Seto Kaiba

Big West appears to have filed for a Class 41 trademark on the VF-1 Valkyrie's transformation in Japan back on 17 January 2020. I pulled their trademark applications from the Japan Patent Office's search engine, and these two are the only ones of this type they've filed. Unless I'm missing something - and it's entirely possible given how sleep deprived I currently am - I don't think so. Unless they're doing this as a preliminary step towards going after bootleg toys or something.

Well... yes and no? The design reference sheets (settei) that Kawamori and co. produced for the animators working on the series did include color guides that identified what inks and paints were to be used and where on a given character or mecha. You can see several of them in the This is Animation books for the original Macross series. Whether Bandai and other manufacturers use them as color reference or just eyeball it from published art and/or the animation itself is something only they know. Hand-drawn animation and all that... y'know? Most questions have answers, though Kawamori is notorious for his "broad strokes" approach to continuity and his official position that all Macross projects are stand-alone works. Big West doesn't seem to completely agree, but they let it stand.

TBH, I don't think the advancements in in-universe technology have anything to do with it. It's just unimaginative choreography. Macross Zero put the VFs front and center, and tried to show off what you could do with one. Consequently, it had a lot of variety in its combat scenes and they were very intense because the pilots were trying everything against each other. You had all kinds of air combat maneuvers torn from the real world and some that are only possible in fiction. Macross Delta wasn't anywhere near as interested in the VFs and the actual war story they were trying to tell, so choreographed combat sequences lacked variety in the name of keeping them easy to animate. There was very little transforming done and the only maneuver used was "The Scissors", over and over again because it's easy to animate. The lack of variety and the need to not get dark meant that there wasn't much in the way of stakes. It was more like a tokusatsu show, with brightly-colored fighters engaging in bloodless violence before both sides retreat with no harm done to anyone but mooks. It doesn't really offer much in the way of tension. If you were feeling really charitable, you could maybe attribute the unimaginative combat choreography to the inexperience of Windermere's untested pilots and the poor quality of the very remote Brisingr Alliance NUNS and the private pilots drawn from it.

There hasn't been any substantial news about the (proposed) series since they announced it. The most likely explanation is that ViacomCBS and Secret Hideout haven't been able to secure the necessary funding to start work on the series. Even though Strange New Worlds would be reusing a lot of assets created for Star Trek: Discovery's first two seasons, the show's development and production costs are going to be significant. Star Trek: Discovery's first season was supposed to cost between $6 million and $7 million per episode, but thanks to reshoots and irresponsible overspending by Secret Hideout it ended up costing $8.5 million per episode. It looks like they coped with Netflix's reductions in their budget by making each successive season one episode shorter than the previous one. (Season 1 had 15 episodes, Season 2 had 14, and Season 3 will have 13.) If you assume Strange New Worlds will cost half as much to develop as Discovery and have a similar per-episode production cost, that's at least $235 million you have to source. Since this is direct-to-streaming, that means finding a distribution partner willing to put up a significant sum for the streaming rights. Netflix and Amazon aren't entirely happy with what they currently have, so they're not going to foot the bill. Who does that leave? Pretty much just YouTube. Hulu was owned by 21st Century Fox and they're owned by Disney now. I mean, yeah... if that big blowup on the normally tame official Star Trek subreddit is anything to go by, even the fans who liked Discovery are rapidly tiring of it. I have to wonder how much actual faith the showrunners have in their concept these days. Strange New Worlds was more or less an admission of defeat, trying to move the franchise back towards its traditional format in the hopes of recovering the fanbase the franchise had lost. It's been indicated by Netflix that CBS is unwilling to let the series die because they're upside-down hundreds of millions of dollars on its development still after planning for a seven season run. It might've been posted six days ago, but there's really nothing new there. It's the same stuff we've known since the project was first teased.

Since someone asked in the DX Chogokin VF-1 thread, I have posted an explanation of how the VF-1's variable intake ramps work there.

I could! So... the variable intake ramp used on Variable Fighters is used in a couple of different ways. At subsonic speeds (far left), the variable intake ramp is stored up out of the way to allow maximum subsonic airflow into the superconducting ram-air pre-compressor stage in the VF's "hips". (That pre-compressor is not actually part of the engine itself, which resides entirely in the VF's leg below the knee.) At supersonic speeds (center left), the variable intake ramp can be lowered to various positions in order to deflect the supersonic intake airflow into the pre-compressor and engine body. This produces shockwaves at the intake that slow the incoming air down, dramatically increasing the air pressure at the intake. In Battroid mode or in space (center right), the variable intake ramp can be fully closed. On the ground, this is done to protect the pre-compressor and engine from ingesting any dust and debris that might be kicked up during ground ops. In space, it's done to protect the inactive pre-compressor. Variable Fighter Master File asserts that VF-1s outfitted to operate exclusively in space sometimes installed additional (removable) fuel tanks in the space between the sealed intake ramp and the pre-compressor. In the event that a Battroid should need to use its engines for something other than an electrical generator, the variable intake ramp can also open (far right) like a set of blinds to provide a modicum of protection from debris while still allowing subsonic airflow into the engine. Page 061 of Variable Fighter Master File: VF-1S Roy Focker Special has a diagram that shows how the intake ramps are used to adjust airflow in those first two cases. You can see the fourth case in this scene from Macross Zero:

Yup... and the last few episodes made the supermassive plot hole that Star Trek: Discovery's third season orbits a little bigger. Do you remember how, early in Discovery's third season, it was (stupidly) claimed that the Federation tried and failed to develop a viable warp core design that didn't depend on using dilithium to moderate a matter/antimatter reaction? How the writers conveniently forgot that the Romulan Star Empire had long since perfected a forced quantum singularity core for their warp drives when the Federation got its first good look at the D'deridex-class warbird in 2364? Yeah... "Unification III" reveals that the Romulans had reunified with the Vulcans and were members of the Federation before the burn. Not only did the 31st century Federation apparently forget that singularity cores were a thing along with all the other warp core alternatives we've seen over the years, the people who perfected the singularity core in the first place apparently did too. "The Burn" has become an idiot ball so large light cannot escape its surface. I'm left to wonder if this is Michelle Yeoh's exit from Star Trek: Discovery. It's pretty obvious that Michelle Yeoh stuck around for Star Trek: Discovery's second season because the showrunners promised her that she would get a spinoff series of her own in the near future. There wasn't a lot for her to do besides make the occasional catty remark and have fight scenes in tight pants. Now that Star Trek: Section 31 seems to have joined several other proposals on the reject pile, there's no reason for her to stay on the show as an increasingly irrelevant character. ("Better to quit than be fired", I guess.) I'm dreading it. We've already seen that the developing AI is a going-nowhere plot and we know the explanation of "the Burn" is going to be dumb.

Tech Romancer is a video game. My apologies for the earlier ambiguous wording. One thing I love about Kawamori is that he almost never throws a design or concept away and says "that isn't workable". He relentlessly polishes even his old ideas until he either finds somewhere they fit or makes somewhere they fit. Like how the plot for his aborted non-Macross project Advanced Valkyrie ended up becoming Macross Plus nearly 9 years after its initial cancellation while many of the designs he did for it became part of Macross or ended up in another project that evolved into Escaflowne and Macross 7. We even saw this at work in Macross Delta, with the Sv-262 being developed from a design Kawamori did back in 1990 that was itself reused in the series as the Sv-262's predecessor the Sv-154 Svard. It's such an iterative process that it feels like engineering AND art. EDIT: Hell, you could argue the concept of the Minmay Cannon from Macross: Scramble Valkyrie found its way into the official setting via the YF-29's Fold Wave System, which was intended to facilitate communication and peace with the Vajra.

Fun fact... Kawamori actually polished this concept art into a finished design different from the final VA-3 in another title. It became the YF-37 Rafaga in Tech Romancer.

Huh... so this is amusing. Star Trek: Discovery season three's mid-season plot twist is that... we're going back to the 23rd century Mirror Universe plotline from season one? And, like season two, the story arc's based on material plagiarized from the Star Trek relaunch novelverse? (In this case, Kirsten Beyer's Star Trek: Voyager novel A Pocket Full of Lies.) The reason the Discovery's walking, talking, cliched and more-than-slightly-racist asian stereotype and massive karma houdini Emperor Phillipa Georgiou has been a bit out of sorts in the last few episodes is that she's dying. Slowly and painfully. The cause is nicked from A Pocket Full of Lies. Because Georgiou is native to a different quantum reality, the matter her body is made of has a different quantum state than the universe she's living in. If the difference in quantum states is small, like from traveling up and down the same timeline or from traveling between two similar quantum realities, it's no big deal. Georgiou's screwed because she's from a thousand years in the past AND a different universe that had diverged a lot from the prime universe, so the matter that makes her up is being torn apart as it tries to reconcile that disparity... causing tissue breakdown and occasional bouts of intangibility. The only person that Starfleet has record of experiencing something similar was an Betelgeusian 24th century Starfleet officer named Yor from an alternate reality 2379 who traveled up to the 32nd century because of the Temporal Cold War and was left in such agonized incapacity that he was granted euthanasia. So instead of The Burn we're switching gears to a story about offloading Georgiou back to the 23rd century Mirror Universe via a convenient portal that appears for... reasons.

Well, that was a short honeymoon. RIP Rogue Squadron... you had potential, right up until they decided you had to be part of the sequel trilogy setting. So... Wedge has an assist? Or two assists? Or is the first assist Han's? How are we scoring this?

... huh? That's not right. Zamuse's Super Dimension Fortress Macross: Scramble Valkyrie has never been listed as a part of the same timeline as the Macross II: Lovers Again OVA. It's never been listed on either of Macross's official timelines, TBH. It was a standalone title that was set in its own alternate version of the First Space War. The game used DYRL? visual aesthetics for the pilot portraits and the Macross itself, but had distinctly TV series touches like Milia having defected to the UN Forces before the start of the story (to be selectable as the third playable character, for the VF-1SOL-J). The game didn't really have a story, it was just an R-Type clone that used Macross designs for mook enemies and had the usual nonsensical R-Type-esque bosses. (The final boss is particularly noteworthy as being a completely out-of-place 2001: a Space Odyssey style giant space baby in a bubble that, in its second phase, turns into Freeza from Dragon Ball Z... but with a dragon's face in the "you won" cutscene.) Prior to 1997, the only games that were a part of either official timeline were the two games Nippon Computer Systems developed specifically as tie-ins to the Macross II: Lovers Again OVA: Macross 2036 and Macross: Eternal Love Song. It wasn't until Macross Digital Mission VF-X that Macross's main timeline started including video games, starting from VF-X and expanding out to the PS1 DYRL? game, VF-X2, Macross Plus Game Edition, Macross M3, and most recently Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy. Nah, that more angular design style is just what was trendy at the time. You can see it in the work Studio Nue did for FASA's Japanese edition of BattleTech around the same time, and in the designs they did for the unrelated FamilySoft trilogy (the VF-X3 Medusa/Star Crusder, SDP-1 Stampede Valkyrie, and LDR-04 Maverick Destroid).

Looking at it as an outsider/non-fan, my assumption would be that Rogue Squadron will end up being a side story set during the original trilogy like Rogue One was... both to market it as an indirect sequel to the one good Disney Star Wars film and capitalize on the fanbase's original trilogy nostalgia. (Well, that and to avoid the antipathy Star Wars fans have for the sequel trilogy.)

Hm... a risky move. Let's see how it plays out for them. I'm surprised we reached this point so quickly, to be honest. Disney tried giving Star Wars fans a nice, safe sequel that took no risks and pushed no envelopes to give them more what they already loved (The Force Awakens), they tried subverting expectations and mixing things up (The Last Jedi), they tried doing an origin story for one of Star Wars's most beloved characters, and they tried to design a film by committee using fan responses to plot leaks (The Rise of Skywalker)... and the fans hated all of it. So they're falling back on the two things that do sell: original trilogy side stories (Rogue One) and borrowed goodwill from old Expanded Universe titles (The Mandalorean). They're on their knees, begging fans "Just tell us what you want!". If they approach this right and avoid the sequel trilogy's bad habits they might actually make good on Rogue Squadron. They proved they can make a decent film when they want to with Rogue One. If anything, I think their biggest obstacle outside of executive meddling is going to be that Star Wars fans are kind of an unpleasable lot these days.

Based on available materials, it looks like for at least the Frontier Valkyries he did do clean or almost-clean final art at a low level of surface detail as shape reference for the CG modelers and then did various focus pieces to show how he wanted key areas to be detailed and textured. There is some good, clean line art of the VF-25 and especially its Super Packs. Not s'much for the VF-27 and none that I've seen for the YF-29. The published YF-29 drawings are almost entirely Kawamori penciling in different wings and rear fuselages over the front half of a VF-25. In the case of the YF-29 and later, it looks like they got the basic design solidified in 3D and then went back and marked up printouts of the 3D models to determine how they wanted to do surface detail.

Gave the book a once-over and it seems pretty solid... a few things I haven't seen before like that unused "Prototype VF" designed for the FamilySoft game trilogy. There's one error I spotted on page 561. The thing labeled "QF-4000" isn't a draft of the QF-4000... it's an original design Kawamori did for the Spring '04 issue of Character Model as a new/original weapon for the VF-0: It's a cruise missile-like Ghost that's used as a standoff weapon, it launches like a missile but can maneuver like a fighter and attack enemy aircraft with micro missiles.

So... since my fellow mecha enthusiasts may or may not be on the fence about ordering Shoji Kawamori Designer's Note, here's a review in brief. Designer's Note is 624 pages, printed on non-glossy ISO standard size A4 paper. The print quality is quite high. Most unusually for a Macross publication, most of its text is printed in three languages: Japanese, English, and... Zentradi. (The Zentradi sections are just a symbol substitution for English though, so it reads exactly the same.) Its contents, excluding the foreword, are divided into thirteen sections: Super Dimension Fortress Macross (TV) Pages 003-186 Lots of rough sketches of the VF-1, various Destroids, and various background designs. Nothing unexpected, except passing mention of a Zentradi variable battle suit that apparently never made it past rough sketches. Super Dimension Fortress Macross: Do You Remember Love? Pages 187-210 Mostly rough storyboard sketches of different iconic scenes from the movie. Nothing unexpected. Super Dimension Fortress Macross (PC Game) - the FamilySoft trilogy of Remember Me, Skull Leader, and Love Stories. Pages 211-256 Mostly draft sketches and some finished art for the SDP-1 Stampede Valkyrie, VF-X3 Medusa/Star Crusader, and an unused Prototype VF that has a lot of design in common with the VF-5000. Super Dimension Fortress Macross: Scramble Valkyrie (game) Pages 257-283 Just the VF-1SOL-S Scramble Valkyrie. Macross Plus Pages 284-420 (lol) Nothing unexpected, mainly just larger, high-quality reprints of art from previous books. Macross 7 Pages 421-496 Nothing unexpected. Macross Digital Mission VF-X & Macross VF-X2 Pages 497-512 Nothing unexpected, mostly sketches. VF Experimental Program (from Character Model magazine) Pages 513-522 Covers the SW-XAI Schneeblume and SW-XAII Schneegans. Noteworthy for decent, high quality prints of art previously only available as grainy low-quality magazine prints. Also noteworthy for a remark at the very end of that section taken from a fax between Kawamori and the magazine staff that 1. affirms Kawamori's stance that he regards each Macross story as a parallel world and 2. indicates that the Stealth Wing X program can be considered to be official setting material! Macross Zero Pages 523-540 Nothing unexpected, almost exclusively drafts of the VF-0 and SV-51 incl. some internal stuff by Junya Ishigaki. Macross Frontier (TV) Pages 541-573 Mostly sketches and drafts showing the development of the VF-25 and VF-27. A few noteworthy pieces of art showing how Kawamori's LEGO models were transitioned into workable line art. There are two particularly noteworthy details on page 561 in this section. One is a bit of detail guidance for the CG model builders that shows how Ozma's Lancia Delta HF Integrale converts to be driven on a Milky Road system. The other is an error. Specifically, the piece labeled "QF-4000" is something that Kawamori developed for the Spring 2004 issue of Character Model. In their feature Variable Fighter Experiment Requirements Review, he designed a new weapon for the VF-0 which was part Ghost part cruise missile. (See below) Macross Frontier (Movies) Pages 574-581 Some good detail art of the YF-29 FAST Pack, but otherwise nothing unexpected. Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy Pages 582-592 Has some good shots of the untextured CG model for the YF-30. The last page is the marker sketches of the VF-31 heads for some reason. Macross Delta Pages 593-622 Somewhat surprisingly, apart from the VF-31 head sketches this section is mostly about the Sv-262 and Lilldraken. All in all, a nice book to have if you're interested in seeing the evolution of Kawamori's mechanical designs from rough sketch to finished product (or LEGO, in recent years). Not a reference book, except maybe as art reference. High quality enough to be worth the price anyway, IMO. Now... WRT the misidentified design on page 561. This is the design in question: These are from page 48 of the Spring 2004 issue of Character Model. This was an original design Kawamori did for the magazine's article Variable Fighter Experiment Requirements Review, which talked about comparing the SV-51 and VF-0 against each other prior to the outbreak of the First Space War. This thing, from what little description is given, is a standoff weapon that's basically the lovechild of an early Ghost (c.QF-2200) and a cruise missile. It's carried into battle as, essentially, a parasite aircraft that the VF-0 launches and then it will deploy wings and fly on its own and maneuver to engage targets with internally-carried micro-missiles. You can see on the image on the right that it's mounted to the same pylon the VF-0's raid specification used for dorsally-mounted orange micro-missile/fuel pods.

My copies of Designer's Note rolled in this morning... and I am pleasantly surprised by how BIG this book is. This is art with some HEFT to it. Print quality seems pretty good too. (I'm even more pleasantly surprised that FedEx managed to get it here as a next-day package... ) I did a quick skim and found mostly the expected content, though I'm rather happy to see more (and cleaner) lineart from the non-official setting FamilySoft games and Scrambled Valkyrie.

Because it popped on one of my Facebook groups, and because nobody's going to stop me, I just thought I'd share this neat photo of the VF-1 Riders custom model of Naresuan's VBP-1/VA-110 Neo Glaug bis from Macross R:

The Macross 7 TV series just seemed like the first logical place to look... both Ep10, where Basara's VF-19 is brought in for servicing by the New UN Forces, and Ep20 when the actual military spec VF-19 makes its in-series debut. No dice in either episode. I've checked the usual suspects - This is Animation, Macross Chronicle, etc. - and come up dry, so this may be one from one of the more technical books like Master File. (It'd make sense if it were Master File, since that asserted the VF-19改 was a lightly modified VF-19E... the variant the VF-19F/S type was derived from. In the official setting, it's the other way around, with Basara's VF-19改 being a modified trial production VF-19F.)

I am so, SO glad that shipping is by package volume and not by weight with most carriers... Just had mine shipped out FedEx Express.

HLJ seems to finally be filling its orders for the Kawamori book. I got my payment confirmation today.

Unless he was drawing a paycheck for it, he was only an exceptionally talented amateur pain in the arse. It really would... especially why he has such trouble in his interactions with others. (Esp. why he has such trouble with his bandmates, even though they share his interest in music. I don't recall that being mentioned directly in the episode, but it would make sense. That the VF-19 had a next-gen airframe control AI is part of the official setting these days. That kind of detail was originally confined to the tech manuals, but Macross R brought it into the official setting and Macross Delta official materials have also made repeated reference to it. So if they really were pulling the data from the ARIEL airframe control AI in Basara's VF-19, it's a safe bet it'd be used to make refinements to the military spec VF-19s that the 37th fleet was building for Emerald Force. (I'm rather glad they brought this stuff into the official setting, the references are so far outside the norm that it's quite fun. Like the original generation airframe control AI ANGIRAS used on the first three generations of VFs being named for a vedic sage known as a mediator between man and the gods and who is said to have originated the fourth veda's hostile sorcery and pursuit of harm unto others. Or the next-gen replacement ARIEL being named for Prospero's servant, the spirit of air and fire from Shakespeare's The Tempest. Given that Basara is a volunteer on a top secret military project, one has to wonder if they even consider him to be a civilian since they basically form a unit of irregulars around him later in the show. They seem to have pretty excellent healthcare overall c.2040... it'd be rather shocking if there were no psychologists. (It'd also be the kind of thing you'd probably want to send with your first-generation space colonists as they adjust to life on the colonies on the moon or the O'Neill cylinders that were built at the lagrange points before the First Space War. Gonna have a LOT of folks coming down with something approximating cabin fever. It wouldn't be too surprising that a fair number of Arabic people would have survived given that there are several Arab nations in northern Africa and Africa was one of the sites of Grand Cannon construction. It'd be only to be expected for them to have had a number of those well-established Arabic construction companies from that region involved in the Grand Cannon project, as well as UN Forces drawn from those nations crewing it. It'd be harder to explain the Saotome family, but not by much... all that it'd have to take would be for a Saotome to be on the Macross after moving to South Ataria.

If you step back and think about it, it's really easy to feel bad for Col. Burton. All he really expected from Basara - a man who purports to be a professional musician - was for him to behave professionally. To treat the sorties like professional performances. Follow a set list. Y'know, the absolute bare minimum expected of any professional musician. His expectations were so painfully low, and Basara still managed to disappoint. Fortunately for Basar's career and those of his bandmates, very few people are actually exposed to him and that isolation prevented his personality from impeding his fame. Poor Col. Burton was left high and dry and had to try and find someone who could do the same job without behaving like a prat... but didn't really account for the way civilians are a little bit afraid of getting shot at. As bad as Basara is with anything resembling a social cue and with his very narrow, highly specific interests, I really think that boy was living with undiagnosed autism.

Indeed. Ironically, the man who is most likely responsible for the development of that VF-19 and its being assigned to Basara is Col. Burton... a man with whom Basara found it quite impossible to be civil, never mind professional. That alone probably makes it rather advantageous that Basara never seemed to question where Ray had come by the New UN Forces' latest top class variable fighter. Either he didn't care enough to question, or knew he wouldn't like the answer and decided ignorance was bliss. That he was shocked and upset when the New UN Forces came to collect it to handle repairs and maintenance suggests the former, IMO. Basara was used not just to evaluate the soundness of the theories and experimental technologies advanced by Dr. Chiba, but to test the fitness of the VF-19 itself prior to the military's official testing. Basara's VF-19 was, as obviously implausible as it sounds, treated as a civilian aircraft until the public announcement of Sound Force's formation. Only some real military clout could make an obviously bogus assignment like that stick. "Need to know" can be a funny thing... and given how unusual the thinking behind the Fire Valkyrie and the various technologies that'd been developed for Project M were, keeping it as secret as possible would've been one way of protecting the unconventional program from being scrutinized in detail until it could provide some results.