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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Thus far, we've been presented with information about most of the branches of the (New) UN Forces... and all indications are that they mostly use the same equipment, though it seems like the planetside defense forces have largely taken a backseat to the space forces given the space-based focus of war. ... since when? We see, right in the original series, that the UN Forces began producing the Regult for their own use shortly after capturing the Esbeliben AWDAP facility from the Zentradi. General Global himself toured the production line not long after its capture. Even Macross the Ride mentions (New) UN Forces-use Regults, and Frontier's backstory material mentions the (New) UN Forces keeping several other types of Zentradi mecha in service for decades after the war. Arguably... though it's worth noting that they were also not particularly successful designs, and weren't (New) UN Forces designs either. That's pretty much the trajectory of the destroid family's decline. Initially, they were developed for surface-based planetary defense on the assumption that the enemy would want to land troops and hold terrain. When the final battle of the First Space War rather explosively put that notion to rest, the destroid's operational role was reduced to shipboard air defense and policing rogue Zentradi on Earth's surface. From there, the destroids basically lost that last niche when the UN Spacy's stealth warship designs went into service and they got replaced by more cost-effective and stealthy integrated point-defense guns and missile launchers. The ships just aren't big enough for destroids to have any practical advantage over the less expensive fixed emplacements. From then on, the remaining destroids were quietly surplussed out of service and became construction equipment, or fell into the hands of anti-government forces. As far as 2-mode variable craft, there are a few of those. The Feios Valkyrie from Macross VF-X and Macross VF-X2 is one. There's also the VF-X-3 Medusa from Macross: Remember Me, and the Macross II OVA's VC-079 Civilian Valkyrie and VF-XX Zentradi Valkyrie. Usually it's GERWALK mode that gets jettisoned, with the VC-079 being the sole exception I know of. It has no Battroid mode instead.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    You've got some false assumptions in here, so that may be part of why... Valkyries are expensive, yes... but they're also markedly more versatile than Destroids, and at least as resilient (if not more so). Properly equipped, they can also bring much more firepower to bear. I'll confess I have no idea where you've come up with the idea that Valkyries are not suited for extended periods of land warfare. Not only is Battroid mode explicitly and repeatedly identified as a mode intended for land warfare use in practically every Macross publication to discuss the three-mode configuration, there's nothing to indicate that they aren't perfectly suited to operating on the ground for as long as their fuel holds out (hundreds of hours). We've seen plenty of examples of VFs acting as ground forces in Macross, especially for patrol and security purposes going all the way back to the original series. Macross Delta's titular main unit even uses a VF specifically optimized for ground combat inside cities. Actually, until Macross Frontier and Macross Delta showed us emigrant forces using refurbished old-model destroids for their ground forces, the general line was that Destroids had gone the way of the dinosaur and been replaced by Valkyries and more conventional armored fighting vehicles. It was only Macross II: Lovers Again that showed the UN Forces still using Destroids in the decades following the First Space War. If Destroids are still viable/practical for ground forces, one has to wonder why there have been no new models of destroid developed in the last half-century... and why airbases on planets seem to prefer using VFs for their ground patrols instead of destroids. The only times we've seen destroids in action in later decades was either as targets on the practice range, or damn near ancient models used by emigrant forces which chose them for special reasons... like Frontier wanting a mecha to operate inside its dome system without ruining the pavement. Al Shahal seems to have been the only world in the Brisingr cluster to use them, and they got pasted pretty damn quick by the Marines and their Zentradi mecha. Effective? Maybe. Effectively unnecessary? Pretty much. The problem with destroid practicality is that, for what the New UN Forces normally expects to fight, if the battle in space has been lost then the war is lost. The Zentradi won't bother with a planetary invasion, they just bombard the surface into a sterile desert and go about their business. Mecha in general aren't particularly well-suited to fighting miclone troops, so if they're fighting other human forces arriving from orbit that'll mean the most likely thing the enemy will send is... you guessed it... VFs. That makes VFs for ground troops more practical for defense, since they can intercept the enemy before they reach urban areas and fight equally well on the ground and in the air. Mobility is king on the Macross battlefield, and destroids just don't have that.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    All righty... sitting down to view this one on the BIG screen. My vote is Negative. If I want a dustbin full of rambling, disjointed, nonsensical exposition upended into my face, I'll put on Metal Gear.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    They already did the Sv-51 in the VF-0 book. Same here! I'm glad I waited to ship a bunch of other stuff... the Sazabi Master Archive, my Evolution Toy VF-2SS Faerie and Nex types, and now Master File.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    The Mayan priestesses were for the purpose of maintaining (and, if necessary, activating) the Birdman, as stated in Macross Chronicle.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Maybe so, but its utility in the field is gonna be a lot lower than a Valkyrie's, and the cost'll be higher than the average Destroid's. The whole selling point of Destroids is that they're dirt cheap (old tech materials for the original series suggest the Mk.VI Tomahawk was only marginally more expensive than an inflation-adjusted M1 Abrams MBT) and therefore you can build loads of them. Well, that's actually the reason most Destroids went away... the niche they offered could be filled pretty easily by a VF, especially one equipped with an Armored Pack. The Konig Monster was pretty much the sole example of "we can't have a regular VF do this"... and SMS's attempts to make the Konig more battlefield-worthy for the 2050's was RUINOUSLY expensive, though undeniably effective. They gave it the same armor material as the VF-25's Armored Pack, which is so pricy that the stock VF-25 only uses it for the forearm shield and the Armored Pack itself is restricted to ace pilots only. The Super Defender aside, there was a terrorist group in Macross M3 that did that with an old Mk.II Monster series unit... they upgraded its reactor and equipped it with a barrier system to make it more resilient.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    They build replacements using the manufacturing facilities and void docks that are part of the emigrant ship itself... and/or the resources of the dedicated factory ships that accompany some fleets, nearby factory satellites in New UN Forces hands, etc. It doesn't come up in the Macross 7 series proper, but the Macross-7's City-7 actually has dock space for THREE Battle-class carriers... the main dock on the prow, and two maintenance docks on the underside of the City ship. The accompanying factory ships are able to mine asteroids and refine materials to build pretty much anything, and are perfectly capable of constructing new warships of most classes from scratch in surprisingly short amounts of time. Depends on how badly the fleet gets mauled. Some fleets have been lost due to fold accidents or just plain fell off the map, and all the (New) UN Government and its military can really do is throw up their hands and go "Oh well". Fleets that are too badly mauled to continue operating independently can get merged into a nearby emigrant fleet that's still in fighting condition, or taken in by the nearest emigrant planet as happened with the survivors of Macross-5 after it was destroyed by the Varauta forces and rescued by Macross-7. If there's an enemy that they can retaliate against that destroys or cripples a fleet, the federal military may opt to send its own forces in or gather reinforcements from other nearby fleets and worlds to kick the teeth of the offending party in. In a couple cases of staggering good luck, a few fleets that have been downed by accidents have had the fortune to blunder right into an inhabitable planet anyway... like Supika III and Windermere. The technology is pretty much omnipresent... it's used for everything from VF-mounted beam weapons and gun pods right on up the line to the largest starship-mounted turrets and standalone cannons. It's mostly a question of scale. A large-scale super dimension energy weapon like a Macross Cannon is a big, unwieldy thing that takes a long time to charge, draws obscene amounts of power, has a significant downtime between shots for cooling, and takes up a hideous amount of space in your starship. Reaction weapons are, in most cases, a lot more efficient and versatile when you need an earth-shattering kaboom, so the truly huge super dimension energy cannons are made in relatively modest numbers for things like anti-fleet use because the size of the ship needed to accommodate a weapon of that size. That there was somebody, or more likely several somebodies, somewhere in the UN Spacy brass who reviewed Basara as a Project M candidate and said "this anti-authoritarian, autistic arsehole is exactly what we need to evaluate potential weaponizations of the Minmay Attack". Basara is just such a tosser that it's hard to believe ANYONE sanctioned Max giving him (via Ray) a state of the art fighter. Tough call. As a translator, I'd probably have to say it's the tech manuals for the various Macross titles. Those are written with such an obscene wealth of detail that you'd almost swear you could build a VF and make it halfway practical. They get into EVERYTHING, even the effect Overtechnology Materials (OTMat) had on the design of threaded fasteners used in the VF-1's construction.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    It's hard to say, given that so little is actually given in terms of specifics about how the fold wave system and fold wave projectors work. I would assume that, given that a fold wave system is necessary to make fold wave projectors work, the fighter with the more extensive fold wave system probably would have superior fold wave projector output. As far as we know, the YF-29 Durandal tops that list with four super-high quality "philosopher's stone" fold quartz nodes in its fold wave system (1 per engine). Like the Chronos, the Siegfried seems to keep its fold quartz nodes inside the airframe, but it's using the less advanced fold wave system instead of a fold dimensional resonance system like the Chronos had. The YF-29 actually has them visible on the outside of the hull, one on each outer engine and one just above the wing root. We've known that for a long time... to a certain extent, those smaller habitat ships seem to have evolved into the support infrastructure ships that accompanied the Macross-7 fleet. The "Philosopher's Stone" refers to super-high purity, extremely large (~1000ct) cuts of fold quartz that can only be obtained from the bodies of certain types of Vajra. Later productions added the caveat that suitably large and pure pieces of fold quartz can sometimes be found in Protoculture ruins. Apparently building a fold wave system requires multiple fold quartz gems at Philosopher's Stone levels of size and purity to work, seemingly one for crystal for each engine. (The YF-29 has four.) The fold wave projectors can use smaller, or less pure, pieces of fold quartz which are a bit less difficult (by which I mean "less life-threatening") to obtain. Yeah, one way Destroids are economized for production in large volumes is they use a single reactor (or a single main reactor with a low-power backup). That's not to say that Destroids can't (or haven't) been upgraded with better reactors capable of utilizing high-draw systems like pin-point barriers on a trial basis...
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Um... not quite. The "Philosopher's Stone" was the codename for the large, super-high purity fold quartz integrated into the fold wave system of the YF-29. AFAIK, the fold quartz insert panels on the dorsal hull are part of the fold wave projector system instead. Inexplicably, the VF-31As used by Xaos also appear to have a multidrone charger.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    That wouldn't be consistent with the established timeline materials from the original series and Macross 7 that say the Protoculture's civil war was caused by the overexpansion of the Stellar Republic and existing internal schisms. Not necessarily. You're forgetting the basic fact that, while Big West and Kawamori have mixed visual aesthetics from the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross and Macross: Do You Remember Love? more or less freely, they favor the TV series continuity for the events of the First Space War on the timeline. There are also several versions of the First Space War narrative (like Macross the First) that follow the whole TV series narrative with the DYRL? Macross design and Daedalus and Prometheus instead of ARMDs. It's pretty clear this is an aesthetic substitution, given that Berger Stone's little presentation shows the initial appearance of the ASS-1 as the Supervision Army design from the original series. Kawamori's view that there is no one "true" version of the First Space War would kind of mean you're overthinking it. OK, forget DYRL? in terms of its plot. As far as the ongoing Macross timeline is concerned it's an in-universe work of fiction. DYRL?'s design aesthetics get substituted into Macross works from time to time because the creators like them better... it makes the Zentradi look more alien, the designs are more polished, etc. Even Berger's presentation affirms, for the most part, that the First Space War happened along TV series lines (with DYRL? aesthetics). The Macross was a Supervision Army gunship (TV ver.), and we see her launch without arms. I went back and looked over the official publications for anything that's said about when the Birdman was installed, and I've found the source of the confusion. People (myself included) were assuming the Birdman was installed a few tens of thousands of years ago because it was buried for tens of thousands of years. Macross Chronicle confirms the Mayan native account that the Birdman was activated tens of thousands of years ago and shut itself down by separating its head and body. So the reason dating it by the geological strata it was found in produced a date only a few tens of thousands of years ago is that it was buried twice: once in ancient prehistory and once in slightly less ancient prehistory. The apparent contradiction is our fault, not Macross's creators.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    It's worth remembering that Berger Stone is not an omniscient narrator, he's a character the same as any other. He's also a civilian, so his knowledge of incidents that the military has either classified or attempted to cover up is probably limited to whatever's in the official military reports that've been declassified or that his security clearance permits him access to. The (New) UN Forces have a habit of covering up details of major threats that could have significant negative PR implications for themselves or the space emigration program, such as the loss of Megaroad-01, their disastrous first contact with the Vajra, or the truth of who dropped the dimension warhead on Windermere. It's also a safe bet they covered up more than just one incident of someone stumbling onto an ancient Protoculture weapon in working order, like the Protodeviln attack on City-7 or the Uroboros incident.As Berger's little monologue was an effort to establish the credibility of songs as weapons, he may be glossing over the Mayan Island incident since that didn't directly involve a song being used as a weapon in its own right... and I doubt the reason Isamu was able to escape Sharon's hypnosis made its way into the official record.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, the only way he could make himself more doomed would be to be two days from retirement and partner up with a devil-may-care wingman who breaks all the rules.The man's sent up so many death flags you could mistake him for a ship under sail.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Totally messed up it most certainly is... I can look the other way on the runes most of the time, but I sincerely hope the prehensile hair stops at the scalp. It did bug me in the first episode that Freyja was showing almost sexual levels of excitement during Forbidden Borderline and her rune... um... got erect.If you've ever been around wallabies or kangaroos, the pouch thing is pretty nasty too... a fair amount of the time the baby does its business right in the pouch. Kinda gross, but the worst part is definitely the smell.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    You've got the wrong date... it was around 497,000 BCE when the Protoculture started to work on engineering a sub-Protoculture species on ancient Earth. They came back after their whole civilization collapsed, about 10-20,000 BCE, to leave the Birdman behind with orders to kill the species off if humanity started to repeat the Protoculture's mistakes.Roid, as a researcher into the ancient Protoculture, certainly seemed to think that humanity was one of the older sub-Protoculture species... it's part of his belief that Windermere was the world where the Protoculture seeded their appointed successors, on the belief that their status as the youngest of the created species meant the ones that came before were flawed or unworthy. For the most part, yeah... the Protoculture were "abusive precursors" who made a big mess and died out, leaving the species they created to pick up the pieces. Humanity and the other sub-Protoculture species were slave races engineered to prepare their worlds for colonization by the Protoculture.Still, the Birdman and the archive on Lux show that the ancient Protoculture were starting to cotton on to the lesson that they had been massive dicks and at least expressed a wish those species they'd created would learn from their mistakes.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    All the missions from Macross VF-X2 were named for fairy tales except the last one... and usually the plot of the mission had some special relevance to the title. As you may expect, the technology first showed up in Mission 3: Die Zauberflote.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Well, yeah... but I'm not sure if that's any creepier than Zolans having kangaroo-like pouches on their stomachs, Ragnans having huge sets of gills on the sides of their necks, or some rare Zentradi types having prehensile hair... and don't get me started on how the second Vajra larva form looks like the infectors from Dead Space with a dead-eyed squirrel head stapled on...
  17. Seto Kaiba
    The size comparison in Macross Chronicle puts it at almost exactly 1,200m.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    You have to take Berger Stone's views with a pinch of salt... the man's a defense contractor, and when you're peddling nails everything starts to look like a hammer.As for fold-bombing Windermere... that's not Kawamori's style to end a conflict without that "Let's all hold hands and sing Rainbow Connection" routine, in which they reveal the enemy's misguided rather than evil. Roid or Keith is probably gonna snuff it and the other will see the error of their ways and save Windermere from itself. I'm not sure that's actually the case... though Roid certainly seems to believe that humanity (wrongly) believes itself to be the appointed heirs to the Protoculture.There isn't really anything to say that one of the other sub-Protoculture species out in the galaxy couldn't have done most of the things humans have done. In fact, if Delta is a fair indication the Windermereans could probably have done most of the same stuff with their wind singers around. Humanity was just (un)lucky enough to get an entirely accidental leg-up on their technological advancement by having a motherlode of functional overtechnology quite literally fall out of the sky... which they were almost destroyed for. They're the ones that were farthest-along in their development, so they're the ones best-equipped to handle all of these crises. Humanity seems to accomplish all this stuff because they are, for all practical purposes, the eldest of the Protoculture's children and therefore the ones stuck cleaning up all the messes left behind by their irresponsible "parents".
  19. Seto Kaiba
    That... I think... would be a very different kind of Zentradi revolutionary group if it were named "Snuggle".
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Unknown. My personal favorite irrational guess is Messer or Dr. Chiba in drag... though it's likely she's a minor character or Lady Not Appearing In This Film from a previous Macross title.Is Miho Global dead? There's another possibility. Yes, the show Reina was talking about is, in all likelihood, the one filmed in Macross 7 with Basara and Mylene. The title's the same. Incorrect.The Lynn Minmay Story is the made-for-TV movie that Basara and Mylene were involved in filming in 2045 in the Macross 7 series. The in-universe version of DYRL that came out in 2031 was titled Do You Remember Love?. (See Macross Chronicle Worldguide 27A.)
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Actually he's technically correct... the Sv-51 was the first production, combat-ready VF. It wasn't the first one to be developed, but it was the first one out of development intended for actual battlefield use.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    The Critical Path Corporation is a rather unscrupulous interstellar megacorporation, mainly focused on the defense industry, which played a pivotal role in the rise of anti-government movements in the late 2040's and 2050's. Their two legitimate claims to fame are supplying munitions to the New UN Forces and having developed the first practical application of fold quartz in 2043, which prompted them to finance the 117th Research Fleet's expedition to the Gallia system in 2048. There's also some evidence they do shipbuilding as well.Their illegitimate claims to fame include having been one of the key backers of Latence, the radical Earth supremacist faction of the New UN Forces which staged a coup in early 2051 and were foiled by the 727th Independent Squadron VF-X "Ravens". They're also known for being an extremely prolific supplier of weapons on the black market, mostly to anti-government groups like Struggle and Black Rainbow, and are believed to be responsible for having developed the Feios Valkyrie and many other unique mobile weapons used by terrorists in the 2040's and the 2050's... probably in the name of using those groups to carry out illegal weapons testing in the field in the same way General Galaxy was doing with Macross Galaxy's corporate army. Not a PMC, you've got "Security contractor" and "defense contractor" mixed up... they don't have a private army, they just develop and build weapons.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Judging by the printing style, art style, and choice of font, I would have to say that's very likely a photograph of a two-page spread from the forthcoming Variable Fighter Master File: VF-4 Lightning III. None of the volumes released to date have had in-depth coverage of the ARMD-class space carriers... though previous volumes have referred to that particular version as ARMD II-class. It'd be far from the first time a theoretically-evil corporation played both sides of a given conflict in Macross... Critical Path and General Galaxy have both done it already.
  24. Seto Kaiba
  25. Seto Kaiba
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