Seto Kaiba

The VF-11 has a gun pointing forward in fighter mode... it's a high-powered 30mm rotary cannon firing Anti-ECA shells. It's an extraordinarily effective weapon. The VF-31's forearm guns are impractical for their own reasons, being that the gun has to rotate 180 degrees to remain usable and being a railgun firing high velocity hard rounds means the weapon's ammunition is aggressively limited by its mounting out on the forearm. Energy weapons would've been more practical, given that they won't run out of ammo. (Xaos is sort of saved in this respect because their engagements are necessarily short.) Um, no.I'm gonna go ahead and operate on the assumption you're not super familiar with the in-depth details of Macross's tech setting. No problem with that, as there's that language barrier. We're here and happy to help lend clarity. There are four types of energy weaponry in the Macross setting. You're familiar with lasers, and particle beams, and plasma weapons. The forearm gun mounts on the VF-22 belong to the fourth family... dimensional weapons, which are also known as super dimension energy weapons or heavy quantum weapons. To produce their destructive effects, these weapons use an exotic form of matter called heavy quantum which exists simultaneously in fold space and our three-dimensional universe. When heavy quantum is excited with a resonance fold, it can drop completely into three-dimensional space... where its mass is so huge that its own gravity will crush it until it fuses. This principle is employed in beam weapons in one of three ways: Heavy quantum reaction cannons excite masses of heavy quantum until the gravity compresses it past the fusion threshold, and focuses the resulting fusion explosion into a hypervelocity beam of fusion plasma made of impossible extradimensional matter. The shot carries incredible kinetic force and heat, a one-two punch so nasty that in many cases a near miss is sufficient to inflict significant damage. This type of weapon goes by a bunch of different names, to reflect the different ways the heavy quantum is focused. This form is the most common type, ubiquitous in starship beam turrets, the colossal "main gun" type applications (e.g. the Macross Cannons of the Battle-class), and in the 4th Generation and later VFs for built-in guns and coaxial guns. Heavy quantum cannons stop short of exciting the heavy quantum into fusing with itself and instead use the fold effect of lob a bolt of super-high mass heavy quantum downrange where the impossible mass moving at speed conveys a kinetic punch that makes the heaviest depleted uranium shell feel distinctly inadequate. This type of weapon is a newer development, used on the gunpods of the VF-27, YF-29, YF-30, and VF-31, the VF-25's Tornado Pack, and also on the SMS Macross Quarter's main gun. Micro-Dimension Eater beam weaponry utilizes a unique form of heavy quantum that can only be produced using fold quartz. The mass is so impossibly huge that it produces a fold effect around itself and collapses back into fold space. It's essentially firing a beam made up of micro black holes which crush the matter they encounter and draw it into fold space. This weapon is one that was developed during the Vajra war, and was employed in the YF-29's turret, in the VF-27's gunpod, and the VF-171EX's beam cannon. The VF-22's forearm guns are in the "Heavy Quantum reaction cannon" type, and use fold effects to fire beams of extradimensional fusion plasma. The official material supports my point, and mentions the Rhea/56 model has basically pushed the enhanced design to its limits... to the point where it needed extra bolt-on propellant tanks, a more potent reactor, and a control system redesign. There's nothing to indicate the Q-Rau is anything like as uber as you contend that it is. We've seen that Q-Raus piloted by elite top aces are equal to the capabilities of VFs piloted by elite top aces, but there's no indication that fodder-piloted units exhibit "game-breaking" performance. "Railguns" is what the official material calls them, so that's what they are. I'd expect overtechnology materials have solved the barrel wear problem that plagues modern railguns decades before Macross Delta, given that some overtechnology materials have been described as being 100 times as resilient as steel at any given thickness (or better).Edit: The third section sounded a bit snarky on review, so I've revised it to the helpful tone I intended. Sorry for that.

That's hard (impossible) to say... given that we don't know how much energy a fold wave or fold dimensional resonance system produces in dimensional energy conversion. Several gigawatts, at least, but we have no frame of reference to compare the two.The only acknowledged area of difference between a fold wave system and a fold dimensional resonance system is that the latter, when activated, lets the VF it was mounted in fly straight through fold fault barriers. (Which, when you think about it, would be a huge asset in Macross Delta.) You implied a casual relationship between the VF-11 having no built-in forward gun and the VF-14's VF-4-style beam cannons. Considering the ones in the VF-22 are converging energy cannons, and therefore are using basically the same technology as the VF-31's gunpod, I'd say calling it "unimportant" is a grave misjudgment. (As to how they engineer those, given that they're converging energy cannons, a few different possibilities present themselves... possibly as simple as setting the directionality of the resonance fold effect exciting the heavy quanta, or a deflection field may be put at one end of the barrel to contain the reaction. A more complex answer might be one power supply which feeds two barrels installed back to back.) Half-correct.The latest-model Queadluun-Rhea (Rhea/56) has maneuverability performance that is only moderately overshadowed by the low end of what 5th Generation Variable Fighters can do... but it's worth remembering that's the very latest model the Rhea has, and that the Rhea itself is a significant improvement over the Q-Rau model it replaced in terms of engine power, maneuverability, armament, etc. Your comparison's a based on a bit of a faulty assumption, I'm afraid. The VF-19 and VF-22 certainly seemed to be at least on par with Queadluun-Rau units in Macross 7, and they're certainly a hell of a lot more defensible. (The Q-Rau's what you'd call a glass cannon, which is one reason the New UN Forces insisted the reproduction plan General Galaxy led include improved defensive capability and survivability for the operator.) At this juncture, it may be wise to briefly digress to talk about the actual defense procurement situation in the New UN Government in the late 2050's and 2060's.After being reorganized into the New UN Government and New UN Forces, a lot of the government and military's power were devolved to the individual fleets and planets that were member states of that government. Kawamori has, in the past, compared the New UN Government to something more along the lines of the EU... the individual member nations have a good deal more autonomy in governing and maintaining their own militaires than they did before. Those local militaries maintained by the individual fleets and planets are still called the "New UN Forces", but they're kind of like a militia or national guard reserve, while the "real" New UN Forces are the federal forces maintained by the central New UN Government to keep the peace. The individual local governments more or less have a free hand to decide how they're going to arm their forces. Some go with monkey model versions of the federal forces main VF that they buy (or buy rights to produce) from Earth's government. Some went in for an all-Ghost air force in an effort to take the risk to human(oid) life and limb out of the picture. Some (very foolish) had gone full pacifist. Several governments have gone in for developing some new VFs of their own based on the specs shared by the New UN Government, and the fleets and worlds that do that usually seem to have a plan to sell their new toy to their allies. These fleets and local government forces aren't small by any means, and since VFs are the default currency of defense even the smaller production runs done for main fighters would be massive by today's standards. They made over 5,400 VF-1 Valkyries in seven years... that's more VF-1 Valkyries than the USAF has planes of all stripes, and that was one of the smallest production runs. Your typical medium-sized emigrant fleet fields over 2,400 variable aircraft... no small feat in itself, but a large fleet like Macross Frontier or Galaxy could have a military escort fleet five times the size. A "small" production run to supply a single large-scale emigrant fleet's forces could still number a good ten thousand fighters. We do know, however, that the VF-27 was far from the only fighter flown by the Macross Galaxy corporate army... but we also know Macross Galaxy weren't the only ones building them. Uroboros Hunter's Guild chairwoman Mei Ririon had a VF-27 for her personal use in 2060. Officially, they're railguns... but that makes them kinetic energy weapons. Technically the beam gun is too, since it's firing a beam of heavy quantum, which relies on kinetic energy to deal damage. You're drawing a conclusion based on an assumption.Per Kawamori in the 2016 Spring issue of Great Mechanics G, the reason the Xaos forces are armed pretty much exclusively with short-range weaponry is because their tactics focus on recovering pilots sticken with Var syndrome instead of killing them from afar. That's all that is. (Though Messer apparently did not get the memo about not killing.) As far as the number of hardpoints, it's a safe bet it's meant to have four... and the art department just screwed up. The Siegfried custom version and the YF-30 both have four. (Mind you, the VF-31A/B type also has missile bays in the legs instead of multidrones, so there's that too.) The wings have never been dead weight... they contain fuel tanks, cooling systems, verniers, and other important things. That's handled by the super-AI avionics, not the pilot... so probably not an issue. The VF-25 was deployed on multiple worlds by 2060 as well... SMS Sephira had VF-25s in Macross 30.

Exactly what's going on with the crater at Scarfell isn't clear (yet), since normally dimension eater warheads don't leave behind a space-time disruption like that. I would guess that there may have been more ruins at Carlyle, and what we're seeing in the crater is the severed energy conduits that connect ruins to the planet's core. Going over your post here in detail... I won't say you're completely wrong, but you're darn close to it. Almost every factoid you cited is incorrect. This is mostly incorrect.The UN Forces originally planned to adopt the winning design from the Project Super Nova competition as their next main variable fighter. The decision that the UN Forces brass made to go with an unmanned fighter instead came along at the last minute, a decision that was rescinded almost as quickly thanks to an unpleasant PR fiasco caused by some monstrously irresponsible (illegal) stuff the Venus Sound Factory did that led to Sharon Apple going berserk and taking control of the AIF-X-9 Ghost prototype in 2040. The YF-19 was declared the winner of Project Super Nova and slated to become the next main fighter of the UN Forces... but its adoption, and that of the special forces VF-22, was pulled due to several factors: The YF-19 and YF-21 independently penetrating Earth's defenses made the UN Government uneasy about the idea of such powerful aircraft being in widespread use. Arms export restrictions were tightened as a result, limiting the ability of emigrant fleets and private military contractors to purchase and employ the VF-19 and VF-22 in their forces. Emigrant fleets and PMCs could only employ an assortment of reduced-capability variants ("Monkey Models") in relatively tiny numbers, effectively demoting the VF-19 to a second Special Forces VF model alongside the VF-22. The high maneuverability of the VF-19 and VF-22 exceeded the endurance of average pilots, which caused numerous accidents and crashes during simulated air combat maneuver training with the new fighters early in their adoption by the UN Forces. Consequentially, plans to use the fighters for their rank-and-file pilots were scrubbed because of the loss of control problem. Shinsei put out several refinements to the VF-19 in an attempt to address this problem in the 2nd Mass Production type (VF-19F/S), but ultimately never succeeded in its goal of making the VF-19 an aircraft average pilots could handle easily. That led to the UN Government soliciting bids for a replacement... a contract that ended up awarded to General Galaxy for the VF-171. The VF-19 and VF-22 had a high purchase cost and relatively high cost of maintenance, making them unattractive for operation in large numbers. At no point have the engines, weapons, etc. been identified as factors in its being passed over for adoption by the (New) UN Forces. Indeed, the same style of engines and weapons were used in the VF-17 and VF-171. Whooboy, WRONG.The YF-24 Evolution was the Earth/Federal New UN Forces' planned 5th Generation Main Variable Fighter, the replacement for the 4th Gen VF-171. Under galaxy law its specs were shared (after some censorship) with the emigrant fleets and the colonized planets of the reorganized New UN Government could develop their own 5th Generation VFs independently. The YF-25, YF-26, YF-27, YF-29, and YF-30 were all developed from the YF-24 by individual emigrant fleets or planets. Some, like the 25, 26, and 27, were the intended replacements for the VF-171 for their respective fleets (the Frontier, Olympia, and Galaxy fleets respectively), while others (YF-29 and YF-30) were technology demonstrators and proof-of-concept aircraft. On paper, all but the YF-30 were developed with the goal of being able to successfully oppose Vajra in an armed conflict... and all but the YF-29 and YF-30 were intended to be a mass-production main variable fighter to replace the VF-171. From Variable Fighter Master File: VF-25, the YF-25, YF-26, and YF-27 were all developed for the same inter-fleet joint development program known as Project Triangler. The winning design was to become the main fighter of all 3 fleets, but Macross Galaxy backed out of it in favor of the VF-27 they'd made illicit improvements to using stolen data and illegally pushed into production and Macross Olypmia and Frontier declared the YF-25 the winner. As Macross Frontier indicated, the VF-25 was in operational evaluation prior to its adoption as the new main fighter of the Macross Frontier fleet in 2059. The Master File writeup indicates that the VF-25 was in service in large numbers by 2065. The VF-25 was arguably the most versatile, but it was also the lowest overall performer of the completed 5th Generation designs to date. The advances you're crediting solely to the VF-25 are present on ALL 5th Generation VFs. Nothing in any official source credits the VF-25 itself with being tempermental, only the Tornado Pack itself. *sigh* Wrong again.The Frontier fleet New UN Spacy built a limited number of VF-171EX Nightmare Plus EX units as a stopgap measure to improve their fleet of VF-171's, since SMS had run off with most of the low rate initial production block VF-25s... the Nightmare Plus EX was only deployed to elite pilots. The VF-25 was still planned to be the fleet's official next main fighter once it entered mass production... and, as Master File has it, did so after the war ended, becoming the main fighter of several emigrant fleets including Frontier and Olympia, and also used by planetary defense forces on Sewell and other worlds. This particular point exists pretty much entirely in your head, I'm afraid. Um... so, I'm assuming you weren't aware that the Shinsei VF-11 Thunderbolt III and General Galaxy VF-14 Vampire were rival designs developed at the same time? The connection you're inferring doesn't exist.Much like the VF-19 and VF-22, the VF-11 and VF-14 were developed at the same time as candidates for the next main fighter to replace the VF-4. The Project Nova competition ended in a victory for the VF-11, which became the next main VF of the UN Forces. The VF-14 still found a market for itself with emigrant planets out on the galactic frontier thanks to its space cruising performance. ... lolwut?You HAVE seen the VF-22, right? That also has forearm-mounted guns and shields, and it's literally modeled on the Queadluun-Rau in both stylistic and technological terms. The VF-22 has the Q-Rau's inertia vector control system protecting the pilot from g-forces, and its battroid mode is a dead ringer for the Queadluun-Rau it was modeled on. ... you do know that all of the 5th Generation VFs are using technologies that were previously tested in other prototypes, right? The YF-24 validated the ISC and EX-Gear and a bunch of other stuff. The VF-27's BDI was validated on both the YF-21 and VF-22HG, etc. etc.You're making a grand declaration that has no actual basis in fact. ... you missed the memo that modular radomes have been a thing for two full fighter generations by this point? Even the RVF-171 is literally just a VF-171 with an Aegis Pack mounted. The Kairos is late to the party, being at best the fourth 5th Generation VF to be in mass production. Depending on when the VF-24 went into production, that would make the VF-27 the first or second, the VF-25 the third, and the VF-31 the fourth.To date, the only 5th Generation VF identified as unsuitable for mass production is the YF-29... due to the monstrous costs involved in securing sufficient fold quartz to build the fold wave system and other related technologies. I'm also unsure why you're praising the Kairos for abandoning kinetic weapons when it still maintains two solid ammo cannons on the forearms. We're certainly not seeing the Kairos being used to its best advantage either, given that Xaos is less a real PMC and more a glorified bodyguard detail for the members of Walkure. They're distinctly under-armed compared to a military unit.

IMO, it's pretty clear Xaos (official subs spelling) was an unholy mess even with Messer and Mikumo at the top of their game... they're not a super-elite unit, they're the Wal-Mart of mercenaries. Name-dropping Messer will always fall flat. Kaname may care about him, but it's almost impossible for the audience to because his one character trait is that the stick up his ass had a stick up its ass.

I'm having trouble remembering exactly which sheet, but IIRC in Chronicle the Birdman the Protoculture left behind on Earth had a synthetic fold quartz-based power system (probably a dimensional energy conversion system)... It's highly probable that most of the fold quartz in the Protoculture ruins is fold quartz the Protoculture produced themselves rather than hunting the Vajra, whom they allegedly revered.

I did, just a few hours ago.

The Vajra hive encountered by the Macross Frontier fleet has folded off to parts unknown, but they may not be the only Vajra hive in the Milky Way galaxy. Vajra were encountered by SMS in 2060 on Uroboros, and the Frontier series notes that there are Vajra hives located out in other galaxies as well (and they do migrate for mating).Such as it is, if you cross the incredibly suicidal approach of "let's hunt Vajra" off a fold quartz shopping list, the two remaining options to humanity are to pillage worlds where there are large amounts of fold quartz left behind by Vajra hives (as on the former Vajra world the Frontier fleet settled) or by the Protoculture in ruins, or finding a way to synthesize it as the ancient Protoculture did. Synthesizing fold quartz may be a ways off, but it seems that a lot of planets with ruins do indulge in pillaging those ruins for fold quartz. As far as fold boosters go, it's only the "super" fold booster that uses fold quartz. In the overwhelming majority of applications, the material of choice is fold carbon: the low purity synthetic equivalent used in practically every piece of Human and Zentradi overtechnology to implement super dimension physics. Humanity can synthesize fold carbon in industrial quantities, so there's no obstacle to building as many fighters and fold boosters as the budget will permit. Fold Quartz, however, is both a scarce and restricted material, so the construction of fighters and systems that depend on fold quartz is not as sustainable in large numbers for reasons of cost, material scarcity, and legal restrictions.

Strictly speaking, that's a 3-mode variable fighter that's been stripped down and disarmed in a more literal sense than usual for air racing... it's not 2-mode by design.It's debatable whether the Neo Glaug counts, since that's an unmanned VA-110 Variable Glaug, which was a three-mode VF. (It's also a case of the design history being backward, since the Neo Glaug appeared first, production-wise, IIRC.) Nah, nothing so fancy... just a crazy R&D engineer whose love of giant robots led him to start hunting down, importing, and translating Macross books and other stuff back in '01. I do the backend web hosting stuff and some book-hunting, translation, and technical consultation for Mr March's Macross Mecha Manual when I'm not playing mad scientist at my day job.

Thus far, we've been presented with information about most of the branches of the (New) UN Forces... and all indications are that they mostly use the same equipment, though it seems like the planetside defense forces have largely taken a backseat to the space forces given the space-based focus of war. ... since when? We see, right in the original series, that the UN Forces began producing the Regult for their own use shortly after capturing the Esbeliben AWDAP facility from the Zentradi. General Global himself toured the production line not long after its capture. Even Macross the Ride mentions (New) UN Forces-use Regults, and Frontier's backstory material mentions the (New) UN Forces keeping several other types of Zentradi mecha in service for decades after the war. Arguably... though it's worth noting that they were also not particularly successful designs, and weren't (New) UN Forces designs either. That's pretty much the trajectory of the destroid family's decline. Initially, they were developed for surface-based planetary defense on the assumption that the enemy would want to land troops and hold terrain. When the final battle of the First Space War rather explosively put that notion to rest, the destroid's operational role was reduced to shipboard air defense and policing rogue Zentradi on Earth's surface. From there, the destroids basically lost that last niche when the UN Spacy's stealth warship designs went into service and they got replaced by more cost-effective and stealthy integrated point-defense guns and missile launchers. The ships just aren't big enough for destroids to have any practical advantage over the less expensive fixed emplacements. From then on, the remaining destroids were quietly surplussed out of service and became construction equipment, or fell into the hands of anti-government forces. As far as 2-mode variable craft, there are a few of those. The Feios Valkyrie from Macross VF-X and Macross VF-X2 is one. There's also the VF-X-3 Medusa from Macross: Remember Me, and the Macross II OVA's VC-079 Civilian Valkyrie and VF-XX Zentradi Valkyrie. Usually it's GERWALK mode that gets jettisoned, with the VC-079 being the sole exception I know of. It has no Battroid mode instead.

You've got some false assumptions in here, so that may be part of why... Valkyries are expensive, yes... but they're also markedly more versatile than Destroids, and at least as resilient (if not more so). Properly equipped, they can also bring much more firepower to bear. I'll confess I have no idea where you've come up with the idea that Valkyries are not suited for extended periods of land warfare. Not only is Battroid mode explicitly and repeatedly identified as a mode intended for land warfare use in practically every Macross publication to discuss the three-mode configuration, there's nothing to indicate that they aren't perfectly suited to operating on the ground for as long as their fuel holds out (hundreds of hours). We've seen plenty of examples of VFs acting as ground forces in Macross, especially for patrol and security purposes going all the way back to the original series. Macross Delta's titular main unit even uses a VF specifically optimized for ground combat inside cities. Actually, until Macross Frontier and Macross Delta showed us emigrant forces using refurbished old-model destroids for their ground forces, the general line was that Destroids had gone the way of the dinosaur and been replaced by Valkyries and more conventional armored fighting vehicles. It was only Macross II: Lovers Again that showed the UN Forces still using Destroids in the decades following the First Space War. If Destroids are still viable/practical for ground forces, one has to wonder why there have been no new models of destroid developed in the last half-century... and why airbases on planets seem to prefer using VFs for their ground patrols instead of destroids. The only times we've seen destroids in action in later decades was either as targets on the practice range, or damn near ancient models used by emigrant forces which chose them for special reasons... like Frontier wanting a mecha to operate inside its dome system without ruining the pavement. Al Shahal seems to have been the only world in the Brisingr cluster to use them, and they got pasted pretty damn quick by the Marines and their Zentradi mecha. Effective? Maybe. Effectively unnecessary? Pretty much. The problem with destroid practicality is that, for what the New UN Forces normally expects to fight, if the battle in space has been lost then the war is lost. The Zentradi won't bother with a planetary invasion, they just bombard the surface into a sterile desert and go about their business. Mecha in general aren't particularly well-suited to fighting miclone troops, so if they're fighting other human forces arriving from orbit that'll mean the most likely thing the enemy will send is... you guessed it... VFs. That makes VFs for ground troops more practical for defense, since they can intercept the enemy before they reach urban areas and fight equally well on the ground and in the air. Mobility is king on the Macross battlefield, and destroids just don't have that.

All righty... sitting down to view this one on the BIG screen. My vote is Negative. If I want a dustbin full of rambling, disjointed, nonsensical exposition upended into my face, I'll put on Metal Gear.

They already did the Sv-51 in the VF-0 book. Same here! I'm glad I waited to ship a bunch of other stuff... the Sazabi Master Archive, my Evolution Toy VF-2SS Faerie and Nex types, and now Master File.

The Mayan priestesses were for the purpose of maintaining (and, if necessary, activating) the Birdman, as stated in Macross Chronicle.

Maybe so, but its utility in the field is gonna be a lot lower than a Valkyrie's, and the cost'll be higher than the average Destroid's. The whole selling point of Destroids is that they're dirt cheap (old tech materials for the original series suggest the Mk.VI Tomahawk was only marginally more expensive than an inflation-adjusted M1 Abrams MBT) and therefore you can build loads of them. Well, that's actually the reason most Destroids went away... the niche they offered could be filled pretty easily by a VF, especially one equipped with an Armored Pack. The Konig Monster was pretty much the sole example of "we can't have a regular VF do this"... and SMS's attempts to make the Konig more battlefield-worthy for the 2050's was RUINOUSLY expensive, though undeniably effective. They gave it the same armor material as the VF-25's Armored Pack, which is so pricy that the stock VF-25 only uses it for the forearm shield and the Armored Pack itself is restricted to ace pilots only. The Super Defender aside, there was a terrorist group in Macross M3 that did that with an old Mk.II Monster series unit... they upgraded its reactor and equipped it with a barrier system to make it more resilient.

They build replacements using the manufacturing facilities and void docks that are part of the emigrant ship itself... and/or the resources of the dedicated factory ships that accompany some fleets, nearby factory satellites in New UN Forces hands, etc. It doesn't come up in the Macross 7 series proper, but the Macross-7's City-7 actually has dock space for THREE Battle-class carriers... the main dock on the prow, and two maintenance docks on the underside of the City ship. The accompanying factory ships are able to mine asteroids and refine materials to build pretty much anything, and are perfectly capable of constructing new warships of most classes from scratch in surprisingly short amounts of time. Depends on how badly the fleet gets mauled. Some fleets have been lost due to fold accidents or just plain fell off the map, and all the (New) UN Government and its military can really do is throw up their hands and go "Oh well". Fleets that are too badly mauled to continue operating independently can get merged into a nearby emigrant fleet that's still in fighting condition, or taken in by the nearest emigrant planet as happened with the survivors of Macross-5 after it was destroyed by the Varauta forces and rescued by Macross-7. If there's an enemy that they can retaliate against that destroys or cripples a fleet, the federal military may opt to send its own forces in or gather reinforcements from other nearby fleets and worlds to kick the teeth of the offending party in. In a couple cases of staggering good luck, a few fleets that have been downed by accidents have had the fortune to blunder right into an inhabitable planet anyway... like Supika III and Windermere. The technology is pretty much omnipresent... it's used for everything from VF-mounted beam weapons and gun pods right on up the line to the largest starship-mounted turrets and standalone cannons. It's mostly a question of scale. A large-scale super dimension energy weapon like a Macross Cannon is a big, unwieldy thing that takes a long time to charge, draws obscene amounts of power, has a significant downtime between shots for cooling, and takes up a hideous amount of space in your starship. Reaction weapons are, in most cases, a lot more efficient and versatile when you need an earth-shattering kaboom, so the truly huge super dimension energy cannons are made in relatively modest numbers for things like anti-fleet use because the size of the ship needed to accommodate a weapon of that size. That there was somebody, or more likely several somebodies, somewhere in the UN Spacy brass who reviewed Basara as a Project M candidate and said "this anti-authoritarian, autistic arsehole is exactly what we need to evaluate potential weaponizations of the Minmay Attack". Basara is just such a tosser that it's hard to believe ANYONE sanctioned Max giving him (via Ray) a state of the art fighter. Tough call. As a translator, I'd probably have to say it's the tech manuals for the various Macross titles. Those are written with such an obscene wealth of detail that you'd almost swear you could build a VF and make it halfway practical. They get into EVERYTHING, even the effect Overtechnology Materials (OTMat) had on the design of threaded fasteners used in the VF-1's construction.

It's hard to say, given that so little is actually given in terms of specifics about how the fold wave system and fold wave projectors work. I would assume that, given that a fold wave system is necessary to make fold wave projectors work, the fighter with the more extensive fold wave system probably would have superior fold wave projector output. As far as we know, the YF-29 Durandal tops that list with four super-high quality "philosopher's stone" fold quartz nodes in its fold wave system (1 per engine). Like the Chronos, the Siegfried seems to keep its fold quartz nodes inside the airframe, but it's using the less advanced fold wave system instead of a fold dimensional resonance system like the Chronos had. The YF-29 actually has them visible on the outside of the hull, one on each outer engine and one just above the wing root. We've known that for a long time... to a certain extent, those smaller habitat ships seem to have evolved into the support infrastructure ships that accompanied the Macross-7 fleet. The "Philosopher's Stone" refers to super-high purity, extremely large (~1000ct) cuts of fold quartz that can only be obtained from the bodies of certain types of Vajra. Later productions added the caveat that suitably large and pure pieces of fold quartz can sometimes be found in Protoculture ruins. Apparently building a fold wave system requires multiple fold quartz gems at Philosopher's Stone levels of size and purity to work, seemingly one for crystal for each engine. (The YF-29 has four.) The fold wave projectors can use smaller, or less pure, pieces of fold quartz which are a bit less difficult (by which I mean "less life-threatening") to obtain. Yeah, one way Destroids are economized for production in large volumes is they use a single reactor (or a single main reactor with a low-power backup). That's not to say that Destroids can't (or haven't) been upgraded with better reactors capable of utilizing high-draw systems like pin-point barriers on a trial basis...

Um... not quite. The "Philosopher's Stone" was the codename for the large, super-high purity fold quartz integrated into the fold wave system of the YF-29. AFAIK, the fold quartz insert panels on the dorsal hull are part of the fold wave projector system instead. Inexplicably, the VF-31As used by Xaos also appear to have a multidrone charger.

That wouldn't be consistent with the established timeline materials from the original series and Macross 7 that say the Protoculture's civil war was caused by the overexpansion of the Stellar Republic and existing internal schisms. Not necessarily. You're forgetting the basic fact that, while Big West and Kawamori have mixed visual aesthetics from the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross and Macross: Do You Remember Love? more or less freely, they favor the TV series continuity for the events of the First Space War on the timeline. There are also several versions of the First Space War narrative (like Macross the First) that follow the whole TV series narrative with the DYRL? Macross design and Daedalus and Prometheus instead of ARMDs. It's pretty clear this is an aesthetic substitution, given that Berger Stone's little presentation shows the initial appearance of the ASS-1 as the Supervision Army design from the original series. Kawamori's view that there is no one "true" version of the First Space War would kind of mean you're overthinking it. OK, forget DYRL? in terms of its plot. As far as the ongoing Macross timeline is concerned it's an in-universe work of fiction. DYRL?'s design aesthetics get substituted into Macross works from time to time because the creators like them better... it makes the Zentradi look more alien, the designs are more polished, etc. Even Berger's presentation affirms, for the most part, that the First Space War happened along TV series lines (with DYRL? aesthetics). The Macross was a Supervision Army gunship (TV ver.), and we see her launch without arms. I went back and looked over the official publications for anything that's said about when the Birdman was installed, and I've found the source of the confusion. People (myself included) were assuming the Birdman was installed a few tens of thousands of years ago because it was buried for tens of thousands of years. Macross Chronicle confirms the Mayan native account that the Birdman was activated tens of thousands of years ago and shut itself down by separating its head and body. So the reason dating it by the geological strata it was found in produced a date only a few tens of thousands of years ago is that it was buried twice: once in ancient prehistory and once in slightly less ancient prehistory. The apparent contradiction is our fault, not Macross's creators.

It's worth remembering that Berger Stone is not an omniscient narrator, he's a character the same as any other. He's also a civilian, so his knowledge of incidents that the military has either classified or attempted to cover up is probably limited to whatever's in the official military reports that've been declassified or that his security clearance permits him access to. The (New) UN Forces have a habit of covering up details of major threats that could have significant negative PR implications for themselves or the space emigration program, such as the loss of Megaroad-01, their disastrous first contact with the Vajra, or the truth of who dropped the dimension warhead on Windermere. It's also a safe bet they covered up more than just one incident of someone stumbling onto an ancient Protoculture weapon in working order, like the Protodeviln attack on City-7 or the Uroboros incident.As Berger's little monologue was an effort to establish the credibility of songs as weapons, he may be glossing over the Mayan Island incident since that didn't directly involve a song being used as a weapon in its own right... and I doubt the reason Isamu was able to escape Sharon's hypnosis made its way into the official record.

Yeah, the only way he could make himself more doomed would be to be two days from retirement and partner up with a devil-may-care wingman who breaks all the rules.The man's sent up so many death flags you could mistake him for a ship under sail.

Totally messed up it most certainly is... I can look the other way on the runes most of the time, but I sincerely hope the prehensile hair stops at the scalp. It did bug me in the first episode that Freyja was showing almost sexual levels of excitement during Forbidden Borderline and her rune... um... got erect.If you've ever been around wallabies or kangaroos, the pouch thing is pretty nasty too... a fair amount of the time the baby does its business right in the pouch. Kinda gross, but the worst part is definitely the smell.

You've got the wrong date... it was around 497,000 BCE when the Protoculture started to work on engineering a sub-Protoculture species on ancient Earth. They came back after their whole civilization collapsed, about 10-20,000 BCE, to leave the Birdman behind with orders to kill the species off if humanity started to repeat the Protoculture's mistakes.Roid, as a researcher into the ancient Protoculture, certainly seemed to think that humanity was one of the older sub-Protoculture species... it's part of his belief that Windermere was the world where the Protoculture seeded their appointed successors, on the belief that their status as the youngest of the created species meant the ones that came before were flawed or unworthy. For the most part, yeah... the Protoculture were "abusive precursors" who made a big mess and died out, leaving the species they created to pick up the pieces. Humanity and the other sub-Protoculture species were slave races engineered to prepare their worlds for colonization by the Protoculture.Still, the Birdman and the archive on Lux show that the ancient Protoculture were starting to cotton on to the lesson that they had been massive dicks and at least expressed a wish those species they'd created would learn from their mistakes.

All the missions from Macross VF-X2 were named for fairy tales except the last one... and usually the plot of the mission had some special relevance to the title. As you may expect, the technology first showed up in Mission 3: Die Zauberflote.

Well, yeah... but I'm not sure if that's any creepier than Zolans having kangaroo-like pouches on their stomachs, Ragnans having huge sets of gills on the sides of their necks, or some rare Zentradi types having prehensile hair... and don't get me started on how the second Vajra larva form looks like the infectors from Dead Space with a dead-eyed squirrel head stapled on...

The size comparison in Macross Chronicle puts it at almost exactly 1,200m.