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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Essentially, using a fold system to fold jump into or out of a planetary atmosphere can be done in a "safe" manner but is still generally frowned upon except in emergencies because the process swaps the volume of space inside the fold effect for an equivalent volume of space at the destination... an unfortunate consequence of which means either way you're creating a large vacuum implosion that won't do anyone's hearing any favors, and may be teleporting chunks of atmosphere into space. As such, it's usually easier and safer to just fly up to orbit first.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Yes. It was originally just "VF-4 Lightning" but they added the III a few years later once the name "Lightning II" started to be bandied about as a possible one for the Joint Strike Fighter. As "Draken" can be translated "Dragon", I have a cunning theory there... I suspect it's "Draken III" in honor of the real world J 35 Draken and the F203 Dragon II the UN Forces used in the Unification Wars. (Either that or there's an unknown VF model out there named Draken II.) Named in honor of the fighter-bomber variant of the Me 262. A later variant of the VF-22 with a cybernetic BDI and other enhancements was named in honor of the straight fighter version of the Me 262, being designated VF-22HG Schwalbe Zwei. The YF-21 was just "YF-21". "Sturmvogel II" was the official name of the production version. An official name usually gets assigned after a design is approved for production, though developers may have nicknames for the design that get adopted as the actual name later.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Apart from noting that strong gravitational fields will increase the disparity between the subjective and objective passage of time, the only evident difficulty seems to be requiring greater precision in calculating the fold jump. Done wrong, you either end up grabbing a chunk of your surroundings and drag it with you through fold space (e.g. the SDF-1 Macross's first and only space fold), or a botched calculation potentially destroys your ship, throws you off course, or traps you in the higher dimension of fold space with insufficient power to return to normal space. Folds into and out of atmosphere are shown on many occasions, though usually they're done over short distances if the ship is folding into the atmosphere. Granted, most other science fiction franchises depict using faster-than-light stardrives in or near a planet's atmosphere as either impossible or irresponsibly dangerous. Admittedly, in most cases, a prohibition on using those drives like that stems from one of three things: Using the FTL drive technology in the setting means the ship will be moving through normal space at speeds above, near, or just below light speed. Examples of this include Star Trek warp drive and impulse drive technology, Star Wars hyperdrive technology, and most other generic faster-than-light drives in fiction involve somehow bending the laws of physics to move the ship through normal space at speeds either close to c or above c. Whether this is a prelude to ramping off into another dimension or the main operating mode of the drive, either case presents the danger as "running into sh*t". Either crashing into a planet at faster-than-light speeds with predictably apocalyptic results (as happened intentionally to Coridan, Draylax, and Galornden Core in Star Trek) or by having the ship ablated away by high-velocity particle impacts (e.g. "if I don't tune the navigational deflector, the first piece of space dust we run across will blow a hole in this ship the size of your fist" from Star Trek: Enterprise's first episode). The FTL drive technology employs a method to achieve faster-than-light travel that can cause collateral damage to the ship's surroundings if used to travel into or out of an atmosphere. Examples include the warp drive technology from Space Battleship Yamato and Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross, the "slipspace" drive in Halo, the singularity drive in Event Horizon, and (used improperly) Macross's space fold systems. The reason this is usually seen as dangerous in-universe is the drive's means of achieving FTL involves creating a gravitational singularity, spatial rift, or other negative space wedgie to circumvent distances or travel into a universe where the normal laws of physics no longer apply. In most cases, this is not a contained phenomenon, so anything near the negative space wedgie gets blasted to atoms, torn to flinders, dragged along for the ride, or sucked into some other dimension because Hyperspace is a Scary Place. The unique physics of the FTL drive technology making attempting to engage the drive either impossible or suicidally dangerous in or near an atmosphere. I'll admit I can't think of many examples of this one. Star Trek's warp drives SHOULD be in this category because they depend on force fields to protect them from particle ablation, but the big one is Warhammer 40,000's warp drives. Stardrives in this category either will straight-up not work or will run with a greatly increased chance of catastrophic failure, almost invariably because the unique physics of their operation can be thrown off by the gravity wells of things like planets and stars. Macross's fold systems are somewhat unusual among science fiction's FTL stardrives in that it's not actually moving the ship. In practice, it's folded (sub)space teleportation that exchanges a volume of space containing the fold system for an equivalent volume of space at the target destination via bridging the two locations in higher dimension space. It's a bit like traveling by tesseract from the novel A Wrinkle in Time, or the jump drives in Dune.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Not honestly sure which generation that is... I'm slightly younger than that other show we don't talk about here. In a timely save, IT manifested themselves in my office with a reminder of exactly why it'd slipped the net about 20 minutes after I'd posted that. Bloody hard to stay on top your fun time task list when you've had eight separate laptops in the last calendar quarter. Gonna be nine over the long weekend, and hopefully call and end to the game once and for all. Found my translation and the scans on the network drive after a few minutes of looking. Definitely need to get back on that one. The YF-19-3 described in the booklet for the toy is described as a structural test unit, while the one in Master File is an avionics test unit. The weird bit is that YF-19-3 is mentioned in passing in connection with the VF-19EF/A Excalibur Isamu Special... but as an avionics testbed plane like Master File's. Officially, YF-19-3 is the highest-numbered prototype, but Model Graphix included descriptions for numbers up to 6 and Master File bumped it to 8. The VF-19A was such a gorgeous plane, it's a shame they had to come up with a simplified version for Macross 7's animation budget.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    That was from the Blue Moon Showcase, right? I'm guessing you were looking at the left two monitors, which were showing the opening of Super Dimension Fortress Macross II: Lovers Again (specifically, its main character Hibiki Kanzaki) and a excerpt from Macross FB7. That was my introduction to the music of Daft Punk, courtesy of a fellow Macross fan from Oz.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    ... wut? Those screens are all playing excerpts from existing Macross titles. Where are you getting this "a new Basara" and VF-19 stuff?
  7. Seto Kaiba
    No problemo... despite its obscurity in Macross proper, the VF-4 seems to be a favorite of most of the people who've worked with me on various Macross projects, so we're always happy to dig into it. (Enough so that I keep an Arcadia VF-4G done up to look like Hikaru's VF-4A-0 on my desk at work.) Weirdly, while the VF-4 has had a few high-profile appearances, I don't think it's ever had a canon appearance where it was actually using its pylons for something. The VF-4A-0 in Flash Back 2012 was running in the "naked" configuration, so was Mahara Fabrio's VF-4G in Macross 7 Trash, and Maximilian Jenius's VF-4G in Macross M3. We've seen the beam cannon-less version in the Macross R materials though, and one with a colossal Zeta Gundam-esque beam gunpod in Macross: Eternal Love Song... (... and I've just realized I still have to finish that translation of the YF-19-3 manual for cypherzero. I dunno WTF is wrong with me these days, I've become so forgetful...)
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Pretty much, yeah... that's why they probably won't bother with a cameo or anything like that, with the compression of Macross Delta's already weak story into a two-hour film while leaving time for a dozen Walkure music videos is going to leave a barely-there plot with no time to develop the many characters already present in the series (who were already underdeveloped in the series format). To those who want to properly calibrate their expectations for Macross Delta: Passionate Walkure, I would suggest watching Leiji Matsumoto's Interstella 5555: the 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem. It's essentially a 60 minute long music video for Daft Punk's album Discovery and probably similar to the content balance we can expect from Macross Delta: Passionate Walkure. Of course, it may give you false hope for Passionate Walkure... as Interstella 5555 is actually good.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, sorry... I ended up a little distracted last night. Had to clean the lizard terrarium, and that's not a task for the faint of heart. So this is the image I was talking about. The pairs of circles are the attachment points for the pylons, at least according to Master File. The positioning of the inboard pylon attachment points are more or less in line with the model kits WRT the placement of the pylons dead-center between the center body and nacelles. There's some variation in how far forward they're depicted as being, I'm inclined to suspect the two pairs of attachment points shown here are another Master File attempt to rationalize most versions. In the art in Master File itself and the few kits that actually support pylon attachments, the most commonly used position is either the forward pair shown in the art here or one that's directly between the two positions shown (on top of the cover plate for the hip joint actuator). Six pylons is the official number, but I confess I rather like this eight pylon configuration idea. It wouldn't work with large ordnance on the inboard pylons, but something smaller like triple racks of AMM-1s or Mk-82 bombs would work fine.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Oy vey... it was awful nice of them to remind me right off the bat why I decided this series wasn't even worth pirating. Saves me a lot of trouble down the road. This just feels like they've admitted that casual viewership can keep the show afloat but that they'll need the support of the die-hard fanbase once its gritty, substance-less, action-centric writing starts to get old and are trying to draw them back by pandering to that demographic with one of the standard Star Trek episode plots. Having Frakes direct it was a cheap ploy to get their attention. By that point in history, they'd already built their own.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Essentially, each of the VF-4's three main propulsion systems is suited for a particular job: Its FF-2011 thermonuclear reaction turbine engines are the all-purpose main engines meant to operate at all altitudes and in space. As their output isn't much improved over the FF-2009s in the VF-1, their ideal operating conditions are in traditional atmospheric service where they can leverage the monstrous fuel efficiency of the gravitationally-moderated fusion reactor. The wing-integral ramjet engines exist to supplement or stand in for the VF-4's thermonuclear reaction turbine engines in atmospheric service to achieve higher speeds or operate at higher altitudes where the ramjets are more efficient and capable of achieving greater thrust than a conventional turbofan jet engine and with significantly greater endurance than a rocket. The rocket boosters in the engine nacelles are for use in space and fulfill much the same role that the rockets in the VF-1's FAST packs did. Thermonuclear reaction turbines consume fuel orders of magnitude faster in space because they're using plasma siphoned off the reactor for propellant in the absence of the air they'd be flash-heating in atmosphere. Those rockets are there principally to extend the fighter's maximum operating time by reducing thrust demands on the thermonuclear reaction turbines and thus reducing fuel consumption. Left without the rockets, a VF-4 could eat through its onboard fuel stores at maximum thrust in under half an hour. Basically, the VF-4 has such variety in its engine systems because it's trying to be as fuel-efficient and versatile as possible.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    This image from the old Musasiya 1/72 VF-4A Lightning III kit is accurate for the placement of the outer wing pylons. The pylon stations inboard of the wings are a little different from what's shown there in more recent works, which show one pylon inboard of the nacelle instead of two, positioned centrally between the centerline and nacelle just in front of the thrust-vectoring nozzle for the in-wing ramjet. Variable Fighter Master File: VF-4 Lightning III shows that placement appropriately (will grab a pic when I get home) but also has an unofficial extra pair of pylon stations directly fore of that official one.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Watched the first episode of New Mobile Report Gundam Wing over lunch today... I'd quite forgotten how weird the space colony designs in the After Colony era are. What's up with that weird double-Stanford torus thing they've got going? (Every time I hear that opening narration I can't help but mentally replace it with "IN AFTER COLONY ONE NINE FIVE, WAR WAS BEGINNING".) I'm also so used to the gags about Heero being an emotionally-vacant stoic that it came as a bit of a shock to see that evil laugh he does when he finds he has the opportunity to attack an Earth Sphere Alliance military transport on the way down. Almost as jarring is his reaction to Relina having taken off his helmet... he's genuinely pissed, but his dialog is something more like what you'd expect from an angry standard anime girl-next-door when her crush accidentally saw up her skirt. What was that explosive packet on his chest meant to actually do anyway? (Come to that, who are the other four talking to when they're doing these dramatic self-introductions?) Gotta hand it to OZ and the Romefeller foundation... their dedication to dressing up their soldiers like they've got a sideline modeling for the decorative art on cigar boxes is truly inspiring. Also Treize's subtle burn on that other foundation member for valuing war machines more than the men who're piloting them. (And you know Treize is wicked cultured right off the bat, the man owns his own pair of opera glasses.) Relina's a girl with strange tastes... she's reintroduced to the strange man who she found laying half dead on the beach, who blew up part of his spacesuit and then mugged half a dozen paramedics for their ambulance, and her first impulse is "gee he's dreamy, I'll invite him to my birthday party". There's the famous "I'll kill you" at the end too, the line that launched a thousand snarky responses to her constant shouting for him to come and kill her...
  14. Seto Kaiba
    For me, the constant shifting in animation quality for the Gundams themselves was the most jarring point... they made the designs so complicated that they could only be properly animated when standing still, so there's a noticeable animation bump every time we see a static shot of a Gundam. Apart from the fact that he's an indecisive extreme doormat, habitual whiner, and dirty coward who gets a bunch of people killed because he doesn't want to accept that he can't just go back to his life like nothing happened after being arrested on suspicion of being a Katharon operative, sent to a forced labor camp, rescued by Celestial Being during a massacre at said camp, and then sheltered by Katharon on Earth? If he could dial the self-righteousness up a bit I'd be calling him Man-Relina. I know in season one he was supposed to be "This loser is you" to the audience, but in season two he graduated from that to being simply insufferable until near the end when his testicles finally dropped. (I suppose one of the ways Gundam 00 improved on the Gundam Wing basic plot was that its annoying pacifist princess spends basically the entire series being rather brutally shown that peace is something you have to WORK for, and that it's not as simple as telling everyone to join hands and sing Rainbow Connection. She's just sort of there, and she's useless... except as Setsuna's morality pet... which was a lot more believable than what happened to Relina.)
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Others have explained this, but there are a few points I want to clarify. Namely, that fully internalized weaponry offers improved aerodynamic performance and improved passive stealth performance... but, in the tradeoff, the aircraft sacrifices some of its operational payload versatility, capacity for ammunition or internal stores may be reduced, and some weapons may experience reduced field of fire or become unavailable or difficult to use in one or more modes. Whether this tradeoff is worth it or not is one of the persistent back-and-forths that, like whether to have one all-regime VF or several regime-optimized VF designs, seems to come and go between fighter generations. The VF-31's not actually a fully-internalized weapons type though... it has underwing pylons meant for carrying medium- or long-ranged ordnance, and some ordnance containers are set up in such a way that the gunpod has to be mounted separately. They just don't use the pylons because Xaos is deliberately sending its VF-31s into combat under-equipped in an attempt to minimize the potential for collateral damage and civilian injury. The 4th Generation's keystone VF designs, the VF-19, VF-22, and VF-171, prioritized internally-mounted missiles and bombs because, at the time the first designs in the generation were drafted, active stealth technology had not caught up to the latest advances in detection systems, making the airframe's passive stealthiness more important. With the VF-19's 2nd mass production type and the VF-171's Block II upgrade, the latest active stealth systems had caught up to the detection systems and passive stealth was no longer as important, making carrying more ordnance externally a more attractive option again. Not un-aerodynamic, but rather deliberately unstable... increasing the available angle of attack for maneuvering. It's that increase in maneuverability stemming from the deliberate sacrifice of stability that the FSW VFs are after, and which also proved to be the achilles heel of the VF-19, making it a barely-controllable mess due to the high g-forces it could impose on the pilot.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    To be fair, I actually did like Gundam Wing when I first saw it back in the day. All the side-switching that went on did get a bit confusing the first few times though...
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Well, if you enjoyed my slow descent into near-madness as a result of Gundam SEED and Gundam SEED Destiny, stay tuned for me coming completely unglued because next up in my and @BlackRose's queue on Crunchyroll is the high definition transfer of New Mobile Report Gundam Wing, followed by Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn RE:0096. Then, hopefully, I'll be moving on to something more enjoyable than unanesthetized oral surgery. That's an awful lot of effort for a series that was marginally less preferable to the Off button on the TV.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Apparently significantly so, since the VF-31's beam gunpod also seems to lack the "beam grenade" charged shot mode.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    I've just finished the final episode of the Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny HD Remastered Edition, and I have to say that I'm glad it's over and - machine god willing - I will never clap eyes on it again. That sh*t was awful! It's a really, really bad sign when you watch a series and you can only sympathize with the villains because they're the only ones in the story who seem to realize what a bunch of pillocks the protagonists are. I know Gundam's favorite theme is "war is hell" and it strives to end on a high note of fostering peace but this was a mess. Just like in the Universal Century, and like Durandal told Kira to his face, they have solved NOTHING and they'll be at war again in a heartbeat. All they've done is kill the latest round of would-be despots who deposed and killed the previous generation of painfully native morons running the governments of the few major power blocs. Their endgame? Install the painfully naive moronic children of those painfully naive morons as new heads of state for those very same power blocs. That's what started this mess! Borderline autocratic rule by the most naive and incompetent is pretty much a surefire recepie to ensure that peace won't last very long. I mean come on... the only put Cagalli in charge of Orb in the first place because her dear old dad whose hypocrisy caused a holocaust was so beloved of the people before he died, and in short order her administration was a powerless joke and the nation was really being run by the Seirans. Who'd put her in charge of Orb AGAIN knowing that she hasn't learned her lesson yet? Kind of weird how the end that Gundam SEED's protagonists fought so bitterly to avoid - having genetically engineered supermen making all the decisions - was the good end in Destiny with genetically engineered superman Kira deciding what's best for all of humanity. Badly written, stuffed to the gills with flashbacks, and so full of hypocrisy that it's squirting out of every pore like a firehose, this show was absolute trash. I didn't think it was possible to find a Gundam character I'd dislike more than Relina Peacecraft or Saji Crossroad... boy was I wrong! Kira Yamato, Cagalli Yula Athha, and Lacus Cline have grabbed the top three spots on the List of Loathing. (If you've ever seen Red Dwarf and remember that one early episode where the ship recovered a pod and Rimmer thought it was an alien spacecraft for most of the episode, only to have the credits pause twice so he could shout "IT'S A GARBAGE POD! IT'S A SMEGGING GARBAGE POD!" at the end? That's pretty much how I reacted to the last two episodes of Gundam SEED Destiny.)
  20. Seto Kaiba
    While I could answer all of these individually with a great deal of wasted verbiage, the honest answer is that all three have the same answer: "it varies significantly depending on the model, variant, warhead filler, and intended use of the micromissile in question". In practice, they're as flexible and modular as the larger missiles. That said, most micromissiles seem to average around 1-2m long, with most hovering between 20cm and 50cm in diameter. Very little information exists on yield for micromissiles. Range-wise, Macross Chronicle describes them as being predominently meant for use on targets within visual range. Old sources like the Sky Angels book put maximum ranges of 5-12km on most models that were meant for use on the VF-1. Presumably with time and improvements in engine technology, range and acceleration have both improved. Yield is a sticky question since some micromissiles, like the VF-19's, seem to be little more than medium-range missile designs with a smaller modular motor bolted on while others are much smaller. Most seem to be a fraction of the strength of the medium-range missiles, something presumably compensated for by quantity. Of course, if you stick a thermonuclear reaction or MDE warhead in there, all bets are off. The YF-30 Chronos's multipurpose ordnance container has 36 micromissile launch ports... that doesn't necessarily mean that it has just 36 missiles. Usually, you can count on a micromissile launcher port having somewhere between 3 and 6 missiles in the bay feeding it1, which conservatively speaking would suggest 108 micromissiles in a container that is essentially about the size that the YF-29's external launchers are, combined. The YF-29's twelve launchers hold an average of 8 missiles apiece. 1. e.g. the VF-1's FAST packs, YF-19's FAST packs, YF-21's internal launchers, the VF-31's internal launchers, etc.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Two episodes left to go in the Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny HD Remaster dumpster fire... and I'm honestly left wondering if the Cosmic Era has a lot lead paint in its buildings. Durandal has come out on top in the "which faction has the most blatantly evil leader" contest between the Atlantic Federation, Orb, and ZAFT. Djibril's dead, having had his entire body vaporized by a DRAGOON from the Legend Gundam. Yuna Roma Seiran's dead, having been beaten up by his own troops several times and then completely accidentally getting squashed like a bug by a GOUF his forces shot down. I'm guessing Star Wars has been forgotten in the Cosmic Era, because nobody seems to come down with any ill presentiments when he shows up to announce that he is large and in charge from a throne in a room that looks suspiciously like he and Sheev Palpatine hired the same architect. To complete the Death Star II comparison it's even got a GENESIS gamma ray laser cannon. I keep waiting for him to start using "forseen" every other sentence and calling Rey his "Young apprentice". When Patrick Zala build one of those damn things and tried to actually USE it on Earth that was the point where his own troops up and turned on him. How does Gilbert Durandal manage to authorize building ANOTHER ONE just a year or two later and nobody in ZAFT sees that as any kind of a red flag? Moreover, this one wasn't hidden by a mirage colloid, so how did nobody know that he'd been building it? Come to that, why didn't it send up any red flags when he had ZAFT seize control of the Requiem and asks them to repair the sodding thing so it can be used again. This series has enough "I was just following orders" idiots to keep Nuremberg busy for the better part of a century. (They still should've shot Orb first, then done the Atlantic Federation's moonbase.) Meer's dead. Whoop-de-doo... it's the biggest anticlimax of the series. A character we've barely seen and who is generally kind of annoying gets whacked and everybody's supposed to be really broken up about it, except she's batsh*t crazy and started to really believe she WAS Lacus Clyne before she died. Little drama queen did an incredibly phony looking pirouette after she was shot...
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Micro Dimension Eater, the term is given only katakana or spelled out in English in most Macross publications that mention it. The difference between a Dimension Eater weapon and a Micro Dimension Eater is purely a matter of scale. You could call it the difference between a Strategic weapon and a Tactical one. They're both essentially fold bombs that use the super heavy quanta produced by fold quartz to create a short-lived pseudo-black hole that crushes nearby matter and pulls it into fold space. That's what the YF-30 was armed with during the final battle with Havamal and the Fold Evil... a MDE beam gunpod that fired a particle beam made up of microsingularities.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    It is, and it isn't. The Virgin Road VF-1 Valkyrie was supposed to be a VF-1D specially repainted in Max's signature colors for the occasion, and is actually referred to as such in Macross Chronicle. However, an animation error put a VF-1A monitor turret on it. This is still very much a thing that can happen, since the VF-1's cockpit block and monitor turret are modular.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Probably not the Master File prototype version cannon that was just a variant of the VF-1's coaxial laser... but yeah, the official charged particle beam cannon and Master File heavy quantum reaction beam cannon both probably had a bit more stopping power than the GU-11, though that didn't stop the VF-4 from having the option to carry the GU-11. (Disappointingly, Master File also ignored the other, official mounting for the forearm gun... a 30mm rotary cannon.)
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Just because Yoda could commune with him doesn't mean Yoda would. Being a spectacular troll is apparently a trait common to many Jedi masters, Luke included. Obi-Wan only seemed to show up when he bloody well felt like it in the original trilogy. For instance, Luke wasn't able to call Obi-Wan forth to explain his "Anakin Skywalker is dead" whopper during the flight from Cloud City in Empire Strikes Back. Kenobi only showed up to explain himself a full movie later in Return of the Jedi. One thing I remember from the few Star Wars novels I read was that, the more time passes since a Jedi's death, the harder it is for their force ghost to manifest itself. It might vary depending on how powerful the force user was in life or how in tune with the light side they were, but by the Thrawn Trilogy, Obi-Wan's ability to reach Luke faded until he could only communicate in dreams, and then not at all. Maybe since Anakin was a Johnny-Come-Lately to the light side, he wasn't able to haunt Luke for very long... or maybe the more a force ghost manifests the faster they "burn out"?
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