jollyreaper

The problem with modern fighters is a matter of information overload. In WWII, fighters were vectored on intercept by the ground or they just went out on control and used the mark 1 eyeball to locate targets. It's funny to note that in the 30's many people assumed dogfights could not happen because the newer monoplanes were so much faster than the WWI models. Well, dogfights did happen but things have grown more complicated. Aircraft like the F-86 were still from the WWII school, gunfighters with similar tactics to WWII. The SAC version of the F-86 dropped the guns in favor of a multi-rocket pack, unguided rockets. The idea was that the F-86 would locate an incoming Soviet bomber, obtain the optimum firing solution and ripple-fire the rockets. (the pack was stored below and forward of the cockpit, descending for firing position.) The idea is that any one of these rockets could knock down a bomber and the fighter has fired a dozen of them. The later model that evolved was two-seat fighters, a pilot and a radar intercept officer. The reason being is that the radar was considered too complicated for a pilot to mess with while flying the aircraft. So F-4's had a Guy in Back, F-14's the same. Attack aircraft like the A-6 had a dedicated navigator/bombardier due to the workload. The Air Force figured the F-15 didn't need one but the F-15E Strike Eagle variant put one back in due to the extra systems. F-18 did without a radar guy, same with the F-16, F-22. It was assumed that the systems were simplified enough that the pilot could multitask. Modern combat choppers use the pilot/gunner model. The Cobra, the first combat chopper was built that way, same with soviet birds like the Hind, same with the Apache. The pilot flew the bird, all the gunner had to do was look for stuff to shoot at. The Army figured trying to do both at once would lead to a lot of crashed choppers. The Comanche did away with that because the information fusion technology was sufficient that they thought the pilot could fly and monitor the sensors at the same time. A modern jet fighter can cover hundreds of miles in minutes at supersonic speeds, can engage targets beyond visual range, can detect and track targets a hundred miles out. An F-22 is supposed to be able to take sensor data from a dozen sources and display them on an integrated track for the pilot. This means that it can fuse data from the radar, aircraft's skin sensors, feeds from AWACS, JSTARS, satellite, local air defense, other F-22's, take all of that and present one unified target plot. By way of comparison, this is giving the pilot the same kind of knowledge as a gamer has with a computer RTS. When fog of war is turned on, you only see as much of the map as your units can see but you have perfect information. A scout encounters an enemy unit on the corner of the map? You see the enemy, what it is, where it's going, etc. As for controlling the giant mecha, there would have to be a neural interface. But even at that, the G's would kill a pilot. Remember when Rick/Hikaru toppled his mecha over outside Minmei's apartment? The impact would be no different from getting kicked down stairs while tied to a chair. There's no cushioning from that kind of impact. It's the same reason why airborne troops don't drop inside their vehicles, the vehicles are dropped separately and the soldiers land under their on chutes -- if they dropped inside the vehicles, they'd crush their spines under the impact.

Hey, I like Robotech! The whole idea of macros controlled by joystick just doesn't make probable sense. You could get away with that explanation for flying, sure. There's talk of making non-pilot controllable aircraft by leaving the computer in charge of all flight controls and the human would just give "suggestions" via a joystick. That's basically now aerodynamically-unstable aircraft that are computer-controlled operate but the system (as yet unbuilt) they're currently talking about is supposed to dummy it up even more for civilians. When we talk about robots, though, there's just too many actions to build a credible library of behaviors on. Just consider the raid on the Zentraedi battleship where Max puts on the guard's uniform, how exactly would something like that be preprogrammed? How could punches be preprogrammed? That sort of AI would have to be so advanced, the human could just stand on the ground outside of the mecha and shout instructions. True, but physics is physics. The Jetfire valk is one helluva toy. Everything is detailed there and there's simply not any space to be had. The animation tends to gloss over flaws and shortcomings in the physical toys. Remember how Megatron was awesome and scary in the toon but the toy was laughably dorky? That's the thing that's nice about watching the CGI mecha, there are less animation screwups and shortcuts. I was such a stickler about this when I was a kid like the poor over-worked Koreans would miscolor a robot and I'd be upset.

Yup. That always made me scratch my head. The Valks were shown as climbing into orbit along with the SDF-1 during the first flight after the Zentraedi attack. The other part that didn't make sense is the claim the Zentraedi pods could not fly on their own in atmosphere. They could jump, sure, but not fly. Weird that they would design a weapon that could be used in space as a fighter as well as a ground mecha on a planet. Why bother with dragging those legs around in space if it's just going to be used as a fighter? The other thing I could never quite wrap my head around, the battlepods are not that much taller than the Valk battleroids. The Zentraedi are pretty much as tall as the battleroids. And yet we're to imagine that they can cram an entire Zentraedi into one of those chicken walkers? Even if he was tucked tight in a cannonball pose he couldn't fit! And that's not even bringing up the impossibility of the officer pod like ol' Khyron used. In the Battletech fan-art the cockpit looks like a snug fit even for a "micronian" of the Inner Sphere so just how does a Zentraedi fit into it? It's not like the humanoid armors which are basically form-fitting and act like Starship Trooper suits. The other thing that tends to get overlooked with the massive Zentraedi size, their ships aren't all that impressively huge when we think about them in human terms. Ok, so for round figures we'll say a human is 6ft tall on average, zentraedi 60ft tall so that's 10x bigger. Bretaii's flagship sure sounds impressive at 9 miles long but it's pretty much the equivalent of a human ship .9 miles long. A lot of space is wasted sizing to Zentraedi scale.

http://macrossworld.com/mwf/index.php?showtopic=27107 Thought it was a reasonable question, didn't see any flaming inside, no moderator comment on the lock but locked it is. Did I broach a topic that's a long-standing taboo or do something else that was deculture (in the bad way?)

The first anime I got into dates back from the 80's and early 90's. Since then there's been a very big trend going towards moe and the sexualization of extremely young female characters. I'm not talking about the creators coming up with a female character and then sick fanfic writers coming along and making it all wrong like with Card Captor Sakura slash, I'm talking about characters that are overtly sexualized from the start, even though they're children. Ok, so Ranka isn't preteen but she's certainly a young teenager, not just physically but also emotionally. The Rei and Asuka in Evangelion were technically fourteen but with bodies like that, no effin' way. They were drawn older, had older personalities (or at least in Asuka's case, a personality), if the subs were changed to say they were 18, nobody would argue. But Ranka comes across like your best friend's sister, not the hot older one you have a crush on but his little sister. How in the hell are they trying to pair her up with Alto? And this isn't just being written as a younger girl's inappropriate crush on an older man who rebuffs it in a kind and gentle fashion, she's plastered semi-nude on the side of warplanes! The show's creators are saying "Yes, think of her when you defile yourselves and buy lots of resin kits." I find this whole lolicon angle disturbing. They even brought it as far as that bridge bunny who has the crush on the captain. Hell, at least that relationship would be legal. Creepy but legal. Are all animes going loli these days?

The bigger question is "where do they get their reaction mass?" Since they essentially have fusion reactors inside, in atmosphere they work like air-breathing nuclear jets. The USAF had something they called a flying crowbar in the 50's, a design for a nuclear cruise missile. Works just like a regular jet except instead of using avgas to superheat air to shoot out the back, they used a naked fission reactor. A weapon like that could fly for years and leave a trail of radioactive death streaming behind it like you wouldn't believe. The Valks would be clean but operate under the same principle. Once in space, those engines would have to become pure rockets. They're still heating up something to throw out the back for thrust but now that "something" all has to come from internal tanks. Those engines have crazy-high thrust values and don't seem to be skimping on the reactants so where's all the reaction mass stored? The denser the better, of course, so they could potentially be using water. But you can only store so much water in the ship. Modern rockets are 90% fuel by weight. The only way to get more bang out of the same mass is to throw it out the back of your ship harder than before. Just how hard are these nuclear engines pushing it?

Ah, my beloved variable fighters. I love them even though they make zero sense. There are several shortcomings in the basic Valkyrie design, persisting into these modern reinterpretations, that I've never been able to wrap my head around. First, there's the matter of just how impossibly strong they are. Their structure takes a pounding that no material known to modern science could possibly sustain. On one hand, we see ships take damage from shrapnel and weapons but we also see stuff like Valkyries flying through buildings intact, falls and bashes that would tear apart the real world aircraft they're based on, etc. While the show makes no mention of the armor being special, there would have to be something crazy to it. Second, how do the pilots pilot the damn things? Back in the Robotech days, there was a jihad between fans of the show and fans of the novels. The novels invented a few things, notably the "thinking cap" neural interface. Those weren't present in the show but do make sense upon reflection. There's no way that anyone could pilot a combat mecha like that with only manual controls. Then again, if you're piloting the battleoid in brain control, why are you flying the fighter version with stick and throttle? A third impossibility, where the hell is the pilot in battleoid mode? Presumably, the pilot's seat is mounted on a 90 degree swivel. When he initiates a transformation, he rotates back and then is raised into a mecha cockpit area that sits behind the fighter cockpit when in plane mode. Once the unit transforms, the pilot is sitting in the chest. (this was illustrated in a few instances when Zentraedi tore into the mecha to get the pilot.) But there's not enough room in the mecha to account for such a cockpit! I remember puzzling over this as a kid with Jetfire, the Transformers version of the venerable Valkyrie. There simply is not enough room to account for a human cockpit. The torso area may have enough room if it was just a robot but it clamshells open to become the ventral surface of the fighter, there's just no room for a cockpit. And there's also the question of where the backseater would sit. We saw that there are two-seater Valkyrie models and the backseater has a chair just like the pilot, one that can raise out of the head of the mecha. The fourth impossibility stems from the vulnerability of the cockpit. While it would have been too complicated to include in the toys, an armor shield is supposed to move over the cockpit canopy. Aside from the fact that there's no way a hard, three-dimensional shape to cover it could actually fit recessed behind the cockpit as shown in the animation, by nature the covering is very thin and means that one solid blow to the "protected" cockpit could kill the pilot or, at the very least, prevent transformation. Hmm! Interesting problems.