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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    It was an innovation, all right... but not one made by the Dian Cecht SV Works.The Macross Galaxy Guld Works beat them to the punch on that one by about eight years... the VF-27's Super Pack included a QF-5100D Goblin II UCAV mounted dorsally that could similarly detach from its mothership VF and operate independently (or be remotely controlled using the pilot's BDI).
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Having four engines provides a greater maximum instantaneous thrust and thrust-to-weight ratio, which generally translates to a faster top speed in atmosphere and better climb rate. (Unless the engines themselves rotate, the actual gain in maneuverability isn't that huge... that's more a function of verniers.) Having twice the usual number of engines means the fighter has twice the usual number of reactors. The practical upshot of this is that the fighter's thermoelectric and MHD generators are producing more energy above and beyond what's actually necessary for flight than what a two-engine configuration is going to produce. This enables the usage of certain energy-intensive systems that would not normally be available in fighter mode without a fold wave or fold dimensional resonance system, like running the energy conversion armor at full power or using the pin-point barriers. The loss of an engine isn't a crippling problem for a four-engine VF, as the total loss of power is more like 1/4 instead of 1/2. Of course, having four engines also comes with the downside that you're using fuel twice as fast... which reduces the fighter's operational endurance, esp. during space combat where the reactors are consuming fuel exponentially more rapidly than usual to produce the plasma the engine expels to provide thrust. Nope... the Sv-262 is noticeably better than a standard production-level 5th Generation Main VF like the VF-25 or VF-31, but it still falls short of what the VF-27, YF-29, and YF-30 are capable of.(In practical terms, Windermere is shelling out for a much more expensive VF with the expectation that quality will cover numbers.) Goodness no.In terms of raw engine power and thrust-to-weight ratio the Sv-262 is behind the VF-27, YF-30, YF-29, and probably VF-24 (which we don't have stats for). You could make an excellent case that the Sv-262 is every bit as flawed as the VF-27... it's over-specialized. Where the VF-27 focused on dogfighting ability to the exclusion of pretty much everything else, and became a fighter with low operational versatility, the Sv-262 shows an exaggerated emphasis on combat in atmosphere. As a result of its atmosphere-centric design, its fuel capacity is low and it has aggressively limited operational endurance in space compared to other 5th Generation VFs. To maintain its streamlined profile its weapons were integrated directly into the airframe, which greatly limits is versatility and effectively precludes equipping it with long-range weaponry. It's a fighter very well-suited to the kind of war Windermere expected to be fighting, but it'd probably fare poorly in massed combat against the NUNS or Zentradi without the Wind Singer there to disorient or subvert the enemy. (Which is, of course, exactly what we saw near the end of the series... when Heinz took a powder, all the sudden the Drakens were being shot down by NUNS pilots flying previous-generation fighters.) As expected, the Sv-262 has no fold system. It can only fold by using a fold booster, riding along inside a starship's fold effect, or utilizing a point-to-point fold effect generated by a Protoculture relic. For much of the series, they appear to be using fold gates produced by the Sigur Valens to get around. (Those who've been on the thread from early on will remember I predicted precisely that about ten episodes before it was revealed, because there was similar technology in widespread use over on Uroboros.)
  3. Seto Kaiba
    More or less, yeah... there's some concept art for it in one of the art books, but not much.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    It's a (politically incorrect) in-universe nickname... one inspired by the way the VEFR-1's radome is positioned over its head in battroid mode, in a manner reminiscent of the conical hats in many east Asian cultures including the Chinese douli and Japanese kasa.(Not sure why it's Chinese, except maybe that the douli made for farmers that I've seen tend to be almost flat with a wide brim.) Edit: I suppose a little casual racism may be in play, since Japan and China are not exactly on pally terms...
  5. Seto Kaiba
    I don't recall it actually rotating the engines a full 180 degrees, but since the Tornado Pack on the VF-25 was the proof of concept for the YF-29's engine arrangement, I don't see why they wouldn't be able to.I doubt it's going to catch on in a mainstream fighter though... seems like kind of a pain in the butt to implement. It seems like the kind of thing we'll see on ultra-agile low-volume production dogfighters...
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, it was a neat touch... I mean, it's a lot easier to fit 5 million people into a space roughly the size of downtown San Francisco if you have two equally large areas of highrises underneath it.I don't believe it's discussed in depth anywhere though.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    It has a "blink and you'll miss it" appearance in Ep27 of the original series... in that pan shot of the hundreds of fighters flying in front of the Storm Attacker-mode SDF-1 Macross.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    I doubt it, since that's also where the wing folds for high speed maneuver mode... but if so it'd give the VF-31 an advantage over the VF-25 in terms of total ordinance capacity.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Pretty sure there isn't... since Big West/Studio Nue own the Macross IP hands down, and plenty of material has continued to use the original UN Spacy roundel and "UN Spacy" markings.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    All things considered, I'd have been floored if they weren't... even the VF-1 could do that.(I still suspect the VF-31A Kairos is supposed to have four hardpoints, though I've noticed the printed stats ignore the existence of the hardpoints altogether but consistently say the Kairos has missile containers where the Siegfried Custom has multidrone racks.)
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Just a note, but in the novelization of Macross Frontier the VF-9 was still being used by Macross Galaxy in 2059. As the VF-9 isn't that much older than the VF-11, and the VF-11 was finally being retired from service in 2058 via disposal sales (noted in Macross R), it's possible those VF-9s are relatively recent acquistions sold off by the Spacy when the fighter finally was withdrawn from service. That, my friend, is putting it MILDLY.Max and Milia were the top aces of the First Space War, founded the UN Spacy's equivalent of TOPGUN, trained innumerable pilots, saved the galaxy a couple of times, helped General Galaxy make a name for itself in VF design and decided the final form of Shinsei's first few big sellers, and their romance is quite literally the stuff of history. The mark they made is arguably second only to that of Minmay herself.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    That would be consistent with the published material, yeah... though it's worth remembering that the UN Spacy was not actually a space navy organizationally-speaking. "Spacy" is short for "Space Military" (Space Forces) or "Space Army". They just nicked Navy-style hull class symbols and squadron designations. That probably has a fair bit to do with the UN Spacy not having a proper space-capable ELINT or AEW/AWACS craft in its formative years. It had the ES-11D Cat's Eye recon plane, which is hinted to be a conventional aircraft converted for space use, but that clearly didn't cut it and they were forced to come up with something better suited to space combat... and, in that period, the gold standard was the VF-1. The VEFR-1 "Funny Chinese" from the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross series was every bit as improvised as the Cat's Eye, and the VE-1 refined the concept into a more production-worthy and modular form that meant with a little time and the right bolt-ons, a fighter could be converted into an AEW/AWACS/ELINT platform should the need arise. (Though, in the Macross II parallel world timeline, the VE-1 was ALSO an improvised design invented aboard the SDF-1 during its return flight to Earth created as a modification of the VT-1 Ostrich.)
  13. Seto Kaiba
    There's very little information available on the operations of the VE-1 ELINT Seeker and the other VF-1 variants developed for AEW and recon use. The technical publications that go into detail on things like squadron organizations focus almost exclusively on the combat variants and neglect the support variants... and the oldest documents predate the VE-1 being a thing. Based on the minimal available evidence for that period of Macross history, the VE-1 units were organized into dedicated Space Airborne Early Warning squadrons (SVAW). The only one I can recall that actually had an identified squadron affiliation appeared in Variable Fighter Master File: VF-1 Valkyrie Vol.2... a unit from the SVAW-12 Praerie Dogs, a unit stationed on the ARMD-213 Altamira.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    I know, right? I've made some of my weirdest finds that way, like looking for the comment about the VF-2JA's vernier count and stumbling across a bore for the Strike Valkyrie's beam cannon. Engrish can be a cruel mistress at times...(But here's me wondering why the UN Forces were apparently so invested in the idea of having ties to the Navy's Black Aces that they founded a Spacy equivalent squadron TWICE... once in the years leading up to the First Space War, and again after they copped it in said war along with the ARMD Ranger.)
  15. Seto Kaiba
    I actually found the ship's name completely by accident a moment ago... CV-339 is identified in the back of This is Animation: Macross Plus as being the B.J. Gloval (sic.) (should be "Global"). The book has a VF-11C Super Thunderbolt from the SVF-41 Black Aces as the representative squadron from that ship.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Thank the machine god for small favors... They'll have to succeed or fail on their own merits... but since the music was Delta's single strong point, they at least have a good platform to launch from. I have a feeling the merchandise for the series isn't going to sell particularly well now that it's over, due to the mecha being more an afterthought than a proper part of the series.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    What would I want a Macross Delta movie to be? 3. Cancelled. Seriously, the second cour of the series was such a train wreck that Macross Delta just doesn't DESERVE a movie. If I had my way, I'd quietly scrub the series from the continuity and pretend it never happened, like Sunrise did to G-Saviour. The only way I could consider them doing a film would be if they fired the writers of the series and hired someone else who could clean up the mess the current mooks made. Under new writers, I'd prefer to have a compilation-type movie in the hopes that an alternate version of the story by another writer wouldn't leave me wanting a refund.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Depends on how official you want to be there... Variable Fighter Master File has shown the GBP-1S-equipped VF-1 Valkyrie with three gunpods. One mounted to each forearm, and one handheld. (It's in the Operation Bullseye portion of the second VF-1 volume.)
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Maybe... though the normal VF emphasis on speed and evasion is more Dark Eldar territory. Perhaps that's why I like them so much... Now, whether the VF-31's forearm guns are actually in the same firepower tier as a proper gunpod isn't clear. The caliber of ammo they take (27mm on the military model, 25mm on the Xaos custom) is below what the nominal minimum gunpod caliber is (30mm), though since Ek still equals 0.5MV2 they could compensate with additional muzzle velocity... Your main point is bang-on correct though. The VF-31 may seem somewhat under-armed, but its weapons are actually pretty typical for a 5th Generation VF. It's got a gunpod, a pair of fixed-forward rapid fire cannons for fighter mode, coaxial guns on the monitor turret, and a fair amount of missile capacity. It's got less versatility in missile options than the VF-25, but the VF-25 kind of dominates in that respect by design with twice the number of pylons as any other 5th Generation VF. Yeah, but he had to stay in GERWALK mode or ditch one because he didn't have anywhere to put two.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    I doubt "Make it Orky" is part of the average VF's design plan... (Well, unless we're talking the VF-X3 Medusa or SDP-1 Stampede Valkyrie... they both look like they're cobbled together from whatever was laying around, and the former actually was...)
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Mostly that first one. Yeah, that's from The Show That Must Not Be Named... or, to be precise, the comic books that were produced for same. Those comics depicted some of the Zentradi characters as being quite old, hundreds or thousands of years old and effectively immortal barring combat injury.Vrlitwhai wasn't exactly ancient in the original Macross series... IIRC he was 38.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    The range of movement of the ordinance container is somewhat limited... being handheld clears that problem right up. How many gunpods does one fighter need?(The current official recordholder is the VF-2SS Valkyrie II, which can carry three gunpods without resorting to hardpoints. Pseudo-official loadings also give the VF-1's Armored Pack and VF-25 the ability to carry three gunpods at once.)
  23. Seto Kaiba
    It's been a while since last I saw Macross 7, but IIRC they say that a Zentradi is hardier than a human... not longer-lived. Milia had simply never caught a cold before and leapt to the illogical conclusion that she was dying, when all she had was the space equivalent of the common cold. By 2067 they probably have started to get a handle on what the Zentradi average lifespan is... but in 2045 that was probably still unknown. We've seen several Zentradi still hale and hearty enough to go about their business in 2059 while still being First Space War veterans... but that doesn't mean they're necessarily longer-lived than the humans they're virtually identical to on a genetic level. Nah, Max and Milia are actually probably one of the best parts of that show.The only real bad parts about Macross 7 are Basara's personality (he's an a-hole, no two ways about it), the repetitive use of the same handful of animated sequences in the combat, and the repetitive use of the same couple songs in the first half. (The budget wasn't huge.) The rest is actually watchable.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    The emigrant ships are mostly self-sustaining, but not completely... and they aren't possessed of infinite endurance. Endurance has improved as ships have gotten larger and the recycling technology has gotten better, but the Megaroad-01 should be well over its planned service lifespan by 2067. So... a couple things...First, the loss of communication in July 2016 is what prompted the UN Forces to conclude the SDF-2 Megaroad-01 had gone missing, and the ensuing coverup... so they clearly don't have a cavalier attitude about ships going silent. Second, the time between the Varauta system being conquered by the Protodeviln and the start of Macross 7 is only two years (2043-2045). Third, I don't believe it's said that the Varauta system went silent after being conquered. The entire population was brainwashed, so it wouldn't have been any real challenge to fake routine communications to ensure the UN Government was convinced all was well.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    The reason that Max and Milia look young is kind of an in-joke on the part of the show's creators. Namely, Max is a genius (or Jenius)... and growing old is a state of mind for normal men.
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