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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    The latter... with a further caveat. Not only do we not know what kind of Republic the (Inter)Stellar Republic was (or if it was even truly a republic and not a People's Republic of Tyranny)... it's not always referred to as a Republic either. Sometimes it's 星間共和国 (seikan kyouwakoku, "Interstellar Republic") and sometimes it's 銀河帝国 (ginga teikoku, "Galactic Empire"). The latter is more common in early works, but Macross Chronicle expressly acknowledges both terms. It's possible that both are correct and either the government changed its name or those existed concurrently as the two factions in the Protoculture's civil war.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Both old and new Macross were made by "corporate suits that see anime as a marketing tool for music sales and other products". All anime, and really all mass media, is. We call those corporate suits "producers" or "members of the production committee". They're the ones putting up the cash for the work to be produced/published in order to make money on its distribution and licensing. Anime makes most of its money from licensed merchandise, after all. Even the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross was very much driven by the sponsor's desire to sell licensed toys, model kits, character goods, and many other kinds of merchandise and reap the financial rewards. All that's really changed from then to now is Big West is no longer inexperienced with animation production they way they were in 1982, those young guys who made the original series are not so young anymore, and Macross is now a well-established property that's experimenting with its formula and chasing media trends in order to remain relevant to its target audience like any other long-running property.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... I'm with ya on the "Why bother?", but the OP pretty clearly meant "for a Macross series" not for the backstory. Yes and no. The Stellar Republic is a vanished golden age civilization, but it's not really equivalent to the Star League of BattleTech in any meaningful way. None of the civilizations depicted in the main Macross continuity were once a part of the Stellar Republic. Only two cultures encountered in the series had any kind of a significant mytho-historical association with the ancient Protoculture, the Mayan islanders on Earth and the Windermereans of Windermere IV. Neither party has any designs on restoring the Stellar Republic. The Mayan's mytho-historical "memory" of the Protoculture is not exactly positive (it centers on the Birdman's aborted attempt to destroy them) while the natives on Windermere IV were almost certainly created long after the Protoculture's Stellar Republic fell given that the Brisingr star cluster is believed to have been their final enclave late in their slide into extinction. Another key difference is that nobody is trying to recreate the Protoculture's Stellar Republic. The New UN Government's space emigration program is driven mainly by the fear of extinction at the hands of the Protoculture's rogue creations, and the Zentradi have no knowledge of cultural pursuits outside of their strictly military function. It wouldn't be much of a stretch to say the more humanity learns about the Protoculture the more it sees the Stellar Republic as a pack of irresponsible maniacs who left the galaxy absolutely littered with incredibly dangerous abandoned weapons. Nobody even really knows what the Stellar Republic's actual system of government was. Can't very well recreate a government you know nothing about. Not even close. The Zentradi may be divided into thousands of Main Fleets and each of those divided into thousands of Branch Fleets, but they're all effectively on the same side. They have no culture of their own, and the closest they have to "traditions" are the military regulations laid down for them by the long-vanished Protoculture that include a built-in prohibition on matters pertaining to culture. They're not driven by honor, or a desire for dominance, territory, or resources. They're not the least bit interested in trying to recreate the Stellar Republic and don't even have a proper concept of what it was. Their only interest is in continuing to carry out their orders to seek and destroy the Supervision Army. Naresuan's motive is not linked to any such notion of reviving the Stellar Republic or creating a new one. He's an otaku who adores Earth's culture, but his terrorist organization Fasces (subtle, no?) is a surviving remnant of the Latence faction that lost the Second Unification War and its motives and aims are the same as its parent organization. It's a fascist movement that grew out of the fear of the unknown and of imminent extinction that resulted from the First Space War and was driven to a fever pitch by the events of the Varauta conflict. It really doesn't seek to "unite all nations under a centralized government". Its actual aim is the overthrow of the New UN Government and the imposition of direct or indirect rule by the military in the name of coordinating defenses against threats to humanity.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, they had guts... the problem is they completely ruined the impact of the film's one big character moment by foreshadowing it SO heavily and SO often that throughout the film's runtime that when the blow finally landed it had no impact whatsoever.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    After a disappointing TV anime and first movie, Absolute Live!!!!!! definitely feels like an attempt to win back the fans who are there for more than just Walkure. The movie was supposed to have Ernest Johnson and the Macross Elysion, but after Unshou Ishizuka passed away they had to come up with a replacement and Max was who the team ultimately settled on because he had a pre-existing relationship with another character they could use as a story hook to introduce him. Given the way Show Hayami's Max runs away with the movie while they're busy telegraphing... ... it feels like promoting Arad to captaincy of the Macross Elysion would've been a less problematic idea. He escalated a training exercise already in progress... that he cut the number down below four so quickly is more a testament to how lacking in professionalism they are compared to a real ace pilot. Watching Max dunk on Chuck, Mirage, Bogue, and Hayate like that and then explain to them how much they suck was intensely satisfying for those fans critical of the Macross Delta series, but not a great moment for the story as a whole when the protagonists get publicly humiliated as they're preparing to save the day.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    In all fairness, they do a better-than-usual job this time around. How much of that is because of how little they're in the actual episode vs. their foes having no weapons and being able to fight from secure positions is debatable. I was... but then, I'm not exactly a Star Wars fan so maybe I'm "no one" for the purposes of that topic. During the prison arc episodes, I was looking around YouTube on the assumption that it was obvious to everyone but the non-fans and got told stuff like that it was a probe droid's chassis or a TIE Fighter wing frame.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    It's in good company. Gawking uselessly when Max takes to the field is about all Delta Flight contributes to the proceedings for most of the movie too. It's gotta suck to get upstaged in your own movie by a 75 year old retiree who hasn't been an active duty pilot since your parents were in diapers. Especally when he rubs it in by being better at your own signature moves than you are and humiliating you and your squadmates in a four-on-one fight.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Seldom have I ever been this excited for a season finale. Andor has grabbed me in a way that I really did not expect it to, having never really been more than a casual member of the audience where Star Wars was concerned. Well, that wraps up most of the plot threads from season one in a neat and tidy package. Hopefully this is the last we'll see of the Ferrix set, considering how much time was squandered there dramatically walking nowhere in particular. They neatly wove the various side stories - Vel and Cinta's, Syril and Moss's, Luthen's - together with Cassian's for the ending of the first season so there are very few loose ends still remaining to be tidied up. Notably, who the hell the new kid the camera keeps dwelling on is and why we're supposed to care about Mon Mothma. She stopped being relevant to the series just a few episodes in, and now when the story switches focus to her it feels like someones's cutting segments from a completely different series into Andor as makeweight. Switching from grounded, focused, compelling character drama about the rise of the Rebellion and the espionage speed chess Luthen and the ISB are playing to another segment of the marital and financial struggles of a family of out-of-touch 1%-ers who loathe each other on Coruscant is as jarring and unwelcome as cutting away from a Bond movie to show segments from episodes of Frasier or Days of our Lives. It almost feels like they're trying to stealth pilot a Mon Mothma series, the way Star Trek has tried and failed to do stealth pilots for spinoffs like "Assignment: Earth" or Michelle Yeoh's Section 31 series... except even more ill-advised.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Probably none. Even in the oldest version of the VF-1's development history, Stonewell and Bellcom's joint engineering team designed the first Variable Fighter digitally. Physical prototyping didn't begin until after that design - which the oldest material calls VF-X X021 - was completed in 2005. Ejection seat manufacturers Marty & Beck* probably destroyed at least a couple dummies prototyping the actual ejection seat itself, but by the time the Earth UN Forces took delivery of the first prototypes in 2007 those were solved problems. Due to extensive use of computer modeling to evaluate the design before parts or even the materials to make them were available there were relatively few differences between the VF-X prototype seen in Super Dimension Fortress Macross and the Block 1 VF-1A. (It's actually kind of surprising how little has changed in the VF-1's development history from its first version in 1984 to the present day.) * A "bland name" version of real world British ejection seat manufacturer Martin-Baker.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    More like four different ways to eject using the same system. The Sky Angels book actually describes more than that, though it's all variations in the same basic concepts like ejecting the nose in Battroid mode instead of Fighter or GERWALK or firing the ejection seat forward out of the Battroid's midsection if the head is too damaged to clear the path of the vertical ejection. Because it contains so many diagrams, the part about ejecting is actually one of the book's longer sections!
  11. Seto Kaiba
    A steel-capped stick with a contoured grip? To me, that says "trench club". Or maybe some kind of stungun/prod? Luthen doesn't strike me as the kind of guy who believes in being elegant in battle. He strikes me as a "whatever works, works" kind of guy who wouldn't hestiate to carry something to silently knock heads in should the need arise.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    As questionable as the Macross Galaxy fleet's executives can be at times, it's an understandable view. As previous posters noted, something like BattleTech's clans wouldn't fit into the Macross setting on a motive level because it's thematically incompatible with Macross. The Clans are all driven by Nietzchean will to power and not a hell of a lot else. Even the ones that profess more noble goals like reforming the Star League are really only doing it for their own power and prestige. After all, what's more prestigious than returning humanity to its golden age as the restorer and undisputed ruler of its greatest civilization? The antagonists in the Macross franchise tend to have more relatable motivations that are intended to keep them redeemable or at least understandable. Galaxy's executives are arguably chasing the polar opposite, since their endgame is not individual power but ego extinction via the creation of a unifying human hive mind. A story that's thematically all about the power of communication wouldn't work very well if the antagonist was nothing more than irrational and power hungry, y'know? That's why even when you get factions that woud ordinarily be in the very dark gray or the black like the fascist Latence movement or the Macross Galaxy fleet, they're kept clear of card-carrying villain territory by giving them a rational motive for their misguided actions. In both cases, their misguided actions were taken because they sincerely believed their chosen course of action was The Only Way to save humanity from imminent destruction... whether that destruction was external or self-inflicted. Quite possibly. I'm actually surprised it lasted this long, considering it's almost a "Vs" thread.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    That or, as @JB0 pointed out, ejecting the cockpit block as a single unit. For various reasons, the VF-1 Valkyrie came equipped with at least four separate ejection system operating modes. One for subsonic flight, one for supersonic flight that deployed an additional bit of decking below the chair to shield the pilot from the supersonic airflow, one for space flight that ejects the entire aircraft nose, and then battroid that pops off the VF's head and allows the seat to eject out the neck. TTC ejection is mainly a British thing for low-altitude aircraft. Most aircraft just pop the entire canopy off. Esp. American aircraft, and the VF-1 Valkyrie is an American-designed plane. If the fighter's blowing up around you, exiting the aircraft by the most expeditious means possible is generally recommended for your continued health and safety. At no point will the stewardess tell you to please wait until the aircraft has finished exploding to disembark.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Nobody did. Believe me, the history of medicine is quite unpleasant enough without getting into that particular pit of insanity. Macross's creators have been pretty damned clear about the fundamentally optimistic nature of the series from its inception. The antagonists in any given Macross storyline are not evil. They might be misguided, desperate, afraid, or even unaware of the harm they're causing. None of them are card-carrying villains out to dominate others or destroy things for no reason or because it makes their balls feel big like Stefan Amaris, Gihren Zabi, Sheev Palpatine, etc. That precondition of malice just isn't there in Macross. *sigh* We've been over this. Yes, Macross Galaxy uses questionable methods. The point you keep overlooking is that their questionable methods were exercised in the (misguided) pursuit of the otherwise noble goal of preventing the human species from destroying itself the same way the Protoculture did and achieving the Protoculture's definition of societal perfection. That's not quite accurate either. Todo is an extremely damaged person. He's running on survivor's guilt and trauma from the First Space War, and his goal is to go back and change history to make the First Space War un-happen and prevent the destruction of virtually every human society and culture. It does, as you say, come at the expense of retrocausally erasing the people born after the war (maybe, if that's how time travel works in this setting) but his mental calculus is probably aligned to the idea of erasing millions to save billions and ensure humanity is a good deal more prepared for the first contact event when it ultimately happens. It's misguided, sure... but it's not evil. He's not doing it to screw anyone over. He's trying to recover what was lost in the First Space War (in terms of both lives and culture) and give humanity a more peaceful existence. That's very, VERY different from the kind of thing we're talking about here WRT the BattleTech setting where pretty much everyone's motivations are sh*tty, selfish, and generally full of horribleness because it's a Forever War setting and that horribleness allows everyone to fight everyone else plausibly.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    There's no caveat on it... they just say TTC ejection is not possible because of the material strength of the OTM materials used in the canopy. Based on what's said about the strength of Overtechnology Materials used elsewhere in the Valkyrie's design I'd assume that any blast strong enough to break the canopy from the inside would probably kill, or at least severely injure, the pilot.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Beam gunpods are something that's been flirted with before that. The earliest example belonging to an in-continuity Macross title is Macross: Eternal Love Song from the Macross II timeline giving the VF-4 a beam gunpod. As to the advantages and disadvantages... it's a balancing act. Variable Fighters, Battle Pods, etc. are made of, and armored with, extremely tough composite materials that have excellent resistance to heat and ablation and are reinforced with energy conversion armor to make them more resistant to impacts and explosions. Human-built mecha have increasingly supplemented that defensive ability with special ablative anti-beam coatings to provide additional protection from laser and particle beam weapons. Energy weapons have to overcome those defenses by brute force, while cannons that fire hard rounds and missiles with explosive warheads circumvent part of that defense using special armor-piercing warheads that can defeat energy conversion armor. The first three generations of Variable Fighter didn't have a lot of surplus generator output to work with. Their initial-generation thermonuclear reaction turbine engines were a lot less efficient than the thermonuclear reaction burst turbines developed for 4th Generation VFs or the Stage II engines developed for 5th Generation VFs. Most of their power was either going to thrust generation and other propulsion loads (arcjet verniers, etc.), to energy conversion armor, or to active stealth. They didn't have enough power to equip the VF wtih an energy weapon that was as effective against energy conversion armor as a conventional cannon using OTM propellants and anti-ECA rounds. An OTM-improved modern rotary cannon was a lot simpler, cheaper, and more robust than a beam weapon. By making them out of OTM composites and using more powerful OTM propellants they had an EMP-hardened cannon that could hit many times harder than a conventional air-to-air or anti-tank rotary cannon and reliably defeat energy conversion armor while requiring very little energy to run. 4th Generation VFs benefitted from a new model engine that had superior thermoelectric converter technology. However, that improvement in generator output was once again devoted mainly to defensive systems like the energy conversion armor, active stealth, and the newly-introduced pinpoint barrier. It wasn't until the Stage II thermonuclear reaction turbine engines were introduced for 5th Generation VFs that the amount of surplus generator output available reached the level where it was possible to start employing it in unconventional ways. The VF-25, for instance, employed that additional surplus to improve its defensive abilities still further with a newfound ability to run its energy conversion armor around vital areas at low power in Fighter mode. The VF-27 used the surplus power from its four engines to drive a massive beam machine gun with firepower rivaling or exceeding that of the current-generation anti-Vajra rotary cannon used by the VF-25. Later models like the VF-31 seem to have just adjusted their engine tunings to prioritize generator output over thrust and enabled the use of a smaller, less powerful beam gunpods that nevertheless at least rivals what more conventional gunpods can do. Even then, they still keep hard round cannons around as a backup just in case. Aside from being simpler, cheaper, and more resistant to EMPs, conventional (OTM-improved) hard round cannons have a distinct advantage over beam gunpods in terms of the energy requirement. They can operate without a supply of power from the VF's reactors, since they have an internal battery they can use to drive the cannon's motor and firing is chemical combustion so there's no power requirement there either. Beam gunpods can be made as small as a conventional gunpod, but ultimately it's just an externally carried beam cannon powered by the VF's reactors and if the reactor is compromised the beam gunpod is worthless. There's no onboard power supply for the beam gunpod. The two-engine YF-27 prototypes needed to carry an external wing-mounted reactor module to drive their beam gunpods because they lacked the power to do so on just their two main engines. The advantage to a beam gunpod, of course, is that they have effectively unlimited ammunition as long as the reactors are running and supplying power and the gun's cooling system can keep up, and theoretically there is no cap on their firepower the way there is for the chemical propellants of the conventional gunpods. We've also seen that beam gunpods can potentially be improved further from particle beam weapons to dimensional weapons with sufficient power.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    There is flood control, but it's not that strict... it's measured in minutes, not days. It's been noted in a few books going back as far as the old Sky Angels book that TTC ejection is not possible on a Variable Fighter. The reason is simple... despite being only 10mm thick (on the VF-1), the OTM material used in the canopy's construction is much too strong for the ejection seat to be capable of breaking the canopy during an ejection sequence. It's said that the canopy is not glass or a plasticized composite, but rather is a transparent metal (possibly the same Herculite used in starship windows). To work around the problem, in Fighter and GERWALK mode ejections the canopy is ejected with rocket motors to ensure that it clears the seat's own flight path during an ejection.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    It's rare for me to watch a series and feel like it's actively insulting my intelligence. The last episode of The Witch from Mercury definitely has me feeling like the show's insulting not just my intelligence, but that of its entire audience. The story finally catches up to the fact that the... But, of course, this The Witch from Mercury so everyone's been issued their own personal Idiot Ball until further notice. Hold on though, because it gets dumber. Suletta and Miorine go to a black tie event so Suletta can keep stalking "Elan". The fancy party they go to is a glorified in-person Kickstarter where people pitch new business ideas and have just minutes to get the funding needed. When she finally meets "Elan"... But really, the piece de resistance here is that, as the Holder, Suletta has to give a speech and during that speech... This is some serious BS. Miorine: I wanna do illegal stuff. Give me billions of dollars. Everyone: No, that's stupid. And unethical. And illegal. Miorine: Dad, I wanna do illegal stuff. Give me billions of dollars. Delling: This is utterly antithecal to my one defined character trait, so sure. Miorine: I wana do illegal stuff. Give me billions of dollars. Eveyone: This goes against everything we profess to believe in, including our defined code of ethics, and will surely involve inhumane experimentation on living people. You have no business experience, no personnel, no premises, and no resources to speak of. You were party to the most public and damning fraud in living memory that was exposed just five minutes ago. Should I just make the check out to cash?
  19. Seto Kaiba
    History is nothing if not replete with examples of frankly awful things being done to achieve great and noble ends... many of which have had long-term benefits for humanity as a whole. The history of modern medicine is especially horrific in that regard but that doesn't stop people from reaping the benefits gleaned from that past awfulness. Mind you, it's not merely the means that make a monster... it's the motive. Good people can and will do horrible things if there's no alternative available or they simply don't know any better. A monster chooses horribleness in spite of the alternatives available. There are no monsters in the Macross setting. Misguided people, sure, but no Stefan Amarises or Sheev Palpatines cackling with villainous glee as they overthrow governments and commit all manner of atrocities for funsies. Only actually true for the Macross Galaxy side... and that was limited to the soldiers in their corporate army in a last ditch effort to protect the Vajra Queen, on which their entire plan to save humanity from being destroyed by its internal conflicts hinged. It was not done out of malice, but out of necessity. There is some other stuff they did along the way (e.g. in Wired Warrior) that is questionable in terms of medical ethics... but at least theoretically non-evil given that it was done to avoid risking the lives of living people. Havamal used Sharon Apple's unique flavor of manipulation, which is more making people incredibly chill with mild hypnosis. Not exactly "I have no mouth and I must scream" territory, but also done in order to defend their plan to alter history and retroactively save the entire population of Earth and its many cultures. Pretty understandable, especially considering the plan was motivated by the trauma and survivor's guilt of its ringleaders not any kind of actual malice. That was pretty awful, granted, but the stakes were (in the minds of the Galaxy fleet) the preservation of the entire human species. Mind you, it is explicitly indicated in both the audio dramas and movies that Grace truly does care about Sheryl in a parental manner. In the audio dramas, Grace can't bring herself to betray and abandon Sheryl until she uses her implants to edit her own personality for the sake of the mission. You could say movie Grace was proposing a radical method to save her adoptive daughter from a premature death out of familial love as much as out of being manipulated. That's... untrue on almost all counts. Nobody really dwells on the fate of the Galaxy Executives in the movie version because there's no time to... and they disappear with the Queen Frontier when it folds away, so from the perspective of the Frontier government their deaths are unconfirmed. Grace, well, same reason more or less... but it's a safe bet that people were actually bothered by it since she was close with several people including Sheryl, Ranka, and Nanase. Even Leon was probably upset by it, though for his own more selfish reasons... but he did seem to have a good working relationship with her to the extent that some of the more fun albums have them singing duets together and playing card games. Boddole Zer, for his part, is similarly not portrayed as evil or destroying Earth out of malice. We know after Macross 7 that his real motive was probably fear that he was seeing his troops fall victim to something akin to a Protodeviln attack. Something so horrible that it instilled almost Lovecraftian levels of instant fear in the Zentradi themselves half a million years after the Protodeviln were defeated. In the movie version, it's an honest mistake where he destroyed the planet thinking it was a Meltrandi Army base. The only reason the UN Forces had to kill him was purely strategic. Standard operating practice for Zentradi fleets is to retreat when their flagship is sunk. The UN Forces had no chance of defeating his Main Fleet as a whole, but by sinking his flagship they could force his unbeatably vast force to quit the field entirely and en masse. Keith and Roid... well... that's a very poorly executed scene that doesn't actually make a ton of sense in-context or out. Keith could have just disconnected Roid from the shrine and kept him alive, but for whatever reason he decided he'd really rather they died together.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    What's weird is that they somehow missed having that one additional meeting for nearly twenty years running. After the New UN Forces revised its decision to adopt the VF-19A as its next main fighter and basically asked the defense industry "What else ya got?", Shinsei Industry seemingly just surrendered the field to General Galaxy and let them run off with the 4th Generation main fighter contract rather than scale back the excessive performance of the VF-19 to a more manageable level. Even in 2058, seventeen years after the NUNS took a hard pass on the VF-19, they're still pushing the performance envelope rather than trying to make it actually flyable. It took an original development of the Frontier Government's fleet arsenal, LAI, and the Frontier branch of Shinsei to sit down and come up with a local variant of the VF-19 that actually prioritized handling.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    "Toned down" and "more controllable" are relative statements, to be sure. It probably didn't help matters any that Shinsei Industry seemed to be working at cross purposes with itself when it came to improving the VF-19. Efforts to improve stability and ease of control via aerodynamic refinements and flight control program updates for the airframe control AI were deployed to models that were adopting new, more powerful engines which almost certainly exacerbated the very g-load problem they were trying to fix. Somehow, it seems like it never occurred to Shinsei Industry's engineers to dial the engine power back to make the VF-19 more controllable. (And as a result, General Galaxy were able to steal a march on them with the VF-171 in the mid-2040s by rolling out a much less extreme 4th Generation VF that didn't have a thrust-to-weight ratio of over 10 and therefore lacked the control issues plaguing the VF-19 and VF-22.)
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Infrared would be a much bigger challenge to mask than protecting the cockpit from excessive g-forces, since you'd have to worry about the entire aircraft and the exhaust flow that will naturally be VERY hot because it's fusion plasma. There is currently no infrared active stealth system in the setting. Infrared detectors in Macross have the same limitations as real world systems, so it's not as big a problem as you would think for Valkyries except at short ranges thanks to VFs being relatively small in spacecraft terms. The few times the subject has been broached, the answer given has been that VFs employ heat sequestration techniques to reduce their infrared emissions in combat. Their fuel is a cryogenic material so it's also used as a coolant in space operations. Waste heat is captured in the coolant and stored in the insulated fuel tanks throughout the airframe until it's either cycled into the reactor or combat ends and the Valkyrie switches to radiative cooling. This approach is described on the VF-25, which makes use of its wing tanks for heat sequestration during combat and then uses its wing surface as a radiator for radiative cooling after combat ends. EDIT: Of course, the difficulties in hiding the heat emissions of a Valkyrie at short range are the reason that infrared is the dominant guidance technology used in micro missiles... In-universe, it's something that goes back and forth like a pendulum. Radar and active stealth technology are competing technologies. When radar technology is outpacing active stealth, you see an emphasis on passively stealthy designs. When active stealth is outpacing radar technology, you see less passively stealthy designs. Macross Plus was set at a point in history where 2nd Generation active stealth technology was losing ground to radar technology, so the VFs of the 2030s were designed around a passively stealthy profile and that carried over to the new designs of the 2040s. The 3rd Generation active stealth that was prototyped for the YF-19 and YF-21 one-upped current generation radar technology and the increasing generator power of the late 4th and early 5th Generation VFs enabled active stealth to have an edge over radar systems. There is some evidence in the VF-31's shift back towards internally carried weapons and low observable stealth design that suggests radar might be catching up to 3rd Generation active stealth in the 2060s. Of course, active stealth has its own problems in that it's active cancellation based using destructive interference to zero the amplitude of enemy radar pulses and thus requires a LOT of power.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    It did... though you could say it's a further evolution of the movable seat that was installed in the YF-19. The YF-19 had a movable seat that could rotate a bit to help pilots cope with lateral g-forces. The EX-Gear on 5th Gen VFs adjusts the pilot's posture to optimize blood flow during high g-force loads to prevent blood from pooling in the extremities and reduce the risk of G-LOC. The 5th Gen VFs main anti-g mechanism is the Inertia Store Converter that takes inertial forces and displaces them into higher dimensional space temporarily.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    When you think about it logically, you're probably right. All of the other deal-breakers in the Project Super Nova VFs are only deal-breakers if the aircraft is actually flyable. If (almost) nobody can actually fly it, the other roadblocks like its high initial and operating costs, arms export restrictions, etc. mean very little. (Though it was the ISC, moreso than EX-Gear, that was the "fix" for the excessive g-load problem.) As we've already done solo jpop idols, idol groups, and more than one rock band if you count the manga side stories, I think the next logical port of call is probably metal. Japan's got its own local flavor of metal (Kawaiicore) and a few past anime titles like Detroit Metal City have explored metal as a musical genre. That said, it'd really depend on what the balance of action vs. music was going to be. Kawaiicore metal would be better for a more music-focused series, where I'd say something like power metal would work better for more of an action focus. If you were willing to let the music take a back seat or do another virtuoid idol, you could go with something more action-friendly like eurobeat. Swing might work too, if it were really uptempo. There was a time I would have said jazz, but Mobile Suit Gundam Thunderbolt was so incredibly pretentious about it that it ruined the idea for me forever. An idea that probably wouldn't work that I'd love to see attempted anyway would be someone doing a series or side story with musical comedy... a space-future version of Weird Al, Tom Lehrer, or Spike Jones.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    It can't. Pre-Mor's security force was disbanded by the ISB back in the fourth episode when the Empire revoked the corporation's governing authority. Admittedly, I was so sure that gun was going to turn out to be the Chekhov's Gun that would link Andor to Aldhani... but it seems to have been a fakeout. If Melshi does get arrested, it might accidentally convince the Empire he's Cassian Andor if they notice it's a stolen Pre-Mor security-issue weapon.
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