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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Dunno 'bout any VF-23, but we have had mentions of a YF-26 and YF-28.Specifically, Variable Fighter Master File: VF-25 Messiah mentions that the "Project Triangler" program, the joint development program shared by Macross Frontier, Olympia, and Galaxy, had a design submitted by each fleet for consideration. Obviously Frontier had the YF-25 Prophecy, Galaxy had the YF-27 Shahar (a smokescreen for their actual development plans), and Macross Olympia supposedly submitted the YF-26. There is mention of a YF-28 in Macross the Ride (IIRC in Ch.9 "Peace Children") in connection with the YF-27 program. LAI supposedly furnished Macross Galaxy with the YF-29 specs under the table, which led to the VF-27's four-engine configuration. Based on what's said, the YF-28 seems to be either an incremental step from the YF-25 to YF-29 or Galaxy's spin on the YF-29 spec.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    I said it before and I'll say it again... Walkure ain't nuthin' ta f*** with.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Ooookay... yeah, definitately gotta flag those for update and pass along updated writeups to Mr March.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    The VF-17 Nightmare never held the (New) UN Spacy main fighter spot... in fact, only 718 of them were built.The VF-171 Nightmare Plus is a new model of VF that's a decade and generation newer than the VF-17 it's loosely based on. It was developed as a replacement for the VF-11 Thunderbolt after plans to adopt the VF-19 fell through. Things being what they were in the 2040's, tightened restrictions on arms exports to the emigrant fleets and colonized planets combined with the VF-19's extremely difficult handling and high per-unit price tag to make adopting it as the new main fighter unfeasible. So, of course, with the (New) UN Spacy looking for a "next main fighter" again, General Galaxy tabled a proposal that they thought would address the problems with adopting the VF-19. They took their VF-17 and reworked the design considerably, simplifying it for mass production and easy maintenance while also refining the design to improve its maneuverability and aerodynamics, defensive capabilities, operational versatility, and improving its ease of control. The end result was a multi-role variable fighter/bomber that was highly versatile, extremely cost-effective, and offered a reasonable improvement in performanve vs. the VF-11 without crossing the line into being so high-spec that average pilots couldn't handle it the way the VF-19 had. Thus far, the VF-171 seems to have held onto the main fighter role for about twenty years and is facing replacement (if not already in the process of being replaced). The attempt to produce a fighter that could keep the ultra-high performance without sending pilots into G-LOC or turning them into flight suits full of chunky salsa eventually culminated in the 5th Generation YF-24 and its high powered inertia capacitor technology... which became the starting point for various emigrant fleets and planets to semi-independently develop their own replacements for the VF-171 in the late 2050's. The Macross Frontier fleet developed the VF-25 and YF-29 based on those specs, while Macross Galaxy's engineers created the VF-27 and YF-28, and the SMS branch on Uroboros came up with the YF-30 that was eventually developed into the VF-31. (There may be more, Master File mentions Macross Olympia having developed a YF-26 prototype that never saw production.)
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Funnily enough, later Macross works actually suggest that's not entirely the case. Specifically, that even old recordings of Minmay's songs produced measurable amounts of song energy... a Chiba unit rating of around 10,000. (Macross Chronicle Technology Sheet 12A) Actually, that's not quite the case. The explanation Exsedol gives of the relief carving of the Protoculture's history in the ruins found on Lux in Macross 7 indicates that the Protoculture's civilization was never Utopian. They were as divided a people as humanity for almost all of their history, and only really united when they were facing extinction at the hands of the Protodeviln and their legions of brainwashed soldiers (the Supervision Army). The Zentradi didn't have to inherit any warlike tendencies from the Protoculture, they were created specifically as living weapons for proxy warfare... meaning they were engineered for war so the ancient Protoculture's people wouldn't have to do any of the fighting and dying themselves. That's a fair point. I'm torn between two potential explanations: The New UN Forces were so badly mauled trying to contain the Zentradi marines who'd been driven berserk by the Var syndrome outbreak that they were unable to coordinate an effective evacuation. The small crowd seen in the vicinity of Walkure's operations are the people who weren't able to evacuate in time, and stopped fleeing in the general direction of "Away" because they concluded that the next safest place to be was next to someone capable of neutralizing the Var lethally or otherwise. (That said someone has a portable barrier system able to protect a crowd probably didn't hurt their feelings any either.) 's not quite the same. Per Ken'ichi Yatagai (Macross II's producer), the songs sung by the Mardook's song priestesses function like combat drugs for their brainwashed Zentradi troops. The various songs manipulate the Zentradi's fighting instincts and aggression levels, from "neutral" right up the scale to "Doom comic book". There's no implication of higher-dimension power involved... it's just the result of their Zentradi soldiers' mental conditioning.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    The original Macross wasn't really a treatise on cultural drift either... what affected the Zentradi so deeply wasn't music, it was the culture shock of encountering emotions and aspects of life that their society's strictly military mindset hadn't equipped them to process. The ancient Protoculture forbade the Zentradi to have culture to preserve their effectiveness as soldiers, so constructive and social activities like art, music, dancing, romance, etc. were a complete mind-screw which they had no frame of reference to understand. The ensuing confusion gradually gave way to fascination, which left them unwilling to destroy the Macross when the time came. There wasn't any intrinsic power in music itself, it was that the Zentradi weren't equipped to understand music or the concepts and emotions the music was communicating. The Zentradi were just as thrown by seeing a man and a woman kiss. The connection between the ancient Protoculture and music wasn't drawn until Do You Remember Love?, and only then because the "Fragment of culture" the Boddole Zer main fleet had preserved was the sheet music for a song. All the same, the power wasn't in the music itself... it was the emotional and cultural content that was the "active ingredient". The Protoculture itself wasn't presented as an idyllic yesteryear so much as an enigmatic alien race who created the Zentradi and were simply no longer around... and DYRL? revised them into a race of neglectful precursors who ended up in a literal war of the sexes after their advanced science took love out of their society's day-to-day life. Music in Macross has always been about the ability to communicate with each other... it's the emotional content that has always counted and, later, what had the real power. Basara and Mylene's anima spiritia abilities depended on their emotional state. Likewise, Sheryl and Ranka's songs varied in effect based on what the singer was feeling. I'm betting Freyja's strong reaction to Walkure's songs is her picking up on their emotional content, and her detectable response is her own emotions influencing her biological fold waves as she sings. Yep, that's what the Birdman/AFOS was. It actually has a little back-and-forth with Sara after it's activated where it asks about the state of human affairs, before concluding that humanity needs to be destroyed so it won't repeat the Protoculture's mistakes.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    ... the only ones I can think of that actually do that are Macross Plus, Macross Flashback 2012, and Macross FB7. Macross II went with more or less the exact same approach as Macross: Do You Remember Love? (just from both sides), Macross 7 and Macross Frontier played with the theme of music's ability to sway or communicate emotion, and if my earlier guesses prove out Delta is also following in the 7/Frontier model. Based on what's been established previously WRT song and higher-dimension effects, I think the Var syndrome is the consequence of using fold song to communicate purely negative/destructive emotions rather than the positive ones typically found in the songs of any given Macross series. (Like Rezső Seress and László Jávor's song "Gloomy Sunday", the song urban legends allege caused a series of suicides among its listeners in the 1930's.) Of all of them to date, Macross Plus is the only original one where music is purely for entertainment's sake and doesn't have direct relevance to the plot. An ancient Protoculture bio-technological weapon left behind on Earth to wipe humanity out if we tried to leave the planet before we settled our internal differences. Well, yes... that's because the UN Forces had no inkling that Earth's culture could be employed as a psychological weapon until the 26th episode ("The Messenger"), when Exsedol told them as much. They didn't use those tactics earlier because they didn't know. A subjective difference, yes.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    THANK YOU. I've been sitting here reading through the recent posts about how silly and completely un-serious Macross Delta is and going "wait, didn't this episode open with some dude suicide bombing a tram and the narrator telling us there's a literal epidemic of that kind of thing going on galaxy-wide?" Macross is known for being "lighter and softer" than many mecha shows, but even for Gundam the idea of an enemy that can override the will of large numbers of people and turn them all into psychotic spree-killers or willing suicide bombers at a distance is some seriously dark stuff. The only previous Macross title to have something like that was the Macross II: Lovers Again OVA, and even though it only worked on the specially-brainwashed Zentradi clone soldiers under Mardook control (and who were regarded as disposable equipment rather than people) the Mardook themselves regarded the use of that ability (the Song of Death) as grotesque overkill and being ordered to do so as their leadership having jumped off the slippery slope to such an extent that many of the fleet's song priestesses refused orders for the first time in their lives. Apparently whoever's pulling the strings behind the Aerial Knights of planet Windermere has no such compunctions... which would make him or her (or maybe it? we'll find out) the closest Macross has come to an antagonist who's a complete monster. (And that's saying something, considering previous antagonists include dictatorial despots, genocidal clone soldiers, and literal space monsters...)
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Um... I'd have to say the reverse is probably true WRT production quantities. Some fleets have gone to using nothing but Ghosts in their air forces, but the older generations of VF were not exactly made in huge numbers. They only built a little over 5,000 VF-1's, and 8,000 VF-4's. The typical 3rd Generation long-distance emigrant fleet had around 2,400 variable craft of different types in its (New) UN Forces garrison and those are the medium-sized fleets now. With upwards of 59 long-distance fleets and 100 short-distance fleets launched, we likely have upwards of 150,000 variable aircraft in service at any given time starting in the mid-2040's. A 5th Generation VF that's been picked up by only a handful of fleets and/or planets as their next main fighter could easily push its production numbers past that of earlier-gen VFs. The one that's going to be all but impossible to top is the VF-171 Nightmare Plus... the last standard main fighter. There are probably 80-90,000 of those things kicking around the galaxy. Arguably, the planetary governments have always had the authority to arm their defense forces however they wished (within the limits of restrictions on arms exports). That's what a lot of the single-digit VFs were explicitly for... to be low-cost VFs targeted specifically toward newly-established emigrant world governments with limited defense budgets. The Varauta system's defense forces chose to arm themselves with the VF-14 instead of the UN Spacy's chosen main fighter (the VF-11), which is how the Varauta Army ended up with the Fz-109s, and by Macross the Ride and Macross Frontier the emigrant fleets are developing their own local variants of existing VFs AND producing original VF designs for their own forces and selling those designs to other emigrant worlds. ... well, we've kind of already reached that point too. It was in a serialized novel rather than an anime series, but one of the main characters of Macross the Ride gets an upgraded custom VF-0A as a mid-story upgrade. It's cobbled together out of an existing VF-0A airframe and an assortment of parts borrowed from the YF-25. (Never mind the replica VF-0's used on Uroboros in Macross 30, that are equipped with reaction engines... so I guess they're technically replicas of a VF-0+ instead.) Yeah, barring a few exceptions where FAST pack models were developed with the specific goal of being operated in the atmosphere (e.g. the ones on the VF-11, VF-17, and VF-19 near the end of Macross 7) they're generally meant to be used in space only. However, since Macross 30's one and only space level is the supposed-to-lose fight at the very beginning of the game, that's kind of gone out the window for gameplay's sake so you can equip pretty much any FAST pack in atmosphere. I remember that one of the many bugs in Robotech: Battlecry allowed you to keep the Super Pack for ground levels if you completed a space level without losing it.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    I know Zero came after 7 in production terms, but I'm talking about the in-universe(s) continuity. Humanity hadn't quantified any of the things that would eventually provide potential explanations for the phenomena connected to Sara and Mao in throughout Macross Zero's story. Sara and Mao's abilities get stuck with the label of "magic" because the world the characters exist in was still about thirty years off from having an understanding of higher-dimension physics sufficient to start explaining what happened in purely scientific terms. Now, in Delta's "present day" of 2067, it seems like the understanding of a living being's ties to higher dimensions is still developing. Whether there's a physiological component to Var syndrome remains to be revealed, but we could be looking at what amounts to a weaponized sickness of the spirit... and since 7 suggested a person's natural higher-dimension energy can have a distinct polarity, it stands to reason that what can be used to heal could also be used to hurt.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    I've done the analysis several times... and, apart from Plus, I get the same result every time. Macross Delta is very much in the mold of your typical Macross series. Older fans sometimes cling to this myth of the original series being a gritty war drama, something even Kawamori himself has refuted. As Kawamori put it, Macross is a love story which uses those battles as a backdrop. There's always been an air of strained realism and no shortage of silliness. I look at Delta's first episode and I see essentially the same thing I saw in the original's first episode. All the classic Macross tropes are present and accounted for. We've got a naturally talented but withdrawn young man who will join the military (or a paramilitary force, whatever Chaos is) to protect a young, slightly selfish girl who dreams of being an idol after falling into the cockpit of a transforming fighter at the outbreak of an interstellar conflict and gradually ends up growing closer both to that young girl and an older, professional woman who he serves alongside. Almost everything we see in Delta's first episode is building upon an aspect of a previous Macross story. Walkure is essentially another go with the Jamming Birds but with their sh*t together this time. Fold song is anima spiritia all over again, built on terms and tech from both 7 and Frontier. There are hints that the enemy is using songs to drive their ad hoc soldiers into a berserker rage ala Macross II. Delta Platoon's got the usual formula of The Big Brother, The Ace, The Clown, and The Natural, though this time there's two of that last one. Point is... the visual style has changed somewhat, but that's about all that has changed and it's no more than we would expect from a long-running series like Macross. They update the look to stay current with the times. The substance is very much Macross as we have long known it. The things people are complaining about are the same things we've seen in an assortment of previous titles, with just some slight differences in how the show presents them. You're entitled to your opinion, but I'll say that I have yet to see a cogent argument about why they're not the same. Lots of complaints and lots of demonstrably-flawed examples, but I haven't seen anyone table an actual reason for being so very unhappy with the show other than, perhaps, that it's not aimed at the 30 or 40-something "oldtaku" in the west who remember the original as being rather more gritty and dark than it actually was. It'd be easier to understand the other side of the argument if I had more to go on than just the erroneous carping about magical girls and some nitpicks that are explainable via technologies that are well-established in the universe of the shows. So I'm stuck sitting here going "you all loved this stuff and you suspended disbelief for it in previous shows X, Y, and Z, but it's not OK in this one for no clear reason?".
  12. Seto Kaiba
    LOL! I appreciate the thought, but I think I'll be OK. Macross Plus isn't a bad OVA by any means (in fact I think it's fantastic), but it's just not really on the same page with the rest of the Macross franchise on a thematic level. The rest of Macross puts the love story and the music front and center, while the war aspect is kind of an expensive sideshow there to inject drama into the romance proceedings. Macross Plus goes the other way, using the physical business of Isamu and Guld's personal conflict as the core of the story, and reducing the music and the love triangle to an afterthought. Instead of being important because of the power of song and communication, Sharon's important to Macross Plus because she's a crazy killer robot. Delta is much more in the mold of a traditional Macross show, with the music and the romance aspects front and center, and a more upbeat, optimistic tone. Some characters will die, and some will assuredly attend the school of hard knocks, but we'll have an uplifting ending at the finale. I'd have to agree there... Zero is the only Macross title in which we got "supernatural" phenomena without any kind of accompanying scientific explanation. It's probably related to fold song and/or spiritia, but they never actually make the connection... whereas in the later shows (chronologically speaking, Macross 7, Macross Frontier, Macross Delta) that sort of thing is firmly placed in the realm of science immediately after being introduced. Anima spiritia and fold song can produce some effects that seem magical to the uninitiated, but the shows are all very definite about them being quantifiable, controllable, phenomena that function on higher-dimension physics. They're associated with the presence and flow of higher-dimension energy that can be measured, stored, tuned, amplified, and can be repeatably used to achieve certain effects. Whether that constitutes "sufficiently advanced science" or "sufficiently analyzed magic" is a YMMV thing, but the shows lean quite heavily toward the former. I'll say that, in practice, anima spiritia and fold song seem to be pointing toward humanity and the other sentient races all having an intrinsic mental/spiritual/emotional connection to super dimension space, and some special individuals having the ability to actively tap into that connection and some individuals using artificial means to increase their ability to use that energy like biological amplification (Sheryl and Ranka) or technological amplification (Sound Force). It sounds kind of like The Warp from Warhammer 40,000 when if you think about it that way... though without the "it's kind of actually literally hell and monsters in it will eat your soul" part. Well, actually... wouldn't the Protodeviln be the soul-eating monsters part? Delta's Walkure seems to be pretty well-equipped to detect other individuals with similar abilities to their own... after all, Very similar, yes.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Well, yes... we see both in the main Macross 7 series and in Macross 7 Plus's "TOP GAMRIN" that Gamlin underwent some g-force stress training as part of basic training, and some more when he became suitably PO'd about being shown up by Basara, but that was before Valkyries equipped with inertia controllers were the emerging standard. Alto got knocked about a bit during hard maneuvering in his VF-25, but it's worth remembering what constitutes" hard maneuvering". The ISC on the VF-25 has the ability to insulate the craft against g-loads up to 27.5G (per official spec), and the YF-29's is good for up to 30G. If he's feeling the strain, he's over the ISC's limit... which means he's potentially pulling the kind of g-forces that'd cause a VF-19 to break up in midair. The YF-30's ISC is supposed to be comparable to the YF-29's, and the VF-31's may be even better. We don't see Delta Platoon's VF-31's pulling any extreme maneuvers on the ground with Walkure's members around... they take it nice and easy until they're up in the air. It doesn't seem at all unreasonable that a VF capable of damping 30G's or more would be able to insulate a passenger from a low-speed low-altitude cruise at automobile speeds. ... I'll admit the showmanship on Delta Platoon's part is something we haven't really seen much of in Macross (barring some minor showboating on Alto's part and the on-the-ground antics of the Hamming Jamming Birds), but I'd like to point out the VF-31 does in fact have a gun pod. Like the VF-2SS, VF-14, VF-17, VF-171, VF-22, etc., its gun pod is stored internally. What the VF-31 does differently is that the gun pod is stored in the fighter's ordinance container (the big pod on the back) rather than in a leg or arm bay. We've yet to see it held in the hand in the show, but print materials have confirmed that it is in fact a hand-held gun pod. Kind of two-for-the-price-of-one, really... you get the functionality of a Tornado Pack when it's stowed, and a regular gun pod when it's not. For your convenience, the link below is to the cover of Figure King 215, showing Hayate's VF-31J holding the gun pod in its hand. http://st.cdjapan.co.jp/pictures/l/02/35/NEOBK-1898555.jpg Macross Plus is kind of an unfair title to compare any other Macross to, as Macross Plus is almost Macross in name only... it has so little in common with the other shows.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Oh yes, because we've never seen mecha be agile on the ground... like the bloody pro-wrestling moves that Britai and Hikaru were pulling on each other. You fondly imagine you've countered it... but that's not the same thing as actually countering it. In Macross Plus, they did show the effects of inertia and g-forces on the pilots... but we don't see anything even remotely that bad in the Macross Frontier series and movies even though those fighters are working with MUCH more thrust and maneuverability. They do show the pilots get rocked around a bit when the fighter is hit by multi-ton objects, etc., but in normal maneuvering we don't see anything like that. What we're shown in Delta is low-altitude, low-velocity maneuvers... almost like they're being careful not to over-exert the members of Walkure. Imagine that, eh? Your contention is that the Aerial Knights are flying their fighters without flight suits or helmets... but you've missed the point in your attempt to reply to my statement. As I indicated, there is no guarantee that us not seeing it means it isn't there. Brera looked exactly the same in his virtual cockpit regardless of whether or not he was wearing a helmet (and yes, he did go into combat without a helmet on several occasions, like the final battle sequence of the Macross Frontier: Sayonara no Tsubasa film). Several pilots are shown operating VFs without a helmet, flight suit, or sans both. Basara, Mylene, Hikaru, Isamu, and Brera are just the easiest ones to name off the bat. What's being done here is not a departure from previous Macross shows. It's not even particularly unusual. Nobody is saying you don't have the right to have an opinion... but if you start complaining about Delta doing things that have been part of Macross for decades and aren't even being presented differently, it's rather hard to see those complaints as anything other than the trolling they are. So many of these complaints being voiced don't hold water that it's not surprising people would be sick of hearing them.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    A giant robot in Macross is highly agile and capable of human-like movement? How very unprecedented... Yeah! To pull that off they'd have to have some kind of proven technology that could manipulate inertia in order to insulate a fighter from g-forces by converting that energy into another form and storing it. Some kind of inertia store converter, if you will. Y'know... kind of exactly like what was installed in the Queadluun-Rau, YF-21, VF-22, YF-24, Y/VF-25, Y/VF-27, YF-29, and YF-30. Also, fighter pilots flying without a visibly-sealed flight suit and helmet? Madness! What kind of show would possibly have something like that on a regular basis...? You'd never see something like that all over Macross's original series, or at the finale of Macross Plus, or on a regular basis in Macross Frontier. Since the advent of the virtual cockpit in Frontier, not seeing a pilot suit is no guarantee that they're not wearing one... and restraint systems have typically involved docking the backpack and/or shoulders of the pilot suit to the chair. Very few VFs have a traditional harness. Some supplement the suit connectors with a lap belt, but that's about it. Speaking of virtual imaging... where's the magic? I see no sorcery here, sir. There's the ubiquitous holographic technology that we saw for the first time in Macross: Do You Remember Love?, and which has been shown to be portable and capable of some rather expansive effects from Macross II and Macross Plus on... Energy shielding that can be re-positioned on command? A barrier that can be moved to for precision - dare I say pin-point - interception of enemy fire? Surely that is a new and unprecedented idea in Macross. No? Drat. The only new wrinkle with the multidrones is that the barrier is generated by a multitude of smaller craft instead of one larger one... and who says Walkure/Chaos is the only user of this tech? They're the only ones we've seen so far, but that doesn't mean that it's unique to them. (Esp. likely, as we're told that the VF-31 is already a production aircraft.) So... a small number of state-of-the-art craft are shown to seriously outmatch significantly older fighters, but have to fight on an even footing against other state-of-the-art fighters? Once again, hardly a new trope... we've already seen this in Macross Plus (YF-21 vs. VF-11), Macross 7 (Fz-109s vs. VF-11s, VF-19s vs. Fz-109s), and Macross Frontier (VF-25s, 27s, and 29s vs. VF-171s). I know, right? To pull that off, you'd have to have a highly proficient operator and the controls of a VF and a modern Destroid would have to be essentially the same. We're explicitly two for two on that front... so what's the problem again? A great deal of context, apparently...
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Oh yes, Mr. Kawamori absolutely delivered the goods this time around. I remember back when Macross Frontier first started airing, I wasn't really sold on the series until the one-two punch of the fourth and fifth episodes had Alto grow the beard (metaphorically speaking) and took Sheryl from Queen B*tch to Defrosting Ice Queen. My first run-in with Macross 7 and the wandering, weak plot that we got in Macross Zero had left me kind of up in the air as to whether Macross still had greatness left in it. Frontier absolutely sold me on Macross's potential for future excellence and, IMO, Macross Delta seems to be set to continue living up to that high standard. I think I've warmed to Hayate, Freyja, and Mirage a good deal faster than I did to Alto, Sheryl, and Ranka. In general, they seem to be a little less angst-y than their predecessors. (Between Macross Delta, Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans, and the 30th anniversary of Five Star Stories, this is shaping up to be a fantastic year for mecha... and a terrible, TERRIBLE year for my wallet.) Yeah... the unbalanced love triangle was my biggest problem with Macross Frontier. Alto was as indecisive as you'd expect a teenage boy to be for most of the series, but it definitely felt like the participation on the part of the girls was uneven. Sheryl was the one putting in all the effort and having all the moments, while Ranka's only involvement for most of the series seemed to be lurking on the periphery so she could get upset whenever Sheryl decided to steal a march on her and get closer to Alto. Freyja Wion seems to be a lot more upbeat and driven, so I'm betting she shows a more initiative than Ranka did. I'm still rooting for Mirage though... and strongly suspect her stiffness will set her up to be a tsundere type.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    So far, so good... I was very satisfied with Macross Delta's first episode. Tone-wise, it feels very similar to Macross Frontier, which IMO is nothing but good. Hayate seems like he's less conflicted and passive than Alto was... Likewise, Freyja seems to have a lot more drive and confidence than Ranka did in Frontier, which IMO makes her much easier to like. Still very much in Camp Mirage though, but at least it looks like there'll be two actual contenders in this love triangle instead of one serious player and one hanger-on. (Yay!)
  18. Seto Kaiba
    The Macross Frontier Official Fan Book, and I believe the novelization of the series also describes him as having Zolan ancestry. Macross F 2059 Memories indicates that he has some Zentradi ancestry as well, which quite frankly means someone (or several someones) in his family really idolized Captain Kirk. "Cute alien girl, gotta get me some of that!"
  19. Seto Kaiba
    This was discussed in depth on the previous page... the short version being that a radio play overheard in Macross Dynamite 7's final episode has a line or two that suggests Humans and Zolans can't procreate because Humans don't have pouches (which, apparently, damn near everything on Zola does), but this may not have been accurate (or, in production terms, may no longer be accurate due to oversight or intent) given that Macross Frontier's Michael Blanc has a Zolan grandparent.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Not necessarily... the character design aesthetic WRT ear shape as an indicator of species heritage lost some of its consistency in Macross Frontier. Prior to Frontier, the big Record of Lodoss War elf ears were a Zolans-only thing. That changed in the Frontier series, which gave Zentradi and part-Zentradi women (and only the women) a more subdued version of the elf ears instead of the Spock ears that were the standard from DYRL on for most Zentradi characters.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    I await the outcome of that with great interest... even if it is just a video of Kawamori making a mad dash for the nearest fire door.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Actually, I'd say the opposite is true... the Valkyrie II's Squire auto-attack bits are a good deal less advanced than the various drone fighters that can be controlled from, and operate in support of, Valkyries in Macross Frontier and Macross Delta. The Squires are bits that operate automatically in defense/support of a VF that serves as their mothership, but they're not capable of operating independently the way the main continuity's drones are. They're smaller, but their performance is lower and they have a lot less weaponry (no missiles). The VF-19 basically had disposable funnels (funnel missiles) already... they are WAY ahead of where the timeline of Macross II was WRT drone technology.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    The Sv-262's Lilldraken drones? I can't say I agree... they're physically connected to the airframe of the Draken "mothership", and used like a Ghost Booster until ejected. That'd put them more in the same category as the VF-0's Raid configuration from the final episode of Macross Zero or (most closely) the VF-27γSP Super Lucifer from the Macross Frontier movies. The VF-27γSP had the ability to detach its QF-5100D Goblin II booster for independent operation in the same manner. The VF-2SS Super Valkyrie II's bits are never connected to the airframe... they're launched separately, and aren't capable of being operated autonomously. By in large, they're bits in the Gundam sense except they're computer-controlled instead of controlled by psycommu (so sort of like the GN Fangs in Gundam 00). The VF-4ST Super Siren's funnels in the Macross II prequel video game (for PC Engine) Macross: Eternal Love Song did start out docked to the fighter, but they weren't autonomous either.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Well, I feel a little better about not being able to make out all of it... Yes, I have... several times, in fact. Other than the apparent hint at an enemy songstress, I didn't really see anything that could be characterized as a distinct nod to Macross II... at least, not in the way Macross 7 Trash, Macross the First, and a handful of other official and fanmade titles have. Did you have something particular in mind?
  25. Seto Kaiba
    To be fair, the Macross Chronicle coverage was separate for all of the Macross movies except Macross Plus's... no doubt because the differences between versions of the story were much less significant than usual. As far as Macross's ongoing continuity catching up to the time period of Macross II and its technology, we've already seen a couple examples of technological convergence... but I'm convinced those convergences are simply coincidental. It's mostly minor stuff like the portable full-body holographics, the pilot seat of VFs incorporating a powered armature intended to help combat g-force strains on the pilot, railguns as gun pods, or VFs that are modeled on Zentradi battle suits. (On that last note, the two timelines went with different suits... Macross II's are modeled on the Nousjadeul-Ger, and the ongoing continuity's on the Queadluun-Rau.) I doubt we will see anything overtly Macross II though... True... but after a while the problems can start to compound, like what seems to happen every few years in the American comic book industry when they reboot titles after sales-boosting crossovers result in continuity lockout and sales start to slip.
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