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Seto Kaiba

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  1. 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).
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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).
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. 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).
  11. 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.
  12. 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.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, and they've paid visits to the JASDF as well as several other fact-finding trips in the past.
  14. 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".
  15. 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.
  16. 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.
  17. 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.
  18. 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!
  19. 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.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Nothing announced, AFAIK... but given that this is your bog-standard Macross compilation flick, I'd say the staff will be mostly the same and that suggests that our only area of genuine concern is its writers. If they're the same writers as the TV series, then pessimism is entirely warranted. That was always supposed to be a duology though, so ending the first one in medias res was kind of intentional. No, realism is what we need... too many folks went into Delta expecting Frontier 2.0 and ended up bitterly disappointed when the series fell far short of Frontier's lofty standard. Blindly hoping for a massive improvement without a reason to suspect that said improvement will occur will only end in disappointment.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    A series of modifications made to an aftermarket VF-31A Kairos by Χάος Valkyrie Works, including, but not limited to: Replacement of the stock FF-3001A Stage IIC thermonuclear reaction turbine engines with a detuned version of the YF-30's FF-3001/FC2 engines (a 14% improvement in engine output). Modification of the the Shinsei/LAI TO21C inertia store converter to increase the unit's buffer capacity from 28.0G to 29.5G. Switching the outer wing segment of the delta wing for a forward-swept winglet and overall strengthening of the airframe. Exchange of the stock A-type monitor turret for a custom-built monitor turret (each Siegfried monitor turret is unique). Upgrading the stock ARIEL II+ integrated airframe control AI of the VF-31A to a custom build optimized for close air support of Walkure. Installation of the fold wave system and fold wave amplifiers on the dorsal surface of the VF. Fixed weapons (e.g. the LM-27 railguns) replaced with lower-powered versions than military spec in anticipation of having to operate in close proximity to civilians. Engine nacelle ordnance bays retrofitted into storage and charging racks for 8 MDP-001W Cygnus multidrone plates. Fitted with a custom multipurpose container unit that includes a remote recharger for the Cygnus multidrones. No and No, respectively. Yep. When you think about it, the VF-31 Siegfrieds are essentially the same kind of custom job that Sound Force's VFs were, except they're all customized from the same base aircraft this time. Heck, the operating profile is almost "What if the Jamming Birds stole Fire Bomber's ride?" Not a new theme, mind... Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy had most of the placenames and so on for Uroboros drawn from Norse mythology. The only references that aren't are Uroboros and the Chronos, which are both Greek, and the Percival, which is French. Even the bad guys, Havamal, are Norse-inspired. Fun fact... the custom build of ARIEL II that was used by the VF-25 and YF-30 is called "Brunhilde". It wouldn't work nearly as well with the enemy fighters being Draken, which can be translated as "Dragon", though the company operating them DOES have a Greek name and logo... Χάος.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    The original design's even by the guy who specializes in malevolent space triangles.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Hm... that's a complex question. Most of the Generation 4.5 VFs in Macross were created either as stopgaps to improve performance enough to fight the Vajra (e.g. VF-171-IIIF and VF-171EX) or as test articles that were intended to evaluate technology intended for use in Generation 5 VFs. (Thinking about this really makes me want to go back and update my old .pdf for thrust-to-weight on all VFs.) It's kind of a skewed picture, when you look at it. Outside of the key areas where there were enormous advances in technology, most of which became the defining traits of the 5th Generation, performance didn't actually improve all that much between the Gen 4.5 and Gen 5 designs. I think you could make a case for saying that those key areas of advance on the Gen 5 designs enabled them to make much better use of what the Gen 4.5 and Gen 4 designs already had. The gulf between them is pretty big, but I think it's mostly built upon the advances in those key areas and without them the Gen 5 designs wouldn't be significantly better aircraft than the Gen 4.5s. Looking at it in terms of flight performance, the disparity is pretty enormous thanks to the improvements in engine technology and the advancements in man/machine interface tech and the introduction of the Inertia Store Converter that rendered them usable. Just in terms of thrust-to-weight ratio you're looking at a bare minimum 2:1 disparity if you compare the highest-end Gen 4 and Gen 4.5 VFs like the VF-19S against a typical Gen 5 VF like the VF-25A, VF-31A, or Sv-262Ba. Against a more typical Gen 4 or Gen 4.5 VF like a Block II VF-171 Nightmare Plus or a VF-19EF Caliburn you're looking at more like anywhere from 2.7:1 to 5.3:1. The more powerful engines also benefits the defensive capabilities, so even though armor material strength hasn't improved by leaps and bounds (barring the very limited introduction of advanced energy conversion armor) they're more durable because the existing armor material is being fed more power... like how the YF-29 achieves 4x the armor strength of a VF-25 by having twice the armor thickness and then supplying it twice the amount of power. (The implication that, within a given armor material, strength has a linear relationship to thickness and power consumption is rather helpful in and of itself.) The introduction of EX-Gear, ARIEL II avionics to capitalize on it, and the ISC also widen the gulf considerably by insulating the pilot from g-forces that would have been game-enders in previous-generation designs, which widens the gulf considerably. Augmentations like the fold wave system or the Draken III's reheat system just improve those already substantial areas of existing improvement even further by supplementing generator output with fold dimensional energy conversion or simply boosting thrust by 25%+. Weapons, sensors, etc. don't seem to actually be all that much better than what the Gen 4 and Gen 4.5 had, barring anti-Vajra equipment like the overkill gunpods, but it's that huge flight performance improvement that really makes the Gen 5s stand head and shoulders above their predecessors because it snowballs into other areas of performance.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Don't forget that these special mushrooms make small things much bigger... like that
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Those are Tamiya Corp. Mini 4WD non-remote control racecars... customizable kit cars powered by little battery-driven electric motors. You can find them in many reputable hobby shops. They were fairly popular in America in the late 90's, though they were just referred to as "Tamiya cars" out here. I remember my younger siblings used to build and race those at our local hobby store. I believe the anime you're thinking of is Bakusō Kyōdai Let's & Go!!.
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