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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Such extensive customization is not without precedent1, but it is a bit of a mechanical nightmare... It's more the sort of thing you'd expect from a Vanquish League air racer... admittedly unless the pilot were backed by a major corporation like Shinsei, General Galaxy, etc. they probably wouldn't be able to afford an AVF at all, let alone upgrade it like that. (Especially in light of arms export restrictions that prevent even emigrant fleet governments from building a VF-19 at its full performance.) 1. Two of the Macross the Ride Valkyries fit this mold... the aforementioned Sv-52γ Oryol flown by Magdalena Zielonaska had been upgraded with parts and technology from a variety of sources (including VF-17 engines) such that it was on an equal footing to a VF-171. Likewise, protagonist Hakuna Aoba's VF-0 Custom "Zeak" built by the Robbins Design Company was essentially a VF-0 upgraded piecemeal until it was technically more YF-25 than VF-0.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Most of the official sources I know of just say "in 2016". The Macross Chronicle mechanic sheet for Flashback 2012's SDF-2 Megaroad-01 cites "July 2016". The aforementioned musical greeting card from the Macross: Do You Remember Love? video game does give a specific date for the transmission of Minmay's last message to Earth... that being Thursday, the 7th of July, 2016. Presumably there was some time lag between the message being transmitted and it being received by Earth during which the ship actually disappeared.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Officially? The 1st large-scale long-distance emigrant fleet led by Megaroad-01 lost contact with Earth in 2016 somewhere near the galactic core and hasn't been heard from since. Nobody knows what happened to it, in-universe or otherwise. Richard Bilra, owner of the interstellar shipping concern Bilra Transportation, was hoping to locate Minmay and the Megaroad-01 on the 55th large-scale long-distance emigrant fleet's trip into the core, but nothing came of it. The UN Government covered up the fleet's disappearance, and it is still officially regarded as being en route. The Macross: Do You Remember Love? video game had a mail-in giveaway bonus that was a musical greeting card in the shape of the Protoculture tablet from the movie, with what purports to be the last known transmission from the fleet (penned by Lynn Minmay). It indicated that Megaroad-01 had found some kind of hole in space from which music was being broadcast, and was moving in to investigate. It's speculated that they may be somewhere in another galaxy.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    It's theoretically possible... though whether it's economical is another matter entirely. It's not a ringing endorsement of the idea that Macross Galaxy thought it'd be more effective to build a more durable pilot instead when they built VF-19C's for their garrison. By the time you were done redesigning and upgrading the VF-19 to accommodate that modernization, you'd be well into the same territory occupied by Vistula & Oder's Sv-52γ Oryol from Macross the Ride: "a custom Valkyrie of unknown origin produced to imitate the Sv-52".
  5. Seto Kaiba
    An excellent question to be sure... because the only shoki that's a rank/title that's leaping to mind means "Secretary". (Yes, that kind.) They're an organized knighthood, so they may be using some title related to training rather than a military rank... I'm looking into that now. EDIT: Poss. a variation on "Novice" and "Expert/Master"? That's still a great big "If", mate... their ranks sure as heck aren't Russian.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    ... and with two carriers for arms, there's the faint promise of a Macross rocket punch!
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Your guess is as good as mine... though if the YF-29's head is structured anything like the old VF-1's, then it is mostly empty space.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    The full version of "If I Love Only Once" has a bit of that kind of punch... I'd really like to get something along the lines of Infinity #7 or Lion from them though.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Their programs were able to advance relatively quickly because they didn't have to do the R&D or the testing themselves... they were stealing advancements from the UN Government as they became available and applying them. Not quite... the alien spaceship that would become the SDF-1 Macross crashed at the southern edge of the Bonin Islands (on the fictional island of South Ataria) on 17 July 1999 shortly after 18:15 (JST). By that time, the Soviet Union had dissolved and the Cold War had been over for 7 1/2 years.* Russia did, in fact, have access to overtechnology through legitimate channels. It was one of the six major nations that co-founded the overtechnology research and development institute OTEC, along with the United States, Britain, France, Germany, and Japan. It was also one of the major players in the Unification Government. * The series chronology written for the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross series in 1982 naturally did not account for the Soviet Union's dissolution in December 1991, and thus refer to both the Soviet Union and West Germany. Later versions of the series chronology from the 90's amended those to Russia and Germany to account for changes in real-world history that occurs before the start of the Macross story.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Per Macross Chronicle, this is kind of an Obi-Wan Kenobi "from a certain point of view" thing on D.D. and Nora's part. You see, D.D. and Nora are partisans opposed to the Unification Government, so they see the requirement that its member nations share technological advances derived from overtechnology with each other as the Unification Government stealing that technology from its creators. The technology was not truly stolen, it was simply shared with the other UN Government member nations. Macross Chronicle's coverage of the Anti-Unification Alliance's mecha clearly indicates that they were developed using data obtained from the UN Government's military programs. Some of that data and technology was acquired by through legitimate channels by defense contractors in nations that just happened to be in the Alliance's sphere of influence, but much of it was acquired through espionage or stolen by defectors. The Sv-51 is noted to have been developed quickly as the result of D.D. Ivanov himself handing over development data he stole from the VF-0 program when he defected to the Alliance forces, and the Octos is also mentioned as having been fast-tracked through development using data and technology stolen from the UN Government's Destroid program. It's rather unlikely that the engineers who defected from the UN Government to the various anti-government groups after the First Space War had any connection to the engineers who provided weapons to the Alliance "under the table" during the UN Wars. In all likelihood there is no actual direct connection between the old Sv-51/52 and the Sv-262.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    I remain endlessly amused by the fact that Star Trek has had multiple PhD'd science consultants on payroll, and maybe half of their technobabble is just thinly disguised "I'm going to try turning it off and on again". Reconfigure the primary power coupling indeed... (Someone needs to write Paramount and tell them we want an I.T. Crowd cameo in the new TV series...) Can that technology be retrofitted into an existing design? Explicitly yes. In fact, it was integrated into the joints of the ADR-04-Mk.XV Super Defender to improve the speed, responsiveness, and accuracy of its target-tracking capability. Now... whether it can be integrated into the transformation of an existing variable fighter is a great big unknown. I would assume that it can, but it would probably be a fairly major rework of the transformation system to accommodate the fact that some of the moving parts would no longer be in physical contact, which would no doubt require a good deal of recalibrating system timings and tolerances to make sure you don't have moving parts miss each other like ships in the night or run two identically-polarized components so close to each other that they jam the system up. The 5th Generation VFs owe the speed and stability of their transformations to the linear actuator, though the actual transformation configuration itself is down entirely to the practical matters of the airframe's design.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    It's certainly possible that there were Russians on Megaroad-04. However... it wouldn't be entirely accurate to say that the Anti-Unification Alliance's technology was Russian. In truth, their overtechnology was acquired via two means: the UN Government-mandated sharing of technological advances between its member states, and UN Forces research data obtained via espionage or theft. That technology was packaged by companies in Russia, Germany, and Israel that were either friendly to the Alliance or unscrupulous enough to profiteer from the war or use the alliance as guinea pigs to test their implementations of overtechnology in live combat. We know the New UN Gov't classifies the Draken III as "Sv-262", but we don't know how the Windermereans classify it... they don't seem to use English in their interfaces, so it's doubtful they use it in their designation systems.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    *nods* That's my pet theory, based on the Sv-262's GERWALK mode... I suspect it's based on the VF-171 units that were left behind when the New UN Spacy's garrison force pulled out. We'll know for sure sooner or later... but right now the idea that it's something the anti-human Windermereans got from human anti-government forces strikes me as unlikely.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, the moving parts are held in place and rearranged with electromagnetic fields, rather than being in direct contact with each other. Our technobabble is arguably nicked from Star Trek and Gundam when it isn't based on real world theoretical technologies...
  15. Seto Kaiba
    The Free York Liberation League probably wasn't an entirely native group, but in Windermere's case it would appear that they'd be the kind of party that renegade anti-government forces would WANT to support since they can present a credible threat to the New UN Spacy's regional garrison forces at the very least. That is, of course, assuming that an unsubstantiated rumor from 2ch is actually accurate and the Windermerean fighters were in fact developed by engineers from Shinsei, General Galaxy, etc. who defected to anti-government forces in prior decades. Perhaps "Sv" is just how the New UN Spacy designates the fighters that were developed by factions other than the New UN Gov't... something like how the US military classified US-operated Russian and Chinese fighters under Project Constant Peg.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, for a while anyway... after the government reorganized the chief anti-government threat was actually the leftover bits and pieces of Latence that escaped the purge after their failed coup d'etat in 2051. Ironically, the one splinter of that Earth supremacist group we've seen was actually a Zentradi-led affair with a leader whose enthusiasm for Earth culture put even Vrlitwhai to shame. The governmental reorg supposedly gave almost all of the anti-government groups exactly what they wanted on a silver platter... so it's actually kind of surprising that we're now back to a New UN Gov't member world accusing the central government of unequal trade and declaring a war of independence. (What with Ep6's hints that the accusations of unequal trade are a smokescreen for something else, it's possible the other worlds in the Brisingr cluster spotted that one for a load of BS.)
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Not really, no... like the power generation system, it's mostly mentioned in the marginal notes. (Like on page 36.) We know that it eliminated many of the moving parts in the transformation system outright, which were often the most difficult to repair, the most delicate, or the most prone to wear and damage. That alone is said to have greatly simplified maintenance, and improved durability and reliability.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    I'm irrationally irritated that I like long-haired Freyja better...
  19. Seto Kaiba
    If there's one comprehensive explanation for the VF-19 and VF-22 supposedly being extremely expensive to build and operate, I haven't seen it. Various reasons are given in bits and pieces as part of the coverage of the various models of Valkyrie that supplanted them in the roles of main variable fighter, with most ultimately boiling down to it being a consequence of the fighter's excessively high performance... either in terms of the robustness of the materials or systems necessary to stand up to the high g-forces, the maintenance requirements involved in keeping those expensive systems from breaking down under all that high-g abuse, or the training costs involved in finding and acclimatizing pilots to operating under those high g-force loads. There are also one or two vague mentions of the requirement for high all-purposefulness that were either unreasonable or at least incompatible with the requirements for high performance. At the end of the day, it wasn't a fiscal beheading... it was a monetary death of a thousand cuts that made the VF-19 and VF-22 too pricey to operate in significant numbers. The joint Shinsei-General Galaxy YF-24 program and Shinsei's YF-24 Evolution program were basically a twenty year effort to find workarounds for the problems that had hamstrung 4th Generation Variable Fighter programs. The linear actuator system removed a lot of the most fragile, high-maintenance moving parts from the cost equation, the ISC solved the g-force problem at the pilot level, and EX-Gear improved control stability and reduced training times. The description of its operation in official sources is unhelpfully brief... but the gist of it seems to be that it smooths out the peaks and valleys in the curve of the pilot's experienced g-forces, buffering and then slowly releasing that energy back to the airframe in a controlled fashion. It sort of spreads out those g's so that the pilot doesn't experience a level of g-forces that could inhibit their control of the aircraft, cause injury, or damage the aircraft itself. I'm not certain if there's a level where the ISC is on hot standby instead of operating. There is a very detailed explanation of the ISC in Master File, but I have not translated that section yet.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    It's just one of Macross's favorite little callbacks... protagonists have been using "borrowed" Valkyries as civilians to save young women since the original series. ... so, let's go ahead and make the point that the complete opposite of that is explicitly true in pretty much every Macross series. Hikaru spent most of his first outing in a Valkyrie crashing into buildings, falling over, and generally making an arse of himself despite being a trained and highly-skilled stunt pilot. Shin Kudo likewise spends most of his time training for a transformable fighter falling over, crashing, and generally finding new ways to ensure the Asuka II's deck crew hate his guts. Hayate Immelman in Macross Delta has the good fortune to jump into a Valkyrie that was specifically designed to be easy for even average pilots to handle, but he explicitly notes that the controls (for battroid mode) are not much different from the controls for the Workroid he piloted at his day job in the Al Shahal spaceport. His fighter mode operation is lamentably bad, and he's still getting sh*t for it from his fellow pilots and the mechanics several episodes later. All of Macross's other protagonists came into their respective shows as highly-trained pilots with loads of prior experience operating Valkyries. Can't be because Macross is a Japanese series and music has always been an integral part of Macross's story... ... he's a fighter pilot, named after a famous German flying ace, whose love interest is a Jenius that flies a red plane. Do we really need to explain the obvious implications here? ... what? Because we've seen enough Macross shows to have a good feel for the tropes used in certain situations... This is a Macross series after all... Macross doesn't do irredeemable villains.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Rod Baltemar is a pilot attached to the New UN Spacy Special Forces 815th Independent Squadron "Havamal". His callsign is Odin-1, his rank is Captain1, and he's the right-hand man to Havamal's commander: Colonel Ushio Todo. 1. In the Army/Air Force sense, not the Navy sense. 2. The system in which the emigrant planet Sephira is located, originally colonized by Macross-4.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    It was never used to colonize Eden to begin with... that's a fairly straightforward chronology error in Macross Chronicle, and is actually contradicted by remarks in an earlier part of the same sheet which contain the correct information. The graphic in Macross Frontier that likely prompted the error has many inaccuracies, in this case the problem being its omission of the (initially) more numerous short-range emigrant fleets. It was one of those fleets, which started launching 04/2013, that discovered and colonized the newly-discovered planet Eden. After all, it'd be rather difficult for Megaroad-04 to have done the deed when she wasn't launched until two years after the colony had been established. It'd also be a colossal waste of resources to use a large-scale long-distance emigrant ship to colonize a planet that's not even twelve light years away, which is a milk run by fold travel standards. Those ships were built to locate habitable worlds hundreds or thousands of light years away. SDF-5 Megaroad-04 was apparently the overachiever of the family, wandering something like a hundred thousand light years before finding Windermere.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    They're flight platoons, so presumably not more than 4-5 aircraft apiece. When they're shown coming up from the vicinity of the Aether, there appear to be six of them in total (3 in each?). Related to that... I noticed that the name of the long-range radar window is "HIBIKI.SYS". I wonder if this is a Macross II nod?
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Nope... not as such. Usually stuff that Kawamori directly contributed to is considered to be "official", but Macross runs mainly on broad strokes continuity rather than any kind of rigidly defined canon. The Variable Fighter Master File books are unusual in that they explicitly disclaim their status as not being part of the Macross official setting on the credits page of each book. Various details in the books have been independently corroborated in official sources, but the lion's share is unofficial. (Some consider these highly detailed sources that are occasionally corroborated by official sources to have a kind of unofficial expanded universe status.)
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, it looks like they might have a bulkier version of the self-rescue ejection seat that was installed in the Block 6 and later VF-1 Valkyrie... where verniers were fitted to the chair itself (on a pair of swing arms) to enable it to maneuver in a limited fashion. This is probably the first time they've officially acknowledged propellant limitations on a Valkyrie in-series... normally that kind of thing is purely the province of the printed material. Probably not loads of additional fuel in the boosters, considering they seem fairly small and are probably mostly missiles. Anti-government sentiment was by no means limited to only those who fought in the UN Wars... the Feios Valkyrie and Queadluun-Alma are credited to designers who defected to rogue Zentradi groups in later decades rather than die-hards from the long-defunct Anti-Unification Alliance. There was still some discrimination against Zentradi in the decades after the First Space War, and there's nothing that stirs up anti-establishment sentiment quite like legitimized discrimination.
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