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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    The Brendok Jedi have emotional baggage, but that's not quite the same thing. They're all afraid their secret will get out, but it's only Master Sol who gets lost in reminiscences about his old students and gets lectured by his current student about how very inappropriate that is. To be fair, Anakin was NINE at the start of his story... being childish is pretty damned excusable there. His arc is pretty believable IMO for a kid who's been raised on the belief that he is The Chosen One in an environment where emotional repression is the norm. It's actually pretty impressive more Jedi don't fall to the dark side, because those ain't mentally healthy living conditions.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Yes. Assuming you don't count various character-specific custom appearances, two specific variants of the YF-29 have appeared. Master File divides things up somewhat differently and posits the existence of three distinct versions of the YF-29. Official setting materials present two different YF-29s: YF-29[A] Durandal: the original YF-29 specification developed by the Macross Frontier fleet. YF-29B Perceval: a New UN Spacy VF-X Special Forces version of the YF-29 with improved equipment that appears only in Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy as an ace pilot machine for the 815th Independent Squadron "Havamal". Macross Chronicle describes the YF-29B Perceval as a state-of-the-art aircraft that improves on the YF-29, but we're never actually told how. Its only apparant difference is that it has a bayonet on its beam gunpod and its equipment is otherwise no different to that of the other YF-29s in Macross 30. Macross 30's story also provides several character-specific versions of the YF-29 to certain characters. These are all functionally identical to the base YF-29 specs-wise, but with different heads and paintjobs to reflect the identity of the pilot. Alto Saotome gets the YF-29 he uses in the movie. Isamu is given a YF-29 in the colors of his YF-19-2 from the Macross Plus OVA, and Ozma Lee is given a YF-29 in the colors of his VF-25S from Macross Frontier. Max also gets one in blue for his guest spot in Absolute Live!!!!!!. Variable Fighter Master File: VF-31AX Kairos Plus presents a different view of the YF-29 that groups all YF-29s into one of three designations based on their specs as a part of its attempt to explain 6th Generation VFs as a whole: YF-29A: the original YF-29 prototype flown by Alto Saotome in 2059. A one-of-a-kind aircraft that cannot be replicated due to the ultra-high purity of the fold quartz obtained from Vajra queen forms that bestows unsurpassed performance even among YF-29s. YF-29B: all of the subsequently produced YF-29s that were built using fold quartz from Protoculture ruins or Vajra carcasses that is not as large or as pure as that used in the original YF-29. Their performance is lower than that of the YF-29A as a result, but fold quartz of the required purity exists in sufficient quantity for small numbers of YF-29B's to be produced and put into actual military service. YF-29C: Earth's experimental effort to develop a mass production-ready YF-29. Instead of fold quartz, which is a rare material that cannot be synthesized (yet), the YF-29C's design substitutes fold carbon of the highest possible purity as a synthetic alternative. Despite the cutting edge fold carbon synthesis techniques used and the services of expert jewelers to handpick the finest pieces for use in the YF-29C, the YF-29C's Fold Wave System is only 1% as effective as the YF-29A's. Several squadrons worth of the YF-29C have been produced and sent to test facilities on Earth's moon for evaluation. This breakdown was partly used to explain Max's YF-29 in the Macross Delta: Absolute Live!!!!!! movie and partly to explain why 6th Generation VFs aren't really a thing yet... why we haven't see a VF-29 or a VF-30, and why fighters like the VF-31 Custom Siegfried from Macross Delta or the VF-31AX Kairos Plus from Absolute Live!!!!!! cannot be mass produced. The Fold Wave Systems that give them their incredible performance cannot be produced without very large pieces of very high purity fold quartz. Humanity can't synthesize fold quartz with its present technology and understanding, so they're limited by what they can dig up in Protoculture ruins or old Vajra nests. Hunting the Vajra is illegal and suicidally stupid, so supplies of fold quartz in general are very limited and subject to strict export controls. The size and purity of fold quartz needed to create a 6th Generation VF is almost unthinkably rare, so for the time being only a tiny number of VFs with Fold Wave Systems can be produced and most of them don't have the same power as the original YF-29 due to using smaller or lower quality pieces like on the Siegfried or Kairos Plus.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Strictly speaking, they are pretty close. Macross Chronicle's Mechanic Sheet for the VF-27γ Lucifer with Super Parts from Macross Frontier the Movie: the Wings of Farewell describes it as having demonstrated potential approaching that of the YF-29. The movie's liner notes, and the light novel Macross the Ride, reveal that the VF-27 is based on the YF-29 in part using development data leaked to Macross Galaxy. It is, however, true that Alto Saotome's YF-29 defeated Brera Sterne's VF-27γSP and its escorting Ghosts in a dogfight in that movie. It was a victory won on skill and tactics, not simply raw specs. Alto made exceptional use of the YF-29's unique features like its MDE beam turret and Super parts to take out the Ghosts. One thing to remember in Macross, pilot skill matters at least as much as machine specs. Well, we have the VF-27 Lucifer... that's pretty high spec all things considered, and at least a limited mass production VF to boot. Variable Fighter Master File: VF-31 Siegfried mentions two: the YF-30B and YF-30B改. (YF-30B Custom) Master File describes the YF-30B as being a second and more practical prototype that omitted the extraordinarily expensive Fold Dimensional Resonance system and FF-3001/FC2 engines because of their need for ultra-high purity fold quartz. It's said that the YF-30B prototypes were loaned out to various private military contractors like SMS and its affiliates for evaluation. Favorable impressions of the YF-30B led to plans to develop a mass production derivative of the YF-30B that, after much work, became the VF-31A Kairos. It's also noted that the YF-30B apparently gave rise to the (false) impression that there was a mass production VF-30 in service. The YF-30B改 is an improved YF-30B that was used in small numbers by General Galaxy's private military, the General Galaxy Corporate Forces (GGCF).
  4. Seto Kaiba
    From the sound of it, breathing's about all the pilot's allowed to do... but their head's held completely immobile the entire time they're in the aircraft. Available material either strongly suggests or outright indicates the problem was not unique to Guld... the system really is just that flaky.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Indeed. In terms of composite performance, the YF-29 is superior to the YF-30 in part because the YF-30 is not intended to be used in actual warfare. The Sv-303 is pretty weird. Unfortunately, the only source we have that talks about it in any detail is Variable Fighter Master File. Master File's backstory and description for it makes it out to be a further development of a second 5th Generation VF that Windermere was developing for its war against the New UN Government. It's got a lot of extremely innovative new systems, but on the whole it seems to belong in Awesome but Impractical territory since its engines need to be replaced after just a few uses and it needs to be controlled by a special quantum AI supercomputer. It's about as close as anyone's come to a mass production-ready 6th Generation VF.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, I don't think there are any good images of the Queadluun Rhea cockpit. The decent description of the cockpit actually comes from the Macross Frontier novelization. The YF-21's brainwave direct control system was incredibly innovative... but the technology was so unstable and so expensive that it was deemed impractical for actual battlefield use compared to the more conventional AI-based flight control systems that'd been used on VFs from the beginning. Official materials mention the brainwave direct control system (BDS) was considered unsuitable for practical use because the system was both extremely expensive and prone to failure because it required the pilot maintain an extreme degree of concentration to operate. Variable Fighter Master File predictably offers a LOT more on the subject. According to Master File, the YF-21's BDS calibrations were so delicate that the pilot basically could not move while it was in operation. The pilot's limbs and head had to be locked in place and rendered immobile to prevent the instrumentation for reading and transmitting brainwave signals shifts even 10mm it can cause the system accuracy to drop over 40% and trigger an automatic emergency switchover to manual control. To maintain control, the mental state of the pilot has to be controlled using specially tailored sound to help the pilot remain relaxed because loss of focus can cause the system to behave erratically or fail. The system also requires hundreds of hours of separate training to get the system calibrated to the individual pilot's brain, is extremely heavy (over 100kg just for the imaging system parts), and consumes so much power that the YF-21/VF-22's engine design had to be changed to run the reactor hotter and double the number of thermoelectric converters so it could produce twice the amount of energy the VF-19 requires at maximum output in order to meet the energy demands of the BDS on top of its other systems. (Those changes made to the engine design are also said to have increased the cost of the engine significantly while also reducing its lifespan.) The system was dramatically scaled back to a sub-control system on the production VF-22 with considerably fewer issues, but development did continue at General Galaxy. The implant-based control system in the Macross Galaxy fleet's VF-27 Lucifer is a further development of the YF-21's BDI/BDS systems. It's a much more mature and reliable system, but it's also basically illegal because of the New UN Gov't ban on cybernetically-reinforced soldiers. Yup, that system was trialed on the VF-22HG and implemented in full on the YF-27 and VF-27.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    That's what the fans wanted, though. They rejected Disney's fumbling attempts to put a fresh face on Star Wars and now most of their efforts are focused on fanservice and combing through the open septic tank that is the old Expanded Universe for the least odious content they can find to repurpose. They brought Filoni back because the fans like him and he's obsessively tying things back to his own previous body of work. There is beautiful irony in this. The Jedi say that attachments and the fear or loss that comes with them are the path to the Dark Side, and The Acolyte harps on this heavily. The Acolyte's writing suffers in no small part because of its showrunner's attachments to Star Wars and its Expanded Universe. Leslye Headland is a "promoted" long-time Star Wars fan with a profound love of the series as a whole and the Expanded Universe in particular. Her attachment to that pre-existing material is inherently limiting, as it disincentivizes making creative decisions that might compromise the status quo of that older material she so adores and promotes "in the box" thinking and a tendency to focus on fanservice like continuity nods, homages, and in-jokes. This is extremely clear in the entertainment news coverage of the series, which focuses heavily on all the little "Glup Shitto" odds and ends rescued from one EU work or another and inserted into the background in The Acolyte that don't actually contribute to the story in any way. (Can I just say I love how the Star Wars fandom coins nicknames? "Smilo Ren" was solid gold, but "Glup Shitto" as a catch-all term for that kind of pointless and stupid rescuee from the EU is one of the best terms I think I've ever seen a fandom produce. Shine on you crazy diamonds, shine on.) It's no accident that the best writing Star Wars has had came under Tony Gilroy, a showrunner who was not a Star Wars fan. He didn't have affection for the source material getting in the way of telling the story.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Here's another view that shows the pilot with the arms still inside the torso.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    It depends on the model of battle suit, but the answer is yes and no. Typically, the battle suit pilot's legs extend into the legs of the battle suit but the arms are kept inside the battle suit's torso. The Queadluun Rhea seems to be the exception, with the pilot having a sort of squatting posture inside the torso similar to a Regult and all four limbs control remotely.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    "Magick." They spell it with a "k" so you know it's serious mystical stuff and not that silly Harry Potter kid stuff. As you might expect, the powers of the Witches aren't explained any more than the powers of the Jedi are. They just work. The closest we get to any kind of explanation in The Clone Wars, where witches featured most prominently, was that "magickal ichor" is somehow involved and they seem to be able to turn themselves into it like Dracula turns into mist. Thanks to The Clone Wars, that idea would probably be a non-starter. Even a century later, both the Jedi and the Sith treat the Witches as a largely inconsequential group of primitive weirdos from the space boonies whose worship of the Force (via the Dark Side, mainly) is seen as backwards and quaint and almost harmless. So much so that wiping them out is one of the rare occasions General Grievous and his comically ineffectual droid army got to chalk up an actual win in The Clone Wars. It kind of says a lot that the most powerful and dangerous Witch who didn't also have Sith training ended that series being defeated by the incredible duo of Mace Windu and Jar-Jar Binks.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    In the profoundly unlikely event Disney wanted revenge over a nonevent film like that... well... surely they'd realize that the best revenge is to let Alex Kurtzman et. al. finish flying the Star Trek franchise into the ground with series concepts nobody wants and cancellations for the shows that are actually doing well. Yeah, you're probably right. This latest episode's "big reveal" would've meant a lot more several episodes ago before Mae's arbitrary heel-face turn and her Sith master entering the picture. Mae herself is now headed towards irrelevance either because her master is the greater scope villain, his master is the greater scope villain, or because she's been replaced, so her motive for murder now doesn't really matter much.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    It seems like, after the episode's debut, the majority of the discussion and theorizing is now about whether... Nobody seems to be surprised that the story bent over backwards to get the Jedi off the hook, though.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Eh, yeah... considering The Acolyte's writers have been relentlessly teasing and building up to this episode as The Big Reveal, it's a truly underwhelming answer to the show's central question: "What happened on Brendok sixteen years ago that drove Mae to murder?" This is just my ignorant hot take, but in hindsight it honestly feels a bit like executive meddling to me. Someone in authority stepped in to ensure the Jedi couldn't really be the bad guys.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Definitely RVF fodder... sight beyond sight? That's AWACS territory.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Well friends, it's that time again. Time for... The Power of One! The Power of Two! The Power of Manny! So what's the over-under on this episode also being a tease-and-denial about WTH happened on Brendok? As expected, this episode definitely seems to be leaning towards the Brendok coven actually being the same evil previously seen in The Clone Wars and similar. For all Leslye Headland's talk of making the Jedi the bad guys in this piece, the story seems to be bending over backwards now to show that the Jedi are in the right. The writers have pretty definitively weaseled out of actually making the Jedi the bad guys here... exactly as predicted. The credits have a pop song instead of the usual orchestral music... which feels very out of place IMO. To make a long story short...
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Same. That was a Gundam UC title with some actual soul and an artistic statement to make. Plus the NT-1 is just a damn beautiful design on its own. I'm surprised they're bothering to probe it at all... VR seems to be struggling pretty hard thanks to the technology's relative immaturity limiting what can be done in terms of user experience. Game developers have really struggled to find anything meaningful to do with VR due to the limitations of the technology. Most VR games are more like tech demos or gimmicky casual games than the kind of fully developed immersive experience VR hardware developers keep promising.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Looks like it's already available for preorder on CD Japan and HLJ.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, the modern music is definitely in screamingly poor taste for this. It wouldn't even be good on its own, but attached to a movie set in the Late Roman Empire it's just wildly out of place. Hopefully it's just for the trailer or maybe the credits and not the actual film proper.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Macross Chronicle is the official Macross encyclopedia. Its first edition was published shortly after Macross Frontier came out, and its revised and expanded second edition was published the year after the second Macross Frontier movie was released. Both editions were published under the supervision of Macross's creators. Yes, the Macross Mecha Manual is definitely being cautious with its listing there because of the confusion that was caused by those misprints in early books. I don't believe any one publication got both the mass and the engine thrust wrong at the same time. They either get the mass wrong or the secondary engine thrust wrong, so if you take the majority of results from either group you get the same result as the official writeup from Macross Chronicle and the thrust-to-weight ratio of 46.6755. Macross Chronicle's version is the one that's been used by most publications, including those published after Macross Chronicle, so it does appear to be the official/correct set of stats. It's also the only version that aligns to the written statements about the capabilities of the VF-27 with Super Parts and VF-31AX Kairos Plus having performance similar to that of the YF-29.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Basically, typos. Our first look at the spec came from the Bandai 1/100 scale model kit, and the specs that were listed there contained a typo. The aircraft's mass was correct but the second pair of engines had the thrust listed as 1,970 kN instead of 1,470 kN. A later art book gave a incorrect mass for the aircraft but correct engine thrust, listing the mass as 11,920 kg instead of 15,620 kg. These two typos taken together, when examined on fan sites, produced a radically different picture of the YF-29's performance that put the YF-29's thrust to weight ratio in the 60s. Macross Chronicle set the record straight with official specifications, listing both the correct airframe mass and the correct engine thrusts, aligning it with the official statements that put the performance of the YF-29 at approximately the same level as the VF-27.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Hell, we don't even know for sure that Lady M is a flesh-and-blood person... she could be some random Protoculture artifact that's stranded the Megaroad-01 in fold space or some other nonsense like that. The restrictions on future international releases means they'll probably abandon that whole plotline, though. For the best, IMO, considering what a mess everything to do with the eternally-offscreen character was.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    The Ossan Newbie Adventurer had a new episode the other day... it's not doing a lot to deviate from the formula, but it's still pretty fun. Definitely very much in the mold of Mashle or One Punch Man in terms of the protagonist being a physical powerhouse who doesn't quite comprehend just how ridiculously overpowered they are. I also started Wistoria: Wand and Sword. It's another series in that same vein... a protagonist in a magic-heavy setting who has zero magical ability but is an incredible physical powerhouse to the point of doing things magic users consider impossible. The twist here seems to be that he's trying to graduate from magic school and achieve a high rank to fulfill a childhood promise to a friend who turned out to be a magical prodigy and is upholding the ancient magical barrier that protects the world from invasion. It's not bad, but thus far hasn't done much to stand out in a field populated by similar premises. Today's new start is My Deer Friend Nokotan... a comedy series about a former delinquent who's made a fresh start as an honor student in high school, who gets thrown for a loop when she encounters a strange girl with antlers on her way to school. This one has been the subject of a lot of memes, and seems to be the same kind of absurdist slice-of-life comedy as Charge! Cromartie High School or Nichijou. This series seems to like throwing photorealistic deer into backgrounds the same way that Cromartie liked doing with that gorilla of theirs. I'm not sold on it, as it seems to be just maximum randomness at all times.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Yup, in class. Our Latin teacher had a field day with it (he taught Imperial Roman Latin not Church Latin), and the marching band did a Gladiator-themed show. (The same teacher, for much the same reason, also screened A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum in class... and at one point also screened a bootleg of Austin Powers in Goldmember because he couldn't be arsed to find a more appropriate movie for the school's fundraising week.)
  24. Seto Kaiba
    That'd be wild... though I'd wonder how they'd explain it, since in Macross self-aware AI requires specific hardware. The irony there is that, in that same relaunch timeline, the planet V'Ger's actually from might as well be Cybertron... if Cybertron had its sh*t together. Oh, I know... that's why I called it "Star Trek's (thankfully non-canoncial) expanded universe" a few posts back. Even then, there's still a lot of "multiple choice past" in play... to a level that makes Macross's fuzzy canon seem blissfully clear by comparison.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    "Canon" is not a word that Macross really uses... the whole franchise operates on "broad strokes canon" or "fuzzy" canon, so that Kawamori et. al. aren't constrained one specific version of a past story's events when developing new stories. (There's a great example of this in play in Macross Delta, where Berger Stone gives his summation of the history of music as a weapon. Quite a few of the previous events that his presentation shows are mixing and matching between TV series and movie versions of events. For instance, the Vajra conflict he shows the end of uses the TV version of events but shows the movie costumes and the movie-exclusive YF-29.) That said, I don't think that jamming capability of the Fold Dimensional Resonance system is mentioned anywhere other than the notes section after the end of the novelization of the Macross 30 game. I don't recall that capability ever being used in the novel, and it's not mentioned or used in the original game either. Macross Chronicle doesn't really cover the Fold Dimensional Resonance system, and Variable Fighter Master File mostly glosses over it the same way the game does as an improved Fold Wave System. So it's sort of a "very definite maybe" without any kind of corroboration? Acceleration isn't the be-all, end-all of combat performance. The YF-29 is basically the meme about "thrust vectoring owns the sky" taken to its logical extreme. Not only does it have thrust vectoring on all four engine nozzles, the wingtip engines themselves can rotate 360 degrees parallel to the aircraft. This allows for a nearly unprecedented level of maneuverability when combined with the four very powerful engines and its inertia store converter. The YF-30's thrust-to-weight ratio may be slightly misleading as well, since that number is based on the core airframe weight that almost certainly (based on VF-31 specs) does NOT include the mission container. If that container weighs just 1,113kg, it obliterates the T/W ratio difference between the two aircraft. The YF-29 is also a prototype intended for use in actual (heavy) combat, so it is extremely heavily armed and armored. It has twice the usual thickness of energy conversion armor for its generation, achieving four times the defensive ability and exceeding the defensive potential of an Armored Pack. Its trump card is its heavy MDE beam cannon turret, which the YF-30 can also take (in the novel) but only at the cost of sacrificing its micro-missile capability. It also has the benefit of things like 25mm machine guns with enhanced armor piercing ammunition and missiles that can have MDE warheads. Otherwise, their armament is quite similar and the YF-29 just has more of it. Basically, the YF-29 is built for war... while the YF-30 is a technology demonstrator that's built for rough handling exploring Protoculture ruins but isn't meant to be a military-use VF. (Its classification as a prototype was its developer attempting to game the system and put off disclosing the new technologies developed for it to the central government as long as possible.)
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