Seto Kaiba

Nobody'd buy that... it's several thousand pages of largely illegible handwriting. It's GERWALK without the arms deployed... it's not really used any differently from regular GERWALK mode. (Which doesn't really preclude its impromptu use as a jet with extreme thrust-vectoring, as seen on more than one occasion.)

Admittedly, it was probably a lot easier to ID an enemy pilot based on their style or a particular paintjob when there were only a few dozen operational, combat-worthy VF's in the entire world, and only a handful of people truly proficient in their use. The task of identifying an enemy pilot by his style or paint would be a lot harder when there are thousands or tens of thousands of virtually-identical fighters kicking around.

*Coughs* Survey says "Yes, it totally does". Unlikely... if anything, the reverse was probably true. The YF/VF-19 program's difficulties are generally attributed to the prototype's excessively high performance, and particularly the g-loads pilots were subjected to as the result of its exceptional maneuverability... the issue was that the airframe was hard to control because it was programmed perhaps a little too well, requiring special training to handle an aircraft that was much more responsive than any previous design. I've read a couple different explanations for that one... the one that made the most sense being that, at the time the VF-0's had been retired before being pushed into service due to delays in VF-1 mass production, they had been evaluating refinements meant for the VF-1's later production blocks and successors. (Probably wasn't so much a case of "train like you fight" so much as "Our enemy has a combat-worthy VF in the air, get a transformable fighter combat-worthy YESTERDAY".) What you're thinking of here is the VF-25+EX-Gear, where the EX-Gear's learning computer learns the habits of its user and uses that data to improve control response. The VF-0 is also described as having a learning computer, but it's only really mentioned in connection with the Ghost Booster... due to the complexity of the aerodynamics involved, the learning computer had to sort out the handling on its own in actual flight due to gaps in the simulated data it was "Trained" with.

Robins don't normally whip through the air at hundreds of kilometers an hour though... (it'd be freaking scary if they did, the birds in my yard keep getting blitzed on fermenting berries and dive-bombing each other). Camera systems in Macross are undeniably very VERY good, but I don't think they're quite THAT good... to pick a single enemy out of a crowd and mark it as the commander based solely on visual cues. An identifying mark one can eyeball if you get sufficiently close for a long enough time... from the dialog in Zero it sounds more like D.D. recognized Roy from his distinctive flying style as much, if not more than, his paintjob. (On the other hand, Roy seems to spot D.D. because of his distinctive all-black paintjob and fanged skull-and-crossed-swords... so it could go both ways.) ... okay, you absolutely have me there. Most of the main character dogfights certainly occur at ranges close enough for the pilots to exchange profane hand gestures. The same appears to be true for elite units later on too... where everyone's pretty much painted the same. If Master File was anything to go by (and it may or may not be!), units where the aces engage in "combat peacocking" are the exception rather than the rule... Well, that may actually be a definite Red Baron-type situation... in the series, Milia was renowned even among the male portions of Boddole Zer's gender-segregated fleet for her amazing combat prowess. Macross 7's unaired episode, "Fleet of the Strongest Women" seems to affirm that that she was notorious among other fleets as well... and that she wasn't the only notorious ace the women had either (Chlore). The Macross II prequel games ran with this too... with the Leplendis fleet in 2037 also having its own notorious top ace who went out of her way to paint her machine differently from everyone else.

A good memory for detail, and notes... pages and pages and pages of notes. Seriously, it's like an open-notes college exam over here. The screencap? That's not from the Macross Frontier series. It's one of the early scenes in the second movie. Talos screencap'd it for me ages ago, and until this thread it was collecting digital dust in my Skype received files folder.

Hence the first point in my last post.

Well, that rather depends on whether the fighters with single-axis thrust vectoring are truly single-axis or whether, like the picture above, they've actually got some range of motion in another axis. (I think it's likely that many do.) The SV-51, SV-52, YF-21, VF-22, and YF/VF-27 all use X-31-style multi-axis/three-dimensional arrangements of three thrust-vectoring paddles. The YF/VF-27 and YF-29 also use axisymmetric three-dimensional vectoring nozzles for their outboard engines. Most of the others use pitch-axis thrust vectoring nozzles, though the VF-17/VF-171 have yaw-axis thrust vectoring nozzles instead.

Bingo... especially if, as in the VF-171's case, the single-axis thrust vectoring is actually multi-axis via the present of multiple, stacked sets of nozzles as in this instance.

Unlikely, IMO... as just about every VF which has had detailed coverage has ailerons and either a V-tail or X-tail configuration in which the stabilizers function as ruddervators. (The VF-22 is the only notable exception, being that its wing is essentially one colossal variable cant, variable camber control surface.) The only ones that don't appear to have flaps and ailerons are the VF-5000, VF-9, VF-17, VF-22*, Fz-109F, and VB-6... and in many of those cases, it may be because the line art is at a relatively low detail level and doesn't show any control surfaces. The VF-17 likely has the same control surface arrangement as the VF-171 (which did have ailerons), the Fz-109 likely has the same as the VF-14 (same story), the VF-22 has independently mobile sections of wing that roughly correspond to both but are not distinct from the entire mechanism of the wing, etc. EDIT: The VF-2JA from Macross II: Lovers Again definitely doesn't have ailerons, but its configuration is roughly analogous to the F-14's, being that it has six stabilizers... four vertical/canted, and two horizontal/taileron.

Well, they still carry liquid oxygen because the verniers and other onboard rocket motors (if any) also draw on the hydrogen tanks... but yes, hydrogen-hydrogen fusion moderated/catalyzed by gravity is based on something very concrete. It's also one of several candidates for aneutronic fusion for power generation.

I'll see about accommodating that after I get home. HLJ has it for about $22 (USD), not counting shipping.

Some folks like to get directly to the important bits, and cut out the bits that aren't directly relevant to their response and dozens of image uploads... makes it easier to read, y'know? Based on Master File and the scenes of the YF-21's paint burning off in Plus, to be a sort of medium grey color... either a warm grey (6% yellow) or a cool grey (6% blue), that seems to vary scene-to-scene and image-to-image. It's highly probable that there is no one uniform color or shade in which energy conversion armor is found in its unpainted form, since that would vary based on the composite materials used in the armor's construction. But they had to get to impractically close quarters to recognize each other... and even then, Roy's paintjob only stood out because the VF-0's in question were from an evaluation unit that didn't have any kind of uniform heraldry at the time. Things got more uniform with the VF-1 (circa DYRL) and on later VFs, where there might only be a colored stripe to distinguish one pilot's machine from another... and often not even that much. After that, completely individualized paint schemes seem to be the domain of the irregulars (e.g. Sound Force) and mercenaries (SMS).

Yep... two dead, and two giving the health plan a whirl. Fortunately, Episode Archive is about one of the luckier ones. ... okay, so I'm not the only one who noticed that her "tracts of land" were drawn much bigger in this. Good to know I'm not (completely) crazy.

The easiest way would be to use a player like VLC to play back the discs, and run a separate subtitle file in the player at the same time.

More of a Hall-effect magnetohydrodynamic thruster, but yes... We got a few real-world examples as I indicated via that link... but, yes, sort of. To be precise, it's a sort of a hybrid of fusion rocket and magnetohydrodynamic plasma ion thruster system... which will seem uncannily familiar if you're at all familiar with the technology of Star Trek, because impulse engines work on the same basic principles. The plasma stream produced by the engine's reaction power system powers (and is further accelerated by) the MHD plasma ion thruster near the rear of the engine. More or less, yeah... the diagrams in Sky Angels and Variable Fighter Master File show cutaways of thermonuclear reaction engines that look like variations on a low-bypass turbofan jet engine, just with the thermonuclear reaction power system situated directly behind (or partly overlapping with) the high-pressure stage of the compressor, so that plasma is bled directly into what would be the combustion chamber. Later engine designs show the "combustion" stage as having a few concentric "rings" of heat-exchange surface area. The MHD system is usually situated in or near the tail end of the turbine shaft. By all accounts, the preferred fuel is hydrogen slush for a hydrogen-hydrogen reaction... one of the benefits of the thermonuclear reaction overtechnology is it's easy to maintain reactions like that in the plasma state, and they don't produce harmful radiation.

Probably not as severe an issue on a smaller craft like a VF... esp. if, as in Macross, the "paint" is also fulfilling other functions... and this neatly ties into the next bit: Actually, according to the descriptions in Macross Chronicle and Great Mechanics.DX, the two are actually one and the same. The ablative anti-beam coating is an added function of the passive stealth coating applied to the airframe. The material we see is pretty darn tough stuff... though that's a recurring theme in Macross where material science is concerned. The paint on the YF-21 survived pretty much everything that was thrown at it, until pushed the YF-21 to the limit at too low of an altitude and the paint burned off from the friction heating at some ungodly high velocity below 30km. (Mind you, there's some art that suggests Mylene hand-painted the Gubaba on her VF-11MAXL... and that's shown to have been tough enough to withstand reentry heat.) That's... not exactly accurate. Quamzin just said that there was an ace aboard the Macross that was as good (or better) than Milia, and at the time Max was not flying an "elite" craft either. Not to mention Milia's exploratory attack had her killing mooks at random because she had no idea what to look for. Now THAT part is true... though the VFs in question needed to get VERY close to each other in order for the pilots to recognize their opposite numbers... and they needed to be on fairly intimate terms to recognize the other's personal markings. The IFF and HUD actually are shown to cheerfully tag nearby units with not only their type, but their unique identification if they're friendlies... you might call it an aid to visual recognition that removes any ambiguity. Actually... the descriptions associated with the VF-25 suggest that it's actually storing its waste heat somewhere insulated that won't show up on infrared detectors, and then radiating it out after combat ends using the wings as a heat sink.

On the VF-0? Yeah, I think that's a fair summation. With a maximum operating depth of just a few dozen feet and without a power plant capable of running underwater, the limited lifespan of the VF-0's capacitors would probably be enough to put all but the most daring or suicidal pilots off the idea of taking a swim. They'd have only a few minutes to surface and to restart the engines to avoid their dive becoming a one-way trip to the ocean floor.

That looks like a probable place where that misconception could be picked up. 'course, we know VFs aren't flying as bare metal airframes... they've got a variety of materials applied to the airframe's composite armor skin, such as paint or coatings of passive stealth material/anti-beam weapon ablative armor. The "Caution Sign and MODEX" sections of Variable Fighter Master File also include a number of locations on the airframe (sensors and such) which are not to be painted on. Perhaps the most blatant case of this being the VF-171EX Nightmare Plus EX, for which the change from blue-grey to white is explained as the result of the new formulation of ablative anti-beam coating applied to the airframe.

Well, yes... to a point. Not all armor or armor-piercing ammunition is created equal, after all. Nor is all armor of uniform thickness or defensive capability... even across a single fighter. The level of firepower that can take down a light AFV will not necessarily be enough to hurt a main battle tank. Or, to point to examples in-series, ammo which would have been enough to seriously mess up an enemy VF will not necessarily be equal to the task of taking down an enemy whose armor is better than what the NUNS uses... as the Frontier fleet found out to its peril in Macross Frontier.

Not sure where you're getting that idea... Not quite. Realistically, any color is a low-viz color in space because there's simply not enough ambient light to make out color unless you're very close to a star or a massive, high-albedo surface like a planet or large-ish moon. Sci-fi commonly has ships unrealistically (and uniformly) illuminated to make it easier for the viewer to see the ship. What you'd get during most flights in space would be more on the order of what we see in the original Macross series when they pass through Jupiter's shadow... nothing visible but running lights. (Or as seen on the SDF-1 Macross in the opening sequence of DYRL?.) That's what IFF and other squad datalink tools are for. Sounds like a Robotech-ism to me.

It's a picture in the Lost Two Years part of Perfect Memory... which shows what looks to be a pro-wrestling match between two (giant) Meltrans with a VF-1A referee. (From page 64 of Perfect Memory.)

I haven't found anything that states (or suggests) that Zentradi warships employ energy conversion armor. Though it's worth noting that only a few human-built ships are explicitly identified as using the stuff too... and that's mainly the ones which are meant to wade into the areas of the heaviest fighting (transformable warships) and the more sophisticated vessels used by the Varauta forces (which nevertheless appear to only be partially covered). Cost is almost certainly a factor, given what's been said about how prohibitively expensive the heavier forms of ECA are. It certainly seems that way, yes. The wording on the Technology Sheet for gun pods (Tech 03A) implies that Zentradi mobile weapons do incorporate energy conversion armor... and there's a bit said about how the VF-0 and so on had their armaments developed with the expectation of having to fight a foe with energy conversion armor comparable to that which was employed by the UN Forces. (Anti-ECA shells are mentioned in the VF-1's assortment of shell options for the GU-11 in Master File as well.)

As far as I know, all of the thrust figures that've been quoted to us WRT thermonuclear reaction turbine performance are for the engine mounted on the aircraft itself.