Killer Robot

That's about what I figure. Before the ICS, the most important factors in what acceleration a VF could withstand were instantaneous acceleration and long-term wear, since more than 8-9 G wasn't sustainable by the pilot for more than a very brief duration. Those brief durations are still important, mind: a properly secured human can walk away unharmed from brief episodes in the 30-40G range, though in modern vehicles such accelerations are encountered only in ejections and collisions. Even more than that can be survived, though with much higher chance of injury or lasting unconsciousness. In light of that things come together. For example, an instantaneous rating for the VF-19 in the 60G range is sensible: it's what a pilot can take for a moment or two, roughly doubled for a margin of error. If the pilot avoids the missiles but cracks a rib, or blacks out for a few moments, so long as he recovers before crashing or being shot at again it's all good. The ICS changes things, though. Before that there was no reason to make a VF that could take 25G or more for more than a few seconds, because that would kill the pilot. Or to be more specific, some might have been tough enough to due to their other design considerations. There was simply no reason to rate how much acceleration older VFs could take for two minutes. With ICS-equipped models, that statistic becomes suddenly important. As for it being per flight in any case, that would make the most sense. So far as I know they're not using parts that can rest up and heal after some some hard stresses on the airframe, so it's more what's considered safe to endure before getting it on the ground for a mechanic to check it again. Especially years down the road when you have individual fighters that have a long history of combat maneuvering. Again, endurance ratings on aircraft are for the operational lifetime, not just when they're shiny and new.

This really should go in this thread instead of the Frontier tech one, so I'll answer it here, or at least the second. The Macross was badly damaged in Kamjin's suicide run, but not completely destroyed. Macross Plus also takes place a good thirty years later. By then they'd completely rebuilt it, including numerous refits and replacing the old naval vessels with ARMD units like it had originally been planned to have docked at its sides. I suppose there wasn't much practical reason to keep it fully armed and combat ready when Earth had a lot of other defenses by then, but as a central symbol of the new government and one that had come under attack before, it's not a nonsensical thought to have it remain a functional warship.

That's the point I was making before: in real planes "cruising speed" is based on the particular plane's fuel economy curve at a given altitude and load, while maximum speed is based on actual safe and economical long-term operation of the aircraft frame/engines/handling/etc. Since VFs and similarly fusion-powered aircraft in atmosphere have no meaningful range limits, only the last really is important. Further, since no VF has both a cruising and a maximum speed listed(Those from Macross Plus have "max cruising", those from 7 have "cruising standard", those before and after have "maximum" and with different phrasings besides), it's reasonable to assume that the multiple different phrasings all apply to the same number. Actually, double-checking, the YF-19 and YF-21 both have "Cruising" and "Max Cruising" speeds listed, but "Cruising" is under Mach 2 for both, and "Max Cruising" is slightly over Mach 5. So I take back there being only one number for each craft. All the same, I think it makes it all the more clear that the highest practical speed on a given model of VF is just named differently according to which series it appeared in.

It's not that it's a rare thing in sci-fi: lots of things are common in sci-fi that I wouldn't really expect or want out of a new Macross series. For something that started so heavily on the "Just Like Us" approach to alien design, where the ancient galaxy spanning civilization had been very humanlike and in fact humans were seeded/engineered in their image, and their remaining weapons were similarly humanlike only larger and stronger, it set a certain tone. That tone was rather broken when the second type of alien encountered consisted of giant space monsters with no special resemblance between each other, possessed by extradimensional beings which can only be damaged by song-fueled chi powers. After that, the third alien enemy being a symbiotic relationship of giant space bugs and a network of ansible-linked microbes was a step back into harder sci-fi by comparison It wasn't "too crazy for sci-fi" so much as arguably "too crazy for Macross." I'm sure many who had issue as is would have found it easier to swallow had it been a standalone, or a sequel to a series that had some prior manifestation or hint of seriously inhuman aliens/creations and of superhuman powers. Had there been a series in 1973 that was about slightly futuristic fighter pilots and the people around them with no hint of aliens or spaceships, then ten years later SDFM was a sequel to that - people might have found an invasion fleet of four million ships filled with ten meter tall green men to be really out there, right?

Yeah, that part is just how the outfit is designed, with an asymmetrical look. It was that way in the show too.

One might as well ask why, when the foundations of civilian government were similarly destroyed, the military authorities which remained didn't simply take over. Or why individual cultural traditions are still being fostered in a society that has been reduced to small numbers, unified, and split up again in a way having little to do with their initial nationalities? The issue was covered right from the original series, when rather than the refugees just eating ship's rations, Minmay and her aunt and uncle got the restaurant restarted. It was an effort to give people their normal lives back: working, doing business, what have you. This moved to setting up an economy, with shops and luxury goods(such as they could manage), entertainment venues, coin-eating arcades, and what have you. It's not hard to envision the survivors after the war taking this further: the towns set up, the work to be done...people wanting to feel like they had more part in their lives than taking military rations and doing work under military authority was much of how things got back to normal. The world's surface got wiped clean, but the humans that were left didn't...and culture is more than just singing. Their laws, their customs, their interactions: all of these were done in recreation of the world they knew. Maybe trying to fix some past problems along the way, but "let's throw away the whole notion of private business" wasn't on that list. To sum up, after the war, Global and others in authority were perceptive and ethical enough to want to distance the combined future of humans and Zentradi from the Zentradi's uncultured past, and to want humanity back to some semblance of normal life after the ordeal. Obviously they considered private enterprise as part of that culture right along with the arts and elected civilian government, and there's nothing in the setting to suggest that wasn't a reasonable or likely choice.

A great point there, and the one in your earlier post about simple fan love of the VF-19 being a significant factor in this. I'm sure that if this forum were around in 1995 the tech thread would have included a long discussion about "The VF-1's a classic! I bet if you put VF-19/22 engines and a pinpoint barrier system it would totally be as good as the new model too!" Which is nice and all but only covers one factor of many and distances itself from real comparisons of the fighters in question. (Which admittedly is SK's apparent design motif for the VF-25, but to disclaim that's only visual reference, nothing to do with the underlying technology or airframe.)

That's a pretty good point. Taking just the other TV series into consideration, I can't really call MacF low on dogfighting. SDFM and 7 likewise had a lot of "mecha zoom across the screen firing weapons, some blowing up", "quick pass", and "battroids punching each other" scenes in preference to complex and expensive dogfighting scenes.

Oh, that was an aside. You asked why there weren't more scenes like that after all.

Hey now, Ozma did an homage to that scene, facing down a cyborg in a dark passage. He just wasn't in his VF. If he ends up marrying Brera, Ranka's family situation will be very, very confusing.

No, the actual episode zoomed out further on the picture and it was applesauce: she'd mashed them up right there so some were still identifiable.

Interesting. That makes Battle Frontier somewhat longer and significantly heavier than Battle 7, doesn't it? The Compendium has it as 1510m and 7.77M tons, Even if the Frontier figure includes the 2.5M for the gunship and 7 doesn't, that's a pretty big difference.

More from Danbooru - I think this one is a cute and different approach. And it's kinda scary, the last few pages are almost all Sheryl and Sheryl/Alto. Better catch up, Ranka! (Yes, I'm just being silly.)

I'm not totally sure how seriously I take a claim it will be more about Klan: wasn't that statement posted along with clearly silly cast interview answers and a big picture of the whole cast having switched costumes? I got more of a "the movie's coming and we're not giving much away" vibe out of it.

Air density changes in relation to temperature, since higher temperature gases will have a lower density at the same pressure. However, since the speed of sound is affected by temperature and not much by density it isn't that important. In any case, atmospheric pressure and density both fall off steadily at increasing altitude, just at not exactly the same rate. As for the engine design, that's possible. VF engines also seem to have turbine setups that make their internals look a lot more like a modern turbojet than a ramjet or scramjet, so it's possible they have different needs. All the same, the fact that Mach 5 is an area that sees a lot of varied changes in the fluid properties of air is one that might reasonably affect other and highly different aircraft and engine designs. For things past that, I don't know that it's entirely clear what the distinction is between "cruising" and "maximum" speeds are for a VF. With modern aircraft, cruising is the speed at which the craft is most fuel efficient or at least does not suffer a sharp drop in fuel efficiency(for fighters the general line is without afterburners), and maximum is generally the maximum speed which is safely sustainable, usually at much lower ranges. With VFs having effectively unlimited atmospheric range this is not an issue. One thing I noticed looking through Macross Compendium: no VF appears to have both a cruising and a maximum speed listed. In fact, how speeds are listed seem to be entirely determined by what they appeared in: The VF-1 and VF-4 have a "Max Level Speed", the Macross Plus and 7 fighters have "Cruising speed standard in atmosphere", and the Macross Frontier fighters have "Max speed standard in atmosphere". The sole exception is the VF-11D Custom, which has a listed "Emergency speed" which is not much higher than its standard cruising speed. I think it reasonable to assume that the main speed listed for all fighters is intended to be the same actual factor, with different wordings by series being a matter of stylistic changes in designer notes over the years: namely, what can be safely sustained over an indefinite amount of time, rather than what peak(the emergency speed so far known for only one craft) that can be reached for seconds or minutes over the course of a high speed pursuit or combat. Notably, the relationship between maximum and emergency speed in a given model may not have any fixed proportion: that's going to depend on what part is going to fail first and just how sensitive it is past the safe maximum. One VF might become swiftly unreliable not far past the normal limit, and another might have more headroom. Some might be limited by drag, some by structure, some by stability, As a result, emergency speed isn't something that can be extrapolated from the single existing reference point. As for the new information on the VF-25 writeup that isn't on older ones, specifically mention of the "fuselage heat-resistance boundary" and the design load being specified as "at maximum acceleration for 120 seconds", I don't think it's possible to say with certainty that one of the two is an important difference/departure from the same statistic in past designs and that the other is entirely irrelevant. That said, if either is a point actually new to the VF-25 writeup, I'd say it's the second, mostly because it's a new number rather than a new explanation of an existing number. Which makes sense, since the VF-25 is the first one with enough raw thrust to commonly sustain those Gs for more than a matter of seconds, it needs to consider more than the instantaneous stresses undergone during atmospheric turns. Problem is, what does that make the instantaneous number, if the 120 seconds part makes it new? And if this is also the instantaneous number, why would there be engines that will destroy the VF simply by being throttled up? Also as DH said very importantly, design loading on an aircraft has very much to do with warranty and maintenance schedule rather than when an aircraft literally comes apart. This is not even an immediate concern but rather one over the planned design life of the aircraft: how many flight hours do you plan to get out of an individual airframe under those conditions? Personally, I think the writers are either commonly not stating exactly the same statistic for different craft, especially those appearing in different series and thus written up years apart from each other; or worse are sometimes just throwing numbers and words at the paper. Most charitably, they are meaning to give the same set of statistics for each model but are doing it sloppily and confusingly. Which isn't so bad: they're not doing real engineering work, they're writing about imaginary planes in a world where ten meter humans are physically possible and songs can stop space fleets. I understand this does not make for useful technological discussion, however, so trying to make it make sense is still important.

That's not really the case. The speed of sound is virtually independent of air density. It is, however, greatly affected by air temperature, which is why it drops markedly going from sea level to the bottom of the stratosphere at about 10km. Above that it begins to increase again, until at 50km it's close to that of sea level. Past there, it changes further, but by then the word "atmosphere" is mostly a formality. Mach 5 is an important number since that's when the hypersonic range is generally defined as beginning. It's not a simple matter of frictional overheating: the way air flows over an aircraft, affecting many aspects of efficiency and handling, changes sharply in that general speed range. Even aside from heat issues, a VF in atmosphere would handle much differently, and an efficient design might need considerable adjustments to its aerodynamics, decreasing its capability at more common atmospheric speeds. Also, engine design becomes a great issue. Conventional ramjets lose thrust at hypersonic speeds due to the intake design needed at lower speeds forming shock waves at higher speeds that produce significant and eventually overwhelming drag. While a VF's air-ram engines might have different thresholds for this, eventually it would have to close intakes and operate in rocket mode with the associated limited fuel capacity that entails. Engine redesign could push these boundaries further, but how much is technologically feasable, and how important Mach5+ atmospheric combat is to the military of the 2040s and beyond, who knows? Main point is that higher temperature resistance isn't all that's needed to pass that boundary, so it's reasonable that a lot of VFs are in that range. Though that all aside, I agree how fast a VF can go will depend heavily on its altitude, since the primary limit is atmospheric friction. That's taken into account at some level in having low and high altitude speeds listed, but obviously it's going to be a curve that starts at the low altitude number, goes up to whatever the optimum is, and then drops again as the available air does until the plane is better off switching to space mode.

I want something with more character development and better pacing than Mac7, and less of the hero mech focus, but silly? Silly's what kept me watching anyway. Bring it on! Not that I hate serious, but not everything has to be totally so.

Can it start with a nice big first post "Beginner's Guide to the bewildering array of new Macross books?" Since I could totally use that.

See, RedWolf is talking about just what I thought. Good enough in mecha design to mine for the main line, bizarre enough in story design that they're thankfully not making game events have important impact on the animated installments.

Human heads are not armored. Neither are most military aircraft, not in the sense of "armor" as the word is used for anything on the ground or water. Even the A-10, an aircraft designed specifically to survive punishment from ground fire, does it mostly by means of an overengineered frame and lots of redundant systems. Armor in the sense of a hard coating meant to stop bullets is mainly just used for the "bathtub" around the pilot and some critical flight control components. Why is the Vulcan still so popular? The US military has a love of standardization in many systems: not in all, but this is a classic case. In part, this is because the US doesn't prioritize guns on its fighters as much as some other militaries do. It's not as bad as when they decided guns were entirely obsolete in the 1960s so designed the original F-4 as a missile-only craft, but US fighter doctrine still gives its love to distance kills with missiles, so it's no wonder they're not rushing to replace it. That ignores the complexities both of how tank armor works, and how strafing works. Even the weak points of tank armor are stronger than the tough points of aircraft, that's true. That's why the GAU-8 is much heavier than smaller aircraft guns like the Vulcan, and has a higher rate of fire and muzzle velocity than even 25-30mm guns meant for air-to-air rather than air-to ground. But even then, it's a world smaller than the 105mm or larger rounds used in tank guns, or AC-130 gunships: penetration depends on the fact that tank armor is still much thinner from above or the side, and where the armor slope tanks rely on against ground attack can't help. It also depends on heavy clustering: strafing isn't a matter of dipping your nose down, pressing the button, and waiting for the explosions. It's a rather dangerous and difficult method of lining up a steady shot while flying rapidly through the air, sending 60 or so rounds at the target(that 'less than a second' you mentioned), and trying to land them in a tight cluster while knowing you make a good target in return. Of course it looks easy and flawless on Youtube: who posts the runs that don't do much? It's not that physics is different, it's that the vehicles are different. You've made the important point right there: The VF with ECA has armor like a tank's. But since it's an aircraft with multiple configurations fighting in a high-speed three dimensional environment, it can't use the tricks tanks do with their armor: no easy loading on the front plate, no sloped armor, no way to only really need to be strong against heavy weapons from another tank in front of you. So either the VF is protected like the thin parts of a tank, which I don't think is what most people say when they mean "like a tank", or else it's protected like the strong parts of a tank, only in a much more all-over fashion. Further, it's a lot faster and more maneuverable than a tank: remember what I said about strafing and clustering? It may not be easy work, but it still relies on tanks being relatively slow and not able to accelerate and dodge like a VF does. This means that a 20mm M61 would be useless. It means a 30mm GAU-8 wouldn't be at its best even if you could get the VF to hold still while you put a whole burst in. It means, in short, you need a new gun. This brings us to the 55mm VF-1 gunpod. Sure, it's half the diameter of a 105-125mm MBT gun, but if Mr. March's estimates of muzzle velocities over 3000 m/s are correct, its rounds are going much faster, and the 1200rpm rate of fire is well ahead of the 8-12rpm you might get out of conventional tanks, so really it sounds like about what you need to kill heavily armored supersonic vehicles. I suppose my basic point is, you're talking about futuristic weapons. Even if you don't want your OverTech flaunting the laws of physics too badly, applying modern examples is like applying WWI anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons design standards to what we have now.

I've generally gotten the idea of the games, VF-X2 among them, as being not unlike the assorted games and books for Star Wars, where some are canon in theory and might be an occasional source of idea or mecha mining for things to actually put in the "main" franchise of movies/TV, but which aren't considered important enough that the main properties will hinge on them or work too hard to fit in line with them. I may be wrong, but I haven't seen any clear indication otherwise.

CD or anime, I just meant that there's no sign the door has closed to her doing Minmay work again in general. I don't expect new anime with Minmay either, but it's not due to Mari Iijima.

She did Minmay for the newest English dub just a few years ago, so I imagine she's not entirely averse to the work. A little averse, I'm sure: that one little voice acting role ended up dominating her reputation back home(she's lived in the US for years now) in a way that probably only the Star Trek cast can truly understand.

I agree. I liked DYRL, but only because it was such a stunning leap in visual quality that it was a whole new experience. Had it been mostly looking like the TV show but with the plot crammed down and altered the same way I really would have found it ignorable.

Several shout-outs. Including from Sheryl. I'd say odds are good.