Seto Kaiba

It's not anything revolutionary, but it's definitely a lighthearted breath of fresh air in a world otherwise inundated with bad news.

My read on it is that it's basically his version of a classic muscle car as he heads into an early midlife crisis. It's not bleeding edge performance, but for him something like an Inertia Store Converter probably counts as cheating.

I like to think General Gomez, the man who was dead-set on killing the Project Super Nova contest in favor of the Ghost, likely had to be forcibly restrained during Isamu's debriefing. It's official. The "space trucker" bit was revealed at the aforementioned official Macross concert, and the thing about him sinking his life savings into the VF-19EF/A "Isamu Special" is taken from the Mechanic Sheet for the VF-19EF/A "Isamu Special" in the official Macross encyclopedia Macross Chronicle. Ouch... my group is similarly on hiatus, due to furloughs from our various offices dumping more work on us. We were in the middle of a campaign that's playing with the aftermath of the rather weak ending of Macross the Musiculture.

Y'know, I don't know... I don't recall them ever offering an explanation for what the military said to explain away the presence of the YF-19 and YF-21.

Reincarnated into an Otome Game as a Villainess With Only Destruction Flags confirmed for a second season. https://www.crunchyroll.com/anime-news/2020/06/20-1/my-next-life-as-a-villainess-all-routes-lead-to-doom-continues-dodging-death-flags-in-2021

Unfortunately, that's all I was able to find... most of the character designer's published artbooks are just collections of storyboards from Banner of the Stars.

Trying again, as attachments,

Sorry, something about how I pasted the images into the post didn't go over well with the forums. I'll re-upload them as attachments.

Unfortunately, most of his published Design Works volumes are just storyboard collections. Here's some reasonable color reference I turned up in a collection of DVD booklet scans:

Wow... did NOT expect this request for art reference to be as hard to fulfill as it turned out to be. The only content I was able to turn up is from the sequel, Banner of the Stars. The following is from character designer Keisuke Watabe's Design Works Vol.4:

If you stop and think about what the consequences for Isamu's offenses likely was, he's basically Macross's Kou Uraki... saved from the firing squad by the government covering up the circumstances of the incident he played such a pivotal role in.

This season's one cour shows are drawing to a close this week... and I have to admit, I won't miss most of them. The 8th Son? That Can't Be Right! deserves special acknowledgement. Not just because it's the most blatantly half-assed and lazily-written Isekai story I've ever seen... but also because its final episode seems to give even fewer f*cks about the story than the audience does. The climactic confrontation between the protagonist and his evil oldest brother - an event that the entirely of the last two episodes was spent building up to - lasts a minute and ten seconds and consists of one thrown punch followed by immediate obliteration by holy magic. It's over so fast there's literally 2/3 of the episode left when it's done. If this were One Punch Man they'd make a joke out of how short the fight was, but this is played completely seriously and treated like a major accomplishment and the remainder of the episode is spent watching the King's court argue over his reward for it. The ending reveals his grand plan for all that land he just inherited by killing the previous heir is to... make a miso and soy sauce factory. If I didn't know better, I'd swear I had just been trolled. I am hoping for better from Reincarnated into an Otome Game as a Villainess With Only Destruction Flags when its final episode hits Crunchyroll tomorrow.

Oh, it cost him a lot more than that... he sank his entire life savings into that VF-19EF/A. Assuming, of course, that Spaz Platoon can keep its undiagnosed ADHD under control long enough to actually deal with its assigned objectives... One has to wonder... Isamu isn't exactly a stable individual by any stretch of the imagination. He's a meatheaded adrenaline junkie with poor impulse control and little-to-no respect for authority. That's why every part of his career in the New UN Forces was punctuated with disciplinary hearings, administrative punishments, and multiple punitive reassignments. Even a major achievement like having defeated the out-of-control AI Sharon Apple after it seized control of Earth's defenses was tainted by the fact that he stole a heavily armed top secret VF and a fold booster test article, destroyed part of a hangar complex at New Edwards Test Flight Center, incurred some pretty hefty expenses for the Eden NUNS chasing him in his stolen VF and trying to shoot him down, attacked and destroyed part of Earth's orbital defense network, and caused all kinds of property damage on Earth beforehand. He took his retirement from the New UN Forces to avoid being pushed into an administrative position where he'd have to behave like a responsible adult, blew his life savings on a VF after attempting to buy a banned-for-export VF one part at a time in an illegal transaction, and took a job as a space trucker with Bilra Transport. If Myung is still with him, she's probably aging at ten times the rate he is from the stress of dealing with him. If they were together for any length of time, my bet is she dumped him or divorced him after he nearly got arrested for trying to buy VF-19 parts under the table and blew his entire savings on a VF before running off to live as a space trucker in the sticks.

That should have landed Isamu in prison, had Dr. Jan Neumann not covered for him.

As I hinted at in my previous post, nomenclature is a bit of a sticky wicket when it comes to the VF-19 that Isamu flies in Macross Frontier: Sayonara no Tsubasa... and I'm going to try to put this in approximate chronological order by publication: January 2011 The light novel Macross the Ride starts serialization in Dengeki Hobby magazine, and its first chapter "Deep Space Warbird" establishes that the branch of SMS operating in the Macross Frontier emigrant fleet had several platoons equipped with a locally-developed VF-19 "monkey model" variant designated "VF-19EF Caliburn". The VF-19EF Caliburn is a 2nd Mass Production type VF-19 modified for all-regime operation, and to a limited extent is used for data collection for the YF-25 program. 26 February 2011 The movie Macross Frontier: Sayonara no Tsubasa debuts in theaters, incl. a brief cameo scene featuring Isamu Dyson flying an aircraft that appears to be a 1st Mass Production type VF-19 in colors identical to his infamous YF-19-2 from Macross Plus. 31 March 2011 Ukyo Kodachi's novelization of Macross Frontier: Sayonara no Tsubasa is released. The text identifies Isamu's VF-19 as the "VF-19ADVANCE Excalibur Advance". 16 April 2011 The Official Complete Book: Theatrical Version Macross F: Sayonara no Tsubasa is released. Isamu's VF-19 is mentioned only in passing, and referred to only as a "VF-19 SMS Ver." in the text. 13 May 2014 Issue 69 (nice) of Macross Chronicle's revised edition is published, including a Mechanic Sheet for Isamu's VF-19 which refers to it as the "VF-19EF/A Isamu Special" and specifically links it to the monkey model VF-19EF Caliburn from Macross the Ride. June 2015 Bandai releases the DX Chogokin toy for Isamu's VF-19. The packaging uses the movie novelization's designation "VF-19ADVANCE". March 2017 Hasegawa releases a 1/72 scale kit of Isamu's VF-19. The packaging uses the Macross Chronicle designation "VF-19EF/A Isamu Special". 17 March 2017 SoftBank releases Variable Fighter Master File: VF-31 Siegfried, which includes the offending statement that refers to the "VF-19 Advance" as being a catch-all name for modernizations and refurbishments of the VF-19. So you see the problem... Isamu's VF-19 from the movie has been very inconsistently named... the movie's official artbook just calls it "VF-19 SMS Ver.", Macross Chronicle and Hasegawa's kit call it "VF-19EF/A Isamu Special", and the movie's novelization and Bandai call it "VF-19ADVANCE Excalibur Advance". In any event, prior to SoftBank walking in and trying to change the context of "VF-19 Advance", the term referred to a very specific unique aircraft built for Isamu Dyson and not some family of VF-19 modernization programs. Hence the weird disconnect with that thing in the VF-31 Master File that seemingly has a VF-25's nose, a YF-30's multipurpose container, and the VF-31's tail. Yeah, the VF-19EF Caliburn was a new design in Macross the Ride... one of several special VF-19s to appear in that story (also the only one of those that was a mass production unit). The VF-19EF Caliburn was a VF-19 variant that the Macross Frontier fleet independently developed based on the reduced capability export specification for the VF-19E Excalibur. Like the YF/VF-25, it was a joint venture of the fleet arsenal, Shinsei Industry, and LAI. Modifications were made to the design to improve its atmospheric performance from the VF-19 2nd production type that had been optimized for space use. They built 156 of them, which were divided up between the fleet's New UN Forces, a New UN Spacy special counterterrorism unit called "Round Table", and the fleet's branch of SMS. There were three variants developed... the base VF-19EF, a command variant informally designated VF-19EFs, and a reconnaissance/AWACs variant designated RVF-19EF. A few were converted into the VF-19ACTIVE Nothung technology demonstrator specification. Some were outfitted with EX-Gear. The first couple of trial production VF-25s were entering service when the VF-19EF was being used by the NUNS and much of SMS in Macross the Ride.

IIRC that's in the Blu-ray liner notes... alongside the remarks about the original plan for the series having been 13 episodes and a movie until early in its development. There are a number of one-off errors like that Mirage VF-31C error on page 007... though if you look on the very next page, you'll notice they got it right in every other picture in that section. All told, I suspect there are just too damn many versions of the VF-31 and they got them mixed up because they're trying to focus on Xaos Valkyrie Works' VF-31 Siegfried in place of the much better-looking production model. The book is, at least, not using VF-31A and VF-31S interchangeably... it very clearly differentiates the two, but it spends a LOT of time trying to explain how they're different while not really giving much attention to the VF-31A that's tipped to be the next main fighter of the Brisingr Alliance NUNS. It's a bit frustrating, since this book outright contradicts the series itself about the origins of the VF-31 customs that Xaos uses... trying to pass the forward-swept winglets and so on off as alternative prototypes instead of an aftermarket custom job. As to Master File's "original" variants... they tend to fall into three basic categories: Accidental duplication of things that already exist in Macross's official setting... e.g. Master File's VF-1N is essentially the exact same thing as the official setting's VF-1A+ and its VF-1G is essentially just a VEFR-1 drawn in a less cluttered style. Sensible things which almost certainly exist offscreen in the official setting... e.g. model conversion training variants for the VF-19 and VF-25, a VF-19 AWACS variant, a bomber variant of the VF-22, and so on. Ridiculous-looking garbage that the authors conceived of seemingly without regard for feasibility, which exist mainly to pad a book's page count. The way it seems to work with Master File, the less official setting material there is for a particular design the more likely they are to pad the book out with original variants and thus the more likely it is that they'll start throwing in stuff that belongs in that third category. I don't think it's a coincidence that the three worst books - VF-22, VF-4, and VF-31 - have a lot of those out-there original variants in them and are HEAVILY padded to cover for a lack of research. The very best books in the series, the VF-19 and VF-25 books, also have lots of variants, but they're more sensible ones that were clearly given a fair amount of actual thought and the few out-there ones they have mostly aren't original. Nope... at the very least, the writers of Variable Fighter Master File: VF-31 Siegfried remembered that the VF-31 was a further development of the Shinsei/LAI/Uroboros YF-30 Chronos from Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy. They do make several mentions of an improved YF-30B along the way as well, in a similar vein to the YF-29B that appeared in Macross 30's story as the rival's VF. That little blurb on page 028 about a "YF-19 Advance" is somewhat unhelpful from an official setting viewpoint since there's already a specific aircraft called "VF-19ADVANCE" in the novelization of the Macross Frontier movies (which is also variously known as "VF-19 SMS Ver." in the official artbooks and "VF-19EF/A Isamu Special" in Macross Chronicle). What it describes is the term "VF-19 Advance" as an umbrella term for a number of different modernization and refurbishment plans that've been applied to the VF-19 over the years by the Jan Neumann design office at Shinsei Industry. This one in particular is described as a refurbished model (presumably post-2060) that includes new nose sensor windows, a new tail design, and the multipurpose container unit from the YF-30. To be fair, it may well be that the default configuration is meant to be similar to the YF-30's where the gunpod was stored in a conventional centerline weapons station instead of on the container itself (as it is when Delta Flight equips the fold speaker container early in Macross Delta). Having the beam gunpod on the container kind of apes the MDE beam cannon turret that the YF-30 had in the novelization of Macross 30.

Oh, anyone with an ounce of sense would obviously point out that making an annual convention tour the full extent of the brand's marketing of new products itself is a spectacularly bad idea... but because they put all of the brand's marketing in the hands of a man who doesn't really understand how to promote a product, that's all they ever do. Harmony Gold's VP of Marketing doesn't have the first bloody clue how to put together a press release. They rely on the convention tour to promote anything they're doing themselves and product releases from licensees are promoted by the licensees themselves or not at all. As they say, "You get what you pay for"... and Harmony Gold put the Robotech franchise staff together on the cheap. Have you ever seen someone screw up a Chia Pet? It's HORRIFYING. I saw someone mess up a Bob Ross chia head and it looked like something out of a horror movie. It's not that movie studios NEED to make a movie to retain their license to an IP... it's that an exclusive license to a major property like Spider-Man is so expensive that the studio can't cost-justify retaining the rights without using them. An exclusive license to a do-nothing, borderline nonentity property like Robotech is a petty cash transaction by the standards of a AAA studio, so they can afford to buy up the rights to dozens of properties like that on a whim and sit on them until the licenses expire even if it's just to deny them to rival studios. Harmony Gold hangs onto its license agreement with Tatsunoko Production as hard as they do not because the rights to Robotech are worth anything... but because the rights to the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross and the trademarks they hold on it are worth quite a bit more to any party that wants to try to bring the rest of Macross to the US. They're hoping Macross becomes enough of a phenomenon that they can either strongarm Big West into licensing the rest of Macross to them by threatening trademark infringement suits over the other shows or at least collect a tidy sum in royalties from distribution without having to do any actual work themselves. For their part, Tatsunoko Production doesn't care because they were able to goad Harmony Gold into dropping a lawsuit against them and cancelling a debt owed from a prior arbitration in exchange for renewing a license to one show that has a successful franchise they're not a part of and two shows from their back catalog that practically nobody remembers or cares about. If Tatsunoko were to revoke or not renew Harmony Gold's license, Harmony Gold wouldn't be able to "squat" on the IP because they don't own any of it. The Robotech franchise has all the structural integrity of cotton candy. There was, for a long time, a recurring joke that McKeever only updated the slideshow once every five years or so for precisely that reason. Apart from whatever sad effort they were making in CafePress apparel (Robotech socks, really?) there wasn't anything new to talk about... so they just repeated the same old points even when people who worked on the cancelled projects like Richard Epcar or the studio behind Robotech Academy were saying loudly and clearly that it was cancelled. Back when the site was new, the Robotech.com forums were one of the few unambiguously good ideas that the newly reconstituted Robotech franchise staff had. Prior to that, the Robotech fanbase's primary means of interaction was various UseNet groups. Those early communities were largely unregulated and incredibly toxic thanks to fans endlessly rehashing the same old arguments about which of the competing versions of Robotech was the "true" one. A lot of major franchises were creating their own official online presences with built-in communities as a way of marketing directly to fans, and Harmony Gold quite sensibly jumped on the bandwagon. For Robotech, including forums in the new official website they were making was a way to not only maintain a captive audience they could market directly to with the site's web storefront. It was also a way for Harmony Gold to have control over the fanbase's dialogue about the series. It enabled them to almost totally abolish the rampant toxicity that had driven so many fans away from the franchise in the late 90's. When combined with the official "Infopedia", it enabled them to gently steer the fandom away from the old material and towards the newly established official setting they established with their reboot and relaunch of Robotech that they envisioned as the framework for reinventing Robotech as a viable modern anime property. In that capacity, the Robotech.com forums were the only part of Robotech's attempted "comeback" that was an unqualified success which significantly improved Robotech's prospects for long-term success. As is so often the case, the weak link in the system was the people in charge. To be precise, it was abuse of authority by two of the volunteer moderators who had been recruited to police the forums. Harmony Gold picked the volunteer moderators from the heavily active long-time fans who'd been invited to beta-test the new website, and while most of them were fairly level-headed there were a few hardcore sycophants mixed in with them. They'd been sucking up to members of the Robotech franchise staff in the hopes of being the next Robotech superfans to gain paying positions at Harmony Gold. They were still actually halfway passable moderators as long as the fandom's outlook on Robotech was rosy, but they were totally and completely unprepared to deal with the overwhelmingly negative reception that Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles got. Almost nobody had anything nice to say about Shadow Chronicles, and their reaction to that negativity was to ban all the fans whose criticisms crossed lines in the site's Terms of Use. When that failed to stifle criticism of the OVA and steer the discussion towards unbridled positivity, they started to concoct increasingly flimsy pretexts to ban people who spoke critically of the OVA... which was basically everyone. When the dust settled, there were only a dozen or so regulars on the forums and everyone else had either been banned or left for better communities elsewhere. The actions of those two suckup "superfans" did almost as much damage to Robotech as the failure of Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles itself did. Then the hacker attacks started. Harmony Gold's management had basically neglected the maintenance of the official website except for the web storefront, so the badly outdated content management system the site ran on was compromised a bunch of times in quick succession until HG took the whole damn thing down. This was what ultimately killed what remained of the community that they had built... they (sensibly) temporarily shut it down because they couldn't secure the software it ran on, but then never bothered to build a replacement until a full decade later. Even though the new community section was open to previously banned users, the entire community had long since moved on and nobody really gave a toss about it anymore. So now the only activity it sees is spambots. Everyone had either moved on from the franchise entirely or moved to fan-run groups on social media... most of which are also populated mainly by bot accounts.

Nope... I'd call Variable Fighter Master File: VF-31 Siegfried one of the most disappointing installments in the series. Most of the VF-31 book's technical material is reprinted content originally written for Variable Fighter Master File: VF-25 Messiah. It must be admitted that this is at least partly justified by the VF-31's high level of parts commonality with the VF-25, but it's still disappointing. The portions of the VF-31 book that are actually original are mostly garbage. The worst of its issues is that the writers seem to periodically forget that the Siegfrieds are extremely expensive one-of-a-kind Ace Custom units individually tailored to their pilots by a third party that modified trial production VF-31A Kairos units from their stock configuration. It keeps trying to pass the Siegfried off as a production-intent configuration.

When you think about it, the VF-4 can be described as the merger of a VF-1 and its Strike Pack.

True... it's the fact that their VP of Marketing has no idea how to put together an online press release that stops them from doing press releases. No joke. The whole reason that the annual Robotech convention tour exists is because McKeever and co. seriously believe that that's the most effective way to promote the brand. It's not just their show that's decades behind the times. Nothing whatsoever. As I noted in my last post, Harmony Gold effectively defunded new Robotech development back in '07 when Shadow Chronicles flopped and seem to have abandoned the field entirely after Robotech Academy bombed on Kickstarter in '14. Last I recall hearing, Harmony Gold was still halfheartedly trying to do that thing they do where they pretend their most recently cancelled project is just "on hiatus" and might still get made one day... though the studio that made the Robotech Academy trailer indicated quite clearly that it was definitely cancelled.

As a Magic 8 Ball might say... Outlook Not So Good. Thanks to the pandemic shutdown, a lot of stuff got delayed... including some shows that were in active production being put on hiatus for the health and safety of the production staff.

Based on what's said in Master File with respect to the capacity of the conformal fuel tanks the Super Pack adds... between 30 and 45 minutes of main engine operation at full power, but that's extended by the use of rockets to supplement the main engines. Not to mention that the VF-4 is a substantially better space fighter than the VF-1 is at any range. What was the number they gave? A 40% improvement over the VF-1 Super Valkyrie in space combat performance? There's some talk in the second VFMF book about fuel bladders that were inserted into the intakes for that purpose, but they didn't provide a significant increase in fuel capacity.

Sort of... their thermonuclear reaction turbine engines use the plasma produced in their compact thermonuclear reactors as propellant in space flight. This approach understandably has its ups and downs. The practical benefits include a greatly simplified fuel system that only needs tanks for one type of fuel material that can be used with equal ease in atmosphere and space and being able to make that hydrogen slush fuel pull double duty as a coolant for the engine. The primary downside is that using the plasma produced in the reactors as main engine propellant in space flight forces the VF to consume its fuel exponentially faster in space. This, of course, led to the addition of FAST packs that compensated for this shortcoming by adding liquid-fuel rockets to reduce the burden on the main engines and massive bolt-on fuel tanks to extend the onboard fuel supply. A VF-1's FF-2001 engines have enough fuel to run for almost a month in atmosphere... but in space, at maximum thrust the internal propellant supply is good for about ten minutes at the VF's maximum thrust. That's 4,200x increase in fuel consumption. Verniers and so on burn liquid hydrogen and oxygen, as do the liquid fuel rockets built into some VFs (e.g. the VF-1's backpack) and bolt-on rockets like the VF-1's Super Pack.

There's not a lot, really... though the absence of various types of development is one way to gauge things. Robotech is functionally dead as an animated property. The last serious effort to continue the Robotech animated series - Tommy Yune's "Shadow Saga" OVA - ended in cancellation after just one episode when it was poorly received by fans and ignored by most everyone else. That failure caused Harmony Gold to cease funding future development of Robotech's animated series, and seven years later fans refused to foot the bill for the Robotech Academy pilot on Kickstarter. All development halted after the campaign there failed. Robotech is a nonexistent property as a live-action film franchise. There has been no indication of any progress made towards the start of development, never mind production, in the thirteen years and counting since the license was announced. Robotech is functionally dead as a comic book property. Titan Comics' Robotech Remix appears to have been cancelled early this year after just four issues, with the publisher refusing to answer any questions about its status. The only forthcoming titles are an assortment of trade paperback reprints of old Comico comics. It is not immediately clear why Titan abandoned Remix, since their sales were poor but certainly no worse than those of many long-running niche comics, but the distributor is not expecting any new issues and has cancelled all outstanding orders. Robotech's gaming side is in a pretty pathetic state. There are no forthcoming video games for any console. Palladium Books, the franchise's oldest licensee, had its license revoked by Harmony Gold two years ago over fiscal improprieties related to a Robotech-branded tabletop miniatures game that Palladium was developing via Kickstarter. The "traditional game" licenses passed to indie outfits like Strange Machine Games who produced a few cheap and forgettable cardstock boardgames that sold only to die-hard fans and only in very limited quantities, the first installment new RPG that most Robotech fans found obnoxiously half-assed, and some so-so miniatures that are at least better than the mess Palladium came up with (which is "damned by faint praise"). Robotech's toy side is also in a pretty pathetic state. Toynami is making some knockoff Funko Pop-type collectibles, Caliber Wings did an F-14 redeco and non-transforming VF-1 of passable quality, and the rest is low volume indie stuff from Hong Kong that has met with very mixed receptions or incredibly overpriced limited edition statues that double as bluetooth speakers. By in large, the real licensees seem to have given up the ship in the face of competition from Japan's Macross franchise and everything the rest make these days is dual-branded in the hopes of attracting Macross fans to buy it. At least two of their licensees were actual toy bootleggers, one of which went out of business due to mismanagement of its own finances. Robotech's online community is kind of a joke. The official website's discussion boards are populated more or less exclusively by bots, and the Facebook groups are mostly devoted to taking the piss out of Robotech. For ultra-low-volume borderline bootleg stuff, yeah. Nope.