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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Yes, the prologue of Ep4 says that Var syndrome is encountered all around the galaxy. The problem is, even if you put yourself in the view of the characters with the knowns and unknowns they have to work with (as I did in my previous post) it's pretty obvious that Johnson and Lady M's counterattack plan was a stupid, suicidal, full-blown Leeroy Jenkins move. As far as surgical strikes... the Sigur Valens has never gone anywhere without its escorting fleet. If you attack that bloody thing, you're going to be under fire from all the ships supporting it.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Drawin' a blank here... when did they do that?
  3. Seto Kaiba
    I doubt it... this is not the first time we've seen what appears to be Gramia's runes warning him of impending enemy action. The "scar" was caused by a dimension eater weapon... we saw flashbacks of it detonating back in episode 7. Its propaganda value would appear to be quite limited off Windermere itself, given that Windermere's neighbors and the New UN Government both know that it was the Windermereans themselves who set that dimensional warhead off. That Voldoran politician that Roid meets with in episode 7 flat-out calls him on it, saying that they'll "behave" because Windermere likes to indiscriminately kill enemies and allies using dimensional weaponry. From what we've been told so far, Windermere's getting outside help... but from anti-government factions rather than the New UN Spacy. I'd say it's more likely by far that Gramia and co. are being manipulated by an anti-government faction through the Epsilon Group.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    It'd be hard to characterize the counterattack on Al Shahal as anything other than a suicidal waste of resources. You left a few seriously significant points out of your list of pros and cons that turn the entire situation on its ear. To clarify: Assumption: Heinz can't sing the Song of the Wind more than once in 24 hours.They made this assumption entirely on the premise that Windermere's fleet didn't immediately attack another planet after defeating the one they were currently attacking. This was such an obviously faulty assumption that it's flat amazing nobody called them on it. For all they knew, Windermere's downtime between attacks was because Gramia fancied a nap after a good curb-stomping or they'd paused to have a light lunch and prep the New UN Spacy forces they'd mind-controlled to defend their newly conquered territory under Windermerean leadership. They don't even know Windermere only has one Wind Singer. For all they knew, Windermere had an entire boy band of Wind Singers. (Possibly a plausible sounding bet, considering the Aerial Knights already look like a boy band or shampoo commercial gone horribly wrong... or horribly right, if you're a female fan.) Assumption: Macross Elysion and Walkure would be able to successfully oppose the enemy at Al Shahal.Kaos seems to have an incredibly exaggerated opinion of its own capabilities and/or a terrible inability to recognize a pattern. They pulled their flagship off Ragna's defense lines and sent it, alone, to fight an enemy fleet that vastly outnumbered and outgunned it even without the assistance of dozens of New UN Spacy warships with mind-controlled crews. What were they expecting to accomplish with one warship, barely twenty fighters, and Walkure? Walkure can, at best, draw with the Wind Singer and take each other out of action. That still leaves the Macross Elysion looking down the gun barrels of two fleets worth of warships at least as heavily armed as it is, and protected only by four platoons of variable fighters who have so far failed to do more than "escape with their lives" against the Aerial Knights. Their best ace had recently ended up as a smear of tomato sauce attempting to take an Aerial Knights ace one-on-one, and the other members of Delta Platoon thus far have had zero luck even when they gang up. The ONLY possible outcome of that counterattack would have been the loss of Macross Elysion, Walkure, and twenty-plus VF-31s. Assumption: The ruins would pose no threat to Ragna and the Brisingr cluster if the liberation of Al Shahal succeeded.This assumption on Kaos's part is based on a terribly poor grasp of tactics. Unless the Sigur Valens is destroyed, as long as the ruins are intact Windermere can always come back and conquer any planet with ruins in a matter of minutes. By leaving the ruins intact until Windermere attacked, Kaos and Lady M left a massive, obvious weak point in the planet's defenses that could turn the entire defense fleet into enemy forces in a matter of minutes. Likewise, by leaving the ruins intact they opened themselves to the possibility that Windermere could conquer the planet before Major Valan's troops could detonate the bomb and thus complete his mind-control system covering the entire cluster. Likewise, had Major Valan's forces been allowed to blow the ruins up beforehand, they could have had much longer to analyze the portion of the ruins that was hiding in super dimension space (or it may never have emerged if the Sigur Valens wasn't there) and either destroy, sabotage, or abscond with the key part of King Gramia's weapon. Leaving the ruins intact was far and away the LEAST viable option, especially since it robbed the evacuation effort of its urgency and left Ragna with the burden of evacuating under enemy fire when things inevitably went pear-shaped. Assumption: The New UN Spacy and Kaos would not have been able to mount a successful defense of Ragna together.Why they'd assume this, I don't know. With Walkure able to keep the New UN Spacy forces on task, they would have at least outnumbered the Windermerean forces and had a much better chance than Macross Elysion would've had trying to ambush the Windermerean fleet on its own. Particularly if Walkure could wear Heinz down or song-of-war him out of the fight the way they've done twice now when not under enemy fire. Without Heinz in the fight, the Sigur Valens is vulnerable. Without the Wind Singer helping them, the NUNS and Kaos are able to at least hold their own against Windermere. Assumption: Windermere would not be able to detect the bomb or do anything to prevent its detonation.They can't have been completely in the dark about Windermerean abilities... they were a member state of the (New) UN Government for 33 years before their war of independence. There is no way they've never noticed runes allow Windermereans to detect emotion and fold wave activity, given that it's an essential part of Windermere's culture. There was also the outside chance they'd all get Var'd before they could push the button. Basically, the attack on Al Shahal superficially seems like a smart idea... but if you examine the greater tactical picture it becomes pretty evident that it was a hasty, terribly shortsighted move that would have been suicide for all concerned if Gramia had anything on his mind other than setting a non-lethal trap for his old teacher. None of the possible outcomes are particularly rosy, but Captain Johnson and Lady M practically handed Ragna and the entire Brisingr Cluster to Windermere on a silver platter by being Lawful Stupid. They only got out of it alive because Gramia apparently believed in chump charity. You can practically hear the unspoken "I told you so" in Major Valan's voice when he notes that their attack on Al Shahal failed...
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Slight problem with that line of reasoning... or rather, two slight problems. The first is that it's not actually established which ship he's on... and the NUNS ships floating above the cityship are mysteriously absent before he orders his retreat. The second is that, within a few minutes of him ordering the retreat the cityship is lifting off and later seen being escorted out of the system by NUNS warships... so he doesn't seem to have retreated alone. (A technical third is that his forces were apparently still in the fight during the ship's ascent... being that "all defense platoons" participated in the extraction of the ship, and Kaos didn't have nearly that many aircraft aboard the Elysion.) Funnily enough, we keep coming back to the point from the previous episode where the New UN Forces followed the orders they were given to blow the ruins up. Macross Frontier pretty firmly established that the New UN Forces can only employ thermonuclear reaction weaponry with the express consent and authorization of the New UN Government. That means that the government approved and signed off on that whole operation to destroy the ruins before Windermere could attack. Lady M and Kaos stepped in and stopped him from doing his job, arm-twisting the New UN Forces into agreeing to delay the operation to destroy the threat to the lives and liberty of EIGHT BILLION PEOPLE without tabling a single alternative proposal... all in the name of some vain desire to play the hero by launching a solo counterattack on the enemy's fleet in orbit of Al Shahal. Johnson deprived Ragna of the best portion of its defenses, taking Walkure and the Elysion out alone to chase an enemy fleet that outclassed them on practically every level, leaving Ragna with no defense against the tactics that had led to Al Shahal falling in barely fifteen minutes. An entire fleet's fire could barely annoy the Sigur Valens' crew with its dimensional fault barrier up, and Delta Platoon wasn't and isn't anything like a match for most of the Aerial Knights. Johnson and Lady M's counterattack had zero chance of succeeding, and the only thing that prevented it from becoming a complete debacle was that the one lucky shot they got prevented Heinz from singing the Song of the Wind for half an hour or so, giving the New UN Forces the opportunity to try to finish the evacuation and get the hell out. Major Valan was the one cleaning up a mess... the mess made by the monstrously irresponsible and tactically unsound decisions by Lady M and Captain Ernest Johnson. They blundered headfirst into a trap and left the citizens of Ragna they were contractually bound to defend to flap in the breeze. That got no small number of Ragnans killed, and left the entire Brisingr cluster under the thumb of a genocidal madman and his even more genocidal bastard son. Yes, we're clearly supposed to interpret Major Valan's opposition to Kaos as the military being nasty, obstructive bureaucrats who care only about themselves. The problem is that this falls completely flat like so many of Delta's other attempts to jerk our heartstrings (most of which involve Messer). When Major Valan told them the plan, they all but admitted it was in fact the best plan under the circumstances and weren't able to raise any alternative proposals. Then, when Lady M poked her oar in and demanded they delay the operation he complied in good faith and not only held off detonating the warhead as long he he could... but also managed to use the detonation to take down a good chunk of Windermere's forces after Kaos screwed up and left Ragna all but defenseless because Johnson had a bad case of Leeroy Jenkins. That all rather significantly undermined the "he's a big meanie" position we were supposed to internalize. Instead of being an a-hole, he came across as being a "good is not nice" officer who apparently gave more of a toss about preventing an attack on Ragna than Kaos did.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Song energy and spiritia are two different things... you've accidentally conflated them here. Based on one key point raised by Reina early in Macross Delta, the biological fold waves broadcast through fold song may be something different as well. Spiritia is mental/life energy, which the energy beings known as Protodeviln require to continue existing. It's extremely scarce in the material universe, and thus needs to be harvested from living beings for the Protodeviln to survive. Without spiritia, a person will die, and a person who is dying from a lack of spiritia can be revived by receiving an infusion of spiritia. There is, however, no evidence that an infusion of spiritia can revive someone who is otherwise mortally wounded. Song energy is, per Macross Chronicle, believed to be a type of fold wave produced by singing that can trigger the regeneration of spiritia in the listener. Basara and other special individuals (anima spiritia) seem to be able to control what the polarity of the song energy and the resultant spiritia are, which proved to be inimical to the Protodeviln. It's noted that the average human produces measurable amounts of song energy (~100 Chiba song units) and that special individuals are able to generate vastly greater amounts (~200,000 Chiba song units was Basara's limit). Macross Chronicle notes that even recordings of those particularly talented individuals, e.g. Lynn Minmay, produce significant amounts of song energy (Minmay's recordings produce about 10,000 Chiba song units). Fold song is songs that are imbued with a special type of biological fold wave which is apparently different from ordinary song energy and can have rather dramatic effects on living beings. Sara Nome's fold songs were able to influence the growth and regeneration of living things like plans and certain bio-technological systems created by the Protoculture, and the fold songs of Walkure and Prince Heinz Neirich Windermere seem to be able to influence the development and/or activity of the fold bacteria that cause Var syndrome. Reina Prowler noted, for Freyja's benefit, that recorded media does not reproduce the effects of fold song and that a live performance is necessary in order to achieve the effect. The super dimension organs in the Evil series are, in a way, similar to the fold wave system but not for the reason you specify. They both provide an inexhaustible supply of energy from super dimension space via fold dimensional energy conversion, but the fold wave system and fold dimensional resonance system are intended to do more than that... as, when activated by appropriate fold waves, the systems that use fold physics in their operation are boosted in efficiency. Freyja's fold song seems to be not only triggering the activation of the fold wave system, but also heightening Hayate's awareness through his own fold receptor factor. I doubt it. The VF-31 is one of the biggest airframes to date, and the similarly-sized YF-29 carried dozens of missiles in its legs.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    At this point, King Gramia and Keith's instances of prescient tactics seems to confirm one of my early theories about the series. Windermereans are a mildly psychic race in the WH40K sense of the term, connected to a higher dimensional realm of emotion and energy (fold space) and able to sense disruptions in that realm caused by things like starships traveling by space fold, strong emotion, and other individuals with similar talents. Gramia sensed the disruption which was caused by the Macross Elysion's fold jump and knew to move out as a result, and on Ragna they both sensed either Valan's ill will toward them or the fold resonance of the thermonuclear reaction warhead's trigger mechanism and were able to take appropriate actions to counter it as a result. I think what we're looking at is an enemy that didn't start out being an apocalyptic threat but is quickly approaching that territory. They've subverted the New UN Forces assets for a dozen or so worlds, giving them a relatively big fleet of technically-disposable mind controlled slave soldiers that have access to nasty weapons like thermonuclear reaction warheads and dimension eaters. The Windermereans could conceivably do a LOT of damage if they were so inclined, an amount out of all proportion to their numbers thanks to the weapons they have. Plus, of course, they have an ancient Protoculture weapons system. That's never been good, historically. Every time some jerkass activates some weapon that the ancient Protoculture left behind, it's literally the end of the world. When the Birdman was woken up, it would've destroyed humanity if its operator hadn't had enough willpower to subvert its program and protect Mayan island. When colonist expeditionaries in the Varauta system found the lab where the Protodeviln were sealed, the end result nearly destroyed all sentient life in the galaxy. Then, naturally, when Col. Todo found the fold evil on Uroboros he nearly wiped out everybody currently alive in the universe by altering history. Whatever Gramia and Roid and co. are waking up, it will turn out to be some galaxy-ending and potentially genocidal stuff. (Never mind Keith's repeatedly stated desire to commit genocide... he wants to kill every last one of the millions of humans in the Brisingr cluster.)
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Think of the fold wave system as a turbocharger for systems that use super dimension physics in their operation and you won't be far from the truth. It's also kind of a supplementary power system, since in addition to jacking up the power of the thermonuclear reaction turbine engines it also lets the fighter draw energy directly from super dimension space the way the Vajra do, so it can run energy-intensive systems like energy conversion armor at full power even in fighter mode. I think the effect that we see Hayate pull off, where his piloting gets magically better when he's synchronized with Freyja, is a quasi-unrelated bonus... his abilities are being boosted via his fold receptor factor, the way Var syndrome apparently does to normal people. I'm still not sure that the Draken III actually has a fold wave system, it could just as easily be that the Knights are receiving a boost from the song of the wind the same way Hayate is from Freyja's songs...
  9. Seto Kaiba
    VF-171, not VF-17I... and we got some love for it in Macross Frontier via the VF-171EX. (It's also a pretty damn good craft in Macross 30.)
  10. Seto Kaiba
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Amen, brother! I was really, REALLY hoping for Mirage to be more impressive than she's been so far... it's been so long since we've had a woman in the cockpit who put the boys to shame, like Milia, Komilia (M2 timeline ver.), Sylvie, or Therese. My remaining hope is that hanging around with Hayate will let some of his more fluid, intuitive piloting rub off on her and let her achieve true greatness.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    We don't know yet. It's certainly possible that the Draken III has a fold wave system similar to the VF-31 Siegfried and YF-29's, or in Keith's case it may simply be a case of him using his runes to apparently slow down his perception of time as Hayate and Messer were apparently able to do with the aid of fold song and Var syndrome respectively.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Macross II didn't just have one badass woman in the pilot's seat, it had an entire platoon of them: Silvie Gena's Fairy Platoon.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Very probably, yes... it would certainly explain why a ship the size of the Macross Elysion only supports four platoons of fighters if most of each carrier's structure is devoted to a heavy quantum reaction cannon.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Yes. Barring one minor exception/error in Macross Zero, when ranks have been shown on-screen in written form they have always been written in English and they have been Army/Air Force ranks... even for individuals who do not belong to the (New) UN Spacy like SMS or Kaos personnel. The earliest occurrence I know of is in Super Dimension Fortress Macross episode 10 "Blind Game", where we get our first up-close look at an ES-11D Cat's Eye recon plane. The crew stencils on the double canopy identify its crew as being F/Lieut M. Hayase and S/Sgt. H. Iwata. Now, since Misa's rank is given in Japanese as 中尉 (Chūi) that makes it contextually obvious F/Lieut is "First Lieutenant" (rather than, say, the RAF rank of "Flight Lieutenant, equivalent to a Captain in the USAF) and of course S/Sgt. is Staff Sergeant. Likewise, in Macross Plus, Isamu's rank in his personnel file is given as "First Lieutenant", and we get a good look at his superior officer's door tag while he's punching it, which proclaims that office to belong to Colonel Millard Johnson. In Macross Delta's 11th episode, when we're shown the list of Alpha and Beta platoon candidates for Delta Platoon's fifth man, all eight candidate bios display Army/Air Force rankings (though they are somewhat hard to see, being printed quite small). On rare occasions, model kit box art has shown Naval and/or incorrect ranks... I know of two of Tenjin's pieces that have this issue, one of which displays Shin Kudo's rank as Lt. (JG) and the other displays Roy's rank as LT. WRT subtitles... often fansubbers miss the memo that Macross's creators want the ranks in-series translated as Army/Air Force ranks. The official subs for the original Macross series do not use naval ranks, but they do render the titles of 提督 (Teitoku) and 艦長 (Kanchō) as "Admiral" and "Captain" respectively. The actual meaning of those terms is "commanding officer of a fleet" and "commanding officer of a ship" respectively, my personal preference being to translate them in less ambiguous terms as "shipmaster" and "master of the fleet". There have been one or two Macross releases in the west that DID confuse the rank systems. Viz Media's translation of the official Macross II: Lovers Again manga notoriously used a somewhat archaic form of naval ranks in its translation, so Silvie Gena was presented as a "Sublieutenant" and Nex Gilbert as a "Lieutenant". The US Renditions dub of Macross II also notably changed the rank of Nex Gilbert from Captain to Major in the dub, to avoid the confusion between Captain in the OF-2 sense and Captain in the "commands a ship" sense. Edit: Realized I had "Captain" and "Admiral" switched in that second-to-last paragraph.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Kaos isn't an actual military too, so their practices may differ. With respect to rank, I don't believe Ernest Johnson's rank has ever actually been given. He's always referred to with Kanchō (艦長), which is a title rather than a rank and is translated as "Captain" in the sense of "Captain of a ship". To avoid confusion, I often translate this as "shipmaster". The commanding officer of a Macross-type ship is usually either a Colonel (like Battle-7's Max Jenius or Macross Quarter's Jeffrey Wilder) or a Brigadier General (like SDF-1's Bruno J. Global or Battle Frontier's Pelliot). So far, the largest number of fighters we've seen launched from the Macross Elysion is 21... divided into four known platoons: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Delta. Delta was down to four men, so that means the other three platoons were six, six, and five.
  17. Seto Kaiba
  18. Seto Kaiba
    All right... settling in to watch the latest episode with a few of my fellow translators. I'm going to summarize our thoughts on this one as we watch. (Wanted to do this on the big TV at home, but the AC's busted... so we're misappropriating the conference call suite with its lovely HD DLP projector. After all, authority's meant to be abused, right? )
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Or, potentially, get them accused of "human" trafficking... Unrelated: I just realized why it's called Var syndrome. One of Var's duties in Norse mythos was to punish those who break oaths or agreements... and that's exactly what Windermere accuses the New UN Government of doing.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    ... my girlfriend had a theory about where, but it's really not fit for a family-friendly forum. (From that, I think you oughta be able to guess.) I suspect it's just belted around their waists and they're rendered invisible by holograms.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Well, remember... Sheryl's holographic wardrobe was every bit as adept at simulating the absence of clothing as it was the presence of same. Those revealing outfits she favors are often the same full-body holosuit as her conservative wardrobe choices. I would assume that Walkure's equipment is capable of that same feat. (Played to humorous effect in a short comic in Macross Ace, in which she shows off her holographic wardrobe's variety, ending with an accidental bit of indecent exposure when the system glitches and gives Alto an eyefull.) It seems like they've finally reached the level of the holographic disguises from Macross II, which had no obvious projector and which required no special garment to project upon. (This was also played to humorous effect in Viz Media's unofficial Macross II sequel comic, where Hibiki briefly borrows one of those projectors that is small enough to be disguised as a digital wristwatch, which came preloaded with disguises that were all in-jokes for other anime titles... including Dr. Hell from Mazinger and Usagi Tsukino from Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon. Why absolutely nobody on the streets of Macross City seemed to think it odd that magical girls and mad scientists were wandering the streets is anyone's guess...)
  22. Seto Kaiba
    That still wouldn't be accurate in the case of Macross Galaxy and the VF-27... in the sense that there is, effectively, no actual government there. It's run entirely by the corporation. (Which is why it's a hellhole.) Leon didn't really have a say in anything until he had President Glass whacked... he was just a military advisor to the president, and wasn't even part of the actual fleet chain of command either. "Opportunism" might be a better word for his attempt in the movies. It's not really competing ethos, since Frontier is not advocating its position is better than Galaxy's or vice versa... Frontier's ban on implants is more of a pragmatic factor forced by their bioplant ecological system. Implant tech is legal in most of the galaxy, and by that point had been for something like 11 years. Likewise, Galaxy's lack of a maintained environment is simply its design, being a previous-generation emigrant ship built on closed-loop chemical plant technology with an emphasis on efficiency. Personally, when you factor in Galaxy having been caught red-handed carrying out illegal weapons tests in the field and so on... I'd call it more a case of "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me". "Don't judge a book by its cover" is pretty much all that needs to be said about that... there were some fairly significant structural changes, but the internals are supposed to be wildly different. The YF-29, yes... the VF-27 was a mass-production aircraft, but you could say that it suffered from crippling overspecialization because it was designed to tackle the Vajra threat and be an incredible dogfighter, but not much else. (Whether they actually couldn't use pylon-mounted ordinance isn't 100% clear... sometimes details like that crop up much later on. I mean, we didn't know how many pylons a VF-11 had until 14 years after it debuted.)
  23. Seto Kaiba
    That's pretty much the philosophy for all gun pods in Macross... "screw rate of fire, we'll just make the bullets really big and REALLY fast".
  24. Seto Kaiba
    ... if by "native" you meant "one had regional offices from several interstellar megacorporations and the other is a branch of an interstellar megacorporation", then yes. The new fighters in Macross Frontier weren't the product of insular little regional developers: the YF-25 Prophecy was a joint venture between the local branches of technology giants Shinsei Industry and Legodt & Angeloni Industries; and the YF-27 Shahar was produced by what was quite literally General Galaxy's giant flying test center and technology showroom. The first "1" is correct. The second "1" (which I'm assuming was supposed to be "2") is not. The "3" is half true for one of the two fleets, but not the other. Half right... there was bluffing going on, but it was done entirely by General Galaxy, who trotted out misleadingly underpowered prototypes (the YF-27-3 and YF-27-5) that were not at all representative of the final VF-27's specs. The YF-25 Prophecy could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be considered a "minimally changed" YF-24 Evolution. The YF-29 was being developed in parallel, but not for use against rival fleets... it was developed as a trump card for a decisive battle against the Vajra, and basically too resource-intensive to actually build, so it sat completed but unbuilt for two years. Aisha had development support from Shinsei Industry and Legodt & Angeloni Industries, and manufacturing support from the factory satellite orbiting Uroboros. Shinsei may have opted not to further develop the YF-30 because of SMS's proprietary technology and Surya may have opportunistically pounced on the incomplete program.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Possibly next episode... Gramia and co. did Var the population of Al Shahal, and that seems to be where the cluster's NUNS Marines garrison force is based.
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