Seto Kaiba

Of course, one always has to be careful drawing comparisons between different fictional settings because so much is often left deliberately vague and subjective assessments of performance depend heavily on the quality of the enemies in the series and their tech level. Valid comparisons can only really be drawn where there are objective measures of any given design's capabilities... and there are certain settings that are simply SO over-the-top that any comparison becomes a bit silly. I will explain in detail why this is silly in a spoiler tag so nobody has to wade through my ranting if they don't explicitly make a choice to do so. Drawing comparisons between different franchises with vastly different worldviews and concepts of scale is going to yield pretty silly and often one-sided results even when there's objective data for comparison. (Thankfully it's not as bad as, say, trying to compare to Five Star Stories where the tech level is bonkers enough to have semi-perpetual motion generators producing petawatt-levels of power and beam weapons able to destroy planets carried by regular mecha.)

Kinda... according to Yutaka Izubuchi, who based the ReGZ on Koichi Ohata's earlier designs for a mass produced Zeta Gundam, the ReGZ is a simplified Zeta Gundam with the transformation system cut out, and the ReZEL developed from it is basically the ReGZ plus the Methuss's transformation system. I dunno, I think the Zeta's transformation is pretty good... and it was heavily inspired by Macross's VF-1 Valkyrie. A lot of the other transformations are pretty underwhelming, true. Transformation design is hard, and there aren't many designers who can really do it well like Kawamori. It really is impressive just how influential the VF-1 Valkyrie proved to be. The 10th Anniversary feature in B-Club that talks about all the different mecha anime that credit Macross as an inspiration is basically a who's who of late 80's and early 90's mecha anime.

Oh, yeah... that was a theory about the Battle Astraea that was discussed here and elsewhere when promotional material for the movie gave us our first look the film's mechanical designs. Since it was obvious at a glance that the Battle Astraea was a reuse of the Battle Galaxy CG model from Macross Frontier's TV series with fairly minimal modifications, a bit of pre-release speculation was that the anti-government organization Heimdall might've taken the wreck of the Battle Galaxy and restored it to use as their flagship. When the film came out, that theory was jossed and we learned that Battle Astraea was a completely separate and unrelated ship that Cromwell commanded in the NUNS 7th Fleet before he went rogue to hunt Lady M. He and his crew disappeared with the ship and its disappearance was eventually written off as a fold accident before she reappeared with a bunch of new upgrades as the flagship of the anti-government organization Heimdall. The first VF-1 Valkyries entered military service at the very end of November 2008. They effectively missed the "official" end of the Unification Wars in 2007 and the de facto end of the Unification Wars in 2008. Outside of video games like Macross 30 where much of the franchise's "back catalog" of mecha are up for grabs, I can think of two very specific cases where a VF-1 is said to have encountered a SV-51 in combat: The first is in the sixth and final volume of the incomplete manga Macross the First. The flashback arc of the manga depicts a never-before-mentioned fourth defensive battle of South Ataria Island on Christmas Eve 2008. Anti-Unification Alliance remnants basically carried out a suicide attack on the island as a distraction for an experimental unmanned SV-51 to take out the SDF-1 Macross and the island itself with a thermonuclear reaction bomb. Most of the VFs used in that battle were VF-0's from the Asuka II's sister ship Graf Zeppelin II, but partway through the battle Roy sorties in his newly issued VF-1 to intercept the enemy leader. The second is a passing mention in Variable Fighter Master File: VF-0 Phoenix that completely ignores the above. In the story section SV-51's Final Air Battle starting on page 107, the final paragraphs describe a "distant finale" in the following year where an Alliance pilot named Kilis Dakurd who'd defected to the UN Forces after being defeated in the battle in the main section of the narrative scored the last known confirmed kill of an SV-51 in air combat. He had been assigned to a VF-1 squadron based at Grand Cannon III in Africa and in June 2009 a badly maintained SV-51 attacked his unit and was easily shot down by Dakurd. His after-action report noted that the SV-51 was in no shape to sustain combat and looked like it was looking for a place to die. Dakurd is noted to be one of the few pilots to have scored against both a VF-0 and a SV-51.

From what I can see in newer sources (e.g. Master Archive), the ~20 trial production Zeta Plus units that were delivered to Karaba make up the majority of the production volume and several of those units were broken up for parts instead of being used due to lack of spares. (Considering how often its many configurations are said to have been unsuitable for mass production for cost reasons, or SO unsuitable for mass production due to cost that they were never actually built... it seems unlikely that it was ever truly a production model until the simplified ReGZ and ReZEL.) I was actually thinking of the simplified GUN-EZ mass production model... I completely forgot the Hexa exists. Earth's substantial military prowess owes a lot to Earth's massive technological and industrial base. Not only is Earth home to the headquarters/head offices of many of the megacorporations on the bleeding edge of military and civilian technological development, it possesses (as far as we know) the single greatest concentration of manufacturing capacity anywhere outside of a Zentradi main fleet. The Sol system is home to more than twenty factory satellites seized from the Zentradi Boddole Zer main fleet in 2010-2011. Even one factory satellite is a gargantuan amount of manufacturing power, and most emigrant planets and fleets don't even have that and make do with Human-built automated or conventional factories. It's how they were able to build these massive emigrant fleets so fast. To date, I believe we've had mention of two independent Battle-class ships used by the Earth and/or central New UN Forces. The Macross 13/Battle 13 that appears in Macross Frontier's novelizations as a not-so-secret defense flagship of the Earth New UN Forces under the command of General Kim Kabirov, and the Battle Astraea that belonged to the NUNS 7th Fleet before its commander (Cromwell) went rogue and disguised the theft of the ship as a fold accident. Battle-class ships are rare, with most fleets having only the one, and independent Battle-class ships seem to be a recent introduction in the 2050s. (Esp. given some accounts like the non-official Spica Shock where the central NUNS had borrowed the newly completed Battle 7 instead.) It'd mean upgrading the VF-11's engines, since the thermonuclear reaction burst turbine's greater output seems to be required to meet the power demand of the barrier. Wouldn't be the first time... after all, the ancient Protoculture's solution to the Zentradi struggling with the Queadluun-series battle suits wasn't to scale down the suit's performance, it was to build a better pilot!

In a way, it's kind of impressive that they've managed to make this more detailed and yet it still doesn't look like much of an improvement over MS Igloo from... 20 actual goddamn years ago. It's literally been 20 years since MS Igloo.

"Varying levels of success" in that case still being single digit numbers of one-off test units that never made it to mass production. I think the single largest lot mentioned was the six Zeta Plus A1s that were delivered to Karaba, and most of those were subsequently converted into one-offs. The only one to actually reach true mass production was, IIRC, the ReZEL... which is not even really a Zeta Gundam derivative. It's a tarted up ReGZ, which was another overpriced flop that saw only a tiny number of demonstrators produced despite basically being the GM version of the Zeta 1. (I think the only UC title where Gundams are truly mass-produced as a main MS is Victory... and even that is watered down a bit subsequently.) We've nominally had that... in Macross 7, with the 37th fleet VF-11s fighting the Varauta Fz-109s that were basically Gen 3.5 equivalent at the very least. That's one area where the novels, manga, and games excel. Like showing the Macross Galaxy Corporate Army uses a mixture of older models in normal duty including upgraded VF-9s and VF-17s, and even some build-under-license VF-19Cs. On specs, I doubt anything short of an upgraded VF-19 or VF-22 can match a 5th Generation VF in combat because their acceleration performance is so much higher and they're not maneuver-capped by the pilot's g-limits the way their 4th Generation predecessors are. Isamu's VF-19 Custom from Sayonara no Tsubasa is said to have extremely high maneuverability performance, though that owes quite a bit to its unstable flight control program and its frankly insane pilot. We did get to see Alto take on Ozma using a VF-171EX, which is basically a 4.5 Gen vs a 5th Gen... though Ozma's machine was operating with lower than normal mobility thanks to the Armored Pack it had equipped and it still won despite both being extremely talented pilots. I'm not surprised we haven't gotten to see a stock VF-24 directly in the animation. After all, the Central NUNS are basically the Biggest Stick. Exactly what they get up to is never specified, but they apparently don't get involved in tiffs between emigrant governments because their bad behavior in the Second Unification Wars (Macross VF-X2) led to major reforms that put them on a much shorter leash and prevents them from interfering in politically difficult conflicts like that. The few times we've seen representatives of a central New UN Forces unit they've basically been Power Overwhelming. Colonel Todo's VF-X Special Forces unit more or less took over an entire planet with a single squadron and an extremely well-executed Bavarian fire drill. Cromwell went off the radar with a single Battle-class and, after picking up some next-gen unmanned fighters, essentially took over an entire star cluster in just days with a single ship. I'm not sure there is such a thing as a "stock" VF-11MAXL. What little is said about it has indicated that it's not so much a true variant as a catch-all designation for a series of one-off custom machines based on the VF-11B/C and built to order for specific top ace pilots. There are supposedly less than a dozen of them in existence, though it's not clear from the material if that means just in the Macross 7 fleet or in general. Either way, vanishingly tiny production numbers for a machine that's explicitly custom made for each pilot. A lot of Mylene's VF-11MAXL Custom is said to be expensive custom hardware, so I'd assume that was one custom option she requested. Quite a few of the parts are said to have been custom-machined to Mylene's request by the an ultra-high end luxury car company.

The production 5th Gen VFs are all based on the YF-24 directly or indirectly, with less capable or different local technology substituting for the more advanced Earth tech that the central New UN Forces and New UN Gov't decided not to share in full. On paper, the VF-24's supposed to be the most powerful 5th Gen production VF. Moving the YF-29 and YF-30 to 6th Gen frames a number of statements made about them in a slightly different context, particularly statements about the YF-29 being "developed to surpass the YF-24" and "The Strongest Valkyrie". Pretty much all of their performance improvement vs. the 5th Gen designs is tied up in their use of fold quartz and fold wave resonance effects. It's let those designs leapfrog ahead of production aircraft performance-wise, at the expense of basically being something that can't be mass-produced... yet.

Hopefully Macross Delta: Absolute Live!!!!!! will remain Macross's one and only flirtation with that kind of thing. It's not quite the same as what Bandai Namco's Gundam franchise does with its ongoing and infamous love affair with the Super Prototype trope. In fairness to Gundam, though, that distinction is also a borderline technicality in the case of the YF-29, YF-30, and VF-31AX. The Gundam franchise's Super Prototypes are not really prototypes. In the UC, many are simply overengineered technology demonstrators meant to showcase and evaluate new technologies that might one day make their way into a different and much more economical next-generation Mobile Suit design. Others are simply one-of-a-kind showpieces the creators of which built to be The Biggest Stick with no regard for practicality or mass production whatsoever. The Macross franchise's few borderline Super Prototypes are (mostly) intended as real prototypes and aren't intended to be "Super". The VF-25 and VF-31 are simply a next-gen production model that hasn't yet entered mass production, while the YF-29 and VF-31AX are (on paper) actual prototypes meant to be developed into a next-generation main VF and mass produced. The YF-29 was a prototype that had reached a high level of completion, practically production-representative. The VF-31AX is, at least per Variable Fighter Master File, an early experimental prototype made by converting an existing previous-gen aircraft where the conversion was rushed and incomplete and done under duress. For both, the main thing that prevents them from advancing to production status is a supply chain issue. They can't secure a large or steady supply of the ultra-high purity large fold quartz necessary to construct Fold Wave Systems. They're still basically handled the same in-story, though... so the distinction doesn't matter as much in-story as it does on paper. I'd love to go back to something more like the original series or II where the protagonists and the background characters are all flying the same machine. Standing out by being THAT GOOD is way more impressive when you're not using a massive specs advantage to do it.

Hrm... that is a very well thought-out reason. I'm intrigued, and will reach out to the distributor directly to inquire as to whether any content has been stripped or reduced in quality vs. the Japanese release. I kind of question the math there, though, since it seems to be assuming that the video and audio stream will be continuously at the maximum rate for a Blu-ray (48Mbit/sec). Given that anime is given to a lot of static frames with minimal changes, I kind of doubt that'd be the case... esp. considering live-action 1080p bitrates tend to be closer to 25-30Mbit/sec. That would yield a size that'd fit on one dual-layer Blu-ray (about 36GB).

OK, I'm curious... why is that an issue/dealbreaker? Macross Zero is only five episodes long, and each episode is only about 30 minutes long. The advertised total runtime is 158 minutes. For perspective, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is 157 minutes. It should fit neatly onto a single dual-layer Blu-ray with plenty of room to spare.

The Summer '24 simulcast season is in the home stretch... and it's been pretty darn uneventful. The Strongest Magician in the Demon Lord's Army Was a Human ended the other day and in a fashion as unremarkable as everything else about the series. Calling this series "dull as dishwater" might honestly be doing a disservice to dishwater... My Wife Has No Emotion also ended recently... and quite honestly it never once stopped being massively, MASSIVELY cringeworthy in every single respect. It didn't quite cross the line into being so appalling that I dropped it, but there's no entertainment value to be had here. Pseudo Harem had its penultimate episode yesterday, and if I had to describe it I'd say all 11 episodes thus far have been the TV equivalent of eating cotton candy. It's sweet and light, but ultimately insubstantial. It has a lot of cute and funny moments but its story had little-to-no feeling of direction or progression. It's not so much a story as just a string of incidents. Failure Frame has actually developed into a watchable series over the last six episodes. It's nowhere near the high bar set by its genre's major players (Overlord, KonoSuba, Re:Zero, and Yojo Senki) but it's head and shoulders above the low-effort isekai and isekai-adjacent shovelware infesting most of the broadcast schedule. No Longer Allowed in Another World was initially kind of funny and audacious, but it hasn't really gone anywhere interesting with its running joke and the seven "Fallen Angels" (isekai'd folks) who embody the seven deadly sins are pretty flat characters so far. So much so that the protagonist even lampshades how uninteresting Gluttony's one is, being just a bored rich kid looking for stimulation. Ossan Newbie Adventurer's 10th episode has more or less closed the door on the possibility of the season going anywhere interesting, since both of the competitors who'd been built up as Final Boss-type opponents for the season were knocked out of their fighting contest already. It's fun, but it's a pretty mediocre 5.5 or 6/10 sort of story. Wistoria: Wand and Sword is back to just kind of being a trashfire. It's one of the most visually distinctive titles in the season lineup but its story is so painfully by-the-numbers that the audience doesn't feel smart for spotting the thread ahead of time. Dahlia in Bloom: Crafting a Fresh Start with Magical Tools dropped its penultimate episode today. Honestly, I'm inclined to wonder if this is just a REALLY badly done adaptation of the light novel and not simply a bland story. There are times where it starts to remind me a lot of Ascendance of a Bookworm, particularly when the protagonist has to learn about the many euphemisms the nobility use as her business starts catering not to regular civilains but to low ranking nobility. Other times, I just have to wonder if there's actually any conflict in the story at all. Its weakest point might be how indistinct the visual designs are. The sameface is strong with this one. There's one moment in the latest episode where Dahlia's love interest is sitting in a meeting with the other knights and the person sitting to his left is an Identical Stranger with the exact same character design and uniform who can only be told apart because his hair has a slight blue tint.

One of the details I often find myself nostalgic for from older Macross titles is the "hero" Valkyrie being the same model as the "cannon fodder" Valkyries. Giving the protagonist(s) a unique Valkyrie was central to the premises of Macross Plus and Macross 7, so it was a lot easier to excuse. What Macross Frontier and Macross Delta's writers did was pretty forced. Macross Frontier handled it a bit better, I think, since SMS was explicitly recruiting top talent away from the New UN Forces. Even then, it made them look kind of dickish when they made scornful remarks about the Frontier NUNS being unable to fight the Vajra effectively while the main difference was SMS using trial production next-gen Valkyries designed to fight the Vajra while the NUNS made do with the previous-gen mass production unit. IMO it didn't become intolerable until Macross Delta, where the Xaos PMC division talks all kinds of sh*t about the local New UN Forces despite their most elite unit being four washouts from those very same local New UN Forces and the one real advantage they had being a monopoly on Walkure (to the detriment of everyone and everything else including their own objectives) rather than their next-gen Valkyries. I'd love to see Macross get away from PMCs, and get back to the protagonists using the same models as the rank and file like in the original series and II... it says more about their skill if they're outperforming the background characters in the same model as opposed to one with twice or more the performance. (That said, I do adore the VF-31A's design...) Or the writer just never bothered to consider the size of it and went with "Rule of Cool". EIther way, it was a nice inclusion the same way it was in Macross the Ride. (As a taller chap, I have a lot of sympathy for the Zentradi in terms of the lack of ergonomics in their mecha... I've had to pretzel my 2m tall arse into a Fiat 500e for work before, and it gave me an immense feeling of empathy for those poor Regult pilots.)

Yes, I made the same point... though, as I noted, that cut-down release without the extra features and "bonus" goods usually comes out a few months to a few years later once the initial release with the extras sells out. I wouldn't say it's driven by FOMO given that the edition isn't that limited, the "bonus" goods are mostly cheap low-effort merchandise like posters or art cards, and the existence of subsequent releases without that extra content are basically a given. It's just an upsell to people who liked the series enough to buy it right away. Or in this case, to fans who have been waiting literal decades to get Macross on home video in the west. It's still within the normal price range for a western release and a 50% discount vs. buying the Japanese edition of the same box set... never mind the shipping cost. They don't suck any worse than any other distributor, so stop whining about it.

Games and novels tend to be much less restrained when it comes to incorporating a large number of different mechanical designs into their stories. IMO, there are few titles that demonstrate that principle quite as effectively as Bandai Namco's adaptation of the Mobile Suit Gundam UC light novel into an OVA. The huge number of niche, background, and MSV designs that narrative included ended up turning the OVA into an obscure gunpla free-for-all. Macross Digital Mission VF-X, Macross VF-X2, Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy, and Macross the Ride all include practically every major model of Variable Fighter that existed in the setting at the time they were created. I guess it's easier to pull off if you don't have to draw them at all or you only have to model it once and can just reskin it thereafter. If we do get an adaptation of the Second Unification War, I imagine it'll probably have a much more limited selection of Variable Fighters in use to spare the sanity of the animation team. IMO, Absolute Live!!!!!! is probably the weakest new Macross title of the last 25 years. It's an unnecessary story that doesn't really add anything to Macross Delta as a whole or to the greater Macross setting. It's pretty telling that the limited coverage the movie got in official publications also treats the film's events as pretty unnecessary and its new VF as cobbled-together trash. The terms of the distribution agreement between Big West and Harmony Gold probably put the kibosh on future Lady M shenanigans, since the movie created the Megaroad-01 connection and using the original cast is apparently off the table. Ah, yeah... I'd expect it's pretty cramped in there for a giant. Then again, Temjin supposedly flew one in the novelization of Macross Frontier... poor bloke's on the big side, so he must've been INCREDIBLY uncomfortable. Either that or he's just used to folding up like a pretzel. Pretty much everything after the Second Unification War is affected by the war... because that's what led to the devolution of more autonomy to individual emigrant governments, the reorganization of the New UN Forces to diminish the immense authority it once wielded (and abused), and of course contributed to the trauma that the game's villain carries which is driving his desire to hit the Reset button on history. The broad authority delegated to the VF-X Special Forces to suppress anti-government forces and terrorists is what lets Colonel Todo and Havamal carry out as much of their plan as they did in secret and leverage local resources to arm the Bandits.

It's actually more like $80 because of the automatic and optional discounts. Mind you, that $80-90 is actually a pretty typical asking price for a complete season box set of a new anime series nowadays. Western distributors seem to have got the Limited Edition bug, so every new release seems to have to be a Limited Edition set with extra features from the JDM release and art cards and other "bonus" goods and they seem to all average around $75-95. It's not Anime Limited, it's everyone. They're ALL doing it. My Dress-Up Darling is $89.98 plus tax, so's Re:Zero season 2, SPY x FAMILY, Your Name, and Mieruko-chan. Overlord IV's $94.98. Weathering With You is $79.98. Jujutsu Kaisen is $99.99! Oshi No Ko is $129.99! Even if you wait for the cut-down box sets that have none of the extra features, the asking price is still easily $40-50 for newer titles. It feels like Japanese physical media prices have finally started to creep their way into the western market. Ouch. 😵‍💫

Yeah, from the description he has a bio-fiber optic peripheral nervous system similar to what the Meltrandi in DYRL? have. Macross Delta: Absolute Live!!!!!!'s story has a lot of issues, and that's one. Lady M's supposed influence and the developments she's supposedly banned doesn't really track with the events of past shows. Macross Frontier, Macross the Ride, Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy, and Macross Chronicle present a layered approach to the legality of cybernetics. Macross Chronicle's Technology Sheet for Macross Galaxy indicates that research into practical cybernetic implants began after the First Space War using Zentradi implants as a starting point. The New UN Government is said to have become concerned by the prospect of creating cybernetically-enhanced soldiers and enacted legislation to limit cybernetics research to the comparatively safe medical applications. Macross Frontier and its audio dramas have some dialog that suggests that, beyond the galaxy-wide ban on "Cyber Grunts", individual emigrant governments have imposed their own restrictions on implant technology and surgery. The technology was heavily restricted in the Macross Galaxy fleet until the mid-2040s, and its legalization was a hot button issue that led to civil unrest. Macross Frontier is said to generally prohibit implant technology except for medically necessary organ and limb replacements. Uroboros seems to have a more relaxed view, as we see Aisha Blanchett has a network terminal implant and Mei Leeron may be a full-body cyborg as she's got a personal VF-27. Cybernetically-enhanced soldiers are prohibited under New UN Gov't law, but there doesn't seem to be anything stopping people with medical cybernetics or even some kinds of elective cybernetics from joining the armed forces or piloting military-grade VFs as a civilian. Temjin of the NUNS 33rd Marines and Col. Todo of the NUNS VF-X Special Forces both have cybernetic eyes and network implants, and several Vanquish racers have medical cybernetics including full limb replacements (e.g. Team Shinsei's Oscar Brauhitsch). That's probably the reason the Queadluun-Rhea's cockpit is entirely within the torso, Regult-style, instead of having the pilot's legs inside the suit's legs. That way the Regult could lose all four limbs and the pilot could still be unscathed. The Neo Glaug designed for giants was not built for the New UN Forces, so it may not have had conventional escape measures. Then again, its original pilot was also quite a bit smaller than a regular Zentradi due to being a child, so there may have been room. Earth's reproduction of it is designed for miclones, so it definitely has conventional escape and survival measures. It really feels like it'd be a good idea to do the Second Unification War, considering how important that event has turned out to be to Macross Frontier, Macross 30, and Macross Delta's events... not to mention the implication that Max was a main mover behind the pro-autonomy forces and the leader of Vindirance may have been one of his daughters under a paper thin alias, and that King Grammier of Windermere's worldview was shaped heavily by his own participation in the war when he was in his prime.

No kidding... I have to imagine that a fair amount of that difference is not having to license pre-existing dubs from the 90's and not including extravagant extras like a ~200pg art book. This appears to be basically the exact same box set as the Japanese "Premium Remastered Edition", but MUCH cheaper. That was around $151 US (¥21,478) when it came out. With the CRAFF15 discount code that @Master Dex found and the Crunchyroll "Mega Fan" discount, it's $81 shipped, so a bit more than half the Japanese retail price. Looking back at it, the Japanese edition was actually more expensive than Macross Plus's Blu-Ray Complete Edition in Japan... that sold for $119 (¥17,000) with both the movie and OVA.

https://store.crunchyroll.com/products/macross-zero-ova-series-blu-ray-limited-edition-crunchyroll-exclusive-5037899090947.html It looks like Crunchyroll has put up preorders for a domestic release of Macross Zero now. EDIT: Crunchyroll's store has automatic discount pricing for members, and @Master Dex found a coupon code CRAFF15 that will knock 15% off the top for you at checkout.

But for the disquieting tendency to explode, yeah. Berthier's choice of VF is said to be something like a self-imposed challenge, since he's a cyborg with an augmented nervous system that gives him superhumanly fast reflexes. Almost certainly, given that the Varauta VFs are technologically upgraded versions of the existing VA-14, VF-14, and VAB-2 that the Megaroad-13 defense forces used. Macross 7 was the only series to use the ejection of the cockpit block as an "escape pod" prominently in actual combat, but the actual capability goes back to the original series and the VF-1. You probably remember how Roy ejected the cockpit block of Hikaru's disabled VF-1D and took it with him when he evacuated from South Ataria. Masahiro Chiba and company wrote up a fairly detailed explanation of how VF ejection mechanisms work in the original Sky Angels VF-1 tech manual. It describes ejecting the entire nose as a standard ejection method for space or very high altitudes, while more traditional ejection methods are used at lower altitudes. There are some remarks made in connection with the VF-25's APS-25A/MF25 Armored Pack that suggest that ejecting the cockpit block is probably still one of the standard VF escape methods even in 2059+. It seems that we just don't get to see it because the few times we've seen a pilot have to escape an aircraft in recent titles have either been catastrophic loss of the aircraft while stationary or flying at low altitudes (e.g. Alto's first VF-25F, Michel's VF-25G, Hayate's VF-31J). I'd love to see them go back to the late 2010s or 2020s and show us the heyday of the 2nd Generation VFs before they were replaced by the VF-11. Or go back to the late 2040s and 2050 and show us the Second Unification War.

Yeah it's really that small. The VF-9 Cutlass is a very small, light duty, low cost variable fighter meant primarily for atmospheric service on emigrant planets. Basically it's made to be small and cheap and extremely maneuverable in atmospheric flight for planetary defense purposes. Apparently this also made it quite an excellent air racer. Vanquish League racing champ Nicolas Francoise Berthier used a VF-9E as his ride in Ultimate class races and managed to remain undefeated despite many of his opponents using significantly newer aircraft.

Unless the next series is going backwards in time into the gaps between the original and Plus or 7 and Frontier, I suspect we're in for at least one more round with 5th Generation VFs derived from the YF-24. Both Macross Frontier and Macross Delta used the exact same excuse of PMCs being contracted to do the final phases of operational tests before rollout to the real military. Once they officially enter service, they've got a good 20+ years as main fighter ahead of them before their eventual replacement enters the picture. That'll get us to at least the 2080s in-universe since the VF-25 is said to enter service in the early 2060s and the VF-31 c.2069 or 2070. Without a major new threat to drive fast-paced advancement, the 5th Gen could easily hang around into the early 22nd century. Especially considering what's been said about the 6th Generation in materials for Macross Delta and especially Absolute Live!!!!!!. Unless the definition of the 6th Generation itself changes, 6th Generation development is likely to remain stalled until Humanity either discovers a MASSIVE cache of ultra-high purity fold quartz or improves the techniques used for fold carbon synthesis to the point of being able to synthesize the high purity fold quartz necessary to make a working fold wave system. Right now, the best they can do is to produce very small numbers of halfhearted 5.5th Generation units like the VF-31 Siegfried Custom or an even smaller number of 6th Generation prototypes like the YF-29.

Gah... that, I think, is the first time I've seen someone successfully riff on Escaflowne's name. Considering Kawamori almost never seems to be willing to leave a design on the cutting room floor, I'm wondering how long it'll be before we see concepts like the ones from the main mecha in Air Cavalry Chronicles... which had FAST packs to turn into things like a boat.

Yeah. Kivas Fajo was the villain of the episode "The Most Toys". He was an eccentric collector who faked Data's death and abducted him in order to put him on display in his private collection of rare and valuable artifacts. Fajo vaporized the girl who helped Data try to escape, and threatened to kill more people if Data didn't comply so Data opted to prevent any future murders by killing Fajo only to be beamed away at the last second by the Enterprise, with Fajo being placed under arrest soon after. https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Kivas_Fajo The guy we see Tendi's pirate crew roughing up is a member of the same unnamed species as Kivas Fajo's friend Palor Toff, a collector who visited Fajo's ship during Data's time as part of Fajo's collection and whom Data used to publicly humiliate Fajo by pretending to be a statue. https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Palor_Toff

No, but a member of that same unnamed species was a friend of Fajo's Who visited his ship to see Data in "The Most Toys". It's possible it's meant to be that same character (Palor Toff).

We have a reasonable idea of what it looked like, since the Sv-154 Svard is one of those Kawamori trademark reuses of a design concept he made for a prior non-Macross project. Specifically, it's the LV-7 Valorous Rapier "Excalibur" from Air Cavalry Chronicles. Air Cavalry Chronicles was a further development of the cancelled Advanced Valkyrie project which also never made it to production. Its story and design works would part company with each other as the story underwent a genre change to become The Vision of Escaflowne and the design works finding their way into Macross 7 and Macross M3. Early emigrant fleets don't seem to have been very large, all in all. The 1st, 3rd, and 5th generations of emigrant fleets seem to each be separated by an order of magnitude in population. Megaroad-01 was said to have around 80,000 people in its fleet in total, with 25,000 living aboard the emigrant ship itself. Those Zentradi ships are physically big, but they don't actually hold a huge number of people or mecha because the crew themselves are 125 times the size of a human (5x in all dimensions) and the ships have to be supplied for long-duration spaceflight. If you work backwards from the Boddole Zer main fleet's total population, the size of the average battleship's crew is something like 1,500 people tops on a ship that, to scale with its crew, is about the same size to them as a Nimitz-class carrier is to us. (So around 1/4 or less the crew of a comparably sized Human naval ship.) With a composition like that, esp. early on, you'd probably be far more likely to have Regults than Destroids. (The old Sky Angels book does assert that postwar carriers used a lot of Regults.)