Seto Kaiba

Granted, but isn't that more or less exactly what we're dealing with here? Instead of a F-15D built in Japan for the JASDF, we're talking about an export-specification VF-19E (presumably) built on Frontier for the fleet's New UN Spacy garrison and the attached SMS forces. This does take place like fifty years after whatever was left of NATO went up in smoke, so it's not like they're wedded to the NATO designation system... and I'm pretty sure there's not a lot of precedent for "改" as a variant letter under NATO's guidelines either.

... the hell? Was that a VF-25 in Brera's colors?

Eh... the use of a double-suffix may be more common in Macross II's parallel world continuity, but it's not like it's unique to it. In the confines of Macross II's official setting, the second suffix letter denotes either a unit carrying special purpose equipment (VF-1xR, VF-4S[P/T]), or the operational regime it was designed for (VF-2x[A/S]). The use of second suffix letters is far less consistent in the main continuity and sources based on it. The use in this particular case is consistent with some versions of US fighters built either for experimental purposes (F-16XL) or under license by foreign powers (F-15DJ). No, it actually doesn't... at least not entirely. There's always the VF-5000T-G, the VF-11MAXL, VF-171EX, etc... or non-canon customs like the VF-19ES and VF-25Gu. One would assume that, as with the F-15DJ and the still-in-testing F-16IN, the atypical use of a second suffix letter denotes that it's a VF-19E is either being built for, or under license by, (and to a somewhat different spec) what is technically a foreign power (from Earth's perspective)... the Frontier government.

Uh, no... to expand on what sketchley has already said, the VF-19EF Caliburn and its "leader" variant are not a replacement for a preexisting design. The Dengeki website for Macross the Ride explains the VF-19EF as being a stripped-down export version (a "monkey model") of the VF-19E. As the "Master File" books apparently aren't part of the official setting, this is actually the first halfway-reliable mention of the VF-19E's existence. Even if the Master File books were part of the official setting, the VF-19EF wouldn't be replacing anything... the VF-19EF and Basara's VF-19改 would presumably just be variations on the stock VF-19E. Personally, I'm hoping for a model kit... or at least directions for kitbashing your own.

That's a question for another thread, but the short version is that it's nowhere near as secure or capable as the major third-party alternatives. It enjoys a large share of the web browser "market" because it's a pre-installed component of every modern Microsoft Windows OS, which accounts for a little over 83% of the world's personal computers. There are plenty of reasons to dump on IE, but that's a matter for another thread... On the note of cell phones, one of my other pet peeves cropped up today... most phones these days try to get you to buy custom ringtones and whatnot from the service provider, and go WELL out of their way to stop you from just putting some music clips on your phone's memory card manually and using those. Every new phone I've gotten in the last half-dozen years has required some kind of firmware crack or other trickery to get it to let me load my own custom backgrounds and ringtones onto it without a fuss.

Likewise... it's a stylistic clusterf*ck of elements from several different previous VFs that just do not work well together. I'd much rather see Alto stick to flying his VF-25F Tornado Messiah or the VF-171EX Nightmare Plus than have that horrid thing take center stage. There's ugly and then there's ugly... and being a mishmash of conflicting design elements from the SV-51, VF-19, VF-25, and VF-27 firmly puts the YF-29 in the ugly category, IMO. I have a sneaking suspicion that the YF-29's the main Macross continuity's answer to the Metal Siren... a painfully ugly and painfully overpowered prototype pressed into combat in extremis at the climax of the movie. I'll second that emotion...

Eh... this is literally the first we've seen or heard of the bloody thing and the movie won't be out for another 2 months, so we're not going to have an answer to that question. The piece describes it as being Alto's, but the movie is still forthcoming... so I'm not surprised that they have almost nothing to say about it. The main thrust of the piece is exactly as sketchley summarized in the SCOOPDA thread... it's a new valkyrie made for the 2nd Macross Frontier movie, supposedly piloted by Alto, and Bandai is tentatively making a 1/100 scale model of it to sell for 1260 yen. That's all there is (of significance) in there... there ain't no more. So far, the only screen captures from the movie that we've seen have shown Alto still flying his Tornado Messiah.

It does... but the odd part is that it really looks like a SW-XAII Schneegans from VF-Experiment.

One or the other... I don't recall having seen that in his post at the time I posted. It might've been blocked by my IP range filter if it was running when I made that post. Oh well...

There's also concept art of what appears to be an early version of Basara's Fire Valkyrie modeled on the VF-11 with a guitar on the contents pages of Kawamori's Macross Design Works book...

Yes, that would seem to be the case... and was also apparently the genesis of research into better anti-g-force measures that culminated in the YF-24 Evolution and its inertia store converter.

Yeah, it does... though since the VF-171 is a background mecha for almost the entire series, the gun pod it had before being upgraded to the VF-171EX (the GU-14B) rarely appears. One would assume that it has to be kept inside the leg, since we never see a stock VF-171 carrying one externally. The only time we do see the gun pod carried externally is on Alto's VF-171EX command spec., which has additional armor on the legs that likely blocks access to the gun pod's usual internal holster. There's not exactly a surfeit of art for the VF-171 either, so none of the art I'm aware of shows munitions bays in the legs... though there is an aperture on the inside of the knee which looks suspiciously like a pair of micro-missile launchers similar to those on the underside of the VF-22.

Yup... gonna have to second that emotion the same way Xx-SKULL-ONE-xX's did. +1 again. It breaks my heart to think of what Macross 7 could've been if Gamlin had just pulled the damn trigger!

Nah... wasn't splitting hairs to begin with, just dealing with some people who are ordinarily pretty sharp that seem to be having reading comprehension issues today. To (briefly) reiterate, this was never about who had the first concept art for the VF-4's transformation or anything like that. It was about who got their completed VF-4 design and name out first... Macross II's creators beat Kawamori to the punch by ~5 years. For reasons unknown, Gubaba misinterpreted what I said to mean that Kawamori had never intended the VF-4 to have a transformation until he did the Lighting III in 1995... which would, of course, be untrue had I actually said it. Then you jumped in in medias res and tried to make it a battle of who had the first concept art rather than who finished their version first. Somehow, we got way off track from my simple statement that I'm particularly fond of the VF-4 because it has a highly colorful design history that gives it one fighter mode, but two separate sets of transformation modes and names... the first being the "Siren" version from 1992's Macross: Eternal Love Song, and the second being the "Lightning III" version from 1997's Macross Digital Mission VF-X. That's all... nothing more than that.

lol wut? It's pretty obvious from just looking at the GERWALK mode art on p66 that it's the VF-X-4. Check the airframe's "neck" between the cockpit and the wing surface... it's not nearly long enough to be the VF-4 from Macross Flashback 2012. What's right above it is also indisputably a VF-X-4 from the Super Dimension Fortress Macross series... it's identical to the clearly labeled VF-X-4 on the bottom left of the very next page, it's even drawn from the same angle. EDIT: The same goes for your linked picture... it's clearly a VF-X-4 not the VF-4 from Flashback 2012. You provided a link to concept art... not a finished design. This is not, nor was it ever, about who had the first concept art.

Uh... the VF-X-4 and VF-4 aren't the same plane, for one. Please also note that I'm not talking about "ideas for transformation", I'm talking about a finished design. There's no denying that he obviously toyed with ways that the VF-4 could transform... I would be rather surprised if he hadn't. However, there's also no denying that the completed VF-4 Siren appeared five years before Kawamori's completed VF-4 Lightning III ever did... and a good three years before he finalized his version of the VF-4's battroid and GERWALK modes. You, me, and Gubaba are kind of talking past each other... you guys are raising objections to things that aren't even part of what I'm saying. I'm not talking about who had the first piece of concept art (Kawamori, duh), I'm talking about who was first to market with a finished design and an official name for the VF-4. The finished VF-4 Siren appeared in 1992's Macross: Eternal Love Song, while the finished VF-4 Lightning III didn't appear until 1997's Macross Digital Mission VF-X... this ought to be a no-brainer.

Huh... that could be a looooooooong list. To be honest, I can't say anything for or against the recent trend of 3D movies because I only rarely go to the cinema anymore. There's just too much flash and not nearly enough substance to warrant paying eight bucks, and I just don't see the appeal. If there's one technology I can say I have nothing but loathing for, smart phones would definitely be it. I could maybe look the other way if they were a "power toy" for executives with more money than sense or business owners who actually need to be reachable at all times... but they're not. I've yet to see anyone actually using their smart phone for business purposes. The only smart phones users I see are the spoiled teenagers and twenty-somethings who suffer from a crippling addiction to whatever the social networking flavor of the week happens to be, and as a result think every insignificant detail of their lives is of vital importance to all of the 6+ billion people on Earth. After seeing the way my kid sister behaved with hers when she bought one for herself, I'm seriously convinced they're a cause or exacerbating factor in ADD. Social networking sites and services like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and whatever the flavor of the week is are all equally useless in my opinion. Every time I hear about one of my friends having a facebook-induced squabble with someone, I wonder how the sheer amounts of unnecessary drama those services accumulate doesn't just collapse on itself and form a black hole. The last annoying technology trend that really grinds me gears these days is the inexplicable popularity of the Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC). Yes, it's free... but unless you have a super premium stereo in your house, the kind with a six-figure price tag, you won't hear any appreciable difference between FLAC audio and MP3 at 320kbps. The only appreciable difference is that the FLAC file is, on average, about three times the size of the MP3 for the same song. I realize that large HDDs are cheap these days, but there's no reason to waste space storing massive lossless audio files when they're utterly indistinguishable from last-generation lossy MP3 over computer speakers. It's a waste of time, bandwidth, and storage space.

Ugh... look, if you're going to correct me, I would really appreciate it if you made sure of your facts beforehand. For starters, that "fallacy" explanation you quoted off the Macross Compendium doesn't say anything like what you're claiming it does. At no point does it say that Kawamori had already worked out a transformation for his VF-4 design. All it does say is that he always intended for the VF-4 to be transformable, something that should be self-evident given its designation of VF-4... rather than the SF-4 or F-4 we would expect from a plane that wasn't transformation-capable. Go back and read my post... never once do I suggest that Shoji Kawamori did not intend for the VF-4 to transform. For two, the idea that Kawamori had the VF-4's transformation worked out from the get-go is thoroughly and completely ruled out by his own Design Works book. If you have a copy, please open it and turn to page 68. I'd like you to please tell me the date on the VF-4's transformation line art. For those of you unwilling to wait, the sketchy transformation line art is dated March 1995... as is the completed battroid mode. The complete GERWALK design sketch on page 67 is dated April of that same year. The earliest indication that he gave any thought to how the VF-4 would transform is a chibi-VF-4 sketch that looks like a VF-1 wearing goofy shoulder pads dated May 1990. The book makes no secret that the VF-4's transformation, and the final battroid mode and GERWALK mode designs were created for the 1997 videogame Macross Digital Mission VF-X... putting the finished design in the Game and Advanced Valkyrie section.

'k... I realize I'm dusting off an old thread that hasn't seen activity for a while, but this isn't worth making a new thread and it's strictly relevant to the above-quoted translation. That the production model VF-22 uses a limited version of the Brain Direct interface System for operator assistance came as a surprise to us when we first read azrael's translation, but it turns out it's actually not a new development. After my discussion with Talos about the VF-171's size, I was idly flipping through Macross Dynamite 7: Mylene Beat and happened to pause on the page where Gamlin is doing pre-flight checks on his VF-22S before going to look for Basara. Lo and behold, the four items on his pre-flight checklist were the fold booster, verniers, thrust vectoring flaps and the BDS. The collected edition was published in August 1998, so clearly this has been there for a while... maybe that's where Chronicle's writers sourced it from?

Likewise... and I doubt that racing will be all they do, since there's already been mention of a New UN Spacy special forces unit that uses the VF-19EF Caliburn. At this point, I think it's a foregone conclusion that they'll have some kind of combat in the story. I can't imagine it would go over well with the populace at large that they'd founded an expensive special forces unit with brand new VFs just to race the guys from SMS for kicks. This is just me guessing wildly, but I can't shake the feeling this whole racing thing with EX-Gear and possibly ISC-equipped VF-19s is a way of evaluating both technologies under operational conditions to further the development of the VF-25. Bah... not likely. You made a fuss even though I pointed out that there was no evidence of inconsistency, so I humored you and checked every source I could lay hands on to see if another number was offered... and found no evidence to support the "mistake or typo" theory. I do agree the size given is odd... but that's more a topic for another thread. Speaking of, I gotta go revive the Chronicle Translations thread for an interesting VF-22-related revelation.

Uh-huh... at least, according to the size comparison in This is Animation Special #5: Macross II.

Yeah, it does... and I think I might know why. Earlier tonight, I was having a chat with Talos about the VF-171 and how it looks like it should be more than just .02m longer than the VF-17, and while I was checking a couple different publications to confirm the size given in Macross Chronicle I noticed something unexpected. In the "VF Evolutionary Theory" article in Great Mechanics.DX 9, the commentary in the VF-25 section (pp16-17) mentions that equipping the VF-19 with an inertia store converter was expected to be economical during development of the YF-24. IIRC, the VF-25 and VF-27 keep their inertia store converters in the aircraft's nose... and since the VF-19EF is already equipped with prototype EX-Gear it doesn't seem beyond the realm of possibility that it might also be equipped with a developmental version of the VF-25's inertia store converter, necessitating the remodeling of the aircraft's nose. Easily explained... it started with "Why a monkey model", and then a possible explanation emerged that the Earth forces keep all the best toys for themselves. Terrorism entered the picture as the obvious reason they started keeping all the best technology out of the hands of the colonists.

Because the VF-4's a wicked cool design that somehow doesn't get a lot of love from the powers that be? Personally, I not only like the design of the VF-4 in fighter mode... I love the unique and bizarre place it occupies in Macross's production history. It's the only variable fighter in Macross to have one fighter mode, but two totally different in-universe histories, names, transformations, and variant lists, both of which were created after it first debuted in fighter mode in Macross Flashback 2012. Until 1992, all we had was the fighter mode and the "VF-4" designation. Macross II's creators gave it its first transformation and a VF-1-like battroid mode, equipped it with a beam rifle and honest-to-goodness Gundam-style funnels, and dubbed it the "VF-4 Siren" for the canon game Macross: Eternal Love Song. Kawamori came back to the VF-4 and finished his version, the "VF-4 Lightning III" in 1995, and it first debuted in the 1998 main Macross continuity game Macross Digital Mission VF-X. Interesting food for thought... thanks sketchley.

Just about every Macross show has a faster pace than Macross 7, partly due to its greater length and partly due to it wasting about 22 episodes before they make any progress with the plot. This is, of course, not to say that Macross Frontier's pacing is perfect or even close to it. In the first half, the show has to be dragged kicking and screaming away from its school drama for some Macross-style woosh crikey fighter action. Near the end of the series, it's like the show's creators suddenly realized they were only doing 25 episodes and had to wrap things up with almost indecent haste. Still, it balances out better than 7, though I think I agree with the oft-voiced sentiment that ~36 episodes is the "butter zone" for a Macross series. 7 could've stood to be shorter, and the Frontier series could've stood to be longer. In my experience, the very arguments you've cited in defense of the Vajra concept are usually the reasons that people cite for not liking them. In order to empathize with a character, you have to be able to understand their motivations and interactions. The human(oid) antagonists in Macross have human-like emotions, react to things in human-like ways, and have motivations that are easy enough to understand from a human perspective. The Vajra are utterly inscrutable... their motivations are impossible to understand without a humanoid character "in the know" explaining them flat-out, and they have no personality at all. They're a faceless, voiceless, generally purposeless antagonist until Grace rolls in and takes over, giving them a set of motivations we can understand. We don't find out why they've been shooting up the Frontier fleet until the very last episode, when Ranka has to explain it to everyone.

Huh... yeah, I don't recall seeing that one before. What book/magazine is it from?