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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, Delta put a bit of a damper on my enthusiasm for future Macross works too. I'm trying to stay positive about it. Since I have little use for Walkure outside of their relevance to Macross, and quite frankly scarcely any more use for them in the Macross context, I'm trying to look at the dearth of new material resulting from the franchise's current obsession with Walkure as a nice little hiatus that'll let me catch up on the small mountain of stuff I've yet to finish without being distracted by new material. (Not before time, mind you... the To-Do pile is at least 2m tall and was growing all the time!) Still, after a half-assed Macross series that was 100% about promoting an idol group, I can't escape the feeling that Kawamori finally sold out. I can only hope that this won't turn out to be the beginning of a similar trend to Sunrise's decision to abandon all pretense and turn Gundam into a thinly veiled gunpla commercial or CBS selling out Star Trek's central themes in the name of trying to be Game of Space Thrones.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Clarification request... when you say "galactic north" are you referring to actual galactic north under the galactic coordinate system (above the galactic plane) or in sense often used in science fiction where 2D space is in full effect and "north" is just "up" relative to wherever Sol is on the map's given orientation? (I ask because that's going to make an enormous difference in the answer.)
  3. Seto Kaiba
    It's going to be a Star Trek comedy... I guess I got my sadistic wish that they'd do a Star Trek version of Red Dwarf.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    What I was getting at was more that, details of their suffering aside, you can count the number of male characters who end up on the receiving end of that violence on one hand while only a few of the prominent female characters have been exempted from it. Goblin Slayer himself is the only one of the recurring male characters who is ever nontrivially injured, and the only prominent male character to actually die is the greenhorn Warrior in the prologue. The ladies team had already racked up five graphic deaths and a rape by the time chapter four (episode two) was over and their track record really hasn't improved.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    One aspect of the Goblin Slayer light novels that's been largely left out of the Goblin Slayer anime adaptation thus far is the occasional chapter breaks that show the story in progress from the perspective of the gods (usually Truth and Illusion). The world is literally just a (tabletop) game to them. That's implied to be the reason nobody has an actual name, and is more or less explicitly stated to be why it's a crapsack world in eternal Medieval Stasis, perpetually overrun with Always Chaotic Evil monsters, and is so disproportionately fond of the Total Party Kill. (The gods are pretty vindictive GMs.) The pre-opening blurb does kind of allude to it in a vague way, with the talk about the gods rolling dice for the fate of the world. It's equal opportunity in terms of the severity of the horrible things that happen to its characters... but the women FAR outnumber the men in the "you've met with a terrible fate, haven't you?" department.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    The TV anime may or may not turn out to be... the light novel it's adapted from, and the manga also adapted from it, likes to dive into fairly dark territory on a regular basis vis a vis the horrible things goblins do to people because of their general disregard for non-goblin life... the general rapey-ness of goblins aside, they're also pretty darn enthusiastic about torturing people to death for fun or revenge, openly cannibalistic and routinely force their prisoners to engage in cannibalism, employ unconventional weapons like poisoned blades and poison gas, and neither they nor Goblin Slayer are at all shy about killing children. It is pretty clearly pandering, but it's more gore porn than the regular kind.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Hajimete no Gyaru's sixth chapter has a Macross 7 nod...
  8. Seto Kaiba
    From what I've seen, I don't believe they can... but the VF-4 is so little-covered despite its relatively important role that it's hard to say for certain.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Caught the third episode of Ulysses: Jeanne d'Arc and the Alchemist Knight today... and the pacing is still all kinds of f*cked up. If they'd stop skipping around so much, Ulysses would be a lot more watchable. I'm still getting this really bad Seikon no Quasar vibe from it, in that it feels like the fanservice is a desperate "please like me" end unto itself, but when Jeanne starts acting like someone switched her script with one from Hellsing Ultimate it starts getting watchable. The story's clearly trying to get somewhere interesting, but after three episodes of disjointed, seemingly random exposition I can't quite say where. I suspect a lot of it has to do with the way the anime industry is currently in one of its "light and soft" periods. Shows like Overlord and Goblin Slayer look a lot darker than they actually are when the rest of the season's packed with your standard shounen and shoujo offerings, cutesy stuff, and slice of life comedies. The next darkest thing on the schedule that isn't Attack on Titan is either Ulysses: Jeanne d'Arc and the Alchemist Knight or That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime... and those are sweetness and light by comparison. Even then, Attack on Titan has largely used up the shock value of the titans in both formats so the darkness of its setting is feeling decidedly careworn, making Goblin Slayer look all the darker for it. You also kind of have to mark OVAs to different standards, since they don't have to comply with the same censorship requirements as a TV anime. (WRT the light novel and manga versions, the sheer gratuitousness of the violence and the general rapey-ness of the goblins can be rather off-putting in that it's clearly meant to be fetishized and is all the more wrong and distressing for it.) Having read the manga version... it totally is. Rimiru is just WAY faster about getting to the same endgame Ainz is looking for. What did you think of it overall? I'm still slogging through Lupin III: the Italian Adventure... my mind keeps checking out around the time Lupin steals the Mona Lisa for what must be the sixth or seventh time.
  10. Seto Kaiba

    Hi-Metal R

    Seto Kaiba replied to joppewo's topic in Toys

    First a pair of VF-2SS's, now a VF-4? Bandai is finally speaking my language.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    For the light novel and manga, that first story was starting as they meant to go on. Goblin Slayer's anime series seems to be headed in a slightly less gratuitous direction, if the second episode omitting the grisly and graphic fate of the all-female party of adventurers who found that ruin before Goblin Slayer came along is any indication. TBH, that was the point where the story picked up in the light novels too. Having an actual party to adventure with starts to make Goblin Slayer a bit less "Medieval Doomguy" and more "Medieval Batman"... even if High Elf Archer's perpetual refrain is "Stop using [extremely effective and practical anti-goblin strategy] because it's not adventurer-like".
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Nothing that I've seen... though I'd expect the answer probably has a good deal to do with the 25mm (27mm on the military model) railguns on the VF-31's forearms. By leaving the beam gunpod stowed in the ordnance container they can fire the railguns AND the beam gunpod at the same time, as they did on a few occasions in the series. Instead of foregoing a gruntier gunpod the way the VF-4 did or making it an either-or case like the VF-22, they found a way to have their cake and eat it too.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    That, I must admit, adds a rather amusing dimension to Macross Delta having ripped off Macross II's gimmicks almost whole cloth but with far worse writing... particularly when you factor in that 4 is an unlucky number in Japan. There may be something in one of the books I haven't gotten to yet, but if it's anything like the other technologies that involve gravity manipulation it probably involves the exotic matter referred to as "heavy quantum". (Heavy quantum exists simultaneously in fold space and normal space, but its mass is incredibly high and exists mostly in fold space unless it's subjected to certain types of resonance fold effects. It's the substance used to produce intense gravity to compress fuel in thermonuclear reactors and is used in similar capacities in thermonuclear reaction and dimensional weapons.)
  14. Seto Kaiba
    "Character development" is apparently a missed point... They had an entire episode devoted to this in the series. It was literally the exact same scene from the first episode of the TV series, just with Hayate's VF-31J substituted for the VF-171-II he was piloting before. This scene was in the TV series... ... you didn't really pay attention to the movie, did you? It's just demoted to a throwaway line, not gone entirely.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Different strokes for different folks, y'know? I'd be interested to know which version of the VF-19 is the most popular in Japan... my sample population for that is way, way too small to draw any conclusions but I have a feeling it's the Fire Valkyrie. It's possible that the staff was referencing either Delta Flight itself or the Protoculture's Delta Wave system that was crux of the plot even if it didn't show up until a few episodes before the end... or perhaps they were referencing the mathematical operator for Change. Sigma tends to be the favorite when they're pulling the mathematical gimmick though. Or... if you're in the mood for a spectacularly pedantic but otherwise entirely sound argument... the Siegfried Custom VF-31 does technically have a delta wing configuration. It uses the same wing configuration as the VF-19F/S type, which IS officially described as a hybrid of forward-swept and delta wing configurations. IMO it's more like a clipped delta with a forward-swept winglet stuck on, but I don't write the books. Curious that the VF-19F/S materials explicitly mention its delta wing characteristics but the Macross Delta materials that have been published for the VF-31C/E/F/J/S do not. Or Walkure Delta, considering how often the Macross aspects of the story take a backseat to promoting Walkure.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    My hopes for this series are not high. Since we've got a power outage that put the kibosh on my plans for the day, I've been reading the manga adaptation of the light novel and it's a mess. It legitimately takes at least fifteen LONG chapters (we're talking monthly serialization 30-50 page chapters) for them to even give Rimiru a humanoid form, and 20 chapters in I still have no sodding idea what's actually going on. It's almost stream of consciousness of Rimiru reacting to random bullsh*t that happens.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    You'll want to bring a snack... I got a bit wordy, as I am wont to do when a subject is worth analyzing in detail. The 5th Generation of Variable Fighters is shaping up to be a very interesting one, since for the first time we have multiple main fighters coming into service that AREN'T the result of deficient performance in a particular regime the way we had with the 2nd Generation's VF-4 and a parade of atmosphere-optimized designs like the VF-5, VF-5000, and VF-9. Yeah, I've found that to be a fairly common opinion among Western Macross fans. When it comes to forward-swept wings, there seems to be a strong preference for an all-or-nothing approach and a general feeling that the forward-swept winglet with delta wing combo on the space-use VF-19s and VF-31 Siegfried customs look stunted or somehow wrong.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Further to my last on the subject of Master File asserting the existence of NUNS VF-31S's, I did a little skim over the book's squadrons section and found that they aren't quite the same as Xaos's VF-31S... they seem to be just a VF-31A with the S-type monitor turret and forward-swept winglet.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    The only VF-31s mentioned in connection with the Xaos branch HQ on Ragna are the Xaos 3rd Fighter Wing... composed of four flights, with Alpha, Beta, and Gamma using VF-31As and Delta using the ace custom Siegfried versions. All the information we've been given thus far has pointed to the Siegfrieds being modified VF-31A airframes specially tailored for the individual tastes and styles of the members of 3rd Fighter Wing Delta Flight. They've also implied that the reason there are five different variants of Siegfried, each with distinct differences in appearance and coloration, was (in-universe) to facilitate the celebrity status of Delta Flight by making its members easier to identify at a distance. As far as I've found, the only source that refers to the Siegfried custom VF-31s as though they were something intended for eventual production is Variable Fighter Master File: VF-31 Siegfried. Master File books aren't official setting material so... y'know. The book's contents are wildly inaccurate and focus primarily on Xaos's use of the VF-31, but it does treat the VF-31S as something that ended up in the New UN Spacy's inventory. That's probably the least bizarre divergence from canon in the book. Here's a somewhat more detailed analysis I did back in '17.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Ordinarily, I'd expect all of the platoons to be the same size... the TV series org chart showed fifteen fighters in three-plane platoons, so I'd expect the DYRL? version to be more like 20 planes in five 4 plane platoons. Given how little we see of the YF-29, I wouldn't hold my breath for a Master File book. I was a little surprised it got a passing mention in the VF-25 book, even if it was half for the sake of an obscure reference to the design the YF-29 was developed from: the SW-XA II Schneegans. Can't say... we've never actually seen a VF-31B. Apart from the five customized VF-31 "Siegfried" units operated by Xaos's Ragna branch 3rd Fighter Wing Δ flight, all of the VF-31s seen in Macross Delta are the VF-31A Kairos initial mass production type flown by Xaos. The Siegfried customs are all VF-31As that've been upgraded by replacing their FF-3001A Stage II thermonuclear reaction turbine engines with a derated version of the YF-30's FF-3001/FC2 Stage II engines, installing a fold wave system and fold amps, exchanging the delta winglets for a forward-swept winglet, installing a customized integrated airframe management AI, and giving them lower-powered firearms for safer operation around civilians. No, the B is just a letter B... not a β. (Even then, for standard usage, β would still have been the 2nd mass production variant behind α, as on the SV-51.) The VF-31A and VF-31B are the first mass production variants of the VF-31 Kairos. The way they're described, the VF-31A and B seem to have the same relationship that the VF-11A and B or VF-19A and B did. The -A variant was the initial trial production variant used for its operational evaluation testing, and the -B variant based on the feedback from those tests is the first version to actually be widely adopted by the New UN Forces. The VF-31 Kairos is the next (5th) generation main fighter developed locally by the New UN Gov't member worlds of the Brisingr globular cluster (AKA the "Brisingr Alliance") to replace their aging fleet of VF-171 Nightmare Pluses. The VF-31 Siegfried is an Ace Custom unit that Xaos makes in-house by modifying stock VF-31As specifically for use by Δ flight. The variant letters that Xaos assigns to them are probably only for their internal use, rather than being official. It should probably properly be VF-31改. Neither the VF-31 nor the Sv-262 is all that impressive by 5th Generation VF standards, really. The VF-31A/B shares a lot of parts in common with the VF-25A, like its engines, EX-Gear, avionics, integrated airframe management AI, laser cannon, and missile launchers. Its performance is a bit lower than the VF-25's because it's a fair bit heavier thanks to the ordnance container system. Its only real improvements are the aforementioned ordnance container that makes configuring for a special mission easy as hot-swapping a FAST pack, the beam gunpod, and having those forearm-mounted railguns instead of machine guns or beam machine guns. You could say that it's almost certainly the lowest-performance 5th Generation fighter we've seen so far. The Siegfried custom version is a bit more impressive, but its performance still between the VF-25 and VF-27, and its guns are a bit less powerful than the military spec version's and it sacrifices the ordnance bays in the legs for multidrone racks. The Sv-262 Draken III's also hovering in that space between the VF-25 and VF-27, but it's a design that suffers from crippling overspecialization. It's dependent on conformal packs to carry missiles, and the only fixed armament it has is a pair of railguns (and a pair of lasers on the command type). Its design actually cripples it in space, since its complex VF-9-like transformation leaves less space internally for fuel tanks. It's very much an atmospheric dogfighter made for close-range combat, and since the honor-before-reason Aerial Knights insisted on having a sword the close combat blade's so fragile it can't be used unpowered the way the VF-25 or VF-31's knife can. (It came as something of a relief, since people were upset about the possibility of a new generation of fighters so soon after Frontier... instead, we just got some more regional 5th Generation VFs that really aren't all that impressive.) By the time the VF-31A/B Kairos finally makes it into New UN Spacy service in the Brisingr Alliance, the VF-19 and VF-22 will be 30 years old. Mr March is working on updates, but y'know... day jobs. I've been so preoccupied with my day job that I haven't spoken to him in a good while. I'm keeping the site's server ticking and all, but that's about it right now. I'm still plodding along on a project of my own that I'm trying to get launched in time for New Year's. Well, the most noteworthy accident we've heard about is the one that wasn't actually one... the 117th Research Fleet that was actually destroyed by the Vajra. One that we found out about via Delta was the Megaroad-04. It accidentally discovered the planet Windermere IV in 2027 when it hit a fold fault that knocked it back into realspace. (Incidents caused by fold faults vary... depending on how they're encountered they can either vastly increase the time disparity between objective and experienced time so that a fold jump takes DAYS longer than it would have, knock a ship out of higher dimensional space entirely, or even trap a ship in higher dimensional space and dooming it to be destroyed when its power runs out.) Either that or they're incredibly cynical... IIRC one or more of the Zentradi spies is an alcoholic, Vanessa and her husband run a bar.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, that's about where I am with it. Goblin Slayer himself is carrying the entire story, and the bits where the girls just get together and talk about him just highlights that he's the only one moving the story forwards. I put Witch in the love interests category, since the light novel leaves no doubt she wants the G... er... the D. She's what, the fifth or sixth woman who finds him to be irresistible? (Priestess, Guild Girl, Cow Girl, Sword Maiden, High Elf Archer... and the Witch makes six. Good thing Goblin Slayer is oblivious.) Chosen Heroine is like a fake alternate protagonist, but considering what happened to the last two of those in Goblin Slayer (Fighter and Sword Maiden), I have a nasty suspicion she'll be experiencing "goblin hospitality" sooner or later. Especially given that she was part of the framing device for volume five.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Admittedly it's not clear if the YF-29B Perceval was something that the federal New UN Forces had taken notice of, or just the particular (rogue) NUNS VF-X special forces squadron in question.1 (As the planet Uroboros had a factory satellite, Havamal wouldn't have had to twist too many arms before they got permission to use some of the planet's abundant fold quartz build a few YF-29B's.) Regrettably, we got the square root of bugger all. Literally all we're told about the YF-29B Perceval is that it's an improved version of the YF-29 used by Havamal's top aces. The only externally-visible improvement is that the fighter's heavy quantum beam gunpod has a bayonet now. Sort of. The Zentradi have known about them all along, but never really gave them much thought as it didn't really fit into their "Is it an enemy? Y/N" mindset. Humanity's fold technology wasn't all that great at the beginning, and their understanding of higher-dimensional spacetime was kind of rough, so there were supposedly a number of accidents and losses caused by miscalculated jumps and fold faults that weren't properly identified at the time. As time went on and humanity improved its understanding and its fold technology, such incidents became less common and fold travel became "faster" and more precise as humanity grew used to computing jumps that avoided or accounted for navigational hazards that could disrupt a jump or increase the disparity between experienced and objective time like fold faults and intense gravity fields. IMO, that fold jumps shown in earlier Macross shows are almost all short-ranged jumps of only a dozen to a couple dozen light years probably helped avoid areas of major fault activity. It wasn't until Macross Frontier that we actually saw ships folding close to a thousand light years at a time onscreen. Eden's only 11.7 light years from Earth, after all... and anything up to 20ly seems to be considered "short range", since that was the rated one-way capacity of an initial-type fold booster unit. I can only assume that the moon is somewhat light on entertainment and/or has incredible daycare facilities. IIRC, Macross 7 Docking Festival indicated that the Zentradi spies tended to crash at Vanessa's place, suggesting none of them married their Zentradi opposite numbers. 1. The New UN Spacy 815th Independent Squadron VF-X "Havamal".
  23. Seto Kaiba
    There are plenty of civilian mass-market publications that do that... I've got loads of 'em at home, and not just for fighters either. Not in the VF-1 volumes... I know those show up in the VF-19 book as part of its discussion of how the forward-swept wing affected its aerodynamics. The very first book has side-on plan views of GERWALK mode and front/rear, side, and top/bottom views of Battroid mode on literally the next two pages after fighter mode. There's also an entire volume devoted to the VF-1's Battroid mode. Neglecting the variable system they most certainly aren't.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    They never indicate that she's rendered all of the ships in orbit inoperable, we only see responses from the orbital weapons platforms. But she started hypnotizing everyone during Isamu's reentry... there likely wasn't anyone in a position to notice by the time they finally started shooting at each other. Basara is a Godmode Sue... but the fact that Basara was under a gargantuan amount of strain doing what he did in the VF-19 Custom is discussed, and shown that it was beyond what even one of the fleet's best active duty pilots could handle. A space fighter capable of hypersonic flight in double-digit mach regimes. The YF-29 is indicated to have been developed as a dedicated anti-Vajra variable fighter intended to exceed the capabilities of the YF-24. Whether it was actually successful in that regard is unclear, and the Frontier fleet probably didn't have a real way to make the comparison given that the YF-24 spec they were given was a redacted version. It was unsuitable for mass production anyway, thanks to its insane cost in terms of material requirements. It may technically not count anymore anyway, since we've seen that the New UN Spacy Special Forces appropriated the design and made a better version for themselves (in Macross 30) designated the YF-29B Perceval. Actually, that one's one anyone could've picked up on just by watching the show, no books needed. They used the same visual effect for the super fold booster in Macross Frontier that Macross Zero had used for the Birdhuman's fold jump. In short, a zero-time fold is "faster" because there is no disparity between the passage of time in the folding ship and realspace during the fold jump and it can traverse fold faults unimpeded. The downside is you need fold quartz to build a fold system capable of it, and since that stuff can't presently be synthesized it's not a technology that's going to be widely disseminated. Earth's total population in the wake of the First Space War was only about 9 million... 8 million of which were Zentradi. They've done a fair bit of growing since then, but it's worth noting that the Sol system has a lot of its population living in space colonies and on Mars. Earth may be the seat of the New UN Government parliament, but it's still a mostly-barren dump that's going to take somewhere on the order of 10,000 years to return to its pre-war state via the environmental reclamation tech the New UN Government is using. The New UN Government did have a cloning program going both to shore up the population and duplicate individuals with vital skills to crew emigrant ships, but shut it down in December 2030 due to a spike in the number of recessive genetic illnesses cropping up. The "donor" airframe that became Basara's VF-19 Custom was a locally-built VF-19F Excalibur, and the only real noted performance improvement was swapping the engines out for a more powerful model that had slightly more thrust than the VF-19S's. That's Macross 7 Docking Festival, IIRC. Kim was the only one of the bridge bunnies to stay in the military and not get married. Shammy's got 11 kids and lives on the moon. Vanessa and her husband have a club in Macross City. Interestingly, Zentradi spy Roli Dosel seems to have had a family too... his granddaughter appears in Macross the Musiculture, as a citizen of the Macross-29 fleet.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Even though I'm not much of a Harry Potter fan, I'll admit the first film had me interested enough that I'm actually quite eager to see where this is going.
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