Seto Kaiba

By all accounts, they didn't have to hypothesize the existence of alien mecha... they had samples. Macross Chronicle mentions, at a few points, that the research teams studying the crashed Supervision Army gunship on South Ataria island recovered battle pods from the ship's interior and studied them. Analysis of those recovered battle pods was what allowed Humanity to develop energy conversion armor. It's also said that the data from studying the battle pods was used to decide how powerful the weapons of Earth's anti-giant robotic weapons needed to be in order to defeat that armor. (It's also highly probable that other essential technologies used in the Destroid and Battroid programs were obtained from those battle pods, like compact thermonuclear reactors, superconducting motors, megawatt-scale laser and particle beam weapons, more powerful high explosives for warheads, etc.) Why Earth didn't assume those were the standard... well... they were generalizing from self and probably assumed that the battle pods were something akin to a light tank. After all, no army on Earth puts every soldier into their own armored fighting vehicle. (Either that or the UN Forces dropped Heinlein's Starship Troopers from the curriculum.) To be fair, we see pretty much exactly that in the encounters with Zentradi small craft like the Quel Quallie scout in the TV series and the assault gunship in the movie and Earth's mecha seem to do fine. When you're building something by the millions, every little bit of unnecessary cost balloons out into a fiscal atrocity in pretty short order. It's mentioned surprisingly often that the Protoculture spared every possible expense when it came to the design of the military hardware they were producing for the Zentradi. If you don't care about operator comfort or safety - and the Protoculture didn't - you can save an awful lot by doing without little mod-cons and luxury extras like ergonomic design, redundant control circuits to protect against equipment failure, more than the bare minimum necessary system automation, escape/survival equipment, more than the minimum necessary armor and radiation shielding, and so on. It's why the Regult is said to be draining to operate... it's cramped, uncomfortable, and very little of it is automated. (Also why the battle suits like the Nousjadeul-Ger are coveted... they're a LOT easier on the pilot and have substantially better survivability.)

Granted, I agree wholeheartedly that the shield designs that show up are seldom attractive... but they have been shown to be undeniably effective in the animation. I think the main reason the shield gets a bad rap is that the Gundam didn't really need the shield much because the OYW Zeon forces were using mainly hard rounds that its own armor was proof enough against. It was much more advantageous for the GMs, which weren't made from Luna Titanium and lacked the same bullet resistance of the Gundams they were based on. Once everyone switched to beam weapons and most new mobile suits were made from Gundarium around the time of the Gryps conflict the shield was a lot less necessary, and became little more than a plank covered in extra-thick anti-beam coating so that the MS carrying it could tank a few more hits. (The two best examples of the shield providing highly effective defense are the showiest... the GP02 using its shield to protect itself from its own nuclear bazooka in Stardust Memory and the Unicorn and Banshee tanking a hit from a colony laser in Gundam UC.) It's a different kind of shield... collapsible, and forearm mounted so it leaves both hands free. It definitely has a lot more utility than the regular model. (Though, since we were once again seeing Gundams made from Luna Titanium its main value was that extra utility.)

Maybe, then again maybe not... I went looking in Master Archive and it doesn't mention the beam javelin at all. A bit of an odd choice I guess, but then again it doesn't mention a lot of the more niche equipment options in the series like the hyper hammer and super napalm. Interestingly, well I was looking into it, I found that there is an appearance by the classic beam javelin in the Gundam UC novel and OVA. Apparently one of the GM III units fighting at Dakar had a beam javelin that looks identical to the one used by the RX-78-2 in the original series.

But there's exponentially more Zeon characters in her camp, morally, than in Ral's. Even in Origin, which was more even-handed than OG, Ramba Ral was still one of very few decent and honorable people on Zeon's side... and like most of them, there's an asterisk hanging over that because he's still an officer in the occupation forces oppressing people. The main reason he's remembered as "good" is simply because he has some standards where the other Zeon characters in the series are puppy-kickers for fun AND profit. Kinda what I'm getting at here... there are Zeon characters who are not horribly sh*tty people, but they are rare and being one almost invariably requires being opposed to Zeon's goals, methods, and/or leadership. Making a Zeon protagonist without that is going to be an incredibly hard sell. Weren't the beam sabers in this era each individually expandable into beam spears? That was one of the RX-78-2's lesser-used gimmicks, but still...

Granted, that's what the Zentradi would consider equivalent to "regular infantry". The UN Forces were aware of battle pods, and even benchmarked their weapons against them, but they seem to have designed around the expectation of Zentradi soldiers on foot as being the norm given how they chose to scale the Destroids and Valkyrie Battroid.

In all likelihood, it probably has a lot to do with the Earth UN Forces very inaccurate expectations of what a future war against aliens would look like. The Earth UN Forces assumed that a war with an alien power would take the form of a classic alien invasion scenario. Their incorrect prediction was that hostile aliens would be coming to Earth with conquest in mind, and that they would necessarily be obliged to deploy ground forces and wage a land war for control of the planet's surface. The Earth UN Forces developed their plans for planetary defenses around that assumption including the development of their anti-giant weapons. They thought they'd be squaring off against, and potentially peacefully interacting with, alien infantry for the most part so they constrained the designs of their anti-giant weapons to the approximately 10m height they were expecting the alien giants to be. Considering they were expecting such hand-to-hand engagements to occur between a heavily-armored war robot and a comparatively squishy alien infantryman in body armor, it isn't hard to see why they might have thought hands alone would do it. Considering the defensive strength of a Destroid or Battroid's armor and structural material is several times that of a main battle tank and that losing limbs or the head won't stop them, they probably figured (not unreasonably) that a hand-to-hand engagement between a flesh-and-blood alien soldier and a Human-piloted war robot would be nearly as unbalanced as any time someone tries to go hand-to-hand with a Terminator. We've seen in the original series and DYRL? that the average Zentradi can beat on a Valkyrie with their bare hands and do little to no damage, while the larger and stronger command class Zentradi still need a runup and a LOT of strength to inflict significant damage, so that expectation doesn't seem to have been that wide of the mark.

TBH, I don't think this argument works... in the main, because it's been addressed and refuted in-series. For instance, in Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory, one of the characters (Cima Gaharu) is a Zeon soldier who participated in Zeon's gassing of defenseless space colonies during the One Year War. Not only is made explicitly clear that Cima and her troops knew what they were being ordered to do was a war crime and the worst kind of atrocity, it's also indicated on no uncertain terms that the rest of the Zeon forces shunned them for doing it. It's how Cima's unit ended up becoming pirates. They were considered a disgrace to the rest of the Zeon military and weren't allowed to join the retreat to Axis. (And they couldn't go back to the colony they were drafted from because it'd been made into the Solar Ray.) It wasn't a "my country right or wrong" thing... they knew they were being ordered to commit war crimes and did it anyway. At least a few of them (e.g. M'Quve) did it because they figured it was expedient and they'd never have to actually answer for it. It's not an accident that most of the time when we see a Zeon unit in the UC, they're not exactly sane and rational people. (Like the ones in Cucuruz Doan's Island, who are basically all axe-crazy.) Unicorn is a pretty good example too, considering how far the story had to go to give the Neo Zeon remnant some skin in the game. Take away the reveal in Laplace's Box and The Sleeves are just terrorists killing people out of spite. They've proven they can make Zeon soldiers interesting and sympathetic protagonists very rarely and only under very special circumstances... which usually involves them not really being invested in Zeon's goals or a party to its crimes like Bernie Wiseman in 0080: War in the Pocket or Oliver May in MS IGLOO. Bernie was able to be a convincing nice guy as 0080's protagonist in no small part because he was a new recruit fresh out of training on his very first assignment. He'd never taken part in a military operation before, so he wasn't carrying the guilt of Zeon's various war crimes. It also helped that, late in the OVA's story, his motivation is preventing his superiors from committing another war crime when he learns their contingency plan in the event of Cyclops Team's failure was to destroy Libot with a nuclear strike. Oliver May worked really well as a protagonist in MS IGLOO because he was similarly unconnected to Zeon's war crimes and his visible dismay with the lengths Zeon was going to in order to win the war helped keep him sympathetic as the story progressed through the One Year War. Even when he's drafted into the defenses of A Baoa Qu at the end of MS IGLOO: Apocalypse 0079, he's terrified instead of patriotic and jumps at the chance to stop fighting. Whether they can make a unit who are actively fighting for Zeon's cause anything but villain protagonists... we'll see. My hopes are not high. Historically, shields with notches or gaps like that were constructed so that you could shoot out through the shield. They were usually built as literal movable walls called mantlets... which has since become the term for the movable armor around a gunmount. Master Archive Mobile Suit suggests several models of Mobile Suit shield, including the NFHI RGM-M-Sh-AGD used by the RGM-79G GM Command, RGM-79N GM Custom, and RGM-79Q GM Quel were made to be used this way. There's also the suggestion that the GP-series RX-Vsh-023F/S-04712 shield used by the GP01 was intended to be used that way, with sliding rails for the grip so the shield could be flipped upside-down and mounted. This new Gundam's shield most closely resembles the GP01's shield, so presumably it's made to be used in siege conditions or as a brace for a heavy weapon as we see the RX-79[G] doing occasionally with its smaller collapsible shield.

The shield looks like a derivative of the GP01's, but the beam rifle is the Guncannon's. The shoulders and head look like the Ez-8's. ... does it have three beam sabers on its left shoulder? Naturally. 👍 Oh, I know... and Gundam the Origin played the Federation's provocations up quite a bit to make it clearer that Zeon didn't declare independence for shiggles. It still doesn't excuse or justify what Zeon did after declaring independence. Their opening move was to massacre billions of people via unrestricted use of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons against the other Sides. There's disproportionate retribution and then there's that. It was Zeon's fanatical and ongoing commitment to mass slaughter and widespread destruction that created the conditions that gave rise to the Titans. Zeon's war crimes during the One Year War had already created an environment of fear and suspicion that allowed power-hungry officers like Jamitov Hymen and Bask Om to agitate for the creation of an elite anti-spacenoid force. Aguille Delaz and Anavel Gato handed the Federation's hardliners a picture-perfect and damn near irrefutable argument in favor of policing spacenoids more rigorously through Operation Stardust. That led directly to the creation of the Titans... so directly that we see the Titans being founded and the characters who'd fought the Delaz fleet joining the Titans in the ending of Stardust Memory. It doesn't excuse what the Titans did either, but it cannot be denied that they are monsters of Zeon's creation. Zeon's actions convinced the Federation the Titans were necessary... and Zeon's actions convinced the Titans that the extremity of their own actions were justified in the name of protecting the peace.

Just because it was a tight, focused narrative doesn't necessarily mean it was good or fit for purpose. Star Trek: Discovery's showrunners and writers seem to have gone into the project with a clear and consistent vision... for something almost entirely unlike Star Trek. Even now, it honestly still feels like Discovery's season one story was developed as an original IP and hastily rebranded as Star Trek when there were no takers. It's really easy to spot where Discovery's writers literally lost the plot. It's the mid-season break. For some reason, likely an executive poking their oar in, they hit that mid-season break and went "Sh*t, we're writing for Star Trek. That means we have to do Star Trek things!". And from that we got the extended digression to an even darker and edgier version of the mirror universe. Why darker and edgier? Because the regular one is a significantly nicer place than Discovery's normal setting. That was followed by the season's hastily-composed conclusion wherein the crew realize their time over in the land of evil twins has taught them the true meaning of christmas and they take the strong and controversial moral position that... *checks notes*... "genocide is bad". It isn't a moral stance they're completely committed to, though, as they still use the very real and immediate threat of genocide to force their enemies into a ceasefire... a decision that's lauded as the very model of Federation ideals for some reason. ... and the producers wondered why this left fans wanting to tar and feather them. The reason the series continues to fall apart as time goes on is because its showrunners keep making half-baked course-corrections intended to "win back the fans"... but without the courage to acknowledge that the problem lies in their concept for the series being at odds with Star Trek thematically and tonally. If they'd stuck to their original concept and run it as an original IP instead of as Star Trek, they'd probably have done OK for themselves.

Eh... I'd disagree with your assessment. While the Earth Federation are surely no saints and the size of the moral gulf between them and the Zeon faction du jour varies from work to work, one of the constants of the UC-era Gundam titles is that Zeon can be counted upon to be substantially more evil than the Federation at any given time. The Federation might fall anywhere between "Good is not Nice" and Lawful Evil depending on the writer, but Zeon can be relied upon to start at Lawful Evil and where necessary proceed across the Godwin Line at the first opportunity. It's not "good and evil" in the sense of moral absolutes... of sainthood vs. eating babies. That said, it's still "good vs. evil" in relative terms considering Zeon's ideology and modus operandi are pretty consistently in the realm of what your average person would consider "genuine evil". There's not exactly a defensible case for unprovoked and indiscriminate nuclear bombing of civilians, gassing millions to death in order to turn their homes into an improvised ballistic weapon, or attempting the wipe out billions of people by rendering Earth ininhabitable. That's the uphill battle facing every attempt to do a story about Zeon characters. Nobody on the Federation side is a saint, but no matter how individually nice Zeon loyalists are they're still kind of inherently tainted by their association with the atrocities Zeon has committed and its abhorrent policies. The best you can usually do is make them as close to conscientious objectors as possible like they did in MS IGLOO. It's gonna be a lot harder to pull off with this new lot, given that they're a frontline unit in the Zeon occupation force and their daily business is oppressing the residents of Earth. It's not saying it's impossible, but Sisyphus has seen easier uphill battles.

Quite the opposite, in fact. Back when the UN Forces first kicked off development of anti-giant robotic weapons, both the Battroid and Destroid design concepts anticipated use in close quarters combat. In their earliest forms both concepts were essentially equivalent to a Mobile Suit. The Battroid program evolved into the Variable Fighter, while the main model Destroid remained a Mobile Suit-like design with hands for delivery of knuckle sandwiches until at least the MBR-04-Mk.I Destroid: the progenitor of the Tomahawk series. The idea endured past that point as well, finding its fullest expression in the MBR-07 Spartan series, which beefed up the hands into instruments of true day-ruining force. Hand-to-hand with a Zentradi on foot is just a somewhat different prospect to what they ended up with... hand-to-hand with Zentradi in a powered battle suit or pod. It's interesting that almost no source seems to want to comment on the VF-11's bayonet and why a similar feature wasn't available earlier or later... the closest we get is Macross Chronicle suggesting that multifunction gunpods are too expensive for widespread use.

d'oh... you're right. Still, I'm not sure that doesn't run into the same problem or worse... the Principality of Zeon's Earth occupation forces were not exactly replete with decent human beings. They're either full-on space fascists or at least under the command of some M'Quve-type smug snake war criminal. That's not exactly a formula for a sympathetic protagonist. It's more like a formula for "watch the arsehole get what's coming to them".

I feel like hate-watching is the only viewership Star Trek: Discovery has left. I'll be hate-watching the final season... if only because I want the satisfaction of knowing it's over and won't come back. For me, it's been all downhill from Discovery's already low starting point. Season one had a tight, focused narrative until that mirror universe plot tumor cropped up. Each season has felt progressively less like the writers and showrunners have an actual plan and more like they're just throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks.

You mean the 117th research fleet that was destroyed by the Vajra in 2048? No, we've been given no indication of how big that fleet actually was. We've only seen I think two ships from it.

It's undeniably pretty... but I have a bad feeling about the story. Making the Principality of Zeon sympathetic is an uphill battle at the best of times. MS IGLOO managed it, but mainly because the members of the 603rd Technical Evaluation Unit and the conscripted crew of the Jotunheim were not THAT invested in Zeon's cause. They were patriotic enough to do their duty but still objective enough about what they did that they were frequently disgusted with the needless loss of life and the questionable decisions coming down from Zeon's commanders. (So much so that even their most fanatical officer, Captain von Kuspen, is shocked and appalled by Zeon's use of child soldiers.) Given that this series is set eleven months after Zeon's surrender, it's gonna be a lot harder to make the characters sympathetic given they'd have to be lost causers still waging a needless guerilla war against the Federation out of spite. It's not that big of a leap from there to the kind of complete monsters that Zeon OVA/movie antagonists often end up as like the baddies in Cucuruz Doan's Island, Ghinias Sahalin in 08th MS Team, or Cima Gaharu in Stardust Memory.

It is, but not for very much longer. Paramount announced back in March that season five would be Discovery's last and they're sticking to it. Looks like Paramount finally decided to cut its losses after three major efforts to overhaul the series failed to get the show's viewership up to a reasonable level. We can't really blame this on the cast, though. The lion's share of Discovery's problems came from the writers room. There's only so much even the best actors and directors can do to salvage a truly awful script... and the Discovery writers room seemed to produce nothing but. It honestly seems like every bad decision that could be made was made, from going all-in on a single painfully unlikeable main character to developing whole seasons around pitches that previous teams of producers had rejected as unworkably awful ideas.

If I had to guess, I would say it was probably someone who was very tired of having to fix or replace mangled manipulators after Pilot A decided to punch a battle suit or battle pod in the heat of the moment. Energy conversion armor is extremely tough stuff. It wasn't until the advent of miniaturized pinpoint barrier technology that VFs were able to engage in fisticuffs without fear of damaging the sensitive mechanisms in the hand. They didn't. You can see the VF-11 using its underwing stations in Macross R. Most of the time we see the VF-11 in space, so presumably it is relying on the internally stored weapons in its super pack in order to preserve its stealth profile as much as possible. Because the VF-0 was a test article that was hastily pushed into actual combat service in the Unification Wars. It wasn't expected to ever actually be shot at for real. It was there to evaluate the variable fighter concept and collect data to further the development of the VF-1. It was forced into live combat situations by the existence of the SV-51. The VF-4 didn't use a gunpod it normal operation, so it was the VF-11 that was the first to be outfitted with a bayonet when it was believed that one would be advantageous. It may be fair to say that the first practical VF mounted blade was probably the combat knife on the 5th generation VFs like the VF-25 or the VF-31 since that was made of much newer and stronger materials and frequently beefed up with the strength of a pinpoint barrier.

So... who's up to watch Discovery finish stumbling into the unmarked shallow grave that's been open and waiting for it since season one? Kind of amazed it made it this far, considering Netflix tried to cancel it after seasons one and two and the season three course correction was one of the most poorly received story concepts in the franchise's history. It can't claim responsibility for all or even most of the red ink on Paramount's earnings calls since it came out, but it definitely put a huge dent in the franchise's bottom line.

It's always interesting to see what they come up with... though each in-universe historical account is blatantly tailored to give the subject matter Valkyrie a "hero moment" where it saves the day all on its own. The VF-0 Master File's account stands out mainly because it's told from the perspective of the guys who are jobbing to make the book's subject look awesome. Reading it, it's a secondhand description of a Romanian mercenary and SV-51 pilot experiencing an escalating series of "Oh cr*p" moments after the UN Forces seemingly illogical choice to use the normally short-ranged VF-0s in a long-distance raid turned out to be the first warning sign that the balance of power had irrevocably shifted in the UN Forces favor. Dakurd's story is definitely atypical... the Macross stories that depict the Anti-Unification Alliance remnants after the de facto end of the Unification Wars generally depict what's left of the Alliance forces as broken, bitter, and occasionally downright vengeful people. In a way, they're kind of the closest Macross has come to card carrying villains since they don't really have explored motives beyond "revenge" most of the time. In Macross Zero and in Master File, they're seemingly gambling on increasingly long odds in the hopes that ekeing out a win over the UN Forces will breathe fresh life into their cause no matter how costly or transitory it might prove to be. By the end of 2008 in Macross the First, the Alliance had lost the plot so thoroughly that the objective of their (suicide) attack on South Ataria island on Christmas was simply the mass death and destruction they could cause by blowing up South Ataria island with a thermonuclear reaction bomb. Compared to that, Dakurd is basically a punch-clock villain who's not really all that invested in the cause. He's a mercenary fighting because the Alliance are the only ones left who are hiring mercenaries, and he's stunned out of his complacency not by defeat but by a friendly enemy moment with the man whose fighter he'd just downed. It's actually surprising just how much survived the First Space War when you think about it. The Alliance's top VF engineer ended up working for Stonewell and Bellcom after giving up on the rebellion and he and parts of his design team would not only develop the VF-4, but go on to found General Galaxy. It's even implied that the remnants of the Alliance have something of a hand in the various revolts against the New UN Government that led to the Second Unification War.

Since I'm kinda bored waiting for my study to air out after the radon mitigation crew finished, I decided to revisit the subject of the SV-51's swansong from Variable Fighter Master File: VF-0 Phoenix. In hindsight, it's actually kind of weird that the book chose to randomly include Russian text in the titles of the two sections that talk about the SV-51 given that the SV-51 was only codeveloped by the Sukhoi Design Bureau and most of them (incl. the ones featured in this segment) weren't even built in Russia. They were manufactured in Romania, in Poland, and in eastern Germany. Master File's story of the SV-51's last stand starts where the Unification Wars officially ended... the de facto collapse of the Anti-Unification Alliance in 2007. Interestingly, it does not mention that the reason the Alliance collapsed in 2007 was because support for the Alliance evaporated in the wake of them destroying St. Petersburg with a thermonuclear reaction weapon. It just mentions that, by the end of 2007, the Anti-Unification Alliance had been reduced to a fragmented and increasingly unpopular resistance movement. It does mention that the Earth UN Government more or less declared an end to the Unification Wars on their own, and that guerilla conflicts continued in various places even after that declaration. The story is framed as an account from a former Romanian Air Force pilot-turned-mercenary who fought for the Anti-Unification Alliance in their final major offensive and later served in the Earth UN Forces during the First Space War named Kilis Dakurd. The account, referred to the Arad Papers, was recovered from the ruins of Alaska Base after the conclusion of the First Space War and details of the Arad Papers and the military operation they document (Operation Scoria) were later declassified and became reference in publication of the in-story Master File. Cpt. Dakurd belonged to a mercenary unit called Ansel, which possessed twelve Romanian-manufactured SV-51α's. They were specialists in infiltration attacks, reconnaissance-in-force, and air superiority operations that were mainly used to bully conventional fighter units of the UN Forces and mainly survived by shooting down surprised enemies before any heavyweight response could arrive. Operation Scoria was, well, not exactly the work of a tactical genius. Its objective was simple... launch a series of diversionary attacks around the world to draw the attention of the UN Forces and decapitate their chain of command by invading and capturing Alaska Base and the UN Forces Headquarters located there. The book's historical perspective makes this goal out to be... excessively optimistic. Not only was the Alliance probably underestimating Alaska Base's defenses, they were dramatically overestimating their own offensive power as well. The plan called for the Alliance to commit three of its six SV-51 units to the offensive, for a total of around 40 aircraft. However, according to Cpt. Dakurd's record, many of the aircraft slated to participate in the operation were nonfunctional, including four of his Ansel unit's twelve aircraft. The actual offensive only included about 20 SV-51s, supported by various Cold War-era garbage, and while they got the attention of the UN Forces their goal was figured out fairly quickly and a counteroffensive was launched to nip their plan in the bud. Lt. General Takashi Hayase approved a strategic plan for the counteroffensive composed by Col. Ichiro Yabuki, which involved deploying its own VF force to strike industrial areas supplying the Alliance and identified Alliance bases like Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy airport in Kamchatka. The force was composed of the new VF-0+ Phoenix Plus, a version of the VF-0 outfitted with the new FF-2001 thermonuclear reaction turbine engine designed for the VF-1. On 12 October 2008, the UN Forces "Operation Yabuki" taskforce crossed into the Bering Sea and began the counterattack. At 0531 local time, the Alliance base in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy reported a massed formation of indistinct radar returns in nearby airspace, indicative of active stealth-equipped aircraft and went immediately to alert status. Ansel's machines were to sortie and intercept the UN Forces advance. Cpt. Dakurd notes that he felt it odd that the VF-0, which like his own SV-51, was noted to have a very short operating range due to its limited internal fuel storage, was seemingly at the forefront of the operation. Visibility was poor, Dakurd's unit were stunned to hear that the vanguard unit of MiG-29s preceding them into the combat space while they were refueling were being shot down almost immediately after they engaged the VF-0 unit. The MiGs reported a follow-on force composed of 20 escorting fighters and 22 B-52 bombers. Dakurd's Ansel unit went into the engagement confident in their abilities and their belief that the SV-51 was at least slightly superior to the VF-0 in combat performance and expecting the engagement to be short as both sides would very quickly run out of fuel. Ansel's strategy was to exhaust the VF-0s and then pounce on them once their fuel supplies were low. This normally-sound judgement call would have a rather disastrous consequence. The VF-0s greeted the SV-51s of Ansel with medium-range missile strikes, though they were noted to be more of a deterrant than something expected to down any aircraft and were intercepted. Cpt. Dakurd noticed the VF-0s, which should already have been low on fuel, were also displaying abnormally powerful active stealth performance which was enough to compel Ansel to engage at short-range with infrared-guided micro-missiles. On the first pass, they noted that the VF-0s weren't equipped with Ghost boosters as an extended range option. Dakurd finally began to notice something was horribly wrong when he realized the VF-0s also lacked any kind of drop tanks and despite the long flight towards the Alliance base were still operating at near-ideal levels. Ansel's attempt to pincer the VF-0s from above and below fell apart as the VF-0 unit continued to climb at a speed thought impossible for a VF-0 without a Ghost booster, outpacing the SV-51s and evading incoming fire from the pursuing Alliance forces. The tally of impossible feats racked up by the VF-0 unit continued to rise as they evaded missiles with bursts of acceleration and tight turns or, more concerningly, intercepting missiles en masse using the coaxial laser cannons. As the dogfight continued, Dakurd's forces grew increasingly concerned that the VF-0 had improved considerably as they noticed its infrared profile was quite different and it seemingly had no issues operating even at the SV-51's atmospheric service limit. It was then that Dakurd's wingman was shot down, and he himself was forced to flee, jettisoning his boosters to reduce his aircraft's weight and improve acceleration. He had concluded, at that point, that the VF-0 had become an unknown monster aircraft... and he was now being chased by three of them. After returning to low altitude in a bid to rendzevous with friendly forces, Dakurd noticed large numbers of downed aircraft (that he would later learn were the remains of Ansel). With almost no fuel remaining, he engaged and shot down a VF-0 with his 12.7mm cannon and gunpod before he himself sustained several hits from a VF-0's gunpod. Rather than crash land ignobly, he decided to take at least one more enemy aircraft with him and promptly rammed the nearest VF-0. He lost his right wing in the collision and crashed in a nearby potato field. Relatively uninjured, Dakurd was pulled from the wreckage of his SV-51 by the very VF-0 pilot whose aircraft he had rammed... Major Albert Staker, one of the most veteran VF-0 pilots. Staker praised the stunned Dakurd's maneuver, though Dakurd couldn't bring himself to share Staker's cameraderie over their dogfight. He fled the area as a UN Forces rescue helicopter approached. With civilian assistance, Dakurd escaped south to Vladivostok by boat, where he met up with his surviving unit members. It was then, after comparing notes with the other survivors, that they realized the UN Forces had achieved a practical thermonuclear reaction engine and implemented it on the VF-0. It was a demoralizing realization, and without orders the SV-51 unit effectively disbanded The author speculates that Dakurd was so stunned by Staker's lack of animosity that it ultimately motivated his decision to travel to America and join the UN Forces some months later. In an oddly serendipitous twist, after joining the UN Forces and ironically being assigned to a VF-1 unit attached to Alaska Base, Cpt. Kilis Dakurd scored the last known UN Forces kill of an SV-51 in June 2009. While suppressing guerillas, Dakurd's unit discovered a dilapidated SV-51 operating as a radar control aircraft in the combat space. The aircraft was clearly in no shape for combat, as repair parts were no longer available. It ignored Dakurd's warnings and approached the VF-1 unit, at which point Dakurd shot it down with one of the UN Forces new AMM-1 Arrow missiles, making him one of the few pilots to have scored kills on both VF-0s and SV-51s. He described the engagement in somewhat mournful tones, indicating the SV-51 was "moving as though it were looking for a place to die". (A parenthetical note earlier in the article mentions that Kilis Dakurd would later be assigned to ARMD-04 Clemenceau... and would ultimately perish in the final battle against the Boddole Zer main fleet in 2010. His onetime foe Albert Staker survived the war, and passed away in 2019 at age 48.)

No idea, on account of there being no confirmed appearances by the regular army in Macross Frontier or Macross Delta. That said, given that the regular infantry we do see (affiliation unclear) do not use EX-Gear I'd assume "probably not". The only time we've seen a dedicated EX-Gear infantry unit was a New UN Spacy Special Forces unit outfitted to suppress the cyber-grunts from Macross Galaxy in the Macross Frontier movies. Those suits are presumably not practical for widespread adoption, given that they're said to be approximately twice the cost of the regular model issued to the Valkyrie pilots. I'm not sure that would even be an improvement over the EX-Gear's regular armament. Macross Chronicle has suggested that the EX-Gear rifle seen in Macross Frontier is a rapid-fire railgun.

Yeah, I don't thrill to the McFarlane ones either... shipping nightmare aside, the Joytoy ones are definitely more to my taste.

... I'm not sure any restaurant out there serves charcoal.

Whatever our opinions on the film are, it cannot be denied it was a godsend to pop culture... as a seemingly inexhaustible source of memes. (Or as General Grievous might've put it... "Another fine addition to my collection.") Same. Honestly, I think it's been at least two years since I've seen a Burger King.

Yes... it's a common enough phenomenon (esp. with Wikis) that it has a name. "Link surfing". 🤣