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Seto Kaiba

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  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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).
  4. 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.
  5. 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.)
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. 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.
  11. 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.
  12. 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:
  13. 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.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    I said it before and I'll say it again... Walkure ain't nuthin' ta f*** with.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Ooookay... yeah, definitately gotta flag those for update and pass along updated writeups to Mr March.
  16. 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.)
  17. 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.
  18. 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.
  19. 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.
  20. 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...)
  21. 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.
  22. 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.
  23. 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?".
  24. 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.
  25. 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.
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