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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    I'm fairly confident that my translation is accurate, but I can revisit it later tonight. It was four launchers on the outside of each [leg/engine nacelle]. The art in Designers Note definitely leaves that in no doubt. The launchers form a semi-permanent conformal pack that is split up into two independently movable halves, each with two launcher assemblies built into it (each port is one launcher). Any other interpretation doesn't work out in terms of both consistent usage and numbers. It's uncommon for prototypes and experimental Valkyries to have names at all, the vast majority of which are 5th Generation units. Offhand, I'm pretty sure the only one outside of the 5th Generation that had a stated name was the VF-X-7 Ghost Valkyrie. The YF-19 and YF-21 sometimes get appended with their radio callsigns of "Alpha One" and "Omega One" respectively, but beyond that... nothing. I'd assume it's probably just the game conflating them, since they shared 3D models with the VF-19A and VF-22 respectively. Really? That kind of spelling error, and often much worse, crops up all the time in anime, manga, other media, apparel, and so on. The YF-27-5's name is also misspelled, the word they're trying for is "Shahar" (a Hebrew word) but they misspell it "Shaher". They also misspell "Female" as "Femail". (If I had a dollar for every time I saw "LOCK ON" written as "ROCK ON" by mistake, I'd treat myself to a very nice solid gold Mercedes-Benz.) The bottom third of the Variable Fighter Designers Note cover has a fair amount of spectacularly awful Engrish, complete with spelling errors and atrocious grammar... and that came out just a few days ago.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Looking at the concept line art for the VF-0, it almost looks like it started as an outgrowth of Kawamori's SW-XA1.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Amusingly, some interesting ground has been broken on that in the case of elephants and cats... they communicate in frequencies outside normal human hearing, but systematically enough for several researchers to make a stab at starting to systemize it. The Vajra don't seem to exist as discrete beings in an intellectual sense, so whether they communicate with themselves/each other in terms humans could readily understand is questionable. The whole hive is one giant networked intelligence.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    The one that counts, Macross Chronicle, does spell it correctly in English as "Vajra". It's certainly possible someone mangled the katakana adapting the sanskrit term. The New UN Government's first contact with the Vajra is officially down as 2040. The Zentradi may have run into them before, but... well... we know what the Vajra are like in a fight, and we know the Zentradi only really categorize things into "enemy" and "not enemy", so it's highly probable any Zentradi fleets that encountered the Vajra and were smart enough to leave them alone lumped them firmly in "not enemy" and the ones dumb enough to attack didn't live long enough to report on the experience. Fleets that pissed the Vajra off probably were written off as casualties of the search and destroy op for the Supervision Army, or maybe as fold accidents the way the New UN Government covered up the loss of the 117th Research Fleet.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    It's stated that they don't communicate at all in the conventional sense, but rather are linked into a hive mind via natural(?) zero-time fold communication facilitated by fold bacteria they've formed a symbiosis with... so, kinda. They "sing", but the singing is all fold waves with no conventional audible component, as you'd expect from a species that evolved in a hard vacuum. The most noise they seem to be capable of making is an inarticulate screeching sound. (At no point has anyone raised the subject of what the Vajra call themselves, assuming such a thing could even be translated, though the name Vajra can't have come from them as communication with them wasn't possible until 19 years after first contact thanks to Sheryl Nome and Ranka Lee.)
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Nothing whatsoever. It's almost exclusively an art book, the few pieces of text therein that aren't the handwritten notes the designer included on the original animation model sheets that the book reprinted are image identification captions the publisher put in that any Macross fan would almost certainly find to be entirely unnecessary. It also skips a lot of stuff, like the Macross II continuity VFs, the Varauta Army VFs and their NUNS design basis, the Spiritia Dreaming VF-14, the Variable Glaug, Neo Glaug, Feios Valkyrie, all the recently-canonized Advanced Valkyrie designs, everything from Macross 30 except the YF-30, etc. It's not a bad book, but it could've been a LOT better with relatively little work. I'll say this though, it does contain a good clean version of the YF-24 Evolution multiview graphic from the Macross Frontier series... and at a size larger than "postage stamp" too!
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Nope, the only material of interest for the VF-27 in Macross Variable Fighter Designers Note was the larger and cleaner reprinting of some of the (colored pencil?) early concepts for the VF-27 that were color inserts in the biography Shoji Kawamori: the View Point of Visionary Creator. There's some of the VF-25 concepts from the same period included as well, with some of the Super/Armored Pack drafts that look straight out of a Rockman X game.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    My copy rolled in today, a day earlier than FedEx promised, and after a quick skim I'm pretty darn pleased. Mr March will be over the moon about having some proper line art to work with for the YF-29 and Sv-262, I'm sure.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Just picked up my copy of Macross Variable Fighter Designers Note over lunch, and it seems we're going to be able to glean a not-insignificant amount of usable art and some new information from this book after all. One thing I did note is that my earlier statement about the YF-29's shoulder missile launchers being a toy feature is incorrect, they're represented in the line art but not mentioned in the official specs. This would mean the YF-29 has about 130 missiles instead of 100.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Ground base? The Zentradi Army is a fleet-based military organization for which the closest thing to a ground base is a space station large enough to more than justify hammy proclamations like "that's no moon, it's a space station"... an environment in which gravity is not a constant. If I had to guess, I'd assume VTOL. The Gnerl aerospace dogfighter pod has a number of massive high-powered verniers assisting its thrust-vectoring paddles in maneuvering, and one of them is on the underside directly below center mass. Its position is very nearly ideal for VTOL use.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    About half of it has been translated, that I know of. I haven't actually got 'round to getting the second volume that depicts the events on Windermere after the destruction of Carlyle yet.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Flying on thrust. It's mostly engine.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Thus far, Ragna, Voldor, and Windermere IV are the only ones we know about. Mind you, the populations of those worlds and natives who've emigrated to other planets in the cluster probably make up the majority of the Brisingr cluster's 8 billion inhabitants. I don't believe it's been revealed how advanced Ragna and Voldor were when first contact was made, but when SDF-5 Megaroad-04 found Windermere IV in 2027 the natives had the equivalent of at least a late medieval or Enlightenment era civilization. It's actually kind of amazing that Windermere IV's feudal absolute monarchy was able to adapt so readily to a complete upending of its entire worldview and become a semi-functioning member of an interstellar government. They went from berks on giant birds waving bits of sharp metal at each other over control of small parcels of land to defending their solar system and their neighbors using hypersonic SSTO stealth aerospace variable fighters powered by fold effect-driven thermonuclear fusion engines without any intermediate steps and in the space of barely one generation. To put the cherry on that sundae of existential horror, the sudden imposition of realities like the galaxy being crawling with aliens who are all significantly more advanced and longer lived than your own people, who could end your entire civilization with relatively little effort, and who probably weren't all that shy about undermining several other bastions of your socio-political stability like commerce and religion with advanced technology and science... it can't have been an easy or relaxing time for the native Windermereans. Just telling the truth about the Zentradi Army and the threat it poses to the galaxy could start a planet-wide panic. It really makes you appreciate why the UFP in Star Trek has the prime directive, and makes you wonder why the New UN Government doesn't have a similar policy. Zola appears to be the planet that was the farthest along in its development when it was discovered by the New UN Government's emigrant fleets. The Zolans had already achieved their own pre-spaceflight industrial era agrarian civilization comparable to the first half of the 20th century when their planet was discovered and the planet became a member of the New UN Government. They seem to be incredibly chill with the whole thing, and even in the late 2040s hadn't let it affect their culture much. Without reading Macross Delta Gaiden: the Black-Winged White Knight it's REALLY hard to sympathize with Windermere at all... why the writers felt compelled to leave all the facts of the raw deal Windermere IV had under the New UN Government in a manga is beyond me. Just two chapters is enough to take Bogue from "that boy ain't right" to "I'm not surprised he has anger management issues, life has been elephant-making-love-to-a-cat ROUGH on him."
  14. Seto Kaiba
    I wouldn't go quite that far... So, a few points here: They do, in fact, have cities. We see their capital city of Darwent several times in the series, and one of their main reasons for hating the New UN Government so passionately is that the New UN Spacy did a number on several Windermerean cities during the 2060 war where the Kingdom of the Wind seceded from the New UN Government. The city of Sparrowhead took quite a beating in a bombing, and Hayate's dad wiped the city of Carlyle right off the planet with a dimensional warhead. You forgot that Windermere IV's Kingdom of the Wind had the backing of the Epsilon Foundation, an interstellar mega-conglomerate that sold them ships, the Sv-262 Draken III fighters developed by its subsidiary Dian Cecht, various other weapons, and also provided the technological aid necessary to reconstruct the Sigur Valens and render their Protoculture ruins workable. Windermere IV may be an economically underdeveloped world with a largely agrarian society, but it's noted as being especially rich in one invaluable rare commodity... fold quartz. One of the root causes of Windermere's war of secession against the New UN Government was that the government's restrictions on trade in fold quartz (laws that were enacted to prevent the proliferation of dimensional warheads) left the mining of fold quartz in New UN Government control and prevented Windermere from using the immense wealth represented by those caches of fold quartz to get rich quick. Being that fold quartz is an essential component of inertia store converters and in many other technologies can improve performance over synthetic alternatives (e.g. fold systems), it's a safe bet Windermere IV financed its war by paying Epsilon in fold quartz. (More or less the equivalent of real-world conflict diamonds, but even more valuable.) They want to free the Brisingr globular cluster from what they see as human tyranny... since they had serious issues with how humans rode roughshod over their government when they were a New UN Government member world. They expected (somewhat wrongly, as it turned out) that the other worlds in the cluster would feel the same. (Macross Delta Gaiden: The Black-Winged White Knight shows this in more detail, almost to the extent of "villain had a point", though it wasn't helped that rational/sane New UN Forces actions intended to prevent Var syndrome from becoming a thing were undertaken under the guise of MASSIVE dickishness on the part of the NUNS garrison, like "accidentally" torching the Eber-hardt family's orchards during exercises.) Their most elite unit... not their entire army. We see on numerous occasions that they have plenty of ships, several of which are carriers. The Aerial Knights we see are basically their top ace's personal unit, like an equivalent of Baron Manfred von Richthofen's so-called "Flying Circus" (Jagdgeschwader 1). Now THAT, I'll grant you, was monstrously lazy... for Roid's plot to be precisely the same plot as Grace O'Connor's in Macross Frontier was just bad writing. Strictly speaking, there are actually five custom VFs in the series... the five VF-31 Siegfried units used by Delta Flight. The Siegfried is an aftermarket modification of the Surya Aerospace VF-31A Kairos by the Xaos Valkyrie Works. A summary of what modifications go into converting a Kairos into a Siegfried is available here. Keith's Sv-262Hs Draken III is not a custom machine, but rather is a production command variant like the VF-1S.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    I forget if it was in one of the Pash! Animation Files or an issue of Otona Anime, but I do recall it being said that the naming was an intentional reference to the sanskrit term's double meaning of "thunderbolt" and "diamond", embodying the concepts of irresistible force and invulnerability. Since humanity named them, it's almost certainly an intentional reference in-universe by whatever party first encountered them in 2040. They certainly would've seemed like an invulnerable, totally unstoppable force of nature compared to the technology of the day... after all, the Vajra don't have a spoken language of their own, so they didn't name themselves.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    The Glaug variant there is marked up only as "Super Glaug" in the few mentions I've seen. The Regult with the big missile rack is the ZBP-104 Regult Type-104 (read "One Zero Four") missile spec, a New UN Forces analogue to the Esbeliben Regult missile light and heavy missile variants in the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross series and DYRL? movie. The regular (non-missile) version shows up at the start of the first episode of Macross Delta. The one with the arms and Quimeliquola Queadluun-Rau-inspired backpack is the ZBP-106 Regult Type-105 (read "One Zero Six").
  17. Seto Kaiba
    They'll probably just reuse the same shots that were used in the Macross Delta series... Grammier's file photo, and maybe Keith and Roid's wrecked Svard during the destruction of Carlyle.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Every subsequent Macross story tends to sneak a few more details into the background timeline as it goes... maybe the next series'll throw in something about the federal NUNS showing up tardy to the party and shelling Windermere IV into a cinder? Either way, I'd argue the Kingdom of the Wind basically punished themselves if you look at it. They sent a good chunk of their youth away to fight a war under false pretenses, and an awful lot of 'em ended up dead at the hands of the local NUNS during the big counterattack. Their royal family has only one remaining heir left and he's a bedridden invalid due to his own father's machinations, with the illegitimate prince having been reduced to nothing heavier than a cough in the destruction of a Protoculture shrine on Ragna... so their autocratic government's about to collapse. Their economy will probably collapse first, since Windermere IV's economy was built on agriculture and their main export of foodstuffs is in a zero-demand situation thanks to being tainted with compounds that are the cause of Var syndrome. Don't get me wrong, Macross Delta had basically no closure to the actual conflict in the series... but it's a safe bet Windermere IV is about to have a VERY bad time as a result of their bad choices, just offscreen. Another five, ten years of time in-universe and the lack of technical aid from the Epsilon Foundation will probably leave the Aerial Knights unable to interrupt a small tea party in the Brisingr Alliance, let alone actually cause trouble.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    The reentry pod does, and some of the shuttles probably do, but other than that... nope. They're staying up on raw thrust alone, which is fine because mostly they're designed for use in space.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Assuming that was the intention to begin with. Most of us assumed that the show was going to do some heavy referencing of Ring of the Nibelung, but they never did even once. Kind of a waste of an opportunity, IMO. It wasn't even the show the first three episodes promised... given how little transformation was used, you could mistake it for a crossover between Ace Combat and Pretty Cure fairly easily. Maybe even Ace Combat 3, since the Drakens don't use normal canopies.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Looks like it's all larger reprints of previously-released art from the series artbooks, liner notes, and the last Tenjin artbook. Not unwelcome, but still... would it kill them to give us some actual specs for the Svard? Or maybe some workable lineart? That's not the VF-14 Vampire, that's the VF-X-10 design from Kawamori's 1985 non-Macross design series Advanced Valkyrie. The story of the Advanced Valkyrie series is, for all practical intents and purposes, the first draft for the Macross Plus OVA and the VF-X-10 filled the role in the story eventually occupied by the YF-19. Bandai bailed on the project before it went past the design phase, and because Kawamori recycles unused designs and concepts until they finally DO get used it was further refined for use in the Air Cavalry Chronicles concept series. Air Cavalry Chronicles was the earliest incarnation of The Vision of Escaflowne before it became a fantasy series, and the polished VF-X-10 design was a fighter the nation of Fanelia (the homeland of Escaflowne's Van Fanel) used: the III-C Baron Rouge. When that fell through after Air Cavalry Chronicles changed genres and became a fantasy series, the designs Kawamori'd made in Air Cavalry Chronicles and Advanced Valkyrie got pillaged for use all of the Macross titles that came out in the 90's and early 2000s. The ZaiBach Empire's fighters became the Varauta Army's VFs in Macross 7 and the VF-14 in Macross M3, the Fanelian III-C Baron Rouge and Asturian A-9B Invader became Macross M3's VF-9 Cutlass and Macross VF-X2's VA-3 Invader, etc. The aforementioned Sv-154 Svard is also a reused Air Cavalry Chronicles design... it's a very slightly modified Fanelian LV-7 Excalibur. A lot of the other unused Air Cavalry Chronicles and Advanced Valkyrie designs were adopted into the Macross universe by Macross Chronicle.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    I dunno, I'd call Qasim's death an incident of friendly fire... his rune was supercharged by the Song of the Wind to the extent that exerting himself caused him to age super-rapidly and die in the cockpit. It nearly killed Hermann too. Basically, Heinz was the actual killer of Qasim. Keith and Roid, well, that's definitely an attempt at atonement equals death by Keith.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    's actually a hardware item that was introduced on a production basis in the 4th Generation VFs, esp. the VF-19 Excalibur, which had it in all three modes rather than just in battroid. When it was new (on the YF-19) there were notations about sensor systems scattered all around the airframe that work together to put together the composite image for the wraparound imaging monitor. The big sensor clusters are visible even on the toys, as the colored insets on the sides or front of the nose, etc. The YF-24 derivatives tend to have a bunch clustered around the canopy, while the VF-19 has ones that are a good 3-4 meters long on the sides of the nose. The effect is achieved, AFAIK, by a matrix of optical, infrared, and laser-based camera systems. I think the design with the engines in the lower legs was the easier one in terms of transformation complexity. The YF-21/VF-22 approach has some significant merits, like rendering the limbs disposable, but it also has some significant design issues like placement of a thrust source for VTOL in GERWALK mode... which had to be achieved by using bypass air from the main turbines, adding complexity to the engines and introducing some balancing issues with the lift source being positioned at the rear of the aircraft in GERWALK mode.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Initially, I was certain Master Hermann Kroos was going to bite it simply because he seemed to be Windermere's own riff on Roy Focker... the beloved mentor figure that even psychotic blood knight Bogue Con-Vaart seemed to respect unconditionally. After Hermann had survived the season finale of Delta's first season I knew he was going to go all the way. There was just no way he was going to survive all that and get killed off in some piddling small conflict in the second half. That said, they clearly weren't above telegraphing imminent character death. Messer Ihlefeld might as well have been living on an all-pineapple diet, it was painfully obvious he was going to die and die BADLY by the end of episode 3. Macross is not a series that has ever been kind to characters who insist that violence is the only answer, or those who know it isn't but got it wrong on purpose. Messer is basically Man-Nora, the ace who lives to fight because a prior traumatic injury took all the joy out of life. Qasim Eber-hardt was also an incredibly obvious telegraphed death. Like Hermann, he doesn't appear in ANY of the show's promo material... but he had even less dialog than Hermann did, he was doubled up with Hermann in the status of the team stoic1, and he was the only one of the lot who wasn't drawn as either a bishounen or a ruggedly handsome older man. I'm flat amazed they didn't kill him off earlier, but the minute he started talking about his family and his desire to return home, he raised the standard "X days until retirement" death flag and promptly died. King Grammier was also a cert for getting killed for most of the same reasons as Qasim... he doesn't fit into the standard list of archetypes, he's not in the promotional material, and he's a literally crusty old man. 1. Ouran High School Host Club provides, as an invoked trope on numerous occasions, a standard list of what you might call shoujo manga or BL romance character archetypes... albeit played for comedy in that case. If you look back at Macross Delta with that list in mind it becomes painfully obvious who was going to die in the course of the series AND who the real mastermind of the Aerial Knights was. Keith Aero Windermere was The Prince, the young man of high social standing who is ruled by his emotions and dogged by a past familial trauma (almost invariably involving being the child of a mistress) and is easily swayed or manipulated by playing on his emotions. Chancellor Roid Brehm was obviously The Cool character, a wicked cultured master manipulator with ominous glasses who plays the role of the voice of reason and calm foil to The Prince while being the real shot-caller in the Prince's group and secretly rather vindictive. The twins, Theo and Xao Jussila, are The Twins; the identical twin boys who are so close that they dress and act identically and even finish each other's sentences who appeal to the girls who want to be fought over by two men or prefer two very close men who have "more than just a warm friendship". Hermann Kroos and Kassim Eber-hardt double up in the role as The Stoic, the older character who keeps his emotions under rigid control, is terrifyingly strong and good in a hand-to-hand fight compared to the other characters, and generally doesn't speak much. Bogue Con-vaart is The Natural, the new kid who has incredible natural talent and good looks, but who harbors a chip on his shoulder due to a family-related problem that drives him to devote his life to one goal and makes it difficult for him to form relationships, leading him to bond with The Prince over similar traumas. Prince Heinz Neirich Windermere is the Lol/Shota, the one who looks like (or is) a younger kid and whose innocence and naivete are meant to invoke maternally protective feelings from the female audience. Pretty obvious, once you look at it, that the redundancy and the one character who doesn't fit (Qasim and Grammier) were going to be the ones to snuff it.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, the YF-25 Prophecy's appearances have mainly been in supplementary material like light novels and video games. Its only animated appearances have been as background filler in the Macross Frontier movies. Chelsea Scarlett, Angers 672, and Reon Sakaki are the only known pilots thus far, the former two being from Macross the Ride and the latter from Macross 30... though IIRC Macross 30 offered both the Macross Frontier movie orange, blue, and white scheme and Reon Sakaki's SMS Sephira branch seafoam and white.
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