Seto Kaiba

Hm? You mean Messer counting in German in the first episode? I don't honestly recall much German besides that... plenty of Norse, since the staff has been on a "use Norse mythological references for the Protoculture" kick since Macross 30. For a while we thought they were going to go for Ring of the Niebelung on us what with Freyja, Siegfried, and Draken, but no dice... Messer Ihlefeld is named for a German aircraft manufacturer (Messerschmitt) and a famous World War II German fighter pilot (Herbert Ihlefeld)... it seems only natural he'd speak a bit of German. The aviation in-jokes are thick on the ground when it comes to Delta Flight and Walkure, with Mirage and Freyja being the only odd ones out.

Dramatic license. Seriously, no clue. It's silly as hell and the off-model animation of the scene only adds to the narminess of the whole affair.

The answer to your question depends on the type of beam weapon used. Some sources (like Variable Fighter Master File: VF-1 Valkyrie Vol.2) describe beam weapons as diverting part of the plasma stream from the thermonuclear reaction turbine engines to power the beam weapon. It's not unreasonable to assume they'd draw the matter for the beam out of the plasma stream. (Esp. as electron particle beam weapons are common in Macross). Dimensional beam weapons like the converging energy cannons used on the YF/VF-19 and YF-21/VF-22, or as gunpods on the VF-27, YF-29, YF-30, and VF-31, are using fold effects to pull exotic matter called heavy quantum out of super dimension space. "Low-powered" is relative in Macross. Outputs aren't listed for the guns on the VF-19 officially, but even the weakest laser weapons with official output ratings are 5,000kW. The highest fighter-mounted beam weapon with an official output is 750,000kW. Durability is a non-issue in Macross, where super-alloys and OTM composites offer hundreds of times the structural strength of armor-grade steel. Also, there are no "coils" in a railgun. You're thinking of a different technology called a Coilgun, or a Gauss gun, which works on a somewhat different set of principles. Coilguns work by using sets of electromagnetic coils that are switched on and off in sequence around a magnetic projectile in order to accelerate the projectile suspended in the center of the magnetic field. A railgun is much simpler and more effective, as the only parts are the projectile and a pair of conductive rails hooked up to a high voltage power source. The projectile completes the circuit between the rails, and the Lorentz force produced by that high voltage propels the round down the rails. The practical upshot is that while its rails may wear out, it's orders of magnitude simpler and therefore easier to maintain, and its rate of fire is limited only by the rate at which the ammo feed can slot new rounds into the barrel, whereas a coilgun is limited in its rate of fire by the switching speed of the electromagnetic coils and the saturation of the coil material. The railgun also has the advantage of being able to calibrate the muzzle velocity as simply as adjusting the voltage at the negative rail. The colossal amount of electrical power generated by thermonuclear reaction turbine engines should make a VF-mounted railgun childishly easy to implement, considering we know some Zentradi thermonuclear converters for mecha as low-powered as the Regult produce output voltages in the gigavolt range. It's actually kind of astonishing it took as long as it did for VFs to start carrying railguns as built-in weapons. The VF-19 and VF-22 had missiles that had built-in railguns for firing armor-piercing submunitions, and, of course, the SSL-9B Dragunov is initially used by the VF-171AS. Railguns and other examples of linear accelerators are not new by any means. Electromagnetic catapults have been used on most UN Forces warships to launch aircraft, and were later replaced by a more direct approach that uses the same principles but no moving parts. Outside Macross II, where railguns had completely replaced conventional firearms on mecha, I know of quite a few applications of railguns on mecha: The original spec for the HWR-00 series Monster destroid called for a quartet of 50cm railguns, though the final design ended up with liquid-propellant cannons instead. The Mk.IP Monster from Macross Zero had three railguns in each arm. The 4th Generation VFs had a type of missile that was essentially a single-use railgun firing a spray of armor-piercing projectiles. The VB-6 Konig Monster had four 32cm railguns as its main mount (and part of its propulsion system). The VF-171 had a designated marksman rifle that was a composite railgun (the SSL-9 Dragunov 55mm railgun) The YF-25 Prophecy's Paladin Pack came with a railgun lance. The Queadluun-Alma had a railgun as its gunpod. The VF-25G had the same designated marksman rifle as the VF-171 (SSL-9B Dragunov 55mm railgun) There's still a frame under the armor material, but the official materials just don't bother to talk about it. "Space metal" is a term that has generally been replaced by "hypercarbon", just as "Gundarium" replaced "Luna Titanium" in Gundam, and there have been some pretty significant strides in material strength. (All told, the VF-17 is around eight times as strong as the VF-0.) They've made some pretty huge strides with avionics... ARIEL II and ARIEL III are a huge improvement over the original ANGIRAS system, and the 5th Generation enjoys the benefits of fully integrated controls and sensors. The harvesting and trade in fold quartz is strictly regulated by the New UN Government, to prevent the proliferation of dimensional warheads... and said restrictions were one of the things that pushed Windermere IV to secede from the New UN Government. The key technological advance of the 5th Generation VFs, the inertia store converter, requires fold quartz, so you could say fold quartz is now a de facto requirement for VFs from now on. Systems like the Fold Wave System, Fold Dimensional Resonance System, fold wave projectors, etc. require pieces of fold quartz that are high purity and prohibitively large... and therefore prohibitively expensive because of their rarity. On the YF-29, the fold wave system required 1,000 carat pieces of high-purity fold quartz to function. The fold quartz amplifier and fold wave projector seem to be related technologies intended for two slightly different applications (one being to amplify an existing transmission, the other being to receive, interpret, and jam a fold wave transmission). The fold wave system that the YF-29 and VF-31 use, the reheat system the Sv-262 uses, and the fold dimensional resonance system the YF-30 uses are different systems that use the same dimensional energy conversion principles. The fold wave system is basically a power source used to tap into super dimension space for energy, the reheat system does the same but only for boosting engine output, and the fold dimensional resonance system is a more effective fold wave system that also enables the fighter to penetrate dimensional faults. As I noted over in the Macross Delta Mecha and Technology thread a while back, the liner notes for the Macross Delta blu-rays do suggest the VF-1EX is essentially a detuned VF-1X+ with a remodeled cockpit and J-type monitor turret. In truth, the best description of the VF-0 Custom "Zeak" and arguably Hakuna Aoba's VF-1X++ Custom as well is "as stable as a biscuit raft".

Available information suggests this is accomplished three ways: Direct airflow contact with the outside layer of the compact thermonuclear reactor. Every diagram we've gotten for the interior of a thermonuclear reaction turbine engine has shown the Compact Thermonuclear Reactor (CTR) system is situated directly behind (or even partially inside) the high-pressure compressor stage and in direct contact with the airflow passing through the engine. There may be a microchannel heat pump or advanced Peltier effect cooling system helping move that heat into the airflow. Thermoelectric effects. The diagrams indicate that thermonuclear reaction turbine engines use thermoelectric effects for power generation, among other things. Thermoelectric effects can be used both to generate electrical energy from heat (Seebeck effect) and to transport heat to provide cooling (Peltier effect). By an amusing coincidence, carbon nanostructures like graphene are excellent for use in thermoelectric systems due to their high Seebeck coefficients. (This probably applies to hypercarbon as well.) Airflow plasma injection. Plasma from the CTR system is vented into the high-pressure air flowing through the turbine body, carrying heat away from the reactor with it. There are some fission generators that do convert the heat from the reaction directly into energy... radioisotope thermoelectric generators are very popular for spacecraft applications and for remote locations that need relatively little power from a high-endurance power source like automated lighthouses and buoys. Power generation in thermonuclear reaction turbine engine applications is achieved in two stages: the first is a high-efficiency OTM thermoelectric generator, and the second is a similarly high-efficiency MHD generator.

If it weren't a Macross story I'd suspect it was veering into Boys Love territory... or, given the lineup of Aerial Knights, some kind of Windermere Knight School Host Club series.

Well, the General Galaxy YF-21 prototypes and the mass-production VF-22 Sturmvogel II aren't alone in having that particular problem. Shinsei Industry's YF-19 prototypes also had that engine cooling issue, and it's highly probable that the VF-19's initial mass-production variant (VF-19A) has the same problem given that it's described in Macross Chronicle and other sources as being all but identical to the prototype and uses the same FF-2200 engine the YF-19 was initially outfitted with. It's possible that it's a more widespread problem even than that. The "Why" of the problem isn't well-documented, given that the problem itself is only mentioned in passing in the few sources to discuss it at all. The very brief description given is enough that I have a reasonably good idea what the actual root cause is. Thermonuclear reaction turbine engines use intake air as both a propellant and a coolant when flying in atmosphere, so I suspect the problem lies with the heat exchange process itself. 4th Generation VFs use thermonuclear reaction burst turbine engines, which boasted improvements in heat exchangers and fuel efficiency that conferred greater maximum thrust. I think that 100%+ increase in maximum thrust vs. the previous-generation's engine technology pushed the engine's thermoelectric generators and heat exchangers to the limit... that the new reactor design was putting out so much heat that it was building up faster than the engine could convert it into electrical power and/or dump it into the intake airflow, which put the engine in danger of catastrophic overheating. In space, the propellant is the plasma from the reactor itself. That means the plasma's vented from the engine after the generator has wrung all the power it can out of it, and since vacuum and near-vacuum are great insulators all of that excess heat doesn't get a chance to transfer itself to the rest of the engine before it's blown out the nozzle. The reason I said it's possible this issue is more widespread than just those four aircraft is that the convention for listing VF maximum engine thrust changed from static thrust to maximum instantaneous thrust in space in Macross Plus and Macross 7, and that convention has been used ever since. Some sources give the VF-11 a static thrust figure, whereas the YF-19 and the YF-21 have separate values for space and atmosphere (though Macross Chronicle has since applied that to anything from Macross 7 and later). I think it's highly probable that the problem exists for all thermonuclear reaction burst turbine engines and Stage II thermonuclear reaction turbine engines... that they all operate with diminished thrust in atmosphere to avoid a core overheat, since the problem is never mentioned as having been resolved or anything like that.

I would expect as much, considering on more than a few of these aircraft the wings themselves are capable of similar feats... and it might be an explanation for a few art anomalies involving the angle of the VF-11's canards. While I was musing on this I noticed something else interesting... Normally, a Variable Fighter uses either boundary layer control or canards to assist in attitude control and improve performance in low speed and/or high angle-of-attack flight... and it's damned rare for one to actually use both. Prior to the Macross Delta series, there were only three examples and only one of those was a production aircraft: the VF-0's delta wing variants (VF-0C/D), the VF-19 prototype and the initial mass production models (VF-19A/C/E), and the YF-30 Chronos technology demonstrator. The VF-31 follows on from the YF-30's design in having both, while the Sv-262 doesn't seem to have either one (possibly making it unique among Macross's VFs). Yeah, it wouldn't be the safest or sanest thing in the world... though Shinsei Industry does have a pronounced bad habit of storing magazines full of high-powered explosive anti-energy conversion armor shells on the back of the antiprojectile shields of their fighters. It would probably be less dangerous if the VF-31's forearm shields were made of ASWAG advanced energy conversion armor like the antiprojectile shields used by the VF-25 and VF-27 and the VF-25's Armored Pack. That's battleship-grade defensive ability, but it's also ruinously expensive stuff even in small quantities so a cash-strapped backwater like the Brisingr Alliance might skimp and go in for layered energy conversion armor like what was used on the antiprojectile shields for the VF-11 Thunderbolt and VF-19 Excalibur. With a railgun, the goal is usually to achieve armor penetration and a kill using sheer kinetic force rather than an explosive round, so it'd make plenty of sense for both safety and practicality if they used inert high-density slugs like the ones on the VF-25G's SSL-9B railgun. That and muzzle velocities exceeding what a conventional chemically-propelled round is capable of... Nothing indimidates like the ability to reach out and touch someone... with a high-density metal slug... at 5 kilometers per second.

To the best of my knowledge, none of the VFs with canards have said canards as a purely stationary surface... Usually the canards are fully-movable control surfaces able to fold up and/or down as well as rotate to change their angle of incidence and even function as an airbrake in a pinch. I'm not sure why some of them have a rear panel line, since every piece of art I have shows canards moving as a single piece. They may also be variable camber, which would pose some interesting possibilities...

The available descriptions in Macross Chronicle, Great Mechanics.DX, etc. indicate they're being used for attitude control, particularly to control the pitch of the nose. The Sv-51 also allegedly uses its canards as an air brake when needs dictate.

Windermere had a New UN Forces garrison on it... the Aerial Knights were a separate organization, possibly out of respect for Windermere IV's local traditions, but they still behaved as a part of the New UN Forces including answering requests for reinforcement. (If we look to Variable Fighter Episdoe Archive, they're not the only ones to do this. Sewell also had an independent space defense force.) Also, the fighters flown by Windermere IV's defense forces not being designated "VF" has nothing to do with it. That the Svard and Draken III were not designated VF-# means only that they were not developed under a New UN Government contract and were marketed directly to the local government instead of through the New UN Forces. Again, the timing problem... the Variable Glaug was already well into its development, and possibly even completed, before General Galaxy and the SV Works were even established. It was already a production aircraft in 2018, less than a year after the merger of OTEC and those various Destroid manufacturers formed General Galaxy. The Neo Glaug is an unmanned fighter that was demonstrated as a prototype in 2040 as a rival program to the Ghost X-9. The Variable Glaug (UN Forces ver.) was the starting point in its development, but the Neo Glaug was developed for the UN Forces with no indication of any rogue Zentradi involvement. Your reasoning here doesn't pan out, partly because you keep leaning on a description in Macross the Ride that confused the manned and the unmanned versions of the craft. As a point of order, OTEC did not "split up". In 2017, OTEC merged with several other companies to form General Galaxy. The OTEC "brand" continued on as a division of General Galaxy in the aftermath of the merger, the same way Shinnakasu continued after their merger with Stonewell Bellcom to form Shinsei Industry. The Macross Chronicle sheet in question (Mechanic Other UN 04B) has the same error of chronology that the Macross the Ride article had... the alleged implication of parallel development is nothing more than an error the writer's part, because we know for a fact the Neo Glaug was developed from the Variable Glaug in-universe, not vice versa. (In production terms, the Variable Glaug was developed for Macross M3 as the manned predecessor to the Neo Glaug in the Macross Plus video game edition.) As the only two known SV Works projects are the Sv-154 Svard and Sv-262 Draken III, I have to wonder what project you claim Alexi Kurakin supposedly rolled out based on another craft's incomplete data, since he reportedly snuffed it while the VF-9 was still under development. What Manfred Brando did is well known, but he didn't work for the SV Works... his company, Critical Path, was confirmed to be developing and supplying arms for anti-government forces and testing those weapons in the field. That's an allegation you haven't been able to make stick to the SV Works, given that we're only told that they developed new designs in secret and may have tested some of them in the colonies (with no actual implication that said testing was illegal).

There are a couple cases... but not many that leap to mind. Macross the Ride name-dropped a couple different ones, if only because those were local specifications that were given unique names (e.g. VF-19EF Caliburn). Col. Millard Johnson refers to the VF-11 by name when he does his little Project Super Nova introductory bit in Macross Plus's first episode. When Arad finally drops the exposition about Windermere and the Aerial Knights in Macross Delta Ep5, he does refer to it by its designation and its name. Non-animated sources tend to drop names more than animated ones, in my experience... video games being the most common ones. Macross 30 is particularly good about it. The VF-19's name gets dropped a few times, but I don't believe the VF-22's does. I don't believe the VF-25 and VF-27 get name-dropped in Macross Frontier itself, but that may have something to do with them going into it unnamed and having their names decided by a fan contest. The prototype (YF-25 Prophecy) is name-dropped a few times. I'm not sure if the VF-2SS counts, since they refer to it as a Valkyrie... but its name is Valkyrie (II). They do name drop the Metal Siren when the unarmed replica is shown off at the Moon Festival. Yep. After the First Space War, "Valkyrie" became shorthand for Variable Fighter.

Profoundly unlikely, IMO... given that Windermere IV was a compliant member of the New UN Government when the Sv-154 was in service and even deployed the Aerial Knights to reinforce the NUNS against a Zentradi fleet. The Sv-262 also seems like its specs were disclosed, as Xaos was able to identify it right away as soon as the Aerial Knights stopped using ECM to disguise the fighters and their affiliation. As noted in Macross 30, manufacturers aren't required to immediately disclose the specs of prototype aircraft that are still being developed. It was no loophole behind Macross Galaxy's failure to disclose the final specs of what became the VF-27, they simply ignored the law to keep the fleet's trump card secret. The YF-30 was a case of Shinsei and SMS gaming the system, using the YF classification to defer disclosing specs for the fold dimensional resonance system and other advances they would otherwise have had to pony up had the aircraft been classified as a VF-X experimental or VF production airframe. No, they indicate that development of SV Works programs was top secret and that there are rumors of field tests being carried out on colony worlds, but there's no statement implying the SV Works were in the habit of illegal arms sales... at least, until they were sold off to Dian Cecht and the Epsilon Foundation. (The legality of Dian Cecht's sales of the Sv-262 to Windermere IV is debatable... but we don't see anything in the series that indicates that it's out-and-out illegal, and they do seem to have disclosed the existence and specs of the fighter to the government.) Sorry, but your conclusion here doesn't make any sense at all. There are a boatload of problems with the Variable Glaug being a SV Works program... the first, and most glaring, problem with that assertion would be that the Variable Glaug's development predates the founding of both General Galaxy and the SV Works. It was a combat-ready and complete production aircraft less than a year after General Galaxy was founded and General Galaxy only got involved with it after a unit was captured by the Dancing Skulls and the miitary decided to produce their own version of it. It also wouldn't make any sense for them to need to steal a VF-4 to reverse-engineer into the Variable Glaug, considering the Variable Glaug was produced while Alexi Kurakin was still alive, and he was both the founder of the SV Works and leader of the VF-4's design team. The Macross the Ride info about the Neo Glaug is actually incorrect, the writer confused the Neo Glaug with the Variable Glaug. The Neo Glaug was the drone version developed decades later as a rival to the Ghost X-9 and was definitely NOT developed for anti-government forces. Also, as FASCES was a splinter organization of Latence, they were being armed and equipped under the table by the Earth supremacist factions in the New UN Forces. That its manufacturer is listed partly as General Galaxy and the Quimeliquola AWDAP station makes perfect sense when you consider it's equal parts Feios Valkyrie (allegedly a Critical Path Corp. product) and reproduction Queadluun-Rau parts (made by General Galaxy at that very facility). The SV Works would not have needed to steal technology or whole aircraft to develop their designs. They were a division of the most forward-thinking VF manufacturer in the business, the one that was always pushing the OTM envelope farther than the more conservative and more successful Shinsei Industry. Everything they would've needed would've been right at their fingertips, and arguably better than the technology Shinsei was using. There are two General Galaxy products, one of which we know Alexi was connected with, that fit the profile of the SV Works' design ethos and emphasis on anti-VF combat. One is the VF-9 Cutlass, which shares a very similar transformation system to a known SV Works project (their Sv-262) and which Alexi was reportedly involvevd in the development of. The other is the VF-22, was is explicitly an anti-VF VF intended to be used to suppress armed revolts in the colonies through decapitation strikes. Were it not already attributed to the General Galaxy Guld Works, the VF-22HG would fit the bill perfectly... being that it's an anti-VF VF developed by General Galaxy, tested in secret, and built in vanishingly small numbers.

That'd depend on the type and power output of the weapon in question. A low-powered laser intended for anti-infantry use is going to make a nice little crater of burned flesh and vaporized tissue that self-cauterizes, though you may still receive secondary internal damage from the energy transfer necessary to vaporize flesh which would damage surrounding tissues. A laser weapon powerful enough to vaporize neat little holes in material many times stronger and more thermally resistant than steel is likely going to cause body-wide systemic damage from both secondary heating and the pressure wave caused by all that flesh, blood, and bone in the path of the beam flashing to vapor inside the body cavity (ouch). If the pressure change is sudden enough and significant enough, you're looking at the potential for blood and organs adjacent to the beam's path to boil or flash to steam. If the victim is lucky, that's total systemic failure from their organs boiling in their own blood and fluids. If they're unlucky... that's a build-up of pressure in the body cavity fast enough that you burst like a balloon full of red Kool-Aid. If they're VERY unlucky... that pressure build-up is going on in their bones because the bone marrow was flash-boiled by the beam and the bones nearest the beam explode like fragmentation grenades. A particle beam weapon or dimension beam weapon is going to add kinetic force to that grisly mess, and the dimension beam weapon's also adding MUCH more heat than the laser is, making the catastrophic body explosion more likely. The Draken III's ROV-76 is identified as a beam weapon, but it's not identified whether it's a particle beam gun or dimension beam gun. Both have historically been used as alternatives to laser weapons for monitor turret-mounted weaponry. The way Messer managed to paint the entire inside of the canopy with his own blood suggests that he probably fell victim to the "your body a'splode" outcome.

"Sv" is a bit tricky, as it's used in two different contexts in Macross. Initially, by which I mean "during the Unification Wars", the designation Sv- referred to variable fighters which had been developed by Russia's Sukhoi Company. It's just the variable fighter equivalent of the modern Su- assigned to Sukhoi's conventional jet fighters. Circa 2060, Sv- has been coopted by the SV Works, a development program group founded by one of the lead engineers who helped develop the Sv-51 for the Anti-Unification Alliance... and who hadn't been particularly invested in the Alliance's goals. The group was founded as one branch of General Galaxy's variable fighter division, but was later sold off to an Epsilon Foundation subsidiary called Dian Cecht. The Sv- in fighters developed by the SV Works (and the SV Works name itself) stands for "Slayer Valkyrie", reflective of the fact that the overall design philosophy of the SV Works was to develop variable fighters designed to combat other variable fighters rather than hostile alien forces. It's that meaning of Sv- that applies to the Sv-154 Svard and Sv-262 Draken III. As far as Fz- goes... I have no bloody idea. Possibly an in-universe nod to the fact that the genesis of those designs was as fighters for the Zaibach Empire faction in Air Cavalry Chronicles (the story that became The Vision of Escaflowne).

Well... perhaps it might be more accurate to say that Macross's animation has become more about selling music, while those who want to get their robot fix are catered to by the various manga, light novel, and video game offerings. The emphasis on music in recent Macross titles still isn't really an excuse for the mecha in Macross Delta being almost an afterthought though. Macross Frontier was mostly about promoting the music of May'n and Megumi and it still managed to squeeze a lot of pretty epic mecha action in. Macross Delta doesn't lack for transforming fighters, its problem is that the individual set pieces like character designs, mechanical designs, and music are great but the show's execution was an absolute disaster. The writers screwed the pooch so hard the SPCA got involved on behalf of a strictly metaphorical dog, with pacing problems galore and an excessively large cast of shallow stock characters and expys, and the fight choreography often completely forgot the fighters could transform and left almost every dogfight with just one or two maneuvers... usually the scissors. What it sounds like kaiotheforsaken wants is a more balanced Macross series like Macross Frontier. Macross Delta just feels like a halfhearted effort compared to what we've had before, possibly because it wasn't the show Kawamori wanted to make.

Yeah, the logistics of building and maintaining relatively small numbers of modified and experimental vehicles is something I unfortunately deal with on a day-to-day basis... it's never cheap and it's never pretty, and the supporting mechanics are never happy. If it's logistics hell with cars, I can only imagine how much worse it would be with aircraft or something like a giant robot. Hmm... you are indeed correct. I'd recalled that shot as coming from farther up, but when I went and checked the episode on the Blu-Ray I saw precisely what you describe. The shot did indeed come from the ROV-76 beam machine gun on the nose/head of Keith's Draken III. Man, that's gotta suck WORSE than taking a hypervelocity armor piercing slug to the chest... but it certainly explains why he painted the inside of the canopy red when he died. Being hit by what was no doubt at 10,000kW+ beam weapon probably burst his torso like a melon hit by high caliber handgun fire, and that's not counting the nastier possibilities of such a high-powered beam weapon hit on flesh that are straight out of the Warhammer 40,000: Dark Heresy RPG critical hit tables. Some poor schmuck at Xaos probably spent a week sponging a fine Messer mist out of the cockpit interior and controls.

Yeah, that's a good point. Usually the variant letters are assigned arbitrarily for things like that... but I suppose it could be like that. I'm not so sure about the railgun's barrel running the entire length of the shroud, precisely because the same model is used by the Draken III and appears to be somewhat shorter. (I suppose the key difference could be one is feeding rounds in from the side and the other is feeding rounds in front behind.) My working theory is that the VF-31's railgun is storing its ammunition inside the forearm itself. Since it's presumably firing inert kinetic slugs (given that the round that killed Messer doesn't seem to have exploded) they wouldn't have to worry about ammo cooking off if the armored shield on the forearm were penetrated. That'd give it the most capacity without adding significant complexity to the feed system. One reason I love the Master File books is they tend to delve into details like this with gusto, though they often acknowledge that the capacity for things like FAST pack booster launchers are not fixed because the interior is modular and can be adjusted to increase either fuel or munitions capacity... so there are likely tons of different "correct" answers. That was my read of it too... the LU-18A seems to be smaller than the various heavy quantum beam gunpods that came before it, and there's no clear point of articulation for the gun to open up to use beam grenade mode. Actually, having the Siegfrieds use a different caliber of railgun from the standard VF-31 would make things more expensive in the long run for Xaos. Remember, Delta Flight is one of four VF-31 units in the 3rd Fighter Wing stationed aboard the Macross Elysion, and the other three use the stock VF-31A Kairos. Having the Siegfried use a different model of railgun in a different bore means they're going to incur extra costs with the need to maintain separate stockpiles of spare parts and ammunition for the standard issue LM-27S and the Siegfried's smaller LM-25S. They're going to lose a lot more money on the logistical complications than they'd gain from having a smaller, less expensive round. It adds the additional logistical issue of not being able to use repelacement parts and ammunition stockpiles from Alpha, Beta, and Gamma Flights to repair and resupply Delta Flight aircraft. Well, remember a railgun isn't given a fixed muzzle velocity. They can dial it up or down by adjusting the voltage on the negative rail... but while it's true those shells will make mincemeat out of bystandards, civilians aren't the only ones afflicted by Var syndrome and VFs are much better armored than battle pods or Zentradi infantry. If they avoid shooting directly at the cockpit (without the armored cover in place it's one of the weakest areas on a VF) the less powerful round would give them a better chance of surgically disabling an enemy mecha without harm to the pilot while wreaking a minimum of havoc and collatoral damage on the surrounding systems and area. Seems unlikely, IMO... if the 25mm version was just as effective as the 27mm version, why did both Windermere and the Brisingr Alliance NUNS both go in for a 27mm option?

Yeah, the VF-1 Valkyrie's pretty small for a VF and its onboard fuel supply is supposedly good for approximately 700 hours of continuous flight operations (meaning the burn rate is around 0.28ml/s per engine). It's another matter in space, where the plasma from the reaction replaces air as a propellant and thus the engine consumes that same amount of fuel in about six and a half minutes at sustained maximum thrust. Hm... I didn't know that there was an identified tanker craft. The only mention of tankers that I was aware of, besides the usage of Lockheed's S-3 Viking with the buddy pod system in Macross Zero was a mistranslation in the English dub of Macross II: Lovers Again's first episode, that had the Mardook equivalent of the Quiltra Queleual-class LST referred to as a "tanker" in passing. I can't imagine the Regult carries more than a few hundred liters of fuel, so a tanker would definitely be necessary for extended operations in space... since they're bleeding plasma off the reactor to use as propellant.

http://www.cdjapan.co.jp/product/VTCL-60050 *wanders off whistling idly*

Those interested in reading about more modern, fusion-based real world theoretical studies in fusion-based turbine engines may find NASA/CR-2005-213749 "Advanced Energetics for Aeronautical Applications: Volume II" an interesting read. The document is public and can be obtained through NASA's STI Program Office website (http://www.sti.nasa.gov)

Oh, handily... funnel missile-type weapons have already been a thing for almost twenty years in Macross by the time Delta is set. The YF-19 had missiles with built-in laser cannons, and an alternate model that had a shotgun-like railgun system instead. If they were flying using a MPD arcjet or something like that, they'd just have to have the VF-31 supply power externally via that multidrone charger to keep the multidrone's cells topped up and it could potentially fly at a reasonable clip and mount a modest beam gun or something. Macross II: Lovers Again's prequels did kind of beat them to that punch though... the VF-4S Siren had funnels in Macross: Eternal Love Song, and the VF-2SS has bits.

IIRC, that was a figure gleaned from freeze-framing the animation of the Macross Frontier series itself. If it is truly the same HMM-5A also used on the Armored Pack, then 20 is the most likely correct count as that is how many the Armored Pack's HMM-5A hold. Unlikely, IMO... the Sv-262 and VF-31A/B are both using variants of the LM-27, which would ordinarily suggest the two are similarly-sized weapons. Thanks to that large shroud over the VF-31's railgun, we don't know how much of that is actually barrel and how much of it is the connection to the feed system. Even if the barrel was shorter, they could easily make up the difference by putting a higher voltage on the rails to increase the Lorentz force on the projectile. That railguns don't/can't have round barrels is something of a modern misconception of the technology... one helped by armature-based railguns which DO need a rectangular-plan barrel to accommodate the sliding of the armature holding the projectile. All you have to do to make a railgun with a round barrel is either have slots in the side of the barrel for a finned projectile to glide along or have the rails mounted flush to the inside of an otherwise nonconductive round barrel. Since a coilgun relies on a series of switched magnetic coils running in sequence to provide the propulsive force, the rate of fire is necessarily limited by the saturation point of the ammunition and the coils themselves... which makes them slower to fire, more complex, and less efficient. A true railgun makes the most sense given the LM-25 and LM-27 being said to be rapid-fire weapons with a high rate of fire, given that as long as you maintain the high voltage on the negative rail your rate of fire is limited only by how fast you can feed rounds into the barrel and your muzzle velocity can be dialed up or down simply by calibrating the voltage at the negative rail. It's gloriously simple, efficient, and terrifyingly effective. And how! The VF-31's developers seem to have forgotten or omitted beam grenade mode from the LU-18A heavy quantum beam gunpod... while the Sv-262's developers seem to have remembered the glorious truth that there's really no kill like overkill. My suspicion is that the Sv-262 has that capability because it's using the newer, more potent /FC2 style Stage II thermonuclear reaction engines like those found on the YF-29 and YF-30, and that it's those more powerful engines that give it the ability to use beam grenade mode without needing extra engines to make up the difference (ala the VF-27). That does make one wonder why Xaos bothered to customize the railguns but not equip the /FC2 engine-equipped custom VF-31s with a better beam gunpod... I wonder if they're not allowed to have something like that, being a NGO? That doesn't make sense though, since the railguns are confined to the arms and the engines and micro-missile launchers are in the engine nacelles.... and railguns are, by nature, very space-efficient things apart from the ammo feed. Literally just two metal rails in the barrel and a connection to the high voltage bus. They did apparently compensate for the loss of the usage of the internal leg bays by adding a second pair of pylons to the custom VF-31 via new wingtips. (Not that they ever used that capability.) Same reason as above, the systems in question are in different parts of the airframe... so that doesn't make sense. The arms aren't next to the legs on the VF-31, they're fused into the wing surface instead.

... I'm not sure what you're looking at, that you're saying the VF-2JA looks "basically the same" as the VF-2SS. They don't look much alike at all, and have very different airframe shapes. The VF-2JA's aerodynamic profile is, as I said, very close to the VF-1's if you actually look at the art. It's longer, proportionally, but it's also a fair bit larger than the VF-1. It's got a nice flat bottom, and both the wing and wing glove act as lifting surface. Proportionally it all works out fine... probably better than the VF-1, considering that relied purely on thrust-vectoring and the roll control thrusters as ersatz elevators. Those models in the video you're using as reference aren't correctly proportioned either, they've had their wings enlarged quite a bit.

Eh? The VF-2JA's aerodynamics aren't all that different from the VF-1's... it's hard to tell from the lineart alone but it's actually a reasonably streamlined design. It's got all the same control surfaces and so on that the VF-1 does, and a few more that it doesn't (again, it's hard to see from the art alone, but it actually has horizontal stabilizers too). Not sure how well the switch from rear to forward swept wing would work in GERWALK mode, but lift is hardly the top concern in that case. Aerodynamics aren't really the Valkyrie II's concern though, given that it's a dedicated space fighter.