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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
  2. Seto Kaiba
  3. Seto Kaiba
    The New UN Spacy pilots, like SMS, stick to fighter mode in space a lot because that's the mode that offers the best mobility in space. We do see they know how to use the other modes when the show's writers allow them to actually fight the Vajra themselves starting in Ep7. Macross Delta is better about the NUNS pilots using the other two modes. When you think about it, it's inter-service rivalry/snobbery on Ozma's part. He can look down his nose at the New UN Spacy pilots because he's attached to this super-elite private military contractor with an unlimited budget and the latest and most advanced variable fighter specifically developed to fight the Vajra on loan from the very military he's mocking... while those poor New UN Forces guys are drawing standard military pay and flying a previous-generation main fighter that really isn't up to the task of fighting the Vajra at all. As to why the New UN Spacy pilots are scared... it could be that they're fairly green troops from an emigrant fleet that hasn't seen a ton of action, or it may be that they're aware that the fighters they're flying are categorically not in the same league, performance-wise, as the Vajra and that they're probably gonna die. In short, it's not really that there's a problem with the New UN Spacy training program or anything like that... Ozma and SMS are spoiled, and the NUNS forces from the Frontier fleet simply aren't equipped to fight the Vajra yet (and may not have even been told what the Vajra are, since their existence was a secret until President Glass revealed it). Exactly how far away that initial engagement is isn't clear... so it may have been at extreme long range, or the tactical net may have been using some less powerful assets like RVF-171's to build that part of the radar picket. The Vajra are incredibly powerful, though... so much so that the Protoculture revered them, studied them, and may have built a fair amount of the weapons technology by imitating them. (Battle pods bear a suspicious resemblance to a Vajra's intermediate larval stages, intentionally so given the development line art for the series.) Nope... there's actually nothing overtly untoward there, it's just lousy timing on the Vajra's part. It seems that the Frontier fleet government wasn't expecting to bump into the Vajra so soon. They knew they were gonna run into the Vajra eventually, since the fleet's secondary mission was to locate sources of fold quartz, but their estimates of when seem to have been off a bit. As such, the next main fighter the fleet's New UN Spacy was planning to adopt was still in OPEVAL when their forces came under attack by the Vajra in 2059... and they were stuck fighting the Vajra with the 4th Generation VF-171 instead. The VF-25 wouldn't be ready for mass production for another few years. As to why SMS was properly equipped to fight the Vajra... that's because they were hired by the Frontier fleet government to test the VF-25 in conditions as close to live combat as possible. Ozma explains the rationale behind it as one of legal expediency. The civilian contractors of SMS are not soldiers, so when a contractor dies during testing or in combat it's legally considered to be an accidental death. No awkward questions, no inquest, the fleet government isn't required to explain themselves to the New UN Government, etc. Richard Bilra's foresight may have been involved a little, in securing the best fighters for his troops, making his PMC more valuable to the government and increasing his already considerable influence.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Lyle's at least part-Zentradi... so no. I don't believe we've ever had one featured, no... but it is explicitly mentioned as possible.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Depends which of the Macross timelines you're talking about... though it's worth remembering that it's Big West, not Kawamori, that cares about an inter-series continuity. The ongoing Macross timeline which was established with the Macross Plus OVA in 1994 and currently has Macross Delta as its far end is in the "Supervision Army" camp story-wise... as that's essential to the whole Protodeviln story in Macross 7. From that timeline's perspective, DYRL and the Meltrandi were UN Government propaganda intended to drive home what a huge threat the Zentradi Army still was and is. The Macross II parallel world timeline takes the view that DYRL's very literal War of the Sexes is the correct backstory... with the ongoing war the Zentradi and Meltrandi are fighting periodically finding its way into Earth's neighborhood and putting Earth in the middle. Thus far, the only encounters humanity in the main Macross timeline has had with the Supervision Army (that we know of) have been the crash-landing of the Supervision Army gunship in 1999, the discovery of a wrecked gunship while en route to nick that factory satellite, and the accidental rediscovery of the Protodeviln by the Varauta system colony... and the subsequent brainwashing of the colonists into a new Supervision Army-type organization. Despite the Protodeviln being sealed away almost 500,000 years ago, that hasn't apparently cramped the Supervision Army's style too badly. Exactly what shape they're in isn't known, but they still seem to be doing well enough that they still provide opposition to the Supervision Army in the present day.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Oh no, the ancient Protoculture's civilization never quite reached the level of a utopia. It was undeniably advanced and spanned a good portion of the galaxy, but its internal strife is what ultimately destroyed it.In the TV series version of the backstory, the ancient Protoculture were never truly unified as one people. Less than a century after bringing their interstellar holdings together under the banner of the Stellar Republic, the sheer scope of the galaxy-spanning civilization left little internal conflicts to boil over into a civil war. The Zentradi did most of the actual fighting, until one side's prototype bio-technological superweapons were possessed by energy beings from fold space, who ran amok and formed an army of brainwashed slaves to attack both sides (the Supervision Army). The Supervision Army all but destroyed the Protoculture before being routed, and what was left of their civilization slowly faded to black after they lost control over the Zentradi... leaving the Zentradi and Supervision Army to continue fighting each other for 500,000 years and counting, and the sub-Protoculture species they created to prepare planets for future colonization developed into the various humanoid species running around the galaxy in the show's present day. In the movie version, the Stellar Republic's civil war broke out after the development of the advanced cloning and genetic engineering technology removed the need for multiple genders for procreation... so men and women split into separate factions and eventually ended up creating the Zentradi and Meltrandi respectively to fight their civil war for them. That didn't really work out, since the ensuing conflict got out of hand and destroyed much of their civilization, leaving them with no way to order either side to stand down... so the survivors who wanted to try to start over legged it and tried to resettle elsewhere in the galaxy (incl. Earth), but had to keep fleeing as the expanding front of the war drew closer.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Mirage is gonna win it. We're following an almost identical trajectory to Misa and Hikaru.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    I'll go back and check, but the VF-22 had a similar-looking feature in its cockpit that was actually part of the restraint system... a sort of mobile shoulder pad that locked onto the pilot's flight suit in much the same way as the restraints on the VF-2SS Valkyrie II.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    They are a thing. Infrared detection systems have been part of every model of Valkyrie since the original VF-0/VF-1. There's actually quite a well-animated scene in Macross Zero where D.D. Ivanov uses his infrared sensors as a way to detect Roy's VF-0S taking cover in the terrain during a dogfight.After the First Generation Valkyries, the infrared sensors got smaller and by the Fourth Generation Valkyries were effectively colocated with other optical and LADAR-based sensor systems in sensor clusters across the body of each new model of fighter. (Those flat, gemlike structures on and around the noses of the Fifth Generation VFs in Macross Frontier and Macross Delta are the protective covers over those clusters of optic, laser, and infrared sensors.) (A contributing factor to the diminishment of their importance may be that a number of VFs in later generations started to display workarounds for infrared detection... like the ability to retain heat in insulated internal spaces to minimize the fighter's infrared profile until combat ends. It may also help that exhaust is not necessarily hot in space... it's plasma.) Pinpoint barriers are standard equipment on all Variable Fighters starting from the Fourth Generation (VF-19, VF-22, VF-171), but the excessive energy demands of warping space-time for defense limit the operation of those barrier systems to GERWALK and Battroid modes on most VFs.Many warships also still use pinpoint barriers, and we've seen emigrant ships using total barrier systems. Collision prevention... though it should be noted that much of the time ships do deploy more than one fighter simultaneously from different catapults, they just stagger the launches so you don't have two catapults right next to each other being used.Using a catapult also saves propellant in space by providing initial acceleration. Unlikely to be viable. Lasers are not particularly effective weapons in most of Macross's timeline, due to the excellent heat-resistence properties that hypercarbon armor possesses on its own... which is often supplemented by anti-beam coatings. Far heavier weapons are necessary to ensure a kill most of the time, like the excessively powerful armor-piercing shells of older gun pods or the dimension-effect beam weapons used by the VF-27, YF-29, YF-30, VF-31, etc.
  10. Seto Kaiba

    Too many new Macross releases coming out! My wallet cannae take the strain, captain!

  11. Seto Kaiba
    No, that's only the case in The Show That Must Not Be Named. In Macross, Misa Hayase was just the only survivor from the UN Forces HQ complex located under Grand Cannon 1 in Alaska. There were other survivors that escaped the bombardment in Grand Cannon 3, Grand Cannon 5, and in space in moon bases and orbiting space colonies. The total surviving human population is said to be roughly 1 million people in total. There's not a hell of a lot of animal life in the aftermath of the bombardment, as you see in Macross Plus. Zentradi cloning technology was used in the nature regeneration project to restore some animal and plant populations using survivors and possibly corpses. (It's also probable that things like the seed vaults in Europe survived.) Depends which version of the story you're looking at.In the TV series version, the Zentradi were originally created as an all-male military for the Protoculture. The female troops were created later, to pilot the Queadluun-Rau series battle suits that were developed near the end of the Protoculture's civil war. Keeping the genders segregated was intended to keep the Zentradi and Meltrandi from engaging in activities not related to war and military duty, ensuring they'd remain an effective fighting force of basically disposable clones instead of developing into a culture in their own right. In the movie version, the Protoculture's civil war was along gender lines and not political ones... with the male faction creating the Zentradi and female faction creating the Meltrandi, with the intention of having the giant clone soldiers do all the actual fighting. They were seperate in the movie version because they were enemies. Because they were made to be a legion of disposable clone soldiers, who could fight the Protoculture's wars for them. They were not created to be a culture or civilization, they were created to be (essentially) living weapons of war.Unlike The Show That Must Not Be Named, the Zentradi don't destroy all civilizations they encounter for some malicious alien empire. They're an army of clones single-mindedly pursuing the annihilation of the foe their creators commanded them to destroy: the Supervision Army. The Supervision Army all but destroyed life in the galaxy once before, so there aren't a ton of planets in the galaxy that have sentient life. The galaxy is a big place, and Earth just managed to accidentally get the Zentradi Army's attention by having a beat-up Supervision Army warship crash in their backyard. Humanity seems to have been ahead of the game, technologically, even before an alien ship landed on Earth and knocked them ahead a few millennia technologically. The other worlds that were seeded by the Protoculture seem to have been pre-spaceflight before they encountered humanity, so they wouldn't draw attention to themselves easily. There were a fair few folks pointing out parallels initially, but most of the similarities are superficial (possibly/probably homages). That's a long story.The short version is that the UN Government and UN Forces were reorganized to decentralize authority somewhat and grant the colonies more autonomy, once it became apparent that Earth could no longer micromanage colonies located years away by fold. Trying to maintain the status quo was encourging armed conflict on some colonies and some abuses of authority from the military, so authority was devolved a bit and the military put on a shorter leash to satisfy all the parties concerned. It happened at some point around 2048-2052. Essentially, the UN Government was reorganized into the New UN Government and went from being something like the US Federal Gov't to the European Union, so the military was accordingly decentralized so that each member world/fleet is responsible for maintaining its own local forces (kind of like a militia or a national guard) while the New UN Government itself maintains its own military force of greater power and scope not tied to any one world or fleet. That's another legacy of The Show That Must Not Be Named that needs a correction. Max and Milia have eight children, not two. They have seven daughters they got the honest way, and one adopted daughter. By birth order, they are: 2011 - Komilia Maria 2017 - Miracle 2022 - Muse & Therese Mariafokina 2024 - Emilia 2026 - Miranda 2031 - Mylene Flare Their adopted daughter is Zentradi ace Moaramia Jifon. Komilia appeared in the original series as a baby, and has appeared as an adult in Macross II prequels Macross 2036 and Macross: Eternal Love Song, as well as appearing as an adult in a group photo of the family seen in Macross Dynamite 7. Emilia appears in the Macross 7 movie, and Mylene is one of the main characters of Macross 7. Therese appeared in Macross VF-X2 under the alias Mariafokina Barnrose. Mirage Jenius is the daughter of Miranda Jenius, the second youngest of their seven biological daughters, who has thus far only appeared in the family photo seen in Macross Dynamite 7.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, we've had a couple fairly high-profile cases showing that the so-called "warp bubble" doesn't stop anything (like aircraft) from passing through it. As far as we know, just having a cockpit that's roomy enough for the system to fit... though, to the best of my knowledge, it's never been fitted in a VF-22. There have been several VF-19 variants with EX-Gear though. Collectively, "New Macross-class" refers to the combination emigrant ship design... presumably an acknowledgement of the Macross-class in either version of the First Space War narrative being either an ad-hoc city-ship (in the series) or a purpose-designed emigrant ship (in DYRL). Neither component part of the ships are referred to as "New Macross" on their own... they're the Battle-class and either City-class or Island Cluster-class. As to when they started naming the ships, that's not established for sure... and it doesn't seem to have been applied in any consistent fashion. It might have been a matter of individual taste by the colonists. Macross-16 (Valiant) is the lowest-numbered fleet I know of with a name, and Macross-29 the highest numbered fleet without one. Presumably because fold receptor factors strong enough to be usable against the Aerial Knights are rare enough even if you don't count that apparently it's not a trait confined to people who can actually sing... and, of course, the galaxy is a BIG place. If there are other tactical sound units, taking them all of the frontlines of their areas of responsibility to go fight Windermere would be an enormous risk. It'd probably help a lot if Windermere wasn't always using the same six knights who all have plot armor... or if the federal NUNS got involved. Right now it's the best the Aerial Knights have to offer vs. the local NUNS scrubs in last generation's hardware.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, it was obvious he was going to die... he's the only Aerial Knight besides Hermann to not get a profile on the official website, and not being a part of L'oreal Platoon makes it a pretty safe bet he's a goner. This sudden bout of characterization was just pathos. Let's be honest, he's basically Henchman #1 at this point. Buddy, I'll take what I can get... it beats wasting screen time on Fetish Filler like Makina and Reina. Oh, I agree with the first sentiment wholeheartedly... it's painfully obvious that a number of the characters on Macross Delta only exist to tick off a bunch of different fanservice character tropes on some producer's checklist. Makina is obviously Miss Fanservice, and her only characterization to date has been her girl-on-girl relationship with Reina and being the token Wrench Wench. Reina's got even less, being the Covert Pervert in the aforementioned girl-on-girl fanservice relationship and The Stoic. Kaname's sole character trait to date is being the Broken Bird. It's painfully obvious Hermann only exists so he can fall victim to the Mentor's Occupational Hazard and Bogue can totally lose his sh*t. The twins... well... let's just say Ouran High School Host Club probably predicted exactly what that's about for the fangirls. Until the last episode, Mikumo and Qasim were both Flat Characters. It's a shame we have all this baggage hanging off of what's otherwise one of the strongest leading trios in Macross history. Looking at how lackluster the mecha action has been so far, I have to draw the opposite conclusion you did... I think Kawamori wanted to do a love story without the mecha, and the sponsors or producers forced them to throw the mecha in because you can't have a Macross series without transforming fighters.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    You have no idea how many different dirty jokes are doing loop-de-loops in my brain because of that. I haven't had a chance to go look at the publisher's blog yet to see what's on offer, but it sounds like we're in for a good book with some new variants. We've got A-G then, at least... I think that may be the longest contiguous run of variant letters apart from the VF-25's.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Just finished watching this one after another work-related delay... and boy did this almost make up for the lackluster showing of the last few. Considering Basara was doing terrible things to realspace somewhere in the 500,000s range (amplified), Mikumo has to be in the seven figures or better for Protoculture tech to be exploding just from being near her.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Unless you count that one special head variant that, IIRC, was never used outside of model kits... they're pretty much identical except for markings.The special variant head for the VF-4G had a rear-facing beam gun in the same style as the VF-22's.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    That was a VF-4A.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    AFAIK the D variant isn't new... that was the UN Navy version.The variants I recall (not counting prototypes) were the A, B, C, D, G, and S... with the SL as a custom. Edit: that's excluding the alternate universe VF-4S and VF-4ST.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Officially, that's pretty much exactly what it is.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Or they restrained themselves because there weren't supposed to be very many VF-0's.With 8,000+ VF-4 Lightning III's in service, I'd expect we'll get the usual combination of stock fighter, trainer, recon, attacker, and kooky custom unit in low volume production.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    We have data on what, six or seven variants of the VF-4 so far... I wonder if they''ll go in for creating new variants for the book or they'll toe the official line the way the VF-0 book did.Still, practically bouncing off the walls waiting for this one. August 10 can't get here fast enough.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    There are a few interesting wrinkles to fold space... other than it being the 10+ dimensional sub-universe adjacent to conventional reality that plays by a different set of physics. Perhaps the most interesting of them is that fold space is a realm in which a person's mental energy is a measurable quantity and can exist separately from their physical body. Apparently this disconnect between the body and mind can result in a variety of ailments. In many, it causes a sort of intoxication or mild high which results from the separation of body and mind. For the unlucky like our gal Sheryl, that can manifest instead as an ailment not unlike a bad case of motion sickness. For the VERY unlucky, that sudden separation between body and mind can be permanent and leave the body in a persistent vegitative state. Yep... it's not well-explained, but the fold wave system (or its big brother, the fold dimensional resonance system) use fold quartz to produce fold waves that interact with systems that use super dimension physics to enhance their performance. Putting together some superficially unrelated remarks, what one such optimization appears to be is that the fold wave system provides energy from fold space to power the fighter while the entire output of the reactors inside the engines is used for thrust production. The inertia capacitor already uses fold quartz, though. It was fold quartz which allowed the development of a more advanced version of the fold carbon-based inertia vector control system from the Queadluun-Rau and VF-22 to take place and achieve a level of performance that enabled it to protect a pilot from the insane g-forces VFs of the 5th generation can pull. Fold quartz itself is rare, yes... but not ruinously so. What makes the YF-29 and other fighters with fold wave systems and fold wave amps so expensive is the size and purity of the fold quartz required to make those systems. Small crystals like the ones in Sheryl's earrings of Hayate's pendant aren't too hard to come by, but the YF-29's fold wave system needs a super-high purity 1000 carat fold quartz crystal. Normally, the only way you can get something like that is from a Vajra queen or semi-queen... or maybe from a really REALLY big cache of the stuff in a Protoculture ruin somewhere. (If you think about it, that's like finding a rough diamond of gemstone level quality big enough to make a baseball-sized cut stone.) It's also possible the Windermereans didn't realize the value of the stuff at the time it was sold, since they don't need fold quartz to send and receive emotions. It's also possible the stones, which appear to have been cut and polished by the time the Nome family passed them down, were jewelry-grade stones left by the Protoculture for some reason. The novelization of Frontier puts it around 2043, shortly after first contact with the Vajra... and puts Critical Path Corporation as the potential innovator who discovered its applications.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Whoo... HobbyLink Japan just billed for the Nex Gilbert VF-2SS, the Faerie Platoon VF-2SS, and the Super Armed Pack for the Sylvie Gena VF-2SS all at once. Considering I was down for a Nex, three Faerie Platoon units, and SAP systems for the two Sylvies I already have, that HURT.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    At best, they're usually on the periphery of the battlefield... and focused entirely on fold songs to negate Var syndrome in the afflicted and protect Delta Flight from the obset of Var syndrome. They don't take any kind of direct role in combat except to defend themselves when attacked. Walkure makes relatively limited use of holograms... in fact, for most of their performances on the battlefield the only thing they use holograms for is costumes. They don't seem to use any kind of active or large-scale holograms when they're operating in close proximity to the battlefield, and the reason is probably the very one you just named: it's not something that they can target just the enemy with. The chances are equal or better that they'll distract a friendly pilot and get them killed. There's no in-story justification for it... it's JUST fanservice, nothing more.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Actually, it's always been everywhere... practically every major system that was on the SDF-1 Macross used super dimension physics in some way. Why d'you think she was called a Super Dimension Fortress?It isn't all the same form of energy, though. Most of the more common examples of overtechnology like thermonuclear reaction generators (AKA "fold reactors"), fold drives, gravity control systems, barrier systems, super dimension energy weaponry, thermonuclear reaction and dimensional weaponry, etc. use a form of exotic matter that is produced by excitation of a special crystal resonator called "heavy quantum". (The resonator is made from a synthetic material called fold carbon in most applications... though some use a purer, more effective alternative refined by the Vajra and once synthesized by the ancient Protoculture called fold quartz, which would be familiar to you as the pinkish-purple crystals in Macross Frontier and Macross Delta. The higher-purity fold quartz produces heavy quantum and fold waves with different properties to those of synthetic fold carbon.) Heavy Quantum has a few unique properties... it exists simultaneously in both 3-dimensional space and 10+-dimensional fold space, and its mass is such that it would collapse upon itself and auto-ignite in a fusion reaction if not for that mass being almost entirely situated in fold space where physics plays by different rules. That intense mass and the gravitational force it exerts gets leveraged in the above-listed overtechnologies. The gravitational force which heavy quantum exerts is used to provide compression and containment of fusion fuel in fold reactors, and manipulated to change the curviture of space or to collapse a volume of space into fold space in gravity control systems, a fold drive, or dimensional warheads. Its tendency to fuse with itself when totally drawn into 3-dimensional spacetime is used in beam weapons, where that fusion explosion is simply focused and contained to form a beam of fusion plasma. Fold Waves are a different animal entirely... you could think of them as fold space's equivalent of the electromagnetic spectrum. Fold waves are the key to faster-than-light equivalents of radar and radio systems. Fold carbon or fold quartz are used to produce energetic excitations in one of the native spectra of energy which travel not at all unlike radio frequencies do here. The other forms of overtechnology that also manipulate fold space for their effects (in the list above) do also produce fold waves as a consequence of their function which can be detected. Where it gets a bit weird is that fold waves are also emitted by biological life forms... as it appears that living beings are in some way connected to higher dimension space, and their mental/emotional energy is measurable and quantifiable as a distinct spectrum of energy in 10+ dimensional space. The inevitable result is that some individuals can actually produce a fold wave strong enough to be not only detected technologically but to have an effect upon people or other life forms nearby. The discovery of song energy by Dr. Gadget M. Chiba was the first quantification of this effect, along with the discovery that some people could control the polarity of that energy (anima spiritia) and thus the polarity of the mental energy generated from it. The Vajra hive mind communicates through fold space using this principle (via a fold quartz helping hand). Some special individuals produce distinct fold waves that can have even more dramatic effects, like producing growth or healing in biological organisms... or cause injurious effects and manipualte behavior. Var syndrome is caused in part by a bacterium that increases a person's receptivity to biological fold waves, which can be used to manipulate them. Heinz, for instance, is able to produce biological fold waves by singing and those waves (after mechanical amplification) cause either mind control or uncontrolled hostile behavior. Walkure's members use similar means, but a different emotional content in the biological fold waves they transmit, to reverse the symptoms of Var syndrome. EDIT: Dammit Google Keyboard... stop autocorrecting me!
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