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Seto Kaiba

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  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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!
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. 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.
  11. 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.)
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Assuming, of course, that said ship was outfitted with the latest conventional fold systems and not a network of stupendously expensive zero-time fold systems based on fold quartz... a couple of years, easy. A good chunk of that would probably be lost in multiple fold jumps as galactic standard value adjustments between time experienced by the folding ship and the objective passage of time in real space.1 Kawamori's remarks in the Otona Anime #9 interview indicated that a ship attempting to travel from the farthest-flung emigrant fleets to Earth would need about ten years to get there. Zero-time fold systems, based on fold quartz and the superheavy quantum it produces, experience no disparity between the passage of time aboard ship and in realspace and aren't hindered by fold faults, so they're effectively about ten times faster (if Luca's remarks can be taken at face value). 1. This disparity was originally estimated by Misa as 1 hr in fold = 10 days in realspace, and has subsequently been shot down by the official publications as an exaggeration based on poor data. The difference between subjective and objective time is relatively small in a perfect world situation, but a variety of local conditions like fold faults can really screw with that. In some cases, that can turn a trip that would be virtually instantaneous into one where the disparity between objective and subjective time is over a week, as it did in Macross Frontier's episode "Fastest Delivery", in which the time lost in adjustment was 172.25 hours, or 7 days, 4 hours, and 15 minutes.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Yes.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    ... actually, yes. Dimension Eater weaponry in the Macross universe is broadly similar to the Vortex weaponry found in Warhammer 40,000. Minus, of course, the fact that fold space is a heck of a lot lower on the "hyperspace is a scary place" brown pants index than The Warp. In principle, MDE beam weaponry isn't all that different from more traditional forms of dimensional beam weaponry like the heavy quantum reaction beam weapons used for practically every scale of starship-mounted energy weapon or the heavy quantum beam rifles employed by the most recent models of variable fighter. They employ a fold dimensional resonance effect to produce and store heavy quantum, a form of exotic matter that exists simultaneously in fold space and normal space which possesses an impossibly high mass on the side in fold space. The dimensional resonator in the weapon that catalyzes the creation of heavy quantum is made of fold carbon, or in the MDE's case, fold quartz. Heavy Quantum Reaction Beam weapons1 use a resonance fold effect to excite the collected heavy quantum, causing its full mass to drop into normal space. The gravity produced by its impossibly high mass causes the heavy quantum to collapse in on itself so intensely that the result is an incredibly violent thermonuclear fusion reaction. This reaction (really more of an explosion) is corralled by the weapon to form a beam of heavy quantum fusion plasma that's carrying a colossal amount of thermal and kinetic energy. Heavy Quantum beam weapons skip that last step, and just lob beams or bolts of the excited heavy quantum at the enemy. The high mass of the heavy quantum dropping fully into three dimensional space results in an enormous transfer of kinetic energy to the target. (It's kinda like having a potato gun fire a potato made of styrofoam that transmutes into a potato made from solid depleted uranium after firing.) Micro-Dimension Eater beam weapons operate much like a Heavy Quantum Reaction Beam weapon. The key difference is that they use high-purity fold quartz instead of the synthetic fold carbon resonator, producing a "super" heavy quantum that carries substantially greater mass than regular heavy quantum. Instead of collapsing on itself so hard it auto-ignites in thermonuclear fusion, that superheavy quantum collapses straight back into fold space in a short-lived but intense fold not dissimilar to a black hole. The MDE beam weapon is firing a particle beam made up of microsingularities, tiny clots of superheavy quantum whose ultra-intense gravitational pull violently draws in any matter nearby before it collapses into a fold effect that draws the superheavy quantum and captured matter into fold space. The same principles used in the heavy quantum reaction beam weapon and MDE beam weapon apply in thermonuclear reaction warheads and dimensional warheads respectively, though in the former case the heavy quantum is used mainly to compress elemental hydrogen in the warhead, acting as a trigger for a "pure" fusion bomb. I guess you could say the chief difference between MDE beam weapons and a D-cannon is the quantity of singularities fired... the D-cannon normally fires one big one, the MDE weapon fires billions of microscopic ones, sandblasting the target out of reality. All of those things would be essentially contingent on the output of the Nousjadeul-Ger's reactor, as dimensional beam weapon technology is scalable enough to be used on every level from the coaxial gunmounts on the heads of VFs and small-scale built-in beam weaponry (as on the VF-22) right up to "that's no moon, that's a space station" level applications with barrels kilometers across like the Grand Cannon or Boddole Zer mobile fortress. The main sticking points would be having a reactor powerful enough to recharge the weapon quickly, a cooling system sufficient to keep the weapon's components from melting (extra important on the heavy quantum reaction guns), and whether the desired rate of fire would mean a reduction in power sufficient to render the weapon ineffective. All told, I'd expect a MDE beam weapon's range to be reduced substantially in atmosphere as there would be more matter for the microsingularities in the beam to interact with between the firing unit and target in an atmosphere. A few kilometers at most, from a mecha-scale weapon. Depends on how big the warhead is. Damage will be more or less directly proportionate to the amount of superheavy quantum in the warhead. For most purposes, the benefit of MDE isn't in massive area damage... it's in the way MDE is essentially the last word in armor-piercing. Armor can't repel MDE weapons, because it's not acting against the kinetic or thermal damage resistance of the armor, its intense gravity is simply tearing the armor apart at the atomic level and sucking the resulting mess out of reality. Given the size of the typical armament on a Regult with missile racks, I wouldn't expect them to be markedly more destructive in terms of blast radius, etc. than a conventional warhead.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Var syndrome was first identified by human science at some point in the wake of the Vajra conflict's conclusion in 2059. That it wasn't discovered until after the Vajra conflict ended seems to be the basis for the highly problematic theory several characters are pushing in the Macross Delta series, that stated that Var syndrome emerged because v-type fold bacteria from the Vajra migrated into new hosts when the Vajra hive left our galaxy. Kind of a massive scientific cockup, as correlation doesn't imply causation and the theory incorrectly took it as read that Var syndrome was a natural occurrence. Almost every aspect of that theory doesn't hold up under examination though, and several outright contradict Macross Delta's own prequels. The first (chronologically speaking) case of Var syndrome depicted in Macross may be in an early mission in Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy, where one of the earliest Hunters Guild missions has you encounter a unit of Zentradi in Ratatoskr Cave who are seemingly going berserk for no reason and are snapped out of it by Mina's song. Just the one, AFAIK... the manga adaptation of the Macross Delta series running in Monthly Shonen Sirius. Dunno how many chapters it's up to, but it must be at least a dozen. The Black-Winged White Knight ran for 11 chapters, Macross E ran for 9 chapters, and the The Diva Who Guides the Galaxy manga ran for 17.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Absolutely gorgeous handiwork.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    At your service... and thank you once again for a good clean image of this odd little variant of the VF-171. I really ought to knuckle down and order the last volume of Macross E at some point. After seeing them in both Macross Frontier's TV series and Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy, the VF-171EX units operated by the Xaos branch on Pipure look subtly wrong without the MDE beam cannon and anti-ship missile rack on the dorsal mounts. Makes sense they wouldn't have them, though, given the restrictions on using MDE weapons and Xaos seemingly not being as flush with cash as its rival SMS.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, if it'd been a connection timeout the code would've something like a 408 Request Timeout or one of the 500 level error codes. This was a fast redirect to a hosting service 403 Forbidden error page, suggesting something was wrong with the site itself. Good that it's straightened out though. Considering the Galaxy Network in Macross is basically a fold wave-based mother of all satellite internet networks, one has to wonder what the latency's like. sketchley, have you seen anything on how long it takes to get a message across the galaxy?
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Triple word score if it ends with a capital Q in a word that is otherwise not capitalized. Either approach is fine and dandy with me, though I would like to note that while it was initially true that some of the more unusual spellings came from, most of them have been used in official material over the years. The most recent newcomer is, IIRC, "Gnerl" referring to the Dogfighter pod, which for the life of me I can't recall seeing used outside of model kits until dogfighter pods made an appearance on the Siera Desert map in Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy tagged with "GNERL" on the game's HUD. (Incidentally, the main page of your site appears to be down... a 403 Forbidden error? Is it that time of year again?)
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Because it looks more alien that way... even though the Zentradi alphabet used in some merchandise and seen in DYRL? and Frontier is just a symbol substitution cypher for English. (Same reason a lot of western sci-fi and fantasy love putting apostrophes in the middle of names. The more alien and/or powerful, the greater the number of apostrophes and other out-of-place punctuation.)
  21. Seto Kaiba
    That's Kite Kinjo's VF-171EX Custom from the Macross Delta gaiden manga Macross E. I hadn't seen as clean a picture of that as the one you posted, so thank you for that. Its operator is the Xaos branch office on Pipure, c.2062. It was originally a stock VF-171EX that was attached to the branch's Echo Platoon, callsign Echo 3. It was modified into the configuration in the picture after being badly damaged by Var-infected megafauna during a Var suppression experiment for Xaos's Project Thrones - a joint venture with the indie idol group Thrones. It's essentially a first try at developing a variable fighter developed for supporting a Tactical Sound Unit. (The idol group Thrones are Xaos's first Tactical Sound Unit, supported by Echo Platoon.) The modifications weren't anywhere near as extreme as those made to the VF-31 Kairos five years later to create the VF-31 Siegfried, but still involved remodeling the monitor turret, fitting a second seat into the cockpit, and the installation of a "live dome"... a custom radome assembly which had fold amps built in, and was used as a stage by the members of Thrones during operations. (That thing where Walkure rides Chuck's radome? Thrones seems to have started that.) Otherwise, the units were basically stock VF-171EX Nightmare Pluses. AFAIK the only source of info on it to date is the manga itself.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    If the incredibly brief explanation on Macross Chronicle's Worldguide sheet for "Renowned VF Units" is a fair indication, the key distinguishing trait is that they exist separately from the regular chain of command. A lot of them seem to be centered around commando-esque independent operations in the field, like the Ravens, Hávamál, or the Dancing Skulls1. The aforementioned Round Table from the Macross R light novel might also belong to that category, as it was (at least on paper) a special force intended for anti-terrorist2 special operations like the others. Others, like Sound Force and the Jamming Birds, seem to have been given that classification as an effort to find a way to identify irregulars and units containing civilian volunteers on the fleet TO&E, or perhaps because they practiced "unconventional3 warfare" tactics. It's possible that units which are optimized to fight a particular foe or employ non-standard equipment, like SMS's Skull Platoon, may fall under this category. Then there's that weird subset that contains units like Diamond Force and Emerald Force, that are seemingly just small units of elite troops who answer directly to the highest-ranking officials in the area and serve as troubleshooters... prestige units that wade into the heaviest combat to turn the tide and deal with especially large threats with maximum force. This group might also be serving the fleet as guinea pigs, testing the latest fighters in combat before the rank and file get 'em, like Docker's Emerald Force was at least theoretically doing. Those all seem to be, for the most part, the responsibility of the regular forces. "Special Forces" in the Macross setting seems to be more a catch-all term for anything that doesn't fit neatly into fleet or planetary defense force TO&Es. Most seem to be, outside of the ones in the "irregulars" category who are civilians. Diamond and Emerald Force gave a good accounting of themselves on foot on numerous occasions, with Gamlin going above and beyond. The Ravens, I know, also had hand-to-hand and infantry ops training. I doubt they're actually used in an infantry capacity unless things go horribly south though. Dunno 'bout that... in the TV series, at least, they lost Battle Galaxy and a good chunk of their fleet but their actual habitat ships and so on are still around. The legacy of their work certainly seems to be alive in the "present day" of 2067 though... although it's being used against the New UN Forces again. 1. Max and Milia's special forces unit from Macross M3. 2. "Anti-terrorist" seems to cover a LOT of ground though, from dealing with actual anti-government forces before they become enough of an issue to merit the en masse attention of the regular forces, to stamping out hostile rogue Zentradi factions and New UN Forces soldiers who've gone off the deep end. Even investigating anomalous readings from decommissioned bases or areas where normal troops like infantry can't go. 3. In a good, legal, entirely above board let's-all-join-hands-and-sing-rainbow-connection, feel-good sort of way.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Are we counting the novelization in this? If so, yes. Otherwise it's a very definite "maybe"... unless you didn't specifically mean Variable Fighters, since they did have the AIF-9V Ghosts seen in the last episode and the QF-5100D Goblin II drones seen in the second movie as part of the VF-27's Super Pack. Back in Macross R, set a year before the Vajra conflict, the Macross Galaxy corporate army did have at least one unit (Pegasus squadron) which was outfitted with a local specification version of the old VF-19C (VF-19C/MG21). The first volume of the Macross Frontier novelization ("Close Encounter") puts a number of other units in the Galaxy fleet's arsenal including a never-before-seen and unfortunately unelaborated-upon VF-17 variant (VF-17F) and several VF-9's that are presumably (but not explicitly said to be) the upgraded VF-9E type. I would assume that they hadn't had time to upgrade every unit in their corporate army to the VF-27 yet, so there were probably VF-171s offscreen as well.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Yep... the Macross Frontier fleet NUNS issued some of the VF-19EF Caliburn units to one of its own special forces squadrons, a unit called Round Table.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... that's not really "things that never [got] animated", it's more along the lines of "things that the GA Graphic staff came up with on their own because they needed to pad a badly-written book like a menstruating firehose so it'd reach the 128 pages management committed to".1 EDIT: Don't get me wrong here, the problems with the VF-31 Master File are entirely on the staff that wrote the book, not the staff of the show. They had information and chose not to use it, or to contradict it, for reasons that aren't clear. With a few exceptions in the earlier books, the original variants in Variable Fighter Master File aren't based on anything official. Several of them even straight-up contradict official series materials from various Macross shows.2 They're basically throw-it-in filler intended to inflate page count and add a bit of visual diversity to what would otherwise be a realistically samey Variants section where all the variants look almost identical. The variants that ARE official or at least based on material in official publications fall into three categories: ones nicked from other sources whole cloth3, ones which are straight-up official4, and ones which are current-model versions of things that existed for a previous VF model.5 The only book that really stayed away from it was the VF-0 book, which covered only the official five variants in any depth... though it did add one or two intermediate variants between the F-14A+ and VF-0A in passing. There are a fair few variants in Master File that don't make a ton of sense... again, because they're throw-it-in filler meant to add visual interest and pad page count. What use is a VF-25 biplane, for instance? Or a VF-19 for ground attack with a tiny little chin turret when it's already got much more powerful beam guns and a rotary gunpod? That one, the book at least explains in a way that doesn't make you wonder if the writer spent the previous hour sampling everything in the nurse's medicine cabinet... some of the others, not so much.
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