Jump to content

Seto Kaiba

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    12922

  • Joined

  • Last visited

 Content Type 

Everything posted by Seto Kaiba

  1. Seto Kaiba
    Well, they haven't completely abandoned the term... it crops up a lot in Variable Fighter Master File, for instance. They just gave the acronym a slightly different meaning. It became "Fuel, Arms, and Sensors Tactical" in the VF-25 book. The most recent volume (the VF-22 book) still uses it.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    That's definitely a Nightmare Plus. Incidentally, has anyone found an online store that's actually carrying this one? I've struck out on my usual two. EDIT: Never mind, even though the book is titled in English it only shows up if you search on the book's title in Japanese on HMV.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, there are some minor differences... enhanced avionics, leg munitions bays, the deletion of the bayonet from the gunpod, etc.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Nope.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    It was a S-3B Viking. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_S-3_Viking#/media/File:Viking_S-3B.jpg <- Front view of a real-world S-3B Viking.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Er... having read Starship Troopers, my gut reaction is "almost certainly not". The two couldn't be more different, thematically. Macross is all about love, peaceful coexistence, music as a universal language, and other uplifting stuff. Starship Troopers is often accused (not without reason) of being a love-letter to militarism and fascism, where no character even considers any course of action other than annihilating the sentient Pseudo-arachnids* in the name of manifest destiny. I think the Vajra were more an attempt to provide an inscrutable adversary instead of one who was practically human, though it would appear from the concept art that their anatomy was inspired by Zentradi mecha (though in-universe it's probably the other way 'round). EDIT: Yeah, as far as the Vajra's motivations, there's something said in the final episode about the Vajra not understanding that humans were an intelligent species, and trying to "rescue" Ranka from them because she was (unintentionally) communicating the way they do... by fold waves. (Probably didn't help that her signature song produces a fold wave equivalent to a Vajra mating call...) * In the original Starship Troopers novel, the Pseudo-arachnid "bugs" were not the mindless hive-mind monsters seen in the Starship Troopers movies... they were actually arachnid in form, individually sentient, telepathic, and of comparable intelligence to a human. They also technologically at least on par with humanity, including faster-than-light spacraft, directed energy weapons, and guided missile systems.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Ah, OK. I misunderstood your inquiry. You need something mounted in the pilot seat slot, whether it's EX-Gear or a conventional pilot seat, otherwise, you'd have no stick, throttle, or pedals to operate the plane with. It is, however, worth noting that under normal circumstances the pilot would not disembark in his EX-Gear. When you remove the EX-Gear, you're essentially taking both the pilot seat and the controls with you, which is why it's normally left in the plane unless a pilot is abandoning a downed or disabled aircraft (e.g. being shot down, being disabled by the enemy, or suffering a complete loss of control as in Ep13). Though, I suppose, since the jump seat is standard equipment on the VF-25, Alto COULD in fact have operated Gilliam's VF-25F without EX-Gear, but he'd be piloting from the back seat the way Sheryl was. Yes... the Genocidas design was a Kawamori concept that predated Macross's original series, and served as an inspiration for the early transformable fighter concept designs (the "Breast Fighter") that ultimately became the VF-1 Valkyrie. I think Kawamori may have found a bit of inspiration WRT powered suits in the novel Starship Troopers, which Studio Nue did a relatively faithful adaptation of in '87.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    They are... they're mentioned on the Compendium, and Variable Fighter Master File: VF-22 Sturmvogel II even has a diagram that helpfully shows how intake air gets to those vanes and even labels them ホバー ベーン (hover vane). (It's on page 66 if anyone cares.)
  9. Seto Kaiba
    That'd be premature... and I really wish you'd stop trying to crowbar that baloney acronym in. The underside of the internal bay door right beneath the intake is where the gunpods are stored when they're mounted internally on the -22. Toys, obviously, take certain liberties. On the -21, that appears to be nothing more than a flat panel over the articulations for the door. That'd be consistent with General Galaxy's design practices, yes. Doesn't seem like it, based on the available material... the descriptions I can find in Chronicle and Great Mechanics.DX indicate the material is a new, flexible composite material. Variable Fighter Master File has a cutaway of the VF-22 wing that shows the wing's internal structure, which has a modest internal frame surrounded by 9 Y-shaped actuator arms that are responsible for bending or flexing the wing surface in different ways... four on the leading edge, four on the trailing edge, and one on the wingtip. Nah, we see Sheryl operate ("fly" might be generous considering her demonstrated skill level) Michel's VF-25G without EX-Gear in Macross Frontier's TV series. The episode is "Mother's Lullaby", about 12 minutes in. Note that while Michel ejected wearing military EX-Gear, HER seat was an ordinary control chair. As far as I'm aware, the actual inspiration for the design comes from one Kawamori's pre-Macross projects... Genocidas. Design-wise, it looks vaguely similar to the old Honda powered exoskeleton.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, the VF-4 was one of the fighters-of-choice for the first generation of emigrant fleets... alongside the VF-1, VF-5, and VF-5000. We even see them being used by training flights on Macross-7 at one point (in Trash). The New Horizon game was fun while it lasted, nice to know someone got something out of it even after its demise. Sort of, yeah... he's supposedly a great pilot, but he's always brought down by mechanical problems before he can finish the race due to his overtuned-to-the-point-of-uncontrollability fighter. Macross Chronicle does suggest there's a connection between the two, yes. Spiritia is a form of higher-dimension energy associated with super dimension space, and song energy is supposedly kind of like a fold wave, yes. (The vibe I get from the descriptions in Macross Chronicle is almost like humanity's connection to the warp in Warhammer 40,000... the human mind has an intrinsic connection to the higher dimension, and their mental and emotional state is reflected there, though super dimension space's native life appears to be benign, whereas the warp in 40K definitely fell under "Hyperspace is a scary place".)
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Fifty issues.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    The animation in Macross Plus does show the YF-19 firing its fixed-forward guns during the dogfight with Guld in the second half. I don't think we see the YF-21's coaxial gun fire, but the bits that end up on the hips are where the gunpods are stored. Exactly how energy conversion armor works is not clearly explained, unfortunately... but there are various materials in existence now that are at least similar in function (increasing rigidity and so on when exposed to a current or electromagnetic field). Nah, that's just the variable camber wing mechanism... which works a bit like an active aeroelastic wing, just turned up to 11.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, I can sort that out for you, GuardianGrey... because most of the tech specs on their wiki were written by me back when I had a character and staff position there. The SV-37 and SV-52 were what I cooked up in an afternoon or so when the game admins were asking for new designs to pad out their anti-government faction. I supplied the line art for the entry too, though only from a scan I'd found (I believe right here on MacrossWorld) years ago. Sadly, the game's pretty much a dead duck now, so I'm not surprised you weren't able to get a response from the remaining staff. Hard to say, but based on the art in the Variable Fighter Master File: VF-22 Sturmvogel II book, I would say it's probably about the size of a man's torso, maybe larger. The Shaher Femail was deliberate misdirection on General Galaxy's part, though... my guess would be that they decided not to put an inertia store converter on the VF-0 either because the airframe wasn't compatible, or because they didn't want to put an insanely expensive piece of hardware in an aircraft belonging to a civilian famous for crashing more than anything else. Could be a museum piece, or a replica VF-0 from a planet like Ouroboros... I doubt Shin's VF is anywhere anyone might find it. Yeah, Macross the Ride had a few numbering inconsistencies like that... like the SV-52 Oryol being listed as having the same engine as a VF-17, which they then list as FF-2010X (should be 2100X). Pobody's nerfect. The Schneeblume in particular is more a "what if" for a design we've ALREADY seen... specifically, "What if you designed the VF-1 during the 2000s". The Schneegans seems to have found its completed artistic expression in the YF-29 (a YF-29 in Schneegans colors can be seen in Variable Fighter Master File: VF-25 Messiah). Yeah... pretty much. I think there are actually a couple really good .5 generation designs out there. The VF-1 Plus (Block 6 and later) is arguably a Gen 1.5 VF, since the cockpit design and other refinements were nicked from the Gen 2 VF-4. The VF-4G's probably Gen 2.5 because of modernizations with tech from Gen 3. The VF-17's a sort of Gen 3.5 for reasons we already went into, and the VF-171 is arguably Gen 4.5 because of the tech it began to inherit from the 5th Gen AVFs (EX-Gear, etc.). The Macross Frontier novelization's VF-17F and so on may also qualify. The ones that are impossible to quantify are the one-offs or limited production ones like the VF-0 Custom "Zeak" and particularly the VF-9E, a trial production Gen 2 design upgraded with Gen 4 hardware.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Macross Chronicle's VF "genealogy" chart (Mechanic Sheet 01Q) offers something like a generational breakdown of VFs... You and they are on more or less the same wavelength, though they put the VF-17 in with the VF-19/22/171 instead of the 11/14. If they had ".5" generations, the VF-17 would probably be one of those, as would the VF-1 Plus variants and so on, because they were built during one generation and adopted tech from another.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    ... and 90% of the combat in Macross 30...
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Unless the pilot in question was locked on to multiple targets at the same time... which is something every VF has been able to do since the original series. They're pretty much always shown kitted out for space use in the Macross Frontier series itself... and I don't recall how they were armed in Macross 30 when you don't have a Super, Armored, or Tornado Pack on. The VF-25 has some limited passive stealth features, but it's principally an active stealth craft... IIRC, Kawamori made it with the intention of specifically getting away from passively-stealthy real world silhouettes. Most VFs seem to be more active stealth than passive, the VF-17 being the principal exception because it came out between active stealth system generations.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    It's not a size concern, but rather that there is some unspecified aspect of the designs of some VFs that make them incompatible with the ISC. The exact nature of the incompatibility is not elaborated upon, unfortunately, however the VF-0 is possibly incompatible, the Zeak doesn't have one listed in its stats. The chief issue there being the aforementioned problems the VF-11 shares with virtually every other aircraft that could potentially be upgraded to AVF tech levels... insufficient structural strength, limited internal space in the airframe (relative to AVFs), and issues with AVF-level tech. That's not quite what I said, actually... the VF-9E, etc. were unrelated efforts to upgrade existing fighters to AVF standards, a job which was generally abandoned as impractical if not downright dangerous. (e.g. the VF-9E, VF-11MAXL, VF-171EX) Their development had no direct connection (that we know of) to Project Super Nova and the solicitation for new next-generation designs. Wrong kind of "Experiment". Aircraft designated VF-X (or XVF) are literally in-universe experimental aircraft like we have in the real world. Offhand, I don't know why the Schneeblume isn't in the VF-E section... probably for want of a good, clean line art source. "VF-Experiment" is the name of the column in Character Model that the Schneeblume and Schneegans were from... it was the column that ran before VFERR. Er... not sure why these are listed as "candidate" designs... they were already AVFs when they were new, and at least the VF-19 is known to have been able to partially adopt VF-25 equipment.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Time travel's a hell of a thing.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    The information in that scan is contradictory, as noted before... and it's not official setting material either, which is also problematic. Mind you, the Armored Pack's chief advantage isn't so much the NUMBER of missiles it carries as it is the types of armament it carries (the Super Pack doesn't have those high-initial velocity anti-armor rockets and anti-warship beam guns) and the extra armor it adds to the fighter, which is the same ultra-tough next-gen armor as the VF-25's antiprojectile shield, allegedly giving it defensive ability approaching that of a battleship (which we have to take seriously, since we see the VF-25 Armored Pack tank a hit from the same guns that were popping frigates earlier). The Super Pack's armaments are suited to dogfighting... the Armored Pack's weapons offer more options, particularly for anti-ship work.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    That's from Macross 30.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    No, the VF-171 has not been depicted with a beam adapter like Gamlin's VF-17 so often used... though that doesn't necessarily mean it's impossible if it's using a later variant of the same gunpod. No clue what the bore of the GU-14B is, though my gut reaction guess would be 30mm.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    By all accounts, the energy consumption of a pinpoint barrier system is pretty ridiculous... there's a little inconsistency between sources, but they agree that the system on the YF/VF-19 consumes more than half (60-70%) of the VF's generator output. Mind you, for what you get, that seems like a bargain. We've seen that a pinpoint-barrier equipped VF can smash its way through a ship's internal bulkheads, stop direct hits from the New Standard gun pods of the first AVF generation, protect the (relatively) delicate mechanisms of a VF's hands from breaking when pilots resort to fisticuffs, and on the VF-25 they're even shown to be able to blunt most of the impact of an anti-capital ship beam cannon...
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Nope, it's still a perfectly viable passively-stealthy airframe... but that passive stealth is degraded somewhat by hanging bombs and missiles off the wings, etc., which the active stealth system compensates for. The ISC is not supposed to actually be all that large... it fits inside the nose of the VF-25 with everything else in there. The catch I'm thinking of is that various sources (Macross Chronicle, Great Mechanics.DX, etc.) have mentioned that certain airframes simply are not compatible with the ISC. No context is given to explain what the compatibility issue is, but the VF-0 Custom "Zeak" isn't listed as having one in Macross the Ride and the VF-171 is said to be flat-out incompatible. (Curiously, the VF-19 IS compatible...) I'd have thought the existing lasers would be more than sufficient for anti-missile duty, and since AVFs have anti-beam coatings, I can't imagine who such a large, diffuse laser weapon would be useful against... We know that the quantum beam cannons can be made fairly small... the only question is "is there enough juice to power it?". We know a third engine could conceivably power one full size one... so two cut-down ones might not be that big a stretch. The quantum beam gun pods that the VF-27, YF-29, and YF-30 use appear to have the same basic setup... their default mode is a "beam machinegun" type rapid fire weapon, and they have a heavier "beam grenade" mode which just seems to fire a much bigger blast. (Admittedly, in Macross 30, beam grenade mode was replaced by a sort of beam sniper mode for consistency across the other VFs, who all somehow got the SSL-9B Dragunov as their alt gunpod. Actually, I think it probably had a lot more to do with the same thing they were having SMS's Chelsea Scarlett and the NUNS special forces "Round Table" do... test hardware for the VF-25 under field conditions. The official word from Macross Chronicle and Great Mechanics.DX is that pinpoint barrier systems produce a focused distortion of space-time... the gist being that it's essentially warping space to create a region matter and energy can't pass through. sketchley would probably know more about this than me, since he's done some work on Variable Fighter Master File: VF-19 Excalibur. Yeah, it shows 8... the VF-171 is said to have two optional gun pods, one is MC-17C and the other is GU-14B, IINM. I think the 8-barrel version is probably the latter.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    More or less... we don't know if it uses the same ARIEL avionics package as the VF-19, and its engines are actually an improved (detuned) version of the VF-17's, but it's got the important bits like the 3rd Generation active stealth package, the pinpoint barrier system, fold booster capability, etc. The EX variant actually used the same engines as a VF-19 (FF-2550F). In a way, the Nightmare Plus actually has a few advantages over the higher-spec VF-19 in that it can be adapted to do pretty much anything. They're using the same generation active stealth tech as the production VF-19. Yeah, Kawamori did a few pieces with not-official-setting material in Character Model, the better known one is VF-Experiment and the VFERR thing gets overlooked a lot. The VFERR article was written as a sort of post-Operation Iconoclasm retrospective of the VF-0 Phoenix and captured SV-51s, and had a couple odd things like an AI-guided cruise missile with micro-missile launchers. I wasn't able to find any either, so it may be that the site's author just doesn't care about sourcing... especially in a series as loosey-goosey about continuity as Macross. In all honesty, I'm not certain that the VF-0 design is compatible with ISC or that it could withstand the strain of a THIRD FF-3001 engine... though the VF-0 Custom already had AVF-grade high-output laser weapons. It used the same model on the VF-25.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    The VF-171 is an AVF, yes... it has the key hallmarks of the AVF generation (fold booster compatibility, pinpoint barrier, etc.). Couple corrections... There's no "e" in "UN SPACY". The UN isn't "Unity Nations", it's just "Unity" (or "Unified", or "Unification") Government/Forces/etc. I tend to prefer the latter, though "Unified" is, I think, the closest literal translation of the term. Development of the VF-171 began before the governmental and military reorganization, due to difficulties and various complications involving the adoption (and export) of the VF-19 and/or VF-22. Er... I'm pretty sure that's an unofficial Macross design from Character Model magazine, circa 2004. I believe it was part of an article called "Macross Zero VFERR" (short for "Variable Fighter Experimental Requirements Review". EDIT: Yeah, Macross Chronicle puts it in the same category as the Schneegans and Schneeblume.
×
×
  • Create New...