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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Misa is really bad at parallel parking. Yeah, and the liner notes actually mention that there was concern about even giving Max a blue YF-29 because they were concerned it being a YF-29 might get it mistaken for Alto's or its blue paintjob and Frontier connection might get it mistaken for Michael's. Regardless of model, it was going to be Blue Valkyrie No.2 in the movie since blue is also Hayate's signature color. (Master File also offers a blue paintjob for an Emerald Force VF-25.)
  2. Seto Kaiba
    From the outside looking in, the "Why not?" is pretty obvious. Andor is the exception, not the rule. It's the only one of the four Disney+ Star Wars series so far that is being carried by the quality of its writing and acting rather than the quantity of its self-indulgent fanservice. There is absolutely no guarantee that they do any other story, regardless of genre, at this level of quality. Goodness knows if they could do that on command they would've done it where it counted... like in Solo, the sequel trilogy, the prequel trilogy, the other three shows, the Expanded Universe, etc.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    No, the Varauta forces in Macross 7 are using modified versions of the same ships and mecha they used before their planet (named Libera, according to the recent movie) was taken over by the Protodeviln. Even Gepernich's huge flagship is just the former flagship of the Varauta NUNS with some modifications. The Fz-109 is a modified VF-14 Vampire. The Az-130 is a modified VA-14. The FBz-99 is a modified VAB-2. The only original design that the post-Protodeviln Varauta forces had was a large aircraft carrier that is just a stretched version of their standard model. Contrary to what the name might make you expect, the Supervision Army was not founded as anything like an organized formal military service. It was a force the Protodeviln threw together out of whatever ships, mecha, and spiritia-drained personnel were on hand and its approach to "recruitment" could best be described as the stuff of vampire action movies. They would attack Protoculture settlements and anyone who wasn't killed in the fighting would be drained of their spiritia and subjected to mind control for use as soldiers to attack more Protoculture settlements and capture more people. Lather, rinse, repeat. The Supervision Army and Varauta Forces are basically legions of ghouls created by space vampires. Odds are their equipment was initially nothing like standardized and they had little or nothing developed for them. It was a force made up entirely of captured ships and mecha that were crewed by the Protodeviln's mind-controlled victims. Millennia of warfare probably saw it deteriorate into something like a standardized force after irreplaceable Protoculture ships were all lost fighting the Zentradi and they were left with the equipment and personnel produced by captured factory satellites.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    I consider this video meme completely appropriate and even on topic considering the big-eared Ferengi-like aliens we see in The Labyrinth of Time. The first one is actually answered in the Macross Delta TV anime directly, so I don't see a reason to spoiler tag that one. By "ruins" I'm assuming you mean the Protoculture System. Yes, the Protoculture System's resonators are physically real. They're hidden/stored in fold space when they are not active, either because the Protoculture were concerned someone might tamper with them after they died out or simply to keep them out of the way. For the record, the answer is the egg did. Eggs predate chickens by approximately 340 million years. </overlyliteralgag>
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Macross Chronicle. You can see one of the prepunched holes for the binders on the left side of the image.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    That kinda already happened once... Mariafokina Barnrose spanked NUNS Special Forces ace Aegis Focker in a VF-1X when he was using a VF-19A.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Probably not, given that... By the specs, the YF-29's flight performance is around 20% higher than the YF-30's. All in all, Leon did have a bit of an advantage in that the fight with Rod took place inside of a base where Rod couldn't leverage the YF-29's maneuverability. I am told the New UN Government and New UN Forces do not negotiate with terrorists. Based on the official materials I've seen, the YF-29 is still considered to be a 5th Generation VF. An extra feature on the Macross Delta TV anime Blu-rays tries to claim the VF-31 Siegfried is a Gen 5.5 unit but there is no real indication what constitutes a 6th Generation machine and the Siegfried isn't a production unit anyway so its classification should be the same as the parent machine (5th Gen). There was, of course, the Third Option of having Max use a different 5th Generation Valkyrie closer in performance to the VF-31. He (and Milia) had VF-25s in the novelization of the second Macross Frontier movie. Or even just giving Max a Siegfried with the FSW after Delta Flight changed to the Kairos Plus.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    In principle, the Varauta forces were Supervision Army 2.0. The main difference - apart from the victims being Human instead of Protoculture - is that when the Protodeviln escaped the second time and brainwashed the New UN Forces survey team and then the colony on the neighboring planet, they were aiming to create a sustainable, renewable source of spiritia instead of simply rampaging across the galaxy. Gepernich's grand goal was a "Spiritia Farm" that would enable the Protodeviln to be self-sufficient without destroying any (other) civilizations.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Since the Macross Delta: Absolute Live!!!!!! Blu-ray booklet decided to offer nothing useful, our last best hope is Variable Fighter Master File. We'll know if THAT was a waste of time in December. I've already preordered multiple copies as per my usual. An improvement it most assuredly is, but likely not one suitable for mass production for reasons of cost and the additional maintenance requirements caused by overstressing the VF-31's airframe. The VF-27 was as close as anyone could get to an actually-economical mass production version of the YF-29. General Galaxy completed the VF-27 using YF-29 development data leaked to them by LAI and pushed the envelope as far as they could with their bleeding edge tech, but because the ISC systems available couldn't keep up it became necessary for the VF-27's pilot to be a reinforced cyborg. It is still the highest performance production 5th Generation VF we've yet seen. (AFAIK, the only outside users of the VF-27 shown to date have been Zelgaar Heavy Industries on Pipure and the Hunter's Guild on Uroboros.) The AIF-9V "Ghost V9"? They are a Macross Galaxy-developed improvement upon the mass production version of the Ghost X-9. Earth was shown to use the AIF-9B in Macross VF-X2, though it was outwardly identical to the Ghost X-9 prototype.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Did you forget Xaos was basically keeping Mikumo as a slave from the moment of her creation until... actually, there's no evidence that they've ever stopped keeping her as a slave. Her interactions with Walkure were strictly limited and she wasn't allowed out into society in order to conceal that she was a 3 year old illegal clone with virtually no understanding of social behavior. She was created to be a weapon, indoctrinated and trained to be a singer, and shuttled from one battlefield to another with no real opportunity to object or even consider an alternative lifestyle.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Ah, that's incorrect. The YF-30 was not developed to surpass the YF-24 or anything like that. It was developed as an Experimental aircraft (an "X-plane") and built to evaluate several new technologies, the most important of which was the Fold Dimensional Resonance system that was developed as a way to cross dimensional faults. The reason it was designated as a prototype (YF) instead of an Experimental aircraft (VF-X/VX) was to exploit a loophole in the New UN Government's laws about disclosing newly developed technologies. Classifying it as a prototype allowed SMS Uroboros to avoid having to make those disclosures to the central New UN Government and continue testing in secret for much longer than they normally would have been able to. The YF-30's performance is actually lower than the YF-29's by a fair amount, and it's much less heavily armed as well because it was not developed as a combat aircraft. For its part, the VF-31 was nominally developed from the YF-30... but it is a heavily economized model that shares little in common with the YF-30 apart from its basic design and transformation. It was not developed as a successor to the VF-24. In fact, its performance is on the same level as the VF-25's and it shares a lot of parts with the VF-25 as well. The VF-31 was locally developed within the Brisingr cluster as an economic stimulus and for export sale to other governments. Rather than purchase a 5th Generation VF from another government like buying VF-25s from the Frontier fleet, they developed their own new model locally to keep that money inside their own economy and create jobs. Their other goal was to bring money into the cluster by selling VF-31s to other governments that hadn't already purchased an export variant of someone else's 5th Gen VF design. (Its backstory is heavily inspired by Japan's own domestic 5th Generation fighter program that had the same motivations.) The VF-31 Siegfrieds used by the Delta Flight of Xaos's Ranga branch 3rd Fighter Wing are "aftermarket" customizations of the stock VF-31A Kairos that adopt a detuned version of the YF-30's engine and a much less capable, but still gobsmackingly expensive, version of the YF-29's Fold Wave System. The modifications push the VF-31 airframe to its limit but only really improve it enough to rival the performance of the VF-27. The VF-31AX Kairos Plus is...
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... I know I'm probably being a bit harsher on that half-arsed creative decision than I actually need to be, too. I've probably said this before in other threads, but I kind of dislike the YF-29 on principle. It's Macross's first real Super Prototype. It is, in Macross, the same kind of thing that the Gundams are in most Gundam shows. It's an irresistable force AND an immovable object. It's an impractical superweapon that is so expensive it can never be mass produced or used widely, but not so expensive that there can conveniently be just one of them hanging around somewhere in case someone needs to be play the next mission with the cheats enabled. It's so incredibly expensive and resource-intensive that there's no believable way for someone to just have one. Giving a YF-29 to any member of the Jenius family other than Mirage would be grotesque overkill. Giving a YF-29 to Max basically allowed him to hijack the entire film and steal focus from the main characters at least three times, including during the climax of the film! We've got no specs for the VF-24 used by Earth and the central New UN Forces, so it's hard to say. It is worth noting that every 5th Gen VF was developed from a redacted version of its specs that omitted key/proprietary technological advancements, leaving emigrant governments to fill in those gaps on their own. We know the YF-29 was developed to exceed the performance of the YF-24 Evolution but it's left unclear if it truly did so and if so by how much. I'd assume the YF-29 probably does surpass the VF-24, but ends up on the losing side of the equation because the VF-24 can be mass produced and the YF-29 can't because of its massive price tag and the insanely high fold quartz requirements.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    That's not spoiling it, that's like bringing out a second bag of magic mushrooms when everyone is halfway to Jupiter and wondering why they can taste time itself. I'll probably finish the first season tomorrow. Uzaki-chan Wants to Play season two is off to an enjoyable start. Belligerent Sexual Tension, the Series. I'm not sure there's a distinction between trolling each other and flirting for Uzaki and Sakurai. Mob Psycho 100 Part 3's first episode has dropped. That should be quite interesting too. Some of this season's shows are really drawing a line under how creatively bankrupt the isekai genre has become though. We're on like our fifth or sixth series about someone getting isekai'd and becoming a pharmacist in a fantasy world.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Ah, what almost was... Not only is this a vanishingly rare Good Wesley Episode, if it weren't for the royalties issues and the showrunners feeling that Locarno was irredeemable Robert Duncan McNeill would've been reprising his role as Nicolas Locarno on Star Trek: Voyager instead of suspiciously similar substitute Tom Paris.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    All right, Andor episode 5 has dropped... "The Axe Forgets". This, I think, is probably pretty good confirmation that we're going to be following a similar three-episode story arc package for the entire series or at least the entire first season. "The Axe Forgets" is another middle installment spent building up to the action sequences in the next episode. It's interesting how this series manages to humanize the Imperials without actually making them any less monstrous. The ISB are shown to have a sort of solidariy among their individual teams, and the grunts at the Aldhani garrison are mostly just men going about their jobs who aren't particularly interested or enthusiastic about the Imperial agenda... they're just doing their jobs. It's also interesting that this at least portrays the rebels as a lot more nuanced and morally complex than any previous work. Some, like Vel, seem to be in it for the principle of the thing. A lot of the ones we've met, though, are just damaged souls who seem to mainly be invested in hurting the Empire than in the grand cause of liberation.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    I'm pretty sure we saw that in an episode of Macross Delta... the "Jenius Air" hangar in Mirage's backstory.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    🙄 That's ridiculous and I have a feeling you KNOW it's ridiculous. Yes, Max was allegedly a backer of the anti-facist paramilitary group Vindirance during the Second Unification War. Macross Chronicle does not present it as a fact, but as rumor along with his supposed connection to Mariafokina Barnrose. Max and Milia did, as I noted here and in other topics, fly VF-25s in the novelization of the Macross Frontier movies. They did so as part of the New UN Spacy and SMS reinforcements arriving to support the Macross Frontier fleet. Not as private citizens. Regardless of the length of his military service, there is no way the New UN Government or New UN Forces are going to just give a retired soldier who is now a private citizen and nothing more a beyond-state-of-the-art fighter that is vastly more powerful and exponentially more expensive than even a current-generation main variable fighter. Not only is there literally a regulatory bureau in place specifically to prevent that kind of military abuse of authority after the Second Unification War, but the New UN Gov't and New UN Forces know only too well what happens when a top ace switches sides and has access to advanced weapons like that. The New UN Gov't had (and has) arms export restrictions that prevented the VF-19 being being adopted by emigrant forces in any significant numbers and prevented them from sharing full specs for the YF-24 Evolution to the emigrant governments. (The backstory for the VF-19EF/A also provides a statement that trying to purchase military tech like that "through channels" is illegal. Isamu tried it, and was only saved by Dr. Neumann hastily conceiving a VF-19 service life extension program and naming Isamu as its test pilot.) More like to work around the areas omitted from the specs by the central New UN Forces and meet the specific priorities of the Frontier fleet.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    It's pretty obvious Macross Delta was primarily a vehicle for Walkure... the writing in much of the TV anime bordered on an Excuse Plot to have Walkure go places and sing. Eh... people are gonna ask that question, since the central New UN Forces can barely lay hands on a YF-29 in the best of circumstances how did a 70+ year old retiree apparently get a personal one, esp. after leaving the military and no longer being able to use his clout as commander of a New UN Spacy defense force to secure the latest models. The VF-25 and VF-31A are about on par with each other. They share a LOT of parts in common too. The VF-27's got higher performance than either, with the Siegfried VF-31 custom hovering between the VF-25/VF-31 and VF-27 performance-wise. EDIT: To make this a bit more precise, the production-intent VF-25 and VF-31 both have a thrust-to-weight ratio of approximately 39. The VF-27's is 46.5, the VF-31 Siegfried's is 44.9, the YF-30's is 53.1, and the YF-29's is 61.2.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    I am deeply concerned that you used the word "first" here. There are multiple seasons of this acid trip in visual form?
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Well, sort of... on previous occasions, Max was a Colonel (or higher) in the New UN Forces and the commanding officer of the local New UN Forces for an entire emigrant fleet. He had a LOT more direct pull with the military. It's very jarring and nonsensical for Private Citizen Maximilian Jenius to somehow be able to obtain The Most Powerful Valkyrie, a craft so expensive and advanced that even central New UN Forces special forces units have to twist arms and take extraordinary measures to acquire them.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    The Supervision Army was an ad hoc force made up of the Protoculture and Zentradi who were captured, drained of their spiritia, and subjected to mind control by the Protodeviln to sustain the Protodeviln's lives by capturing more sources of spiritia.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    It's mentioned only in passing in the Macross Delta TV series and some promotional material for it in Great Mechanics G, but Xaos has a similar arrangement with the governments of the Brisingr Alliance that SMS's Frontier branch had with the Frontier Government in Macross Frontier. Namely, the Brisingr Alliance (the local NUNG economic and mutual-defense pact) contracted Xaos to carry out the operational evaluation testing on its domestically developed 5th Generation VF before the local New UN Forces formally adopt it as their next main fighter. The government gets a pack of expendable mooks (Xaos) whose deaths or injuries are all legally considered "accidental" to test their new fighter in battlefield conditions and Xaos gets to borrow a bunch of trial production next-generation VFs from the government to use while carrying out their contractual obligations to support the defense of the region. Xaos simply went one step further and customized (at their own expense) a handful of the VF-31As they were given into the Siegfried type for Walkure's flight demonstration and bodyguard team. Otherwise, their gear is noticeably less nice than SMS's. Their other branches are flying VF-171s where SMS's had VF-19s, and SMS had the latest prototype Macross-type ship while Xaos seems to have an older, less capable model. The Blu-ray liner notes literally say that it is unknown how Max came to possess a YF-29. (Kawamori jokes that he might've used his influence with the New UN Forces to get it.)
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, it 100% is disjointed... two largely independent breather arcs followed by skipping an arc to go to the shorter arc on the other side of it? No way that was gonna flow well. Having season four be all about Ainz's preparations to raze Re-Estize to the ground would have been difficult, as it really does almost come out of nowhere in the light novel the way that it does in the anime. Some of the buildup to it is lost because they did not include "The Paladin of the Sacred Kingdom", but that's mostly WRT the Sorcerer Kingdom's previous intent for Re-Estize. Yeah, without "The Paladin of the Sacred Kingdom" you kinda miss where those two meet up in the middle. Ainz's position on international relations could best be described as "(Publicly) Do no harm, but take no sh*t." Philip's actions and Ramposa's defense of Philip put him in the position of having little alternative but to declare war (or at least, that's how it's explained in the light novel). Halfway in... and it's just completely insane.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    I did like it, but I am inherently quite biased in its favor as I am a big fan of Maruyama's Overlord light novel series. It definitely had issues. I'd say most of them were caused by where Overlord's fourth season landed in terms of adapting the light novel. The previous three seasons all remained narratively very tight by adapting three-volume story arcs. Season four had the misfortune of starting on not one but TWO single-volume "breather" story arcs with adaptations of volumes 10 and 11 ("The Ruler of Conspiracy" and "The Dwarven Crafter"). Those two tried to bring the tone down a bit before the two-part gut punch "The Paladin of the Sacred Kingdom", but for what I assume are runtime reasons they skipped over that arc completely and went straight to "The Witch of the Doomed Kingdom". The writers did clearly try quite hard to smooth over its absence while leaving a little to tie into the movie, but without "The Paladin of the Sacred Kingdom" first there's a fair amount of context missing for why so many nations not only won't help Re-Estize but aren't exactly bothered by the prospect of its destruction either. I am enjoying Birdie Wing, but for all the wrong reasons. It's not just that Birdie Wing is giving a relatively placid, humdrum sport like golf the Iwakakeru treatment and presenting it as the most exciting sport in the story's world. It's that it takes that to an even more extreme place. This is a world where golf - and more importantly watching golf - are apparently so exciting to these people that there is back-alley golf gambling with people betting thousands and thousands of dollars on single-hole contests and people getting scammed on rigged back-alley putting greens. There is a MAFIA that seems to have little else on its mind besides gambling on golf and cheating at gambling on golf. And to put the cherry on this methamphetamine sundae with adderall sprinkles, a protagonist that behaves like she's in a shounen battle anime complete with battle auras and calling her "attacks". I don't know how you even begin to conceive a series like this. It's so... I don't even have a word. This is the Jojo's Bizarre Adventure of sports anime. It should not exist, but here it is. I want to see where this idea can go next. What "sport" can be made ridiculously over the top? Can we get a pachinko or pachislot anime with heavy Initial D vibes or something?
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Macross runs on broad strokes continuity at the best of times. The word "canon" is almost meaningless to it... and the "truth" of any given scenario in the next work is almost always somewhere in the middle. For instance, the TV and DYRL? versions of the VF-1 coexist as two different production blocks of the in-universe VF-1. Exsedol's TV and DYRL? appearances are both said to be right with the more humanlike one being what he looks like without his Records Officer genetic mods. Macross 7's dramatization of the First Space War has a movie Vrlitwhai next to a TV Quamzin. Macross Frontier shows a Zentradi NUNSM unit using a mixture of TV and DYRL? equipment. Macross the Ride and Macross Delta's TV series both take a middle-of-the-road approach to Frontier with the YF-29 being prominently mentioned and the latter showing the TV ending of Frontier with a movie Sheryl and Ranka and Alto's YF-29. Macross Chronicle's timeline favors the shows, but references to the movies sneak in everywhere anyway... especially in the technical setting. Max and Milia schooling the best aces around has been a running joke since Macross 7. Poor Gamlin got that s*** in stereo having Milia for a teacher, then reporting to Max before being transferred temporarily to Milia's command. ... the Armored Pack has ALWAYS been a flying brick going back as far as the original series. Technologically, the 4th Generation VFs were the point where VFs no longer truly needed Super Packs to have a reasonable operation time in space. The 5th Generation reversed the equation so that Super Packs were no longer about justifying huge boosters and fuel tanks with a handful of missiles but having boosters and fuel tanks to offset a huge amount of additional weaponry. The VF-31's Armored Pack is just badly-designed serial escalation of that design philosophy that looks like someone took every spare part in a model builder's bits bin and glued them to it. The base VF-31 design is some of Kawamori's best work... to the extent that it makes any bolt-on extras look even uglier because they detract from its gorgeous lines. Part of the problem is, I think, that the VF-31 custom Siegfried type was pitched as a less-heavily-armed version of the VF-31 meant for close air support and flight demonstrations and they're overcompensating for that down the road.
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