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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    I've been a little disappointed by how the love triangle has turned out... in spite of all that was said about how Macross Delta was going to mix it up and do things differently, the love story aspect of the series has been by the numbers rote repetition of the original series' romance for the most part. Hermann's had him pegged as a closet Freyja fanboy ever since they noticed that Walkure had a Windermerean member. All indications are that the dome ship was a functioning part of Barette City right up to the point where it was forced to make an emergency liftoff. Smart money says it was probably "the human district" of the city for most purposes and probably saw a fair bit of foot traffic before it was launched again. Its stores may also have benefitted from all of the Ragnan houseboat/shops it had taken aboard prior to fleeting the planet. The ship's apparent dilapidated state is said to be the result of asking the ship's systems to suddenly run at full power after being tamped down for 2-3 decades. The fold reactors in particular apparently didn't like a cold start after decades of inactivity.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Generally speaking, the rules of this forum prohibit requesting and/or linking to downloads or streams of pirated material... and, as noted in one of your other topics, the community also has a sort of informal agreement to particularly avoid the sharing of material that is still in circulation. What you're asking for is technically both, so it's a double-helping of "No". (Possibly three bad categories if you count its relation to The Show That Must Not Be Named.) Anyhoo, there are no less than three different legitimate home video releases by ADV Films that contain the media you're looking for. Two different releases of You-Know-What and the terribad 2006 ADV Films dub of Super Dimension Fortress Macross... which can be had for about six bucks a volume on eBay from top-rated sellers. It's an extra in the first volume of ADV's Macross release.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    All right! I've recovered from a wedding reception-induced hangover, so let's vicariously attend Freyja's birthday party shall we?
  4. Seto Kaiba
    OK... so, you'll see a LOT of the YF-29B in the game. Its pilot, Rod Baltemar, is The Rival so he shows up here and there to drop exposition or a vague hint as the plot develops. (Actually, you've already fought him once... he was the supposed-to-lose fight at the beginning after you defeat the Ghosts he sicced on you.) As to why Havamal felt the need to equip its top ace with an improved version of the YF-29... you could say it's a "sorting algorithm of evil" affair. That was, and by in large still is, the most over-the-top powerful Valkyrie on the market in the 5th Generation. In terms of its flight performance, the already over-the-top VF-27 needed a Super Pack and elite pilot just to keep up. Rod's Havamal's ace (in the hole), so with a fighter that overpowered he can expect to curbstomp pretty much anyone in a fair fight... which would be key to keep the Hunter's Guild, Bandits, etc. from getting underfoot. Only the YF-30 is a match for it... which is why Rod is the 2nd to last boss fight. How the NUNS Special Forces got their hands on the blueprints... sharing isn't just caring, it's mandatory. Under galaxy law, newly-developed weapons have to be disclosed to the New UN Government. It's part of how the central NUNS keeps tabs on the military capabilities of the emigrant forces, and ensures that its forces always have the biggest stick. (To a certain extent this also works the other way 'round, since the central NUNS shared the YF-24 Evolution specs with the emigrant fleets, which became the basis for the VF-25, VF-27, YF-29, etc.) Exactly what the difference between the YF-29 Durandal and YF-29B Percival is remains to be given... all we know is that the YF-29B is an improved version. Unlike the YF-30, it didn't get a full set of specs or a decent selection of art published, so we're kind of unable to cover it properly on M3 at present. The only outward difference seems to be more guns on the monitor turret and a bayonet on the gun pod. The 30th Anniversary YF-29 is just a special redeco of the YF-29 toy, but the Isamu and Ozma ones do figure into the plot. Isamu's, in particular, even has its own cutscene introduction. Essentially... the YF-29B is all business. It's a proven design and its one job is to find things and make those things dead, and it's very good at it. The YF-30 is a still-in-testing technology demonstrator/evaluator for the fold dimensional resonance system and, to a lesser extent, the ordinance container system.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Mostly, that's discussed right in the Macross Frontier series itself... though it's also covered in Macross Chronicle Technology Sheet 08A: Overtechnology: Space Folds. (The bit about time passing at different rates in realspace and aboard a folding ship goes waaay back to the original series... where Misa indicated that, based on the current human understanding of fold travel, an hour's travel by space fold could see as much as ten days pass back in realspace. Chronicle indicates this was a crude, somewhat imprecise guess and indicates that under ideal conditions the time differential isn't much... but if there's a strong gravitational field nearby or a fold fault on the route, the time differential can quickly become large. For instance, Leon mentions in Frontier that if it weren't for the fold faults between the Frontier fleet and Gallia IV, they could've sent Sheryl there almost instantly... but because the fold faults increased the time loss, the difference in experienced time aboard the ship and the passage of time in realspace was 172.25 hours, or approximately 7 days, 4 hours, and 15 minutes. With the Super Fold Booster to cut out the effects of fold faults, Michel Blanc was able to make the trip in an extremely short, but unspecified, amount of time.)
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Macross Chronicle indicates that most of the QF-4000 Ghosts are operated in a semi-autonomous mode where a "ground" station designates the general areas of operation, permissible targets, and gives authorization to attack and the AI handles the rest. It would appear that, in the series, the Ghosts were lost in the first battle as a result of having that control fatally disrupted before an attack order could be issued (and possibly just ECM so strong it scrambled the onboard electronics). The Judas system is basically the same autonomous air combat program that was used in the Ghost X-9, but without the unstable hardware. Essentially, it's a Ghost tactical program with no limiters. Nope... unless it's a 100% artificial body being operated remotely as Grace did sometimes, they still have their brain meats... so they're still vulnerable to Var syndrome.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Technically, even the wealthy planets and expeditionary fleets are can't get their hands on the very best military hardware. The government tightened the restrictions on the export and sale of weapons to the emigrant fleets and to the regional governments of emigrant worlds thanks, in part, to the YF-19 #2 and YF-21 #2 prototypes breaching Earth's defenses in 2040. Even the new fighters developed independently by the wealthy emigrant fleets like Macross Frontier and Macross Galaxy are derivatives of the monkey model version of the YF-24 Evolution spec... and there's some evidence to indicate the VF-31 Kairos/Siegfried itself is an "economized" model with some reduced performance compared to the prototype. It's not that simple, really... In Macross Frontier, the forces of SMS in the Macross Frontier fleet do have the latest fighter... but one of the very first things we're told by Ozma is that SMS only has the VF-25 because the government hired them to test it in conditions as close to live combat as possible before they start equipping the fleet's military with them. Ozma indicates it's civilians doing the testing in live combat because if one of them dies, it's legally considered an accidental death instead of a combat fatality... so the fleet's government won't have the legal consequences of a real soldier dying. In Macross Delta, Xaos's VF-31's seem to be reduced capability versions with lower performance than the YF-30 prototype they were based on... and they only seem to have maybe two dozen of them in total. Small numbers and reduced capabilities would make the price tag a little less ruinous for Xaos. Now, on the Aerial Knights side, we don't know the full story yet but it's likely the Windermerean government spared no expense because they didn't have to acquire many fighters to fully equip their forces and they needed a fighter that could oppose whatever the central New UN Spacy is using. As noted above, in Macross Frontier the Frontier fleet's military was going to adopt the VF-25 as their next fighter once it was done with testing, and some of the unofficial works like Variable Fighter Master File do indicate that not only did they switch to the VF-25 in the 2060's, they also sold VF-25's to their allies as well. (Macross Olympia also adopted the VF-25 as its next main fighter, and Variable Fighter Episode Archive had the VF-25 being adopted by emigrant planets like Sewell too.) The NUNS forces in the Brisingr cluster seem to be kind of under-funded thanks to being in a backwater part of the galaxy...
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Black Rainbow may have been an anti-government group, but it was a puppet organization that was being manipulated by Latence and supplied covertly by Critical Path. I doubt it... the conspicuously spherical dimensional fault that perfectly surrounds and also isolates Windermere IV smacks of design intent. The last time we saw something like this, the ancient Protoculture had gone to some frankly considerable difficulty to keep a dangerous toy out of the hands of literally everyone. It hasn't been said officially if it's an artificial or natural dimensional fault, but the presentation strongly suggests it's artificial.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    LAI's "Super Fold Booster" was a fold system built using fold quartz instead of fold carbon, which enabled it to create a "zero-time fold" instead... which can cross fold faults and has no discrepency between the passage of time for the folding ship and the passage of time back in realspace. (When folding with an ordinary fold system, time passes somewhat slower for the folding ship than it does in realspace... a problem exacerbated by distance and any fold faults that they have to pass through.)
  10. Seto Kaiba
    I noticed something interesting while I was rewatching some of the last couple episodes... I think the Epsilon Group may have ties to the Critical Path Corp. from Macross VF-X2. While Berger's men are repairing the song shrine on the Sigur Valens after the lucky shot on Johnson's part that knocked it out, they mention of the parts is the "Zauberflute". That was the name of a piece of technology developed by the Critical Path Corp., a next-gen fold communications system based on a new kind of dimensional resonance crystal discovered in 2043 (Macross Frontier's novelization indicates this was fold quartz, potentially making Critical Path the first company to develop applications of the stuff after the discovery of the Vajra in 2040). If a Zauberflute system is part of Heinz's song shrine's amplifier, that means Epsilon is building on or adapting technology which the Critical Path Corporation developed for Latence, a rogue faction inside the military... ... ... ... Hell's bells, now here's a theory! What if the reason the Epsilon Group is supporting Windermere and egging on the Aerial Knights in their campaign against the New UN Government is because their real identity is a leftover branch of Latence? They could be manipulating Windermere's elite to pursue this war becuase their aim was to manufacture a galactic-scale threat to the New UN Government so the organization's supporters in the New UN Forces' top brass could either use the crisis to increase the military's influence over the government to the rather excessive levels it enjoyed before the reorganization... or even as an excuse for that rogue faction of the military to launch another coup and establish a Earth-centric government. They were probably in the middle of transitioning part or all of their forces to the VF-171 or VF-19 when Macross VF-X2 was set... since Earth hasn't got the same restrictions on arming its forces as the rest of the galaxy. They were supposed to have been the first to adopt a 5th Generation VF though, that YF-24 Evolution spec that all of the other 5th Gen VFs so far are based on is the stripped-down version of their baby. Technically, all Ghosts are fully AI'd... they're just not "sentient AI'd" as that technology tends to go a tiny bit insane. Both Macross VF-X2 and Macross Frontier's novelization have the flagship of Earth's defenses being the Macross-13, a state of the art Battle-class. In 2059, her captain was General Kim Kabirov... former SDF-1 Macross bridge operator. Probably not... in 2058, the emigrant fleets were starting to sell off their now-retired VF-11s. (Macross the Ride protagonist Chelsea Scarlett put up the cash to buy three decommissioned airframes and use them to build one custom VF-11B.)
  11. Seto Kaiba
    The most likely explanation is that the "camera" is simply cutting away from the fold effect before the ship generating it can emerge. On those occasions when the Aerial Knights seemingly defold alone, the fold effect never closes behind them the way it does on the two or three occasions where we see their fleet defold. That suggests there's something else still defolding. However, the idea of a "fold teleporter" does have precedent. On Uroboros, a form of fold-based teleportation technology was used for instantaneous short distance travel within the planet's Protoculture ruins. (This was the effect for entering and leaving ruins and caves on the three world maps used in the Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy game... pairs of "fold stones" that, when activated, teleported you from one to the other.) For many planets and fleets, there may not have been an immediate or pressing need to upgrade from the VF-171. Frontier and Galaxy went for the upgrade en masse because they were headed into what was, at the time, Vajra territory in full awareness of the fact that a VF-19 or VF-22 would be just as helpless in combat with the Vajra as a VF-171. Backwaters like the Brisingr cluster, that would only have had to worry about Zentradi or terrorists would naturally not see much reason to upgrade to the more costly, more difficult to mass produce 5th Generation VFs. The VF-171 was, and likely still is, an excellent, highly versatile fighter with great cost performance... it's just hopelessly out of its depth against the 5th Generation equivalent fielded in low numbers by the Aerial Knights of Windermere. The VF-19 and VF-22 can't be fielded in large numbers by the regional NUNS as the result of arms export restrictions imposed in the wake of the Isamu's and Guld's little stunt on Earth back in 2040. The central New UN Forces like to have the biggest stick, after all... and they may have finished upgrading to 5th Generation VFs by now (possibly the VF-24). Emigrant forces can deploy a "monkey model" reduced capability version of the VF-19 or VF-22 in some small numbers, but both the restrictions on their construction and use and the high burden their performance places on the pilot in the absence of inertia store converter technology makes them impractical to employ in large numbers.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    I and a couple other people asked this question on the Macross Fans-US Facebook group a week or two back, and the answer we got was: Saturday, 15 October 2016 Torrance Cultural Arts Center Torrance, CA. Not sure if that date is set in stone, but that's all I've seen said of it to date.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    It'd be nice, but that's a LOT of material... and the fans here who do translations, myself included, have their own projects, priorities, areas of interest, and other obligations. Oh, there are loads... like the novelizations of Macross II, DYRL?, Frontier, 30, etc., short stories in Macross Ace, and all kinds of other stuff.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    They're a long-winded bunch, no doubt about that...
  15. Seto Kaiba
    He's probably got a dozen different theories as to how Mikumo can keep that much hair tidy... or wondering how she can stand waking up each morning looking like Cousin It after a purple dyejob. I dunno, the Jammings Birds were up for it in Macross 7... never underestimate the power of someone wanting to be the next Minmay or Basara.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    All told, I doubt the composition of a New UN Spacy battle group would be any different from the local New UN Spacy escort/defense fleets we've seen. The Zentradi Army's fleets will always have the advantage of numbers and capital ship firepower, so getting drawn into a capital ship slugging match is fighting on their terms... which is suicidal at best. The ideal way to deal with the Zentradi is, ironically, the way they dealt with Earth: get the drop on them and deliver a knockout punch with overwhelming firepower before they have a chance to shoot back. Presumably it's that tactical ethos that's why the New UN Spacy has built so much of its fleet around stealth warships. Even the Battle-class supercarriers are stealth warships, supported by stealth carriers, stealth cruisers, and stealth frigates... the goal being to either hold them off long enough for a Macross Cannon to have the last word in the matter, or let the fighters take the enemy fleet to pieces with thermonuclear reaction missiles once they're shorn of their air cover. It's a lot like how modern fleets work... the cruisers, the frigates, and so on are there mainly to protect the carriers, which carry the real offensive power of the fleet. That's why the situation in the Brisingr cluster is so confusing... there ought to be at least one, more likely several, Battle-class macrosses kicking around the cluster protecting the colonies there that were set up by the 3rd Generation and later emigrant fleets. Like the fleet flagship carrier, many of the warships that the Protodeviln employed were previously defense assets from the Varauta colony... built up over the 18 years between the establishment of the colony on Varauta and their accidental release of the Protodeviln. (Being reduced to an unquestioning slave-labor army probably helped speed construction of any new ships they needed to make too...) Why there are so few NUNS ships kicking around the Brisingr cluster is a big nagging question hanging over the Macross Delta series. The average-sized 3rd Generation emigrant fleet had close on two hundred ships, and supposedly the average colony in the early 2030's had close to eighty warships in orbit. The individual worlds of the Brisingr cluster seem to never have more than 2-3 dozen at any given time, which is decidedly odd. That's probably it, actually... if the local New UN Spacy defense fleets had been anything like the size that previous Macross works say they should be, then Windermere's Aerial Knights and/or Walkure and Delta Platoon would be up sh*t creek with neither paddle nor boat. It may be infuriating to watch, but it's not entirely unreasonable that the elite among the superhuman Aerial Knights could take out a few light warships and a dozen or so Nightmare Pluses each in a pitched battle... but I don't think anyone would be able to suspend disbelief if the couple dozen Aerial Knights and their handful of ships somehow defeated an actual full-strength defense fleet with over a hundred frigates, sixty carriers, a Battle-class supercarrier, and thousands of VFs. The law of averages alone would dictate that they'd end up with their bodies occupying the same space as roughly eleventy billion bullets and beam CIWS shots. Similarly, you could expect the Macross Elysion to hold out against a handful of warships while they sing the crews back to their senses, but they'd just get butchered if they were facing down hundreds of NUNS warships all at once.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    The VF-31's transformation is a slightly modified version of the transformation from the YF-30 Chronos in Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy... which carries the fairly straightforward explanation that the VF-31 is a further development (and production version) of the YF-30. Well, yes and no. It's "yes" because it's clearly supposed to be one of the very earliest New Macross-class city ships, or one of the smaller support dome ships seen escorting the Macross-1 fleet in the pre-opening sequence early in Macross 7. It's "no" because the design that we're actually looking at is wrong... the CG model is a slightly tweaked reuse of the Island-1 model from Macross Frontier. To not have a shell, it has to be part of either the Macross-1 or Macross-2 fleets, since Macross-5 had a shell and we know that Macross-3 and Macross-4 settled on Eden 3 and Sephira respectively. Given that we know Megaroad-04 established a human colony on Windermere, and that said human presence was pretty much wiped out by that dimension eater warhead seven years before Macross Delta, it's highly probable the Megaroad-04 was the center of the city of Carlyle (now the large, glowing crater known as Scarfell). We've seen the Aerial Knights watching birds on a few occasions. No idea how big they are, since they're only ever seen from a distance. They do, curiously, appear to have four wings. They keep cutting away from the fold effect while it's still open... so it's still not demonstrated that the Drakens can fold on their own. (There may be a ship behind them, or they may be using something like the fold stones on Uroboros to traverse distances without a fold drive of their own.)
  18. Seto Kaiba
  19. Seto Kaiba
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Sitting down to review this one now...
  21. Seto Kaiba
    All things considered, the Brisingr cluster seems to be the galactic boonies... as far from Earth and the New UN Government's most influential worlds as you can get while staying in the galaxy proper. Strategic Military Services seems to be a fairly influential and expensive outfit to hire, considering the apparent quality of their troops and the amount of money they're depicted throwing around in Macross Frontier and Macross the Ride. As such, I'd assume that SMS would be found mainly on worlds and in fleets that are relatively wealthy, well-established, and have strong corporate support and trade ties. Their presence very likely goes hand-in-hand with Bilra Transport controlling a fair amount of that fleet's or planet's interstellar shipping. Kaos's contract with the Brisingr Alliance suggests that it does a lot of its business out in the sticks, on relatively provincial worlds. Apart from the head office on Ragna, it seems to be extremely lightly armed. Just a very slight correction... the Uroboros SMS branch did have more personnel (not many), though the Gefion was basically left with just Aisha after her original test pilot ended up in the hospital due to a testing accident with the YF-30. The YF-30 development program had a lot more support, including that of the Uroboros factory satellite. (With the Hunter's Guild handling most of the nuisance work and the local NUNS handling the big stuff, SMS's presence could get away with being token.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    The official stats are, as the term would imply, official... and therefore tend to have the last word on the matter. So far, all we've seen from you on this is a circular set of unverifiable claims based on your particular interpretation of a scene, fan works, or toys. Oddly enough, the toy doesn't support your contention... as the scale Valkyries that come with it do in fact fit in the deck elevators and there's clearly quite a lot of space to work with. It's such a small docking port too... but then, space is awfully cold.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    It shall henceforth be known as Turret #2 for reasons that should be obvious. As indicated previously, the Battle-class has far more guns than merely those that are mounted externally on the upper hull. Also indicated previously was the fact that the number of gun turrets on the Macross Quarter-class varies from ship to ship. The third previously indicated point was that the existence of a macross cannon on both the Aether and Hemera is purely conjecture at this point. It should, I suppose, also be noted that the sheer number of guns is no guarantee of power either...and that as a PMC ship its weapons are likely less potent than the military's, given previous statements about the restriction of arms sales to emigrant fleets and non-governmental organizations. There's no indication anywhere in that scene that the Macross Elysion's macross cannon was firing at anything less than full strength. Surely it'd be a bit mental to NOT go all-in when your aim is to disable or even destroy an ancient Protoculture ship apparently many times more powerful than your own. Also, I don't believe I've ever seen an official source say that energy weapons of any type are less effective or required to operate at reduced power in atmosphere. I've only ever seen that in the Palladium Books RPG lines... which is one of their sillier NERF-ings. Use at range is kind of the point too... especially with the bigger implementations of the technology like the Battle-class's gunship or the Macross Cannon-class gunships which are essentially for destroying enemy fleets in one shot. It's only the small, comparatively low powered implementations that we see used at extremely short ranges. Arguably, the SMS Macross Quarter's first outing in the Macross Frontier series was a macross cannon shot from as close if not closer... the Knight-class Vajra ship it destroyed took a hit from its macross cannon at a range of only a few kilometers. As small as the Macross Elysion is, I would assume that it's probably not equipped with retractable guns... unless they're AA guns. (There do seem to be a pair of large slits with AA guns on the sides of the legs.) ... so you're citing a toy instead. At best that's a lateral move in terms of reliability.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Er... both SMS and Kaos are private (civilian) military contractors. As such, both are also technically private armies given that they're military forces that owe their allegiance to a corporation rather than a nation. Both are also [owned by / part of] interstellar conglomerates that started out in much more mundane fields... SMS's parent company is an interstellar shipping firm (Bilra Transport Co.), and Kaos's is an interstellar media corporation (name not known yet). The SMS force attached to the Macross Frontier fleet just seems to have been bigger and more professional than Kaos, a difference that's not altogether surprising considering the Macross Frontier fleet's SMS branch office had a clandestine purpose of being an elite force for an all-but-inevitable conflict with the Vajra and therefore needed the very best soldiers money could hire... while Kaos was essentially a bodyguard detail for Walkure and a supplemental security force for the military out in a sleepy little globular cluster where the occasional Var outbreak was the only real threat until recently.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Per Chronicle, the Macross Quarter can just barely fit the VB-6 into the taller aft hangar section normally used for battroid maintenance (this is also where they store the Queadluun-Rhea units). Even so, the available space is not wide enough to accommodate it without folding the wings.
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