Seto Kaiba

The YF-29's in Hayate's colors and the drone has Xaos markings, so I think you may be misinterpreting those shots... Yeah, I pointed out there's some leading remarks made back in the TV series about Lady M's experiments in creating an Ultimate Weapon based on her research into the military potential of song, in which it's mentioned that she's rumored to be toying with approaching it both with cybernetics and genetic engineering/cloning. Keith, as others have pointed out, is quite busy being a corpse. It's possible the priest is a relative of Roid's, as his family were shrine keepers. Hermann Kroos is, as far as we know, the most senior surviving Aerial Knight... but he's probably too old to take up the mantle of the White Knight. The markings on the red Sv-262Hs are consistent with Bogue's markings. Xaos is a bush-league PMC that failed to defeat the Aerial Knights, who are so bush league they literally had no actual combat experience at the start of the war... there's no way either of them would last five minutes against the New UN Forces. It's been said the enemy in the movie is a new one, so presumably they are in fact new. Or the home airbase... and it's worth remembering Xaos's unit terminology is Air Force-inspired.

All in all, I'm actually kind of disappointed by how few questions it actually raises... While I absolutely 100% think the Kairos Plus is a better looking aircraft than the previous Siegfried Custom, I still can't see a clear rationale for Xaos to have either scrapped their 3-4 surviving Siegfried custom units in favor of this new model or retooled them into this new model. Apart from the slightly heavier armament, the only thing I can really see is having a bit more fuel by retooling the wing surface to make it thicker near the root and swapping the forward-swept winglets for delta winglets. I'm inclined to suspect the new bicep armor there is meant to reinforce the upper arm... Hayate lost several arms below the shoulder over the course of the TV series.

So, all in all, it looks like armaments-wise the VF-31AX Kairos Plus isn't changing much from the base VF-31A Kairos or VF-31 Custom Siegfried. The Mauler ROV-127E 12.7mm beam machine gun appears to be effectively unaltered from the base design. The Ramington LM-27s 27mm railguns on the forearms appear to have been exchanged for a larger model. The Bifors CIMM-3B micro-missile launcher systems in the legs seem to be unaltered. The weapons bay in the back of the legs also appears to be unmodified. The Howard LU-18A beam gunpod has apparently been replaced by one modeled on the General Galaxy GBP-35A beam gunpod used by the Sv-262. The multipurpose container has been exchanged for a type that has a gun of some type (likely a beam gun?) instead of a multidrone charger. Unless something unusual has been done to the fold wave system or the engines, this doesn't look like much of an improvement from the base VF-31 Kairos or Siegfried.

It's a rectal thermometer. Xaos is getting into the challenging field of Zentradi healthcare. *snerk* Unfortunately, the sheet is vague on that note... it mentions the ordnance container has been exchanged for a type that contains armaments and sensors (impl. "instead of the multi-drone recharger equipped previously"). It looks rather odd seen from the other side (img. courtesy of Tamashii's website): It looks like the new gunpod attaches to the underside of the ordnance container and can be deployed beam turret style by unfolding the ordnance container into a turret mount. The new beam gunpod is DEFINITELY based on the one previously used by the Sv-262 Draken III. Another look at the side of the ordnance container with the gunpod deployed. One interesting detail is that the gun barrel on the ordnance container looks like it's hinged to rotate up or down... making it likely it is a beam cannon of some description. On checking Tamashii's website, it seems the movie's date has been given as 2068... so this movie is set only a few months to a year from the end of Macross Delta.

So... this has a few interesting details to offer. Apparently the Kairos Plus will still have a fold wave system. Apparently that ugly splodge that replaced the lens we're used to is an enlargement of the system for some reason? As much as I like them going back to the much better-looking delta wing from the VF-31A I'm not sure I like the other changes to the design.

This right here is EXACTLY how I want Walkure to deal with Bogue every time he opens his mouth. Not as such. You see, Xaos is an interstellar conglomerate which controls a bunch of different subsidiary companies in different industries. Walkure's members are employees of Xaos's performing arts division, a talent management agency owned and controlled by the parent Xaos corporation. Delta Flight's members, and practically all of the other Xaos employees we see in the series, are employees of Xaos's private military contractor division. The Tactical Sound Units are a joint venture between those two very different Xaos subsidiary companies, with Delta Flight acting as a de facto bodyguard detail to Walkure when it's engaged in Var suppression activities. Kaname mentions she had some self-defense training when she was a child, but I don't recall the series ever actually showing or stating that Walkure's members receive any kind of hand-to-hand or weapons training. They don't seem to even get any kind of training to acclimatize them to battlefield operations either, given that practically all of Walkure's early operations were a string of massive public failures when the group did little besides scream, cower, and flee once the fighting started... which, in all fairness, is kind of the expected outcome if you throw untrained civilians into live combat. The only training we see them do is some basic, vaguely military-esque PT (jogging in the rain while dragging a tire), an unconvincing bit of what I assume is survival training (eating canned food in the woods while wearing parkas), and parachute training. Probably.

I'm down for it, if Walkure go after Bogue with harisen or at least a squeaky mallet every time he opens his mouth to say something stupid or sexist.

Nothing meaningful at this time... the only hint we've had so far has been that the VF-31AX's we've seen art for so far have affiliation markings for "PARMENIDES", though it isn't said if that's a planet, a base, or a ship.

Imagine being so incredibly dim that, as an editor of a popular hobby magazine, you go on your social media accounts and proceed to actively and vocally defend the people ripping off your magazine's readers thinking that that won't come back to bite you in the arse the instant someone reads your profile and figures out where you work. F***ed around. Found out. Don't weep for the stupid, you'll be crying all day.

And Gundam ZZ.

In hindsight, I have to question who exactly they think this series is for... Even most Star Trek fans won't subscribe to Paramount+, and the series doesn't exactly have a lot of kid's programming from what I can see of its catalog. Who is the target audience? The only thing I'm mildly curious about is how a random pack of alien kids finding a derelict Starfleet starship is anything other than a setup for tragedy. I mean, these kids probably don't have the necessary skills or training to maintain a starship at all... and Federation starships are not exactly renowned for their sturdiness or rugged dependability being poster children for Made of Explodium.

The existence of the supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way was proposed in 1971, and the first experimental evidence corroborating the hypothesis emerged in 1974 with the discovery of the Sagittarius A* radio source. It was effectively narrowed down to the only plausible hypothesis based on our present understanding of physics in the mid-90's (1994-1995) when studies of Messier 87 effectively ruled out the idea that such regions could be home to swarms of stellar mass black holes in close proximity. I'm not sure how much traction the idea had in the public consciousness prior to the late 90's though... esp. given popular sci-fi in the 80's and 90's made something of a bad habit out of visiting the cores of galaxies like Star Trek V: the Final Frontier and Star Wars I: the Phantom Menace. EDIT: Star Wars - especially the Expanded Universe - is an especially bad repeat offender putting dozens and dozens of planets in or very near the center of its galaxy. Not trivial ones either, but major centers of galactic power like Coruscant, Empress Teta, Alderaan, Corellia, and Hosnian.

On the list of awkward social situations, being stuck on an smallish town flying through space until question-marks with your husband and your husband's ex must be pretty close to the top. Some of those emigrant ships were out there for 10, 20, 30 years...

My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom! X is... not quite as good as the first season, truth be told. Still well worth a watch for the sheer absurdity of it, but the story arc they're doing right now feels awfully derivative of the first season's final arc but much less well-developed.

Possibly. Or it may have been something they perfected until after their civilization's collapse given that a lot of their fold quartz-rich ruins and relics are out on the edge of the galaxy where their final enclaves were before they went extinct. (and hey, we do know that they had the technology to violate conservation of matter at one point...) ... I'm going to assume the "n't" there at the end of "do" is a typo. That is the only possible explanation I could think of for it.

Yup... the Vajra use a biological/biotechnological form of gravity control called a "Bio-Gravitational Field Propeller" in their tails for propulsion. Macross Chronicle theorizes that it's powered by fold quartz (dimensional energy conversion). Perhaps due to the Super Dimension Fortress Macross: Do You Remember Love? PS1 game's mail-in gift "Minmay's Last Message", it's a popular fan theory that the Protoculture's home world was somewhere near the galactic core. It's also often assumed that the Protoculture originated near the galactic core based on the way they're described as fleeting towards the edge of the galaxy once the devastation from the war against the Protodeviln caused them to lose control over the Zentradi fleets, and the fact that the surviving sub-Protoculture that they created and the intact ruins of their final settlements are all located near the edge of the galaxy (e.g. Earth, Zola, the Brisingr globular cluster, Uroboros). Several planets with Protoculture relics depicted in previous Macross titles were also near the galactic center... most notably Lux, the planet the Macross-5 fleet discovered and started to settle on before Gigile's self-destruction destroyed it, and the Vajra planet the Macross Frontier fleet settled on which had Birdhuman relics on its surface. (Given that Varauta is not depicted as being very far from Lux, it is also likely in the general vicinity of the galactic core.)

The Protoculture controlled most of the galaxy at the peak of their power... so it's unlikely that there was another power out there equivalent to them that went undiscovered through their entire civilization and the 500,000 years that followed. If a civilization like that did exist, they would've either been caught up in the Protoculture's civil war and destroyed, caught up in the war against the Protodeviln and destroyed, or caught up in the ongoing conflict between the Supervision Army and Zentradi and destroyed.

It's not even that... we're long used to them pointing out the obvious for the people in the back, but in this case was it necessary to point out that they have no idea how it transforms? It's possible, I suppose... but I'd suspect a more plausible explanation would be that Macross Delta is already reusing a lot of art assets from Macross Frontier and the emphasis was on Walkure so there's not as much incentive to get really creative with mecha that'll be taking a backseat to the idols anyway. It was kind of expected that we'd see the return of the Cheyenne II, Nightmare Plus, and New UN Spacy warship classes like the Uraga, Guantanamo, and Northampton, but reusing the Island-1 CG model felt kind of lazy since it doesn't actually match the proportions of the ship interior animated for it or of an emigrant ship of its generation. I was less happy in the wake of learning exactly how much was borrowed or lightly reworked from AKB0048. The designs of the Aether and Hemera are a lightly reworked version of the Katyusha from that series, and the multidrone plates and other Walkure-specific gear seem to have been based on AKB0048's gear. (Oddly, they didn't copy the one thing that would've made the most sense to have... the transformable flying live stage. Pastrami before bedtime does sound like a gastrointestinal problem in the making... though not so much as my own recently acquired habit of late night curry. We've kind of already seen that particular plot idea in Macross II: Lovers Again... albeit with what was strongly implied to be the descendants of a group of Protoculture refugees. In the main Macross timeline, it seems like such a thing would be pretty unlikely though. The surviving sub-Protoculture species we've seen have all been ones created near the end of the Protoculture's Stellar Republic, or after its fall while they were clinging to what remained of their power on the fringes of the galaxy. Humanity got an unexpected leg up due to an intact Supervision Army warship literally falling out of the sky for them to reverse-engineer. You'd think if there were a more advanced power out there they'd have attracted the unwanted attentions of the Zentradi and probably been wiped out in the interim the way humanity nearly was.

It definitely does have the General Galaxy / Macross Galaxy development group's sticky little fingerprints all over it design-wise. The vibe I got was "unmanned Valkyrie" for sure... it vaguely resembles a Northrop Grumman X-47B with outboard engines and a lengthened nose. It's a pretty safe bet it's not connected to the Protoculture or Supervision Army tho, since it doesn't look like the end result of an inebriated tryst between an Elder God and an unattended houseplant or a coral reef someone decided should fly. We've seen what happens when you upgrade a VF with Supervision Army tech in Macross 7, and this doesn't look anything like the Varauta mecha that were the result of that.

I'm always bewildered by the way people instantly assume anything new or advanced looking must somehow belong to the Protoculture. Like when people assumed the VF-27 was a Protoculture mecha early in Frontier despite all evidence to the contrary, or that weird theory that Mina Roshan was a Protodeviln (as little sense as that made) because she looked slightly different thanks to having dark eyes and a bindi. This thing supposedly belongs to the new antagonist being introduced in the movie, so it's apparently not Windermere's.

... it really is kind of frustrating how some of these magazine pieces can write so much and yet say so little of actual worth. Especially for Delta, where details are painfully sparse as it is. I've often praised the VF-31A Kairos as the most beautiful of the 5th Generation Valkyries. This new thing? It does not thrill me. I'd have liked to see Kawamori try something different for the big finale of Macross Delta, especially in light of how short the TV series was on original designs and plot elements. It's kind of disappointing to get a real good look at the new enemy VF and see that it looks like a rehash of the SV-51 Battroid. Between the multi-axis thrust vectoring nozzles and conehead, both of which are basically the General Galaxy/SV Works signature, it kinda sucks all the mystery out of it too.

Hm... well, the new Robotech Visual Archive books are kind of a mixed bag. The Visual Archive books share a lot of the same issues with the The Art of Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles book. The layouts are poor and the content is sparse and padded pretty heavily to disguise the fact that a fair portion of what you're buying for your $40 is a print version of the old official website's Infopedia section. "Better than the Robotech Art books" is a pretty low hurdle to clear, and IMO the Visual Archive books do clear that particular hurdle, but in terms of content and quality they're still frustratingly short of the mark set by a lot of the nearly forty year old Japanese artbooks for Macross and MOSPEADA. The Masters Saga book is better than This is Animation 10, but that's a bar so low it's a trip hazard in Satan's wine cellar. The Masters Saga book includes a lot of concept art from the show's development, but if you have the Imai Files .pdf you've already seen all of it for free and that free .pdf does more to put the art in its historical context than the Visual Archive book does. As a history buff, I found it supremely frustrating that the book included all the Science Fiction Sengoku Saga concept art but didn't bother to explain any of it. It's all just sort of glossed over as "hey look at these weird samurai designs".

It seems a safe bet the Protoculture developed a means to synthesize fold quartz at the requisite level of purity for a given application. Humanity's noted to be researching that very topic, and they're millennia behind where the Protoculture were technologically. (Esp. if the foundations of the Protoculture ruins in the Brisingr cluster are what they appear to be... planet-spanning networks of fold quartz "tendrils".)

So... that much isn't completely clear. We know that Windermere IV has a large amount of fold quartz that they were very frustrated about New UN Government restrictions on the mining and trading of, but the quality and quantity requirements for the YF-29's Fold Wave System are pretty obscene. We're talking four 1,000ct (200g) pieces of ultra-high purity fold quartz. If fold quartz has density similar to actual quartz, those 1,000ct (200g) crystals would have to be at least 5.25cm across (for comparison's sake, a golf ball is 4.27cm across). The SV-262 Draken III incorporates a Fold Reheat system based on some of the same principles as the Fold Wave System, but entirely devoted to improving engine output. The Hs command type is noted to have a more capable version of the Fold Reheat system that uses special larger fold quartz obtained from the Windermere royal family, so they might be able to get in the ballpark at the very least. That's called the VF-31 Siegfried. The size would depend on the density of fold quartz. Mind you, we're told in the YF-29's official writeups that fold quartz of the appropriate size and purity is vanishingly rare stuff. So much so that in Macross Frontier the only known source was Vajra semi-queen and queen forms. Even on planets with extensive Protoculture ruins, crystals of that type are extremely hard to come by and worth a fortune. Even a fold quartz crystal the size of a golf ball is absolutely gargantuan compared to the size of the crystals we saw in most of Macross Frontier. The fold quartz earrings that Sheryl Nome had, based on the dimensions of the official cosplay accessory, are lozenge-cut stones approximately 2.6cm by 0.9cm. An adult Vajra soldier form has one of those crystals in its entire body, and they're only just pure enough to use in something like an inertia store converter or a dimensional warhead. The fold quartz crystal in Hayate's keepsake pendant is quite a bit larger than any other fold quartz crystal we've seen directly, that much is true. It's probably not at usable level of purity, though, given that the gaiden manga Macross Delta Gaiden: White Knight of the Black Wing shows the pendant came from a street vendor (the young Theo and Xao Jussila) selling touristy knickknacks in a farming village near the New UN Spacy garrison. They offer several pendants of the same design to Keith, Bogue, Roid, and their mentor Morris in the manga's fourth chapter. The Windermereans were well aware of the value of fold quartz at the time, so it seems unlikely that a renowned merchant family like the Jussilas was selling fold quartz crystals that were individually worth a king's ransom for pocket change in the form of tacky costume jewelry. Xaos isn't exactly lacking for experts either, so you would think someone would've examined it and told him how much it was worth. Especially once his resonance with Freyja started causing health problems.

An interesting possibility... but, if what Kawamori and co. put together for Master File is anything like accurate, that wouldn't/shouldn't work. What I've read on the matter suggests that the efficacy of fold quartz is relative to the size of the fold quartz crystal being used and that certain levels of purity are required in the fold quartz crystals for certain technologies. For instance, the YF-29's fold wave system is acknowledged to require multiple 1000 carat pieces of fold quartz at a very high level of purity... both of which mean you essentially need to go hunt a Vajra Queen or Semi-Queen to get it. Master File's description of the VF-31 Siegfried's fold wave system and fold amps talks a bit about them having been designed to minimize the amount of fold quartz needed, and to use smaller pieces of fold quartz than the YF-29 required. Theoretically, they shouldn't be able to reuse the fold quartz from the Siegfrieds in the YF-29 because the crystals aren't big enough.