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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    I have absolutely no idea. I'd love to know, since all my notes say is that it was selected by a fan contest. There are some amusing potential linguistic answers. "Feios" is Portuguese for "Ugly", and there's no denying it's certainly that. Must be... Timothy Daldhanton was the leader of Black Rainbow, and the one who clued the VF-X Ravens into the fact that Gilliam was still alive and that Latence was a thing. Advanced Control Technology for Integrated ValkyriEs. It's a nod to the F-15 STOL/MTD and F-15 ACTIVE. The VF-19ACTIVE "Nothung" was a technology demonstrator Shinsei Industry and L.A.I. built in the Macross Frontier fleet to prove out certain technologies intended to go into the YF-25 Prophecy and VF-25 Messiah.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    As far as I know, it's a reference to the sanskrit word for the Sun which is also the name of the Hindu sun god. This may have something to do with one of the partners being "Bharat", which is the Hindi name of the country/region the west calls India.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    That was probably me... from the Bandai B-Club Magazine #79 feature on Macross's influence on the mecha genre. Zeta Gundam was probably the biggest title listed. Macross II itself, of course, was a new Macross OVA with more than a few Gundam veterans working on it at the time. As far as a Gundam show that's like Macross... we kinda had that too. It was exactly as terrible and forced-feeling as you'd expect an attempt to port Macross's sunny disposition into a franchise which runs on dark and depressing like Gundam. Mobile Suit Gundam: A Wakening of the Trailblazer was just a frigging train wreck start-to-finish, as Gundam's first foray into the subject of actual alien life and first contact. (Sentient life, mind. I don't count the dead space whale in SEED or that bacteria from the Crossbone Gundam: Ghost manga.) These days I certainly find the new AU stories more enjoyable than the Universal Century... barring messes like Build Fighters, Build Divers, and Age. Gundam Unicorn and the Re:0096 series really didn't make much of an impression on me. I've seen both, and neither was engaging enough for me to get invested in the story or so dull that I couldn't stand to watch another minute. Universal Century Gundam show plots are pretty much a foregone conclusion as a rule since the Gundam's side always wins, but because it was set between a pair of older Gundam shows all the fuss and noise about the world-altering implications of Laplace's box in the series fell completely flat because the audience already knew nothing was going to change. If they're determined to keep doing Universal Century stories they need to move to a date beyond what's already been done for the timeline. Side stories like Unicorn and Thunderbolt don't make a meaningful contribution to the setting, because we know going into it that any drama on their part has literally zero impact on the setting. Any consequences the characters incur have no weight to them, because the shape of the future is predetermined. It's like watching a recording of a recent sporting event after you've seen the final score. You can appreciate the technical perspective, but there's little excitement when you already know the outcome.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    We had one of those... Well, more like two... Maybe three if you count the original concept for the SDF-1, which was a White Base knockoff that turned into a giant Gundam...
  5. Seto Kaiba
    I feel like we can get some indecent exposure jokes out of that... Still, that story was kind of a downer even by Universal Century standards, what with Bright having to execute his own son...
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Did Gundam Unicorn really need a sequel? I mean, its plot was pretty self-contained and all and didn't really impact the greater Universal Century any...
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Until @ManhattanProject972 pointed out the A6M Zero connection, I would've said "I have no idea"... since they romanized it "Zeak" in the Visual Book, it just sort of slipped by. That would make it the second VF in that story to have a World War II name reference, the other being the VF-22HG Schwalbe Zwei. That one is a double reference to the Me 262 fighter version (Sturmvogel having been the fighter-bomber configuration) and Messerschmitt's Me 262 V9 Hochgeschwindigkeit (abbreviated HG, lit "high speed") series of test aircraft. The usage of the kanji "改" (kai, lit. "revision") in a context like a vehicle's official designation/model number indicates what might commonly be called an aftermarket modification. For example, Basara's VF-19改 "Fire Valkyrie" started out as a VF-19F1 Excalibur before undergoing extensive modifications to be outfitted with Sound Force equipment. Same as Ray's VF-17T改 and Mylene's VF-11MAXL改, which started out as stock VF-17T and VF-11MAXL units. The VF-0改 Zeak that Hakuna Aoba received in Macross R was a VF-0 airframe that was extensively retrofitted using modern materials and parts from the YF-25 series. 改 wouldn't be used for a one-off or limited production VF that was built to different specs than the mass production model, because it was designed and built that way by the manufacturer. Shinsei's VF-11MAXL Thunderbolt is an ace variant that's built to order for a particular pilot, but because it's delivered that way by the manufacturer it doesn't merit a 改. The same goes for Chelsea Scarlett's VF-19ACTIVE Nothung. It's a one-of-a-kind technology demonstrator, but because it was designed and built to that spec rather than being a VF-19 that was modified after the fact, it isn't a 改. There are a few cases of inconsistent usage. Macross 2036 flipflops on referring to the upgraded VF-1 Valkyries the characters use as VF-1改 or VF-1R. The 改 usage in that case is inappropriate, given that the VF-1R series (VF-1AR/JR/SR) is a production aircraft in its own right that's like the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet to the VF-1's F/A-18C/D. Macross Delta's Siegfried units should properly have been designated VF-31改, since their backstory indicates Surya Aerospace delivered them as trial production VF-31As and they were subsequently modified by Xaos into their present forms. 1. Per Macross Chronicle Mechanic Sheet ALL 01B. Variable Fighter Master File: VF-19 Excalibur takes a different view, and asserts that it was a less heavily modified VF-19E Excalibur instead.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, the Robotech fan film group from (IIRC) Serbia that got hit with a cease and desist before they did went the same route... ditch the Robotech IP and repurpose the original aspects of their existing work as the starting point for an original science fiction series. Mind you, those two groups got their projects nuked for very different reasons. UEG Productions' fan film Robotech Genesis got slapped with a cease and desist when they refused to surrender all rights to their work to HG in exchange for the fan film being exhibited on robotech.com. HG has asserted, in documents provided for the lawsuit between them and CGL/PGI that they shut down that Valkyrie Project fan series under orders from Big West (via Tatsunoko)... though, if true, the decision was probably motivated by HG having publicly endorsed the fan film. Hiring the Valkyrie Project guys was a desperate face-saving move, since HG had previously given that fan film their blessing and then shut it down. Doubly so since the rumor at the time was that Harmony Gold was shutting down these fan film projects because they were angry that those fans were creating higher quality material than they were.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Back when the book was written, that was a bank-breakingly massive, downright unreasonable sum for a development program... almost double what was projected for the first 5th Gen fighters, in the same way the individual unit cost of the VF-1 was a good 4-5 times what a modern fighter jet at the time was.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Ach, my bad. The cost cited for development was $50 billion. (That figure comes from the pre-DYRL? Sky Angels tech manual by Masahiro Chiba.)
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Spring or Summer 2004, IIRC. It was one of a few designs trotted out for the Variable Fighter Experimental Requirements Review (VFERR) column.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Volume 1's cover is Hakuna Aoba's VF-1X++ Valkyrie Double Plus and Chelsea Scarlett's VF-19ACTIVE "Nothung". Volume 2's cover is their respective "mid-season" upgrades... Chelsea Scarlett's YF-25 Prophecy w/ Paladin Pack (SPS-25P/MF25) and Hakuna Aoba's VF-0改 "Zeak", which is basically a VF-0 rebuilt with YF-25 parts.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Before that, when Mirage takes him up in her VF-31C and he barfs all over her on landing.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    As @sketchley said, it's the Russian word for "Eagle"... the Sv-52 in question even has wings designed with feather-like control surfaces (primary remiges). Magdalena Zielonaska is, evidence would suggest, Polish rather than Russian. Her family's company has a name referencing an offensive in the liberation of Poland by the Red Army (Vistula & Oder, the two rivers in Poland that marked the approximate bounds of the Vistula-Oder Offensive that reclaimed most of Poland from the Nazis).
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Huh... so are they measuring that with an onboard accelerometer, or are they computing it from slow motion footage? I imagine they're probably less worried about injury than they are about some hotshot putting himself into G-LOC and putting his plane into the spectators (or the ground). The human body can take astonishing amounts of g's as transitory split-second loadings without incurring lethal damage... IIRC the standard benchmarks for injury start at around 50g with death being around 75-100g depending on the body part pulling that load... but sustained g-loads become injurious at much lower levels. One can only wonder how many g's Guld was pulling when he died, since his fighter was equipped with an inertia vector control system to buffer high g and he STILL incurred lethal g-loads. For that matter, it makes one wonder were the buffer point starts on an inertia store converter. Hayate was clearly pulling several g's when he got violently ill in his first flight with Mirage, and that VF did have a very good quality inertia store converter in it.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Yes, that is Ogol 7312... self-styled as Naresuan after adopting Earth's culture in the wake of the First Space War. Fun fact, he took the name of one of Thailand's most revered monarchs, also known as Sanphet II. He's the leader of Fasces, and a former NUNS Special Forces squadron commander (of SVF-473 Etoile Filane - french for "Shooting Star") who mentored both Hakuna Aoba (right book left dude in the orange jacket) and Angers 672 (the one standing next to him). Very true... which is why I restricted referencing them to corroboration of things said in more official publications. (IIRC, doesn't your site list them as "Expanded Universe"? Incidentally, you have a LOT of AwardZone broken link notifications on the Glossary pages.)
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Safe bet it's Harmony Gold. After all, Catalyst and Piranha submitted that motion to dismiss alleging that Harmony Gold didn't have the rights under license that it claimed to and thus didn't have the standing to bring the suit against them and this is arguing the opposite. I suppose I can't definitively rule out that they might be so stupid they'd refute the entire premise of their own motion to dismiss though, in light of the fact that they keep getting caught trying to commit precisely the same crime over and over again like they're an even less competent Team Rocket.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    You mean context about the document itself, or the mentioned project?
  19. Seto Kaiba
    10g+ is the figure that keeps cropping up in connection with the need for Inertia Store Converter technology. The VF-19 and VF-22's high thrust-to-weight ratios and exceptional maneuverability made them naturally inclined to subject their pilots to g-forces in excess of 10g, which ultimately resulted in frequent crashes after loss of control. The New UN Forces naturally invested no small amount of effort into trying to improve the g-force endurance of their pilots. Better g-suits, seats that adjust the pilot's posture to optimize the blood flow, even a biological anti-g system that used EMPs and infrared to stimulate metabolic responses to stress. It still eventually got to the point where they needed to resort to displacing the g-forces entirely... first with the YF-21's inertia vector control system, then with the Inertia Store Converter developed for the YF-24. Pretty much a necessity for the 5th Gen, since above sustained loads of around 12-17g you're looking at injuries and death and the VF-25's rated for acceleration of 30.5g without its FAST packs on.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Not a perfect fit, but it did an OK job of getting the basic idea across. As I noted previously, this conclusion pulls from a number of different sources. It's not spelled out in its entirety in any one book. The explanation of how destructive interference produces the stealth effect is all me. As noted previously, Macross the Ride's glossary provides a description of the active stealth system as analyzing incoming electromagnetic (radar) waves and transmitting its own back to create false results. Great Mechanics DX #9 describes it as "deceiving" the radar waves rather than disrupting them. There's only one ECM-based (per Macross Chronicle) active stealth technology which works that way... active cancellation. Variable Fighter Master File has a longer explanation on page 54 of the VF-19 book, and its brief remarks on postwar retuning of the VF-1's active stealth system in the Space Wing book does fit neatly with the active cancellation method, noting that it needed software updates to cope with Zentradi Army radar systems that use different sweep patterns and modulations. If this were a jamming based technology (DRFM jamming, for instance) this upgrade wouldn't be necessary. It does explicitly state that the radars have been enhanced. What's pointed to is more along the line of radars being improved AND supplemented with various other sensor systems like optical and infrared cameras, LIDAR arrays, fold wave sensors, and so on... full sensor integration was, IIRC, a major bullet point for the YF-24 and its descendants. (Master File also, naturally, supports the idea of radars continuing to improve.)
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Y'know, I don't think I've ever seen an explicit in-universe rationale for all the missile spam. VFs would be pretty hard to land a hit on with their high maneuverability, weapons able to intercept missiles, active stealth and other forms of ECM, and conventional countermeasures like chaff, flares, smoke, fiber optic towed decoys, and what have you. Then again, there's that old joke about there being a reason they're not called "hittles"... I suppose quantity has a quality all its own in situations like that. "There's a missile here with your name on it and I'm going to keep firing them until I find it!"
  22. Seto Kaiba
    That was my effort to tidily sum up the way the available data points to the effectiveness of active stealth systems going up and down as technology advances. They do actually mention that radar and other detection systems are improving/evolving on page fifteen... but in passing. (Never mind books like Master File gushing about every little update the radar tech went through.) Taken in context with relevant statements from other publications like the Mechanic Sheets for the VF-171, the picture it paints is of the effectiveness of active stealth systems gaining or losing some effectiveness as active stealth and radar technology advance. By the time 4th Gen VFs were being drawn up in the late 2030s, 2nd Generation active stealth's effectiveness had degraded to such an extent that it became necessary to start designing passively stealthy VF designs that mounted the majority of their weapons internally or conformally to reduce the risk of detection. A couple years later, 3rd Generation active stealth comes into use and the need for passive stealth is reduced via the more capable system, so we start seeing less stealthy designs and greater use of wing pylons again. The nature of the technology means that they're not likely to ever be truly effective against a ship or ground-based radar installation at anything other than long range, it's much better suited to the kind of roles the DX article points to it being effective in... concealment from missile guidance radars and other aircraft, which are smaller, less powerful radars. Macross Chronicle's VF-171 Mechanic Sheet does also point to anti-fighter use as the motivation for improving the VF-171's active stealth system from 2nd to 3rd Gen. (In the "Fighter Mode" section.)
  23. Seto Kaiba
    The source with the greatest density of relevant information would probably be Great Mechanics DX 9. It talks a bit about active stealth technology, mostly focusing on how the "arms race" between active stealth and radar systems tipping in favor of radar in the runup to 2040 and Project Super Nova, prompting a greater emphasis on passively stealthy designs until the next generation active stealth systems became available. Some of the details are repeated in Macross Chronicle mechanic sheets like the ones done for Macross Frontier's VF-171s. There are brief descriptions of how the system functions in Great Mechanics DX 9, Macross Chronicle's VF Defenses technology sheet, and Macross R's chapter four glossary... which describe the active stealth technology in use as being one that deceives a hostile radar system by analyzing the incoming radar sweep and transmitting its own electromagnetic waves back to the hostile radar to mislead it into displaying incorrect data. That's a pretty textbook definition of how active cancellation works, and they'd even correctly cited its achilles heel of losing effectiveness as the power of the hostile radar system increases.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    As @sketchley said, the presence of active stealth systems on earlier models of VFs is something that emerged as a result of the VF-0 (and Sv-51) establishing that this technology was in widespread use on VFs from the word "go". This was later finessed into an explanation that radar technology and active stealth technology are in an arms race of sorts. The technique used to achieve the stealth effect is active cancellation, a destructive interference-based approach in which the VF has to generate a radio wave or pulse at the same frequency and amplitude as the enemy radar but with an opposite phase, by which the net amplitude of the returning radar wave/pulse is reduced to zero (or as close to it as possible if the antiphase transmitter can't match the amplitude of the enemy radar). The more powerful the radar, the harder it is for an active stealth system to effectively zero the radar return. As a result, when VF radars exceed the capabiities of active stealth systems, VFs are built with more passively stealthy designs (e.g. the VF-17, YF-19, YF-21), and when active stealth systems have enough power behind them that they can't simply be overpowered by VF-mounted radars then VF designs become less passively stealthy. The VF-17, YF-19, and YF-21 were developed in a period where 2nd Gen active stealth systems had fallen behind radars in terms of power, and so needed to rely more on passive stealth to make up the difference. Once the VF-19, VF-22, and VF-171 reached production readiness, 3rd Generation active stealth systems entered the picture and reduced the need for passively stealthy airframe shapes, allowing more wing-mounted ordnance to be used without compromising stealthiness. I'm not sure "less advanced" is necessarily the right way to put it. The precision of the system is a factor, but it's got a lot to do with raw transmitting power. Active cancellation is very much a brute force approach to stealth, the system has to be able to match the amplitude of the radar wave/pulse. The more juice they can put into generating an antiphase wave/pulse, the more powerful the radar they can hide from.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, that kind of wishful thinking has been showing up increasingly often as new documents from the lawsuit become publicly available. Even overused terms like "fake news" hardly seem strong enough for the kind of coverage that sites like Sarna give to nonevent documents like this, which come freighted with excited, heavily hyperbolic declarations that most any activity is a sign that the tyranny of Harmony Gold will soon be overthrown in court. It's become so absurd that I'd be prepared to bet they'd try to spin the judge calling a ten minute recess because he needed to take a piss as a sign of an imminent ruling against HG that will free the Unseen. The BattleTech/MechWarrior fanbase really ought to know better by now. The owners of the franchise have tried to bring back Unseen designs like half a dozen times now, and every sodding time it ends the same way... Harmony Gold threatens to sue for violation of their exclusive license to the designs in the west, and BT/MW's owners either do the smart thing and back down, or stupidly take the issue before the courts and make fools of themselves before settling out of court to avoid an inevitable ruling against them. It's like the legal version of a Looney Tunes Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner short. That the roadrunner wins is a foregone conclusion, the only question is how the coyote will hurt and humiliate himself in the attempt to challenge it. A ruling in Catalyst/PGI's favor wouldn't materially change anything... it'd just mean that the new designs Harmony Gold alleges were based on Macross designs are different enough that they aren't judged to be derivative of the Macross designs, and would therefore be freely usable without violating the exclusivity of Harmony Gold's license agreement with Tatsunoko. It's not gonna change anything WRT Harmony Gold's license, or the shenanigans they get up to with Macross trademarks or threatening to sue companies like Hasbro.
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