Seto Kaiba

So far it's only been done for the VF-1... and that was more just a deeper dive into stuff that'd already been covered including the controls, engines, etc.

HLJ went from Not Available Yet to Backordered instantaneously... looks like every copy they got went to a preorder customer. CDJapan's still showing like 8 copies in stock for anyone who hasn't got it yet. Showing love to the VF-11 is, on its own, enough to justify a "please sir, can I have some more?"

Once again trying to slog my way through Tatsunoko's original series The Price of Smiles. It started pretty strong, but I gotta admit I can kinda see why it's been sarcastically nicknamed The Price of Gundam and Discount Code Geass... between the protracted attempt to play "Break the Cutie" with Princess Yuki and all the politics, it does feel a bit like it's trying to be both and neither at the same time. First episode's got some pretty decent mecha combat though.

Believe me, we're on the same page on the micromanagement and seemingly endless skill lists... Not sure who these licensees think is going to buy these board and card games though. There aren't exactly a lot of Robotech fans left, and they're pretty well-scattered... which was one of the bigger problems for RRT. They can't exactly depend on the old RPG's saving grace of fans buying it as a reference work, and board games for licensed properties tend to be kind of a for-fans-only thing in my experience. Pretty sure I said as much, yeah.

HLJ finally lists the book as in stock, but it still hasn't processed preorders.

With a little bit of judicious houserule-ing and streamlining, Palladium's system is eminently workable... it's just bloated from decades of skill list expansions and unclear verbiage. Strange Machine's system, however, is a train wreck severe enough that I found a few new bosons in the wreckage. In all fairness, that had significantly less to do with them not being experts at wargame-manufacture than it did with Kevin being Kevin. Kevin went into RRT thinking he was an old pro who knew everything there was to know and puffed up on false confidence from the unexpectedly large take on Kickstarter. He got overly ambitious with design requirements for the miniatures. He vastly underestimated the cost of every phase of the project because it never occurred to him that there might be parts that needed to be reworked or that shipping big boxes of miniatures overseas would cost more than slim softbound books. He similarly overestimated demand for the game based on the strong fan response on Kickstarter, and pillaged a huge sum from the budget for retail stock in order to line his own pockets on the assumption it was going to fly off the shelves and pay back that stolen investment with interest. When the dust settled, Kevin's brilliant management skills left the project upside-down to the tune of over $650,000 (US) with a mountain of unsellable inventory collecting dust in Palladium's warehouse and Kevin himself scrambling to find someone willing to loan the company that massive sum so they could finish... which never materialized before HG terminated his license. That's Robotech. "Yeah, we f*cked up this time. And the time before that. And the time before that. And the time before that. But this time'll be different, honest! It's gonna be great! We'll sell gangbusters! The best is yet to come!"

From director Tony Giglio, the visionary behind such direct-to-video greats as Soccer Dog: the Movie! The cast list is pretty uninspiring stuff too. I'm not sure if the biggest credit is "background character in Captain America: the First Avenger" or the brother in My Big Fat Greek Wedding. I see no ripping and tearing berzerker-packing man-and-a-half here. ... oh sh*t... yeah, this is gonna be based on one of the games all right. Specifically, the steaming turdwaffle that was Doom 3. The released portion of the cast list credits Dominic Mafham as Dr. Malcolm "My Name is a Spoiler" Betruger. EDIT: I guess if you're going to make a hammy direct-to-video Doom movie, Doom 3 would absolutely be the way to do it. Well, it is direct-to-video...

That's actually been around for a while. Shawn turned most of it off because there were some accusations of downvote spamming. Now it's purely a "like" option on posts instead of an upvote/downvote system. (That heart in the lower right.)

I wasn't speaking strictly in terms of Kickstarter, it was more a general comment on Palladium Books's attitude towards customer relations. Kevin's regular news posts tend to have a distinctly distant relationship with objective reality. He gets worked up easily and will often end up energetically hyping products that don't exist yet, making grandiose promises he can't keep, and missing his own self-set release dates by entire years while professing all hands are working hell for leather continuously. Right now, IIRC he has a book that's like 80-90% reprinted material that is still over a full calendar year late and counting. Basically, the fundamentally dishonest, self-destructive behavior you saw on Kickstarter was business as usual for Palladium... he just had already had your money this time, so he could prevaricate all he wanted without consequence and eventually give in to temptation and try to exploit the Kickstarter funds to line his own pockets and bankroll other products.

Hard pass for me... no offense, but the idea of supporting Harmony Gold and Robotech while they continue to block all Macross licensing is profoundly distasteful. That said, since it was free, I did take a look at the Strange Machine Games Robotech: the Macross Saga RPG open beta a while back. I know it's only in beta, and I honestly doubt that Strange Machine will get more than one book out of it, but I was completely unprepared for it to be at least as embarrassingly bad as Palladium's first effort back in the eighties. Zero utility for converting the game to a Macross setting, IMO. Yeah, but in all fairness "over-promise and under-deliver" has been Palladium's SOP for a very long time. It wasn't a new development in their failed tabletop game Kickstarter, that was just a particularly public expression of the company's cardinal sin that riled an unusually large crowd as an inevitable result of them already having the customer money in hand rather than faffing about wasting their own. Yup.

Thanks for the review. My hopes have been raised a bit by hearing that there's a bare minimum of weirdness in Variable Fighter Master File: VF-11 Thunderbolt. It sounds like it should be similar to what we got in the VF-0 book in terms of content then, which means I can expect some good technical trivia instead of the raving garbage I got in the VF-4, VF-22, and VF-31 books. I'm a little surprised they glossed over the Super Pack and skipped the Protect Armor Pack outright since we seldom saw the VF-11 without one or the other outside of Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy. I'm less surprised they skipped the relatively minimal custom VF-11D built for the Jamming Birds. If the first one's good, I'd definitely open my wallet for a second VF-11 volume... unfortunately I still haven't gotten the confirmation that my preorder has been filled and is ready to ship, so I'm stuck in limbo for the duration.

I must confess I was never particularly happy with that factoid... it kind of feels like it invalidated the ending of Macross Plus, after everything Isamu did to prove manned fighters were still the way to go. He must've been pretty steamed when he saw the New UN Spacy adopting the Ghost anyway and some New UN Gov't members adopting all-Ghost air forces. It must've been an especially bitter pill to swallow after the New UN Forces decided not to adopt the VF-19 as the next main fighter after all. Ironically, both the real world explanation and in-universe explanation for the VF-171 essentially amount to the VF-19 being too much of a "main character" mecha. G-force tolerance issues were, for all practical intents and purposes, the making of the VF-171. All of the envelope-pushing in Project Super Nova ultimately ended up producing two 4th Generation Variable Fighter designs that were all but unflyable to the average pilot. They had incredible maneuverability and acceleration, but the high g-force loads on the pilot were severe enough that only the most experienced and talented pilots could get the most out of the aircraft. The New UN Forces scrubbed their plans to make the VF-19 their next main fighter in part because of training accidents caused by pilots losing control of the aircraft under high g-loads. (Arms export restrictions imposed by the NUNG didn't help, but having built a fighter only the elite could properly fly was a major problem.) The VF-171 was a beast born of necessity. The New UN Government needed a 4th Generation main fighter that average pilots could handle, with high multi-purposefulness and low initial and operating cost. By simplifying and polishing the VF-17 design, General Galaxy cut a lot of time out of the development cycle, allowing them to produce a highly robust VF with all the capabilities the New UN Government wanted while keeping it within the abilities of the average pilot to get the most out of the airframe. Later tech upgrades eventually (Block II/2055) made the VF-171 a fighter that offered better comprehensive performance than the VF-17 it was based on thanks to improvements like 3rd Gen active stealth systems. A VF-171 with EX-Gear but without the VF-19-grade engines would be an incredibly responsive aircraft. With the EX-Gear's learning computer and electromyographic sensing, plus its anti-g seat functions to optimize blood flow during periods of high g's, it would probably be a dream to fly. Sadly, the Block IIIF type from the movies went the opposite way and got the upgraded weapons, sensors, and engines but left out the EX-Gear, improved visibility cockpit, and improved anti-beam coating.

Engineers and governmental departments do love their acronyms. Especially finding ways to create ones that are rude to see how long it takes before someone notices. There's actually enough information to draw conclusions about almost every Ghost series unmanned fighter in Macross. The QF-2200 Ghost is an unmanned reconnaissance unit that's noted to contain almost no OTM. It has an AI autopilot function, but otherwise is operated remotely by a human pilot like the modern MQ-1 Predator. The QF-3000 Ghost was the first UN Forces unmanned fighter to have an OTM computer system. Its AI was fully contained within its main computer, but the record is a little unclear as to whether the QF-3000's AI was designed from the ground up as a semi-autonomous model or was designed a fully autonomous one and only run in semi-autonomous mode due to stability issues. The AIF-X-9 Ghost had a self-contained, fully autonomous high-function AI system based on data the Macross Concern provided from the Sharon Apple program that enabled it to be as unpredictable as a flesh and blood pilot. Thanks to Sharon Apple's little psychotic episode the technology was subsequently banned. That said, its derivatives are almost entirely in the self-contained fully-autonomous category: The AIF-7S Ghost that jointly held the title of "next main fighter" for the 4th Generation with the VF-171 is the exception to the above, as anxieties about the stability and reliability of the fully autonomous high-function AI system developed for the X-9 prompted the design to be scaled back to favor stability over maximum autonomy. Its Macross Chronicle sheet asserts that it's using an enhanced version of the QF-3000's semi-autonomous AI to maximize stability, but that it is capable of operating in fully autonomous mode in the event of a loss of communication with the mothership. The AIF-9B Ghost, AIF-9V Ghost V9, and Luca's QF-4000 Ghosts are all indicated to be fully-autonomous AI types. Luca's QF-4000 Ghost is a special case in that it's specifically said to be an AIF-7S upgraded with the same AI used on the X-9 prototype, albeit deliberately subjected to program restraints in normal operation. The AIF-X-8S Ghost prototype from the Macross Frontier drama CDs is unique in that it was equipped with a fully autonomous high-function AI like the AIF-X-9's, but instead of the artificial personality derived from the Sharon Apple model AI they used personality data sampled from living human beings... the members of Skull Platoon. This was theoretically supposed to prevent the kind of runaway AI incident that occurred in the Sharon Apple-based software. The jury's out on the QF-5100 Goblin II. Autonomy is never mentioned in connection with it, only that it can be remotely operated by the pilot's cybernetic Brain Direct Interface. They're known to be able to control multiple fighters at once, though it's unclear if that's being done by the pilot's own brain or if there's a resident AI installed in their brain that's handling that distributed load the way there was for the Project Stella cyborgs.

The sources you cited a both pretty clear that the correct term is Unmanned, not Uninhabited... the first of the two noting that the term "uninhabited" was briefly used but that "unmanned" is the correct one. Ah, so it was your vehicle? I see, what we have here is a failure to communicate. I assume the failure is mine, as I notice I've failed to properly define my terms. As I've said before, the grade of hardware I'm talking about that would be necessary to make a safely operable robotic vending machine like what we see in Super Dimension Fortress Macross is the kind of stuff used for SAE Level 4 or 5 autonomy. The kind of hardware designed for a robotic car that can fully drive itself on public roads without any operator in the vehicle. They use complex networks of LIDAR, RADAR, optical cameras, and high-precision GPS to control the vehicle. This technology isn't available on consumer-level vehicles yet. Right now, the best that's available to the general public is legally SAE Level 21, which depends mostly on short-range optical cameras with limited fields of view, ultrasonic proximity sensors, and usually a single tight-focus forward camera and radar. Level 1 and Level 2 are only conditional driver assistance systems, not true autonomous function. Because those units are purely dependent on regular optical cameras, they tend to have trouble making out signage at a distance or on the periphery of the camera's field of view. Basically, what I'm saying you'd need to do to make something like the Petite Cola machine with today's technology would be give it the sensor suite off the autonomous taxis being trialed by Waymo and Uber, or the autonomous semi trucks from Waymo, Embark, and Tesla. LIDAR and RADAR for environment sensing including hazard detection, optical camera systems for short-to-mid range, and a multiply-redundant navigation system. It can absolutely be done, but it's gonna be a vending machine with a sticker price like an entry level 4 door sedan. (Admittedly, getting all those sensors into a large upright box in a streamlined manner would be substantially easier than trying to work them into a nice, streamlined van.) 1. Tesla's Autopilot HW2 and later is capable of Level 3 functionality under very specific circumstances but is still classified Level 2 because it can only do it under those very specific circumstances. They like to claim the computer will support SAE Level 5 one day, but I don't think they'll ever get there with the sensor suite they've got. They just do not have enough depth of field in any direction other than dead ahead.

Why do you keep saying "Uninhabited"? UAV is short for "Unmanned Aerial Vehicle". It doesn't mean there's nobody at the controls (and never has), only that there's nobody in the aircraft itself. (And while it is standard practice to have someone supervising operations, some models like the MQ-9 Reaper ARE capable of autonomous flight and have logged tens of thousands of automatic takeoffs and landings without human intervention.) ... it sounds to me like you're conflating a couple different incidents here. There have been a number of incidents where autonomous vehicles failed to merge onto or off of a freeway because they couldn't detect an adequate opening to take a lane right, and others where they were fined for driving well under the speed limit during manned test runs on freeways for safety reasons, but I don't think I've seen any reports of vehicles mistaking what lane they were in. (Or you may be mistaking the Tesla fatality from last year, where the somewhat less autonomous than advertised Model X autopilot misread lane markings and plowed into a barrier because it thought it was on the other side of an exit ramp.) Level-4 autonomy hardware would be more than capable of producing a safe robotic vending machine.

... I know several choreographers who would disagree. But they are, by nature, a curmudgeonly lot. Honestly, I doubt it. I know a lot of people want to find significance in trivial stuff in animation, but sometimes the animators just do things because they look good or because they didn't want to mess with the audio. Actually, Delta did... just not in the field. You'll find conventional microphones in a number of scenes during Freyja's audition and training early on, and during their practice sessions. As to Frontier and "vintage" vehicles, the fleet went to considerable lengths to maintain the pre-First Space War aesthetics of the historical locations replicated in it like San Francisco, Shanghai, Beijing, Shibuya, Taiwan, Yokohama, and Yamanote. This seems to have extended as far as ensuring civilian vehicles were period-appropriate even if they were significantly more modern under the hood like Ozma Lee's replica Lancia Delta HF Integrale. (The mechanic sheet that features Ozma's car actually asserts this is something the population enthusiastically appreciates... which for me is a bit horrifying considering most of the background vehicles are stock CG models of Toyota small cars.) "Cheap drones" are generally just remote-control toys with little to nothing in the way of actual AI features... that's rather different from what we're talking about. As our resident USAF chap noted, this is patently untrue. (Calling us "the IT crowd" makes me feel like my office should be in the basement with a guy named Moss and a goth.) Simple color optics can be used for that. Observing traffic signals has not been a problem for autonomous vehicles, and would not be an issue for a robotic vending machine using the same technology. The program I worked on logged over a million miles of driving with exactly ONE accident that wasn't the result of a negligent human... and a vending machine on the sidewalk doesn't generally have to worry about being blindsided by a human in a car under normal circumstances.

The notification sound effect is also behaving badly, it's coming out more as a staticky squelch.

This past week's episode of Star Trek: Discovery manages to simultaneously be one of the strongest and weakest episodes of the series so far. "If Memory Serves" opens on a recap of the lovingly restored original Star Trek pilot "The Cage" and transitions with uncommon grace directly into the episode proper. The only real problem is that the episode's A-plot about Burnham and Spock's visit to Talos IV is a painfully dull dump of plot-critical exposition is nowhere near as compelling or interesting as its B-plot about Hugh Culber dealing with the trauma of having been murdered, hunted through the mycelial network, and then unceremoniously brought back to life. Don't get me wrong, the visit to Talos IV is a lovingly produced aesthetic update to "The Cage" and "The Menagerie" but Spock and Burnham are incredibly boring. Once the Talosians sort out Spock's brain (hoho) and he delivers his incredibly stupid exposition about the rest of the season's plot and the identity of the Red Angel, he and Burnham just start sniping at each other until the Talosians reveal what ultimately ruined their relationship. You probably expected something unique or interesting from the Red Angel, but no... we're just doing a less involved version of Enterprise's Temporal Cold War arc. Even the reveal of what caused the bad blood between Burnham and Spock is a massive moronic anticlimax. She tried to run away from home, and he tried to stop her, so she tried a "break your heart to save you" gambit and insulted him by calling him a half-breed. Apparently it never occurred to her that the "logic extremists" (now there's a stupid term) would take just as much exception to Sarek's human wife and half-Vulcan son as they did to her, so the whole running away bit that nearly got her killed and ruined her relationship with Spock was pure self-serving self-righteous BS. Probably a good thing she's got no chance at the center seat now, as she's clearly got a lifelong Martyr Complex. The B-plot with Dr. Culber getting used to having been unkilled by the jahSopp is a lot more interesting. For once, the trauma of having died and been brought back to life wasn't a case of "death is cheap". He's got some actual PTSD to work through thanks to having been murdered by Voq, hunted through the mycelial network by the jahSopp, and then being brought back to life after he'd achieved something resembling closure. We get to see the difficulties he has as his partner Stamets tries to simply pick up where they left off as though nothing had happened, his difficulties accepting what happened to him, aggressive outbursts as a result of being put in proximity with his killer, and so on. It really throws both Ash's and Hugh's damage into sharp relief, as the two men who probably suffered the most as a result of the Klingon war. It's quite a strong character episode on their part, though it still does feel like they're having trouble with the idea of having a gay couple on Star Trek.

You can program for a choreographed performance, or to have the unit hold position relative to a part of a person's body. (Position-holding could be achieved by something similar to beam-riding guidance, with them wearing some directional transmitter that the microphone is programmed to stay centered in the path of.) I legitimately did not recall that occurring in the series, but then it has been good while I last rewatched Macross 7. I concede the point that the microphone system may have a basic AI for guidance. That doesn't establish AI as ubiquitous in the Macross setting, but it does establish one more (temporary) category where AI made inroads into the consumer-level technology of the Macross universe. (One does have to wonder why they were seemingly abandoned in favor of conventional microphones later on though... did someone lose an eye or something? We do see civilian drones, but curiously they seem to largely be little more sophisticated than what we have today.) You're looking at it from the opposite direction I am, which I suspect is why my point isn't getting across here. If you want to support a software feature, you need to have the available system resources to support it and ideally you don't want to redline the system doing it. This is why most consumer-grade technology with rudimentary AI is extremely simple (e.g. the Roombas) or network-based. Even basic AIs tend to have surprisingly high system requirements, and that leaves you a choice of expanding the available sources locally (more cost), running the system ragged (reduced lifespan both in operating time and overall durability), or you outsource the complex tasks to another system with more resources. This is why those cheap system-on-chip setups you keep referring to are cheap... because the AI features they support are largely cloud-based to avoid the additional cost and complexity of faster processors, more memory, more local storage, and more capacious batteries. The more you want the system to support locally, the more demand on the local hardware and the more expensive the unit gets. Now, if we're talking about something like a FAST Pack that's meant to be as aggressively inexpensive as it can be for the military, there's two questions to ask. What benefit would having an AI on the pack be, and is it sufficient to justify additional cost? As I see it, there's no real benefit to it when the packs are tied directly into a military-grade AI right there inside the fighter and they usually contain nothing but fuel tanks, verniers, rocket boosters, and weapons systems slaved to the fighter's FCS. Same story for most other military hardware. ... "autonomous vehicle" usually refers to cars. When it's aircraft, they're usually called Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. Level 3 and 4 autonomous cars do, in fact, have the software to receive and interpret the inputs from things like LIDAR arrays, RADAR, and so on in order to safely navigate public roads, observe and follow lane markings, prevent collisions with other vehicles or pedestrians, etc. The same technology could be applied to create an autonomous robot vending machine, but it would be a significant increase in cost to an already expensive vending machine for no real gain besides the "ain't it cool?" factor. Being an engineer, I'm all about making cool sh*t for its own sake, but I'd imagine potential customers are gonna want a business case demonstrating why it's an advantage over a static machine besides being a novelty (because the novelty will wear off quickly).

Yes, but sentient AI is such a psychotic crapshoot it had to be outlawed entirely... so you know it prefers store brand cola.

It can be easily achieved by computer control, and unlike AI we can show that computers have infiltrated all manner of areas that they wouldn't until decades later in the real world like tablets having replaced newspapers, television cameras being remotely operated drones, etc. Program the cues, and let the computer handle the timing of the mics. It doesn't need to be an AI, it just needs a little prior planning not dissimilar to the cues used to turn mics on and off on theater performances and concerts when a mic isn't needed. Even if it were an AI managing it, it wouldn't establish that AI technology is ubiquitous in Macross. It would just confirm what we already knew that rudimentary AIs can be used to take over certain jobs nobody wants to do like picking rubbish or putting a microphone in front of Basara without beating him with the stand while most of the rest of technology's seemingly unimpacted. I could see a stronger case for it if the microphones responded to, say, gestures (like summoning one with a wave of the hand), demonstrated collision avoidance behavior, or could follow Fire Bomber outside the stage, all of which would require a lot more immediate, precise control outside of what could be preprogrammed. While I've not been around many bands trying to make it big, even the amateur musicians I know tend to own at least a microphone or two and some entry-level mixing equipment... it would not unreasonable for Ray to have purchased that sort of thing for practice. Yes, it can... but at a lower level of precision and with a lot fewer features. That's point I've been tilting at here. Yeah, you can technically run some of these rudimentary AI features exclusively on a system-on-chip, but at the cost of significant demand on processor time, memory, local storage, and energy that's generally greater than what you would see in an operating environment where you can displace those resource-intensive operations to a less limited system. This is why many modern AI technologies are network-dependent. The technology already exists for autonomous vehicles. LIDAR systems to monitor the movements of other vehicles, people, animals, road markings, hazards, and so on in the proximity of the vehicle, low-power RADAR for short-range collision avoidance, infrared for living object detection and motion tracking is commonly used in the XBox's Kinect peripheral and Nintendo's Wiimote, a decently grunty lithium ion battery can be pillaged from something like an electric wheelchair or a small electric golf cart, emotors can be obtained at shockingly compact sizes that with a few modest gear reductions can easily develop enough torque to shift a vending machine (see Jamie's mechanical ascender in Mythbusters's superhero special, which uses an emotor about the size of a soda can and a few gear reductions to lift a standard 95th percentile male). Really, a robotic vending machine is basically just that robotic mall cop with a minifridge strapped to it. All the various pieces exist but, as I said, it's "awesome but impractical" All that extra expense for what actual gain besides making an already expensive vending machine MORE expensive without materially improving its ability to do its job.

Granted, the litter-picking robot would have to be marginally cleverer than a Roomba... but the Roomba is about as basic as your consumer-grade robotics get. Its program is little more than a scheduler, a motor-RPM-based distance measurement algorithm, and a directive to turn ninety degrees when it bumps into something or is half a device radius from overlapping its path. It really isn't beyond the scope of what a high school robotics team could knock out. That said, the litter picking robot's additional complexity wouldn't be enough to put it out of the reach of the high school robotics crowd either. The additional embedded controls for the arm are almost literal child's play these days, making image processing that design's only real improvement over the Roomba. I've seen a lot of unsubstantiated fan theories over the years, but this is one of the odder ones... Has it occurred to you that, as a microphone in a concert venue, it's vastly more likely that it's simply a remote-controlled device run by the venue's sound engineer in response to predefined cues in a choreographed performance with a set list? (Basara's a prick, to be sure, but even he doesn't generally deviate from the set list.) Your contention that AI technology is everywhere in Macross is entirely unsubstantiated. (Mind you, I'd be curious how that microphone is hovering. There's no evident thrust and it's too small to be contragravitc. Maybe a Biefeld-Brown effect electrohydrodynamic lifter? Though I guess you wouldn't want to touch it if that were the case.) I'm not sure where you thought you were going with this one... there's a pretty significant difference in processor, memory, and sensor utilization between a barebones open source word processor than, say, a piece of software that's trying to convert your speech into text, divine your intent, and convert it into actionable instructions for itself and other applications. The reason the system-on-chip AI software depends so heavily on external processing is because doing all the processing locally would need significantly greater local storage requirements and place far greater demands for resources on the processor, memory, and energy storage system to do the job with anything close to the same level of accuracy. Well, maybe better than a Tesla... but their entire autonomy stratgy seems to be "make misleading statements, backpedal, promise there'll be a patch in the future". The vending machine and litter picking robot are both within the reach of today's technology, and the litter picking robot would be little more sophisticated than a consumer-level robotic vacuum cleaner or lawnmower. The vending machine would be nearly as complex as an autonomous car, mainly to avoid damaging themselves and hurting people. Either could be available today, but in practice they aren't because they are "awesome but impractical".

The Spoiler function also appears to be missing.

Yeah, it's a bit of a math fail. Empty weight usually means the aircraft is drained of fuel and consumable stores, but is otherwise fully topped-up on hydraulic fluid, lubricants, etc. 18,500kg - 13,250kg = 5,250kg of odds and ends to be accounted for including (but not limited to): The pilot (Hikaru is 58kg without his pilot suit) Life support system gases (trivial weight?) 1,410L of hydrogen slush fuel for the main engines (119.85kg @ 0.085kg/L) An unknown quantity of fuel for the liquid-fuel rockets in the "backpack" (liquid oxygen is 1.141kg/L) A Howard GU-11[A] gunpod with 200 55mm rounds (1,550kg) Twelve AMM-1A all-purpose medium-range missiles (12x125kg = 1,500kg, not counting the weight of the pylons) Chaff, flare, and smoke charges for the countermeasure dispenser. Basically, with the knowns we can whittle it down to ~2,022.15kg of unaccounted-for mass. If the four pylons are of similar mass to the F-16 Station 3/7s you quoted, that's another 480kg accounted for putting us at 1,542.15kg of unaccounted-for mass. We could go deeper if we knew how much fuel and of what type was in that rocket assembly, and had more info on the contents of the countermeasures dispenser.

... since we're talking of rogue vending machines, this needs to be posted: ("Aggressive" vending machine designed and built by Jamie Hyneman of M5 Industries and Mythbusters fame.)