Jump to content

Seto Kaiba

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    13136

  • Joined

  • Last visited

 Content Type 

Everything posted by Seto Kaiba

  1. Seto Kaiba
    A couple of the Master File books have already featured warships. The VF-0 one had the Asuka II-class, the VF-1 Vol.1 book had the Prometheus, VF-19 had the Uraga-class, and the Squadrons book had the SDF-1 Macross herself.
  2. Seto Kaiba
  3. Seto Kaiba
    All the VF-27's already have NUNS markings... except maybe Mei Ririon's from Macross 30. (Seriously. It's kind of hard to see on Brera's VF-27 because it's red on pink, but there is a NUNS insignia on the wings.)
  4. Seto Kaiba
    OK, sittin' down to watch this one now...
  5. Seto Kaiba
  6. Seto Kaiba
    That wasn't a complete list by any means... just the ones I could name off the top of my head without having to recall issue numbers and so on. I checked a LOT of sources and came up empty-handed on that front. Macross: Perfect Memory. It's in the two-page timeline spread on pages 54-55, on the entry for March 2005. It's a single sentence that mentions that Oberth-class space destroyer No.1 is commissioned in that month. Yeah, Roy and Kakizaki are big blokes... they cut Roy's height down in Zero. IIRC to a more reasonably 190cm.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    If not Palladium itself, probably through RPG fan sites... even the Japanese Wiki identifies the name as being something that came out of the Western fandom. Before we removed the name from the Macross Mecha Manual entry, I carried out a pretty extensive search for any official work that gave the ship a name and came up dry. Every book I found that so much as mentions the ship lists it only as 中型砲艦 (Medium-size Gunboat). The books I consulted include: This is Animation 3, 5, and 7 Super Dimension Fortress Macross (not covered in the books) This is Animation 11 Macross: Do You Remember Love? Macross: Perfect Memory Macross: Do You Remember Love? Data Bank (AKA the Gold Book) Kazutaka Miyatake Design Works: Macross and Orguss (not covered) Entertainment Bible: Studio Nue Mechanical Designs 1 & 2 (not covered) Dengeki Data Collection: Super Dimension Fortress Macross (identified, in English! as "Medium-scale Gunboat") Entertainment Bible 27 & 51 Macross Chronicle Macross: Do You Remember Love? v1 Blu-Ray limited edition box booklets
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Pretty safe bet that it's not... they'd be spelled differently in kana (カイロス vs ケイオス) and it fits only too well that a production model derived from the YF-30 Chronos would have as its name the other Greek word for "Time": Kairos. It fits particularly well, since "Chronos" is sequential time or continuity and the YF-30 Chronos was used in a story about preventing someone from tampering with the continuity of time, while "Kairos" refers to a singular point in time when an event of great magnitude and significance occurs. The VF-31 Kairos is central to the events of a momentous conflict in the Brisingr cluster on the galactic frontier. As significant naming goes, it's a LOT more subtle than what we got in Frontier. I guess this also makes the Delta Platoon units with different names a custom set of variants along the same lines as the VF-19EF Caliburn.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    All things considered, my suspicion is King Gramia will backstab Epsilon for being human, and they'll scurry to Kaos with intel while hollering "Curse your sudden yet inevitable betrayal!"
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Well, we already had the Macross One-Third in Master File...
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Ah, didn't notice you'd asked this one in two different places... this is the answer I just finished composing from the other thread:
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Actually, the Macross Mecha Manual used to use the "Quiltra-Quelamitz class" name too. We removed the name a few updates back, after I did some digging and was unable to find any official source that referred to that class of vessel by anything other than the type of warship it was... "Medium-sized Gunboat" (中型砲艦), sometimes finessed to "Medium-scale Gun Destroyer" in translation. Some of the Japanese Macross fans I compare notes with on occasion believe it's something that an American licensee came up with, possibly originating from the Palladium Books Robotech role-playing game. That publisher and game had a known habit of trying to come up with Zentradi-sounding names for everything that didn't already have an alien language name in its original source material, some of which sounded fairly plausible and some of which sounded like the result of using text-to-speech with a bad head cold. I'm still investigating where it first occurred, but the Zentradi Army air battle pod has been referred to as the "Gnerl" in print a few official works I'm aware of. The OSD in Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy and the supporting publications for same use "Gnerl", in English no less. (I only noticed it because there's a swarm of them that hang out with an equally large swarm of Nousjadeul-Ger battle suits just north of Jurgen City in the Sierra Desert map for much of the game.)
  13. Seto Kaiba
    All told, micro-missiles are described as being intended for short-range air-to-air use and saturation attacks... they're not really meant for anti-warship use. It's only the very latest and most heavily armored Valkyries like the Armored VF-25 or YF-29 that have achieved defensive ability on par with an escort-type space warship, and they only achieved that by brute force means like doubling up the armor's thickness at the expense of airframe mass and using supplemental power systems to increase the armor's effectiveness. We don't know how the VF-31 or Sv-262 stack up on that front, but I doubt they're as overkill as the YF-29 was, since that was so prohibitively expensive and resource-intensive that it was pretty much doomed to never be mass-produced. A missile designed to destroy a 5th Generation VF should be capable of damaging a ship in sufficient numbers, but a missile capable of seriously damaging a ship should reduce even the the best-armored Valkyrie to a piece of abstract art. The yields of those micro-missiles should be pretty terrifyingly high, all told, since there's not supposed to be that huge of a difference between the yields of micro-missiles and medium-range missiles... it's implied for a few models that they're close in yield, and the main difference is the size of the motor. (Mind you, all missile yields in Macross are terrifyingly high... the VF-1's AMM-1 medium-range missile's warhead had blast power roughly equivalent to a 1,000lb bomb.)
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Well... no hero except Kakizaki, anyway...
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Well... maybe. Walkure were protected by pin-point barriers, which is about the best defense you can get against pretty much anything short of a Macross Cannon. It's safe to say, considering what just two of those micro-missiles do to a VF-171 Nightmare Plus, that being hit by them would be extremely hazardous to your health even in a VF. The fighter Hayate "borrows" is disabled by just two of them, which was enough to incapacitate the pilot and do some unspecified but not totally incapacitating damage to the fighter itself. Technically... Macross Delta Ep.1 at 19:00 is the most recent time we saw a VF vs VF missile "kill". The Al Shahal VF-171 Nightmare Plus that Hayate later uses to rescue Freyja is taken out of the fight by just two micro-missiles from Bogue's fighter in Battroid mode. It doesn't kill the pilot or destroy the fighter, but it does injure the pilot badly enough that he needs medevac and the fighter is out of action. Presumably more hits would've seen them cleaning the fighter up with a dustpan and the pilot with a squeegee. We also got several missile kills in Macross Frontier and its movies, though that was mainly against Vajra targets or Ghosts. I think they've been a bit thin on the ground since the last series didn't really focus on VF vs VF combat, and both Macross 7 and Macross Delta feature pilots who are more concerned with saving the lives of their brainwashed enemies, so they seem to focus more on guns than missiles for kills. Macross Delta has more VF vs VF combat, but missiles are getting short-sold because the VF-31's design did away with the YF-30's missile container for that drone power system they've never used since the first episode. To a certain extent, I think the reason micro-missiles don't seem to be as effective is that we're almost invariably shown ace vs. ace combat when it's two VFs squaring off... and one thing Macross's creators love almost as much as Itano Circuses is showing fighters dramatically evading Itano Circuses. So much so, in fact, that it's usually the way they establish that someone is hot sh*t, like Guld in the YF-21 dodging all those high-maneuver missiles or Messer in the first episode dodging a huge swarm of missiles from Theo and Xao. Missiles are still consistently presented as being incredibly deadly weapons, and when it's micro-missiles we're shown that a kill is simply a matter of getting enough of them on the target, but it's so much more dramatic for a pair of aces to square off at super-close quarters with guns. Some of us do sleep occasionally, lol.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    I have a sneaking suspicion that Kerbal Space Program's physics engine may not be properly handling the projectile velocities and collision detection. Is it actually producing discrete projectile objects or just using graphics of a projectile laid on top of a hitscan field? Even using modern, entirely conventional ammunition it's pretty much impossible for an aircraft to hit itself with shells from its own gun pod because of the physics involved. The muzzle velocity of the bullets coming out of the cannon is relative to the velocity of the aircraft, so the total initial speed of the shell is the aircraft's speed plus the muzzle velocity. With a modern gatling cannon shell like PGU-28/B, to hit yourself with the fired rounds before they clear the airframe the aircraft would have to be pitching down at over Mach 3... and I don't mean "pitching down while flying at Mach 3", I mean that, if you take out all forward momentum, the aircraft's rotational velocity while pitching down at a fixed point in space would have to be at over Mach 3. Even Valkyries don't turn fast enough that they break the sound barrier with their rotational velocity, and the rounds used in Valkyrie gun pods are MUCH faster than anything used today. The GU-11A's shells are traveling at a whopping 2km/s, a little less than double the speed of today's 20 and 30mm anti-aircraft and anti-tank rotary cannon rounds. The GU-15's are moving twice as fast as the GU-11's. It's possible for modern aircraft to accidentally hit themselves long after their rounds clear the airframe, by entering into a ballistic dive and then suffering hits from the falling shells downrange... but even that's rare as all get-out.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    That's not what the Protoculture said, though... the Protoculture archive on Lux in Macross 7 credited the downfall of the Protoculture's civilization to having never been a single, unified society. The overexpansion of the Stellar Republic exacerbated the preexisting divide in their society, and the tensions between the two sides festered until they became battle lines in the Schism War. They didn't unify under one banner until the Protodeviln and their Supervision Army had conquered over 30% of the Republic and enslaved hundreds of billions of people. (They tried, in a predictably jerkass way, to prevent the sub-Protoculture species they created from repeating their mistakes after they passed the point of no return. The Birdman they on Earth was programmed to destroy humanity if they gained space travel capabilities before resolving their internal differences.) Fasces was... well... kinda nutty. It was run by Zentradi, rather than Humans, who were especially enamored of Earth culture. The way it's being presented, I'm not sure their motives are anything so lofty as an existential crisis. They were apparently perfectly happy to work with humanity for decades (and to a certain extent, still are)... so I'm betting that King Gramia's motives for the war are rather more personal, and he's wrapping it up in this dogma of "We're the Protoculture's special-est snowflakes" to make it easier for his people to swallow. (The color of their runes seems to change rather dramatically based on their mood, and Gramia's are ALWAYS red... which seems to be the default state for "angry".)
  18. Seto Kaiba
    I had that exact same thought when I finished Ep11... they're not going to replace Messer because someone is going to defect in the next few episodes. Probably Bogue, as he seems to be most strongly affected by Walkure's songs.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    I'm inclined to suspect that the Sigur Valens is not a Protoculture warship... mostly because the ancient Protoculture had the Zentradi for that, and portions of the Fulbtzs-Berrentzs-class fleet motherships contain habitat blocks dedicated to replicating the ecology of the Protoculture homeworld. It's odds-on that any Protoculture directly commanding a Zentradi fleet would be headquartered on the mothership itself in those areas specifically designed for their use. What I suspect is that the Sigur Valens is actually an ancient Protoculture survey ship like the one that supposedly visited Earth in prehistory and genetically re-engineered Earth's early homonids into humanity. It will still likely be incredibly powerful, because the Protoculture never did anything halfway, but we'll probably find out that the Windermereans and Epsilon Corporation have only scratched the surface of what it can do and there'll be a terraforming or gene lab somewhere in the ship that'll give clues to the origins of the Windermereans themselves. The ship was probably abandoned on Windermere, either because they didn't have time to activate it before fleeing as the fighting between the Zentradi and Supervision Army remnants drew near the Windermere system or because they died out at some point after colonizing the planet and never bothered to dispose of the ship. I guess there's a third potential explanation in that it could be a "come find me when you're grown up" like what the Protoculture programmed the Birdman to do if the human race had passed its test. I do agree that it's unlikely the Windermereans are descended directly from the Protoculture... even they themselves seem to believe that they were another one of the Protoculture's creations, like the Voldorans, Ragnans, Humans, Zolans, etc. The relic that Heinz was using doesn't appear to be fixed to anything... it's sitting in an armature in a chamber that may always have been inside the buried Sigur Valens, or may have been relocated there before launch. Only organic material can fossilize... that relic appears to have always been made from "stone".
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Just a small correction... in Macross Frontier, having to walk laps of the Macross Quarter's hangar in an unpowered EX-Gear suit wasn't training. It was a punishment. The first time we saw it, it was Alto's punishment for being shot down in the simulator (blissfully unaware that Michael had raised the difficulty), and he had laps added for sass. The second time was Michael AND Alto doing laps for sneaking Sheryl aboard the Macross Quarter, with Cathy Glass adding laps to their punishment for sass.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Well, you'll certainly become well acquainted with the wind afterwards...
  22. Seto Kaiba
    That's a really unbalanced fleet, compared to what we usually see... I wonder if that's because of the combat losses from the last time the Aerial Knights ambushed Al Shahal? Under normal circumstances, in a (New) UN Spacy flotilla there are about twice as many destroyers, frigates, and cruisers as there are carriers. Somehow, I suspect that we're not supposed to empathize with the Windermerean "woe is me" routine. It seems like every time they trot out their white knight schtick (hmm...) about how cruel and exploitative the New UN Government is and how justice demands they liberate the Brisingr cluster, they immediately say or do something to reveal that it's an excuse to cover their real motives. What's more, it doesn't seem like that's much of a secret to the other residents of the Brisingr cluster. The Voldoran head of state called Roid on it a few episodes ago, noting that their Windermerean "liberators" were less knights in shining armor freeing a nation from oppression than they were a band of thugs with a reputation for indiscriminate violence turning Voldor into an occupied territory. He basically pointed out that the Voldorans wouldn't oppose Windermere openly only because they were essentially helpless and held at gunpoint. Windermere's "we are the real victim" line seems to be more an excuse for King Gramia to act on the Aerial Knighthood's apparent belief that they have a manifest destiny as the Protoculture's heirs by a campaign of good ol' fashioned empire-building. I'm left to wonder how quickly their apparently deep-seated racism will turn on the "allies" they claim they're trying to liberate.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    IIRC, [gg]'s rep said they were going to be a day or two late because he's traveling... and they're usually first out.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Maybe that's why the plot is developing so damned slow... maybe it WILL be the first 2x25 show Macross has had since 7.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    We get a good view in the first Macross Frontier movie, when Ranka is doing that toy advertisement.
×
×
  • Create New...