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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    None, I'm afraid. It seems to exist only as a textual mention in Variable Fighter Master File: VF-25 Messiah's description of the VF-25's development. The only non-VF-25 pictures in that section of the book are of the YF-24-2, a VF-19F and VF-22S with NUNS markings, a YF-29 (incl. a version in SW-XA II colors), and a VF-27 in plain NUNS heraldry. (I saw that pic on DeviantArt... looks like a frigging Arwing from Star Fox. The other fun one that turned up on a Google Image search for YF-26 was the YF-27-5 Shahar-F from Macross the Ride misidentified as "YF-26 Seraphim".)
  2. Seto Kaiba
    When you factor in that Grace essentially stage-managed the riots that got Sheryl's family killed, she's basically been running Sheryl's entire life from the shadows. Sheryl was kept implant-free and indicated to Alto that being "all natural" was part of her appeal, but that must have made her almost entirely dependent on Grace to get by in the Macross Galaxy fleet's heavily network-dependent society. General Galaxy would appear to have some plausible deniability there, and may not even have been directly aware what Macross Galaxy was planning. The way it's described, Macross Galaxy was a separate corporation that was founded by General Galaxy as a subsidiary... so it had its own corporate leadership who were appointed by General Galaxy's board and was technically responsible for its own decisionmaking. As such, since the identities of the Galaxy Executives aren't known, it's unclear how involved people at General Galaxy were in Macross Galaxy's shenanigans. Some or all of them may have been in the know, or Macross Galaxy might've been a true rogue corporation.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    I've been reading some stuff about the Macross Galaxy fleet's technology lately, and it makes the place sound kinda... completely horrific. As you know, Macross Galaxy is a 4th Generation closed-system chemical plant-type emigrant ship constructed and launched under the sponsorship of General Galaxy. The whole fleet is run by a corporation rather than a civilian government and is more or less one colossal flying R&D facility for its parent company, General Galaxy. The fleet's advances to automation and labor-saving technology have left it with high unemployment despite overall high economic productivity, so large sections of its residential blocks have deteriorated into slums. Its citizens are almost uniformly cyborgs who are described as essentially living in perpetual cybernetically-enforced augmented reality. There are few, if any, entertainment facilities on its main residential ship and natural food production has been replaced by more resource-efficient synthetic foods. The augmented reality its citizens live in compensates for this, since it can be used to convert an empty space into a parkland in the mind's eye of the beholder and modify their sense of taste so that the synthetic food tastes good. The general populace there is being mind controlled on pretty much every freaking level to the point where they're not really in touch with objective reality anymore. The corporation is conducting all kinds of unethical testing and experimentation like using black ops to test new weapons, unlawfully creating cyborg soldiers and implanting battle AIs into civilians to turn them into soldiers without needing to train them, and even backing terrorists to intimidate opponents of legalizing cybernetic implants in the fleet. One of the few entertainment venues we know about within the fleet, the Riviera-class resort ship Evna (which may or may not be named for the capital city of the Land of Ev in L. Frank Baum's Oz series) was attacked and taken over by a splinter group leftover from Latence (the bad guys in VF-X2) in 2058. This whole fleet is straight-up Weyland-Yutani sh*t... except Macross Galaxy is actually good at it. It certainly explains why Sheryl was so in awe of the Macross Frontier's 5th Generation closed-system bioplant-type construction, since the fleet's residential blocks are much nicer places to live in than urban jungle of Macross Galaxy. People without implants in the Macross Galaxy fleet are effectively second-class citizens who lead harsh lives, since the entire community is heavily tied into the implant network there. Visitors can allegedly make use of AR goggles to interact with the network in a limited manner. It kind of has some horrific implications for Sheryl's childhood above and beyond her having spent some time living rough in the slums. She had no implants, so she was a second-class citizen cut of from most of what was going on in the fleet day-to-day. It's like Grace was raising her as a bird in a cage.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Development of the YF-25 Prophecy was undertaken within the Macross Frontier fleet as a joint venture by branch offices of Shinsei Industry and Legodt & Angeloni Industries (L.A.I.) that are located in the fleet. Shinsei and L.A.I. were selected by the Macross Frontier fleet government and the fleet's New UN Forces to develop the fleet's next-generation fighter prototype together. The Macross Frontier fleet government apparently had some pretty good ties with Shinsei given that they're also known to have built (under license) over 150 VF-19's in the late 2050s and Shinsei also played a role in the development of the Macross Quarter-class. The "Guld Works" is the Macross Galaxy corporation's in-house variable fighter development projects group. In practice, they're the equivalent of (and named for) the Lockheed Martin "Skunkworks" that handles development of that company's advanced development projects including both experimental aircraft and military programs. (Well, OK, they're also named for Guld Goa Bowman, the infamous General Galaxy civilian test pilot who bravely gave his life to defeat an out-of-control unmanned fighter on Earth in 2040, but the Skunkworks are what inspired the name format.) Macross Galaxy is an emigrant fleet governed by a corporation with the same name. They're a subsidiary of the General Galaxy corporation that was set up as a colossal flying lab to evaluate bleeding edge overtechnology... presumably intended as a way to compartmentalize questionable research and development programs that would have raised eyebrows or garnered unwanted attention and regulatory oversight otherwise. It's basically a flying private version of Area-51 in that regard. They didn't need to solicit any other corporation to help them because the Macross Galaxy corporation's portfolio included all the necessary resources to handle development of a next-gen variable fighter internally. I've only done a partial translation of the book, but I haven't seen any citation of a manufacturer for the YF-26. Presumably it was one or more corporations with local presences in the Macross Olympia fleet, though it's indicated that the YF-26 was developed to rather different requirements based on the fleet's interest in overtechnology from Protoculture ruins rather than the overwhelming focus on the Vajra possessed by the Frontier and Galaxy fleets.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    This strikes me as a particularly bad idea... the writing in the Star Wars sequel trilogy is dodgy enough as it is, never mind J.J. Abrams's task of unf*cking the story after The Last Jedi is a battle that isn't so much "uphill" as "scaling a sheer vertical wall ten miles high". Leaking a bunch of fake plots for the movie exponentially increases the odds that they're going to put out a "leak" that sounds significantly better than the plot they end up going with.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    It's mentioned in Variable Fighter Master File: VF-25 Messiah. Macross the Ride bandied about (unsubstantiated) rumors of a YF-28 under development in Macross Galaxy, though that turned out to actually be the production-intent VF-27 that we know and love from Macross Frontier. (The YF-27 that appears in the light novel is essentially a deliberately underperforming unit trotted out to mislead as to the capability level of the production-intent design, while the rumored YF-28 was supposed to be an uber-VF on roughly the same level as the Frontier fleet's YF-29 program.) The VF-25 Master File book describes the VF-25's development as having been part of a three fleet joint 5th Generation VF development program called "Project Triangler". Each of the three fleets - Macross Frontier, Macross Olympia, and Macross Galaxy - was to develop, build, and demonstrate a prototype 5th Generation VF in a competition, the winner of which was to be adopted as the next main variable fighter of all three emigrant fleets. The YF-26 was Macross Olympia's prototype, which dropped out of the competition relatively early. Macross Galaxy wasn't exactly participating earnestly, so the winning YF-25 design ended up being adopted by Macross Frontier and Macross Olympia as the VF-25.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Nope, when the admins turned off the Upvote and Downvote options they also disabled displaying the post's number of upvotes, downvotes, and likes on the post itself and disabled the site's "Leaderboard" view that showed the users with the highest reputation scores. When you Like someone's post, they do still get a notification linking to the post in question informing them that someone liked the post and it still increments the reputation total on their profile. You can still see the number of upvotes, downvotes, and likes on your own posts in the Activity timeline view in your profile though.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    The New UN Forces' assessment of the Vajra's capabilities after first contact was made in 2040 was far and away the biggest factor that determined the military's requirements for a 5th Generation Variable Fighter development program. Having capabilities sufficient to oppose the Vajra was the underlying goal of the YF-24 and YF-24 Evolution programs that were the basis for all other 5th Generation VFs, so it could be said that the VF-24, VF-25, YF-26, VF-27, YF-29, YF-30, VF-31, and Sv-262 were all designed with anti-Vajra capabilities. Naturally a lot of their hardware was designed with that goal in mind as well. There is some circumstantial evidence that would suggest anti-Vajra grade munitions are not standard issue. In Ep.6 in Macross Frontier, as the fleet is preparing to launch its mission to rescue the fleeing Macross Galaxy NUNS ships from Vajra attack there's passing mention made to loading special anti-Vajra ammunition. Later on, the VF-171-II's operated by the Macross Frontier NUNS are suddenly scoring kills left and right on Vajra soldier forms with the weapons that had previously been ineffective against them in the first episode, suggesting that they too traded up to a more powerful grade of ammunition suitable for use against the Vajra. Of course, once 5th Generation VFs become the standard that grade of ammunition will likely become the norm.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Given it's Sideous talking, odds are it's no more true than his previous version. My apologies, sympathies, and so on. Jeez Rey, you can't just ask why someone's face looks like a scrotum! Have some manners...
  10. Seto Kaiba
    ... huh? When, in the prequel trilogy, did we get history on that guy? IIRC the only time he's even mentioned is a "legend" related by the galaxy's most unreliable narrator, Darth Sideous, who had already spend the entire trilogy lying through his teeth to all and sundry. This, for a franchise full of incredibly talkative dead guys... (Back before Disney sensibly chucked the entire Expanded Universe, Palpatine had made death into a bit of a revolving door hadn't he? I seem to recall his dumb arse coming back to life several times to continue acting like a goddamn Disney villain.) If that alleged leak is on the level, I'm going to get far more entertainment value out of watching Star Wars fans go to pieces than I am from the film. Either way, I'm going to need popcorn. Lots and lots of popcorn. You've seen the kind of people Disney has let helm the franchise. If we're going to wish, let's at least keep our wishes realistic.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    They made a Sonic the Hedgehog movie. SEGA and SonicTeam can't even make a playable Sonic the Hedgehog game.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    In what regard? For what it's worth, I don't consider the sequel trilogy to be significantly worse than the prequel trilogy. They were both fully of sloppy writing, unnecessary plot devices, a romance sub-plot written by someone who's apparently incapable of relating to other human beings, and characters whose voices quickly became The Most Annoying Sound. Whatever he intends to do, it can't be as heart-stoppingly inane as the alleged plot of The Rise of Skywalker that was leaked online a week or so back.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, he wasn't really whiny... just really obnoxiously insistent. The plot armor is something every force user gets, until they don't. Y'know... destiny this, foreseen that, yadda yadda yadda. He's really more Yoda's student than Obi-wan's... if he were following in Obi-wan's footsteps he'd have cut off three of Ben's limbs, set his ass on fire, and left him to live the rest of his life as a 7'2" asthmatic chunk of burnt, leathery bacon in a robotic gimp suit.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    He was kinda whiny in A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back but he'd started to grow out of it by Return of the Jedi. Him being a massive troll and f*cking off to the middle of nowhere just shows he was a better Jedi apprentice than Yoda thought, pulling classic Jedi Master "I f*cked up" moves like that.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Per the Star Trek: the Next Generation season one writer's guide Starfleet's 24th century ships are advanced enough that they could conceivably be operated by a single person using a PADD if the situation called for it.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, Macross is reasonably consistent about this. Well, remember... Roy might've been on a UN Navy warship in Macross Zero, but he was a UN Spacy officer commanding a squadron of UN Spacy fighter pilots who were there for model conversion training in preparation for adopting the VF-1 Valkyrie. Sort of... I guess you could say that when everyone is essentially using folded-space teleportation to get around, there aren't any "space lanes" to protect. There is passing mention in Macross Plus of some kind of patrol force out in deep space that Isamu was very briefly assigned in late 2038 and early 2039 before he irritated his latest round of superiors and was dumped on another assignment.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Yup. After the war they added the Spacy Air Force and Spacy Marine Corps. Barring one or two incidences where Destroids have inexplicable markings like "US Army", all of the Destroids we see in the Super Dimension Fortress Macross series are indicated to be UN Spacy assets. The line art for the Tomahawk, Phalanx, Defender, and Spartan shows they have UN SPACY stenciled on them (typically on the front of the right ankle and back of the left, opposite the bumper code). To the best of my knowledge, prior to Macross Frontier giving us a look at the New UN Spacy Marine Corps via the 33rd Marines on Gallia IV the only time we were ever shown any characters who were explicitly from another branch of service was in Macross II: Lovers Again. The standard UN Forces uniform in that OVA was color-coded based on what branch a person belonged to. The only two variants whose associated branches were explicitly identified in the artbooks were the Spacy (whose base color was black) and the Army (khaki). The unnamed officer (believed to be a Colonel) we see commanding Earth's surface-based defenses in the OVA's last two episodes was the first (and AFAIK only) character to be explicitly identified as a UN Army soldier. (He is helpfully wearing a patch on his right arm which says "ARMY" where the Spacy characters have "SPACY", seen on page 33 of This is Animation Special #5: Macross II.)
  18. Seto Kaiba
    "Space is an ocean" is a fairly common trope in sci-fi... even if it's not altogether appropriate. I suspect it likely had a lot to do with Shoji Kawamori being a military aviation enthusiast. The sort of bloke who would have known somewhat obscure facts like a space fleet would fall under Air Force jurisdiction or a separate space force would be spun off of the Air Force if it were created in the modern day. That his fictional space force - the UN Spacy - took the form of a Space Army with its own Air Service likely reflects the dual role the VF-1 Valkyrie occupied... it is both Aircraft and Infantry in the planned-for war against giant aliens. I think this is reflected, to a certain extent, in how shipboard life on the Macross was depicted. Hikaru and the other pilots don't live aboard the aircraft carriers attached to the SDF-1 Macross like you'd expect a naval aviator to do. They live on an army base inside the ship's habitat section. You could think of the Macross as a spacegoing town built on a large and suspiciously well-armed army base. Being incapable of independent operation, the Prometheus is less aircraft carrier and more an airfield adjoining the base. In the ARMD-class's development history you see shades of this as they were developed as space airfields to be installed in orbit as a staging area for space fighters before someone arrived at the idea of putting engines and weapons on them. What we have in the UN Spacy and New UN Spacy is something that isn't wholly any one branch of the modern armed forces. The ranks are Army-style, it operates ships and fighter squadrons that use Navy-style designations and honors some naval traditions in the course of daily life, it spun off its own Marine Corps AND an Air Force. It maintains both aircraft that double as infantry and its own armored fighting vehicles that are also ersatz infantry.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Not as such, no. Granted, I did state that in the real world a space fleet would fall under the administrative jurisdiction of the Air Force. In hindsight, I should have added as an addendum to that the caveat of "unless a new branch of service is specifically established to administrate and operate it". Logically, that would be spun off the branch of service that already has overall responsibility for military operations in space: the Air Force. In Macross, the UN Spacy seems to be set up as a Space Army with its own Air Service. They're committed enough to the Army schtick that the Destroids even have Army style bumper code markings in the line art along the lines of the system that was established in the 1940's with AR-850-5. For maximum irony, the translation of Super Dimension Fortress Macross that Egan Loo himself consulted on translates the enlisted ranks as Army ones rather than Air Force. Hikaru is referred to as a Sergeant when his rank is given as 軍曹, and both Max and Kakizaki are referred to as Corporal when their rank is given as 伍長 rather than the Compendium wiki's Staff Sergeant and Sergeant respectively. It'd be nice if we had a bigger sample to work with, but Super Dimension Fortress Macross was the only time we had characters who were enlisted rather than officers or officer trainees right from the outset. DYRL? made Hikaru, Max, and Kakizaki all 2nd Lieutenants at the outset. As the Spacy ends up being a distinct entity from the Spacy Air Force, I'd say Army style for the Spacy rather than Air Force is probably the safer bet. EDIT: No help from the video games... Skull squadron's Purple platoon from the Super Dimension Fortress Macross video game is a 1st Lieutenant and a pair of Sergeants.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Well, yes... unless the translation convention at work in the series that's rendering what is officially supposed to be spoken English into Japanese for the convenience of the domestic audience is concealing the use of some special title analogous to the one that exists in Japanese.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Well, Southern Cross mecha toys... there's still that indie guy making action figures, right? Oh captain my captain? IIRC he'd said he was abandoning Southern Cross stuff because it'd been licensed. If the MAAS Toys license isn't valid anymore (or never was) then he should be in the clear. The propulsion system isn't in the feet... but yes, there are a lot of really illogical design choices in the Spartas and the other Southern Cross mecha. Partly it's a product of the troubled production's rushed schedule, and partly the designers themselves not being accustomed to designing mecha. Whether or not it would sell is academic at this point given that the most recent news about it is that MAAS Toys is broke and going out of business.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    ... honestly, this sounds like a sanitized version of Red Dwarf set in the Star Trek universe...
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, same... G1 Transformers was huge when I was a kid. (Ah, the days when popular fiction thought five inch floppy disks held enough information to destroy the world or unlock the secrets of creation...) Macross's creators... and the shows themselves. Now, your confusion on this subject is understandable because everything you just said about the Japanese terminology is completely correct. Translating the Japanese terms for military ranks is contextual unless they're prefaced by a branch of service. Some fiction authors provide that context themselves in the form of explicit guidance to their translators and/or onscreen conspicuous English, and some don't. Gundam's creators are often in the latter category. Macross's are in the former. Mind you, when it comes to space fleets, in popular fiction there tends to be an improper Navy bias rather than an Army one... since in reality a space fleet would fall under the jurisdiction of the Air Force (something that the makers of Stargate SG-1 got right and almost everyone else got wrong). There are a lot of things one can do in the Navy, and the Village People will sing about them given half a chance, but holding ranks like First Lieutenant and Staff Sergeant are not among them. There are a number of instances in Macross where the ranks of characters are shown on screen in conspicuous English, and they are invariably Army-style ranks. For instance, in the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross series episode "Blind Game", if you look at the markings on the ES-11D Cat's Eye reconnaissance plane you'll see that the name and rank of its pilot stenciled on the canopy frame read "S/SGT. H. IWATA" and Misa's seat is marked "F/LIEUT. M. HAYASE". Macross Plus shows us a biographical summary from Isamu's personnel files at one point (which was faithfully transcribed, typos and all, into the liner notes), in which his affiliation is given as "UN SPACY" and his rank as "FIRST LIEUTENANT". Macross Frontier publications provide the katakana for the SDFN-04's name as ジェネラル・ブルーノ・J・グローバル... "General Bruno J. Global" and SDFN-01's name as ジェネラル・ハヤセ "General Hayase" (presumably its full name is the General Takashi Hayase, Bruno Global's friend, mentor, and superior officer). Likewise, Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy provides us with SDFN-08's name as ジェネラル・ブリタイ・クリダニク "General Vrlitwhai Kridanik" (using the official spelling of his name provided in the on-screen English text that accompanied the aforementioned katakana). IIRC the official English subs produced in Japan for the Macross Frontier movies and the Macross Delta TV series and movie use Army ranks as well for both PMC personnel and the named NUNS ones. Macross II's creators also reportedly dictated that the ranks in the OVA were to be translated as Army ones, which led to US Renditions giving Nex Gilbert an informal promotion to Major to avoid "Captain" (title) vs. "Captain" (rank) problems. These characters are all explicitly in the UN Spacy or New UN Spacy. You can't be a Staff Sergeant or a General in a Navy, and First Lieutenant is a billet there rather than a rank... so the logical conclusion (as if the creators hadn't already told us the answer) is that it's an Army-style rank system. No worries. I'm as pedantic as they go, and this particularly confusing subject comes up at least once or twice a year so I've been used to it for a long long time. The understandable confusion certainly isn't helped by the fact that, prior to his transfer into the Spacy to assume captaincy of the Oberth-class space destroyer Goddard, our boy Bruno J. Global was a Commander in the UN Navy aboard the submarine Marco Polo. (The UN Forces and New UN Forces seem to take a very Japanese view of transfers between branches of the armed forces.) Nor, for that matter, is it helped that the (New) UN Forces steal a lot of their designation system from the US Tri-Service ones, and lifted their hull classification symbols and their Spacy squadron designations from the US Navy despite the Spacy explicitly not being a Navy and not using Naval ranks. It's been a while since I visited his blog, but the short story you're thinking of is "Super Dimension Fortress Macross: the UN Wars: the Plundering Fleet" from the Macross Perfect Memory artbook. That was the long form version of the anecdote Global shared with Misa on their elevator ride down to the base under Grand Cannon 1 in Alaska, where as an officer serving with her father on the UN Navy submarine Marco Polo, his crew had staged a fake enemy raid on their own side's supplies because their superiors were being dickish about resupplying their ship's badly depleted stores. Naval ranks would've been appropriate there, since at the time both Hayase and Global were serving in the UN Navy. (The UN Spacy was barely a year old at the time.) EDIT: For fun, I'll be spending a good chunk of this weekend crawling around the interior of an old Forrest Sherman-class destroyer... so, y'know, go Navy. DD-946 USS Edson, for the curious.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Sorry, two characters who only have half a dozen lines... and that guy went down like a b*tch to some basic Inbit grunt. It's almost as humiliating as the Zor Lords being taken out by a boy-crazy airhead and her mentally ill crush with the purple mullet. Since this topic has now suffered a complete derailment in the wake of another one of Robotech's inevitable embarrassing failures, I'll throw caution to the wind and just pour fuel on the fire for the sake of watching this magnificent disaster accelerate into its death spiral: Rey is the only interesting Star Wars protagonist because she's the only one who isn't being railroaded into a predetermined destiny by the Force and her bloodline. Let the galaxy burn!
  25. Seto Kaiba
    The scene you're thinking of is in Macross Zero, where Roy mentions that the energy converting armor gives the VF-0 the toughness of a tank. EDIT: About 20:20 into Macross Zero's first episode, when Roy and Raizo are talking about the VF-0's in the hangar on the Asuka II.
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