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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Gamlin didn't think much of Milia's VF-1 when he flew it... I think that might be where that's coming from.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Ah... not really sure where that's comin' from. The non-"Plus" version of the VF-1X was, IIRC, a Master File-only variant that's written up as an upgrade of mothballed Block 4 and 5 VF-1 units reworked with avionics upgrades, strengthened wings, and a slightly more powerful engine as a stopgap measure that was implemented while they were waiting for the VF-5000 to go into production. It wasn't quite as good as a VF-4, but it was still a viable improvement. The VF-1X Plus is a more sweeping modernization that, when equipped with its Super Packs, is on a roughly level footing with a VF-11 in terms of overall performance. Not an entirely accurate summation, I'm afraid... We don't know what the stock VF-1X++ is like, except that its materials are lighter and it's meant for undercover work, because the only one we've seen is one that's been extensively retrofitted and customized for air racing by a man of questionable sanity and an unhealthy enthusiasm for "more power". (At this juncture, kindly mentally insert some grunting if you've seen Home Improvement.) Hakuna Aoba's custom job replaced the stock engines with massively more powerful ones designed for unmanned fighters, a few improvements to maneuverability, and some conformal fuel tanks reworked into holders for booster rockets... all of which reduced the fighter to a highly unstable, borderline-uncontrollable mess that's forever one mistake away from becoming a fireball (as Ride's author put it). The only tech shared with the VF-25 was that the racing custom's FAST pack had an inertia store converter built in. (You may be thinking of Hakuna Aoba's mid-story upgrade, which was a VF-0A that'd been basically reworked from the ground up with the help of Katori Brown-Robbins, General Galaxy's Guld Works, and LAI until it was far more YF-25 than VF-0.) True, the VF-1 that Hayate is flying could be one of any number of variants acquired through military disposal sales or built for the civilian market. I'm not sure where you got the rest from, as it's not really consistent with the training programs we're shown and told about in the various Macross works I've seen and read. Usually the trajectory is Simulator -> Tandem Trainer -> Actual Aircraft. The Macross Frontier novelization had Alto and other Mihoshi Academy pilot students train on detuned VF-1s (identified as VF-1Cs), but that's independent of SMS's training for its pilots. Even when we're shown totally green pilots being trained, they're being trained on a simulator for the model of fighter they're eventually going to fly (like Gamlin training on a VF-11 simulator during basic). It probably helps that the VF-1 is cheap enough and easy enough to repair that a rookie wrecking one won't be a bank-breaking problem for a well-to-do PMC, a top-tier vocational school, or the military.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    I'd guess the real deal... various other Macross titles (most notably 7, but also the novelization of Frontier) have shown old VF-1's being used as training aircraft for new pilots because they're as close to dirt-cheap as a VF can conceivably get.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    IIRC, not the first time an EX-Gear equipped VF-1 has been mentioned... though I think the first mention was an unofficial proof of concept aircraft or something along those lines. (I think it was in a model hobby magazine.)
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Unlikely, IMO... but not impossible if old man Raizo had a family stashed away somewhere safe during the First Space War. I'd suspect the aviation in-joke would be enough on its own. (She'd have to be his great-granddaughter or something like that...) Hmm... now that's an interesting line of thought! Freyja's rune certainly seems to be sensitive to biological fold waves, and those of the Aerial Knights seem to respond to heightened emotions (excitement?). The ancient Protoculture's response to having built a battle suit too high-spec for most Zentradi to pilot was to engineer a better breed of pilot (the females), so it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest the Protoculture tried to engineer a species (or multiple species) which possessed greater-than-average ability to access the super dimension for their war with the Protodeviln. (That would logically entail the question of whether the Windermerians were a failed experiment or the survivors of a successful one...)
  6. Seto Kaiba
    I will be sorely disappointed if we don't get a Mirage AMV set to "Hips don't lie".
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Roid appears to be standing on the bridge of a starship when he issues them their orders... so they may have ridden into the battle zone on the fold effect of an Aerial Knights warship/carrier.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    It'd also play well with the Knights of the Wind's ideology... bigotry and hypocrisy often go hand in hand. Yeah, and Barrette City on Ragna seems to have a fairly well-developed tourism industry independent of Walkure's HQ that seems designed to cater to off-world visitors... that sort of thing doesn't develop overnight.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    ... OK, I'm lost. How could you possibly take "there have been railgun gun pods in that continuity for a decade or two by 2067" to mean anything other than that railguns have been employed in gun pod form for years prior to Macross Delta? I didn't even mention energy weapons...
  10. Seto Kaiba
    LAI works with both Shinsei Industry and General Galaxy on various projects, but throughout the events of Macross Frontier they appear to have been thick as thieves with the Macross Galaxy fleet... supplying the Macross Galaxy fleet with the YF-29 spec to further their own fighter development program, giving Brera somewhere to stash his VF-27 in the Frontier fleet prior to his announcing himself publicly, hooking him up with fold boosters and so on. The exchange did go both ways too. In the movie version, it was Macross Galaxy who supplied LAI with the technology for MDE weaponry. The words "questionable sourcing" come to mind... I'm going through the Macross Galaxy-relevant sheets in Chronicle and so far I've not found a single reference to when Macross Galaxy was launched. Literally nothing, which is kind of shocking considering it waxes poetic about ships that barely even appear. Didn't that date come from the same source that mistakenly identifies Macross Galaxy as the 9th rather than 21st? It's a full generation newer than the City-type, so it shouldn't have been launched before the City-type became the norm. (It would not be the first time Mr March and myself found errors in the Compendium...)
  11. Seto Kaiba
    The way Kawamori describes it in the Otona Anime interview is that it was motivated principally by the sheer logistical difficulties of having colonies that were months or years away by space fold. It was just easier to give them the greater autonomy some of them were already asking for (or fighting over) than try to micromanage the affairs of planets tens of thousands of light years away and just hold onto the biggest military stick so they could wade in and knock heads together if two or more colonies had a serious beef with each other. (Hence the arms export restrictions that directly led to the creation of pretty much all the Valkyries we've seen in Macross Frontier and Macross Delta so far and limited the deployment of the VF-19 and VF-22. Earth keeps the biggest sticks for its forces so they can break up fights.) Delta isn't just far away, it's set in a whole other galaxy... talk about hard to manage from afar!
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Nope. They were a corporate army, but since Galaxy's corporate government was a government under New UN Gov't jurisdiction they were also considered a NUNS garrison and their fighters bear NUNS markings. Per Kawamori, the attempted coup by Garland was pretty much a sideshow rather than the actual reason for the reorganization... the reason he identifies for the reorganization was the inability of the centralized UN Government to govern when humanity had become so spread out. IINM Macross Galaxy doesn't have an official launch date... the graphic in the animation contains several inaccuracies WRT dates of launch (showing, as it does, pretty much every emigrant ship launching simultaneously). Only in the novelization of Macross Frontier... in that version of the story, it was Critical Path who financed the 117th Research Fleet's expedition to the galaxy's center to study the Vajra. Macross Chronicle suggests that LAI is generally believed to have been the fleet's financial backer in show. Considering the Draken III's suspicious resemblance to a Nightmare Plus and technological similarity to a VF-27... there are three possibilities I see: The Windermerians developed the Sv-262 Draken III themselves based on "captured" VF-171's that were taken during the Kingdom of the Wind's coup and the New UN withdrawal from the planet. LAI leaked specs under the table again... like they previously did when they leaked the YF-29 spec to Macross Galaxy and it became the basis for the final VF-27 design. General Galaxy is selling weapons to anti-government forces for black ops testing of new technologies, the way their own corporate army used the YF-27-5.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Thus far? Private security forces that were originally founded to protect interstellar shipping, and which grew beyond their original intent to begin providing security services for governments as well because they were easier to write off if something went horribly wrong. (As Ozma put it, SMS employees killed in the line of duty officially die in accidents, not combat.) Mind you, SMS seems to have been extremely well-funded because they were founded and directly owned by Bilra Transport Co., one of the larger interstellar shipping concerns (which also bankrolled the Macross Frontier fleet's construction). Sort of. He only actually identified the Macross Galaxy fleet's administration as being a corporation rather than a government in the interview in Otona Anime #9. The Macross Frontier fleet has an elected government, but it was financed by a corporation and thus the head of said corporation (Richard Bilra) has a LOT of sway in the parliament. As Macross Galaxy's corporate administration was still technically considered a government, the Macross Galaxy Corporate Army was/is also technically a New UN Forces garrison raised by the Galaxy fleet rather than a PMC. (Hence why their equipment has NUNS markings, while equipment used by true PMCs like SMS doesn't.) No. The Macross Galaxy Corporate Army was always technically a UN Forces garrison... it made the change to calling itself a "New UN Forces" garrison at the same time everyone else did, after the government and military reorganized and added the "New" to the name. Per Kawamori, the reason for the reorg was that humanity had become too spread out for a single, central government to effectively govern and so it decentralized, granted more autonomy to the emigrant fleets and colonized planets. It went from being something along the lines of the US's Federal Government (with the various fleets and planets being member states) to something more along the lines of the European Union.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Angers 672's Queadluun-Alma1 was equipped with a rifle-type railgun pod for close-quarters combat in Macross the Ride. Also, Chelsea Scarlett's YF-25 gained a non-standard railgun pod in the form of the SPS-25P/MF25 Paladin Pack's Blaze Lance in Macross the Ride (which is, yes, actually shaped like a lance). 1. Arguably a VF, as it's based on the Feios Valkyrie (by the same in-universe developer) though it toes the line into being a variable Zentradi battle suit.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Dunno 'bout the shell-casings bit... the YF-30 didn't, and it seemed to look pretty darn cool anyway. It seems a safe bet that the VF-31 is also using a beam rifle, so that won't be ejecting shell casings either. (Technically I guess Basara's VF-19, Gamlin's VF-17 and VF-22, etc. didn't either...) WRT the GU-15's caliber, I am not aware of any source that identifies it... though, from the art, it seems safe to say that it isn't the same gun as the VF-17's. It's shown with a different number of barrels, for one. That's a fair point... there have been railgun gun pods in that continuity for a decade or two by 2067, used by both NUNS and enemy VFs. I guess there's just nothing quite as satisfyingly impressive as spraying clouds of spent brass everywhere.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Considering how thoroughly stage-managed everything else relating to the Walkure audition was, I strongly suspect that everything Captain Johnson did - from entering through a door much too small for him to using a chair and mug built for someone a good deal smaller than him - was an entirely deliberate move on his part intended to wrong-foot (and possibly intimidate) the candidates. Chaos's branch office on Ragna seems to have a rather strong commitment to showmanship as the tactical support for Walkure... this also shows in Arad's handling of Hayate. Safe bet it's no accident that they walked Hayate right past the flight decks and just happened to have a few Delta Platoon VF-31's sitting out even though their pilots were occupied elsewhere. They were counting rather heavily on that boy having caught the I-want-to-fly sickness (Alto Syndrome?). Based on Arad's comment about having no love for the military, that they're a PMC seems like a slam dunk. The HQ on Ragna is described as a branch office of the organization, so it seems likely that they have a presence in a number of emigrant fleets and/or on emigrant worlds just like SMS does. That'd also explain why they use a Macross Quarter-class ship (the apparent standard for today's well-armed PMC on the go) and why they're conspicuously better equipped than the local planetary defense force (if they have an arrangement with the local New UN Forces garrisons like SMS did).
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Ah, that's what you meant. Looking at it, I'm fairly sure those aren't fold quartz crystals. IMO, they look like the same sensor clusters that are mounted in the nose of all 5th Generation VFs... which are covered by a tinted piece of material to protect them from debris and so on. It looks like the VF-31A has something in that position too, but it's hard to be sure what because the material color for the lenses is very dark.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Strictly speaking, there's not much preventing them from converting one model to any of the others... 'bout the only actual airframe changes are the head and the wingtips. Oh there almost certainly are a fair few of them kicking around... though I think a few folks are jumping to conclusions about some of what we see in the episodes thus far. Like the alleged cat-girl. The Ragnans seem to have gone all-in for cat-related merch for tourists, so the cat tail may simply be part of someone's outfit rather than indicative of an actual catgirl species for instance. (Or the fin-eared girl... we see them literally selling fake fins on the street, so those may just be an outlandish pair of earrings.)
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Not sure what you mean by a lack of fold quartz... the vast majority of the fold quartz on any 5th Generation VF is used in internal systems. The YF-29 had a few external uses, but it was rather unusual for that (coating the canopy on fold quartz and using it in the optional fold-wave projectors). The crystal lenses on the nose are the protective coverings for an array of sensors, not fold quartz.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    The sensor mast on top of the head definitely seems to be smaller, though I don't know if we can say that about the whole bridge tower since we don't get a good look at it. We always see shots from below where the bulk of the bridge is obscured by the front of the chest. I'm just not seeing it... the buildings down there, from the earlier scenes, seem to be 2-3 story affairs, maybe 4-5 tops. The Quarter-class is roughly equivalent to a 90-story building. It'd dwarf those small buildings even if weren't also standing on a raised platform that, itself, appears to be several stories tall. The problem is that Frontier never really showed us the Macross Quarter herself next to any buildings of normal scale. The carrier ARMD arms seem to be narrower but deeper than the traditional Macross Quarter-class's, and the elevators seem to be a lot smaller. The ones that the normal type from Frontier had were sized to take a Konig Monster. These seem to be sized for a normal fighter only, and lack the offset recovery area.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    It's not identical in every respect, but then it doesn't appear that any two Macross Quarter-class ships are truly identical... and we've seen four or five already, but all of the key structural elements and shapes are the same right down to the positions of the gun turrets. As the arms are separate ships even on the Macross Quarter in Macross Frontier, the arms being different is no big deal. A couple angles have been squared off, but under the more detailed textures she's obviously Macross Quarter-class.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Arad expresses that he has no love for the military, so I think it's a safe bet that Kaos (the organization running Delta Platoon and Walkure) is probably a PMC or, at most, regarded as irregulars by the NUNS. Nah, it's definitely a Macross Quarter-class ship and no mistake... there's just too much design commonality for it to be anything else. Mind you, everyone forgets just how huge the Macross Quarter-class is. It's small by the standards of Macross-type warships, but it's still the size of the Empire State Building and this one is made to look even larger because it's sitting on top of a not-insignificant hill.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Ah, thank you! It's been ages since I last played the game, and I'd totally forgotten the planet even had a name. Well, yeah... on paper the little-n "new" UN Government was supposed to be a joint government between Humans and Zentradi, though there seem to be a fair number of Zentradi who feel that humans are a bit more equal than them in the new government. Yeah, I could certainly see the New UN Government offering to extend technological aid to planets willing to join the government and permit humans and other species to settle there. So far, the Windermerians seem to be the odd men out in that they don't seem to be entirely cool with the idea of alien cultures mixing with theirs. In that sense, I think the Kingdom of the Wind kind of has the New UN Government at a disadvantage. Yeah, the New UN Spacy probably outnumbers them to a colossal extent, but they can't force themselves on the Windermerians because it'd be an invasion and thus a violation of the galaxy treaty. So, as long as planet Windermere avoids attacking multiple planets directly, the numerical advantage is minimized because the NUNS spread out across an area over a hundred thousand light years wide.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    We've only actually seen a few... but the list includes: Al Shahal Avalon Avemaria Banipal(?, there are coal mines there, so presumably some settlement exists) Bellfan Beneb Cristania Dahan Ebel Eden Eden 3 (not the same star system) Endebald Ganymede (also a moon) Gregor Hydra Iota Jupiter (multiple satellite cities) Listania Luna (technically a moon, but hey) Mars Neo York Neptune (satellite city) New Asia Ragna(?, there's an emigrant ship there, at least) Salvation Saturn (satellite city) Sephira Susia Uroboros Varauta Veil Venus ("satellite city" orbital colony) Vulcan Windermere(?, like Ragna, but apparently abandoned) There are a few that are not named... lke the abandoned colony planet to which the Milky Dolls were taken after being abducted, the former Vajra planet which the Macross Frontier landed on... and a few where it's not clear if the planet counts as a colony or not, like Galia 4.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    So... I just finished watching the episode a few minutes ago. Here's some thoughts: The OP... I'm torn on this one, and will have to wait for a full version of the song to properly judge it. It has a nice bounce to it though. On its own, the animation of the OP seems to have answered a few questions. The Sv-262 seems to have a virtual cockpit like the VF-27's, and the reason that it looks like the pilots aren't wearing helmets is because it's being edited out by the virtual cockpit. Drawing the gun pod seems to be a rather involved process for the VF-31 as well. As for the substance of the episode itself:
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