Seto Kaiba

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.)

A fair point!

Within the bounds of the very, VERY specific corner case you've constructed here... yes. ... which naturally explains why the technology is nowhere to be found in Macross outside of high-end military hardware1, litter-picking robots, and vending machines. Ah, I see the reason for the misconception... you're operating under the common misconception that the system-on-chip in something like a phone is doing the thinking locally. The reason those applications of very, VERY rudimentary heuristics work at all is 1. because of how basic they are and 2. because much of the actual processing burden is non-local... it's being done external to the system-on-chip on a remote server or in "the cloud2". When you try to do the thinking locally, it requires a lot more system resources. Even seemingly simple tasks like driving a vehicle on well-mapped public roads (Level 3 or 4 vehicular autonomy) requires a surprising amount of power just to handle sensor input analysis. So much so that those computers can end up weighing hundreds of pounds when you factor in their power and cooling requirements. (This I know from firsthand professional experience.) Likely by a high-efficiency battery or fuel cell. Given the many interesting things Overtechnology has achieved with carbon allotropes, I'd assume it's probably something analogous to a stacked-graphene supercapacitor. Even with today's technology those achieve similar energy density and slightly better performance than modern lithium-ion batteries. OTM would probably better that substantially and give those machines a range measured in weeks or hundreds of miles. There are some entertaining alternatives like magnetic induction, using a receiver pad in the underside of the unit and charging pads buried in the sidewalk3. This would keep those vending machines on the sidewalk and potentially allow them to self-limit their range to just a certain array of associated charging pads. They could be using something like Tesla's wireless power concept (though I doubt it since that saturates the entire area with a charge), or potentially even be operating on a small hydrogen combustion generator like you'd find in a series hybrid car. Ones operating outdoors could potentially use high-efficiency solar, either with a material like vantablack paired with the high-efficiency thermoelectric converters we know exist (because they're used in thermonuclear reaction generators4) or maybe just photovoltaics. Cooling would be an interesting proposition. Electrically-driven conventional mechanical refrigeration is one option, of course. If they're operating on the hydrogen combustion generator option they could potentially be using the cryogenic fuel itself as a coolant to keep the beverages frosty cold, which would also serve to warm the fuel for the injectors5. Thermoelectric cooling is another option, again thanks to OTM-based superefficient thermoelectric technology. Maybe the cans themselves have a small flask of liquid CO2 that releases during dispensing to flash-cool and carbonate the drink (using a CO2 fire extinguisher is a surprisingly effective method to rapidly cool drinks on a hot day). I'm a bit curious how autonomous those vending machines actually are and how they detect customers. I'd guess they're probably semi-autonomous, remotely managed by some central system that is tracking inventory and the locations of the various machines so it can recall them for restock or repair. They definitely have rudimentary voice recognition, as they respond to shouts of "cola" in Super Dimension Fortress Macross, coupled with directional microphones to allow them to locate the speaker. I wonder if they're using LIDAR or RADAR to track the terrain to make sure they don't tip over on the curb or stray into a navigational hazard like traffic. The unit definitely seems to want to rotate towards whoever hailed it, so I'm guessing it's not full 360 degree sensing. I've got a keen suspicion that the way it differentiates potential customers from other objects is by infrared. It's probably setting the ambient temperature as the background level and then looking for objects warmer than that around 36-38 degrees C. Maybe it's using a laser rangefinder to ensure it stops at a comfortable distance from its summoner to ensure it doesn't accidentally mow them down? 1. Sharon Apple doesn't count as a separate category because her AI was military-grade hardware that was shared with the AIF-X-9 Ghost... and she probably would have been used for the Minmay Attack if she'd been completed in a stable state. 2. As a network engineer, I loathe the term "the cloud". It's obfuscatory language at best. There is no cloud, it's just someone else's computer. 3. This technology is being toyed with for extending the range of pure-electric cars, embedding wireless charging pads in the surface of the road that switch on as a vehicle passes over them and off again when the vehicle is past them, allowing it to be "plugged in" and actively recharging while driving. This tech was proposed back in '72 by Professor Don Otto of the University of Auckland and has gone into practical trials on a few stretches of road in Britain in the last few years. 4. One of the two power stages of a thermonuclear reaction turbine engine, the other being a high-efficiency MHD dynamo. 5. Variable Fighter Master File: VF-1 Valkyrie Vol.2 indicates the VF-1 uses the hydrogen fuel slush in its tanks as a coolant for its engines prior to introducing it into the reactor in this fashion.

A number of forum dialog promps are also broken and displaying no text, such as the confirmation request when you cancel editing a post.

I'm well aware of what bingo fuel means. Space is rather different from atmosphere, however. You don't need to continuously run the engine to stay flying, but you do need to save enough fuel to decelerate when you get where you're going and want to stop. Thermonuclear reaction engines are fabulously inefficient in space flight, so a drone that has just enough fuel slush left to limp home is not a likely candidate to do anything except set a straight-line course home, burn the engines long enough to get up to speed, and save the rest of its go juice to decelerate for recovery. Not necessarily, in the case of the Super Packs. VFs with the linear actuator system are capable of some incredibly complex feats of electromagnetic field manipulation to keep parts in proper alignment during transformation and so on. It's possible that same field manipulation is what is causing the "bunching" of the pack on ejection and the proper reconnection on the VF's return. Putting an AI into every piece of the Super Pack would potentially take a trivial cost into nontrivial territory and incur additional costs from the support systems needed to keep those AIs running. (There are a few isolated instances of FAST Packs having internal power sources, mainly capacitors but in one case a small reactor, but most packs operate solely on external power from the VF itself.)

One interesting thing I noticed while I was reading the Project Trapeze section over lunch... for the long flight, it sounds like they converted that VF-1A's engines from an augmented fusion rocket to a fusion-powered thermal monopropellant rocket. Kind of a neat way to think about long-duration spaceflight for a VF and possibly a fun little nod to Gundam's UC timeline as well.

The fleet legging it... meaning recovering the drone wouldn't be on anyone's mind anyway. Also, since the verniers and main engines are pulling from the same tanks most of the time, a drone on bingo fuel wouldn't be maneuvering period. It may not even be something that needs to be done by a human either. When even the equivalent of a forklift has a support AI, C4I center on the mothership may have probably has some fairly grunty AI assistance so the human operators don't need to take their attention off the battle to poke individual recoverable assets one at a time. For the record, it isn't clear if that reattachment function is on the VF, the Pack, or both.

Excluding the Cassini probe's trip through the gap between Saturn's F and G rings during orbital insertion - which required special measures to be taken to avoid damage even in the relatively debris-free space between the rings - it generally stayed at least a light-second from any planet or moon. That's quite a bit different from, say, flying through the Cassini divide laterally, in orbit of a planet with significant space traffic, or in an asteroid field being mined for resources by an emigrant fleet. That kind of assumes the human operator is directly controlling the unit... the way it's described is more like a RTS, where they're selecting a bunch of semi-autonomous units and pointing them in the general direction of something that needs its sh*t wrecked, assigning target priorities, etc. One of the benefits of using 'em is that you can manage a large drone air force with relatively few meatbags. As a rule, if an enemy force (e.g. a Zentradi Army branch fleet) have already spotted the emigrant ship... the entire situation has gone sufficiently pear-shaped that recovery is not likely to occur at all. (Legging it is still the preferred solution in situations like that, and in some Master File accounts, including possibly self-destructing any ships that can't make their fold jump away to prevent capture.) Depends what kind of enemy. Some, like the Vajra, are known to home in on things like active fold wave emissions from communications systems, fold reactors, and the like, so the drone may still be drawing fire even if it's operating in low power mode simply because it presents as a threat and is an easy target. It'd be less an issue for, say, an enemy VF that's using a mixture of RADAR, LIDAR, infrared, and optical sensing rather than fold wave detection since the only thing likely to draw attention is the drone's engine heat. While we haven't had much information on how overtechnology-based artificial intelligence systems work in Macross on a hardware level, some of the terminology choices suggest they're using an entirely different architecture from anything we would recognize as a conventional computer. This reasoning may or may not apply... doubly so given that some of the systems are apparently based on organic technology. (Save for Macross II where the word "apparently" gets jettisoned from that sentence, because it's outright confirmed.) Super Packs are something we've had a fair amount of insight into the inner workings of, and they're generally pretty bare-bones because they are intended to be disposable should the situation call for it. The first several generations of Super Pack were fairly bare-bones affairs, being that they were mostly just high-capacity fuel tanks and hybrid rocket engines with some additional verniers. The addition of weapons to the packs in the form of some simple micromissile launchers was almost an afterthought. It wasn't until changes in engine technology and a larger average airframe greatly reduced the need for massive bolt-on fuel tanks in space that we started to see recoverable Super Packs. That was when the focus of a Super Pack changed from extending operating time to offsetting the loss of performance caused by carrying absurd amounts of ordnance. Those packs could even bunch up in orbit for later automatic reattachment if a fighter needed to make planetfall, so I wouldn't be surprised if they also had recovery beacons of their own... though normally if a Super Pack is being jettisoned during a fight, it's because the pack is damaged to the point that it's a liability or being used as an emergency anti-missile countermeasure.

Granted, Picard did take a licking in the movies... but it was mostly physical, rather than mental, abuse. Generations was more about beating the hell out of Kirk (and LaForge) with Picard riding in to give Kirk a "what the hell, hero?". First Contact was a rough trip since the Borg are Jean-Luc Picard's personal berserk button. Insurrection was a pretty standard "screw the rules, I'm doing what's right" plot. Nemesis wanted to be psychological abuse for Picard, but it was Troi who took the beating instead once the plot became self-aware enough to notice there was no way Shinzon could relate to Picard at all. Wasn't that pretty much entirely because she was a fellow archaeologist though? I recall him being pretty put-off by her casual willingness to engage in dodgy behavior and trying to distance himself from her because of it. Sito Jaxa's definitely the better example there. He only permitted Ro Laren on his ship because he was ordered to, and only allowed her to remain after she had already redeemed herself by outing a flag officer's dodgy plan to wipe out a Bajoran resistance group on Cardassia's behalf.

Gonna second the bug report of Quote blocks no longer showing the original post's author.

My apologies, I thought you were expressing frustration with a lack of AAA fighting games in general rather than just those specific titles since the Nintendo fighting game scene hype is usually dominated by Super Smash Bros. That said, have there actually been Dead or Alive games for a Nintendo console besides the rather lamentably bad Dead or Alive: Dimensions for the 3DS? I'd thought that franchise was more or less wedded to the Playstation in recent years, though I do recall playing Dead or Alive 2 on the Sega Dreamcast back in high school. Soul Calibur 2 as well.

That probably has a lot to do with the Switch's hardware limitations. It definitely doesn't seem to be a port-friendly console when it comes to current games. Doom 3 and Dying: Reborn had some very evident graphical downgrades (and Dying: Reborn jettisoned all of its dialog audio) compared to versions from other consoles.

They've got BlazBlue: Central Fiction and Cross Tag Battle, Dragon Ball Fighterz, Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2, Guilty Gear Accent Core Plus R, Mortal Kombat 11, and Ultra Street Fighter II?

Well, it's not like a thirty-plus year totally unbroken streak of abject failures did great things for the pool of prospective licensees. It isn't like they were spoiled for choice at the outset either, as a kid's show that got middling ratings and had an unsuccessful toy line. They attracted the scrubs, for the most part, and now that the scrubs have lost interest or had their licenses revoked it's all down to the small time indie operators who are looking to make a name for themselves but can't afford a license for a big name property.

... eh? Why wouldn't they be? I mean, it's the commercially successful properties that attract the attention of the bootleggers and other unauthorized third party merchandising. Even if Harmony Gold weren't famously lawsuit-happy, Robotech can't even get real companies interested in their license anymore let alone profit-hungry bootleggers.

Probes like the Pioneers and Voyagers weren't designed to operate in close proximity to planets, where high velocity debris is most likely to gather thanks to gravity. The drones don't have that advantage, since most of them are employed in planetary defense and as advance patrols and first responders by emigrant fleets that, by their very nature, tend to loiter in close proximity to planets and other large stellar bodies. That would tend to make the entire question academic. If they're close enough to spot a mothership with a RADAR, LIDAR, or optical array then they're likely well with remote control range. All the more reason that maintaining object detection and ranging would be important. If the drone is attempting to stay in one piece, flying directly past the enemy is not the way to do it. (Nor, for that matter, would disabling ECCM and active stealth.)

Bummer. Hope she recovers swiftly. KonoSuba was at least mildly entertaining in its anime form because they let Kazuma have some lasting character development. The light novel is an incredibly frustrating read because any character development in Kazuma and Aqua is undone by the start of the next volume and half the story will inevitably consist of Darkness and Megumin trying to turf him off the couch to actually do something. It's sad how little original thought or imagination went into that series. I had expected much better from Tatsunoko. It really hasn't scratched my mecha itch like I'd been hoping it would, so I'm getting by with Gyakuten Saiban and Lupin III Part V.

There've been a few aberrations over the years like Conker's Bad Fur Day, but unless I missed something Nintendo (esp. Nintendo of America) still likes to be seen as squeaky clean family fun. (Surely I didn't imagine the fuss they made over the whole Bowsette thing.)

Kaguya-sama: Love and War and The Rising of the Shield Hero seem to be doing pretty well this season. I've all but completely given up on The Price of Smiles, which is just a horrific train wreck by this point.

Yeah, hearing that Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 was coming to Nintendo Switch was a surprise considering Nintendo is normally so obsessed with being family-friendly. The order of the universe reasserted itself when I heard that Koei Tecmo won't be releasing it outside of APAC. (According to ANN, the JDM release for Switch is going to come with English subtitles for those who want it badly enough to import it.)

... you do realize we're talking about a drone in space, right? Long-range detection and ranging of navigational hazards is essential if the drone is to survive at all, since the speed that navigational hazards in space are moving is going to be considerable and if the drone is budgeting propellant it will need to make its course corrections well in advance to avoid any collisions. Otherwise it'll end up like the Project Trapeze VF-1 that got thoroughly trashed by micrometeor impacts. That's assuming there's even a high-energy capacitor bank or battery system capable of running the drone's systems long-term. Even VFs aren't known to have that level of power system redundancy.