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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Well, it hardly matters now... it's in the past, as much as a war fought entirely via time travel can be said to be in the past without it becoming a snarky play on words. As quickly as Discovery's writers dismissed the entire Temporal Cold War, it seems unlikely that they'll pin the blame for "the burn" on one of the factions of temporal bad actors from previous shows like the Vorgons, Devidians, Krenim, Na'khul, or the Sphere Builders. Pretty much everything about "the burn" as a plot device ends up being more of a gargantuan plot hole on examination in the broader context of Star Trek, so I don't expect the explanation for "the burn" to make any sense in context either.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, I'd hope that Star Trek: Discovery's third season will avoid the mid-season plot snarl in the name of serial escalation that made the previous two seasons such a bear to watch. It feels like the series already has way too much on its plate while it juggles all the different secondary plot holes caused by the massive setting-breaking primary plot hole that is "the Burn", the Discovery's crew doing the "fish out of temporal water" thing, that seemingly irrelevant bit about Booker and the couriers, and wandering around what's left of the Federation to show us how far it had to fall to make an all-around horrible person like Michael Burnham into its hope for a brighter future. "Forget Me Not" has a line from Xi that I sincerely hope is a major Did-Not-Do-Research moment for the writers... because the alternative is incredibly dark and depressing. This is my most fervent hope for season three... that, for once, Michael Burnham will not be written as a Mary Sue around whom the fate of the galaxy revolves. Given the antipathy most fans and the production staff had for the Temporal Cold War story arc of Star Trek: Enterprise, I'm somewhat relieved to that that seems unlikely. The Sphere Builders were just one faction in the Temporal Cold War tho, it's never indicated who actually instigated it all. There was the Federation and the other Temporal Accords signatories, the Na'khul (the baddies from "Storm Front", whose defeat ended the Temporal Cold War), the Sphere Builders, and the unknown Suliban benefactor "Future Guy" (whose identity was never set by the production staff... some concepts had him as a Romulan, others as a future Admiral Archer, still others had him being an augment from a second Eugenics War in the future, etc.).
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Ugh... no thank you.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    ... in Warhammer 40,000, it's more or less a rule of the setting that any relic of a bygone era that shows up unexpectedly is going to cause Very Bad Things to happen in the very near future. Especially if it's an ancient starship. Mind you, what I was getting at was more that Star Trek: Discovery's writers have yet to let optimism stand. Episode 6 in last season was about the point where they jettisoned the show's brief experiment with acting like real Star Trek to set up that nonsensical Control story arc with the genocidal AI that wants to exterminate all life for no reason. Various fanservice nods like the Voyager-J, the Nog, and so on aside, 32nd century Starfleet has made it clear they see Discovery's very existence as a criminal act given that they illegally time-traveled into the future. It feels like there's an imminent betrayal coming, otherwise there's no real way to raise the stakes like the Kurtzman-Trek writers insist on doing in the most ridiculous ways halfway into any season. (5'll get you 20 it's somehow Burnham's fault that The Burn happened too, because the writers are convinced the entire universe has to revolve around her.)
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Back to getting caught up on this season's offerings. Jujutsu Kaisen is increasingly my #1 pick for this season, if only because it's the series that feels the best-developed of the lot. It'd be a fairly standard shonen anime if it weren't for how surprisingly dark it is. Given how casually the series handles violent dismemberment and creepy monsters, it feels like Bleach by way of Gantz. Yuji gets hurt A LOT, and some of those injuries are rather grisly. The cursed spirits they're fighting get their fair share of the gore too in unlovely ways... like the most recent episode where the jovial and genial teacher responsible for Yuji and his two classmates oh-so-casually decapitates one of the show's principal antagonists then interrogates him. (Even the show's occasional moments of levity are colored by this, like the omake after the last episode where the battered but still-living decapitated head of the cursed spirit from the episode is used as an improvised soccer ball by his own side and ends up having most of his teeth kicked out in the process.) Tonikaku Kawaii is, unfortunately, still wallowing in that one joke it seems to have. It'd be a cute and entertaining, if fairly generic, romcom if it had more diversity in its humor. So far, the only joke it really has it that its protagonist Nasa overreacts to absolutely anything involving his new wife because he's literally never had any interaction with a girl before. It's had a few nice charming moments, mostly involving Tsukasa revealing she's just as much of a nerd as Nasa but better at hiding it, but it doesn't really impress. Iwakakeru - Sport Climbing Girls is still gratifyingly free of the kind of blatant fanservice that I and everyone I'd spoken to about it was expecting from the outset, but it feels like its writers were kind of counting on having that kind of fanservice to fill time or add interest. What I know about rock climbing could fit comfortably on a napkin with enough room to pen a dirty limerick or two, but this feels like the showrunners are committed to an authentic depiction of the sport of rock climbing... except in their decision to depict it as being highly competitive and wildly popular like soccer or baseball. I'm sure it's very accurate, but it's not really doing a good job as an ambassador for the sport because it makes the whole affair seem rather boring (esp. when the best comparison they can seem to draw is to a cell phone puzzle game similar to Bust a Move or Magical Drop). I'm Standing on a Million Lives is probably one of the most disorganized-feeling shows I've seen in a good while. There's no real sense of a coherent plot thread. Things just sort of happen and the protagonists seem just as lost as the audience is 99% of the time. It's just that meme where Moon Knight is throwing things and yelling "RANDOM BULLSHIT! GO!", as a story.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Discovery did seem to be headed in that grimdark direction for two entire seasons and as of the last episode I am increasingly struck with a foreboding feeling that they're about to make it three.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Well, the VF-19 is noted to have had both a high initial cost and a high average cost of operation... though it's not clear how much of that was the cost of replacement parts for the high-spec hardware and how much was the frequency of its required maintenance. It's not something most crew chiefs ever had to worry about, though. A combination of factors including rising tensions between the central New UN Government and its emigrant governments, Isamu's little stunt in Macross Plus, and the unacceptably high rate of training accidents early in its rollout that were directly attributed to its high performance led the New UN Government and New UN Forces to pull the plug on plans for its widespread adoption AND slap various export restrictions on the design and its technology that prevented emigrant governments from fielding them in significant numbers and reduced their performance. (This led to the development and adoption of the VF-171 as the 4th Gen main VF of the New UN Forces in the mid-2040s.) The few crews who had to deal with them were either those early crews who spent a fair amount of their time cleaning up the crashed aircraft after loss of control accidents during that initial problematic period of model conversion training and the crews servicing Special Forces aircraft who were used to the greater maintenance demands from their previous experience with Special Forces VFs like the VF-17.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Without the Protodeviln throwing a wrench into the growing tensions between the Stellar Republic and the opposing faction, they'd have probably fought a long and bloody civil war instead of being nearly wiped out and having to join forces to oppose the third party (the Supervision Army) that attacked both sides.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    For what it's worth, the reasons behind the ancient Protoculture repeatedly deciding to bury and seal away the consequences of their folly probably have a lot to do with the swiftness of their civilization's collapse. The Protoculture lost 85% of their population in the space of a year when the Protodeviln appeared, and what was left when the dust settled was a slowly crumbling network of colonized planets, emigrant fleets, and space colonies out on the galactic rim. It seems likely that the reason the Protoculture didn't destroy the delta wave system in the Brisingr globular cluster when their civilization entered the final phases of its collapse was because doing so would've probably entailed completely destroying at least half a dozen habitable planets they'd semi-recently created sub-Protoculture life on. The system was so massive, and so integrated into the crusts and mantles of those planets, that destroying it would've had apocalyptic consequences for the planets even if they didn't outright destroy the planets themselves. The relay station on Windermere IV seen in Macross Delta seems to have fold crystal "roots" spread throughout almost an entire hemisphere of the planet. Why the Protoculture didn't go the extra mile and kill the Protodeviln once their anima spiritia had successfully captured them is a mystery. Spiritia deprivation will absolutely kill a Protodeviln stone dead, and from what we saw when Gigile killed himself on Lux to save Sivil it looks like a dimensional warhead detonation of planet-killing scale might have been enough to do the job. It's possible they were afraid the Protodeviln's seal wasn't strong enough to prevent fold-based shenanigans like Valgo being able to interrupt space folding or Gepernich space folding Max's reaction missile back to the Stargazer in 2046. Perhaps they believed the only way to kill them would be to starve them to death, given how powerful they were even after 500,000 years of confinement without spiritia. (A more ominous theory might be that they intended to starve the Protodeviln and then come back and reclaim the still-living bodies of the Evil series for use in rebuilding their civilization.)
  10. Seto Kaiba
    As I understand it from a friend who is a big fan of the Halo franchise, the Forerunners aren't abusive/neglectful precursors so much as abusive/neglectful contemporaries... having apparently reverted humanity and other species to stone age levels after the early Flood containment efforts by those species were mistaken for acts of aggression. TBH, I'm not sure the Protoculture's motives were anything like altruistic. They were, according to the official timeline, re-engineering native species on planets they found to ensure the emergence of sub-Protoculture species who would prepare their worlds for future colonization. It's likely the Birdhuman was left by the Protoculture as insurance that humanity wouldn't develop into a species that could threaten the Protoculture when they returned to colonize the planet, rather than as a guarantee that we wouldn't repeat their own mistakes... since at the time it was left, they hadn't really realized the magnitude of their error yet. There is the (mythologized) mention that the Birdhuman was accidentally activated once before, and that its Kill All Humans program was interrupted by forcibly separating the Birdhuman's head from its body. Given the Birdhuman's mission, "failing safe" would be destroying humanity rather than risk a violent species making it into space. To me, it seems more like the pilot's influence on the system... esp. given that Sara was only able to steer its defensive fire away from Shin after breaking through its "kadun" brainwashing and seeing that she was firing on Shin and not some amorphous monster. One has to wonder what its program dictated if humanity passed its test. Macross Chronicle suggests that when Sara folded it away it went to Gallia IV. It wasn't able to do that alone... it needed the songs of the Mayan priestesses who'd been engineered with the biological fold wave abilities necessary to maintain it in order to regenerate and sustain itself over the intervening millennia. That's not quite what the Birdhuman said, though... it asked if humans had stopped fighting amongst themselves, full stop. The answer was "No", so it decided to destroy humanity. "Are you fighting for any reason? Yes? Then you're possessed by the Kadun of Battle and have to die for the sake of galactic peace." Birdhuman icons are present on several planets including the Vajra planet at the end of Frontier, but as far as we know the only Birdhuman found was the one on Earth. (It's possible others were present, but unable to restore themselves or activate because the tribe tasked with maintaining them had died out or simply abandoned its traditional role.) The horrible part is that they don't seem to have had any of those conversations until AFTER the worst had already happened. They went on their merry way creating weapons of the most atrocious destructive potential and only AFTER things went Tango-Uniform did they seemingly stop to think "Was that a good idea?". I'm sure it wasn't the first major case of cultural discord... given that, in Macross 7, the schism is described as a sort of Cold War-like condition where two different socio-political groups in the Protoculture coexisted but never reached any kind of accord until things blew up into a mutually self-destructive shooting war. Even in DYRL?, it was the culmination of lifetimes of failure to sit down and talk out their problems. Nah, what Vrlitwhai was so stunned by at the start of Super Dimension Fortress Macross was that the supposedly primitive species he'd just discovered had opened fire on him with thermonuclear reaction weapons. To the Zentradi, thermonuclear reaction weapons are long-lost technology. The factory satellites that manufactured them were destroyed by the Supervision Army some 380,000 years before the series. Nope. Yes and no? It's more a question of scale than anything. Humanity doesn't exactly have the firepower to be taking on Zentradi main fleets willy-nilly, but when it comes to isolated infrastructure-type atrocities humans c.2059 do finally have the firepower to safely dispose of a lot of the Protoculture's mistakes via dimensional warheads. That does seem to be the case, given that we've seen that something like a dimensional warhead could potentially even kill a Protodeviln... at the cost of a planet. Humanity's first attempt to dispose of the delta wave system after realizing how stupidly dangerous it was was more restrained, but still boasted enough firepower to erase a city from existence. The second attempt was more extreme, but even less successful.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    What's surprising is that it took the government of the Varauta colony eighteen years to get around to investigating the neighboring theoretically-habitable planet where the laws of thermodynamics were seemingly out to lunch. Varauta was settled in 2025, but the Special Research Unit that investigated the system's 4th planet looking for the origin of the mysterious energy field didn't start work until 2043. I'd imagine a LOT of the technology on Varauta's 4th planet would be pretty damned interesting to the New UN Government's research agencies. Undamaged Protoculture overtechnology in basically pristine condition would be a BIG draw. (Especially given some of the nonsense of theirs we learn about later, like dimensional energy conversion technology or factory satellite manufacturing tech that can violate conservation of mass.) Sort of... if companies like that hadn't had any indigenous peoples to enslave and abuse. Remember, they did leave a bio-technological weapon of mass destruction on Earth for the very specific goal of exterminating us should we repeat their mistakes and make it into space before settling our internal disputes. They'd be pretty shocked to learn that not only did humanity NOT develop the way they'd hoped, but that we'd failed so hard we managed to cripple the weapon that was supposed to destroy us before it could do much of anything. Depending on the experiment, most of their stuff arguably went horribly right. Like, they created the Zentradi to be an unstoppable military force and were then subsequently disappointed to learn they could do nothing to stop them when they'd lost control of them during the war with the Supervision Army. Or the Evil-series they designed to be civilization-ruining autonomous weapons of mass destruction with infinite endurance ending up operating as civilization-ruining autonomous weapons of mass destruction of infinite endurance under someone else's control.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    True, but that's Basara's default reaction to anything with a pulse... and several noteworthy inanimate objects, like that mountain. 'bout the only thing he DIDN'T tell to listen to his song was that leaf he randomly ate that one time.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Unfortunately, the ancient Protoculture wasn't always that great about keeping people out of places. Security on the 4th planet of the Varauta 3198XE system was more or less on the honor system unless you count the entropy control field the Protoculture set up to keep the Protodeviln confined also turning the planet into an uninhabitable iceball over the intervening millennia. It might've been enough to keep the planet uninteresting to what remained of the Zentradi forces and Supervision Army, but the fact that its climate made absolutely no sense was always going to grab the attention of a scientifically-literate species like humanity and prompt an investigation. The Protoculture did get better about their seals and Keep Out signs as time went on, though. When they sealed the Fold Evil they'd created on Uroboros they used a multi-layered seal that could only be deactivated with fold songs, released self-replicating designer insectoid bioweapons into their abandoned facilities and the surrounding environment to repel intruders by force, and then isolated the planet behind impassible fold faults. It still didn't do the trick, but it performed better than the "let's just cross our fingers and hope for the best" approach they tried in the Varauta system despite humanity's growing familiarity with the Protoculture's BS. Their effort on Windermere IV and the other worlds of the Brisingr cluster actually worked pretty well, burying all their dangerous toys in higher-dimensional space and then burying the key on an isolated planet on the edge of the galaxy (and humans sensibly tried to blow it the hell up with a dimensional warhead instead of studying it, proving they're getting smarter).
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Knowing him, he'll either mutter mutinously as he's forced to accept promotion to a desk job or get himself killed in a crash. It's with good reason that the usual career trajectory for a fighter pilot gradually trends away from actually flying and towards the administrative tasks that support squadron operations. Given their love of song, I expect their reaction to learning what humanity is and what it's done in the not quite seventy years since they learned they weren't alone in the universe would go something like this: Now that would be a real trick given the ten foot clearance most drive thrus have.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    You mean the "Isamu Special" from Macross Frontier: the Wings of Goodbye? Macross Chronicle identifies it as an extensively modified VF-19EF, a monkey model VF-19E that was used for evaluating some next-gen technologies like EX-Gear but was not outfitted with the very expensive ISC system. The improved engines and rolled-back airframe control AI software with less performance smoothing never did quite cross the line into being an aircraft that could inflict instantaneous G-LOC like the 5th Generation VFs with 30G or more of acceleration. It's something beyond the reach of the merely average pilot, but an aircraft that a highly skilled and thoroughly experienced pilot can conceivably manage without killing themselves horribly. (Even with the stability improvements removed, it's still got all kinds of safeguards in the control AI intended to prevent the aircraft from outright endangering the life of its pilot via its high performance.) There is that, yeah, though the introduction of linear actuator technology in the 5th Generation probably did a lot to reduce that risk as well. I doubt we'll ever get a proper official setting comparison of the materials to real world equivalents. Unofficial or "expanded universe" type works have given some direction there but that's just round number figures like "100x the strength of an equivalent thickness of steel". Given that humanity is still a fractious, occasionally violent species that hasn't resolved its internal differences despite expanding across a fair portion of the galaxy in a terrifyingly short time and managed to do ridiculous things like defeat a Birdhuman with crude reaction weaponry, score a pyrrhic victory over a Zentradi main fleet, accidentally release and then defeat and befriend the Protodeviln, release the Fold Evil, or accidentally activate the Delta Wave System... I'd expect them to be a little horrified at our ignorance and a LOT horrified at our tendency to behave violently. There'd probably be some very panicky Protoculture explaining as quickly as possible all the things humanity needs to stop doing right the hell now before they repeat the Protoculture's mistakes. A good landing is one you can walk away from. A great landing is one where you can reuse the spaceship later.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Yup, though it takes some pretty astonishing forces to do that to a VF given that their structural materials are at least a hundred times stronger than steel and later models are often stressed for a G-limit in the dozens. That's an interesting way to think about it. Macross the Ride does kind of paint a picture of Macross Galaxy as a place of rather surprising inequality and poverty. Its government is a corporation, effectively making the fleet a subsidiary of General Galaxy and in a lot of ways a flying extralegal research and development facility. The wealthy and powerful like the Galaxy executives have access to the fleet's best technology and lead very comfortable lives both in the virtual domain and in the flesh. The fleet's lower level employees live in fairly uncomfortable or even harsh conditions that are made less unpleasant for them by implant-induced augmented reality. Their perceptions are filtered and modified by the their implants in some full on Ghost in the Shell-levels of mind screw to do things like make an unused urban space appear to be a beautiful park or make the unpleasant synthetic foodstuffs taste delicious. Unlike the peasants in France during the French Revolution, these folks don't really properly appreciate that they're living in poor conditions because of their implants. Folks without implants, including a very high (compared to other fleets) number of people who've been left unemployed by the fleet's obsession with labor-saving automation, live in harsh conditions and fully appreciate the fact but don't really have a chance at overthrowing the government due to the superhuman abilities of the cyborg soldiers there and the mind control the fleet's executives wield against the populace. General Galaxy sponsored the Macross Galaxy fleet, and the corporation that serves as the fleet's government is effectively a subsidiary of General Galaxy. It's questionable how much direct control General Galaxy had over the Macross Galaxy fleet, but all in all I don't think so. Macross Frontier's story had some fairly blunt points to make about corporate corruption and capitalism's influence on politics, with the two main emigrant fleets in the story both being manipulated, overtly or covertly, by corporate sponsors in a bid to locate and monopolize a precious new resource (fold quartz). Weyland-Yutani used its massive influence to effectively become the government in reality if not in name, where General Galaxy seems uninterested in anything except the business of building things like ships, fighters, gravity control systems, and the like. It was a group of other individuals who kind of hijacked the Macross Galaxy fleet and turned it into a fleet bent on galactic domination via mind control.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Nice. I've got two copies on order already... fingers crossed for no more delays.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Drawn from a common RPG meme... the so-called "Chunky Salsa Rule", that any hit that would reduce a character's head to the consistency of chunky salsa is fatal no matter what other rules say. The first workable ISC prototype wasn't available until around 2057, when Shinsei Industry revived the YF-24 program on their own and completed it as the YF-24 Evolution. Back during Project Super Nova, the New UN Forces did have access to what you might call a low-performance economized version of inertia capacitor technology via the Queadluun-Rau's inertia vector control system. It did the same job, but because it used high-purity fold carbon it wasn't as effective and was still very expensive. General Galaxy, who'd been contracted to restore and renovate the captured Quimeliquola factory satellite after it was moved to Eden, incorporated an inertia vector control system into the YF-21. Great Mechanics DX.9's article on VF Evolutionary Theory does mention that it would be economical to equip the VF-19 with an ISC system. They went ahead with developing new VFs around it instead because the Vajra's abilities were projected to exceed even the VF-19's performance and to preserve defense sector jobs. (Kind of paralleling the way that the development of the F-22 and F-35 plowed ahead despite many design problems to preserve defense industry jobs in the real world.) Given the diverse variations of local specification we've seen from various emigrant governments so far, I would not be even slightly surprised if someone out there were operating ISC-equipped VF-19s. As long as they're designed around those stresses it should be fine... if a pain in the butt to maintain because of the complexity. You run into problems with greater than average frequency when you start exceeding the design tolerances of the airframe on a regular basis. This was/is a noted problem for both the VF-31 custom "Siegfried" and the Sv-262Hs Draken III command type in Macross Delta, as a consequence of the upgrades made to the base VF-31A Kairos and their respective pilots being rough with them while using performance enhancement systems like the Siegfried's fold wave system or the Draken III's fold reheat. Probably a lot like the Varauta forces mecha from Macross 7... because that's basically what they were. They were New UN Gov't mecha upgraded with, and adopting some design stylings of, the Protoculture overtechnology the Protodeviln had appropriated or created for their own use. They do, it's hard to see in many shots but there are several viewscreen panels filling in the footwell similar to the VF-19's (albeit without seamless coverage) and rearview displays to make up for the limited rear visibility. Well, I mean, everything is technically Protoculture-based since overtechnology is something humanity inherited from the Protoculture via that Supervision Army derelict that made an unplanned crash landing on Earth in 1999.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, if this new bird is 5th Generation - or possibly even 6th given that an extra feature in the Macross Delta blu-rays attempts to classify the not-actually-production VF-31 custom Siegfrieds as "Generation 5.5" - then it has an inertia store converter system able to buffer at least 27.5G for at least two minutes if it's manned. Otherwise the massive thrust that its Stage II thermonuclear reaction turbine engines produce would do unpleasant things to the meatbag in the cockpit. If that is its head amidships, it's going to have a weird-as-hell transformation to make that work. (Which would also not be beyond reason, given the weird-as-hell transformation the Draken III had... unconventional transformation designs seem to be another hallmark of General Galaxy/SV Works designs.) The ancient Protoculture were way, WAY beyond building conventional aircraft when their civilization collapsed. Their mecha designs were inspired by Vajra biology, including the fully restored design of the Birdhuman that was based on a Vajra Queen. The head does kind of evoke the Birdhuman's face with its big single monoeye that takes up the entire "face"... though that was also a feature of the SV-51's design in Macross Zero. The closest we've had to a Protoculture aircraft are the Protodeviln reworked versions of the New UN Forces' VF-14, VA-14, and VAB-2. Those were Earth VFs upgraded with some of the advanced tech from the arsenal world where the Protodeviln were sealed away. It's known (see Macross R) that some of that technology wound up in the hands of the remnants of Latence, the Earth supremacist group that staged a coup in Macross VF-X2, and that leftover splinter groups of Latence like Fasces were using upgraded Elgersoln units for some of their forces c.2058. This new VF absolutely has humanity's fingerprints all over it. Given that Absolute Live!!!!!! is advertised as having an all-new story, it seems unlikely that it's a new Windermerean VF (which would mean it was actually just sold to Windermere by a General Galaxy affiliate or middleman under the table). Maybe Macross Galaxy's cyber-nobles are having another go at galactic domination, or selling arms to someone who fancies a go themselves. Yup... the VF-27's used the Brain Direct Interface to project the composite sensor image of the VF's surroundings directly into the pilot's brain, like the YF-21 was supposed to do when the BDI was working properly. The Sv-262 seems to have used a more conventional holographic projection system similar to the footwell displays on the VF-19. In the VF-27's case, it was shown that the armored cover was ejectable and a conventional canopy was underneath. I'm not sure if this one has enough clearance for that kind of redundancy. The cockpit area looks rather flat, similar to the reduced visibility the VF-17 had.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Hm... yeah, I can see how it could look like that. Given his status as a self-confessed Minmay fan, I suspect his motive was more between "is it really her?" and "is she ok?". Isamu, on the other hand, probably would have tried to cop a feel in Hikaru's place.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    It's possible, I suppose. There's been at least one previous model that's had the cockpit in the head itself... the VA-3 Invader. That'd be kinda boring, IMO... the enemy being a drone fighter in Macross Plus only worked because there was an insane AI directly controlling it. Dogfighting against a robot is so impersonal. It does a bit, which would play with the VF-4 resemblance since the Variable Glaug was developed from a stolen VF-4.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Put together a quick analysis of the design in the Mecha Discussion thread for the curious:
  23. Seto Kaiba
    So, first thoughts... As with the initial promotional art from last year, this new Valkyrie's design fairly screams that it's a General Galaxy product... and likely from the SV Works design team. One of the bigger giveaways in that respect is that its Battroid mode has the prominent "conehead" configuration common to almost all of General Galaxy's major VF projects. The 2nd Generation VF-9 Cutlass, the 3rd Generation VF-14 Vampire and VA-14, and the 4th Generation VF-22 Sturmvogel II all have it. It's also something that was present in the work of General Galaxy cofounder Alexei Kurakin before the company's founding (the SV-51 and VF-4 Lightning III) and in the works of the design team he established at General Galaxy to pursue his vision of anti-VF VFs (the Sv-154 Svard and Sv-262 Draken III). Only the VF-17 Nightmare and VF-171 Nightmare Plus really buck that trend, and they were GG's least radical VF designs. (The VF-27 was developed by a subsidiary, Macross Galaxy, based on rival Shinsei Industry's YF-24 Evolution, and so doesn't conform to this norm either.) The actual design is strongly reminiscent of the VF-4 and VF-14. The monitor turret appears to be stowed near the rear of the aircraft in Fighter mode similar to the VF-4, whereas on the VF-14 it was on the underside of the nosecone. The big monoeye design of the monitor turret is strongly reminiscent of the SV-51's, as is the apparent slenderness of the limbs we can see in the second image. The forward fuselage structure in Fighter mode is reminiscent of both the YF-27-5 Shahar Female type and the VF-14. It's difficult to make out on the original image, but in @no3Ljm's brightened pics we can see something that looks like a gun port immediately adjacent to the canopy similar to the main fighter-mode guns on the VF-17 Nightmare and VF-171 Nightmare Plus. There are two areas on the nacelle closest to the viewer that have surface detail that appears to be the mostly-standard stretched hexagonal shape used for internal micro-missile launcher firing ports. You can see one very clearly on the outboard side of the port nacelle right near the leading edge and there looks to be another right near the border of light and shadow smack in the middle of the nacelle. I don't see an obvious rear-facing gun despite that having been a standard feature for quite some time. That doesn't mean one isn't there though, it may be a pop-up type or just a gunport we can't see. The base of the engine nozzle is sporting something that's either a thrust reverser collar similar to the ones on the VF-27, VF-27, YF-30, and VF-31 or a vernier ring similar to what General Galaxy pioneered on the VF-14 and carried over to the VF-17 and VF-171. Given the structural similarities to the VF-4 and VF-14, I am inclined to suspect it's actually the vernier ring, esp. since those VFs it's most similar to were also VFs intended primarily for use in space combat. Instead of a canopy, it appears to have a cluster of polarized sensor covers similar to the VF-27 or Sv-262 but much larger for some reason. I suspect this is still a manned VF, but similar to the VF-27 or Sv-262 they've traded away the visibility of a canopy for the greater survivability of an electable energy conversion armor canopy cover and full 360 degree wraparound monitors.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    So, courtesy of @Tochiro on Twitter, we have our first real look at the new Valkyrie for Macross Delta: Absolute Live!!!!!!. @no3Ljm did a bit of color-tweaking on the image to make some of the surface detail more visible: The original promotional piece from last year, for reference:
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Who'd have thought rewriting Star Trek: Discovery into a Bad Future where interstellar travel is all but nonexistent would make it difficult to hide the painfully underdeveloped characters behind exciting space action? Especially when the entire Bad Future hinges on a plot hole so large it was literally an interstellar empire for centuries.
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