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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    sketchley covered the main points in his usual excellent fashion, so I'd just like to make one additional relevant point WRT the VF-171's tech specs: The VF-171 Nightmare Plus, like the other 4th Generation VFs, is outfitted with thermonuclear reaction burst turbine engines... an evolutionary upgrade from initial thermonuclear reaction turbine engine designs with greatly improved heat exchange technology and fuel efficiency. On paper, a 4th Generation VF isn't supposed to need a FAST pack for most space ops. They probably just use conformal fuel tanks to extend their range on long range patrols. Why we've come back to FAST packs being a thing in some 5th Generation VFs seems to be more a matter of carrying hundreds of missiles without ruining the fighter's thrust-to-weight ratio than a genuine need to extend the fighter's propellant capacity and acceleration. (Of course, toys have something to do with it as well...) We have no idea... no quantification of the fold wave system's performance has ever been made. I'd assume the VF-31's fold wave system is less bank-breaking since the requirement seems to be one super-high purity fold quartz chunk per engine and the VF-31 has just two engines...
  2. Seto Kaiba
    It's on page 38 of the BD Limited Edition Macross Delta Vol.2 booklet. ThisConfusesGamlin reposted a picture of that part of the booklet that someone from AnimeSuki took, showing the bit about the series having been put together as a one cour series and extended to two cour partway into broadcast. http://www.macrossworld.com/mwf/index.php?showtopic=30860&page=55#entry1299041
  3. Seto Kaiba
    It may have something to do with the fact that this series was originally only intended to be 13 episodes long... as confirmed in the liner notes for BD volume 2.It looks like something similar to what happened with the original series happened with the production of Delta... the ratings were good enough around Ep3-4 for the show to get green-lit for an unplanned extension. The difference being, in this case, they don't appear to have had a bunch of predeveloped surplus plot laying around the way they did with the original series (after it was cut from 49 episodes to 27 and then bumped back up to 36). It feels almost like the writing team is having a Futurama moment. As Fry put it, "It took half an hour to write, I thought it'd take half an hour to read!" Way, WAY too much episode left at the end of the plot each time, so it's padded like a menstruating firehose.
  4. Seto Kaiba
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Apples and oranges, I'd say. The "nose lasers" were one of several animation gaffes to occur in the original series because of the way the animation was farmed out to multiple companies (at least one of which was of iffy quality). The Konig Monster having some manner of machine gun out on the arm appears to be very much intentional, but just wasn't documented correctly when the time came to cover it in Macross Chronicle.The switch to CG models has eliminated a lot of the off-model animation for mecha... leaving just these occasional frustrating failures to write stuff down, though at least TPTB are now being consistent in depicting stuff they haven't written down.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    They're not mentioned in the stats (Macross Chronicle sheets) for the SMS version either,
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Nope! It's frustrating, but in Macross Frontier the SMS VB-6 Konig Monster had some kind of machine gun mounted in each arm. Canaria is shown using them several times, most notably in the series finale, where there's a closeup of her Konig Monster in Battroid mode (IIRC that was the only time it was shown in that mode) firing some manner of machine gun (be it laser, beam, or solid shell, we know not). No forearm-mounted gun is documented in the stats for it but it's clearly shown on more than one occasion. (Not to be confused with the movie trailer-only version that showed a pair of colossal rotary cannons mounted to the inside of the arms, clearly copied from the Cheyenne CG model.)
  8. Seto Kaiba
    So... your assertion here doesn't really fit with anything that's been shown in any of the previous Macross titles. Here's why: As noted previously, Macross Delta is extremely odd in that it isn't depicting transformation as a staple of aerial combat in atmosphere. Dogfights in previous Macross shows made liberal use of switching to Battroid for the purpose of shooting down incoming missiles, and GERWALK mode was used many times as a more workable version of Pugachev's Cobra to decelerate suddenly to let an enemy overtake the fighter and get on their tail. Because of fuselage heating due to air friction, the actual usable maximum velocity in low altitude flight has stayed fairly constant, and visual evidence strongly suggests that air combat speeds are in the subsonic regime the overwhelming majority of the time because going very fast matters less than being very agile. Even in the real world we don't dogfight at top speed. You're forgetting that the increase in maximum speed is a function of the increase in overall engine power and maximum instantaneous thrust. As a rule, these VFs have enough engine power that the increasing distance between zero velocity and top speed is balanced by a corresponding increase in the maximum acceleration they can produce by simple brute-force application of thrust. Some of these 5th Generation VFs can accelerate at 30G from a standing start, which kind of turns the loss of momentum from deceleration into a non-issue.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    The Konig Monster has had forearm-mounted guns since Macross Frontier.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Okay, sitting down to watch this one on the big screen... and after the last couple episodes, I have to say my expectations couldn't get much lower. The last few episodes have been R*******-level bad, and the thumbnails my Smart TV is making while the cursor rests on the file are doing nothing to inspire confidence. All told, while a desperate effort was made to recover from the damage inflicted by the last three episodes, I still have to tender an overall Negative vote. Too little, too late, too short, too sh*t. The animation quality was all over the map, blatant reuse... from previous shows no less, and a setup for another bloody "let's go undercover" episode because Walkure haven't proven sufficiently that they suck at that yet.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Ugh... hate that article SO MUCH for all the inaccurate information in it. So many conclusions jumped-to on the basis of a lack of information...For the record, the VF-4 has always been described as being a variable fighter capable of transformation... or at least until some jackass writing a sheet for Macross Chronicle jumped to an erroneous conclusion about it because it wasn't depicted transforming until ten years after debuting in the Macross Flashback 2012 OVA. Go back as far as the prototype's line art in Macross: Perfect Memory and you'll see it's very clearly identified as a Variable Fighter (可変戦闘機). The reason for the stupid conclusion jumped to in that article and in Master File is that the VF-4 simply did not appear again until Macross Digital Mission VF-X, where the G variant was the standard. (Other games subsequently depicted the VF-4 as transformable well before the G variant was a thing in the 2040's. Master File seems to be trying to rationalize this by making the G-variant the standard one from very early on instead of being a 2040's modernization of the VF-4.) As far as Kurakin and Federov, it's worth remembering Master File isn't necessarily official to the Macross setting... and they're certainly not the first ones to be identified as the father of VF design the way Dr. Takachihof was in the Macross II universe. Colonel Takatoku, for one, beat them to the punch in connection with the VF-3 and VF-4. Zentradi engineer Algus Selzaa has also previously been credited as really being the father of General Galaxy's VF program... being the lead developer of the company's first few big sellers like the VF-9 and VF-14 and the main mover behind its Zentradi technology-based design style. Bog standard Super Pack? But we also see, quite frequently, a favorite Kawamori touch of having fighters dogfighting suddenly boost supersonic with the iconic vapor ring so commonly associated with breaking the sound barrier. That strongly points to them being sub-sonic most of the time.Macross Delta is definitely the odd one out in Macross for NOT using all modes extensively in atmosphere. Max made a show of it in Super Dimension Fortress Macross and Macross: Do You Remember Love?, an equally impressive multi-mode pair of dogfights was the climax of Macross Plus, most of Macross 7 was in space and the show all but ignored GERWALK but Battroid mode was used in flight in atmosphere an awful lot, and Zero was just plain showing off as often as the VF-0s and Sv-51s were transforming in atmosphere. Frontier was mostly in space, but in that show's few atmospheric dogfights they transformed fairly frequently (GERWALK seemed to be a favorite mode there due to strafing side to side). In fact, it's kind of weird that the model kit pamphlet for the VF-31J claims the VF-31 cannot fly in atmosphere in battroid mode... we've seen in previous shows that battroids have had more than enough thrust to fly on their own via raw thrust for a good three fighter generations by that point. They did it all the time in Macross 7... possibly because the choreographers seem to have forgotten GERWALK mode was a thing most of the time.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    As azrael noted, we can't pin it on the Draken III's fuel tanks being small... because almost all of the battles so far have occurred in atmosphere. Thermonuclear reaction turbine engines used on variable fighters are extraordinarily fuel efficient in atmospheric service because thrust is produced by heating intake air with the heat from the fusion reaction instead of venting large amounts of fusion plasma to operate as an ion thruster-augmented fusion rocket. To put it in perspective, a VF-1 Valkyrie's 1,410L of hydrogen slush fuel is good for about ten minutes of maximum thrust in space... but, in atmospheric service, that 1,410L is fuel enough for an effectively unlimited operating range and an operational endurance of something like 700 hours (29 days). The Sv-262 Draken III's a fair bit bigger than a VF-1 Valkyrie, and even though it's losing a fair bit of fuel on the orbital approach and the subsequent return to orbit at the end of combat, the chief limiting factor in its combat endurance would be the physical limitations of the pilot like the need for rest, food, sleep, and using the bathroom. Not quite. The heat transfer isn't done by an electric heating element, it's heat transfer from the reactor (and/or the reactor's coolant system). The heat from the reaction that isn't converted into electrical power in the thermoelectric "Glen effect" primary power generation system is transferred to the intake air by forced convection... transferring that heat to the intake air to produce thrust and, in the bargain, cooling the reactor.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Source found, completely by accident! It's the second-to-last page (#38) of the Macross Delta BD limited edition Vol.2 booklet.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    If true, that certainly explains why Delta's second half was such a mess... it wasn't supposed to exist.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Maybe it's just going to be a 22 minute public apology for the second half of the show being garbage?
  16. Seto Kaiba
    The bit about the VF-22 is a theory on my part... at the time the specs were written, they had not published any information about the g-damping capacity of the Quimeliquola Inertia Vector Control System borrowed from the Queadluun-Rau for the YF-21 and VF-22. It's highly probable, given the VF-22's outlandishly massive g-loading limits compared to production and heavily customized ultra-high performance one-off units from the same period, and would put the structural g-limits for the fighter much closer to other production models of the same era if that number factored in the damping effect of the fighter's inertia capacitor. Well, we can't speak for the entire VF design series in the 20+ range because we don't know what the spec for a potential VF-20 or VF-23 looked like. If they were Shinsei designs they wouldn't have had an inertia capacitor in that period, since that was a uniquely General Galaxy design feature initially... the result of General Galaxy having been contracted to restore the Quimeliquola AWDAP facility in Eden's orbit. It's probably safe to assume the YF-26 was in that range, since it was supposed to be a competing design from the same program that gave us the YF/VF-25 and YF/VF-27. You gotta hand it to Shinsei for what they achieved with applying fold quartz to improving existing inertia capacitor technology... they achieved a 52% improvement in g-force displacement performance with the TO21, and then built on that strong start in later models. Nah... in most fighter-mode dogfights, the pilots aren't going to encounter g-forces sufficient to actually put that kind of massive g-loads on the airframe. They're subsonic most of the time. Barring the fold wave Var syndrome bullet time shenanigans we've seen a few times now in Macross Delta, they probably wouldn't be pushing their aircraft anywhere near hard enough to peak the performance of their inertia store converters for any length of time... except perhaps trying to brake with GERWALK mode from a low supersonic speed in the manner that seems to be the default ending of those bullet time dogfights these days. Macross Plus and Macross Frontier had no problems showing dogfights with LOTS of transformation... Delta's just got crappy dogfight choreography. Apart from something like an Immelmann turn in episode 3, the only air combat maneuver we've seen has been excessive repetition of The Scissors.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Wow. OK, how did I miss THAT? The section's title is literally just his name. Yeah, like I said before that doesn't fit with the other sources that discuss the origins of the Variable Glaug and Neo Glaug. The writer of that sheet got the development timeline backwards, though at least his uncertainty is clear given that he didn't state that backwards relationship as a fact. Macross M3 and Macross R's descriptions both establish that the Neo Glaug was developed for the AVF Program in the late 2030's by the Macross Concern. They used the EVA (Enemy Valkyrie) based on the Glaug which Zentradi rebels created using stolen/leaked overtechnology (from the VF-4) in the late 2010's. The Neo Glaug was created first in production terms, but in the story the Variable Glaug was developed a good twenty years before the Neo Glaug was even conceived. (That isn't to say rogue Anti-UN sympathetic engineers weren't involved... as we've been told they had a hand in helping develop all the EVA units.)
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Duly noted and recorded, thank you. Every little bit I add to my notes helps when His Marchness decides to start covering Delta. If it's not an imposition, where is Alexi mentioned in the VF-4 Master File? I don't doubt you, but I've skimmed the book a few times now and I haven't found him yet. Is it one of those little marginal notes like the test pilot bios on pg29, or is he buried in a paragraph somewhere? Macross R gave us a bit of long-overdue insight into the world of non-defense corporate culture in the Macross universe... but it was still rather lopsided and oriented toward megacorporations, since the corporations featured were ones rich enough to sponsor their own Vanquish teams.Apart from Oscar Brauhitsch of Team Shinsei, most of the teams were sponsored by corporations that dealt in the civilian domain. The most common were those interstellar shipping concerns like Bilra Transport Co., Viswa & Oder, and Tachyon Express (the latter of which is apparently Space UPS). There were a couple oddballs in there, like Skylab: a food service company that started as a coffee chain on Eden. For a while there I think Kawamori was going a bit Ghost in the Shell with megacorporations influential enough to be a law unto themselves the way Macross Galaxy was as a branch of General Galaxy.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Ah, yeah... now that's a familiar situation. I'm just trying to figure out why one side of the booklet says "General Galaxy SV Works" and the other says a subsidiary of Epsilon Foundation.Incidentally, where was the 29.5G loading for the VF-31's ISC cited? That puts the YF-29 on top of the known ISC systems with: YF-29 - 32.5G Sv-262 - 30.8G VF-31 - 29.5G VF-27 - 27.5G VF-25 - 27.5G
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Kawamori's only providing supervision on this one, so it wouldn't be completely out of the question... but if they intend to wrap this series up for a 26 or 27 episode final count it's going to be an absolute and unholy train wreck.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    This raises a few awkward questions... like why are the writers working at cross-purposes, indicating that the Sv-262 was designed and built by the General Galaxy SV Works and then saying it's actually built by a company named Dian Cecht? Does this mean that Epsilon is merely financing the SV Works division, do they own a partial stake in it, or is Epsilon merely a dummy corporation run by General Galaxy from the shadows? Insofar as the Anti-Unification Alliance personnel, they weren't integrated into General Galaxy... they apparently helped create General Galaxy from their positions inside the surviving manufacturers that merged to form it. That bit about the Variable Glaug doesn't sound right... can you source it? Existing lore puts the Variable Glaug in service two full decades before the Neo Glaug was even prototyped, being that it was a derivative of a stolen VF-4A Lightning nicked by Zentradi rebels. The Neo Glaug was supposedly a Project Super Nova-era improved (unmanned) version and rival candidate to the AIF-X-9 Ghost. Don't you dare apologize for asking questions! Questions are like 90% of what I'm here for! All told, that's an infuriating area where Macross Chronicle did not present information in a clear manner... which caused no end of confusion. You see... we're never actually told what the airframe maximum design limit is. The Macross Chronicle Mechanic Sheet coverage of the VF-25, VF-27, etc. misuses the airframe maximum design load field to give the maximum g-forces the inertia store converter can buffer instead... so the Mechanic Sheet for the VF-25S, for example, just lists the g-limit as 27.5G+. The confusing way that was presented was exacerbated thanks to English language fansites copying Chronicle's presentation style for the info, making it seem as though airframes of the 5th Generation have somehow become more fragile despite being said to have a defensive strength that greatly exceeds the preceding generation's (and, in some cases, exceeds that of battleships). The actual maximum G-limit of the airframe is the structural limit (unknown) plus an unknown percentage of the ISC limit (usually given). So even if structural strength didn't improve one jot from the VF-19's, we'd still be talking about a VF with an actual operational maximum g-load greater than the ISC output. Come to think of it, that explains the VF-22 having a significantly greater maximum design load than the VF-19. The VF-22 had the ISC's little brother, the Quimeliquola inertia vector control system that was also used in the Queadluun-Rau and Queadluun-Rhea, which was good for buffering up to 18G for short spans of time. If the 60G maximum limit listed in the stats is its boosted g-limit, that'd mean its actual structural design limit is a more reasonable-for-the-period 42G. (Mind you, even if the airframe's maximum design load and ISC design load were the same number N, that'd mean the fighter's total g-force endurance was 2N... the output of the ISC plus the fighter's physical g-limit... which would put the VF-25 at a respectable 55G anyway.) EDIT: The YF-29 mechanic sheet in Macross Chronicle 2nd Edition has a well-camouflaged statement of the VF-25's structural g-limit. It's apparently 30.5G without the assistance of the ISC buffering up to 27.5G. The YF-29's is 40G, also without the ISC support buffering up to 32.5G.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Unless they intend to try to surprise us with a Season 2 announcement at the end of the final episode the way Iron-Blooded Orphans tried to, they're going to have to jettison a LOT of the build-up they've done to get this series wrapped up in an orderly fashion. The fast, almost frenetic pace of the first half practically screamed "2 cour series"... but the glacially slow, padded-like-a-menstruating-firehose pace of the second half feels more like it belongs in a 3 or 4 cour series. Damn near worked on the audience instead, so I can only imagine how bad it was for the guards... I'll just sit and wait for Pink, Neon Green, and Red to be the new Green and let them all get Kakizaki'd.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Yep, it's using the Saab 210's name... which was the predecessor/prototype for the Saab J 35 Draken. Not the first time General Galaxy has been caught doing that either... Macross Galaxy's in-house development group was the Guld Works, apparently named in honor of deceased General Galaxy contractor Guld Goa Bowman. There are a couple problems with what you just said... The General Galaxy SV Works were set up at the behest of Alexi Kurakin, once of the Anti-Unification Alliance... but they were not sold to Epsilon. All indications are that the Epsilon Foundation has been used as the go-between through which the Windermere Kingdom has been purchasing Draken III's from General Galaxy. Per Great Mechanics G, Windermere IV is an underdeveloped planet due to the difficulty of getting there through the fold faults surrounding the planet, so it seems a safe bet they don't have the technical infrastructure to produce the Draken III's locally under license. With the Windermere Kingdom effectively an independent power after its secession from the New UN Government in 2060, their interstellar trade is probably subject to much tighter restrictions and greater scrutiny than trade between NUNG member worlds... and thus they'd have to buy weapons under the table using sympathetic (unscrupulous) intermediaries like the Epsilon Foundation. Also, General Galaxy had no role in the development of the VF-4 Lightning III. The company didn't even exist when the fighter was developed, and it was developed by the companies that merged to become the chief rival to General Galaxy: Stonewell, Bellcom, and Shinnakasu... the forerunners of Shinsei Industry. At present, it's not clear how new the Windermere Kingdom's space fleet actually is. Windermere IV was colonized in 2027 and didn't secede from the New UN Government until 2060, so they had a lot of time to build up their fleet through entirely legitimate channels. Considering what kalvasflam noted about being able to see visible gun turrets on the Windermere ships but not the Macross Galaxy ones, it's possible Windermere is using older versions of some of the General Galaxy ship designs that were updated for Macross Galaxy's use. It would be far from uncommon for a warship class to remain in production with updates for that span of time in Macross. It may be that the Macross Galaxy versions are using high-angle beam cannons instead of turrets... that type of beam cannon uses a pin-point barrier-like deflection field to bend a beam coming out of a fixed gun port. The Mardook ships in Macross II: Lovers Again and Varauta ships in Macross 7 used these a lot. That isn't exactly surprising. A fold system is a big, unwieldy thing that isn't about to fit gracefully into a VF... even the compact fold boosters for fighters are still about the size of a Ghost or Lilldraken. The only time we see the Aerial Knights arrive by fold and witness the fold effect close up behind them, a ship comes out... so it seems a safe bet they're riding inside the fold effect of a warship as is fairly common practice in the Macross universe. Not so much for Epsilon, who are intermediaries reselling the fighters to Windermere... but General Galaxy could probably be pretty smug about how their latest under-the-table toy is kicking a Shinsei-derived next main VF around like it's no big deal. One has to wonder if they'll slap some EX-Gear in that sucker and try to remarket it to the New UN Forces later on, like what happened with the captured Variable Glaug being produced as VA-110. In a word: "Yes". Strictly speaking, it's not a structural integrity system in the Star Trek sense where they're running a force field through the structural frame to increase its resilience. It's a g-force displacement system that prevents the g-load on the airframe from exceeding the biological tolerances of the pilot and the design tolerances of the aircraft by converting the g-forces into dimensional shift energy and temporarily buffering it to clip the peaks and fill the valleys in the graph of experienced g-forces. The pilot and airframe experience a nice, gentle, survivable change in g-forces instead of sharp jumps during intense maneuvering. For humans, this is helped by the EX-Gear, which functions as a vital point stimulation seat that changes angle and position inside the aircraft's cockpit to optimize the pilot's blood flow and g-force stresses on the pilot's body, which helps prevent g-forces from reaching incapacitating levels. Windermereans are just made of sterner stuff, so they forego the EX-Gear. Exactly how the Draken III's 30.8G ISC rating compares to the VF-31's is unclear, since the VF-31J spec didn't give us an ISC value for that fighter. Curiously, the Draken III seems to be using an improved/enhanced variant of the same Inertia Store Converter employed in the VF-25 Messiah (ISC/TO21). The original TO21 was rated for 27.5G, and the TO21G used by the Draken III apparently offers a 12% improvement over the original model in terms of buffered g-forces. That puts it in the same league as the YF-29's ISC/TO22, which was rated for 30G.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    The funny part is that one actually makes more sense than the Super Pack they put elsewhere in the book that completely covers the engine nacelles... that would inhibit transformation, while the conventional FAST packs wouldn't. Pretty much, yes. The VF-4 is basically a VF-1 that internalized its FAST packs and, in so doing, achieved a 40% improvement in combat performance in space.I suppose that, since engine efficiency and fuel storage didn't increase by an incredible amount due to the similar airframe size, they'd still need some drop tanks or something. Some, yeah. The VF-0 and two main VF-1 books didn't really do anything wild, but there were some oddities like the configuration with the four NP-BP-01 boosters in the VF-1 Squadrons book. The VF-19 book had a few kooky variants, mostly in the special purpose roles like the dedicated attacker variant, AEW variants, and non-transforming transport model. The VF-25 book didn't really come up with new ones, it inherited most of its wacky ones from existing magazine custom jobs in Macross Ace and Figure Oh, IIRC.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Back when I (like many others) was assuming the Draken III was an Epsilon product, I equated them to Gundam's Anaheim Electronics... selling weapons to both sides to ensure there would be ongoing conflicts to drive demand for those weapons and future developments. I'd be inclined to say that, with a good chunk of the galaxy still dependent on General Galaxy's VF designs and GG-built starships, they're probably "too big to prosecute" just like Anaheim is for much of the Universal Century.
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