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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Pretty sure I know the episode you're thinking of, and he did that with a GU-11[A] gunpod he nicked from one of the VF-1A battroids he beat up. Those 55mm HEACA rounds would understandably mess a VF-1 battroid up pretty badly since they were more than a little bit overkill. (But hey, there's no kill like overkill.) The Zentradi Army standard issue infantry rifles are laser or electron particle beam weapons, only dimensional beam weapons can be upgraded to MDE specification. I'd assume they're probably laser or electron particle beam rifles, similar to Zentradi Army standard field issue.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, all over the place. Multiple Macross titles have depicted Vajra swarms nesting both in space and planetside, and we've seen them nesting in all kinds of places like on planetary surfaces, on ancient Protoculture orbital megastructures, on asteroids, inside their starship-analogues (which are themselves living Vajra organisms), and inside wrecked starships of Human and Zentradi origin. The Macross Frontier TV series gave us at least one shot of a Vajra heavy soldier digging in an asteroid for raw fold quartz, so it's logical to assume the Vajra are mining asteroids or collecting necessary resources from the environments in which they build their nests. I'd also assume that, given the opportunity, they recycle the bodies of their dead to recover all the processed materials that were synthesized by the hive's queen (e.g. the refined fold quartz) or those that are processed using the Vajra's own biology like the fold carbon in their heavy quantum beam weapons and the materials in their energy conversion armor shells. That might also explain their apparent propensity for nesting in wrecked starships, since a wrecked fold-capable starship is going to be a rich deposit of silicates, refined metals, and fold carbon from the ship's various fold devices1. The Vajra's adaptation against thermonuclear reaction warheads seems to have been just retaining extra layers of exoskeletal armor and letting them ablate away in the heat of the thermonuclear detonation, possibly by changing the molting pattern to produce a thicker exoskeleton (assuming Vajra molt like some large Earth insects). 1. Such as the Gravity Inertia Control systems inside its thermonuclear reactors (AKA fold reactors), the ship's main gravity control system clusters, fold system clusters, fold wave radar, fold communications systems, heavy quantum reaction beam weaponry, and in the case of the human ships potentially thermonuclear reaction warhead trigger mechanisms.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    I'd assume, based on the performance of the General Galaxy Queadluun-Rhea/56 units deployed by Strategic Military Services in Macross Frontier, that sustained laser machine gun fire could penetrate the armor of the Vajra heavy soldier type if it found a weak spot like a joint. Those guns should be roughly comparable to the equivalent laser machine guns on the Gnerl, Queadluun-Rau, and so on. Based on Alto's performance, to get through the armor by simple brute force you'd need repeated direct hits from a medium or large-bore impact cannon like the ones on the Glaug and Nosjadeul-Ger. The big plasma gun on the Nousjadeul-Ger might be able to get through it as well. Missiles seem to be more effective, at least initially. The GU-17A was effective against the Vajra mobile and heavy soldiers initially, though against the heavy soldiers sustained fire was necessary to guarantee a kill. Once they went to more powerful anti-ECA rounds that were intended for anti-Vajra use rather than standard anti-VF use ammo c. Episode 7 they were reliably able to score kills on Vajra heavy soldier units until the Vajra adapted their armor to resist anti-ECA rounds. Then they switched to MDE shells. Very... though the Frontier fleet anticipated that the Vajra would adapt to MDE shells eventually, given the opportunity, and hence they opted to jam Vajra hive mind communications in the area when MDE-equipped VFs sortied.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Yes. As far as we know, the Zentradi Army doesn't have any weapons that use hard rounds. Their infantry-issue "small" arms are all either laser weapons or electron particle beam weapons. Battle pods and battle suits use a mixture of electron particle beam weapons, laser machine guns of various types, impact cannons (an unspecified type of beam weapon I suspect is a dimensional beam weapon), and the occasional plasma cannon. Missiles are the only non-energy weapons they have unless you want to count the lances and halberds used by the Mardook's Zentradi battle suits in Macross II, and those had beam weapons built into them. Their starships are armed exclusively with heavy quantum reaction beam cannons of various scales and missile launcher turrets. The only time we've seen Zentradi using solid-ammo weapons that were actually intended for them (not counting Klan's... stunt) is in the original series, when we see Quamzin's rebels using what appears to be a giant-scale pump-action shotgun that was almost certainly made on Earth. Yep. The Regult's main guns are electron particle beam guns, and the smaller guns are laser machine guns. The Glaug's got four impact cannons, two chin-mounted lasers, and the big electron beam gun.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Dunno. It's entirely possible that other worlds had them and they just never activated because the planets they were on never dug them up or failed to maintain them properly... or it may be that the theory that the Brisingr cluster was one of the last areas settled by the Protoculture is true, and they were never installed to begin with. There were Birdhuman icons found on other planets, like the Vajra homeworld in Frontier, so it's not unreasonable to suspect that there are probably others around. Given what was shown in the Macross Delta series, the belief that Windermere's native people had a manifest destiny as the true and chosen inheritors of the ancient Protoculture's legacy doesn't seem to have been widely accepted even among Windermere IV's elite. The first time it comes up is in King Grammier's speech to motivate the troops right before a major operation to complete the Starwind Sector by capturing Ragna, and even he doesn't seem to really believe it. I think he was probably just using it as a convenient way to tap into the anti-human sentiment that had emerged during Windermere IV's war of independence against the New UN Government in 2060. Some of the Aerial Knights in the Macross Delta series did seem to think that their superior physical abilities made them superior to humans, and after the atrocities accidentally committed during the 2060 war they definitely felt they were morally superior to humanity. By claiming to be the true inheritors of the Protoculture, Grammier could let them see themselves as superior to humanity in one more way... by asserting that humanity's "claim to fame" was a false one. Roid Brehm seems to have been the only one who TRULY believed it. Keith seems to have considered the whole thing a load, and seemed to resent the Protoculture themselves.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, that's what a few books like Great Mechanics DX and the Macross Frontier: Sayonara no Tsubasa Official Complete Book have suggested... that the YF-29 was developed by the Macross Frontier branches of Shinsei Industry and L.A.I. in a bid to surpass the YF-24 Evolution. Macross Chronicle's Macross Frontier movie mechanic sheets for the VF-27γ Super Lucifer and YF-29 Durandal both generally agree that the YF-29 is the superior aircraft in terms of mobility and combat capability. That said, the VF-27γ Super Lucifer is also described as having abilities approaching those of the YF-29. Its AIF-9V Ghost escorts are described as a craft that normally enjoys an overpowering advantage over normal VFs but found themselves on the receiving end of a similarly one-sided fight against the YF-29. The YF-29 definitely has more weaponry than the VF-27γSP, thanks to that MDE beam cannon turret and the hundred-plus micro-missiles it carries internally even without its Super Packs. My read of the scene is that the fight was that Alto wasn't really trying in his fight with Brera. He takes almost no shots at Brera himself, he just shoots down Brera's Ghosts almost casually and then spends the rest of the dogfight in a vain effort to talk Brera into breaking free of mind control. It's pretty evident that killing Brera wasn't an option on the table in his assessment.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    As noted previously, the benchmark set by the Macross's main gun is over 280,000km... there's no reason to assume that a heavy quantum reaction beam cannon at least as powerful as the Macross's would be less capable in that regard. www.macross2.net/temp/LightSecond.JPG It's possible it has an even longer range than the main gun batteries, or it may simply be more killy out to the same range. Either way, a light second is nothing to sneeze at.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Based on the description in Macross Chronicle and their appearances in Macross media including Macross VF-X2's novelization, Macross Frontier, Macross the Ride, Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy, and Macross E, cyborgs in the Macross universe run the full gamut of levels of modification. The most common extent of cybernetic implant adoption is a relatively low-key adoption of non-visible network implants ala Ghost in the Shell, that just connect up the brain to netcom hardware. Virtually every citizen of the Macross Galaxy fleet has this level of cybernetics, with the noteworthy exception of Sheryl Nome, and that was what facilitated mind control over the fleet. Others, like Oscar Brauhitsch from Macross R had basic mechanical replacement limbs or organs to repair old injuries. Very few had any kind of performance-enhancing hardware, like Nicolas Berthier's fiberoptic nervous system upgrades. The "cyber grunts" of the Macross Galaxy corporate army were the most extreme adopters, being either Ghost in the Shell-style full body prosthetic replacement or so close to it as to make no odds. That kind of cybernetic operation was technically illegal, and its illegality the reason for military-grade EX-Gear's existence. It's noted that the VF-27 has an ISC as an unavoidable concession to the fact that one of the few remaining organic components in the pilot is the brain. The VF-27 could theoretically be operated by an unaugmented human using the conventional (backup) controls after the armored shield on the canopy was ejected (at great risk of injury or death, since the usual limiters aren't in place), but to realize its full combat potential the pilot must be a specially g-hardened military-grade cyborg... something only obtainable through the Macross Galaxy military or through the expenditure of a truly incredibly amount of money (ike Ivan Tsari did in Macross E).
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Not sure if math failure or Palladium Books joke...
  10. Seto Kaiba
    At least a light second, based on dialog in the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross series that establishes that the SDF-1 Macross and Vrlitwhai's branch fleet were exchanging fire at distances of approximately 280,000km in "Booby Trap".
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, though at least Isamu got chained to a desk in the best posting he ever landed. Kathryn Janeway, however, got the same "reward" with none of the actual benefits in Star Trek. Kicked upstairs and chained to a desk at Starfleet Headquarters to keep her well clear of anything resembling a starship, in the hopes that it'd prevent her from wreaking the kind of havoc she perpetrated on her rampage back to the Alpha quadrant. (Then, in the wake of her death and resurrection by the Q, they banished her back to the Delta quadrant in the hopes that "anywhere but here" would compartmentalize the damage.) *looks at the most iconic pilots for each* The fujoshi. My money's on the VF-27. Looking at the specs without any add-on parts, the General Galaxy VF-27 Lucifer has several distinct advantages over the Dian Cecht Sv-262 Draken III. The VF-27's T/W ratio is about 15% higher than the Sv-262's, its four engines have a more flexible thrust vectoring arrangement, it doesn't suffer from transformation-related problems with fuel capacity. The VF-27 also has a HUGE advantage in that, even though the Sv-262 has a better ISC system, its pilot can control the aircraft directly with their mind and, being a cyborg with superior g-force resistance, can exploit the fighter's engine power to a greater extent than the fleshy meats in the Sv-262's cockpit can. Armaments-wise, they're about on par, though the Lilldrakens are not nearly as flexible as the Goblin II drone the VF-27 has, which can be directly controlled by the VF-27's pilot while they're flying the VF-27. Word.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... in all likelihood, it'll avail them nothing. The arbitration didn't change anything with respect to Harmony Gold's license to the distribution and merchandising rights to SDF Macross. IMO, it's likely an indicator that Catalyst, HBS, and Piranha are starting to realize that the chances of a ruling in their favor are slim at best and they're falling back on the same tactic FASA did in their lawsuit with HG in 1996: file a bunch of separate motions for summary judgement or dismissal using every reason that comes to mind in the hopes that something will pass muster.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    That wasn't the Birdhuman's first encounter with the Mayan islanders and their superstitions, so it may have known what to expect. It was accidentally activated on a prior occasion, in which it halted its own program by separating its head from its body... an event that passed into islander myth.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    They appeared twice in Star Trek television shows... once in TNG's 2nd season ("Contagion") and once in DS9's 4th season ("To The Death"). On both occasions, they harped on the way the Iconian gateways could take you anywhere instantaneously as easily as walking through an ordinary door. That was how the Iconians managed their entire empire.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Macross Chronicle's Mechanic Sheet 01B "VF Masterpieces seen from their Development Ancestry" points to the YF-19's greater level of design completion vs. the YF-21 as the key factor that led to the New UN Forces declaring it the victor of the Project Super Nova competition. Essentially, the YF-19 No.2 prototype was more-or-less a production-ready aircraft based on more conventional, but highly refined, technologies where the YF-21 had adopted more new technology that hadn't been fully tested and/or was still unreliable like the BDI system. That's been General Galaxy's stumbling block ever since the company was founded in 2017. Their design engineers didn't seem to quite understand that the military was less interested in having all the latest bleeding-edge technology in its main fighters than it was in having the main fighter be a ruggedly dependable mecha that was easy to maintain. Shinsei Industry persistently beat them in design competitions because Shinsei's designs were less radical. General Galaxy only seems like it finally noticed what was going on in the late 2040s, when they finally gave the New UN Spacy just what it'd asked for: a rock-solid, ruggedly dependable, jack-of-all-trades VF based only on proven tech that met requirements without going overboard on feature content... the VF-171 Nightmare Plus. That was the first and only time they beat Shinsei, and thereafter they were back to taking cheap shots at Shinsei behind their backs.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    More a poor man's Iconian Gateway network... something which existed in Star Trek way before the Vajra and Macross Frontier came to be. That last one's just Voyager's signature anti-Borg trick in reverse.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    We don't know what SMS branch office employed Isamu Dyson after he'd retired from the New UN Spacy. All we can say with certainty is that he retired from the New UN Spacy to join SMS after he concluded his participation as the test pilot assigned to Shinsei Industry's YF-24 Evolution program following the successful final demonstration to the New UN Forces in 2057. Considering what had happened to him in the wake of the Sharon Apple incident, he probably considered retiring to join SMS the best decision he'd made since 2040. Exactly where he was and how he got to the Frontier fleet's position so quickly is a mystery... one that I'm inclined to chalk up to Talos's pet theory that the Macross Frontier movies are also an in-universe docu-drama like DYRL?, New UN Government-sponsored propaganda exercise which was meant to make the New UN Forces and SMS look much more heroic and capable than they really were.1 Dunno. It's possible that, since the New UN Government parliament is based on Earth that they've got faster ships than the emigrant fleets. Earth is the most technologically-advanced New UN Gov't member world and has all the best toys, so I wouldn't put it past them to have some zero-time fold couriers for government business. Well... it seems Isamu wasn't joking when he said luck was one of his skills. Col. Johnson from the New Edwards Test Flight Center covered for Isamu (and Guld), taking most of the blame himself. He was helped immensely by a public backlash against autonomous fighters and virtuoids that inevitably resulted and the plaudits that came from his men having stopped both from wreaking further havoc on Earth, the scandal surrounding the discovery that Sharon Apple had been illegally outfitted with unstable bio-neural processing hardware by the Venus Sound Factory and that the AIF-X-9 Ghost's AI was based on some of Sharon Apple's technology, and that the NUNS's brass were grudgingly impressed as hell by the YF-19 and YF-21 doing several things thought to be quite impossible in the space of a single afternoon. Put simply, New UN Government and New UN Forces officials weren't about to argue with results while they were busy covering their own arses.... likely while telling the news what a wonderful person they thought Isamu was and how they just couldn't wait to pin enough medals to him that he'd stand lopsided the rest of his life. As a result, Isamu not only avoided pretty much any disciplinary action beyond a stern talking-to... he got to keep his test pilot job AND he got promoted. Well, arguably that promotion was the real punishment. They kicked him upstairs to minimize his opportunities for getting into trouble by the simple expedient of chaining him to a desk. He still stuck it out a further seventeen years at New Edwards TFC and served as a test pilot for Shinsei's YF-24 Evolution before taking a well-deserved retirement at the rank of Major to join Strategic Military Services. Autocorrect is a hell of a thing. We don't know what became of Myung Fang Lone after the Sharon Apple incident. 1. Most notably, how the movie version of Macross Frontier alters the details of the involvement several New UN Forces senior officers had in the Macross Galaxy fleet conspiracy. Colonel Grace Godunova of the Macross Galaxy corporate army went from being the architect of the conspiracy to being an unwilling cyborg puppet of the Galaxy fleet executives. Likewise, Major Brera Sterne was presented as a mind-controlled slave of the executives rather than a soldier acting of his own volition most of the time. General(?) Leon Mishima was depicted as being an ambitious moron and social climber who was only dimly aware of the Galaxy fleet's conspiracy and actively working to interfere with its execution instead of being one of Grace's co-conspirators and the author of President Glass's assassination and a subsequent coup d'etat. This also let Brigadier General Pelliot (AKA Brigadier General Jean-Luc Tarkovsky in the novels) and 1st Lt. Catherine Glass off the hook as having no connection, direct or otherwise, to a Galaxy conspirator even before the conspiracy became known.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    CDJapan has both tankobon pretty cheap... the whole series'll only set you back about ten dollars plus tax and shipping. The series is also interesting for being the only other story besides Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy to depict VF-27s in the hands of private operators outside of Macross Galaxy.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Maybe so, but you'd think they would've at least programmed their walking apocalypse to get a second opinion before trying to end the world. I mean, what if a disillusioned total misanthrope managed to unearth the damned thing and became the one it interrogated? Nonsense, it was a medical shank. Sterile interrogative violence!
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Potentially. For all we know, the Protoculture may have exterminated the sub-Protoculture species once they deemed that those planets were ready for colonization. By the time they stopped to check in on the project, their goals had changed considerably... with them seemingly having accepted their inevitable extinction and wanting to ensure that any of their creations that developed interstellar capability weren't going to repeat their mistakes. Of course, they chose to do it in a typically draconian manner by leaving a bio-technological WMD sitting around in sleep mode to murder everyone if they failed its secret test of character.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Based on the wording used in the official chronology and the prevailing in-universe theory, the ancient Protoculture modified existing archaic humans (H. neanderthalensis and/or H. erectus) using retroviruses to edit their genome with an eye toward accelerating their evolution into a "sub-Protoculture" species that would develop in a way that would prepare the planet for future colonization by the Protoculture. A rousing success, all told, but for the fact that the paperwork was lost almost immediately thereafter when the survey ship that'd done the deed was destroyed en route to its home port. He didn't specify, actually... just said that the distance between Earth and the emigrant fleets was such that it would take ten years to get back to Earth from them. Since we know that emigrant fleets reached Windermere IV in 2027, I'd use that as a good example because that's as far as you can go without running out of galaxy. Yeah, the Brisingr globular cluster is ~1,000ly across and situated on either the Sagittarius-Carina arm or the Scutum-Centaurus arm, a good 75,000ly+ away from Earth. Windermere IV, on the far side of the cluster, was located by SDF-5 Megaroad-04 in 2027... assuming it was launched ~2015-2016 (a year or two after they launched Megaroad-02 and Megaroad-03) it would've taken approximately 11-12 years to get there, which is consistent with Kawamori's account of it taking ten years to get back to Earth from some emigrant fleets. They're almost certainly nigh-impossible to produce in any numbers. One of the details gleaned from Macross Delta's setting materials and Macross Delta: the Black-Winged White Knight is that after the Vajra conflict ended the New UN Government imposed strict controls and restrictions on the mining/harvesting and trade in fold quartz. The goal was to prevent or at least slow the proliferation of dimensional warheads in the New UN Gov't sphere of influence, and presumably prevent anyone from doing something stupid and suicidal like trying to hunt the Vajra for the stuff. Fold quartz is rare, and the few planets that have large deposits seem to all be planets that used to be large-scale Protoculture or Vajra settlements, so they've been generally successful in controlling it. The New UN Government's stranglehold on Windermere IV's fold quartz mining operations c.2060 was one of the factors that motivated King Grammier Neirich Windermere to pursue renegotiation of his world's treaties with the New UN Government and eventually to secede from it. The only other planets identified as having rich deposits of fold quartz were the Vajra planet that the Macross Frontier emigrant fleet settled in 2059, and the remote and isolated former Protoculture settlement on Uroboros. What little fold quartz is available is probably going to production of 5th Generation VFs.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    I'd be inclined to liken it to sailing a ship through a coral reef or a shoal zone with an especially uneven seafloor. You may end up taking a somewhat circuitous route to get from Point A to Point B to avoid incurring damage along the way. Ja. Of all the FTL methods I've encountered in sci-fi, Warhammer 40,000's warp drive is one of the more out there systems I've seen. Humanity got off to something of a rocky start with its grasp of fold technology. Their early efforts, based on reverse-engineered salvage, were pretty imprecise, inefficient, and bombastic. They got better by degrees, when they had access to intact specimens to study and then the factories that were making them. It's enough that anyone who was actually looking for signs of fold jumps would have very little difficulty finding it, but it's not wearing out the fabric of space-time or causing huge negative space wedgies like some FTL systems (e.g, Star Trek's warp drive, WH40K's warp drive). Ja, though in Macross they're applied on a MUCH bigger scale than anything in Star Trek. There are some engine systems in Macross you could park some of the smaller Starfleet ships inside with room to spare. In theory, yeah. Now that, we don't know. Signs point to the difference in energy requirements (if one exists) being low to negligible as a VF-25 has no problem operating a zero-time fold booster. The difference seems to be in the quality of the dimensional resonator producing the heavy quantum used to create the fold effect... fold quartz creates heavy quantum with much higher mass than the synthetic fold carbon used in most fold systems. That's probably a case of both of them copying real-world theoretical physics WRT the amount of energy needed to incrementally approach the speed of light by conventional means. Star Trek also has something similar built into warp theory, where the energy requirements for each warp factor increases in a geometric or exponential progression with warp 10 being infinite power.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Strong gravitational fields can as well, much as they do in realspace... but fold faults, and the time and energy necessary to either navigate around them or forcibly fold through them could be called the main culprits. Warp currents in Warhammer 40,000 play a much more fundamental role in warp navigation... the term "warp engine" is a bit of a misnomer, since it's mainly just the mechanism that makes a warp gate into the Immaterium and to a limited extent allows ships to maneuver within the currents. In practice, it's the currents themselves doing the heavy lifting when it comes to warp flight. Ships in the warp are kind of like barges riding the current down a river, using their engines only to ensure they're optimally aligned in the current and avoid navigational hazards. Time-related shenanigans have more to do with eddies and other navigational hazards in the warp and the fact that time isn't linear in the warp. It's not really a matter of time's passage being "altered", they're traveling through a universe where time straight-up moves at a different rate. Fold technology wasn't able to produce a fold effect that wasn't impacted by that until the introduction of fold quartz-based zero-time fold systems, and that technology still hasn't been widely adopted. It is noted in Macross Chronicle that as conventional fold tech and humanity's experience with it has improved, they've been able to reduce the disparity between subjective and objective time. If you were somehow able to reach the speed of light in realspace, time would stop from your perspective... so yeah, it's definitely better than that, and most other near-lightspeed instances of time dilation. Well... I wouldn't say realspace isn't distorted in any way. A space fold does involve a rather potent application of gravity control in order to exchange the space occupied by the ship with an equivalent volume of space from the destination through fold space. That entry or exit from fold space creates gravity waves detectable from considerable distances. That's more akin to a temporary creation of an incredibly deep gravity well than a large distortion of the fabric of space-time. Yep, impulse drives in Star Trek are essentially cheating down the mass of the ship by changing the curvature of space around it so that the weenie little ion engine-augmented fusion rockets can actually move it at a reasonable clip. It's noted that, by TNG, the fusion rocket component is more or less vestigial, with most impulse drives being half-arsed reactionless warp drives. Well, the ship does have a gravity control system so, to a certain extent, relativistic time dilation ought to be a controllable phenomenon, though at the speeds they were going it wouldn't have been a huge problem regardless (they would've been going about 1/1000th the speed of light at their top speed). In some ways it would've helped, since it would've let them stretch their supplies. Exactly how it does what it does isn't entirely clear... but the fold effect is apparently intense enough that the disparity between subjective and objective time vanishes. Fold travel, even with a zero-time fold system, would only be instantaneous over short distances of maybe a few light years at most. The zero-time fold system would be much faster, though, as that technology doesn't require navigating around fold faults and the time disparity isn't present. (Think the kind of difference you'd get between a regular international flight complete with connections in several countries and flying international on a high-altitude supersonic jetliner's direct flight.) Both, really. The energy requirements for a fold jump increase both proportionately with the volume of space the fold effect will encompass and geometrically with the distance the fold jump is circumventing. That fact alone effectively dictates the maximum range a fold-capable ship can traverse in one fold jump, since a ship can only generate and store a finite amount of energy. That "perfect world" maximum is reduced by navigation hazards like fold faults, either by forcing the folding ship to avoid them, or by requiring significantly more energy to traverse. Trying to navigate through fold faults is a risky business. The increased energy requirement for a ship to traverse a fold fault can drain the fold system's stored energy, forcing the ship to make an emergency defold or potentially even trapping it in fold space to be destroyed when it runs out of power. Intense fold faults can knock ships trying to traverse them back into realspace, and even damage or destroy them.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Space is vast, and one of the issues with faster-than-light travel by space fold is that by taking the extra-dimensional shortcut around those incredible distances you don't get to examine what might be lurking in the space between Point A and Point B. In a lot of ways, that actually works in humanity's favor. It makes it a LOT harder to encounter a hostile force like a rogue Zentradi fleet unless you specifically go looking for them or vice versa. On the other hand, it also means that sometimes a threat can be hiding right on your proverbial doorstep and go undetected. I'd assume that was the case with the Vajra attacks Grace ordered... hives built into a number of wrecked starships (like we saw earlier in the series) or on asteroids or uninhabited planets in close proximity to the planets that were attacked.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Well, as the ship isn't actually moving, per se... time dilation never really becomes a factor in fold travel. A folding ship is technically stationary, and is playing merry hell with the geometry of fold space to exchange the space it was occupying with the space at its destination. In practice, it's a kind of teleportation more than it is a warp or hyperspace drive.1 The problem is that time flows at a somewhat slower pace in fold space, so a folding ship will be experiencing less time while in fold space than passes in realspace... an effect exacerbated by a number of factors like fold faults and strong gravitational fields. Star Trek's warp drive gets around the time dilation problem in exactly the manner you described... the ship is riding in a bubble of undistorted space-time around which the drive is manipulating the geometry of space to propel the bubble at FTL speeds. Impulse drives in that setting also avoid a time dilation issue while traveling at significant fractions of C by a variation of the same trick.2 Per Leon's remarks in the same episode, the trip would've been very quick (he may be exaggerating a bit when he says "almost instantly") if not for the intense fold fault activity between Gallia IV and the Frontier fleet. Zero-time fold systems create a fold effect intense enough to insulate the ship from the different flow of time in fold space, and can cross fold faults without disruption... effectively cutting the galactic standard value adjustment out of the picture entirely. 1. In a manner not dissimilar to the description of a tesseract in A Wrinkle in Time. The shortest distance between two points on a piece of paper is to fold the paper until the two points overlap. 2. A few Star Trek Relaunch novels have indicated that, without using a subspace field to cancel out the relativistic effects of traveling at a not-insignificant percentage of lightspeed, using impulse drives is a BAD idea and can cause all kinds of "reality ensues" problems like time dilation, dramatic increases in radiation exposure as a result of blueshifted radiation, and so on. The NX-02 Columbia misses almost the entire Romulan War and the first seven years after the founding of the Federation after her subspace systems are destroyed in combat and she experiences an extreme time dilation of 70:1 flying to the nearest star system on impulse without subspace driver coils. (Of course, since the novels run on an incredibly bad philosophy of serial escalation, that was just the start of fate vomiting in their tea kettle.)
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