Seto Kaiba

Started watching The Apothecary Diaries today since the new season simulcasts haven't started yet, and this one is unexpectedly a lot of fun.

I think there are a couple reasons we don't see that happening. First, the amount of plasma in the engine at any one time is actually quite small. Official setting resources like Macross Chronicle describe OTM thermonuclear reactors like the ones found in a VF's engines as extremely high-efficiency due to the use of Gravity and Inertia Control systems for fuel compression and plasma confinement. The reactors can run on less fuel, and run much hotter, than a modern/conventional fusion reactor that relies on lasers and electromagnets. The system used in thermonuclear reaction turbines has such high efficiency that VFs are said to have effectively unlimited range in atmospheric flight due to using intake air as propellant. A few sources say the VF-1 has enough internally-carried reactant to operate for up to 700 hours between refuelings, which means the amount of reactant consumed (and plasma produced) must be very small. Master File gives some directional guidance as to how small. Variable Fighter Master File: VF-1 Valkyrie describes the VF-1 reactant storage as being a pair of 150 liter capacity slush tanks, one in each engine nacelle. That suggests the fuel consumption rate in normal operation is a hair under 0.06ml/s, or about 214ml/hour. In more visual terms, eight hours of continuous operation would consume a bit less than five soda cans worth of reactant per engine. With such a small quantity of plasma inside the engine at any given time, the amount of exhaust is almost certainly trivial unless the turbine is actively generating thrust. Second, the usage of the plasma varies depending on mode and engine demand. The reason that many energy-intensive technologies like energy conversion armor and pinpoint barriers are not available in Fighter mode is because the heat from the plasma is also used to heat propellant (be it intake air or internally stored liquid) in order to produce thrust for flight. The Fighter-mode VF is essentially "wasting" most of the energy-generation potential of that hot plasma in order to use it to generate more thrust. Battroid mode is the opposite, prioritizing energy generation over thrust production and wringing every last bit of usable heat out of the GIC-confined plasma for that purpose. By the time the plasma held in the engine for electricity generation purposes is released, it has cooled considerably and the relatively small quantity being released at any given time is unlikely to kick up any significant debris. With just 0.06ml/s of reactant going into the engine, the volume of exhaust gas coming out is likely around 500-600ml/s... about the same as an average adult's normal exhalation.

Ameku M.D. has delivered another stinker today. I remain oddly impressed by the writing team's profound and all-consuming commitment to delivering an almost unwatchably bad "murder mystery" story featuring the most irredeemably unlikable mary sue protagonist this side of Star Trek: Discovery. I really want to see a fan supercut of this series which cuts out all of Dr. Ameku's claims of being a genius and all of her verbal and physical abuse of her colleagues. I don't think any episode would be longer than about five minutes. 😅 A Terrified Teacher at Ghoul School ended the other day too. To the very end, this series was just boring and unoriginal. It honestly felt to me like the original mangaka couldn't even think of a hook for their own story, so they just infodump about various niche yokai for a few minutes every episode. Otherwise it's a pretty standard "the token human at monster school" style premise aside from the fact that the protagonist's obsession with uniforms veers heavily into sex offender vibes. Medaka Kuroiwa is Impervious to My Charms also finished the other day. It never really went anywhere or did anything outside of the normal formula for this kind of one-sided rom com. To the very end, it read like a PG-rated version of B Gata H Kei. Not bad, but not great. A solid 6/10 basic romcom series that doesn't do anything wrong, but also doesn't do anything particularly right either.

For the sake of comparison, this is the updated cutaway of the VF-1's original FF-2001 engine. You can see the MHD generator called out just aft of the thermonuclear reactor on the interior of the engine body.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzz... Desperate appeals to nostalgia really are all this franchise has left.

That's a bit too complex and mature for Star Wars, which tends to favor very simple, straightforward, and kid-friendly Good vs. Evil storylines. Andor is very much the exception in that regard. That probably would've happened in Star Wars too. I'd assume the reason it didn't (or that it happened quietly and offscreen) is because the more extreme rebel factions that refused to join the Rebel Alliance (e.g. Saw Gerrera's) got wiped out during the war like we saw in Andor, Rogue One, and Rebels. Saw would absolutely have declared war on the Republic too just to spite Mon Mothma. In Rebels, he made his low opinion of her extremely clear... and the hilarious irony is he was completely correct about her. Technically, that happened in The Phantom Menace... we see a couple sessions of a peacetime Galactic Senate and the whole movie's plot was kicked off by a tax policy issue.

This is definitely NOT a dumb question. I would call this a completely reasonable thing to wonder about if you're at all familiar with how conventional turbofan jet engines generate electricity. To explain for anyone who might not understand the question, a conventional turbofan jet engine like you might see on any jet airliner generates both the thrust needed to flight and electrical power to support onboard electronics. There's a gearbox connected to the turbine shaft that uses the spinning of the turbine shaft to also spin a driveshaft that's connected to an electric generator outside the body of the turbine itself. Like a conventional jet aircraft, a Valkyrie uses its engines to generate electrical power for its onboard electronics. Unlike the conventional jet aircraft, a Valkyrie's engines aren't using the diverted mechanical energy of the spinning turbine shaft to generate electricity. Instead, a Valkyrie's thermonuclear reaction turbine engines directly convert the heat of the plasma produced in the engine's compact thermonuclear reactor into electricity. They use two different solid state generator technologies to accomplish this: thermoelectric generators and magnetohydrodynamic generators. Thermoelectric generators produce an electric current from the electromotive force produced by a temperature gradient between two dissimilar conductors. MHD generators use the motion of the hot, charged plasma through a magnetic field to induce an electrical current. Both generator types are build directly into the inside of the engine, and their lack of moving parts makes them extremely durable and reliable. They also both benefitted from overtechnology materials that made them much more efficient than real world equivalents. As long as the compact thermonuclear reactor is running, the thermoelectric and magnetohydrodynamic generators can continue producing electricity even if the turbine itself is not spinning. There are energy capacitor systems scattered throughout a Valkyrie's body that regulate the power flow into the Valkyrie's systems and function as a limited duraction backup power supply should the energy from the engines be cut off. (Master File asserts that these are not conventional capacitors that store energy chemically, but are rather some spacemagic OTM capacitor that directly stores electrical energy without a state conversion.)

The War in Star Wars was against the Empire. Once the Empire fell, it's not war anymore. What's that polite euphemism? It's "Peacekeeping" past that point. Bro, the full and proper name of the Rebel Alliance in Star Wars is literally "The Alliance to Restore the Republic". Reinstating the previous system of government was its entire stated goal. They just... y'know... probably should've tried to find a strong reformist leader who would actually fix the problems in the Republic's system of government that had it collapsing under the weight of its own corrupt bureaucracy even before the Clone Wars. Instead, they put a weak pro-establishment politician in power who spent her time trying to restore the pre-Clone Wars status quo and engaging in some Neville Chamberlain-tier head-in-the-sand management when it came to the Imperial remnants coalescing into the First Order. (Ironically, her successor Villecham who died a few years into his first term on Hosnian Prime in The Force Awakens is actually named for Neville Chamberlain.) They were already doing a civil war. That's what the war in the original trilogy is called! It's the Galactic Civil War. They insist on calling it the "First Order-Resistance War" officially, but what the sequel trilogy depicts is for all intents and purposes the Second Galactic Civil War. So yeah, they did go and do another civil war after the OT ended. It's the war in the sequels.

To be clear, this is exactly as impossible as the proposed live action movie and for essentially the same reasons. Because Robotech was edited together out of three separate shows that Harmony Gold licensed the distribution rights for from another company, Harmony Gold doesn't actually own the content of the Robotech TV series. Their copyright only extends to the few parts of it that they came up with which were not in the original works. That's basically just a title, some names and proper nouns, and some parts of the score. The vast majority of the show's content - like the characters, designs, and most of the story - is property of the Japanese studios that created the original shows (Big West/Studio Nue for Macross, Tatsunoko Pro for Southern Cross and MOSPEADA). HG can't just go and do a remake or a live action adaptation or a sequel using or based on that material without first getting the express permission of the copyright holders via a license agreement. It's a very safe bet that's not going to happen where Big West and Macross are concerned so a remake is off the table, and sequels have historically proven to not be commercially viable. It's also kind of a financial non-starter. As "beloved" as it supposedly is, Robotech was nothing special ratings-wise and all five attempts to develop any kind of continuation for its animated series have failed miserably. The last three attempts were all excruciating and humiliating public failures that were mocked and derided even by Robotech fans. There's no sane business case for sixth attempt at a sequel, spinoff, or side story. A reboot would, for legal reasons, essentially be an all-new IP developed from the ground up with zero connection to the Robotech you know. The studio would have no incentive to pay Harmony Gold royalties to use the title of an unrelated and mostly-forgotten 80's cartoon with a bad rep when they could give it an original title, entirely avoid the reputational baggage, and keep all the money for themselves in the bargain.

Just got my box set this afternoon. First Trek I've bought on physical media since Enterprise.

Crunchyroll has just sent me a notice to inform me that the movie Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle will be doing a limited engagement in western theaters c.September 12th.

Unfortunately, Master File is practically the only source of tech specs for the second Macross Delta movie. I don't believe these "MRV" missiles are mentioned in there. Yup. Looking at it, that's definitely a reskin of the 3D model made for the RMS-7 thermonuclear reaction missile from Macross Frontier and Macross Delta. They're definitely not reaction weapons in this scene, though. The only "MRV" I can think of that's specifically for non-nuclear missiles is a type of rocket fuze used by the Soviets called the MRV-U that was used for blast fragmentation rocket wahreads. I'm guessing this is probably not that. Looking at the footage in slow motion, the "MRV" missiles don't explode at all. It's not actually clear what's exploding in that scene. The missiles reach the target, spray a ring of what I guess are submunitions that also don't seem to explode, and then start to fall before the camera cuts away. If I had to guess, I'd assume they're something akin to the SPP-8 mass driver pod from Master File. Essentially, a missile that has a volleygun-like multi-barrel railgun in place of an explosive warhead. It gets close to the enemy, and then it lets rip at short range with a huge spray of high-velocity projectiles like the mother of all shotguns. This "MRV missile" seems to be made to hit evasive targets, saturating a wide area with missile-launched projectiles instead of a narrow cone ahead of the missile.

Various media outlets like Polygon have reported that the Switch 2's joycons switched to Hall effect sensors, which should eliminate the stick drift issue the Switch 1's analog sticks had.

So, as we see in Macross Plus, the rear-facing laser cannon can actually move a bit. We're not told exactly how much in official sources, but Master File suggests it's got about 55 degrees of adjustable elevation and around 10 of horizontal traverse.

From what I understand, Disney took a slightly different route to get to essentially the same place. (Which is to say, weak and incompetent leadership reinstating a corrupt system that almost immediately starts to collapse on itself like a failed souffle and is overthrown within 30 years.) Gotta have wars in them stars, after all... the fans aren't showing up for Star Peace. That's Paramount's baby.

I guess? As a kid, I never really explored Star Wars outside of the movies so what little I know about her depiction there is secondhand. Under Disney, well... she's written as a very good person but also kind of a rubbish leader and an ineffective politician. She owns a lot of the blame for the First Order emerging and overthrowing the Republic just a couple of years after she left office.

As @sketchley noted, the VF-5000 is designated the way it is because it was the newly formed-by-merger Shinsei Industry's continuation of/successor to Stonewell Bellcom's VF-3000's development program. Why the VF-3000 was designated the way it was... well... that's harder to say. The VF-3000 was named "VF-3000" before it was a Macross design. Kawamori originally designed it for a non-Macross project called Advanced Valkyrie after Macross: Do You Remember Love? was completed, though the project's sponsor backed out and the designs and story were eventually adapted into Macross. Most of the designs adopted didn't change names or designations, so the VF-3000 remained "VF-3000" even as a Macross design and I don't think I've ever seen a strictly official attempt to explain it away. I don't believe there's an explanation for the VF-3000 designation in what little print media covers Advanced Valkyrie either. My personal hypothesis on the numbering is that it may have been inspired by the Dassault Mirage 4000 program that was in active development when Kawamori was working on the Advanced Valkyrie line. The Mirage 4000 was a larger, twin-engine version of the Mirage 2000 built to be an interceptor and fighter-bomber. The Mirage 4000 prototype was in active testing from 1979 to 1988, putting it in the right time period to be the inspiration, unlike the EF2000 Eurofighter Typhoon. The Macross version of the VF-3000 is explained similarly, as a larger VF-1 built to improve its interceptor and fighter-bomber capabilities that had previously been constrained by the original design's small size. Like the Mirage 4000, it was ultimately cancelled and led to the development of a more advanced fighter based loosely on it (the Dassault Rafale and VF-5000 respectively). I suspect the +2000 designation used for the VF-5000 is also a nod to the relationship between the Mirage 2000 and Mirage 4000. Variable Fighter Master File takes a whack at a non-strictly-official explanation for the designation. Its explanation, which can be found on page 109 of Variable Fighter Master File: VF-1 Valkyrie Vol.2, is essentially a case of the military using the manufacturer's internal designation for a prototype aircraft during testing. To explain in more detail, Master File's short account of the VF-3000 explains that the project started as a "continuing development" program that Stonewell Bellcom was carrying out based on their completed VF-1 design before the First Space War. The program's internal designation was YVF-1000. After the war, Stonewell Bellcom attempted to revive its YVF-1000 program despite the loss of some development data under the new internal designation YVF-3000 as a potential internal rival to the VF-X-4. It was quickly apparent the YVF-3000 would not reach adequate levels of completion before the launch of Megaroad-01, and the difficulties Stonewell Bellcom and Shinnakasu encountered in development drove them to separate and consolidate their aircraft design divisions in a merger that formed Shinsei Industry in 2012 in order to focus specifically on VF development. To help solidify this merger and ensure the stability of Shinsei Industry in the short term, the New UN Government arranged to purchase nine YVF-3000 prototypes for evaluation in 2013. Those nine test aircraft were given the out-of-sequence designation VF-3000A, presumably because the military had no actual intention of adopting the VF-3000 on a large scale. The VF-5000 is subsequently explained as a symbolic gesture to indicate it was a continuation and completion of the same program seeking to perfect the VF-1 concept. It was, according to Master File, developed under the program codename VF-X EVO.

It's one of the standard/defining features of 5th Generation Variable Fighters alongside the Inertia Store Converter and Stage II thermonuclear reaction turbine engine. So yeah, very safe bet the VF-31 uses linear actuators in its transformation system. Have not done a complete crawl through the VF-31 Master File books yet. I tend to consider their lore sections to be non-canonical stories, while the technical material reads as "stuff they'll probably poach from for the next edition of Macross Chronicle" like they did with Sky Angels.

Probably. It's not guaranteed, but designing a larger engine naturally means having to design a larger engine nacelle to house it and potentially that larger engine nacelle will have more space to house things like reactant slush, propellant tanks for verniers, weapons and ammunition, etc. The VF-11 Master File suggests the VF-11 inherited the VF-1's habit of inserting supplemental propellant tanks into intakes and bypass airflow spaces when operating exclusively in space, so there's that too.

Gettin' to the end of the season. OKITSURA ended. Start to finish, a cute little romcom that spends about 1/2 of its time being a cultural ambassador for Okinawa. I had a lot of fun with it. Blue Exorcist's fourth season has also officially ended. This manga was definitely past its use-by date when they decided to do a second season. Season four is past the Weekend at Bernie's phase to the point of starting to smell rather off. The extended flashback to give exposition about a character who's literally killed off in the show's first episode is not a particularly value-added exercise. I Want to Escape from Princess Lessons had a deeply unsatisfying ending where Leticia and the prince she desperately wanted to avoid marrying are happily married. I'm Getting Married to a Girl I Hate in My Class definitely had kind of a sloppy ending too. It started strong, but it just bogged down in wanting to be a pseudo-harem show.

The engine section's sparse as expected, but it does directly confirm one theory I've held for a while. Namely, that the physical size of a thermonuclear reaction engine affects both the amount of thrust it can produce AND the amount of electrical power it can produce. Master File quite bluntly indicates that it's a matter of a physically-bigger engine having more room for thermoelectric converters. 😁

Veering once again back towards the VF-11 Master File. According to its version of the VF-11's development history, there were more than twenty different technology demonstrators collectively filed under "XYF-11" prior to the actual YF-11 rollout. Each aircraft was different, and was used to evaluate different technologies and design variations and each was refurbished or modified as necessary to facilitate tests needed for development. There's a bit of talk about Shinsei itself in this section. The Master File mentions that Shinsei Industry had been growing for 10 years since it was formed by a merger of Stonewell Bellcom and Shinnakasu in 2012. It's said to have started out as a monolithic corporation and had more recently begun to spin off its various specialized divisions as subsidiaries and become a conglomerate. At the time of the YF-11's development, the integrated design work was being carried by the parent Shinsei Industry company while various systems were contracted out to more than twenty different subsidiary and external design firms. What Shinsei ended up with after the experimental phase was three separate variations of the YF-11 design competing against each other. Shinsei's president decided to use the profits from mass production of the VF-5000 to bankroll construction of two prototypes to evaluate the rival designs. One of the three design teams, which has been pursuing an engine-on-top design based on the VF-X-11, was disbanded and the remaining development teams were given a set of common requirements to build their prototypes to to make sure of a fair competition. The two prototypes, then nicknamed Alpha and Bravo, were largely similar designs but differed in a few key points like: Cockpit position Nose volume Use of canards Laser turret location This is followed by a bit of discussion about how those first two affect VF performance. It talks a bit about how cockpit position affects the pilot's field of vision with a particular emphasis on landing. Placing the cockpit farther forward was thought to be an adequate way to deal with the loss of field of vision during landing as the nose obscured the view of the runway. They talk a bit abou how many early VFs had relatively large noses and cockpits closer to the center of gravity because of the difficulty in miniaturizing the radar's components. As smaller radar equipment became available, the design trend became placing cockpits farther forward. There's also talk about how the position of the cockpit itself affects the aircraft's center of gravity and, as a result, the layout of things like the onboard computers, landing gear, etc. Alpha team's prototype placed the cockpit as far forward as possible, while Bravo's design kept it farther towards the rear. Alpha team opted to include canards in their design as a way to tune the aerodynamic center of their prototype, while Bravo team opted to change the orientation of the main wings. Another key difference in the Bravo design was placing the laser turret on the underside of the fighter like a VF-1 rather than covering the rear as on the final VF-11. XYF-11-1 is shown to be the Bravo team's plan, which looks like a cross between the VF-1 and VF-11, but without canards. Bravo team, it seems, had a tendency to favor a "back to basics" philosophy and followed it even when there was not a particularly positive reaction to it. The prevailing philosophy was that the gunpod was more than sufficient for forward attacks, and that it would be better to have rear-facing anti-aircraft firepower for defensive purposes. Alpha team, on the other hand, were a team of incorrigible tinkerers who were keen to try any and every improvement they could and chose to work closely with former pilots in order to solicit candid feedback on what pilots actually needed even if it was things difficult for pilots to admit professionally. (No pilot's pride wants to admit that it's easy for enemies to get behind them, it seems.) Because the recruitment pool for pilots was broadening, the NADV board felt it was advisable to err on the side of caution and incorporate the rear-facing laser cannon, which first found its way into production on the VF-5000 series. Design work on the Alpha and Bravo prototypes began in October 2025. There's a bit of cultural posturing about drawing plans by hand as opposed to using CAD and a director named Yuki Nakahira whose sketches based on pterosaurs apparently played a very large role in the work of both Alpha and Bravo team and inspired the general shape of the aircraft. XYF-11-0 and XYF-11-1 were completed in early 2026, though there's a note that both team's design documents say "XYF-11-1", with the book speculating that they were determined not to be outdone by each other. This pissing match was settled by redesignated Alpha team's unit -0 and all subsequent designs were numbered based upon the order in which they were approved. Unit 1 was first flown on 5 February 2026 by Spacy Force reservist Lt. Col. Shinji Ihata, a First Space War veteran with over 5,000 flight hours. The test flight lasted only about ten minutes, with Ihata noting the prototype was "easy to handle". According to the policy set by Director Nakahira, all test pilots were assigned to fly the Alpha and Bravo team units equally. Test pilots being brought in from the military were first made to pilot various Shinsei-made VFs to familiarize them with other Shinsei designs to ensure pilots had some consistent experience as a common framework for reporting. The next section pivots to talking about development of the engine.

The fujoshi probably had a field day with it... with one tabloid issue implying Gamlin and Basara might be "intimate". At least we know Photoshop is alive and well in the future.

Nonsense, everyone knows there are no such things as Skaven. 😉 Almost certainly. From what we know of the Protoculture's history, when the Protodeviln emerged and subjugated the planet they were created on they expanded in a manner not dissimilar to how the backstory of Halo describes the Flood outbreak of the Forerunner era. Their forces would overrun the defenses of planets, capture as many people alive as possible, and then spiritia-drain and brainwash them into joining the Supervision Army, then take those fresh troops to the next planet to repeat the process. The only reason they ultimately slowed down was they were running out of prospective victims and the Protodeviln themselves were weakning without new sources of spiritia to drain. That was the opportunity which enabled the Protoculture to capture them and imprison them for eternity until that goob Ivano Gunther f'ed around and found out. Their whole force was made up of whatever and whoever they could capture, so they almost certainly continued to use the same tactics their victims preferred with the additional advantage of the Zentradi being unable to effectively fight an offensive led by Protoculture troops due to indoctrination not to interfere with the Protoculture.

Even before that, the first shot he ever fires onscreen is at one of his own men for breaking ranks and nearly spoiling their ambush mission on Mars. That the guy actually survives both the near-destruction of his Regult and the ensuing several-hundred-meter plummet back down to the canyon floor inside said nearly-destroyed Regult is a stunning testament to the durability of both the Regult and the Zentradi body. That nobody in the unit is at all surprised or put off by this, and Quamzin's own remarks, suggest this is normal discipline for Quamzin's division. (Then, of course, there's the events of "Love Concert" about 14 episodes later where Quamzin is having a "Stop running away!" argument with the troops under his command who are trying to defect while he's actively trying to kill them for not following orders.)