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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    One thing I'll say for the Cosmic Era as a whole... among villains, it's a World of Ham. Were it not for current events, I'd have been completely thrown out of the series by a critical failure to suspend disbelief that anyone could mistake Patrick Zala, Muruta Azrael, or Lord Djibril for a sane leader. (Then again, with that purple lipstick and terrible dress sense, maybe the OMNI troops were convinced that Djibril was actually Boy George on tour...) Durandal's putting up a pretty convincing facade of sanity so far, without descending into either the territory of the smug snake or the magnificent bastard. His villainous "oh crap" after seeing the real Lacus Clyne shut down his Lacus impersonator was the first sign of him not actually being in complete control of the situation. (That said, Meer seems to actually be behaving more rationally than Lacus in terms of the content of her speech. The only person in this whole Orb invasion more sensible than her seems to be that one Orb general who points out that ZAFT is still attacking after Yuna's statement that Djibril isn't there is because they know he's lying.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    If you think that's bad, you should see the VF-1 book's gallery of all the different versions of the AMM-1... long range versions, short-range versions, high-maneuverability versions, versions for special warheads, versions that your VF-1 only wears to fancy dress parties... The section in the VF-4 book about its equipment is pretty sparse outside of the coverage of the AMM-3, and for good reason... as most of the VF-4's equipment is shared with the VF-1.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Yes and No, in that order. The book describes the semi-conformal missiles as the AMM-3 Flechette1, an all-purpose2 medium-range3 missile design descended from the AMM-1 Arrow4 that was the VF-1 Valkyrie's multipurpose modular missile. It follows the actual physical models in that it says the fighter can take twelve of them, where some official coverage is inexplicably wooly on the actual number. Like pretty much every other source, Variable Fighter Master File: VF-4 Lightning III dodges the question of the bore on the VF-4's beam cannons... the closest it gets to giving an answer is the claim that the VF-X-4 and other prototypes were outfitted with a variant of the VF-1's laser guns there instead (the Mauler ROV-20K laser cannon). It takes a turn for the weird when the book's description turns to the production version though, as the production unit is described as having mounted an OTEC XX-1 heavy quantum reaction beam cannon5 there instead of the official spec charged particle beam cannon. Well, more like four variants of the same missile... IIRC in high explosive, incendiary, high-maneuver, and thermonuclear reaction flavors. No word on when seasonal variants armed with pumpkin spice or peppermint warheads will be available. 1. "Flechette" is its name, it is not a flechette warhead. It borders on a punny name, as the AMM-3 is slightly smaller than the AMM-1 Arrow, the French word "flechette" meaning "little arrow". 2. Air-to-air, air-to-surface, air-to-ground... really, more an "air-to-anything-that-looks-at-me-funny" missile at this point thanks to the integrated multiple guidance system and OTMat high explosive warhead. 3. The term "medium range" was used rather loosely for the AMM-1 Arrow, since it was so heavily modularized you'd swear they contracted it out to LEGO and could have an engagement range of anywhere from 50km to several hundred km depending on how it was equipped. 4. The standard all-purpose medium-range missile the VF-1 Valkyrie was depicted using in the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross series... the ones on the pylon triple-rack. 5. Described as derived from Zentradi overtechnology, and apparently meant to be a predecessor to the OTEC XX-2 heavy quantum reaction beam cannon mounted on the VF-22's monitor turret.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Just a moment ago I finished watching PHASE 42 of Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny's HD Remaster, and there's something about this series that I've been struggling to ignore but has really just become inescapable as of the end of the episode. The real villain of Gundam SEED Destiny isn't Durandal. It's not even Djibril. It's Kira Yamato. Absolutely everything that Kira and the crew of the Archangel who are following his lead do makes the war between ZAFT and the Alliance a million times worse. With the same sanctimonious, holier-than-thou smugness exhibited by Orb's Athha family, he runs headlong into battles between ZAFT and the Alliance and attacks BOTH SIDES, inevitably resulting in more casualties than either side would've been able to achieve alone, prolonging the battle by preventing either side from gaining an advantage and forcing a retreat or surrender, and in so doing causing the war to drag out far longer than it otherwise would have. FFS, the very first thing that he does is start harassing ZAFT forces to support the Alliance, having apparently forgotten that the Alliance military is still a branch Blue Cosmos and had literally just launched an unprovoked nuclear attack on the PLANTs with genocidal intent. It really doesn't get much more villain-y than siding with the side whose policy is genocide because you're not certain the other side are saints. Then he kidnaps Orb's head of state from her own wedding. I mean, sure, it was an arranged marriage to a complete arse, but it literally directly resulted in a militant change of governing policy in the country. With Cagalli kidnapped by a hostile power, Kira'd enabled the Seiran-led takeover of the Orb government. He singlehandedly removed the one thing stopping LOGOS's supporters from taking over Orb and making Orb's forces a puppet of Blue Cosmos. Every single Orb soldier who died, died because of what Kira did. He keeps poking his oar in over and over again, until ZAFT literally catches Orb red-handed sheltering Djibril. ZAFT and literally every other country on Earth are baying for this guy's head on a pike, and when Orb refuses to hand over Djibril peacefully Kira intervenes on Orb's behalf when Orb is invaded for harboring a known terrorist guilty of mass murder and all kinds of other crimes against humanity. Thanks to Kira and the Archangel's intervention, Djibril is able to get away AGAIN, and it looks like he's made it all the way to a superweapon this time... so Kira's responsible for all the people Djibril'll kill with THAT. Honestly, I don't know why Djibril's so down on Coordinators... with enemies like Kira Yamato, who needs friends? Kira's the best damn thing that ever happened to Djibril's plan most of the time. Kira may be Gundam's ultimate villain in that he totally gets away with having caused the deaths of tens if not hundreds of thousands of people and is regarded as a hero.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    For me, what sold me on Iron-Blooded Orphans was how different its setting is from the standard fare of Gundam's Universal Century and most of the standalone shows. Gundam, and particularly the Universal Century timeline, has a formula that it adheres to every bit as rigidly as Nintendo's Mario franchise1... which has become so pervasive that it sucks a lot of the fun out of it for me by making the shows incredibly predictable. So I was pretty pleased when the writers of Iron-Blooded Orphans threw most of the standard Gundam rulebook out the window. 1. Say it with me now! Grasslands, Desert, Forest, Jungle, Ice World, Fire World, Boss!
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, this really is my first time watching Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny. Also my first time watching any Mobile Suit Gundam SEED episode past the 12th. Every time I tried watching it back when the series was airing in the US, the bowdlerized broadcast edition was so offensively awful that it drove me away. I only started watching it now because the HD Remastered edition is on Crunchyroll. Mobile Suit Gundam: the Origin was beautifully animated, though I confess I'm a bit disturbed by how much more of a following its more blatantly evil version of Char has. Even the localization team for the manga was absolutely gushing about how hot the more evil Char is. For my money, the best recent Gundam is still Iron-Blooded Orphans. A good Gundam series should feel like a suckerpunch to the gut when all is said and done, and Iron-Blooded Orphans stopped to put brass knuckles on first.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Since Cagalli's new MS is entirely done over in incredibly tacky high-gloss gold (which I assume is probably an anti-beam coating like Quattro's Hyakushiki from Zeta), I half expect the little inscription on the gem-like thing at the center of the v-fin antenna to say something like "CRUNK AIN'T DEAD".
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Unfortunately, Io and Daryl will never be quite as "Florida Man" as that one Zanscare officer in Mobile Suit Victory Gundam who declared "By reviving the bikes of the middle ages, and reviving the tradition of driving, I've now become unstoppable!"... but they're working on it. "Whoever wins... we lose." also works well. (Credit where credit is due, the marketing department behind Aliens vs Predator in 2004 was so on point they came up with a slogan with damn near infinite reuse value...) Speaking of a "Whoever wins... we lose" scenario, thanks to my company laptop making a noise not unlike a cage full of angry finches going through a roll press I've been stuck with little else to do for the last two days and have made great progress on Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny. The guy who cleans the monkey house at the zoo said it best: This sh*t is bananas. Shinn had a few absolutely badass moments, delivering an epic "What the hell, hero?" to Athrun, pimpslapping Kira so hard he turned the Freedom into a fetching piece of modern art on the seafloor, and then delivering ANOTHER epic "What the hell, hero?" to Athrun before proceeding to pimpslap HIM so hard he reduced Athrun's stolen GOUF to still more abstract art on the seafloor. Now he's come over all weepy again, and you can just tell it's the prelude to a Heel Realization once Durandal's big plan goes public. One thing I admit has me kind of vexed is how easily the Atlantic Federation military just rolls with absolutely any insane plan LOGOS comes up with. They seem to genuinely have less self-awareness than the actual goddamn Nazi party. "Hey, we built this big damn death-thingy that might as well be indestructible, it's armed with roughly enough firepower to level Western Europe with a cough, and it's piloted by a drug-addicted brainwashed crazy person we abducted as a child and experimented on... can we use this to go kill every last civilian in Germany with your help?" "Sure, why not? D'you want us to pack you a bag lunch and some mittens?". The whole fricking world is up in arms after Durandal calls them and every last member of LOGOS on it, and what do they do? They pull up a goddamn sofas in their operations center for Djibril and his ilk and serve them wine while they wait for ZAFT to start shelling their military's supreme headquarters for no reason other than that they're sheltering LOGOS members. They even stop to help Djibril get away while ZAFT is busy wrecking their sh*t. (I also get the feeling this show would be a lot shorter, and include a LOT less fratricide, if people would finish their sentences. Athrun nearly ends up in an octupus's garden in the sea because he couldn't be arsed to finish a loaded sentence about Durandal's sinister plan despite having about five minutes in which to do so.) Durandal's own painfully obvious telegraphed reveal of Djibril as the fake ultimate badguy to his real ultimate badguy is a bit silly too. Kind of reminds me of a line of Bender's from Futurama: "Citizens of Me! The cruelty of the old pharaoh is a thing of the past! Let a whole new wave of cruelty wash over this lazy land!". Nice of him to leave his old homework behind on that colony where anyone could find a bunch of thinly-veiled references to his sinister plan (and presumably a whole lot of angsty poetry). It's almost as lazy as the whole "Neo Roanoke is Mwu la Flaga" thing... Murrie Ramius was pretty much THE ONLY ONE who was surprised by that one. Episode 40's my next up, and it looks to be finishing a round of everyone getting their mid-series upgrades. Durandal just handed Shinn and Rey the keys to the Destiny and the Legend, Lacus forked over the Strike Freedom, and after having Kira borrow and wreck her Strike Rouge Cagalli seems to be getting something downright blingtastic.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Macross Chronicle's wording in the case of the TV series ARMD-class suggests the change of design intent from a "space airbase" meant to operate in geostationary orbit and out at the Lagrange points to a mobile space aircraft carrier came while the design was still under development. Leaving out Master File and its ARMD-00, that suggests to me that the L5 Front Line Station was probably the proof-of-concept for the space station design concept and constructed before OTEC reimagined the concept as a space carrier. Adding in those extra details is where it got a bit wooly for me. From what I've gleaned, ARMD-00 Constitution was a prototype for the ARMD-class (TV ver.) and thus was probably (in Master File's version) gutted and turned into the L5 Front Line Station after it was done serving as a test platform for the VF-0-NF and VF-X-1. It's the Macross 7 PLUS episode "Spiritia Dreaming", a sort of after-episode omake that was sometimes a comedic short (e.g. Milia the President, Macross 7 Bridge) and sometimes a tiny backstory mini-feature (e.g. TOP GAMRIN, Spiritia Dreaming). The episode "Spiritia Dreaming" depicted the Special Research Unit dispatched to the 4th planet of the Varauta 3198XE system to investigate the Protoculture ruins there carrying out their landing op, discovering the Protodeviln, and subsequently spiritia-drained after its leaders, Ivano Gunther and Cpt. Otolmauer, were possessed by the Protodeviln Gepernich and Gigile respectively.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Principally from having read the Mobile Suit Gundam Thunderbolt manga. The whole first arc is a wandering mess that tries desperately, and fails miserably, to make the rivalry between Io and Daryl into something halfway interesting... in no small part because Io and the Moore Brotherhood spend a fair chunk of it literally wandering aimlessly hoping to track down a sniper by enticing him to take potshots at them. It's actually kinda funny in hindsight when you realize essentially it's the story of two grown men trying to murder each other in a disagreement over whose incredibly pretentious music that they'll listen to on the radio, the kind of plot that in the real world normally starts in the news with the words "Florida man". The whole schtick with the Moore Brotherhood and their quest for nonspecific space revenge on the Principality of Zeon for destroying their home colony is literally aimless (they don't have a focus for their revenge plot) and is so completely irrelevant to the story (besides justifying why the Federation side engages in so much pants-on-head stupidity) that other than providing some terribly stilted "drama" from a largely unimportant supporting character it's so lame even their side's own main character can't be arsed to care. Thunderbolt's second story arc, about the religious cult trying to recreate the Psycho Zaku, is so nonsensical that its runs-on-nonsense factor is actually lampshaded right in the manga with a character pointing out that nepotism is basically thing only thing keeping Io's story going. Otherwise he would've been punted out of the EFF and never so much as allowed to look at a Gundam after screwing up and allowing Zeon to capture one in the first arc. It's a fine example of an idiot plot. Thunderbolt's a darker-than-average Universal Century story, but the reason it's a wannabe-edgy tryhard waste of time is that it's taking the same "slaughter spectacle" route to being dark and gritty that Attack on Titan did. Because absolutely everybody in the story is an amoral psychopath there's none of the Universal Century's trademark humanity in the Thunderbolt series. Nobody in the Moore Brotherhood or the Living Dead Division seems to have any real misgivings about the war or the human cost of so much killing. It really feels like Ohtagaki-san didn't really understand why the Universal Century is dark... the reflection on the horrid cost that killing inflicts upon the human soul, and the sheer senselessness of hurting each other when you fail to communicate. There's nothing about the human condition in Thunderbolt, its pretensions to gritty darkness involve nothing more than jacking up the body count to the max and making each death or near-death as gruesome and bloody as possible. Iron-Blooded Orphans is a different animal entirely... it wholly embraces the darkness that Thunderbolt is merely a pretender to. Yes, Mikazuki Augus is a complete monster just like the principals of Thunderbolt, but it works in his case because he's the ONLY ONE. It became meaningless in Thunderbolt because, if everybody is a bastard then nobody is, thus it ceases to have meaning. Iron-Blooded Orphans takes a sincere look at the toll severe inequality exacts on humanity. Many of the characters are horrible people because they live in a world that forces them to be either the exploiters or the exploited, with the protagonists being a group that seeks a fairer world. Tekkadan is full of broken people, and the damage a life of poverty and the low regard for human life has inflicted on them is thrown into sharp relief by their own desire to make a better life for themselves and, later, all Martians. They're not fighting for the sake of fighting or the pleasure of killing, but to overturn a status quo that supports things like massive economic inequality, child labor, slavery, and mass murder in the name of maintaining order. Mikazuki Augus is a complete monster because he is the most broken of all, as someone who had to kill at a very young age just to not starve to death, and all the things he doesn't understand about living a normal life are used to throw into sharp relief how absolutely horrible life was thanks to Gjallarhorn's suppression of Mars. Put simply, Thunderbolt is merely a pretender to darkness because its darkness is purely for the sake of spectacle. Iron-Blooded Orphans is dark because its darkness serves to actually say something, and that something is horrible.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    What @SMS007 is getting at there is that one of the cofounders of General Galaxy - indeed, the man responsible for founding the Slayer Valkyrie Works that would one day be spun off by General Galaxy and develop the Sv-262 Draken III for Windermere IV's Kingdom of the Wind - was a design lead on the team that developed the Sv-51 for the Anti-Unification Alliance. Alexei Kurakin was his name, and once he defected back to the UN Government following the conclusion of the Unification Wars he landed on the Stonewell/Bellcom VF-X-4 project team and thus dodged planetary annihilation by being stationed on the moon for space testing.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    A quick point of order before I delve into this one... several of the designs you listed do actually have coaxial guns (lasers, beam machine guns) on the monitor turret. It may not be on all variants, but they do have them. The VF-14 Vampire animated in Macross 7 PLUS does have visible coaxial guns that, from the spec of the Fz-109F derived from it, are likely a pair of laser machine guns. The Az-130 has a pair of shoulder-mounted guns that fulfill essentially the same role. In all three cases, the chest-mounted guns fill the role of the rear-facing gun that monitor turret-mounted ones normally fill in fighter mode. The Sv-262Hs Draken III also has a pair of laser machine guns on the monitor turret, though the LM-27C railguns fill the monitor turret gun role in fighter mode for the Ba variant. The VF-9 Cutlass's transformation simply didn't make it possible to squeeze the beam machine guns onto the monitor turret, so the "Origami Valkyrie" ended up with them mounted out on the right shoulder. We don't know anything about the Sv-154's battroid mode, so it may or may not have something. As to why the Sv-51 was missing a coaxial gun when it was ostensibly developed using stolen development data from the VF-0 program... your guess is as good as mine. The role which the coaxial gun played in fighter mode was taken over by the hip-mounted miniguns. (It's possible the developers of the Sv-51 valued the extra armor-piercing power of the anti-ECA shells over the versatility of a laser.)
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Just on the off chance... d'you have any info on the connection between the Lagrange 5 front line station and the ARMD-class? Was the latter simply based on the former, or was the front line station the prototype for the ARMD-class? I'm catching up on a chunk of my translation backlog and was working on one of my favorite hobby horses... SVX-12's VF-0-NF Phoenix testbed unit for thermonuclear reaction turbine engines. I've got most of its details sussed out (it's a modified VF-0A outfitted with a pair of the FF-1999 engines used by the QF-3000 Ghost) but its markings include an affiliation for ARMD-00 Constitution, which isn't part of the first production lot of ARMD-class ships. I'm still digging, but I'm wondering if the idea to convert the space platform concept into a ship was tested on the L5 station first for the sake of expediency...
  14. Seto Kaiba
    There's that, yeah... though, in all honesty, there are three other issues with a YF-30 cameo that I'd say are probably more immediate: The completed YF-30 Chronos spec far exceeds the performance of any 5th Generation variable fighter appearing in Macross Delta. Even without enhancement from its Fold Dimensional Resonance system, it's already got a 25-30% performance advantage over the VF-31 and Sv-262. The Fold Dimensional Resonance system offers a more potent boost than the Fold Wave system, so its gains are probably even greater than what the VF-31 Custom Siegfried gets or what the Sv-262 gets from its fold reheat. The YF-30 Chronos final spec was outfitted with MDE weaponry for the offensive against Havamal and the Fold Evil. That's probably illegal at this point, and would certainly be controversial even if it were legal thanks to the NUNS having employed MDE weapons against Windermere IV in 2060. The YF-30 Chronos prototype was SMS property, Xaos's rival, it's unlikely SMS would come to reinforce Xaos since the two don't seem to operate in the same systems.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Delta's already overrun with characters, they probably don't have room for a cameo... the movie won't even have room to develop 90% of the existing cast.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    The Macross Delta series novelization already tarred poor Maj. Aisha Blanchett from Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy with that particular brush... she's supposedly working for the company's Var syndrome research operation. Macross Delta Gaiden: Macross E also put Elma Hoyly from Macross Dynamite 7 in that unexalted company as a researcher attached to a early experiment with Var syndrome suppression using fold singers who contributed to the development of early Tactical Sound Unit hardware.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Granted, Mobile Suit Gundam Thunderbolt doesn't actually manage to achieve Hellsing Ultimate's level of gratuitous hardcore violence... but, like I said, it's the fact that it's blatantly trying so very hard to reach that level of dark and edgy that makes it impossible to take seriously to the extent that the effort itself almost crosses the line into comedy. Mobile Suit Gundam's Universal Century was already plenty bleak and dark so the sudden effort to be gritty and hardcore comes across as both completely unnecessary and as a desperate plea for the audience to take it seriously. It's the cinematic equivalent of that one put-upon kid every school seems to have these days, who starts dressing all in black and posts selfies with replica anime katanas captioned with crap like "*teleports behind you* nothing personal kid" because they think that's edgy and will make them look like a badass. (So, guys like Ben Solo c. The Force Awakens.) Put simply, the series is a poseur. It's putting on airs of gritty grimdarkness in the hopes of covering up its weak, directionless mess of a plot and to distract the audience from the characters all being completely, hopelessly unlikeable. It's all flash and no substance. Nobody seems to have told Ohtagaki-san that a character who's a complete monster is only workable on a narrative level if those kinds of characters are few and far between. If every character's a complete monster, that stops being intimidating or impressive and thus a complete monster is just the new normal. Got thru another episode of Gundam SEED Destiny over dinner. The new normal there seems to be the Minerva getting its sh*t wrecked because the Archangel and Kira intervene while they're defending themselves from Orb's forces, saying they'll attack anyone who fights and then ONLY attacking the already outnumbered ZAFT side who are just defending themselves rather than going on the offensive. Kira and Cagalli are kinda laying on the hypocrisy with a frontloader at this point... and Shinn earned himself more than a bit of my respect for having the stones to take a couple of shots at her with genuine killing intent while Kira was around. Seeing him work out his issues with the Athha family on those Orb ships with a colossal sword is surprisingly cathartic, especially since Orb's leadership is so genuinely unlikeable. It's like the therapist handling all of the grief counseling and anger management cases on the Minerva is Bruce Banner. If Shinn'd actually managed to shoot her down or taken a swing at Kira, he might've effected a promotion for himself to the ranks of my favorite Gundam characters.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Given that the Macross Elysion was the flagship and sector headquarters of Xaos for the Brisingr Alliance, my money's on those other Elysion-types being from other branches outside the Brisingr cluster... reinforcements called in to support the retaking of Ragna.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, we picked up on that one early on... we've been calling her "More Murasume" ever since Shinn rescued her from falling off that cliff while imitating Four's carefree little spinning dance. At least he has Talia Gladys to prove that Meer Campbell isn't reflective of his own personal tastes...
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, I'm definitely getting a bit of that myself... it feels like only the names have been changed to protect those involved. Like Shinn and Stella having basically the exact same castaway scene together as Athrun and Cagalli did in SEED, or the useless effeminate ZAFT officer pal of Athrun's getting sliced in half by a beam saber graphically... the only difference between how Nicol bought it and how Heine did is one got it from the front and the other from behind. I'm 27 episodes in, and with all the recycled launch sequences for the Impulse I'm starting to wonder if Destiny was done by the same team that wrote the Freeza Saga for Dragonball Z. Every time she appears, I'm struck with the distinct impression that Durandal is quietly screaming inside because she's doing the Earth Sphere's worst impression of Lacus Clyne. It seems like the only reason nobody notices is because they've never looked at any part of her above her collarbone thanks to that skintight outfit. Well then, that's a good reason for it to feel that way I guess. I confess that thus far I've found most of the characters bland and inoffensive apart from Ramba Rommel... er... "Andrew Waltfeld", and that downright Shatnerian scenery-devourer Rau le Creuset. Cagalli Yula Athha is rapidly becoming an exception to that in SEED Destiny. She was a useless gung-ho idiot in Gundam SEED, but she at least kept the whining to a minimum and was more than willing to go bust heads when circumstances dictated. Now she's basically Relina Peacecraft with a mobile suit, which I guess makes her Rule 63 Saji Crossroad. She seems to have replaced Yzak Joule as the tantrum thrower-in-chief, having screaming and sobbing fits when the world refuses to conform to her naive ideal... even in the middle of the battlefield. Read the manga, and I've seen the first episode of the series. I wasn't impressed. It's a Universal Century Gundam sidestory for this guy, in which abso-bloody-lutely everybody is a complete and utter psychopath and it's trying SO HARD to be dark, gritty, and Hellsing Ultimate levels of hardcore that it feels incredibly forced, almost to the point of becoming a self-parody. (This is not helped one jot by the art style, which makes it look like the cast were rejected background characters from Charge! Cromartie High School and JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. The music doubles down on the weirdness, making the whole affair feel like they're trying to ape Cowboy Bebop as well.)
  21. Seto Kaiba
    OK, now wave 'em around like you just don't care... Remember mate, I didn't say it was the explanation... just that it was a possible explanation given that we are in fact talking about a series/franchise created by a rabid military aviation otaku with a demonstrated fondness for American programs and some of the pals from his Gundam fanclub. Note that I even said that interpretation doesn't make sense in context, given that Macross 29 was bereft of a military component. (As a side note, anyone familiar with aviation in Japan would know the NATO alphabet... because, as I noted earlier, it's also the International Civil Aviation Organization's official phonetic alphabet used for civilian air traffic. Even domestic flights inside the boundaries of Japan use it. And we know Macross's creators are at least familiar with this, because it's some of the first spoken dialog in Macross Frontier's first episode if you don't count "Yak Deculture!"... in conspicuous English, no less, as the ICAO/IATA mandates. "This is G F S One Zero Eight, belong to galaxy starliner. Reply to me, Frontier Control.") EDIT: Actually, we also hear Makina do a variation of it in the first episode of Delta when she identifies the model of Regult the NUNS Marines are using... reading off the single digits rather than the whole number, albeit in Japanese.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Arguably more so, given that the ARMD-class ships that were docked to it were redesigned/modified versions of a UN Government space station design that was intended to serve as an airstrip in geosynchronous orbit.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Sometimes the creators do what the creators wanna do, and it's up to the audience to catch on... the creators of Macross did enough of that in the original series that the American DVDs from AnimEigo got a half-dozen pages out of just in-jokes and other references that wouldn't be immediately obvious to the casual viewer. Remember, Macross is an anime franchise created and run by otaku. Except when he doesn't... Did we forget about the Neo Nupetiet Vergnitzs-class ship in the Macross 5 fleet in Macross 7, the NUNS 33rd Marines in Macross Frontier, and NUNS Marine garrison on Al Shahal in the Macross Delta series? He hasn't been as blatant about reusing them as Macross II's creators were, but he's most assuredly not avoiding them. That one's a matter of opinion, and struck me as odd for two reasons: It's only the VF-19 Custom and VF-19A that look hero mecha-y no matter what. The 2nd production type, e.g. VF-19F, looks perfectly fodder-y in the standard coat of Kill Me Khaki (which may be why they're painted that color in Macross R). The VF-17 the VF-171's based on was also a hero mecha in Macross 7... it was Gamlin's main ride for pretty much the entire series. On the other hand, he's left in some really bewildering stuff like that Meltrandi fleet showing up out of the blue in "Fleet of the Strongest Women" despite DYRL? being an in-universe docu-drama, or a half-dozen different depictions of First Space War events in retrospective, leading to "whose aesthetic was it anyway?".
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Given the sheer extent of the rebuild/redesign which the wrecked [Supervision Army/Meltrandi Army] gun destroyer was subjected to after it crashed on South Ataria island, it usually isn't considered to be the same class of ship as its original configuration. OTEC modified it so extensively that its manufacturer probably wouldn't recognize it anymore... heck knows the guys who made a job out of blowing up ships just like it barely did. It'd become the basis for a new class of human warship, so it's generally counted as belonging to that class: the Macross-class Super Dimension Fortress.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Eh, if it were any other franchise... but Macross's creators are military nuts who operate on a level above even most of us. They're not shy about putting out reams of material about fighters and throwing all kinds of obscure military references into Macross shows...
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