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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    The problem there is twofold: Thanks to the lack of official publications about the mecha of Macross Delta, the mechanism responsible for concealing the markings and paintjobs of the Aerial Knights and, later, Delta Flight has not been officially identified. It's not even clear if the two organizations are even using the same technology to do the job. The only source I know of that identifies it is a manual from one of the TOMYTEC model kits, which does refer to it as an optical camouflage system. Given the almost total lack of information about the optical camouflage technology (technologies?) used in Macross Delta, it isn't clear if these systems are capable of doing more than what we see them do... concealing a fighter's markings and paint color. There's a good deal of difference between making a fighter appear matte black and making it out and out invisible... What I know of Halo lore you could fit on a paper napkin with enough room left over for a profoundly filthy limerick or three, but to bend light around an individual only blinds them if they're depending on the particular wavelengths being bent for vision. I'm not sure what wavelengths the freaky Predator-faced things see in, but it's entirely possible that if the system is only bending visible wavelengths they could see by infrared or ultraviolet, or potentially using some more exotic form of sensing that isn't impacted. The implementation of optical camouflage in Macross is more along the lines of using holographic projectors to present the illusion of empty space instead of bending light.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    One explicit mention to date... the YF-27-5 Shahar ♀ is noted as having an active [visual/optical] camouflage system and a dazzle camouflage paintjob in addition to the typical active stealth system and passive stealth measures. The optical camouflage was a design choice intended to facilitate its illegal use in black operations for the Macross Galaxy Corporate Army during testing of the prototype fighter and the prototype Stella-series cyborg pilot.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Well, I'm disappointed... that means CBS is likely to continue trying to crowbar the mess that is Star Trek: Discovery into the Prime timeline despite it being increasingly obvious that it doesn't belong there. It's a near-perfect fit for the Kelvin timeline, but all of its xenophobic undertones and Burnham and Lorca's highly flexible morality and "ends justify the means" attitude towards the law is definitely not consistent with what we've seen of other Federation Starfleet crews of the era like Captain Robert April, Christopher Pike, James Kirk, etc. It wouldn't even be consistent with the nascent Federation Starfleet under Admiral Jonathan Archer almost 100 years prior when the Federation couldn't afford to be that holier-than-thou. For my money, the biggest problem is that it's a prequel allegedly set in the prime timeline. If this were in the Kelvin timeline, it'd be no harm no foul because that timeline is a LOT more militaristic and paranoid thanks to the Narada incident, Khan's shenanigans, etc. and was only just getting on its feet and starting to really look at what it'd become around the time Discovery was set. On reflection, it's so weird that Burnham would cite a Vulcan precedent for shooting first when it came to Klingons... she could only be referring to the strategic doctrines of the Vulcan High Command. How the hell did Burnham get the idea that the doctrines of a deposed and disgraced Vulcan government that was overthrown because of its rampant, amoral militarism and involvement in all manner of religious and social bigotry was a role model? There is no way in hell that Ambassador Sarek, a post-Surak Vulcan, was teaching her that the High Command's doctrines were diplomatically sound.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    OK, that's enough to work with... so, a 3rd Generation emigrant fleet centered on one or more City-class habitat ship with logistical support vessels and a military escort detail of approximately 180 warships and 2,600 combat aircraft. Fleet composition-wise, I think I would skew somewhat closer to the Macross-5 fleet composition with fewer dedicated logistical support ships and more City-class ships with the attendant Battle-class supercarriers. I also think I would probably tend to use a greater number of Ghosts as first-responders to minimize losses of manned craft while feeling out potential threats. All told, it'd probably look something like this: 60x Northampton-class stealth frigate (standard type) 20x Northampton-class stealth frigate (air defense type) 10x Northampton-class stealth frigate (radar picket type) 10x Northampton-class Gefion-subclass stealth light carrier 20x Osaka-class1 stealth cruiser 40x Guantanamo-class Advanced ARMD 20x Uraga-class escort battle carrier 4x Saratoga III-type stealth escort carrier 1x Macross Quarter-class variable space carrier 3x Battle-class space stealth attack carrier w/ 3x City-class habitat ship 1x Three Star-class factory ship 2x Sunnyflower-class agricultural ship 1x Hollywood-class amusement ship (w/ Galaxy Network transciever) Given that the stated timeframe would put us right in the middle of the introduction of 5th Generation VFs, I would be inclined to go with an air/aerospace force composition that would be 15-20% unmanned fighters. Probably about 15-17% QF-4000 Ghosts, while the remaining 3-5% would be the more versatile but limited Neo Glaug. The Ghosts would definitely be the first responders, as you can get three QF-4000s for what you'd pay for one VF-171, and there's much less fuss if one gets shot down since it wouldn't incur any loss of life of a valuable trained pilot. The other 80% would be manned fighters. Mostly the VF-171-II, but with as many units updated to the VF-171-III spec as humanly possible, with particular priority given to the fighter squadrons attached to carriers that serve in the fleet's advance scouting groups. Definitely transitioning to a VF-24A monkey model around that period, since that's a fighter on which almost all the actual development is already done ahead of time, and for which the engineering was done with a much higher level of performance in mind so it's over-engineered, thus making it more robust. Attackers would be a mix of VA-3s and VB-171s, and reconnaissance planes would be a mix of RVF-171s and a recon model VF-24. The one thing I would definitely insist upon would be having fighters permanently stationed aboard most of the frigates. We know that the Northampton-class can carry up to a full platoon of VFs without modification or sacrificing operational endurance. I think the advance reconnaissance Northampton-class ships would greatly benefit from having a platoon-strength unit of Ghosts kept in their hangar on standby and with each taskforce having at least a Gefion-type or Saratoga-type carrier hanging around as support and an Osaka-class hanging about for added punch, while the proper full-size carriers form part of the skirmish screen around the City-class ships and protected by the air defense-configured frigates. There's not really any practical situation in which resources would be unlimited for an emigrant fleet... only the Sol system and the other wealthy core systems could reasonably claim to have nigh-unlimited resources thanks to the incredible material processing and manufacturing capabilities they have thanks to the dozens of factory satellites they possess. 1. It's from a doujinshi, but it's the only name I've ever seen anyone attempt to tack onto the stealth cruiser from Macross Frontier.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    More than that... we need 30 people pledging for each of them. Right now, we have 14 of 30 committed to a Spartas (with one "if" not counted) and 16 of 30 committed for an Auroran (with the same "if" not counted).
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Most VFs have a couple different ejection mechanisms. The VF-1 Valkyrie could eject just the pilot's seat and deploy a parachute in atmosphere, or use verniers built into the chair in space, or it could eject the entire cockpit block as an escape capsule. Considering his size and mass, it isn't that impressive... force equaling mass times acceleration and all. Mind you, the armor plates he was buckling and bending through sheer brute force had an equivalent strength to three meters of rolled homogenous steel armor. It's hard to put this into a usable scale for a miclone, but this would be like something along the lines of bending an inch-thick steel bar by hand. Possible, but you'd need to be VERY strong to do it. Yeah, the VF-0's was comparable to a modern main battle tank while in Battroid mode (with over 90% of the turbine generator output devoted to it). The VF-1 Valkyrie was about three times that. He does note that he's literally built tougher than the average Zentradi, but he's pretty amazingly durable... Very little, I'm afraid... tho didn't I answer this one not too long ago? We know that it's a local development by Surya Aerospace, a joint venture of the Brisingr Alliance branches of Shinsei Industry, LAI, Feifeng, and Bharat. It's tipped to be the next main (5th Generation) fighter of the Brisingr Alliance's New UN Forces and expected to go into mass production and begin replacing the Alliance's aging VF-171-II Nightmare Pluses at some point in 2069 or 2070. At present, a trial production lot of VF-31A Kairos units is being evaluated in the field by the Xaos Corporation's PMC Brisingr Cluster HQ on Ragna. A fair amount of its component parts are off-the-shelf hardware originally developed for the Macross Frontier fleet's VF-25. The only production-intent variants known to exist are the VF-31A and VF-31B, nothing is known about the VF-31B or how it differs from the VF-31A. The basic specs writeup is also available detailing weapons, engine thrust, etc. On the whole, it's a late entry into the 5th Generation by an isolated local government and it doesn't really have a lot to make it stand out in the crowd. Five VF-31A units were modified by Xaos Valkyrie Works to create the VF-31 Siegfried customs used by Delta Flight. They were retrofitted with detuned versions of the YF-30's engines, reduced firepower, and various customizations to make them work well in close air support of Walkure. In what timeframe? That's a question with a LOT of potential answers depending on when we're talking about...
  7. Seto Kaiba
    I'll post the long explanation later today, I'm getting ready to fly out for vacation (including a stop in LA for SDCon this saturday).
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah. We see Alto do it in the first Macross Frontier movie while he's fighting that giant Vajra that looks like a preying mantis... the cockpit's located on the back, under the plate with the wing joints on it, so that just lifts up and he is able to drop down and out in EX-Gear. I'd assume it works the same for the VF-27, which has the same transformation. The VF-171 has the same cockpit hatch as the VF-17 in Macross Delta, which is how Hayate is able to get into a downed battroid. Not clear on how the VF-31's would work, but I'd assume the escape capability exists.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    It's actually used relatively often, the F-16XL just did it a bit differently with a collection of tiny ports on the leading edge of the wingtip instead of a larger sub-intake and/or a splitter plate. Yep.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    It's pretty much entirely real-world technology... though some of it is mostly restricted to X-planes and other prototype aircraft. Almost every Valkyrie uses boundary layer control to manipulate laminar airflow over the airframe to manipulate aerodynamic drag on the airframe. The real-world application most commonly uses suction via a sub-intake to reduce drag, decreasing the minimum takeoff distance, improving fuel efficiency, and increasing the available angles of attack during maneuvering. Macross goes a good deal farther, using BLC suction to gain all those benefits at a greater level and also even acheive some limited attitude control purely by asymmetric laminar airflow manipulation. (This is what those little intakes separate from the main intake are for.) Later VFs, like the VF-19, added vortex flow control to that. That approach involves injecting small amounts of gas into the airflow over the aircraft skin, shifting the postions of the vortices and reducing drag on one side of the aircraft, causing it to pull towards the side with greater drag. (Much like the above, but MUCH more effective and versatile, to the extent that it can potentially be a substitute for an aircraft's tail.) This was toyed with on the Grumman X-29, which the YF-19 is based on. What you saw in Macross Plus was a bit more mundane... the YF-21 and AIF-X-9 were both indulging in more brute-force methods to super-high agility, burning their high thrust verniers heavily to achieve that maneuverability. Airflow control methods like BLC or VFC are better suited to lower speeds.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Hope leads to belief, belief leads to expectation, expectation leads to disappointment. The flipside of platitudes like "pressure makes diamonds" is the less-selective reality that pressure much more commonly just makes garbage more compact. There's a very small outside chance that compacting twenty-six episodes of Macross Delta into a two-hour feature film will induce improvement... but that's all. Better to invest our hopes in the series to follow, which will almost certainly be operating with a substantially different staff and concept.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Heh, I guess when you're in a dangerous line of work and you're drawing plenty of hazard pay on a regular basis, you can afford the finer things in life. Mind you, both the Ghost in the Shell manga and Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex anime imply that Batou didn't exactly pay for his fancy cars.1 Ozma must be getting paid pretty well, to afford a custom car modeled on the Lancia Delta HF Integrale Evoluzione and a house in one of the fleet's most upscale neighborhoods. (The main residential areas are actually the subterranean urban district seen in the movies, living topside is said to be the most exclusive and expensive place to live.) The anime industry seems to have a lot of love for Lancia and other FCA brands... when he's not stealing cars to be inconspicuous or driving that ancient and frequently-destroyed Mercedes-Benz SSK2, Lupin III's usually seen driving a yellow Fiat 500 or an off-white Abarth 595.3 Well, we've got empty masses for all but a few... or did you mean with a combat load? Fuel mass is an amusingly negligible concern on Valkyries, considering that the fuel of choice for the thermonuclear reaction turbine engines is hydrogen slush... which is just shy of 1/10th the mass per unit of fluid volume. The VF-1 Valkyrie's full fuel load (without drop tanks or conformal tanks) has a mass of just under 120kg (264lb). 1. It's implied, with varying degrees of strength, that Batou may have "liberated" some of his cars from asset forfeitures of wealthy criminals and the like. Section 9 apparently does this a lot, so much so that in Stand Alone Complex they get flak for it from a couple sources including in court and from the JMSDF's Umibozu special forces team. 2. Mercedes-Benz made less than 40 SSKs in the entire production run, and at most 5 survived to the modern day. Lupin III's as hard on cars as James Bond, and his poor SSK gets destroyed several times a season. The only explanation I can think of is that Mercedes-Benz made a lot more than 40, and Lupin I or Lupin II made off with most of them. 3. ... and before you say "that's not Macross", Lupin III and his Fiat 500 show up in episode 24 of Super Dimension Fortress Macross, as part of a video game in the arcade where Max first meets Milia.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, according to Macross Chronicle Ozma's a bit of a car nut... it shows, considering he chose to make a replica Lancia Delta HF Integrale Evoluzione 1 rally car retrofitted for Milky Road service his daily driver. No word on what the powerplant is, but if it's anything like the other cars described in the Macross Chronicle mechanic sheets for DYRL? and Plus, it's almost certainly a hydrogen engine or a series hybrid with a hydrogen-burning generator... a subject quite near and dear to my heart, considering my vocation and employer. It's noted in the relevant Macross Chronicle mechanic sheet that it was remodeled for space use (probably meaning Milky Road use).
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Realism. Calling a spade a spade is not pessimism. For the movie? Very little. A reduced runtime is not at all likely to be conducive to solving the many problems the Macross Delta story had in its TV series format. It's likely to exacerbate some of them, particularly the lack of character development across the vast majority of its cast. For the new series? Bare minimum we're probably looking at a major shakeup of the staff, which is likely to include different writers. That alone makes improvement highly probable.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    IMO, that's more a symptom of the show's biggest letdown. Macross Delta had serious potential that the writers completely squandered. The series had great character and mechanical designs, an interesting and well-developed setting, great music, and the main cast was engaging and immediately likeable. All the individual pieces were as good as what the Macross Frontier series had at its start, but the writers just couldn't join up the dots and make the pieces into a cohesive whole. Hayate wasn't the only one who got cheated out of a payoff on plot threads the show abandoned for no reason... It would've been a much better show if they'd actually come up with an original plot in the second half instead of blatantly trying to crib Macross Frontier's. From episodes 3-26 they forgot they were supposed to be developing the supporting cast as well... it's a bad sign when your show centers on an idol group and only two of the five members got any actual characterization.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    All told, in some respects (e.g. active stealth) they're on par but the VF-19EF Caliburn has a higher level of flight performance thanks to its more powerful engines and its less stable aerodynamics. There's not a 100% unambiguous explicit flag that a given fighter is a monkey model, but usually a monkey model will either be outright identified as one in its tech writeup, or it'll be flagged as either an export variant or a locally-built derivative of an existing variant. We don't know for certain, but based on what's said in Great Mechanics DX widespread adoption of the VF-19 fell through at the federal level very early on in their attempted transition to it... so I would assume that any VF-19s which were built locally by emigrant governments were monkey models regardless of variant. The extent to which the monkey models we've seen thus far have been simplified varies a bit, but in general they all seem to have been simplified or detuned at least slightly. Some of the limitations in the monkey models are imposed in software rather than hardware. Given that all but one of the monkey models we've seen thus far have been produced locally under license, I would assume that the federal New UN Forces probably wouldn't need to fall back on the export models in wartime. They have the manufacturing power of dozens of factory satellites as a fallback plan. That may have been the case for the VF-19P, if nothing else... though the other identified monkey models have all been built locally under license by their end users (e.g. Macross Frontier, Macross Galaxy).
  17. Seto Kaiba
    It definitely put the brakes on the New UN Forces' adoption of the Ghostbird as the next main fighter and spelled doom for the idea of autonomous fighters as the wave of the future. That said, once General Galaxy removed the prototype's unstable bioneural main processor and the fully-autonomous air combat software was restricted by order of the New UN Government, they did still end up suppliers to several governments who preferred the idea of an all-Ghost air force. Their big seller to the emigrant governments was an economized, semi-autonomous model designated as AIF-7S (or QF-4000 to the New UN Forces). The federal New UN Forces obtained a full spec model without the unstable hardware designated AIF-9B, and Macross Galaxy produced its own version of that with enhanced (anti-Vajra) armaments officially registered as AIF-9V (locally as Ghost V-9/MG) that was illegally equipped with the fully autonomous air combat program of the prototype. Technologically, yeah... the fallout of the events in Macross Plus was far-reaching, though only one subsequent story I'm aware of (Macross the Musiculture) directly references it. Mostly it's all in the backstory. Thanks to the Venus Sound Factory illegally outfitting Sharon Apple with a bioneural processor and her subsequent rampage, the New UN Government not only banned responsive virtuoids, they also legislated Sharon Apple's music off the shelves for a time. The insane Sharon Apple's remote hijacking of the AIF-X-9 prototype during a public event the New UN Government intended to both demonstrate it at and announce its selection as next main fighter was a massive public fiasco that led to the New UN Government terminating its autonomous fighter program, the imposition of a ban on fully-autonomous fighters, Project Super Nova's reinstatement, and both prototypes being approved for production. Of course, Isamu and Guld independently penetrating Earth's defenses in those prototypes broke it worse than the Ghost had... since the New UN Government decided it was too dangerous to export the VF-19 and VF-22 en masse, so they ended up getting shelved in favor of a less-uber fighter. ... and, to put the cherry on it, since Colonel Johnson took the blame, Isamu got punted upstairs to fill a desk job role at New Edwards to keep him out of trouble.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Yes (to both). By the time the 4th Generation VF prototypes entered testing at the New Edwards Test Flight Center on Eden (see Macross Plus), thrust-to-weight ratios were already sneaking up on 10:1. The 3rd Gen VFs were all in excess of 6.3:1 on their own, meaning that without Super Packs every one of them is able to rival or exceed the acceleration of a VF-1 Super Valkyrie going flat out. The VF-17S was the first to actually exceed 10:1, and from that point on the only VF that wasn't operating above 10:1 is the VF-171 Nightmare Plus in its stock Block II configuration. Most exceed 13:1. One of the things that made the Ghosts derived from the AIF-X-9 Ghostbird prototype so deadly was that in a period where manned fighters couldn't really exceed 10:1 without the significant risk of loss of control, it was hovering just below 20:1. (Between 19.3 and 19.52, if we're being precise, and I am). Thanks to the introduction of Inertia Store Converter technology that could protect the cockpit of a VF from high g-forces, manned fighters were able to rival or exceed the performance of the Ghosts with Stage II thermonuclear reaction turbines that pushed thrust-to-weight ratios through the roof. Practically every 5th Gen VF exceeds 39:1, with the current reigning champion being the YF-29 at 61.164:1. Even with the extra weight of the Super Pack degrading its acceleration a bit, the VF-27 Super Lucifer that Brera flew in the second Frontier movie was in excess of 41:1. To put all this in perspective, the best performers among modern fighter jets of the current 4th and 5th Generation designs doesn't exceed 2:1, and most are just around 1.1:1 under ideal conditions. The amount of thrust being thrown around is absolutely off-the-hook insane. Even those humble, little, unassuming-looking rocket engines on the VF-1's backpack are putting out more thrust than an engine from a typical 4th generation jet fighter, and it has THREE of those. EDIT: That high performance is also a big part of what killed the Ghosts's role as next main fighter. Nobody wanted a fully-autonomous fighter that exceeded the abilities of any manned craft that could decide that it wasn't interested in the orders of meatbags and go rogue.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, and they've paid visits to the JASDF as well as several other fact-finding trips in the past.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Not likely. The other Macross shows are as long or longer than Macross Delta and they all managed to have MORE combat than Macross Delta without it becoming boring and unduly repetitive. What's making Delta's combat scenes boring and repetitive is a crippling lack of variety. Delta Flight seems to have only two moves in its entire repertoire... The Scissors, and flying backwards in GERWALK as the railguns fire with the arms crossed to shoot Lilldrakens or missiles down. Other than that, all of the combat scenes are just reaction shots of the cockpit or the occasional static shot of shooting at an indistinct target offscreen. It's lazy choreography and writing, in short, not overuse of combat scenes. An eminently fixable problem, if the show's creators had cared enough. Same problem... Gundam SEED suffers from a punishing lack of variety in combat, compounded by its protagonist being one of the anime industry's most notorious Godmode Sues. Combat itself isn't overused, it's just very formulaic and the formula has relatively few permutations to "Death by Kira".
  21. Seto Kaiba
    The Sv-51 isn't a SV Works program, that was something done by the Sukhoi Company jointly with Dornier Flugzeugwerke and Israel Aerospace Industries using stolen VF-0 development data before the First Space War. The SV Works didn't exist until after General Galaxy was founded, around 10 years later. Like the VF-0, the Sv-51 was a development and trial production platform for an anti-giant fighter. Its design emphasized maneuverability, so it was a better anti-VF VF than the VF-0 was. Regular VFs are meant to be all-purpose fighter aircraft, but the primary design focus behind their development was always on fighting hostile aliens (the Zentradi). Having to fight other VFs was a corner case, a grim but unlikely possibility that had to be considered but wasn't a core area which the designers focused on... until the 4th Generation. By the time Project Super Nova was on their plate, the New UN Government had expanded to the point that internal conflicts were occurring in their sphere of influence with monotonous regularity, so it was necessary for the new fighter to be focused on fighting other VFs and suppressing revolts at least as much as it was on fighting aliens. General Galaxy cofounder Alexei Kurakin simply saw that one coming a long way off, and opted to establish a dedicated team to explore what he saw as the inevitability of VF on VF combat one day becoming the norm.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    That's because that's the vast majority of the actual combat we get to see... and it's done in such a way that we can't even see the actual fighters 90% of the time. Just tiny dots crisscrossing over a vapor trail with random explosions. It's an impressive visual effect when used sparingly (e.g. Macross Plus), but in Macross Delta it was massively overused to the point that by the show's halfway point it felt like the show's staff folding their arms and refusing to show us the fight because they'd rather talk about Walkure. There's no payoff at the end, so it's even less satisfying than Gamlin repeatedly blowing Gavil's FBz-99 away with the beam adapter, or Basara spraying the dogfight with speakerpods. While not strictly impossible, that is so wildly unlikely given that we know it's a compilation movie reusing material from the series that it might as well be impossible.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    I just wish I had more information on the development of the VF-31 series and Sv-262. Right now, the only sources of tech specs are the Limited Edition Blu-ray liner notes, a couple interviews about the series in Great Mechanics G, and booklets from the TOMYTEC and Bandai model kits. It's all so basic, and gives very little insight into the mecha beyond the bare-bones facts of their major pieces of hardware... and it doesn't help that the text in those kit booklets is contradictory outside of basic tech factoids. Variable Fighter Master File would normally be our port in this particular storm, but it's even worse... contradicting not only canon, but also previous volumes in the series. Personally, I really want a proper official explanation of the SV Works team that produced both the Sv-154 and Sv-262 for Windermere IV. We know they were a pet project of one of the cofounders of General Galaxy, but exactly what they did between the team being founded in the 2010s and its change of ownership to the Epsilon Foundation subsidiary Dian Cecht is a great big blank. They're engineers who specialized in developing VFs designed to fight other VFs, and there are a couple of General Galaxy's projects that feel like they should be one of theirs... like the VF-9 Cutlass and the VF-22 Sturmvogel II.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    ... ... ... It's moments like this that remind me how very important context can be. Kawamori-sensei, please use more variety in the movie dogfights so we can stop abusing that word!
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Started watching the new season of Shokugeki no Souma last night... so far, so good I suppose. I'm just hoping they'll continue to avoid a gecko ending. I've got so many shows to catch up on... just looking at the queue on Crunchyroll is faintly depressing.
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