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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Watched the latest from Metallic Rouge and started Bang Brave Bang Bravern today... Metallic Rouge is really not doing anything unique or interesting. It really is just a halfhearted version of I, Robot but with the addition of some Rockman X or Android Kikaider-style hunting "evil" robots who all have specific themes and signature attacks. The writers can't seem to be bothered to spend the time to make the Neans interesting or relatable or to even make the characters themselves invested in their plight (despite the titular character being one), so all the time the series spends dwelling on their plight just feels insincere and wasted. Bang Brave Bang Bravern is... I feel trolled. I went into it blind, and the first eighteen or so minutes of the series look like a fairly unimaginative form letter space war robot anime... and then...
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, there are ceramic composites like the RCC and LI-900 used in space shuttle thermal tiles and various aerogels and high-entropy alloys that have extremely high heat resistance. The main problem with the ceramic composites and aerogels is that they tend to be extremely brittle, and the high entropy alloys are hard to produce, have high materials costs, and a host of other practical drawbacks. Macross's solution was better carbon-based materials, eventually culminating in an all-hypercarbon version of RCC on the VF-25 if you take Master File's word for it.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Hokkaido Gals are Super Adorable is, at the very least, shaping up to be something a bit more substantial than just another fanservice-y show. Some mildly diverting character moments, but still nothing to write home about yet. Villainess Level 99 seems to be speedrunning the usual isekai overpowered protagonist tropes. It's only three episodes in and the protagonist is already more or less at the official level of "a state-recognized person of mass destruction" and absconding with the main story arc of the original story. It's still not really doing anything to stand out. Also started Metallic Rouge today. This is one of those dystopian sci-fi/action titles that really makes me think the author has a terrible understanding of human nature. We live in a world where people can't help anthropomorphizing and empathizing with machines as inhuman as a Roomba, and yet so many authors assume all of Humanity will arbitrarily be complete arseholes to self-aware humanoid androids just because they can. It doesn't even make sense in context. All in all, first impression is that Metallic Rouge is a terribly unimaginative and by-the-numbers post-cyberpunk title that dares to halfheartedly ask if artificial people are people too... but only for some fake pathos while the protagonist is dismembering another android-gone-rogue like this is Rockman X.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Potentially, though the difference in actual speed between the YF-21/VF-22 and YF/VF-19 is pretty small and in both cases their speed at ~10km is, as @sketchley noted, mainly limited by friction heating of the fuselage caused by air resistance. Even the later 5th Generation VFs are limited to not more than about Mach 5.5 at 10km because otherwise the friction heating caused by the air at that airspeed will reach damaging levels.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Ah, thank you... that's some good news indeed. 😄 I'd hate to see a series as fun as that one be one-and-done. Kinda wishing Love After World Domination had a second season too... my group is watching that one, and it's a lot of fun and a very affectionate parody of tokusatsu hero stories in general. I've almost caught up to this week's releases. The Unwanted Undead Adventurer really does feel like it's taking a lot from That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime, as the protagonist's goal is basically to raise his level in this RPG influenced world until he can return to something like human form. I didn't find Slime all that interesting either so I'm not surprised this one's kinda "meh" to me, though at least The Unwanted Undead Adventurer doesn't have the feel of a general accountancy simulator the way Slime did. The Wrong Way to Use Healing Magic is... I feel like the author has very specific tastes involving that one really big lady in Resident Evil 8. It's occasionally funny, but IMO it doesn't feel like it's found its feet yet. Blue Exorcist: Shimane Illuminati Saga is dull. There's no other word I can use for it. It picked up in the middle of a breather arc in the manga and it's been so long since the last season that it feels like it's groping around in the dark for something to do with itself. The Strongest Tank's Labyrinth Raids is also pretty dull. It doesn't really feel like there are any stakes in the story, and plot progression just kind of happens elsewhere while the protagonist is busy being creepy siscon. Tales of Wedding Rings is one of those form letter isekai titles that are basically just an excuse to do a harem series. The only thing it really does to stand out is that the story's main character isn't a total loser shut-in. He's just a standard harem anime MC whose first partner is the Childhood Friend. It's eminently skippable, IMO. The story's a low-effort vehicle for fanservice. Mashle is still pretty fun. Everyone seems to be talking about it, but only because the OP for season two's such a banger. The big dramatic story about whether people without magic deserve to continue living in a world where magic is a basic necessity of everyday life would have a lot more weight to it if Mash didn't have a permanent Saitama-esque poker face (and if it wasn't transparently obvious that he's the most brokenly-powerful person present at any given time). A Sign of Affection is... almost intolerably cute. Tastes like diabetes. It's a very sweet, very cute romance story that's absolutely worth a watch for how seriously and sensitively it deals with the protagonist's disability. It is a bit surreal how the level of facial detail changes. Characters go from basically looking like an egg with hair for any comedy scene to almost over-detailed in closeups. As I mentioned before, the original author clearly has a type... and made every single guy in the story in that mold. 7th Time Loop is your standard otome game reincarnation sort of schtick. It's mildly diverting, but it has yet to do anything particularly interesting with its premise or story. Villain-san's Day Off continues to be a fairly light and insubstantial slice of life story. That its protagonist is a top-level tokusatsu series villain is almost forgotten entirely since his days off are spent in such peaceful ways. Frieren: Beyond Journey's End is one I'm way behind on, but as of about episode six or seven it hasn't really grabbed me yet. Villainess Level 99 is also some pretty form-letter otome game nonsense, though it tries to make acknowledging that a part of the humor with mixed results. I have yet to start Metallic Rouge. Once my group clears the rest of Original Dirty Pair we'll probably segue to Phantasy Star Online 2: Episode Oracle just to behold the beautiful disaster that was that MMO's first three major story arcs squashed into two cours. It's not the most tangled story I've seen or played, but it's up there esp. considering how liberally time travel is abused.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Yup... and not just militarily. Politically, socially, culturally, technologically, economically, financially... It's even more important in the Macross setting than it is in the real world, since nowhere in the real world is months or years away from the next-nearest outpost of civilization. Based on Macross 7's unaired episode "Fleet of the Strongest Women" and Variable Fighter Master File: VF-25 Messiah, information about such encounters is relayed to the New UN Government as quickly as possible. Given that the typical Zentradi main fleet normally has its forces dispersed across many light years to scout for enemy forces in the area in a manner not dissimilar to an emigrant fleet's early warning picket scouting for threats, resources, inhabitable planets, etc. getting anything more than a rough order estimate of a Zentradi main fleet's available forces is unlikely without risking detection. (And risking detection is incredibly undesirable, so they would probably be content with just that rough estimate.) In Macross Frontier, we see a Frontier New UN Spacy reconnaissance unit drop relay pods after folding into the area of operations to ensure that the Combat Information Center back on the fleet's flagship (Battle Frontier) has uninterrupted access to all available data on the emerging situation with as little delay as possible. So even if it's not connected directly to the galaxy network proper, the same approach is used to overcome fold communications obstacles in a strictly military environment. The logistics involved probably means that fixed early warning satellites are likely connected to the network, while reconnaissance flights (manned or unmanned) from carriers are likely tied into the carrier the flight launched from, and from there into a fleet or planet's local network. But because this has not been a topic that has ever come up other than for fleets operating on the frontier, this is nothing but an educated guess.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    No, I'm approaching it from the perspective of that series being the first time that any source elaborated upon how this technology works.🙄 Just FYI, the application I described WRT in-flight telephony and Wi-Fi is a system that was designed and implemented in the 1980s and achieved widespread adoption in the early 1990s. The system was expanded and adapted for in-flight internet service in the early 2000s with the first systems entering service around 2003 and beginning to achieve widespread adoption around 2006. So it was a thing at the time those shows were made. I don't disagree that the nature of the network probably means that most resources are cached locally, especially given that we know many corporations seem to prefer to have local branches in various emigrant fleets and regions. The part I don't agree with is that a internet design for interstellar use would necessarily have the same very specific shortcomings of Japan's domestic internet despite vastly more advanced technology and a very different operating architecture. Especially given that, for some of these fleets and planets, this network is essentially the only way to conduct communications and commerce with other governments. (Never mind the logistical problems of trying to upgrade infrastructure if it takes literal years to reach the infrastructure you need to upgrade.)
  8. Seto Kaiba
    From the text on the image, that's not a Lancer II on a carrier. The caption says "Anti-aircraft gun at OX Town 3-chomei", which is apparently in the middle of a market area in Macross City. There's a note that it's a piece of tracked artillery, that it advances to the exterior of the ship through a triple airlock ahead of it, that private homes in the area are often damaged, etc. I know I've seen this picture before, but I don't think I've seen it printed quite so large in the past.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Finished My Dress-up Darling yesterday. It's cute. I'm kind of surprised it hasn't had a second season yet. Whole bunch of new episodes seem to drop on saturdays, so I've got new Blue Exorcist, Mashle, The Strongest Tank's Labyrinth Raids, Tales of Wedding Rings, and A Sign of Affection waiting for me. Still haven't started Metallic Rouge. The two watch groups I'm in went backwards a bit... one to Original Dirty Pair and another to Love After World Domination.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... when you get right down to it, a big part of the reason that more "mature" content escaped the editors in Robotech is because the series was slapped together in an indecent rush and on a hair-shirt budget. Macek's weird priorities WRT character ethnicities didn't help matters either. The best they could do was to cut out the most objectionable content like the nudity, rotoscope out a few extra moons, and haphazardly splice some footage together while the writers weren't even given enough time to check that their scripts were consistent with each other. It's more by accident than design that Robotech retained more "mature" content like that... though it had unintended benefits in that it reduced the damage the rewriting inflicted to the original shows and subsequently saw its fans mistakenly attribute the quality of the original works to Robotech.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    TBH, I'm not sure I'd say there's all that much artistic license being taken. Many sci-fi titles like Star Trek, Star Wars, Macross, Gundam, etc. are pretty upfront about the fact that most of space travel is boring stretches of getting from Point A to Point B in which nothing particularly exciting happens. It's one of the favorite approaches for "breather episode" stories. Star Wars doesn't indulge in it as heavily as others since it's mainly a film series, but there are prominent moments showing that the actual business of space travel is waiting to get there like Obi-wan training Luke while en route to Alderaan with Han bumming around the ship's lounge with them. So many Star Trek bottle episodes involve the crew going about their daily lives while the ship is traveling to its next port of call, never mind Voyager explicitly being the exciting moments in what was otherwise seven years of sailing back to Earth or Picard directly acknowledging the fact that space travel is mostly passing the time waiting to get where you're going. Multiple Gundam titles acknowledge the incredible tedium of interplanetary travel to even the nearest planets (e.g. Iron-Blooded Orphans and Reconguista in G) with weeks of downtime spent on training and other pastimes. Macross is more open about it than most, with both Macross 7 and Macross Frontier acknowledging that the titular emigrant ships sail for years if not decades to find a habitable planet to colonize... ideally uneventfully. They're not looking for adventure, they're trying to get a prefab city to a suitable environment in one piece without any undue "excitement" which might put the lives and livelihoods of its civilian inhabitants at risk. Everything they have is set up to preemptively detect, and avoid detection by, potential threats if at all possible. In all four of the Macross TV shows, there are weeks or months between episodes where people are aboard ship doing not much beyond getting on with daily routines... including a number of breather episodes and the like. Probably not as much as you're thinking, Macross Frontier elaborated more on how fold communications work. From the name, we'd think of something like what you're envisioning. A transmitter that creates a tiny space fold to connect two points in realspace. Instead, what Frontier established was that fold communications is more like your standard sci-fi FTL communication tech that works like radio but uses an exotic energy wave that propagates at FTL speeds. Producing these waves (fold waves) is one of the key uses of fold carbon or fold quartz, since fold waves are used for all kinds of things. The most important is controlling the heavy quantum that's used in gravity control systems and dimensional weapons, but they're also used in the FTL communications and FTL radar technology as a substitute for lightspeed-limited radio waves. Armed with that understanding, it's seems very likely that the relay satellites used in the Galaxy Network are little different to the communications satellites today... maintaining a large number of parallel frequencies at all times that are used for point-to-point communications. Just the range is much broader than geostationary orbit because the fold waves can cross interstellar distances easily and the obstacles being circumvented are things like fold faults instead of the curvature of the Earth. If we were to look for the closest real-world analog, I'd say it's probably the in-flight wifi and phone systems of modern jet airliners. Those systems use a high-powered, high-bandwidth antenna clusters in the outer skin of the aircraft that maintain connections to either ground-based towers directly when over land and to satellites that redirect to ground stations when over the ocean in order to provide a link between the wifi access points in the cabin and the internet. The antennas in the ship connect to whatever station in the network provides the best signal, and when it moves to an area where a new station has better signal it switches over to use that relay instead, as your PC or phone might in a mesh network. Long-distance emigrant ships in Macross just operate in a condition where they have to continue dropping new relay stations whenever they get too far from the previous one in order to maintain communications with the rest of the network. (Basically, if you've got a home wifi system like Netgear's Orbi, Asus's AiMesh, Linksys's Velop, etc. you can play with this principle at home as your device will seamlessly switch to whichever base station has the best signal strength and maintain the same communications sessions through a dedicated backhaul frequency that the different stations use to talk to each other. If you have Philips Hue smart lights, a similar mesh technology called ZigBee is used wherein any client on the network is also a repeater on the network so you can construct daisy-chains of clients to places well outside the range of the base station/hub that'll still be connected to the hub as long as they're connected to a client directly or indirectly that's within range of the base station/hub.)
  12. Seto Kaiba
    That's from the extra features on the Absolute Live!!!!!! Blu-ray?
  13. Seto Kaiba
    The word you're looking for there is "latency"... the delay time between an input and a response. Speed is the modulation rate of the waveform... that is to say, how quickly the transmitting micro can change the outgoing signal per unit of time on a single channel. Volume for a network is simply the speed times the number of channels. That said, I'm not sure latency is all that big of an issue c.2040 or beyond except perhaps for the farthest-flung reaches of the galaxy. Macross 7, Frontier, and Delta offer examples where people are shown to be able to access realtime or near-realtime video streams (including bidirectional video calls) for people and events that are tens, hundreds, or even thousands of light years away without cheats like fold quartz. For a conversation to flow naturally the way we see in-series, a real world video call generally needs a latency of less than 150 milliseconds. It's not quite "online pro gamer" levels of low ping but that's not much different from what you'd get browsing on a typical 4G cell phone. It depends... not every service has servers in every region, and quite often those servers are not actually located in the countries they're supposedly for. Even then, that's less about speed of delivery and more about load balancing and maximizing reliability via shortest-path-to-target. It's still perfectly possible to manipulate those applications to connect to a server other than the closest without even using a VPN. I'd expect that to be the case for a lot of consumer media, but things like communications and browsing content hosted elsewhere is still going to incur latency from the outside networks. Especially for things like bidirectional communications. I'd assume there's something very much like the border gateway protocol used to find the shortest/optimal route to the requested resource since we know they have to route the communications through various relay satellites and so on to circumvent fold faults and other problematic astrographic phenomena. That probably plays a significant role in the latency of communications the same way it does for the internet today.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... given the state of computer hardware in the Macross setting, I doubt it's anywhere close to that bad. After all, the galaxy network connecting the various New UN Government member states - be they fleets or planets - is an internet backbone that supports not just the ever-growing volume of civilian and commercial traffic but also the military's communications needs. The typical individual line in a backbone connecting networks on the internet today runs at 100Gbps, and most backbones have far more than just one line. To give everyone living in the Macross Frontier fleet basic DSL-level internet connectivity, your backbone would be running at over 36,500 Gbps to cover peak loads. Traffic across the modern global internet backbone networks is typically measured at 500 Tbps or so. Consider as well that the state of computer technology in Macross is at least several hundred years ahead of the modern day's thanks to OTM. Odds are the fidelity of things like music, movies, and the other data like blueprints for nanometer-precise engineering being sent over the network commercially is probably MUCH higher than anything we have today to support. I'd expect an emigrant fleet to have enough bandwidth in its galaxy network connection to rival the internet backbone of a far larger modern metropolis if not a small first-world nation like Japan. (Hell, considering video games today are already tens if not hundreds of gigabites in size... imagine how bloated they've become in a world where someone can walk into a store and buy a laptop with a 250GHz processor, a few hundred gigs of RAM, and a graphics card with enough shaders to render the electron orbits in a character model's hair?)
  15. Seto Kaiba
    There's no such thing as a true "top speed in space" other than speed of light. In space, the only limiting factormon your velocity is how much propellant you have and therefore how long you can sustain acceleration. The official top speed of the VF-1 is approximately Mach 3.87 at 30km. Master File adds the aforementioned ramjet and scramjet capability which is not reflected in the official spec, and also indirectly acknowledges the reality that the speed of sound decreases as your altitude increases due to the diminishing density of the atmosphere. Yeah, the boosters in the VF-4 seem to be made for less power and more endurance. The system itself is largely the same, just smaller. You and me both.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, Master File cites Mach 3 as the handoff point where the intakes for the ramjet switch from being used for engine cooling to being used as an actual ramjet engine. Ideally, no more than two engines would be active at any one time. Conceivably, no more than four at the absolute maximum. Sort of? AFAIK the official setting materials don't comment on how the VF-1's engines operate near its maximum airspeed. Variable Fighter Master File: VF-1 Valkyrie Vol.1 presents an operating scenario where the VF-1's engine switches from a kinda-sorta low bypass turbofan jet engine to a ramjet or scramjet configuration by closing the primary intake and opening a secondary intake at the knee joint and bypass inlet to allow air to flow directly into the turbine body instead of passing through the precompressor or primary compressor stages. It's said that it operates as a ramjet from Mach 2.5 to Mach 7.2, and as a scramjet above that. It switches to thermonuclear rocket propulsion at/above the atmospheric service limit where the air is too thin to support turbine/ramjet/scramjet operation. Probably, yeah.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    An interesting, but tangential, note is that the VF-4 is indicated to have kept essentially the same hybrid rocket motor design used in the VF-1's Super Pack but scaled down to fit in the VF-4's engine nacelle... including the polymer putty fuel and electric fuel heating/ignition system with liquid oxidizer.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    We don't actually know... for pretty much the reason you're asking. Unfortunately, we have no official numbers for anything except the output of the FF-2011 thermonuclear reaction turbine engines. If we go outside the bounds of official setting material, Master File offers no guidance on the in-wing thermonuclear ramjet systems but puts the compact hybrid rocket boosters at a comparatively humble 18,560kgf (182kN) apiece. In theory, there's no normal circumstance under which all three pairs of engines would be operating concurrently and in atmosphere it's supposed to be kind of an either-or where the turbines and ramjets are concerned. If we accept Master File's not-strictly-official number then the maximum possible thrust the VF-4A can produce in space flight is a hearty 65,120kgf (638.6kN). About 79.6kN more than the combined main engine thrust of the VF-11 Thunderbolt's two FF-2025 turbines or around the output of one YF-19/VF-19A main turbine.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Maybe, maybe not...
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Eh, Rome wasn't built in a day... not even the imitation version in Culture Park. I'd rather Animeigo take their time and do an exemplary job than have it ASAP.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    My group finished its watch-through of Goblin Slayer II... if you overlook the huge amount of material that was skipped, it's a reasonably faithful adaptation for better or worse. It is a bit jarring that the change in studios between seasons one and two led to such a significant visual difference. The color palette changed in season two, and the characters proportions were changed quite a bit in the case of the lizard priest and the slayer himself, so the whole thing looks slightly wrong at times.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Yes, they do. The main example - and probably the medium on which all the other options work - is the Galaxy Network. An interstellar internet linking all of the different emigrant planets and fleets together that's used for basically everything the regular internet is used for today. It's been a part of the setting since Macross Plus and Macross 7, though didn't really start being described as "the space internet" until around Macross Frontier when Shoji Kawamori started explaining the current space emigration era in Macross as being like the Age of Sail "but with internet". Xaos actually got its start as a private interstellar communications company before expanding into a conglomerate with subsidiaries in various fields like defense, entertainment, etc.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    You mean the VF-31AX? Yeah... it's actually pretty weird how low Variable Fighter Master File: VF-31AX Kairos Plus's opinion of its titular aircraft and its operators is. Normally you can count on any given Master File to talk about the VF it's covering in a highly positive light as it talks about ways the design was influential and the successes it had on the battlefield. The VF-31AX Master File presents its subject aircraft as a failure, labels its one canonical use in combat not as a win for Xaos but Heimdall tripping at the finish line due to other circumstances, and uses that as a springboard to talk about tech being developed for the 6th Generation and roadblocks faced by development and production. As I've noted previously, there are three separate explanations for the VF-31AX Kairos Plus: Battle damaged VF-31 Siegfrieds that were repaired with VF-31A Kairos parts and tweaked. VF-31A Kairos units upgraded with VF-31 Siegfried parts to replace battle damaged Siegfrieds. Battle damaged VF-31 Siegfrieds that were repaired using parts intended to convert them into a 6th Generation experimental aircraft "VF-31X". ... with the last one being Master File's new take, and the others being some kind of confusion on the part of the coverage of the movie.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Hrm... when all's said and done, I just realized I'm following 18 different titles this season. I've exhausted all the available episodes of everything except Metallic Rouge, so I've gone backwards a bit to revisit a series from years ago that I didn't get a chance to watch at the time. 2017's Saiyuki Reload BLAST is... well... more of what audiences already got in Gensoumaden Saiyuki, Saiyuki Reload, and Saiyuki Reload GUNLOCK way back in 2000, 2003, and 2004 respectively. It's got a way better translation that actually gets its historical, geographic, and religious terminology right but it's so much in the mold of previous seasons that the first three episodes are The Usual Shenanigans of the Sanzo party rolling into town and resolving local focus character A's tragic backstory before moving on, and the next three episodes are a three-part remake of the gaiden arc from the original Gensoumaden Saiyuki series from 2000 but without the violence toned down. The only thing it does to move the plot even the tiniest bit forward prior to episode 7 is have the Sanzo party finally arrive in India after 101 episodes, 7 OVAs, a feature film, and eighteen years of real world time. The animation quality's worlds better than the rather iffy animation from Reload and Reload GUNLOCK, and the translation's actually pretty good quality overall barring one typo I've seen. It must've done pretty well, since another sequel was done in 2022... Saiyuki Reload ZEROIN.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    The VF-1's GU-11[A] has had several different sets of numbers listed over the years. The official spec lists 1,200 rounds per minute as the standard rate, though sources over the years have specified various different levels. 30 rounds per minute shows up in several different iterations, along with either 500 or 800 rounds per minute, and occasionally rates as high as 1,600 or 2,000 rounds per minute.
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