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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

My expectation would be that it wouldn't be... as an anti-frustration feature for players.

You must not have read/watched much science fiction then. Granted, that kind of thing is pretty standard fare in fantasy... and I blame J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings for becoming the encyclopedia of Standard Fantasy Tropes.

Not a pinpoint barrier... energy conversion armor is a technology that's used on all VFs to compensate for their armor being comparatively thin in order to keep their weight down for flight. It's a system that uses a special layered, laminated armor material that becomes more resistant to damage when it's charged with electromagnetic pulses. That system draws a LOT of power, though, so VFs are forced to trade off engine output for armor strength depending on mode. Normally, the energy conversion armor is turned off in Fighter mode so a VF can exert all of its reactor output producing thrust to fly, it's turned on at partial power in GERWALK mode where demands for raw engine thrust are diminished, and full power for Battroid mode where thrust requirements are lowest. On the VF-0, the energy conversion armor made Fighter mode a fair bit tougher than the average fighter plane, GERWALK mode was as durable as a well-armored attack helicopter, and Battroid mode was as tough as a main battle tank. This way, a VF that has armor only a fraction of the thickness of a Destroid's can acquire similar defensive ability. The VB-6 Konig Monster in Macross Frontier was an improved type that uses a next-generation energy conversion armor technology that boasts defensive capabilities rivaling the armor of a heavy cruiser-class space warship when operating at maximum potential. It's even more Tonka-tough than the already incredibly durable VFs in common use (which are themselves several times as durable as the VF-1, which was by all accounts at least three times the toughness of a main battle tank). It's broadly similar to technologies like Star Trek: Enterprise's polarized hull plating, Gundam SEED's phase shift armor, and Gundam 00's structural GN fields.

Well, welcome! Dunno where you read that, because that's actually not true... they did actually render all three modes for Macross Frontier, though the Destroid mode puts in only one brief appearance in the final episode of the TV series. It's at 19:16 in the episode, where SMS's VB-6 is shown defending Island-1 during its landing on the Vajra planet. We see it transform at around 18:36, after it shot Battle Galaxy full in the face with four thermonuclear reaction warheads. It was also animated in the trailer for the second Macross Frontier movie, though that was an ultimately unused variant that has some big damn rotary cannons (reused CG models off the Cheyenne II destroid) on its arms. Konig Monster fans did at least get some recompense when Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy made the Konig Monster one of its playable VFs. Setting any weaponry from Macross up against the Inbit from Genesis Climber MOSPEADA - AKA the Invid from Robotech - would be a level of overkill that crosses the line twice and ends up feeling like bullying. The Inbit/Invid are so lightly armored that, even in the native MOSPEADA setting, their mecha can be easily destroyed by weapons little more powerful than modern man-portable rocket-propelled grenades and anti-materiel rifles. A 30mm rotary cannon like the A-10A Thunderbolt II's (or the trio of 'em carried by the AB-01 TLEAD AKA "Beta Fighter") is itself comical overkill against an enemy like that, and the VF-1's GU-11A gunpod is something on the order of 7 times as powerful. The Konig Monster has the firepower to flatten cities. (Never mind that the SMS/NUNS upgraded Konig Monster from the late 2050s and 2060s has advanced energy conversion armor that would make it difficult for the Inbit/Invid to do much more than scuff up the paint and annoy the pilot.) Yeah, all 5th Generation VFs have linear actuator technology. The VF-31 and Sv-262 are 5th Gen.

Yeah, and his only appearance after that was a cut cameo in Star Trek: Nemesis. They could always stick him in Star Trek: Discovery now that the unlovable cast of the show have f*cked off a thousand years or more into the future. Maybe he and an elderly Neelix can be besties with Burnham and they can change the show's name from STD to Star Trek: Cancer. With the Buffy the Vampire Slayer level of writing they've got going with the idiots from Secret Hideout, they could set a new speed record for cancellation. I'm most concerned that we'll start to see crap from Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Picard bleeding through into Strange New Worlds... especially since "time crystals" have already given Pike a preview of his own future.

Sounds about normal for a Macross development. IIRC, wasn't it about 2 years from Macross Frontier start of development to the first trailer?

Surely you jest. Wil Wheaton may have managed to use The Big Bang Theory to at least partially separate himself from the antipathy that die-hard Star Trek fans and general audiences had for Wesley Crusher, but that's all he did. It's not like he managed to diminish the Star Trek fandom's loathing of Wesley Crusher, who was rightly lambasted as Star Trek's first Canon Sue. He was the Star Trek franchise's most loathed character, with only Star Trek: Voyager's Neelix and Star Trek: Discovery's Michael Burnham coming close to achieving the same levels of fan hate. (Kai Winn doesn't count, because she was deliberately written to be a Hate Sink.) Not doing something that's all but guaranteed to fail isn't exactly a "lost opportunity". Now, the proposed Hikaru Sulu series... that was a missed opportunity. Shame Shatner was so dead set against George Takei getting more time in the limelight. If CBS had an ounce of sense, they'd dump Discovery and Picard altogether and throw their budgets at Strange New Worlds.

> implying Harmony Gold is capable of feeling shame Really, it's the quintessential Robotech setting... there's no chance for peace, love, or understanding in the universe because everyone has been driven mad by their lust for the ultimate power and nobody will suffer someone else to possess it. So it's just an unrelenting string of gritty, grimdark genocidal wars of conquest. Basically WH40K Lite.

It was. But that's the point he's making... the ONLY successful part of Voltron is the part that's repeatedly adapting Beast King GoLion, just like the only part of Robotech that's successful is the part adapted from Super Dimension Fortress Macross. Nobody gives a damn about the other Voltron that was adapted from Armored Fleet Dairugger XV, just like nobody gives a damn about Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross. The oldest case of this that I know of is from 1939. A Moscow University professor named Alexander Melentyevich Volkov produced a Robotech-esque translation/adaptation of L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1939 under the title The Wizard of the Emerald City. It was so well-received in the Soviet Union that Volkov produced five original sequels for it: Urfin Jus and his Wooden Soldiers, The Seven Underground Kings, The Firey Gods of the Marrans, The Yellow Fog, and The Secret of the Abandoned Castle. (This is assuming you want to count only official commercialized media... otherwise the oldest case I know of is Sherlock Holmes fan fiction written in the late 19th and early 20th centuries shortly after Doyle killed Holmes off in The Final Problem in 1893.)

So ViacomCBS's latest, and probably last, attempt to turn a profit on Secret Hideout's wildly unpopular take on Star Trek is... a Captain Pike series? I mean, yeah... Anson Mount's Captain Christopher Pike was basically the only character on Star Trek: Discovery that anyone actually liked, but it's not like that was an achievement when the entire rest of the cast consisted of shallow stock characters backing up a handful of Mary Sues and complete monsters (and a main character who managed to be all three). Maybe the third time really will be the charm, but I doubt it. They've already managed to turn Jean-Luc Picard, master diplomat and moral paragon, into an incredibly selfish and manipulative old man who endangers the entire galaxy for the sake of his own ego and had Pike spend an entire season as Burnham's doormat... I don't think they're going to change how they do things.

Only the Draken III and Kairos... the Siegfrieds had forward-swept winglets.

The 8th Son? That Can't Be Right! is proving to be the painfully generic sleep-inducer I suspected it was going to be. Fantasy at its most generic, to the extent that I literally cannot tell you what the protagonist's name is, and I literally just finished the most recent episode. Reincarnated into an Otome Game as a Villainess with only Destruction Flags is proving to be a surprisingly lighthearted and entertaining series, in no small part because Catarina (the show's main character) has so thoroughly derailed the plot of the otome game setting she was reincarnated into that she's not only stolen the role of main character from the otome game's main character Maria, she's accidentally turned it into a reverse harem series with a harem of both the original male capture targets AND the rival female characters.

So, probably from Comichron... albeit indirectly. ... there are still Robotech fans who think Harmony Gold is going to one day go back and finish Robotech II: the Sentinels. I wouldn't take their blind optimism seriously. Like Voltron, they keep coming back to the one and only part of the series that was actually well-liked by its audience. They literally can't move on from it, because it's the only part of the franchise that makes money and that's mainly just from nostalgia.

That wouldn't be a spoiler... that'd be a warning sign that someone divided by zero and reality is starting to unravel. ... 22 July 2014 must've been a slow news day on io9. Their list is just a list of every failed/cancelled Robotech project except Robotech: the Untold Story, plus one that never even existed outside of Carl Macek's fevered delusions of Robotech being relevant and popular. Given that even Robotech fans don't seem to actually like Titan's take on the series, and that it's officially an AU, I think it'd probably fail to make the cut.

Do you have a source that actually gives an official sales figure? Or are you just using Comichron's approximation based on the Diamond Comic Distributors index ranking? I know in the latter case, the projected sales based on the index value was less than 4,500 total copies sold. (4,486) Thus far, there has not been an announcement from the distributor that the series is cancelled by the publisher. Titan Comics has not, AFAIK, made any statements of any kind as to the status of Robotech Remix. We may learn more from Diamond's cancellations list once they officially resume operations on 20 May. The only news I've received WRT the status of the publication is that Brendan Fletcher came down ill in late March and was bedridden until mid-April. Some Robotech fans who didn't work out the dates attempted to point to this as the reason for the delays, though the comic was already 47 days and two monthly deadlines late when he came down sick on March 24th (based on his own statements). Correction: Remix began on 16 October 2019, and Issue 5 was supposed to be released on 6 February 2020. When Remix #5 missed its 6 February release date, it was rescheduled to be released on 11 March before missing that date too and then falling off the radar altogether shortly before the UK went to stay-at-home orders on 23 March. It was 45 days overdue when Titan Comics temporarily suspended operations in accordance with the stay-at-home order. As I see it, the problem will eventually resolve itself. Robotech is a functionally-dead property, and Macross is thriving. Eventually, we will simply run out of Robotech fans due to simple attrition.

Well, you'd have to ask Egan Loo... that statement was ported over directly from his original Macross-class article on the old Macross Compendium website. What I can say with some confidence is that this statement was based on a later chronology, since the earliest versions of the chronology put the events of the first episode in October. For what it's worth, it generally agrees with what Macross Chronicle has written about the subject in the "Within the Macross" Worldguide sheet (No.07). That sheet has a diagram that indicates the city was built into internal compartments throughout the main body of the ship (everything aft of the main gun) and the engines/legs.

My understanding is that the city occupied a number of different portions of the ship including a fair portion of the core block and was stacked five or six layers deep in places. There are a number of shots that clearly place at least part of the city inside the ship's core block, most particularly the immediate aftermath of the ship's first return to Earth. There are also a few shots that depict the city as actually existing in several distinct layers of town inside the ship, stacked vertically. The population density should be higher than what we see in the series, but it's possible the folks who lived in the highrise buildings we saw in the first episode were displaced to more space-efficient cabins in the rest of the ship and the actual "city" was mostly the suburbs with low-rise buildings that could be efficiently packed. (That said, 58,000 civilians is almost six times the Macross-class's long-term sustainable population if the Macross-class SDFNs are any indication... so it's not surprising the ship had so many problems accommodating them.)

Or something similar, yeah. I can honestly say that's a new one... the Macross was originally going to have a lot more weaponized gimmicks back when the original series was being drafted, and most of them ended up cut from the concept.

Yeah, Dyaus nests are all over the world maps for the three regions in the game and their eggs are a collectible item. Some of the early City-class ships were a bit weird. Macross 1's City section, for instance, had no shell. The alternative is that it's maybe something like one of the supplementary habitat modules that were sometimes docked to the city ships.