Seto Kaiba
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You could call it a question of degree... when I said the SW-XA I Schneeblume was built around a VF-1 airframe, I did mean it quite literally. Take out all of the external passive stealth refinements to the skin and various system improvements and what you're left with is a bog-standard, almost entirely unmodified VF-1 airframe. If the Schneegans is based off a VF-1 airframe too, at least that saw some significant modification. The Schneeblume is basically just a VF-1 with a coat of black paint and some extra panels stitched on.
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*nods* I've run across a little bit about the aftermath of the Sharon Apple incident... apparently she really managed to turn people against virtuoids, to the point that her music was banned for a few years and responsive virtuoids were legislated out of service.
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Kawamori's VF-Experiment column in Character Model magazine... the (explicitly non-canon) fluff provided indicated that all the Stealth Wing X work was done to create a companion craft to operate alongside the VF-17 Nightmare as an air superiority and defense fighter to complement the long range attack-oriented VF-17. The SW-XA I was built around a VF-1 airframe, while the SW-XA II was... not. (Yes, slowpoke.jpg, but I hope the little clarity I can lend to this helps somewhat.) If its role was, as indicated, air superiority and area defense, it probably wouldn't need to worry about active or passive stealth as much as the Nightmare with its long range attack operational profile.
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Well... what little I've been able to turn up suggests that Marge Gueldoa was, in addition to being Sharon's lead developer, at least a little in love with Sharon (or what Sharon represented). He drops a hint about his motives earlier on, when he first receives the chip and comments on how he takes exception to Aristotle's view that the mind (Aristotle's treatise Peri Psyche actually called this the soul, though the actual meaning is more like the fundamental essence of a living thing rather than a separate spiritual body) could not exist independently of a body. (Aristotle actually goes further, suggesting that the soul is the fundamental condition to truly be alive, and that it's impossible to have a soul without a body, a body without a soul, or a body with the wrong type of soul.) In that light, the reason Marge was so determined to see Sharon's system completed by any means necessary is he probably felt he was about to prove that the self (or "soul") could be an existence independent of a body. Sharon would be, by Marge's terms, a truly living being that possessed a soul but no true body. Thematically, it has a lot in common with Ghost in the Shell's notions of whether or not the human self can exist once the body is no longer actually human at all... or is entirely absent.
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Initially, yes... Unless, of course, the surviving elements of the lost fleets manage to contact other fleets and request reinforcements... At the end of the first space war, Boddole Zer's fleet had fractured and fled in all directions, with around three million ships still in service. While it doesn't seem that any of them managed to secure reinforcements and return to attack again in Macross's main continuity, it did happen TWICE in Macross II's parallel world continuity. (Both times because our boy Quamzin escaped death's embrace in a previous conflict and led reinforcements back to Earth.)
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Might be... not "is". Not an original notion by any means... Max's alleged infidelity is a core plot point of the entire Macross 7 Trash manga, for one, and as Max is quite popular with young women even into his fifties (see Macross 7) I can see plenty of reason for Milia to be at least a little hacked off with him. Eh... it makes sense to me. Adopting Moaramia, a Zentradi, would give both of them some perspective on Milia's situation trying to adapt to human familial norms and provide a stable family life. They did kind of rush into a wedding, after all... and during the period between their wedding and when they adopted Moaramia, they were not exactly leading a laid-back life.
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Actually, isn't it mentioned/implied in Macross Chronicle's Zentradi Worldguide sheet that Zentradi is a tonal language like Chinese? "Deculture" could, then, have several separate, distinct meanings depending on the intonation. EDIT: Yep, looks like... the sheet has a section devoted to intonation markings for Zentradi words, so with the negative prefix De- and karucha being roughly analogous to "wonderful", "magnificent", or "amazing", with one intonation it could be "outrageous!" or "unbelievable!", and with another it could be the more negative version seen in DYRL, etc. where it means "disgusting" or "unthinkable". "Protoculture" is just a near-miss coincidence between Zentradi and English, according to the glossary on the sheet. The Zentradi word literally just means "(the) old/ancient culture". "Yakk deculture" is simply a more emphatic and specific... making the meaning more like "such a disgusting thing" or "such an outrageous thing". -
There's a backhanded acknowledgement of that in Variable Fighter Master File: VF-25 Messiah... page 27 has a YF-29 shown in exactly the same paintjob as the SW-XA II.
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The amount of inaccurate information going into Chronicle's coverage of Macross II is kind of upsetting (for me, anyway)... the Metal Siren that Sylvie flew was never described as a prototype in the animation materials. I'm not sure how they decided that it was, since the production art was captioned "Metal Siren Replica".
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Not that I'm aware, no... but with the overwhelming tone of "Make love, not war" in Macross, I'd wager that the UN Forces aren't exactly fussy about first contact as long as the local pointy-eared space girls are cute. (Admittedly, the UN Forces have only really encountered a few alien races in their exploration of the galaxy... so the Zolans being the only ones who were friendly from the word "go" isn't as far in the minority as it sounds.)
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"Better" is a rather subjective term... the improvements made between the UN Spacy's use of the Queadluun-Rau and their new Queadluun-Rhea are principally improvements in the area of survivability rather than performance. The Queadluun-Rau was, in what the official material tells us, such an effective battle suit that the UN Spacy quite cheerfully continued to use them after the first space war ended. It's occasionally worth reminding ourselves that the Zentradi Army may have been in a de facto state of technological stasis, but that they went into that period of stasis armed with the best weapons and equipped with a mass-production infrastructure which the Macross Chronicle mechanic sheet for the Factory Satellite tells us is capable of developing and incorporating some design improvements into the weapons it produces over time. So, after 500,000 years of being cut off from "new" developments, the Zentradi Army is tooling around the galaxy with weapons that were built for them by the galaxy's most technologically advanced species, which have been undergoing constant, patient, automated refinement for several times longer than human civilization has been a thing. We're shown pretty clearly on several occasions that the Zentradi mecha might not necessarily be as high-performance as the human-built mobile weapons when it comes to flight or armor, but they're still perfectly capable of wrecking a VF or five when the chips are down... even into the 2050s.
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Yeah, that's an art error... though I don't think the decorative art on that (or any other) sheet is meant to be taken as gospel. The title for the portion of the VF-11B's mechanic sheet says "30mm 6-barrel gun pod", and the line art for the VF-11C's shows the six barrel arrangement. As far as gun pods with 5 barrel arrangements go, the GU-17 is the only one that leaps to mind in official material... though the unofficial art in Variable Fighter Master File: VF-19 Excalibur shows the GU-15 with a five-barrel arrangement.
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Dunno... but didn't Macross 30 use that, in English no less, for the fighter pods that appear in-game? EDIT: Yes, yes they did. To confirm, I started up the game and flew over to at rock formation just north of Jurgen in the Siera desert where they congregate, and sure enough they're labeled "GNERL".
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Aaaaaaaaaactually... I can think of a few cases where there are explicit comparisons drawn between human and alien mecha in Macross. One moment that leaps to mind was Klan Klan passing some remarks about how Zentradi mecha compare quite favorably to human equipment in some respects early in Macross Frontier. Macross II sources contain a number of remarks about how Zentradi mecha and VFs compare, including a few specific notes about where efforts were made to address those areas of deficient performance in subsequent designs. When main timeline official sources talk about how VFs compare with Zentradi mecha, they're usually speaking in pretty general terms... like Chronicle's assertion that the Regult is pretty rubbish when it comes to atmospheric flight and thus needs support from Gnerls for planetary invasion operations. Non-canon sources like Master File do spare a thought for those kind of comparisons as well... though the specific example I recall offhand refers to VFs having difficulty coping with Zentradi tactics. I think it's as much a matter of raw performance as it is humanity's attempts to improve their ability to fight the Zentradi on the Zentradi's terms. Well, the Regult is established to have better performance in space than atmosphere... and the VF-1 is described as having a couple significant issues with its flight performance in space, so we're halfway home already. I think part of the reason you don't see that play out explicitly on screen is most of battles in Macross take place in space, and the few that don't are usually fought between VFs and the Zentradi's best flight-capable mecha, the Queadluun-Rau. (You could take Macross 30 as throwing this a bone, since the Regults in that are pretty awful in the air... though the actual game mechanics of a canon game are never reliable.) Not initially... remember, for a decent span of time (most of the series!) they thought that humans might, just might, be their long vanished creators. They were basically subjecting the Macross to just enough pressure to make 'em sweat so the Zentradi had something to draw conclusions from. Once they concluded the Macross was an actual threat... well, things went to hell VERY quickly and everybody had cause to regret it.
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Eh... the VF-1's got a few officially-acknowledged deficiencies in space flight, the biggest being that its small airframe size limits the amount of fuel it can carry, and thus the maximum acceleration and sortie range. One of the bigger points mentioned with the VF-4 was, IIRC, something like a 40% improvement in space combat capability over the VF-1. Actually, a lot of the mecha which followed the VF-1 in either universe have some form of mention of "the VF-1 was deficient in X, Y, and Z, which were remedied on the new design". Nah, the UN Spacy was basically being subjected to the gentlest of love taps from the mostly curious Zentradi for the bulk of the war. The few times someone on the Zentradi side (usually Quamzin) got serious were the few times the Macross's crew were on the ropes and were often only saved by circumstances like the detonation of Salla base's reaction furnace, or a senior Zentradi commander ordering Quamzin to back off (sometimes at gunpoint). The Macross was barely surviving when Vrlitwhai and other commanders were sending just one or two ships at them at a time just to see what those wacky miclones would do next... In short... because the Zentradi were busy satisfying their curiosity about these strange miclones, and weren't earnestly trying to rub them out. Remember, wasn't one of Hikaru's first comments to Minmay after joining the military to point out that the internal announcements about how the last battle went were a load? When the Zentradi finally decided to take the kid gloves off, it ended badly for six billion people in just a few minutes.
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I think JB0 has the right of it... these mecha were, by in large, developed for space combat and a "quantity has a quality all its own" philosophy of warfare. The UN Spacy might achieve a ten or twelve to one kill ratio over the Zentradi, but the Zentradi do tend to show up with a few thousand of their mates whenever they decide to start trouble.
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They can fly in a planetary atmosphere.
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*wince* Oh gods no... please no... at least they should wait a few more titles before they throw out another edition. My poor bookshelves can't take the strain!
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Yes, you are... the series chronology that fills in most of the Macross II backstory was never made completely available in the US thanks to the Turbografx-16 failing to penetrate the video game market here, and the kind of scattershot hobby magazine market. There were a number of major Zentradi conflicts in the Macross II backstory between the end of the first space war and the Mardook invasion. The big ones were in 2036 (Macross 2036), 2037 (Macross: Eternal Love Song), and 2054 (mentioned only). The 2054 Zentradi invasion of the Sol system was stopped dead at Pluto's orbit by a UN Spacy defense perimeters, but it took quite a toll on the fleet... ending with the UN Spacy capturing a factory satellite.
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Macross 35 production Committee project signing activities
Seto Kaiba replied to Mari-ja's topic in Movies and TV Series
Bloody hell, you're right! Well, I guess some things never change. -
Macross 35 production Committee project signing activities
Seto Kaiba replied to Mari-ja's topic in Movies and TV Series
Actually, it looks like I misread it when I mentioned it to Mr March... the Japanese version of the petition makes as little sense as the badly fractured Babelfish English we got here, but I got the essence of it right the first time. The gist of it appears to be that the poster wants the 35th Anniversary series to have a new Macross 7 story about Basara, set four years after Dynamite 7 and involving around Basara getting invited to a music festival on Earth, which turns out to be a trap by the Protodeviln that involves Minmay somehow. All in all, the whole idea sounds surpassingly awful... the kind of thing I'm glad Kawamori would never do, and something I would need to be reincarnated as a Hindu deity to have enough thumbs to show my disapproval of. -
I'll second that emotion.
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To be fair, the VF-2JA probably deserved to get the shaft... it's so frigging minor even though it's an unconventional and interesting design. It'd be like them giving a cover to any of the other one-scene wonders like that messenger plane from Macross Galaxy, or the construction Valkyrie from Macross 7. Still, nice to see a nice big version of the Metal Siren painting...
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No, I don't think I am... I think you're making a conclusion there's a connection when there's no evidence any exists. Also, VF-4? I thought your point of inquiry was the VF-X3 Star Crusader from Macross: Remember Me. We know roughly when Kawamori designed the VF-X3 Star Crusader... because it's stylistically almost identical to work he was doing for BattleTech's JP release, which was done at the same time he was developing the other original VFs that went into the FamilySoft Macross game series. Late 1992, early 1993. We can point to exact dates for when some of the other VFs from those games had their line art done... the Stampede Valkyrie was November 1992, for a game that debuted about a year later in 1993. The rough version of the finished VF-4 was dated March 1995... so that's not a likely inspiration either, though he'd roughed out some stuff regarding battroid appearance that Ohata and Fujita either didn't have or didn't care for, because their VF-4 from the Macross: Eternal Love Song game looked nothing like it. Without a time machine? Not likely. Remember, Studio Nue wasn't involved in the development of Macross II, so it's unlikely the concept work of Studio Nue's staff would've been available to the Macross II creators. Likewise, the original VFs designed to be included in the FamilySoft games weren't finished until November 1992 according to the dates on the art in Kawamori's Macross Design Works book, and that's a year after the VF-XS Valkyrie II's art was printed in Animage, and the same month the final (6th) episode of Macross II was released... by which point that ship had SAILED.
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By "published in", I literally mean the art was published in a print resource... in this case, it was part of a Macross II teaser article in the hobby magazine Animage, in the #11 issue for 1991. I wouldn't really call it a "line art compendium", and the VF-XS was not printed in any Macross II art book, but the magazine was definitely publicly available for a whopping 600 yen! (There's a copy on eBay for ten bucks right now.)