Seto Kaiba

Wistoria: Wand and Sword has a new episode today... and I'm still not sold on this one either. It was doing some interesting worldbuilding for a bit, but too much of that is starting to converge on increasingly blatant Harry Potter references. Will Serfort was already a scrawny, short, geeky kid with ill-fitting glasses attending a wizard school in the company of an obnoxious girl prodigy... but now we have a bully teacher with long dark hair and unpleasant manner intrinsically associated with snakes who is trying his damndest to get Will expelled. He's basically Professor Snape after a significant glowup looks-wise. If I had to describe it in a single sentence... "This is what Mashle would be if Mashle weren't a comedy." Now you know... and knowing is half the battle! Please see the quartermaster for the red or blue lasers that make up the other half.

Pretty much everything on the CY24 release schedule could be described that way. Alien: Romulus is just the latest attempt to soft reboot a boomer-centric horror franchise after a string of piss-poor sequels. Like what they did to Halloween in 2018. No, they didn't multiply it... they diminished it. The xenomorph was scary because of how unknown and unseen it was in the original film. Aliens was a competent action-focus spinoff of a horror movie that diminished the fear invoked by the monster by making it both a known quantity and easily killable. It's a wonderfully tense action movie, but there xenomorphs invoke no terror because they're simply very dangerous predatory animals in the movie. The third might as well have been called Alien 3: Troubled Production, going through a bunch of different concepts based on Aliens before settling on trying to pivot back to horror and ended up a borderline remake of the first film but worse in every way. Executive meddling combined with a creative team that really, truly, desperately DID NOT want to be working on an Alien prequel. Executive meddling combined with a creative team that really, truly, desperately DID NOT want to be working on an Alien prequel again. They just wanted to be left in peace to do their unauthorized Blade Runner spinoff, but the executives said "No, you have to have a xenomorph in this one Ridley." And now this... a soft reboot set between Alien and Aliens that allegedly wants to try to pivot back to horror (again) and try to make this lurching zombie of a franchise relevant to audiences who don't have to pop tylenol for their back before standing up when the film ends. The horror aficionados, meanwhile, are just looking at this and saying... The true successors to Aliens, IMO. After you've diminished your horror movie monster to the level of a dangerous animal all that's really left on that course is gratuitous splatter horror like Alien vs. Predator that's all about spectacle rather than invoking fear. Alien: Isolation is, IMO, the one true successor to Alien in that it returns the xenomorph to being an unkillable, unknowable menace that the protagonist is stuck living on borrowed time in an expansive-yet-claustrophobic space with because it's in no hurry to finish the job. We're talking about a horror/action series set in a proto-cyberpunk dystopia... happy endings are the very picture of "We don't do that here."

Watching Pseudo-Harem, and to be honest its premise is feeling pretty thin even just two episodes in. It's just two weird theater kids flirting in the most awkward way imaginable with little to nothing in the way of a plot behind it. It's cute, but it doesn't feel like there's any direction to it. Dahlia in Bloom still isn't making much of an impression. None of the characters feel like they have a distinct personality. This episode supposedly sets up the main plot, but the cast sleepwalk through the entire thing.

Firepower-wise, the YF-29 is a lot more heavily armed in its basic state. All the Sv-303 really has for built-in weapons are guns... a pair of beam machine guns, a beam gunpod, and a copy of the YF-29's MDE beam turret. Fully-equipped, they're a lot closer in terms of firepower thanks to the Sv-303's four underwing pylons for mounting missiles and six Chhaya mini-ghosts parasite fighters, each of which has a beam gun and two micro-missile launchers. We're not sure how the armor compares, since the Sv-303 uses a completely new technology different from what's been used on every previous VF. At present, they are not officially available in any language except Japanese. EDIT: ... and a few Master File books were printed in Zentradi as special editions. Partial translations by fans do exist, particularly for Macross Chronicle. Sketchley's Macross Gateway has quite a lot of that.

Since I have a free moment after dinner, I decided to start digging into the story section of the Variable Fighter Master File: VF-31 Siegfried book that mentions the YF-30B. The Volunteer Knights of Arkarelia Normally, these story sections are set after the events of whatever TV series or OVA introduced the design. This tale's events occur a year before the events of Macross Delta's TV anime and first movie, and involve the first use of the newly completed VF-31 custom Siegfried in live combat. In 2066, the Xaos branch on Ragna was still in the process of equipping and training the four flights of its 3rd Fighter Wing stationed aboard Macross Elysion. Plans were underway to equip the first three flights with the trial production VF-31A Kairos and to outfit the fourth flight (Delta) with the Siegfried custom (what Master File calls the SYF-31). Plans for a Flight consisting entirely of Siegfried customs were being held up considerably by the sheer difficulty of obtaining fold quartz of the required size and purity to manufacture its fold wave system and FF-3001/FC2 enignes. With the Vajra having left known space, the only source available was Protoculture ruins. The first two Siegfried custom airframes were delivered by Shinsei's factory on Eden, and delivered to Xaos that year. Several pilots and support staff have been rotated there for training on the new fighter, including Cpt. Arad Molders, a 1st Lt. named Christian Christiansen, and a 2nd Lt. named Ella Kuroki. The two Siegfried test airframes were loaded on the NUNS carrier CV-458 Vikrant (named for India's first aircraft carrier, INS Vikrant) for transfer to Ragna and meant to carry out simulated combat exercises along the way. There's then an extended digression into the subject of the Brisingr globular cluster's development. It's noted that the region was discovered in the 2020s and that many planets therein are suitable for Human life and emigration to those worlds began in an era before the central government had set down detailed rules regarding how to interact with less developed alien races. Windermere is presented as an example, where the Kingdom of the Wind's royal family is described as having become a puppet government ruling under the control of the colonists and that this developed into an independence movement later on. Many civilizations in the cluster were apparently at medieval (or earlier) levels of development at the time they were first discovered by emigrant fleets, and having irresponsible aliens from beyond the stars drop out of the sky and start taking over did not do great things for society. Massive social upheaval caused by skipping centuries or millennia of social development in the transition directly from the Dung Ages to interstellar society created a lot of friction both between those civilizations and Humanity and between the civilizations that hadn't even known each other existed until that point. This apparently drove a lot of demand for the New UN Forces and PMCs to intervene in conflicts which broke out between those planets. Ragna is said to be a key hub in those worlds, and also a popular leisure destination thanks to its pleasant climate and beaches. (Romanizations get conjectural from here on out...) The story itself starts when, shortly before the final leg of the trip to the Brisingr cluster, the Vikrant receives emergency orders from the New UN Forces and Xaos to rush to the planet Arkarelia in the Lanina system in order to evacuate the planet's royal family from the capital city of Kareliad. Arkarelia is a world at a medieval level of development that prematurely entered the interstellar age when Humanity made contact with the natives, and is currently in a state of interstellar war with their neighbors the Roakites. The Roakites are described in unflattering terms as a greedy people who eagerly promoted cultural and technological advancement via contact with Humanity to enhance their own power and were savvy enough to understand the situation in the globular cluster and aim to avoid being exploited by the New UN Government. Still smarting after the huge disaster that was the Windermere war of independence, the New UN Government apparently declined to intervene as the Roakite government transitioned into a military regime through a coup and began undermining their neighbor Arkarelia's autonomy. Worse, the Roakite government is being supported by interstellar arms corporations from who the Roakites are purchasing weapons through legal channels. Since an armed intervention was not an option, the New UN Forces opted to intervene stealthily and evacuate the Alkarelian royal family to prevent the Roakites from having them assassinated in order to place the Roakite king's half-Alkarelian son on the throne. The Roakite's half-Alkarelian prince Simka covertly cooperated with the New UN Spacy's intelligence division to arrange a brief ceasefire and allow a rescue team to be sent in to extract the royal family. The Roakite king agreed to a four hour ceasefire and an immediate evacuation by just two transport aircraft with escorting Marine and VF forces on the condition that they use PMC troops instead of New UN Forces ones. Some 20 hours later, the Vikrant defolded in the Lanina system and the rescue force immediately began operations at midnight on July 9th, 2066 (Galactic standard time). Local time in Kareliad was 1400 (said to be approximately equivalent to 1pm on an Earth day). As soon as the Roakite liaison was aboard, the Vikrant dispatched two transport aircraft and an escort of four VFs including the two VF-31 Siegfrieds and two VF-31A Kairos units and several VF-171s from the Roakite forces. On their approach to the Arkarelian royal palace, the main Roakite forces (using Regults and old VF-14s) fired warning shots at them that destroyed buildings elsewhere in the city despite the liaison officer ordering their side to stand down and observe the ceasefire. On arriving in the palace itself, the rescue party discovered thousands of refugees inside the palace and a royal family that couldn't run away and leave the refugees behind. After some debate, the King agreed that he himself cannot evacuate but agrees to have the rest of his family evacuated. While the royals were loaded onto the transport, Cpt. Molders attempted to formally persuade the King to formally request a defense contract with Xaos to protect the native Alkarelians. Using his VF-31's fold wave communication system to send a report to Xaos HQ, he requested and received approval from headquarters to begin defense operations on Alkarelia. 30 minutes before the end of the ceasefire, Xaos forces mobilized under Arad's plan "Operation Gram". (Named for the holy sword Gram.) 1st Lt. Christian Christiansen's VF-31F was tasked with escorting the transports out of the area, while Cpt. Molders's VF-31S and the two VF-31As remained behind to slip out past the VF-14s chasing the transport and VF-171s still encircling the palace and head for the edge of the city. Using their data links and the advanced ARIEL III control AI, the three VF-31s were able to simultaneously shoot down all nine pursuing VF-171s with air-to-air missiles. They then proceeded to strafe the ground forces with beam gunpod and railgun fire, and lure approaching enemy VF-171 and VF-14 units in closer by deliberately reducing the effectiveness of their active stealth systems before climbing and switching back to full power with support of an ECM container carried by one of the VF-31As. With no countermeasures for the false radar information broadcast by the VF-31s, the VF-14s and VF-171s of the Roakite forces were quickly shot down. Nearly twenty enemy aircraft were downed in the first few minutes of the engagement, though a significantly larger force is quickly mustered in an attempt to counter Delta Flight. With three of Delta Flight's four members running delaying tactics against Roakite ground forces, Lt. Christiansen's VF-31F returned from orbit with reinforcements in tow. In an "exact words" situation, the Vikrant had deployed a full squadron of unmanned VF-11L's under the remote control of an drone control container attacked to Christiansen's VF-31F. The unmanned Valkyries technically did not break the terms of the cease fire since only four pilots were involved in the operation. Shortly thereafter, enemy reinforcements arrived in the combat area. YF-30B改 Chronos units from the General Galaxy Corporate Forces. There's another brief digression to talk about the YF-30B改. The YF-30B改 is described as a prototype aircraft based on the YF-30 Chronos produced to evaluate the transformation system and container system, and which was eventually developed into the VF-31. It's said to have been tested by various forces including the New UN Forces and various PMCs including GGCF. General Galaxy apparently modified its YF-30Bs with its own proprietary avionics and control systems and they were believed to possess capabilities rivaling or exceeding the VF-31A. I'll get the rest in a bit, this is a LONG one.

Because vinyl is trendy right now, and everyone else moved on to digital. Physical media in general has been on the decline for the last twenty years thanks to the superior convenience and cost-efficiency of digital downloads and on-demand streaming audio. Customers have largely moved on from CDs to digital formats the same way customers moved from LPs to CDs for their superior fidelity and capacity back in the 80's. It's driven a bit of a counterculture-type interest in vinyl, which has seen a modest rise in the last four or so years. Not to significant levels, but enough to overtake cratering interest in CDs. I'd assume ATA probably didn't bother pursuing a license for a CD release, since the albums are already available in digital formats worldwide via Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, etc. The main thing you do with a CD these days is rip it to MP3 or some other format and put it on your phone or cloud-based media app, so what's the bloody point?

Yeah... once you get past a certain point of building up a mystery, no explanation will be satisfying. It's probably for the best that we'll never learn why the Engineers created the xenomorphs, or what they weaponized them against. The idea that there's something out there that scared the godlike Engineers badly enough to create incredibly deadly parasitic biotechnological horrors as weapons is more than a bit creepy in its own right. I think part of it is that Prometheus, at various points in its development, changed how close its relationship to Alien was. Fox announced it as an Alien reboot in '09, then changed their story to calling it an Alien prequel, then around '10 started to diverge from a prequel to a quasi-unrelated story set in the same universe as Alien. Then, after that did OK but not great, Scott's plans to not even bother with xenomorphs in "Prometheus 2" in favor of focusing on the monster that was AI were overruled based on audience feedback from Prometheus and they had to crowbar the xenomorph into Covenant somehow to appease the crowd.

Yeah, Macross Delta did lean very heavily towards the music side of Macross's three pillars. The combat choreography definitely was lackluster by Macross's normally very high standards. It was criticized pretty harshly here and elsewhere for many dogfights forgetting the VFs could transform and for only using one maneuver: "the Scissors". Hm... I'm not sure how much I can properly explain without spoiling other Macross titles for you. It's more like very specific roles and character archetypes in Macross come with a built-in death flag... to the extent that some of them are running jokes to the fans, and at least one is a running joke to the characters themselves.

TBH, I kinda thought I already had... the aforementioned continuity snarls. Prometheus and Alien: Covenant are only separated from the events of Alien by 28 and 18 years respectively. The derelict on LV-426 has supposedly been there for thousands and thousands of years. Unless David time traveled, the xenomorph eggs in that derelict Engineer bomber are at least several millennia older than David is. The derelict was also piloted by an Engineer, and David killed all of the Engineers on Paradise between the events of Prometheus and Covenant ten years before his first successful xenomorph was born. By the time he had xenomorph eggs, there were no Engineers left on Paradise to pilot a ship carrying them, so that bomber has to predate David's genocide of the Engineers in 2094 and thus predates the creation of David's xenomorphs by over 10 years. (For what it's worth, the novelization of Alien: Covenant also comes right out and says that the Engineers created the xenomorphs, not David. David created his own strain of them by replicating the process the Engineers used.) I'm inclined to suspect the main reason that Alien: Covenant's writing team dropped the idea was because it was building on material that'd been cut from Prometheus's script well before filming ever started. Material that was probably cut from Prometheus because the studio was worried it would offend Christian viewers.

Yeah, about the only detail Master File didn't give was the Sv-303's weight. It's a four-engine VF that's using overtuned versions of the Sv-262's FF-2999/FC2 engine for its main engines and overtuned versions of the YF-29's FF-3003J/FC1 engine for the smaller secondary engines. The main engine thrust increased 20% from 1,955 kN to 2,346 kN and the secondary engine thrust jumped 34% from 1,470 kN to 1,970 kN.

👍 Same here, though I count Alien: Isolation among the good ones. It may be a video game, but it comes far closer to what made Alien the horror classic than any other title that the franchise has produced. It didn't just make the xenomorph scary, it made it pants-soilingly terrifying again. For that, I'll forever count it among The Good Ones. 3 is a mess and Resurrection is more like an SNL parody than anything. I prefer to treat them like fever dreams after a particularly ill-advised late night pizza binge. They cut that material for a number of reasons... the main one being that it sounds cool but doesn't actually make sense or work in context. The pseudo-religious angle about the Engineers worship of the Deacon was also cut from Prometheus in the early draft stage of the script, so there wasn't any proper buildup to it.

Definitely wanna know what the story behind that Barbie Pink YF-30B is...

Eh... the visual design for the series is nothing to sneeze at most of the time. The fight choreography in the lightsaber fights is a lot more visually impressive and exciting to watch than anything the sequels brought to the table. Even the story could be turned into something pretty damn interesting if only the creative team working on it weren't blinded by their love of the source material. Just to throw a couple ideas out there that I think would've made a more interesting series with little actual change to the framing of the story: Mae could've been a Jedi padawan who fell to the dark side and started killing Jedi because she discovered that the Jedi had actually taken her in after killing her family and not because she'd been willingly given up her family. That could've driven a much more personal character arc for Mae without the need for the identical twin BS, and neatly avoided the continuity-breaking Sith Lord too. The Jedi could've been pursuing Mae for the same reasons, to cover up the murder of Jedi by Jedi. Mae's Master could have been a rogue Jedi who discovered some kind of awful hidden truth about the Jedi Order and either went mad from the revelation or decided to try to bring the Jedi to justice by killing the criminal Jedi Masters to draw attention to their crimes. The Order could be pursuing them either to enforce the coverup or to simply cover up the murders. Mae could've been someone taken in and weaponized by that rogue Jedi specifically to avoid putting themselves at risk.

Official material for the YF-30 is somewhat sparse. We don't know when precisely development kicked off, but Macross 30 itself does identify the YF-30 as another original VF that was independently developed based on the YF-24 Evolution specification. So its development was at least partly in parallel to that of the VF-25, VF-27, and YF-29. We also have, in its Macross Chronicle Mechanic Sheet, a statement that its design was reworked pretty significantly in mid-development as operational priorities changed and we know in Macross Delta backstory materials discussed in Great Mechanics etc. and the game's dialog that the YF-30 also drew on technology developed for the YF/VF-25 and YF-29. So we can reasonably assume development kicked off somewhere in the mid-to-late 2050s and was probably heavily revised somewhere around 2059. No relation to the Macross Galaxy fleet at all, as it happens. A note in the margins of that part of the VF-31 Master File explains that the General Galaxy Corporate Forces (GGCF) are a Private Military Company that spun off from the General Galaxy (mega)corporation's security division at some point after the Second Unification War (c.2051~). Basically, General Galaxy did the same thing that Bilra Transport and Xaos did: they converted the internal security division that protected their ships and facilities into a PMC that operated as a subsidiary corporation. That way, they could sell their security services to themselves but also turn that into a profit center by hiring more soldiers and renting them out to emigrant governments as a supplement to their local New UN Forces defense forces. Bilra Transport did this when they spun off their security division as Strategic Military Services (SMS), and Xaos probably did it too when they founded their PMC Division. It's rather interesting that General Galaxy's in-house PMC would take such an interest in a nominally Shinsei-developed VF like the YF-30B... I have not translated that section in full yet, but it's clear there's a story there (in the literal and figurative senses).

Failure Frame's second episode dropped on Crunchyroll the other day, so I gave that a whirl a bit ago. It's... better than the previous episode. Much of that is simply the absence of all of the other characters, though. There's definitely a very The Rising of the Shield Hero flavor to this series, with the protagonist being an underdog written off by the other "heroes" and saddled with a superficially useless isekai superpower that quickly turns out to be an incredibly broken utility power once he learns to use it properly.

Hm... it seems I've upset you, and for that I apologize. That said, you are kind of going off on a tangent here about something that was just one specific example of how the showrunner's "promoted fan" status contributed to the series having an Idiot Plot infested with one-dimensional stock characters. The point I made is that The Acolyte's creative team were so thrilled to simply be working on the High Republic era and so in love with it from the Expanded Universe works set there that once they'd brought it to life they were too afraid to actually do anything with it. So The Acolyte ended up with a directionless story that visits many lovingly rendered locations in the Star Wars galaxy but has nothing to do once it gets there except show off its attention to detail. That's why, as I pointed out, the media can find nothing to talk about WRT the series except its "Glup Shitto" moments. They're a symptom, not the problem. I don't doubt you for a second, though it's basically expected in Andor since Andor leads directly into Rogue One which leads directly into A New Hope. As I said previously, Andor is a much better story because it doesn't let affection for the source material get in the way of the story they're telling. It has loads of references, sure, but they're in service to the plot rather than distractions from it or purely decorative.

It's hard to say... in part because the specifications we have for it are not complete. Master File is our only source, and while it provides details of the Sv-303's history, key systems, and armament it doesn't provide a weight for the aircraft. Unless the Sv-303 is the single heaviest regular VF ever built, it would appear to have the highest thrust-to-weight ratio of any VF. If we assume it has the same weight as the YF-29 then its thrust-to-weight ratio is 56.3500. If its weight is the same as the VF-27, it's 72.8632. If it weighs as much as the heaviest regular VF (the SV-51) it's still 49.4487. My thought is that this thing has to be an absolute brick in order for the YF-29 and the VF-31AX to be able to match it in combat the way that they do. It's definitely enough to very quickly overwhelm a conventional New UN Forces planetary defense force with sheer power, since even the most modern of those are armed with a mix of 4th and 5th Generation VFs. Unfortunately it's hard to get a good read of its true ability because we never see it fight against a well-organized force. It quickly thrashes the Aerial Knights and Delta Flight at the start of the movie, but they're both third-rate forces and Master File even suggests that Heimdall's forces would actually have won if not for a series of unforced errors made by Cromwell and Hunt.

The Brendok Jedi have emotional baggage, but that's not quite the same thing. They're all afraid their secret will get out, but it's only Master Sol who gets lost in reminiscences about his old students and gets lectured by his current student about how very inappropriate that is. To be fair, Anakin was NINE at the start of his story... being childish is pretty damned excusable there. His arc is pretty believable IMO for a kid who's been raised on the belief that he is The Chosen One in an environment where emotional repression is the norm. It's actually pretty impressive more Jedi don't fall to the dark side, because those ain't mentally healthy living conditions.

Yes. Assuming you don't count various character-specific custom appearances, two specific variants of the YF-29 have appeared. Master File divides things up somewhat differently and posits the existence of three distinct versions of the YF-29. Official setting materials present two different YF-29s: YF-29[A] Durandal: the original YF-29 specification developed by the Macross Frontier fleet. YF-29B Perceval: a New UN Spacy VF-X Special Forces version of the YF-29 with improved equipment that appears only in Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy as an ace pilot machine for the 815th Independent Squadron "Havamal". Macross Chronicle describes the YF-29B Perceval as a state-of-the-art aircraft that improves on the YF-29, but we're never actually told how. Its only apparant difference is that it has a bayonet on its beam gunpod and its equipment is otherwise no different to that of the other YF-29s in Macross 30. Macross 30's story also provides several character-specific versions of the YF-29 to certain characters. These are all functionally identical to the base YF-29 specs-wise, but with different heads and paintjobs to reflect the identity of the pilot. Alto Saotome gets the YF-29 he uses in the movie. Isamu is given a YF-29 in the colors of his YF-19-2 from the Macross Plus OVA, and Ozma Lee is given a YF-29 in the colors of his VF-25S from Macross Frontier. Max also gets one in blue for his guest spot in Absolute Live!!!!!!. Variable Fighter Master File: VF-31AX Kairos Plus presents a different view of the YF-29 that groups all YF-29s into one of three designations based on their specs as a part of its attempt to explain 6th Generation VFs as a whole: YF-29A: the original YF-29 prototype flown by Alto Saotome in 2059. A one-of-a-kind aircraft that cannot be replicated due to the ultra-high purity of the fold quartz obtained from Vajra queen forms that bestows unsurpassed performance even among YF-29s. YF-29B: all of the subsequently produced YF-29s that were built using fold quartz from Protoculture ruins or Vajra carcasses that is not as large or as pure as that used in the original YF-29. Their performance is lower than that of the YF-29A as a result, but fold quartz of the required purity exists in sufficient quantity for small numbers of YF-29B's to be produced and put into actual military service. YF-29C: Earth's experimental effort to develop a mass production-ready YF-29. Instead of fold quartz, which is a rare material that cannot be synthesized (yet), the YF-29C's design substitutes fold carbon of the highest possible purity as a synthetic alternative. Despite the cutting edge fold carbon synthesis techniques used and the services of expert jewelers to handpick the finest pieces for use in the YF-29C, the YF-29C's Fold Wave System is only 1% as effective as the YF-29A's. Several squadrons worth of the YF-29C have been produced and sent to test facilities on Earth's moon for evaluation. This breakdown was partly used to explain Max's YF-29 in the Macross Delta: Absolute Live!!!!!! movie and partly to explain why 6th Generation VFs aren't really a thing yet... why we haven't see a VF-29 or a VF-30, and why fighters like the VF-31 Custom Siegfried from Macross Delta or the VF-31AX Kairos Plus from Absolute Live!!!!!! cannot be mass produced. The Fold Wave Systems that give them their incredible performance cannot be produced without very large pieces of very high purity fold quartz. Humanity can't synthesize fold quartz with its present technology and understanding, so they're limited by what they can dig up in Protoculture ruins or old Vajra nests. Hunting the Vajra is illegal and suicidally stupid, so supplies of fold quartz in general are very limited and subject to strict export controls. The size and purity of fold quartz needed to create a 6th Generation VF is almost unthinkably rare, so for the time being only a tiny number of VFs with Fold Wave Systems can be produced and most of them don't have the same power as the original YF-29 due to using smaller or lower quality pieces like on the Siegfried or Kairos Plus.

Strictly speaking, they are pretty close. Macross Chronicle's Mechanic Sheet for the VF-27γ Lucifer with Super Parts from Macross Frontier the Movie: the Wings of Farewell describes it as having demonstrated potential approaching that of the YF-29. The movie's liner notes, and the light novel Macross the Ride, reveal that the VF-27 is based on the YF-29 in part using development data leaked to Macross Galaxy. It is, however, true that Alto Saotome's YF-29 defeated Brera Sterne's VF-27γSP and its escorting Ghosts in a dogfight in that movie. It was a victory won on skill and tactics, not simply raw specs. Alto made exceptional use of the YF-29's unique features like its MDE beam turret and Super parts to take out the Ghosts. One thing to remember in Macross, pilot skill matters at least as much as machine specs. Well, we have the VF-27 Lucifer... that's pretty high spec all things considered, and at least a limited mass production VF to boot. Variable Fighter Master File: VF-31 Siegfried mentions two: the YF-30B and YF-30B改. (YF-30B Custom) Master File describes the YF-30B as being a second and more practical prototype that omitted the extraordinarily expensive Fold Dimensional Resonance system and FF-3001/FC2 engines because of their need for ultra-high purity fold quartz. It's said that the YF-30B prototypes were loaned out to various private military contractors like SMS and its affiliates for evaluation. Favorable impressions of the YF-30B led to plans to develop a mass production derivative of the YF-30B that, after much work, became the VF-31A Kairos. It's also noted that the YF-30B apparently gave rise to the (false) impression that there was a mass production VF-30 in service. The YF-30B改 is an improved YF-30B that was used in small numbers by General Galaxy's private military, the General Galaxy Corporate Forces (GGCF).

From the sound of it, breathing's about all the pilot's allowed to do... but their head's held completely immobile the entire time they're in the aircraft. Available material either strongly suggests or outright indicates the problem was not unique to Guld... the system really is just that flaky.

Indeed. In terms of composite performance, the YF-29 is superior to the YF-30 in part because the YF-30 is not intended to be used in actual warfare. The Sv-303 is pretty weird. Unfortunately, the only source we have that talks about it in any detail is Variable Fighter Master File. Master File's backstory and description for it makes it out to be a further development of a second 5th Generation VF that Windermere was developing for its war against the New UN Government. It's got a lot of extremely innovative new systems, but on the whole it seems to belong in Awesome but Impractical territory since its engines need to be replaced after just a few uses and it needs to be controlled by a special quantum AI supercomputer. It's about as close as anyone's come to a mass production-ready 6th Generation VF.

Yeah, I don't think there are any good images of the Queadluun Rhea cockpit. The decent description of the cockpit actually comes from the Macross Frontier novelization. The YF-21's brainwave direct control system was incredibly innovative... but the technology was so unstable and so expensive that it was deemed impractical for actual battlefield use compared to the more conventional AI-based flight control systems that'd been used on VFs from the beginning. Official materials mention the brainwave direct control system (BDS) was considered unsuitable for practical use because the system was both extremely expensive and prone to failure because it required the pilot maintain an extreme degree of concentration to operate. Variable Fighter Master File predictably offers a LOT more on the subject. According to Master File, the YF-21's BDS calibrations were so delicate that the pilot basically could not move while it was in operation. The pilot's limbs and head had to be locked in place and rendered immobile to prevent the instrumentation for reading and transmitting brainwave signals shifts even 10mm it can cause the system accuracy to drop over 40% and trigger an automatic emergency switchover to manual control. To maintain control, the mental state of the pilot has to be controlled using specially tailored sound to help the pilot remain relaxed because loss of focus can cause the system to behave erratically or fail. The system also requires hundreds of hours of separate training to get the system calibrated to the individual pilot's brain, is extremely heavy (over 100kg just for the imaging system parts), and consumes so much power that the YF-21/VF-22's engine design had to be changed to run the reactor hotter and double the number of thermoelectric converters so it could produce twice the amount of energy the VF-19 requires at maximum output in order to meet the energy demands of the BDS on top of its other systems. (Those changes made to the engine design are also said to have increased the cost of the engine significantly while also reducing its lifespan.) The system was dramatically scaled back to a sub-control system on the production VF-22 with considerably fewer issues, but development did continue at General Galaxy. The implant-based control system in the Macross Galaxy fleet's VF-27 Lucifer is a further development of the YF-21's BDI/BDS systems. It's a much more mature and reliable system, but it's also basically illegal because of the New UN Gov't ban on cybernetically-reinforced soldiers. Yup, that system was trialed on the VF-22HG and implemented in full on the YF-27 and VF-27.

That's what the fans wanted, though. They rejected Disney's fumbling attempts to put a fresh face on Star Wars and now most of their efforts are focused on fanservice and combing through the open septic tank that is the old Expanded Universe for the least odious content they can find to repurpose. They brought Filoni back because the fans like him and he's obsessively tying things back to his own previous body of work. There is beautiful irony in this. The Jedi say that attachments and the fear or loss that comes with them are the path to the Dark Side, and The Acolyte harps on this heavily. The Acolyte's writing suffers in no small part because of its showrunner's attachments to Star Wars and its Expanded Universe. Leslye Headland is a "promoted" long-time Star Wars fan with a profound love of the series as a whole and the Expanded Universe in particular. Her attachment to that pre-existing material is inherently limiting, as it disincentivizes making creative decisions that might compromise the status quo of that older material she so adores and promotes "in the box" thinking and a tendency to focus on fanservice like continuity nods, homages, and in-jokes. This is extremely clear in the entertainment news coverage of the series, which focuses heavily on all the little "Glup Shitto" odds and ends rescued from one EU work or another and inserted into the background in The Acolyte that don't actually contribute to the story in any way. (Can I just say I love how the Star Wars fandom coins nicknames? "Smilo Ren" was solid gold, but "Glup Shitto" as a catch-all term for that kind of pointless and stupid rescuee from the EU is one of the best terms I think I've ever seen a fandom produce. Shine on you crazy diamonds, shine on.) It's no accident that the best writing Star Wars has had came under Tony Gilroy, a showrunner who was not a Star Wars fan. He didn't have affection for the source material getting in the way of telling the story.

Here's another view that shows the pilot with the arms still inside the torso.