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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    I used to play Warhammer 40,000 on a regular basis... I've been looking at getting back into it. Some of my coworkers roped me into joining their Overwatch team, so I've been playing that competitively for about half a year now. I've also been coordinating watch parties on Discord with several coworkers and friends who are casual anime fans looking to sample various titles... we've been doing a weekly Jojo's Bizarre Adventure marathon and finally got to Stardust Crusaders: Battle in Egypt this week. My RPG group's on hiatus, but we've been taking a break from my heavily hand-edited take on Palladium Books's Macross RPG to play Dark Heresy and Pathfinder. I'm also involved as a volunteer researcher with a couple different local historical societies, and I'm a volunteer coordinator and judge for National History Day's events here in Michigan. ... and because it sort of meshes with my Macross hobby, I also sometimes do translations by request for Gundam publications like Master Archive Mobile Suit and artbooks from various other anime properties. I've also occasionally accepted commissions to translate doujinshi, which I've mostly stopped because there isn't enough brain bleach in the world to unsee the things I've seen. (It's not even the gore or freaky porn, some of the stuff I've seen makes Rob pecs-bigger-than-their-head help-I-can't-draw-feet Liefeld look like a master of anatomy.) I'm not sure if it necessarily counts as a hobby, but I also take in a lot of pets that people can't care for or can't take with them to a new home... I've ended up with a lot of weird critters part-time or full-time because of that.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    I mean, we already kinda did that... it was called Macross 7. The Varauta forces are basically a second Supervision Army, created by the Protodeviln to help Gepernich pursue his more humane (but still pretty awful) plan to make a sustainable spiritia farm instead of nearly obliterating all life in the galaxy (again). Well, they used both the Megaroad-13 colony and later the captured Zentradi citizens of Macross-5... but as far as we know they never managed to link up with the Supervision Army they created in the ancient past.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Past tense... the Supervision Army was controlled by the Protodeviln. After the Protodeviln were sealed away by the anima spiritia, the brainwashed members of the Supervision Army lost the highest level of their chain of command. With neither side having anyone left who could call a halt to the conflict, the Zentradi forces and Supervision Army have continued to follow the last orders they were given and have waged 500,000 years of war against each other with no sign of stopping. Exsedol was afraid of the Protodeviln because they were essentially terrifying, utterly unstoppable monsters by the Zentradi's standards. It took anima spiritia, Protoculture who had special spirita like Basara's, to contain the Protodeviln and seal them away in the laboratory where they had been created. Initially, the Zentradi were unable to effectively oppose the Supervision Army because they had standing orders to not "interfere with" the Protoculture... and the Supervision Army's troops included vast numbers of brainwashed Protoculture. It wasn't until the order to not interfere with the Protoculture was rescinded that the Zentradi forces could properly fight against the Supervision Army.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    There's been no mention of any consequence like that... though the Supervision Army has more pressing concerns, like the Zentradi who've been hounding them with the intention of exterminating them for the last 500,000+ years.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Only one small portion of it was mentioned in a marginal note on one piece of line art from the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross. I noticed the connection during a discussion on another forum about Macross drawing inspiration from the US armed forces for much of the UN Forces. While I was looking for a picture to show an example of the old school Army bumper numbers I happened upon a picture that also had the AR-850-5 1942 formation markings visible and it just clicked. There are several other members here who have a better claim to that title than I do... and a few folks who don't come here anymore who'd also have a pretty good claim on it as well.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    When Macross was made, the US Navy's career path for pilots was Pilot -> XO -> CO -> CAG -> CO of a high-draft support ship -> CO of a larger ship Max's career followed a similar trajectory from pilot to squadron leader to XO and CO on an escort ship to CO of a Battle-class. Macross actually does an OK job of following formation organizations nicked from the US Armed Forces... there are fairly few distinctly Japanese touches to its organization, it's mostly American.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    I'm not entirely sure what you're asking? The presence or absence of a dedicated unit command variant doesn't really have any implications for squadron or air wing organization, modex numbers, etc. In the real world, all that sets a CAG bird apart from the rest of the squadron is that (if certain permissions are obtained) it can have the squadron colors instead of the standard low-viz paintjob. Macross is a bit more lax about low-viz paintjobs and such, so all that would really set a CAG bird apart would be its modex number.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    The only member of the Jenius family who got screwed over was Mirage... who had to deal with feelings of inadequacy because she was merely Above Average in a family that not only literally defined what excellence meant as a VF pilot, but also dominated in politics and professional music.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Macross borrows a lot from US Armed Forces practices and systems, but it doesn't always follow those systems to the letter. For instance, the SVF-1 Skulls have a weird aberrant modex number set that starts with a leading 0. The Destroid formation markings are borrowed from World War II-vintage US Army regulation AR-850-5, though they're missing division-level numbers. As to why Hikaru's VF-4A and Roy's VF-1S had a squadron commander's modex (x01) instead of a modern CAG modex (x00)... Macross's usage of the term CAG seems to be more in line with the original context of the title from World War II. Back then, the CAG was simply the most senior squadron commander currently embarked and functioned as a department head under the ship's captain while continuing to lead their squadron directly. It was after the war that the post of CAG evolved into a dedicated administrative billet for a senior officer who had "graduated" from squadron command on a career path towards being made captain of an escort vessel.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Unless there's been a run on 20-grit sandpaper, I doubt anyone would want to use something quite that unpleasant.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Nope... the Fold Dimensional Resonance system is only shown piercing a fold fault once, and that was a fold fault barrier produced by the Fold Evil. It got stuck on its first try too, until Basara boosted it with song energy. It's not clear how the Fold Dimensional Resonance system would have facilitated overcoming fold faults, unless perhaps it was intended to work in concert with a regular fold booster to help it operate like a super fold booster.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Part of it is, as @sketchley said, a convenient contrivance of the plot. Having Reon Sakaki get shot down in orbit of Uroboros while on a mission to hand-deliver a YF-25 Prophecy from the SMS Sephira branch to the Uroboros branch was very convenient to the plot, since it set up a combat tutorial vs. Rod's YF-29B, introduced Reon's rival (Rod Baltemar), and being shot down put him in the position of having no choice but to take a position with the Uroboros SMS and participate in the plot after the Uroboros Aurora flares up and blocks all fold travel to and from the planet while he's in hospital recovering from the injuries he sustained in the crash after he was shot down. There is also an element of secrecy to it. Strategic Military Services and its parent company Bilra Transport chose Uroboros for its remoteness as a place to develop the YF-30 Chronos as clandestinely as possible. It was an extension of Mr. Bilra's mania about finding a way to overcome fold faults. Parting out an existing, unneeded aircraft would be one way to conceal having acquired the Ariel II "Brunhilde" airframe control AI system from the YF-25. Otherwise, attempting to acquire a new one from the manufacturer would potentially draw unwanted scrutiny to the top secret project... one doesn't simply place an order for bleeding edge military avionics and expect it to go unscrutinized.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Macross Chronicle's Mechanic Sheet for the factory satellite seen in the Super Dimension Fortress Macross TV series indicates that factory satellites have a fleet of robot ships they use to mine the necessary resources to facilitate continued production. Presumably there is some "recycling" involved as well, given Quamzin's allusions to "retiring" elderly Zentradi and what we see of biomatter recycling in Macross Frontier.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Well, yes... though in practical terms there isn't actually much difference between the YF-25 and VF-25 outside of its monitor turret and tandem cockpit. It might as well be a VF-25B with a different head. Mind you, the whole reason Reon Sakaki was ferrying that YF-25 from Sephira to Uroboros was so that the SMS office on Uroboros could part it out and use some of its more useful bits (like its Ariel II airframe control AI) in the YF-30. Presumably Sephira was not willing to part with a production aircraft on the altar of Major Blanchette's ambition. The idol group Walkure was extremely well-received in Japan and still enjoys considerable popularity there today. I'm not sure I'd be willing to argue that the Macross Delta series itself was particularly popular or well-received outside of its role of promoting Walkure's albums and live concerts. The show's merchandising is pretty limited outside the realm of Walkure character goods. There's the obligatory novelization, manga adaptation, PSP game, and DX Chogokin toys, and then there's two brief gaiden manga titles, a technical manual that's mostly copy-pasted from a previous Macross Frontier book, and some model kits in various scales. There's very little in terms of character goods for Delta Flight or Darwent High School Host Club The Aerial Knights except for some Mirage stuff (a lot of which is her cosplaying a Walkure member) and even a fair number of the kits are Walkure versions of various mecha even though exactly none of the Walkure characters are pilots. The kit for Roid's Sv-262Hs had to be advertised with Mikumo on the box instead of Roid, and come with a huge Mikumo sticker that covers a lot of the plane. Roid's not the only one getting shorted either, Bogue and Keith are the only two members of the Aerial Knights to get kits and actually appear on the box art. Theo, Xao, Hermann, and Qasim apparently don't count. So yeah, I'd say Macross Delta was well-received and quite popular in Japan... but it's mostly because of Walkure. (Not gonna lie, I love the setting, I've got all of Walkure's albums, and the VF-31 and Sv-262 are some of my favorite later Kawamori designs... but if you tried to make Macross Delta stand on the merits of its heavily-derivative and obviously phoned-in story and the horribly underdeveloped cast, I wouldn't rate it much higher than I did The Price of Smiles, Tatsunoko's ill-fated attempt to get back into mecha anime for its anniversary that didn't so much go down in flames as find the elevator in Hell's sub-basement was out of order.) We don't really know any details, do we? I mean, we know the title is Absolute LIVE!!!!!! and that's about the end of it.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    It's possible some did... but if there were any, we haven't been told about it. As to "why incur the extra development costs", in part it's to get yourself something better than a half-complete YF-24 and partly to have something you can sell in export to turn your own profit on it... as the Macross Frontier fleet is alleged to have done in various sources like Master File (and implied to have actually taken place via Macross 30 showing a VF-25 from Sephira) and the Brisingr Alliance was explicitly planning to do in Macross Delta with the VF-31A Kairos.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    That is something that Master File came up with, independent of the official setting.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, the YF-24 is the common ancestor of all 5th Generation VFs so far... and likely will remain a common ancestor to all of them, since the technology that defines the 5th Generation was developed on and for it. The gimmick the last two shows have done where the shiny new VF is only available to a non-military group of elite mooks who are picked to test it because they're legally expendable is overdone. The whole PMC schtick is overdone too, though at least Xaos was closer to the reality of PMCs than SMS was... what with Xaos being mostly made up of people who couldn't hack it in the military's ranks. All they were really missing, since Lady M constitutes corrupt corporate management, was having the ranks packed with the kind of pasty, out-of-shape, military-cosplaying militia nut the real military didn't want, convinced they're living out the plot of their very own Call of Duty game. I'd like to see a return to something closer to the original series, where the protagonists were the actual military and there wasn't a unit of elites doing all the heavy lifting with VFs a generation newer than everyone else's. Or, hell, let's go towards the realistic and have the PMC be the bad guys... or maybe an underequipped PMC can save the day, like in Terrestrial Defense Enterprise Dai-Guard. (In the last Macross RPG campaign I ran, the villain was a megacorp with its own PMC, the Canaries.... and the Canaries are, yes, based on the ones from Red Dwarf in every respect.)
  18. Seto Kaiba
    It wasn't the merchandising rights to Macross: Do You Remember Love? that had unclear ownership... it was the distribution rights that nobody's really clear on the ownership of. Tatsunoko does still have the merchandising rights to the movie outside of Japan, and Harmony Gold licensed those rights c.2001 after their failed bid to stop Macross toy imports with cease and desists claiming they owned the rights to all Macross titles. They were basically trying to ensure that their then-forthcoming Toynami VF-1 toys wouldn't be competing against higher-quality import toys from Japan. They did briefly experiment with making Do You Remember Love? merchandise of their own and importing toys from Japan, but it seems to have been a failure in no small part because they were Robotech.com store exclusives... Robotech fans have little to no interest in non-Robotech merchandise, and Macross fans were generally averse to the site itself to say nothing of the buying from the same idiot brigade responsible for preventing Macross distribution in the west. Nowadays, with their brand having fallen even farther into obscurity and ineptitude, they and their bargain basement licensees are unwilling to gamble on any but the most sure bets when it comes to saleable Robotech merchandise.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    If I had my way, I'd like to see them go backwards a bit and give us a story where the main VF is from one of the neglected generations... like the largely skipped 2nd Generation, the 3rd that was mostly only around as cannon fodder in Plus and 7, or the 4th when the VF-171 was actually new.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Let's be honest, he makes an exceptionally good point... the R-word Series That Must Not Be Named is a textbook example of why you DO NOT keep bringing back your original cast once their story arc is over. It inevitably becomes a shameful mess. The Star Wars sequel trilogy (especially The Last Jedi), Star Trek: Picard, and Blade Runner 2049 are all also recent excellent examples of why it's better to let your heros go when their story is over and move on instead of dragging them back for more after they've had their closure. Kawamori is a wise man to insist that he will not bring them back, and the aforementioned examples amply demonstrate the wisdom of his decision.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Smart money says it was all about stopping power. Laser weapons are compact, simple, robust, and extremely precise... but their maximum achievable output power is relatively low compared to particle beam weapons due to the way the stimulated emission of photons is achieved. Particle beam weaponry's a directed energy weapon technology that's more conducive to scaling up power without necessarily significantly increasing size... but it's also more complex and finicky. More firepower would have been necessary as VFs and other mecha adopted new, more durable composite materials, improved energy conversion armor systems, and energy weapon-specific countermeasures like ablative coatings painted over the armor's surface to dampen the power of energy weapon hits. That was special equipment manufactured to Dr. Elma Hoyly's specifications as prototype Tactical Sound Unit hardware. Normal VF-171EX units look the same as they did in Frontier, minus the anti-Vajra weapons.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Somehow, that one never made it into the final cut of the movie. Yup, they're reskins of the same CG model... and the turret is visibly present and accounted for (see 7:27 in Macross Frontier ep7). The turret isn't exposed in Shuttle mode, you can only see it clearly in the other two modes. IINM, the last we really see or hear of the Dulfim is at around 6:48 in Macross Frontier Ep8... where she's shown to be alongside one of the Macross Frontier's Island-class environment ships. It's mentioned that the Dulfim's crew had been interviewed about the fate of the Macross Galaxy but that they didn't really know anything useful, and that they were currently quarantined and awaiting medical examination due to the risk of V-type infection. They just kind of drop off the face of the story after that, except in the movie version where those ships and the refugee ships they escorted carried the cyborgs who hijacked Battle Frontier. It's been a good while since I last reviewed the novelization and I'm well overdue for a reread, but I don't recall anything specific being mentioned about the fate of the ship or her crew. They're the ones on either side of the cockpit. Well, almost all of them... there's an eccentricity in the Macross Frontier movie materials that list a different model of coaxial gun on the VF-25's monitor turret (head) that's a laser weapon instead of a beam weapon. Laser weaponry is exactly what the name indicates: they produce an extremely intense, tightly focused beam of light that damages the target by heating the target's surface until the target's surface burns, melts, or evaporates. They're very limited weapons in terms of stopping power and top out below the other types of energy weapon in Macross, but they're an extremely precise class of weapon because they fire a tightly focused light beam at, well, the speed of light. Laser weapons can also be made extremely compact, which is a virtue for something with an internal structure as complicated as a VF's or as cramped as a battle pod or battle suit. Beam weaponry, on the other hand, is an umbrella term that refers to two different types of directed energy weapon: particle beam weaponry and dimensional beam weaponry. Particle beam weapons are weaponized miniature particle accelerators. They use electromagnetic fields and electrostatic lenses to focus and accelerate subatomic or atomic particles to relativistic velocities (significant fractions of the speed of light) so that the immense transfer of kinetic energy causes the target's surface to superheat almost instantaneously and a deeper hit might see the beam's charge cause secondary damage to onboard electronics. The Zentradi make widespread use of electron particle beam weapons as the main weapon of the Regult series battle pod. Macross publications usually aren't specific about what type of particle beam weaponry humanity favors. Starting in Macross Frontier, the generic term "beam gun" or "beam cannon" started to be applied to dimensional beam weapons too. These are the exotic energy weapons that are built on the same technology as the Macross's main gun. They produce a type of ultra-heavy exotic particle called heavy quantum that exists simultaneously in realspace and in fold space, and when they've got enough of it they use fold waves to cause all of its mass to drop into realspace. This causes the heavy quantum to collapse in on itself due to the heavy quantum's intense gravity, until it ignites in a fusion reaction. The ensuing explosion triggered by the fusing heavy quantum is corralled using any of several technologies to make a highly destructive beam of fast-moving fusion plasma. This technology is sometimes called a converging energy cannon, super dimension energy cannon, or more recently a heavy quantum reaction beam cannon. This technology was mostly confined to ship-based gun turrets and the larger "main gun" type systems, but miniaturized versions began showing up on VFs starting with the VF-19 and VF-22. (I privately suspect the unspecified "impact cannon" technology the Zentradi have is also a miniaturized dimensional beam weapon.) Where the line has started to blur has mainly been in warship stats... abbreviating "converging beam cannon" down to just "beam cannon". When a VF is equipped with dimensional beam weapons, they're usually specifically called out as such instead of being referred to by generic terms. (Macross Delta publications have been a bit hit-or-miss in that regard.) They did, in the gaiden manga Macross Delta Gaiden: Macross E. The Xaos PMC branch on Pipure uses VF-171EX Nightmare Plus EX units... albeit without the MDE beam weaponry and other anti-Vajra add-ons.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    One interesting detail - well, interesting to a detail-obsessed mecha nut like me - that I noticed while I was reviewing footage to answer the above question is that the Brisingr Alliance's member worlds seem to be equipping their local New UN Forces defense forces differently. From the sound effects used, the New UN Forces from Voldor and Al Shahal have outfitted their VF-171s to use conventional machine guns on their forward gun mounts, while Randor's VF-171s seem to be using beam machine guns.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Macross Chronicle's Mechanic Sheet for the VB-6 Konig Monster in the Macross Frontier movies does note that the craft has many armament variations to deal with diverse combat situations, though it doesn't even mention the guns in question. I'm actually rather glad for this particular topic, since I get to go back to one of the few actual good moments in Macross Delta and a much better series in general (Macross Frontier). What's interesting here is that there is very clearly more than one set of unlisted guns on the 2050s-2060s era Konig Monster. Both 1st Lt. Canaria Berstein and Cpt. Alberto Larazabal's VB-6 Konig Monsters are depicted firing two different sets of unlisted machine guns. One set is a pair of machine guns that appear, from the muzzle flashes, to be set into the sides of the nose near the vernier thrusters in Shuttle mode. The second is the aforementioned set of guns that're mounted in the arms in GERWALK and Destroid modes. There's an up-close view of Cpt. Larazabal firing the nose guns on his Konig Monster at about 9:50 in Macross Delta's 22nd episode, but they made their debut in Macross Frontier's 7th. As to what they are, it's hard to say... since the main Variable Fighters in service around this time seem to have been designed with an eye towards easily exchanging even the internal weapons systems. For example, the VF-171 and VF-25's fixed-forward guns could be either beam machine guns or conventional machine guns. There's often little obvious difference, visually, between the two. Given the space constraints in the VB-6's nose, I'd expect them to be beam machine guns... but it's anyone's guess really. The sound effect used is the one that's normally used for solid-ammo machine guns though, for what little that's worth.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    My expectation would be that it wouldn't be... as an anti-frustration feature for players.
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