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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    They're still around, the fleet just upgraded to a more powerful round intended specifically to counter the higher-powered energy conversion armor of the Vajra starting in ep7 of Macross Frontier. They were later replaced with MDE shells, because the Vajra adapted.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Everything else in the comic is borrowed from somewhere else, why not that too?
  3. Seto Kaiba
    The New UN Spacy Air Force also puts in an appearance in Macross the Ride.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Yes, it's just that the Space Forces get all the attention. (Also, both Frontier and Delta had episodes devoted to the New UN Spacy Marine Corps. If you look on Isamu's service record, you'll find he's also served with the (New) UN Navy.)
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Granted, a rotary gunpod will eventually run out of ammo... but most of them carry enough ammunition to dust several dozen battle pods or battle suits. The reason rotary gunpods stuck around as long as they did is that they have the advantage of anti-energy conversion armor shells that negate the enhanced defensive ability of energy conversion armor. A beam weapon used against a VF has to contend with an anti-beam ablative armor coating AND the strength of the energy conversion armor. The rotary gunpod using HEACA shells is only working against a fraction of that armor strength and the high-explosive component of the shells detonates inside the target, which causes more damage. It says a lot about the incredible stopping power of the rotary gunpods that the thing that eventually replaced them was a compact dimensional beam weapon.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Maybe. We dunno. Macross Delta's mecha are poorly documented on a level seldom seen in Macross as a whole. Hopefully that will change, but I fear it will not.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    "Monitor turret"... though for simplicity, often just "the head".
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Yup... though that's far from the most extreme deviation that the 2nd Edition Robotech RPG contains, and that particular factoid happens to be supported by Macross Chronicle's own Mechanic Sheet for the MBR-04-Mk.VI Tomahawk (Mechanic SDF:M UN 08A). Harmony Gold seems to have generally lost interest in the Robotech RPG's 2nd Edition around the time they ran out of material that was actually based on the show (c. the publication of the New Generation sourcebook) and their management officially abandoned the pretense that they were still pursuing a Shadow Chronicles sequel by abandoning all the trademark filings they'd made for the sequel's title. Without serious oversight, Palladium Books promptly lost the plot completely and delivered a monster manual, followed by a book that might as well be titled "Robotech 1 7/8ths: Not The Sentinels, Honest" full of designs nicked from the MOSPEADA portion of the Imai Files. Udon's feeble squirt of an artbook is basically another installment in that franchise's Macross-centric "let's get every buck out of it that we can before we lose the rights" death spiral.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    In my experience, there's also shades of "they're trigger-happy loons with dubious ethics and no discipline" in there too... often with references to the many misdeeds of Blackwater.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    My money is on 40mm, since that was the emerging standard shortly before Project Super Nova kicked off. Mind you, the difference there isn't necessarily just in caliber. Muzzle velocity may also play into the extreme difference in firepower between the GU-15 and GU-17. Nothing on the crew, just basic details of the ship's size, armament, and mecha complement. ARMD-L is noted to have a capacity of 80 mecha, and presumably a maintenance crew appropriately large enough for that. Crew sizes are one of the details that are almost never brought up, you usually have to either guesstimate or, as in the case of the Zentradi, work backwards from a larger figure like a total fleet population as I did when I discovered the average Zentradi ship's crew should be just a hair over 1,500 people.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Looks like we were bang on the money when we predicted this was gonna be Harmony Gold's cheap knockoff of Macross: Perfect Memory. The tech pages are pretty just art from Perfect Memory with text copy-pasted from the Robotech.com Infopedia, same as The Art of Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles with lots of screenshots and reprinted text. Not in this case, no... but such snubs have been delivered in the past. When Harmony Gold launched the Robotech official website back in '01 and decided to build an official encyclopedia into the site, the lion's share of the information was drawn from Japanese publications for the original shows rather than from any Robotech publication. The main exception being Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross, which had no detailed tech specs and only minimal reference art, leaving them to swing for the fences armed with only the minimal detail from a few pamphlets and This is Animation 10: Southern Cross when writing their Masters Saga material. They copied so energetically and so blindly from Japanese sources that they accidentally copied things that don't even appear in their Robotech adaptation, like the VF-1 Valkyrie's UUM-7 micro-missile pods from DYRL?. (Most Macross sites don't differentiate between equipment for the TV and movie VF-1s.) The snub came about five years later in 2006, when Palladium Books reacquired the Robotech license from Harmony Gold and the Harmony Gold representatives did a podcast interview about the new license and forthcoming "2nd Edition" RPG. They didn't pull any punches there, and basically dismissed the old RPG as a poorly-researched, low-quality mess that was Robotech in name only and would never have gotten approved for publication had management not been asleep at the switch. That was their lead-in to grandiose promises that the new edition would be much more accurate, because Harmony Gold would be exercising an editorial approval over everything before it went to print to ensure Palladium didn't cock it up again.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    The GU-11[A] and SSL-9B are the only gunpods with officially-stated magazine capacities. The GU-11 held 180-200 rounds, and the SSL-9B has two magazines, one with 13 rounds and a drum with 35. The only other one I know of that has a firm number put on it is Master File's number for the VF-19's GU-15[A] gunpod, which held 150 rounds per magazine, for 450 rounds total with the two spare magazines under the shield. Beam gunpods naturally don't count, because the ones we know of do not have a fixed power supply... rather, they're powered off the fighter's reactor and will work as long as they receive sufficient power to fire. RPG fan writers generally assume that ~150 rounds is typical for a gunpod magazine.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    To be honest, they're infuriatingly vague on that score... it's only mentioned that Hávamál is a VF-X unit equipped with many state-of-the-art variable fighters, and that their aces are issued the YF-29B Percival. The novelization of Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy skips most of the little encounters with Hávamál from the game (the ones that weren't really an actual part of the story) in favor of focusing on the various lackeys Hávamál uses to fight their battles by proxy... like how they basically blackmailed Shin, D.D., and Nora into helping them, secretly backed the bandits under self-proclaimed "Bandit King" Ganess Modora to use them as a proxy to attack Uroboros' New UN Forces and privateers, and used Sharon for the purpose of mind-controlling the crew of the SMS Macross Quarter and aces from Macross 7. As in the game, the only Hávamál pilot who figures prominently in the story is Rod... and only at the beginning and the end, the fight where Reon has a YF-25 and the one after he gets the YF-30.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Whether or not that's actually canon is ambiguous, though... the only VF-27 user from the game that got confirmed in Macross Chronicle was Mei Leeron. I'd have to check the novelization to see if they depict Havamal using VF-27s there too (I don't recall them doing so).
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Government users? None that we know of. Several VF-27s are known to have ended up in the hands of private users, though. In Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy, Uroboros Hunters Guild administrator Mei Leeron has a VF-27γ Lucifer as her personal VF in 2060. In Macross E, Ivan Polyvanov (AKA Ivan Tsari) of Selgar Heavy Industries also has a private VF-27γ that he uses in opposition of Xaos's Tactical Sound Unit Thrones in 2062.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    It did seem a bit out of place, given that he'd previously sentenced Hayate, Mirage, and co. to a public execution without so much as batting an eye.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    The court records, mainly. Particularly the various attempts FASA made to get the case dismissed, all of which failed miserably. renegadeleader1 already posted a link to some of them. What the original settlement from that 1996 lawsuit in the Illinois Northern District Court contained came out thanks to Catalyst getting slapped down by HG in the early 2000s, they revealed in a news post on their official site that the original binding settlement from that case prohibited the game from using any secondhand mechanical designs... even ones to which Harmony Gold did not have the rights, like Orguss and Crusher Joe. That settlement has formed the basis for every slapdown since. This is particularly well-trodden legal ground... so much so that it's frankly amazing Catalyst and its partners keep trying to illegally base designs on The Unseen when they ALWAYS get slapped down for it. Well, it certainly answers one nagging question... how Titan Comics was going to wrap the story up at the end of the "Macross Saga" without continuing into the Masters Saga or New Generation. It's not bad, as cop-outs go. Can't very well have the Masters Saga or New Generation if the SDF-1's a origin-less object resulting from an ontological paradox in which the same ship is locked in a loop of crashing with its crew dead, being rebuilt, and relaunched in the same repeating 15 year timespan. Rick Hunter and all the other characters on whom the background events hinge would be dead, so those events would never happen, the protoculture matrix disappears instead of being breached by the ship's destruction, so the Robotech Masters never detect it and neither do the Invid. It's not an original concept for Robotech... a very similar idea was used in the Robotech novels, but in that version it was the SDF-3 that was launched back in time by a fold accident, ending up in the distant past and becoming the origin of the Robotech Masters.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    The blade antenna on the FFR-31MR/D Super Sylph from Battle Fairy Yukikaze is, IIRC, as far as I can find from the few Yukikaze publications I have, either the Super Sylph's "frozen eye" spatial passive radar or a multiband electronic support measures antenna cluster. The actual TARPS pod (camera array) sits farther forward. Ventral blade antennas are not uncommon, but they're never quite THAT large in the real world. Can't say I recall that part. I do recall reading that Windermereans physically age at the same rate as humans from birth until approximately their mid-twenties. Beyond that point, the aging process (at least in human terms) is vastly accelerated and individuals over 30 have a similar physical state to a human twice their age (if they don't abuse their runes). Given that their pace of physical development is the same as humans initially, that their emotional development is also similarly paced wouldn't surprise me much. Freyja's emotional maturity might have something to do with her having been an orphan, a byproduct of her experiences as a part of Walkure, or simply a result of the accelerated aging brought about by her overusing her rune. Heinz also shows maturity far in excess of what we'd expect from a nine year old, but he also overused his runes to the extent that he's physically as frail as someone almost four times his actual age.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    That's not really a different picture, per se... that's just looking at the same picture from a slightly different angle. Having the PMC be a convenient way to lump elite warriors together is the excuse for compartmentalizing the characters from a narrative standpoint. Having the PMCs conveniently be assigned to test the very latest military hardware in combat before it's given to actual soldiers is how they justify that elite-ness. They're elite because they have better gear, but because it's not plausible that a private corporation has more defense funding than an actual nation they're simply doing advance testing for the military using gear loaned to them. This is a very common trope for mecha titles featuring PMCs, going back at least as far as Full Metal Panic!'s light novels, in which it's a sort of open secret that MITHRIL is a NATO-funded black ops organization that carries out covert testing of next-gen American AS's before they reach US and NATO hands. (Ozma actually subverts the "elite" part early in Macross Frontier when he points out to Alto that the reason PMCs are increasingly popular with the local governments is because PMC troops are a contracted redshirt army. Their appeal, in government terms, is that if a PMC soldier dies it's legally an accidental death and the government is absolved of any potential liability even if said soldier died in combat. Their lives are cheaper than those of the military's own redshirts. They don't even get a military funeral.)
  20. Seto Kaiba
    ... No. I have no idea where you could have read that, but there's absolutely no truth to it. What makes you think HG had anything to do with the "edgy reboot" aspect of it? Titan Comics is leading this one, AFAIK. All Harmony Gold is doing is rubber stamping issues as they go to publication. Isn't the title warning enough about the quality?
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Where's Bogue? The guy assigned to do the sculpt started shouting about Walkure and hasn't been seen since. I doubt we'll see anything for the VF-22, except maybe a HiMetal or something. That Wright Immelmann's VF-22S survived intact enough to be repaired and restored to factory condition is just BS... it was shot down by the goddamn White Knight of Darwent FFS, you DO NOT recover from that. The only way I wanna see a PMC in Macross again is if they're the hopelessly inept comic relief... like 21st Century Defense Security in Dai-Guard, but without the hero status.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Hey now, a little honesty in Robotech's advertising was a refreshing change of pace for the brand. Yep... but, admittedly, this was not, by any stretch of the imagination, an attempt to distance Robotech from Macross. This was a simple, straightforward, minimum-effort cash grab so that Harmony Gold can continue to say that they're using the Macross trademarks. (Which, like all trademarks, are on a "use it or lose it" basis.)
  23. Seto Kaiba
    From everything I've heard from friends and family members of mine in the armed forces, I would have said more along the lines of "PMCs tend to look for trigger-happy gung-ho morons convinced they're living in their own personal action movie"... which admittedly fits Xaos alarmingly well. I've yet to meet the soldier who speaks well of the private contractors, which kind of made Major Valan easy to sympathize with when he was dealing with Xaos's intransigence. At this point, kindly direct your attention to Exhibit A: "727th Independent Squadron VF-X Ravens" from Macross VF-X2... which are exactly that in the most stringently literal sense. Hávamál's formal designation is the 815th Independent Squadron VF-X Hávamál. Hávamál and the Ravens are the exact same type of New UN Spacy Special Forces unit, with the same command structure. The only dangling question is we've never seen what Hávamál's main ship looks like, but it's probable it's another Saratoga II-type like the 727th's CV-565 Saratoga II "Mother Raven". Edit: Maybe it's the "Father Odin"?
  24. Seto Kaiba
    The obnoxious thing is that it's not "PMCs are better than the military"... twice now it's been a very contrived situation where a war breaks out while the latest fighter the military plans to adopt is still being tested in combat conditions by the technically-expendable PMC pilots prior to the start of the new fighter's mass production. In both cases, nobody from the military thinks to repo the damned things or it's somehow impossible to advance the production schedule enough to get the new VF in the military's hands quickly. Essentially, it's not "PMCs are better than the military" so much as it is "PMCs are temporarily better equipped than the military thanks to equipment on loan from the military for testing". In Macross 30 and Macross E we see a more typical picture, where the SMS is actually outclassed by the NUNS forces who actually DO have the latest gear, and Xaos is making do with the same old gear the NUNS is using but in less quantity.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Enough so that he absolutely deserves an honorable mention on the TVTropes page for "Nice job breaking it, hero!". By refusing to follow orders and deliberately trying to sabotage his mission to drop the dimensional warhead his fighter was carrying on the ruins outside Darwent, he caused a terrifying amount of death, destruction, suffering, and hatred. I mean, c'mon... Hayate may be a bit of a flake, but his father Wright absolutely has a lock on the prize for worst judgement of any character in Macross. There was literally no way that the moron was going to do anything but cause a complete, unqualified disaster... the only question was what the death toll for his staggering idiocy was going to be once he decided to break orders. Wright's plan to delay the operation to bomb the uninhabited ruins by flying off course to the target via a deliberately circuitous route that greatly increased his risk of detection to ensure that he'd end up detected by the Aerial Knights and intercepted put him over a major metropolis while carrying a live weapon of mass destruction. Even if he got his way and was recalled by command before they could intercept him, there's no way having a strategic bomber hovering over a major city could get taken as anything but a statement of their intent to bomb civilians. If he got intercepted and was taken down non-destructively, he's just been busted carrying an armed dimensional warhead over one of Windermere's major cities... effectively handing a highly dangerous WMD to a hostile and somewhat xenophobic government and making the war worse. If he got shot down over Carlyle without setting the warhead off, the crash and the explosion of the various conventional munitions aboard is still going to hurt or kill many innocent civilians because the prat was flying over a major city. Then, of course, there's what happened... he got intercepted and the warhead was deployed before he could be downed, wiping a city full of innocent civilians off the map, exacerbating the war to the point that the only viable option was for the New UN Government to withdraw, and causing the Windermereans to hate humans even more than they already did, leading to them declaring a war against the New UN Government years later. It's small wonder one of the few things that Windermere and the New UN Spacy can agree on is that Wright Immelmann was an arse. If he'd just done his job, the whole plot of the series would never have happened and millions of people would have been spared. Not to mention it'd facilitate the massive coverup necessary to pass the recently-made clone off as an ordinary girl. CF units are usually the last ones to come out, so we're getting there slowly but surely... Captain Larazzabal probably won't have to wait more than another year. It's not even necessarily "I'm doing what's right"... it's "screw the rules, I'm doing what I want to" in most cases. Xaos makes a lot of terribly short-sighted decisions throughout the series, seemingly for no reason other than to "stick it to the man", most of which come back to bite them in the arse, and the New UN Spacy's attempts to deal with the situation (and their foreknowledge of the threat) was played as something ominous even though everything they do in the series is perfectly reasonable and they achieve more concrete gains over Windermere in two episodes than Xaos does in twenty-six. Unlike SMS, who may have been dismissive of the NUNS but worked in open cooperation with them to deal with a major threat, Xaos seems to be determined to rebel against authority for no reason... and staffs its PMC accordingly with people who seem to arbitrarily resent authority like Hayate and Arad and people the military wouldn't take like Ernest and Messer. Macross 7 even handled the conflict with the military better... despite Basara's way being right, he at least grudgingly acknowledged that violence was necessary to an extent. He didn't want to be the one dispensing said violence, but he stopped grumbling about it and tried instead to minimize the amount of violence that would be necessary. You don't see that cooperation in Delta, the Xaos forces screw up and blame the NUNS over and over again, and then only achieve success by exploiting the NUNS's independent activities against Windermere. I'd give an awful lot for the next series to do away with this PMC garbage and get back to having the main character actually belong to the military. It was a great deal easier to respect Hikaru's life choices and conflicted nature because he at least showed enough commitment to follow orders and such. All of these mildly military PMCs are more focused on trying to be awesome than having any real conviction.
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