The Newbie and Short Questions thread

[Brofessor]

I am reading the translation of the Macross Chronicle on the web. Can anyone help me understand this sentence from the synopsis for Episode 9: Miss Macross? "Also, a little bit before that, director Yamaga Hiroyuki seems to have received Mr. Miyatake Kazutaka's "purchased with cake" depiction of the genga in the cut where Hikaru clutches the control column in the scene where he intercepts the missiles (pictured)."

Is "purchased with cake" just a strange Japanese idiom or maxim? Does it just mean included in the price? I am just curious because I suspect when Hikaru clutches his control column it is an innuendo or double entendre. Does "purchased with cake" have a risque implication?

[Brofessor]

Ahhh. Now I see. "Bribed with cake." No euphemisms involved.

[Brofessor]

Hi. In Episode 3 of SDF Macross Britai orders Exedore or his troops to fire on the ARMD's but not the SDF-1 because "that ship interests" him. What is the reason for this? Why does Britai and eventually Bodolzaa want a supervision army ship? Thanks.

[jeniusornome]

I assume because they recognize it has been heavily modified from the specifications they would otherwise be familiar with. The Zentradi did not have the skills to modify or repair their equipment themselves but they would have clearly noticed it was different from the ship they had been following originally.

[Seto Kaiba]

3 hours ago, Brofessor said:

Hi. In Episode 3 of SDF Macross Britai orders Exedore or his troops to fire on the ARMD's but not the SDF-1 because "that ship interests" him. What is the reason for this? Why does Britai and eventually Bodolzaa want a supervision army ship? Thanks.

... this is explained in the very first episode of the show.

Vrlitwhai and Exsedol recognize almost immediately that the two ARMD-class ships that attacked their branch fleet as it approached Earth were not Supervision Army warships, and just as quickly they recognize that the SDF-1 Macross is one of the Supervision Army ships they've been pursuing... but modified extensively by the "primitive species" on the planet that had designed the ships that attacked them earlier using the long-lost thermonuclear reaction weaponry.  That's 31 different flavors of impossible by Zentradi standards.

Edited July 9, 2020 by Seto Kaiba

[Bolt]

I read in the fan fiction thread there was a red light district in SDFM amd DYRL? 

Is this true? Now i need to rewatch. Again..

[Master Dex]

1 hour ago, Bolt said:

I read in the fan fiction thread there was a red light district in SDFM amd DYRL? 

Is this true? Now i need to rewatch. Again..

Hey, even stranded spaceship populations have needs lol.

[Brofessor]

2 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

 

Vrlitwhai and Exsedol recognize almost immediately ... the long-lost thermonuclear reaction weaponry.  

Thanks a lot. I just found in Episode 11 where Bodolzaa refers to the reaction weapons.

 

2 hours ago, Bolt said:

I read in the fan fiction thread there was a red light district in SDFM amd DYRL? 

Is this true? Now i need to rewatch. Again..

Minmay's birthday episode with the introduction of Max and Kakizake shows Kakizaki pointing out the area. DYRL? shows Minmay sort of eye-roll during her and Hikaru's date montage. 

[Seto Kaiba]

4 hours ago, Bolt said:

I read in the fan fiction thread there was a red light district in SDFM amd DYRL? 

Ah, no... there is not.

I've looked up the thread and posts in question, and the poster you read that from is SEVERELY misinformed. 

I don't know why they would think that there would be a brothel in the show, given that prostitution is illegal in Japan.  

What Kakizaki is pointing out to Hikaru in Super Dimension Fortress Macross's 8th episode is a cabaret club, also known as a hostess club.  There's nothing overtly sexual about it.  It's an overpriced bar catering to men that serves overpriced drinks with the main appeal being that the hostesses are beautiful women who light your cigarettes, pour you drinks, occasionally make flirtatious remarks, and sing karaoke for the entertainment of the male patrons.  That's all.  It's no more explicit than a Hooters, and arguably in far better taste.

If you've ever seen Soul Eater, the bar that Maka's dad hangs out in is a cabaret club.  Nothing overtly sexual about it. 

Likewise, what that misinformed poster is thinking of in Macross: Do You Remember Love? is a love hotel.  There's no connection to the sex industry there either.  It's just a branch of the hotel industry that caters specifically to couples who are looking for a more private place to hook up.  That's why Minmay shoots Hikaru a dirty look and then forcibly steers him away... he unsubtly attempted to score on the first date and she was having none of that sh*t.

 

EDIT:  It's worth noting that the script-style short story collection My Fair Minmay does make reference to a "pleasure district" inside the Macross, but that's not quite the same thing as an actual red light district... the businesses congregated there are things like bars, cabaret clubs, massage parlors, and some varieties of establishment that skirt the limits of Japan's ban on prostitution like soaplands (referred therein by their old name as toruko-buro) and pink salons.  Nothing of that nature ever made it into the show, though... 

Edited July 9, 2020 by Seto Kaiba

[slide]

I think the sticking point is the connotation of "red light district" in other cultures.

It's close enough to be described as-such, but not hardcore like in Amsterdam or something...

 

According to Wikipedia:

Kabukichō (歌舞伎町) is an entertainment and red-light district in Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan. Kabukichō is the location of many host and hostess clubs, love hotels, shops, restaurants, and nightclubs, and is often called the "Sleepless Town" (眠らない街). Shinjuku Golden Gai, famous for plethora of small bars, is part of Kabukicho.

 

so as @Seto Kaiba said: no "brothels"... at least not legal ones.

 

 

 

On 7/9/2020 at 3:40 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

I don't know why they would think that there would be a brothel in the show, given that prostitution is illegal in Japan.  

1: because they're inescapable, legalities be damned.

2: because the UN is notoriously corrupt [even IRL] when it comes to such things, and the UN is not Japanese, it's global, which means the French and Dutch would have had some input .: brothels!

[Seto Kaiba]

1 hour ago, slide said:

I think the sticking point is the connotation of "red light district" in other cultures.

It's close enough to be described as-such, but not hardcore like in Amsterdam or something...

Eh... it's not really a connotation issue, it's more a question of certain sources like that Wikipedia article using the term loosely or incorrectly.

The actual definition of a red light district is a part of an urban area (city, town, etc.) with a high concentration of brothels and other sex-related businesses... either by natural pressure or by an official classification of the area as an effort to contain that kind of business away from more respectable neighborhoods.

 

1 hour ago, slide said:

Kabukichō (歌舞伎町) is an entertainment and red-light district in Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan. Kabukichō is the location of many host and hostess clubs, love hotels, shops, restaurants, and nightclubs, and is often called the "Sleepless Town" (眠らない街). Shinjuku Golden Gai, famous for plethora of small bars, is part of Kabukicho.

Kabukichō did at one point honestly deserve to be called a red light district, but it hasn't really fit the bill since the so-called Kabukichō Renaissance that started back in 2004.  Tokyo's governor, the National Police Agency, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Police made a big push to shut down whole categories of businesses allegedly connected to organized crime as an opening move in the redevelopment of the area.  The various flavors of not-technically-a-brothel sex shops that skirted the limits of Japan's ban on prostitution were the main targets of that purge.  So it's not really a red light district anymore because what remains of that activity has largely gone underground.

 

1 hour ago, slide said:

so as @Seto Kaiba said: no "brothels"... at least not legal ones.

Admittedly in the cases of a number of types of businesses like soaplands and pink salons, this is kind of a case of exact words rules lawyer-ing... 

 

1 hour ago, slide said:

1: because they're inescapable, legalities be damned.

Yeah, but good luck getting it past the broadcast standards people with that argument. 

That's why the ONLY mentions of anything even remotely close are confined to passing references in My Fair Minmay and Perfect Memory.

 

1 hour ago, slide said:

2: because the UN is notoriously corrupt [even IRL] when it comes to such things, and the UN is not Japanese, it's global, which means the French and Dutch would have had some input .: brothels!

Well, the real-world UN doesn't exist in Macross after 2001... it drafted the constitution for the Earth Unification Government and acted as the provisional Unification Government until the formal start-of-business for it...

Mind you, five of the six major powers behind the formation of the UN Government have outright bans on prostitution and the sixth has a ban on organized prostitution.  It's not the French who are the liberal ones there, it's the Brits weirdly enough.

[Bolt]

How long does it take to get from Earth to the Brisingr Globular Cluster ?  Are we talking days?  I imagine there's a difference weather you're in a standard cargo or passenger ship. Or a Macross class vessel..

[sketchley]

3 hours ago, Bolt said:

How long does it take to get from Earth to the Brisingr Globular Cluster ?  Are we talking days?  I imagine there's a difference weather you're in a standard cargo or passenger ship. Or a Macross class vessel..

If memory serves, Fold Travel time was described as something like the Macross Frontier Fleet taking 10 years to reach the neighbourhood of the centre of the galaxy, and it taking half that time to get back to Earth (or 5 years).

So, going by that, using regular Fold Travel to the Brisingr Globular Cluster (located at the edge of the opposite side of the galaxy, right?) it will take up to 10 years.

Of course, if they use the Super Fold Booster (introduced in Macross Frontier), it will be reduced to 1 year (or 1/10 of regular Fold Travel).

 

Some ships are described as being able to Fold for longer distances and reFold quicker with less time spent recharging (E.g.: the High-Speed Raiding Cruiser), however, I don't think anything has been mentioned about certain types of ships being able to travel faster in a Fold—speed seems to be more down to single-Fold ranges and recharge rate between Folds.

[Seto Kaiba]

3 hours ago, Bolt said:

How long does it take to get from Earth to the Brisingr Globular Cluster ?  Are we talking days?  I imagine there's a difference weather you're in a standard cargo or passenger ship. Or a Macross class vessel..

Just now, sketchley said:

If memory serves, Fold Travel time was described as something like the Macross Frontier Fleet taking 10 years to reach the neighbourhood of the centre of the galaxy, and it taking half that time to get back to Earth (or 5 years).

So, going by that, using regular Fold Travel to the Brisingr Globular Cluster (located at the edge of the opposite side of the galaxy, right?) it will take up to 10 years.

Yeah, I think it was Otona Anime #9 where Kawamori first commented that humanity's farthest-flung settlements were some ten years away from Earth by space fold.  That travel time may vary somewhat based on the quality of the fold system and what the conditions in fold space are like.  A route that's free of fold faults can be traversed much MUCH faster than one where the ship's forced to either push through or navigate around a series of faults (as discussed in Frontier, where Gallia IV was said to be close enough for an almost instantaneous space fold if not for the fold faults that blew the travel time disparity up to over 172 hours).

 

Just now, sketchley said:

Some ships are described as being able to Fold for longer distances and reFold quicker with less time spent recharging (E.g.: the High-Speed Raiding Cruiser), however, I don't think anything has been mentioned about certain types of ships being able to travel faster in a Fold—speed seems to be more down to single-Fold ranges and recharge rate between Folds.

Not to mention the prevailing conditions in higher-dimensional space (e.g. fold faults) and the quality of the fold system itself... the disparity between subjective and objective time shrank as humanity got better at making and using fold systems, though Chronicle contends it was never anywhere near as bad as Misa posited in the original series.

[Bolt]

Thanks. Very informative. 

1 hour ago, sketchley said:

I don't think anything has been mentioned about certain types of ships being able to travel faster in a Fold—speed seems to be more down to single-Fold ranges and recharge rate between Folds.

I assume not all fold boosters are the same. Civilian or military, etc.

It's safe to assume communication can be had much quicker than travel, from say Earth to Brisingr? What's the lag on that?

[Master Dex]

8 minutes ago, Bolt said:

Thanks. Very informative. 

I assume not all fold boosters are the same. Civilian or military, etc.

It's safe to assume communication can be had much quicker than travel, from say Earth to Brisingr? What's the lag on that?

I don't know any numbers, but Frontier definitely implied transmissions are affected my faults the same as travel, which is why they learned about the revolt on Gallia IV so late that the only way to help was with the super fold booster. Or to put it another way, they couldn't get a message out to ask for a cease fire any quicker, at least not before open conflict escalated.

What I am not sure of is if the lagged transmission was subject to the same 172 hour dislocation as Alto and Sheryl's trip. Obviously the fold radio signal is faster than a ship but I feel like it was less than a week after Alto and Sheryl arrived than Frontier heard the news of the uprising.

[sketchley]

Communications get around Fold Faults by transmitting in real space via satellite relay (if memory serves).  So, that means messages can travel at light speed (ships, on the other hand, cannot travel at light speed in real space).

That's not saying that communication is near instantaneous, it's just much, much faster.  Kawamori-san summed it up when describing the worldview in Macross F as "the Great Age of Exploration*, with e-mail".

It ought to be stressed that there are significant transmission delays, otherwise the whole plot in MF (Macross Galaxy Fleet attempting to take control of the Vajra's real-time communication network) becomes meaningless...

 

As for the delay in hearing about the revolt on Gaul 4: that's probably due to the delay from using a satellite relay...

 

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Discovery

Edited July 14, 2020 by sketchley

[Seto Kaiba]

15 hours ago, Bolt said:

I assume not all fold boosters are the same. Civilian or military, etc.

Yeah... humanity's grasp of fold technology has improved considerably over the last sixty or so years of in-universe time, but a fold system's capabilities are determined by a number of factors like the fold system's maximum energy storage capacity, the purity of the fold carbon it uses to produce heavy quanta for gravity manipulation, etc.

 

15 hours ago, Bolt said:

It's safe to assume communication can be had much quicker than travel, from say Earth to Brisingr? What's the lag on that?

Oh, yes... fold communication is much faster than traveling by space fold.  However, like fold navigation, the time lag on fold communication is heavily dependent on the conditions in higher-dimensional space like the presence of fold faults.  The fold faults between the Macross Frontier fleet and Gallia IV were bad enough that there was a significant lag which even relay pods couldn't fully mitigate.  Leon mentions to President Glass that, after deploying relays, they'd managed to cut the lag down to 127 minutes.

With appropriately powerful transmitters and relay pods to circumvent fold faults, realtime or near-realtime communication across interstellar distances is possible... though I'd guess fold communications with Earth from Brisingr are probably still significantly delayed just because they have to cross the entire galaxy to get there.  

 

 

15 hours ago, Master Dex said:

I don't know any numbers, but Frontier definitely implied transmissions are affected my faults the same as travel, which is why they learned about the revolt on Gallia IV so late that the only way to help was with the super fold booster. Or to put it another way, they couldn't get a message out to ask for a cease fire any quicker, at least not before open conflict escalated.

Not quite?  It wasn't that the Frontier fleet learned about the uprising too late because of fold communication lag caused by the fold faults between them and Gallia IV.  It was that it was clearly planned in advance, to exploit the fact that the fold faults between the Macross Frontier fleet and Gallia IV were severe enough to delay any reinforcements dispatched to relieve the loyalist Zentradi in the Gallia IV garrison wouldn't arrive at the planet for at least a week.  Until Luca revealed the existence of the super fold booster, there wasn't any real option apart from letting the hostages die or giving in to the renegades demands.

[Master Dex]

5 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Yeah... humanity's grasp of fold technology has improved considerably over the last sixty or so years of in-universe time, but a fold system's capabilities are determined by a number of factors like the fold system's maximum energy storage capacity, the purity of the fold carbon it uses to produce heavy quanta for gravity manipulation, etc.

 

Oh, yes... fold communication is much faster than traveling by space fold.  However, like fold navigation, the time lag on fold communication is heavily dependent on the conditions in higher-dimensional space like the presence of fold faults.  The fold faults between the Macross Frontier fleet and Gallia IV were bad enough that there was a significant lag which even relay pods couldn't fully mitigate.  Leon mentions to President Glass that, after deploying relays, they'd managed to cut the lag down to 127 minutes.

With appropriately powerful transmitters and relay pods to circumvent fold faults, realtime or near-realtime communication across interstellar distances is possible... though I'd guess fold communications with Earth from Brisingr are probably still significantly delayed just because they have to cross the entire galaxy to get there.  

 

 

Not quite?  It wasn't that the Frontier fleet learned about the uprising too late because of fold communication lag caused by the fold faults between them and Gallia IV.  It was that it was clearly planned in advance, to exploit the fact that the fold faults between the Macross Frontier fleet and Gallia IV were severe enough to delay any reinforcements dispatched to relieve the loyalist Zentradi in the Gallia IV garrison wouldn't arrive at the planet for at least a week.  Until Luca revealed the existence of the super fold booster, there wasn't any real option apart from letting the hostages die or giving in to the renegades demands.

Right, I had a feeling I was forgetting some aspect, including the quote about the actual transmission lag time of 127 minutes. That wouldn't have been nearly as bad but as you say, the fold forecast (it's essentially a form of dimensional weather if you think about it) ensured the travel was bad. Thanks for the clarification.

[twich]

So forgive if this is just a stupid question, but I had always thought that fold was near instantaneous or very short time span. In the original Macross, when the Zentran folded back to the main fleet, it only seemed like it took hours, when isamu and guld folded to earth, again seemed like hours. I could not imagine being in fold space for 10 years for travel. There must be a lot of supplies needed or people go into some sort of cryogenic sleep. Why does this seem untenable from a logistical standpoint

Twich

[Bolt]

It seemed a bit longer than that in DYRL?..

[Seto Kaiba]

1 hour ago, twich said:

So forgive if this is just a stupid question, but I had always thought that fold was near instantaneous or very short time span.

In what I'm sure by now sounds like me warming to a theme... it does kinda depend on the quality of the fold system, how far you're folding, and the conditions in higher-dimensional space.  (This is, of course, partly an excuse for space folding in Macross being an example of "speed of plot" travel.)

Under ideal conditions or over short distances, folding is said to be nearly instantaneous even as recently as Macross Frontier.  It's when you go from dozens of light years to hundreds or thousands of light years that you start having to spend significant amounts of time in fold space.

Admittedly, one thing that's been retconned is how severe the disparity between subject and objective time in fold is.  Back in SDF Macross, Misa asserted it was basically a 1:240 relationship with 1 hour in higher dimension space equaling about 10 days in our normal three dimensions.  Macross Chronicle was the first to kind of walk that back, and assert the actual disparity is a lot less in practice and that it's been getting smaller as fold tech improves.  Fold faults, introduced in Frontier, became the go-to excuse for a near-instant fold becoming a far longer flight that had a time loss of over a week.

 

Quote

In the original Macross, when the Zentran folded back to the main fleet, it only seemed like it took hours, when isamu and guld folded to earth, again seemed like hours.

Less than an hour, according to Misa's watch... we don't know what the subjective time for Isamu's fold jump to Earth was.  We do know that, for an old model commercial fold system the Earth-Eden run was an 18-24 hour objective time run (presumably a high time error due to a primitive low-quality fold system).  The interior of the starliner in question is set up like an ordinary jumbo jet's, so presumably the passengers only subjectively experienced a few hours of flight at most.  (There was one piece in one of those magazine-exclusive design article features in the early 2000s that suggested that a VF-19 with a fold booster and proper flight clearances could go from wheels up on Eden to wheels down on Earth in under two hours objective time... reducing the time commitment to travel interstellar to the same category as intercity commuter flights.)

By the time of Macross Frontier, even fold jumps of hundreds of light years seem to be little worse than a standard airline flight is today.

 

Quote

I could not imagine being in fold space for 10 years for travel. There must be a lot of supplies needed or people go into some sort of cryogenic sleep. Why does this seem untenable from a logistical standpoint

Oh, you wouldn't be spending that entire time or even a significant portion of it in fold space.  

The reason it took Megaroad-04 ten years to get to the Brisingr globular cluster was that you're folding that massive distance in lots of shorter jumps of a few hundred to maybe a thousand light years at a time, then spending weeks or even months charting nearby star systems and mining valuable resources from nearby asteroids, before making the next hour or two-long jump to the next point a thousand light years or so away and doing it all again.  The amount of energy required to fold such a massive distance in one go would be gargantuan, far more than any ship could generate.  Even in a pinch, it can take hours to fully recharge a fold system for a new long-range jump with full generator resources committed (as in Macross 7, where it took 7 hours to fully recharge City-7's fold system at the fastest possible speed after the Varauta forces hijacked it).  

(This is why emigrant ships are designed to operate independently for decades, recycling their waste and mining fresh resources from systems they pass that don't contain habitable worlds.  And also why they're designed to be nice places to live... you're gonna be there for a while.)

Edited July 15, 2020 by Seto Kaiba

[twich]

I guess that makes more sense. Most of the time we see Frontier Fleet, they are in real space put putting along on normal sublight engines, which brings up another question....How in the Christmas mother crap powerful do the sublight engines of Frontier (city section) plus all the island chains have to be to get moving, let alone stop. City 25 was 15km wide? Plus tack on the connector and Battle 25 which was another 1600m ship. I am amazed by the power of the engines of the YF-29, SV-262, which all rate to between just under 4000kN to around 7500kN for the YF-29. How powerful are the engines for the Frontier? Mind boggling to comprehend.

thanks! 
Twich

[Dressykamila1]

What happened to the ship that landed on windermere?

Did Alto from the movie macross f die or did he finally come back?

[Seto Kaiba]

6 hours ago, twich said:

I guess that makes more sense. Most of the time we see Frontier Fleet, they are in real space put putting along on normal sublight engines, [...]

Yup... IIRC, in Macross Frontier: the Wings of Goodbye we see Ranka working a rally for asteroid miners preparing to start work on an asteroid that'd been towed into formation with the fleet.

 

6 hours ago, twich said:

which brings up another question....How in the Christmas mother crap powerful do the sublight engines of Frontier (city section) plus all the island chains have to be to get moving, let alone stop. City 25 was 15km wide? Plus tack on the connector and Battle 25 which was another 1600m ship. I am amazed by the power of the engines of the YF-29, SV-262, which all rate to between just under 4000kN to around 7500kN for the YF-29. How powerful are the engines for the Frontier? Mind boggling to comprehend.

Well, it likely helps that these ships have sophisticated gravity control systems they can use to cheat down their inertial mass to make their engines more effective.  They likely don't actually need proportionally huge amounts of raw thrust to do the same job because they have the internal space and power generation ability to support large-scale manipulation of gravity and inertia.  (Otherwise it'd take hundreds of millions of kilonewtons of thrust to produce even 1G of acceleration for a ship like Battle Frontier.)

Island 1, the main habitat module of the Macross Frontier, was 15km long and 2km tall, training a string of more than twenty 8km x 3km Island modules... and of course that doesn't count Battle Frontier at the front.

 

3 hours ago, Dressykamila1 said:

What happened to the ship that landed on windermere?

You mean SDF-05 Megaroad-04?

The Megaroad-04 discovered Windermere IV when it ran into the fold faults surrounding/protecting the planet and subsequently landed there and made first contact with the locals, who subsequently joined the New UN Government.  Beyond that, we don't know what became of the ship.

 

3 hours ago, Dressykamila1 said:

Did Alto from the movie macross f die or did he finally come back?

He survived.  Alto and the Vajra Queen that had been forcibly merged with the Battle Frontier escaped by space fold before they could be destroyed by the incoming fire from the Macross Cannons of the Macross Quarter-class ships coming to reinforce the Macross Frontier fleet.

One of the illustrations in the Macross Frontier: Sheryl Nome Final Visual Collection book purports to be a picture of Alto and Sheryl being reunited after the events of the movies.

[Bolt]

Fold Quartz first came to light in Macross Frontier , yes? Has it been retconned into any other Macross light novels or such?

[Seto Kaiba]

42 minutes ago, Bolt said:

Fold Quartz first came to light in Macross Frontier , yes? Has it been retconned into any other Macross light novels or such?

Sort of... there was a macguffin in Macross VF-X2 called a hyperspace resonance crystal lens that had very similar properties to fold quartz, and was established to actually be fold quartz in the Macross Frontier TV novelization.  It was discovered in 2043, and was said to be the key to next-generation fold communication and fold navigation technology and the focus of a number of military development programs including Die Zauberflöte, a next-gen fold communications transmitter that became the basis of the Jamming Sound System that was the big bad's trump card.

The Macross Frontier novelization connected the two by revealing that Die Zauberflöte's creator, the Critical Path Corporation, bankrolled the 117th Research Fleet's mission into Vajra space.

 

EDIT: There is a very brief mention of Die Zauberflöte in Macross Delta as well, as part of the support system created to assist Heinz in broadcasting his fold song interstellar distances.

Edited July 16, 2020 by Seto Kaiba

[Bolt]

Thanks SK!

[Sildani]

It just occurred to me that your initials, Seto, are the same as the Hoary Froating Head’s...

Has anyone seen Seto and Kawamori in the same room at the same time? It would go a long way to explaining your encyclopedic knowledge... 

[Master Dex]

1 hour ago, Sildani said:

It just occurred to me that your initials, Seto, are the same as the Hoary Froating Head’s...

Has anyone seen Seto and Kawamori in the same room at the same time? It would go a long way to explaining your encyclopedic knowledge... 

Not at the same time, but I have seen Seto in person and I'm preeeeety sure he isn't Kawamori-san.

Granted Kawamori could be using his own show's holographic underwear technology... now isn't that a scary thought?

[Seto Kaiba]

48 minutes ago, Sildani said:

It just occurred to me that your initials, Seto, are the same as the Hoary Froating Head’s...

That's why I gently discourage people from abbreviating my username "SK"... it tends to give people entirely the wrong idea.

Tried changing my handle on a few websites ten years or so ago, but people complained so I had to change it back.  The perils of internet notoriety combined with an embarrassing screen name I chose on the spur of the moment when I was a freshman in high school.

 

48 minutes ago, Sildani said:

Has anyone seen Seto and Kawamori in the same room at the same time? It would go a long way to explaining your encyclopedic knowledge... 

No, I don't think we've ever been in the same room... but I guarantee you'll have no trouble telling us apart given that I'm about twenty-five years younger, a bit taller, and rather more Scandinavian.

[sketchley]

8 hours ago, Bolt said:

Fold Quartz first came to light in Macross Frontier , yes? Has it been retconned into any other Macross light novels or such?

In addition to what Seto said, derivatives of Fold Quartz, such as Fold Carbon and Fold Ore have appeared in such places as the Variable Fighter Master File books—Fold Carbon being used in Fold Drives and weapons like the Macross Cannon.  Which essentially retcons how they work (caveat: their inner workings were never really explained before MF).

While it hasn't been directly retconned, one can also surmise that the poachers at Zola were hunting the Galactic Whales to retrieve Fold Quartz (or a derivative) from their captured carcasses.

Edited July 17, 2020 by sketchley

[JB0]

1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

an embarrassing screen name I chose on the spur of the moment when I was a freshman in high school.

I just barely dodged being stuck with my high school nom de plume, "Jack Daniels".

I thought it was hilarious at the time for some reason.

[Bolt]

4 hours ago, Sildani said:

It just occurred to me that your initials, Seto, are the same as the Hoary Froating Head’s...

Has anyone seen Seto and Kawamori in the same room at the same time? It would go a long way to explaining your encyclopedic knowledge... 

OMG. Lol. Never occurred to mei.

 

2 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

That's why I gently discourage people from abbreviating my username "SK"... it tends to give people entirely the wrong idea.

 

Had no idea. This is my first offense!

2 hours ago, sketchley said:

In addition to what Seto said, derivatives of Fold Quartz, such as Fold Carbon and Fold Ore have appeared in such places as the Variable Fighter Master File books—Fold Carbon being used in Fold Drives and weapons like the Macross Cannon.  Which essentially retcons how they work (caveat: their inner workings were never really explained before MF).

While it hasn't been directly retconned, one can also surmise that the poachers at Zola were hunting the Galactic Whales to retrieve Fold Quartz (or a derivative) from their captured carcasses.

That makes sense it would be called back in the VFMF's ,but  harkening it back to the galactic whales.. please elaborate sensei.

 

1 hour ago, JB0 said:

I just barely dodged being stuck with my high school nom de plume, "Jack Daniels".

I thought it was hilarious at the time for some reason.

Good on you for dodging that one mate!

[Seto Kaiba]

3 hours ago, Bolt said:

OMG. Lol. Never occurred to mei.

 

Had no idea. This is my first offense!

Eh... it hasn't really been much of an issue in the last ten years or so.  Back in the 00's it was a bit of a problem, and there were a number of hasty corrections from people where some other poster thought they meant Kawamori when they referred to me as "SK".

 

3 hours ago, Bolt said:

That makes sense it would be called back in the VFMF's ,but  harkening it back to the galactic whales.. please elaborate sensei.

So... as you recall, the Galactic Whales in Macross Dynamite 7 were being hunted by a group of incredibly well-equipped poachers for the entirety of the OVA.

Naturally, such a large and well-equipped organization isn't in it for sport.  Some unspecified part of Galactic Whale carcasses is said to be highly sought-after because it can be used in the engines of spacecraft.  There is licensed, regulated whale-hunting going on... but these guys are criminals looking to make a substantial amount of money in illegal whaling.

As a lifeform, the Galactic Whale is somewhere between vegetable and mineral rather than animal.  Their bodies are part crystal, and part plant.  They travel the galaxy to absorb energy from stellar radiation and grow by absorbing gas and dust from interplanetary space.  Exactly how their anatomy could be made to work in spaceship engines was never explained.  The introduction of fold carbon and fold quartz in Macross VF-X2 and Macross Frontier offered one potential explanation.  If special crystal resonators are necessary components in all of the various technologies that leverage higher-dimensional space-time and its physics like thermonuclear reactors, gravity control systems, fold navigation and communication systems, and so on, then it's odds-on the reason Galactic Whales are being hunted is because some part of their bodies contains biologically-produced fold carbon at a high level of purity.  If those whales are producing purer, higher-quality fold carbon than the synthetic fold carbon that's widely available in Earth's civilian and military tech, that'd be a sound reason to hunt them (and an even sounder reason to regulate hunting of them... nobody wants to kill the golden goose, y'know?).

Fold quartz, which is even better than high purity fold carbon, is probably going to kill the market for galactic whale hunting eventually... but it's also harder to get since you either have to mine it from Protoculture ruins (which is dangerous, given how often they buried Things Man Was Not Meant To Find) or hunt Vajra to get it.  I can't imagine anyone being suicidal enough to rush into a Vajra-hunting industry... unlike the whales, the bugs shoot back and they're really f*cking good at it.