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Seto Kaiba

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  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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".
  5. Seto Kaiba
    CDJapan is occasionally useful for that purpose. I've gone through them to get several DX Chogokins and other items.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Not that you'd notice a change in edibility once they went bad...
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Ordinarily, yeah... you would think a special forces unit from the federal New UN Forces would be using the federal forces main fighter or a special forces variant thereof. This, of course, probably wasn't possible for Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy because Kawamori never completed the YF-24 Evolution design. He only did the fighter mode, though realistically it ought to look a good deal like a delta-wing VF-25 in all respects. Looking at it from an in-universe perspective, the federal New UN Forces are likely still working on transitioning from their last main fighter to the VF-24. The decision to adopt the YF-24 Evolution's design as the next main fighter was made in mid-2057, so there were probably relatively few units outfitted with the VF-24 in 2060. The VF-X squadrons also don't necessarily use the latest fighters when there's a mission or performance advantage in using something older, like how the 727th IS VF-X Ravens' top ace in 2051 was using a ten year old VF-19A Excalibur instead of the newer and nominally higher-spec VF-19C, VF-19F, or VF-19S. The 815th IS Hávamál had been operating out there in the galactic boonies for a while before the events of Macross 30, and they might not have had access to the unredacted VF-24A specification either due to communications difficulties due to the Uroboros Aurora fold fault or because Earth wasn't willing to transmit the unredacted specs of the VF-24A for security reasons. Using their clout as a federal special forces unit, and Uroboros' substantial reserves of fold quartz, they secured the next best thing for their ace pilots... an uprated version of the only emigrant VF allegedly able to rival the VF-24, the YF-29. They built them in numbers too, where the Frontier fleet government could only afford to build the one. Hávamál's aces were all issued YF-29B's. The YF-29 would only graduate to a production design and become the VF-29 if it obtained official approval for production by the New UN Government. Hávamál's limited production of the YF-29B likely either didn't count due to being unauthorized or was counted as a separate prototype run in light of the design changes between the initial YF-29 and YF-29B. Even with those "inferior" VF-19s and VF-22s, Hávamál still massively outgunned the local Uroboros New UN Forces garrison. The planet's remoteness and isolation left the local NUNS more than a bit undermanned and under-equipped. By 2060, the NUNS had been depending on Hávamál and their contracts with the Uroboros Hunters Guild to maintain planetary security and control the alliance of anti-government, terrorist, and pirate factions collectively known as bandits... all while unaware the ones supplying the bandits with weapons and logistical support were Hávamál themselves. With the local NUNS being made up of less experienced pilots flying the aging VF-171-II Nightmare Plus, and the Hunters Guild being made up of amateurs, wannabes, and NUNS washouts using all manner of obsolete and replica VFs, there were only a handful of pilots on the entire planet who'd have stood a chance against ONE Hávamál ace, let alone the entire unit. Uroboros Hunters Guild director Mei Leeron was too busy with contracts to stamp out bandit activity to sufficiently join up the dots and implicate Hávamál, and Aisha Blanchett's SMS branch office was so undermanned it operated as a privateer organization under the auspices of the Hunters Guild with its only other pilot besides Major Blanchett herself hospitalized due to a testing accident. Without a large number of ace pilots being drawn to Uroboros by the effects of the Uroboros Aurora, Hávamál would have been able to mop up any potential opposition easily... and to be fair, even after they started appearing they probably felt they had the matter well in hand when they recruited (and blackmailed or brainwashed) most of them like Max and Milia Jenius, Gamlin Kizaki, D.D. Ivanov, Nora Polyansky, SMS Frontier's Skull and Pixie Platoons, etc. Variable. The GU-11A, for instance, had a maximum rate of fire of 1,200rpm but all indications are that its actual rate of fire was more like 180rpm most of the time to avoid precisely that problem. The VF-0's GPU-9 gunpod had selectable rates of fire as low as 60rpm and as high as 2,500rpm.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    The funny part is that not only is that a near-universal reaction Macross fans - and especially Robotech fans who made the move to Macross - have to watching Robotech, it's also a reaction many Robotech fans have to the various reboots and alternate versions in that franchise. Most Robotech fans find this comic just as subtly unsettlingly wrong as Macross fans find Robotech. ... having been there myself courtesy of a friend in the USMC, that's maybe harsher than even I would've put it. There's a reason those are called "Meals Ready to Expel".
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, MDE is short for Micro Dimension Eater... they're ultracompact dimensional warheads. MDE beam weapons operate on similar principles, firing what amounts to a beam of microsingularities that collapse and pull matter around them into fold space.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    What little of it I've read sails right off the end of the critical spectrum... past "good" and "bad", through the thickets of "so bad it's good" to "so bad it's awful", and vaulting into the vast abyss of dispassionate loathing where Battlefield Earth and the Star Wars Holiday Special live. It's operating on a level where I can't help but wonder if the captive Robotech audience inexplicably praising it is experiencing some sort of literary version of Stockholm Syndrome.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Something like that, yes... seemingly inspired by the Japanese Self-Defense Forces' more "corporate" attitude towards service. Unlike the US military, in the JSDF you don't need to apply for early discharge in order to switch branches of service, and can usually retain rank in the transfer. It doesn't seem to be very common for soldiers to switch branches, thus far there are only a few characters identified who've ever explicitly served with more than one branch. The only ones I can recall offhand are Col. Millard Johnson (Macross Plus), who started his career in the UN Spacy and later transferred to the New UN Air Force before becoming a senior officer at the New Edwards Test Flight Center, and 1st Lt. (later Maj.) Isamu Dyson, who started his career in the New UN Spacy and was subsequently punted around to the New UN Navy, New UN Air Force, and back to the New UN Spacy because no commander wanted to deal with him.
  12. 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.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Everything else in the comic is borrowed from somewhere else, why not that too?
  14. Seto Kaiba
    The New UN Spacy Air Force also puts in an appearance in Macross the Ride.
  15. 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.)
  16. 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.
  17. 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.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    "Monitor turret"... though for simplicity, often just "the head".
  19. 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.
  20. 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.
  21. 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.
  22. 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.
  23. 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.
  24. 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.
  25. 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).
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