Seto Kaiba

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.