Seto Kaiba

It's definitely not the first one, as Project A-Ko beat it to market by about eight months (March vs. November 1994).

Yeah, the titular doctor from Ameku M.D. could give Burnham a run for her money in the unlikeable protagonist department. She is, for all intents and purpose, Hugh Laurie's Gregory House from House M.D. but with none of House's redeeming traits. Where Gregory House was a brilliant but incredibly flawed doctor whose toxic jerkass tendencies were a product of significant trauma, Takao Ameku is seemingly just an arrogant rich kid who believes herself to be a genius, who treats her colleagues so badly she's banned from several departments, and who seemingly forces her way into people's business purely for her own entertainment.

Crunchyroll's Spring 2025 lineup has started announcements... https://www.crunchyroll.com/news/seasonal-lineup/2025/3/19/spring-2025-anime-crunchyroll Looks like we're getting another season of Fire Force, which should be interesting. Along with a new season of Black Butler, the inevitable continuation of One Piece, and a new season of I've Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years. There's also My Hero Academia: Vigilantes, an adaptation of the yawn-inducing My Hero Academia spinoff. Rather interested to see what appears to be an adaptation of Anne of Green Gables in the season's lineup under the title Anne Shirley. There's a Guilty Gear Strive anime in this coming season too. That should be almost Jojo levels of bizarre. Kind of a lean-looking simulcast lineup so far. I was hoping we'd be seeing more of MF Ghost this summer. Still five or so titles left unannounced. Really, anything to save me from the drudgery of the Spring lineup's repeated failures to stick the landing. The ending to Ameku M.D. will be a mercy indeed. It's been a while since I've had a series where the protagonist was this unlikeable. Not since Star Trek: Discovery, I think.

Like they say... "Friendly fire - isn't". As a clone army on a scale almost unrivaled in sci-fi, Macross's Zentradi are shown to have a pretty cavalier attitude towards casualties. Even benevolent Zentradi commanders like Vrlitwhai are shown to have zero qualms about sacrificing whole ships and crews to lure enemies out of hiding, and who could forget that one of Vrlitwhai and Laplamiz's key colleagues is a psychotically reckless commander with the sobriquet "The Ally-Killer" for his strategic tendency to get as many of his own men killed as the enemy's. Mind you, the whole bit about the Imperial Guard's cruelty in Warhammer 40,000 is oversold by its fans too...

Enjoy! I'm still hoping we'll one day get a fourth season that will adapt the manga's final, climactic story arc about Kaguya's family. It's not a bad show by any means, and it does have a few good songs for OP and ED. Ending the adaptation where they did was definitely the right call, though. The amount of fun in the story gradually diminishes as the distance between the A-plot starring Kumoko and the B-plot starring Shun closes. By the time they're aligned, it's a joyless slog through preventing a fantasy apocalypse.

To be fair, the Zentradi and the Mardook in Macross absolutely do the same thing and have a "We have reserves" attitude on par with the worst Guard regimental commanders. Remember, Boddole Zer wanted to wipe out whole branch fleets worth of his own forces for being "contaminated" by Earth's culture in the original series. He also destroyed tens of thousands of his own ships just for being in the way of the shot he wanted to take at the Meltrandi mobile fortress in DYRL?. Ingues in Macross II also starts destroying his own fleet en masse simply for refusing an order to employ unnecessary levels of overkill in a fight they'd already effectively won and sank one of his own flagships because its crew had been exposed to one Earth song. (Never mind all the cases of them sacrificing whole ships and divisions of troops just to scout out the enemy.)

It really is. Honestly, that one's good start-to-finish. 😁 My watch group recently started So I'm a Spider, So What?. I've seen this one before, though after reading the light novel I definitely understand why this one ended where it did. It relies so heavily on anachronic order for its story that it just sort of falls to pieces at several points because there's no real connection between what the protagonist is doing in its A-plot and what the Hero's party is doing in the B-plot. They kind of cut their losses right around the point of darkness-induced audience apathy kicking in when Kumoko/Shiraori jumps off the slippery slope and becomes a rather unlikeable villain protagonist.

That's halfway to an actual episode of Macross 7, where that muckraking tabloid journalist was trying to find scandals on Basara and Fire Bomber and having not much luck.

Eh, assuming it's designed anything like a cruise liner, ferry, or jet liner, it's probably more a case of the manufacturer providing a standardized hull design and leaving it up to the company operating it to customize the interior to their needs. That said, given that these ships are designed for a fairly specific and inflexible purpose of providing "luxury" ferry services to emigrant planets within the 100 light year sphere around Earth, I would assume the balance of the interiors is relatively standardized based on an average balance of passengers. WRT "Earth First" design philosophy, that's not really much of a thing prior to 2040 and the impromptu practical demonstration of the YF-19 and YF-21 over Earth during the Sharon Apple Incident. That led to the New UN Government's crackdown on exports of weapons technology to emigrant fleets and planets fearing that those new advanced weapons will be turned against them by anti-government militants. In the 2010s through the 2030s, it could be said that Earth's design philosophy was "Emigrants first". Not only did they put a fair amount of effort into trying to make emigrant fleets safer and more comfortable, the overriding priority in VF design for the 2nd Generation was developing VFs that were both easy to build and easy to maintain for the sake of emigrant fleet/planet defense forces upgrading their equipment. According to Master File, even the 3rd Generation's flagship VF designs were intended first and foremost to improve the defensive ability of emigrant fleets and research fleets that were stumbling into new threats as they spread out into the greater galaxy. Fans often forget, the New UN Government was formed in April 2010. It's in the original series, after the timeskip. Thus far, the emigrant governments we've seen all use the same standard designs that are used basically everywhere with the exception of Macross Galaxy (which used its own designs) and Windermere IV which seems to be using derivatives of the Macross Galaxy fleet designs. With respect to the VF-25, while Master File asserts that some aspects of its equipment were intended to accommodate the resource priorities of emigrant fleets, the VF-25 as a whole wasn't really optimized for use in emigrant fleets in any sense. It was designed to be a general purpose next (5th) generation main VF that the Frontier Government could equip its own New UN Forces with for protection against the Vajra and also rake in money from export sales of their new fighter to allied governments without the resources to develop and/or build their own 5th Generation main VF. For its part, the VF-31 was developed primarily for economic reasons. Both to give the local economy of the Brisingr Alliance a shot in the arm and to hopefully make some cash selling their state-of-the-art 5th Generation design to nearby allied emigrant governments. (It broadly mirrors Japan's own efforts to develop a domestic next-gen fighter jet.) It's not a specialized craft by any means. If anything, it's meant to be a radical new approach to a highly generalized main VF. The ordnance container system the VF-31's designers inherited from the YF-30 prototype is meant to do away with specialized mission-specific aircraft variants in favor of a common airframe with hot-swappable mission modules to satisfy most role requirements. The Sv-262's not really a specialized design either. It reflects some weird cultural biases on the part of its operators (e.g. the sword) but it's just meant to be a general purpose Valkyrie with a design bias towards fighting other Valkyries (as a product of a design team that specializes in that exact mission profile).

Surprisingly, no. Given that the final form of Project Nova was a competition between the YF-11 and YF-14 for the role of next main fighter, you'd think the VF-11's Master File would have at least one picture of the bloody thing. Actually, looking over the whole of Variable Fighter Master File: VF-11 Thunderbolt, there's shockingly little variety in the book's art. The development history has very small bits of line art of the VF-1, VF-4, VF-3000, VF-5000, and VF-9, a half-page piece of the VF-X-11, and some full page fighter mode line art for the YF-11 prototypes and four other variants of VF-11 (D, MAXL, MAXL Custom, and VT-11). The 3D modeled art is all reskins of the same B/C type model. The only other fighter that's even in the color images is a VF-17 that I think was made for an earlier volume. Even the color schemes are kinda lazy... they're just the DYRL Skull squadron colors, Macross Plus colors, low viz grey, etc. The only one that's really breaking the mold is one that's allegedly from an acrobatic team on the planet Mystras. (It's kind of weird that it mentions two other variants, the VE-11 Thunderseeker from the Hasegawa model kit line and a VF-11E Advanced Thunderbolt, but never troubles itself to actually describe them.) Yeah, Uroboros seems to be especially strange in that regard in that it's the only world we've seen where multiple settlements aren't clustered together in the same region. They're spread across three distinct areas of the planet for some reason. How well the Zentradi blend in seems to be something that varies from series to series. One point that Macross keeps coming back to is that Zentradi are supposed to be quite a bit taller than the average Human, averaging approximately 2m instead of 1.8m. Klan's quite a bit taller than the standard Zentradi in her adult form, and Ernest Johnson seems to be as well. We've also seen this with some of the Zentradi in Macross 7, like Veffidas and the rioters who try to take over city hall. Ernest has an explicitly given height, and he's a whopping 227cm (7 feet 5.4 inches). That'd make him as tall as some the tallest to ever play professional basketball, but rather than being gangly he's extremely broadly built. Guld is only half-Zentradi, but he's still well above average at 195cm (6 feet 5 inches). They do seem to lean towards making Zentradi very tall... unless they're girls, then they're Human-sized to keep them cute (unless they're Veffidas). Part of this is probably dependent on what type of Zentradi they are. There's a LOT of variability in the Zentradi height chart too, with records officers and so on being quite a bit smaller than normal soldiers (who average 10m) and commanders being Large and In Charge at as much as 13m. (Maybe that's why Milia's aide de camp is built like four brick sh*thouses stacked together... it's what she's used to, even though he's a standard human. He's probably meant to be American, given that he's like 7 feet tall and a blonde to boot.) We've never properly seen a VA-14, all we know it from its its Varauta derivative Az-130. Mind you, the VF-14 was also said to be very much favored by the Zentradi in official setting materials because of its size, simplicity, and sturdiness. One thing we know about the battle pods from a very early point: their ergonomics are hot garbage. The Regult is often singled out as being very uncomfortable and draining to operate for long periods because it has the bare minimum level of automation and its cockpit is very cramped and forces the pilot into an uncomfortable position. So much so that the still-cramped Glaug and Nousjadeul-Ger battle suit were seen as more luxurious. It's not hard to see why Zentradi might want the greater flexibility and defensive ability of the VFs and why ones raised among Humans would want a cockpit they don't have to pretzel themselves into. (As a man almost 2m tall myself, who has had to pretzel himself into more than one Fiat 500e, Abarth 595, or Alfa Romeo 4C for work, I can sympathize intensely.) Both the VF-11 and VF-14 are naturally designed to be upgraded throughout their service lives. The VF-14 is just a more extreme case, thanks to the abundantly roomy airframe General Galaxy designed it with in pursuit of a space-friendly VF that wouldn't need FAST Packs for extended operations. The one nit I have to pick with that idea is that, by its nature, the Acshio area is not nondescript. The class of ship the Dejima/Acshio belongs to might be nondescript in its sheer ubiquitousness, but the contents aren't. The Acshio area is 300m of slums and urban decay that's parked right next to a fairly posh small city. It sticks out like a sore thumb the same way 300m of Gary, Indiana would if you deposited it on the outskirts of metropolitan Tokyo. By all accounts, they were still doing research into the 2060s as Elma Hoyly is researching it in 2062 as part of anti-Var countermeasures based on what she learned from her mentor Dr. Lawrence, and he based his work on Dr. Chiba's. If you take Berger Stone's claims at face value, research has been going on in that field since the First Space War's conclusion.

Oh, I definitely am. I'm an engineer. I over-analyze everything. 🤣 That's not a bad idea. If, say, the military approved it and the City 7 government didn't then it could be said to be unauthorized since the civilian government that's supposed to be in charge never OK'd it. The ensuing adminstrative dustup could easily end with neither side being able to authorize repairing it due to its unauthorized status and lack of budget. I'm only too familiar with that kind of administrative "Not my problem" situation. Alternatively, if the Dejima/Acshio area did dock without proper authorization it's possible there is some legal reason that the 37th Fleet can't cut it loose or rebuild it. If the ship's not able to support its unregistered population long enough to reliably return to a safe port or is no longer spaceworthy, then there are almost certainly military regulations and/or civilian laws and treaties prohibiting the 37th Fleet from de facto marooning the inhabitants in space.

It changed names several times over the years. Originally, it was just "VF-4" or occasionally "VF-4 Valkyrie". In '92 it was given an official name "Siren" for Macross: Eternal Love Song. Then Macross Plus's artbooks changed it to "Lightning" in '95, and it was subsequently retconned to "Lightning III" in '97 for Macross Digital Mission VF-X. (Though you are right it's an error on my part... the "Lightning II" in that case was almost certainly the Lockheed YF-22, which was semi-officially called Lightning II from '90 until the finished aircraft was redubbed "Raptor" in '97. During the same period Kawamori was also drawing on the YF-23 for inspiration for the YF-21/VF-22.)

Probably. My guess is that the creative team working on Macross 7 never really expected anyone to question it. Then again, it does work pretty well as a way to justify Basara having a place that's big enough and isolated enough to rehearse a rock band. With his autism-coded difficulties in understanding other people and his hyperfocus on music, he's absolutely not the kind of guy who could hold down a 9-5 to make rent and utilities living in the city proper. That's definitely how I see it, though I am known to be a cynical curmugeon. 😝 Until Absolute Live!!!!!!, Lady M's just this weirdly half-baked plot device the writers repeatedly drag out to justify Xaos acting independently all the time instead of doing the job they were hired to do: supporting the local New UN Forces.

Veering back towards the VF-11 Master File... it's interesting to note that its explanation for what got the New UN Forces off the dime and developing a next (3rd) generation main VF was the disappearance of Megaroad-01 in 2016. It's noted that a number of other incidents followed where research and emigrant fleets encountered unexpected new threats out in the greater galaxy in the 2020s. The military, and in small part naturalized Zentradi with combat experience, agitated for an improvement in the defenses of the large-scale emigrant fleets before scaling up Humankind Seeding Plan. Master File recontextualizes Project Nova a bit. In its view, Project Nova is commonly known as the design competition between the VF-11 and VF-14 but was actually a series of development plans that evolved from the Advanced Valkyrie Project including both the 2nd and 3rd Generation VFs from the VF-4 and VF-3000 up to the VF-11 and VF-14. It was, according to Master File, a program intended to develop a VF for large-scale emigrant fleets that saw its fulfillment in the VF-11. Interestingly, its description of the actual kickoff of the VF-11's development describes the military as not providing any concrete requirements to the developers. Essentially, the plan was just for the developers to come up with their concept for a next-generation main VF without any restrictions. It's said that two developers dropped out, and the military sweetened the pot for the remaining six companies by promising that it would adopt both of the designs that were selected for the final competition. Proposals were submitted after a two year grace period. The six competing proposals submitted were numbered YF-10 through YF-15. The military spent six months assessing the designs, and ultimately settled on Shinsei Industry's YF-11 and General Galaxy's YF-14. This, I guess, explains the plethora of skipped numbers in the early teens and I guess indirectly confirms that the (New) UN Forces weren't skipping "unlucky" numbers. (It's mildly amusing that, by this point in the narrative, the Advanced Valkyrie Planning office has become nicknamed the "VF Mafia".) In early 2025, the YF-11 and YF-14 officially entered development. There's a brief digression where they talk about the development of General Galaxy's YF-14, and how General Galaxy angled for a larger all-in-one aircraft concept with a large size and long operating range in space partly to accommodate the broadest possible assortment of pilots. It's mentioned that, because many Zentradi are unusually tall as miclones, the cramped cockpits of many VFs meant that a nontrivial percentage of applicants were unable to become pilots. Argas Selzer of General Galaxy apparently did a study and had found that around 2% of applicants were rejected for this reason, amounting to an estimated 40,000 potential candidates whom a larger VF could put on the front lines. Sorting this out was also expected to have the benefit of diminishing the number of Zentradi joining rebel groups by making it easier for them to pursue desirable careers. Thus, General Galaxy bet on a signficantly larger airframe in expectation of bringing in more Zentradi and part-Zentradi pilots. The YF-11, it's said, went in the opposite direction and focused on trying to reexamine and optimize the proven concepts behind the VF-1 Valkyrie. Honestly, my read of it is that General Galaxy was making an extremely posh, high-tech VF while Shinsei set out to make the most simple, rugged design they could be easily tuned to suit the preferences of a huge array of different pilots and organizations. Kind of an M-16 vs. AK-47 sort of moment. Apparently this period also saw a need to lay the groundwork for inter-fleet collaboration as humanity spread out into the galaxy. So the Macross Concern subsidiary Glory Earth Systems, General Galaxy, and Shinsei jointly developed a inter-fleet network standard to support fleetwide and multifleet theater control. Skimming ahead, the book describes the two official setting prototypes (the one with canards and the one without), but also finesses in a whopping SEVENTEEN incremental YF units for various purposes before the VF-11A was completed.

Pretty disappointed with the direction I Want to Escape from Princess Lessons has taken. It doesn't really feel like the same show, or even the same main character, now that she's apparently decided the prince she spent the first ten episodes running away from is actually the love of her life. Kind of a flat and boring resolution to the story. Also pretty disappointed with Headhunted to Another World... it's another fun series that's kind of stumbling to a weak and halfhearted ending. Not a bad ending, like what Princess Lessons seems to be barreling towards, but kind of a lame one. Seems to be a bit of a theme, this season... writers just aren't sticking the landing.

Third Fourth time lucky?

I dunno. Max is obviously no fool, especially in Macross 7 Trash where he's shown to be an extremely adept player of military office politics. Even so, explaining away the presence of a cruise ship-sized slum district full of unregistered persons that attached itself to City 7 without permission while posing enough of a safety risk that the citizens branded it the fleet's "dangerous area" and also leeching off the fleet's limited and tightly controlled resources without contributing anything itself would be quite the to-do. What kind of plausible explanation exists for something like that? It can't be to ring-fence the fleet's "rough" elements, since Rex's biker gang and the toughs Midou brawls with show up elsewhere all the time. It's not being redeveloped, since it's still a crumbling ruin in 2046. It's not a cover for Project M's research spaces, they're in City 7 and Battle 7. Can Max really have had THAT much faith in Basara that he kept up a slum district at the public's expense for seven years on the off chance he'd be suitable? I am absolutely (and unapologetically) overthinking this. 🤣 I hate Lady M for exactly that reason. She's a lazy, and contradictory, plot contrivance for Macross Delta's story. She started out as the Omniscient Council of Vagueness directing Xaos from behind the scenes so that an otherwise unremarkable small-time PMC could flex on the NUNS, and the second Delta movie made her into the Macross Deep State secretly controlling the government from afar despite being unidentified. None of it makes sense. Some of it directly contradicts previous material. I have a feeling she's going to be forgotten about entirely in the future.

It did, yes. Macross II: the Micron Conspiracy. A five-issue miniseries set one year after the events of Macross II: Lovers Again.

Huh. Y'know, I'd never really thought much about that aspect of it either. The "Acshio" area is an unregistered emigrant ship that's attached itself to the City 7 without authorization and is apparently even linked up to the larger ship's public utilities. At least some of the people living there (e.g. Basara) are explicitly not registered as fleet citizens. The whole thing is basically a single large slum district full of squatters living in buildings in dangerous states of disrepair that nevertheless still have power, water, and even network/telecom access. At some point, the City 7 government probably had a lot of explaining to do. The fleet had been underway for seven years as of the time of the series, so surely in all that time at least a few people questioned why the ship was allowed to dock in the first place, why it hadn't been depopulated and decommissioned as unsafe, or why it hadn't been repaired inside and out to make it a safe living space. Considering emigrant fleet economies are to an extent designed to be deliberately inefficient to ensure consistent employment for emigrants, you'd think the city government would have been able to make an economic stimulus out of rebuilding the Acshio Area. It was clearly convenient for Project M later on in the 2040s, but one had to wonder what the original justification for it was.

No worries. I did some research because I was curious about the term, and it seems that the term "floppy" is more of a specialist, industry, or collector's term. The sources I found claim it was coined relatively recently (about 20 years ago) to distinguish the American style of thin, staple-bound periodicals from the thicker, paperback graphic novels that were growing in popularity at the time. Most people call that format a "comic book", out of long habit.

I know it's probably not their intent - or at least I hope it's not because the joke is atrocious - but this would mean every time Mylene drives out to see Basara she's getting on the (literal) Highway to the (literal) Danger Zone. *Kenny Loggins intensifies* Jokes aside, that explanation makes good sense. The people living in City 7 proper and the other environment ships officially accompanying the 37th Fleet aren't likely to actually care enough about the rundown old colony module clinging to the side of City 7 without permission to call it by its proper name (if it even has one). To them, it's just the Bad Part of Town. The slums. A dangerous area with unmaintained and crumbling infrastructure.

Hm. Given that emigrant fleets are dispatched into the greater galaxy in search of habitable planets first and foremost, I would assume something like a "satellite city" is probably a late-stage development? Earth had already begun the business of establishing permanent colonies on its moon, at its Lagrange points, and on Mars before the First Space War broke out. Satellite cities weren't mentioned for the first time until after the war ended, and we're never told what drove them to build them in orbit of Venus, Earth, Jupiter, and Saturn. It's understandable that people wouldn't necessarily want to live on Earth's surface after the war between the poor environmental conditions and the occasional strife with Zentradi who were left on Earth, but there presumably was also some practical reason to build orbital cities in those places. Most emigrant fleets probably don't have quite the incentive to set up satellite cities, since they are often the only city on a given planet for a good while and the resources they'd require could also be obtained by processing ocean water or capturing and mining asteroids like we see them doing in Macross Frontier. Actually, we do see a giant space station or some kind in the Macross Frontier prologue... maybe that's a satellite city? Y'know, I've never thought all that hard about the Acshio. It's just sorta... there. It's supposed to be an area separate and distinct from City 7, but Macross 7 spends so much of its time there that it doesn't really feel that way watching the show. The name is "slang"... but what is it slang for? The kanji they use is the same kanji used for Dejima (later known as Tsukishima), the artificial island that the isolationist Tokugawa shogunate had set up as a sole port of trade with the west. I guess they might mean the literal reading of the kanji ("exit island" or "protruding island") since it is both an Island-type colony module protruding from the side of City 7 and the exit from which Sound Force emerges when needed in battle. It's not unreasonable to infer that it might've been a design used in short-distance emigrant fleets. It may also have been developed as a supplemental craft to operate in support of larger fleets, if the design of Macross 11 is anything to go by. Maybe Megaroad ships in later fleets used these to supplement their capacity? "Very carefully". Maybe the whole backpack lifts up or even detaches to allow access to the regular embarkation hatch? Yeah, it probably needs to sit differently, on account of how the backpack sits.

They're more like vague summaries... but let's run up some quick full ones for everyone to enjoy. DRIVE VALKYRIE Like the Strike Valkyrie, it is a derivative of the Super Valkyrie. The Strike Valkyrie has one of the missile pods (HMMP-02) removed from the FAST Pack and a twin beam cannon attached, but this type takes this a step further and attaches beam cannons to both FAST Packs, making it a quadruple beam cannon. However, compared to the conventional Super Valkyrie, it is inferior in its ability to engage multiple enemies, so it is common to install a missile pod in the center of the FAST Pack. Also, as discovered in actual combat, the engine overload caused by the rapid firing of the four beam cannons was far greater than expected and the combat time was inevitably shorter than the conventional type's. BUSTER VALKYRIE Before the Super Valkyrie's armament was planned, there was a Valkyrie mission-specific armament called the Buster Valkyrie, but this ended up being completely an armchair theory. The GFP-1, now called the Buster Valkyrie, is based on that idea and has been significantly improved to emphasize the high mobility of the Super Valkyrie as a fighter. It was designed and tested onboard the Macross, but it was not actually used in military service until after the SDF-2 Megaroad was repaired. The most typical tactic is to use overtechnology to generate a simple barrier over all of the Armored Parts, turning the Valkyrie itself into an armor-piercing bullet and firing a reaction shell (micro-missile) inside the enemy ship before withdrawing from the front lines. However, it's said that pilots were initially instinctively repulsed by this tactic, which ignores the concept of a fighter plane by ramming the entire aircraft into a ship's side. VFS-3S It was designed to be the next generation's main fighter, but due to some issues with its transformation system and a major problem of a lack of sufficient thrust, only 10 completed VF-3s were deployed for testing. What we present here is the VFS-3S, equipped with Super Parts to make up for the lack of thrust. This is the machine of Hikaru Ichijo, the "Terrible Skull" squadron commander's machine, but is has only seen combat on one occasion. GBP-2S(C) A Protector Weapon System manufactured by Shinnakasu Heavy Industries. Essentially, there are few changes from the standard Armored Valkyrie, but the main difference is that the missile pod on the right side shoulder has been removed and a large-caliber beam cannon has been installed in its place. This allows the GBP-2 to fire at long ranges, making it a much more practical (operationally versatile?) weapon than the GBP-1, which has the greatest loss of time due to the need to replenish missiles. VF-1A II (Shadow) The next generation main fighter of the New Unification Forces. The main change is that the laser machine gun, which was previously installed in the center of the head of the VF-1A, has been moved to the side of the head and a sub-camera has been installed in its place. This aircraft has excellent visibility and transformation capabilities, and the New Unification Forces are currently planning to gradually replace the VF-1J, which had a small defect in its transformation system, and the current main fighter VF-1A with this "Shadow". VF-1N (VF-1S II) The favorite machine of Major Nasuka of the Arc Skull platoon. There are three laser machine guns on the head, which were designed as the VF-1S II. A feature of this new head is that it is equipped with a line-of-sight synchronization targeting system when in Fighter form. The VF-1S II is still in the testing stage and has not been mass-produced, but one of the extra prototypes was deployed to Major Nasuka for practical testing. ZARUK REGULT It looks just like a Regult-type battle pod with double the armament from the outside, but its internal technology is incomparable to the Regult's. The ultra-high mobility thrusters on its back have thrust several times greater than that of the Regult, and it was the only battle pod that could compete on equal terms with the Meltrandi powered suits. It was mainly used by Commander-class soldiers, but it was said to be more popular than the Glaug-type battle pod. There are very few of these units left in the current New Unification Forces, but they are still used by squadron leader-class Zentradi soldiers. The boarding and disembarking system is also fundamentally different from the Regult, allowing for smoother boarding. HOLTO REGULT A Regult with most of the machine's armaments removed, prioritizing maneuverability. It was used for the purpose of one-hit kills in fleet battles. Because the weight of its armor was also stripped away, this machine had very poor resistance to bullets, with soldiers disliking it and dubbin it the "steel coffin". It's a crazy idea... and not the Spacy's first flirtation with a "manned missile"-type aircraft either. The SF-3A Lancer II from Super Dimension Fortress Macross is a similar concept. It's not meant to ram an enemy ship, but it is a super-high velocity manned missile of a "fighter" meant for anti-warship operations. It's designed to use a short-burn thermonuclear rocket to come screaming in for a strafing run at 7 kilometers per second, blazing away with beam cannons and low-yield tactical reaction missiles and then exiting the fight from the enemy's back line in order to be recovered on the next orbit. We've seem something similar in two other Macross titles: Macross II and Macross 7. In Macross II's sixth episode, Cpt. Nex Gilbert's Metal Siren blasts its way into a Mardook battleship and blowing it up from the inside with some unspecified weapon. Cpt. Kinryu does something similar with his "borrowed" VF-11C Armored in Macross 7, ramming his way into a Varuta ship and destroying it from within. The Buster Valkyrie's meant to do the same, but in Fighter mode with a tactical reaction warhead... and then leave intact (which Kinryu didn't exactly manage). I can definitely understand why pilots would balk at that. "You want me to ram the enemy ship. With my fighter. And survive. And THEN fire a thermonuclear bomb at point blank range. And survive. Have you been to see the therapist? The chaplain? The inside of this lovely padded cell in the sanitarium?"

I guess I belong to the crowd thrown by the term "floppy"... but Viz Media did publish a trade paperback of their mirrored translation of Tsuguo Okazaki's Macross II: Lovers Again manga adaptation in 1994. It's actually reasonably easy to find on the secondhand market, though the individual issues are often even easier to find. Here are two separate eBay listings for it. https://www.ebay.com/itm/306041609829?_skw=Macross+II+trade+paperback&itmmeta=01JPB4B2DHA1WE4Q408ZAKR5BM&hash=item4741805e65:g:KfwAAOSwm6VmDdwK&itmprp=enc%3AAQAKAAAA4FkggFvd1GGDu0w3yXCmi1fqTciFP4wJcTAwdNqKQpa6ONtKLTBej0Lgn2Sfg1iiVbx7H3BvQN9itqCCuClxqO6fCJcsqNAsE0PcbwlZ8%2BAfiwv02MvZAnY8fpWf7pm99fX1yY6jt8%2B2IUHscOOpdHQZxVJCqOBKxO8RcH9Isam8rA%2BPtmgyHBx580PZ5D7Dg9o04Jr0h5%2FEhShd%2FQf3BoOjOHFOlUp%2BPcvjoZ01UaP2ebYVsmxFJj8bvFItj5P3gWvkDecRknSKIAPT6uBYfsgyURe6y%2FgEQhvLxdhCElMH|tkp%3ABk9SR4KnrOSyZQ https://www.ebay.com/itm/226610105426?_skw=Macross+II+trade+paperback&itmmeta=01JPB4B2DH6JMZP7M1Z7W6VA6N&hash=item34c303cc52:g:KAEAAeSw3Ctnt5aE&itmprp=enc%3AAQAKAAABAFkggFvd1GGDu0w3yXCmi1df2wJiGA05LYnlOhjY8r82LAq0YIiOPt%2F54Rv1nMJOlf5CLR6P4lPXqH%2Bf0d%2B03%2FfQM5fJZM5JEdF3IgUIAf1MkYJ3VZJCdpG4%2FeRzCDKeIm35eL4516PIp%2BXIUMLBN7%2Baker2fNcV7hOJZ9QPqeKRfevLQnSvq0YrSjQyNV4KY%2F2KCboiLxE5Bsx%2FKEY8wb0x4GgGZ0J3RJy%2BDYF64S3YGilpi0ul6zSXZoVYoo9d%2B3HSVQ64lVaavVDto--iNkzifklSBmqBh1B51kwu4ycwWy1TdjfJGBrPDlKCjuSj4ovrtwhqyLS5QuZQczZrMG8%3D|tkp%3ABk9SR4SnrOSyZQ

Thanks for sharing this piece! This is some awesome old fan material. I don't know what it is about the older Macross fan material. Maybe it's the influence of Sky Angels, but so much of it ends up being so well-considered that it ends up predicting stuff that would make its way into canon later. Like the Drive Valkyrie here: This VFS-1SD "Drive Valkyrie", for example. On the one hand, it's weirdly heartwarming to know that fans on both sides of the ocean inevitably looked at the Strike Valkyrie and said "What if it had MORE beam cannons?". What makes it even better is that this one's basically canon. There was never anything saying you COULDN'T stick a Rö-X2A beam cannon on both sides of the Super Pack... though it wasn't until Macross 30 that someone actually depicted it officially as the "Double Strike Valkyrie". (Its SP attack is Dragonball Z levels of beam spam, which doesn't hurt any feelings either.) It's especially cool that the writer thought it out as far as the practical problems it might cause too, like reduced ability to engage multiple enemies and the additional burden that operating two high-powered particle beam cannons would put on the Valkyrie's reactors. The Buster Valkyrie (Engrish ensued?) is another particularly neat idea... in part because the author thought out how it would sound cool in concept but also be problematic in a practical setting. It's presented as a post-war design, and meant as an improvement on the Super Valkyrie... but its main mode of operation is to essentially repeat the Macross's attack on the Boddole Zer fleet mothership on a smaller scale by using a barrier to ram its way through the hull of enemy ships, drop reaction missiles, and bug out. Yeah, I can definitely understand why pilots might balk at the idea of being told "You're riding in an armor-piercing bullet, not a Valkyrie". Looks pretty darn cool though, with those outboard vernier pods replacing the wings it kind of feels like an earlier version of the Valkyrie II's Super Armed Pack. VFS-3S, eh? Ah, they're playing with the design from Macross Perfect Memory's "Outside Story" section on page 68. That's a bit that's pretty telling about when this was printed, since the VF-X-3 was subsequently retconned into having been lost during the bombardment. Their version has only ten made and deployed for testing, due to issues with their transformation system and engine problems leading to a lack of thrust. Nevertheless, it's nice to see someone remember that one-sketch wonder. GBP-2S Armored Valkyrie II... hmm... an equipment variation that installs a Rö-X2A beam cannon on the Strike Pack. This one's borderline official. Variable Fighter Master File: VF-1 Valkyrie Vol.2 mentions a beam cannon based on the Rö-X2A as an option for the GBP-1S Armored Pack on page 36. On page 38 it also mentions a GBP-1S/C variant that has a gunmount there with four RöV-20 laser cannons, and that there is a successor to that type known as the GBP-2S. VF-1A II Shadow... a next-generation main fighter that is basically a VF-1A with a Gundam-style sub-camera on the crown of the head and the laser offset to one side. Nothing too remarkable, but the asymmetrical head design looks cool. Not too many of those in Macross as a whole. VF-1N (VF-1S II)... another asymmetrical head, this time an S-type with only three lasers and an improved sighting mechanism for Fighter mode. Presented as being a test unit not approved for production. Zaruk Regult. "MORE DAKKA" was alive and well in the fanbase even then. 🤣 Can't argue with the description that, from the outside, it looks like a Regult-type battle pod with twice the usual armament. Presented as a high-mobility version of the Regult with mobility comparable to the Queadluun battle suit series, used mainly by commanders and a more popular option than the Glaug. Looking at it, it feels less like a high mobility option and more like a "If I fill the intervening space with enough heavy fire I will hit something" option. Holto Regult... or "How to know your commander REALLY hates your guts". A machine that largely removes the armor and weaponry of the Regult series to focus on mobility. "It was used for the purpose of one-hit kills in fleet battles". A largely unarmored, unarmed Regult... I can only imagine it was on the receiving end of "one hit kills". The description really takes the cake by noting that its very poor defensive ability saw soldiers derisively nickname it an "Iron can".