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SebastianP

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Everything posted by SebastianP

  1. SebastianP
    It's not just cost. Compare VFs to cars. The VF-1 is like a rally car. It's rugged, it's durable, it's reasonably fast, and if you flip it over you'll probably survive. A high-end VF is like a Ferrari or McLaren - four times the engine power, and half a ton of electronics just to keep the car going where you want it, and even *that*s not enough if you drive stupidly. And if you manage to crash it despite the safety measures, chances are not only is your car totalled, but so are you. If you stick a noob driver in a McLaren F1, he'll most likely break the speed limit before he figures out which way he's going, and then break his gearbox because he forgot to shift up from first, or he'll smash into something at high speed because he didn't brake in time. The equivalent noob mistakes in a YF-19 would be going supersonic on the runway and collapsing the landing gear; or getting off the runway, accelerating too fast, and reaching orbital velocity in the lower atmosphere, at which point the aircraft burns up from the friction. A VF-25 or VF-31 would be more like a McLaren P1 - you wouldn't break the gearbox, because it's a semi-automatic; you might still smash into something because the car doesn't steer for you. Likewise, you probably wouldn't go supersonic on the runway because intelligent throttle governors, and rather than going too fast in the lower atmosphere, you risk going to space unintentionally. Or into the ground, the plane can't keep you from being suicidal.
  2. SebastianP
    The visible crystal bits from the top are also missing, they're shaded so they almost look like missile ports on the VF-31A. They're certainly not sparkly crystals at any rate. As for the missing hardpoints, I'm thinking that someone forgot to draw them in the line art, then the 3D model was made without them, then the model kits were made using the 3D model as a reference, and so none of them have any extra hardpoints. Stupid, but that sort of thing happens.
  3. SebastianP
    Mine is paid for, as is shipping. Using the slow option this time, usually I wait until I have enough kits that EMS is cheaper than SAL, but my budget won't allow that many kits for a while.
  4. SebastianP
    So are mine, but the kits themselves don't take that much skill. It's not like you need to fully paint the whole thing to make it look decent, unlike a Hasegawa kit. You can make it look better with some paint, true - you can also make it look a lot worse, and you don't strictly need it anyway. The only really bad part is usually the decals or stickers, which is like a choice between plague or cholera, due Bandai being cheap bastards. And I can get all of Delta Squad (or at least the current membership ) for the price of one DX toy...
  5. SebastianP
    Curiously, my research into the matter suggests the opposite. The hardpoints have been marked out in basically every source as three small rectangular recesses in a line with a panel line around them, looking kind of like the slots where the hardpoints on the DX toys connect. On the Siegfried, these are visible in the actual show, on the 1/72 Bandai kit, on the 1/144 Tomytec kit, and the non-scale MechaColle kit. All of them show one hardpoint on the arm shield, and one on the outer wing... on the Siegfried. (Curiously, the DX Chogokin toy prototypes does not even have panel lines in those locations...) For the Kairos, we have line art of the underside, which shows a smooth outer wing. And the Tomytec kit, which shows another smooth outer wing. I haven't started going through the footage of the VF-31 from the show, but I don't think I'll find any evidence for any outer wing hardpoints there either... Edit: Here's one from the actual show too, the only time I think we actually see the underside of the outer wing of the plane in the whole show to date:
  6. SebastianP
    Pretty sure that "overboost" has been factored in with previous VF specifications, given what Seto Kaiba wrote above about the listed thrust plus 15% being in line with the listed thrust of the YF-30, which uses the same engines. It just wasn't written out like this before. The advancement of the VF-31 is probably focused in areas other than raw thrust-to-weight or G loading, like the Modular Container subsystem, sensor tech, and finally getting landing gear that aren't more than half way between the center of gravity and the tail end of the plane (something that's pretty much always bugged me about the VFs.) And at a guess, the reason a lot of things aren't mentioned as being "advanced" versions when their predecessors were, is that by now the old versions - 8+ years old at this point - are no longer "advanced", they're standard. What used to be "advanced energy conversion armor" eight years ago is now just "regular energy conversion armor", with "advanced" being reserved for something that's really on the bleeding edge right now. Oh, by the way I'm looking at the model kit instructions, and it looks like the Siegfried has two hardpoints under each wing - on is on the arm shield units, and the other is on the outer wing section. They're pretty clearly visible in the paint guide for the plane, and have their own warning stencils. They're not functional on the model, then again we've never seen the actual plane carry anything under its wings so far in the anime, so it's not like they need to be functional for anime accuracy or anything.
  7. SebastianP
    It's written スーリヤ・エアロスペース, Shinsei is written with the kanji for "Nova", at least according to Wikipedia. If you go to the Japanese Wikipedia and look up the VF-19 or VF-25, and let it auto-translate for you, it'll tell you both aircraft were built by "Nova Industries".
  8. SebastianP
    If you look at both the toy and the official 3D renders of the Chronos, you can see a crystal insert in the edge of the auxiliary intake on the "chest" section. They're smaller and they're completely streamlined as opposed to free standing like on the Durandal, but they're there.
  9. SebastianP
    Those dark hexagons to either side of the head are where the fold quartz inserts go on the Siegfried version, and as you can see they don't really look like crystal on this Kairos. Here's Mirage's machine, you can see the difference in that area pretty clearly. Edit: Huh, I never noticed you can actually read the Aether's name on the fin of the VF-31A. Not too surprising I suppose.
  10. SebastianP
    I got bored with machine translating that PDF and posting my findings in the Tech thread, so I went over the instruction booklet instead. The runners are weird, there are VF-31J -specific bits on runners A, B, D, E and F, and aside from the A bits, they don't look like they were designed with dummying them out in mind. I'm predicting that they might have to give us an extra multi-color runner for each of the other versions, and leave most of the J bits in. Also, the multi-drones are molded as part of the ABS frame for the leg, so unless they decide that the A models have drones as well (and they shouldn't, given the blurb I was just translating) they'll need to supply some replacement ABS parts on top of the outer wing panels and whatever parts are needed for the A-version head if they intend to give us one of those. Which they probably won't, because when has Bandai ever supplied Macross Cannon Fodder kits? Leave the pilot out? Put the female figure in the front? Put head of the female figure on the male figure? Sculpt a new head? Use a head from a different figure? The possibilities are still endless.
  11. SebastianP
    I'm thinking that the C/E/F/J/S models are *all* Chaos Valkyrie Works redesigns, based on the blurb at the top of the page about the VF-31 Siegfried. It mentions that the Siegfried was developed for Delta Squad from the VF-31A Kairos for supporting Walkure, and has several features to that end such as the forward swept wing for improved mobility, the "rare fold quartz" insert, the drone launchers, and specialized Multipurpose container units like the sound projection unit and an energy supply unit for the drones. Or at least that's what I can make out from the machine translation. The blurb under "Battroid" of course mentions the history behind the mode (needing it to fight 10 meter tall giants), and how the battroid mode can be used to penetrate into enemy ships like infantry. Also, the capabilities for battroids have improved with time, to the point where they can now use fold boosters to jump right into the enemy command centers. (This will be a thing to see - battroids defolding in the enemy base. Forget cloaking devices like the Frontier special forces EX-gears had, we foldin' now!) Another blurb says the forward swept wing was adopted in order to enhance the mobility at low speed in the atmosphere during Var suppression. Yet another says the fold quarts (FQ) is equipped only on Delta squad machines, and is used to amplify the fold waves of Walkure's songs to make them reach further, which is probably why they fly air shows over the concerts. (though standing around on the ground would probably work as well, but it wouldn't be as fun to watch. ) Edit: The rest of the text blocks appear to mostly be either general historical information about other fighters or the setting; or "look how great this model is" bits.
  12. SebastianP
    Thanks for the correction regarding the books, the site didn't really machine translate very well at all so it was hard to tell what was going on. I know one the things they apparently do *is* a Five Star Stories RPG, because one of the other "look what we make" pages literally says "Five Star Stories RPG". I've posted a request in a few places for pictures of the underside of the ARMD-L section of the DX Chogokin toy, because while I was looking for existing pictures I saw something that makes it look like that rear hangar the doujin is talking about is an open void with no back and no bottom on the actual ship, as that's where the Quarter's arm goes... Things would be so much easier for everyone if the ships were double their given size.
  13. SebastianP
    Model kit promos and manuals and whatnot for the Bandai 1/72 VF-31J kit is out. Here's their PDF promo brochure: http://bandai-hobby.net/site/character_macrossd/72_vf31j_spec01.pdf Since the PDF has selectable text, it's machine translatable, so I plugged in some of it into Google Translate. To wit: ? VF-31J [sPEC] Basic design: Surya Aerospace Renovated: Chaos Valkyrie Works Overall length: 19.31m overall width: 14.14m Height: 3.85m (Battroid time: 15.33m ? not included laser machine gun) Empty weight: 8,525kg (not including multi-purpose container equipment) Airframe design maximum load: 29.5G (At the time of ISC operation is protected from both high-G aircraft, crew and equipment) Engine: Shinsei Industry / P & W / RR Co., Ltd. FF-3001 / FC2 stage IIC heat nuclear turbine engine × 2 Space maximum thrust: 1,875KN + × 2 Fold Wave system during operation is up to about 15% Over boost is possible. High Mobility thrusters: P & W HMM-10A Maximum speed: M5.5 + (advanced 10,000m / However heat limit) Thrust Ribasa, three-dimensional deflection nozzle equipment The big gun pod is labeled "Howard Co., Ltd. LU-18A beam gun pod", and the explanation given is that previous VFs had physical gun pods, but engine output is now great enough to support a beam gun pod and so the VF-31 is now officially equipped with one. The knives are labeled "AK / VF-M11 Assault knife", with the explanation telling where it's stored (back edge of elbow shield), that it's made of super-alloy, and how the edge can be enhanced with the use of the pin-point barrier for extra force. The "Elbow Shield" caption states that they're made from Energy Conversion Armor, and can be improved with the pin point barrier, then something about functioning as "Uchitsubasa" which I don't know what it means. The "Arm rail gun (mini gun pod)" caption mentions how it's stored facing forwards in fighter mode and rotates around a fulcrum to face forward in Gerwalk or battroid, near as I can tell. The model kit instructions have bigger captions for some of the items, but the scans are small so I can't see the characters well enough to transcribe them.
  14. SebastianP
    Hobby Search has scans of the kit instructions up now. http://www.1999.co.jp/eng/10382560
  15. SebastianP
    Do any of you lucky(?) owners of the DX Chogokin Macross Quarter toy have it where you can get to it easily? I'm doing some research (and trying to prove a point or two) and I kind of need pictures of the underside of the ARMD-L (the carrier section) from various angles. I'm trying to work out how much space there is for a hangar inside the thing, and so far it's not looking promising...
  16. SebastianP
    Heat doesn't transmit that quickly through water, and steam that's free to expand cools quickly - sure, whatever was near the surface directly under the ship would get cooked, but even just a hundred meters away would probably be fine, if badly shaken. It's a far different thing from setting off a reaction warhead right up next to something that they don't know what it does and which has the potential to go off like Castle Bravo...
  17. SebastianP
    You do know that the physical dimensions of the Nimitz-class hangar bay are known, right? And that it's trivially easy to literally puzzle out how many aircraft of various types you can fit inside using aircraft silhouettes? The actual hangar capacity of a Nimitz-class carrier is less than 40 fighters - during the Tomcat era, less than *thirty*, according to the official US Navy briefing on fire safety I just downloaded. The rest of the air wing - two thirds of it! - had to be parked on deck or kept in the air, because there simply is no room for more aircraft below the flight deck. Someone doing a fan-made RPG book (I think it's an RPG book at least, the doujin circle in question publishes a lot of stuff for a game called Five Star Stories) about Macross ships took the known size of the ARMD-L, made some generous guesses as to the extent of the hangar, and worked out how many fighters would physically fit inside those spaces, just like people have been doing for real world carriers. The conclusion they came up with was that the forward hangar where most of the VFs are stored has a total capacity of *thirteen* VF-25s. The aft hangar, which is the double-height bit, has what looks like enough space for the König Monster, the three Queadlunn's, and seven standing VF-25 Battroids, if I'm reading the diagram they made correctly. Note that the hangar spaces can't be larger than depicted, because the ship isn't big enough. They also probably can't be made half-height to fit in more fighters, because the VF-25 is too tall in fighter mode; it's definitely too tall if it's got Super, Armored or Tornado parts on. Now you can say this is doujin material and not official, but the diagrams were made using the official dimensions, and they're really really generous given that there's no room for a power plant unless it's in the forward section in between the Destroid hatches, nor any propulsion system (I really need some pictures of the underside of the DX toy's ARMD-L to see if there are any engines on it...), and no matter how you slice it you cannot physically fit in more VF-25s than this inside the hull dimensions and hull shape that we've been given. And I'm fairly certain that the SMS isn't using the US Navy method of expanding your air wing and storing the planes on the deck, because we never actually see them do this - and the deck isn't much larger than a Nimitz-class hangar deck anyway, being somewhat shorter and only a little wider, and only for part of the way at that, so you couldn't park any awesome numbers of fighters there anyway. The same picture, by the by, also shows the kind of modifications that would be necessary to fit thirty-seven fighters inside a Northampton-class, and while it can physically be done, it basically wouldn't have any interior to speak of left. I'm not sure whether the authors did this for any other ships, such as the ARMDs or the Prometheus, since I don't have the book itself, just six pages of official thumbnail previews. If you still think the ARMD-L can carry 80 fighters, then show me how...
  18. SebastianP
    A very Macross solution. Step 1: Try singing to it. Step 2: Try singing harder. Step 3: If it obviously doesn't intend to listen, punch it in the face with an aircraft carrier. Step 3B: If getting close enough to punch it in the face with an aircraft carrier is proving difficult, shoot it with a Macross cannon first and charge through the hole you just made. *Then*, punch it in the face with an aircraft carrier. While singing. And if what I suspect and hope about the Elysion is true, we might end up getting to see something get punched in the face with an aircraft carrier that turns out to hide a Macross cannon inside of it, which would combine the two attacks really nicely.
  19. SebastianP
    Six, including "extras" in the more recent volumes (4, 5 and 6); chapter length has been dropping and the last two chapters were only 20 pages long. If they stay that short, we're looking at seven chapters in volume 7. Then again, Mikimoto may have recharged his enthusiasm during his absence and we might get another 80+ page monster or two to finish off the Tales of South Ataria arc before going back to Lap'Lamiz investigating human pornography on orders from Bodole Zer, which is where we left off... (Now we know why she was so interested in "making culture" with Kamjin in the final episodes of SDFM...)
  20. SebastianP
    Which decal are we talking about here? Because given that you're making a model of a war machine from an actual shooting war where every mech was basically rushed from the assembly line to the front line, a painting mistake on the order of flipping even the national insignia upside down would be totally plausible as an in-character mistake, and unlike in peacetime where there'd be an NCO loudly insisting it be repainted according to regulation immediately, during an ongoing battle any such person would basically be transferred to somewhere he couldn't do any more damage within the day, possibly by means of a boot applied to the posterior, while the machine would be sent into combat with whatever errors it came with. And who knows, if the pilot got back from his first mission without a scratch, he might insist on the mistake *not* being fixed, because it was lucky. That kind of stuff actually happened in WW2. It used to be that the judges at a certain modeling competition would frequently mark down models of WW2 allied aircraft that didn't have the invasion stripes painted on perfectly even with straight edges. Then someone dug up a photo of the stripes actually being applied to an aircraft... by means of a broom dipped in paint. No masking, no spraying, a broom that was more or less the right with for the stripes was dipped in paint and dragged across the wing and that was that. So he made a diorama of it, complete figures walking a paint-filled broom across the wing and with the photo he used for reference being part of the display, and entered that in the competition. The judges have never marked down a model for "uneven invasion stripes" since.
  21. SebastianP
    I'm thinking part of the reason the Elysion did a take-off on thrusters over water was to scare all the wildlife with any sense (such as the mercats) out of the lagoon, so they don't get crushed by the underwater shockwaves when the ruins are blown up...
  22. SebastianP
    The ginormous hangar capacities quoted for a lot of the ships make no sense, and neither does a lot of the things we see in Macross City during the TV series and DYRL. A stadium? Seriously, what component of the - need I remind you - 1,200 meter long SDF-1 is big enough that you could build a stadium inside it, with plenty of space above and around it? Even the legs aren't wide enough for that. I'd go on at great length about the impossibility of the official specs of the ARMD-L (it's smaller than a WW2 Essex! And it's supposed to have an air wing the size of a Cold War Nimitz class? All carried internally? When half the hangar would need to be double height due to Pixie Squadron and Rabbit 1? Who came up with these numbers...) and the absurdity of the Monster on the Asuka II (it's taller than the ship is, from the waterline to the flight deck...), but it wouldn't be good for my blood pressure... so I'll just go with the assumption I just came up with: one of the most common applications of Super Dimension Technology is making things bigger on the inside, and the tech is so subtle you don't even notice when you're passing into a "compressed" area...
  23. SebastianP
    The Galaxy fleet is special, precisely because it was corporate sponsored. There are hints that the Galaxy colony fleet is from the pre New Macross-class era, in which case they would have had to build the Battle Galaxy from scratch while in space; they also designed all the hardware we see them use in Frontier themselves, even if most of it is a further development of NUNS-supplied designs (like the VF-27 being derived from the YF-24 and the AIF-9V being developed from the AIF-9B). They even completely redesigned the internals of the VF-19C to make the VF-19C/MG-21, which was the model used by Galaxy's special forces prior to the VF-27. Most fleets probably aren't home to galactically competitive research and development facilities, the way Galaxy and Frontier were, That said, the ones that are competitive are known to export their designs far and wide, even the ones that fail to find federal contracts. Someone, somewhere, either flew or is still flying every VF design we have an official designation for, and probably a few of the ones we don't. Hell, in Macross The Ride there are a couple of people flying modified Macross Zero-era designs in the Vanquish races.
  24. SebastianP
    Remember that we have all sorts of evidence now that flying using the gravity control system with a properly built ship is completely safe - for example, we have the scene in Delta ep 1 where a Thuverl-Salan - a ship which dwarfs a New Macross Class - is just hovering there a few hundred meters over the local Zentran garrison. Also, going out over the bay and using the main engines to ascend may be a question of how long it would take to actually get to a safe altitude using the gravity control system, in-universe. Out-of-universe of course it was a reason to play with hypervoxel 3D graphics and make a really cool shuttle-style launch sequence. Also... ascending using the main engines would have made enough noise to scare away all the mercats living in the lagoon, and keep them away for a while - which means they're not going to die horribly when the NUNS sets off the underwater reaction warhead and kills everything still in the lagoon with the shockwave.
  25. SebastianP
    Just in case anyone missed it: Hull number of Hemera confirmed (CV/C-110). Hemera and Aether confirmed identical, as opposed to mirrored. (Island structure is on the starboard side of both ships). And the top ends of the spires are really fat and squared off (didn't expect that), with four visible fixed guns and four of what appears to be large missile ports each.
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