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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    That's my favorite kind of question. You wouldn't believe some of the stuff I've found entirely by accident while looking for answers to the tough questions. Last time, I went looking for a factoid on the ARMD-class and ended up finding a probable engine output for the QF-3000E and VF-0+. I'm not sure what the benefit of the first inlet connecting the low pressure and high pressure air streams is, except maybe that it's close enough to the engine's compact thermonuclear reactor and the two stages of the engine's generator system to be more effectively heated than it would if it were simply mixing with the exhaust stream after the turbine stage. From the look of the FF-3001A diagram, even the low pressure air stream from the bypass is heated pretty damn effectively when the engine is running at above about 80% power. (It would've been REALLY interesting if they'd given us a better look at the diverter system for that vernier ring used on the VF-14, VF-17, VF-19 2nd production type, etc., since that pulls from the exhaust stream just ahead of the nozzle to provide a combination of vernier and thrust reverser function.) On a lark, I went looking in another book and found another, less conventional example of bypass airflow for a VF's engines. I'd forgotten about Variable Fighter Master File: VF-22 Sturmvogel II's diagram of the VF-22's FF-2450B thermonuclear reaction burst turbine engines, where there's a special bypass between the precompressor and the body of the engine that's used to provide downward thrust for hovering while operating in GERWALK mode in atmosphere. (The "nozzle" for that system is the set of horizontal vanes on the underside of the engine compartment in GERWALK mode.) I don't currently have a working scanner, so I'll see if I can make Office Lens produce acceptable results on my tablet. Yep... 2.14 meters. That doesn't count the ducting or the precompressor, but that is one tiny engine... but when you consider the amount of heat energy being released by a hydrogen fusion reaction, it's not hard to see how it can produce such incredible amounts of thrust without being very large. Jet fuel's burn temperature peaks at what, about 2,200 celsius? Hydrogen fusion's around 13 million.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Really, I got nothin'... info on the YF-30's pretty sparse. If there are sub-engines there, I would assume they sit in the two black V-shapes on the trailing edge of the wing... and are probably either totally separate from the main engines or are maybe using intake air from the BLCS sub-intakes above the detached-in-GERWALK-mode main intakes. They'd have to be capable of independent operation though, since the YF-30 is as space-capable as any other variable fighter.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Actually, that's a really good question... I had to do a fair bit of digging to find an answer. Most of the diagrams I'm familiar with for thermonuclear reaction engine technology outright ignore the subject of bypass ratios... but after some research, I found two that do not. The diagram of the FF-2001 which appears in the Sky Angels tech manual on page 40 and the diagram of the FF-3001A Stage II thermonuclear reaction turbine engine used on the VF-25 Messiah on pages 58 and 59 of Variable Fighter Master File: VF-25 Messiah show thermonuclear reaction engines as a low-bypass turbofan-style jet engine (with the obvious substitution of a compact thermonuclear reactor for a burner stage). In both cases, the body of the engine shows a few sets of sub-intakes where air from the low-pressure bypass air can be drawn into the high pressure areas of the turbine and further heated by exposure to the hot exhaust stream. The FF-3001A diagram shows two sets... one in burner stage ahead of the turbine and one in the afterburner stage. It looks like, instead of injecting more "fuel" into the exhaust stream, a reaction engine's afterburner works by injecting more air into the exhaust stream to mix with the already-hot mixture of hot exhaust and plasma. On the VF-25 engine diagram, it does look like the bypass air is picking up a good amount of heat as it passes over the engine, regardless of whether or not it's then introduced into the high-pressure stream... so it does appear to be cooling the engine somewhat. Yeah, normally the main body of the engine is in the "shin" of the VF's leg... while the hip area contains a precompressor driven by a superconducting motor which is connected to the rest of the engine via a flexible duct that runs inside the VF's knee. The bypass doesn't seem to come into play until you're past the precompressor and into the fan at the leading edge of the turbine engine itself in the lower leg. I would assume that arrangement hasn't changed in later VFs. The diagram of the FF-2001 engine used by the VF-1 in the Sky Angels book gives the total length of the actual engine (which resides entirely in the lower leg) as just 2.14 meters (just a hair over 7 feet) with a mass of just 1,580kg.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Yes, I remember Major Ogotai from the Macross Frontier series. It's worth noting that the DYRL? version of the Zentradi (and Meltrandi) didn't use cybernetic enhancements purely to repair wounds. Many types of Zentran and Meltran soldier were equipped with bio-technological enhancements as a matter of standard... I don't want to say equipment, maybe their "standard physical template"? In fact, the only Zentradi commander I know of who received a cybernetic faceplate/eye to repair a wound was the alternate reality version of Quamzin/Kamujin from the Macross II: Lovers Again timeline.1 Many of the commanders we see have an eyepiece as standard, and it's mentioned in Chronicle that pilots on either side have central nervous system modifications to connect them to their mecha. The Meltrandi have been engineered to have a bio-fiber optic central nervous system and connect to their Queadluun-Rau battle suits via an implant in the optic nerve, while the Zentradi have a hard-plug system that links their central nervous system to the Nousjadeul-Ger. The Macross Frontier movie v1 blu-rays had English subs. I don't know if the v2's that came out recently do. Macross Plus's initial blu-ray release even had the English dub on it. 1. The DYRL? version of Quamzin (Quamzin 03350) comes down with a bit of "comic book death" in Macross II's parallel world continuity. Even though he "dies" in the movie fighting Roy, even having a GU-11's magazine emptied into his back and then having a VF-1 blow up in his face couldn't keep him down. Somewhere along the way, his fellows are able to resuscitate him and repair his wounds such that he's still very much alive after the war ends. He eventually flees into space with other Zentradi and Meltrandi malcontents rather than live on Earth, and becomes the chief villain in both canon video games that were made to connect DYRL? to the rest of Macross II's timeline. He comes back at the head of a second Zentradi Army main fleet in 2036, intending to destroy Earth, and in 2037 with a third one attempting to use Earth's culture as a weapon against the Meltrandi. He's defeated the first time by UN Spacy forces under Vrlitwhai 7018 (including Komilia Maria Jenius and her wingman Lott Sheen) and the second time he's technically successful in that the UN Spacy destroys the Meltrandi fleet for him... before rounding on him and kicking his butt too.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, that's true... though it's worth remembering the Zentradi didn't get involved in using cybernetics until DYRL?. In DYRL?, the implant he has seems to be part of the basic design for the commander class Zentradi. In the TV series, the production art shows a damaged, apparently useless eye under what is essentially an outlandish eyepatch. If it IS a genetic defect, it may be something that resulted from 500,000 years of neglect and automated self-repair on the factory satellite responsible for cloning him. I can't see a way it could be a battle injury since he didn't rise through the ranks... he was cloned to be a fleet commander and would've therefore spent his entire service life on the bridge of a ship.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    We're looking for an area where something analogous to the six little thrusters used by the VF-25 for forward thrust in GERWALK mode as shown on the line art and modeled on the VF-25F Version 2 DX pictured above. On the VF-25, those little thrusters appear to be very much an independent system from the main engines... analogous to the "backpack" rockets on the VF-1 Valkyrie.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Y'know... I honestly can't recall Macross's creators ever offering an explanation for Vrlitwhai's/Britai's bad eye. I know the comics adapted from the-show-that-must-not-be-named made it out to be an eye lost to a combat injury, but the one piece of Macross art to show his face under the plate doesn't show any scarring... just a lazy, possibly blind, eye. I wonder if it's actually a genetic defect? Something that a micloning machine wouldn't be able to fix even if it did replace missing bits of you when you went through it.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Nah... you're overthinking it. Kawamori's view on Macross continuity can be expressed relatively simply as "What continuity?". He basically takes the view that all versions of a given story are equally correct and valid. So it's kind of a "Schrodinger's continuity". It's a useful view that effectively frees Kawamori from being tied to the minutae of any one story while working on the next one. (Can't really argue with the results, since it always seems to lead to an interesting story.) Official publications often take a less loosey-goosey view that favors the TV series version of multiply-depicted events for timeline purposes. Macross Chronicle's timeline sheet set works like that for the most part.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    For non-Zentradi characters, yeah. Max is the only human we've seen do it on-screen, but Macross Chronicle does mention that it's possible. As RedWolf mentioned, it seems to work fine for Zolans too, with Graham Hoyly having been a giant in Macross Dynamite 7. Michael Blanc from Macross Frontier is mentioned as being able to do so, but that it would be a one-way trip for him because something about his genes is unsuitable for miclone systems, so the return trip from giant to miclone might kill him.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Only in the most general terms, courtesy of one of the Macross Chronicle worldguide sheets.A miclone system apparently scans the subject's DNA and clones a new body for them, before it transfers the subject's mind across and decomposes the old body into raw material. What Chronicle focuses on is a genetic trigger present in, and apparently unique to, Zentradi DNA that is vital to the micloning process. When reduced to miclone size, the gene is dormant and the result is a miclone body that is anatomically and biochemically almost identical to a human's (though they're a little more resilient on average and retain some of quirky traits such as pointed ears, odd skin colors, etc.). The gene is active in the enlargement process, causing the miclone system to produce a radically different biochemistry and anatomy that is better suited to combat, changing the position and function of many organs and making them a good deal more resilient as a result. It is possible to enlarge Humans and other sub-Protoculture species via a miclone system, but presumably they don't get the same combat-enhanced biochemistry and anatomy becuase they lack that genetic trigger... so they're just scaled up and adjusted enough to get around the whole square-cube law problem with giant humanoids. It's not stated, but the system would have to also be replicating a person's microbiome to prevent various health problems, so it probably wouldn't cure diseases or anything like that. (Whether it's smart enough to copy something like the absence of a limb is unclear... but I'd assume it is, given that some other brief descriptions suggest it produces a more or less exact copy of the body.)
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... I doubt it. The mass-produced Macross-class weren't attached to any one fleet on a permanent basis, but the Battle-class literally (physically!) were. The idea being that a colony would have not only a defense fleet but its own Macross warship shooty enough to successfully defend that colony should they encounter something like a rogue Zentradi branch fleet. (Such as it was, this becoming the standard seems to have motivated at least one previously-established colony to build their own massive anti-fleet warship on an even greater scale to be able to take out an entire branch fleet without the need for the rest of the fleet... the ship in question was captured by the Protodeviln and became Gepernich's flagship.)
  12. Seto Kaiba
    The Sv-51 didn't have a sub-engine system to push it forward in GERWALK mode the way that the VF-0 did. It seemed to get by using by leaning forward enough that the angular thrust of the engines would provide both forward thrust and lift.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    That's a fun thought... if the Brisingr cluster offices are Kaos's equivalent of "reassigned to Antarctica" used to get rid of staff who can't hack it in a more important market or who would be legally problematic to fire, that'd go quite a ways to explain why Kaos's staff seems to lackluster compared to the fairly elite SMS troops from Frontier. (Either that or SMS just pays better and is just recruiting all the best and brightest soldiers and Kaos is left with the scrubs.) New theory! Lady M is actually Dr. Gadget M Chiba in drag. He lost a bet and had to come to work one day in a dress, and everyone was so afraid to ask why (for fear of ending up chained to a chair like Gamlin) that he simply resolved to keep the dress until someone said something. 20 years later, the military and Kaos staff call him "Lady M" behind his back to avoid getting in trouble. She's already an employee of Kaos... she's wearing the uniform. She just doesn't appear to be attached to the Ragna branch office.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Y'know, I've never bothered to actually transform my DX YF-30 to see if they molded anything like that there. My wager would be that there's probably a cluster of small thrusters hidden on the trailing edge of the fuselage in the portions that are exposed by detaching the arms and ordinance container from the fighter mode. Either that or they've gone way retro and it's just pushing the engine nozzles back like the Sv-51 did.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    We don't have official specs for the Sv-262 Draken III and we've seen almost nothing of its Battroid mode in the series... so unless I've missed something, we don't actually know that that fighter doesn't possess a pin-point barrier system. Windermere's Aerial Knights almost never use the Battroid or GERWALK modes. It would be a very odd choice indeed for Windermere to build a 5th Generation-equivalent VF and not equip it with technology that has been standard equipment for two generations and a good 19 years by the time of Macross Delta's events. We know that the rogue engineers who helped develop fighters like the Draken III for various anti-government factions are familiar with barrier technology as well, since they equipped a one-off 5th Generation-equivalent VF with a super-powerful barrier system in 2058. Windermere was discovered and settled by the SDF-5 Megaroad-04 in 2027, a good while before fighter-scale pin-point barrier technology was developed. However, by the time Windermere's natives launched their war of secession against the New UN Government, the New UN Spacy had been using a main variable fighter equipped with pin-point barrier technology for 12 years. The Windermere forces are clearly familiar with barrier technology, since they know how the ones on the Sigur Valens work, and they should've had access to the tech from either legitimate channels or VFs they captured during their war of secession.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Maybe... but the impression I got was that Windermere's war of independence was very short, probably too short for the Windermere NUNS to have called in reinforcements from more than their closest neighbors. Ragna is all the way on the other side of the cluster. Almost certainly not, given that we're told that the dimension eater destroyed a city and its detonation would have to have been near ground level to produce that kind of crater. Getting a ship that big that low over a city would be insane. I'm not sure how a dimension eater would go off aboard a NUNS ship when the Windermereans were reportedly the ones who used it. (Now, I'll wager the emigrant ship that settled Windermere - Megaroad-04 - was probably lost in that blast. It was probably the heart of the city of Carlyle/Carlisle, like that one New Macross-class domeship was for Barette city on Ragna.) Just a note... it's Al Shahal that's 30 light years from Ragna. Windermere is, per Arad, 800 light years from Ragna.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, that's one of several nagging questions surrounding the chain of command at Kaos. Ernest Johnson's reputation as a commander is so incredibly bad that soldiers and private citizens alike know him as the fleet commander who would lose 100 out of 100 battles. The "Soldier for hire" business is a results-driven field to say the least. It doesn't make any sense that planetary governments and an extremely well-funded PMC would want to retain his services with a reputation like that. With Windermere I could maybe believe that he was hired because he was cheap, but there's gotta be something more to it with Kaos. I doubt it's anything as mundane as nepotism. (I'm privately inclined to suspect that, like SMS's staff and the loss of the 117th Research Fleet, Kaos's staff has a large percentage of people who had a role in the Windermerean war of independence. It is, however, possible that a decision to hire him was made because they assumed he'd never have to do more than orchestrate a glorified bodyguard detail for Walkure.) ... actually, there's a bigger question associated with that. Why is the Macross Elysion apparently the only Macross-type warship in the Brisingr cluster? Unlike Windermere, which was colonized by a Megaroad-class ship, we're shown that Ragna was settled by an early New Macross-class ship. Where is its Battle section? Even if the fleet was Macross-1 and the habitat ships that made up the fleet all settled different planets, Battle-1 still would be somewhere in the cluster... possibly more than one Battle-1 if the other city ships in the fleet also had their own Battle sections as the Macross-5 fleet did. I mean, there are something like a dozen inhabited worlds that make up the Brisingr cluster... they can't all have been settle by one or two emigrant fleets. There should be at least one, possibly several Battle-class ships and maybe an old Macross-class or two. The Elysion should not be the only Macross-type ship in the cluster, or even the system... so where are they all? I know it's so far out in the space boonies you hear banjos during the fold jump, but key assets sent out with the 3rd Gen and later emigrant fleets can't have just gone walkabout... how do you lose a supercarrier a kilometer and a half long?
  18. Seto Kaiba
    ... nope, they actually did get it correct. Even the Japanese wiki confirms that it's 百戦百敗, 100 losses for 100 games (battles). Not really, no... and the statement that he always picks the losing side is in the sentence before that one. Kind of hard to argue that point... he's either just good enough to skulk away with his life intact, or he's managed to make luck a viable substitute for skill. That, plus his track record is lousy.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Um... that's not actually demonstrated in the episode. What the episode does, in fact, show is that some of the New UN Spacy forces were affected by Var syndrome when Heinz first began to sing the song of the wind. Some, not all. As to why, we have to look at the members of Walkure who apparently forgot that stopping Var outbreaks was literally their goddamn jobs until Arad ordered them to suppress the Var and Hayate had had the time to go back to the hangar and prep a new aircraft for himself. That's an awfully long time to let the enemy leverage its trump card unopposed. Still, as we know Kaos doesn't have nearly the number of aircraft shown coming to support the emigrant ship's evacuation of the civilians (or the warships seen in orbit escorting the ship out of the system). So, clearly Walkure was able to protect a good portion of the New UN Spacy from Heinz's song. They had other options besides a hopeless Leeroy Jenkins run at the Windermerean fleet in orbit of Al Shahal... but they got suckered bigtime. That lucky shot is all that prevented Johnson and Lady M's blunder from letting Windermere take the last planet in the cluster without a fight. (Captain Johnson seems to be in the territory of "better to be lucky than good".) Actually, we're shown that even Elysion's forces were not immune... but they CAN be protected by Walkure's fold songs (when they remember to actually sing them). Freyja even managed to drown out Heinz unamplified. That's a hell of a thing right there, considering Heinz was at his most powerful. That taken into account, there's a pretty solid argument that chasing after Gramia was the wrong thing to do... Eh... not all Macross-type warships are created (or armed) equally. Civilian-owned Macross-type warships like Kaos's Macross Elysion or SMS's Macross Quarter-class are much more lightly armed in terms of their macross cannons than the military's Macross-type warships. The original Macross-class had a very powerful heavy converging beam cannon with a range of a light second and enough power to kill multiple enemy ships with a near miss. The New Macross-class's cannon was a good deal more powerful than that, with the ability to kill over a dozen ships with a single shot and not even needing to directly hit most of them. The Macross Quarter and Macross Elysion's main guns seem to be much more reserved, able to destroy a smallish warship in one hit but otherwise not the sort of thing that might obliterate something like the Sigur Valens in one hit. The Elysion's macross cannon seems to be on par with one of the Sigur Valens' gun turrets. As far as the SDF-1 Macross and long odds, it's also worth remembering that the Macross had more than fifteen times the number of fighters the Macross Elysion apparently does, and its heavy converging beam cannon was on a whole other scale (being almost as big as the Elysion itself). Also, almost as important, is the fact that the Zentradi were not earnestly attempting to destroy the Macross for most of that time (whereas Gramia seems to have given Johnson a pass initially, and then tried to kill the hell out of him unsuccessfully). At the risk of pointing out an inconvenient fact, the show actually explicitly supports our contention that Captain Ernest Johnson is absolutely terrible at his job. We had, in the previous episode, a scene where Mr. Berger from Epsilon tells King Gramia about Johnson's reputation... that's he's known far and wide as the commander who loses 100 out of 100 battles. You don't get a reputation of "the man with a 100% failure rate" by being good at your job! You were right up to the point where you said they were trained to shoot to disable rather than kill... remember, Messer frequently chewed out Hayate and Mirage for doing that, saying that they didn't have the skill to do it without endangering themselves and that they should shoot to kill (as he does). Not quite... they sat around gawping at it instead of immediately opening fire. Not the best idea when the thing you're gawping at is an enemy fleet. Officially... Roid has kind of an obsession with glasses. You could call him a glasses otaku. If you look in earlier episodes, his study on Windermere has a HUGE display case full of pairs of glasses in different styles. His official bio on the website actually says he has a different pair for every occasion.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Swedish, eh? While I don't recall ever seeing an official explanation, I'd be willing to bet that what it was meant to be was an acronym in German. The manufacturer is a non-infringing "bland name" version of Mauser.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    The earliest example I know of, though it is not strictly a "head" turret, is the VF-9 Cutlass that first flew in 2021. (Due to the eccentricities of the VF-9's design, though they filled the same role as the coaxial guns normally found on the monitor turret they were actually situated on the right shoulder.) Usage of beam machine guns seems to have become the standard with the 4th Generation (Advanced) Variable Fighters like the VF-19, VF-22, and VF-171. Though I am not aware of anything that explicitly says the relationship is causal, but I strongly suspect the reason for the change occurring at that point is the adoption of the new and more efficient thermonuclear reaction burst turbine engines that were first introduced in that generation. (The VF-17 variants seen in Macross 7 had also been retrofitted to accept this improved engine technology.) Strictly speaking, the actual stopping power depends pretty much entirely on the energy output of the weapon... there shouldn't be no difference between a 5 megawatt laser and 5 megawatt particle beam in terms of the energy conveyed to the target under identical conditions, but particle beam or dimension beam guns may have an advantage against armor with better thermal resistance, since lasers would burn through the armor rather than ablating it. Hm... I suppose that's probably a simple case of dramatic license, as in they just couldn't find a way to work that weapon into a scene in a suitably dramatic fashion. Sometimes that stuff shows up later in video games, like the VF-19 being able to fire its wing glove guns in battroid mode... (which looks bizarrely like it's pelvic-thrusting at the enemy)
  22. Seto Kaiba
    You mean apart from having gone half a series without notching up a single win and his reputation, as discussed in-series, being that of a man with a rather impressive ability to consistently snatch defeat from the jaws of victory? Actually, when you said this another, even simpler solution occurred. We're told that the ship's conventional barrier is not operating at anything like full power when the ship is folding. Why didn't they just spawn-camp up in Ragna's orbit with a charged Macross Cannon and cap the sucker when he was defolding before Heinz could whip up a dimensional fault barrier? That'd settle matters really quick. You're not accounting for the continuing presence of Walkure, whose songs don't just knock Heinz on his butt but also prevent the NUNS garrison force from going Var. Four 20 kiloton reaction warheads all but totalled the Birdman when they went off inside the barrier. The most powerful reaction warhead yet mentioned is a good 500,000 times as powerful as the ones that messed the Birdman up. A Macross warship with a fully operational macross cannon, a New UN Spacy fleet in orbit, hundreds of variable fighters, and Walkure to prevent the troops from succumbing to Var syndrome. Everyone who keeps trying to shout me down on this keeps forgetting this episode showed us Walkure can overcome Heinz's amplified Song of the Wind and keep troops from going Var in a direct conflict. An eloquent argument, but you've missed one detail that undermines it.The ships escorting the Sigur Valens are Windermerean, not captured ships from the New UN Spacy. Their crews would not be under mind control, and they might even have enhanced abilities from the song of the wind. Johnson would've been charging blindly into a fight with the Sigur Valens and maybe a dozen escort ships that would be perfectly adept at shooting back. It goes without saying that a Macross warship is heavily armored, but there's only so much one can take and we've seen that the Sigur Valens' turrets are enough to knock big chunks off it. He might have done some damage, but odds are he'd have lost the Elysion, Hemera, and Aether and Walkure in the bargain.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Well, remember... Windermere is out in the galactic boonies, and they've already shown that they have dimension weapons and aren't afraid to commit genocide. Mind you, we've also been told that it takes a fair bit to get the federal New UN Forces to intervene. Odds are they'll take an active interest now that it's clearly beyond what the local schmucks can deal with. (Also, since the NUNS are supposed to be a pretty peace-loving lot, genocide probably wouldn't be their go-to solution. I doubt they'd look kindly on doing the same thing to Windermere that the Zentradi Army did to Earth.) Unlike your theory that the NUNS is working with Gramia "for teh evulz", mine is based on actual evidence. We know for a fact that a high fold receptor factor runs in Gramia's family... it's literally stated on the official website. We know that they can detect fold waves via their runes... because Heinz has been doing it all series long. We know that these things Gramia mysteriously clued in on despite not being told a damn thing by anyone produce very specific, measurable fold waves... because those facts were established before this series was made. We know Windermereans have heightened physical abilities including faster response times than humans... because it's stated right in the show. There is no evidence anywhere in the series that Gramia is receiving any kind of intelligence from the New UN Spacy or anyone else. Also, your contention that you can't fold at short notice is demonstrably untrue... it'd be a short-ranged fold, but it has been shown to be possible MANY times. (Hell, it was practically Gigile's signature move for half of Macross 7.) A few points: There's actually a pretty good track record of "kill it with nuclear fire" working just fine on ancient Protoculture doodads... like the Birdman, or the Fold Evil on Uroboros, or the ruins on Lux. Pretty much the only time it didn't work was Operation Stargazer, when Max tried to nuke Gepernich. Staying put when you have well-established defenses, a way to semi-effectively counter the enemy's main strategy, and the advantage of numbers is actually a pretty good tactic. It's called a defensive war, and we've been doing it for millennia. As this and previous episodes demonstrated and Kaname explicitly stated, pretty much anyone who doesn't have a fold receptor factor can be mind-controlled... as that short list is "Walkure + Hayate", by your own definition the attack was a suicidal one. Many battles have been won by a bold, decisive action by a well-informed commander with a sound grasp of tactics. Captain Johnson's botched preemptive strike at Al Shahal was some bush league Leeroy Jenkins BS... but that's what we'd expect from someone with an interstellar reputation for being bad at his job. He didn't know what his enemy's capabilities were, and he didn't have the force to actually overwhelm them. All he would've achieved if Gramia hadn't trolled him by stranding him well outside the battle zone would have been to die messily.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Actually, I can explain that one with minimal conjecture. Thus far, everything we've seen Gramia's rune react to when he displays prescient knowledge has involved fold waves in relatively close proximity to him. He detected Macross Elysion's fold jump to Al Shahal with a defold point practically on top of the Sigur Valens, and we know from Macross Frontier that folding ships produce measurable and detectable disruptions in super dimension space (fold waves) that can be used to track folding ships. A fold jump exchanges the space containing the ship with an equivalent volume of space at the destination, so even though the Macross Elysion was still 30 light years away when he sensed a fold jump, because the defold point was practically in his lap he would be able to detect the fold waves from the fold system's distortion of local space. Likewise, on Ragna, he detected the activation of a thermonuclear reaction warhead's trigger... the trigger mechanism of a thermonuclear reaction warhead uses a resonance fold effect to excite heavy quantum until it collapses fully into this dimension, crushing the warhead's hydrogen warhead material past the fusion point. More fold waves of a very specific variety as a precursor to detonation. Keith clearly sensed them as well, which is why he bailed before the bomb even properly went off. We know some Windermereans, particularly the royal family, have a fold receptor factor and can therefore receive, transmit, and interpret certain types of fold waves... and we also know via the White Knight with Black Wings manga that runes can transmit and receive emotions, so that may help. In all likelihood, Gramia didn't detect the Macross Elysion's dynamic entry because it defolded too far away for him to sense it (and Heinz is the only one with a booster) and made its dive on purely sublight power. Nah, he can't see the future... but he can sense fold waves. The official glossary on Macross.jp even confirms that fold receptor factors run in the royal family. Legendary screw-up status, maybe... it's gotta suck to go down in history as the guy who lost an entire star cluster to the galaxy's rowdy children. (Not as bad as Gramia, who at this point is probably going down in history as Space Napo-Hitler...)
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Yes, the prologue of Ep4 says that Var syndrome is encountered all around the galaxy. The problem is, even if you put yourself in the view of the characters with the knowns and unknowns they have to work with (as I did in my previous post) it's pretty obvious that Johnson and Lady M's counterattack plan was a stupid, suicidal, full-blown Leeroy Jenkins move. As far as surgical strikes... the Sigur Valens has never gone anywhere without its escorting fleet. If you attack that bloody thing, you're going to be under fire from all the ships supporting it.
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