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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Books, plural... there are at least three that I'm aware of. I managed to obtain copies of them a while back thanks to the assistance of some very helpful and generous MacrossWorld-ers. They're not RPG books, though... they're "reference dojinshi" (effectively, fan-made technical manuals). I've only translated bits and pieces here and there, since we were more interested in the art when we first obtained them, but I found them to be reasonably well-written. They take a fair few liberties, invented a few new ship classes of their own, and missed some details from the shows themselves, but on balance it makes for an interesting read and good material if you happen to be finessing your own homebrew Macross RPG stats. ... and you're not familiar with the Five Star Stories? Boy are YOU missing out. That's a long-running science fantasy manga series by Mamoru Nagano, whose work you may also be familiar with from Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam, Heavy Metal L-Gaim, Brain Powered, and the Tekken game series. It recently celebrated its 30th anniversary, and is currently being serialized in Newtype magazine. If "bullet time Jedi with giant robots in a feudalistic spacefuture" sounds like your kind of thing, message me and I'll point you in the right direction. ... aaaaaaaactually, we do see them do this on a few occasions in the Macross Frontier series. It's a "blink and you'll miss it" thing, but it does happen. I'll get you a screen capture later later today. (It is, however, worth remembering that the 80 mecha maximum capacity is the number given for the Macross Quarter as a whole, not just ARMD-L... and that a fair number of those 80 mecha are Cheyenne II destroids that are stored elsewhere.)
  2. Seto Kaiba
    I answered this one on the previous page. Short version is "it depends on how big your ship is, how far you want to go, and how much juice you can spare". Al Shahal and Ragna are fairly close, being just 30 light years apart, so it shouldn't take long at all unless they end up in a fight with the Al Shahal NUNS fleet. It's only the long jumps, of hundreds or thousands of light years, that seem to require a significant charge-up.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    ... that's actually not new, we've seen that ability in play at least two or three times before. As with so many other technologies the Protoculture developed, dimensional fault barriers were almost certainly something they came up with by imitating the natural abilities of the Vajra. The Vajra Queen demonstrated the ability to produce a dimensional fault barrier of some substantial size during the final battle of the war between the Vajra and the Macross Frontier emigrant fleet (in the Macross Frontier series). The Birdman, which is believed to have been based on Vajra Queen anatomy, almost certainly possessed that ability as well and used it to contain the detonation of the thermonuclear reaction shells used in Operation Iconoclasm. The fully-functional Evil-series bio-weapon that Havamal recovered on Uroboros also was able to produce a dimensional fault barrier and Colonel Todo used that ability in an effort to prevent the combined SMS Uroboros and SMS Frontier forces from intervening in the weapon's activation (though the YF-30 was able to get through it using its fold dimensional resonance system). The Protodeviln may have also been capable of producing this type of barrier, and that may also explain the barrier produced by the Queadluun-Alma's Astral System, which was said to be able to repel fire from a Macross cannon. This is, at least, the first time we're seeing a starship capable of producing a dimensional fault barrier. I'm still holding out hope that Aether or Hemera will perform the long-overdue Macross Rocket Punch.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    That Thuverl Salan-class battleship was hovering over the parade ground at an army base on the outskirts of Shahal City... that's a bit different from flying a warship a few dozen meters over everyone's houses with the main engines pointing DOWN. Even if they know that it's perfectly safe, buzzing people's houses like that is definitely going to annoy or frighten people.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    That would be an unusually mundane explanation for this series, where it seems like even the most trivial things turn out to have great significance. I doubt that the Draken III has any kind of internal fold system... fold systems are just too big to do that, that's why they piggyback on the fold effects of their motherships. Strictly speaking, fold systems in Macross Delta and Macross Frontier work the exact same way that they did in the original series. It's just that the visual effect for entering and leaving higher dimension space has changed to the more fancy "portal" type we first saw at the beginning of SDF Macross episode 1 that was too expensive to animate every time until computers started doing the heavy lifting. Instead of the ship glowing like a lightbulb for a few seconds before vanishing abruptly, we now see it slowly vanish. The jumps were never instantaneous either, the very first one that gets explained in the series is mentioned to be a trip of close to an hour as Vrlitwhai's ship went to report to Boddole Zer. It's always been possible for folding ships to drag fighters or even other ships along with them. Obviously we first saw that in the original Macross series, and the first time it was done intentionally was in Macross II, when Sylvie tagged along inside the fold effect of Feff's Mardook picket ship to rescue Ishtar. The key bit to remember is that the fold system isn't moving the ship, it's moving the space inside of the fold effect and exchanging it with an equivalent volume of space that exists at the destination as something not dissimilar to teleportation. Normally that volume of space is just enough to encompass the ship executing the fold jump, but it can be enlarged to allow for the transportation of other vessels or other objects in nearby space. If you try to exit that volume of space before the fold ends, you're gonna have a bad time... like Hikaru and Misa did in DYRL?. (It's implied that this is how early emigrant fleets traveled, with fold-capable ships using their fold systems to transport themselves and their fold drive-less escorts.) You know that's totally how he's going to defrost Mirage... stuffy little miss by-the-book is going to learn the Immelmann dance.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    It's funny that this comes up as often as it does... but a lot of fans who point of scale problems in Macross often don't have a good grasp of just how HUGE some of these ships really are. I suppose it's hardly surprising, given that most people will never live or work anywhere near something as large as a modern supercarrier... let alone fully appreciate just how vast something like that can be. Many also overestimate the size of the internal features inside ships like the Macross, by relating them to venues in modern cities designed for much larger populations. I'm unusually lucky in this regard, since the office I work in has a footprint not too far off the size of a Macross-class ship in terms of square footage, which makes a great metric for comparison. (The PR blokes brag that it's the second-largest building in the US for internal floor space under one roof, behind the Pentagon). There is a certain amount of artistic license involved in the Macross's internal spaces, but it's nowhere remotely near the level its critics usually claim, except perhaps on the TV series version of the Macross's internal city. The auditorium we see in the original Macross series and the Macross: Do You Remember Love? movie is no Madison Square Garden. It can't be more than maybe 61m in diameter, based on the size of its stage, and it's clearly less than half that in height. At that size (roughly half of Madison Square Garden), it'd still be able to hold over two thousand people in relative comfort, and fit neatly into either of the Macross's legs. Based on the available official cutaways, the auditorium is more like 40-50m in diameter, which would still comfortably allow it to seat close to a thousand, which wouldn't be at all unreasonably for a community of approximately 50,000. (We've got two auditoriums on close to that scale in this building, and I can assure you either one would fit neatly into the footprint of one of the Macross's legs.) The Macross Quarter-class's ARMD-L is a hair under 200m long, and has a maximum capacity of approximately 80 aircraft... roughly equivalent to the typical (but nowhere near maximum) capacity of the Nimitz-class, but with a tiny fraction of the crew. It's indicated in official sources that the vast majority of the hangar is NOT sized to accommodate large craft like a Queadluun-Rhea or Konig Monster, and that those are kept in a small, separate portion of the hangar with greater vertical clearance (which also doubles as maintenance space since battle suits take up very little horizontal floorspace). The hangar wasn't designed to take such large craft as the Konig Monster, so it has to be stored with its wings folded up to fit. (It's also worth noting that they're not strictly limited to just using the hangar floor thanks to gravity control...) Can't say I see any problem with the Monster on the Asuka II myself... it's big, but it's not exactly inclined to high-speed maneuvering.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... the parallel you've been trying to draw here is a false one though. You're conflating several different, entirely unrelated illnesses and their equally-unrelated remedies. On Zola, the local bacteria that are so inimical to humans don't come from the galactic whales... but their replication rate is somehow boosted by the presence of the galactic whales. Whether the hot spring that Elma took Basara to had any actual role in his recovery is unclear, since he'd already been treated in a hospital and snapped out of his semiconscious state suddenly after remembering the whale song. There's nothing to indicate the waters in the hot spring actually possess any healing effects at all ("healing" hot springs are popular in Japanese folklore but have little-to-no basis in science). On Uroboros, Sheryl's illness wasn't the result of her v-type infection but rather a locally-caught disease that was treated not with water from the oasis at the northern edge of the Sierra desert, but with medicine made from the species of cactus that grows near the oasis. The fold bacterium that causes Var syndrome in Macross Delta is not the same microorganism as the Vajra bacterium (aka V-type bacterium). The V-type bacterium was absolutely deadly to humanoids unless the infection occurred in the intestines. The fold bacterium that causes Var syndrome doesn't seem to be in any way harmful to humans unless stimulated to reproduce at an abnormally high rate by seidznole-221 or certain types of high-intensity biological fold waves. Whether they're a part of the sub-Protoculture species' natural microbiome or possibly a natural mutation caused by exposure to super dimension space is not clear, but nobody in the series seems to be at all worried about the presence of fold bacteria in their bodies... whereas in Frontier, having a v-type infection was a serious brown trousers moment that led to blood screenings for anyone who came in contact with the Vajra. It's possible... I speculated initially that they were using something similar to the "fold stones" on Uroboros that provided teleportation around the planet. I'll admit, I had never considered that possible meaning for "branch". It seems so bloody obvious now, but until you said it it never occurred to me. Bravo!
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Pretty much how I view it, except instead of a wooshing noise Hayate's brain is looping Safety Dance by Men Without Hats.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    IMO, it's a safe bet that the Macross Elysion and most of the other ships in this series, with the possible exception of the Sigur Valens and Windermerean fleet, are using conventional fold systems instead of the fold quartz-enhanced zero-time fold technology pioneered in 2059. Between the New UN Government's trade restrictions on fold quartz and humanity lacking the technological means to synthesize the stuff, it'd probably be prohibitively expensive if not downright impossible for even a well-to-do civilian corporation to outfit its ships with fold quartz-enhanced fold systems. If the brief looks we've had at the VF-31A Kairos are anything to go by, it looks like Kaos was only willing to splurge on enough fold quartz to outfit five VF-31's with fold wave systems. (Which is fine, since that'd be consistent with the reasons the YF-29 didn't see mass-production, being that its fold wave system needed a vast quantity of fold quartz.)
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Good question... that seems to depend on the distance you want to go, the size of the ship, and (peripherally) the amount of energy you can either generate in excess of the ship's needs or can afford to divert from other systems. Al Shahal is only about 30 light years from Ragna, per Hayate back in Ep1, so I'd expect the Macross Elysion to be able to pull a U-turn and take off in hot pursuit of the Sigur Valens and Windermere's fleet in fairly short order if they don't end up embroiled in a fight with Al Shahal's now-mind controlled New UN Spacy fleet. That'll be the biggest potential delay, though I wonder if the reason the Windermere fleet's ships have a different visual effect for fold jumps is that they're using zero-time fold systems. If so, that'd give the Windermereans a bit of an advantage since they'd be able to make the 30 light year trip to Ragna more quickly than the conventional fold system of the Macross Elysion. "I hope so" and "I hope not", respectively.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Well... yes and no. At the time of her launch in February 2009, the SDF-1 Macross had a complement of 212 VF-1 Valkyries of various types. It was after the supercarrier Prometheus and supermassive assault ship Daedalus were connected to the Macross that she gained 587 destroids of various types and extended her hangar capacity by utilizing the Prometheus's hangar and flight decks. The Prometheus had a complement of 150 Valkyries, and carriers practically never operate at their maximum capacity, so the actual combined capacity was probably more than the 362 it would've been without combat losses factored in. The way it's presented in-series, it's generally assumed most of the Macross's own VF-1 complement ended up in the Prometheus. (If you don't count combat losses and you factor in the 51+ new destroids built in the onboard factories of the Macross, it's 362 VF-1's and 638 destroids... which is no patch on the DYRL? version, which theoretically had 524 Valkyries between the docked ARMD-01 Harlan J. Niven and ARMD-02 Invincible.)
  12. Seto Kaiba
    I can't honestly think of a better place to be during the detonation of a tactical reaction warhead than on the other side of a heavily armored, potentially barrier-protected starship bulkhead. I think a bunch of the houseboats just headed for "anywhere but here" or some kind of mandatory safe distance from the detonation area... though I guess a species that can breathe water doesn't need to worry about drowning.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    There was a similar set of specialized variants in the last series too... the VF-25's main variants were split up into: A: General duty machine F: Attacker/strengthened offensive capability machine G: Designated marksman machine S: Command machine RVF: ELINT/AWACS machine Well, remember, the pre-Island Cluster domeships were much, MUCH smaller than the Macross Frontier's Island-1. The dome was only a couple hundred meters high, and pretty much every example except the original Macross-1 had buildings poking through the dome. It wasn't until the fifth-generation emigrant ships where you had a dome so large that it peaked at multiple kilometers high. Based on its design and appearance, it's almost certain that the emigrant ship that discovered Ragna was one of the initial New Macross-class emigrant ships... either Macross-1 or Macross-2. As I'd explained in an earlier post, we know that by the time Macross-5 was completed and launched the armored shell had become a standard feature and this ship clearly doesn't have one. The whereabouts of the Macross-3 and the Macross-4 are well known, so it must be either Macross-1 or Macross-2. The Varauta system used the normal UN Spacy variant. The Zentradi variant Northampton-class was used by the Macross-5 fleet. Yeah, that struck me as a poor decision too... even if the Macross Elysion was flying almost entirely on gravity control, skimming the rooftops with a skyscraper-sized battleship is hardly going to set the public at ease. They shouldn't have even needed to burn the main engines like that, since the ship is perfectly capable of ascending under gravity control... unless they'd maneuvered out over a colossal clam bed and decided to give the civilians a celebratory clam bake on the way out of town? I know it's obviously meant to be a homage to the original series, but they seem to have forgot that when the SDF-1 Macross did that it was a bit of deliberately risky flying Global ordered to bully the UN Forces brass into letting him disembark the civilians... it was intended to scare people.
  14. Seto Kaiba
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  16. Seto Kaiba
    A couple of the Master File books have already featured warships. The VF-0 one had the Asuka II-class, the VF-1 Vol.1 book had the Prometheus, VF-19 had the Uraga-class, and the Squadrons book had the SDF-1 Macross herself.
  17. Seto Kaiba
  18. Seto Kaiba
    All the VF-27's already have NUNS markings... except maybe Mei Ririon's from Macross 30. (Seriously. It's kind of hard to see on Brera's VF-27 because it's red on pink, but there is a NUNS insignia on the wings.)
  19. Seto Kaiba
    OK, sittin' down to watch this one now...
  20. Seto Kaiba
  21. Seto Kaiba
    That wasn't a complete list by any means... just the ones I could name off the top of my head without having to recall issue numbers and so on. I checked a LOT of sources and came up empty-handed on that front. Macross: Perfect Memory. It's in the two-page timeline spread on pages 54-55, on the entry for March 2005. It's a single sentence that mentions that Oberth-class space destroyer No.1 is commissioned in that month. Yeah, Roy and Kakizaki are big blokes... they cut Roy's height down in Zero. IIRC to a more reasonably 190cm.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    If not Palladium itself, probably through RPG fan sites... even the Japanese Wiki identifies the name as being something that came out of the Western fandom. Before we removed the name from the Macross Mecha Manual entry, I carried out a pretty extensive search for any official work that gave the ship a name and came up dry. Every book I found that so much as mentions the ship lists it only as 中型砲艦 (Medium-size Gunboat). The books I consulted include: This is Animation 3, 5, and 7 Super Dimension Fortress Macross (not covered in the books) This is Animation 11 Macross: Do You Remember Love? Macross: Perfect Memory Macross: Do You Remember Love? Data Bank (AKA the Gold Book) Kazutaka Miyatake Design Works: Macross and Orguss (not covered) Entertainment Bible: Studio Nue Mechanical Designs 1 & 2 (not covered) Dengeki Data Collection: Super Dimension Fortress Macross (identified, in English! as "Medium-scale Gunboat") Entertainment Bible 27 & 51 Macross Chronicle Macross: Do You Remember Love? v1 Blu-Ray limited edition box booklets
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Pretty safe bet that it's not... they'd be spelled differently in kana (カイロス vs ケイオス) and it fits only too well that a production model derived from the YF-30 Chronos would have as its name the other Greek word for "Time": Kairos. It fits particularly well, since "Chronos" is sequential time or continuity and the YF-30 Chronos was used in a story about preventing someone from tampering with the continuity of time, while "Kairos" refers to a singular point in time when an event of great magnitude and significance occurs. The VF-31 Kairos is central to the events of a momentous conflict in the Brisingr cluster on the galactic frontier. As significant naming goes, it's a LOT more subtle than what we got in Frontier. I guess this also makes the Delta Platoon units with different names a custom set of variants along the same lines as the VF-19EF Caliburn.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    All things considered, my suspicion is King Gramia will backstab Epsilon for being human, and they'll scurry to Kaos with intel while hollering "Curse your sudden yet inevitable betrayal!"
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Well, we already had the Macross One-Third in Master File...
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