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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    As far as we know, nobody who was on Earth's surface at the time of the bombardment survived it and the accompanying environmental calamity. Most resources that've discussed the aftermath of the First Space War put the total number of Human survivors at "approximately 1 million" before the start of the New UN Gov't's mass cloning and space emigration programs. The survivors were people had the good fortune to be either underground in the command bunkers beneath the incomplete Grand Cannons III and V or living offworld in one of the space colonies built at the Lagrange points, in the military bases or colony on the Moon, or in one of the few surviving UN Spacy warships. Earth's new population of Zentradi defectors and refugees supposedly numbered approximately 8 million. Not a world totally bereft of dogs, at least... they're just rare. IIRC, former SDF-1 Macross bridge operator and career soldier Kim Kabirov was noted to have a pet dog c.2045 in Macross 7 Docking Festival. The "Lost Children" narrative in Variable Fighter Master File: VF-25 Messiah also includes a moment where a pilot from the SVF-173 Ripsnorters takes on an additional objective to locate and rescue a lost dog during the defense and evacuation of a resort ship from the Macross Valient fleet that'd failed to fold out of the path of an approaching Zentradi main fleet. 1st Lt. Sato ends up using his squadron's VF-25G to locate the dog, a fold booster to jump his VF-25C into the ship's interior, and then escape the same way before the ship was destroyed with a MDE warhead to prevent it from being taken by the Zentradi.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Earth's not going to win any awards for "best garden party venue" anytime soon, but with the most advanced technology and most robust economy in the New UN Government it's not exactly an awful place to live. It's still going to take thousands of years, but Humanity is still basically speedrunning the process of recreating the pre-war environmental and ecological conditions on the planet thanks to a combination of the cloning technology obtained from the Zentradi and the gene and seed banks created in anticipation of an environmental disaster. Perfect Memory suggested that they started cloning extinct animals back into being relatively quickly, though later material suggests they mainly focused on plant life early on and that Earth pets like dogs are still rare and valuable animals into the 2060s.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    That's a Robotech-ism... I don't believe Macross ever specifies where the small forested area Quamzin found his derelict ship was. Probably not that far away, considering that the forces loyal to Quamzin were raiding cities near Macross City for supplies on foot and using cars... and that's in Alaska. No, Earth was basically a write-off... it seems like the only reasons Humanity didn't simply abandon it was because they didn't have enough ships right off the bat and didn't know about Eden yet. Even as far as back as Macross Perfect Memory, it's indicated that the bombardment wiped out nearly all flora and fauna on the planet. A few tiny pockets of life survived, but in practice the planet was rendered almost totally lifeless. Perfect Memory suggests the bombardment was so intense it actually changed the axis of Earth's rotation, and agrees with later works that it radically changed the composition of the atmosphere and the global climate. Later works (e.g. Macross Chronicle) added more detail like that it kicked up so much dust and debris that the air was basically unbreathable, much of the oceans evaporated, the global average temperature jumped by six degrees centigrade to 21C with ongoing global warming occurring due to elevated carbon dioxide levels and almost no plant life to process it, apocalyptic levels of air and soil pollution, etc. It took drastic measures to make Earth even marginally habitable again, including installing a massive orbital sunshade to slow global warming down, deploying designer bacteria to correct the atmospheric composition in place of the wiped out plant and plankton species, cleanup of radioactive contamination, cloning animals back into existence using the captured cloning technology of the Zentradi, etc. The damage is so severe that it's indicated it'll take ten thousand years or more to restore Earth to something like its prewar state. The restoration efforts are said to be going well, to the point that plants have been found growing outside of cultivated areas, so those patches of forest are probably still around but they're a tiny exception in what is otherwise an enormous desert.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    We haven't actually seen Earth's surface outside of Macross City in a while... but yeah, almost certainly. Earth's environment was almost totally destroyed by the Zentradi in 2010 and it's only through technological measures that the planet has a breathable atmosphere and isn't being quickly rendered uninhabitable by runaway global warming. It's supposedly going to take thousands and thousands of years to restore the environment to something resembling the planet's pre-war state. It was still mostly a desert in 2040, and it's likely that hasn't changed much by 2067-2068.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, it didn't stop me from buying multiples because hey... it was anyone's guess when Macross II would get another toy release... but it'd be nice to have something higher quality and hopefully this Kickstarter among other things will demonstrate that demand exists for more Macross II stuff.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    They only did the VF-2SS, the quality was ok but not great, and like Bandai before them they did the super-armed pack as a detachable setup so it is considerably chunkier than it is in the animation and looks kind of terrible. They did do three separate color schemes for the VF-2SS, the red stripe Sylvie type, the blue stripe Nex Gilbert type, and the yellow stripe women's version used by the other three members of Fairy Platoon.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Nice. Either way, seems like a win-win proposal to me. 😀 Makes me wonder what other extras they've got in mind.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, that must have been wild. They made first contact with aliens and had an alien colony established on their planet at a point where their own societal development was about on the level of Earth's European Middle Ages. King Grammier from Macross Delta was born just 5 years after first contact, so he would have lived through almost that entire period of upheaval as his people had to adjust their worldview from an age of feudal lords squabbling over fiefdoms to an era of diplomacy with beings from the other side of the galaxy. That they seem to have made the transition relatively peacefully is actually pretty impressive. Either they really didn't care, or they are an extremely resilient people. Having a flying city drop out of the sky would probably have been traumatic enough. Seeing that it's full of technology so advanced it might as well be magic and that the people who live there are just entering the prime of their life at a point where you would be ready to die of old age surely came as a nasty shock to the locals. It does use linear actuator technology, so in a certain sense it is simplified in terms of its maintenance demands but that's only relative to the previous generations of VF. We don't get much in terms of statements about the maintenance of the Sv-262, but given that it has a very complicated transformation it's maintenance demands are probably not that minimal. Refueling and rearming is probably not a big issue since the Sv-262 uses railguns and beam weapons, and itss missiles are stored in modular packs. Actual maintenance is probably a lot more involved, especially since it's noted that the fold reheat system the Draken III uses can actually cause damage to the aircraft.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    That line seems to have blurred somewhat in subsequent materials. The Gjagravan Va and Annabella Lasiodora are implied or outright stated to be products of Human defense corporations, for instance. That does seem to have been the original intended usage... but the term seems to have broadened somewhat with time, to the point that the term "mobile weapon" is being used more like a generic term for any of the robotic weapons or for anything that doesn't neatly fit into an existing category like "Valkyrie", "Destroid", or "Battle Pod". Similar in principle to how it's used in Gundam.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    "Metallic" hydrogen refers to a phase of hydrogen where it gains the electrical conductivity of a metal. It doesn't necessarily imply a particular state. The elemental properties of hydrogen and the pressures necessary to achieve metallicity in it (over 3.9 million atmospheres) suggest that naturally-occurring metallic hydrogen will exist as a liquid in the middle and lower atmospheres of gas giant planets. Theories regarding the possibility of metastability in metallic hydrogen (the ability for it to stay metallic after being removed from the high pressure environment) suggest a metastable or stable metallic hydrogen would be a supersolid... a sort of liquid crystal with the zero viscosity of superfluids. It'd work like liquid rocket fuel, assuming the real thing meets the properties physicists say it should. (Of course, if you're storing your fuel under 4 million atmospheres or more of compression, just releasing that pressure would be enough to get some pretty impressive propulsion... never mind burning the stuff.) As I noted, the RPG writers in question picked it purely because it sounded "Sci-Fi" without any familiarity with the material's hypothetical properties. Macross, as noted previously, uses a real world material: hydrogen slush. It's mercifully quite light so even thousands of liters doesn't add a significant amount of mass to the VF and it can pull triple duty as both fuel for the compact thermonuclear reactor, the laser and arcjet thermal rockets used for verniers, and as a system coolant for the engines in space. The rocket motors in Macross are a mixed bunch, but the ones used as boosters for VFs and so on are often hybrid rocket systems with a solid fuel putty and liquid oxidizer. The VF-25's Super Pack boosters are described as using a weird inert fuel gel that contains both fuel and oxidizer in suspension that evaporates under high voltage for combustion.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    I believe that one's another one that was filed under the somewhat vague title of "Mobile Weapon".
  12. Seto Kaiba
    There is something vaguely like that which appears in Macross VF-X2 and is mentioned in passing in the Macross Frontier short stories. It's officially given the more vague and nebulous classification of "Mobile Weapon", and structurally it's more like a Gundam Mobile Armor than a Destroid, but the mobile weapon "Annabella Lasiodora" is a [large aircraft/small warship]-sized mobile weapon with six arms/legs that's fought inside of Ceres Base in Macross VF-X2's 10th mission. (Why it has only six limbs when it's apparently named for a genus of tarantula, I cannot say.) The Macross Frontier short story "Wired Warrior" suggests it's a 2040s-era offshoot of Destroid development that, like the Konig Monster, is a heavy artillery platform.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    An interesting thought... though not a topic I recall being mentioned in any of the writeups for the Dian Cecht Sv-262 Draken III. It honestly wouldn't surprise me, though. It seems like something almost every VF developed after the First Space War would be designed for, considering the realities of postwar reconstruction and initial settlement of emigrant planets would mean VFs would have to be equipped to operate in the absence of properly constructed dedicated runways. Their VTOL and STOVL capabilities aside, it'd be an immensely useful thing to have and existing material does indirectly suggest roadways are reinforced to support the weight of stuff like workroids and giant Zentradi. Whether Windermere IV includes such infrastructure is unclear. We only ever see the Aerial Knights operate from aircraft carriers or an airbase outside of their planetary capital of Darwent. They jumped right from a pre-industrial or early industrial agrarian society to an interstellar one and their economy's still near-exclusively agrarian, so it's not clear if they had the time or resources to redo their road system to support battroids and workroids in addition to light trucks and draft animal-pulled carriages.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Your recollection is accurate. The circumstances behind that are somewhat involved and off topic, so I'll answer by way of spoiler tag. I was actually able to discuss that with the very people who made that decision back in the mid-2000s, so I've got firsthand knowledge as to the why. It was indirectly inspired by the Macross setting's use of thermonuclear fusion as the default power source for any kind of giant robot though...
  15. Seto Kaiba
    It's aerodynamic enough to work in atmosphere. It's a lifting body design. It's not going to win any prizes for speed or making tight turns, but then bombers seldom do. In principle, it's a medium bomber that is also a self-delivering artillery piece capable of firing guided and unguided long-range munitions. It's a more situational weapon than a normal VF but it is supremely good at making enemy fortifications and warships go away. Especially since it can be outfitted to deliver thermonuclear reaction weapons en masse. It's just not particularly relevant to this line of inquiry because it's not really a destroid in the strictest sense of the term. The main niche they seem to have carved out for themselves is the workroid... a non-military utility robot for all kinds of different heavy machinery applications. That they make them literally nimble enough to dance is kind of impressive in a way. It's probably not necessary for a giant robot forklift to be so agile, but one can only imagine that it's probably pretty multi-purposeful if it can clear a modern dance class while handling large cargo containers.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    In all fairness, the mass per unit of volume of hydrogen slush is not exactly huge... 0.085 kilograms per liter (about 0.71 pounds per gallon), a bit more than 1/10th what the same volume of JP-5 weighs (0.81kg/L or 6.76lb/gal). The full internally-carried fuel load of a VF-1 weighs only about 1.5x what the pilot does. (1,410L @ 0.085kg/L is 119.85kg or 264lb.) Weight isn't the problem for a VF, it's more a matter of consumption rate and available internal tank capacity. The other beautiful thing is that the supplemental thrusters for maneuvering are pretty darned simple. The thrust vectoring nozzle aside, it's basically just a channel for propellant and either an electrically-driven laser diode or just an electrical arc across the propellant stream to flash-heat it. Simple, lightweight, and effective.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    To be fair, the OP has a pretty good point about the (in)validity of the VB-6 as an argument. The VB-6 Konig Monster is a Variable Bomber. Its Heavy GERWALK mode resembles an old model Destroid and its Battroid mode is somewhat counterintuitively named "Destroid" mode, but as a Variable aircraft it's technically part of the rival Battroid design lineage and not truly a further development of the Destroid concept. By the definition Macross Chronicle gives us, a Destroid is a non-transformable, heavily armed, AFV-equivalent walker for land warfare. Macross Chronicle does, somewhat charitably, describe the Konig Monster as an offshoot of the Destroid concept that emerged after Destroid development died out in its glossary entry but I don't think that's quite the direction the OP was looking for.🤷‍♂️
  18. Seto Kaiba
    VFs have thrusters all over the place independent of the engines in the legs... around two dozen of 'em, in most cases. The vernier thrusters used for attitude control in space and, in some cases, in atmosphere. The low-thrust verniers used for most maneuvers don't have huge output on their own, but when you can throw a dozen of them at the problem it adds up. The high-thrust verniers used for braking and roll control on the VF-1 Valkyrie can put out up to 24.5kN apiece, around a quarter the total engine output of the Harrier (105kN). They're not fixed nozzles either, they can ALL thrust vector.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Well, there we have it... the delay must have been some kind of holdup at the printers or something.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    All in all, the Fall 2023 season felt like a really weak collection to me. There was never any doubt Spy x Family's second season was going to be good, and it did not disappoint. For me, there was also never any doubt that Goblin Slayer II was going to be a turd. Much of the attention the first season got was because of how graphic the violence in the first episode was, and much like the first season the story has to skip around a fair bit in the light novel in order to get to the bits with goblins because the light novel suffers the Tomb Raider problem of having exhausted its premise's limited utility very quickly. Tearmoon Empire showed some initial promise but devolved into an incredibly generic and tedious reincarnation comedy. I'm Giving the Disgraced Noble Lady I Rescued a Crash Course in Naughtiness was cute but ultimately lacking in substance and rather unsatisfying as a result. The Saint's Magic Power is Omnipotent limped to a pretty weak finish as well, with a chunk of the final episode being a clipshow. Haven't gotten to start Overtake! yet.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Well that improved my mood immensely. I woke up just in time to snag the last of the available prominent patron level upgrades that were added.😀
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Excessively broad requirements from the VF-X program. Going as far back as the first VF-1 technical writeup by Masahiro Chiba, the newly-founded Earth UN Forces had two separate camps when it came to development of anti-giant alien robotic weapons. The UN Army championed the Destroid as a fairly straightforward walking weapon for land warfare. The UN Air Force, UN Navy, and UN Marine Corps were looking for something more versatile, and the intersection of their interests produced the Battroid program and then the VF-X program. The Battroid program was absorbed into the VF-X as it'd already been doing some useful work in terms of a robot system meant for use in extreme environments like underwater, in air, or in space.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Mine just arrived a few minutes ago. EDIT: The only thing I can see in the book that might potentially be of issue to HG is the VF-1EX... so I doubt it was any holdup from their side.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    The terms of the Big West-Harmony Gold agreement as we know them would prevent it, yes. But that's off-topic.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    "Art evolution" is a natural part of a long-running work, though. Taking that away, and making it more homogenous, can rob a series of some of its charm. That said, a remake is almost always a divisive title in a franchise's fanbase no matter its quality... this might end up an unintentional bit of self-sabotage.
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