Seto Kaiba

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.)

I'm not sure a toy is a good representative sample? Sadly, there isn't much art of the YF-30 Chronos to get a proper look at the underside of the CG model's wings. All I see on the CG model there is the seam where the wings fold for storage. Oh, handily... it's an ultra-high speed dogfighter with exclusively short-ranged armaments. Kinda what you'd expect given that it was built pretty much exclusively to fight the Vajra and Macross Galaxy completed it using development data from the YF-29 that was leaked to them by LAI. It varies by missile, and Macross's creators are usually quite vague about it for obvious reasons... the one time I recall seeing ranges stated explicitly was in the old Sky Angels book, for the ones used by the GBP-1S Armored Pack which are between 2km and 5km. Those missiles appear to be coming from the ordnance container. In GERWALK mode, if the ordnance container isn't deployed the launchers are facing left and right, parallel to the wing surface. That looks like missiles firing from the container on a trajectory to ensure they clear the wing and limbs.

Honestly? With the amount of trash the industry is producing lately, a couple month breather to reevaluate their life choices sounds like exactly what the industry needs... and it'll give them a chance to get older shows back into the broadcast rotation and maybe make up some of the losses on those older shows from royalties.

I enjoyed the hell out of Reincarnated into an Otome Game as a Villainess with only Destruction Flags's second episode over lunch today. It's an isekai series, but its premise is so totally different from the usual boring "oh noes, I am teh min-maxed godmode sue in a fantasy MMORPG world" fare provided by the billion different copycat shows that it stands out twice as much.

The 8th Son, That Can't Be Right! limped in with a second lazily-written yawner. This is western fantasy anime so generic you can practically see the barcodes.

Your decimal point drifted a bit... it's $27, not $2,700.

I'd look at it more in terms of the difference between the firepower the heavy quantum beam rifle or heavy quantum beam cannon turret container put out vs. the firepower of the eight or so thermonuclear reaction warheads the VF-25 can carry.

Nope... Hikaru, Misa, and Minmay's story reached its natural conclusion with Flash Back 2012. A story that's already over doesn't need a continuation, and we DEFINITELY don't want to see them dragged back and subsequently beaten down the way The Show That Must Not Be Named has done to them over the last three decades and change. Let them be. Their story is over and they've almost literally sailed off into the sunset. It's better by far for Macross to continue focusing on moving its story forward, with new people and new places. We've already had two different animated takes on their story (SDF Macross and DYRL?), a novelization by Sukehiro Tomita, several video game adaptations, and a modern manga adaptation (Macross the First). I think we're good.

It's not hard to pick out which of its design features are intended for anti-Vajra use and why... though the reason I've argued that the YF-29 suffers from crippling overspecialization is that it has no real operational versatility. Its weapons are exclusively short-range, intended for visual range dogfighting. It has no pylons, and no optional gear that would let it mount any weapons that would give it medium- or long-range offensive capabilities. Its anti-Vajra focus also makes it impractically expensive to actually use becuase at least half of its armaments require fold quartz to operate, as does its all-important fold wave system. By the standards of 5th Generation VFs so far? Kinda, yeah. The YF-30 Chronos has a heavy quantum beam gunpod and a pair of coaxial 12.7mm beam machineguns, but other than that its armament is all tied up in the ordnance container. If it takes the beam turret container from the novel, then it's got no missiles. It lacks a built-in fixed-forward gun (a design standard since the 4th Generation and a common feature since the 2nd), wing pylons, and internal ordnance bays or micro-missile launcher systems. If you look at its military spec derivative, the VF-31 Kairos, you'll see all those features present. It has fixed-forward railguns, six internal micro-missile launchers, two internal ordnance bays, and wing pylons. It also lacks the 5th Gen's standard close combat blade. Compared to its facing competition, the YF-29B Perceival, the YF-30 REALLY seems under-armed since the YF-29B has a hundred internally-carried micro-missiles, multiple built-in beam cannons, an almost identical gunpod, a bayonet and an assault knife, and Ghost support. Yeah, the Sv-262 Draken III arguably has an even better claim to suffering from crippling overspecialization since the design is SO overoptimized as an atmospheric dogfighter that it has to resort to FAST Packs to have any missiles at all and its transformation left it with too little internal fuel to be an effective space fighter. It theoretically could counter one of the YF-29's shortcomings by having a FAST Pack with long-range or medium-range missiles instead of micro-missiles. With what little's been said about the Draken III, the transformation design seems to have been a deliberate choice to misdirect the enemy about the VF's design and capabilities. The Sv-262 was developed by a design group that, until recently, had been an operating unit of General Galaxy before it was sold to the Epsilon Foundation subsidiary Dian Cecht. The Sv-262's transformation is modeled closely on that of General Galaxy's first big seller, the VF-9 Cutlass.

Started The 8th Son? That Can't Be Right! today... it's another bloody isekai series, and it may be giving Isekai Cheat Magician a run for its money in terms of "laziest isekai story". Usually, this kind of boring minimum-effort copycat production at least bothers to establish that the protagonist died somehow and was reincarnated into a fantasy world or somehow was transported to said fantasy world via a summoning spell. This show's main character falls asleep waiting for his rice to finish cooking and wakes up a 5 year old boy in the standard issue Eastern take on generic Western Fantasy. The real killer is that there's an incredibly lazy scene right before the opening credits (in the middle of the episode) where they establish the main character is the 8th son by just having a clumsy "as you know" bit where everyone spells out their familial relationship for no clear reason. The opening bodes ill for the series as a whole, between the unmistakably cheap CG animation and art assets that very obviously were "inspired by" (read: "borrowed from") Overlord, The Rising of the Shield Hero, and possibly Those Who Hunt Elves from the look of it...

So... on a lark, decided to watch Reincarnated into an Otome Game as a Villainess with only Destruction Flags, since it just premiered. The first episode made a generally favorable impression. Instead of the standard "transported to a MMORPG world" Isekai setting, the protagonist is reincarnated into the setting of a romance genre visual novel... and not as the player character, but rather as the story's principal villain. She's left to use her memories of the game from her previous life and the genre savvy she possesses to navigate the plot in a way that won't get her killed or exiled the way the villain in the visual novel was.

Valkyries use the compact thermonuclear reactor inside their engines in order to run their engines as thermonuclear fusion rockets in space flight. While the VF's engines are not very efficient while operating like this, the main advantage to doing it is that you only need to carry one fuel material because the reaction mass is plasma produced in the same thermonuclear reaction that's also generating your electrical power. Internal space in a VF's fuselage is already at a premium, so a fuel system that makes optimal use of that internal space was a priority. An alternative method that is used extensively in Gundam's Universal Century is the nuclear thermal rocket, which uses heat from the reactor to explosively flash-heat an otherwise-inert propellant to generate thrust. That, of course, requires multiple fuel systems that are easier to pull off in a non-transforming mecha. Argon slush is a fuel intended for use in ion thrusters, which are a lot less powerful but a LOT more fuel-efficient... usually run off low-output power sources like batteries or radioisotope thermoelectric generators.

The year 20XX, eh? So right around the time Megaman is repeatedly foiling Dr. Wiley. And with that one pose they use in EVERY. FREAKING. BOOK. Seriously, even the Gundam ones.

Seems sensible enough, yeah.

Yeah, I'll likely buy two copies... one for my own personal enjoyment and one for my translation group's library. From the description on Amazon, it sounds like they intend to do something along similar lines to the Master Archive Mobile Suit: MSV Ace Pilot Log book that they did for Mobile Suit Gundam back in Autumn 2018. The book was more about the featured pilots than the mecha, discussing the military careers and One Year War service of five selected top-scoring ace Mobile Suit pilots: the Principality of Zeon's Johnny Ridden, Gabby Hazard, and Ian Graden, and the Earth Federation's Tenneth Jung and Lydo Wolf. That reminds me, I still need to order the RX-93 Nu Gundam Master Archive...

Well, that depends on how the timelines shake out... specifically, if the events of Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles recur in each instance of the history. In DC/Wildstorm's Robotech: Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles, the SDF-3 is critically damaged by a surprise attack from the traitor General T.R. Edwards and has to be basically rebuilt from the keel up over the space of a year. That was the explanation for why the SDF-3 in Shadow Chronicles looks nothing like the one in Robotech II: the Sentinels. For the most part, it isn't even really the same ship. To be honest, this is the closest I've seen to an intelligent discussion of Titan's Robotech comics as well... most Robotech fans on Facebook are either cringing constantly over the comics, bitterly complaining about their Macross-centric story that dispensed with the other sagas entirely, or just pointing and laughing at how terrible the comics are. The biggest, most active Robotech group I know of is firmly in that third category. The comics are basically a joke.

Not gonna lie... I have a bad feeling about this one. There wasn't anything special about Roy Focker's VF-1S in Macross... it was a perfectly ordinary Block 4 VF-1S that was no different from any other. This feels like we're about to descend into Robotech-isms about Roy's VF-1S being a super-special one-of-a-kind custom job or maybe the original VF-1 prototype or some BS like that. Also, this is the fifth bloody VF-1 book... I'd like to focus on something else for a while, like maybe the VF-17 and VF-171, or the VF-3000, VF-5000, and other 2nd Gen VFs.

Not quite... it means you're alert to injustice in society, be it racism, sexism, etc. Political correctness is avoidance of anything that might offend or disadvantage a particular group in society.

Another one? This is the fifth bloody VF-1 book in the series... the fourth if we don't count Squadrons. I have a bad feeling about this one. There wasn't anything special about Roy's VF-1S apart from the fact that it was Roy's.

Now, if I had to theorize as to why... The Robotech and Robotech Remix comics seem to be trying to find ways to justify Rick's central role in the Robotech animated setting. Even when he wasn't present, he was still this all-important character whom the plot essentially revolved around because he was the one who deprived Earth of most of its defenses in the Masters Saga and then was dispatching soldiers to Earth to recapture it in the New Generation. He was still plot critical in Shadow Chronicles, with the whole story essentially being "whatever happened to Rick?". It felt like Titan was trying to justify him still having such a central role in their own version of the story by making him Neo from The Matrix and giving him superpowers on top of making him more like the alleged badass Robotech's sequels tried to make him out to be. Part of it, I suspect, is dictated by Titan's or HG's legal counsel. It's dangerous enough for Robotech to continue to use Rick Hunter/Hikaru Ichijo because of HG's inability to use the Haruhiko Mikimoto character design in new film works or make derivative designs based on it (which is why the Sentinels design was deemed too close and was ditched in favor of making him unrecognizable in Shadow Chronicles). Max and Milia, however, are probably the most dangerous/risky characters for Robotech to use in post-Macross Saga stories, as the Macross franchise has made extensive use of those characters in its own original sequels like Macross M3 or Macross 7. Trying to continue their TV series relationship in sequels would pose a lot of risks and require a lot more oversight from legal to make sure they weren't visually or narratively converging on their Macross counterparts in any way that Big West might consider legally actionable. Not having their relationship is the easiest way to make sure they remain legally distinct, short of just not having them present at all. That was what Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles did... it killed off or otherwise disposed of characters that were too risky to use like Breetai, Exedore, Max, Miriya, and Minmei before the OVA actually started. More like someone was desperately trying to make Rick Hunter into the elite badass that Robotech's various failed sequel efforts talk him up as... despite that always turning out to be dialog writing a check the story can't cash. That, I suspect, is why he's been made into a top ace with superhuman powers stolen from The Matrix sequels. To be fair, Robotech's Max is kind of a weenie... Cam Clarke makes him sound more like an introverted shy guy with self-confidence problems than Sho Hayami's humble badass ladies man. Robotech also basically demoted him to a background character in Sentinels and then to Sir Not-Appearing-In-This-Film thereafter for legal reasons. This is more or less standard practice in the Robotech franchise. Harmony Gold and its licensees knew from a very early point that Macross was the only part of Robotech 99% of Robotech's fans gave a damn about, and so almost every attempt to develop an "original" continuation of the Robotech animated series has leaned on Macross heavily despite their inability to use Macross designs in new film works. The Robotech fan base may not want to acknowledge that Macross is infinitely more successful than Robotech, but every Robotech sequel effort except Robotech 3000 was basically just a bad Macross fanfic. Titan's Robotech Remix is just more blatant about it than usual.

Eh... I don't think you can dismiss it that easily. I'll grant you there are a lot of bad movies, TV shows, comics, etc. that are bad because they're ill-conceived, under-developed, and/or poorly executed. That doesn't preclude the existence of works that are bad because of a particular creative choice with sweeping implications for the story. Yes, there are movies and TV shows and comics and so on that are bad because they are "woke". When people complain about "woke" entertainment, they're usually not complaining about the message itself. The objectionable part is that the author has done such a terrible job of working the message into the story that it comes off as grating and preachy, wildly out of place, or otherwise significantly detrimental to the story. Not really a problem for Robotech though... that fandom is full of Comic Book Guys, and most of Robotech's "creatives" know it. Their problem is more the paradox of not liking anime and finding anime tropes offensive but liking Robotech, which is anime. Titan Comics kind of found themselves in a merciless case of Morton's Fork where they tried to take their new comic reboot of Robotech away from its anime roots and got blasted for it by the fans and reversed course only to get blasted for making it more like anime in Robotech Remix. You just can't win if you're trying to satisfy Robotech fans.

Probably, yeah... there were a LOT of ships in that general area (Earth orbit). That'd be the SDF-1 Macross. General Higgins is the Chief of Staff for the New UN Forces in 2040, and a leading proponent of unmanned fighters. The Macross in this era is essentially the space pentagon, the headquarters of the New UN Forces.

Now, in all fairness, the vast majority of the political spectrum seems to find the entertainment industry's deeply insincere ("fake woke") attempts to convert the various key issues that social reform advocates are pushing for into cashflow terribly obnoxious. It's not JUST the basement-dwelling neckbeards rolling their eyes as Marvel and DC attempt to one-up each other with hilariously ill-advised attempts to pander like Marvel's newest superheroes: Screentime, Snowflake, and Safespace. The basement-dwelling neckbeards and all the time the comics industry spend pandering to them are part of the problem, though, since pandering to their tastes meant comic books quickly drove away almost everyone else and left major publishers with a serious problem of slipping sales as the fanbase shrunk. Very similar to Robotech's problem, really... except in Robotech's case the franchise's obscurity and lack of innovation over entire decades keeps casual audiences away and the fans are even more unpleasable that comic book guys because the Robotech they love exists exclusively in their fabricated memories. I think you're using that word wrong... Really, Titan's Robotech and Robotech Remix were never going to be hits because they slaughtered the sacred cow that was the Robotech TV series story and then tried to market their bad Macross fanfic to an audience that doesn't really care for anime tropes either... they didn't consider who their audience was.

Eh... I think the actual Aesop here is that Robotech should stop trying to be a low-rent Macross knockoff and focus on developing its own original story. Either that or, if a job's worth doing it's worth doing well... and if it isn't worth doing, give it to a Robotech licensee because they literally have nothing better to do.

Granted, that's absolutely and demonstrably not helping matters... but mainstream comics have been in trouble for a long time now thanks to risk-averse creative management that stagnated every brand they have. They repeat the same tired stories and plot beats over and over again, resort to crossover events when sales slip past a certain point, and when a crossover can't arrest the slide they reboot and repeat the same mistakes all over again. No character ever gets to have any lasting character development, they never see a proper end to their story that gives them and the audience closure, and never ever make any kind of lasting progress to their stories. Playing the identity politics game and resorting to trying to sell on the basis of terribly tone-deaf new representational characters is a symptom of the larger problem. The smaller publishers are less impacted by it, but it's a choice between obscure properties, terrible licensed comics, or poor quality... unless it's Robotech, which is all 3.