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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Said Valkyrie wasn't exactly going all that fast... so she conceivably could've done what she did even without the assistance of any kind of inertial damping or augmentation. Why do people keep suggesting this for every "mysterious-looking" female character? There were only seven Protodeviln to start with, three of which came down with a bad case of dead by the end of the Varauta conflict, and the remaining four left the galaxy after acquiring the ability to generate their own spiritia. Cyborg or "conventional" humanoid alien are possibilities, though. Or, as appears to be the case with the others, she may be a baseline human(oid) wearing holographically-camouflaged equipment that helps her function under the strain. Conversely, any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from science... but what with fold song, that line is starting to blur a little. I don't know why anyone's throwing a fuss over any of that... the technology Walkure is using to do what they do isn't anything new, unprecedented, or particularly unconventional in Macross. We first saw holographic costume technology in DYRL? we saw it as an extremely compact, portable technology in Macross II: Lovers Again, and in Macross Frontier it was presented as the standard way of handling costumes and costume-changes for performers. Fighting via fold song is not a new concept either... that was codified and quantified in Macross 7 by Dr. Chiba, who proved that it's purely scientific and that it could easily be amplified, focused, and weaponized to fight the Protodeviln. Macross Frontier refined it further by introducing a way that singers could produce fold song at detectable levels without mechanical amplification, and now it seems that Walkure is simply weaponizing it a slightly different way. There is no magic here, and no "magical girls". You just have what's shaping up to be a five-girl group of singers doing what other singers have been doing in Macross for decades... the only difference is that they're out on the battlefield itself instead standing on the bridge of a warship, projected as a hologram out into space, or inside a Valkyrie.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Paid for my two at HLJ... gonna get 'em shipped, since other items I was waiting to batch aren't coming out until the month's end.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Well, perhaps... though I would say it's probably a stretch to say that tanks in mecha anime are depicted as heavy, slow moving, and imprecise. Outside of Super Robot shows, if the setting hasn't had robots completely replace tanks then it usually depicts them as being reasonably effective in combat but otherwise less versatile and/or less well-adapted to fighting whatever threat forced the development of giant robots in the first place. The less futuristic the tech, the more of a threat a conventional tank usually is. The robot's saving grace in shows like that (e.g. Full Metal Panic!, Mobile Suit Gundam: MS IGLOO, etc.) is usually its greater agility vs. the tank. When those settings have a tank that turns into a robot, it's usually depicted as having been stuck with the worst aspects of both... and it being a transformation with two modes that do the same job gets lampshaded by it being shown to be not as effective as either conventional vehicle.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Probably, yes. In various print sources outside the "official setting" like Master File and Episode Archive, some of the NUNS planetary or fleet garrison forces were starting to upgrade to 5th Generation Valkyries in the early 2060's. I'd expect that the pace of adoption is varying throughout the galaxy based on the availability of fold quartz in different regions... and the perceived need to have the latest and shiniest toys. The sheer number of Nightmare Plus units that would need to be replaced would probably give the fighter another 5-10 years as the de facto main VF of the New UN Forces.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Staff Sergeant.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, we all know that's the real reason... 'cept maybe Mit... but because of that, Kawamori has constructed a setting where a transforming tank would be an entirely redundant thing. He's not alone in doing that either. Most settings where transforming robots exist would be ones in which a transforming tank would be a waste of resources on a machine that has two modes to do the exact same job. (e.g. Southern Cross, Eureka Seven, Mobile Suit Gundam, etc.)
  7. Seto Kaiba
    All things considered, I'd have been a little bewildered if Al Shahal hadn't been using the Nightmare Plus in 2067. Sure, being so far out in the space boonies that it's literally in another galaxy might complicate the lines of supply for the Al Shahal NUNS garrison, but the Nightmare Plus still isn't that allfired old. It first flew in 2046, so if the VF-171's program followed the usual timing for this sort of thing, it likely entered mass production in 2048 and became the new main fighter shortly thereafter. Main VF service lifespans have been getting longer as the time gap between new VF generations grows, so I'd expect the Nightmare Plus's time as main VF to be at least as long as the Thunderbolt's (18+ years) before its inevitable replacement... especially since the 5th Generation VFs may have to cope with the scarcity of fold quartz slowing down mass production. At 19 years in service, the VF-171 Nightmare Plus is probably nearing the end of its service life in the wealthiest parts of the galaxy, but probably has a few years left as main fighter simply because of the sheer number of them that'd have to be replaced for a new fighter to become "next main fighter". (Not every fleet has 'em, obviously, but considering the sheer number of emigrant fleets and worlds out there and the size of their NUNS garrisons, it's highly probable there are close to a hundred thousand Nightmare Plus units in service. Replacing all of those is going to take a LONG time.)
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Yes. In fact, Macross 7's Gamlin Kizaki is a Martian... his personnel file lists him as being from H.G. Wells City, Mars.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    The adequate substitute is called Valkyries and ship-mounted anti-aircraft guns and missile phalanxes. That ugly turd is from R******* and even they didn't end up using it because it's a completely redundant mess. (and once again you're scraping the bottom of the barrel for reference sites...) 1. Just because we only see the one small group doesn't mean they were the only ones... those fighters didn't have fold boosters, which means the fold effect they came from had to have a ship in it as well. When the average carrier holds upwards of 50 VFs... well... you do the math. 2. Incorrect. All indications are the Aerial Knights' Sv-262 is on par with a VF-31 or YF-29, which make them more advanced than the VF-27 and significantly more advanced than the VF-171 that was the garrison standard. 3. Where is it said that the ground forces have inadequate equipment or training? Nowhere. 1. Shin never engaged an Octos with his VF-0D's gun pod. He shot one underwater with the coaxial laser while running the entire VF on backup power. Even so, he destroyed its primary camera and disabled it long enough to get away. 2. Roy's VF-0S disabled one Octos and destroyed another with nothing more than its coaxial lasers. Yes, the Octos units destroyed the ADR-03-Mk.III Cheyenne units defending the village... with the advantage of surprise, superior numbers, and not caring if they destroyed the village. The only Valkyries that could not were the VF-0 and Sv-51, because they were powered by conventional jet engines. Every Valkyrie with reaction engines is capable of operating underwater. The only difference is how far down they can dive. You keep coming back to the D-50C Loto as though it offered some kind of support for your argument instead of being a perfect, explicit example of transformation offering no added value for a land warfare robot. The transformation so thoroughly crippled all aspects of the Loto's performance that the only way it could fight effectively was to ambush the enemy and hope it killed them all before they could fight back. Every time it got into something resembling a fair fight it got destroyed easily. The D-50C Loto carries significantly less weaponry than practically any destroid in Macross (except possibly the Octos). It has 2 missile launchers (24 missiles total) and one gun mount that can take either a machine gun too light to hurt a MS, a rotary cannon, or a pair of 120mm cannons. It's really not much better armed than the tanks from its own universe. Compare that to the Cheyenne II, which has two particle beam cannons, two 30mm rotary cannons, two missile launchers holding an unknown number of missiles, and an antipersonnel machine gun. And what enemy in Macross fights like that?
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Sadly, no... the only major players identified in the Anti-Unification Alliance were Russia, Germany, and Israel via their contributions to arming the Alliance. It's implied that the UN Wars may have partly been fought along Cold War lines, with the UN Government's member states (led by former NATO members) squaring off against Anti-Unification partisans in the former Warsaw Pact states. (Just because certain countries aided the Anti-Unification Alliance doesn't necessarily mean the entire nation was supporting their opposition to the UN Government. Russia and Germany were founding members of OTEC and UN Gov't member states, so their representation in the Alliance may have been more a case of the national government aligning itself with the UN Government and some of the nation's districts/states choosing to align themselves in opposition to it.) 1. I don't believe an explicit motive has been given for the attack, but my gut feeling is that it was a terrorist-type attack like bombing St. Petersburg with a reaction weapon... just to show that they could strike anywhere. It could also be that they wanted to keep the 3,055 UN Forces personnel in the Mars fleet from becoming reinforcements in the war. 2. If they wanted to destroy the ship they probably would've just used reaction weaponry. Since they were trying to capture South Ataria Island, it can be assumed that their goal was to capture the ship and any war materiel on the island (and possibly take all of the civilians hostage). The 4th Defensive Battle that is depicted in Macross the First seems to have been an attempt to destroy the SDF-1 Macross and/or the entire island, but that was sort of retaliatory final strike for the dissolved Alliance. 3. Officially, it was to demonstrate that the Alliance had the potential for retaliatory strikes with reaction weaponry... but as for their choice of target, I suspect it was because the Russian government was aligned with the UN Government. Not really a "World War III"... it doesn't look like Russia was publicly/openly supporting the Alliance, or even that all of Russia was a supporter of the Alliance. The UN Wars were a series of local/regional conflicts between the UN Government and various regional groups opposed to the UN Government. All told, the Alliance doesn't seem to have had enough power to credibly threaten the UN Government on a worldwide scale, just to harass and annoy its military in various hotspots of separatist sentiment. France wasn't an Anti-Unification Alliance member, and Germany had been reunified a decade or so before the UN Wars started... but it's clear that certain factions and corporations in Germany supported the Alliance (like Dornier Flugzeugwerke). Israel, well, it's an incredibly independent state that is very proud of, and determined to defend, its sovereignty, so it's not altogether surprising that having to give up some of its independence in the name of a one world government (even one led by a staunch ally like the United States) wouldn't go over well. We have no idea what the disposition of China was, but as they're not mentioned as a supporter of the Alliance they were probably UN Government backers. That's not said officially... but it's highly probable that having destroyed their own nation's second city would have prompted Russian soldiers in, and supporters of, the Alliance would cause them to withdraw their support.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Almost none of what you've said there is accurate... not for Southern Cross, and not for the appalling rewrite. (The only correct detail is that the Spartas can use its main gun in Battle Sniper mode... albeit awkwardly.) That's not correct either... the Spartas's role is effectively equivalent to those of the MBR-04-Mk.VI Tomahawk and ADR-04-Mk.X Defender respectively (MBT equivalent and self-propelled gun), and the Logan and Auroran fill essentially the same role that the Valkyrie does in Macross (all-regime aerospace fighter and land warfare robot). The Destroid running speed is right out of the official stats, and consistent with the presentation of the Destroids in the series and various later titles as being surprisingly agile for its build. They also have much more contact with the ground than a Valkyrie, so their drive train would be more stable on land at high speeds. On the battlefield, Destroids were the victims of the ever-increasing multi-purposefulness of Valkyries. For the defense of ships and bases, Destroids fell victim to their own size and price tag. Most UN Forces ships are too small to reasonably support Destroids for air defense, or would have to curtail their primary offensive/defensive capability to make room for them. Thus, most ships make do with the cheaper, less complicated, stationary anti-aircraft guns and missile phalanxes. Even on the SDF-1 Macross, the Destroids were a supplement to the fixed defenses, not a replacement for them. Problem is, that they were retired is official... in fact, the ones in civilian hands in Macross 7 are referred to as units that were sold to civilians as part of the disposal process. Same with the various VF-1's and other Valkyries that've ended up in civilian hands. There is, also, a key difference between the Destroids and Battle Pods. The Destroids were designed for human crew, and far more effective mecha and cheaper alternatives to air defense became available as time went on. Giant Zentradi don't really have as many options as miclones due to their sheer size, and the mecha they do have are extremely low-maintenance and (with a little improvement by human engineers to make them more survivable) still as murderously effective as their 500,000 year service history would indicate, which makes their continued use economical and practical. The "Super Defender" from Macross the Ride was a recent development by the Macross Galaxy fleet in 2058, and the Cheyenne II likewise seems to be a late 2040's or 2050's-era development. Destroids did continue on after the First Space War, but the niche they carved for themselves and still hold with tenacity seems to be that of heavy work machinery. Destroids seem to be the go-to platform for everything from construction equipment to mining to cargo handling.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Not quite, no... the ELINT Seeker was VE-1, it had a mission code that marked it out as a dedicated electronic warfare craft. So far, all VF-31's have been designated as fighters. The VF-31 Siegfried seems to have a bunch of apparently-arbitrary variants to justify them giving each character's fighter a different head. (The VF-31, like the YF-30, wouldn't need a dedicated ELINT or Recon version, since the ordinance container system on any fighter could be fitted with ELINT equipment without requiring any design changes at all.) Platoon, not squadron... but I wouldn't jump to conclusions based on the VF-31A's markings without knowing the context.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    It's possible there's a launcher door to facilitate B and G mode launching like there was on the YF-29.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Well, yes and no... the YF-21/VF-22 (and Q-Rhea) use the Queadluun-Rau's special inertia vector control system, which was the technological basis for the Inertia Store Converter and probably uses fold carbon, but it's not anywhere near as effective as the fold quartz-based Inertia Store Converter on the YF-24 and all craft derived from it. So it's a "yes" because you could technically produce the same general effect using fold carbon, and it's a "no" because its actual performance is so much lower that it wouldn't be adequate protection against the high performance of an ISC-equipped fighter.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Goodness no... the Destroids aboard City-7 were units that had been retired by the military and subsequently sold off to civilians for conversion into heavy construction or mining equipment (or in some cases, given to retiring soldiers as part of their pension). The Monster in City-7 was problematic because it was crewed by elderly retired soldiers and couldn't actually hit the enemy fighters that it was shooting at... so it was destroying buildings in the city instead. The police patroids were not designed for combat against military-grade equipment... they were only built for the preservation of the public order. Once they were forced to fight against military hardware they were wiped out easily by Valkyries. A few things about this... 1. Al Shahal's garrison wasn't particularly large. 2. They were facing a technologically superior enemy in orbit. 3. The Al Shahal garrison's forces were reduced by the outbreak of Var syndrome among their soldiers on the surface and divided because they were also trying to subdue those soldiers who went on a rampage because of Var syndrome. The Octos units were disabled or destroyed just as easily, if not more so... considering Roy is able to blow their limbs off or even destroy them with the VF-0's coaxial lasers, the lightest weapon it has. They weren't really forced to use the VA-3M... it was just the most appropriate unit for the job considering they needed to hunt an enemy submarine from the air and destroy it underwater. While we don't often see VF's operate underwater, all of them are capable of it down to a certain depth... (~100m for the VF-1). No, it just prevented the Loto from being able to fight against modern mobile suits on an even footing. The last thing an infiltration unit wants is to be completely screwed if they don't kill the enemy with their first shot. As far as replacing the Loto's reactor and giving it energy conversion armor... you'd just be creating something inferior to, and more expensive than, a Cheyenne II or Super Defender destroid. MAHQ's stats are often inaccurate... in some cases extremely so. (I've found one entire section on their site where it's actually not even information from the right series.) Still, even if we were to assume the numbers provided indicate that some of these LFOs/KLFs are capable of 200-300km/h in vehicle mode, they're cars... which means those speeds will be unattainable over rough terrain. Also they're not capable of fighting in their vehicle mode... which makes those numbers effectively meaningless. I'm very familiar with it... and with the way that many mecha are shown to be able to defeat an Itano Circus by shooting down a few missiles and letting the explosions set the other missiles off. It's as much a trademark of Macross as the Itano Circus itself.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Well... a significant portion of this site's membership is from the United States, which is one of three countries in the world that don't use the metric/SI system as their standard. (The other two are Liberia and Myanmar.) Mr March and I are perfectly happy to use metric, as he's from a metric country and I'm an engineer, but many members are used to thinking in terms of Imperial units of measure. Y'know... I don't think I have ever seen an explanation for the unprotected pilot position on the ATAC・01-SCA Spartas hover tank in the few available publications for Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross or the American R****** adaptation. Seems like kind of a huge oversight for an armored fighting vehicle, but I guess the Southern Cross Army wasn't expecting to ever have to actually fight a war since humanity hadn't encountered any aliens and probably wasn't up for a civil war after having only narrowly escaped extinction in a nuclear holocaust by fleeing Earth.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Actually, the VF-27 has both the NUNS kite and the Galaxy fleet insignia on it... it's kind of hard to see on Brera's VF-27γ because the NUNS kite is red and Brera's fighter is painted pinkish-purple. It's much more visible on the VF-27β, which are painted that kind of olive green. The NUNS kite is on the starboard wingtip, while the Galaxy fleet emblem is on the port wingtip and side of the nose. Presumably SMS's VF-25's lack the spiral insignia of the Frontier fleet because they were trial production units not officially attached to fleet NUNS forces. (Though one has to wonder why the VF-171's only bear the NUNS kite and not the fleet insignia...) EDIT: Battle Galaxy also has the Galaxy fleet logo on it, it's on the starboard side of the flight deck near the bridge.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Sure looks like it. Not that I'm aware of, no... the TW1 Tornado Pack does have a dedicated power supply of its own (a reaction engine, power condenser, and capacitor) to feed the heavy quantum beam gun turret, but with its operating time at full power being a matter of a few seconds I doubt it could be used to bolster the barrier. We know that the VF-25's FF-3001A Stage II thermonuclear reaction turbines have a lot more excess output than previous-generation engines... enough that a light form of energy conversion armor can be run in critical areas of the airframe during fighter mode. I would assume that that same excess could be used for operating the pin-point barrier in GERWALK mode, since the thrust requirements in GERWALK are much lower.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    azrael was talking about the Tomahawk's land speed, which he converted from the metric 180 kilometers per hour to the Imperial 112 miles per hour. (He rounded up slightly, it's really 111.8mph.) Aye, Southern Cross in general was a substantial series of bad decisions... and the horrible adaptation did nothing to deny that the mecha were poorly designed. Nothing I can find in official material on the City-7 Patroids suggest that they were inexpensive... and we never see them in any large numbers, which suggest they may actually be quite pricey despite their extremely limited capabilities and poor combat performance. The UN Forces didn't need or want a rather poorly-designed transformable armored car though. They already had Valkyries and Destroids and armored fighting vehicles and so on that did the exact same job in significant numbers. The only Destroids seen aboard City-7 were retired models from the First Space War that had been converted into various kinds of heavy equipment for task like mining and construction. (With the sole exception of a single Mk.II Monster destroid that caused very significant collateral damage attempting to fire on enemy Valkyries.) Because it was a habitat ship, City-7 didn't have a dedicated defense force permanently stationed aboard... it was dependent upon the Valkyries carried by the Battle-7 and other ships of the fleet for protection. Mayor Milia addressed this during the war by having Gamlin Kizaki's Diamond Force placed under her command. True, but few and far between are the foes who hide in the water... the defenses of emigrant planets and Earth are focused around protecting against attacks from space and preventing enemies from reaching the surface. Yes, and the D-50C Loto paid for that carrying capacity, transformation, and small size by using a much less powerful reactor, being able to carry far less fuel, having a much less sophisticated AMBAC system, and reducing overall performance. It was not as heavily armed, as heavily armored, as fast, or as agile as a conventional mobile suit. The Terminus series LFOs from Eureka Seven are not an example of typical LFO performance... they were a series of unstable and unnecessarily finicky super-prototypes that were beyond the abilities of all but the best pilots. That's why the Monsoono series was adopted by the military instead. Also, the data I can find gives that 300km/h speed as its maximum speed in flight. The Octos was nowhere near as fast or capable as a Destroid or Valkyrie on uneven terrain and would be much more prone to sinking into the ground and getting stuck because its incredibly small footprint and heavy weight give it a far greater ground pressure than any of its potential foes. Also, leakage? The reason explicitly given in Macross Zero for the VF-0 not being able to operate underwater was that the fighter's main power system was its conventional jet turbine engines... engines which don't work underwater. They had to use battery power to operate underwater, and that limited their operating time. VF's with thermonuclear reaction turbine engines don't have that issue since oxygen isn't required for them to run. The Octos in Macross Zero only had armor comparable to a modern armored fighting vehicle because it didn't have an engine that had enough output to support energy conversion armor and the composite armor it had needed to be kept light for transformation. The newer Series 04 Destroids and the VF-1 Valkyrie had much better armor. (About 3x better, all told.) In Macross Frontier, we only see EX-Gear infantry fight the weak, larval form Vajra. As we see at the beginning of the series, their weapons are not effective against the mature Vajra whose armor rivals that of a 5th Generation Valkyrie like the VF-25. The problem with this line of reasoning is that even if they were far enough away that the pressure wouldn't kill them, they'd still be shooting at an extremely high-mobility target perfectly capable of intercepting the missiles... assuming said missiles actually had the stopping power to hurt the mecha.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    There's a modest amount of information available on the Unification Wars (plural). Essentially, the Unification Wars were a series of regional conflicts and organized opposition to the Unification Government that sprang up shortly after the public was first told about the existence of aliens and the rough plan to form a world government. Officially, the Unification Wars started in the Middle East in July 2000 (older sources mention it was in a fictional country called the People's Republic of Garalia), though organized opposition to the proposed new government didn't begin until the various nations and organizations that were opposed to the Unification Government's ideology formed a military and political alliance (apparently blissfully ignorant of the irony inherent in doing so) to oppose the new government in January 2001. Other motivations included concerns over the leadership of the UN Government, the distribution of overtechnology to member states (or, as noted by Nora in Zero, the "forced" sharing of technological advances), and the expected assortment of political, ideological, ethnic, and religious quibbles. Apart from a few major battles, we know very little about the day-to-day details of the conflict. The Anti-Unification Alliance Army made no less than three major attempts to invade and capture South Ataria Island: the first in July 2002, the second in January 2005, and the third in May-November 2006. (A flashback story that appears in the Macross the First manga appears to show a fourth Defensive Battle of South Ataria Island on Christmas Eve/Day 2008.) The other four big military actions of the UN Wars were the hijacking of the Oberth-class destroyer Tsiolkovsky in September 2005 and its subsequent use to destroy the UN fleet returning Mars Base personnel to Earth (and the destruction of the Tsiolkovsky by Bruno J. Global's destroyer Goddard), the November 2005 destruction of the Grand Cannon II construction site by the Anti-UN Alliance Army, the October 2006 destruction of St. Petersburg, Russia, by an Anti-UN Alliance reaction missile attack, and the 2008 Mayan Island incident depicted in Macross Zero. Politically and militarily, the former Eastern Bloc (Warsaw Pact) states had a huge influence on the Anti-Unification Alliance... though the resistance to the idea of the UN Government prompted formerly pro-American nations to also side with the Alliance. The Russian influence was particularly strong in their mecha, with a major Russian contribution to both the Sv-51 and Octos (though the Sv-51 was a joint Russian-German-Israeli effort and the Octos was a joint Russian-German project). Most of their equipment was apparently conventional though, with the MiG-29 serving as the main fighter of their forces, though more advanced fighter aircraft became available in small numbers (like the MiM-31 Karyobin from the original series or the Sv-51 in Macross Zero). The UN Wars officially ended in January 2007 with the Russians backing out of the alliance, but the war actually carried on until December 2008 with the various remaining Alliance forces continuing to fight with their much-diminished backing (as in the Mayan Island incident in Macross Zero). Macross the First's alternate depiction of the chronology includes a last, petulant attack on South Ataria island on Christmas 2008, which looks like it'll be brought to a halt by the first combat deployment of the VF-1 Valkyrie.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    So, I found a new one... From Chapter 110 of Jitsu wa Watshi wa (in English, Actually, I am...), we have a Macross Frontier reference... Aizawa apparently wants to be Ranka Lee after graduation.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    We've had very little information about the rest of the Unification Government's military and civilian spacecraft outside the emigrant fleets. Several (New) UN Spacy Special Forces units have appeared in various Macross video games... like the Dancing Skulls in Macross M3, the 727th Independent Special Command "Ravens" in Macross VF-X2, or Havamal in Macross 30. We've had a few details here and there in Frontier-related titles regarding interstellar commerce and shipping. Strategic Military Services (SMS) was originally founded as a protection detail for its parent company's (Bilra Transport Co.'s) interstellar shipping. Other, similar, shipping concerns are mentioned in connection with Macross the Ride as sponsors of Vanquish races. Macross Delta's pilot was the first time we've actually seen a cargo ship though... which seem to be essentially a spacecraft version of an eighteen wheeler lugging around surprisingly conventional-looking shipping containers of produce (and presumably other stuff). Research-wise, we've seen two research groups... both exceptionally ill-fated. The first was in Macross 7 PLUS episode "Spiritia Dreaming", where the Varauta research/survey fleet was shown deploying to investigate the ruins that turned out to be where the Protodeviln were sealed away. The second was the 117th Research Fleet, which was centered around the SDFN-04, and met its end at the hands of a Vajra swarm. The novelization of Macross Frontier suggests that some research fleets have been funded by private companies, with the 117th being funded by Macross VF-X2 villains Critical Path Corp. Passenger ships are another vague area. We've not heard anything about civilian corporations operating them, but we've seen a total of three different examples of passenger ships. The first was in Macross II: Lovers Again, and was a civilian shuttle that was apparently analogous to a jet airliner (with restraints that look right off a roller coaster) that traveled to and from the moon. In the Macross Plus OVA we saw the Stellar Whale-class passenger ship, which was something more along the lines of a cruise liner built for space and which Myung and her colleagues took to get from Eden to Earth. The third was the OGL Galaxy Starliners from Macross Frontier, which returned to the jet airliner style, but with a fold system. I don't believe the YF-19 or YF-21 are explicitly modeling their paint jobs on real-world fighter squadron paint schemes. At present, no Valkyrie has true independent fold capability... meaning that they don't actually possess an internal fold system. The earliest model fighter known to have been outfitted with an external fold system (fold booster) was a VF-X-11 prototype which was stolen by Zentradi deserters in November 2030. Project Super Nova's Advanced Variable Fighter prototypes were the first to have native support for fold boosters rather than having it patched in with avionics upgrades later on (like the VF-11, VF-17, etc.).
  23. Seto Kaiba
    At the very least, he appears to be familiar with its R******* equivalent. He did mention the Spartas hover tank in his original post, though it's funny that he'd cite the adaptation where it was considered a rubbish mecha like the other failed transformable tanks.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    *sigh* This sh*t again... For starters, I have no idea where you're getting those designations for the City Police patroids... because the official publications which cover them most assuredly don't even give them proper names, let alone designations. As far as the performance of the flying and armored car patroids, the official publications don't agree with your contention. Their coverage in Macross Chronicle says nothing of their cost, and notes that they were adequate at maintaining public order inside of City-7 when dealing with civilians, but were completely unequal to the task of protecting City-7 from attack and suffered significant losses against enemy VFs. As the Octos was inferior in most respects to a traditional Destroid and most definitely inferior to a Valkyrie, there wasn't really any incentive to bother trying to economize it... particularly as the focus of military procurement had been on space-oriented planetary defense. As the Octos was not suited to space operations, and the far cheaper conventional Destroids outclassed the Octos as a land warfare weapon, large-scale production of the Octos would've been a waste of resources on a mecha that was less effective than practically every other option. It was, to be blunt, crippled by its overspecialization. So... now would be a real bad time to point out that the Octos is substantially larger than the ADR-03-Mk.III Cheyenne and Series 04 Destroids of the First Space War? The Octos stood 11.2m tall and was a good 15m+ long in its ground warfare mode... the Cheyenne was smaller in all respects, and the Series 04 Destroids were comparably tall but significantly less long-bodied. The Octos is large, but its footprint on the ground is small and its weight is excessive, meaning the ground pressure will be much greater than a Cheyenne or Series 04 destroid's, meaning it will be less stable and more likely to get bogged down in soft terrain. (There is a REASON that Destroids have such large, flat feet.) Really, pretty much every supposed advantage you're trying to attach to the Octos doesn't stand up under even a casual analysis. The VA-3M was not the first underwater-capable VF... all of them have had some underwater capability, starting from the VF-0, as a consequence of the technology used in the engines and the structural design for aerospace operations. The VA-3M was simply the first variable aircraft purpose-built for aquatic operations. Unlike the Octos, the VA-3M can fight in the air, on land, and underwater, and can boost to at least a low orbit for recovery... while Octos units would need a spacecraft to land and recover them. The Octos may be cheaper than a VA-3M, but it's also a lot less versatile and effective. Nope. We see infantry in a few different Macross titles, but the reality is always the same... they are rear-echelon security, not a front-line combat force. They guard installations and VIPs, but the bulk of the actual fighting is done by Valkyries and other mobile weapons. Targeting joints or sensors will only work if the weapons are sufficiently powerful to get through the armor protecting them... armor material is several orders of magnitude more durable in Macross than the real world. The blast from a warhead powerful enough to penetrate the OTM composite armor of a Destroid would very likely kill anyone in the ground within several dozen yards. The Zentradi Marines don't really count, as on foot they're equivalent to a battroid and they're usually deployed in their own mecha. No speed is given for the Cheyenne or Cheyenne II using rollers in Macross Chronicle or any other official publication that we have. Its rollers were considered advantageous because they helped it move across the hull of a ship more effectively than magnetic walking, and didn't mess up the pavement inside the city ships.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    "Widely used" may be a bit of a stretch... we don't actually know how widespread the deployment of the Cheyenne II is, but it is well worth noting that Destroids basically disappeared from military service for twenty or thirty years before a new model emerged. The battlefield role they occupy has shrunk significantly as well, to the extent that they're no longer front-line combat mecha... their fleet role has been almost totally eradicated by static defense turrets. It's true that we've had two units of transforming ground mecha... but it is also true that the Octos and City-7 police patroid were not widely used or produced in large numbers. They couldn't match the all-purposefulness of the Valkyrie or the cost-effectiveness of a conventional Destroid. We haven't seen any transforming tanks because there is no practical advantage to a transforming tank in the Macross setting. You would have two different modes that are for the exact same purpose. Transformation in Macross (and, really, most other mecha shows) is used so that a mecha can operate in a different operational role in each mode... like the Valkyrie being a fighter jet, an attack helicopter substitute, and a combat robot, or the Octos being a submarine and a land warfare robot. Actually, the VA-3M Invader makes a reasonable amount of sense... the thermonuclear reaction engines of a Variable Fighter use MHD systems for space propulsion, and that same technology can also be used to power boats and submarines. All VFs can be operated underwater, so making a VF that was optimized for underwater operation is a logical step that eliminates the need for a dedicated submarine mecha. Where are there Zentradi in Macross Zero? Oh that's right... NOWHERE. Infantry is useless against the Zentradi, being the infantry don't carry weapons big enough to hurt a giant that can live through being shot with a 55mm armor-piercing cannon. The infantry in Macross Zero are only viable because the war was being fought between humans on Earth prior to first contact with the Zentradi. Even then, they're basically window dressing once the giant robots start to fight. So far, we have not seen any evidence that weapons that infantry can carry can hurt something armored as heavily as a Valkyrie or Destroid. We saw Gilliam using a linear rifle against a Vajra that had armor roughly equivalent to a VF-25, and all it did was ricochet everywhere without doing any damage. If we look to some of the old data, a Valkyrie or Destroid have armor equivalent to at least three meters of steel armor plate, or about triple the heaviest armor of a main battle tank. That's not armor that infantry weapons are going to get through without being so powerful that they could kill or severely wound the firer too. (The warheads of the missiles are equivalent to a 1,000lb bomb's explosive filler... and it usually takes two or three to get through a Valkyrie or Destroid's armor.) It means that only a tiny fraction of Octos units had energy conversion armor, and only after they weren't being used in combat. The Octos models that actually fought in the UN Wars were using composite armor and weren't as well-protected as a Space War 1-era Destroid. The Macross Mecha Manual is what you'd call a "living document", in that it's constantly being revised and updated by myself and Mr March as translations of new material are made available by myself and the other translators on MacrossWorld. They were outnumbered and ambushed, so it's not surprising they didn't fare well... but the Octos didn't exactly fare well itself when it had to fight the VF-0's. The difference being that the Defender, Phalanx, Spartan, and Monster can operate on land, underwater (to limited depths), and in space... whereas the Octos is only viable in combat underwater and at the coast. They built a handful... not enough to actually matter, and of course they never saw combat in the First Space War. Unlikely! The Daedalus was a heavily-armored ship, and we see in Macross the First that submarine attacks don't actually do enough damage to be a serious threat to it. In Macross VF-X2? That's no Destroid, that's a VB-6 Konig Monster... a Variable Bomber. There were some conventional tanks shown, but they were... well... ineffective as hell against a VF. The Cheyenne II is not new, it's an upgraded version of a Destroid design that is 51 years old as of Macross Frontier. The Super Defender from Macross the Ride is also five decades old. Which a Valkyrie is infinitely more suited to attacking, because they can freely maneuver in space... unlike a Destroid or a tank. (Even in Gundam, the D-50C Loto was not nearly as capable in space as a conventional mobile suit.) The whole point of Destroids is that they're cheap and can be deployed in large numbers where numbers matter most. Poor emigrant planets do use inexpensive Valkyries like the VF-9 Cutlass or VF-5000 Star Mirage, but those fighters still have all of the versatility of the Variable Fighter design. They can be aerospace fighter jets, attack helicopter substitutes, and combat robots... while a variable tank can be a tank for land warfare or a robot for land warfare, which is redundant. Also, a planet's defenses are mostly oriented around keeping the enemy AWAY from the planet... so a Destroid on the ground isn't gone to see any action unless something goes horribly wrong. If something does go wrong, what's going to be more effective if an enemy makes it to the planet's surface? 1 variable tank, or the 10-20 Destroids you could build for the same money? You get way more firepower with the conventional Destroids. Ghosts are eating into the number of VFs being built because they cost a fraction of what a VF does... and the technology which enables a VF to rival a Ghost's performance is prohibitively expensive because it depends on a rare material that (as far as we've been told) cannot be replicated by human science.
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