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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Macross II didn't just have one badass woman in the pilot's seat, it had an entire platoon of them: Silvie Gena's Fairy Platoon.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Very probably, yes... it would certainly explain why a ship the size of the Macross Elysion only supports four platoons of fighters if most of each carrier's structure is devoted to a heavy quantum reaction cannon.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Yes. Barring one minor exception/error in Macross Zero, when ranks have been shown on-screen in written form they have always been written in English and they have been Army/Air Force ranks... even for individuals who do not belong to the (New) UN Spacy like SMS or Kaos personnel. The earliest occurrence I know of is in Super Dimension Fortress Macross episode 10 "Blind Game", where we get our first up-close look at an ES-11D Cat's Eye recon plane. The crew stencils on the double canopy identify its crew as being F/Lieut M. Hayase and S/Sgt. H. Iwata. Now, since Misa's rank is given in Japanese as 中尉 (Chūi) that makes it contextually obvious F/Lieut is "First Lieutenant" (rather than, say, the RAF rank of "Flight Lieutenant, equivalent to a Captain in the USAF) and of course S/Sgt. is Staff Sergeant. Likewise, in Macross Plus, Isamu's rank in his personnel file is given as "First Lieutenant", and we get a good look at his superior officer's door tag while he's punching it, which proclaims that office to belong to Colonel Millard Johnson. In Macross Delta's 11th episode, when we're shown the list of Alpha and Beta platoon candidates for Delta Platoon's fifth man, all eight candidate bios display Army/Air Force rankings (though they are somewhat hard to see, being printed quite small). On rare occasions, model kit box art has shown Naval and/or incorrect ranks... I know of two of Tenjin's pieces that have this issue, one of which displays Shin Kudo's rank as Lt. (JG) and the other displays Roy's rank as LT. WRT subtitles... often fansubbers miss the memo that Macross's creators want the ranks in-series translated as Army/Air Force ranks. The official subs for the original Macross series do not use naval ranks, but they do render the titles of 提督 (Teitoku) and 艦長 (Kanchō) as "Admiral" and "Captain" respectively. The actual meaning of those terms is "commanding officer of a fleet" and "commanding officer of a ship" respectively, my personal preference being to translate them in less ambiguous terms as "shipmaster" and "master of the fleet". There have been one or two Macross releases in the west that DID confuse the rank systems. Viz Media's translation of the official Macross II: Lovers Again manga notoriously used a somewhat archaic form of naval ranks in its translation, so Silvie Gena was presented as a "Sublieutenant" and Nex Gilbert as a "Lieutenant". The US Renditions dub of Macross II also notably changed the rank of Nex Gilbert from Captain to Major in the dub, to avoid the confusion between Captain in the OF-2 sense and Captain in the "commands a ship" sense. Edit: Realized I had "Captain" and "Admiral" switched in that second-to-last paragraph.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Kaos isn't an actual military too, so their practices may differ. With respect to rank, I don't believe Ernest Johnson's rank has ever actually been given. He's always referred to with Kanchō (艦長), which is a title rather than a rank and is translated as "Captain" in the sense of "Captain of a ship". To avoid confusion, I often translate this as "shipmaster". The commanding officer of a Macross-type ship is usually either a Colonel (like Battle-7's Max Jenius or Macross Quarter's Jeffrey Wilder) or a Brigadier General (like SDF-1's Bruno J. Global or Battle Frontier's Pelliot). So far, the largest number of fighters we've seen launched from the Macross Elysion is 21... divided into four known platoons: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Delta. Delta was down to four men, so that means the other three platoons were six, six, and five.
  5. Seto Kaiba
  6. Seto Kaiba
    All right... settling in to watch the latest episode with a few of my fellow translators. I'm going to summarize our thoughts on this one as we watch. (Wanted to do this on the big TV at home, but the AC's busted... so we're misappropriating the conference call suite with its lovely HD DLP projector. After all, authority's meant to be abused, right? )
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Or, potentially, get them accused of "human" trafficking... Unrelated: I just realized why it's called Var syndrome. One of Var's duties in Norse mythos was to punish those who break oaths or agreements... and that's exactly what Windermere accuses the New UN Government of doing.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    ... my girlfriend had a theory about where, but it's really not fit for a family-friendly forum. (From that, I think you oughta be able to guess.) I suspect it's just belted around their waists and they're rendered invisible by holograms.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Well, remember... Sheryl's holographic wardrobe was every bit as adept at simulating the absence of clothing as it was the presence of same. Those revealing outfits she favors are often the same full-body holosuit as her conservative wardrobe choices. I would assume that Walkure's equipment is capable of that same feat. (Played to humorous effect in a short comic in Macross Ace, in which she shows off her holographic wardrobe's variety, ending with an accidental bit of indecent exposure when the system glitches and gives Alto an eyefull.) It seems like they've finally reached the level of the holographic disguises from Macross II, which had no obvious projector and which required no special garment to project upon. (This was also played to humorous effect in Viz Media's unofficial Macross II sequel comic, where Hibiki briefly borrows one of those projectors that is small enough to be disguised as a digital wristwatch, which came preloaded with disguises that were all in-jokes for other anime titles... including Dr. Hell from Mazinger and Usagi Tsukino from Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon. Why absolutely nobody on the streets of Macross City seemed to think it odd that magical girls and mad scientists were wandering the streets is anyone's guess...)
  10. Seto Kaiba
    That still wouldn't be accurate in the case of Macross Galaxy and the VF-27... in the sense that there is, effectively, no actual government there. It's run entirely by the corporation. (Which is why it's a hellhole.) Leon didn't really have a say in anything until he had President Glass whacked... he was just a military advisor to the president, and wasn't even part of the actual fleet chain of command either. "Opportunism" might be a better word for his attempt in the movies. It's not really competing ethos, since Frontier is not advocating its position is better than Galaxy's or vice versa... Frontier's ban on implants is more of a pragmatic factor forced by their bioplant ecological system. Implant tech is legal in most of the galaxy, and by that point had been for something like 11 years. Likewise, Galaxy's lack of a maintained environment is simply its design, being a previous-generation emigrant ship built on closed-loop chemical plant technology with an emphasis on efficiency. Personally, when you factor in Galaxy having been caught red-handed carrying out illegal weapons tests in the field and so on... I'd call it more a case of "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me". "Don't judge a book by its cover" is pretty much all that needs to be said about that... there were some fairly significant structural changes, but the internals are supposed to be wildly different. The YF-29, yes... the VF-27 was a mass-production aircraft, but you could say that it suffered from crippling overspecialization because it was designed to tackle the Vajra threat and be an incredible dogfighter, but not much else. (Whether they actually couldn't use pylon-mounted ordinance isn't 100% clear... sometimes details like that crop up much later on. I mean, we didn't know how many pylons a VF-11 had until 14 years after it debuted.)
  11. Seto Kaiba
    That's pretty much the philosophy for all gun pods in Macross... "screw rate of fire, we'll just make the bullets really big and REALLY fast".
  12. Seto Kaiba
    ... if by "native" you meant "one had regional offices from several interstellar megacorporations and the other is a branch of an interstellar megacorporation", then yes. The new fighters in Macross Frontier weren't the product of insular little regional developers: the YF-25 Prophecy was a joint venture between the local branches of technology giants Shinsei Industry and Legodt & Angeloni Industries; and the YF-27 Shahar was produced by what was quite literally General Galaxy's giant flying test center and technology showroom. The first "1" is correct. The second "1" (which I'm assuming was supposed to be "2") is not. The "3" is half true for one of the two fleets, but not the other. Half right... there was bluffing going on, but it was done entirely by General Galaxy, who trotted out misleadingly underpowered prototypes (the YF-27-3 and YF-27-5) that were not at all representative of the final VF-27's specs. The YF-25 Prophecy could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be considered a "minimally changed" YF-24 Evolution. The YF-29 was being developed in parallel, but not for use against rival fleets... it was developed as a trump card for a decisive battle against the Vajra, and basically too resource-intensive to actually build, so it sat completed but unbuilt for two years. Aisha had development support from Shinsei Industry and Legodt & Angeloni Industries, and manufacturing support from the factory satellite orbiting Uroboros. Shinsei may have opted not to further develop the YF-30 because of SMS's proprietary technology and Surya may have opportunistically pounced on the incomplete program.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Possibly next episode... Gramia and co. did Var the population of Al Shahal, and that seems to be where the cluster's NUNS Marines garrison force is based.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Probably less of an issue where there are factory satellites or human-built automated factories kicking around that can custom-fab whatever parts are needed. (That's one of the reasons the Sol system is such an economic and technological powerhouse... they have upwards of twenty factory satellites.) By all accounts, the General Galaxy VF-171 has been so widely used for so long because its cost performance, ease of handling, and versatility are fantastic. (It's basically everything the F-35 promised to be, with none of the failure to deliver.)
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Looks delightful. Definitely glad I preordered them all.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    There really isn't any one set "look" for a railgun... the technology can be packaged quite efficiently even in the real world. It's very, VERY doubtful that they said "railgun" and didn't actually mean "railgun"... this is hardly the first railgun in Macross. Nope. You may want to check your facts before making pronouncements like that, because Macross's creators have definitely shown their work on that front. Mind you, Macross's gun pods don't hold thousands of rounds... most don't even hold hundreds. The GU-11A held 180-200 rounds, in a helical magazine that wrapped around the barrel assembly and made up the entire front half of the gun's outer shell. Many of the later Valkyries that had gun pods with detachable magazines only carried about 120-150 rounds per magazine and made up for the loss of capacity with spares carried elsewhere on the airframe. The rate of fire's much lower than that of conventional rotary cannons, but the stopping power of each round is orders of magnitude greater and with significantly tighter accuracy to compensate for that loss. Simply put... the New UN Government is not a monolithic entity like, say, the US Federal Government. It's more like the European Union, a loose politico-economic union where each member state has a more or less free hand to decide how best to arm its defense forces and can develop its own new weapons. Though, unlike the European Union, the supranational government has its own armed forces and the member state forces are sort of like national guard forces, who can be called upon to bolster the central government's forces if necessary. The reason we're seeing so many new Valkyries in this time period is because the VF-171 Nightmare Plus was the last federally-mandated main variable fighter of the New UN Forces. After that point, it was up to the various planets and emigrant fleets to decide how best to arm themselves. Some fleets and planets opted to buy export models of fighters used by the federal New UN Forces, while others opted to use specs for the latest federal NUNS fighter that were shared to all the fleets as a starting point to develop their own fighters. The YF-24 Evolution spec that was shared in a lightly censored form became the starting point for the Macross Frontier fleet's YF-25 Prophecy (VF-25 Messiah), Macross Olympia's YF-26, Macross Galaxy's YF-27 Shahar (VF-27 Lucifer), Macross Frontier fleet's YF-29 Durandal, and Uroboros' YF-30 Chronos (VF-31 Kairos and VF-31 Siegfried) and probably several more fighters besides. Very probably the same role... just for a different batch of emigrant planets and fleets.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, numerous titles... The first occurrence of a civilian market variable fighter was actually in Macross II: Lovers Again... with the Takachihof Corp. VC-079 used by SNN. Official continuity materials for that parallel world timeline mention that it's actually the second civilian-market fighter by that corporation (a follow-up to an earlier model developed in the 2050's). Shortly thereafter, Macross 7 introduced civilian market Valkyries in several episodes of the show's first half. City-7's mayor, Milia Jenius, revealed that she had a privately owned VF-1J Valkyrie in Ep13, and we're shown two episodes later that she's far from the only one in the city to have a privately owned VF-1 when the government hosted a fair with a "try your hand at a Valkyrie" event as a thinly-disguised attempt to find recruits for a citizens militia after City-7 was hijacked by the vampires. Also, in Macross Dynamite 7 we see a number of civilian-owned Valkyries. In the first episode, we see privately-owned VT-1 Ostrich units being used on (and in orbit of) Zola by both the galactic whale poachers and private citizens like the Hoyly family. We also get a "blink and you'll miss it" moment where a modified VT-1 is shown being used in the construction of the new Battle-7 (and we've tentatively dubbed it the "Battroid Work" on the Macross Mecha Manual... which I guess trips off the tongue less awkwardly than "Workyrie"). The poachers also had VA-3C units, though it's unclear if those are civilian market models or something obtained through black market channels like the VF-17D that Liza Hoyly stole from them to escape. In Macross VF-X2, Critical Path corp. CEO Manfred Brando had a privately-owned VF-17S Nightmare... but that's down to him being super-wealthy. In the Macross Frontier novelization and the Macross Frontier short story "Actor's Sky" published in Macross Ace magazine, we have the civilian market VF-1C Valkyrie used by Mihoshi Academy's pilot training program. Macross the Ride also offers us numerous examples of privately-owned variable fighters of a variety of models. Protagonist Hakuna Aoba has a privately owned, customized VF-1X++ Valkyrie Double Plus as his chosen racing plane for competing in Vanquish League ultimate class races. Likewise, Chelsea Scarlett privately purchased not one but THREE VF-11B Thunderbolt airframes that were being sold off by the New UN Spacy escort fleet and used the parts to build one working custom VF-11B. Reporter Rose Guryunesilt and her pilot "D." Aivori have a privately owned VF-11D Custom as well. Nicolas Berthier may actually own the VF-9E he flies, and be using sponsor money to pay for its maintenance. In Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy, numerous NPC escort/protection mission objectives are privately owned Valkyries of various makes and models. Hunter's Guild head Mei Ririon also has an apparently privately owned VF-27γ Lucifer. Edit: Spelling! Not surplus, it was a test article from a UN Forces black project... and he was either smart enough to know he didn't want to know where it came from, or simply too thick to wonder. I'm undecided on which.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    ... that is an excellent question. I'd assume that they would ordinarily be able to, if only Heinz were not using that Protoculture artifact and the associated shrine and ruins to mechanically amplify his already-formidable fold receptor factor to overpowering levels. (Essentially, I'm guessing he's transmitting as such a high power that jamming it with Chuck's fold-wave radar would be like trying to jam a radio station with a cell phone.)
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Pretty sure you're right. We get a look almost right down the barrel of one in Ep8 right before Freyja manages to free Captain Larazzabal from Var syndrome, and it appears to be a single barrel.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Y'see... that might've been the case initially, but that stopped being true several decades before Macross Delta. Not only have Valkyries essentially replaced most other forms of military combat aircraft, they've also followed destroids into civilian markets as specialized utility vehicles. By 2047, the civilian versions of the VF-1 were not just within the reach of the super-wealthy or the megacorporations, they were accessible to moderately wealthy civilians. I'm not talking millionaires either, I'm talking retired soldiers and elected officials and, in one memorable case, a singer from a backwater planet. There's literally a military VF-1 variant intended to capitalize on the fact that the VF-1 is so common in civilian service that the concept of a mecha used for undercover operations is actually viable. Kaos is a megacorporation and they could probably afford a better class of training aircraft if they really wanted one. Mihoshi Academy is a vocational school. That they can afford MULTIPLE VF-1's for a space pilot training program for high school students really shows how the Valkyrie has become a thoroughly unqualified "nothing special". That's another contention that doesn't quite pan out in the Macross universe. We have plenty of examples of people who learned the basics of flight in a variable fighter like a civilian market VF-1. Alto Saotome's one. The jerk who played Shin Kudo in the Birdhuman movie is another. Vanquish league racers Nicolas Berthier and Magdalena Zielonaska also fit that category. So too does Hayate Immelmann. It's also worth noting that you could "mistake" a fighter trainer for a utility aircraft in this case... but it wouldn't be a mistake, because one of the most popular civilian models of Valkyrie is literally a detuned trainer used for utility work like construction, starship fabrication, wildlife management, or simply as a hobby plane. Can't honestly say I've ever heard a character express a dream to fly a VF-1 in the more recent decades of the Macross universe...
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Alto was a pilot with at least a full year's training in a vocational school's space pilot program behind him... implied, by the novels and that short story, to have been partly logged in a VF-1C. Presumably the (New) UN Spacy uses something more modern or has a better simulator or something of that nature. SMS and Kaos are both civilian-owned corporations are limited in what they can legally buy, weapons-wise.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    That the YF-27-5's beam gun pod is externally powered is explicitly stated in Macross the Ride... that the energy requirements of the gunpod are the reason for the four engines on the production model is not. (That, from Ride and the movies, was hinted at being the result of the VF-27 being based on illicitly obtained YF-29 developmental specs.) Sometimes yes, sometimes no. It really depends on the fighter. For instance, the VF-25's Tornado Pack and Armored Pack both have dedicated power systems built into them rather than tapping the fighter's own generators. The Armored Pack had capacitors, and the Tornado Pack actually had a small reaction power system. None of the packs added additional reaction engines with their own generators, they mostly used chemical rockets. Master File has waffled back and forth about whether things like Strike Packs have the ability to top off the beam gun capacitors from the fighter's reactors. With the FC2 versions of the FF-3001 Stage II thermonuclear reaction turbine engines, we finally appear to have enough surplus generator output to power a beam gun pod with just two engines instead of four.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Nah man, being able to go supersonic isn't anything special for a variable fighter in Macross... even the ones powered by conventional jet turbofans could easily exceed Mach 2. The VF-1 Valkyrie's one of the very few that wasn't capable of hypersonic flight, and needed a decent run-up to go supersonic. The civilian market ones have the lowest thrust-to-weight ratio of any VF with thermonuclear reaction engines (potentially including the VF-0+ Phoenix Plus if my research has borne accurate fruit), and if you take the VF-5000 out of the equation the next nearest production model has 33% more get-up-and-go. It's the oldest, slowest, simplest Valkyrie they could lay hands on... and in terms of the gap of power between the training plane and the modern fighter, it's really is like pitting mom's old minivan against a supercar.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Almost certainly a conductive power transfer through the hand... Macross the Ride confirmed that beam gun pods are powered externally by tapping into the fighter's reactor. (Based on Macross the Ride's presentation of the YF-27-5, this is almost certainly a big part of why the VF-27 has four engines... the prototype needed an extra reactor mounted out on one wing to power the gun pod.)
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Well, that's debatable bordering on dubious... by 2059, the VF-1 Valkyrie was a cheap and comparatively simple aircraft that Shinsei Industry had spent the best part of fifty years polishing and perfecting. All of that time and effort made the civilian market VF-1 into a highly reliable aircraft with detuned performance that wouldn't test the limits of even a green pilot trainee. It's simple and it's rugged, but by VF standards it's what you'd call "durable". Compared to the military standard in 2059, let alone 2067, it's armored like a cream slice. To use your car analogy, it's more like your average kid's first daily driver. It's that ancient beater that's inexplicably still running despite having originally belonged to somebody's grandpa, with a 0-60 time that needs to be measured on a freaking sundial, a speedometer that shows numbers that it couldn't reach even going downhill with a hurricane-force tailwind, and fancy onboard electronics like an analog clock and genuine cassette player. In short, the kind of vehicle where nobody will weep unduly if the damn thing ends up totaled by little Johnny Q. Public (except maybe the freshly unhorsed Johnny Q. Public himself). The rest of your analogy is pretty much bang-on accurate tho. Don't need a trainee going into g-loc in a 44G turn and bending a plane that with a nine figure price tag.
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