Seto Kaiba

A lot - and I mean A LOT - of fans assumed those were something knocked together by Zentradi terrorists inside New UN Gov't territory instead of being original Zentradi-issue gear.

There are two kinds of people in this world... people who understand that Ikenai Borderline is an amazing song, and people who are wrong.

It varies. Some groups are giants, some are miclones, some are a mixture. The New UN Government banned giant Zentradi from Earth's surface in late 2030 after a second major armed revolt by the Zentradi that culminated in the Second Defensive Battle of Macross City. The Zentradi anti-government organization that was responsible for creating the Variable Glaug also had giant Zentradi in it, incl. the Variable Glaug's test pilot Moarmia Jifon (later adopted by the Jenius family as Moaramia Jifon Jenius). They're not necessarily limited to one size or the other either. As we saw in Macross Frontier, with ready access to micloning systems it's perfectly possible to change size in a matter of minutes based on circumstantial need. A soldier could live as a miclone in miclone accommodations and change into a giant when needs dictated, or live as a giant and change into a miclone when needs dictated. The titular Macross Frontier fleet was somewhat unusual in that it had provisions for giant Zentradi settlements as well as miclone living quarters, and to support that had the infrastructure to allow people to live as miclones or giants based on preference. Some Zentradi troops like Pixie Platoon lived principally as miclones but became giants when combat was in the offing, while others like the NUNS 33rd Marines lived as giants most or all of the time. Nope. The "enemy battle suit" from Macross Plus is indicated to be original Zentradi forces issue... one of the many mecha designed for them by the ancient Protoculture over 500,000 years ago. Its pilot is a 9-10m Zentradi clone soldier. It's been speculated by fans that the unnamed enemy battle suit from Macross Plus is an economized version of the Quimeliquola Queadluun-Rau intended for use by the Zentradi rank and file as a substitute for the too-expensive Queadluun-Rau that was reserved for elite forces with purpose-built (female) pilots.

They've done relatively little with the Zentradi main fleets since the original series and first movie, but Zentradi terrorist groups have featured fairly prominently in a number of stories so far. Macross II: Lovers Again not being canon was, ironically, fanon intended to troll Macross II fans. Big West, the owners of Macross, never considered Macross II to be non-canon or "not official". Their stance only changed from it being THE Macross sequel to A Macross sequel and an officially-recognized alternate universe story. It was never disavowed the way its vocal critics claimed. You'll find acknowledgements of it and its tie-in games throughout various franchise publications in the 90's and into the 2000s even before Kawamori spoke up about it. Shoji Kawamori publicly dismissed the "Macross II is non-canon" argument about ten years back, indicating that he considered it just as valid a Macross story as any other. Mind you, Kawamori's view of canon and continuity is a "broad strokes" view. He considers all of the Macross stories equally valid, but doesn't want to get bogged down in minutiae, and also has indicated that he sees them all as being dramatizations of a "true" Macross history. Var syndrome isn't really a zombie virus in the traditional sense... though I suppose it is a bit similar to the one in 28 Days Later that produces berserk fury in its infectees without actually killing them.

Gundam kinda cornered that market anyway. No sense in trying to compete with the metaphorical 800lb gorilla of the genre, even if it is clinically depressed and frequently about as exciting as listening to Ben Stein narrate the phone book.

Put simply, there is no such thing as "post-Zentradi" in Macross. The Zentradi Boddole Zer Main Fleet was "defeated" in February 2010, but approximately 60% of the fleet's nearly 5 million warships remain active after retreating from the loss of its various command ships. Roughly 3 million Zentradi warships in formations of various sizes scattered around the general region of space the New UN Government was exploring and settling with its emigrant fleets would be ample justification on its own to consider the threat posed by the Zentradi to be an ongoing one. The reality is even harsher. Boddole Zer's main fleet was just one of five thousand Zentradi main fleets the ancient Protoculture created at the peak of their power, and somewhere between two thousand and three thousand of those main fleets are still active in the galaxy. Humanity's saving grace is that traveling by space fold is about the worst possible way to explore and survey the galaxy, so Zentradi only find emigrant fleets and colonized planets completely by chance. With tens of thousands of automated factory satellites across the galaxy churning out unceasing supplies of soldiers and war materiel for the Zentradi, there is unlikely to be a "post-Zentradi" era anytime soon. "Rogue" Zentradi forces stumble onto New UN Government planets and fleets on a fairly regular basis though, and Zentradi terrorist organizations inside the New UN Government's sphere of influence pose their own threats as well. For instance: Macross II: Lovers Again's timeline has Earth's UN Forces fighting no less than six main fleets and innumerable smaller "rogue" formations between 2009 and 2092. Two of its side stories, Macross 2036 and Macross: Eternal Love Song, involve conflicts with two (three) of those main fleets. Macross Plus Episode One essentially opens on Isamu's unnamed squadron fighting rogue Zentradi in deep space in 2040. Macross 7's unbroadcasted episode "Fleet of the Strongest Women" shows the 37th long-distance emigrant fleet encountering a rogue Zentradi fleet in 2046. Macross Frontier's titular fleet encountered rogue Zentradi forces at least twice in its backstory. Once in ~2055 (see Macross Frontier ep09 "Friendly Fire") and once in 2058 (in the light novel Macross the Ride, which also includes a 2058 terror attack on Macross Frontier and Macross Galaxy by a Zentradi-led anti-government group.) Macross Delta's gaiden manga The White Knight of the Black Wing depicts Windermere IV's Kingdom of the Wind balking a bit at its obligations as a New UN Gov't member to send part of its defense forces to reinforce one of its neighbors which is under attack by a rogue Zentradi fleet in 2060. This obligation, and the inevitable wartime losses, are a part of what motivated King Grammier Neirich Windermere VI to decide that the Kingdom of the Wind should secede from the New UN Government... leading to the 2060 war of secession that ended with NUNS Maj. Wright Immelmann dropping a dimensional warhead on the city of Carlyle, setting up the entire plot of the series. The "canon" videogames Macross M3, Macross Digital Mission VF-X, and Macross VF-X2 all feature Zentradi terrorist groups. Variable Fighter Master File makes several mentions of fleets or planets being attacked by rogue Zentradi, including the total loss of emigrant planet Spica III and an attack on the Macross Valiant fleet in 2061 in which an emigrant ship that was unable to escape with the rest of the fleet had to be self-destructed with dimensional warheads to avoid it falling into Zentradi hands after its passengers were evacuated. There are more examples, this is just what I can recall offhand. Macross II: Lovers Again had new models of Destroid. That OVA and the "parallel world" timeline it occupies are pretty much the only Macross setting where Destroids remain a viable strategic option. The UN Forces in Macross II had updated the First Space War-era Destroid concepts with new technologies and at least one all-new model, like the railgun-equipped Defender EX, a more robust and heavily armed Phalanx Kai, a Tomahawk II model that was also upgunned with railguns and multiple sets of beam cannons, an even gruntier Monster, and the all-new GERWALKroid that filled a role similar to an attack helicopter. The Macross official setting that Macross Plus and later works belong to, however, took the view that the Destroids were surplus to requirements since they were developed for a land war against the Zentradi that never came and wasn't really part of the Zentradi MO. They remained in service for a little while, but they were eventually retired and either found their way onto practice ranges for use as targets in live fire exercises (as seen in Macross Plus) or were disarmed and sold off to civilians to be used as various types of heavy machinery for construction, demolition, and mining (as seen in Macross 7). The only "new" Destroids seen in limited military use have been local governments using modernizations of decades-old platforms like the ADR-03 (the "Cheyenne II" in Macross Frontier and Macross Delta) and the ADR-04 (the "Super Defender" in Macross the Ride). There hasn't really been new model development of Destroids since the end of the First Space War... unless you want to count the mobile weapons Gjagavan Va and Annabella Lasiodora from Macross VF-X2, which are mobile weapons used by anti-government forces. (A Macross Frontier short story hints at them being mobile weapons rejected for use by the New UN Forces.) There's also the VB-6 Konig Monster, but that's a variable bomber that just happens to look like the Monster Destroid in GERWALK mode. More or less. Some New UN Government members make limited use of modernizations of 50 year old Destroid designs in their armed forces. The Macross Frontier fleet, for instance, makes use of a modernized version of the UN Wars-era ADR-03 Cheyenne as a mobile anti-aircraft gun and ground defense unit to fight threats inside of its habitat ships... in part because the rollers in their feet don't rip up the pavement of the public roads. They're not depicted as being particularly effective, and those with static postings like the ones used as AA guns aboard the SMS Macross Quarter are unmanned and remotely operated. Destroids have found a niche as heavy industrial equipment, though. Unarmed versions of the modernized ADR-03 Cheyenne - known as the "Destroid Work" or "Workroid" - seem to be a fairly popular and widespread heavy duty vehicle. They're depicted being used for asteroid mining, construction, disaster recovery, and even spaceport cargo handling. The protagonist of Macross Delta, Hayate Immelmann, is introduced as a (bored) workroid driver handling interstellar freight at a spaceport on Al Shahal. Eh... the writing in the last series wasn't that great because they were hardcore pushing the idol group they'd formed for the series, but audiences still went nuts for it and it's making serious bank in Japan with another movie scheduled to come out soon. I don't think I'd say it's stale... it's just not focusing on the wants of western audiences, because we aren't the primary/intended audience. ... yeah, don't hold your breath for that one. Your expected wait time is approximately forever.

Just text.

It was the original YF-24 that had the hump that got it nicknamed "Camel". The Evolution version had a scaled-down, more mature version of ISC technology that fit into the aircraft's nose the same as the production ISCs.

But the VF-X-2, VF-X-3, VF-X-4, and YF-24 aren't... I was responding to the list.

Even if Kawamori were so inclined, it's highly likely that he would defer to aviation traditions and conventions and only assign names to the production aircraft. Experimental aircraft - the so-called "X-planes" - are almost never given actual names. This is partly because experimental aircraft tend to be built in very small numbers only and are prone to a high loss rate, so nobody really wants to get too attached. Of the few that do have names, most are just the government program name or an abbreviation thereof, as on the X-30 NASP, X-23 PRIME, and X-20 Dyna-Soar ("Dynamic Soarer"). Naming prototypes is a fairly recent trend, usually individual prototypes are unnamed or are given individual nicknames by their pilots like two YF-23s being Gray Ghost and Black Widow II respectively. Sukhoi, the designers of the SV-51, don't give their aircraft designs names either. Even the SV-52 орел is an affectation on the part of its pilot not an official name for the SV-52.

That has a fairly straightforward explanation. During testing, the USAF's YF-22 was informally known as the Lightning II between its rollout in August 1990 and the USAF's formal announcement that the production aircraft would be named "Raptor" in April 1997. Macross's VF-4 Lightning gained the III after the YF-22's informal nickname became public knowledge, but before the F-22 was officially named "Raptor". IIRC, the first time that the VF-4 appeared with the roman numeral III appeneded to its name was in Macross Digital Mission VF-X, which came out a little over one month before the F-22's name was officially designated "Raptor". Perceval may constitute a separate theme specifically between itself and Durandal, namely one of knights and holy weapons with Christian mythos basis. Durendal in The Song of Roland is a holy sword that derives its magical powers from four holy relics that were embedded into it (which the four pieces of fold quartz that power the YF-29's fold wave system are named for). One of the details that is frequently lost in later Arthurian mythos is that Perceval/Peredur possessed a holy weapon of his own... a magical eternally-bleeding spear strongly implied to be the Spear of Destiny (AKA the Lance of Longinus). In some versions of its myth, the lance itself also contains a holy relic (a nail from the true cross) and is otherwise follows the standard myth of an "invincible spear" that can pierce any shield or armor. The VF-3/VF-X3 actually belongs up with the mythological references... its other name, as indicated in the game's manual, was the Medusa.

He seems to be a big fan of giving everything a Meaningful Name... and I do mean EVERYTHING. Almost every placename, even the trivial ones, in Macross 30 have direct significance to their relevance to the plot. That's what happens when you let the fans name your latest design... previous contests resulted in VF designs with names like "Schneeblume" and "Schneegans". Kawamori has some esoteric tastes and is a noted student of aviation history. One has to wonder what he might've otherwise named the Su-27-inspired VF-25... as the second (third) coming of the VF-1 design maybe it would've been Tomcat II?

Sort of? Robotech's fans are paradoxical creatures at best. Their attachment to, or perhaps its would be more accurate to say "obsession with", the early 80's storytelling and art style of the three original anime series that were adapted into Robotech is completely and utterly at odds with their vocal disdain for anime and "anime-ness". They don't want Robotech to be anime, but they also don't want Robotech to ever do anything that would distance it from the 80's anime that makes it up. The "original" Robotech series has become the metaphorical sacred cow to its fans, something the franchise's owners can't mess with without infuriating the fans but also can't slavishly follow without being blasted for a lack of original thought. Robotech is not allowed to be anime, but it's not allowed to not be 80's anime either... so it stagnates by endlessly revisiting what can only generously be called its "glory days" with rehashes of its "original" series. The only Hell is the one you make for yourself... and Robotech is forever trapped in a Hell created by all of the lies Carl Macek told about its origins over the years. Carl Macek unwittingly set Robotech up to fail in the long term by spending so much time and effort telling anyone who would listen that Robotech was entirely HIS creation and nobody else's. He, and through him Harmony Gold, took credit for the writing of Sukehiro Tomita and Ken'ichi Matsuzaki, the character designs of Haruhiko Mikimoto and Yoshitaka Amano, the mechanical design works of Studio Nue and Studio Artmic, and all the rest. It gave fans completely the wrong idea about who was actually responsible for Robotech's quality... the many Japanese creators of the original shows. Even if Robotech's fans now understand that Robotech's quality is the borrowed gloss of the original shows, they've long since internalized Carl Macek's lies about having been the one responsible for everything they love about the series. Harmony Gold doesn't, and never had, the talent pool or the funding to create something anywhere close to the level of the SDF Macross series. All those years of hearing Carl Macek brag about Robotech being entirely his work have made the fans believe, at least on an emotional level, that they ARE capable of that level of quality. That makes every sh*t-awful effort to continue the Robotech story almost as disappointing for fans as it is embarrassing for us to watch from afar. Harmony Gold is cheap about Robotech because Robotech was never really commercially successful. It just BARELY justified the minimum effort necessary to make a movie and to try making a second season when it was new, and only then on a shoestring budget. But, of course, Harmony Gold's manic self-promotion is self-sabotaging. They tell their fans (and anyone who'll give them the time of day) that Robotech was a huge phenomenon that shook the industry to its foundation and created the modern anime industry in the US... and not the truth that it was an at-best middle-of-the-pack ratings performer with an unsuccessful toy line that was almost completely forgotten within five years of its debut. The fans rail against its perceived cheapness and the perceived incompetence of its "creators" now because they've spent decades living with a completely unrealistic idea of what Harmony Gold was capable of. It's unmistakably cheap and amateurish, but for the resources and talent pool Harmony Gold actually has they're not doing that bad a job. They're performing at a level you'd expect them to if you had a realistic view of their capabilities and the franchise's history. Fans don't, so they rail against the cheapness and incompetence they see in comparing Harmony Gold's actual work to the material borrowed from some of the anime industry's biggest names.

Ah, was that the reason? I was so put off by the radical change from actually-pretty-well-researched to total over-the-top nonsense that I never really bothered to look into why... I had just assumed there was some jumping, and that a shark was possibly involved. I'm behind on the anime adaptation, so I'm rewatching season one right now to start fresh.

Y'know how a series can have a solid ending that provides satisfying closure to the narrative while wrapping up all of the story's loose ends... and then just kind of forgets to stop? That. Big time. Freighted with one of the lamest soap opera twists imaginable.

Seconded... nothing of value is being lost.

I have recently been forcibly dragged into the Discord user community by my office's Overwatch team (yes, really), so I'd be game.

The vast majority of them fall into this category, to be honest... some of the more out-there sounding ones are just relatively obscure aircraft like the de Havilland Vampire or Vought Cutlass. "Messiah" was chosen as part of a promotional contest that allowed fans to name the VF-25. The actual intention wasn't religious, it was a reference to a lyric in Shao Pai Loon that referred to the film's hero as "a very messiah" (sic). Durandal doubles as a meaningful name considering the YF-29's insane abilities are enabled by four great treasures of fold quartz embedded in it... the way Durandal's supernatural powers came from four holy treasures embedded in it. The four pieces of fold quartz are even named for them in its official write-up. Kairos kind of fits with it being a derivative of Chronos. Chronos was the personification of linear time and continuity, suitable for a story about preserving continuity and linear time. Kairos is a "supreme moment", a point in time of great opportunity... which is kind of what the Kairos represents for the Brisingr Cluster's economy as their great moment to revive their fortunes by exporting a 5th Generation fighter. The Siegfried thing kind of ties in with the Draken's name... one of Siegfried's famous deeds was slaying a dragon, and Draken can be translated as "Dragon". There are a couple of references to Der Ring des Nibelungen in the series, though Macross 30 also spent a lot of time creating connections between the Protoculture and Norse/Germanic mythology. A lot of the placenames and so on on Uroboros were Norse in nature. The Nightmare's name was a play on the name of its inspiration, the Nighthawk. The Vampire's actually named for a real-world aircraft built by de Havilland during/after the 2nd World War. That last one is actually a typo... it's supposed to be Shahar, a Hebrew word for "Dawn" which is part of the Hebrew term that is translated as "Lucifer" in the Vulgate. Shahar was also a diety in the Ugarit pantheon, the god of the dawn. "Lucifer" is Helel bin Shahar, "Light-bringer, Son of the Dawn". Lucifer, the Light-Bringer, is the son of the Dawn. Shahar is Dawn, so the Lucifer (VF-27) is the son of the Shahar (YF-27). As references go, this one is OBSCURE. Took me ages to figure out "Shaher" was a typo. The model above was converted from a VF-31J kit.

Macross Delta seems to have been done on the cheap, likely due to the cost of the music production, so they don't seem to have bothered making a different ordnance container CG model for the Alpha, Beta, and Gamma Flight VF-31s. At least one of the model kits I've seen for the VF-31 does give the military spec VF-31 a different ordnance container that contains micro-missiles and what looks like some kind of a camera system?

Ah, so they're taking the half-truth route... blaming the inability to release the issue now on the COVID-19 shutdown as a way to avoid discussing why it was delayed beforehand. That way they aren't technically lying and they look like they've answered the question even though they actually haven't. Oh, that's an easy one... both times Harmony Gold has tried to move the Robotech story past the end of the "original" animated series, the fans crucified them for it. Robotech 3000 was a catastrophic failure that the fans hated so much the series was cancelled after just one screening of the teaser trailer... and then cancelled again when Carl Macek unwisely attempted to revive the project as a traditionally-animated series. Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles was also a catastrophic failure that the fans hated so much, and failed so completely at its stated goal of introducing new fans to the franchise, that its failure not only got the OVA cancelled after only one episode... it also got all development of new animated Robotech works defunded. Nobody wants to try it because Harmony Gold's three failures have proved it's a high-risk no-reward scenario.

Have they actually commented publicly? I haven't seen anything from them about Robotech at all this month.

Kinda? The YF-30s that are pictured in Variable Fighter Master File: VF-31 Siegfried are the military's YF-30B specification, not the original YF-30 Chronos technology demonstrator spec that Reon Sakaki flew on Uroboros in Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy. I haven't seen anything about how they differ, though. (Same as with the YF-29B in Macross 30 that presumably inspired it... all we know is that it's a superior version.)

Shinsei Industry's VF-11 Thunderbolt was actually pretty average for its time. The (New) UN Forces were looking for an all-regime main variable fighter, a "true successor" to the VF-1 Valkyrie's all-purpose operating profile in the wake of the more specialized VF-4 and VF-5000. It's got a gunpod, a rear-facing laser cannon to cover its blind spot, four underwing pylon stations, and it may or may not always have had a weapons bay in the side of its engine nacelles as seen in Macross 7. For the time it was developed, that was a pretty respectable armament that was augmented further with a Super Pack and Armored Pack. I think a big part of why it seems under-armed is that we never really get to see it using its wing pylons outside of Macross the Ride. The all-regime focus meant that it was more dependent on the Super Pack for space operations like the VF-1 was, so most of what we see is the Super Thunderbolt spamming micro-missiles. Master File has suggested the VF-11's Super Pack is heavily modularized, so that it can be reconfigured to accept different quantities of fuel and missiles depending on operational need, allowing it to potentially missile spam at almost a VF-25 level. Its facing competition in Project Nova, the VF-14, was a much larger and more specialized variable fighter. It got passed over for main fighter status because it didn't have the level of operational versatility the military was looking for... though it still got bought by a number of governments and enjoyed considerable popularity as a highly effective space fighter that was modification-friendly thanks to its roomy airframe. Even the VF-14 wasn't really much better armed, it just kept its dangerous toys on the inside.

Macross Chronicle is firmly in the "amazing missile countermeasures" camp on this one. Modern missiles already had to contend with a variety of countermeasures like lock-on detection and warning systems, chaff, flares, decoys, electronic countermeasures, and increasing adoption of passive stealth technology. Even in the Vietnam War, it was standard practice to fire at least two missiles with different types of guidance systems to improve the likelihood of a kill because the agility of aircraft was such that at short ranges an enemy aircraft could simply steer out of the guide beam for a semi-active radar homing system so SARH missiles were often followed up by infrared seekers as a one-two punch. The introduction of overtechnology made these problems substantially worse. Variable Fighters were substantially more agile than modern conventional fighter aircraft, making it that much harder to actually score a kill on one with a missile at any range and making semi-active homing all but useless. The real killer, however, was the quantum leap in ECM made by the invention of active stealth. Now that fighters could be all but invisible to radar at range, active radar homing missiles needed powerful (and expensive) ECCM to be effective and it fell to short-range missiles using guidance systems that were unaffected by active stealth tech like laser, infrared, and TV homing to reliably engage aircraft with active stealth. Firing a large number of small, short-ranged missiles in a saturation-type attack is a way to improve the odds of scoring a kill.

I've gone back and reviewed the (paltry) official coverage of the YF-30, and I couldn't find any mention of pylon mounts for ordnance. The only items listed under its armaments are its pair of 12.7mm beam machine guns, the heavy quantum beam gunpod, an assault knife (which is my bad, it does have one), and the ordnance container which contains all of its missile weapons in Macross 30 and in the novelization is later swapped out for a MDE beam cannon turret for the final battle. The best quality art I could locate for the YF-30 is in the Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy Visual Complete Guide, and it does appear to have a pair of pylon mounting locations on the forearms like the VF-31 does, but it's not listed or mentioned or alluded to in any way. The toy has four. I think the Macross Mecha Manual's entry listing six underwing pylons is a copy-paste error from the VF-25 page... because this thing definitely doesn't have six. The biggest sticking point there is the ordnance container itself. It has 36 launchers, but we don't know how many missiles each launcher has. For the sake of argument, let's assume that the armaments we can see in print or with our eyes on the toy exist... so the YF-30 has 36 micro-missiles and four underwing pylons. The YF-30's direct derivative, the VF-31 Kairos, outguns it despite being an economy model. The YF-30 has two beam machine guns to the VF-31's one, but the VF-31 makes up for it with two 27mm railguns. The VF-31's got 36 micro-missiles carried internally and four underwing pylons, but it also has two internal ordnance bays in the legs for large munitions or racks of micro-missiles. The VF-31's got a second assault knife. They've both got heavy quantum beam gunpods. The VF-31 does all that without its ordnance container, though, where the YF-30 has to sacrifice its missile payload to equip a radome or beam cannon. Then, of course, there's the VF-31's Super and Armored Packs. The YF-29, the YF-30's facing competition in ridiculously impractical technology demonstrator-ism, doesn't have any wing pylons to speak of but it has almost 3x as many internally-carried micro missiles (100 vs. 36) outfitted with the more deadly MDE warheads, its coaxial guns are firing MDE rounds, and it's got a built-in anti-warship grade MDE beam cannon turret. The YF-30 can take a similar turret, but at the expense of its micro-missile container, giving the YF-29 a 100-0 advantage instead. The VF-25, the VF-31's facing competition, has a pair of extra gun mounts on the hips for lasers or solid-ammo machine guns, six or eight underwing pylons (depending on which book you ask), an optional 55mm anti-armor railgun, and a multitude of FAST Pack choices including hundreds of missiles like the Super, Strike, Armored, Tornado, and Paladin packs. (FWIW, the RPG stats I homebrewed for the YF-30 give its container 108 micro-missiles... partly because we usually expect a micro-missile launcher to hold 3 or more missiles, partly because it's more balanced vs. the YF-29 that way, and partly because 108 has a pleasing significance WRT the Chronos's time-related implications... 108 being the number of times the temple bells at Japanese Buddhist temples are rung at the end of the year to finish the old year and welcome the new.) The interface in Macross 30 is probably not helpful for these purposes either, since two of the three boxes on the vast majority of VFs in-game refer to the same missile system firing in two different modes... one being multiple lock-on missile spam, and the other being single lock-on high rate-of-fire missile spam. The third Box is usually a built-in beam weapon of some description, most often the coaxial laser or beam guns, but sometimes another weapon like the VF-19's wing root/hip mounted guns or the YF-29's turret. (This can get weird on a few VFs, like the VF-11, where missiles seem to sprout from nowhere because they're not modeled with pylons.)