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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Remember when Star Trek: Picard's showrunners were adamant that their series was going to focus on developing the new characters? How it wasn't going to be a TNG cast reunion? Funny how that worked out.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    It shows how much forethought and planning the Kingdom of the Wind put into their preparations for their second war with the New Unification Government. The Aerial Knights knew going into it that the New UN Forces in the Brisingr globular cluster had significant advantages in training, experience, and sheer weight of numbers. Few Windermereans who served in the last Zentradi attack on the Brisingr cluster c.2059-2060 were still fit for duty, so their forces were mainly combat virgins banking on their greater natural abilities, the far greater performance of their Sv-262's compared to the New UN Forces' VF-171's, and weaponized Var syndrome to make up the difference. As we saw late in Macross Delta, once Walkure started actually supporting the NUNS the playing field leveled fairly quickly. Xaos is definitely not on par with Sol system-sourced New UN Forces... or even SMS. I've argued in the past that Macross Delta is basically a war between two bush league powers... the Aerial Knights, and Xaos. Yeah, one big thermonuclear reactor was enough to meet the energy needs of Mars Base Salla easily enough. The VF-1's problem wasn't so much the expectation of a terrestrial war as the expectation that they'd be fighting infantry. The fighter's size was constrained by a perceived need to match a Zentradi soldier on foot, little realizing they don't fight that way. Yeah, Xaos is not as upscale a PMC as SMS, since their parent company is a conglomerate that started as a communications firm rather than one of the biggest interstellar shipping concerns in the galaxy. Where SMS was able to recruit from the wealthy and well-maintained Frontier NUNS and even pick up troops from the Earth NUNS in a couple places, Xaos's troops are mostly local boys from the Brisingr Alliance NUNS and not really up to the same standard.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Difficult to say, since their cost relative to each other is not commented on... and the Sv-262 is a production aircraft while the Siegfried-type VF-31 used by Delta Flight are expensive aftermarket custom units incorporating a lot of the same high-end performance features the Sv-262 has. The Sv-262 is definitely more expensive than the stock VF-31A Kairos used by the other elements of Xaos Ragna 3rd Fighter Wing though.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    As far as we know, except for the Sv-262 Draken III. Depends on how you want to define "a small amount". In MOSPEADA, a single Type-3 HBT cylinder was enough fuel for 380km of driving. (An HBT canister doesn't contain straight hydrogen, though. It's a room-temperature hydrogen storage medium similar to cycloalkanes like methylcyclohexane. A way to store a lot more hydrogen in less space at room temperature for combustion use. A hair over three and a half seconds, all told... assuming a standard 1ml eyedropper. The hydrogen fuel used in a compact thermonuclear reactor in Macross is a cryofuel, yes. It's slush hydrogen. MOSPEADA's HBT is a hydrogen fuel storage compound, it's meant for combustion rather than fusion. Almost certainly not. Doing a multi-part movie would have been practically unheard-of. Yoshiyuki Tomino had to engage in some serious shenanigans to get Gundam's three-part compilation movie approved, and even then Parts II and III were contingent on the success of Part I. Even then, the only way he got away with that was that the Gundam movies were a compilation feature, reusing existing animation as much as possible. Macross: Do You Remember Love? was all-original animation, and therefore much more expensive.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Pretty much the only place the Regult's compact thermonuclear reactor could be is in the mecha's "pelvis", for want of a better term. It's a safe bet that the battle suits keep theirs in the "backpack" so it's close to the engines it's powering and protected from the front by the body of the mecha. One of the virtues of Overtechnology-based thermonuclear reactors is that they can be made VERY small if need be. The one in the heart of the VF-1's FF-2001 engines are less than half a meter long and maybe a third of a meter in diameter. Basically, about the size of a standard 16" beach ball. One of the other, highly relevant virtues of Overtechnology-based thermonuclear reactors is that the reaction with standard fuel is aneutronic and the reaction itself produces little in the way of harmful radiation. The vast majority of the reaction's energy is released as heat, with byproducts including small amounts of neutrinos, positrons, and gamma ray photons. The reaction is contained by an intense artificial gravity field, so exposure is essentially a non-issue though the reactor is well-shielded by overtechnology super-alloys and a lot of the byproducts are still used to generate energy.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Not that I am aware of. The first battle sequence in the series does depict at least some of Walkure's gear, like the Cygnus multi-drone plates, as having limited battery life that needs recharging from an external power source (e.g. the chargers carried by the Delta Flight VF-31s). It's not clear how long the battery life on those devices is, since in most cases they're seemingly being operated using external power. Though, the "flight" isn't really flight... they can hover to a limited extent and slow long falls to a non-injurious degree using a nitrogen gas jet cluster worn like a skirt. It's a separate system from their costumes with very limited endurance. Sheryl Nome used a similar system in the first Macross Frontier movie, and like Walkure's it was worn as a skirt underneath the holographic costumes.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    He did specifically ask "for Earthside use". The VT-1C Ostrich is just a general consumer product sold throughout the galaxy... though Graham's is more like an aftermarket conversion, apparently.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, that was a second-generation civilian-use Valkyrie outfitted for war reportage with cameras and such. Like most things in the Macross II RPG, the stats were pretty much bunk. It's definitely a unique design for Macross though, the only boxed-wing aircraft in the setting so far IIRC.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Reworked to better fit the overall aesthetic they were going with for the movie.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    They're already using some pretty fancy stuff, with large-scale atmospheric cleanup and radioactive pollution mitigation using designer bacteria. It's gonna take a long time to restore Earth to anything like the state it was in before the war, though. If they have, we've heard nothing. The closest we've seen is that a number of old model Destroids were disarmed, retrofitted, and repurposed as construction equipment in a sort of ad hoc precursor to dedicated non-military units like the Destroid Work from Macross Frontier. In Macross II's timeline, the civilian-use Valkyries (VC series) started out as craft intended for use in natural resource management and so on before finding their way into more diverse roles.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Earth's environment is still in pretty rough shape, as noted previously, and it's going to take thousands or even tens of thousands of years of constant effort to repair it using available terraforming technology. There are a number of cities mentioned on Earth in the wake of the First Space War, many of them mentioned in the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross series. The obvious big one is Macross City in Alaska near the remains of Grand Cannon I. There's also Gante City, IIRC this is the city Hikaru visits in the episode directly following the timeskip. Ionesco City, where Quamzin takes Minmay hostage. Onogi City, an industrial city that Quamzin attacked to steal power condenser parts for the ship he was repairing. Trad City, a city with a high percentage of Zentran in its population. Highlander City, which had shades of being a showbiz town. There were one or two others as well. Most of the mentioned settlements in the Sol system in sequels are either "satellite cities" (massive space colonies orbiting a planet) or on other planets and moons like Gamlin's hometown of H.G. Wells City on Mars or Moon Riverside City on Luna, Miho's home town of White Flora in orbit of Jupiter, Rex's hometown of Axia Roader orbiting Earth, etc.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Not stale, but lunches that were made to sell that day which didn't... and would otherwise be tossed at the end of the day if they didn't sell. Most of the characters are students living on allowances in a nearby boarding school. The whole affair is very strange.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Yup.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    I think you might have the movie one a little big in that shot... if facing front, the TV Fulbtzs Berrentzs-class mothership should be a bit over two Gol Boddole Zer-class mobile fortresses wingspans tall. (2 1/3, to be precise.)
  15. Seto Kaiba
    To such a worrying extent that the markdown stickers are trophies. If there's a plot thread here, it has completely eluded me.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Hibiki's arc is even more than that, really. Yeah, he starts out as a (highly successful) celebrity scandal-chaser for SNN who gradually comes to appreciate the idea that journalist integrity and truth matter far more than simply having the latest hot take, but it's kind of a vehicle for something else. His arc is almost a Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket-esque admonishment of the audience to remind them the war is not meant to be entertainment. That it's brutal, horrible, unnecessary slaughter. Hibiki wanted to be a journalist because he saw the heavily sanitized coverage of the Zentradi attack ten years prior, and when he's given permission to cover the Mardook attack he's excited. Once he actually gets into the battle, he's freaking out because he can't conceive of or tolerate showing the UN Forces losing. He has to gradually accept that war really is horrible and that it's not something that should be glamorized. That's a really good, really important point. The Gloria is a flagship in one of the UN Spacy's defense fleets... but a warship is all it is. It's not an emigrant ship. It doesn't have a city built into it. As you say, there wouldn't have been any opportunity for Ishtar to have the revelations about Earth's culture that she did if she were aboard a warship. It also wouldn't have afforded her an opportunity to come into contact with the Macross itself, which is what convinced her that peace was possible. So, yeah... you missed the point of Macross's story completely, even in the original series and DYRL?. The moral here is that the antagonists - the Zentradi, Mardook, etc. - are Not So Different. They're people with thoughts, feelings, etc. no different from the protagonists and war is an unfortunate result of the fear and misunderstandings that come from a failure to communicate with each other. They're not evil and they're not monsters, and making them grotesques would take away from that.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, the closest Ben-to offers to a justification for a constant low level gang war fought exclusively in supermarkets is that the boarding school the students in the show attend only serves breakfast in its dining hall, not lunch or dinner.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Wrapped up most of this season... So I'm a Spider, So What? is on hiatus 'til the 9th, so nothing new from that front. Went back for Ben-to, and I am NOT impressed. I'm four episodes in, and I'm kind of sad to say that this show doesn't appear to have anything resembling a plot. It's a one-joke comedy where the joke is comedic sociopathy. Why is absolutely everyone in this world beating the stupid out of each other over half-priced bentos? High school students, college students... even teachers and housewives. Nobody seems to be put off in the slightest to find people laying around supermarkets beaten so badly they have to be hospitalized, over prepackaged lunches. On a few occasions it's even framed as a kind of gang violence, but literally nobody seems to mind. It's especially weird that the supermarkets where all these fights take place never object to their stories being the scene of a bloody brawl every night or think to just make a few more bentos so people don't have to fight over them. I know I'm probably overthinking the premise by... well... a lot, but it feels like the required amount of thought to watch this show is not more than zero.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... the Battle Suits are a lot more ergonomically sound and had better overall performance and survivability than, say, the Regult. That said, that's also a different timeline altogether where the direct interface with the pilot's nervous system isn't a thing so there's one less barrier to entry there. The New UN Forces in the main Macross timeline kept the Queadluun series around because of its high flight performance, but insisted on heavily modernizing it to improve its survivability with beefed-up armor, redundant control circuits, and other enhancements. Whereas in Macross II, the UN Forces simply incorporated the technology obtained from battle suits into their next-generation VFs to beef up their performance... which is where they got the proof-of-concept "Zentradi Valkyrie" that became the common ancestor to the VF-2 series. It's another R-word fan midlife crisis thread... like the necro-post in the topic about Macross II's tie-in games. The essence of his "changes" are just wanting Macross II to be exactly like the original.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    DYRL? deliberately reworked the Zentradi more overtly alien without taking away their basic humanoid appearance, and that meant going whole-hog on the already design aesthetic of their gear. So their ships and weapons went from being organically-styled to actually part-organic. Boddole Zer's flagship in the movie is actually a lot smaller than its TV series counterpart, which was so vast that its height was equivalent to the length of the Japanese isles on Earth (1,400km). The problem is it was so vast that there was no way to properly convey in the series just how astonishingly colossal it was. Despite being only a tiny fraction of the size of its TV counterpart with a wingspan of 600km and a center section around 160km across (making the center section slightly larger than the second Death Star from Star Wars) it does rather a lot better job of looking big because it's small enough to be put next to something we can properly perceive the scale of.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    There have been scenes in Star Wars that have acknowledged Macross as an inspiration. To the best of my knowledge, this is not one... though your picture is not showing up.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Ergonomically, it's not exactly a pretty picture.... this is from the production line art of the original series. That's a 9m tall pilot pretzeled into that cockpit. Mind you, cramped conditions and terrible posture are only the beginning of a Regult pilot's woes. Because it was designed to be simple and easily mass-produced, it has overall low performance, low defensive ability due to its thin armor, and a comparatively low level of automation that requires a lot of manual control from the pilot. The amount of manual input needed from the pilot, combined with the awful conditions, is said to make operating a Regult more tiring than fighting on foot.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    That's some sweet looking fan animation. I've no idea what to make of this, though... Fanmade unmanned VF-25? Or a VF-25 with a an armored canopy cover like the VF-27's? Hmmm....
  24. Seto Kaiba
    The most popular fan theory for how Macross II: Lovers Again fits into the main/ongoing Macross timeline is as a work of in-universe fiction... a speculative-fiction sequel to the 2031 pseudo-documentary drama Do You Remember Love?. One of the reasons this idea gained traction is that a lot of the Macross II soundtrack was reused for Macross 7, so music from the OVA is EVERYWHERE in 2045. It's the chart-topping music on the Galaxy Network, the indie bands on City-7 play it, and the Minmay Attack girl from the OVA's first episode even puts in an appearance or two. Even the Jamming Birds perform songs from it. (This idea gains a bit more traction from books like Master File implying that there were other docu-dramas like DYRL? that came before the 2031 movie.)
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Y'see... the thing about the mecha that the ancient Protoculture designed for the Zentradi is that they didn't consider the Zentradi operators people. They were expendable biological military hardware, so little things like survivability or operator comfort either weren't on the priority list at all or were pretty far down. Some, like the Nousjadeul-Ger, require bio-tech implants in order to operate properly while others, like the Regult, are noted to be horribly uncomfortable. (It kinda says a lot that the Mardook variants have demonstrably superior ergonomics, even though the Mardook also treat their Zentradi as eminently disposable.) The Earth UN Forces don't see their Zentradi officers and enlisted men as expendable. They're people, not equipment, and most of them were born and raised on Earth like any of their Human colleagues. With limited resources, survivability is much more of a priority. Especially against an enemy that will always have numerical superiority. So the UN Forces prioritize survivability... and most Zentradi mecha come up short in that department. Valkyries and Destroids are simply more practical and effective in that regard. Massive losses among an all-volunteer armed force are hard to replace, and most Earth-born Zentradi would probably be unwilling to put up with the ergonomic nightmare that the old Zentradi mecha represent (or submit themselves to surgery to operate some of them). Apparently this is called a "proprietary eponym"... when the name of a specific instance of a thing becomes the generic term (e.g. "Kleenex" for facial tissue). It's likely they don't need to... they're heavily implied to be Protoculture themselves, they have what amounts to a main fleet-scale force that's technologically superior to what the Zentradi are fielding, and they've got an equally-advanced mobile fortress running the show. Odds are they probably have the production capacity to sustain and expand their Zentradi forces without needing to attack Zentradi main fleets.
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