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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Can't answer that, it's against the rules to link to (or ask for links to) pirated material. Please support the original creators whenever possible. Twice, that I can recall... both in the Macross 7 PLUS short "Spiritia Dreaming". The first enemy soldier captured in the main Macross 7 series, Irina Hayakawa, refers to him by name in the short. He's Captain [Autolmauer/Otorumawa]. I'm undecided how to actually spell that name, since it doesn't seem to conform to any known existing surname I can find. It's spelled オートルマウワー, which suggests the former at least.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Now that's putting it mildly... Prometheus set the bar so low it's a trip hazard in Hades' wine cellar. Huh. I was kind of watching Covenant's development out of the corner of my eye for fear that we'd get Prometheus Mk.II. This made me sit up and take notice more than any previous trailer or teaser for the film. If the movie fails to live up to the promise this shows, I'll be doubly upset. Garnishing a monster horror movie with a little existential dread? Please sir, can I have some more?
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Dunno why there's selective enforcement on that... but the mods seem to come down a lot harder on pirated media than pirated goods. Second verse, same as the first... at least with respect to price. The movies only run about $45, but even when you're looking at collected Blu-ray box sets like the ones for Macross 7 you can expect to pay almost exactly $63.50 per disc. Macross 7 was 8 discs, sold as two 4-disc sets for $254 apiece.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Erm... not that I'm aware of, at least in the short term. Mind you, the asking price for the Macross Δ "Special Edition" Blu-rays is only a few bucks more than the average asking price for any given single Blu-ray volume of about $63.50 (US). The movies average a bit cheaper at around $45 a pop, but all in all these are pretty typical media prices for Japan. This holds true for all of the Blu-rays, even the ones that are for decades-old shows like the original series or Macross 7, so I wouldn't expect the price to come down much (if at all). (Also, ixnay on the ootleg-bay... we don't talk about that kind of thing here.)
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Not anywhere that I'm aware of, no. It's never depicted using any that I recall, but I would assume it has at least four, maybe six (probably two inboard of the nacelle, one outboard). There isn't really a firm distinction between them, honestly... the New UN Spacy is what the UN Spacy became when it was reorganized (and decentralized) along with the other UN Forces branches of service. Any aircraft that were still in active service would've had their markings updated as a matter of course. Reserve or test aircraft held in storage would have been updated either at the time of the reorg or if/when they were pulled out of storage for use. The only ones that would/should have missed it would be aircraft that were already earmarked for decommissioning and destined for either materials recycling at a boneyard or disposal sale to civilian buyers. (The Macross Frontier fleet was still in the process of selling off its old VF-11 Thunderbolts in 2058 per Macross the Ride, and there were air racers who'd managed to get their hands on VF-17Ds, so I would assume that they were updated to New UN Forces markings during the time they were still in service prior to sell-off.)
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Is new user registration disabled? There are some people on a Macross facebook group I'm on who are saying they can't register because it's saying new user registration is closed on MW.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Reasonably so, yes... and it looks like you spotted the detail that put me on to the correct order. The order in which the SYF prototypes seem to have been commissioned for customization and use by 3rd Fighter Wing, Delta Flight seem to correspond to the order in which they joined the outfit... not their callsign numbers. Chuck Mustang may be Delta-3, but he's been there longer than Messer. There are a few numbers in the middle that may not have ended up with Delta Flight, possibly being assigned to one of the other Flights aboard the Aether or Hemera or used as test aircraft. No kidding. It didn't make any sense that the VF-31's military spec, with its larger wing area, would have less pylon capacity than the custom forward-swept wing model. Granted, the VF-31A has the ordnance bays in the engine nacelles free to use for larger munitions instead of being filled by a rack for Cygnus multi-drone plates, but because they're on top of the wing that makes them only really useful for air-to-air ordnance rather than air-to-ground. Yep... though, admittedly, it is kind of a slippery slope since the same outfits (GAGraphic and SoftBank) have also done tech manuals for other properties like Mobile Suit Gundam, Galactic Drifter Vifam, etc.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Depends what you mean by "quality"... All of the books are loaded with with plenty of lovely pictures, though I think the VF-25 or VF-31 book might've got the best of that. For the broadest generally-informative coverage, I'd say the VF-25 book probably wins there. It doesn't delve too deeply into any one topic, but it covers a broad spectrum of the VF-25's feature content and the explanations are succinct and generally helpful. It's also the one where the non-canon variants are largely not Master File originals, which makes them a bit less ridiculous on average (a lot of them are nicked from the Macross Mechatronix series in Macross Ace). The VF-19 book probably has second place for being most broadly informative, though its original variants list gets a bit weird in places. For deepest, most technical coverage you'd probably want to get the two volumes of the VF-1 book, which go so deep into the spec as to give a full breakdown of all production blocks and even start talking about things like fuel consumption and the influence of overtechnology on material science in even mundane things like threaded fasteners. (It certainly explains why the sortie range for VFs being "unlimited"... a fighter with a power plant endurance measured in months!) The VF-0 book is arguably second-place for informative-ness, being the only book I know of to actually give separate stats for beautiful but almost-never-seen VF-0C. The worst books in the series are probably the VF-4 and VF-22 books, which all but ignore the official material and completely lose the plot about 30 pages in.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    As Master File would have it, the Shinsei Industry project teams have an obsession with evaluating technologies by building impractical one-off prototype aircraft specifically for that purpose. (This one was profoundly unnecessary and potentially confusing, given that Shinsei Industry had already built not one but two prototypes as a means to evaluate the ordinance container system that are covered in this book... the official/canon YF-30 and Master File-original YF-30B. It also shares a name with the VF-19ADVANCE, a one-off production aircraft that was not a technology demonstrator.)
  10. Seto Kaiba
    With respect to the subject of new weaponry... the missiles and bombs and what have you in Variable Fighter Master File: VF-31 Siegfried are newer versions and variants of the same munitions listed in the VF-25 book. The only noteworthy additions are the obvious ones, such as its heavy quantum beam gunpod, the rapid-fire railgun pods on the arms, and the modular container system. For the most part, the weapons on the VF-31 are derivatives of the VF-25's... even the micro-missile launchers in the legs are a newer variant of the same launcher in the VF-25's Super Pack. The only truly new weapons in Master File are a few new variants of the container system that include a YF-30-style micro-missile container (albeit apparently not double-sided like the YF-30's), an ECM pod, and a pod that unfolds into a beam cannon turret. They curiously neglect covering the standard container that the VF-31A uses, which is mostly identical to the Xaos Custom's version except it has sensors and an assortment of micro-missiles instead of a multidrone charger. There's also a VF-2JA-esque under-wing missile pod that holds half a dozen or so medium-range multipurpose missiles. They say almost nothing about the railgun mounts... nothing about ammo, feed system, nada. There's like one picture of the gun itself, and it isn't even a cutaway. I suppose if you don't say anything the nothing you say can't technically not make sense... so I guess they're in the clear there, right? The Variable Fighter Master File: VF-25 Messiah book is, in my opinion, one of the very best books in the series for both completeness and for technical content. For me, it's tied for first place with the second volume of Variable Fighter Master File: VF-1 Valkyrie (and only then because the latter got into the nitty-gritty of fuel system endurance and the tank capacities of both the "naked" VF-1 and all the versions of FAST pack). Even its goofiest original variants are miles better than the ones in the other books, and it diverges from official material much less than the majority of the other books while also offering a bunch of fairly stealthy nods and in-jokes to half-forgotten projects like VF-Experiment.
  11. 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.
  12. 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?)
  13. 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...
  14. 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.)
  15. 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.
  16. 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.
  17. 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.
  18. 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...
  19. 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".)
  20. 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.
  21. 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.
  22. 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).
  23. 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!
  24. 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.
  25. 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.)
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