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Seto Kaiba

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  1. 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.)
  2. 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.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Yes.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Absolutely gorgeous handiwork.
  7. 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.
  8. 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?
  9. 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?)
  10. 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.)
  11. 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.
  12. 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.
  13. 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.
  14. 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.
  15. 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.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, there was a pretty concerted effort to preserve humanity via cloning and good old fashioned boot-knocking. Zentradi-Human hybrids weren't rare, but they weren't exactly ubiquitous either... hence the big to-do about Guld's ancestry in Macross Plus. (There do seem to have been no shortage of Zentradi couples pairing off though.) Yep, even exploiting the captured Zentradi Army cloning technology to its fullest, they ran up against that wall around 2030 and pulled the plug. Of course, sending ships full of clones with a sufficiently diverse genetic origin off to colonize other planets in the galaxy helped defer the inevitable. (There is also some indication that the cloning tech can mix and match genes to create individuals who aren't simply genetic duplicates, but its usefulness in that regard is apparently limited.)
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Just imagine it... Warera Nantes, Roli Dosel, and Conda Bromco: Space Nannies. (Or from Macross 2036, the implication that General Vrlitwhai Kridanik himself may have been the one babysitting Komilia when her parents were busy. "Uncle Vrlitwhai" indeed...) Clearly... I can only imagine that "Day care worker" suddenly became a fairly lucrative business, considering Max and Milia's seven (plus one) kids weren't even the largest family we know about from that period. Shammy Milliome and her husband had ELEVEN, and they were living in those relatively small colonies on the moon. That must have been a nightmare, you can't even tell the kids "go play outside" when outside is an airless 1/6th G dustball. It's certainly possible. (It'd be like the Jackie Chan movie Shuāng Lóng Huì /Twin Dragons, but with even more potential for comedy.) Raising eight daughters with his clone soldier wife, I can only assume Max locked himself in a bunker for a couple days every month for his own safety...
  18. Seto Kaiba
    About 9 million, all told... ~1 million humans and ~8 million Zentradi. Presumably, yes... since it's mentioned that they duplicated important personnel with key skills right down to their memories and learned skills. On Earth, as far as we know. Apparently not, given that a portion of it was identical copies of people with key skills and they had to kill the program after about 20 years because of a significant increase in the rate of recessive genetic illnesses. As far as we know, Aegis has no relation to Roy.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Depends if they're mecha-oriented fans like us, or the more typical Delta fan who'd probably ask if you'd hit your head if you said it was a mecha series.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    You'd have to ask Bandai on that score. I'd assume they probably tried a more animation-accurate matte color and found it made the toy look dirty or faded. The VF-25F DX has the same issue, being visibly much brighter than its CG model. IIRC the VF-171EX is supposed to be approximately the same color as the VF-25F, since they're using the same anti-beam ablative coating that makes up the VF-25's paint. It may simply be an animation shading thing, like how in much of Macross II's pre-remaster cut the VF-2SS looked almost blue because in space they tinted everything a deep blue to make it look dark. For my money, the Macross Frontier the Movie: the Wings of Goodbye version of the VF-171's anti-Vajra specification (VF-171-IIIF) makes more sense than the VF-171EX. It's a less radical modification, which makes sense for the more compact timeframe of the Macross Frontier movies, but it incorporates almost all of the same upgrades that went into the VF-171EX/MF25. It's got the same AA/AS/SF-06 integrated sensor matrix borrowed from the VF-25, the same upgrade to derated FF-2550F thermonuclear reaction burst turbine engines, the same new anti-Vajra MDE weaponry... almost all the stuff that could be dropped in or bolted on without major modification to the airframe. They seem to have forgone the improved energy conversion armor, the VF-25-grade ablative anti-beam coating, and the cockpit reengineering to adopt EX-Gear, which would've required a more serious tear-up. I think the VF-171EX was only really in Frontier because the story called for Alto and Luca to briefly have a "hero" version of the VF-171, hence its redesign to have a more "hero"-y bubble canopy.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Well, you can have a catboy-piloted one... but we'll see if the novelization or manga humor you. I dunno 'bout "general knowledge" there... I mean, every bloody model kit and DX and so on does mention that the Siegfrieds are ace custom VF-31s rather than the production unit. Can't help but think that a further evolution of the VF-31 would be an even cheaper version than the VF-31A... VF-30&2/3 Kairos Minus?
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Y'know what, I'm gonna +1 this just because you used "bagatelles" correctly in a sentence. (But yeah, totally... the First Space War was such an incredibly traumatic event that the estimated time to restore Earth to something resembling its prewar state using overtechnology is over 10,000 years and even decades later there are soldiers jumping at the opportunity to use Protoculture technology to make the war un-happen.)
  23. Seto Kaiba
    I'd like to see them stop doing that. It's a big galaxy, but by 2067 the majority of galactic governments have already started to transition to 5th Generation VFs. The Brisingr Alliance was a slow child in that crowd with its 5th Gen VF not coming into service in 2069-2070. Unless Kawamori drags the next series forward several decades, it won't make a ton of sense to add new VFs again. Nah, the YF-29 is basically a reuse of a design Kawamori did almost ten years before... the SW-XA II Schneegans. The YF-30 Chronos wasn't a "throw it in" either, it was a new VF for a main character in a canon videogame. If anything, what Bandai's leaning on them to do is throw in tons of different character variant paintjobs so they can endlessly redeco the same handful of molds, like seven different VF-31s (A, C, E, F, J, S, J Custom), two Sv-262 variants each of which has two official paintjobs (Ba and Hs, in green and white), and another VF-171. That's what the Siegfrieds are... modded versions of the VF-31A Kairos.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Depends how you want to define "last". The last official conflict of the Unification Wars was the Third Defensive Battle of South Ataria Island in 2006, after which the partisans in the Russian Federation withdrew support for the Anti-Unification Alliance. The last actual conflict of the Unification Wars was Operation Iconoclasm at the end of the Mayan Island conflict in September 2008, after which the Anti-Unification Alliance dissolved entirely. Macross the First has one more conflict, a fourth Defensive Battle of South Ataria in which an Anti-Unification Alliance remnant launched a surprise attack on South Ataria Island on Christmas Eve 2008, shortly before midnight. That particular battle has a few interesting tidbits. If canon, it would count as the last known canon/pseudocanon usage of the VF-0 Phoenix, Sv-51, and Octos destroid... as well as the first known usage of the VF-1 Valkyrie in combat, the first known incidence of an unmanned variable fighter (the Sv-51Σ), and CVN-100 Graf Zeppelin II's only appearance outside Variable Fighter Master File: VF-0 Phoenix. Otherwise, the next conflict would be the start of the First Space War.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    February 2007, about a year and a half before Macross Zero.
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