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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, all 4th Gen and later VFs have miniaturized pinpoint barrier systems. The inclusion of pinpoint barrier systems on a VF was a major design goal/requirement in the Advanced Variable Fighter program that produced the first 4th Generation VFs (in Macross Plus, the YF-19 and YF-21 prototypes for the VF-19 and VF-22 respectively). Other design goals for the 4th Generation included a 3rd Gen active stealth system, thermonuclear reaction burst turbines, next-gen super AI avionics (ARIEL), and native support for fold boosters. The VF-25 adopted ASWAG advanced energy conversion armor for its anti-projectile shield to improve the robustness of the shield itself in the event it needed to stop a shot that powered through the barrier (or the barrier was committed elsewhere). On screen in Macross Frontier, the VF-25 mainly used its barrier offensively to reinforce its combat blade... though Alto did use it defensively in several high-visibility scenes in Macross Frontier: Itsuari no Utahime when equipped with the Tornado Pack. Very prominently, to the extent that I'm actually a bit befuddled that you asked. It's probably the most prolific user of pinpoint barriers onscreen since the VF-19s in Macross 7. Hayate's VF-31 loses a number of arms to shots from the heavy quantum beam gunpods of the Draken IIIs when his barrier can't absorb all the energy of the shot, and there's that very drawn-out scene in Hayate's first real combat sortie where we see him tank fire from a Var'd VF-171 on his barriers and watch the strength indicator for the barriers tick down on his cockpit display. Not ASWAG'd, the YF-29 achieves comparable defensive capability to the ASWAG-based Armored Pack for the VF-25 by applying a double thickness (vs. the VF-25) of conventional energy conversion armor and operating it at twice the power. It also makes rather extensive use of its pinpoint barrier in combat.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Nothing says cheap late 80's comic like eye-searing gradient fills, right?
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, do one better and edit him into every shot of the film.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, the VF-22's bay doors basically absorbed the YF-21's FAST Packs... so if you look at the production version's underside you'll see the same gunports present on the YF-21's FAST Pack but built directly into the fighter.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Eliminated between the prototype and final production design. With the exception of the forearm shield, they were basically integrated into the airframe.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Really, I think that says all that needs to be said on that score... standardized hardware. The VF-22 has connection points for things like fold boosters and the like, so it wouldn't be all that surprising if other things could be connected to those stations. Yeah, Isamu's VF-19EF/A is a custom job... it probably wasn't in Milia's case, since her swiping those Sound Boosters was a spur of the moment thing when she thought (for rather dumb reasons) that she was dying.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Just finished episode 3 of Lost Universe, and so far I'm having a lot of fun with it. Like Slayers, it doesn't really take itself all that seriously. Millie even looks a bit like Lina Inverse, TBH. I did enjoy the low-profile gag where Kane is shown to have an entire closet full of identical mantles as a justification for why he's always wearing one. There's the retro charm of the old school hand-drawn animation working in its favor as well, even if it is rather unmistakably on the cheap side. Despite that, it still feels like a close cousin to both Slayers and Outlaw Star... as if Gilliam, Jim, and Melfina were all the same person. The show's early CG animation for the Swordbreaker has NOT aged well... but the biggest visual bugaboo is that the transition from interlaced to progressive scan when what was clearly an old DVD release was converted for streaming was very poorly done. There are a lot of pan shots with stuttering problems as a result... which is irritating but not a deal breaker.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    They've been doing THAT for ages... Robotech II: the Sentinels had two original main characters who were literally just transparently obvious bad copies of Hikaru and Misa, with precisely the same relationship and precisely the same problems right down to Karen having an overbearing dad among the military brass. By Shadow Chronicles it'd reached the point of recursion, with Marcus Rush and Maia Sterling being bad copies of Jack Baker and Karen Penn. Well, they kind of are... via Harmony Gold's license to the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross. Still, it is rather a dick move on their part to constanty trace his work and claim it's their own. It really is beyond rude of some Robotech fans to bring their bastardized work for autographs from Macross's creators.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, that's one of a number of Gundam touches in Macross II's timeline. The VF-4's beam rifle looks suspiciously like the Zeta Gundam's, and Feff is basically a Char clone with Ishtar as his Artesia. He's even got a bright red custom mecha with a command horn.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Since the current season is so disappointing, I'm starting an older show I've had on my docket for-bloody-ever... Lost Universe. I've heard it's set in the same multiverse as Slayers, in that there's some connection between the sci-fi setting here and the gods of the Slayers setting. EDIT: Jeez... early deinterlacing shows his this release with a brick.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    The Macross II: Lovers Again timeline's version of the VF-4 did have funnels. Well, Macross: Eternal Love Song called them funnels... but they were computer controlled like the GN Fangs of Gundam's Anno Domini era rather than being controlled by the thoughts of the pilot. The VF-2SS had bits, as noted previously. The distinction between the two is the same as in Gundam. The VF-4's funnels needed to reconnect to the fighter to recharge while the VF-2SS's bits had built-in generators so they didn't need to dock with the fighter for power. No "e" in Spacy. How else are you going to fight an enemy that will ALWAYS outnumber you thousands if not millions to one? The Spacy had a strategy that worked, that was repeatable, and that kept the loss of life on both sides to a minimum while also kicking open the door to turning their enemies into new allies in the near future.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Honestly, the most terrifying thing in this new trilogy is that Kylo Ren looks a little bit like emo Doomcock.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Well, they have to up spending a little since this comic is ending with a whimper rather than a bang anyway... But I doubt it's all that expensive, given that they're just having him write a little mini-comic. Bingo. Part of it is helped by the fact that manufacturing has become cheap enough for them to do many types of merchandise as on-demand small batch orders instead of having to stock a lot of merchandise at any given time. Things like the two artbooks they've printed in the last 15 years were helped by the fact that there wasn't really much new content, and they had the option of padding the books without mercy. The Udon "Macross Saga" artbook is mostly just a bad reprinting of portions of Macross Perfect Memory with reprinted material from the old website's "Infopedia" warts and all. They padded the The Art of Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles artbook like a menstruating firehose by giving over more than half of each 2 page spread to a large, low-resolution screenshot from the "movie" to stretch about 20-30 pages of content to 144 pages and then charge a premium for it even though a fair chunk of that new art had already been printed in the halfhearted Newtype USA article they tried to use to promote the project. Two of their toy licensees (now one, as one has gone out of business) were literally toy bootleggers using the cheapest Chinese factories available to run out knockoff Macross toys and Transformers merchandise.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Probably not, since VFs rely heavily on thrust vectoring for their extreme maneuverability and the VF-24's got a LOT more engine power to play with than the VF-25. Quite the opposite, the close-coupled canard delta is a design feature aimed at mitigating the disadvantages of the delta wing design by stabilizing the airflow over the wing to help improve stability and maneuverability by manipulating the airflow over the main wing. Well, there are limits to what the Χάος Valkyrie Works can do... Χάος Valkyrie Works aren't building new aircraft from scratch, they're taking trial production VF-31A Kairos airframes and modifying them to create the VF-31 Siegfrieds. They can't simply ignore the structural safety limits of the VF-31's design, or they'd create an aircraft that would literally fly itself to pieces. Likewise, cost is an unavoidable limiting factor for a custom VF's development. Χάος's Brisingr globular cluster branch headquartered on Ragna isn't exactly flush with cash, and while 5th Generation VFs are quite expensive already, a lot of the high-performance hardware they need for the upgrade to the Siegfried spec is EXPENSIVE. The ultra-large, ultra-high purity fold quartz they need to make the fold amps and fold wave systems go is EXTREMELY expensive due to its rarity. The advanced energy conversion armor used by the VF-25 is also noted to be very expensive, to the extent that the only part of the VF-25 that actually uses it is the anti-projectile shield and the Armored Pack that makes more liberal use of the material is restricted to squadron leaders and/or ace pilots due to the enormous costs involved. Even the YF-29 is apparently extremely sparing with its use of ASWAG, achieving the same defensive capability across most of the airframe by doubling the thickness of its regular energy conversion armor and then doubling the power supply to that double thickness of armor for 4x the defensive capability... approximately rivaling the Armored Pack's defensive strength. Yeah, the VF-31 was really misleading out of the gate since what we originally got specs for was the Siegfried and that was not a production aircraft. The Kairos and Messiah are on very similar levels, despite the Kairos being developed a decade after the Messiah. Very much so, yes. Macross II: Lovers Again's "parallel world" continuity is rather Gundam-like, which may have something to do with several of its creative staff having come from Gundam projects like Char's Counterattack. The increases in flight performance are more gradual but other technologies advance at a much faster pace... and platforms that became legacy weapons in the main Macross timeline stuck around because they're constantly fighting the same enemy. (The Spacy has a war with rogue Zentradi fleets an average of once a decade, and has gotten so good at it that they're thoroughly used to tabling the Zentradi in round one and taking their sh*t.)
  15. Seto Kaiba
    As far as we know? No. When did a VF-22 appear with Super Packs? It doesn't have any, outside of Master File or that one time Milia stole Sound Boosters designed for a VF-11.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Most FAST Packs are designed to be comparatively simple and inexpensive precisely because they're designed to be purged on the battlefield in combat conditions if they're damaged or if sacrificing them can prevent damage to the much more expensive aircraft. Once the later generations of thermonuclear reaction turbine engine improved fuel efficiency to the point that FAST Packs were no longer strictly necessary for VFs to have reasonable operating times in space maneuvers, FAST Packs switched their focus from augmenting and reducing the burden on internal fuel stores to offsetting the addition of increasingly large amounts of weaponry and armor. Consequently, FAST Packs became more complex and expensive and we started to see packs that could be ejected and reattached in the field, and packs that would bunch magnetically up for easy recovery if ejected like the SPS-25 Super Pack used by the VF-25 in Macross Frontier. The first three generations of VF (e.g. VF-1, VF-4/5000, VF-11/14/17) had cheap, disposable FAST Packs that were little more than rocket boosters and slush tanks with some verniers and the occasional missile launcher slapped on. The 4th Generation designs mostly didn't have FAST Packs because engines had reached the point where they didn't need the large external tanks (e.g. VF-19, VF-22, VF-171). It was the 5th Generation (VF-25, VF-27, YF-29, VF-31) where we started to see these increasingly complex, feature-heavy FAST Packs designed to be easily recovered.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Well, no... by the time we see it in the Macross II: Lovers Again OVA, it's already got ten years as the Spacy's main VF under its belt and the underlying platform it was developed from is pushing twenty. The original VF-2 was introduced in 2072 and its derivative space-optimized variant was introduced in 2081 and first saw combat in 2082. The Siegfried is not a mass production aircraft, it's an aftermarket ace custom that's too expensive for even a megacorporation to build more than a handful of... after massively economizing its upgrades. The production specification VF-31, the VF-31 Kairos, is set to be adopted by the Brisingr Alliance NUNS in 2069 or 2070. Specs-wise, it's difficult to compare the VF-2SS to the VF-31 or any other main continuity VF because the pace of technological advancement is wildly different between the two settings. In terms of raw flight performance, the VF-2SS is only on par with the 3rd Generation VFs of the main Macross continuity. Technologically, there are areas it lags far behind the 4th or 5th Generation VFs of the main continuity and areas where it blew right past them. The Valkyrie II's at the level of engine efficiency comparable to the 4th and 5th Gen VFs where it doesn't really need FAST Packs anymore, and is using them as a convenient way to package a large emount of weaponry. Its actual engine output is low, about on par for thrust-to-weight ratio with the VF-11 at between 6 and 7. It does, however, have VERY powerful generators that wring an enormous amount of energy out of its fuel to the extent that it can casually deploy pure railgun weapons. The main Macross continuity VFs are still at the point where "railguns" are hybrids which employ chemical propellants for initial acceleration and electromagnetic force for additional acceleration to achieve their great stopping power. The Valkyrie II has pure railguns for its regular and heavy gunpods, as well as a large anti-capital ship railgun. The actual quantity of armaments the Valkyrie II carries is only about 1/4 to 1/8th what a 5th Gen Armored VF has though, and is only slightly more than what an old VF-1 Strike Valkyrie would carry. One, possibly two, gunpods, 54 micro-missiles, 6 long-range anti-ship missiles, two beam cannons, and a big anti-capital ship cannon... plus five bits. I'd expect a 5th Gen Armored to wreck the everloving sh*t out of a Valkyrie II with its superior maneuverability and the simple quantity of firepower it can bring to bear. The only way I could see it going differently is if the Valkyrie II got off a shot with its anti-capital ship railgun, which even in the OVA is like using a sledgehammer to shell a peanut when used against a mecha.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Did you mean VF-25S or VF-2SS? Remember, the VF-31 Siegfrieds are all one-of-a-kind ace custom aircraft that were specially modified to improve their performance with technology from the YF-29 and YF-30. Their performance isn't reflective of the capabilities of the production-intent VF-31A/B Kairos the Brisingr Alliance NUNS is set to adopt in 2069-2070. I'd expect the VF-31 Custom Siegfrieds are probably more maneuverable than the stock VF-25, thanks to the greater maximum instantaneous thrust from their derated FF-3001/FC2 engines attached to comparable thrust vectoring nozzles and thrust reverser collars. They're specially tuned for low-altitude maneuverability because they're designed to be flying a close air support role to protect Walkure. By the same token, I'd expect the stock VF-25 to be more maneuverable than the stock VF-31 because of the compromises inherent in adopting a close-coupled canard delta wing vs. the VF-25's variable-sweep wing. Well... the Siegfried's Armored Pack definitely carries a greater quantity of munitions, but I'm not sure that numbers necessarily covers quality in this instance. To compare: The Siegfried w/ Armored Pack is about 4,500kg lighter than the Messiah w/ Armored Pack (47.5t vs 52t). The Siegfried w/ Armored Pack is carrying 500kg more fuel than the Messiah w/ Armored Pack (15.5t vs 15t). The Siegfried w/ Armored Pack has 1G more of acceleration at a full load than the Messiah w/ Armored Pack (12.5G+ vs 11.5G+). The Siegfried w/ Armored Pack has 410kN less booster thrust than the Messiah w/ Armored Pack (2,530kN vs 2,940kN). The Siegfried w/ Armored Pack has 100kN more total thrust than the Messiah w/ Armored Pack (6,280kN vs 6,180kN) due to its greater main engine thrust (1,875kNx2 vs 1,620kNx2). The Siegfried w/ Armored Pack has a marginally higher (1.3627) thrust to weight ratio than the Messiah w/ Armored Pack (13.4812 vs 12.1185). The Siegfried's Armored Pack adds 484 micro-missiles, a pair of 40mm beam cannons, a pair of 35mm rotary cannons, and a 105mm twin beam cannon turret. The Messiah's Armored Pack adds 244 micro-missiles, 30 anti-armor rockets, 4 22mm beam machineguns, and 2 57mm beam cannons with optional autonomous fire capability, The Messiah's Armored Pack, however, is noted to be composed of the ASWAG Advanced Energy Conversion Armor that offers battleship-grade defensive capability, whereas there is no special notation made about the armor of the Siegfried's Armored Pack... which suggests (in conjunction with ASWAG's noted HIGH price tag) that the APS-31 is probably made of conventional energy converting armor or composite armor and thus offers less defensive strength. Without the greater thrust of the Siegfried custom's non-stock engines, the difference in acceleration performance all but disappears (it shrinks to a 0.3752 advantage to the VF-31) and the key difference appears to be simply that the APS-31 goes all-in on close-range firepower where the APS-25 offers a better balance of offensive and defensive capability. I'd also note the APS-31 seems to prevent the Siegfried from using gunpods while it's equipped, while the APS-25 doesn't prevent the Messiah from equipping a gunpod on top of the other armaments.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, that's fairly easy to explain... because it's the same explanation that's behind everything else Robotech does. Put simply, Robotech manages to continue limping along where any sensible brand would've packed it in and gone home because they and their licensees will cut any and every corner that can be cut in order to keep development and production costs low enough to turn a profit from the couple thousand fans who still open their wallets for the franchise. They don't care if it negatively impacts quality, because the remaining Robotech fans are so desperate to validate their faith in the brand that they'll buy most anything. Titan Comics picked up Robotech because the license was dirt cheap, and kept costs down on the production of the comic by tracing everything that could be traced to avoid having to draw things themselves while half-assing the writing. This is why the comic's characters have so many unnatural-looking poses and facial expressions. The reason so many of the Titan comic's action panels look like poorly-composited Photoshop collages of Macross lineart is because that's exactly what they usually are. Even if Diamond overships to inflate their sales numbers for the comic, Titan still turns a modest profit on the comic because of all the corners they cut making it. The same aggressive corner-cutting prevails in every part of the Robotech franchise. Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles was made on the cheap by using the cheapest animators HG was able to find (the interns at DR Movie), the cheapest orchestra money could rent, and all the new design work was done in-house by Tommy himself on his pittance of a salary. The one and only place they couldn't cut corners was the voice actor budget, since the returning voice actors are all SAG members now they had to pay guild rates... so a huge chunk of its tiny budget went to that. Their current crop of toy and game licensees are all itty-bitty indie outfits, two of whom were literal toy bootleggers, who are producing limited edition merch in tiny production runs (in some cases as small as 200 pieces) or using the cheapest materials possible (e.g. miniatures for board games being printed cardstock instead of plastic) due to low demand while hiding behind "limited edition" to justify a premium price tag.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Didn't they basically do that twelve years ago as part of the "special edition" Shadow Chronicles DVD?
  21. Seto Kaiba
    For added entertainment value, this is the first actual candid piece of news about the film project in its twelve year history... and it's one of the directors approached about the film very bluntly stating that a live action movie just isn't realistic because the brand's too obscure.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    No, it's dead... these clowns couldn't get their own fans to cough up $500k to resuscitate a property they allegedly love, and even Harmony Gold itself balked at the idea of spending $1 million on continuing Shadow Chronicles. Nobody's going to throw $100+ million at Robotech.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Either that or the publisher's made such a pig's ear of the layout and print quality that they keep rejecting proof prints of the book.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    I got fully caught up with Do You Love Your Mom and Her Two-Hit Multi-Target Attacks? last night, and I'm pretty unimpressed with it as a show. They did tone the fanservice down a bit for an episode or two, but it's back in full force shortly thereafter thanks to Medhi's overly competitive mom. The recurring plot device that the moms (or at least Mamako) have new powers as the plot demands every time it's convenient makes the story as a whole rather dull, since Masato never really gets a chance to grow or do anything himself. He's just slowly succumbing to being smothered by his increasingly creepy-clingy mom. King Oedipus, call your agent.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Definitely looking forward to Luigi's Mansion 3. I never played the original, but I enjoyed the hell out of Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon on the 3DS.
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