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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    They'll probably just reuse the same shots that were used in the Macross Delta series... Grammier's file photo, and maybe Keith and Roid's wrecked Svard during the destruction of Carlyle.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Every subsequent Macross story tends to sneak a few more details into the background timeline as it goes... maybe the next series'll throw in something about the federal NUNS showing up tardy to the party and shelling Windermere IV into a cinder? Either way, I'd argue the Kingdom of the Wind basically punished themselves if you look at it. They sent a good chunk of their youth away to fight a war under false pretenses, and an awful lot of 'em ended up dead at the hands of the local NUNS during the big counterattack. Their royal family has only one remaining heir left and he's a bedridden invalid due to his own father's machinations, with the illegitimate prince having been reduced to nothing heavier than a cough in the destruction of a Protoculture shrine on Ragna... so their autocratic government's about to collapse. Their economy will probably collapse first, since Windermere IV's economy was built on agriculture and their main export of foodstuffs is in a zero-demand situation thanks to being tainted with compounds that are the cause of Var syndrome. Don't get me wrong, Macross Delta had basically no closure to the actual conflict in the series... but it's a safe bet Windermere IV is about to have a VERY bad time as a result of their bad choices, just offscreen. Another five, ten years of time in-universe and the lack of technical aid from the Epsilon Foundation will probably leave the Aerial Knights unable to interrupt a small tea party in the Brisingr Alliance, let alone actually cause trouble.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    The reentry pod does, and some of the shuttles probably do, but other than that... nope. They're staying up on raw thrust alone, which is fine because mostly they're designed for use in space.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Assuming that was the intention to begin with. Most of us assumed that the show was going to do some heavy referencing of Ring of the Nibelung, but they never did even once. Kind of a waste of an opportunity, IMO. It wasn't even the show the first three episodes promised... given how little transformation was used, you could mistake it for a crossover between Ace Combat and Pretty Cure fairly easily. Maybe even Ace Combat 3, since the Drakens don't use normal canopies.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Looks like it's all larger reprints of previously-released art from the series artbooks, liner notes, and the last Tenjin artbook. Not unwelcome, but still... would it kill them to give us some actual specs for the Svard? Or maybe some workable lineart? That's not the VF-14 Vampire, that's the VF-X-10 design from Kawamori's 1985 non-Macross design series Advanced Valkyrie. The story of the Advanced Valkyrie series is, for all practical intents and purposes, the first draft for the Macross Plus OVA and the VF-X-10 filled the role in the story eventually occupied by the YF-19. Bandai bailed on the project before it went past the design phase, and because Kawamori recycles unused designs and concepts until they finally DO get used it was further refined for use in the Air Cavalry Chronicles concept series. Air Cavalry Chronicles was the earliest incarnation of The Vision of Escaflowne before it became a fantasy series, and the polished VF-X-10 design was a fighter the nation of Fanelia (the homeland of Escaflowne's Van Fanel) used: the III-C Baron Rouge. When that fell through after Air Cavalry Chronicles changed genres and became a fantasy series, the designs Kawamori'd made in Air Cavalry Chronicles and Advanced Valkyrie got pillaged for use all of the Macross titles that came out in the 90's and early 2000s. The ZaiBach Empire's fighters became the Varauta Army's VFs in Macross 7 and the VF-14 in Macross M3, the Fanelian III-C Baron Rouge and Asturian A-9B Invader became Macross M3's VF-9 Cutlass and Macross VF-X2's VA-3 Invader, etc. The aforementioned Sv-154 Svard is also a reused Air Cavalry Chronicles design... it's a very slightly modified Fanelian LV-7 Excalibur. A lot of the other unused Air Cavalry Chronicles and Advanced Valkyrie designs were adopted into the Macross universe by Macross Chronicle.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    I dunno, I'd call Qasim's death an incident of friendly fire... his rune was supercharged by the Song of the Wind to the extent that exerting himself caused him to age super-rapidly and die in the cockpit. It nearly killed Hermann too. Basically, Heinz was the actual killer of Qasim. Keith and Roid, well, that's definitely an attempt at atonement equals death by Keith.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    's actually a hardware item that was introduced on a production basis in the 4th Generation VFs, esp. the VF-19 Excalibur, which had it in all three modes rather than just in battroid. When it was new (on the YF-19) there were notations about sensor systems scattered all around the airframe that work together to put together the composite image for the wraparound imaging monitor. The big sensor clusters are visible even on the toys, as the colored insets on the sides or front of the nose, etc. The YF-24 derivatives tend to have a bunch clustered around the canopy, while the VF-19 has ones that are a good 3-4 meters long on the sides of the nose. The effect is achieved, AFAIK, by a matrix of optical, infrared, and laser-based camera systems. I think the design with the engines in the lower legs was the easier one in terms of transformation complexity. The YF-21/VF-22 approach has some significant merits, like rendering the limbs disposable, but it also has some significant design issues like placement of a thrust source for VTOL in GERWALK mode... which had to be achieved by using bypass air from the main turbines, adding complexity to the engines and introducing some balancing issues with the lift source being positioned at the rear of the aircraft in GERWALK mode.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Initially, I was certain Master Hermann Kroos was going to bite it simply because he seemed to be Windermere's own riff on Roy Focker... the beloved mentor figure that even psychotic blood knight Bogue Con-Vaart seemed to respect unconditionally. After Hermann had survived the season finale of Delta's first season I knew he was going to go all the way. There was just no way he was going to survive all that and get killed off in some piddling small conflict in the second half. That said, they clearly weren't above telegraphing imminent character death. Messer Ihlefeld might as well have been living on an all-pineapple diet, it was painfully obvious he was going to die and die BADLY by the end of episode 3. Macross is not a series that has ever been kind to characters who insist that violence is the only answer, or those who know it isn't but got it wrong on purpose. Messer is basically Man-Nora, the ace who lives to fight because a prior traumatic injury took all the joy out of life. Qasim Eber-hardt was also an incredibly obvious telegraphed death. Like Hermann, he doesn't appear in ANY of the show's promo material... but he had even less dialog than Hermann did, he was doubled up with Hermann in the status of the team stoic1, and he was the only one of the lot who wasn't drawn as either a bishounen or a ruggedly handsome older man. I'm flat amazed they didn't kill him off earlier, but the minute he started talking about his family and his desire to return home, he raised the standard "X days until retirement" death flag and promptly died. King Grammier was also a cert for getting killed for most of the same reasons as Qasim... he doesn't fit into the standard list of archetypes, he's not in the promotional material, and he's a literally crusty old man. 1. Ouran High School Host Club provides, as an invoked trope on numerous occasions, a standard list of what you might call shoujo manga or BL romance character archetypes... albeit played for comedy in that case. If you look back at Macross Delta with that list in mind it becomes painfully obvious who was going to die in the course of the series AND who the real mastermind of the Aerial Knights was. Keith Aero Windermere was The Prince, the young man of high social standing who is ruled by his emotions and dogged by a past familial trauma (almost invariably involving being the child of a mistress) and is easily swayed or manipulated by playing on his emotions. Chancellor Roid Brehm was obviously The Cool character, a wicked cultured master manipulator with ominous glasses who plays the role of the voice of reason and calm foil to The Prince while being the real shot-caller in the Prince's group and secretly rather vindictive. The twins, Theo and Xao Jussila, are The Twins; the identical twin boys who are so close that they dress and act identically and even finish each other's sentences who appeal to the girls who want to be fought over by two men or prefer two very close men who have "more than just a warm friendship". Hermann Kroos and Kassim Eber-hardt double up in the role as The Stoic, the older character who keeps his emotions under rigid control, is terrifyingly strong and good in a hand-to-hand fight compared to the other characters, and generally doesn't speak much. Bogue Con-vaart is The Natural, the new kid who has incredible natural talent and good looks, but who harbors a chip on his shoulder due to a family-related problem that drives him to devote his life to one goal and makes it difficult for him to form relationships, leading him to bond with The Prince over similar traumas. Prince Heinz Neirich Windermere is the Lol/Shota, the one who looks like (or is) a younger kid and whose innocence and naivete are meant to invoke maternally protective feelings from the female audience. Pretty obvious, once you look at it, that the redundancy and the one character who doesn't fit (Qasim and Grammier) were going to be the ones to snuff it.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, the YF-25 Prophecy's appearances have mainly been in supplementary material like light novels and video games. Its only animated appearances have been as background filler in the Macross Frontier movies. Chelsea Scarlett, Angers 672, and Reon Sakaki are the only known pilots thus far, the former two being from Macross the Ride and the latter from Macross 30... though IIRC Macross 30 offered both the Macross Frontier movie orange, blue, and white scheme and Reon Sakaki's SMS Sephira branch seafoam and white.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    There is, in Macross the Ride. The antagonist-in-chief Naresuan adopted a human name upon assimilating into Earth society after the First Space War because he was that enthusiastic about Earth's culture and was terribly proud of his new home and life. He's kind of the anti-Quamzin in a way, he remained so psyched about Earth that he bitterly opposed the decentralization of the government and military and ended up leading an Earth-supremacist militant group. Richard Bilra seems to have done something similar, and he was also originally a veteran of Vrlitwhai's branch fleet, though instead of staying in the armed forces he went into business and became an interstellar shipping mogul. Chelsea and Aisha aren't clones, like Klan Klan they're natural-born full-blood Zentradi who were raised in humanity's interstellar society. Their parents may have adopted more human names to fit in better with their new neighbors, or they may just have been following Milia's lead on that front considering she gave her children human names (Komilia insists on going by her middle name "Maria" in her one starring appearance).
  11. Seto Kaiba
    As far as we know, Zentradi (and Meltrandi) age at roughly the same rate as a standard human being... with similar life expectency barring violent death in combat. For the most part, the soldiers we see are in their teens, twenties, and thirties. Vrlitwhai was, IIRC, something like 38 years old at the start of SDF Macross. Richard Bilra is a fairly elderly Zentradi in 2059, and he's known to have served in Vrlitwhai's fleet during the end of the First Space War in 2010. Some of his contemporaries, like Timothy Daldhanton and Naresuan, have maybe shown some slightly slower aging in that they still seem to be physically fit enough to fight at ace level even in their 50's and 60's. The only Zentradi (and I have to use the term loosely here) that has ever indicated an age greater than that of a standard human or similar is the Gol Boddole Zer biocomputer in Macross: Do You Remember Love?. Not strictly Zentradi, being a part of his fortress's systems, but he was noted to be over 120,000 years old.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Well, several reasons actually. The first is that the Macross Chronicle mechanic sheet for the YF-25 Prophecy lists it as "attached to SMS", and the No.3 prototype was seen in the SMS Macross Quarter's hangar in Macross Frontier the Movie: The Wings of Goodbye. Macross the Ride also shows the No.1 prototype being used by Chelsea Scarlett of SMS's Apollo Platoon after it'd already been extensively tested by the NUNS, incl. Chelsea's mentor Angers 672. The reason they have NUNS markings is that they were aircraft built for, and largely operated by, the Macross Frontier fleet's New UN Spacy. SMS was permitted to pilot them, but they belonged to the NUNS.... unlike the trial production VF-25s, which were on loan to the SMS branch. It appeared as a toy in that public appearance Ranka did to promote the Dainamu Chogokin toys in the first Macross Frontier film. Y'all got VF-X-4'd. By all accounts, they test-flew the YF-25s in 2057... but the production VF-25 wasn't ready for adoption by the fleet's NUNS until some point in the early 2060s. Macross the Ride also puts a hundred and fifty or so VF-19EFs in their arsenal.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Because the Zentradi are a mass-produced clone army that was scattered across much of the galaxy, while the Protoculture were mostly concentrated on inhabitable planets inside their Stellar Republic's sphere of influence. Being the living embodiment of "we have reserves", even though the Zentradi were decimated too in no small measure because of their programming to not interfere with the Protoculture (even if said Protoculture were spiritia-drained and brainwashed) they had the massive factory satellites churning out endless quantities of men and materiel to feed their war machine. The Protoculture's reproduction was not anywhere near as prolific, so their population began to diminish due to the mauling they'd taken while their Zentradi soldiers continued to clone at a rate that'd make bunnies envious. So, despite the fact that something like 40% of their fleets were obliterated, the Zentradi bounced back with vigor and without the Protoculture around to hold the leash while they blindly followed their last orders to exterminate the Supervision Army.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, Shinsei... hands down. General Galaxy has only managed to win the competition to select the next main fighter ONCE with the VF-171. Other than that, they've done mainly niche and special forces designs. Every other main fighter has been a Shinsei program... either by the companies that merged to form it (like the VF-1 and VF-4), by Shinsei itself (VF-11, VF-19, VF-24), or Shinsei partnerships with local companies (VF-25, VF-31). The same with many influential prototypes like the YF-29 and YF-30.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Meh, anyone could do what I do with a little patience and a fair amount of practice. I always find myself a little bit in awe of the artistic skill that goes into cleaning up scans and colorizing the lineart for the site. My only artistic skills are in music, so seeing him turn scans of grainy transfers or poorly copied line art in artbooks and turning them into all the glorious color art is a bit like watching a magic show for me. (He's threatened to try teaching me on a few occasions, and I've told him if he did I'd feel so bad for wasting his time I'd have to buy him a Creative Cloud membership.) Super Dimension Con was definitely the straw that broke the camel's back this year... after finally unpacking the last of my purchases and shelving them, I'm out of shelf space in my study again and perilously close to running out of space on the DVD rack after buying another copy of Macross Plus (the American OVA release this time) that Les Claypool III was right there to autograph for me. Sturdier bookshelves might not be goin' the wrong way either... do your bookshelves bend in the middle under the weight of Chronicle? I've been using shelves from Sauder Woodcrafts, and I swear they're one fly's cough from snapping in half under the weight. I'm right there with you on that fight between wanting to cover new titles and wanting to go back and improve old stuff. I've got a bunch of books I only did bits and pieces of I'd love to go back and finish, but I cringe every time Mr March or someone else asks me to check any of my notes from Chronicle 1st Ed. because they're a handwritten mess of non-sequiturs and crossed-out sentence fragments that looks like it was written by someone chasing an ink-soaked chicken across a legal pad. Hm. If you work backward from the thrust-to-weight ratio and assume that the VF-24's ratio and overall acceleration is similar to the YF-29's but has a mass similar to the fighters directly derived from it (e.g. VF-25, YF-30, VF-31) it's looking like about 2,535kN per engine... about 20% more output than the YF-29's main engines. Just in case you want to check my math: Twelve. They go up to twelve. The YF-29 needed four Stage II engines and a fold wave system to do that... Because I was a smartarse in school and didn't take a practical language (classical Latin, woo!), my education in Japanese started informally while I was still at the university. At the time, I was dating a gal from Nagano who started teaching me the rudiments of written and spoken Japanese as a twofold effort to get me familiar enough with the language that she could share some of her favorite books with me while I helped her build proficiency in English, and to prepare me to eventually meet her parents. The first part went pretty well, all told... within about two years I was able to at least muddle through light novels with frequent recourse to a pocket dictionary. The second part was an unqualified disaster, as her parents disapproved to say the least (and were rather rude about it until they realized I could understand what they were saying). The whole relationship kind of self-destructed a while after that, but I kept going with learning the language because it fit together neatly with my other hobbies. The many inconsistencies and errors in the Palladium Books Macross II RPG had bugged me for some time, and since I had the skillset to start unpicking the puzzle I figured "why not?". In hindsight, the words "slippery slope" seem awfully apt to describe what happened next. But what really fueled my practice was the discovery that my university had an anime and manga club that was willing to pay cold, hard cash for translations of manga and doujinshi on a per-page basis. Once I realized that most of what they wanted was terrifying porn, cliched romances, and what my ex would've called "shonen battle sh*t", none of which was particularly dialog-heavy, I discovered that I could quickly rake in enough cash to cover my textbook expenses in the first three or so weeks of the semester and the rest went straight into my pocket and fueled my collecting of Macross stuff. I was able to keep on that particular gravy train clear through to the end of graduate school, though it ultimately meant my proficiency is higher for written than spoken and my vocabulary's super lopsided. I could probably hold my own in a seminar on nuclear physics and make a total arse of myself in a discussion of gardening. All told, after I started learning it became a self-fueling hobby... but I've never taken a formal class in the language, unless you count the self-teaching tools like Rosetta Stone I'm using to polish my conversation Japanese and re-balance my vocabulary. (IMO, as languages go it's less of a pain in the arse than most other languages I've studied, including Latin and German.) Based on what's been said in Great Mechanics DX, Macross Chronicle, and a few magazine interviews and so on, the New UN Government and Earth/Federal New UN Forces had withheld a number of technological advances from the YF-24 specification they shared to the emigrant fleets and colonized planets. Earth is essentially THE hotspot for new tech development, with General Galaxy's independent spacegoing laboratory Macross Galaxy as a distant second. Earth's got something like twenty factory satellites to play with too.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    So... an unnatural disaster to ward off the consequences of a natural disaster? Substantially more entertainment value than reading Titan's Robotech comic or watching the show.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    He does a hell of a job. I just vomit up torrents of factoids and continuity data on command, which he reorganizes and polishes into those beautifully succinct summaries while decorating them with a bunch of beautifully cleaned-up and colorized art pieces. It's had a few helpers like me in the past, like the bloke who used to run the UN Spacy Quartermasters Database site (wasn't that briscojr84?). I don't have anything to do with the FB page, that's all Mr March. Better that way, IMO, otherwise it'd be less "hey look at the cool art" and more like my replies in this thread. Brevity is the soul of wit, I suppose. But yeah, day jobs suck that way. Mr March kind of comes at it in surges of activity, then burns out on Macross for a bit and pursues other interests before coming back to it. I sort of maintain a low-level plod of activity on translations and so on because it's good practice and because it's very effective as diversions from my work go. I do occasionally find myself diverted into other shows if someone presents me with an interesting question, like the guys on the MAHQ forums asking after development history data from an old Zeta Gundam side story Tyrant Sword of Neofalia. I'm really, REALLY behind on translations at this point though. Four whole articles went to print on the site without data because I haven't finished them yet, and the pile of magazine articles, books, liner notes, etc. waiting to have their contents appraised and translated is now well over a meter in height... over two if you count the Gundam and Ghost in the Shell books I bought in the dealer hall at Super Dimension Convention last month. I'm still barely twenty pages into the Macross Journal Extra: VF-1 Valkyrie Special Edition "Sky Angels" book if you don't count the jumping around for a variety of interesting tidbits. Yeah, they just seem to come outta nowhere, don't they? From the display in the scene right after they fold away, it looks like they were launched from low orbit... maybe a defense station like the ones we see over Earth (and which Isamu shoots down to use as cover for his reentry)?
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Fairly certain there's no consensus between East and West on the level of obnoxiousness exhibited by the Aerial Knights... but the point may stand anyway, on the grounds that characters with those particular traits that western audiences find annoying do seldom get their comeuppance due to the Japanese audience feeling sorry for them. From what I've read, Bogue seems to have been The Scrappy until the show started hinting he had a thing for Reina Prowler... which the omakes mercilessly took advantage of for comedy's sake and made him a fountain of suspiciously specific denials. After The Black-Winged White Knight, he's a more sympathetic character in general even among western fans, since it became clear the reason he's such a blood knight circa the events of Macross Delta is because the universe seemingly went WAY out of its way to ruin his life once Windermere went to war with the New UN Gov't in 2060... he's informed that huge swaths of his family perished in the destruction of cities TWICE in that one manga, leaving him as practically the only member of his noble family left. (But in Japan, a fair number of them seemed to get a pass simply because they're pretty... and all Keith's sins seem to have been forgotten in the wake of all the ho yay from the Keith x Messer and Keith x Roid shippers.)
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Yes, it is. I believe it's from the last two episodes, the CF VF-25A showed up in several earlier episodes, including episode 16. EDIT: I had the wrong episode number.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    It's Mr March's project, I just translate and hunt sources and keep the server ticking over.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Each port is a separate missile launcher... there are four ports on each leg, and two on each outboard engine pod, twelve launchers in total. The shoulder-mounted missiles seem to be a feature unique to the toy. ("Beam gun pod" pretty much is the technical name for it... or "heavy quantum beam gun pod" if you want to be specific abou the technology used.) The ones on the forearms are confirmed to be verniers, of a type identical to those used on the VF-25 Super Pack. The hip gunmounts carried over from the VF-25 and VF-27 are inexplicably not mentioned, even though a gun barrel is visible on the CG model. The YF-29 is unique among VFs in that its monitor turret-mounted guns are solid ammo weapons firing MDE rounds rather than beam weapons. Not really... the Tornado Pack was a method of field testing some of the design choices that went into the YF-29, including the beam turret and the flight dynamics with the rotating engine pods, but the final version that went into the YF-29 was much more powerful and deadly, given its more powerful engines and the turret being a MDE beam cannon on the YF-29. Working on that, but we do have day jobs y'know... I am way the hell behind on my translations. Well, yeah... same as every other Macross site worth a damn, including the Macross Compendium, Macross Wiki, Sketchley's Macross Gateway, etc. That's how research works when you're compiling a reference site from official materials. The same is also generally true for Macross Chronicle, the franchise's official encyclopedia, which I can attest is primarily just an effective condensation of material from previous Macross publications... albeit periodically garnished with new information and clarifications. They did miss some truly obscure stuff I have in my collection, but you can't win 'em all. ... you do realize that's me you're taking shots at, right? I've only done a few translations on a professional basis (for the SAE), but outside of the guys who worked on Macross Delta's BD official subs all of the Macross translators here are fans and volunteers doing it for the love of the game. We may not be pros, but we get the job done. The romanizations used are, wherever possible, the official romanizations provided in English in various official publications. There are a few that need to be updated based on new documents, but like any living document the site exists in a process of continuous revision.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    As far as we know, the improvised (VF-1D) and purpose-built (VT-1) training variants of the VF-1 were only deployed as part of separate training squadrons. The VF-1D had extra factors that kept it from seeing frontline combat service despite being equipped with live weaponry. Namely, one of the compromises made to accommodate a second seat in the cockpit block was a reduction in survival equipment including the life support systems intended for operation in space. (Variable Fighter Master File cites this, but picked it up from earlier official works like B-Club 79's VF History piece.) Nah, the VF-19's first mass production type never had a command variant that we know of. The VF-19C was a relatively minor [update to/replacement for] the VF-19A with some safety and control improvements, like the relationship between the VF-11A and VF-11B, or Master File's take on the VF-25A and its original VF-25C. Yep! Outside of the Special Forces units, that was a pretty rare thing. We can't speak to the organization of NUNS VF-25 squadrons in the Macross Frontier fleet, but we never saw any CF VF-25s except the VF-25A, and there were several different platoons worth of fighters around. A lot of Japan's SF military fiction draws on World War II-era dynamics... Gundam so much so that I've occasionally felt like the Universal Century was almost a "what if we sided with the Allies instead of the Axis" thing. The unlisted but visibly present beam machine guns on the hip mounts may not be.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Arguably just three... the VF-1A, VF-1J, and VF-1S. The VF-1D variant was a rushed conversion of the VF-1A to make a training aircraft1, and the design was retired and replaced by a proper training model (the VT-1) before the First Space War even ended2. Even the VF-1J's placement on the list is tenuous, since they were only produced in low volumes as a potential alternative to the VF-1A in the early blocks that never really "took off"3. Some works like the DYRL? writeup and Macross II's continuity materials4 suggest that most ended up being used as Armored Pack units semi-permanently while the VF-1A and VF-1S did the heavy lifting. There were some attempts to consolidate it down to one variant, like the VF-1B (Half-S), eventually succeeding with the VF-1X. Let's lop the -E off that, since sources can't even agree if the -E is a first or second production type. When all's said and done, the VF-19 ended up with at least seven variants operating concurrently5, though no more than two at a time in any known location... inevitably in "grunt" and "command" versions. Some forces were more reasonable, though, like Macross Galaxy's Pegasus Squadron, which was made up entirely of VF-19C/MG21s. To be fair, those at least had the good grace to all be design-optimized for different operational roles. Ech... not quite. The VF-4 had several variants that were in service simultaneously, though most were optimized for particular operational theaters similarly to the F-356. (Its known official variant list includes Air Force and Navy versions in addition to the all-regime/Spacy version.) The VF-11's a better example of that, as is the VF-171, once you subtract out regional variations. There are two potential real-world motivations I can think of. One was an old wartime practical concern of giving the most experienced pilots the newest and best possible hardware that they'd have been best suited to making full use of. The other would be the distinctly Japanese habit of having the larger flight platoon instead of pairs of aircraft, with the leader and most experienced pilot being expected to mentor and, to a certain extent, protect the less experienced pilots in his charge. (It was also not unheard-of for experienced pilots to customize their aircraft back in the bad old days of the world wars, though customizations often focused more on defense rather than offense, such as the Soviets removing the wing guns from their lend-lease P-39s or the Japanese up-armoring the cockpits of their A6M Zeros to ensure that experienced pilots made it back alive. Of course, the most storied example would be Baron Manfred von Richthofen's ace custom Albatross D.III with structural reinforcements.) Considering practically every one of its weapons is MDE? Yes.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Well, there's a fair amount of variation in size between models of micro-missile... but as a helpful metric to envision how small they generally are, the Bifors HMM-1 micro-missile that was used on the VF-1 Valkyrie's under-wing missile pods and Super Pack is about a meter long and ~20cm in diameter. No VF actually carries that many micro-missiles internally though. The YF-29 Durandal is currently the VF with the largest official, explicitly-stated internal micro-missile capacity. Between its twelve Bifors MBL-02S micro-missile launchers, it has a whopping 100 micro-missiles. Mind you, I'd quite like to argue that only the four launchers on the outboard engine pods count as "internal" ones, in light of the fact that the eight launchers on the engine nacelles are essentially mounted in a semi-permanent conformal weapons pack rather than actually being internal to the nacelle. The YF-30 Chronos is believed to have something like 108 micro-missiles in its ordnance container, but same deal... that's not really internal to the aircraft anymore. Based on the explicit payload statements we have, an internal micro-missile launcher typically has somewhere between 3 and 6 missiles. The external (FAST Pack) mounted ones... now all bets are off, since those have become enormous and the option pack portion itself is modular, meaning they can potentially adjust the interior of the pack to increase fuel capacity at the expense of missiles or vice versa. For my money, it's not hard to believe that they could conceivably fit upwards of 90 micro-missiles in each option pack on the VF-25's NP-FAD-23 boosters. Sort of? It's not unheard-of for there to be some fairly radical differences in hardware between two prototypes in a development environment (e.g. the YF-19's changes in engines and the avionics AI software), but this doesn't seem to be quite the same thing. The YF-29s in Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy are treated like character customs in Macross Chronicle, the Macross 30 visual guide, etc. Since even Alto's is technically a deviation from YF-29 base spec due to its rushed construction borrowing VF-25 parts, I would be inclined to classify the lot of them as YF-29改 (Custom) instead, similar to how the official coverage has them as "____'s aircraft".
  25. Seto Kaiba
    CDJapan is occasionally useful for that purpose. I've gone through them to get several DX Chogokins and other items.
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