Seto Kaiba
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This link I posted back on page 5 is likely to be the last news we'll ever get on this project: https://toy-wizards.com/2019/04/17/toy-news-rumor-maas-toys-goes-under-customers-demand-refunds/ TL;DR: MAAS Toys is broke and effectively out of business. Their pissed-off customers are filing Paypal grievances in the hopes of getting refunds, and BigBadToyStore have cancelled all MAAS Toys preorders. What I've heard from folks inside HG is that they spent most of the voice actor budget hiring him - to do background voices and a character who has half a dozen lines tops - in the hopes that his name on the box would catch the attention of Star Wars fans. Making a mint. Regardless of whether your personal feelings about it, that was a major studio's AAA flagship property that made over $1.333 billion at the box office. "Slumming it" is appearing in a project like Shadow Chronicles that barely made back its shoestring budget. Well, as an alternative, you have a lot of potential ways to react to the fact that the entire MAAS Toys Southern Cross announcement was basically a sham perpetrated by a group of bootleg toy makers who were looking for a way to cover their debts and couldn't actually afford to make anything? Relief, amusement, concern, and dismay are all valid options there... a real emotional smorgasboard. -
Shadow Chronicles was even more of an unfinished project than Southern Cross was... it's literally JUST the introductory episode for a cancelled 3-4 part OVA. Southern Cross at least got to get over 1/3 of the way done before the network put them on notice. That is called Mark Hamill slumming. Half full of what is the question...
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Granted, this whole "the VF-1 Valkyrie is still in widespread military service" schtick is mostly Master File swinging for the fences to justify doing a fourth book about the VF-1, so it isn't altogether surprising that their justification is vague and wandering. They've got virtually identical cockpits, so I'm not sure one would necessarily be more comfortable than the other. Shinsei Industry has had a LOT of time to refine the VF-1's ANGIRAS airframe control AI though, so it's probably about the most stable and forgiving training VF you could ask for.
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They look like the outrigger gun-arms on the Strike Gundam's METEOR system. That's an easy one. Robotech fans hated Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles, so Harmony Gold won't do more comics for that for fear that it wouldn't sell. Robotech Academy was an embarrassing and VERY public failure in no small part because the fans hated the entire premise, so they're going to bury that one and pretend it never happened like they did when that same thing happened to Robotech 3000.
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I'm just going to be over here in the corner singing Ave Maria in the hopes that we won't have to rehash that steaming turd in any detail.
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You'd think pioneer planets would want to adopt the latest, most capable fighters in order to maximize the capabilities of their numerically limited defense forces. Even then, we've seen (or read) that emigrant fleets do commonly use older models of variable fighter for various purposes. For instance, in the manga Macross 7 Trash we see that the 37th large scale long distance emigrant fleet "Macross 7" is using VF-4's as training aircraft and test airframes for evaluating certain new technologies. A testing accident that resulted in the loss of a VF-4 and the death of a soldier is what kick-starts the plot by instigating Mahara Fabrio's resignation from the military. Later, in the light novel Macross the Ride, it's noted that the 55th large scale long distance emigrant fleet "Macross Frontier" is still in the process of decommissioning and selling or scrapping its remaining inventory of VF-11 Thunderbolts in 2058. Main character Chelsea Scarlett buys three VF-11 airframes from the fleet's NUNS in order to construct her (third) racing VF to compete in the Vanquish League. The VF-5000 would probably be a less than ideal choice since it's principally made for atmospheric service. Ideally you'd want something like the VF-14, which can operate for long periods in space without needing FAST Packs or conformal fuel tanks. The VF-11's a step in the right direction but it still suffers from most of the same problems the VF-1 had. The timing definitely makes it sound like the official setting VF-1X++ Valkyrie Double Plus and not-official setting VF-1Z are closely related, both allegedly being mid-to-late 2040s era modernizations of the VF-1 that benefit from the improved materials and electronics available at the time. Where they seem to differ is that the VF-1X++ apparently kept all of the structural refinements made by earlier improvement programs and focused on weight reduction and strength improvement, while the VF-1Z seems to be all about undoing the refinements and creating an updated version of the original VF-1 design with modern materials. In terms of the official setting, the VF-1 has stuck around as long as it has and been so widely produced because it was a comparatively cheap training aircraft whose handling had been refined to the point that you'd have to really really suck to crash one and it wouldn't break the bank if you did. Its performance is low enough that it's not going to seriously test the limits of a trainee's g-force endurance even accidentally. The military kept some around for training purposes for that reason, and improved special forces variants that it could use for "covert" operations... if anything involving a twelve-and-a-half meter tall robot could be considered "covert".
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Libera temet ex infernis... Seriously, there are things man was not meant to know.
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Oh yeah, it did have some cone-like bits that looked like GN drives.
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I was thinking more of the one bomber design that they stole from Transformers, the hideous Garfish class ship with all that extra junk on it, and the other "original" ship design that was just one of the Macross class gun booms on its own.
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The original plan was a Spartas but it mutated into a Spartas and Auroran running in parallel, IIRC. I was one of the one who had pledged for an Auroran, which is why I mentioned it.
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That's kind of Sophie's Choice for Southern Cross fans... If Harmony Gold keeps the Robotech franchise limping along they will continue neglecting Southern Cross becuase it's unpopular and focusing almost exclusively on Macross. If Harmony Gold loses the Robotech franchise, it's unlikely anyone will take an interest in the Southern Cross license for its own sake since the show was a failure in Japan in its original format and a failure outside of Japan as a part of Robotech. It's tough but fair. The very rough, amateurish animation used in the promotional materials and the terrible and terribly unoriginal design works were targets of harsh criticism during the Kickstarter campaign. More than a few Robotech fans suggested that it looked like Harmony Gold had outsourced animation and design to high schoolers on DeviantArt. That was an issue, but the problems with it were so all-encompassing that no one problem can claim a majority or even plurality of credit for the failure. A lot of Robotech fans were PO'd that it was another Robotech 1 7/8: Approximately the Sentinels type project like Shadow Chronicles or the UEEF Marines RPG sourcebook instead of just finishing Sentinels or Shadow Chronicles (or both). Given what's been leaked from Harmony Gold, Shadow Chronicles parts 2-4 were canceled shortly after part 1's release. Tommy Yune made a lot of promises to his bosses to get funding for Shadow Chronicles part 1, and when it failed to set the world on fire like he'd promised (garnering instead a resounding "meh" from Robotech fans and going unnoticed by everyone else) they'd reminded him that the deal was parts 2-4 were to be funded by sponsors attracted by part 1 and quietly canceled the whole mess while pinning their hopes for the future on Warner Bros. (This is why Robotech Academy was done as a Kickstarter, HG's management was flat-out done with trying to fund the Robotech franchise's development after Shadow Chronicles failed to deliver.) Talk to @captain america. Like Obi-Wan Kenobi, he is your only hope now... and his kits would be pretty much guaranteed to do a more faithful rendering of the designs than MAAS Toys. (Assuming you can round up enough people to fund it. We failed to do so previously.)
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I would love to know why they censor that... (and if you ever want a domain that doesn't censor you like that, our doors remain ever open to you.) It makes a certain amount of sense and fits well with the Macross Frontier-era assertions that commercially-available VF-1s and VT-1s are common enough that they're used for pilot training even in civilian vocational schools like Mihoshi Academy (which is indicated to have maintained a number of VF-1Cs for its space navigation majors). Based on my understanding of the VF-1X++ as it's described in Macross the Ride's materials, my conclusion would be that the VF-1X++ and VF-1Z represent two different offshoots of the VF-1X+ that was used by the New UN Forces into the 2040s. The VF-1Z sounds like it's a general duty variant where the VF-1X++ was said to be a high-performance variant produced for the NUNS Special Forces for use in covert operations and the like.
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Oh, it was. Palladium Books presided over a complete and utter fiasco. Their naive incompetence, massive overconfidence, and overestimation of actual demand for a Robotech tabletop game to a frankly comical extent based on the Kickstarter campaign's payout made the project self-sabotaging to the point that it swiftly devolved into a rolling multi-year public relations disaster for the Robotech brand. The PR fallout from Palladium's Robotech Kickstarter had a measurable role in the failure of Harmony Gold's own attempt to use Kickstarter to finance a pilot for a new Robotech TV series. When that Robotech Academy Kickstarter campaign inevitably failed as a result of Harmony Gold's public displays of massive hubris (bragging that fans would be throwing their money at it), the shameless attempt to exploit Carl Macek's passing a few years earlier to get fans to open their wallets ("Make Carl's dream a reality!"), the concept art and animation looking like arse thanks to having been done by a South American fan film group HG had shut down years earlier, and the distrust of Kickstarter sown in their fandom by Palladium's ongoing clusterf*ck, it led to HG ragequitting the Kickstarter about a week before it was due to end when it became apparent they were unlikely to even come close to their funding goal (after a month they barely hit 38%). All of that public embarrassment for Harmony Gold and the Robotech brand was what prompted management there to set a condition in all future license agreements that there would be no crowdfunding of any kind for licensed Robotech merchandise. That, of course, was the VERY BIG PROBLEM that put the brakes on MAAS Toys's plans for a line of licensed Southern Cross toys. They would've been in violation of the terms of their license if they'd used Kickstarter, Indiegogo, or a privately run crowdfunding drive, and without crowdfunding they couldn't afford to keep the lights on let alone finish the design and start production. As catch-22's go, it's a doozy. Really? This kind of crash-and-burn abject failure has been the norm for Robotech for like 33 years now. Southern Cross itself isn't exactly a stranger to it either, if we're being honest. For that very reason, I don't think that MAAS Toys's implosion will have any measurable effect on how the perceived viability of the Southern Cross license. Not that that's cause for good cheer, mind you. It's because the vast majority of toy companies had already written Robotech off entirely as commercially unviable, and the ones that hadn't yet (like Toynami) wrote Southern Cross off as commercially unviable based on its status as the Robotech fandom's un-favorite saga. Perceived demand for Southern Cross toys was never not at rock bottom, so a realist would say there's no impact and optimist would say there's nowhere to go but up.
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Right on the Macross Compendium's timeline. Edit: the article title for it is "Before 1 BC"
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The Supervision Army didn't cease to exist just because its leaders were captured. Over 85% of the Protoculture's total galactic population was lost in the first nine months of the conflict, and when the Protoculture's newly discovered anima spiritia captured and imprisoned the Protodeviln approximately three months later it didn't free any of their hundreds of billions of brainwashed Protoculture and Zentradi troops in the Supervision Army. All they really achieved was to gain a strategic advantage over the Supervision Army by removing the highest level of their chain of command. The devastated Stellar Republic slowly fell apart and its Protoculture population went extinct while the Zentradi and Supervision Army spent the next 500 millennia (and counting) energetically trying to destroy each other as they'd been ordered to do by their now-absent masters. That war between the Supervision Army and Zentradi Army is still going on. The First Space War started because a Supervision Army gunship fleeing from a defeat by the Zentradi Army happened to crash on Earth. The mission to capture the first Zentradi factory satellite for the New UN Gov't after the war had them stumble upon a recent battlefield in that ongoing war and discover another mostly intact Supervision Army derelict.
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Well, a Vajra hive left the galaxy to mate with another hive elsewhere... but there are still Vajra living in the Milky Way galaxy after the events of Macross Frontier. We've seen them twice since, once in Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy on Uroboros in 2060 and once in Macross Delta Gaiden: Macross E on Pipure in 2062. They were just living on Uroboros, but the one specimen on Pipure was a Vajra soldier drone that the Epsilon Foundation had captured on behalf of Zelgar Heavy Industries for their research on weapons applications of fold songs. Oh, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the Federal New UN Forces and various local ones had Vajra carcasses on ice for study. Waste not, want not, the Vajra had some pretty darn sophisticated biotechnology and the New UN Government very definitely wants the means to refine fold carbon into fold quartz to eliminate the need to mine the stuff from Protoculture ruins or extract it from Vajra carcasses. The Galaxy executives were definitely flesh-and-blood people. The Macross Frontier TV series is a bit vague about whether they're all actually in the Macross Galaxy fleet or are all over the place and conferring via zero-time fold communications, but at least some of them are implied to have survived aboard Macross Galaxy's Mainland city ship when the Battle Frontier destroyed Battle Galaxy. In the movie version, Brera gets to kill some of them by blasting them point-blank with a heavy quantum beam cannon but some likely survived by being elsewhere. Since mind control was explicitly in play, it's not clear how accountable Macross Galaxy's surviving population can be held for their actions in 2059. None. The ancient Protoculture are heavily implied to have revered the Vajra and studied them extensively, but there's no indication that they ever came into conflict with them. The Protoculture were all but totally wiped out in the conflict between their Zentradi Army and the Protodeviln's Supervision Army, with the surviving population gradually dwindling until it disappeared.
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I dunno, I'm kinda partial to the unused NX-class update that the relaunch novels call the Columbia-class:
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Ah yes, intact flooring... the greatest evil of all. I'm not sure I agree with the idea that the ADR-03 Cheyenne looks more advanced than the 04 Series Destroids. As a CG model, it's drawn at a much higher level of detail than the original destroids but if you look closely at the actual design it's very rough and noticably more primitive than the 04 Series. It's really evident when you look at the line art for it. The whole design is very top-heavy and with its disproportionately small backwards-jointed legs it's visibly poorly suited to walking at all. Its wheels are there to help it get around without having to walk. It's got this big, delicate, rocket nozzle that looks fresh off a mid-1960s-era rocket on its back. The crew sits in an armored cupola on the unit's left shoulder that looks like it was nicked from a Cold War-era tank. The shoulder opposite the cockpit is home to a radome that was very clearly borrowed from a 1980s vintage Phalanx Block 1A CIWS turret manufactured by General Dynamics for the US Navy. The pair of rotary cannons it has are literally 1970s vintage GAU-12 Equalizers... the exact same model used on the AV-8B Harrier II and AC-130 Spectre and Spooky II. They're not protected from the elements or anything, they're just hanging out there on the end of the arm with all the machinery exposed like they were an afterthought. It's got two different sets of manipulators, but one is visibly (and explicitly) torn from a VF-0 and mounted on the back of the arm where it'd be difficult to use and the other is a comically primitive one looks like it was nicked from a Mars Rover. So much of its hardware and design is visibly primitive if you know what you're looking at that its superficial advanced-ness lent to it by the CG animation evaporates and it looks like exactly what it was supposed to be: a transitional model robot caught between conventional military technology from the late 90's and early 2000s and the later overtechnology-based models we know and love from Super Dimension Fortress Macross, hastily hacked-together out of whatever parts were collecting dust in someone's warehouse. The Cheyenne isn't even Kawamori's... it was designed by Junya Ishigaki, with evident care in his line art and early drafts to make something visibly more primitive than the Destroids from the original series. It kinda draws a line under my point that while Shoji Kawamori might not care, everyone else involved seems to. Macross II: Lovers Again quite sensibly replaced the Monster's walking systems with gravity control.
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Please, please, please be more careful with your quote tags... this is very difficult to read. The first most of us heard of it was in the 25th anniversary events, where Kawamori torpedoed the idea that Macross II was not an equal partner in the franchise by declaring that all of the Macross shows were islands unto themselves. If he held that view earlier than that point, that's fine... it only really changes the length of time he's been horrifically inconsistent about applying it and how long the rest of Macross's creative staff have been studiously ignoring it. This is a popular misconception. Macross: Flash Back 2012 is the epilogue for the Super Dimension Fortress Macross TV series. Specifically, the launch of the SDF-2 Megaroad-01 was originally planned for the final episode of the TV series but was cut in the storyboard phase due to runtime constraints. When Kawamori returned to Macross for '94's Macross Plus and Macross 7, that was when we started seeing him explain that the DYRL? aesthetics co-existed alongside those of the original TV series, that the SDF-1 Macross had been rebuilt to the DYRL? spec after Quamzin's suicide attack in Ep36 (which remains the official explanation for it to this day). Quite a bit gets said on that note in This is Animation: Macross Plus, which goes well out of its way to explain how the TV and Movie VF-1s existed side-by-side in the series. True, but as I've noted previously the rest of Macross's creative staff doesn't seem to be onboard with his views there. If anything, the number of explicit callbacks in Macross has only increased with time. If you go digging into Macross Delta's setting, for instance, you'll find it depends heavily on callbacks to Macross 7, Macross Dynamite 7, Macross VF-X2, and Macross Frontier, with a smattering of Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy thrown in and a dash of Macross the Ride added for the novelization. Macross the Ride was made under Kawamori's supervision and its story was built heavily on callbacks to Macross 7 and Macross VF-X2, garnished liberally with calls forward to the Macross Frontier story and a few references to the original series and Zero. As far as I've heard, that was a cost save... it was cheaper and easier to reuse existing CG models leftover from Macross Zero with slight tweaks than to design and animate an all-new destroid. Anime is an industry running on a razor-thin margin, so any opportunity to save money by reusing animation or animation resources is generally welcomed. For the same reason, they reused CG models from Zero for the episode "Legend of Zero" and you'll find practically every car that isn't Ozma's is a generic, low-poly, stock Toyota Prius CG model. Kawamori's love affair in Frontier was painstakingly recreating San Francisco landmarks throughout Island-1. They were pretty clear about the Cheyenne II's being military units in Frontier... the reasons given for the refurbished 50 year old design were largely pragmatic matters like the rollers in the feet making them easier on the pavement, or being small enough to operate easily within city limits. (You wouldn't want your last-ditch defense units to destroy the roads you would need later for emergency services or a general evacuation.) Delta must've spent most of its budget on the music, because they were reusing Frontier art assets like they were going out of style. Reused materials practically outnumber original ones, with the VF-171-II, Cheyenne II, Destroid Work, Konig Monster, Island-1, Uraga-class, Guantanamo-class, Dulfim-type, Kaitos-type, and so on.
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Previous Star Trek shows had all kinds of fact-checkers and consistency checkers whose job was to prevent the kind of boneheaded writing problems that plague Discovery. Beginning in Star Trek: the Next Generation's first season, each Star Trek series created and maintained a "series bible" for its writers that included basic biographical and personality info about the characters, vital statistics for the ship(s), explanations of how various important pieces of technology worked, and in the course of all that also identified a list of stuff the writers were not allowed to do. I've got copies of the TNG season one and VOY season one series bibles. The TNG one very clearly has Gene Roddenberry's fingerprints all over it, like his insistence on describing any female character who is supposed to be attractive as having a "strip queen" body. Did that design appear anywhere besides the calendars? Memory Beta says it's alluded to in the Enterprise relaunch as a design that was on the drawing boards in the wake of the Romulan War (c.2163) when the early UFP's main starship design was still the Daedalus-class and its de facto flagship was the NX-class Columbia-subclass USS Endeavour under the command of Captain T'Pol. The Bonaventure-class would've been half a century or more old when Star Trek: Discovery is set. It's a nice design, mind you. Eh... sort of. You do still see well-researched, detailed labors of love on TV, but a lot of it is exactly that kind of quick-and-dirty, sloppy, lowest common denominator garbage.
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The Vajra aren't constructs... as far as we know they evolved naturally up to the point where the Vajra developed to the point of having control over their own development. They've made biotechnology part of their own genome, to the point that they naturally possess things like energy converting armor, gravity control, and heavy quantum beam weaponry. Like Tyranids, but not hostile. Exactly how their metabolism works is a bit of a mystery, but their more exotic, energy-intensive biotechnology is supposedly powered by a fold dimensional energy conversion organ. The way it's described, they're pulling energy directly out of super dimension space, giving them a power source with finite output but infinite endurance. This can only be done using fold quartz, so the Vajra mine fold carbon and process it into fold quartz using their queen forms. Both the Protoculture and Humanity have tried their hand at imitating that biotechnology. The Evil-series bioweapons that would become the bodies of the Protodeviln were powered by the Protoculture's first try at fold dimensional energy conversion, which accidentally trapped energy beings from fold space in their bodies. The Birdhuman is powered by a perfected form of the technology. The YF-29's fold wave system was also capable of fold dimensional energy conversion when it was active.
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As reasons for having not heard about any of the events of Star Trek: Discovery in shows set in Discovery's future go, this was rather shockingly meta. Star Trek: Discovery was poorly received by the Star Trek fandom and with the fate of its third season very much still up in the air in light of Netflix's ongoing dissatisfaction with the show's cost performance, the licensees protesting that the series isn't marketable for them, and independent reviews of the series being almost uniformly negative. Having an established and beloved classic Star Trek character like Spock propose that we never speak of this again on pain of death feels a bit like an attempted author's saving throw in the event the show ends up being canceled or heavily retooled. This way, if the show ends prematurely they can write its lack of future references off as "the greatest story never told" and if they have to retool it heavily and say, start over with another ship named Discovery and a new crew, they have an excuse to never reference the events of seasons one and two. This would seem to have put paid to the proposed Section 31 series starring Georgeau though, since Section 31 was wiped out by the joint Federation-Klingon-Kelpian taskforce and its fleet obliterated and Georgeau herself was aboard the Discovery when it left the present day for (allegedly) 930 years in the future to abandon it as seen in the Short Trek "Calypso". (Weirdly, this seems like a choice that actually sets Calypso's events in the 42nd century, since the ship had been abandoned for a thousand years before it became sentient and they jumped almost a thousand years into the future to put it there in the first place.) It's the same bait-and-switch routine they tried at the end of season one... by ending not on the horribly unpopular Discovery and its crew, but rather the beloved and iconic Enterprise and its crew, they're trying to bait the fans into not giving up on the series. I went and canceled my subscription the minute I finished watching. The ending was such an anticlimactic mess that it's amazing they actually went with it. How do they deal with the genocidal AI "Control"? They magnetize the floor under Control!Leland's feet and it just falls down and immediately dies... like it's running on a bunch of old 5400rpm hard drives or something. It makes the entire final fight ridiculous. Couldn't they have magnetized the floor literally anywhere on the ship and saved themselves a lot of grief, trouble, and the lives of several bridge crew members? We had to sit through like twenty minutes of Georgeau and that Barzan security officer punching Leland even though we know he doesn't feel pain and can't be hurt that way. With Control dead, there's also literally no reason to send the Discovery into the future anymore... they killed the threat in the present day, so the rest of the season's ending is totally unnecessary with Control's corpse stuck to the floor of the spore drive's reaction cube.
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For continuity purposes, the official timelines usually favor the series versions over the movies but movie-specific designs and so on often end up also existing but in a slightly different context as explained previously. Of course, it's worth remembering that what Berger Stone is showing is not an authentic depiction of the history even in-series... it's his Powerpoint deck, which is probably populated in no small amount by stuff from the various docu-dramas about Minmay from the last fifty years. As often as sequels harp on DYRL having been a Protoculture love song, it's likely that some events from the DYRL version occurred like Boddole Zer having a copy of the sheet music for DYRL and wanting to weaponize it. But Kawamori came to this view relatively recently... previously he'd supported a firmer view of continuity.
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It's a fairly safe bet that most of the familiar forms of overtechnology were derived from study of the Vajra and other natural super dimension lifeforms... energy converting armor, dimensional beam weapons, gravity control, fold navigation and communication, and so on.
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It's not really a theory if it's stated as a fact. That the Protoculture based some of their tech, particularly military hardware, on Vajra biology was more or less confirmed back when the Vajra concept art was published and several of the designs were just Regults with insect features. It wasn't even much of a surprise when Macross Frontier revealed the Protoculture studied the Vajra intently. It'd been a popular theory among fan since Dynamite 7 that the Protoculture had probably discovered the existence of higher dimension space and applications of it like gravity control, fold navigation, heavy quantum beam weaponry, etc. by studying naturally-occurring super dimension lifeforms like the galactic whales. The Vajra were just another, less passive, flavor of that. We humans model a lot of our technology on the natural world, so it makes perfect sense the Protoculture would too... especially if their natural world had stuff like fold-capable sapient space-plants the size of city blocks or gigantic hive mind space bugs that fly by gravity control, network their minds across light years, and can teleport interstellar distances.
