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Seto Kaiba

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  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.)
  4. 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...
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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?
  9. 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.)
  10. 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.
  11. 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.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    February 2007, about a year and a half before Macross Zero.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    No chain-jerking involved... high-voltage electric motors, my friend. Ain't it just? Having basically no experience with Hebrew, it took me forever to suss out what "Shaher" was supposed to be. It seemed like a meaningless pseudoword at first. ... tough call. It might be more accurate to say "the Gnerl is powerful boosters with a cockpit haphazardly welded on". Yes. I have no idea, but given that its engines are rockets rather than turbines I would presume it could. Probably not for very long, or with much hope of a return trip, but hey... Same as above, I would assume that it could just by brute force application of the rocket engines. Again, probably not for very long.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    It would have been helpful if the show's creators hadn't compartmentalized a lot of Windermere's backstory in a manga... they're not xenophobic by nature, but they got such a raw deal under the New UN Government that it really pushed them to the breaking point. Yeah, kind of a sleazy thing to do... but they probably saw it as the only option since their planet has a relatively small population, their people don't live long, and fighting fair they had basically zero chance of victory over even the local New UN Forces thanks to their greater numbers. I'd expect that the entire Brisingr cluster is going to be VERY annoyed with Windermere IV... and at the very least, it'll probably result in a full-on trade embargo against them that will annihilate what's left of their economy. Once the NUNS gets its act together, a retaliatory strike isn't out of the question.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Ayep... but I am powerfully annoyed that the shoulder missile launchers are clearly documented in the line art yet NOT listed in the stats. Very few VFs have acknowledged program names, but there are at least a few that we know about. Plenty of internal project designations from developers though, some of which ended up adopted as out-of-sequence designations like the VF-3000. With enough torque, any car can move like all get-out... and I have the tools to create maximum torque at 0rpm. I know, right? They've gotten a lot better in recent years, but every now and then they slip and deliver something truly cringeworthy.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    I'm fairly confident that my translation is accurate, but I can revisit it later tonight. It was four launchers on the outside of each [leg/engine nacelle]. The art in Designers Note definitely leaves that in no doubt. The launchers form a semi-permanent conformal pack that is split up into two independently movable halves, each with two launcher assemblies built into it (each port is one launcher). Any other interpretation doesn't work out in terms of both consistent usage and numbers. It's uncommon for prototypes and experimental Valkyries to have names at all, the vast majority of which are 5th Generation units. Offhand, I'm pretty sure the only one outside of the 5th Generation that had a stated name was the VF-X-7 Ghost Valkyrie. The YF-19 and YF-21 sometimes get appended with their radio callsigns of "Alpha One" and "Omega One" respectively, but beyond that... nothing. I'd assume it's probably just the game conflating them, since they shared 3D models with the VF-19A and VF-22 respectively. Really? That kind of spelling error, and often much worse, crops up all the time in anime, manga, other media, apparel, and so on. The YF-27-5's name is also misspelled, the word they're trying for is "Shahar" (a Hebrew word) but they misspell it "Shaher". They also misspell "Female" as "Femail". (If I had a dollar for every time I saw "LOCK ON" written as "ROCK ON" by mistake, I'd treat myself to a very nice solid gold Mercedes-Benz.) The bottom third of the Variable Fighter Designers Note cover has a fair amount of spectacularly awful Engrish, complete with spelling errors and atrocious grammar... and that came out just a few days ago.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Looking at the concept line art for the VF-0, it almost looks like it started as an outgrowth of Kawamori's SW-XA1.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Amusingly, some interesting ground has been broken on that in the case of elephants and cats... they communicate in frequencies outside normal human hearing, but systematically enough for several researchers to make a stab at starting to systemize it. The Vajra don't seem to exist as discrete beings in an intellectual sense, so whether they communicate with themselves/each other in terms humans could readily understand is questionable. The whole hive is one giant networked intelligence.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    The one that counts, Macross Chronicle, does spell it correctly in English as "Vajra". It's certainly possible someone mangled the katakana adapting the sanskrit term. The New UN Government's first contact with the Vajra is officially down as 2040. The Zentradi may have run into them before, but... well... we know what the Vajra are like in a fight, and we know the Zentradi only really categorize things into "enemy" and "not enemy", so it's highly probable any Zentradi fleets that encountered the Vajra and were smart enough to leave them alone lumped them firmly in "not enemy" and the ones dumb enough to attack didn't live long enough to report on the experience. Fleets that pissed the Vajra off probably were written off as casualties of the search and destroy op for the Supervision Army, or maybe as fold accidents the way the New UN Government covered up the loss of the 117th Research Fleet.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    It's stated that they don't communicate at all in the conventional sense, but rather are linked into a hive mind via natural(?) zero-time fold communication facilitated by fold bacteria they've formed a symbiosis with... so, kinda. They "sing", but the singing is all fold waves with no conventional audible component, as you'd expect from a species that evolved in a hard vacuum. The most noise they seem to be capable of making is an inarticulate screeching sound. (At no point has anyone raised the subject of what the Vajra call themselves, assuming such a thing could even be translated, though the name Vajra can't have come from them as communication with them wasn't possible until 19 years after first contact thanks to Sheryl Nome and Ranka Lee.)
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Nothing whatsoever. It's almost exclusively an art book, the few pieces of text therein that aren't the handwritten notes the designer included on the original animation model sheets that the book reprinted are image identification captions the publisher put in that any Macross fan would almost certainly find to be entirely unnecessary. It also skips a lot of stuff, like the Macross II continuity VFs, the Varauta Army VFs and their NUNS design basis, the Spiritia Dreaming VF-14, the Variable Glaug, Neo Glaug, Feios Valkyrie, all the recently-canonized Advanced Valkyrie designs, everything from Macross 30 except the YF-30, etc. It's not a bad book, but it could've been a LOT better with relatively little work. I'll say this though, it does contain a good clean version of the YF-24 Evolution multiview graphic from the Macross Frontier series... and at a size larger than "postage stamp" too!
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Nope, the only material of interest for the VF-27 in Macross Variable Fighter Designers Note was the larger and cleaner reprinting of some of the (colored pencil?) early concepts for the VF-27 that were color inserts in the biography Shoji Kawamori: the View Point of Visionary Creator. There's some of the VF-25 concepts from the same period included as well, with some of the Super/Armored Pack drafts that look straight out of a Rockman X game.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    My copy rolled in today, a day earlier than FedEx promised, and after a quick skim I'm pretty darn pleased. Mr March will be over the moon about having some proper line art to work with for the YF-29 and Sv-262, I'm sure.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Just picked up my copy of Macross Variable Fighter Designers Note over lunch, and it seems we're going to be able to glean a not-insignificant amount of usable art and some new information from this book after all. One thing I did note is that my earlier statement about the YF-29's shoulder missile launchers being a toy feature is incorrect, they're represented in the line art but not mentioned in the official specs. This would mean the YF-29 has about 130 missiles instead of 100.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Ground base? The Zentradi Army is a fleet-based military organization for which the closest thing to a ground base is a space station large enough to more than justify hammy proclamations like "that's no moon, it's a space station"... an environment in which gravity is not a constant. If I had to guess, I'd assume VTOL. The Gnerl aerospace dogfighter pod has a number of massive high-powered verniers assisting its thrust-vectoring paddles in maneuvering, and one of them is on the underside directly below center mass. Its position is very nearly ideal for VTOL use.
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