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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    I noticed something interesting while I was rewatching some of the last couple episodes... I think the Epsilon Group may have ties to the Critical Path Corp. from Macross VF-X2. While Berger's men are repairing the song shrine on the Sigur Valens after the lucky shot on Johnson's part that knocked it out, they mention of the parts is the "Zauberflute". That was the name of a piece of technology developed by the Critical Path Corp., a next-gen fold communications system based on a new kind of dimensional resonance crystal discovered in 2043 (Macross Frontier's novelization indicates this was fold quartz, potentially making Critical Path the first company to develop applications of the stuff after the discovery of the Vajra in 2040). If a Zauberflute system is part of Heinz's song shrine's amplifier, that means Epsilon is building on or adapting technology which the Critical Path Corporation developed for Latence, a rogue faction inside the military... ... ... ... Hell's bells, now here's a theory! What if the reason the Epsilon Group is supporting Windermere and egging on the Aerial Knights in their campaign against the New UN Government is because their real identity is a leftover branch of Latence? They could be manipulating Windermere's elite to pursue this war becuase their aim was to manufacture a galactic-scale threat to the New UN Government so the organization's supporters in the New UN Forces' top brass could either use the crisis to increase the military's influence over the government to the rather excessive levels it enjoyed before the reorganization... or even as an excuse for that rogue faction of the military to launch another coup and establish a Earth-centric government. They were probably in the middle of transitioning part or all of their forces to the VF-171 or VF-19 when Macross VF-X2 was set... since Earth hasn't got the same restrictions on arming its forces as the rest of the galaxy. They were supposed to have been the first to adopt a 5th Generation VF though, that YF-24 Evolution spec that all of the other 5th Gen VFs so far are based on is the stripped-down version of their baby. Technically, all Ghosts are fully AI'd... they're just not "sentient AI'd" as that technology tends to go a tiny bit insane. Both Macross VF-X2 and Macross Frontier's novelization have the flagship of Earth's defenses being the Macross-13, a state of the art Battle-class. In 2059, her captain was General Kim Kabirov... former SDF-1 Macross bridge operator. Probably not... in 2058, the emigrant fleets were starting to sell off their now-retired VF-11s. (Macross the Ride protagonist Chelsea Scarlett put up the cash to buy three decommissioned airframes and use them to build one custom VF-11B.)
  2. Seto Kaiba
    The most likely explanation is that the "camera" is simply cutting away from the fold effect before the ship generating it can emerge. On those occasions when the Aerial Knights seemingly defold alone, the fold effect never closes behind them the way it does on the two or three occasions where we see their fleet defold. That suggests there's something else still defolding. However, the idea of a "fold teleporter" does have precedent. On Uroboros, a form of fold-based teleportation technology was used for instantaneous short distance travel within the planet's Protoculture ruins. (This was the effect for entering and leaving ruins and caves on the three world maps used in the Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy game... pairs of "fold stones" that, when activated, teleported you from one to the other.) For many planets and fleets, there may not have been an immediate or pressing need to upgrade from the VF-171. Frontier and Galaxy went for the upgrade en masse because they were headed into what was, at the time, Vajra territory in full awareness of the fact that a VF-19 or VF-22 would be just as helpless in combat with the Vajra as a VF-171. Backwaters like the Brisingr cluster, that would only have had to worry about Zentradi or terrorists would naturally not see much reason to upgrade to the more costly, more difficult to mass produce 5th Generation VFs. The VF-171 was, and likely still is, an excellent, highly versatile fighter with great cost performance... it's just hopelessly out of its depth against the 5th Generation equivalent fielded in low numbers by the Aerial Knights of Windermere. The VF-19 and VF-22 can't be fielded in large numbers by the regional NUNS as the result of arms export restrictions imposed in the wake of the Isamu's and Guld's little stunt on Earth back in 2040. The central New UN Forces like to have the biggest stick, after all... and they may have finished upgrading to 5th Generation VFs by now (possibly the VF-24). Emigrant forces can deploy a "monkey model" reduced capability version of the VF-19 or VF-22 in some small numbers, but both the restrictions on their construction and use and the high burden their performance places on the pilot in the absence of inertia store converter technology makes them impractical to employ in large numbers.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    I and a couple other people asked this question on the Macross Fans-US Facebook group a week or two back, and the answer we got was: Saturday, 15 October 2016 Torrance Cultural Arts Center Torrance, CA. Not sure if that date is set in stone, but that's all I've seen said of it to date.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    It'd be nice, but that's a LOT of material... and the fans here who do translations, myself included, have their own projects, priorities, areas of interest, and other obligations. Oh, there are loads... like the novelizations of Macross II, DYRL?, Frontier, 30, etc., short stories in Macross Ace, and all kinds of other stuff.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    They're a long-winded bunch, no doubt about that...
  6. Seto Kaiba
    He's probably got a dozen different theories as to how Mikumo can keep that much hair tidy... or wondering how she can stand waking up each morning looking like Cousin It after a purple dyejob. I dunno, the Jammings Birds were up for it in Macross 7... never underestimate the power of someone wanting to be the next Minmay or Basara.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    All told, I doubt the composition of a New UN Spacy battle group would be any different from the local New UN Spacy escort/defense fleets we've seen. The Zentradi Army's fleets will always have the advantage of numbers and capital ship firepower, so getting drawn into a capital ship slugging match is fighting on their terms... which is suicidal at best. The ideal way to deal with the Zentradi is, ironically, the way they dealt with Earth: get the drop on them and deliver a knockout punch with overwhelming firepower before they have a chance to shoot back. Presumably it's that tactical ethos that's why the New UN Spacy has built so much of its fleet around stealth warships. Even the Battle-class supercarriers are stealth warships, supported by stealth carriers, stealth cruisers, and stealth frigates... the goal being to either hold them off long enough for a Macross Cannon to have the last word in the matter, or let the fighters take the enemy fleet to pieces with thermonuclear reaction missiles once they're shorn of their air cover. It's a lot like how modern fleets work... the cruisers, the frigates, and so on are there mainly to protect the carriers, which carry the real offensive power of the fleet. That's why the situation in the Brisingr cluster is so confusing... there ought to be at least one, more likely several, Battle-class macrosses kicking around the cluster protecting the colonies there that were set up by the 3rd Generation and later emigrant fleets. Like the fleet flagship carrier, many of the warships that the Protodeviln employed were previously defense assets from the Varauta colony... built up over the 18 years between the establishment of the colony on Varauta and their accidental release of the Protodeviln. (Being reduced to an unquestioning slave-labor army probably helped speed construction of any new ships they needed to make too...) Why there are so few NUNS ships kicking around the Brisingr cluster is a big nagging question hanging over the Macross Delta series. The average-sized 3rd Generation emigrant fleet had close on two hundred ships, and supposedly the average colony in the early 2030's had close to eighty warships in orbit. The individual worlds of the Brisingr cluster seem to never have more than 2-3 dozen at any given time, which is decidedly odd. That's probably it, actually... if the local New UN Spacy defense fleets had been anything like the size that previous Macross works say they should be, then Windermere's Aerial Knights and/or Walkure and Delta Platoon would be up sh*t creek with neither paddle nor boat. It may be infuriating to watch, but it's not entirely unreasonable that the elite among the superhuman Aerial Knights could take out a few light warships and a dozen or so Nightmare Pluses each in a pitched battle... but I don't think anyone would be able to suspend disbelief if the couple dozen Aerial Knights and their handful of ships somehow defeated an actual full-strength defense fleet with over a hundred frigates, sixty carriers, a Battle-class supercarrier, and thousands of VFs. The law of averages alone would dictate that they'd end up with their bodies occupying the same space as roughly eleventy billion bullets and beam CIWS shots. Similarly, you could expect the Macross Elysion to hold out against a handful of warships while they sing the crews back to their senses, but they'd just get butchered if they were facing down hundreds of NUNS warships all at once.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    The VF-31's transformation is a slightly modified version of the transformation from the YF-30 Chronos in Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy... which carries the fairly straightforward explanation that the VF-31 is a further development (and production version) of the YF-30. Well, yes and no. It's "yes" because it's clearly supposed to be one of the very earliest New Macross-class city ships, or one of the smaller support dome ships seen escorting the Macross-1 fleet in the pre-opening sequence early in Macross 7. It's "no" because the design that we're actually looking at is wrong... the CG model is a slightly tweaked reuse of the Island-1 model from Macross Frontier. To not have a shell, it has to be part of either the Macross-1 or Macross-2 fleets, since Macross-5 had a shell and we know that Macross-3 and Macross-4 settled on Eden 3 and Sephira respectively. Given that we know Megaroad-04 established a human colony on Windermere, and that said human presence was pretty much wiped out by that dimension eater warhead seven years before Macross Delta, it's highly probable the Megaroad-04 was the center of the city of Carlyle (now the large, glowing crater known as Scarfell). We've seen the Aerial Knights watching birds on a few occasions. No idea how big they are, since they're only ever seen from a distance. They do, curiously, appear to have four wings. They keep cutting away from the fold effect while it's still open... so it's still not demonstrated that the Drakens can fold on their own. (There may be a ship behind them, or they may be using something like the fold stones on Uroboros to traverse distances without a fold drive of their own.)
  9. Seto Kaiba
  10. Seto Kaiba
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Sitting down to review this one now...
  12. Seto Kaiba
    All things considered, the Brisingr cluster seems to be the galactic boonies... as far from Earth and the New UN Government's most influential worlds as you can get while staying in the galaxy proper. Strategic Military Services seems to be a fairly influential and expensive outfit to hire, considering the apparent quality of their troops and the amount of money they're depicted throwing around in Macross Frontier and Macross the Ride. As such, I'd assume that SMS would be found mainly on worlds and in fleets that are relatively wealthy, well-established, and have strong corporate support and trade ties. Their presence very likely goes hand-in-hand with Bilra Transport controlling a fair amount of that fleet's or planet's interstellar shipping. Kaos's contract with the Brisingr Alliance suggests that it does a lot of its business out in the sticks, on relatively provincial worlds. Apart from the head office on Ragna, it seems to be extremely lightly armed. Just a very slight correction... the Uroboros SMS branch did have more personnel (not many), though the Gefion was basically left with just Aisha after her original test pilot ended up in the hospital due to a testing accident with the YF-30. The YF-30 development program had a lot more support, including that of the Uroboros factory satellite. (With the Hunter's Guild handling most of the nuisance work and the local NUNS handling the big stuff, SMS's presence could get away with being token.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    The official stats are, as the term would imply, official... and therefore tend to have the last word on the matter. So far, all we've seen from you on this is a circular set of unverifiable claims based on your particular interpretation of a scene, fan works, or toys. Oddly enough, the toy doesn't support your contention... as the scale Valkyries that come with it do in fact fit in the deck elevators and there's clearly quite a lot of space to work with. It's such a small docking port too... but then, space is awfully cold.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    It shall henceforth be known as Turret #2 for reasons that should be obvious. As indicated previously, the Battle-class has far more guns than merely those that are mounted externally on the upper hull. Also indicated previously was the fact that the number of gun turrets on the Macross Quarter-class varies from ship to ship. The third previously indicated point was that the existence of a macross cannon on both the Aether and Hemera is purely conjecture at this point. It should, I suppose, also be noted that the sheer number of guns is no guarantee of power either...and that as a PMC ship its weapons are likely less potent than the military's, given previous statements about the restriction of arms sales to emigrant fleets and non-governmental organizations. There's no indication anywhere in that scene that the Macross Elysion's macross cannon was firing at anything less than full strength. Surely it'd be a bit mental to NOT go all-in when your aim is to disable or even destroy an ancient Protoculture ship apparently many times more powerful than your own. Also, I don't believe I've ever seen an official source say that energy weapons of any type are less effective or required to operate at reduced power in atmosphere. I've only ever seen that in the Palladium Books RPG lines... which is one of their sillier NERF-ings. Use at range is kind of the point too... especially with the bigger implementations of the technology like the Battle-class's gunship or the Macross Cannon-class gunships which are essentially for destroying enemy fleets in one shot. It's only the small, comparatively low powered implementations that we see used at extremely short ranges. Arguably, the SMS Macross Quarter's first outing in the Macross Frontier series was a macross cannon shot from as close if not closer... the Knight-class Vajra ship it destroyed took a hit from its macross cannon at a range of only a few kilometers. As small as the Macross Elysion is, I would assume that it's probably not equipped with retractable guns... unless they're AA guns. (There do seem to be a pair of large slits with AA guns on the sides of the legs.) ... so you're citing a toy instead. At best that's a lateral move in terms of reliability.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Er... both SMS and Kaos are private (civilian) military contractors. As such, both are also technically private armies given that they're military forces that owe their allegiance to a corporation rather than a nation. Both are also [owned by / part of] interstellar conglomerates that started out in much more mundane fields... SMS's parent company is an interstellar shipping firm (Bilra Transport Co.), and Kaos's is an interstellar media corporation (name not known yet). The SMS force attached to the Macross Frontier fleet just seems to have been bigger and more professional than Kaos, a difference that's not altogether surprising considering the Macross Frontier fleet's SMS branch office had a clandestine purpose of being an elite force for an all-but-inevitable conflict with the Vajra and therefore needed the very best soldiers money could hire... while Kaos was essentially a bodyguard detail for Walkure and a supplemental security force for the military out in a sleepy little globular cluster where the occasional Var outbreak was the only real threat until recently.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Per Chronicle, the Macross Quarter can just barely fit the VB-6 into the taller aft hangar section normally used for battroid maintenance (this is also where they store the Queadluun-Rhea units). Even so, the available space is not wide enough to accommodate it without folding the wings.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Yes, they still exist. Like Kaos, the SMS office in the Macross Frontier series was just one branch of a corporation with locations on many different worlds and fleets. The branch office in the Macross Frontier fleet was temporarily drafted into the fleet's local New UN Spacy forces... but most of the staff legged it instead of complying, and may have regained their autonomy after the crisis was over. In the movies, we see reinforcements from SMS branches in other fleets, and the Macross 30 game's protagonists belong to SMS branches in other star systems (Leon is originally from the Sephira branch office, Aisha runs the branch office on Uroboros).
  18. Seto Kaiba
    So... a couple points here. I think you may be counting several of these turrets two or three times apiece. I've given it an eyes-on review and only found twenty-four turrets in total spread across the entire ship: fourteen on the main body, and a further ten split evenly between BASTER-L and BASTER-R. I'm not counting CIWS guns here. Just for the record, the "Quarter Cannon" is just another name for a super dimension energy cannon... there are a good dozen different variations on that theme these days, depending partly on who's using it, how the beam is aimed, how it's focused, etc. Given that a standard stealth cruiser has eleven beam cannon turrets and the Macross Quarter-class can have anywhere from ten to twenty-four, having fourteen beam gun turrets doesn't give the larger Macross Elysion much of an advantage... especially given that the ship's unusual shape of the ship builds some fairly significant blind spots in the coverage of those turrets. Also, as a side note, it's worth remembering that the Battle-class official specs give them not just the large turrets mounted on the upper hull... but also a large, indeterminate number of retractable beam cannon turrets scattered around the rest of the hull. The ones you mention are simply the heaviest guns it has, not the only ones. (These guns have been seen firing in official art, but not in animation that I can recall offhand.) That would be supposition, not a fact. It's probable, but it's not confirmed. Also, the Elysion's macross cannon doesn't seem to be particularly powerful... certainly much closer to the Macross Quarter's than the one on a Macross-class or Battle-class. We've gone over your claims about size and the unreliability of that dojinshi you cite several times, so we don't need to rehash that again.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Very much so, yes... the Macross Elysion seems like exactly the wrong kind of ship for a private military contractor headquartered out in the space boonies to be operating. Their whole operation doesn't make a ton of sense, but the Elysion seems like the worst possible combination of design features for what their day-to-day operations would be. The actual Macross Elysion itself is not particularly well-armed for a Macross, or even simply for a ship of its size. Her only actual armaments are a handful of converging energy cannon turrets mounted on the hull, and she doesn't seem to have an aircraft hangar or destroid complement of her own. Without the Aether and the Hemera she's essentially little more than an overcomplicated alternative to the New UN Spacy's stealth cruiser1, and the Aether and the Hemera don't seem to be particularly effective or capable carriers for their size either. Individually they seem to be somewhat smaller than a Guantanamo-class space stealth carrier, but combined the two are apparently carrying about half the capacity of a single Guantanamo-class or a Macross Quarter-class ship. On the whole, the Macross Elysion seems to be a much less effective warship than anything we've seen before... she's basically a less-capable Macross Quarter-class alternative at twice the size. As I noted before, what's weird in Macross Delta is that an area so densely populated by emigrant fleets seems to have had all of its Battle-class ships go walkabout. Each New Macross-class, Island Cluster-class, or whatever the Macross Galaxy was had AT LEAST one Battle-class supercarrier for its defense. They've been building variants of the Battle-class for decades, after all. It's less surprising that we haven't seen a lot of Macross Quarter-class ships, since in the Macross Frontier series that class was literally brand new and still in testing when the war with the Vajra began. (She still had that "new warship" smell, y'know?) It's supposed to be the standard for an emigrant world to have at least one transformable super-warship in orbit as the de facto flagship of the planetary defense fleet. That was still true at the end of Frontier, so we're left to wonder where all the ones in the Brisingr cluster went. The only ones that weren't supposed to have been produced in significant numbers were the old mass-produced Macross-class, because those were mostly for reconnaissance rather than for fleet defense. Certainly a fair theory, given that we've never actually seen the federal New UN Forces of the space emigration era before... the defense forces of the emigrant fleets are the local New UN Forces, which are more along the lines of national guard reservists or a state militia. Even in the Macross Frontier movie, the fleet that relieved the 55th Long-Distance Emigrant Fleet was made up of forces from other emigrant fleets. IIRC, there may be multiple Macross-13's... it being the code for a warship that doesn't officially exist. 1. The only time this class has been named is in a Circle FANKY dojinshi, which calls it the Osaka-class.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    The figure we're given is not length, it's the Macross Elysion's total height while in Storm Attacker mode... 828m, the same as the Burj Khalifa (which is the comparison made along with giving the figure). All things being proportional, that makes her roughly twice the size of the Macross Quarter, or around half the size of the bulkier Macross-class and about 1/3 the size of an initial-type Battle-class if you factor in the extra mass that came with the gunship.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    At most, it's maybe 600m long... the way the legs fold in its transformation cuts a good chunk out of its length. The Elysion's only 828m in storm attacker mode with the BASTER-L and BASTER-R included... the lower legs are almost exactly half the ship's total height, and the Aether and Hemera are significantly smaller than the legs. They're also much narrower in profile than the Guantanamo-class... so I'd say they are in all likelihood smaller than the Guantanamo-class in all respects. (That, in conjunction with the integration of a heavy quantum reaction cannon, would certainly explain why the Macross Elysion's fighter complement only seems to be about 1/2 of the officially-stated capacity of the Guantanamo-class.)
  22. Seto Kaiba
    All told, I think it's pretty evident that the city ship in question is a reuse of the Island-1 CG model from Macross Frontier and we just weren't supposed to notice. Elysion's only something like 400-500m long in cruiser mode, and the presentation of it in proximity to the dome suggests that the dome must be a good 3-4km long but only about 400-500m tall. Slightly smaller, but a lot flatter, than the typical city ship. EDIT: Confirmed, it's the Island-1 model... they didn't even remove the observation platform over the SMS Macross Quarter's dock from the top-down views.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    It was in 2010... February 11th, at some point prior to 1100 hours Macross standard time.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Honestly, the only person I've ever seen take issue with Michel and Klan's relationship is Michel himself... when he said that he couldn't date her because people would think he was doing something indecent.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Personally, I'm totally OK with everything except their proximity to an open ultra-high-voltage circuit... if that cable is carrying such high voltages that it can arc a distance of at least a dozen meters, it should've messed them up pretty bad. But that's a tiny realism nitpick in what I felt was otherwise an excellent episode.
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