Seto Kaiba

Eh... honestly, I think "advanced technology did it" is still probably a more plausible explanation for a fantastic occurrence than "a wizard did it". Granted, it's not meant to be entirely realistic or 100% plausible... if it were, it wouldn't be SF or nearly as entertaining. Yeah... I got that too, to a certain extent. It never made me feel particularly unwelcome (it was the "you're a Macross II fan? That show sucks!" sort of behavior that did that), but after a while that sort of thing did get a little tiresome. I've only rarely had people give me grief for criticizing Macross 7 though... and a lot of that was, I admit, mostly an attempt to get me to give the show another (fair) chance... which I only got around to doing with the recent re-release of the series. I'm still not fond of it, but I no longer think it's completely without redeeming qualities. In my experience, Macross 7 rarely goes over well with serious-minded people. It's the same type of show as Gurren Lagann or G Gundam where you have to suspend rationality for a while and just appreciate it for the crazy, pointlessly hot-blooded, completely over-the-top spectacle that it is. If you can make that leap and ration yourself to 1-2 episodes per day, you can usually find Macross 7 at least halfway enjoyable. It's definitely not a show that's meant to be marathonned, and I'm inclined to suspect that that's the reason behind at least some of the more profoundly negative impressions of the series. Bah... there's plenty of divisions in the Gundam fandom as well. Just look at all the hate heaped on Gundam SEED by western fans... or Gundam Wing... or for that matter, Gundam ZZ.

No... no, you definitely aren't. I've always thought that was a bit weird too, but I confess I'd always assumed that a lot of any VF's reactor output in fighter mode was spent heating intake air and running the ion thrusters in flight to provide the impressive levels of thrust most VFs put out. I forget which publication it was, but I remember one of the pieces translated by sketchley mentioned that reaction engines are real light on fuel consumption in atmospheric flight because of the way they flash-heat intake air to provide thrust... that might be why.

Granted, that would be the usual assumption... but the "VF Evolutionary Theory" piece in Great Mechanics DX 9 indicates that surplus output from the VF-25's reaction engines can be used to run a built-in light form of energy conversion armor around the engines, cockpit, etc. in fighter mode. The heavy ASWGA energy conversion armor used on the Armored Pack and powered by the pack's internal capacitors is something else entirely. This is also bolstered by further mention in the VF-0 section... which also says that improvement in engine power, the latest VFs can partially operate their energy conversion armor in fighter mode. Okay, that is a mistake on my part... thank you for the correction.

Excellent question... To the best of my knowledge, the answer to your question is "no" in almost all cases. It fighter mode, it seems that most of the reactor output was needed to provide thrust for flight. I would guess, given what's said about the VF-25 in Great Mechanics DX 9, that the trend continued as the thrust ratings of reaction engines grew, and increased the burden on the power plant. It wasn't until the VF-25 and VF-27's Stage II reaction engines were introduced that VFs had enough of a power surplus in fighter mode to operate energy conversion armor in even a limited fashion. In the case of the VF-25, there's enough spare juice that it can operate a light form of energy conversion armor around vital areas like the engines and cockpit. Having four engines, the VF-27 has a sizable enough surplus to allow it to run both the energy conversion armor AND the pinpoint barrier in fighter mode. EDIT: The armored VF-25 can draw on the capacitors built into the armored packs to run the energy conversion armor built into the packs for an unspecified amount of time... but the beam guns built into the packs share the same capacitor. EDIT #2: The VF-0 did have a large capacitor that allowed the fighter to operate in "mighty wing" mode, wherein it could run its energy conversion armor in fighter mode for a short period of time. That system was apparently not carried over to subsequent models. EDIT #3: Ironically, the variable fighter with the highest known reactor output, which would presumably give it more than enough juice to run energy conversion armor in fighter mode, belongs to Macross II: Lovers Again... a continuity where energy conversion armor doesn't exist and VFs have conventional armor made of supermaterials (ala Gundarium).

Yes... it is. Both characters are voiced by Megumi Toyoguchi.

Oh, but of course... though the important thing to remember there is that the new designs made for Robotech II: the Sentinels weren't made in-house by Harmony Gold the way the ones for Shadow Chronicles were. They were created in-house by Tatsunoko staffers Ippei Kuri (aka Toyoharu Yoshida) and Naito Anmo, who designed all the new characters and mecha respectively. This was, after all, the same project where they had to fire the writers Tatsunoko provided and bring in writers supplied by Harmony Gold because they couldn't figure out why anyone would combine three totally unrelated shows or wrap their brains around the moon logic used to make them fit together... something even modern Robotech fans frequently have a hard time with. I'd say that, with that kind of confusion in play, it wouldn't be hard for them to make that kind of unintended gaffe... especially after they had only just finished DYRL a year or two prior to the start of work on the Robotech II project. If it was out and out "borrowing", then they probably figured (as with other vaguely familiar designs), that it was far enough away from the original to make litigation unlikely. Presumably they would both end up in court together... Tatsunoko as the licensing agent who provided Harmony Gold with the license and would be accused of misrepresenting or failing to communicate the limitations of its license to the licensees, and Harmony Gold for committing the actual violation.

But you missed the point there... at his Robocon 10 interview, Carl Macek made it clear that Harmony Gold knew that they couldn't use designs from Macross back when they first started work on Robotech II. The lawsuits that went down in the early 00's almost certainly have no bearing on it. Those designs were created for the specific purpose of providing something that looked vaguely similar to Macross without being similar enough to get them sued for copyright infringement. Just given their behavior, I would assume their reasons for killing or otherwise banishing the remaining Sentinels versions of Macross characters was, as you assume, probably done to ensure there was zero chance of drawing unwelcome attention from Macross's creators and their lawyers.

Yeah... that was jokingly suggested so often that some Robotech fans actually started to believe it. That's about when all the humor went out of suggesting that might be the case. Tommy's artwork and remarks seem to point toward it being a MOSPEADA-related feature, which Astro Plan definitely isn't.

Uh... it's a nice theory, but it falls short on the grounds that they already animated it. Carl's big red turd was a design created for the failed Robotech II: the Sentinels series, and does (briefly) appear in the animation they salvaged and made into a "movie" after the project's collapse. Carl's remarks at Robocon 10 make it clear he and Harmony Gold knew that Macross designs were off-limits, and that the designs done for Sentinels were a deliberate attempt to make things look similar to the familiar Macross designs without being similar enough to land them a copyright infringement lawsuit from Macross's creators. Eh... you might have a point there. They were certainly aiming to keep things as low-poly as humanly possible, and that'd be all but impossible with the original SDF-3 design. However, given the sheer amount of pandering to the long-time fans Tommy did in Prelude and Shadow Chronicles, I think the chief reason for blowing it up and redesigning it was to get rid of another much-maligned Sentinels design and get the ship in line with the design aesthetic of the other lightly redesigned repainted ships. lol... somehow I can't see that working. (the transformation, I mean) Indeed it was. Repeatedly...

Uh... it's been a while since I last bothered reading/watching anything Robotech, but haven't they already done that at least twice with generally poor results? If I recall correctly, their first attempt was the SDF-3 in Robotech II: the Sentinels... a design so breathtakingly bad that even those strange mutants who thought that Robotech II: the Sentinels was a great idea have little use for it. Tommy Yune apparently felt the same about it, since one of the first things he did in the Prelude miniseries was blow the damn thing up so he could replace it with something that didn't look like a colossal crimson bowel movement: Mind you, the end result of all this wasn't a hell of a lot better... just boxier and more in line with the utterly generic MOSPEADA ship designs: and who could forget this godawful thing...

Eh... your guess is as good as mine, since I don't think they ever really bother to explain the markings found on destroids in the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross. It seems like a reasonable assumption though. Not that I'm aware... the line art for the Super Dimension Fortress Macross series and Macross: Do You Remember Love? only ever shows that "D" insignia. The only exception to that I can think of is that is a Mk.XII Phalanx that shows up in one cut in episode 27, which has a palm tree and slogan in place of the usual logo. If there was an insignia specifically for destroids stationed on the Macross itself, it's probably the one you've got there... but I'm not aware of any official line on the matter. Some... there's a bunch of "nose art" type stuff that was published in the old Macross Model Hobby handbook, and I think there's some newer stuff in the same vein for Macross Frontier in either Model Graphix 2009 #1 or Macross Frontier Archives.

If they're bootlegs, then you already know the answer to your question... of course not.

Huh... didn't they actually attempt that one on Mythbusters? IIRC, they actually succeeded. In Harmony Gold's case, I think it's really more a matter of them just not having the creative talent necessary to make something halfway presentable out of the festering corpses of Southern Cross and MOSPEADA, and that to even attempt it means running a gauntlet of senior executives who know better than to let them try. Their own faults are compounded by the franchise's miserable reputation, which all but guarantees that no self-respecting network in North America will actually carry a Robotech title in any timeslot where there's a chance someone will actually see it.

Hmm... to be honest, the Macross show I consider my favorite and the one I consider the best overall aren't one and the same. I guess that makes me weird, but whatever... lol This's probably no surprise to anyone, but my favorite Macross title is Macross II: Lovers Again. It was the series that first got me into real Macross, and I think that its mechanical designs are some of the best in Macross... with the noteworthy exception of the Metal Siren. I didn't mind at all that it stayed very close to DYRL in its story and themes, since I absolutely love DYRL too... and the more I dug into its back story, the more I liked its somewhat more Gundam-like continuity. (no doubt partly influenced by the presence of Char's Counterattack and Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam staffers on the project) But if, as some have done, I were to rank the Macross shows I've seen in terms of which was the strongest show overall, it would look like this: (excl. FB2012 since it's more epilogue than anything else) SDF:M > DYRL? > Macross Frontier > Macross II & Macross Plus > Macross Zero > Macross 7 (Admittedly, I feel one part of this bears some explaining... while I feel that Macross Plus was, in most regards, an exceptional show, the story felt kind of scattered and only superficially like Macross. Were it not for that, I would probably have put Macross Plus above Macross II for overall quality instead of on the same level)

It's the first time I've seen a hero mecha intentionally squash an enemy pilot like a bug... but there is one scene around the middle of Eureka Seven where Renton's Nirvash stomps on an enemy KLF repeatedly until he sees a broken and bloodied arm from the smushed pilot sticking out and starts puking.

Okay, yeah... I'll admit that was awesome, even though I have no bloody clue what was going on... I lol'd IRL when I noticed that the gunplay portion of the fight choreography starting at about 2:30 in is... move for move... copied from that weak Christian Bale movie Equilibrium... right down to the pose they do with the pistols before going on a shooting spree.

IIRC, it was one of the earlier issues of Mecha Press... and it was not terribly edifying. The one they really dug into on that front was the mega-particle weapons in Gundam, since even back then there was a boatload of data on Minovsky physics.

Indeed... and this particular problem isn't necessarily limited to only those Macross titles created by Kawamori and company. Even though the VF-2SS Valkyrie II's anti-aircraft lasers face forward like those of the VF-1, we almost never see them used in combat. The only noteworthy occasions were in the OP and the first big battle scene, and otherwise they seem to prefer the more visually impressive railguns and Itano Circus-style missile attacks for drama's sake. ... the only noteworthy main timeline exception to which being the VF-27 and its crazy huge beam rifle. Even in the Macross II parallel world continuity, when slugthrowers were in danger of obsolescence they were replaced with more powerful and advanced slugthrowers in the form of railguns instead of the beam weaponry they had toyed with on the VF-4ST some fifty years prior. Not that I'm aware... sketchley might know, since he digs into a wider variety of stuff than I do. There may be an answer for that question in Macross Chronicle Technology sheet 06A, but I don't think anyone's tackled that one yet. I'll dig it out and check in a little bit. EDIT: No... doesn't look like it offers any significant detail on that front. Sorry. Some do, some don't... it depends on which model of powerplant the Octos was equipped with. Early in their production run, they were equipped with composite armor and powered by diesel turbines and fuel cells, and later models were equipped with energy conversion armor and powered by thermonuclear reaction turbines. It's unclear whether it was only the ones produced by the UN Spacy after the war had reaction powerplants or the later Anti-UN models did too. Either way, they seemed to have enough juice to fuel a pair of 12.7mm beam machine guns.

Eh... the visual evidence in the various shows is generally pretty favorable as far as the effectiveness of head-mounted laser weapons goes. Admittedly, they don't get a whole lot of use after Super Dimension Fortress Macross and Macross: Do You Remember Love?, but that's mainly because they changed roles slightly and from around the VF-5000 on they were chiefly concerned with covering the VF's blind spot and providing it with a way to strike back at an enemy on its tail in a dogfight. We seldom see them used in that capacity, but when they are they generally make whoever was doing the tailing get the hell out of the way (be it Guld or the Vajra) at the very least. When we see them used offensively, they seem to do a good job cutting holes in starship hulls or shooting down Zentradi pods. Something we're all too aware of... see the notation under the entry for "Laser" in the Macrosspedia... or TVTropes if you're in the mood for humor.

There's no arguing necessary there... the Octos units that'd been equipped with reaction powerplants did have energy conversion armor. It's unclear if the ones that we see in Macross Zero did, but remember that Roy's VF-0 is working from a significantly less capable powerplant than the mass-produced VF-1 was. They're shown to be at least effective enough to shoot down missiles on the fly, so their reduced power in a test machine isn't all that much of a hindrance. Destroids don't have to worry about keeping themselves light enough to fly, so they can also afford to take much heavier composite armor even if they don't have the powerplant necessary to run an energy conversion armor system. Not necessarily... we seldom actually see variable fighters using their beam weapons in combat, since there are very few models that carry them, but we have seen at least a few instances of rapid fire beam weapons. The one that leaps most readily to mind outside of Macross Frontier is Gamlin's little shooting spree against all those VA-3s the Galactic Whale poachers used in Macross Dynamite 7. In Macross Frontier there are a few that are explicitly identified as either "beam machine gun" or "rapid fire beam gun", which would mean their use as a rapid-fire weapon is to be expected... like the engine nacelle guns on the VF-27, or the hip/intake guns on the VF-25 and the ball turret guns and supplemental hip/intake guns on its Armored Packs. Um... the VF-25 doesn't have any laser weaponry. Excluding its gun pod, the guns built into the airframe are all beam weapons... at least before the Anti-Vajra MDE retrofit when the hip/intake beam machine guns were changed out for high-speed conventional machine guns. It's established in the series (and then harped on at some length) that the Vajra adapt to the weapons used against them... so that conventional beam weaponry doesn't work very well against them is no surprise, as they'd been having similar weapons used against them by the fleet's VF-171s and Ghosts since way back in episode 1... if not further.

Eh... I may be a fairly recent addition to the Macross Mecha Manual's contributors, but I think I can offer the clarity you seek. To be precise... it wasn't a decision on Mr March's part to use "beam gun" or "beam cannon" in the M3 entries for Macross Frontier's mecha. It's that those were the terms used in the official material that provided the stats for the show's mecha... including Macross Chronicle. Given that the terminology for previous models of VF went unchanged and that the specs for the VF-19 present a case where it's clear that they're not two names for the same technology, this appears to be an intentional change in technology rather than a shift in terminology. To illustrate, the terms are generally spelled out in kana... the "laser machine gun" used on the VF-0 gets spelled (レーザー機銃), while the "beam machine guns" used on the VF-27 and such are spelled (ビーム機銃). The choice of terminology there was on the part of the writers rather than the translators. Nah... we've seen some pretty small-scale ones in the past. Putting aside the question of the Tomahawk's two big beam guns, there's the beam guns on the VF-4, and the ones on the YF/VF-19, and those fitted to the head and forearms of the VF-22. They haven't exactly been super-common on VFs in the past, but they have been at scales usable by VFs for a while now. I dunno about that... the Mauler RÖV-20 anti-aircraft laser guns on the VF-1 were reasonably effective against Zentradi mecha in the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross series. In, I think, the third episode of the TV series we see Roy destroy a Regult with nothing but a short burst from his VF-1S's four laser guns. This is my impression of things, but I would guess that the VF-0's laser machine gun probably wasn't all that effective in use against the Octos because of the limitations of the VF-0's powerplant more than anything else. After all, those VF-0s don't have the colossal 1300MW power supply provided by the VF-1's two reaction engines to draw on.

Yeah... it's the logical suggestion for a question like that. The problem is that it only covers the most prominent flying KLFs in the series, the ones used by named (and plot armored) characters and United Federation's grunt mecha. The handful of other sources I was able to turn up on short notice either confined themselves to using text-only descriptions of the main mecha, or only covered the ones used by the Gekkostate rebel movement in excruciatingly brief detail.

Unfortunately, no... the only website I'm aware of that makes even a token effort to cover the mecha of Psalm of Planets Eureka Seven is MAHQ, and their coverage of the series is spotty at best. The "Ground KLF" you've found isn't a design they have listed for the series, and I haven't been able to find any description matching the mecha you're inquiring about on the Japanese wiki. Admittedly, it's been a while since I last saw Eureka Seven (entirely intentional... I hated that show), but I don't recall seeing anything like that in the series proper. If it is actually a mecha from that series, it may only show up briefly... or it might belong to one of the Eureka Seven videogames that hasn't been covered by MAHQ yet. On your behalf, I popped over to a few image boards and took a look through their Eureka Seven content in the hopes of finding both the original picture you're inquiring about and a name for the mecha. While I was unable to find a name to attach to that particular unit, I did find the original picture and a second image that I believe might be its robot alt-mode, or at least the alt-mode of one of its close relatives. I'm just guessing here, but it looks a little bit like an early version of the Mon-Soono series brightly colored wake-boarding KLF, which would fit... since that thing in the foreground of the robot mode image is the prototype version of the main character mecha "Nirvash typeZERO". The one in the background behind the robot-mode mecha in question looks to be the Terminus typeR909. Yeah... it's not much of a stretch to say that Psalm of Planets Eureka Seven draws rather heavily on Neon Genesis Evangelion for "inspiration". The three principal characters of the series (Renton, Eureka, and Anemone) are, to be honest, thinly camouflaged copies of Evangelion's leading trio (Shinji, Rei, and Asuka respectively), and based on my impressions of the series the story draws on a lot of the same sort of themes and plot devices too. About all that made it tolerable for me was that the leader of the renegade former soldier surfer group (Holland Novak) kicks the crap out of Renton for being a whiny, cowardly, self-righteous little snot on more than one occasion.

It'd certainly be a nice change of pace if the idiots who've been put in charge of the Robotech franchise had the wherewithal to either make a significant investment in Robotech and turn it into something worthwhile that can stand on its own merits, or give up on Robotech and sell their rights to the original shows to a more competent distributor. What's keeping the Robotech "creative team" at Harmony Gold from either staging a comeback for Robotech or having it go out in one last blaze of suck is that everything they do has to go through their senior management for approvals. They'll never do anything drastic because drastic things might imperil their safety net of fanatic fans and their ability to keep their main competition out of the market by sleazier means.

Y'know... I'm really glad you chose to qualify that statement with "or later", though it probably would have been more accurate to say there might be something new coming maybe. It would hardly be the first time that a new Robotech animated feature was announced and then died a humiliating death. In practice, I suppose it'd be the fourth... the fifth if you're in the mood to count the indefinitely-stalled Shadow Rising as another failure. To put it bluntly, there's no guarantee that this as-of-yet unnamed side story is even going to come out. That they put a "coming soon" button on their website and run the same useless hype over and over again doesn't mean much. Even if they do somehow manage to see it through to completion, that just means they've succeeded in wasting a fair bit of time and money on a smokescreen to disguise their lack of forward motion in same story that they've been spending the past 25 years trying and failing to tell. Granted, a documentary "commemorating" the editing process that shat Robotech into being is about as close to inevitable as it gets for Robotech releases... but that's not a sign that they're trying to drag the whole Robotech franchise back from the brink, that's a clear indication that they have no idea how to move forward. It wouldn't be a stretch to call the Robotech franchise a washed-up old mess that spends its days reminiscing about the good old days when people actually took it seriously.