have a shiny new Razzie to go with the Golden Globe he won for Show Me a Hero if this actually gets made. A compressed adaptation of Hideo Kojima's already-terrible writing can only end badly. Dragonball Evolution-tier badly. His stories are such tangled, borderline incoherent narratives infested with badly-delivered exposition dumps, arbitrary plot-lengthening twists, and the kind of tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist insane troll logic that even Tom Clancy's ghostwriters would laugh out of town. It's the kind of crap you need a flowchart the size of Rhode Island just to follow, and I can't see audiences being too keen on having to read a guidebook the size of a doctoral thesis just to know what the hell is going on.

Well, yeah... there are people who'll cling to tradition no matter what just because "that's the way it's always been" even if it no longer serves any purpose. Like so many other traditions that've lost, or are in the process of losing, their societal relevance the number of people who feel compelled to follow tradition for tradition's sake will steadily decline with the passage of time. Right now, the movie theater industry's saving grace is that the major studios are too hidebound by last century's market model to be confident about declaring their independence from the big movie theater chains. It's also fortunate for them that, right now, the streaming media market is fragmenting as the major studios and networks are trying (and for the most part, failing) to launch their own proprietary streaming brands so they won't have to share profits with Netflix, Hulu, Google Play, or Amazon Prime. The main thing theaters will have going for them in the next couple of years is that most consumers won't want to subscribe to a dozen different streaming services, especially when that service only has one or two shows that people actually want to watch like CBS All Access and Star Trek, Disney+ and The Mandalorean, or HBO Max and... ok, drawing a blank here, nothing really stands out on their slate of exclusive programming... a lot of DC stuff, I guess? Movie theaters are gonna have to seriously rethink their business model or risk being run out of business by the ever-increasing quality and accessibility of home theater. Back before the pandemic, a number of the theaters out my way were trying to modernize their business model by adding restaurants or bars to their premises that serve alcohol. It sounded like a good idea on paper, I guess. For my money it was a bad idea since it just added the smell of cheap beer and cheaper wine and the annoyances caused by inebriated moviegoers to the experience. That and the restaurants were all upscale pub food-type places, which this area already has a glut of. It might be more workable in a town that doesn't have a university, and the drinking-to-get-wasted that inevitably comes with them.

Essentially, yes... both in the sense that it had a high degree of equipment customizability via Option Packs and that it could operate equally well in space and in the atmospheres of planets. That was, to the central New UN Forces and most emigrant governments, more desirable than the greater main engine thrust and better passive stealth performance of the VF-14. If anything, I'd actually say the opposite would be true. In terms of familiarity, a pilot who qualified on the VF-4 would probably find the model conversion training for the VF-14 less of an adjustment than the VF-11's. The VF-14's design is structurally and aerodynamically a lot closer to the VF-4's and they're both VFs optimized for operations in space. The difference in handling isn't going to be as great as it would be with the more VF-1-like VF-11. Especially in atmospheric flight, where the VF-11 is going to be a lot more maneuverable. Pilots who'd qualified on the VF-5000 would probably find the VF-11 the easier aircraft to switch to for similar reasons.

Just as long as you don't make me think about Basara. As much as I love Macross, that guy still grinds my gears with his lack of character development. Oh boy, where to start... With respect to the subject of Project Nova and why Shinsei Industry's VF-11 Thunderbolt was selected over General Galaxy's VF-14 Vampire as the next main fighter of the New UN Forces... it's all about roles, and what the New UN Forces were looking for in a 3rd Generation main VF. The 2nd Generation VFs left the New UN Forces managing large numbers of specialized and niche VFs that were optimized to operate in specific conditions or environments, and which often performed poorly if forced to operate outside their metaphorical comfort zone. New UN Forces leadership were looking for a "true successor" to the multi-purposefulness of the original VF-1 Valkyrie. They wanted an all-regime 3rd Generation VF. Something compact enough to easily operate in a space carrier's unique "ecosystem" and also flexible enough to operate equally well from space carriers and surface bases. Shinsei Industry's VF-11 delivered exactly what the New UN Forces asked for: a balanced all-regime main variable fighter ideally suited to be used aboard existing carriers old and new as well as on surface bases. What General Galaxy delivered with the VF-14 was a further exploration of the design concept behind the VF-4 Lightning III with all the good and bad that comes with it. As good a design as it was, it wasn't what the New UN Forces were looking for. Like the VF-4, the VF-14 is first and foremost a space-use variable fighter. It had an unusually large airframe for its time and that additional size was leveraged mainly to improve its performance in space and, to a lesser extent, improve its stealthiness. The VF-14 uses the same generation engine technology as the VF-11 but its greater size allowed the engine to be scaled up accordingly for more power and allowed the fighter to internally carry more fuel to extend its cruising range in space beyond what the VF-11 could accomplish without external tanks. Its armaments were also internalized and its aerodynamics adjusted for maximum passive stealth performance. The design choices that made it such an excellent space fighter also made a relatively stable aircraft in atmosphere, negatively impacting its maneuverability. Not to the same level that it did the VF-4, which didn't surpass its predecessor, but enough that the VF-11 had a clear advantage. It's also worth noting that the Special Research Unit's VF-14s - the ones that were captured by the Protodeviln and became the basis for the Fz-109 and Az-130 - weren't the standard New UN Forces model. Macross Chronicle describes them as being an independently developed "heavily armed" specification that differed significantly from the standard New UN Forces VF-14s seen in Macross M3. The standard VF-14 didn't have the micro-missile launchers or the chest-mounted guns. Some emigrant governments had different priorities for their defense forces than the central New UN Forces, and opted to adopt the space-focused VF-14 over the VF-11... but most governments went with the VF-11 for that balanced performance and versatility. The VF-17 (starting from the D type), VF-19, VF-22, and VF-171 were built with the next-generation thermonuclear reaction burst turbine engine technology. Their greater thrust output comes from having a more advanced and efficient engine design. The VF-14, on the other hand, is brute forcing its way to higher thrust outputs by simply making a bigger engine so it's less efficient.

... well, that certainly helps the size of this book hit home. I kinda feel bad for the delivery guy now. I ordered multiples.