Seto Kaiba

70's apparently stilll on the wrong side of mandatory retirement age... Max's whole schtick in Absolute Live!!!!!! being that he took a "I'm bored in retirement" gig with Xaos after he retired from the Spacy, so presumably medical tech hasn't come that far. Max is just exceptional as ever.

Yup... the Martin Marietta X-24A, which was created specifically to test the kind of lifting body design that Kawamori would use for the QF-3000E Ghost. The Martin Marietta X-24B also pictured there (the wedge shaped one) is the inspiration for the Advanced Valkyrie design called the VF-X-7 Ghost Valkyrie. (See pg052 in Kawamori's Macross Design Works book.) The X-24B was also kind of a proof of concept for the lifting body design later used by Rockwell International for the US's Space Shuttle Orbiter. Yup, there's a section about the YF-29 being inspired by the Grumman X-29 in This is Animation: the Select: Macross Plus Movie Edition. The X-29 was a proof-of-concept for forward swept wing and canard configurations.

Not s'much... Walkure's outfits, like Sheryl's and Ranka's before them, are nothing so fancy as morphing smart materials. Their changeable costumes are holograms projected over a lightly armored bodysuit. It's a portable version of the same tech that was used for entertainment purposes in DYRL?. That said, said 70 year old man does live in a world where medical technology is way more advancd and (illegal) cybernetics have already raised the possibiity of post-biological humanity. Y'know, that got me thinking... it's been a hot minute since we've had a Macross story that showed what civilian life is like. It'd be interesting to get another title with more of a civilian focus like Macross 7 or Macross R and get a look at what folks are doing for fun and profit in the 2070s or wherever we're headed next.

Macross doesn't have a hard canon... it runs entirely on broad strokes continuity, with any given sequel freely mixing and matching details from the TV and movie versions of any or all of the previous titles. Sometimes a new series will even invent new versions of events which don't correspond to any existing version of the story it's referencing. For instance, in the Macross Delta TV series a presentation about galactic history mixes and matches aspects of the DYRL and TV series versions of the original story, and also combines aspects of both endings of the Frontier story by showing the TV series ending but with the YF-29 and the costumes from the Wings of Goodbye. Macross 7 straight up invented its own version of DYRL that included scenes that weren't in the actual movie like Max and Milia's wedding.

Don't get me wrong, the YF-29 has one of the best ISC systems around... but it's not that good. It can buffer up to 30G (an improvement over the VF-25/VF-27's 27.5G) but the YF-29 can pull 40G from a standing start... so if he's drawing the YF-29's abilities out to the fullest he's still potentially feeling 7.5-10G, which is a LOT for a 70 year old. (My best math suggests a drift racer pulls not more than about 2G.) Same. I'm still waiting for my DX VF-11C Mina Fortre... but hell, any excuse to get an updated VF-11 would be fantastic. Anything with the older Valks would be fantastic, though they'd probably have to go backwards in the timeline to do it.

Well, for the reason I just explained... any government with the means to do so would have upgraded several times since the heyday of the VF-4, VF-5000, VF-11, VF-14, and by the time of Frontier or Delta would have either decommissioned or scrapped the 3rd Gen and older VFs. That's why most Vanquish Racers use 2nd and 3rd Gen VFs... they're buying decommissioned and disarmed ex-military Valkyries at disposal sales.

It'd really depend on when you set it... and exactly how broke the operators are. Generally speaking, by the time a fighter aircraft is two generations old it's considered past the end of its useful service life and has either been retired or is in the process of being retired by anyone who used it except for the very poorest nations. This may be somewhat mitigated by the fact that the Zentradi aren't developing new weapons of their own, so it could be said that the real world pressure to upgrade isn't entirely there in Macross. Still, Macross R suggests that the New UN Forces are still largely following that guidance and retiring older models once they're two generations old. Macross 7 Trash kind of implies the same, with the Macross 7 fleet having relegated the late model VF-4s to training units while they focus on phasing in a 4th Generation VF. There are still a few countries operating 3rd Generation jet fighters like the MiG-23 and F-4 Phantom, but they're using late service life variants and either in the process of retiring them, have converted them to radio-controlled training targets, or are unable to afford to upgrade and are waiting to buy 4th Gen at fire sale prices when 5th Gen becomes the new normal. It's not totally without precedent to continue using older model VFs in Macross though. Macross Galaxy is still using some upgraded (E-type) VF-9s and VF-17s in 2059 in the TV series novelization of Macross Frontier, though the bulk of their forces are using the current-gen VF-171. Milia probably hasn't either. I'd imagine there's probably a subtle guilt trip hidden in every Christmas card or something...

The oldest explanation was that it had mechanical issues due to being essentially a "stretch" VF-1. More recent explanations like the one in Macross Chronicle take a simpler approach, saying that it was a parallel development to the VF-4 that was cancelled with only a couple of prototypes completed because of the military's decision to adopt the VF-4.

I think it's probably got a lot more to do with another series we don't talk about than it does Gundam... In all fairness, we've had no stories about the "hot new superfighter prototype of the week". Macross Plus, Macross 7, Macross Frontier, and Macross Delta do all feature next-generation fighters... but in each case, they're just early adopters of the next-generation's standard model or at least the design intended to be the next-generation's standard model. Macross likes to mirror real world developments, and the latter two titles mirror the development in the real world as various nations develop and introduce their own 5th Generation fighters. (The VF-31 is an especially blatant example, as it's transparently based on the efforts made to domestically develop a next-gen fighter in Japan.) If we're going forward again, we'll likely/hopefully start to see stories where the 5th Generation VFs are the standard type. Stonewell and Bellcom only made a few VF-3000s, because of issues with the design. The VF-5000 was widely used in the late 2010s and 2020s, but it's optimized for atmospheric use and shared the main fighter role with VFs designed for space operations like the VF-4. I would love to see a series that actually uses the VF-4.

I was going for "Usagi Tsukino's not the villain of her series", but that works too.

But, oddly, not our first flirtation with Mazinger in Macross... Viz Media's original follow-up to their translated release of Tsuguo Okazuki's official Macross II: Lovers Again manga adaptation has characters from several unrelated anime and manga properties show up as holograms including Dr. Hell, Berg Katse, Char Aznable, and Usagi Tsukino (one of these things is not like the other...).

Since the film became available on YouTube today, I'm sitting down to watch Cucuruz Doan's Island. Literally the first thing you get after you get past the various studio logos is a note indicating that Cucuruz Doan's Island is an adaptation of the 15th episode of the original Mobile Suit Gundam TV anime from 1979. All in all... I agree with the production staff that the plot of Cucuruz Doan's Island isn't bad despite the abysmal execution of the original TV episode, but there's just not enough of it for a two hour movie. A 40-minute OVA episode perhaps, but way too much padding was needed to make a 109 minute runtime even after expanding the scope of the story. The place where it falls down the hardest is character development. Cucuruz Doan is as thinly written as a one-shot character in a TV episode would be, with the movie making little to no effort to explore his motivation or backstory. The antagonists - SouthernCross team - get it even worse. They're totally undeveloped flat characters with at most one character trait apiece and there was absolutely enough runtime to do more with them than simply have them call him a traitor and then obligingly get killed off one at a time in totally one-sided fights that last an average of about a minute.

Destroids are kind of screwed coming and going, because the kind of ground warfare they're designed for isn't really a thing in the Macross setting and because mobility matters at least as much as heavy armor in combat their low mobility as walking weapons makes them sitting ducks. That said, the Spacy didn't have it quite that bad against the Vajra. The Nightmare Plus did OK, but not great, against them once the Spacy switched to more powerful anti-energy conversion armor ammunition to get through the Vajra's natural defenses. Once they upgraded to the VF-171EX or VF-171-IIIF they did a lot better since the improvements made them more maneuverable and they were also far better armed, and they were able to largely keep that advantage once they discovered how to jam the Vajra hive mind on a local level so the Vajra couldn't adapt to the new weapons as readily. I'm not sure that conversion would be possible... esp. since the Neo Glaug is 20+ years newer than the Variable Glaug and presumably takes advantage of not just improvements made in things like engines, weapons, and avionics but also in materials. The designation used in Macross R does seem like it would come from the original Variable Glaug. It's a reference to Project Constant Peg and the US Air Force 4477th Test and Evaluation Squadron's secrecy-preserving US designations for captured or clandestinely obtained Soviet aircraft being benchmarked at the Tonopah Test Range. YF-110 was the US's designation for captured MiG-21s. Yeah, that one's a bit odd... though it has so little screen time. We do know a modest amount about its armaments, since the line art for it details those relatively clearly. It has what are essentially non-psycommu funnel missiles, or an early version of the Laser Propelled Pod from the VF-19 Master File. The one that probably has the least actual information is the VC-079 Civilian Valkyrie AKA the SNN Valkyrie. About all we know about it is that it debuted as a commercial use VF in 2079 as a part of the Takachihof Corporation's lineup and that SNN uses at least one of them for war reportage.

Or they thought it would do something right, at least... Macross Chronicle's Mechanic Sheets for the Destroid Cheyenne II do say that it was basically useless against the Vajra. It doesn't seem to have fared any better against Zentradi battle pods in Macross Delta either. If nothing else, the Destroid Cheyenne II lives up to the Destroid legacy of being jobbers. One potential explanation is that the (initially) unmanned Neo Glaug is actually bigger than the Variable Glaug of the late 2010s and early 2020s. After all, it is a new aircraft based on the Variable Glaug and not simply an unmanned version of the Variable Glaug. There is a fair amount of real world precedent for that kind of thing, like the relationship between the General Dynamics F-16 and its Mitsubishi F-2 derivative or the Boeing F/A-18 and F/A-18E/F. If the Neo Glaug was built slightly larger than the original Variable Glaug that would explain both the disparity in the games (though scaling in games is always an issue) and the manned Neo Glaug bis's ability to accept an adult Zentradi pilot as it is said to do in the Macross Frontier novelization and Macross the Ride. Alternatively, it's possible that if it's the same size that application of more modern technology allowed the designers to hog out a bit more space for the pilot to sit inside of the cockpit block. My recollection is that the Master File books tend to only mention the Zentradi mecha in passing unless they're directly relevant to the development of a Valkyrie. There's a fair bit said about the Queadluun-Rau in the VF-22 book, but that's got direct relevance to the VF-22's development because the VF-22 applied lessons learned from the restoration of the Quimeliquola factory satellite that was relocated to Eden for restoration in the 2030s and directly incorporates some technologies from the Queadluun series like the Queadluun's Inertia Vector Control System. Other than that, they tend to only show up in terms of the very earliest models and "We did X because we studied the Zentradi mecha and they did Y" like calibrating the power of gunpod shells to pierce battle pod armor or adjusting the radars and active stealth systems of VFs after the First Space War to achieve better stealth performance vs. a Zentradi radar system. They get mentioned in passing in narrative sections that describe how the subject matter VF model saved the day in some skirmish or battle. Woooooah, we're halfway there... Oh wait, that's not the lyric. Alas, no. We know approximately how big the VFs of Macross II are thanks to statements of Battroid mode height and size comparisons from the art books. We know what they're armed with, and in some cases what some of their key design features or changes are. But the only one of the Macross II Valkyries to get an actual stat block is the VF-2SS. That's not even in the contemporary artbooks. It comes to us from Bandai's 1/100 plamodel kit. The poster that comes with the kit has, at the bottom, the stat block for the VF-2SS and the Super Armed Pack. Macross Chronicle subsequently used that information for its Mechanic Sheet. Perhaps if the OVA had been more popular back when it was new we might've gotten subsequent kits with similar stat blocks, but its lukewarm reception in '92 meant that we got just the one... which has subsequently been re-released several times. Much of the technical information for the Macross II setting comes from the marginal notes on the animation model sheets and coverage of the OVA in Bandai B-Club magazine in 1992.

They've got two in cetacean ops.

Not that I have seen. The only enemy mecha covered in the recent ones have been the Sv-262 Draken III and Sv-303 Vivasvat.

We've never or almost never seen individuals from two separate branches together at the same time in the main Macross timeline. Almost everyone seems to be from the Spacy. The main exception is Isamu Dyson, the New UN Forces multiply-regifted holiday fruitcake who was bounced between the Spacy, Navy, Air Force, and Spacy Air Force. Very likely, yeah. That does appear to be the case. The only mention of attempts to improve the stock models comes from Macross R in 2058, when Macross Galaxy was experimenting with the application of 5th Gen VF technology to First Space War-era Destroids for some reason. Battle suits are definitely the most survivable of the Zentradi units, since they boast better armor than the regular battle pods. The New UN Forces improved version of the Queadluun-Rau was about equal to a Gen 4 or Gen 4.5 VF, which is pretty darn impressive. Of course, Humanity's saving grace when facing the Queadluun series in Zentradi hands is that they're quite rare due to the complexity and cost of their manufacture. True, they are cheap... but that comes at the expense of low survivability, low operator comfort, and high strain on the operator in operation. The New UN Forces mercifully thinks rather more of its Zentradi pilots than the Protoculture did, so it's not surprising that even the improved Regults don't appear to be widely used and the Zentradi forces are implied to mainly use far more defensible units like the Neo Glaug bis and Queadluun-Rhea if they're not just miclones using VFs. One of the details I really enjoy is that Master File and other books occasionally offer details of postwar Zentradi VF squadrons with markings and heraldry using Zentradi text and evocative unit names like the "Big Aces".

Hard to say... in no small part because characters explicitly affiliated with the UN Army are vanishingly rare in Macross. The only one I can say with 100% confidence was a UN Army officer is the UN Army Colonel commanding the air defense of Macross City in the Macross II OVA's penultimate episode. That's one of the only times that branch of service has been clearly delineated by uniform, with the UN Army personnel wearing khaki uniform jackets and slacks as opposed to the Spacy's black jackets and white slacks. Of course, in that timeline, Destroids never faded into obscurity the way they did in the main timeline. IIRC, the Army's the only branch that has NOT been mentioned as using Valkyries... we've got example squadrons and/or characters representing the Air Force, Marine Corps, Spacy, Spacy Air Force, and Spacy Marine Corps. Considering the overwhelming emphasis on space-based defense, I'm not sure the Army would even have a need to have Valkyries. The Zentradi are not inclined to take and hold land. Their attitude is more "that's a nice planet you have there, shame if someone glassed it from orbit". I'm not even sure what the Army would do in the modern era, apart from possibly providing infantry for security inside of emigrant ships and so on... assuming the Spacy doesn't have infantry of its own for that. In the main Macross timeline... probably not, IMO. In Macross II, the Destroid concept remained tactically viable and new models of Destroid were in widespread use throughout the Mardook conflict in 2092 with new versions of the Tomahawk, Phalanx, Defender, and Monster. The main Macross timeline from Macross Plus onwards essentially took the stance that Destroids and many other equipment decisions made in the runup to the First Space War were conceptual misses based on the incorrect assumption that a war with aliens would take the form of a classic Alien Invasion and ground war against occupying forces. The UN Forces learned to their great surprise and detriment that the Zentradi really didn't care for that, and the ground-based defenses were wiped out without firing a shot by orbital bombardment. It's implied that Destroids as a concept didn't last much past the end of the First Space War, since planetary defense shifted its focus to space and point defense guns and anti-aircraft missile batteries could do the same job less expensively on emigrant ships and New UN Spacy warships. The Cheyenne II was kind of a surprise when Frontier aired for those reasons, and even Macross Chronicle suggests that the re-adoption of Destroids is an isolated phenomenon covering some weird corner cases. Even the Frontier materials point to the Cheyenne II still just being an overcomplex air defense gun and that they typically aren't even manned when they're used on the Macross Quarter. Their main utility seems to be that they don't mess up the pavement the way a Valkyrie does when it's walking in Battroid. In a limited manner? It was well attested to in Frontier-era materials that the New UN Forces had a great fondness for the Queadluun-series battle suits due to their incredible maneuverability and high overall combat performance. So much so that, when the number of remaining Queadluun suits dropped due to the difficulty of repair they set out to capture the factory satellite to not only make their own but develop an improved version that we see in the Macross Frontier series as the Queadluun-Rhea/56. It was known from the original series that the New UN Forces initially made use of Regults produced by the captured factory satellites, but it wasn't until Macross Delta that there was any indication they were STILL using them. Especially given that they have low survivability and that the cramped conditions and low level of automation make them rather uncomfortable to operate. Presumably the Regult Type-104, Type-106, and Super Glaug are better in that regard, but I'd expect that Valkyries have probably stolen their thunder rather comprehensively except among new Zentradi recruits used to the stock model.

Just one episode... No.15, "Cucuruz Doan's Island". It was kind of "The Incident" when it came to the production of Mobile Suit Gundam and kind of became the franchise's Old Shame. It was a one-shot episode that had such disastrously poor production quality that it's held up as one of the most infamous examples of animation collapse (作画崩壊), the term for when the bottom falls out of a show's art quality. It was left out of the compilation movie trilogy, and when the series was licensed in the US the entire episode was omitted on Yoshiyuki Tomino's request. It was also left out of Mobile Suit Gundam: the Origin manga updated retelling of the original series. This movie, Mobile Suit Gundam: the Origin MSD: Cucuruz Doan's Island is... well... a "do-over" on the infamously poor quality episode of the original Gundam series in the style and alternate continuity of Mobile Suit Gundam: the Origin and its partial OVA adaptation. The movie's part of a new spinoff title Mobile Suit Discovery (MSD), a play on the Mobile Suit Variation series acronym "MSV" that'd been used for non-canonical side stories in the past. Nope... there was a six episode Mobile Suit Gundam: the Origin OVA series that was subsequently re-edited into a one-cour (13 episode) TV anime series Mobile Suit Gundam: the Origin: Advent of the Red Comet. It's only a partial adaptation of the Mobile Suit Gundam: the Origin manga, though. It's a villain origin story for Casval Rem Deikun (alias "Char Aznable") that shows his incredibly messed up childhood, the traumas that led to his Start of Darkness, how he enlisted in the Zeon armed forces under a stolen identity, the collapse of Zeon's relationship with the Earth Federation and its subsequent declaration of independence, and the early parts of the One Year War including Operation British (the colony drop), the Battle of Loum where Casval/Char earned his sobriquet "the Red Comet", and General Revil's escape from Zeon. It ends shortly before Amuro would enter the story proper, with the White Base being dispatched to Side 7 to retrieve the Federation's Mobile Suit prototypes. IMO, it's pretty dark even by UC standards... and puts a WAY darker spin on the direction that Side 3 was heading before the war. EDIT: For your viewing pleasure and convenience, Crunchyroll currently has the OVA and TV series edit, subbed and dubbed: https://www.crunchyroll.com/series/G3KHEV0NW/mobile-suit-gundam-the-origin https://www.crunchyroll.com/series/G60X0KVGR/mobile-suit-gundam-the-origin-advent-of-the-red-comet Their reasons for making the Curcuruz Doan's Island movie seem to be a desire to put right what once went wrong, as a few of the staff have said that the story was sound but the animation didn't do it justice.

It seems there's some small brouhaha going on over the Witch from Mercury in the latest Gundam Ace. Something seems to have prompted the publisher to remove a statement or two about Suletta and Miorine's relationship from the web version. I saw something on Facebook about them now saying they wanted to leave their relationship open to interpretation? I'm not sure how open to interpretation the fact that they're clearly married is, esp. given that the arranged marriage to the Holder was the main thing driving the plot in the entire first half. That should be interesting. A little while ago I was looking over some of the publications for this one because people on MechaTalk were asking about the new Zaku variant. Sadly basically no information about it. It's kind of disappointing how sparse the info in new Gundam publications has become.

They've got a sense of humor about it too... both in production terms and in the Macross setting itself. Going back as far as the original VF-1 technical manual, the name of the system that controls the operation of OTM thermonuclear reactors is literally "MAGIC". (The acronym is short for MAtrix of Gravity and Inertia Control.) We engineers do love to have fun with acronyms. Sadly, the leadership types tend not to let us get away with most of it... especially when it's a rude word or forms a joke when read aloud.

Yup... whether the next Macross series will change that is unknown, but as of Macross Delta: Absolute Live!!!!!! (2068), Humanity can apparently synthesize fold carbon of such high quality that it can approach a tiny fraction (~1%) of the potential of fold quartz but is still unable to achieve a synthetic version of fold quartz itself. Fold carbon is used in all sorts of systems, like the Gravity and Inertia Control systems inside of thermonuclear reactors, ship-based gravity control systems, fold communications and radar systems, fold navigation systems ("fold drives"), dimensional beam weapons, the detonation mechanisms of thermonuclear reaction warheads, holographic projection systems, and so on. Master File also suggests that it's used in advanced computer systems. Essentially, it only really does two or three things: it's a catalyst for producing heavy quantum, it can function as a higher dimension equivalent to a radio crystal, and if Master File is accurate it can be used to make computer circuitry. The trial production model VF-31A has two large fold carbon pieces inset along the spine of the aircraft, though it's not 100% clear what they're for. Yup, that is the Master File-original YF-29C... a (failed) experiment meant to facilitate development of a mass production-worthy version of the YF-29 using carefully selected ultra-high purity fold carbon in place of the nearly-impossible-to-obtain ultra-high purity fold quartz used in the original YF-29 or extraordinarily rare super-high purity fold quartz used by the handful of YF-29Bs produced. With the very best fold carbon Humanity could make, the fold wave system only achieved about 1% of the potential the original YF-29 displayed in Macross Frontier: the Wings of Goodbye.

Probably because episode 1 introduces the series and episode 4 is the first big concert and battle. Episode 2 and 3 are a breather between them with Hayate's training arc. HG has said that all current/existing Macross titles are in the clear... so I'd assume it's because episodes 1 and 4 are simply the most exciting ones in the early series.

Like a lot of things in mecha anime, it's one of those "it's all in the manual" sort of situations with the information. The "heavy quantum" in Macross that is so critical to the operation of thermonuclear reactors and fold technology is very much inspired by the exotic Minovsky particles that make much of the advanced technology in Gundam's Universal Century era go. Minovsky particles are exotic charged particles that are a product of fusing deuterium and helium-3. The positively and negatively charged Minovsky particles naturally align themselves into a sort of lattice based on opposing charges. Almost all of their tricks depend on the Minovsky particles being charged particles and interacting with electromagnetic fields/waves. In extreme densities, they can block heat and neutron radiation from a fusion reaction, letting them be used as a self-sustaining form of shielding in fusion reactors. In lower but still high densities they can jam radio and radar in a manner similar to chaff (but longer lasting) by absorbing radio waves. They can also be used in certain kinds of sensors, and fusing them using magnetic pressure releases an enormous amount of energy that is focused to produce destructive high energy particle beams. A similar effect can allow ships to float on a cushion of high density Minovsky particles via magnetic levitation. Macross's heavy quantum is also principally produced inside thermonuclear reactors, albeit by a fold carbon or fold quartz catalyst, and while the force it exerts is gravitational not magnetic it's still used to provide fuel compression and plasma confinement that makes a compact fusion reactor possible. Instead of magnetic fields, fold waves produced by a fold carbon or fold quartz resonator are used to control the amount of gravitational force. It can similarly be used for reactionless flight via antigravity or opposing gravity ("falling up"), and like Minovsky particles compressing heavy quantum to the point of fusion with itself releases an incredible amount of energy that's focused into the most destructive form of beam weaponry: the heavy quantum reaction cannon AKA super dimension energy cannon. The main thing it doesn't do that Minovsky particles do is block radiation. The other key difference is that there's only one flavor of Minovsky particles... whereas the force heavy quantum can exert varies depending on the purity of the fold carbon or fold quartz used to produce it, which can vary wildly. Letting normal heavy quantum collapse on itself will yield a thermonuclear boom (this is largely how thermonuclear reaction bombs work), but letting the superheavy quantum produced by fold carbon collapse on itself yields a fold effect intense enough to be a pseudo black hole (a dimension eater bomb).

On an unrelated, but fun, note... a Gundam book I'm working on for a friend (Gundam Century: Renewal Edition) contains a very familiar friend... ... with a very familiar explanation. Checked the credits, and lo and behold... "Cooperation: Studio Nue". This is a drawing of the MS-09B Dom's thermonuclear jet engine and it looks A LOT like the drawings of the FF-1999/FF-2001 initial type thermonuclear reaction engine from the QF-3000E Ghost and VF-1 Valkyrie. Its description even boasts the same design flaw. Both designs omit the turbine stage that would normally drive the compressor in favor of using an electric motor because the temperature of the plasma-heated exhaust was too high for a turbine built with available materials to survive. The main difference between the two, apart from substituting the gravity produced by heavy quanta or the magnetic compression of Minovsky particles is that the Dom's turbine had to use indirect heating to keep the engine at a safe temperature. Macross's thermonuclear reaction turbine engines put the compact thermonuclear reactor in the engine core and the heating of intake air is achieved by passive transfer and by injection of minute quantities of plasma from the reactor core into the airflow. Gundam's Dom wanted to do that, but didn't have materials with the heat resistance to pull it off. Instead, the primary reactor fusing deuterium and helium-3 inside the MS's body is used to heat hydrogen from a separate set of fuel tanks into a lower temperature plasma for injection into the turbine in order to heat intake air. Just thought y'all might enjoy this fun little bit of serendipity between Macross and Gundam.