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Seto Kaiba

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  1. 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...
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. 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...
  10. Seto Kaiba
    The size comparison in Macross Chronicle puts it at almost exactly 1,200m.
  11. 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".
  12. Seto Kaiba
    That... I think... would be a very different kind of Zentradi revolutionary group if it were named "Snuggle".
  13. 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.)
  14. 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.
  15. 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.
  16. 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.
  17. Seto Kaiba
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  19. 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.
  20. 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.
  21. 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.
  22. 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.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Mirage is gonna win it. We're following an almost identical trajectory to Misa and Hikaru.
  24. 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.
  25. 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.
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