Jump to content

SebastianP

Members
  • Posts

    295
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Recent Profile Visitors

3754 profile views

SebastianP's Achievements

Sharon Apple Concert Attendee

Sharon Apple Concert Attendee (4/15)

29

Reputation

  1. Yeah, this is the Windermere ship, the Dulfim is much less rounded. Wonder if it's named Dulfim in the files, though, because it just might? It's based on the same general concept... Anyway, thanks a bunch for posting these, @reaper7092
  2. A 3D model is "whatever scale you decide it is" when you have a 3D program that can be set to work in meters. I made the 3D model 1:1 scale according to the official chronicle size. And the video game model is quite possibly the same overall mesh as was used for the TV show, it certainly has the same texture, maybe at a lower resolution. Even the smudge pattern is the same. It's not like the shape is super complex or it was fetured as a "hero unit" at any point, so it never needed to be super high detail in the first place. The fanmade doujinshi only really needed to draw a triangle the size of the Northampton's forward hull, and a triangle the size of a folded up VF-11, and attempt to fit as many VF-11 triangles into the size of the Northampton triangle as possible. Which is what they did, except with silhouettes of the fighters. The liberties taken by FANKY involve *making the ship bigger and fold the fighters up tighter in order to make things fit*. They didn't shrink the ship any, or make the fighters bigger. And it's not like "bad official figures" is a new thing - Star Wars had the infamous Executor controversy, where the books were saying Vader's flagship was five times the length of its escorts and all the visual evidence in the movie said it was more like 11 or 12 times, and the fans got vocal enough that Lucasfilm actually changed their mind (and amusingly claimed the older figure was "Imperial disinformation" that had been reprinted without checking). Stargate SG-1 had its liner notes, where the fighters were 30 meters and the carriers were 195 and 225 meters, which meant the fighters wouldn't fit in the hangars (they were literally too wide); the VFX crew eventually leaked the models, which had been made 516 and 650 meters long in 1:1 scale which could be verified by the size of the bridge chairs; while the fighters were only 14 meters and could be comfortably parked three wide in the hangar just like they did in the interior shots in the show. Several points here. First of all - if the ship masses a mere 1,200 tons, it launched a third of its mass in fighters during Operation stargazer, as 28 nine-ton VF-11s, 4 twelve-ton VF-17s, and 4 eight-and-a-half ton VF-19s add up to 336 tons total, *without* super packs, fuel, or ammunition. Oh, and Max' VF-22S, that's another nine to nine and a half tons. This is easily in the 400 ton range just by allowing one ton each for super packs for the 32 fighters that had those, plus another ton in fuel for all fighters. That's absurd. Second - the Hindenburg was 245 meters and massed 200 tons. The Northampton would be having a density close to that of a Zeppelin. Third - you can tell what a decent mass for the ship would be by scaling the 7.77 million ton, 1510 meter Battle 7 down to 1/6 scale, which drops its mass to 36,000 tons at just over 250 meters. (While it would have 1/6th of the bulkheads and decks inside, those decks and bulkheads would be 6 times as thick relatively, so it's basically a wash). A Northampton is less blocky and less robust than a Battle class, so I'll allow it to be a third of that mass, so 12,000 tons. Mass controversy solved by means of shifting a decimal point. (same goes for the Guantanamo, which is the size of an aircraft carrier and should mass like an aircraft carrier, i.e. 90,000 tons rather than 9,000.) Basically, I'm more willing to believe that the numbers are wrong when they contradict everything else I can see, than I am willing to believe convoluted explanations for why the numbers are accurate. Occam's razor and whatnot. In this case, at 250 meters I'm more than willing to believe that someone forgot a zero in the mass of the ship; but if the 250 is wrong like I believe, then the 1200 tons even more wrong. Yet the length of the Northampton-class was revised from 250 to 252.5 meters. Databook authors don't care - you saw that with the Delta stuff. I'm the kind of person who'll go by the VFX over the databook when the databook figures don't work. (Hmm. At some point I should actually check how big the DYRL macross model becomes if I scale it by the conning tower. That might actually make some sense of the city interior.)
  3. Thanks! Problem is it's another piece of evidence that the official length of the ship is bunk, tho... Here are the points I've found so far regarding that: 1 - the official line art of the bridge shows that it has three vertically stacked decks, with a sensor cluster underneath, all under the main windscreen. The middle deck is wide enough for three bridge operators abreast (though there's just a box in the the middle), which means the bridge has to be at least three meters wide. more likely four given that there are consoles to either side of the chair. The spacing of the seats and consoles of the back row of the second deck indicates that there's something like two meters in between the chairs, so I'll go with four meters. If each deck is three meters tall, which seems to be the minimum given how much headroom there looks to be, then the whole windscreen would need to be twelve meters. On the game 3D model, when the ship is scaled to 250 meters, that window is 2 meters wide at its absolute widest, by 6 meters tall. Ergo, in order to make the bridge fit, the ship needs to be 500 meters. (scaling up the bridge on the outside until the interior fits would make it look Super-Deformed...) 2 - the FANKY doujin did a "how do we stack the VF-11s to fit all 37 we see launch from the Stargazer" - the answer was, "gut the entire ship and leave no room for anything except the hangar". And they still had to use a "fat" version of the hull to do it. 3 - the Gefion's hangar pods in Macross 30 aren't tall enough for most of the fighters to fit through, and especially not the Koenig Monster. Some of the fighters have trouble fitting on the width of the flight deck, even. (Gefion appears to be rendered at the official 250 meter size...) 4 - there's somehow a sixty to eighty meter hatch on the aft belly of the Northampton-class (the VF-14 is just short of 20 meters, and the hatch is more than three times the length of the fighter and we don't see the forward edge of it) where the longest unbroken edge I can find at 250 meter scale is less than 20 meters unless on the actual bustle itself where the engines are. 5 - the fighters for Operation Stargazers were said to be fired out the missile launchers on the Stargazer... missile launchers which are less than 2 m in diameter on the model. (The 2059 model of the ship is actually remarkably proportional to the 2030 model, and there are a lot of features in common to the point where I've been able to almost entirely backdate it with only a few details left to do...) And finally, 6 - if the ship is 1,200 tons at 250 meters, it's basically made of styrofoam. It's literally the length of a Kirov-class cruiser by its official stats, much more voluminous due to its shape, and weighs 1/20th of what the Kirov does with full magazines and empty tanks. Whoever wrote the chronicle writeup went through all the papers and only looked for numbers and never analyzed the art, at all, and now we're stuck with numbers that make no sense.
  4. So, I've been playing around a bit with the Northampton 3D model that someone extracted from the PS3 games some more, and a question kind of strikes me: How do people get on or off this ship without it being docked to either a bigger ship or a space station? (the docking tube arrangement is in the Mac7 lineart on MMM). It can't land (though we see ships hover indefinitely just fine, so not a huge deal); and the standard version most definitely does not have the room for a flight deck. And the "beam me up zone" under the Gefion in Macross 30 is game mechanics, plain and simple. In other words, the ship basically has to have a shuttlecraft somewhere, maybe two given how it's symmetrical. So where are they and how do they dock? Are they in the cavity in the back inboard of the weapons pods? Would there be a hidden hatch on the underside next to the Yamato-esque third bridge? Actually, do we even have any pictures of shuttles other than Sheryl's private transport, the König Monster and the Delta shuttle? Because none of those would even fit physically through anything that looks like an opening on the Northampton *or* the Stealth Cruiser....
  5. You're missing something critical here. I don't expect the show air until 2025, with a teaser in December next year, for one important reason; We haven't heard a thing about auditions, yet. Frontier wasn't announced at all - we first heard about it when someone described auditions going on at Victor Entertainment for a "new big-budget anime" and someone said the pamphlets given to the hopefuls mentioned Macross. That was in February 2007. In April, auditions had concluded and Megumi Nakajima was presented as the winner at the 25th anniversary concert. There was the Deculture Edition episode 1 in December, and then the show aired properly starting in April 2008. Delta was given an "A new Macross TV show is in development" announcement in March 2014, and then we next heard about it in October 2014 when they announced that auditions would begin in December that year. Auditions ran until April 2015, and then there was silence until October, when Kawamori revealed more info; and then we got the first episode preview in December 2015, followed by the show proper in April 2016. We are at "A new Macross TV show is in development", and I haven't heard anything about auditions, which means we're at least one year out from today. More likely, we'll get an audition announcement somewhere this fall, and they'll be done by April next year, with the show airing in April 2025. (Unless I've been totally oblivious and there *has* been auditions that I missed hearing about. But IIRC all we know about Macross 40+ is that it's being animated by Sunrise.) Edit: The original thread discussing the existence of auditions for a new Macross show back in 2007 is absolute megacringe. The things people apparently wanted from the new show... thank the Hoary Froating Head we didn't get any of that.
  6. Not really. I *like* that Macross has the balls to say "their story is done, let's look at someone else's story" and *doesn't* fall for the urge to go back and fill in the blanks (except for Zero, which was pretty, but weak, IMO. So many little things that make me go "but how?!?" on a rewatch with that.) It's nice to see some characters again *occasionally*, but Macross is much, much better at any other Space Opera I can name that it's a *vast* galaxy, too large to comfortably travel across. Once you start to deliberately follow one particular cast member around after the end of their initial story, it becomes about *them* instead of about the setting you've built. See Star Wars, which was "The adventures of Luke Skywalker and Friends" so hard that if you look at the official Legends chronology, there's only like one year total out of *thirty* starting with A New Hope when Luke is actually not out and about doing something. (one of the last novels written in the Legends continuity filled in the other gap in that thirty year stretch, so chances are that one year of vacation would have gone as well eventually). Disney pulling the plug on the Expanded Universe has only fixed the issue in that there's a lot of empty places to put new adventures in now, because every damned official media is still involving the Skywalkers or adjacent characters somehow. (Rebels had guest appearances from Leia and Vader. The Mandalorian guest starred Ashoka and Luke. Boba Fett wasn't a *friend* of Luke's per se, but he was an original trilogy character. Kenobi is Kenobi, and his show included Vader and Leia as well. I haven't actually seen Andor, but it's been touted as the best piece of Star Wars media since Disney took over, and that might be because of a lack of Skywalkers?) Meanwhile, Macross can and does have the balls to go "yeah, have a story about characters who've never met and are never going to meet anyone from any previous show, at least not on camera", like Macross Plus or Macross Frontier, *and* it has the balls to go "this is a dramatization, and may not be 100% historically accurate" so that people won't get hung up too hard on canon. Heck, given how the shows seems to actually alternate a bit? We got Plus, which had no prior characters involved; Seven, which had the Jenius clan; Zero, which had Roy; Frontier, which had no prior characters except for a *connection* to Zero; and Delta, which involved the Jenius clan again, I'm going to speculate and say "the next show might involve relatives of someone *else* in the original series bridge crew". Maybe a member of the Milliome family? (Shammy settled on Luna after Space War 1 and had eleven kids by 2045... and while her hubby was a rich heir type, Shammy was bridge crew on the ship that saved humanity, so maybe some of them took her name?)
  7. I personally was hyped as heck for that scene, because it marked the point where the story was going "nope, downers are over, time for the cast to be awesome and holy crap is that a surfing robot? Just what the doctor ordered to cure the depressive fit!" Anyway, a drinking robot doesn't make much sense because why would you make a piloted robot with the ability to drink, that's inefficient. On the other hand, motor skills we know transfer, and have known since back in SDF Macross, where Max and Milia turn out to be just as good on foot as they are in the cockpit. And it's not like Captain Wilder is the only one showing off a skill learned normally while driving a robot. Alto does kabuki acting - while piloting his VF. Michael does sniping both in and out of his VF. I don't remember if Ozma actually uses a knife while on foot at any point, but do you doubt that he'd be able to? Hayate dances in his robot. The Windermere knights have swords, both for their uniforms and for their robots. (and later on, Max flies the Gigasion like it was a fighter jet...) All you need to be able to surf in a robot is for the robot to have three points of articulation per leg (hip, knee, ankle), and two per arm (shoulder and elbow) so it can adjust its pose and hold its balance; a good balancing system; and a surfboard and a wave to ride. And we had already seen that there was enough articulation and balance, given that Bobby does all sorts of flips and stuff, so all that was needed was a board and a wave. And a helmsman who would do it. Also, there's something called conservation of detail, aka Chekov's gun, which means that if I see a character perform a signature activity that is theoretically possible to do in a VF or other robot while on foot, I'm not going to be surprised to see them do it while piloting a VF.
  8. I dunno, "ruthless will to power" kind of describes at least Bodolza (he decides to wipe humanity out because they're threatening his control) and Leon Mishima (who murders his way to the top in the TV series... so it can be him standing on the bridge of the Battle Frontier commanding the assault on Planet Vajra.). I'll agree we didn't see anything resembling the "earthnoids vs spacenoids" nonsense from Gundam in Macross, but we've gotten at least a couple of actual megalomaniacs. I think I'll direct you towards Alan Dean Foster's Humanx Commonwealth (a long, long series of novels that started back in the 70s about the alliance of the Humans and the Thranx, an insectoid species, after a very nearly botched first contact); Larry Niven's Known Space (another long series of novels started in the 60s, where the cat-like Kzinti nearly eradicated their warrior caste trying to defeat the humans, and the remaining castes were much less hostile afterwards, IIRC); and Star Trek's Klingons, who are allies as far as I remember in current "prime" timeline material, as well as in Star Trek Online. There's probably other examples, but these are the ones that spring to mind. (I've also not read a whole lot of either of the novel series, and the ones I did read were ages ago so I may be misremembering how things went with the Kzin after the war...) Oh, and then there's stuff like Dragonball Z, but you knew that, I think.
  9. Macross has plenty of "bad guys", it's just that no species in the whole franchise is "always chaotic evil". Individuals can and have been absolutely terrible with insane motives and no regard for what anyone else thinks but by-and-large, the majority of sapients would avoid fighting if given the option. Bodolza feared humanity so much he tried to wipe them out, and was killed for it. The Galaxy hive mind decided that their vision for humanity trumped everyone else's wishes and went "join the hive mind or die". They wished to end the fighting by ending *humanity*, humanity objected and the hive mind died. Ushio Todo decided that everyone alive right now (except him!) was less important than whoever he had lost during the Rain of Death and could not be convinced otherwise, and had to be killed to prevent him from wiping everything out and starting over. Roid Brehm tried the same "join the hivemind or die" thing and *his best friend* went "you're nuts" and killed him. Cromwell was going "anything is an acceptable sacrifice if I can just kill 'Lady M' who is the source of all evil despite being out of contact for most of the last fifty years". He was *nuts*. Also, evil is as evil does, I suppose. When your methods include "stab everyone else supposedly on your side in the back" it doesn't matter what you think your motive is, you've crossed a line. (Edit: I suppose the exception is if you found out that the organization you worked for was evil and had deceived you, stabbing them in the back is in itself not evil. But neither Mishima, Cromwell, or Todo had that excuse, nor did Galaxy). What Macross is showing though is that *as long as both parties are willing to communicate*, and try hard enough, communication will be established and war can be avoided or ended. But whenever someone goes "nah, I'm not going to bother listening to your attempts to communicate because my right to dominate is stronger than your right to free will or life", there's no choice but to mass your forces and kill them before they kill you. The tense mood goes away when Ranka starts singing, and everyone gets caught up in *her* mood. Plus, Jeffrey Wilder being a surfer is shown off earlier in the movie when they're at the beach and he's surfing while the others are chatting. Also... it's a ship that transforms into a robot, one of the most articulated ones in the entire franchise, of course it's going to show off its agility and this was a fun way to do it that even makes sense in context.
  10. I don't know which show you were watching if you think Hikaru didn't have talent and wasn't precocious - he's an air show pilot since his early teens, he's still sixteen at the start of the show, heck he's still sixteen when he gets promoted to flight lead and given Max and Kakizaki as wingmen (his seventeenth birthday is somewhere around when they're captured by the Zentraedi). At the end of Space War 1, he's still seventeen, and effectively CAG of the whole air wing of the Macross. The specific "take that" I'm thinking of as such is Macross' treatment of women. Yamato had one significant female crewmember (Yuki Mori) who starts as the nurse, and then becomes the radar operator, the computer operator, the morale officer, and the food procurement officer. All at the same time. Macross starts out with *five* named female characters *on the bridge*, giving orders. And it's made clear there are others. Sure, we don't see a lot of female combat pilots (only Milia and the other female Zentraedi in the original), but that reflects reality at the time. (Other shows that I'm fairly sure inspired elements of Macross include Blue Noah (AKA Thundersub), which I should really see if I can track down and rewatch. I only saw the dub way back in the 80s.)
  11. Wasn't Macross basically written as a reaction to Gundam and Yamato? There's a bunch of elements to the original Macross story which kind of feel like big "take that!" moments aimed at both Gundam and Yamato. Like, in Gundam you *could* say "Amuro wins because superior robot to anyone else", at least in the beginning. The Gundam is special - not to the point of a Super Robot, but it's certainly not standard issue, and Gundam was supposed to be a "serious war story", not a Super Robot show. In Macross, the only thing truly special about Fokker's VF-1S is the paint job, it does not explicitly have better performance than the rest (also, Max is the superior pilot.) Also, Yamato's crew had one named female character, and she's shown being a nurse, doing laundry, cooking, and what have you (and she's the only one doing those things, IIRC). Macross has five women out of six named characters on the bridge, and they're all giving orders. (one of the *major* changes to SBY2199 was the inclusion of many more female characters in different roles, including combat roles.).
  12. Others have already pointed most of this out, but - the early stuff made in the 70s and 80s are a tiny fraction of the whole, and Gundam is a far vaster franchise that went in a lot more directions than "easily depressed director tries to make serious war story while sponsors try to milk it for as many toy robot sales a possible". Mostly by replacing the easily depressed director. If you want the *creator's* definitive version of Gundam and Zeta Gundam, try the compilation movies. They're a much shorter time investment because they cut so much sponsor-mandated filler. With regard to rebalancing the triangle - remember that the OVAs (Macross+ and Macross0) are niche content in Japan, while all the shows aired on TV and saw a much broader audience. The TV shows are what Macross *is*. And rebalancing the formula to de-prioritize the music and the singers is never in a bazillion years happening, because the music is where the sponsors make their money. Neither an SDF remake nor a Megaroad-01 story are really on the table, because Kawamori is against recasting characters because their voice actors are dead, and several of the original Macross cast are gone. (The games have recast some of them, but that's a different thing.) And the reason we see so much of Max is because his voice actor *really* likes his role, and is very likely good friends with Kawamori, given how much they *have* worked together on that character. Hence why the family featured heavily in two TV shows, had one game to themselves, were again featured heavily in a second video game, and now Max is headlining a third game after jumping in as a substitute in Zettai Live.
  13. It is a little strange that Megaroad-01 would run into a fold fault if they had any Zentraedi advisors aboard as anyone knowledgeable about deep space navigation should have told them how to avoid the phenomena and how bad an idea it was. Then again, they definitely didn't have Exedol with them, and I don't know how many other similar advisors were available to them at the time as Ogotai and company (from Gallia IV) could have joined up after MR-01 vanished.
  14. My defense of Macross 7 over Macross Plus as defining what Macross really is might ruffle some feathers at least, given what I saw over the last couple of pages. Also... Zero not being a stand-alone title is kind of awkward because there's so far between it an the two surrounding titles. I watched it on release, and it really didn't feel like it connected, especially when the last episode felt like "oh, the action scenes got kind of long, and we don't want to cut any of them, so we cut out the beginning instead". (I was also watching Sento Yousei Yukikaze at the time, and it had similar problems with figuring out what the story even was. I think both of them suffered from being OVAs with long intervals between episodes; on top of having way too much plot that needed to fit in each episode).
  15. No, I have admitted that I was unable to read the book at the time I first got my hands on it, and therefore analyzed the image in isolation without the caption first. Which is how I drew conclusions about the image *based on the actual image*. I am now perfectly able to use Google Lens to machine translate the text, and have it come out pretty damned readable, but at the time, my only solution to Japanese was to pull out my Intous tablet, and write, by hand, each kanji into the input box of Google Translate and see what it would spit out. I did this with the entire chapter about weapons, one kanji at a time. It took me nearly an hour to do that page. What you appear to have done is you saw the caption and discarded the image without looking, which was not an option for me. Do not claim to me that the caption is accurate to the image without having spent a few minutes actually verifying it. No. What I posted was an accurate summation of what the image actually depicts. It depicts: 1 - a 5x4 grid of missiles, tightly packed. 2 - a picture of the whole magazine, where we can see the magazine is five wide, eight tall with a divider in between, and eight long. The immediate implication, absent the caption, is that there are two boxes, each with 5 x 4 missiles per layer, and eight layers, for a total of 320. That is the maximum interpretation. Zooming in and counting the lines in that artwork, I can verify the presence of 96 missiles, and assuming that the missiles we can see are all of them gives me the lower bound of 96. The other options are me trying to come up with alternatives in between, but the image ABSOLUTELY shows 96 missiles, and it very definitely seems to imply 320. What you appear to have done is you saw the caption and your brain filtered out anything that didn't support that number. Is it really consistent? Because "90" only comes up twice in that chapter, once as part of that caption, and once when describing a 90 degree angle, as far as I've been able to tell. I can't find any other statements about capacity in the rest of that chapter, at least not for missiles. If there are other instances in the book, please give me a page number. (I am still not able to comfortably read the whole book as the process still involves photographing the thing with my phone. It does a pretty nice job of making the text readable these days, but it's still a royal pain.) I did not pick a conclusion at random. I added the logical interpretation of the image as an option to be considered, as an outlier. If you trust the diagram, there might be close to 700 missiles on a Super Messiah, is what I said. As the diagram is hinting at 320 missiles per launcher, this is a correct statement. I have never claimed that there were canonically 700 missiles, because we can't say for sure because the sources *do* disagree. (And quite frankly, given how badly for example the Macross chronicle missile counts for the Armored VF-25 match *any* other source - screenshots from the anime, model kits, or toys all give different and much higher counts - and how they blatantly resized the Elysion, I am disinclined to ever trust a specific number given in a book as more than a "possible" unless it's backed up by visual information that *matches*. At this point, if the book says 20 turrets on a ship, I'll still count the ones on the ship to make sure.) A source that is not consistent *IS* useless as a source of absolute truth, because you have to determine which of the conflicting statements is true. In this case, we have *one* statement about 90 missiles, and *one* drawing that indicates more than 90 at least. Either *could* be true, but we don't know. (Again, I have been unable to find any other mention of 90 missiles in the book). You were the one who decided that it could not be true that the picture itself implied 320 missiles. I gave that interpretation as an option, and I maintain that this is a valid interpretation of the image, but that is all. I am aware. I am merely justifiably peeved for being called a spreader of misinformation for pointing out that the image, sans the caption, is very much implying that there could be 320 missiles per pod. You have to read the caption and then not look at the image at all in order to come to that conclusion.
×
×
  • Create New...