Seto Kaiba

That's the first sentence of the first paragraph under the header "Development of the FF-3000" on page 058 of Variable Fighter Master File: VF-25 Messiah. I'm fairly sure what that says is that the FF-2200/FF-2550 series thermonuclear turbine engines which were developed for use on the VF-19 and VF-22 saw widespread use as 3rd Generation thermonuclear turbine engines. You're a more proficient translator than I am, so if I've got it wrong I welcome the opportunity to learn. (One thing to note WRT the above statement about the FF-2200/FF-2550 series being mentioned in connection with the VF-22 is that Variable Fighter Master File: VF-19 Excalibur has a brief section at the bottom of page 057 where it's mentioned that the YF-21's (and VF-22's) FF-2450B engines can be considered a tuned-up/production-ized derivative of the FF-2200B series engine that was used on the initial spec YF-19 before being abandoned for the FF-2500 series engines it had in Macross Plus. Apparently the implication here is that both Project Super Nova prototypes originally used the FF-2200B series engine in initial testing, and that the FF-2450B is considered to be part of the FF-2200B series.)

Isn't that basically what Lower Decks is shooting for when it's not trying desperately to be Rick and Morty?

... no comment. I've been trying to forget it for a while... it wasn't very good. They could always take the "Threshold" approach, where a future series very definitively established that That Never Happened, It'd Just Be Stupid If It Did. Or the ENT Relaunch approach, where the whole thing is dismissed as an obviously fake cover story for something else entirely... hopefully something less stupid than Charles Tucker III going to Romulus to sabotage their Warp 7 program as a Section 31 spy.

Dude, look at what you're replying to before you hit reply... that post you quoted is over eleven years old at this point. While it is essentially true that merchandising is the primary means by which studios to profit from the anime they produce, the rest of what you said is incorrect. Southern Cross was a flop because its ratings were in the toilet. The show's poor ratings performance was why there was no merchandise, not the other way around. It was so poorly received that it was earmarked for a premature ending barely 1/3 of the way into its planned broadcast run. Its failure is usually attributed to its heavily derivative and poorly developed story, its generally unlikable protagonist, and at least partly to trying to market a mecha series to a then-nonexistant female audience. There was actually a fair amount of merchandise being developed for Southern Cross, and several of the show's licensees did make it far enough to actually release Southern Cross goods before the show was cancelled. The reason so little merchandise was made before the show's cancellation was that the show's development was so rushed and disorganized that the final designs and even its title weren't set until shortly before the start of production. That left the merchandising partners little time to develop the branded merchandise for the series before it went to air. It didn't help that several of the licensees were also working on products for Super Dimension Fortress Macross: Do You Remember Love? at the same time, but the biggest problem was that development of Southern Cross merchandise started very late. Much of that merchandise was still on the drawing board when the show's ratings came back and it became apparent Southern Cross was a flop. A few products that were far enough along to be released were - several kits, a few apparel items, etc. - and the rest were quietly abandoned as licensees cut their losses. Imai Kagaku's planned model kits of the Spartas and several other mecha were among the cancelled projects.

Not specifically Star Trek's Federation, but close enough... it was one of several sci-fi series concepts Roddenberry pitched around the time Star Trek's original series was being developed. It's also the entire premise of Star Trek: Discovery's third season, in which the Discovery and Mary Sue Burnham have jumped into a distant future where the Federation apparently no longer exists and is now going to be re-founded by the worst crew Starfleet has ever had. (Even though previous shows established that the Federation was still very much around at that time... which IMO confirms that STD has always been a bad future alternate reality.)

Yup... and this all started because Paramount made a hilariously ill-advised decision to try to reboot Star Trek and entrusted it to the famously inept J.J. Abrams, who wasn't interested at all in Star Trek or making a Star Trek movie. He wanted to make Star Wars, so he tried to turn Star Trek into Star Wars. Specifically, he tried to make Star Trek into a bad remake of Episode IV, with a Romulan Death Star destroying the peaceful/defenseless planet Vulcan and then Earth as a stand-in for Yavin IV. (Whether this is necessarily any more palatable in hindsight than his attempting to pass a bad remake of Episode IV off as Episode VII is up for debate.) Really, it isn't... that allegorical writing style works just fine today and is still widely used in many different genres of storytelling. Star Trek's problem today is that the showrunners and writers currently working on it were/are so caught up in trying to make Star Trek the next Game of Thrones that they've never really stopped to think about why either of those things was popular. They were initially convinced that all they had to do was spend big on special effects and set design and fill it with dark, depressing, violent content, and that'd bring everyone and their dog to CBS All Access. That didn't work, because the story they wrote was a steaming pile of incoherent garbage and the characters were all written to be unlovable and unrelatable a-holes who hate themselves and each other. Then you had Star Trek: Picard, which still believed that what you needed to succeed was to spend your entire budget on special effects, but compounded that by trying to appeal to Twitter SJWs by repeatedly "humbling" Picard for the crime of being a white male and therefore privileged... in an explicitly postracial society where that privilege hasn't been a thing for hundreds of years. Consequently, the story was yet another steaming pile of incoherent garbage and the characters were a pack of utterly forgettable stock characters or cringeworthy racial stereotypes such as a cigar-chomping hispanic smuggler (because every hispanic is Cuban, right?), a "strong" black woman struggling with the loss of her job and substance abuse problems trying to go straight and get her family back (a racial stereotype if ever there was one), every character Zooey Deschanel has ever played, cringeworthy overly literal Space Ninja Legolas that absolutely sounded cooler in a writer's head, Great Value Benedict Cumberbatch, predatory femme fatale with vaguely incestuous overtones, and butch lesbian straw feminist Seven of Nine. Who are they writing this crap for anyway? Literally nobody asked for this. In short, the problem with Star Trek today is that it no longer has a message or a moral... it's just a bland, generic, lifeless cash-grab sequel that doesn't know what it wants to be other than "profitable". So it's a designed-by-committee mess that's hemorrhaging money because it has nothing to offer its audience besides substanceless VFX sequences and shallow, hypocritical virtue signaling. It's the same problem the Star Wars sequel trilogy had, embodied in its fullest by The Rise of Skywalker's committee-driven endless cycle of rewrites during production.

Eh... I don't mean to come off as confrontational, but if you came to a thread about a series that was so poorly received that it suffered a mass walkout of its franchise's merchandising partners before it ever aired, left its star openly reluctant to return for a second season, gave its financial backers buyer's remorse so severe they're talking about taking a loss on it and walking away after just one season, and was widely panned by the franchise's devoted fanbase, and were expecting positivity... well... that one might be on you. Just sayin'. To be brutally frank, I don't think there has been any increase in the average amount of vitriol involved in fandom-type discussions in general. That people are going to disagree, and sometimes vehemently so, is just part and parcel of being passionate about a subject. This isn't even confined to fandom, really. You get this all the time in academia too. Everyone bags on the lit majors as taking a soft option, but goddamn if there aren't some areas of that field that are more like a fight club than anything. There is, on the other hand, admittedly a marked increase in the negativity surrounding certain long-running franchises that have suffered under the hands of new creative teams who don't really understand what made those properties so successful and iconic in the first place. These new creatives are either deliberately hostile to the franchise's fans to no useful end, trying to pass virtue signaling off as a substitute for character and story development, or simply so beholden to the design-by-committee process that the end result is something fans and even general audiences found unpalatable. It's not that fans are shitting on things they supposedly like... they're expressing their understandable frustration that the owner(s) of the series they so love is letting someone crap on it on a professional basis, seemingly heedless to the fact that it's demonstrably hurting the franchise narratively and monetarily. For instance, I've been a lifelong Star Trek fan. Even when the franchise occasionally stumbled and released something less than great, I stuck with it because even those failures were true to the spirit of the series and enjoyable in their own way, whether it was watching Shatner go full ham in Star Trek V or seeing the creators discreetly bag on their own failures in-series like Voyager's "Threshold". Star Trek: Discovery's promotional materials left me feeling more than a little wary, given how blatant the virtue-signaling was and how the lead actress's own manic self-promotion ignored that Star Trek had already had both black and female leads (whose combined episode count makes up half the franchise). I gave it a fair shake, and was almost immediately put off by the blatant attempt to rewrite Star Trek's bright future into a dystopia. I probably could've forgiven that if the writing had been solid, though. I'll forgive a LOT if a show's writers can make me invested in the characters and their journey. Discovery couldn't get me engaged in the characters, because the characters were almost exclusively written to be blatantly horrible people who often made no secret of the fact that they despised each other. Starfleet's characteristic bonhomie was missing entirely, and in its place was a crew of miserable souls who were together against their will and took every opportunity to remind each other and the audience of that fact. It says a lot that the main character's one brief moment of self-awareness was wondering if she fit in too well in the mirror universe where everyone's a murderously xenophobic fascist. I stuck with it into season two because we were promised a return to form, and they actually had me on board for the first couple episodes where Anson Mount's Captain Pike briefly managed to bring back the spirit of high adventure. They lost me against almost as quickly when the show decided that the female cast should treat Starfleet legend Captain Pike like crap "because feminism" (which is not exactly what feminism is about) and then saw the plot devolve into a totally nonsensical action movie premise torn from the pages of a Terminator sequel/reboot. Until they banish Burnham, I'm not going to be able to watch Discovery anymore. I'm all for representation, but dear gods she's just an objectively awful human being. She's incredibly manipulative, disrespectful, unapologetically xenophobic, and the writers bend over backwards to try and force the audience to see her as heroic instead of for the shitty person she is. Star Trek: Picard kind of had me deeply concerned from the outset because of what'd happened with Discovery. I finished the first season, but promised myself I will never watch it ever again because the entire plot was nonsense. It was incoherent gibberish start-to-finish, and the fact that the show's entire plot seemed determined to unnecessarily "humble" someone who'd been essentially a paragon of Starfleet virtue for no reason apparent in the show itself (creator interviews explicitly indicate it's for him being a privileged white man, which makes less than zero sense in a postracial utopia like the Federation) just made it a miserable slog. Like Discovery, these characters were horrible people who didn't want to be there and that made it really impossible to like or sympathize with them. They're not relatable in any way, and in most cases their issues don't even make sense in context... like Raffi being upset about losing her Starfleet career as though it was a significant hardship on her, despite the fact that she lives in a post-scarcity society with universal basic income and universal housing, and the fact that all the family problems she blames on it were actually caused by her substance abuse problems and the ensuing paranoia. It says a lot that the Romulan super-secret police - the Zhat Vash - are arguably the actual heroes of the piece since they're the ones risking everything (sanity included) to try and prevent a galactic genocide while our protagonists are kind of aimlessly wandering the galaxy so Picard can be a sad old man until they bump into a pointlessly-evil android and hand her what she needs to obliterate all organic life in the galaxy. Even if the character writing were spectacular (and it was quite the opposite), I doubt I'd be able to get invested in it simply because the plot is an incoherent mess that doesn't make any sense in context. I haven't watched Lower Decks, and I don't think I ever will... fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. That adage doesn't contain a case statement for three or more times.

To be honest, I'm fairly certain what that says about the fanbase is that there really isn't much of one anymore. Alex Kurtzman, Bryan Fuller, Michael Chabon, and the other drooling incompetents currently running the Star Trek franchise (into the ground) boldly doubled down on the mistakes of J.J. Abrams and created a new kind of Star Trek that appealed to nobody. That's why they have almost no third-party merchandising support for the new flagship Star Trek series. Seriously... look at the audience scores from Rotten Tomatoes: Star Trek: 88% Star Trek: the Animated Series: 80% Star Trek: the Next Generation: 90% Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: 86% Star Trek: Voyager: 75% Star Trek: Enterprise: 77% Star Trek: Discovery: 42% Star Trek: Picard: 56% Star Trek: Lower Decks: 36% Now, my two degrees might only technically be in mathematics but I'm pretty sure I see a trend here... all-original Kurtzman Trek does frankly terrible, and Kurtzman Trek that leans on beloved characters from much better previous shows do significantly better but still nowhere near as well as Star Trek shows made by people who actually "get" Star Trek. When a video about a cat who'll be guest-starring on the latest season of Discovery has TWENTY TIMES the number of views as its new main cast member, that should tell the creators something about how well-received their work is. Even Garrett Wang and Ethan Phillips, the actors behind two of Star Trek's most loathed characters, have almost three times the view count of the new leading man in Star Trek: Discovery, and the two of them played characters so unpopular they were almost killed off to appease the audience.

Yeah, I'm pretty damn pleased with what we got. I was expecting something more along the lines of Master Archive Mobile Suit: MSV Pilot Log, a book that has majority biographical content and only marginal levels of detail about the mecha those pilots famously used. I've got some time tomorrow, so I'll be taking a whack at several small sections of the new book then. I really wanna do the ANGIRAS section, but it's kinda long and detailed... definitely more than I can tackle in an afternoon.

To be honest, a lot of the explanations for why things are the way they are in Southern Cross feel like the staff came up with them after the fact to talk their way around how disorganized and blatantly derivative the show's development process was. Their body armor - the Arming Doublet - definitely works with the idea that the Southern Cross Army was mostly for show, but that's because that armor was designed back when the series was going to be about space samurai. The mecha came along much later, and in something of a hurry, when Tatsunoko decided it'd rather have another go at cashing in on the success of Gundam and Macross, and consequently don't fit the same aesthetic. The only mechanical design that dates from around the same time as the Arming Doublet is the Zor Lords mothership, being the foundation of their earlier flying castle design with the castle itself removed.

Got my copies of Variable Fighter Master File: VF-1S Roy Focker Special today... and there's some good sh*t here. The book's basically mistitled, there's only about 20 pages about Roy and his aircraft. The rest is tech bits omitted from other VF-1 books. I did a full review in the Master File thread in the Books section, but the bits I'm REALLY looking forward to doing are the ones about the actuators in the VF-1's tranformation system, the bits about the structural materials used in various parts of the VF-1, the section about ANGIRAS, and especially the section about the BLCS sub-intakes.

My copies came in early... props to FedEx for going above and beyond again for no clear reason. After skimming the contents, I have to say this book is mistitled. This is Variable Fighter Master File: VF-1 Valkyrie Vol.1.5. Only about 23 pages of this 128 page book are actually about Roy Focker and fewer still are specifically about Roy's VF-1S. There are a few pages about Roy's Fokker D.VII stunt plane, a few about Roy's F203 Dragon II, a bit about the VF-X-1 prototype and VF-0S, and that's kind of it. The real attraction here is the other stuff. There's a section in this book that looks promising about the manufacturing of the VF-1 Valkyrie, a two-pager that revisits the "Streak Valkyrie" altitude test mentioned in Variable Fighter Master File: VF-1 Valkyrie Vol.1, and some amazing art showing how the VF-1's control surfaces operate incl. the double slotted fowler flaps, the spoilers, and ruddervators. Some good stuff about changes between the three main production groups (Block 1-5, 6-8, and 9-17, see my posts in the Mecha Funtime thread in the TV and Movies section for more), a REALLY excellent section I'm very excited about that shows how the VF-1's boundry layer control airflow system is set up, some decent detail on the airbrake behind the cockpit, some VERY nice material about how the actual transformation system actuators are set up and how the VF-1 holds its shape during transformation, a fascinating section that shows what structural materials are used in which sections of the VF-1's design, a section about how the ANGIRAS airframe control AI works (you have no idea how excited I am for that), diagrams that show where the VF-1's optical sensor systems were, some details about the design of the mintor turret including how the motors to rotate the lasers are set up and the configuration of the main camera eyes, some repeated content about the change in cockpit design between Blocks 1-5 and 6+, a section about the GERWALK mode, some brief material on the orbital booster, and some low detail filler about the Cat's Eye and Ghost. TL;DR... if you're buying just for the pretty pictures of CG Valkyries, this book probably won't satisfy, but if you're buying it for the technology porn you're in for a treat. I am definitely looking forward to translating several sections of this book.

FedEx claims I should be getting my copies tomorrow, along with the HJ Vintage issue about the old Macross kits. Since I've been binging translations of various sections of the Master File books over the last few days for fun, it'll be interesting to see if there's anything of actual interest in this one.

This season's offerings have been kind of a snore. I legit stopped watching 'em a week or so and I literally cannot remember the names of any of the characters or what the hell is going on in any of their plots.

As clunky as that prototype looks, beggars might want to give choosing a try...

Damn it all, 2020... The Venture Bros was basically the best piece of original programming [adult swim] had. I put my name on one of the petitions to have the show picked up by a streaming service. It'd be infuriating to have the show end now when fairly half of Season 7 was spent setting up Season 8. I expected the plot thread about Rusty being a clone to be The Unreveal since he knows what the learning beds are actually for due to having used them himself as a kid, but they ended with The Monarch having finally ranked up to the point of being able to arch the newly-rich Dr. Venture again, both The Monarch and Dr. Venture learning that they're half-brothers, Hank heading off to find his biological mother, most of the B-cast trying to rebuild the Guild of Calamitous Intent, and the whole rivalry with the Peril Partnership heating up to the point of extortion and murder. They had, at most, maybe two more seasons of material in the show... but cutting it short HERE is a dick move.

Genesis Climber MOSPEADA: Magazine for Anime and Hobby Fan Genesis Climber MOSPEADA Color Graffiti Genesis Climber MOSPEADA File for Animeca Fan (sic) MOSPEADA: Complete Art Works and other books... it's literally just the exact same paragraph reprinted verbatim every time. WRT the earlier discussion of the Condor armo-soldier... you should NEVER expect accurate information from a Robotech website. That fanbase just isn't interested in accuractely documenting anything, they're just out there to write their fanfics. The safest assumption WRT anything you find on a Robotech site you haven't seen before in the OSM is to assume it's BS.

Nah, that part is just in his official bio.

Yeah, the FF-1999 thermonuclear reaction turbine engine has the dubious honor of being the first actual production-model thermonuclear reaction engine to be mass produced for the Earth UN Forces. I'm inclined to doubt that it's different-enough from the FF-2001 that was used in the VF-1 Valkyrie to constitute a different generation of engine since their adoption is separated by less than two years (2006 vs 2008) and Master File's take seems to be leaning hard towards Sky Angels's old stance that they were very similar engines (to the point that early VF space tests used the FF-1999 when the FF-2001 was delayed). Nah, as noted in my last post those are described as 3rd Generation engine technology... that's what set me wondering what the 2nd Generation was. Initial-type thermonuclear reaction turbine engine (1st Gen) -> ? (2nd Gen) -> thermonuclear reaction burst turbine engine (3rd Gen) -> Stage II thermonuclear reaction turbine engine (4th Gen) There's gotta be a missing piece to the puzzle here somewhere, since Master File's writeup of the FF-2550 talks about the engines of the 2nd and 3rd Generation VFs (the VF-4's FF-2011 and VF-11's FF-2025) as being mechanically the same as the VF-1's final FF-2008 engine but different-sized to suit the needs of the target aircraft.

So... looking into the FF-2550 and FF-3001... Variable Fighter Master File: VF-19 Excalibur has some interesting things to say about how the FF-2500 series. One interesting detail that's mentioned is that the FF-2500 series was described as being developed with practicality of maintenance and servicing in mind. Shinnakasu, P&W, and Roice apparently packed the design team off to a New UN Forces warship to work on maintenance of engines in the field. It does erroneously describe VF engines as being fueled with deuterium and helium-3 in the engine section, where in other sections it correctly mentions they're using slush hydrogen. I wonder if the writers goofed and forgot that they weren't working on Master Archive Mobile Suit. Among the mentioned improvements made in the thermonuclear reaction burst turbine engines are: Higher-purity fold carbon produced using an improved synthesis process allows for higher reaction temperatures. A next-generation OTM alloy-based thermoelectric cooler/generator system - the HamiltonX-Ash4 power generation system - was implemented to offer improved generator output and engine cooling. (Interestingly, this technology was noted to have been discovered in 2020 but not implemented until the late 2030s.) In addition to containing the fusion plasma with artificial gravity fields, a cyclic gravitational field produced by the GIC is used to artificially extend the thrust-increase stage by slowing down the plasma and air moving through it to allow it to pick up more heat from the plasma stream until it's able to escape the gravitational field, where it meets the airflow that bypassed the thrust-increase stage and triggers a second explosive pressure increase while also reducing the temperature of the exhaust to a level that the heat-resistant turbine blades can withstand. (This may be the "burst" in "thermonuclear reaction burst turbine".) The engine used for the 2nd Mass Production-type VF-19 is noted to have had further improvements made to its cooling systems and improved heat-resistant materials are used for its turbine blades, allowing for even higher temperatures inside the thrust-increase stage. Somewhat interestingly, Variable Fighter Master File: VF-25 Messiah's coverage of the FF-3001 engine mentions that the thermonuclear reaction burst turbine engines were a third generation engine design. One has to wonder what technically constituted the second generation, since in official materials there are only three types of engine mentioned: the initial-type thermonuclear reaction turbine that was the standard from the VF-1 to VF-17's first variants. One thing that is again noted as a key to breakthroughs in thermonuclear reaction engine technology is improvements in the purity of synthesized fold carbon. It's noted that the development plan had three basic steps/goals: Phase 1: Development of improved heat-resistant materials to facilitate increased reactor temperatures. Phase 2: Development of a more efficient thrust-increase stage using GIC. Phase 3: Review and revise the propellant inflow inside the engine. Apparently one of the things that caused issues for the YF-24 program was the lack of a method to synthesize fold carbon at the requisite level of purity. LAI made the breakthrough they needed with the development of FC.5 fold carbon that enabled the production of the more powerful GIC system. The improvements in the GIC system apparently required that the design of the interior of the engine be revised. Improved engine control systems were needed to moderate the significantly increased output, necessitating the installation of a transmission on the high-pressure turbine. Other noteworthy changes include: Secondary compressor increased from two blades to four, with a larger leading blade used to propel bypass air for cooling the exterior of the engine. Compact thermonuclear reactor size was decreased, but reaction temperature was increased to 400MK. The thrust-increase section is enlarged relative to previous generation engines. Reintroduction of the MHD dynamo as a secondary power generation system to supplement the H-APG thermoelectric generator/cooler. The thrust-increase section contains multiple, separate airflow paths. The flow path closest to the core is hotter and drives the high-pressure turbine and the outer flow paths help reduce the temperature of the exhaust drive the low-pressure turbine. (This is apparently where "Stage II" comes from.) Two separate turbines, one high pressure and one low pressure, are connected to a transmission to allow for fine adjustments in the intake air pressure rather than allowing just the high pressure turbine to drive the compressor, making output more stable.

It's a dangerous condition... fortunately, I have a LOT of books standing between me and doing something crazy like building a death ray and trying to conquer the world. Based on a quick skim, the thermonuclear reaction turbine engines do seem to involve pulsed output... but surprisingly it's not from the thermonuclear reactor. It's pulsation in the GIC system that handles plasma containment in the thrust increase section of the engine. There are a few other minor details where the writers seem to have come down with a spot of amnesia and forgotten they weren't working on Gundam, like misattributing the fuel material of previous-gen engines as deuterium and helium-3 instead of the slush hydrogen that earlier books cited.

So, I got a little bored today after some plans fell through and decided my unprofitable boredom could be spent sussing out something that's bugged me since it first appeared in the first volume of Variable Fighter Master File: VF-1 Valkyrie. Namely, why the VF-1 is described as having three different engines during its mass production run and what the differences between them are according to Master File. This information came to us in Variable Fighter Master File: VF-1 Battroid Valkyrie. As you know, in the official setting the VF-1 Valkyrie only had the FF-2001 engine during its mass production run (2008-2015) but picked up several performance improvements starting with Block 6 upping its maximum output to 240%. I was given to wonder if these new engine types were an attempt to explain why these performance changes occurred. One nice touch I noticed is that this diagram of the internals of the Shinnakasu/P&W/Roice FF-2001 thermonuclear reaction turbine engine is an updated version of the diagram from the original Macross Journal Extra: VF-1 Valkyrie Special Edition "Sky Angels" book. It's a much higher quality drawing, but mechanically they preserved the original engine design the 1984 doujinshi presented. The engine-savvy among us might notice that the engine is actually missing its turbine stage and is therefore not technically a thermonuclear reaction turbine engine. They actually make an effort to explain this, both in terms of the reason for the lack of a turbine and WHY it's still called a turbine engine. Specifically, their stance is that the manufacturers didn't have access to a suitably strong heat-resistant material to make turbine blades from, and that it's still called a thermonuclear reaction turbine engine because later improvements to this design that made up the majority of the production run did add a turbine stage. This art, like the original art, omits the superconducting ram-air precompressor stage that's farther up the VF-1's leg. We can see that the secondary high-pressure compressor there is driven by an electric motor, which runs off electricity generated in the MHD dynamo farther back in the engine. The reactor sits directly behind that, allowing compressed air from the intake to pass over the reactor housing and then into the accelerator stage where it can pick up heat from the reactor and from the reactor's waste plasma (which is confined by Gravity and Inertia Control systems). Thrust control is achieved by vanes that control the amount of air directly exposed to reactor housing and plasma exhaust. Master File contends that the FF-2001 was only used on the very earliest blocks of VF-1 Valkyrie (Blocks 1-5, AKA the "TV" version) and was hastily replaced because it wasn't very good in space operations. When the VF-1 Valkyrie was updated to Block 6 - AKA the "Movie" VF-1 Valkyrie - in Master File's account it received a new engine: the FF-2006. This engine is presented as a derivative/improved version of the FF-2001 that could be called a continuing parallel development that went on while the FF-2001 went into production on the Block 1-5 VF-1 Valkyrie. How did it improve on the FF-2001? To improve control in low output scenarios, they reduced the number of blades in the secondary high pressure compressor from 6 to 4. Adjustments were made to the volume of the compact thermonuclear reactor and thrust-increasing stage to more efficiently transfer heat to the intake air. To address durability/lifespan issues in the original FF-2001's MHD dynamo resulting from its continuous exposure to high-temperature plasma, the MHD dynamo inside the thrust-increase stage was replaced by a thermoelectric converter. A secondary air inlet was added behind the second compressor stage, allowing the engine to function like a ramjet in high speed flight by bypassing the compressor to allow ram air to enter the engine directly without passing through the compressor. This is noted to have improved the top speed and high altitude performance of the VF-1, to the extent that it actually increased the VF-1's service ceiling. Then there's the FF-2008, the engine that Master File asserts was the standard for the VF-1 from Block 9 to the end of mass production. As you can see, the FF-2008 keeps a lot of the refinements introduced on the FF-2006 and finally adds that long-missing turbine that makes it a turbine engine. Master File calls this the true start of the history of the full-scale thermonuclear reaction turbine engine. The superconducting motor to drive the high pressure compressor was abolished and the compressor is now driven directly off the turbine stage. Improvements made to the compact thermonuclear reactor and GIC maintain plasma containment more effectively even at hypersonic wind speeds, allowing the FF-2008 to operate as a scramjet in addition to its existing low-bypass turbofan jet engine, ramjet, and fusion plasma rocket modes. Improved GIC function allows the engine to retain plasma-heated air for longer, allowing the thermoelectric converters to collect more energy and reducing the temperature of the engine exhaust in battroid mode (and the potential danger to the surrounding environment and nearby ground personnel). My next little boredom-motivated investigation is gonna be how exactly thermonuclear reaction burst turbines and Stage II engines differ from the standard thermonuclear reaction turbine engine nominally embodied by the FF-2008.

I wouldn't expect much on that front from this volume, mainly because all the fun stuff that modelers might find very useful like unit paintjobs, markings, variants, armaments, etc. is in the four previous VF-1 Valkyrie-focused Master File books already. I'm interested to see how they'll fill 128 pages talking about Roy and the VF-1S given that Roy's career wasn't that long and he only flew two models of VF... the VF-0S and VF-1S.

Still waiting for HLJ to confirm they've got my copies in... but, all in all, I don't expect much from this book. If it's anything like the MSV Ace Pilot Log, it'll be a solid but unremarkable entry in its series.

Probably, yeah... like how the UN Forces weaponized the overpowered radar system on the SDR-04-Mk.XII Phalanx Destroid. At the very least, short-burst irradiation at that level would make the target pilot horribly ill. Even with the limiters in place, the New UN Forces had so many problems with loss of control accidents thanks to the excessively high performance of the VF-19 and VF-22 that they had to abandon them in favor of something less insane.