Seto Kaiba

Existing material does indicate that he did, for a time, live as a miclone. He returned to his giant size and reactivated his role-specific enhancements for fear that he would lose the information stored in his memories.

Depends on your definition of "utterly ruinous". The Earth Unification Government was already spending a huge percentage of the entire planet's GDP on a military build-up to resist a potential alien invasion. Macross Chronicle and other official media generally do not acknowledge the F-14 Tomcat's circumstances in any way other than to mention they were used by the UN Forces during the Unification Wars and that they had been received upgrades/updates based on OTM. This lack of detail can probably be chalked up to the F-14's relatively minor role in Macross Zero. One article published in Great Mechanics DX does note that there would have to be some divergence from the real world timeline for F-14s to still be in service in 2008, but goes no further than that. For its part, Variable Fighter Master File's unofficial/non-canonical history offers the explanation that the Earth UN Forces officially put the brakes on plans to retire the F-14 sometime in July 2001. The decision was apparently driven by difficulties in procuring sufficient quantities of the newly introduced F/A-18E/F Super Hornet and the Navy variant of the new F203 Dragon II (an unofficial variant exclusive to Master File). A modernization plan for the F-14 was launched to keep the fighters viable, and in 2002 this plan intersected with the new VF Development Plan and led to "dozens" of mothballed F-14s being restored and reactivated for duty with OTM improvements for field testing as part of early VF-0 development.

Kawamori's Design Works book mentions the F203 Dragon II bears a resemblance to the F-15... but I don't think I've ever seen it said that it was supposed to BE a F-15 originally. That's a common misconception... or perhaps it would be fairer to call it an oversimplification. Macross was not originally a parody. Both the initial pitch Genocidas and the later Battle City Megaroad series concept were conceived and developed as serious sci-fi dramas in a similar style to 1979's sleeper hit Mobile Suit Gundam. After Artmic (under the name Wiz Corp.) bought in as sponsor, Artmic insisted on changing the direction of Battle City Megaroad from the serious space opera Kawamori et al. wanted to make to a Gundam parody series. Once the two companies had a falling out and Studio Nue found a new sponsor in the Big West Advertising Co., the series changed back from a Gundam parody to a serious drama. Studio Nue does credit a specific 1980 film as having significantly changed the direction of the project... but it's not The Final Countdown. It was another, rather more famous, film that came out in Japan a few days earlier: Star Wars: the Empire Strikes Back. That film, and specifically the Imperial AT-ST walker, was what ultimately spelled doom for the initial Genocidas concept because many of the mechanical designs for Genocidas were reverse-jointed walkers. Other designs from Genocidas, including the Flight Suit which was to evolve into the Breast Fighter and then the Valkyrie, were carried forward into the next series concept. The F-14 was not the inspiration for the VF-1.

We can rule that out with a fair degree of confidence because we have Kawamori's draft designs going back to early 1980. As I said, it's largely a coincidence that the VF-1 ended up looking like an F-14. The design of the VF-1 Valkyrie originated from a transformable powered suit design that Kawamori drew for a series pitch titled Genocidas that also originated the GERWALK concept. It was a big, bulky, ~4m tall powered suit which could transform into a not-at-all realistic fighter mode vaguely reminiscent of the Martin Marietta X-24B. A little over a year later in March-April 1981, the design had evolved into the Breast Fighter: a giant robot with the VF-1J's visor and a body plan largely resembling the final VF-1's but retaining the Gundam-esque aesthetic. Its transformation resembled the final VF-1's as well, but the actual shape of it was more in line with the earlier Genocidas draft and bears a fairly strong resemblance to the (much later) Zeta Gundam Wave Rider. Later that year, the Breast Fighter design was revisited and reworked into a less sci-fi aesthetic while retaining much of the Breast Fighter's design and transformation, producing a fighter that looked a lot like a miniature F-14... though with aspects explicitly noted to be drawn from other aircraft like the F-15, Su-27, and BAE Hawk. You can see this design progression in the first section of Kawamori's Macross Design Works book. He did probably get the Jolly Rogers-inspired paintjob for the VF-1S from The Final Countdown, but the F-14-like design is mostly a coincidence of its development from the earlier designs that already set a similar pattern. (The Genocidas designs in particular predate the release of The Final Countdown in Japan.) His enthusiasm for military aviation is a well-noted matter of record. That second one... the Tomcats and other old aircraft were hauled out of mothballs and upgraded or prevented from being retired and upgraded to make up for the shortfalls in other areas due to losses and the like in the Unification Wars.

Emigrant fleets are, by their very nature, mobile things... it's only natural that one emigrant fleet wouldn't necessarily know the exact positions of every other emigrant fleet when they mostly only trade with the planets and fleets closest to them. They are retirees... their appearance in Absolute Live!!!!!! is Max and Exsedol after they got bored in retirement and took another gig to have something to allay their boredom. Like how a lot of retired cops and career soldiers take corporate security jobs because the working conditions are vaguely similar. The PMCs in Macross seem to hire a lot of retired NUNS officers... occasionally even ones who received bad conduct discharges (like Ozma). ... we see exactly three, all of whom are the crew of the same old Monster Destroid. The presence of three former crewmates who decided to retire together hardly makes the fleet a "Space Florida"... no matter how much Basara's antics could fall under the umbrella of "Florida Man". After the First Space War, the New UN Forces got into the practice of selling off disarmed military equipment to civilians for its secondary utility in things like construction work. That practice caught on enough for a market for VFs as pleasure and sporting craft developed, followed by actual sports for them.

So... I found an interesting detail while I was fact-checking my answer for this other thread: A lot of you are probably familiar with how many of the companies mentioned in the lore for the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross series are trademark-safe bland names for various real world companies. Chrauler for Chrysler, Viggers for Vickers, Mauler for Mauser, Centinental for Continental, and so on. It seems that the authors of Variable Fighter Master File decided to come up with an alternate explanation for Stonewell and Bellcom. Stonewell was originally a bland name version of Rockwell International, the now-defunct firm that codeveloped the space shuttle orbiter and owned North American Aviation. Bellcom was originally a bland name version of the Bell Aerospace division (now Bell Textron). Variable Fighter Master File: VF-0 Phoenix, however, came up with a new explanation for both that makes the VF-1 somewhat more multinational. In its version of events: Stonewell is not Rockwell International, it's a OTM-focused joint venture by Lockheed Martin and Daimler-Chrysler Aerospace AG (now Airbus Defense and Space GmbH). Bellcom is not Bell Textron, it's an OTM-focused joint venture by Boeing, Construcciones Aeronáuticas SA (now Airbus Defense and Space GmbH), and Marconi Electronic Systems (now BAE Systems). They also mention in passing another company besides Pratt & Whitney, Rolls-Royce, and the fictitious Shinnakasu Heavy Industries who participated in the development of the first thermonuclear reaction turbine engines: EuroJet Turbo GmbH and BAE Systems.

's more like the attempt to develop the "Breast Fighter" from the earlier Genocidas series concept into a robot that transformed into a plausible-looking fighter ended up looking like the F-14 by coincidence. Just the VF-0, actually. One detail many fans get wrong is to assume that because the VF-0 has a lower design number than the VF-1 that it was developed first, and that the VF-1 was developed from it. In fact, the VF-0 was developed from the Stonewell and Bellcom design proposal for the VF-1 Valkyrie ("Plan E303") and its development, construction, and testing was carried out alongside that of the production-intent VF-1 Valkyrie. The VF-0 is, in practical terms, a technology demonstrator and development mule for the VF-1 program. Not much is said in official media about the VF-0 having "inherited" the F-14 Experimental Systems Group. Shortly after the outbreak of the Unification Wars, the Earth Unification Government began experimenting with applying technological advancements derived from OTM to conventional weapons. A handful of all-new weapons built around OTM (such as the F203 Dragon II) were rushed into service, while a number of older designs including the US Navy's Grumman F-14 received OTM-based upgrades and retrofits to extend the usefulness of those designs as the conflicts dragged on and the UN Forces struggled with the attrition of many simultaneous conflicts. The group that worked on the OTM-based improvements for the F-14 was pulled into the work on the VF-0, presumably due to their experience in applying OTM to conventional systems. It's only in the unofficial material in Master File that there is a concrete connection between the F-14 itself and the VF-0. In the development history laid out in the Variable Fighter Master File: VF-0 Phoenix book, the VF-0 was also preceded by the Plan E303 design for the VF-1 but had a number of intermediate steps between that and the recognizable VF-0 from Macross Zero that involved progressively adapting the F-14's design to test various features. The starting point being the UN Forces version of the US Navy's F-14 which had received some degree of enhancement derived from OTM. From there, it progressed to a single-seater stealth version of the F-14 one could say is loosely based on the Grumman plans for the Super Tomcat 21 which the book calls the Advanced Tomcat and a "F-14X" that incorporated a rudimentary variable system for test purposes, before arriving at the earliest version of a true VF-0 in late 2005. (That prototype, which the book calls YVF-X-0, is said to have been a converted F-14 Advanced Tomcat, which many later VF-0s were constructed as a VF-0s.) To summarize the above... they didn't. Once the initial Variable Fighter development plan was approved, the existing design that most closely resembled Stonewell and Bellcom's Plan E303 was Grumman's F-14. That the F-14 was also one of the older aircraft models selected for improvement and a return to frontline service during the Unification Wars is more or less a coincidence.

There is... kind of. Macross 7: the Galaxy is Calling Me! was initially released as a short film alongside Macross Plus: Movie Edition. Macross 7 wasn't exactly a series that would lend itself well to a compilation film format considering how much of a slow burn the first half of the story was.

It's not just Bogue's... all of Delta Flight's VF-31AX Kairos Pluses have the same container. Xaos seems to have decided to go all-in on firepower during the retrofit, so even Chuck's aircraft was given the same weapons-only container instead of his usual radome continer. Considering its size, and the overall economized nature of the VF-31, it's probably just a regular particle beam gun rather than the more powerful heavy quantum beam guns that the YF-29 uses. Probably not a particularly powerful one either, given that it's about the same size as the coaxial beam guns on the VF-31's monitor turret (head). Most of the film - and, really, most of Macross Delta as a whole - is callbacks to previous Macross titles. It's basically a madlib of plot points from previous stories. It's almost a whole plot reference from Macross VF-X2, with the secret organization inside the New UN Forces and New UN Gov't conspiring to oust the current leadership using a secret bleeding-edge Battle-class ship and a bunch of unmanned fighters. Heimdall's Siren Delta System and the virtual idols it produces are one massive reference to the Sharon Apple system and the events of Macross Plus, where Sharon wielded the Ghost X-9 (and in the game edition, the Neo Glaug) against the protagonists. Max, Exsedol, and Mirage's whole thing is a protracted series of callbacks to Macross 7. For instance, Max and Exsedol's whole situation is just their roles from Macross 7, Mirage is standing in for Mylene for Max disapproving of her choice to become a pilot, and the whole "Max leaves someone else in command of his ship so he can sortie in a blue state-of-the-art VF for the final battle" is taken direct from the last episode of Macross 7. Freyja's whole ill girl schtick with the "I have to sing even if it kills me" thing is the exact same plot from Macross Frontier: the Wings of Farewell but handled much less well. The VF-31AX is a low-rent YF-29 (even in-story), and the Sv-303 is more or less just the Ghost X-9 and Neo Glaug merged into one aircraft.

While I agree that there is a subset of the fandom that'll can be counted upon to consistently buy any new book/mook/magazine/etc. that comes out, I do think we're in something of a publishing dry spell right now. Not for lack of publishers interested in the property or lack of an audience... but for lack of anything new to write about. The Macross Delta TV series and its two movies are such painfully threadbare stories that they didn't leave the publishers much to work with. It ticked the obligatory licensing checkboxes of a light novel version and a few short manga titles, but it doesn't seem to have achieved the level of interest that earned its predecessor an ONA, 14 short stories, a spinoff light novel series, four drama CDs, multiple video games, a TCG, and all the accompanying coverage. There's only so much publishers can do to milk something worth writing about out of shows from 10+ years ago. What little we've gotten from the latest series has not been very substantial either.

They could have. I get the feeling they opted to not recast Ernest Johnson out of respect for Ishizuka-san's passing since he was a relatively minor character. Whether or not a character gets recast after their voice actor either retires or passes away often depends on how important the character was in the story, and the personal inclination of the showrunner and/or production committee. Some voice actors working on recurring roles in long-running properties will even handpick and train a successor if they're getting up in years or their health is failing, as Yasuo Yamada did when he trained Kanichi Kurita to step into his shoes as the titular thief in Lupin III. To a lot of us, it's kind of a copout for a weak love triangle in the main series. IMO, it loses a certain je ne sais quoi given that only a short while earlier he'd been energetically telling them how much they suck. (And slightly worse, related publications tend to bear his assessment out... even the new Master File book sort of makes it clear our protagonists didn't really win this one, the film's antagonists just tripped at the finish line.) Well, you see... when a mommy plot hole and a daddy plot hole love each other very much the Variable Stork comes down and drops off a bundle of "the ending is too depressing, lighten it up" from the production committee. It's a really stupid and unnecessary plot point... one that'll probably get swept under the rug in future works. There's really no reason to doubt him. The extra features suggest this is TV Max we're looking at, which means he was born in 1993 and therefore is either 74 or 75 at the time the movie is set in October 2068. Mandatory retirement for commissioned officers is typically around 62-64 in real militaries, with flag officers sometimes being allowed deferments to at most 68. Max was likely pushed into a mandatory retirement sometime after the events of Macross Frontier.* The NUNS didn't beg him to come back. He took a do-nothing "I'm bored in retirement" job with the mega-conglomerate Xaos to head up their PMC division's branch office on the remote planet Listania in the Brisingr globular cluster. That position made him the captain of the Macross Gigasion the same way Ernest Johnson's post as head of the Ragna branch made him captain of the Macross Elysion. * The Macross Frontier: the Wings of Farewell novelization depicts Max as still being in command of the 37th Large-Scale Long-Distance Emigrant Fleet and its flagship Battle 7 in September 2059, at which point he would have been 64 or 65. Dunno. The last time Battle 7 put in an appearance, it was in the novelization of Macross Frontier: the Wings of Farewell when it was part of the combined rescue fleet that came to assist the Frontier fleet in the final battle of the story in September 2059. Their kids are old enough to have kids, and a few of them old enough to potentially have grandkids at the time Macross Delta: Absolute Live!!!!!! is set. Komilia Maria from the original Macross series is 57. (She also had two video game appearances in the Macross II timeline: Macross 2036 and Macross: Eternal Love Song. Her age is different in that timeline.) Miracle is 51. Muse and Therese are 46. Therese is alleged to have appeared in Macross VF-X2 under the paper thin alias "Mariafokina Barnrose". Emilia from the Macross 7 movie is 44. Miranda is 42 (and Mirage is supposedly her daughter). Mylene is 37.

None that I can recall.

By test aircraft standards, it's a pretty huge number... but then most test aircraft aren't meant to be used by more than one or two branches of one nation's armed forces. The VF-0 may have ended up with more aircraft than intended due to the influence of different branches of the UN Forces. The existence of the delta wing single-seat VF-0C is said to be to satisfy requests from the UN Marine Corps.

Sort of. Unlike the Anti-Unification Alliance's SV-51, the VF-0 was not developed with live combat in mind. It was, in development terms, a "mule" vehicle built out of available "off-the-shelf" and/or custom fabricated prototype parts intended to evaluate technologies during the course of development on an actual vehicle. Master File alleges that there were several VF-0 phases that started out as modified F-14s and gradually developed into the completed craft we saw in Macross Zero. The completed VF-0s we saw in Macross Zero were pressed into combat service after the "formal" end of the Unification Wars in 2007 to deal with Anti-Unification Alliance remnants, but only a few dozen were ever built* and were mostly used for model conversion training. Master File alleges that several VF-0s at Grand Cannon III also fought off an attack by the remains of the Anti-Unification Alliance, and Macross the First also depicts several units from the Graf Zeppelin II being used to defend South Ataria Island from a suicide attack by the Alliance in late 2008. Master File offers up a table of VF-0s produced for the UN Forces that accounts for slightly more aircraft than the official sources mention (though the official numbers are said to be approximations), indicating that most VF-0s were assigned to three places: either the carrier CVN-99 Asuka II seen in Macross Zero, her sister ship CVN-100 Graf Zeppelin II seen in the manga Macross the First as part of South Ataria's defenses at the end of 2008, and UN Forces HQ in Alaska. Small numbers of VF-0s were also sent to Grand Cannon III in Africa and the SLV-111 Daedalus, and a few ended up stationed aboard the Macross and one ended up on HMS Ark Royal. * Official sources suggest 24 VF-0A, 6 VF-0B, 6 VF-0C, 18 VF-0D, and 4 VF-0S for a total of 58 VF-0s built.

Overspecialization is inherently limiting, yeah. Perhaps the clearest demonstration of that fact of life in Macross can be found in the design of the Sv-262 Draken III. The Kingdom of the Wind's Aerial Knights went all-in on a high-performance atmospheric dogfighter to fit their organization's professional ethos and then ran into a number of problems because their new main fighters lacked the endurance for protracted space engagements despite space being their enemy's favored operating environment and could only engage at visual ranges against an enemy who had vastly superior numbers, training, and far more experience. As soon as Heinz and his fold songs are out of the picture, we see the Aerial Knights in their shiny new Drakens getting bodied by local NUNS troops using twenty year old previous-gen fighters.

An understandable reason to drool. By definition, all VF-0s are proof-of-concept models. They were built to evaluate the Variable Fighter concept and various technologies being developed for the VF-1. The "Space Proving Wing" markings probably mean that specific aircraft was one of the few outfitted for space operations... probably equipped with either the QF-3000E Ghost's FF-1999 initial type thermonuclear reaction engine or an early trial production version of the VF-1's FF-2001 thermonuclear reaction engine. Variable Fighter Master File: VF-0 Phoenix doesn't feature that Space Proving Wing, but offers a broadly analogous unit in the 55th Development Experimental Wing Orbital Weapon Test Squadron AKA the SVX-12 "Space Fighters". That unit used a handful of VF-0's retrofitted with the Ghost's FF-1999 engine to carry out testing of the VF-0 and Variable Fighters overall in orbital space. The UN Spacy was established in March 2003. The crash of the ship that would become the SDF-1 occurred in July 1999. You'll see it basically everywhere in Macross Zero, which is set in July 2008.

Yes, he knows what he's talking about. The dreaded "H-bomb" that dominated Cold War-era fears of nuclear world war and a nuclear holocaust is a nuclear bomb that uses thermonuclear fusion as its primary destructive force. Mind you, you weren't entirely incorrect about it being a more efficient use of fission. Thermonuclear fusion bombs are a two-stage weapon that uses a small nuclear fission bomb as a means to create the super-high temperatures and pressures needed to kick off an uncontrolled fusion reaction in the hydrogen stored in the primary warhead. It was the only way to achieve a significant release of fusion energy at the time. Some of the test apparatus that were developed for those experiments were further developed into the technologies used in this breakthrough experiment in fusion energy generation. Of course, because those thermonuclear fusion bombs use a nuclear fission bomb as a trigger, they still release dangerous radioactive fallout despite the primary product of fusion being intense heat. The "holy grail" of nuclear weapons research is a "pure" thermonuclear fusion weapon that does not require a fission bomb to trigger that explosive release of fusion energy and thus would be a "clean" nuclear weapon that produced minimal or no long-term radiation. These, of course, currently exist only in fiction.* The first full-scale test was the "Ivy Mike" experiment in 1952. * In Macross, these pure thermonuclear fusion weapons were able to be realized due to Overtechnology and are called thermonuclear reaction weapons. Rather than a fission bomb, they use the intense artificial gravity to create an uncontrolled thermonuclear reaction in hydrogen.

As a relevant aside to the above, one of the reasons that the VF-31AX Kairos Plus spec in Master File is that its baseline performance is significantly lower than the Siegfried's and the impact that has on the boosted performance. Essentially, the Kairos Plus may be 275kg lighter but it's working with 12.26% less output than the unboosted Siegfried. In order to match the Siegfried's boosted performance, never mind exceed it, the output of the Fold Wave System would have to almost double from +15% to +26.85%. Even then, because Xaos's Fold Wave System cannot self-activate, the end result is a fighter that's measurably worse than the Siegfried the vast majority of the time.

One thing to remember is that all engines are not created equal... and the engines are a significant portion of the aircraft's mass. True, the VF-27 has four engines but each of those engines is individually a fair bit less powerful than one of the detuned YF-30 engines used in the VF-31 Siegfried. It has about 47% more thrust to work with than the unboosted VF-31 Siegfried, but it also weighs about 42% more because of those extra engines. The end result is the VF-27 has a thrust-to-weight ratio of about 46.49335 while the VF-31 Siegfried is only slightly lower at 44.854 without its Fold Wave System active. That's not even a 4% difference. With its Fold Wave System on and operating, its output increases 15%. That might not sound like a lot, but at the baseline level we're talking about here that increases the total combined thrust of the engines by 562kN. That's more than the maximum output of a VF-19A's FF-2200 thermonuclear reaction burst turbine, and pushes the output of the individual FF-3001/FC2 engines to slightly over the tuning used on the YF-30 (2,156kN vs 2,110kN). That increase puts the VF-31 Siegfried's T/W ratio at 51.582, 10.9% higher than the VF-27's. It's got a better ISC than the VF-27 does too, rated for 29.5G rather than 27.5G, though it seems a safe bet there are also some limiters in place to protect the pilot in normal operation and the ISC is likely boosted by the Fold Wave System as well. Its gunpod may lack the punch of the VF-27's massive one that requires 3+ engines to operate, but it has a lot more operational versatility than the VF-27 which is almost exclusively a dogfighter.

Nope. The first one to get them was the YF-24. One of the three original YF-24 prototypes was lost due to a linear actuator malfunction during testing that caused a crash.

Yes, it was. One of the signature technological advancements of the 5th Generation Valkyries was the adoption of a new form of non-contact linear actuator that replaced many of the small and comparatively fragile electromechanical and electromagnetic rotary actuators in the transformation system. Reducing the number of moving parts and having them not actually be in physical contact with each other during the transformation made the transformation process faster and more reliable and made the Battroid itself more durable.

Probably Masahiro Chiba, Macross's go-to man for specs and technical writeups. No, that's Masahiro Chiba. He's been with the franchise from a very early point, to the extent that he's one of the few staffers to have an actual named character modeled on him in a Macross series. (Macross 7's Dr. Gadget M. Chiba.) No, but this is currently the ONLY source that has presented any kind of specs for the VF-31AX Kairos Plus. Almost certainly not. The main problem with these specs is that it doesn't at all align with what's said about the VF-31AX anywhere else. When they're introduced in Macross Delta: Absolute Live!!!!!!, the VF-31AX Kairos Plus is presented as an improved version of Xaos's custom VF-31 Siegfried that Delta Flight had been flying up to that point. Official publications haven't been clear or consistent about whether they were stock VF-31As that were retrofitted with new and salvaged parts from the Siegfrieds or Siegfrieds repaired with new and spare parts from the stock VF-31A, but the one thing they all agree on is that this new model is supposed to outperform the VF-31 Siegfried and the Sv-262 Draken III and rival the unmanned Sv-303 in mobility. In one interview, Kawamori claimed that its performance was not hugely different from that of the YF-29. Where we run into problems is that these stats - the ONLY stats we've seen for the VF-31AX thus far - don't support any of that. Well, except for the notion that the Kairos Plus is a stock VF-31A Kairos retrofitted with salvaged Siegfried parts. Based on these stats, its performance without the Fold Wave System active is no different from the stock VF-31A (and therefore a decent bit below the VF-31 Siegfried or Sv-262, never mind the Sv-303 that Worf'd both with comical ease). This becomes slightly more problematic in that the Master File for the VF-31 Siegfried established that Xaos's version of the Fold Wave System is a good deal less powerful than the YF-29's and cannot be activated at will the way the YF-29 Fold Wave System can because it's dependent on a powerful external bio-fold wave source (e.g. Freyja or Mikumo). By any objective standard, it looks like a downgrade instead of the upgrade the film presents it as. It's not a marketing buzzword, it's a classification system that was proposed by a historian looking at the evolution of jet fighter technology up to 1990 and subsequently adopted and finessed by various government agencies. You are correct that it's not based on raw performance... it's based on significant advances in technology and the corresponding shifts in design and strategic priorities. The same is true for the New UN Forces classifications of Variable Fighters into Generations. The ones that got the most attention are, of course, the ones that were introduced after the idea of dividing fighters up into generations became popularized in the 90's... the 4th Generation Advanced Variable Fighters (VF-19, VF-22, VF-171) in Macross Plus and Macross 7 and the 5th Generation in Macross Frontier and beyond. As in the real world, this tends to correspond to major development programs that defined the requirements for that generation's designs. ... we have notes on that. Extensive notes. The short version is that the 1st Generation are, of course, the initial designs for Variable Fighters like the VF-1 and VF-X-2, as well as proof-of-concept aircraft like the VF-0 and the Sv-51 and Sv-52. The 2nd Generation starts with the Earth UN Government's plans for the VF-1's successor with the competing VF-X-3 and VF-X-4 that were in early testing during the First Space War and a number of designs developed after the war ended with a focus on small, often specialized, Variable Fighters designed for good cost-performance in early emigrant fleets. The 3rd Generation is marked by Project Nova, the design competition between the VF-11 and VF-14 to select the VF-4 and VF-5000's successor, as well as efforts to diversify the Variable concept into the realms of dedicated Attackers and Bombers. Oh, it's more than that. Project Super Nova set down the requirements for a 4th Generation Variable Fighter as a high-performance stealth-focused Valkyrie able to infiltrate behind enemy lines to strike command centers/ships to fatally disorient enemy forces without the need for total destruction. This was especially important because the New UN Forces had begun to have to consider the use of Valkyries against Human threats on top of rogue Zentradi forces. The new technologies that defined that generation were the thermonuclear reaction burst turbine engines that enabled VFs to have efficient SSTO capability and more surplus generator output for defense, the ARIEL airframe control AI, the 3rd Generation active stealth technology, independent fold capability via native support for fold boosters, and pin-point barrier systems for defense. More than that, 5th Generation VFs are defined by Project Evolution and the New UN Forces demand for a next-generation VF that could address the controllability issues of their failed 4th Generation designs (the VF-19 and VF-22) while also achieving performance able to rival or exceed the Vajra's in anticipation of further conflicts with them. The creation of Inertia Store Converter technology was a keystone technology of that generation, but its other hallmarks include the EX-Gear control suite, the Stage II thermonuclear reaction turbine engine, ARIEL II airframe control AI, linear actuator transformation system, integrated sensors, and new armor materials. For its part, the VF-171 Nightmare Plus is a 4th Generation Variable Fighter. It was developed as a replacement for the failed VF-19 and VF-22 as a less extreme design prioritizing ease of control and handling over red raw performance, but nevertheless included all of the same technological advancements used in those initial 4th Generation models. The Frontier fleet's VF-171EX and VF-171-IIIF could be considered 4.5th Generation designs. The 4th Generation VF-171 was improved with certain technologies developed for the 5th Generation VF-25 like the integrated radar system, EX-Gear cockpit, and its new ablative anti-beam coating formulation. The didn't adopt the ISC or other technologies like the ARIEL II avionics, Stage II engines, or linear actuators for transformation. That's where we run into problems/conflicts... since the official materials classified several fighters with those systems including the Siegfrieds as 5th Generation still. The YF-29 and YF-30 were also developed in parallel with the VF-25 and other 5th Generation VFs, and the VF-31 Siegfreid and VF-31AX Kairos Plus are modified 5th Generation VFs. No, we know that's not the case for several reasons. First, the production VF-31 Kairos explicitly does not have a Fold Wave System. The Fold Wave System is what produces the synergistic effect between fold waves and various key systems on the Valkyrie that provide that performance improvement and, on the YF-29, allow the craft to draw energy directly from higher dimensional space. Second, fold carbon can't be used in a Fold Wave System. The reason that a technology as amazingly useful as the Fold Wave System is so rare is because manufacturing one takes incredibly rare materials that can't be synthesized (yet). Specifically, it needs very large pieces of extremely high-purity fold quartz. Something that generally isn't found outside of the bodies of Vajra Queens or rarely in certain Protoculture ruins. Fold quartz could be described as a very high purity form of fold carbon that's beyond Humanity's current ability to manufacture, which creates much more powerful fold waves that transcend dimensional faults and time differentials. Fold carbon is an essential material in any overtechnology that manipulates gravity or higher dimensional spacetime, and is used in thermonuclear reactors, gravity control systems, fold navigation and communications systems, holographic projectors, and the like. Even the highest purity fold carbon is not up to the task of driving a Fold Wave System, so it wouldn't provide any performance improvement unless it was directly applied in place of a lower-purity fold carbon in a direct application (e.g. a reactor's Gravity and Inertia Control system). Third and lastly, the VF-31A Kairos is explicitly officially described as 5th Generation like the VF-24, VF-25, VF-27, YF-29, and YF-30. Even the Siegfried custom version is described as being "5.5th Generation" rather than 6th, officially.

The Tempest was the joint British-Italian 6th Gen fighter program that merged with Japan's 6th Gen fighter program to form the Global Air Combat Programme earlier this year. Because the merger of those programs happened just a few months ago, they haven't announced an actual name for the new fighter they're codeveloping. Sort of. The 2nd Generation airframe control AI "ARIEL" is not a mere support system like the deep learning AI planned for the BAE Tempest... like the 1st Generation AI "ANGIRAS", it's the main flight control system and supervisory controller for all onboard systems. The Ghosts, for their part, are more or less able to fight and fly autonomously. BAE's plan is more like the Squire bits used by the Valkyrie II in Macross II... with the "mothership" exercising direct control over the unmanned units accompanying it.

Yup... owing, I suspect, to popular fiction entirely too many people erroneously believe that a nuclear reactor is a nuclear bomb in potentia just waiting for an excuse to go off like in the movie Aliens. The reality is so much more mundane. A fission reactor's a kettle heating on a pile of hot rocks and the thing you're most in danger of it if breaks down is a steam explosion that exposes those hot rocks to the outside world. A fusion reactor is like a diesel engine, requiring the injection of fuel into the reaction chamber and a compressive force to trigger the reaction... and if you shut off the fuel flow or decouple power to the system providing the fuel compression, the whole thing stops almost immediately.

It is based on a real-world aircraft... but not that one. The VF-31's development history is one long whole plot reference to Japan's effort to domestically develop and produce its own 5th Generation stealth fighter in the Mitsubishi ATD-X (later known as the X-2 Shinshin). Like Japan and the F-22, the Brisingr Alliance wasn't able to import the full spec VF-24 and opted to develop their own next-generation fighter as an economic self-stimulus and with an eye towards future export sales to allied governments. The prototype, then designated ATD-X, was being prepared for the first round of test flights at the time Macross Delta premiered in April 2016. The idea to present the VF-31AX as a 6th Generation fighter is probably inspired by what happened afterwards. When the ATD-X's test flights were done, Japan's government decided that they needed outside help after all, resulting in plans to pass on producing a 5th Generation fighter in favor of jumping into development of a 6th Generation one... launching the Mitsubishi F-X program.