Seto Kaiba
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As alien as the Vajra are, it's probably pretty difficulty to determine what their exact feelings towards humanity as a whole are. They're obviously not an allied power the way the Zentradi, Zolans, etc. are. I guess you could call it something closer to "good fences make good neighbors"? The Vajra hive that the Frontier and Galaxy fleets were messing with cleared out and left humanity to its own devices, but other Vajra swarms in Macross 30 and other works seem content to at least live-and-let-live with humanity in the greater galaxy. (There are Vajra on Uroboros in 2060, and on Pipure in 2062.) Maybe they did... but probably not. The theory that Macross Delta presents for the origins of Var syndrome and fold receptors doesn't tally with any previous Macross works on the subject of biological fold waves or the properties of coexisting with the V-type bacterium. In Macross Frontier (all versions), being infected with the V-type bacterium is fatal unless the infection is confined to your entric nervous system. Sheryl was dying from having the V-type bacteria living in her brain in the series, and in her vocal cords in the movies. Macross Delta depicts the fold bacteria that live symbiotically with humans living in their brain tissue, which would be deadly if it were the same thing. Not to mention this alleged migration of fold bacteria into humans allegedly occurred in 2059, but humans with fold wave abilities existed for millennia before that (e.g. the priestesses in Zero). The ability just wasn't understood or codified until Dr. Gadget M. Chiba's Song Energy theory was proven in 2045, and was further refined by the work of other researchers like Zola's Dr. Lawrence and Dr. Elma Hoyly, and the researchers at Frontier's LAI branch.
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Closer to "villains who we share a mutual enemy with". He was such a little edgelord in Rogue One, having him be happy-go-lucky would just be weird.
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Still waiting on mine... I've never had a package labeled "Operational delay" with FedEx before, but it's finally at the sort facility. -
So, I see two reasons this won't work right off the bat. First and foremost, the Macross setting is a fundamentally optimistic one like pre-Abrams/Kurtzman Star Trek was. It's built on the fundamental premise that communication and mutual understanding can and will end or even prevent conflicts. Music is the franchise's chosen method for that because the series grew out of the 80's idol boom. It isn't, and it isn't meant to be, one of those western grimdark Forever War sci-fi settings like BattleTech, Warhammer 40,000, or Robotech. Secondly, the BattleTech setting was able to develop in the manner you describe for two main reasons that are not at all compatible with Macross's setting: In BattleTech, the "present day" for the story is somewhere in the mid-31st century with the furthest extent of the official timeline being somewhere in the 32nd. Humanity's been a FTL-capable spacefaring civilization for over 900 years at that point and that span of time. That's a lot of time for the limitations of the Kearny-Fuchida drive to give colonist cultures the opportunity to diverge from their roots and each other. Humanity in Macross has only been an interstellar civilization for 55 years by the "present day" of Macross Delta: Absolute Live!!!!!!. That's just not enough time for disparate and conflicting cultures like that to develop. In BattleTech, the various planets colonized by humanity were able to develop independently because the limitations of the Kearny-Fuchida drive make interstellar travel of more than 30 light years logistically difficult and prohibitively time consuming. Traveling more than 30 light years means a week's down time to recharge the drive before a second jump. Traveling just 100 light years involves 22 days of downtime in-transit to recharge the K-F drive. Crossing a distance of 800 light years? 191 days. Using K-F drives to go from Ragna to Windermere starting on January 1st would get you there on July 10th if all went well. That kind of travel limitation enables cultural distances to form from isolation, especially when faster-than-light communications are nearly as limited (not more than 50ly one-way). The space fold technology in Macross's setting hasn't got limitations like that. Humanity's emigrant fleets and planets are spread out across tens of thousands of light years and nevertheless are still linked by a faster-than-light internet called the Galaxy Network that allows for rapid communication and the sharing of information and cultural exports. Fold navigation technology c.2059 makes crossing distances of hundreds of light years in a civilian starliner no more onerous than a cross-country or transatlantic direct flight by jet airliner is today and the military's are implied to be even better. That 800 light year trip that would take a K-F drive over half a year? The work of a couple hours to a ship in Macross. Fold system performance isn't static either, it continues to improve as humanity gets better at synthesizing fold carbon at higher purities and is poised to improve by a factor of 10 via adoption of fold quartz in its place as on the Super Fold Booster LAI trialed. In short, the conditions that produced the Clans in BattleTech can't occur in the Macross setting as it's been presented thus far... both because there hasn't been enough time for humanity's emigrant fleets or planets to even begin to develop their own distinct cultures the way they do in BattleTech, and because faster-than-light technology is simply THAT much better in Macross that planets and fleets aren't likely to end up isolated enough to become clannish about it for any significant length of time. Mind you, the Human vs. Human thing has already been done TWICE. Macross VF-X2 depicted what later came to be called in-universe as the Second Unification War, where the logistical problems caused by the central government trying to exert more and more direct authority over worlds half a galaxy away led to a brief civil war. Then, of course, there was the prequel Macross Zero depicting the original Unification Wars on Earth. I guess it's more like four if you want to count Macross R and Macross 30... which respectively did plots involving a remnant of the forces that attempted to overthrow the government in 2051 attacking an emigrant fleet and a rogue New UN Spacy special forces unit teaming up with pirates to distract the military while they attempt to alter history using a temporal weapon the Protoculture left. Or five if you wanna throw Macross E on there since its plot involves a human corporation trying to weaponize Var syndrome to take over a planet. As noted above, not a problem present in Macross. Emigrant fleets take a long time between long-distance fold jumps of hundreds or thousands of light years so pilot fleets from their escort detail can explore nearby star systems for usable/valuable resources and potentially habitable worlds. Not because they have to. ... I hate to burst your bubble there, but Plus and 7 both introduced the idea of using music for more than just music. Frontier built on what was laid down in 7 and refined in Zero, and Delta only very slightly expanded upon what was set down in Frontier. There's no handwave going on, these are core mechanics the series spends a fair amount of time and exposition on.
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To be honest, I kind of suspect that the lack of likeable characters is intentional and maybe even part of the point. We know from Rogue One that Cassian Andor and Saw Gerrera both belong to rebel factions that are a lot more militant and extreme in their views. So much so in the case of Saw Gerrera that he's at loggerheads with the mainstream Rebel Alliance. These aren't the principled Original Trilogy freedom fighters firmly ensconced on the Light Side of Star Wars's rigid moral absolutes, embodying "The Revolution will not be Vilified". These are the amoral but well-intentioned terrorists whose consolation is that they (believe that they) are a Lighter Shade of the Dark Side compared to the evil Empire they're working to overthrow, embodying "The Revolution will not be Civilized". It'd be kind of weird to make these people really likeable when Cassian is basically an antihero bordering on villain protagonist territory.
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The Bad Luck Brothers, for sure. At least Gorman has the excuse that he was very carefully and deliberately set up to fail by the long and highly amoral arm of the Weyland-Yutani corporation. The chief instigator of Syril Karn's destruction was Syril Karn. His victory condition was do nothing and he still screwed it up. That's fair, though I wasn't arguing that it in any way diminished the events of Rogue One. I was just saying that, for the casual audience, it would probably have been more helpful to date it relative to the events of Rogue One since that's where we all know Cassian from anyway. I'm sure it wouldn't have been a huge dealbreaker for the die-hard fans to spell out "Five years before the Battle of Scarif" instead of "BBY5". (Is there no established in-universe calendar? I'd expect there to be something like "Imperial Year such-and-such" or "Year such-and-such of the Xth Republic".) SAAAAME. Especially with how... easily upset... the Star Wars fanbase seems to be from the outsider's perspective. (Of course, I know that's a bit skewed... bad news has a much better publicist than good news.) That's definitely a point where the flashbacks have not helped. Looking back at it, I didn't get the impression those two things were connected. Are we sure the Empire would see him as "safe"? IIRC the corporate cops mention he's got an Imperial prison record for sedition or something like that. It's not like the Imperials knew about his crime and decided to ignore it. The corporate cops discovered the crime and their own leadership decided not to report it to the Imperial authorities because, at the time, it was the soon-to-be-covered-up deaths of two corrupt cops who'd gotten killed doing several shady things at once. After Cassian and Luthen's... discreet... exit from Ferrix, I'd imagine the Imperials need no further incitement to take an active interest. Box or no box, they made enough noise on their way out of town that the corporate police won't be able to keep the Imperials from noticing.
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Shipping of preorders has begun at CDJapan. I received my notice that my copy of Absolute Live!!!!!! is in transmit at about 2am local time today.
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Nah, calling the deputy inspector - who Google tells me is named "Syril Karn" - a knucklehead implies he's stupid. He's clearly not stupid. He's something much worse... he's clearly one of those weak and insecure people who joined law enforcement because he wanted to have some concrete form of power over other people. His establishing character moment shows how much he fetishizes the authority his position gives him: he had his duty uniform tailored to make himself look more impressive (and, no doubt in his mind, more intimidating). As soon as his superior is out of the picture, he takes every opportunity to demonstrate his authority over his colleagues and the populace in general. The only one of his colleagues who is shown to actually like him is a similarly-minded junior officer who repeatedly expresses his contempt for the general populace and enthusiasm for violence. (The political critique being made via these characters is super obvious...) But not one Cassian is relevant to... this is his story, after all. His definining moment is the Battle of Scarif. Prior to that battle, Cassian Andor is just some terrorist. Understood, but for the plurality if not majority of the intended audience who do not partake of the Expanded Universe to any significant degree it's a meaningless string of letters and doesn't really connect to Cassian's story regardless. It's a good demonstration of the way having Star Wars fans making Star Wars material can lock new or casual viewers out of the loop. Unpoliced, it's a self-defeating spiral that can kill entire franchises as we're seeing with the slow-motion collapse of the American comics industry. Hence my question... Rogue One presents the state of the rebellion up to the Battle of Scarif as a loose collection of anti-government militant groups with differing ideologies that were largely unwilling to agree on anything. From A New Hope, there's the suggestion of capital emphasis on "Rebel Alliance", and they're presented as a unified force without any demonstrable infighting in the movies. My read of it, as a casual enjoyer of the films with almost no exposure to the EU, is that that was the moment that made the Alliance gel to become the unified fighting force in the original trilogy.
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Isn't Andor kind of before the rebellion proper? IIRC, the Battle of Scarif in Rogue One was presented as kind of the moment the rebellion became an organized thing instead of just a bunch of disparate militant dissident groups with their own separate agendas.
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I'd agree with your dissent... the flashbacks to Cassian's early childhood as a member of an inexplicably primitive tribe on Kenari serve no real purpose in the story. It doesn't add anything meaningful or interesting to Cassian's character or to the story as a whole. It's not like Cassian is a Proud Warrior Race Guy and he hasn't shown any real attachment to his birth world or its culture in the story thus far. It could be omitted entirely without subtracting anything from the story except total runtime. After a while, you start to wonder if it's a subtly racist thing... if Cassian Andor's dissolute lifestyle is supposed to be because he's a native who's left the reservation like that old racist stereotype of the First Nations folks. Really, possible racist implications aside, all it really does is leave you asking why there's a primitive tribe of explicitly-human hunter-gatherers living barely a stone's throw from a massive high-tech Imperial strip mining operation. How do you even get a half-feral human tribe like that in a setting like this? (Not being snarky, I really want to know.) Looking back at it, there is at most one 30 minute episode's worth of material spread across more than 90 minutes in the three episodes thus far. This could have literally been one episode. It definitely feels like that... they spent so much time shooting people walking purposefully down the same handful of streets for minutes at a time. If this is starting as it means to go on, I can hardly wait for Andor Kai, when they cut out all the filler and lose 3/4 of the episode count. It's also really stupid that for all Cassian's real planet of origin is supposed to be a secret, he's apparently blabbed to so many people he can't name them all. Even his adoptive mother is visibly exasperated by his stupidity. Now this, I disagree with... Andor has, thus far, lived up to its showrunner's promise to focus on storytelling and not let the show be driven by fanservice. Even weak as it is, it stands head, shoulders, knees, toes, and several banthas above the likes of The Mandalorean, The Book of Boba Fett, and Obi-Wan Kenobi in my opinion. Those shows are driven almost exclusively by fanservice. My experience has been that if you're not already fully invested in the specific fanservice they're built on, they don't really bring much to the table. For me as the filthy casual, none of those shows have really offered much in actual entertainment because they are very much "By fans, for fans". I too hope this series picks up, though my fear is that it will decay into a fanservice-driven affair like the other three shows once Cassian becomes involved with the founders of the Rebellion. Saw Gerrera and the boss lady from Return of the Jedi are already confirmed to be in this one. The more references and in-jokes they draw, the more casual viewers like me end up locked out of the loop in "Sorry, who are you again?" reactions.
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... and for the hat trick, episode 3 "Reckoning". EPISODE 3: "RECKONING" Andor is pretty weak tea thus far... though episode three shows a modicum of promise once the series finally gets off the goddamn dime and gives up on its multi-episode walking tour of Irrelevant City A's grungiest edifaces in favor of actually moving the plot forward a little bit. I do like that, once the action finally gets rolling, there's no quipping. No smart remarks. For both Cassian and the corporate cops, the situation is a tense life-or-death affair and they look appropriately tense and anxious during the whole thing. No graceful acrobatics, no trick shots, just a bunch of panicky scrambling for cover and desperate fighting for survival. I am especially fond of the scene after the episode's climax, where nobody celebrates. The deputy inspector is so shellshocked he's left staring blankly into space and needs to be dragged away by his subordinate. The locals who assisted in the sabotage aer traumatized by having taken a life, and of course those who saw someone die right in front of them are distraught. This wasn't a bold moment of heroism for anyone, it was a violent traumatic event that touched EVERYONE... even the would-be jaded antagonists who thought they were above it all. That positive node aside, three episodes in and I'd call Andor boring. Even tedious. Over ninety minutes of footage in the can and maybe ten minutes of actual content if you're generous about it. The protagonist is an arsehole, and we know he's not going to get better because he's still an arsehole in Rogue One. We're just going to see a lot more very vicious, inhumane moments as Cassian becomes the cold killer he brags about being in Rogue One.
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Alrighty then... after a first episode so bland, insipid, and lifeless that it felt like it could be dropped into any dystopian sci-fi franchise virtually unaltered and still be unremarkable at best, it's off to episode two "That Would Be Me". Thus far, I have to say I'm not impressed by Cassian's backstory either. Han Solo was a scoundrel, but at least he was a scoundrel with a good heart. Cassian Andor's seems to be just kind of a sh*thead supreme. Everyone he talks to is either intensely wary of him being a con artist, manipulative dick, or a debtor trying to skip out on repayment. Admittedly, I guess he never did claim to be a good person, but he's just kind of an unlikeable prick here and I can't imagine he gets any less difficult to tolerate once he launches his career as a remorseless terrorist. EPISODE 2: THAT WOULD BE ME Honesly, the writing on this show is so bad and so badly paced that I actually went and checked and make sure the Writers Guild of America wasn't on strike when it was filmed. Over sixty minutes of runtime between the first two episodes, and maybe four minutes of actual plot progression, all of which is at the start of the first episode. You could cut ninety percent of this material and lose literally nothing. I'll give Tony Gilroy his due. Two episodes in and Andor is very definitely NOT driven by fanservice... because it's not driven by ANYTHING. It's sixty-plus minutes of aimlessly f***ing about in a run-down industrial town. If you took the background aliens out, this could belong to literally ANY franchise. It's THAT un-distinctive (and I'm sure that's not even a word). It's padded so heavily I'm waiting for the narrator to cut into the teaser and say "NEXT TIME! ON DRAGON BALL Z!". Hell, the sheer number of wretched hives in Star Wars and the escalating dinginess of each successive wretched hive has started to make me suspect Obi-Wan's a judgemental dick and Mos Eisley's actually a nice middle-class neighborhood. It's visibly nicer and a LOT livelier than this place, or that port town on Jakku, or anywhere they visit in the new trilogy except maybe Maz's place. Why is there seemingly no middle ground in this interstellar civilization between almost-literal ivory tower luxury and squalid borderline slums?
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Eech... well, as laudable as showrunner Tony Gilroy's stated desire to keep Andor accessible by prioritizing a coherent narrative over fanservice was, Andor now has a lock on first place with a commanding lead on my personal leaderboard of franchise shows that sent me to Wikipedia to look up some critical bit of info the fastest. I had to hit pause at only one minute and thirty-nine seconds into the first episode to figure out what the actual hell "BBY5" meant, because the series clearly expected me to already know. On my way to Wikipedia, I could only think "Wow, BestBuy stock is trading super cheap in the Galaxy Far Far Away" (its stock symbol is BBY)... or if it was some weird sexual thing like "BBW" is. Nope, we're just marking time relative to an event that hasn't happened yet for some reason. Were they paying by the letter or something? Was it too expensive to have this text just say "Five years before the Battle of Scarif", the defining moment in Cassian Andor's life and the movie this is spinning off from? Why mark time from the Battle of Yavin when this series is about a guy who's been dead for days or possibly weeks by the time that battle takes place? As for the start... well, I'll just quote from an episode of Star Trek: the Next Generation for a second: EPISODE 1: KASSA As first episodes go, I'm with Captain Picard. This isn't a promising beginning. I'd call it a bad sign that the character I most identify with is the security supervisor who clearly thinks the crux of the entire plot is bullshit. It's an origin story for a character in an another origin story, so my expectations are going to stay pretty low. I know this is building to something and following multiple characters in their separate stories is helping towards that eventual intersection, but right now it gives me the same badly-paced feeling as Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Like I'm watching two or more separate stories that only coincidentally share the same sets sometimes.
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Okay, if we had Variable Fighters in real life....
Seto Kaiba replied to cheemingwan1234's topic in Movies and TV Series
Really, the thing that'd find the most use wouldn't be the Valkyries... it'd be the Ghosts. What government wouldn't want a semi-autonomous or autonomous unmanned aircraft able to loiter over an area for weeks at a time without needing to be refueled? Not just for its military potential, but for what it could do for the sciences. An unarmed Ghost would be an invaluable asset for an organization like the US NOAA for collecting data on tropical storms, hurricanes, and tornadoes. Conservationists would jump at the chance to have aircraft that could remotely monitor the populations and migrations patterns of the various endangered species (esp. ocean-dwelling ones like whales and sharks), or as an armed anti-poaching measure. Emergency services would probably love having them for search-and-rescue operations, especially maritime ones.- 14 replies
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Okay, if we had Variable Fighters in real life....
Seto Kaiba replied to cheemingwan1234's topic in Movies and TV Series
No kidding... I've seen e-motors do terrible things to steel and aluminum. Science, however, marches on and there are few carbon allotropes that've been created in laboratories that are approaching the properties of the "hypercarbon" used as structural materials and armor in Macross's VFs and warships. NCSU researchers reported creating a metallic carbon allotrope that responds to magnetic fields while also being harder than diamond back in 2015. It's called Q-carbon, though their experimental results haven't been replicated yet.- 14 replies
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Macross: Eternal Love Song for the PC Engine took the same step a few years earlier in the Macross II timeline. The UN Forces tried the Minmay Attack on the Burado main fleet only for it to prove ineffective because Quamzin had outfitted the ships of the Burado main fleet with an ancient Protoculture communications system that prevented the Minmay Attack from cutting into their communications. The Prometheus II taskforce launches a raid on Quamzin's own flagship and fight the penultimate boss fight against Quamzin himself in order to steal Quamzin's piece of the system so they can break into the Burado fleet's communications with the Minmay Attack in preparation for the assault on the Burado mobile fortress.
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In a few ways, yes... mainly ones inspired by certain early 90's trends like pop culture's sudden and intense interest in railguns driven by the media attention on a US military railgun project that was announced around that time. Several other items are inspired by Gundam, which several OVA staffers had previously worked on. (Let us just say that is is not an accident that Feff's ace custom Gigamesh has a horn, a bright red paintjob, and is faster and more agile than the standard type. Fortunately, he does not have a younger sister as far as we know.) In all fairness, the Macross II UN Spacy fleets defending Earth were made up in large part of captured and refurbished/upgraded Zentradi warships. Macross II's Earth had a lot more trouble with the Zentradi, with remnants of the Boddole Zer fleet showing up to bother the planet every few years (later tailing off to about once a decade) provided a LOT of "free" secondhand Zentradi warships alongside defecting Zentradi soldiers. Add to that defectors and remnants from the four other main fleets the UN Forces encountered and actually beat in the years between 2010 and 2092, that's a LOT of surplus Zentradi hardware piling up and just begging to be put to use. That's why there are structures in Macross City that are clearly Zentradi ships that've been built into/over, huge numbers of upgraded Zentradi ships in the Spacy's fleets, and a new class of ship in the fleet that is literally four modified Nupetiet Vergnitzs-class fleet command battleships reengineered and upgunned to be cannons on a massive transformable gunship. Earth's original designs seem to mostly be their own takes on Meltrandi designs. The Gloria's silhouette is strongly reminiscent of the Meltrandi fleet command battleship and the heavy battleship Heracles and her sister ships appear to be an Earth take on Meltrandi gunboats. (Macross II's timeline did also carry forward the ARMD-style design... in the 2030s, a new ARMD-type warship called the Daedalus II-class was introduced and played a large role in the Zentradi invasions of 2036 and 2037. And yes, with that name, it does EXACTLY what you are thinking it does.) TBH, I doubt it. The New UN Forces in the main Macross timeline are somewhat gunshy about adopting large amounts of Zentradi overtechnology. They almost always pass on General Galaxy's more Zentradi tech-intensive designs in favor of Shinsei Industry's more conservative ones. Available evidence suggests that, in the main Macross timeline, humanity rolled out a BUNCH of ARMD II-class ships (the movie ARMD version) after the war and accompanied it with a bunch of new ship classes that mainly show up in the games like the Algenicus-type stealth cruiser. Of course, the Guantanamo-class is also technically an ARMD. Eh...you're a bit wide of the mark there. The VF-XX wasn't built solely for cultured Zentradi. It was the proof-of-concept for the Valkyrie II series and supposedly widely used in the transitional period of the 2060s when the VF-2 series was being developed. It's a "Zentradi Valkyrie" mainly in the sense that it uses a lot of tech from the Nousjadeul-Ger and is basically a transformable battle suit. It wasn't really "more guns" so much as "better guns"... the VF-2SS Valkyrie II w/ Super Armed Pack is basically just a 90's futuristic take on the VF-1S Strike Valkyrie. It's a lot more sleek and rounded, but the essentials are all there. The lasers got swapped for beam cannons, but you've got a large anti-warship gun, a handful of long-range missiles, and a lot of micromissiles. It's just in a sleeker, more compact package. It's even got almost exactly the same number of missiles. (6 fewer micro-missiles and 2 more long-range ones in their place.) About all we can say for certain is that from its designation it was probably a late Gen 3 design and one of the first to adopt thermonuclear reaction turbine engines.
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That's doing them quite a disservice. The Zentradi are exactly what the ancient Protoculture created them to be: highly trained, highly motivated, professional soldiers who are well-trained and well-drilled in everything they needed to be trained in to do their jobs. They're not stupid or ignorant by any means. They're just the very model of "end user" when it comes to the advanced technology the Protoculture created for them. They have the training and experience to operate their technology to its full potential. They're just missing the necessary education about how that technology does what it does that would let them troubleshoot and repair it themselves. The Zentradi forces absolutely know how to switch frequencies and encrypt their communications the same as humans. The inventors of the Minmay Attack in the Vrlitwhai fleet and aboard the Macross weren't idiots either and accounted for that. With the Vrlitwhai branch fleet's help, the first Minmay Attack was broadcast on all Zentradi frequencies and using the Boddole Zer main fleet's own ciphers. The point was to make exposure to the culture shock material inescapable and prevent Zentradi ships and mecha from taking up an effective defensive posture by jamming their communications. They could change frequencies, but if it's on all the standard frequencies then there's no way to communicate the new frequency bands and ciphers. It becomes an exercise in "pick and pray", hoping someone else picked the same random non-standard channel you did (and odds are the Vrlitwhai branch fleet had the short list of agreed-upon backup channels too) all while being blasted with incomprehensible sounds and images non-stop.
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Great Mechanics G is a quarterly hobby magazine/mook, not an official artbook. The cover art is new, the art used in the article is reprints of official art from 1982. It's only natural there'd be a difference in quality there.
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It is difficult to say, because technology developed very differently between the two settings. Human overtechnology in the Macross II: Lovers Again timeline developed at a more conservative pace than the main/ongoing Macross timeline's did in many respects. Reverse-engineering the technologies left behind by the ancient Protoculture played a much bigger role in Macross II's timeline, with progress being made at a slower pace overall but with several periods of extremely rapid advancement in the wake of capturing a new factory satellite or other ancient Protoculture device. The Macross II timeline's UN Forces used a good deal more Zentradi and Meltrandi overtechnology in their military hardware, where the main Macross timeline's New UN Forces relied mainly on reproducing the technology themsleves and using the reproductions. The two settings are also rather different strategically, with the Macross II setting's UN Forces adopting more Zentradi-esque strategies centered around fleets of battleships where the main Macross timeline's New UN Forces adopted a carrier-centric strategy more closely resembling modern Navy practice. Consequently, Valkyries developed in those timelines had rather different design priorities. The main Macross timeline's Valkyries frequently prioritized stealth and evasion due in part to the New UN Forces standard approach to Zentradi fleets being avoidance. The Macross II timeline's Valkyries instead prioritized durability, survivability, and firepower as a part of a defense-oriented strategic doctrine supported by the Minmay Attack (later retitled the Minmay Defense). The Macross II Valkyries like the VF-2SS Valkyrie II have quite a bit less in the raw engine thrust department than main timeline Valkyries, being about on par with the VF-11 in terms of flight performance and they're not built for stealth. Rather, their design emphasis is on high agility though large numbers of verniers, sub-engines, etc., on maximizing generator output, and on using that generator output to deliver a lot of firepower with direct-fire weapons. The Macross II version of the VF-4 was upgraded with a substantially powerful beam gunpod and funnels armed with beam guns (yes, like the ones in Gundam, but computer-controlled like 00's Fangs). The Valkyrie II series had coaxial beam cannons on the monitor turret and went in for railguns for its gunpod and for a large anti-capital ship cannon on its Super Armed Pack. It was also outfitted with Bits (again, like Gundam, but minus the psycommu) that were armed with multiple beam guns. Firepower-wise, they may actually exceed the main timeline's Valkyries in some areas since the main timeline has yet to mount a true/pure railgun system on a Valkyrie... those railgun weapons in the main timeline are using electromagnetic rails as an assist to boost the firepower of chemically-propelled rounds where Macross II's railguns are entirely electromagnetic. The amount of internally-carried missiles is about on par with 4th Gen Valkyries like the VF-19 or VF-22, with the Valkyrie II having six long-range missiles and fifty-four micro-missiles. Under the hood, there are some similarities as well like the Valkyrie II having a g-force support armiture in the cockpit to help the pilot function under high g-loads similar to EX-Gear. There is also mention of improved actuator technology involving keeping moving parts separated but aligned with electromagnetic forces that is vaguely similar to what's used in the main timeline's 5th Gen VFs for transformations, though noted to be used throughout the Valkyrie II's entire body.
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Yup. These are the occupational hazards of farming out animation work to multiple studios on a tight timetable... and back then they had to consider shipping times between the different supporting studios, some of which (esp. ones specializing in manpower-intensive work like tweening) were located in Korea. Redrawing often wasn't on the table. True, though that's more the fault of the game's publisher. Palladium Books's staff are undeniably passionate about their games, but when it comes to their licensed games their work is often rather wide of the mark accuracy-wise. That wasn't their fault in the first version of their R-word licensed game since they were flying blind with no help from the people they licensed the rights from. They did marginally better with the second version and the Macross II game, but in all three cases the content of the books is only vaguely representative of the content of the show at best and both weapon damage values and armor values were arbitrary or completely contradictory.
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Those are, officially, an animation error. The blisters on either side of the VF-1's nose contain camera systems incl. infrared sensors. Super Dimension Fortress Macross, like many shows of its era, was hand-drawn and to help meet deadlines studios often subcontracted out animation work to other studios for "production cooperation". Tatsunoko Production, the main studio, contracted some of the animation work out to AnimeFriend and StarPro. StarPro was, IIRC, responsible for a great deal of the off-model animation in the series. The "R-word" series made the animation error canon to its setting.
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Granted, it's a big ship... but it's a ship so big that the crew frequently use cars to transport men and materiel through it. On a fair number of occasions, we see pilots and other personnel using the M-299 Sugarfoot to get around inside the ship. It's probably not an obstacle to have an actual goddamn staff car driving through the ship's corridors too.
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Of course, for off-center bridges on large military ships is typically to make room for a carrier deck... but the Macross doesn't have one of those. Quite a bit of thought was put into the Macross's design... but I suspect you're overthinking it. Most of the commentary on the bridge is related to how the design evolved from its "the Macross is a giant Gundam" origin to its present form. The two sides of the bridge tower docking at the end of the transformation seems like a little stylistic touch to cap the transformation. The Macross would naturally have some bays for its own auxiliary craft, but there's no guarantee that it's anywhere near the bridge. It's a BIG ship.
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Yes. The VF-1's service ceiling, transit time, and preservation of the VF-1's onboard fuel supply. In atmospheric service, the VF-1 Valkyrie's FF-2001 thermonuclear reaction turbine engines are extremely fuel-efficient because they can use intake are as a propellant and heat it using waste heat and plasma from the compact thermonuclear reactor. That efficiency is lost once the Valkyrie ascends past the atmospheric service limitation where a planet's atmosphere is too thin to sustain conventional jet/ramjet propulsion and it has to switch to operating its engines as thermonuclear rockets. The exponentially greater rate of fuel consumption at extremely high suborbital altitudes and low orbit leaves the VF-1 with only a few minutes of maximum thrust before its tanks are dry. Because its Battroid mode's size was constrained to approximately what the UN Forces expected the Zentradi to be, it is a small aircraft with relatively little room for internal fuel storage that prevents it from being able to do things like operate in space for extended periods without additional tanks or launch into satellite orbit independently. With internal fuel only, the VF-1 can launch itself to the edge of space (over 100km altitude) but that consumes most of its onboard fuel, leaving it needing recovery and refueling, and takes a fair bit of time. The atmospheric escape booster system has its own engines and fuel supply. Using one enables the VF-1 to reach higher altitudes than it ordinarily could, faster, and without the use of its internally-carried fuel supply so it will still have fuel to maneuver once it reaches space. Macross Chronicle also asserts that the boosters are reusable SSTO units that are able to return to base autonomously after being detached from the Valkyrie.