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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Let's be honest, that's the best damn picture in the book... The YF-30 is such a goddamn gorgeous plane that it felt almost criminal that it'd probably end up as a forgotten "super prototype" the way the YF-29 did... but Master File threw it a bone not once but twice! Once in the VF-31 book with some discussion of an improved military spec version of the prototype (YF-30B), and once in the VF-4 book with some passing references to the VF-30.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    I think he means what variant... which, honestly, I don't recall. It's after he came back to the Macross, so theoretically it should be his red-stripe VF-1S. (Though since Max was acting Skull Leader it may have been another VF-1A?)
  3. Seto Kaiba
    After watching the first two trailers, I have kind of a bad feeling about this one... maybe it's just that they're coming on hard and fast with shots of the standard xenomorph to prove it won't be another bait-and-switch tease like Prometheus was. Every time they announce a new Alien flick I keep hoping for a return to the subtle, claustrophobic horror of Alien and Alien: Isolation. To have hordes of xenomorphs running 'round in broad daylight and displaying themselves like anatomically abominable peacocks at every opportunity like Aliens and Alien Resurrection dilutes the shock value of the xenomorph itself. When there's enough of them running 'round to form their own baseball team, it stops being THE monster and starts being just "a" monster. Worse if the protagonists can kill them with guns, then they're just dangerous animals. The xenomorph was at its most frightening when it was this inscrutable, unstoppable killing machine that was somewhere nearby... picking people off according to its own agenda and not really in any hurry to be done with it. It just isn't as scary when the alien practically calls ahead to reserve dinner seating before chowing down the way this lot seems to be doing by jumping on people's windscreens. Not sure what to make of the spineburster(?) thing...
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Because the higher-capacity transit system - a public rail system - is situated above and below the topmost layer of Island-1's city. We see in the series that they have the same high-speed train system running through the dome and into the island modules that the City-7 had... that's how Alto and Sheryl get to the station at the apex of the dome, and then to Island-3 on their date. That same train system is also shown to run through the lower two layers of the city in the first Macross Frontier movie (seen for brief moments during Ranka's toy advert in Deep Akihabara.) I'm not sure if we can call it a subway or not, since it's below the ground of the top layer but above ground to the upside-down layer immediately below that. (Island-1's population of 5 million doesn't all live on the top layer... considering the bottom two layers are both highrise districts, it's probably not even most of them live topside.)
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Like most of Macross Delta, the VF-31 Master File could best be described as "disappointing" or "half-assed". Is it accurate? No. The writers apparently didn't pay attention to the creator interviews for Macross Delta, because they mention the VF-31A being in military service years before it was adopted by the NUNS. Is it useful? No. A good chunk of the technical material is slightly reworded or redrawn content lifted from the VF-25 book and key features of the VF-31 are ignored entirely or mentioned only in passing. Is it better than the VF-4's Master File? I would grudgingly have to say "Yes, it is". If only because the VF-31 book mostly concerns itself with official variants instead of ignoring them in favor of making up a bunch of crap that doesn't make sense. The book would probably be a good deal less useless if only the main characters weren't flying one-off ace custom VFs.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Not the first time they've gotten landing gear wrong, IIRC... didn't the VF-25 book cite landing gear from a model kit that got it wrong instead of the correct version from the animation? I'd wonder if they same thing happened there. Definitely miffed about #2 at least as much as you are... esp. since that was made out to be an equivalent arrangement to the modular ordinance bays in the engine nacelles of the VF-19. I'm not sure #3 is an error... it never did make sense that the milspec model would have less pylon space than the goofy, forward swept winglet version used by a PMC, especially given that the military model had more wing area and therefore greater carrying capacity. I'd characterize that as a correction rather than an error. I felt downright cheated that there was no detail at all about the railguns. That's a main weapons system and it's barely mentioned at all! Yeah, the series really kind of went off the rails starting at the VF-22 book... their coverage of the Sturmvogel was pure trash, the VF-4 book was just as bad, and the VF-31 book is kinda useless since roughly half to two thirds of its technical material is copied from the VF-25 book and the parts that talk about the VF-31 entering service don't fit with the series timeline and Kawamori's statements about when the VF-31 formally went into service. Really? That's what got you? Those didn't strike me as particularly unusual... though IIRC they got the idea of the disposable funnel missile thing from one of the VF-19 model kits or toys. I'm used to the idea, since Macross II already introduced computer-controlled funnels and bits to the equation, and one of the Mardook mecha had something along similar lines, though it was a micro-missile with four little laser cannons built into it for sort of a scatter-laser effect. Almost certainly not. They never did for the variants of the VF-25's FAST pack.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    That's a tall order... if we're trying to dream up a thirteenth labor for Hercules, that'd make the short list for sure. I'm not sure there's enough tape in the world for a task of that magnitude.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    I don't honestly recall any cases of them firing in full auto, but then the Draken III is almost never depicted in Battroid in the series...
  9. Seto Kaiba
    It's loads better than it used to be... though I think the Excite translator is probably a little more accurate, even if its grasp of English grammar leaves a lot to be desired. (Sometimes it's the difference between "badly translated VCR manual" and "My Hovercraft is full of eels"... though it also isn't too great with the technical terms. It seems to be especially unhappy with words like "thermonuclear reactor".)
  10. Seto Kaiba
    They forgot the dancing pretty quick... by the second cour it was basically forgotten until the series finale. It wasn't even particularly good mecha footage, it was just the best of a distinctly unsatisfying lot. For a series that was trying to hard to be Frontier 2.0 you'd think they'd have followed Frontier's near-ideal mecha-music balance. Instead we got something that's hard to defend against accusations of being "PreCure with robots" because the balance was skewed so heavily towards the singers and they only reluctantly explained what the hell was going on. They didn't focus on Hayate being immune to Var syndrome because they made a plot point out of the fact that he wasn't. He had reasonable resistance to it, same as the others who had never succumbed to it before, but in the second cour he started experiencing the same symptoms that preceded Messer's messy death as a result of Freyja's fold song increasing in power. Not only did he get Var syndrome, he's the only character in the series to get it from a member of Walkure instead of from Heinz. The only reason they put up with his nonsense is Arad's past relationship with Hayate's dead dad and the usual "he's a natural pilot" schtick (well, that and nobody bloody listens to Mr. Messer "Fun Times" Ihlefeld, the man so stiff and inflexible the stick up his arse has a stick up its arse). I definitely still stand by my statement from last September... the only thing a Macross Delta movie should be is Cancelled. The individual pieces of Macross Delta are anywhere from passable to excellent, but the writers failed to seal the deal so completely and comprehensively that they actually managed to put together a whole less than the sum of its parts. I don't think I could stand to see Macross waste that much potential TWICE, and I don't think compaction into a two hour movie would do anything for the fundamental problem.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    On the occasions they've helpfully provided it to us in English, it's been written: "Xaos Third Fighter Wing" and "Delta Flight". (They're apparently organized as an Space Air Force?) So a full translation of that would be: Xaos Third Fighter Wing CV/C-109 Aether (Delta Flight). They broke the habit of three decades by translating shotai as "Flight" instead of "Platoon" in Macross Delta, though perhaps justifiably if they're (as noted above) organized as a Space Air Force instead of the more Army-oriented Spacy. In all likelihood, nothing at all. Machine translators are still far from perfect on their own, and combining them with optical character recognition just complicates matters. The Google Translate app's OCR feature has a limited pool of kanji characters to pull from, and is taking what amounts to a best guess at what any given character is based on a mathematical approximation of its shape as detected by color variations in a coordinate grid laid over the target image. Kanji makes optical character recognition of Japanese a real uphill battle, since the size of the radical tends to be inversely proportional to the number of them in the character and that makes it easier for the OCR tool to be unable to differentiate them. Below a certain font size, it all just becomes a smudge to the OCR tool, and even small variations in the source image like dust or a shadow can cause it to detect characters incorrectly. So, basically, the reason it's coming across as mostly gibberish is because the already-imperfect machine translator with a propensity for choosing Definition 1 and running with it is being fed the "best guess" transcription output of an OCR algorithm that may not even possess the vocabulary to correctly transcribe the text selection. The modest font size in Master File isn't helping matters either, I would guess. (Back in graduate school, I developed an OCR tool for transcribing Japanese for a term project... the pitfalls of the technology described above caused no small number of all-nighters for me. I never fed it anything as complicated as a technical document though, just excerpts from Momotaro and whatever manga I was reading at the time... IINM Saiyuki and Nagasarete Airantou.) The OCR tool in Google Translate is, right now, mostly intended for stuff like helping tourists interpret public signage and restaurant menus... it's not really up to the task of handling a technical publication.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    You are kinda the gold standard by which mecha-specific translations are measured 'round here... I tend to get bogged down in the minutae when I'm doing translations, and it ends up being less important when we're decomposing reams of information into a few paragraphs of factoids for M3. (I'll admit I've not actually fully translated the literal nuts and bolts bit in Variable Fighter Master File: VF-1 Valkyrie Vol.1... there are limits to even my love of the game, and surprisingly they start right about at the point where I have to start reading about the applications Overtechnology Materials had in threaded fastener design... if I want to bore myself stupid, I'll go chew over some more SAE standards committee feedback instead.) In all honesty, I'd recommend the VF-19 Master File... it's one of the best in the series, even if it does have a few minor issues like the engine types and thrust outputs. There's some really, REALLY good info in there. I think my favorite bit is the lateral g-mitigation techniques they used in the cockpit... having a mobile seat that can tilt ~25 degrees in any given direction to optimize the pilot's bloodflow. I'd beg to differ... I've found the translations I've done that were not machine-assisted tend to make more sense than the ones that are, thanks to the dubious grammar employed by many of the algorithms used. We're still a looooong way from a Universal Translator. Another fun continuity tidbit gleaned from the VF-31 book... someone writing the book was paying attention when they played Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy. They've identified the ARIEL II airframe control AI in the VF-31 mass production type as Brunhild+ (sic). That's a continuity nod to a blink-and-you'll-miss-it statement in Macross 30's first chapter, where they mention Reon was sent to Uroboros in a YF-25 Prophecy to deliver its airframe control AI for use in the YF-30 Chronos prototype. The specific ARIEL II build was identified as Brunhild. I didn't notice that line 'til the second playthrough (when I noticed Aisha also drops mention of the full term "thermonuclear reaction burst turbine" in that mission where her VF-19E is stuck grounded with engine trouble and you have to defend her).
  13. Seto Kaiba
    It's a typo... it's supposed to be "SVF". Though the "Spacy" in "UN Spacy" stands for "Space Military" rather than "Space Navy", and it isn't organizationally a navy, the (New) UN Spacy did nick a few things from the (US) Navy in terms of designation systems and markings. The Spacy's ships have Navy-style hull symbols, and the Spacy's aircraft squadrons follow a modified version of the US Navy's squadron designation scheme. They just stick a leading S onto the code so it's clear that it's a Space (Spacy) unit. So... SVF-26 would break down as: S = Attached to the UN Spacy V = Fixed wing (meaning "not a helicopter, ornithopter, or balloon") F = Fighter squadron ## = Squadron number It would be read, fully, as Space Fighter Squadron Two-Six. If you read Master File or books like the Macross Plus This is Animation books, you'll find a lot of examples of these... SVF, SVFA, SVA, SVQ, SVAQ, SVAW, SVFC, etc. which all mean the same as their Navy counterparts... but IN SPAAAAAAAAAAAACE!
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Doin' a quick skim of the Variable Fighter Master File: VF-31 Siegfried book for anything halfway useful or interesting... From pg22-23, it looks like in Master File's version of things the New UN Forces did the same thing to the YF-30 that they'd already done to the YF-29 once they got their hands on the blueprints... constructed an improved model for military use and designated the prototype YF-30B. From page 25, it sounds like they've added this to the existing evolutionary tree that was published for the VF-31... Originally it went YF-24 -> VF-25 & YF-29 -> YF-30 -> VF-31 Theirs seems to be going: YF-24 -> VF-25 & YF-29 -> YF-29B & YF-30 -> YF-30B -> JYF-31 & SYF-31 -> VF-31A Very tight timeline on this one too... from the sound of page 25, the JYF-31 development kicked off just a year after the first flight of the completed YF-30 prototype, and around the same time the military debuted its YF-30B. Sounds like they had a flyable prototype within two years (2063) and another two years down the road Xaos was receiving the first of the VFs that would become the basis for Delta Flight's equipment. The J in JYF is apparently denoting its status as a jointly developed program run by the Brisingr Alliance rather than one single planet or fleet. I found the first detail I actually like... pg32-33, a clear and concise statement that (in the book's non-canon view) the Delta Flight VF-31s aren't even based on production machines. They're an offshoot of prototype development used for field testing, technically considered to still be prototypes (and early prototypes at that. It's suggested that the VF-31A that Arad flew in that flashback episode was actually SYF-31-1, the first prototype for the Sigfried, basically just a JYF-31 equipped with the FF-3001/FC2 engines. It looks like Delta Flight's units are really SYF-31-2 (Arad/VF-31S) SYF-31-3 (Messer/VF-31F), SYF-31-4 (Chuck/VF-31E), Mirage's is unknown, and Hayate's was SYF-31-8 and SYF-31-9. They seem to have missed the memo from Kawamori on the VF-31's military adoption date... they have units here marked as being in military service as production aircraft five years or so before they were canonically delivered to the New UN Forces.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Who are you kidding... I'd be hosting it. Prior to the VF-4 book, the VF-22 book definitely had the distinction of "worst Master File" for the same reasons... it's like the writers did only the most basic research they could get away with, and the variants section reads like the result of a 3am brainstorming session two days before its print date and fueled by entirely too much coffee to be good for anyone's sanity. I'm not sure what annoys me more, that half of them are just whatever garbage they could throw on the page, or that half of them look like Kamen Rider's mask. When'd I get appointed that? I always thought that was Sketchley or Gubaba, really. Or maybe it's a "by our powers combined" sort of thing, since we each have different areas of interest. The art problems are the least of that book's sins... Yeah, but like any machine translation you end up with a lot of "My hovercraft is full of eels" and "English as she is spoke"... which is sometimes even more of an impediment to understanding than not being able to read it at all. (The machine translators also REALLY don't like loanwords... I've noticed that several times when I've gotten stuck on a particular term and chucked the kana into a machine translator to see what it makes of it. Last time I tried, when I was working on Macross R, Schwalbe Zwei ended up becoming some gibberish about shwarma.)
  16. Seto Kaiba
    That was one of the few things that the VF-22 Master File did right... sparing the page count to talk about why Guld, a civilian, became the test pilot for the YF-21 No.2 prototype. Who better to have test-piloting and calibrating your fancy new brainwave-based flight control system for a next-gen VF than a neuroscience researcher who just so happens to be a licensed pilot with a decent amount of experience? (Then again, since General Galaxy's VF development center was basically run by a Zentradi man and made greater than average use of Zentradi overtechnology in its designs, there may have been a little favoritism involved.)
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Realistically, it's because the main characters from Macross Delta flew the customized Siegfried model rather than the model the military was going to be using the way the Macross Frontier cast did. From the book's own in-universe perspective, it's devoted to the Siegfried custom instead of the military's model because it's published by the multimedia branch of Xaos Corp., as a shameless plug for their monstrously incompetent PMC division. Nah, they could totally do Vol.2 versions of a bunch of different books to cover some of these bizarre custom jobs and all the official stuff they forgot. Pretty much all VFs from 3rd Gen on do... the YF-21/VF-22 just incorporated more than is typical. Then again, it was developed at the General Galaxy-run Quimeliquola factory satellite in Eden's orbit, so...
  18. Seto Kaiba
    By all accounts, it ought to look much the same as any other VF from the 3rd or late 2nd Generation thanks to their adoption of some Zentradi overtechnology. I suppose the VF it should most closely resemble would actually be the VF-4, given that it was developed from one that was captured by Zentradi rebels in 2014. (The VF-4 predates the implementation of Zentradi OT in the design, but proves the soundness of the idea by improving the performance of an early 2nd Generation design to arguably a 3rd Generation equivalent.) Come to that, it'd have been a nice touch if they'd remembered the link between the VF-4 and Variable Glaug for the VF-4 Master File... or, if they ever pen a VF-11 Master File, if they'd recall the Feios Valkyrie (Gen 4 equiv.) was developed by applying Zentradi overtechnology to a captured VF-X-11 Thunderbolt. ('course if they had done that for the VF-4 book they'd have needed to address that Macross R accidentally conflated the Variable Glaug and Neo Glaug, and that the VBP-1 and VA-110 designations probably belong to the initial versions.)
  19. Seto Kaiba
    What I've gathered from the much less detailed information available on Zentradi mechanics is that the flight engines on Zentradi mecha operate more or less identically to a thermonuclear reaction turbine's space mode... a hybrid of fusion plasma rocket and ion thruster. Their propellant efficiency is probably quite high, considering the limited space they have to store fuel. The best part was definitely seeing multiple YF-30s in the book... between that and the VF-31s, who cares about the Siegfrieds?
  20. Seto Kaiba
    What's the verdict on the SV-262Hs? A good, solid display piece? (I got mine the other day, but I haven't unboxed it yet... that unconventional transformation has me wondering how fragile it is.)
  21. Seto Kaiba
    To me, the bits that delve into the specifics of how things operate are my favorite part... the VF-0, VF-1, VF-19, and VF-25 books were this to a "T", but the VF-4, VF-22, and VF-31 books are a huge disappointment on that front. (The squadrons book is actually interesting not because it has technical material, which is mostly of the forgettable variety, but because it offers insights into the tactics used during the First Space War.) Yeah, ever since the earliest tech manual (Sky Angels) it's been pretty clear that the key difference between a thermonuclear reaction turbine engine and a normal jet engine is that they've substituted a compact thermonuclear reactor for the burner stage. Other than that, it works an awful lot like a normal turbine... in atmosphere, anyway. The "foot" is traditionally the thrust-vectoring paddle, while the actual nozzle sits on top of the back of the engine inside the foot. That's also where the thrust-reverser's intake is. (Macross Frontier: Sayonara no Tsubasa points to that interior nozzle being capable of limited thrust vectoring in its own right, esp. on the VF-171.) Basically, yeah... at least, in their air-breathing mode. They're made with tougher stuff so they can endure higher temperatures and RPMs, but at the end of the day they're still heating intake air in a high-pressure environment to provide thrust. The chief difference is that, as I noted above, they've replaced the combustion stage and its very volatile liquid hydrocarbons with a compact thermonuclear reaction system that is using fold effect-based gravity manipulation to initiate and contain the reaction, and the heat from the reaction is used to both generate electrical power and conducted into the airstream to provide the engine's thrust. (The engines are actually one of the best described technologies in Macross, and ironically their implementation is mirrored by a later NASA paper on theoretical fusion turbine engines.)
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Well, the art was (mostly) fine... but the rest of the book was an absolute mess. There was a good-sized chunk of the development history section that had basically bugger-all to do with the development of the VF-4, being mostly a plug for Macross Delta, and the same with the service history section. The actual technical coverage sandwiched between them was a disappointing mess that had that iconic feel of a student trying to BS their way through their term paper the night before it's due without doing any research. They made up some gibberish about having a couple different aircraft all being mass produced under the designation "VF-4" (actually prototypes), they totally ignored the official variants list, made the VF-4G out to be the only one which was able to transform, and even presented the VF-4A and VF-4G as being different sizes... I could go on, but really, since the VF-4 is a personal favorite it's just making me depressed. On checking, I was wrong about the chart appearing to have a second GIC... they relabeled part of what used to be labeled "GIC" as the "ISC Receiver". Other than that, the chart is more or less identical except for the engine nozzle at the far end.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    On the subject of the engines, the book talks a fair bit... but says very little. The whole of the first two paragraphs is devoted to a rather tedious explanation of how the FF-3001/FC2 engine used in the VF-31S is a derivative of the FF-3001/FC1 engine the YF-29 used, which itself is a derivative of the FF-3001A Stage II thermonuclear reaction turbine engine used by the VF-25 and VF-31A. (They missed a step, about the FF-3001/FC2 engines Xaos uses in their custom VF-31s being detuned versions of the one installed in the YF-30 prototype that were rated for 12.5% more thrust.) The rest is a fairly wordy but otherwise non-specific comparison of the FF-3001A and FF-3001/FC2 that suggests the latter has improved power and propellant efficiency due to a refined GIC system and thermoelectric converter. (The diagram is mostly copied directly from the VF-25 book, though it looks like the FF-3001/FC2 version may have at least one system that wasn't part of the base model engine... I'm not sure if someone just labeled this wrong, but it looks like there's a second GIC system downstream of the reactor, and there's something on there that has gone totally unremarked-upon labeled "ISC Receiver" that, from its acronym, must be tied to the inertia store converter.)
  24. Seto Kaiba
    It's a convenient little service they offer, especially if I can nick a company car to go fetch my packages. Got mine 'round lunchtime today, but didn't get a chance to read 'em until after work hours. I'll say this much... after a quick skim of the contents, if you don't count the pictures that might actually be the better choice. The VF-31's Master File book is not as bad as the lamentable and borderline-unreadable mess that was the VF-4 Master File, but it's not a big improvement either I'm afraid. For me, the biggest disappointment is that a fair-sized chunk of the book seems to be copied from the VF-25's Master File book and only minimally reworded. It's not entirely unreasonable, considering how much of the VF-31's hardware is newer variant versions of hardware that was in the VF-25, but it feels kind of like a copout at the same time. The rest is noticeably light on detail... very little said about the VF-31's weaponry (its distinctive built-in railguns are almost ignored), its FAST packs are glossed over, but the Variants section makes the goofiest choices in previous books look positively reasonable. Lotsa pretty pictures tho... but not nearly enough of the real VF-31. They do, at least, give an unofficial designation to the class of ships the Aether and Hemera belong to: they call it an Enterprise-class space carrier. The Master Archive Mobile Suit: MS-06 Zaku II book, on the other hand, is a treat for the eyes...
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Above a certain declared cash value, FedEx requires signatures on international shipments regardless of the content... I've run afoul of that many times before. I found it helpful during the Mecha Manual's last round of acquisitions, to use the "Hold at FedEx Location" option in the FedEx app to have them deliver any package from overseas at the FedEx store closest to my day job. Then I just pop over on lunch or after work and collect everything since the stores are open much later than the depots.
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