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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    The End of an Error.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    In the Macross M3 opening, the arms seem to end in some kind of small block that attaches to the underside of the aircraft rather than a large clamp. For what it's worth, the ARMD-class has never been depicted using a conventional carrier deck setup. Exactly what the purpose of the markings on their upper surfaces are is unclear, esp. given that they carry over to the later Guantanamo-class Advanced ARMD. The only ship of that earlier period we know of using artificial gravity and arresting wires to recover fighters and conventional catapults to launch them is the Prometheus. Not surprising it might have larger bays, since the ship would doubtless have larger auxiliary craft in addition to fighters.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    The one and only shot we have of VF-4s being launched in the main Macross continuity is in Macross M3's opening, where Max's VF-4G is shown being deployed via a launch arm similar to the DYRL? VF-1s. The gate they're shown launching from seems to have multiple tracks for launch arms too, since Milia launches from the same gate at the same time, only offset 180 degrees so her VF-5000B appears to be upside-down. Image shamelessly snipped from a YouTube upload of the Macross M3 opening by VF5SS. That approach is probably not used by the Megaroad-class. That's one of the through-deck elevators on the Prometheus... and the Megaroad-class doesn't have any "space flattop" features.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, localization teams seldom barrage the audience with news during the dub/sub production process. Plus mergers and acquisitions tend to upend production schedules at even the best-organized companies... and I unfortunately am living that experience myself right now. I see no cause for concern. Yeah, he and Naresuan seem to get that Jenius family "looks young into their 50's" thing. He actually puts in a couple appearances in video games and the like... though the only one that's part of an official timeline that has him make a prominent appearance is Macross 2036, where his ship is the flagship of the UN Spacy force defending against the Zentradi Neld main fleet.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    No, it did not. It went for some cheap shock value in the stinger after the credits, but other than that its only deviation from G-Witch's weekly directionless nothingburger of a story was a painfully forced attempt to build some pathos by killing off one complete arsehole literally nobody liked. Eh... the body count is almost entirely among nameless mooks and it's almost comically halfarsed. Plant Quetta's a Front the size of a small moon and a major Benerit Group weapons plant and the best they can muster for defense when attacked is... four Beguir-Pentes and a handful of armed Demi Trainers? They literally mustered more firepower for that 6v6 high school pissing match. It's so badly animated that most of them don't even fight back or dodge. They stand perfectly still and get shot. There's one scene where the animators got so lazy that they drew the Lfrith Ur just flying in a circle around a Beguir-Pente that fails to even react before shooting it in the back. The big fight between the Aerial and the two Lfrith units lasts maybe a minute and ends with neither side even managing to land a hit on the other. The only actual fight is... There's the cheap shock value of Suletta's one and only kill in the stinger... but that's not because it's consequential, just because it's unexpectedly gory. As much of a mess as this series has been, I'd honestly shed no tears if they decided to scrap it at 12 and go do something else with a different writer... or at least fire the writer and take the series in a completely different direction.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    The last time the topic was broached in-series in Macross 7, in-series medical science did not yet have an answer to the question of what the natural life expectancy of a Zentradi is. In "Which one do you love?", Milia gets sick and WebMD's herself into believing she's dying and goes on a rampage across the fleet to tie up her loose ends. The episode ends with Dr. Chiba chiming in to point out that her self-diagnosis is wrong and she just has a cold. The subject never really comes up again after that, though. It isn't until Macross Frontier and its side stories that we start to see Zentradi in the general populace on a regular basis, as they'd been restricted to Jenius family members and the occasional antagonist or throwaway background character up to that point. It's then that we start seeing apparently middle-aged and elderly Zentradi civilians like Ranka's (later Sheryl's) manager Elmo Kridanik and the owner of SMS and its parent company Richard Bilra. Based on them, Zentradi appear to age at approximately the same rate humans do, which would jive with what's said as far back as the original series about them being virtually identical to humans genetically. Richard Bilra was a former subordinate of Vrlitwhai Kridanik's during the First Space War, so he would be somewhere between 70 and 87 years old, and he looks the part. Ranka's (and later, Sheryl's) manager Elmo Kridanik is said to be the son of a famous First Space War commander (both Macross Chronicle and the light novel lean heavily into him being Vrlitwhai's son) and a retired Lt. Colonel in the Earth NUNS, meaning he's likely in his late 30's or early 40's. We don't know. The topic only comes up once, in an episode of the original SDF Macross series. Quamzin mentions an "old timer" aboard his ship who's due to be retired, but we never learn what that entails or when it occurs. They just use that older soldier's degraded abilities as an excuse to violate orders and hit the Macross directly with what was supposed to be a warning shot, setting up the events of "Blind Game". With the Zentradi lacking culture and any kind of society outside of their military organization and duties, it seems likely that "retiring" an old soldier means euthanasia and having their biomass broken down and recycled for the creation of fresh troops.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Definitely not, given that the VF-4's development contributed to the development of multiple successor aircraft developed by Stonewell Bellcom and its post-merger successor Shinsei Industry and arguably the entire General Galaxy lineup. The conformal missiles and thermonuclear ramjet engines did not persist into later generations of Variable Fighter due to the introduction of internal missile bays and launchers in its successors, but many later VFs use similar built-in beam weapons including the VF-14, VF-17, VF-19, VF-22, VF-25, and VF-27. Elements of the VF-4's transformation system (esp. WRT the cockpit) made their way into the VF-17, VF-171, and VF-31's designs. (The reason this shows up more in General Galaxy's works may have a lot to do with the VF-4 development chief Alexei Kurakin leaving Shinsei Industry in the late 2010s to cofound General Galaxy.) It's no different from the VF-1 in that regard... so I don't think that argument really holds water. Really, the problem the VF-4 faced is that Macross simply leapfrogged past it. All the 2nd Generation VF designs get shortchanged because Macross stories collectively skipped the late 2010s, 2020s, and early 2030s. By the time the story picks up in either timeline, the VF-4 and all other 2nd Generation VFs are obsolete and have been replaced by newer and more powerful models: the Valkyrie II in Macross II, and the VF-11 and VF-14 in Macross Plus and Macross 7. It's a victim of being the main fighter in an era of "Not much exciting happened".
  8. Seto Kaiba
    That was probably not this site, and as @azrael already pointed out we can't link to or endorse copyright infringing material here. The good news is that soon you will be able to replace those fansubs with legitimate subtitled home video releases for almost all titles thanks to the licensing stalemate being broken in 2021.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... it does, but the reference isn't exactly Japanese. It's not quite as bad as, say, Legend of the Five Rings where "as long as it sounds Asian" was in full effect as the writers conceived a bizarre melange of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean in their setting. It is, however, still very much in "as long as it sounds Japanese" territory and based on James Clavell's 1975 historical fiction novel Shogun. James Clavell's novel is based on the story of William Adams, the first Englishman to reach Japan shortly before the Battle of Sekigahara and the start of the Tokugawa Shogunate. The novel did some questionable things in terms of Japanese-sounding names while renaming actual historical figures. "Toranaga" was the novel's stand-in for daimyo, later shogun, Tokugawa Ieyasu. Toranaga was his given name in the novel, not his family name. Neither "Toranaga" nor "Matsuhari" is exactly a correct Japanese name. (For instance, "Gunji-no-Kanrei" isn't exactly correct either... with that romanization, it could be read "District Governor of Chilliness" or "Cold Military Affairs" depending on the kanji used. A lot of the Draconis Combine stuff is like... the kind of Japanese you expect to hear from someone who learned it from the dub of Naruto.)
  10. Seto Kaiba
    The semi-conformal medium-range missiles and built-in beam guns were an effort by the developers to prevent the standard armament from degrading the VF-4's stealthiness or its top speed and cruising performance the way it had on the VF-1. Later models had newer materials, fully-internal micro-missile launchers, and better active stealth systems to make up the difference.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    As others have said, we've never seen it do so... and, really, we've never actually seen the VF-4 Battroid in animation at all. The rotation point does appear to be under the engine, so without rotating the engine itself it seems unlikely that it can do so. Only Fighter mode. The VF-4 has only appeared in a few Macross games to date: Macross: Eternal Love Song - which largely predates Kawamori's transformation design for the VF-4 and created a very different version of the VF-4 with a VF-1-like Battroid, a large beam rifle, super pack, and funnels. Macross Digital Mission VF-X - very brief appearance in opening animation in Fighter mode only. Macross M3 - appeared in the opening animation in Fighter mode only. Macross VOXP - gameplay only Macross Ultimate Frontier - gameplay only
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Given the distressing frequency with which surviving Protoculture technology is either a weapon of apocalyptic destruction or the seal on a weapon of apocalyptic destruction, I'm not sure I'd trust any appliance manufactured by the Protoculture to be benign in nature. That ice cream machine's probably an entropy control weapon or the cooling system from some autonomous genocide engine that makes the Death Star look modest in its scale and destructive ambition. In Macross Delta, they couldn't even build a telepathy machine without the damned thing carrying a serious risk of accidentally genociding every sentient species in the galaxy. As an engineer, I feel compelled to say that if "normal operation may cause the unintended destruction of all sentient life" is on your DFMEA as a potential failure mode, you are doing something very very VERY wrong and need to stop IMMEDIATELY if not sooner. (Such an advanced civilization would surely scoff at the primitive likes of McDonald's anyway... surely the base level of their fast food has to be at least Culver's.)
  13. Seto Kaiba
    The VF-25's GU-17A gun pod doesn't use a detachable magazine. Like the GU-11 or GV-17L, it opted for a larger single internal magazine.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah. Variable Fighter Master File: VF-4 Lightning III's loading chart shows that the VF-4 can potentially take two gunpods, one apiece on underwing pylons as shown on that model. Since Master File alleges that the VF-4G is actually bigger than the VF-4A (officially it's not) the loading is different between the A and G variants. The A loading chart shows it on the pylons inboard of the engines, while the G loading chart shows it outboard of the engines. The only other one that presents a non-animation gun pod mounting besides the occasional VF-0/VF-1 Armored mounting spares on the forearms is the VF-25, which shows it able to carry three GU-17As, one center-mounted and one on each wing glove.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    The image is a bit dark, but yes it appears to be what Master File calls the GU-11C.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Thus far, no such issue has been mentioned. The ancient Protoculture's tech is basically Ragnarok-proof, with only battle damage really being enough to cause it to break down or malfunction. The factory satellites doing large-scale cloning have been doing so for half a million years without apparent incident. The only genetic or biochemical abnormalities that have been mentioned in connection with the Zentradi to date have been in children born via natural reproduction. Like the half-Zentradi Guld Goa Bowman's issues with managing his Zentradi side's heightened aggression in Macross Plus. Or Cpt. Klan Klan's genetic abnormality that causes her to revert to a childlike form when micloned but return to her true biological age as a giant. The most severe example being Michael Blanc, whose mixed heritage apparently gave him some rare genetic issue that causes no health problems normally but would make him terribly ill if he were ever to use a micloning system. None mentioned. It would not be entirely unreasonable for there to be some, given that the Zentradi forces were originally maintained by Protoculture colonies across the galaxy that may have had different regional accents or dialects. It could be said that the Zentradi language itself is something like a dialect of the Protoculture language. One specializing entirely in military matters with no words for things outside that narrow field.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    The Soviet Union was very much still a thing in the initial versions of the Macross timeline and backstory. It wasn't until the mid-90's that the Macross official timeline was adjusted to account for the real world dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. References to the Soviet Union were replaced with Russia, references to Leningrad were replaced with St. Petersburg, and references to Germany were updated to reflect German reunification. Mind you, it's entirely possible that it wouldn't actually have changed a thing. Russia was one of six major nations to cofound the overtechnology research institute OTEC alongside the US, UK, France, Germany, and Japan, and a cofounder of the Earth Unification (UN) Government and Earth Unification (UN) Forces. The development of various new weapons was done via design competitions and bidding processes as with normal military procurement. It took the industry and economy of the entire world to successfully reverse engineer the systems of the crashed alien starship and apply it and the UN Government mandated sharing of technological advances among all member nations to ensure nobody could monopolize those advances. Stonewell and Bellcom landed the winning proposal for a Variable Fighter out of all the companies around the world that submitted proposals. Alien StarShip 1 could have landed anywhere, and it probably would not have affected Stonewell and Bellcom's design significantly because it was based not on an existing aircraft but on a set of requirements put forward by the UN Government. Both in-story and in the real world, the VF-1 was not based on the F-14. It ended up looking like one largely by accident due to the unique requirements of its transformation. The real world version started out as a transformable powered suit vaguely reminiscent of Gundam's Core Fighter, before evolving into a more SF-like giant robot and then ultimately a modernesque fighter reminiscent of the F-14 thanks to how its transformation was designed. EDIT: Also, Soviet Air Force and Navy aircraft didn't typically use the hammer and sickle iconography of the Union's flag. They would have used the red star, like the one on that MiG-29 model in your video, and as a rule they tend to lack the fancy iconography the US uses. Probably not, unless somehow a different set of firms won the contract to develop the first generation Variable Fighter. Like how Sukhoi, Israel Aircraft Industries, and Dornier worked together to develop the SV-51 based on development data stolen for them by VF test pilot D.D. Ivanov. Yes, Macross Zero is a prequel. It's set in 2008, one year before the start of the First Space War in the original Macross series. It wouldn't work as a post-DYRL? movie, given that everyone on Earth's surface was killed in the First Space War when the Zentradi destroyed Earth's surface. The non-technological society of the Mayan islanders would not have survived the bombardment and the contamination of the atmosphere and oceans. The only survivors were the people who were 6km underground in bunkers beneath the Grand Cannons or out in space aboard the Macross, on the moon, or in the space colonies at Earth's Lagrange points.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    This is really not a Robotech-friendly site as the rules will remind you... discussion of it is only permitted as it relates to Macross. Probably best to just forget the R-word entirely. No. There are topics about care and cleaning in the Toys section, though. Because Go-Bots was a less-than-successful western rebranding of Bandai's Machine Robo toy line by Tonka, which was bought out by Hasbro in 1991 and folded into Transformers. Bandai continues to market the Machine Robo toy line in Japan to this day, though mostly through a spinoff called Mugenbine (originally Machine Robo Mugenbine until 2008) and the occasional anniversary special toy marketed under the original Machine Robo name. ... why would anyone want to do that? Macross and Machine Robo are from two different genres, for two wildly different age groups, and they're not owned by the same company. Bandai owns Machine Robo, but Big West and Studio Nue jointly own Macross. Bandai is a Macross licensee only. Eh... how can I put this gently? That kind of goofy and deeply unnecessary crossover schtick is more the content-starved Robotech fandom's thing than ours. They abandoned the whole brand years ago. I will send a more detailed explanation by PM, but the short version of the story is that they licensed control of the franchise to Funimation back in '19 after a string of embarrassing failures to relaunch the brand and then bent the knee and became a Macross release partner after losing a series of court battles over trademark rights to Macross's owners. They've effectively retired the brand, save for streaming licensing and a small amount of merchandise needed to hang onto their US trademark.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    You won't find much, it was a PC Engine game from the early 90's made as one of two game tie-ins to Macross II. The main VFs that omit a gunpod are the VF-4, Variable Glaug, VAB-2/FBz-99, and VB-6. It's longer than the regular GU-11[A], the grip was moved to the back portion beneath the ejection port, it's more streamlined, and the underside acquired this weird pump action shotgun-like grip that runs almost the entire length of the front part of the gun.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    In terms of its official appearances, the VF-4 is depicted without a gun pod in Flash Back 2012, Macross Digital Mission VF-X, Macross 7 Trash, etc. The only official appearance I can recall where it does have a gun pod is Macross: Eternal Love Song, in which it has a large beam rifle similar to the Zeta Gundam's. It's mostly model kits and such that depict the VF-4 with a gun pod. 's worth noting the "GU-11C" in Master File differs quite a bit from official gun pod designs.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Most of the time, the VF-4 didn't use a gun pod at all because it had a pair of built-in beam cannons as its main armament that could be exchanged for 30mm machine guns should projectile weapons be more advantageous. It has occasionally been depicted, mainly by model kits, as being able to wield the VF-1's GU-11 gun pod. Variable Fighter Master File also depicts it with this capability, though its version has the VF-4 using a variant of the GU-11 that has a more streamlined shape. In Macross: Eternal Love Song, the VF-4 instead has a large beam rifle as its gun pod... but that game is part of the Macross II timeline.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    I'm not sure if they would/could have boiled away the atmosphere itself given that the planet's gravity and electromagnetic field are the chief forces keeping it in place. It'd probably be easier to actually physically destroy the planet using something like the Golg Boddole Zer mobile fortress's super-large scale super dimension energy cannon from DYRL? than just boiling off the atmosphere. That thing's basically a Death Star... and a fusion plasma beam weapon able to vaporize moon-sized armored spacecraft would probably do a number on planets. They absolutely could - and did - saturate the Earth's atmosphere with so much dust and pulverized debris kicked up by the bombardment that it became upsettingly lethal to breathe across much of the planet. It took several months of atmospheric cleanup operations before it was safe-ish to be on the planet's surface without a space suit. The damage was so bad that Earth is only kept habitable by large-scale technological intervention in the form of a massive orbital sunshade preventing runaway global warming and designer bacteria that are regulating the atmospheric composition and cleaning up radioactive contamination.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    It's not explicitly stated to be, but it's clear from in-story context in official and unofficial material that it is given that it's described in terms like "the strongest naval weapon" and said and shown to be an anti-fleet weapon able to vaporize many ships with a single shot. Exactly how much more powerful is unclear, because not all Macross Cannons are created equal and not all of them are used to their full potential in their respective stories. Macross 7's Battle 7 was able to sink half a dozen enemy ships with a near-miss at 80% power from its Macross Cannon. Battle Frontier seemingly only ever fired low power shots, but used a sweep of a low-power beam to kill hundreds if not thousands of Vajra converging on it during an emergency fold. Macross 13's gained a scattering beam cannon effect that let it hit multiple enemy ships with a single low-power shot. It wasn't until Battle Astraea that we got something resembling a full-power shot again, which in that case was projected to do a downright apocalyptic level of damage to Windermere IV just by having the path of the beam pass through the planet's atmosphere on its way to its target. Variable Fighter Master File's description of the fleet assembled to tackle the Main Fleet that destroyed Spica III included the Battle 7, using its main gun in several sustained barrages to help destroy a fleet with a hundred thousand ships (alongside gratuitous reaction weapon spam). By all accounts, probably not. The incredible firepower of super dimension energy cannons (AKA heavy quantum reaction beam cannons) have some pretty significant drawbacks that make them difficult to use effectively on the battlefield. They're quite large and unwieldy, taking up a substantial amount of space inside of a ship that could be used for conventional beam weapons and to carry combat aircraft. The energy requirement to achieve such massive destructive force is substantial and even with dedicated reactors and the support of the power grid on the rest of a large ship, it can take several minutes to charge the weapon to fire. It also takes several minutes (if not longer) to cool the barrel after firing because the beam is made of fusion plasma from a sustained exotic matter thermonuclear detonation. You pay for the incredible firepower in the vulnerability of your ship between shots. The Zentradi, and presumably the Supervision Army as well, use more conventional but still immensely powerful particle beam cannons as their main offensive option for ship-to-ship combat. In the distant past, they apparently made widespread use of less powerful (in individual terms) but more versatile and spammable thermonuclear reaction warheads launched from battle pods and warships... probably in a manner similar to how the New UN Forces do in the modern day. The factory satellites producing those munitions were destroyed hundreds of thousands of years ago, and so they make do with conventional munitions to supplement their particle beam cannons. EDIT: You absolutely CAN build a giant F-Off super dimension energy cannon and try to take out the whole enemy fleet in one go... but if you don't get 'em all, as we saw with Boddole Zer in DYRL? and the UN Spacy in Macross II, you're in trouble. Golg Boddole Zer, call your agent.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, it's slow... but take it slow with Andor. The story's broken up into story arcs of 3 or so episodes, which are largely self-contained but build in the same direction. If you're going to do multiple episodes, groups of three is the way to go.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Finished Part 2 of Spy x Family. I'm impressed by how solid and consistently enjoyable the series is. I think the series really strikes a great balance between the slice of life family bits and the action-oriented spy bits. It's especially enjoyable when those two meet in the middle, either with Anya getting involved in Loid's business or Loid going to the same extreme lengths in his helicopter parenting that he does in his superspy work. Thus Spoke Rohan Kishibe fell kinda flat for me. Partly because of the significant difference in art style, and partly because the stories really are inconsequential ghost stories that don't even really have anything to do with the nominal protagonist.
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