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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    This will never happen, because neither Sony nor the clueless idiots behind The Show That Must Not Be Named have access to the Japanese BD transfers... and likely never will, because Big West doesn't do business with the clowns in Cali, and rightly so. They don't have any rights to the Japanese DVD/BD extra features, so they wouldn't be legally allowed to include them. If they did, they'd be sued for copyright infringement. I would not, and will not, purchase any Macross goods that would support Harmony Gold in any way. I don't think many Macross fans would.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Not just anime... one of my favorite manga titles, Five Star Stories, has at least as much material in supplemental publications as it does in the actual story.Macross Delta's info is actually shockingly thin on the ground for a Macross title...
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Macross Δ's visible in-show text, official subs, and merchandise all translated Δ小隊 as "Δ Flight"... prior to this series, 小隊 was always translated "Platoon".Mirage gives the unit's full designation as Xaos Ragna branch 3rd Fighter Wing Δ Flight. (I guess since the default currency of the armed forces is the VF platoon, Xaos and SMS don't see a need to organize into any units larger than that.)
  4. Seto Kaiba
    That's true of a lot of Macross shows... and, to be frank, a decent-sized crosssection of anime in general.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    The original Macross series has been available for bloody forever in the US in English subs (via Animeigo and ADV Films), and also with a breathtakingly bad dub (by ADV). Macross II: Lovers Again and Macross Plus can be had thru legit channels as well, and some Japanese home market releases of Macross Frontier's two movies, and the current Macross Delta DVD/BD release have official English subs... so the American fan who speaks not a word of Japanese isn't as dependent on bootlegs as he used to be. Still kinda up a certain septic creek without a paddle when it comes to 7, Zero, and the Frontier TV series tho.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Yep, that. It folds out into this weird double-jointed winglet thing that the art shows firing little pink plumes of exhaust that, for some reason I cannot precisely recall, puts me in the mind of Gundam SEED.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    As expected, the official Blu-Ray liner notes offered some clarity on this subject.The liner notes for BD Vol.3 have a somewhat reduced version of that chart from the Summer '16 issue of Great Mechanics G comparing the VF-31A/B Kairos to the VF-31 Custom Siegfried. In the special equipment line item, the VF-31 Custom Siegfried has "fold quartz", but the VF-31A/B's entry is a blank (just a hyphen). (The VF-31A stats block on page 22 unfortunately does not do anything to clear up the wing pylon issue. I am, however, slightly befuddled by Messer's fashion sense... all of the Xaos staff kind of dress like bums or out-of-work gigolos, but I cannot fathom why Messer's day-to-day attire includes a pair of side-buckle shoes and what are very clearly kneepads.) BD Vol.4's liner notes are exceedingly light on technical material, but there is one point of interest therein. The Aerial Knights don't use EX-Gear, and their ejector seat doesn't seem like it's got maneuvering thrusters built into it. Apparently their pilot suit has a pair of extendable winglets with verniers built in... it's the gold trim bits shaped like <> on the backpack. (On another unrelated note, we're going to have to correct the spellings of a few names... apparently Hermann's surname is spelled "Kroos" and Qasim's name is really spelled "Kassim Eber-hardt". I have to wonder if Berger Stone is fully human too... his concept art in the booklet has what looks like pointed ears under his headscarf.)
  8. Seto Kaiba
    As most of them can plead "mind control" and point fingers, prosecution probably wouldn't go very far...
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Nope, you're thinking of the New UN Government theories... which we pretty much settled not too long ago with the conclusion that the New UN Government had been a thing since shortly after the war.The New UN Forces became a thing after the Latence mess, which in the novelizations even prompted the formation of an independent watchdog organization to ensure the military didn't get any more unseemly ideas above its station.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    To be fair, until the applications of fold quartz were discovered in the late 2040's or early 2050's, Windermere probably didn't realize fold quartz was anything other than tacky costume jewelry. Within two years of the first widespread applications of fold quartz, the stuff was made a restricted substance and Windermere's potential windfall became a lot of deadweight.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Because, in the final episode of the series, the ship is revealed to be just fine... Neither really makes sense, since Lady M has supposedly been active since just after the First Space War and the Megaroad-01 is still MIA in 2067... while Mao has been dead since 2048.Plus, if Mao were Lady M she would've been one of the wealthiest individuals in the entire galaxy... and wouldn't have needed to beg Critical Path corporation for money to finance her expedition to Vajra space in the 2040s. The design was kept secret until mid-2059, at which point they HAD to disclose it because, hey hey, it would've been damn near impossible to deny that they'd been mass producing it from the point Galaxy's "survivors" joined up with the Frontier fleet... and certainly impossible after squadrons of VF-27s fought Frontier's forces at the end of the Vajra conflict.Galaxy probably coughed up the plans in an effort to avoid sanctions, or their specs were taken by Frontier when Galaxy forces took shelter there.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Ah, no... the problem is you're assuming the L-5 Manufacturing Station that built the majority of the UN Spacy's early fleet is the same installation as the L-5 Lab Station which Master File alleges existed and was destroyed by the Zentradi.Where the logical flaw in that assumption comes in is that the L-5 manufacturing station is allegedly producing new VF-1s and so on in the period between the First Space War ending in 2010 and the first mission to capture a factory satellite in 2011. (You have to admit, dead workers in a destroyed factory building new fighters and ships for the newly established New UN Government would be a work ethic above and beyond the call of duty...) For the record, the L-5 in question for both the Manufacturing Station and Zentradi factory satellite is Earth-Moon L5. (This is very briefly visible on Exsedol's console while they're folding the factory satellite back to Earth.)
  13. Seto Kaiba
    In pretty much any fleet battle that isn't hopelessly one-sided, you're gonna see the escort ships taking damage or getting sunk. That's far from being the kind of curbstomp battle you're implying, where the capital ships are utterly helpless against enemy fighters. It's usually the Nightmare Pluses getting creamed that's the measure of "look out boys, here comes a serious contender", and even THAT'S not exactly balanced coverage considering that we've never not seen the Nightmare Plus go up against an enemy that doesn't have a monstrous performance advantage.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    That largely depends on the capability of the ship's radar, but yes... their limited utility is probably why they fairly swiftly became one of the Option Pack choices for normal aircraft instead of a dedicated aircraft (barring an assortment of amusing unofficial designs in Master File). I'm not sure how you came to that conclusion, given that the "Space Wing" VFMF book mentions the L-5 Industrial Station is still very much around in 2029. There's a Zentradi factory satellite at L-5 as well, but to the best of our knowledge that's called the New Frontier shipyards after its capture.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, very likely... though I'd have expected Walkure's equipment to be based on fold quartz instead, since that's a more effective resonator and apparently is better suited to controlling and amplifying fold song. Dr. Chiba's song energy amplification system from the 2040s was built around the core of a fold system and therefore was probably packed to the gills with fold carbon. Personally, I'm not so sure that's actually the case... or at least, that it's not the case when there aren't Villain Sues and copious shenanigans.In Frontier, the New UN Spacy flotilla protecting Island-1 scored quite a few kills on the highly mobile Vajra with their AA guns despite the Vajra in question being far more agile than the typical variable fighter of the day. At the end of the day, only a handful of Vajra actually made it through the anti-aircraft fire to the emigrant ship, and a large share of the blame there rests with a lack of preparedness on the part of the fleet's top brass for venturing into Vajra territory and not bothering to equip their fighters with ammunition powerful enough to hurt the Vajra. We only see ships taking a pasting when the fighter screen has taken a powder. Delta is an exception, but that's pretty much entirely down to the fold songs of King Ketchup giving the Aerial Knights an unfair leg-up and making it all but impossible for the fighter screen protecting the warships to do its job.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    My suspicion is that they simply didn't know the significance (or, rather, lack thereof) when they were given the notes to write the article on... it'd make sense if they were simply told the difference was that one was special because it used fold quartz and the other's design is using fold carbon. To someone not in the know, that would sound like fold carbon were special rather than the basis for a good chunk of the overtechnology in every VF for the last 60 years.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    The Macross had actually lost her main sensor system twice over... first she lost her cross-dimension radar when the fold system vanished during the botched fold jump that landed them at Pluto's orbit, and then her main radar when Quamzin "accidentally" shot it.It's not clear how good a ship's cross-dimension/fold wave radar is at spotting small targets like fighters over long distances, and the conventional radar's range is limited by the noise of background radiation and intervening obstacles, so a small craft-mounted reconnaissance and electronic warfare system with a high-powered radar makes a fair amount of sense. (Particularly once they switched from conventional radars to cross-dimension/fold wave ones.) Not sure it's talking about the same installation, to be honest... the base at L-5 was a manufacturing station and shipyard, not a lab, and IIRC the Squadrons book has the VF-1L's being built there in 2011.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    In the closeup of the VF-31A sitting on the Aether's deck when Hayate joins Xaos, there doesn't appear to actually be anything there... just an empty space. You can see the panel line through the space where the crystal and its mount should be. The question then becomes "did the person who wrote the article understand that fold carbon isn't anything special?". IF there's actually a chunk of it mounted there... and there doesn't appear to be, based on the animation and the available model kits.There's no acknowledgement of any kind of fold carbon crystal or system using same in the official specs for the production model Kairos.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Just a point of order, it doesn't actually say the VF-31A/B has a fold carbon crystal in the space where the Xaos custom models have fold quartz. It simply lists fold carbon as "special equipment", which as I noted back in the Newbie thread makes precisely zero sense as fold carbon is an essential component of most any system that uses higher dimension physics... like fold reactors that are the core of the engines, or the beam gunpod.You couldn't build a variable fighter without the stuff. Slight correction... there isn't an overboost feature mentioned in the stats for the VF-31A/B Kairos mass production type.The overboost percentages are entirely attributed to fighters that have fold quartz enhancements. Xaos's customized VF-31s get a 15% improvement in their engine output when their fold wave systems are active. Windermere's Sv-252Hs gets a 30% improvement from its reheat system, which is a kind of poor man's fold wave system focused on engine performance improvement.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Ah, I can have a whack at that when I get home.(I took an extra day after MacrossWorldCon to do a few more tourist-y things before flying home.)
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Haven't seen that myself, but I would not be surprised if it were so.After all, Walkure's fold song amplification technology is almost certainly built on research and technologies developed by Dr. Gadget M. Chiba in the 2040s (IIRC Dr. Chiba was alleged to be Lady M's protege). The core of the Sound Energy System he developed to amplify song energy was a super dimension converter from a fold system, which probably contained a fair amount of fold carbon. The "microphone" end of the amplifier ought to have a dimensional resonator that can pick up the fold waves of the singer and boost and/or transmit them to the amplifier for further enhancement.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    What little I've found on the subject seems to suggest that the vast majority of the fold carbon in use is synthetic.I do suspect that there is naturally-occurring (or biological) fold carbon in the setting. My pet theory on the matter is that since galactic whales have a partially crystalline body and are fold-capable, that their bodies contain or are made of fold carbon of unusually high quality. That'd explain the rather bizarre statement that galactic whales were being hunted for the benefits the body of the whale could provide to starships. Just like fold quartz, a higher-purity and larger stone means a better, higher energy reaction and better-quality heavy quantum. I doubt they'll reinvent the wheel for this one... Delta was kind of a minimum-effort series from the mechanical standpoint. The VF-31's systems are mostly nicked from the VF-25 if the stats are anything to go by, and even the Xaos Valkyrie Works custom job is practically a fighter built ala carte from existing systems.They didn't really introduce any new wrinkles to the setting or the existing technologies this time around... it was almost "Macross by numbers".
  23. Seto Kaiba
    There's kind of a fine distinction to be made here.The version of DYRL? that we've seen, the one that was released in '84, is not the version that's actually an in-universe movie. The in-universe film Do You Remember Love? is supposed to be mostly the same as the film in the real world, but it also has content that wasn't in the real film like Max and Milia dogfighting in space and their wedding that's seen in snippets from Macross 7. The actual film Macross: Do You Remember Love? is one of several titles that collectively exist in the vague and nebulous "Whose First Space War is it anyway?" period. All or none may be authentic and correct versions of the war, given Kawamori's view that each Macross title is an island unto itself (though Big West seems to diagree via Chronicle). It would've been interesting, but I don't think even Kawamori is seriously committed to the idea of Macross titles as dramatizations of events rather than depictions of events... I think he'd rather just tell a story instead of trying to explain away every little example of zeerust and their assumptions about the future made decades ago not lining up with reality (like there being no cellular phones in 2009).Like his notion that each Macross series is an island unto itself, it's just a clever way ot telling fans to go away and stop asking him about fiddly little details.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Fold carbon is a (synthetic) substance that's used in overtechnology devices that operate on the higher-dimension physics of fold space. In particular, fold carbon is the catalyst which permits the production of heavy quantum, which is essential to the function of thermonuclear reaction power systems, gravity control systems, converging energy cannons, and so on. It doesn't make a ton of sense to list fold carbon as "special equipment", since having fold carbon on the aircraft is not only not in any way special but a bare necessity for essential systems like the engines and beam gunpod to operate. It's a lot like calling blood "special equipment" on a person... Heat travels pretty effectively in vacuum as infrared radiation... but yeah, the effects of being adjacent to a blast in space will be somewhat less due to the lack of a pressure wave from an atmosphere.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    There's actually a fairly straightforward explanation for that.The VF-0 Phoenix was still being used as a technology demonstrator and testbed aircraft at the time the Mayan Island incident broke out and they were pressed into combat service. The base design of the VF-1 had been pinned down the year before, and development of the VF-X-3 and VF-X-4 had already been going on for several years. The VF-0 has a Block 6+ model cockpit because it was being used to evaluate that production-intent cockpit installed on all but the first few production blocks of VF-1 (and which those early blocks would swiftly be upgraded to). If it helps, think of the Block 5 cockpit as a legacy of the VF-X-1 prototype, something that was better suited to testing than combat use, and was replaced by a more production-worthy design shortly after trial production ended. The "TV" VF-1s had the older cockpit because they were the very first batches of VF-1s off the production lines, rushed off to meet the February launch date only about two months after the first aircraft came off the line. You're really overthinking this "TV production" thing... the only one that's actually applied to is DYRL?.
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