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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    An equally valid question would be... is this voted on by readers on a one-person one-vote basis, or is this one of those polls-by-postcard where one person can submit as many votes as they like as long as they're willing to spring for that many postcards?Did Delta score in some of these categories it clearly doesn't belong in, like story, because of a handful of determined fanboys sending thousands of postcards? Some of these categories are eminently deserved, but story? C'mon...
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Ah, interesting. Mine are still penned en route thanks to a customs screwup... sometimes I hate the way FedEx can't seem to agree on one port of entry. It is... and the launchers are apparently a variant of the same model used on the VF-25's SPS-25/MF25 Super Pack: the Bifors CIMM-3. Yep... and it paints a very interesting picture of the VF-31's relationship to other 5th Generation VFs, and the relationship between the stock VF-31 Kairos and the Xaos Valkyrie Works VF-31 Siegfried. I think the biggest thing this clarifies is why Hayate kept getting chastised for being rough on his plane even though the maneuvers he's doing aren't that impressive compared to what we've seen in previous shows. The VF-31 Kairos is essentially a VF-25 equivalent, and Xaos Valkyrie Works heavily modified that design to increase performance above what the airframe was actually stressed for. A 14% increase in maximum instantaneous thrust, the additional output of overboost from the fold wave system, changing out the missile containers for multidrone racks, installing a new Airframe Control AI (the stock machine is using an Ariel II variant, the Siegfried uses Ariel III), and a few other things like changing the wingtips. The stock VF-31 Kairos actually isn't a particularly impressive aircraft for a 5th Generation VF either. Its thrust to weight ratio and ISC performance are very slightly higher, but the same HMI and different versions of the same AI control system, and the VF-25 has a definite edge in carried ordinance. The Cygnus multidrone plates being able to generate pinpoint barriers is the one major technical advancement we've seen in Macross Delta. The rest hasn't really been anything new or remarkable. Delta has done no real innovation, technologically or otherwise, so suspension of disbelief hasn't really been tested much. Come to that, why would she need the rocket belt? She was wearing a flight suit with rockets built into the backpack. Yes, I'm aware of the GAU-8/A's return mechanism... but that's not something that's ever been presented as used on Valkyrie gun pods. The high caliber of their ammo, combined with the need to keep the gun pod streamlined, left the choice between ejecting spent shell casings or using caseless ammo. The vast majority of gun pods went in for the former, and stealth gun pods opted for the latter.Now that there are beam gun pods in common use, the question is academic from the mid-2060's on.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    So... what you're saying is the last episode means we need to Kickstarter an exorcism for the Macross Delta staff?That'd make for some interesting news to post... Anyone got anything on the new characters that were just revealed the other day for Macross Delta Scramble?
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Just because something is hovering doesn't necessarily mean it's really using anti-grav levitation... and offhand, I don't recall the show ever saying what Walkure's Cygnus multidrone plates are using to stay aloft. They have visible verniers and wings for forward flight.For that to be an antigravity effect, that'd mark an enormous advance in GIC technology... I find it more plausible they're flying by more energy-efficient means like an ionocraft lift effect or simple raw thrust through those verniers. Granted, but as we've seen in the show the battery life is aggressively short and only good for blocking two or three shots from beam machinegun-level guns or micro-missiles before needing to be recharged. In this case, I think it's very safe to say the simplest explanation would be the correct one... Reina was simply wearing an ordinary pilot's suit, as the idea of a "force field" spacesuit ala Dirty Pair or the Star Trek cartoon would require ENORMOUS strides to be made in barrier technology and several other fields of research that simply aren't demonstrated in the show... and unlike those examples, would also carry so many problems that it wouldn't be an attractive alternative to a good old fashioned counterpressure suit and helmet.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    I can't screencap it right now, but if you look at the underside of the VF-31s when they're deploying those speaker pods on the Aether's catapult deck you can see the gun pod has apparently been placed on a ventral mount like the majority of other Valkyries use. Projecting over whatever the user happens to be wearing goes all the way back to DYRL?, and in a mobile form in Macross II: Lovers Again. I'd assume the reason for the holosuit was probably something that wouldn't shift around under the hologram and was easy to move in... or possibly something to keep her cool or wick away sweat, since stage lights are inclined to heat the stage up considerably. 'bit of a lost cause then, isn't it? It was established way back in Episode 5 or so that Walkure only has two members who can get the job done: Freyja and Mikumo. Everyone else is too weak to contest Heinz or stop the Var without a fold wave amplifier. Somehow, I have to think that's confirmation bias on their part... their jump in effectiveness coincided with the addition of Mikumo to the group (AKA "the one who actually has ability") and some small growth in professionalism on the part of squad "Broken Bird" Kaname before being kicked out of the lead role in favor of Mikumo.It seems incredibly reckless for Xaos to have ditched proper body armor in an essentially-irreplaceable unit for cling wrap that offers zero protection and makes them look like hookers from a nuru massage parlor. There's no denying Macross Delta is a poorly thought-out mess and Xaos's administration likely couldn't empty water from a boot if IKEA instructions were printed on the heel, but it's flat amazing Walkure isn't in the ICU 24/7. That seems like kind of a glaring contradiction right there... that they can't do the job wearing a holographically-concealed suit of body armor, but there's no difficulty doing it in a military-grade mechanical compression pilot suit complete with breathing mixture tanks, connection points for EX-Gear, and an inbuilt set of verniers? Those multidrones are far from small... given the visual cues available, they look to have a 1.5-2m wingspan when unfolded, and they probably weigh quite a bit. Plus you need two or more and an external power source to generate even small barrier effects. A wearable version of the barrier technology would be, in all likelihood, weigh hundreds of pounds, require an external power source, and be every bit as easy to move in as a sandwich board made of manhole covers.Also, just as a note, barrier technology in Macross is not an "energy force field" like your generic sci-fi shields... a barrier system produces a localized distortion in space-time that matter and energy can't pass through. A personal barrier system, if one existed, would be a pretty poor substitute for a pilot suit... you'd still need a helmet and rebreather so you wouldn't suffocate, given that air can't pass through a barrier. You'd have a difficult time seeing, since most wavelengths of light have a hard time making it through a barrier. You'd also have the problem of being unable to touch anything without great care even if you had the ability to wrap the barrier around each finger, because the barrier has zero give to it and is essentially an immovable object relative to its projector... pressing a button would be the same as the button running into a wall at the speed your hand was moving. Without tactile feedback, you would easily wreck the controls with your barrier-covered hands in a very short span of time.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    The part that bothers me the most about Walkure's holosuits is that we know for a fact from multiple Macross titles that these holographic projectors have no problem creating a costume projection over anything the operator happens to be wearing. We know it can conceal anything the wearer happens to have on, and the projector is more than capable of providing the illusion of bare skin without any actual exposed flesh. Sheryl's holosuit looked like a wetsuit, and Mina didn't even bother with one... so there wasn't a practical reason for the Walkure-issue holosuits to be underwear and a transparent body stocking.Considering that Walkure is a frontline combat unit, shouldn't they be wearing something that offers a little more protection like... y'know... body armor? They seemed to be wearing more protection in the flashback episode, so why'd that go away? It seemed especially stupid once the Aerial Knights revealed they could jam the multidrones and thus deprive Walkure of all defense. (I mean, I know that fanservice is basically what Mikumo, Makina, and Reina were relying on instead of characterization... but it's kind of lame.)
  7. Seto Kaiba
    That's actually a really good question... every VF has had infrared cameras as part of its sensor suite, so why the hell are the Aerial Knights wasting their time sweeping the frozen hinterland with searchlights? Maybe, in the epilogue. Odds are he's probably pulling the strings behind the NUNS counteroffensive... being better at saving the galaxy than the protagonists.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    I don't believe it's ever been quantified in explicit terms, no... but the VF-1 uses verniers out on the wingtips for roll control even in atmospheric flight (finally animated as such in Macross Delta Ep.3), so the output of the high-thrust verniers must be pretty damned huge for their size (tens of kilonewtons).
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Well, all six launchers are just below the knee... so that may be what's up there.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Did they? I thought they only warned us that the love triangle was going to be done differently... (and by differently, I suppose they meant "not at all").
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Maybe... but then, large-scale applications of hologram technology in starships have been done for reasons scarcely less flimsy than that. I'd suppose the propaganda value of the Do You Remember Love? movie was largely based on the presentation of more Zentradi fleets as a very real, very immediate threat. Unfortunately, a threat that in recent decades seems to have only popped up offscreen. (Though I suppose, as an essentially defenseless training ship, some holographic camouflage ala YF-27-5 might not be an entirely bad idea for ships operating as part of emigrant fleets...) EDIT: Come to think of it... why isn't this used to protect Island ships when they're operating independently of their docked carrier? Throw a barrier up, then turn that sucker invisible. "Target? What target? We're just some empty space, yo."
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Well, the franchise owner certainly seems to care... but then, they really ought to start keeping Kawamori on a shorter leash. Well, they're still doing it in-universe in 2059... using real Variable Fighters for motion capture in battle sequences. Make of it what you will, but there has to be some practical or pragmatic reason they're paying for real variable fighters and helicopters and so on for their movies instead of using CG.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    More like anime's Gene Roddenberry... he's a good idea and concept man who's entirely dependent on others to turn his broad, sometimes absurd concepts into reality with varying degrees of success. Delta is his equivalent of Star Trek: the Next Generation season 1: all the pieces are there, but they've been put together wrong into something absolutely abhorrent. Anime's George Lucas is probably Yoshiyuki Tomino, whose ups and downs led to some legendary (Zeta Gundam, Char's Counterattack) and legendarily bad (ZZ Gundam, Reconguista in G) installments where the quality was largely dependent on how short a leash the producers kept on him during development. After ten years mostly spent watching Macross II get bagged on for NOT having Kawamori at the helm... I'm really, REALLY fighting the temptation to laugh at how a Kawamori-concept series has turned into such a train wreck that fans are looking back fondly on Macross II.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    A good while before that, actually... if you remember, Hikaru VTOL's a VT-1 Super Ostrich with just the ventral verniers in order to get enough ground clearance to transform to GERWALK in Macross: Do You Remember Love?.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    We'll probably have to wait until the Variable Fighter Master File: VF-31 Siegfried book comes out to know for sure, since Macross Delta is apparently incredibly determined to neglect the mecha of the series like the proverbial redheaded stepchild.It doesn't look like the VF-31's beam gun pod is set up for beam grenade mode, but it's gotta be generating some serious juice to use the regular mode, and a railgun isn't exactly light on energy consumption either and it's got two of those... You do realize the MC-17C and GU-14B are almost the exact same gun pod, right?The only appreciable differences between the two are the caliber of ammunition and the placement of the removable magazine. Other than that, the two are more or less identical. The CG model even preserved the surface detail of the MC-17 folding stock. That the most common variable fighter in the galaxy and the de facto Special Forces VF both use caseless ammo would suggest that they do, in fact, have the problems inherent in modern caseless ammo quite thoroughly licked. The pamphlet for the 1/72 scale VF-31J model kit had a line in there about the VF-31 being unable to fly in Battroid mode... citing that it could only hover.Based on what we saw last time the show's cast went to Voldor, that's clearly bunk. Hayate's VF-31J was shown flying in Battroid mode as he charged Keith's Sv-262Hs to stop him from one-upping Bogue by gunning down Walkure. Also, VFs with a fraction of the VF-31's engine power have been shown to be easily able to fly in Battroid mode in previous shows. No they weren't, they're still there... just better integrated into the body of the fighter. You can clearly see them being used to provide forward thrust for the VF-25's GERWALK mode in Ep2 of Frontier, and they're very much present in the line art and visible on some of the toys as well.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Much the same as the regular mode... "Blowing crap up with extreme prejudice".As far as I know, the closest any official source has come to identifying a concrete design intent for the beam grenade mode on the VF-27's gun pod was that it had firepower enough to penetrate the armor of the larger types of Vajra. It wouldn't be a stretch, based on what's shown in the series, to say it's an effective analog for a Strike Pack's anti-ship cannon.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    It'd take an incredible amount of force to do that... especially since it looks like Windermere is an Earth-type planet in most respects, with gravity at or in the vicinity of 1G. We can say with some certainty that they've licked caseless ammo's issues... given that several models of Valkyrie equip, as standard, gun pods that fire caseless rounds. Mostly Generation 3.5 or 4 designs like the VF-17, VF-22, or VF-171's gun pods.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Buckshot doesn't spread out enough over short to medium ranges... what Messer needed was a goddamn light grenade launcher or flechette gun. As far as active camouflage goes, I think that's probably a no-go. If they're not much improved over Sheryl's rig in Macross Frontier they can make that bodysuit appear invisible in part or in full (done once in an amusing little short comic in Macross Ace), but turning the wearer invisible probably isn't in the cards without more power or a more sophisticated projector. The YF-27-5 had a holographic camouflage system like that, but that had a lot more power behind it. It seems a bit inconsistent, since even in the 90's we were seeing futuristic firearms in the hands of UN Forces, the Varauta troops, and Zolans.How'd the NUNS go backwards from laser machineguns to a rifle from 1995? They use a rifle no more advanced than the FAMAS G2 Shin was brandishing way back in Macross Zero... Dunno 'bout you, but photorealistic CG always comes off looking a bit odd or out of place to me... the articulations are never quite right, features blur unrealistically, etc. Maybe they're just sticklers for authenticity, or maybe they just find using motion capture with a real Valkyrie makes for a more natural CG compositing job in postproduction? Every time they've filmed an in-universe docu-drama so far, they've used real Valkyries either as-is or as motion capture targets for later editing. That should be perfectly possible... but we've seen that Xaos, Delta Flight, and Walkure are not exactly good at what they do.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Dunno 'bout Messer's rifle, but the H&K G36 knockoff has line art from Macross Frontier that shows it ejecting shell casings when firing. I don't think we've had a confirmed caseless gun in Macross since the original series.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Let's just say it wouldn't be the first time in Macross that someone's static display of an old Valkyrie turned out to still be in working order and possessed of enough emergency backup power to transform and maneuver briefly.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Or maybe... or better yet...
  22. Seto Kaiba
    That kind of ventures into the territory of "Why would you do such a terrible thing?". To be fair, everything the Windermereans are using is a human design. Even their fighters were developed and built by humans. They were an agrarian society before humanity showed up, and to a certain extent still are. The history of firearms in Macross is a weird one though, and they seem to be evolving BACKWARDS. The standard-issue weapons used by the UN Spacy in the First Space War were caseless machine guns... but by the 2040's in Macross Plus and Macross 7 they're back to using .380 ACP handguns, Colt Police Positive revolvers, and knockoffs of the MP-5 and AR-15. The G-36 clone Windermere's using in Delta is a rifle also used in Macross Frontier by the New UN Forces infantry aboard Island-1. (Considering how recently the NUNS was on the planet, Windermere probably either purchased those rifles through the New UN Forces or looted them from the supply depot at the base we saw Arad and Kaname visit in the last episode.) Kawamori-san's excuses for Zeerust and the schizophrenic inter-show aesthetic continuity aside, Do You Remember Love? is the only Macross title to be officially identified as a dramatization of events. Mind you, the 2031 movie Do You Remember Love? was shot using as many period-appropriate props as possible... and substituted holograms for anything that wasn't readily available. A few of the things they used have been identified, like late-block VF-1 Valkyries and the use of a West Point-class training ship with a holographic skin for Boddole Zer's flagship. We can hazard guesses at a few of the other things that were used. The Zentradi, their ships, and their mecha were probably supplied by the UN Spacy Marines with some actors mixed in, and the role of the Macross was probably played by the SDFN-1 General (Takashi) Hayase or one of her sister ships the way the USS Ranger was used as a stand in for USS Enterprise in the filming of Star Trek IV. One of my colleagues has an interesting theory that the "movie versions" of the stories are all propaganda docu-dramas produced by the (New) UN Forces intended to make the general public think they had a better handle of the situations than they did. Like how DYRL? skips the UN Forces brass being intransigent and ignoring the Macross crew's advice about the size of the enemy fleet, or how the Frontier movies changed the nature of Leon Mishima's involvement in the Vajra war to remove him as one of the primary local conspirators in Macross Galaxy's plot to take over the New UN Government. (If true, you have to wonder how a Macross Delta movie would play out... the NUNS'd probably put up a lot more of a fight.)
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Probably exactly the same as this... you'd have a handful of people who are just happy there's another Macross show on the air or praising its "easy to follow" absence of a story, and the rest would probably be baying for the director's blood over Macross 7 having two full cours of "bugger all's going on". At least Macross 7 had a much stronger finish than Delta is likely to receive, with those two cours of nothing being run-up to something much more reasonably-paced and interesting. I'd actually rank 7 above Delta on those grounds. 7 started weak and finished strong. Delta started strong and will finish weak, and be all the more disappointing for it. Five'll get you twenty an Armored Siegfried will show up in the Variable Fighter Master File book a year or so from now as equipment issued to the NUNS squadrons flying it. As lame as the dogfights have been, I almost have to say "good riddance"... Xaos is almost as bad in the air as they are on the ground, and the VF-31's too good-looking an aircraft to have its legacy weighed down by association with them.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, I'll admit if this one didn't have Macross in the title it'd long since have joined the very elite fraternity of shows that were so awful I couldn't finish them. In a lot of ways, it feels worse than shows which were garbage from the outset like Stratos4 or Bubblegum Crisis: Tokyo 2040 AD because all the elements of Macross greatness are there. The main trio are actually quite interesting, even the weaker songs like Walkure Attack! are eminently listenable, the mecha are interesting and some downright gorgeous, the scenery is beautiful and the setting enormous... but it's put together wrong. It's painful to watch because it's obvious a competent staff could have turned this into something wonderful and exciting, and the nutters running the show have produced something that I actually straight-up dread watching every week with a plot that is pants-on-head retarded. In all honesty, Mythbusters proved you could polish a turd (Ep.113)... but some turds really don't deserve the effort. I doubt condensation is going to do this sh*t awful barely-there plot any favors, and I don't need Macross serving up two disappointments in a row when installments are so infrequent.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    All right! In the interest of honesty and in acknowledgement of the show's horrendous track record, I'm not going to pretend I have any anticipation for this new episode... so, instead, we'll settle in for another date with Delta Disappointment and spend 24 minutes wishing we were watching something else. This was actually a mild improvement over the shoddy mess that was 19 and 20, but it still feels like Macross Delta's producers are desperately rummaging around in the show's toybox for something to show us. Trying to humanize Mikumo NOW is a waste of time. It should've been done half a series ago, and falls flat now that she's Ms. McGuffin. So I'm going to have to tender a negative vote again, but with less venom this time.
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