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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    An interesting, but tangential, note is that the VF-4 is indicated to have kept essentially the same hybrid rocket motor design used in the VF-1's Super Pack but scaled down to fit in the VF-4's engine nacelle... including the polymer putty fuel and electric fuel heating/ignition system with liquid oxidizer.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    We don't actually know... for pretty much the reason you're asking. Unfortunately, we have no official numbers for anything except the output of the FF-2011 thermonuclear reaction turbine engines. If we go outside the bounds of official setting material, Master File offers no guidance on the in-wing thermonuclear ramjet systems but puts the compact hybrid rocket boosters at a comparatively humble 18,560kgf (182kN) apiece. In theory, there's no normal circumstance under which all three pairs of engines would be operating concurrently and in atmosphere it's supposed to be kind of an either-or where the turbines and ramjets are concerned. If we accept Master File's not-strictly-official number then the maximum possible thrust the VF-4A can produce in space flight is a hearty 65,120kgf (638.6kN). About 79.6kN more than the combined main engine thrust of the VF-11 Thunderbolt's two FF-2025 turbines or around the output of one YF-19/VF-19A main turbine.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Maybe, maybe not...
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Eh, Rome wasn't built in a day... not even the imitation version in Culture Park. I'd rather Animeigo take their time and do an exemplary job than have it ASAP.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    My group finished its watch-through of Goblin Slayer II... if you overlook the huge amount of material that was skipped, it's a reasonably faithful adaptation for better or worse. It is a bit jarring that the change in studios between seasons one and two led to such a significant visual difference. The color palette changed in season two, and the characters proportions were changed quite a bit in the case of the lizard priest and the slayer himself, so the whole thing looks slightly wrong at times.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Yes, they do. The main example - and probably the medium on which all the other options work - is the Galaxy Network. An interstellar internet linking all of the different emigrant planets and fleets together that's used for basically everything the regular internet is used for today. It's been a part of the setting since Macross Plus and Macross 7, though didn't really start being described as "the space internet" until around Macross Frontier when Shoji Kawamori started explaining the current space emigration era in Macross as being like the Age of Sail "but with internet". Xaos actually got its start as a private interstellar communications company before expanding into a conglomerate with subsidiaries in various fields like defense, entertainment, etc.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    You mean the VF-31AX? Yeah... it's actually pretty weird how low Variable Fighter Master File: VF-31AX Kairos Plus's opinion of its titular aircraft and its operators is. Normally you can count on any given Master File to talk about the VF it's covering in a highly positive light as it talks about ways the design was influential and the successes it had on the battlefield. The VF-31AX Master File presents its subject aircraft as a failure, labels its one canonical use in combat not as a win for Xaos but Heimdall tripping at the finish line due to other circumstances, and uses that as a springboard to talk about tech being developed for the 6th Generation and roadblocks faced by development and production. As I've noted previously, there are three separate explanations for the VF-31AX Kairos Plus: Battle damaged VF-31 Siegfrieds that were repaired with VF-31A Kairos parts and tweaked. VF-31A Kairos units upgraded with VF-31 Siegfried parts to replace battle damaged Siegfrieds. Battle damaged VF-31 Siegfrieds that were repaired using parts intended to convert them into a 6th Generation experimental aircraft "VF-31X". ... with the last one being Master File's new take, and the others being some kind of confusion on the part of the coverage of the movie.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Hrm... when all's said and done, I just realized I'm following 18 different titles this season. I've exhausted all the available episodes of everything except Metallic Rouge, so I've gone backwards a bit to revisit a series from years ago that I didn't get a chance to watch at the time. 2017's Saiyuki Reload BLAST is... well... more of what audiences already got in Gensoumaden Saiyuki, Saiyuki Reload, and Saiyuki Reload GUNLOCK way back in 2000, 2003, and 2004 respectively. It's got a way better translation that actually gets its historical, geographic, and religious terminology right but it's so much in the mold of previous seasons that the first three episodes are The Usual Shenanigans of the Sanzo party rolling into town and resolving local focus character A's tragic backstory before moving on, and the next three episodes are a three-part remake of the gaiden arc from the original Gensoumaden Saiyuki series from 2000 but without the violence toned down. The only thing it does to move the plot even the tiniest bit forward prior to episode 7 is have the Sanzo party finally arrive in India after 101 episodes, 7 OVAs, a feature film, and eighteen years of real world time. The animation quality's worlds better than the rather iffy animation from Reload and Reload GUNLOCK, and the translation's actually pretty good quality overall barring one typo I've seen. It must've done pretty well, since another sequel was done in 2022... Saiyuki Reload ZEROIN.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    The VF-1's GU-11[A] has had several different sets of numbers listed over the years. The official spec lists 1,200 rounds per minute as the standard rate, though sources over the years have specified various different levels. 30 rounds per minute shows up in several different iterations, along with either 500 or 800 rounds per minute, and occasionally rates as high as 1,600 or 2,000 rounds per minute.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    All in all, the Special Forces VF-19A's acceleration/mobility performance is about 1/2 of what your garden variety mass production 5th Generation VF can achieve thanks to the huge power disparity between the VF-19's thermonuclear reaction burst turbines and the VF-25/VF-31's vastly more powerful Stage II thermonuclear reaction turbine engines and inertia store converter. Controlability is also superior on the 5th Gen units thanks to EX-Gear and the next-gen ARIEL II control system. Overall survivability is a fair bit higher in 5th Gen thanks to the better engines allowing the 5th Gen VFs to run energy conversion armor on critical areas even in Fighter mode, better composite materials in the armor improving overall defensive capability, the next-generation advanced energy conversion armor used in the anti-projectile shield, fewer mechanical parts in the transformation system that can break down thanks to the linear actuator, etc. Offensive ability is also a fair bit higher, given that it's noted the VF-19 cannot wield the VF-25's GU-17 without structural reinforcement to the arms and the ability of several 5th Gen models to control multiple unmanned wingmen derived from the X-9 Ghost. Based on what little has been said on the subject of 6th Gen in Macross Delta materials - not all of which are strictly reliable as the main source is Master File - something akin to the YF-29, YF-30, or VF-31AX. The one semi-reliable point that's consistent between official setting and Master File materials is the idea that the 6th Generation will have Fold Wave Systems or some similar tech boosting performance. The addition of a Fold Wave System is seemingly enough to push the VF-31 custom from a 5th Generation to a 5.5th Generation according to extra features found in the Macross Delta TV Blu-rays. Master File is the source that talks the most about it, and being that it's the ONLY source to really talk about the VF-31AX Kairos Plus and Sv-303 Vivasvat. That book changes the context of the YF-29, retroactively reclassifying it as 6th Generation and also recontextualizes the VF-31AX Kairos Plus from the Absolute Live!!!!!! movie not as an improvised field repair/redesign of the VF-31 Siegfried but as a repair-by-upgrade of the damaged VF-31 Siegfrieds using parts intended to upgrade/convert the 5.5th Gen VF-31 Siegfried into a 6th Gen experimental aircraft codenamed "VF-31X". Only a partial upgrade was performed due to time constraints, omitting total replacement of certain structural materials and the addition of engines 3 and 4, resulting in a patchwork aircraft that was more like just a better Siegfried than the planned "VF-31X", to the extent that the developer supposedly asked that it not be referred to as "VF-31X" to avoid tarring their program with the failure of the rush job. If we assume Master File is somewhat reliable, 6th Generation's key feature is the Fold Wave System but other improvements have also been included. One of the other key ones besides yet another avionics upgrade with ARIEL III seems to be the adoption of energy conversion armor material into the aircraft's structural frame. The book describes using energy conversion armor in alternating layers that are designed to resist deformation in different directions to improve overall frame rigidity and reduce torque on the frame. The VF-31X design also suggests four-engine configurations might become the norm.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Decided to try a few more of this season's offerings... Honestly, for the first time in a while a season has me questioning the health of the whole industry. So much of what's on offer is so underdeveloped or so thinly written that it feels like they'll green light anything. Then again, I've heard that the working conditions over at MAPPA are so atrocious that there was talk of a walkout by the animators... so it might not be entirely in my head that things aren't going well. 'Tis Time for "Torture", Princess is one of those titles that has a really thin premise and one joke. Though at least that one joke isn't delivered the same way every time. The Princess has been taken prisoner by the armies of the demon lord and sells out her own nation as soon as she's offered comically small rewards like fresh toast, ramen, playing a video game, a hug, or evenjunk food from a vending machine. This gag is repeated two to three times per episode. Vilainess Level 99 is yet another one of those otome game villainess stories where a girl has a run in with truck-kun as is normal for isekai and is reincarnated as the mean girl from whatever otome game they were last playing only to wrong context knowledge their way out of the actual story and avoid their bad end. This is like the third one of these in this season alone. It can be funny as hell or weirdly compelling when it's done right. Unfortunately this seems to be more minimum effort copycatting of successful titles, with even the main character lamp shading how threadbare and cliche the story is.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    That clinches it... 4K UHD for all, and Macross II: Lovers Again is the biggest Kickstarter campaign in Animeigo's history. 😀 I definitely agree DYRL? would raise even more... not sure it would get all the way to $1M, but double Macross II's pull at least. Well, yeah... Animeigo's Macross II: Lovers Again Alus Edition Kickstarter was a crowdfunding campaign from a reputable outfit with a proven record of delivering on commitments, conducted in a professional manner, for a product that people actually want, and with sensible backer rewards. That Kickstarter for The Other Franchise was a first outing from a company with a pretty poor reputation that's infamous for not finishing what it starts, conducted in a terribly smug and arrogant manner, for a product nobody wanted or even asked for, with ill-considered backer rewards... and as if that wasn't self-sabotaging enough, it was all for a property that'd been embroiled in a years-long scandal involving misuse of Kickstarter funds by a long-time licensee who spent years lying about it and ultimately failed to deliver backer rewards and adds-ons and had its license revoked over its failure and the reputational damage it caused. Comparing the two is kicking down so far that you're in danger of having your leg repurposed as a space elevator on the other side of the planet.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    A Sign of Affection might be my stand-out drama for this season... even if it has the bloom turned up to almost comical levels and is so excessively sweet and cute that it tastes like diabetes. It's still a fairly novel approach to a romance, between a deaf girl and a linguist, that actually takes the social, societal, and safety implications of deafness quite seriously and the potential obstacles the handicap poses in a relationship seriously. It really feels like the author put a LOT of thought into this series and I'm actually quite impressed by the level of "show your work" they're operating on. I'm also REALLY weirded out that, of all this season's offerings, the one that seems to have gone viral is Mashle. The OP for season two seems to have become quite the meme in and of itself due to how catchy the song is. The series itself ain't bad either, as a semi-affectionate jab at the Harry Potter series by way of One Punch Man... or possibly Black Clover.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    There's possibly a bit of early installment weirdness going on with the Stellar Whale-type starliner. For example, it's noted that it has enough resources to go 30-60 days between port calls... but at the same time it's said to be operating exclusively over short distances (service to planets within 100ly of Earth) and that the Earth-Eden run takes it 3-4 fold jumps to complete. Instead of being set up like a cruise liner for multi-day voyages, the interior supports the idea that it's meant for short-duration flights like a particularly spaceous high-capacity airliner instead of long cruises like a cruise liner. The only explanation I can really come up with for this is that it really is just a giant airliner, and the reason it takes 3-4 fold jumps to do what every other source claims is the space fold equivalent of a milk run is this thing's got a route like a city bus and it's putting into multiple ports every shipboard day to pick up and drop off passengers and that the onboard amenities are for the folks who have a few stops between them and their destination and can't stomach another go at the catalog of inflight movies or want something to do while the ship is embarking/disembarking passengers.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    30 hours left and sitting pretty at $369,176... just a hair shy of 5x its funding goal. 😀 Loving that Macross II is now officially Animeigo's biggest-ever Kickstarter campaign.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    For the truly aggressive calorie-counters in the spacefuture...
  17. Seto Kaiba
    The Unwanted Undead Adventurer's new episode is still pretty formulaic, but there's signs of it actually attempting to do something different and interesting near the end. The Wrong Way to Use Healing Magic is increasingly feeling like isekai made for the guys who were REALLY into that one eight foot tall woman from Resident Evil 8... Tales of Wedding Rings... well... it's not a great sign that this one was marked "Mature" by Crunchyroll. That usually means "fanservice of the most shameless kind". Seems like my worry was spot on, considering there were two such incidents before the runtime even hit five minutes (three counting the OP). If the protagonist spends any more time staring at the palm of his right hand I'm going to start worrying he's gonna Shinji Ikari things up in here if you know what I mean. OK, yeah... it's almost definitely one of those. An excuse plot for an ecchi harem series. The kind where, if you take a shot every time there's fanservice, you'll be in detox before the credits roll.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Isn't it kind of the norm for a lot of properties, though? I mean, Star Trek has had what... ten movies and counting that follow on from the events of a TV series and there are supposedly two more in development. Doctor Who, Firefly, The X-Files, the 60's Batman series, a whole mess of kid's shows like Power Rangers, Pokemon, Transformers, etc. Most, if not all, wouldn't make a lick of sense if you weren't following the TV series that spawned 'em beforehand. A fair point, and well made... though my issue is less with the glowsticks themselves than the spacky twits who are usually found waving them about and making proclamations about Destiny and The Chosen One. Call me picky if you like, but to me there are few surer ways to make a character boring than establishing that they are almost literally being railroaded by Fate. It makes it less The Hero's Journey and more The MacGuffin's Sightseeing Tour. To me, a character like Mando or Cassian Andor is far more interesting because their choices actually matter. They're not some smug super who can see the future and solo a small army. They're ordinary people - well equipped sometimes but ordinary nevertheless - who can and do misjudge situations and screw up in potentially fatal ways. They're able to occupy moral shades of gray instead of the world of black-and-white moral absolutes the Jedi and Sith exist in. As a result, I'm vastly more interested in something like a Mandalorian movie than I could ever be for something like the semi-recently announced Rey movie about founding a new Jedi order.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Hrm... I don't know about that. Andor has, thus far, been refreshingly free of any members of the glowstick society and season two is likely to be the same. Rogue One IMO left it at least debatable whether that one monk was actually a force user or just working with blindness-heightened senses, and Darth Vader only shows up very briefly. IIRC, Solo: a Star Wars Story was generally free of them as well except for that brief cameo at the end. IMO, the sequel trilogy and The Mandalorian are fantastic examples of how treating the presence of force users as a narrative obligation can backfire horribly.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    I can see it now... "Somehow, Moff Gideon returned..." and then the Empire invades/bombs Mandalore again.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Hrm... it's not the worst idea Disney's had for the Star Wars brand. After nine movies of the Jedi order's baggage, the last few of which have been incredibly tedious, the idea of Star Wars taking its setting to some new and different places without handcuffing itself to the agency-less glowstick fetishists definitely has some appeal. I'm not sure Mando and Grogu are the right vehicle for it, though. It's different, but it's not that different. Mando spends most of his time in the franchise's trademark Wretched Hives of Scum and Villainy or in remote rural areas populated only by dirt farmers, alien raiders, and space monsters. They even issued him his own glowstick by the end of the second season and he rubs shoulders with the few remaining Jedi. For my money, I'd rather see a story that explores more of what the setting has to offer. It can't be ALL wretched hives and remote farming villages. Generic space cowboy adventure can be fun and exciting, but IMO it doesn't make for particularly memorable or impactful storytelling. If it gets made, I suspect The Mandalorian & Grogu will be an all-right-but-not-great summer action movie... kind of like the J.J. Abrams Star Trek movies. Maybe this is their saving throw for the guaranteed-to-be-controversial Rey movie.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Definitely questioning the wisdom of whoever decided the time was ripe for another season of Blue Exorcist. It took a while for me to figure out why the animation in Blue Exorcist: the Shimane Illuminati Saga looks so off. Not only is it a different studio doing the animation production work (Studio VOLN instead of A-1 Pictures)... it's been full-on seven years since Blue Exorcist: Kyoto Saga. I didn't realize it'd been so long, so that certainly explains the first episode's heavy use of As You Know. The character designs were updated from the ones A-1 Pictures was using for the previous two seasons, and while some characters came through almost unchanged others (esp. the women) had their body proportions changed enough that some of them almost look like completely different people. Not a great choice of story arc to come back in on either, considering Blue Exorcist's story was never particularly strong and they came back on what was basically a breather episode between major story arcs. The Unwanted Undead Adventurer is another one of those fantasy titles that takes almost all of its pointers from isekai without actually being one. The world inexplicably runs on JRPG/MMORPG logic, dungeons are everywhere for no clear reason, adventurer is an occupation run by a trade association and they're basically just monster-hunting mercs with an ill-defined rank system based on different metals, and the protagonist dies at the start and is reincarnated as a monster only to spend his time leveling up to reach the point of being able to do human stuff again. It's basically the exact center of a Venn diagram of Overlord and That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime... just with the protagonist ending up reincarnated in the same world where he died instead of going to another. It's not bad, but it does feel pretty bland and derivative. I will say the staff did surprise me somewhat with the attention they put into correctly animating the movement of the anatomically correct skeleton.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Since it was an astonishingly slow day at the office, I got a few more episodes in... Finished Demon Slayer - Kimetsu no Yaiba's "Entertainment District" arc. It has all the same problems as the rest of the series so far, particularly its preoccupation with waiting until characters are dead or at least dying before bothering to give them any exposition whatsoever. Unlike the rest of the series, that arc actually has a fair amount of fanservice in it... a factor I had hoped the series would continue to do without. I guess someone at the publisher must've said something for the series to so suddenly switch from having basically zero fanservice to having three scantily-clad kunoichi and a barely-dressed demon woman all at once. Hopefully they'll reverse course on that now that all four of those characters have exhausted their roles in the story because honestly I think it works better without the fanservice. Also watched The Foolish Angel Dances with the Devil... and boy is it forgettable. Honestly, I watched it barely an hour ago after I finished writing my last post and I seriously cannot remember 90% of what happened in it. Heaven and Hell are at war, both sides have sent emissaries to Earth for some reason as high school students, and the new devil student is captured after accidentally outing himself to the angel in class. It's so generic and unremarkable that I swear I can almost feel my memory of watching it fading. It's not good and it's not offensively bad either. It just sort of exists. Its story is the animation equivalent of the color beige or maybe that middle gray that every cubicle wall on Earth seems to be. I think I'll give it another episode or two to find its feet, but I can't see this one developing past the writing equivalent of white noise. I still have The Unwanted Undead Adventurer and Tales of Wedding Rings on the docket yet.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Started The Wrong Way to Use Healing Magic... and barely five minutes in I'm already feeling like this show has lost me. If your first episode exists to grab the attention of the audience and hold onto it, all I can say to describe this one is "butterfingers". Like, ok... isekai stories always take a minute or two to establish that the soon-to-be isekai'd protagonist is a loser, a shut-in, or otherwise just kind of a no-hoper.* This series spends a good seven-and-a-half minutes on the main character all but turning to the camera and directly stating "Golly, I'm so ordinary and unremarkable I sure hope I don't have anything interesting happen to me like getting isekai'd!". Honestly, the whole premise of "Standard Western Fantasy Kingdom summons X many Japanese high school students across realities to be The Hero and defeat the Demon Lord" is so overused that it's impossible to take seriously. It was novel the first few times, but it has become a Default Trope to the point that it feels like "It was a dark and stormy night" levels of bad writing to use it. The introduction to the main storyline here is so form letter that it's actually kind of hard to watch. Really, the only thing livening the proceedings up at all is the student council president who got isekai'd with her VP and the random student seems to be getting off on it. The rest is just a slightly less lazy version of Isekai Cheat Magician with the protagonist having an affinity for a rare/obscure type of magic that he wrong-contexts into being overpowered. * Outside of the rare exceptions like Isekai no Seikishi Monogatari or The Hero is Overpowered but Overly Cautious where the whole joke is that the protagonist is unnervingly hypercompetent, or the even rarer situations like Youjo Senki where the protagonist is a proper adult who nevertheless runs afoul of truck-kun because they decided to nitpick The Powers That Be.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Being able to cross interplanetary distances basically instantaneously and interstellar distances in only a short time is pretty darn useful, yep. High powered engines'll only get you so far, since any ship has a limit to the amount of fuel it can carry at one time.
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