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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Ordinarily, yeah... you would think a special forces unit from the federal New UN Forces would be using the federal forces main fighter or a special forces variant thereof. This, of course, probably wasn't possible for Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy because Kawamori never completed the YF-24 Evolution design. He only did the fighter mode, though realistically it ought to look a good deal like a delta-wing VF-25 in all respects. Looking at it from an in-universe perspective, the federal New UN Forces are likely still working on transitioning from their last main fighter to the VF-24. The decision to adopt the YF-24 Evolution's design as the next main fighter was made in mid-2057, so there were probably relatively few units outfitted with the VF-24 in 2060. The VF-X squadrons also don't necessarily use the latest fighters when there's a mission or performance advantage in using something older, like how the 727th IS VF-X Ravens' top ace in 2051 was using a ten year old VF-19A Excalibur instead of the newer and nominally higher-spec VF-19C, VF-19F, or VF-19S. The 815th IS Hávamál had been operating out there in the galactic boonies for a while before the events of Macross 30, and they might not have had access to the unredacted VF-24A specification either due to communications difficulties due to the Uroboros Aurora fold fault or because Earth wasn't willing to transmit the unredacted specs of the VF-24A for security reasons. Using their clout as a federal special forces unit, and Uroboros' substantial reserves of fold quartz, they secured the next best thing for their ace pilots... an uprated version of the only emigrant VF allegedly able to rival the VF-24, the YF-29. They built them in numbers too, where the Frontier fleet government could only afford to build the one. Hávamál's aces were all issued YF-29B's. The YF-29 would only graduate to a production design and become the VF-29 if it obtained official approval for production by the New UN Government. Hávamál's limited production of the YF-29B likely either didn't count due to being unauthorized or was counted as a separate prototype run in light of the design changes between the initial YF-29 and YF-29B. Even with those "inferior" VF-19s and VF-22s, Hávamál still massively outgunned the local Uroboros New UN Forces garrison. The planet's remoteness and isolation left the local NUNS more than a bit undermanned and under-equipped. By 2060, the NUNS had been depending on Hávamál and their contracts with the Uroboros Hunters Guild to maintain planetary security and control the alliance of anti-government, terrorist, and pirate factions collectively known as bandits... all while unaware the ones supplying the bandits with weapons and logistical support were Hávamál themselves. With the local NUNS being made up of less experienced pilots flying the aging VF-171-II Nightmare Plus, and the Hunters Guild being made up of amateurs, wannabes, and NUNS washouts using all manner of obsolete and replica VFs, there were only a handful of pilots on the entire planet who'd have stood a chance against ONE Hávamál ace, let alone the entire unit. Uroboros Hunters Guild director Mei Leeron was too busy with contracts to stamp out bandit activity to sufficiently join up the dots and implicate Hávamál, and Aisha Blanchett's SMS branch office was so undermanned it operated as a privateer organization under the auspices of the Hunters Guild with its only other pilot besides Major Blanchett herself hospitalized due to a testing accident. Without a large number of ace pilots being drawn to Uroboros by the effects of the Uroboros Aurora, Hávamál would have been able to mop up any potential opposition easily... and to be fair, even after they started appearing they probably felt they had the matter well in hand when they recruited (and blackmailed or brainwashed) most of them like Max and Milia Jenius, Gamlin Kizaki, D.D. Ivanov, Nora Polyansky, SMS Frontier's Skull and Pixie Platoons, etc. Variable. The GU-11A, for instance, had a maximum rate of fire of 1,200rpm but all indications are that its actual rate of fire was more like 180rpm most of the time to avoid precisely that problem. The VF-0's GPU-9 gunpod had selectable rates of fire as low as 60rpm and as high as 2,500rpm.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    The funny part is that not only is that a near-universal reaction Macross fans - and especially Robotech fans who made the move to Macross - have to watching Robotech, it's also a reaction many Robotech fans have to the various reboots and alternate versions in that franchise. Most Robotech fans find this comic just as subtly unsettlingly wrong as Macross fans find Robotech. ... having been there myself courtesy of a friend in the USMC, that's maybe harsher than even I would've put it. There's a reason those are called "Meals Ready to Expel".
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, MDE is short for Micro Dimension Eater... they're ultracompact dimensional warheads. MDE beam weapons operate on similar principles, firing what amounts to a beam of microsingularities that collapse and pull matter around them into fold space.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    What little of it I've read sails right off the end of the critical spectrum... past "good" and "bad", through the thickets of "so bad it's good" to "so bad it's awful", and vaulting into the vast abyss of dispassionate loathing where Battlefield Earth and the Star Wars Holiday Special live. It's operating on a level where I can't help but wonder if the captive Robotech audience inexplicably praising it is experiencing some sort of literary version of Stockholm Syndrome.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Something like that, yes... seemingly inspired by the Japanese Self-Defense Forces' more "corporate" attitude towards service. Unlike the US military, in the JSDF you don't need to apply for early discharge in order to switch branches of service, and can usually retain rank in the transfer. It doesn't seem to be very common for soldiers to switch branches, thus far there are only a few characters identified who've ever explicitly served with more than one branch. The only ones I can recall offhand are Col. Millard Johnson (Macross Plus), who started his career in the UN Spacy and later transferred to the New UN Air Force before becoming a senior officer at the New Edwards Test Flight Center, and 1st Lt. (later Maj.) Isamu Dyson, who started his career in the New UN Spacy and was subsequently punted around to the New UN Navy, New UN Air Force, and back to the New UN Spacy because no commander wanted to deal with him.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    They're still around, the fleet just upgraded to a more powerful round intended specifically to counter the higher-powered energy conversion armor of the Vajra starting in ep7 of Macross Frontier. They were later replaced with MDE shells, because the Vajra adapted.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Everything else in the comic is borrowed from somewhere else, why not that too?
  8. Seto Kaiba
    The New UN Spacy Air Force also puts in an appearance in Macross the Ride.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Yes, it's just that the Space Forces get all the attention. (Also, both Frontier and Delta had episodes devoted to the New UN Spacy Marine Corps. If you look on Isamu's service record, you'll find he's also served with the (New) UN Navy.)
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Granted, a rotary gunpod will eventually run out of ammo... but most of them carry enough ammunition to dust several dozen battle pods or battle suits. The reason rotary gunpods stuck around as long as they did is that they have the advantage of anti-energy conversion armor shells that negate the enhanced defensive ability of energy conversion armor. A beam weapon used against a VF has to contend with an anti-beam ablative armor coating AND the strength of the energy conversion armor. The rotary gunpod using HEACA shells is only working against a fraction of that armor strength and the high-explosive component of the shells detonates inside the target, which causes more damage. It says a lot about the incredible stopping power of the rotary gunpods that the thing that eventually replaced them was a compact dimensional beam weapon.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Maybe. We dunno. Macross Delta's mecha are poorly documented on a level seldom seen in Macross as a whole. Hopefully that will change, but I fear it will not.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    "Monitor turret"... though for simplicity, often just "the head".
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Yup... though that's far from the most extreme deviation that the 2nd Edition Robotech RPG contains, and that particular factoid happens to be supported by Macross Chronicle's own Mechanic Sheet for the MBR-04-Mk.VI Tomahawk (Mechanic SDF:M UN 08A). Harmony Gold seems to have generally lost interest in the Robotech RPG's 2nd Edition around the time they ran out of material that was actually based on the show (c. the publication of the New Generation sourcebook) and their management officially abandoned the pretense that they were still pursuing a Shadow Chronicles sequel by abandoning all the trademark filings they'd made for the sequel's title. Without serious oversight, Palladium Books promptly lost the plot completely and delivered a monster manual, followed by a book that might as well be titled "Robotech 1 7/8ths: Not The Sentinels, Honest" full of designs nicked from the MOSPEADA portion of the Imai Files. Udon's feeble squirt of an artbook is basically another installment in that franchise's Macross-centric "let's get every buck out of it that we can before we lose the rights" death spiral.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    In my experience, there's also shades of "they're trigger-happy loons with dubious ethics and no discipline" in there too... often with references to the many misdeeds of Blackwater.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    My money is on 40mm, since that was the emerging standard shortly before Project Super Nova kicked off. Mind you, the difference there isn't necessarily just in caliber. Muzzle velocity may also play into the extreme difference in firepower between the GU-15 and GU-17. Nothing on the crew, just basic details of the ship's size, armament, and mecha complement. ARMD-L is noted to have a capacity of 80 mecha, and presumably a maintenance crew appropriately large enough for that. Crew sizes are one of the details that are almost never brought up, you usually have to either guesstimate or, as in the case of the Zentradi, work backwards from a larger figure like a total fleet population as I did when I discovered the average Zentradi ship's crew should be just a hair over 1,500 people.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Looks like we were bang on the money when we predicted this was gonna be Harmony Gold's cheap knockoff of Macross: Perfect Memory. The tech pages are pretty just art from Perfect Memory with text copy-pasted from the Robotech.com Infopedia, same as The Art of Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles with lots of screenshots and reprinted text. Not in this case, no... but such snubs have been delivered in the past. When Harmony Gold launched the Robotech official website back in '01 and decided to build an official encyclopedia into the site, the lion's share of the information was drawn from Japanese publications for the original shows rather than from any Robotech publication. The main exception being Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross, which had no detailed tech specs and only minimal reference art, leaving them to swing for the fences armed with only the minimal detail from a few pamphlets and This is Animation 10: Southern Cross when writing their Masters Saga material. They copied so energetically and so blindly from Japanese sources that they accidentally copied things that don't even appear in their Robotech adaptation, like the VF-1 Valkyrie's UUM-7 micro-missile pods from DYRL?. (Most Macross sites don't differentiate between equipment for the TV and movie VF-1s.) The snub came about five years later in 2006, when Palladium Books reacquired the Robotech license from Harmony Gold and the Harmony Gold representatives did a podcast interview about the new license and forthcoming "2nd Edition" RPG. They didn't pull any punches there, and basically dismissed the old RPG as a poorly-researched, low-quality mess that was Robotech in name only and would never have gotten approved for publication had management not been asleep at the switch. That was their lead-in to grandiose promises that the new edition would be much more accurate, because Harmony Gold would be exercising an editorial approval over everything before it went to print to ensure Palladium didn't cock it up again.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    The GU-11[A] and SSL-9B are the only gunpods with officially-stated magazine capacities. The GU-11 held 180-200 rounds, and the SSL-9B has two magazines, one with 13 rounds and a drum with 35. The only other one I know of that has a firm number put on it is Master File's number for the VF-19's GU-15[A] gunpod, which held 150 rounds per magazine, for 450 rounds total with the two spare magazines under the shield. Beam gunpods naturally don't count, because the ones we know of do not have a fixed power supply... rather, they're powered off the fighter's reactor and will work as long as they receive sufficient power to fire. RPG fan writers generally assume that ~150 rounds is typical for a gunpod magazine.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    To be honest, they're infuriatingly vague on that score... it's only mentioned that Hávamál is a VF-X unit equipped with many state-of-the-art variable fighters, and that their aces are issued the YF-29B Percival. The novelization of Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy skips most of the little encounters with Hávamál from the game (the ones that weren't really an actual part of the story) in favor of focusing on the various lackeys Hávamál uses to fight their battles by proxy... like how they basically blackmailed Shin, D.D., and Nora into helping them, secretly backed the bandits under self-proclaimed "Bandit King" Ganess Modora to use them as a proxy to attack Uroboros' New UN Forces and privateers, and used Sharon for the purpose of mind-controlling the crew of the SMS Macross Quarter and aces from Macross 7. As in the game, the only Hávamál pilot who figures prominently in the story is Rod... and only at the beginning and the end, the fight where Reon has a YF-25 and the one after he gets the YF-30.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Whether or not that's actually canon is ambiguous, though... the only VF-27 user from the game that got confirmed in Macross Chronicle was Mei Leeron. I'd have to check the novelization to see if they depict Havamal using VF-27s there too (I don't recall them doing so).
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Government users? None that we know of. Several VF-27s are known to have ended up in the hands of private users, though. In Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy, Uroboros Hunters Guild administrator Mei Leeron has a VF-27γ Lucifer as her personal VF in 2060. In Macross E, Ivan Polyvanov (AKA Ivan Tsari) of Selgar Heavy Industries also has a private VF-27γ that he uses in opposition of Xaos's Tactical Sound Unit Thrones in 2062.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    It did seem a bit out of place, given that he'd previously sentenced Hayate, Mirage, and co. to a public execution without so much as batting an eye.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    The court records, mainly. Particularly the various attempts FASA made to get the case dismissed, all of which failed miserably. renegadeleader1 already posted a link to some of them. What the original settlement from that 1996 lawsuit in the Illinois Northern District Court contained came out thanks to Catalyst getting slapped down by HG in the early 2000s, they revealed in a news post on their official site that the original binding settlement from that case prohibited the game from using any secondhand mechanical designs... even ones to which Harmony Gold did not have the rights, like Orguss and Crusher Joe. That settlement has formed the basis for every slapdown since. This is particularly well-trodden legal ground... so much so that it's frankly amazing Catalyst and its partners keep trying to illegally base designs on The Unseen when they ALWAYS get slapped down for it. Well, it certainly answers one nagging question... how Titan Comics was going to wrap the story up at the end of the "Macross Saga" without continuing into the Masters Saga or New Generation. It's not bad, as cop-outs go. Can't very well have the Masters Saga or New Generation if the SDF-1's a origin-less object resulting from an ontological paradox in which the same ship is locked in a loop of crashing with its crew dead, being rebuilt, and relaunched in the same repeating 15 year timespan. Rick Hunter and all the other characters on whom the background events hinge would be dead, so those events would never happen, the protoculture matrix disappears instead of being breached by the ship's destruction, so the Robotech Masters never detect it and neither do the Invid. It's not an original concept for Robotech... a very similar idea was used in the Robotech novels, but in that version it was the SDF-3 that was launched back in time by a fold accident, ending up in the distant past and becoming the origin of the Robotech Masters.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    The blade antenna on the FFR-31MR/D Super Sylph from Battle Fairy Yukikaze is, IIRC, as far as I can find from the few Yukikaze publications I have, either the Super Sylph's "frozen eye" spatial passive radar or a multiband electronic support measures antenna cluster. The actual TARPS pod (camera array) sits farther forward. Ventral blade antennas are not uncommon, but they're never quite THAT large in the real world. Can't say I recall that part. I do recall reading that Windermereans physically age at the same rate as humans from birth until approximately their mid-twenties. Beyond that point, the aging process (at least in human terms) is vastly accelerated and individuals over 30 have a similar physical state to a human twice their age (if they don't abuse their runes). Given that their pace of physical development is the same as humans initially, that their emotional development is also similarly paced wouldn't surprise me much. Freyja's emotional maturity might have something to do with her having been an orphan, a byproduct of her experiences as a part of Walkure, or simply a result of the accelerated aging brought about by her overusing her rune. Heinz also shows maturity far in excess of what we'd expect from a nine year old, but he also overused his runes to the extent that he's physically as frail as someone almost four times his actual age.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    That's not really a different picture, per se... that's just looking at the same picture from a slightly different angle. Having the PMC be a convenient way to lump elite warriors together is the excuse for compartmentalizing the characters from a narrative standpoint. Having the PMCs conveniently be assigned to test the very latest military hardware in combat before it's given to actual soldiers is how they justify that elite-ness. They're elite because they have better gear, but because it's not plausible that a private corporation has more defense funding than an actual nation they're simply doing advance testing for the military using gear loaned to them. This is a very common trope for mecha titles featuring PMCs, going back at least as far as Full Metal Panic!'s light novels, in which it's a sort of open secret that MITHRIL is a NATO-funded black ops organization that carries out covert testing of next-gen American AS's before they reach US and NATO hands. (Ozma actually subverts the "elite" part early in Macross Frontier when he points out to Alto that the reason PMCs are increasingly popular with the local governments is because PMC troops are a contracted redshirt army. Their appeal, in government terms, is that if a PMC soldier dies it's legally an accidental death and the government is absolved of any potential liability even if said soldier died in combat. Their lives are cheaper than those of the military's own redshirts. They don't even get a military funeral.)
  25. Seto Kaiba
    ... No. I have no idea where you could have read that, but there's absolutely no truth to it. What makes you think HG had anything to do with the "edgy reboot" aspect of it? Titan Comics is leading this one, AFAIK. All Harmony Gold is doing is rubber stamping issues as they go to publication. Isn't the title warning enough about the quality?
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