Seto Kaiba

No, your memory's sound... having Chase Masterson's character (Janice Em2) sing that horrible old Minmei song "We will win" in a voice almost as ear-bleedingly bad as Rebecca Forstadt's original performance didn't really serve any purpose in the film, except giving them some theoretically plaintive-yet-hopeful background music while they panned backwards out the Ark Angel's window. Chase Masterson's other music number about midway through the film, equally awful, had little purpose other than allowing them to show off Janice's massive rack in a low-cut slurmty dress (rather, a holographic projection of such, since Janice is a robot) and provide fodder for a halfhearted attempt to inject some romantic tension Marcus and Maia's relationship.

Oh, there's precious little in the way of actual harm they could do... but that doesn't make it any less obnoxious, nor any less creepy. I must confess it is somewhat amusing to me that even after being banned from Robotech.com and MEMO's RobotechX for what I can only call my "heretical views", they still consider me enough of a threat to their narrow-minded, dogmatic little fantasy world to want to keep a close eye on me to make sure I'm not spreading my dangerous, seditious knowledge among the fans. I doubt they're watching me because I'm saying something they can't counter, because in all the time I was verbally sparring with them they never once came up with a counterargument for something I'd said which didn't immediately set off the bullshit detectors of every sane reader.

Glad we're on the same page as far as the context of my analogy goes... the rest is generally irrelevant. Nice to see some more IT blokes around here, I do IT work in the auto industry m'self, but that's neither here nor there. Well, I do... the idea that I'm being actively cyber-stalked by two married men with no lives because they're afraid that I might say something bad about a failed animated sci-fi franchise from the mid-80s is somewhere between hilarious and downright creepy. That the people in charge of the Robotech franchise are SO thin-skinned and SO incapable of handling criticism that they actually want to silence me is nothing short of comical. If I had a Facebook account or anything like that, I don't doubt that one or both of 'em would be spying on me there too... and that's just freaking ridiculous.

Granted... but it's dollars to donuts he's been accessing my profile here to keep an eye on what I say about Robotech and Harmony Gold. Just like MEMO, Mav's borderline-obsessed with silencing criticism of Robotech and its creators by any means available, and thanks to the incredibly childish antics of Doug Bendo my reputation among Robotech fans seems to be an eclectic mix of "top Robotech expert" and "ringleader of the Robotech haters". For all practical purposes, they seem to perceive me as Schrodinger's Fan... I'm both an expert fan and detestable hater until they read a post of mine and the waveform collapses temporarily, leaving me as one or the other. I do seem to attract the crazies, don't I?

So... never? It's not like they have the know-how to produce anything that'll make the industry take them seriously again. Any future the franchise has is going to be in the hands of someone other than its owners. Nah, I think it's called cyber-stalking... poor bastard must think I'm behind PTH's latest bout of unfocused rage.

It's nothing to do with my antipathy towards Apple, well-justified though it is. Take my remarks in context and you'll see I was drawing a parallel between the business plans of Apple and Harmony Gold. Specifically, how the core demographic of both companies is a "captive consumer base" which will buy just about anything with the brand name on it, with little or no regard for quality. In some ways, Harmony Gold's current situation reminds me a lot of where Apple was in the mid-90s, with a small but fanatically local consumer base keeping the brand moving forward despite some astonishingly stupid calls by the management and public opinion of the brand ranging from polite indifference to undisguised scorn. Now, whether or not Harmony Gold will find that one magic product (like Apple's iPod) that'll become wildly popular and make them mainstream... your guess is as good as mine. EDIT: I wonder why Maverick_LSC keeps checking my MacrossWorld profile... 's that boy back to spying on me to see what I'm saying about Robotech again? Dude needs to get a life... or maybe his wife just needs to take away his internet privileges .

Definitely... at this rate it looks like it's only a matter of time until Pizza's pointed criticisms of Harmony Gold's handling of Robotech and the 25th anniversary get MEMO so thoroughly hacked off that he'll re-ban him from RobotechX, leaving him nowhere to go except back to RobotechFactor or over to HappyPenguins's site, assuming he doesn't just re-register there under a new name like he did last time. I doubt it... they couldn't even scrounge up enough material to make a single reasonably compelling 90 minute movie. At least the first 30 minutes were recycled story from Symphony of Light, and the remainder could only be called flat, dull, and uninteresting. Yes, other people have essentially handed them everything they need in the setting, the characters, the mecha, and the overall plot outline, but even then they couldn't come up with a compelling story to save their souls.

So far, I haven't been able to find the exact post where it all went down, but given what he's said about it he was banned for antagonizing other members on the Series & Stories section of the Robotech.com boards. He was baiting the "Disciples of Leonard" in a thread about what would've happened if the Robotech Masters had made peace and warned humanity about the Invid, and he seems to have interpreted his ban as having been motivated by MEMO's friendship with some members of the DOL. Once again, he seems to have concluded he was banned not because of his actions, but rather because someone was conspiring against him. Based on this, I'd say his attacks on MEMO and Harmony Gold are probably motivated more by anger over his ban than having come to his senses and realized what a crapshoot Harmony Gold is.

Not entirely... if such a thing could even be said to have existed in the first place given the general shortage of Shadow Chronicles merchandise. Apart from the DVD, the only merchandise the movie had was the artbook, the soundtrack, the recalled Shadow Fighter MPC, and some miscellaneous odds and ends. In the last year or so, the only "new" RTSC merch is the reissue of the recalled Maia Sterling MPC. Being an IT guy by trade, I have no respect for any division of Apple except their marketing team, who have gone above and beyond the call of duty by using fraud and deception to sell low-grade consumer trash to the general public and got them to like it. Harmony Gold doesn't have the talent to do more than flail around and look foolish whenever someone asks a question for which they don't have an answer that makes them look good.

With the housing market in the shitter, whether Harmony Gold is still actually turning enough of a profit on their real estate interests to make any potential loss on Robotech insignificant is somewhat dubious... but yes, they have their captive audience, populated primarily with 30yo+ guys who are so starved for new material that they'll snap up anything provided Tommy Yune slaps the name "Robotech" on it first. It's like Apple's core demographic, the militant macfags who don't care WHAT the new Apple product is or how much it costs, so long as they can get their hands on it as soon as possible. In this case, the difference is that Harmony Gold keeps its fans waiting indefinitely and has never produced anything trendy or popular. There is a small and growing trend of fans starting to finally realize they're being strung along though... (Still no way to tell if PTH is genuine in his sentiments to that effect or not, since the factor that got him railing against HG and MEMO seems to have been MEMO banning him from Robotech.com (again)) Closure nothin... it's ridiculous in the extreme considering the franchise has been staying afloat by milking those Mikimoto character designs and Kawamori/Miyatake mechanical designs for ~20 years.

Of course. Even a halfway-competent creative director would have known that establishing your new villain's motivation in some limited edition comic book most of the audience will never lay eyes on, let alone read, rather than in the movie itself where the general audience will be seeing the villain for the first time is a phenomenally stupid idea. It's the sort of pants-on-head retarded plan we'd expect from a rank amateur or someone suffering from drill-induced brain trauma, and only the most inept creative staff could take even remotely seriously.

Y'know... I'd be a lot kinder to Robotech as a whole if its writers had sat down and figured out exactly what exposure to protoculture does to you. Exactly what happens changes almost on an individual basis, and varies between depictions... sometimes it's harmless ("Lunk" reports that it tastes awful, but has apparently suffered no ill effects from tasting it), on other occasions it's a powerful hallucinogenic substance, sometimes it causes evolution while large amounts cause totally Akira-esque mutation... I could go on. It's really funny how the Rick Hunter on the cover looks NOTHING like the one in the comic itself. On the cover, he looks more like a badly drawn Hikaru Ichijo with a really ugly jacket. In the book itself, he looks like Hideo Kuze from Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex 2nd Gig. His hair's black or really dark brown for the first few pages, then Lisa has a miscarriage and there's a jump cut of one year, and when he reappears he's gone completely gray. Because, like as not, without Prelude the story of Shadow Chronicles makes even less sense... since it's in Prelude where the motivations of the Haydonites are established, among other things. It also sets up the scene with a bunch of really lame Sentinels references (like the return of Rem and Cabell, the existence of the Sentinels Council, and the red turd SDF-3). Nah, in the last volume of the Waltrip bros. Sentinels comics he certainly makes it sound like he's boned Minmei too... he tells Kyle that she's crap in the sack while they're wrestling over a gun, right before he shoots (and kills!) Kyle (yay!) and absconds with Minmei over his gently-steaming corpse. I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say "Because he does". It's not implied, it's given as fact... he murders Kyle and kidnaps her, and she spends a year as his hostage before being rescued... they find her floating in a tube and they seem pretty farting shocked by whatever happened to her...

Um... what? I hate to rain on your parade and all, but the symbol inside the NUNS diamond looks nothing like a Greek letter "nu". The uppercase Nu is Ν and the lowercase Nu is ν. It looks far more like a lopsided lowercase sigma (σ).

True enough... but that isn't what Tak was getting at. In the current climate it's entirely understandable for some of these people to have never seen the majority of the Macross sequels out there, or that they don't know the difference between those and RT, particularly if they're not exactly tech-savvy. What he's saying is that these people have essentially no excuse for not knowing these Macross sequels exist when information about them can be obtained in fifteen seconds or less from a quick Google search. The objectionable behavior is not their failure to watch the shows, but rather their failure to check their facts before running off at the mouth.

Of course it's stupid... but let's not forget these are Robotech fans, many of whom came to this thread spoiling for a fight or trying to troll us because they can't stand the idea that people criticize Robotech and the complete bellends who created and maintain it. Honestly, after all that time wasted at Robotech.com, I know all too well that there are plenty of Robotech fans out there who unquestioningly buy Tommy Yune's line that Macross is no big deal, that it isn't that successful, and that its only real importance is as the first installment of Robotech. Just from my experience, his behavior is typical of the what remains of the loyal Robotech fanbase. Hell, back when he first registered on Robotech.com PTH spent a good deal of time telling Macross fans off for criticizing Robotech's failure to produce a sequel because he wasn't aware of any Macross show newer than DYRL.

Odds are they'll probably run an extension to cover the movie material and that'll be it for the time being... though I wouldn't say no to a VF-2SS Master File.

Granted... but I doubt he was really given a choice in the matter. Despite their many faults, The Powers That Be in Harmony Gold's senior management aren't completely stupid. Even as early as 1986 they knew full well that Macross was the only part of Robotech its viewers actually gave a toss about, and they tried to act accordingly with subsequent productions... with predictably disastrous results. At least with regard to "Macross Saga" merch, Tommy has no choice by to try to imitate Mikimoto, because if he tried to put his own spin on the art the fans'd crucify him for it. In a word... you said it. Not entirely accurate... but an adequate summary. Since I'm a firm believer in being precise, let me toss out a somewhat more detailed account of the waxing and waning bullshittery of Pizza the Hutt. It seems he's going in cycles, and he'll likely soon be back to ragging on Macross. Back when he first registered on RT.com under the handle "Wraith_Knight", our boy PTH had clearly bought Tommy and Carl's line about Robotech being a universally-beloved, industry-redefining instant classic hook, line, and sinker. Almost right away he was bickering with other members when he posted a thread about the need for a new Robotech game for next-generation consoles that stopped just short of accusing Harmony Gold of major negligence. What really got him hacked off was when a few people, myself included, pointed out that Harmony Gold likely didn't see the need for such a thing because of Battlecry's lukewarm sales and Invasion's pathetic showing, and particularly not for the PS3, which was (and still is) a distant third place in the console market. He eventually chilled the hell out after BlackRose talked to him, but that didn't last. Our boy then, in genuine ignorance, latched onto the idea that Macross fans were being unfair by bagging on Robotech for having only turned out a single mediocre movie in 20+ years of trying. So he came right out and promptly jammed his foot in his mouth by denouncing Macross fans for being unfair and claiming that Macross hadn't done any better... while, at the time, blissfully unaware of the existence of everything made after Flashback 2012 and having never seen any of the shows he knew about. Being the helpful sort, I corrected him and even pointed him towards the fansubs so he could see what he'd been missing out on. For a good month or two he was positively GUSHING about how awesome DYRL was and how much Macross kicked ass, until he get to Macross Frontier and started in with the gay-bashing because he thought Alto was a cross-dresser and found Bobby just plain offensive. Once people started getting on his case for that, he changed tacks again and started saying how he never thought Macross was THAT good and how Robotech was so much better... eventually settling on his long-running line that Macross fans were at the root of all the Robotech fanbase's problems. Now it seems the pendulum is starting to swing the other away again, and he's come to another unpleasant realization about Robotech that'll push him towards the Macross camp for a while before his nostalgia and crackpot conspiracy theories reemerge and drown his common sense.

In the interest of fairness, the overall quality of the promotional art he did for the masterpiece collection isn't exactly an accurate representation of what he's capable of. I get the feeling he has a lot of trouble imitating Mikimoto's drawing style, and that unless his work is being marketed as a product in its own right he doesn't bother to give it his best effort. In particular, it seems like he only bothers to turn out the occasional piece of promotional art or the occasional desktop wallpaper when some kind of major event or pressure from above force him to.

Precisely right. It even manifests in the little details like the rank insignia which first appeared in Macross: Do You Remember Love? and were also used in Macross II: Lovers Again. Like the ranks of the Japanese Air Self Defense Force (and the old Imperial Japanese Army, and the police, etc.) the rank insignia worn by the U.N. Forces follow the same progression of threes, and in Macross II even share the same general coloration pattern (switching from red to gold for General officers). Okay, one of those four assertions can be backed up, the other three are opinion stated as fact. Yes, the "standard destroid" (whichever model that is) is rumored to be approximately 1/20th the cost of the VF-1. Whether or not it's true is another matter entirely, though logically the non-transforming destroid designs should be easier to build and possibly to maintain (barring potentially high-wear equipment like particle beam cannons). Whether they are easy to train on, employ enlisted soldiers, and are actually easy to maintain is unknown, and thus should not be entered as supporting evidence for any kind of assertion. With regard to the ease of operation where destroids are concerned, what makes you assume Valkyries are any exception? I could point to a handful of pilots who were simply dropped into the cockpit with little or no time for training and produce results ranging from muddling along acceptably to shaming the best aces of the era. Such examples on the low end include Hikaru Ichijo and Shin Kudo, both of whom did reasonably well in their first outing in a VF despite minimal (or absent) training, and Alto Saotome, whose pilot training and EX-Gear experience let him save the girl and get away with his life and his dignity. On the "embarrassing our aces" front we have Milia Fallyna Jenius, who would only have had a week or two to familiarize herself with the real McCoy before going into battle, and Misty Klaus, who on her very first outing and with no prior preparation manages to shame the best pilots of the Prometheus taskforce by singlehandedly defending the Prometheus II from a sustained Zentradi attack. Touche... though even the Compendium offers at least those few details about mobility and increased range of motion from EB51 thanks to the efforts of Azrael. Try searching.

Here's the problem... belief. Rather than going by the available evidence which suggests that learning to operate a Valkyrie isn't necessarily all that difficult or time-consuming (as we see in SDF Macross), you're projecting your beliefs based on something that is at best a poor analogue for the technology being used onto the situation. Aside from flight training, both destroid and Valkyrie pilots are going to have to learn ground combat, the difference being that a destroid operator might have to learn to operate more than one type of destroid during basic, whereas a Valkyrie pilot will, in most cases, only have to learn one VF at a time. As far as the actual ground combat training goes, it can't honestly be THAT different, since Hikaru displayed reasonable aptitude at operating a MBR-07-Mk.II Spartan on the fly. Unless that expenditure translates into increased survivability, which according to Chronicle was one of the main reasons for implementing the EX-Gear on Valkyries. There's a difference between logical inference based on in-universe evidence and trying to apply something only tangentially related from the real world. Pretty much what I was getting at... Gamlin might've been a bit green as of 2045, but he was good enough to be assigned to a special operations unit right after graduation. That's not average by any means. You'd be right if they were evaluating the production model. But if you're examining a new design and implementations of new technology, you're going to want to push that new design to its limits. Once you've established whether the new technologies work or not, and pushed the design to its limits to find out what it's capable of in actual testing, then you can worry about tuning it towards the needs of an average pilot (or in the case of the VF-22, an above-average pilot for a special operations bird) and be fairly confident that the average pilot won't be able to fly the damn thing to pieces. Among other things, one of the goals of Project Super Nova was to evaluate several new technologies, including the Brainwave Control System, so an above average pilot who'd be able to handle not just flying the damn thing, but managing data collection and keeping it airborne as long as possible if things start to go awry would be in order. Either you're referring to the Giant Monster (in which case you're somewhat inaccurate) or you've never actually done any research into the destroids I'm talking about. Two of the key design features in Macross II's destroids that're mentioned repeatedly are the greater range of motion in the joints and rollers installed in the feet to make the mecha faster. Mobility was improved in the second generation, not sacrificed. (At least for the majority, we can't speak for the Giant Monster because the damn thing is never actually seen moving, and the official artbooks only spare thought for HOW it gets around, not how quickly). All the same, there's total overkill and then there's that... though I suppose it must be some comfort to know you can annihilate even the most heavily armored enemy combat mecha in a single shot when it comes down to it and potentially give a low-flying battleship a hard time if you need to. Stick a Phalanx Kai next to that Defender EX and you're looking at more than 3x the firepower of a SAP-equipped VF-2SS.

Calling it my "preferred date" wouldn't exactly do it justice... particularly since when you examine the official chronology published in B-Club 79 and the dialogue of the OVA itself, 2092 is the ONLY date where everything actually works out. It certainly doesn't hurt my feelings any that the booklet Japanese edition of the soundtrack says flat-out that Macross II is set in 2092 either. It's somewhat unsurprising that books like Macross Ace and Macross Chronicle are somewhat inconsistent in dating Macross II, as neither one seems to have bothered paying much attention to stuff outside of the OVA itself. Exactly how we arrived at 2092 as the year in which the Macross II: Lovers Again OVA is set was, as I said, by a combination of dialogue from the show and one particularly important date in the official series chronology. Both Hibiki and Mash establish that roughly eighty years have passed since the end of Space War 1, which gives us a lower bound for the date of 2090. What firmly establishes the date is the last Zentradi invasion, the one that inspired Hibiki to study journalism, which occurred ten years before the events of the OVA. The chronology the OVA's creators developed as a means of linking Macross II to DYRL firmly places the last Zentradi incursion in 2082. It doesn't take a minor in applied mathematics to deduce that 2082 + 10 = 2092. It's also pretty bloody obvious these numbers weren't chosen arbitrarily... the 10 years is obviously significant (it IS the 10th Anniversary OVA after all), and when you subtract 100 (10^2) from both dates you get 1982 and 1992, which as we all know are the release dates for the Super Dimension Fortress Macross TV series and the Macross II: Lovers Again OVA respectively.

So far, I haven't been able to find any canon explanation for what "NUNS" stands for in Macross II, though nothing thus far has addressed the military in the OVA as the "New U.N. Spacy", not even Macross Chronicle. The service patch located on the right arm of the standard uniform is generally obscured at least partially, so most of the time it's illegible, leaving us to go by the lineart which shows only two variants of it... one which reads SPACY, and the other which reads ARMY, the latter having only one example... the khaki-clad guy commanding the destroid defenses. Exactly what branch those other guys in "Zentradi green" and dark green belong to is something of a mystery, as are the baby blue uniforms briefly seen in the peace treaty scene. (My guess would be U.N. Zentradi forces, U.N. Marines, and U.N. Air Force respectively) I know... what I'm saying is that these design elements were fairly common in "real robot" mecha anime prior to the development of Macross Zero and Macross Frontier, so it's somewhat unlikely that Macross II inspired either. Yeah, in the very first issue Macross Ace tacked Macross II onto the back end of the timeline as occurring in 2090. How they expected it to fit is anybody's guess.

It certainly doesn't help that there're one or two extra branches of the service that appear to be redundant or otherwise somewhat unclear in their particular role... the one that leaps to mind being the U.N. Spacy Air Force, which has no clear reason for existing. After all, we already have both a U.N. Spacy and U.N. Air Force, to say nothing of the U.N. Army, the U.N. Navy, the U.N. Marines, and the U.N. Spacy Marines. So far, at least four branches of the service could easily offer a reasonable justification for the inclusion of destroid units among their ranks. Obviously, the U.N. Spacy could justify their use as mobile air defense platforms on their larger ships and for the odd ARMD/Daedalus/Macross Attack, which may or may not fall be the jurisdiction of the U.N. Spacy Marines. Likewise, both the U.N. Army and U.N. Marines could make a case for the inclusion of destroid armored units for ground combat (their intended purpose, after all) and as ad-hoc anti-aircraft emplacements for the defense of planetside bases, naval vessels, and cities in the event that things go seriously pear-shaped and their opponents (Zentradi, Mardook, etc.) make it past the fleet and the orbital defenses (as they did in Macross II). As to who actually owns the destroids... in the main continuity the finger seems to be pointed primarily at the U.N. Spacy, given that even the early ADR-03 Cheyennes used aboard the Asuka II bore the legend "U.N. SPACY" on their gun arms, and all subsequent models in Super Dimension Fortress Macross are listed as operating under the U.N. Spacy as well. Other branches might have their own, but the ones we've seen so far belong to the Spacy. In the parallel world continuity's Macross II: Lovers Again OVA, we're offered possible evidence of more than one branch of the service using destroids at one time... with the battleship-based destroids likely serving under the auspices of the U.N. Spacy and the ground-based units under the command of a U.N. Army officer.

Hmmm... the worst science fiction book of all time? Considering the sheer volume of piss-dribblingly bad sci-fi on bookstore shelves these days, singling out the worst of the bad lot is going to be no mean feat. At the very least, each and every one of the licensed Star Trek novels and the Star Wars expanded universe novels deserves a (dis)honorable mention either for bordering on the unreadable or being the very worst kind of fanwankery, if not both. Also noteworthy is the Ultramarines series of Warhammer 40,000 novels by Graham McNeill, whose dubious talents as a wordsmith have brought forth a protagonist who is so profoundly one-dimensional that he isn't just impossible to like... he's impossible to relate to in any way, shape, or form. While it certainly feels like reaching for the low-hanging fruit, it would be remiss of me not to also nominate the Robotech novelizations written by James Luceno and Brian Daley under the pseudonym "Jack McKinney", as their Sentinels books could quite easily be called one of the worst crimes against the English language since the invention of ebonics. I would also include Like a Phoenix From the Flames: The Founding of the 597th and Like a Phoenix on the Wing: The Early Campaigns and Glorious Victories of the Valhallan 597th by General Jenit Sulla, though they (and the truly staggering amounts of overly purple prose they contain) must be excused on the grounds that the books themselves are fictional, and only "excerpts" from them were ever actually published in the Ciaphas Cain novels written by Alex Stewart under the penname "Sandy Mitchell". That having been said, my nominee for the worst science fiction book ever written is The Return, a Star Trek novel penned by William Shatner after the release of Star Trek: Generations. In this horrid crime against both the Star Trek franchise and the literary arts as a whole, the author (Mr. Shatner) takes it upon himself to unkill James T. Kirk and involve him in a pointlessly overcomplicated plot by a Borg-Romulan alliance to assassinate Jean-Luc Picard, allowing him to indulge in a series of Mary Sue-esque antics like beating up Worf, outwitting Data, and dying gloriously while singlehandedly crippling the entire Borg collective and sucker-punching Picard to show him who's boss. Of course... Shatner didn't let Kirk STAY dead... and promptly revived him with an almost equally bullshit excuse in the next novel, only to be dragged into the Mirror Universe to confront his alternate self, who has become the ruler of the Terran Empire.

I'm kind of astonished that, blunt as I am about most things, that you need me to reiterate it... but okay, I'm game. My point here is that while you are entitled to your opinion and all that, you're basing your objections (or rather, grievances) on a series of faulty assumptions... namely, comparing destroid training and its inherent costs to much lower-tech real world equipment and the training necessary to use it, and the particularly odd choice of the US Army as a model, when Macross's creators are Japanese, and thus modeled some elements of the U.N. Spacy on the SDF (most noticably, rank insignia in the DYRL scheme). Yes, but that doesn't necessarily mean that all VF pilots (or destroid pilots for that matter) attend a military academy or even anything beyond their basic training. That all VF pilots must be officers who graduated from a military academy is demonstrably faulty, as we have the previously-offered evidence that not all pilots are officers, and that the training to operate a VF in combat definitely does not require years of study. Well, you have to consider things like the current military situation (quite a few Macross pilots have been trained or had their training abbreviated during a time of war, incl. Hikaru Ichijyo, Maximilian Jenius, Hayao Kakizaki, Komilia Maria Jenius (M2036), Lott Sheen, Hayato Kiryu, etc. etc. etc.) and other concerns like changes in technology. Ostensibly, one of the primary motivations for equipping EX-Gear is to make the fighters easier for pilots to control and facilitate training cutbacks without significantly impairing their performance in the field. One does have to wonder how the EX-Gear might improve the destroids of the era too... since they don't have to worry about concerns like transforming I'd imagine that weak variant of the BCS might drastically improve their performance and accuracy... but that's just my particular hypothesis. Okay, let's not ASSUME anything. Assumptions invariably come back to bite the one doing the assuming in the arse. We have a post-facto statement that the VF-17 was somewhat difficult to control compared to the VF-171. That is pretty much the only VF actually singled out as abnormally difficult to operate in any way, barring prototypes which would not be mass produced. Whether the VF-17 is ACTUALLY difficult to control or just more difficult than the VF-171 is kind of ambiguous. 'kay... let's go back and re-read that citation, the VF-19 isn't singled out like the VF-17 is. It's mentioned that the YF-19 was difficult, but that usability was improved in the mass-production model, so that leaves our one and only problem child being the VF-17, a special forces bird that no rookie has any business being in unless they're hot poo already. It would've been nice for Macross Frontier to use something newer than the Cheyenne, but it was only going to be a background mecha anyway, and they already had a 3D model for it... so waste not, want not. Thank you, I do try... Something that will always perplex me... though not quite as much as EB51 sparing a thought for how the Giant Monster (or as Chronicle mistakenly calls it, the Monster II) moves on the deck of a carrier, but it never actually appears on one (that I've been able to discern). I gotta admit, I find the Defender EX to be possibly the single most frightening AA unit the U.N. Spacy's ever produced... if only because it's an anti-aircraft unit armed with four anti-battleship railguns.