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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    It was the first time we really got to see a scene that justified Darth Vader's reputation as The Dreaded. Costume and technical limitations in filming the original Star Wars trilogy meant that Vader had to have an aggressively minimalist fighting style and couldn't really abuse force powers in showy ways. Rogue One's Darth Vader has the same minimalist style, but in light of advances in effects technology we get to see why he doesn't need prequel trilogy acrobatic nonsense to tear through whole platoons of enemy troops like a tornado of knives. The casual brutality of it makes for an incredibly tense visceral action sequence and leaves no doubt as to why this guy showing up makes the rebel troopers wish they'd been issued brown pants. This quadruple amputee burn ward patient is nowhere near the top of his game, but he's still a one man army.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    You say that like it's a bad thing... that scene in Rogue One was the first time Darth Vader had been intimidating in any way, shape, or form since the prequel trilogy ruined him. For once, he wasn't just Little Orphan Ani whining about how he doesn't like sand. Well, for one, it kind of reduces the opening of A New Hope to absurdity... the lie about the ship being on a diplomatic mission goes from "cover story" to "incredibly blatant and obvious lie nobody was going to believe" by establishing that Vader'd been chasing them since the theft of the plans at Scarif and had almost boarded the ship once already.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    I had a feeling Games Workshop would eventually cross the line into prepainted collectibles like this... though I never expected it'd be Bandai they'd partner with to do it. Overall, it looks pretty damn good in terms of the fidelity to the original art and build quality. I wish they'd picked a more interesting start to such an unexpected line though. A generic Primaris marine in generic Mk.X Tacticus pattern power armor belonging to the Ultramarines - the Space Marine chapter embodying genericness - isn't a particularly exciting offering. It's more or less the default settings for space marines in the present edition. I mean, if you're gonna do a posable character model shouldn't you do an actual character with a little personality? Like Marneus Calgar, Cato Sicarus, Uriel Ventris, Azrael, Asmodai, Dante, Kayvaan Shrike, Vulkan He'stan, Vorn Hagen, etc. I know I'd spring for an old school Beakie (Mk.VI Corvus pattern) in a heartbeat, since that was the iconic space marine design when I first started out.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Master File kinda ran with the idea of doing something with the unused hull frame space on the underside in the VF-4 book, so the idea at least has a certain amount of currency. It's basically the three-hull type described in Master File with a less-busy design. I did find it rather amusing that Master File included a freaking water landing conversion. Yeah, it's a modified T-Crash suit equipped with weapons derived from Midou's mom's research. Fun stuff tho, it was nice to see a tiny implicit nod towards that kind of tech in Frontier was the hover skateboards. That thing is a write-up nightmare... a custom manned conversion of an unmanned variable fighter prototype that was converted from a manned variable fighter that was developed by rogue Zentradi based on a stolen VF-4. The way it's written up, I'm half-convinced VBP-1 and VA-110 are actually the designations for the original Variable Glaug. It would fit with Kawamori and Chiba's love of nicking US conventions. 110 would be a design number from Project Constant Peg, the once top-secret test program evaluating captured enemy fighters... and the Variable Glaug was that. The funny part is that, despite all the fuss and noise about the Zentran version only being suitable for a petite Meltran, two of the three known pilots are bigger-than-average Zentradi men: the commander-class Temjin and Naresuan. That can not have been a comfortable ride for them. No kidding. After the last couple Master File books, I am once again out of shelf space and having to buy more bookshelves.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, it was odd. Mahara Fabrio's subordinate, Hoyer, needs a word in private with Macross 7 Trash's protagonist Shiba Midou and totally unheralded we get this QF-3000 that's been converted into a manned spacecraft with a suspiciously roomy side-by-side cockpit so they can talk in private. Nobody bats an eye at this or remarks on it at all. That same sequence depicted a hereforeto unseen and unmentioned variant of the ARMD-class space carrier as part of the 37th large scale long distance emigrant fleet, which is also not remarked upon despite this class of ship being close on fifty years old when the manga is set.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    My mental image was more us translators sitting around loudly agreeing with each other about the things that frustrate us, like a bunch of old duffers at the nursing home. That approach runs an even greater risk of confusion, IMO. Pre-war, you've got publications like Macross Chronicle that insist upon prefacing the pre-war government and military with the word "Earth". Post-war, you've got the problem that a couple of descriptions imply Earth has a local New UN Forces specifically for its own defense AND is the de facto headquarters of the supranational armed forced. That leaves the awkward question of which Earth New UN Forces are we talking about... the ones that answer to the Earth head of state (whatever he/she/fill-in-the-blank is called) and then the ones that answer to the New UN Government itself and its head of state (who I've seen variously referred to as a Prime Minister or Chairman). Well, all the military organization and designation systems that Macross copied almost whole cloth from the US would appear to be the doing of Shoji Kawamori and Masahiro Chiba... as that goes all the way back to Sky Angels if not further. For instance, if you look at the VF-1 units mentioned as being assigned to ARMD-class carriers in the wake of the First Space War in Sky Angels, they're all famous US Navy F-14 squadrons: the Tophatters, Swordsmen, Black Aces, Jolly Rogers, Checkertails, Checkmates, the Wolfpack, Bounty Hunters, Freelancers, Black Knights, Challengers, and Stallions. Likewise, the ARMD-class ships are a who's who of famous aircraft carriers, with almost half of them being US Navy (Enterprise, Constellation, Ranger, Midway, Independence, and Forrestal). Neither are the sort of thing the typical Japanese English-speaker is likely to know. That's every language though... I remember sitting down to my first Latin lesson in high school and being informed that we were going to have to learn both classical Latin (the formal dialect used by the Roman Republic and Empire) and the informal "vulgar" everyday Latin spoken by the plebs, while other classes used the bastardized Latin used by the church and later generations of western scholars. (I took Latin to annoy my parents and keep them from trying to mess with my homework, since they'd taken Spanish and French.)
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, it's WAY too roomy for its size. The cockpit would look more at home on a commercial airliner in terms of size.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Hey, it's Hoyer's little leisure craft from Macross 7 Trash...
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Well, this is now officially a translator pet peeve thread... Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here. I notice it fairly often, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were more slipping past me. I may be American, but virtually all of my coworkers speak British English being Brits themselves or from former crown colonies. (Sadly, this has not given me any insight into the appeal of cricket... it remains as alien to me now as it was when I first read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.) Believe me, I'm not altogether happy with it either... but it's the closest term I've found that communicates that we're talking about the supranational government/military rather than that of the individual member nations to the predominantly American audience here. There's gotta be a better word out there to capture that particular dichotomy, but it escapes me. (I am open to suggestions. I'd previously tried referring to it as the "central" government/forces but that seemed to be insufficiently clear in many cases.) I'd guess it might be easier for an American audience to get their heads around if the EU moved forward with Germany's proposals for a supranational European Army. It wasn't something that Macross really made prominent until Macross Delta, when the subject of "can we expect assistance from the supranational armed forces?" came up fairly prominently in an episode. I feel it might be a smidge more accurate to say that the current state of the New Unification Government is more reminiscent of the European Union. Prior to the reorganization of the government and military brought about by the conclusion of the Second Unification War, the New Unification Government was more along the lines of the American Federal Government in that it was a strong central government that exerted broad authority over its member states. That, of course, was the whole reason that conflict happened at all... folks in the emigrant governments were unhappy with the increasing concentration of governing authority in the central government, and there was a faction within the government and military working to increase that centralization of power (the bad guys in VF-X2). Given the strong American bias Kawamori introduced in his worldbuilding of the [New] UN Forces, using the American terms for levels of organization like that is probably a "best fit" scenario. Obnoxiously, that seems to change between versions of the Macross Frontier story. IIRC it's the TV series that leans slightly French while the novelization(s) lean more towards American with the inclusion of an American-style Vice President on the list of officials that Leon has to have murdered in order to seize the office of Frontier President.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Are you possibly thinking of "fighter/attacker" rather than fighter/bomber? Because I've seen statements that the aircraft that the QF-3000 Ghost was based on was a fighter/attacker multirole aircraft, but I've never seen the bomber role associated with it. Its weapons are exclusively short-ranged, consisting of six 55mm cannons and 2 3-tube missile launchers mounted in the fixed-forward position behind the guns... and a lifting body like that can't carry much under the fuselage without screwing up its own aerodynamics. Design-wise, it's more or less a freshened version of the Martin Marietta X-24A/SV-5J lifting body prototype with armaments. That experimental aircraft was used to test the feasbility of several design choices that were being made for the space shuttle. (There is a nod to this in the form of Kawamori's VF-X-7, which is a Martin Marietta X-24B that Kawamori named the "Ghost Valkyrie".) Macross Chronicle's a top-tier source, but there were changes and corrections to many sheets between editions.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Resources are pretty slim all around on that one... the only book I've translated that says more than a little about it is the old Sky Angels book, which is where most of the info in later publications comes from. Perhaps not directly, but the AIF-X-9 Ghost from Macross Plus is a descendant of the Northrom QF-3000E Ghost from the First Space War. It was arguably also a predecessor of the Neo Glaug drone that was also under test in 2040 (and was a boss in the Macross Plus video game edition). Volume 2 of the VF-1 Master File indicates that the Northrom QF-3000 was internally designated AIF-3, and also mentions an improved model that was developed in the late 2010s that was designated QF-3100 Ghost Kai. After the fully autonomous AIF-X-9 ended in a spectacular fiasco in 2040, the economized production version of the nextgen Ghost (the AIF-7S seen in Macross Frontier) was built with an improved version of the same semi-autonomous artificial intelligence used by the QF-3000. Yeah, the QF-3000 had some issues with its FF-1999 initial-type thermonuclear reaction turbine engine. The knowledge gained while investigating and correcting those issues also benefited the VF-X program. Variable Fighter Master File: VF-0 Phoenix gives a little detail as to how. It describes the VF-0-NF, a VF-0 outfitted with a pair of FF-1999 engines, that was used in atmospheric and space testing to evaluate the performance of a Variable Fighter with thermonuclear reaction turbine engines. (This apparently later led to the VF-0+, a VF-0 updated with the same FF-2001 engines used by the VF-1A.) Yeah, the initial generation of OTM-based AI computers were a little flaky so the QF-3000 was a semi-autonomous unmanned fighter. None before, though it's said that the vast majority of QF-3000s saw combat exactly once... in the battle with the Boddole Main Fleet in 2010. Of the 1,500 produced, less than 100 survived that engagement. Variable Fighter Master File: VF-1 Battroid Valkyrie suggests that the 20 or so remaining Ghosts that the SDF-1 Macross had access to after its defold at Pluto's orbit did pretty well for themselves against the Vrlitwhai branch fleet and suffered only about 50% losses in the entire flight to Mars.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Considering he can't be much over 50 in Macross Frontier, it's a damned impressive resume regardless. The Macross Frontier novelization makes him out to be one of Ozma's old COs from the time he spent in the NUNS prior to the 117th Research Fleet incident, which implicitly further ups his badassery level by suggesting he was Earth/Federal NUNS before going off to join a PMC. Not so much, no. That only came up in connection with my correction of the rank table in the thread's first post by @DWN013. The rank table in question incorrectly presented the rank of Junshō - the word used for foreign "one star" flag officer ranks - as equivalent to the US Navy's usage of "Commodore" as an honorary title held by a senior captain. The best equivalent term for the US Navy's title of "Commodore" is Teitoku. Basically, it was the American English version of the Captain (title) vs. Captain (rank) conundrum that often crops up when translating Japanese into English. On the contrary, we're 100% certain that military structure was changed at least twice in the wake of the First Space War. The first time was when the New Unification Government was established after the First Space War in 2010, and the second was the governmental and military reforms that came out of the Second Unification War. This isn't really about in-universe changes or whether or not it's consistent between shows, though. The actual bone of contention in this discussion is the allegation that the ranks in Macross media being consistently translated as Army-style (or Air Force-style) ranks both in-series and out since the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross TV series is a result of a systematic bias towards the use of Army ranks in the Japanese-to-English translation process, and the related assertion that the Spacy's ranks should actually be translated as Navy ones since it operates a space fleet. (It's worth noting that the general idea that a bias exists is not entirely unreasonable, as the alleged bias can actually be demonstrated in the handiwork of machine translators like Google Translate and Babelfish. Those systems tend to pick whatever the first dictionary definition because their ability to detect context is limited or nonexistent.)
  13. Seto Kaiba
    That could get messy. Is the novel Darth Plagueis still canon-ish? From what I've read, he was kind of a high-functioning psychopath from a very young age.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    According to Vol.3 of the Macross Frontier audio dramas, Colonel Jeffrey Wilder was a lifer in the New UN Spacy with a frankly impressive resume as a variable fighter pilot until some unspecified life event drove him to leave the military and join Strategic Military Services. (It may or may not have been his wife leaving him.) He is, however, acknowledged to be an avid enthusiast of water sports in his free time with a particular passion for surfing. What he's doing in that scene is using the Macross Quarter's Storming Attack mode to surf a piece of armor down into the atmosphere of the Vajra planet. Given his acknowledged passion for the sea in his off time, it wouldn't be surprising if he had boating experience as well. (Getting assigned to an emigrant fleet that had large simulated bodies of water must've been a dream come true for him.) Macross Frontier character designer Risa Ebata did acknowledge in interviews that the visual theme they went for when designing Jeffrey Wilder was that of a "pirate" and a "man of the sea", which is apparently why Kawamori insisted on the goggles he wears over his duty uniform. His passion for surfing was apparently determined early on but not properly touched on until the second movie. More like his hobby. They touch on his past career in the Macross Frontier audio dramas, and as a New UN Spacy fighter pilot he supposedly flew an impressive array of VFs over the years including the VF-1, VF-4, VF-11, VF-17, VF-19, and VF-171.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Considering it's Rebecca Forstadt's tone-deaf caterwauling, the only thing I would say it could inspire would be suicide... or perhaps murder, whatever it takes to stop the Most Annoying Sound. (Seriously, it's like listening to someone insert a barbed-wire buttplug into a hungover cockatiel.) Ah, no... just as in the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross version, the lolicon trio are pretty freaking stoked when they hear they're being delivered to their objective by none other than top ace [Milia/Miriya]. The ONLY hostility ever displayed was between the commanders, which was pretty much entirely work related. [Quamzin/Khyron] was PO'd because [Laplamiz/Azonia] put him on the shortest of short leashes to make him behave, and [Vrlitwhai/Breetai] was a bit snippy because she took his job and it took him a fair bit of political maneuvering to get it back (with interest) from their mutual boss. Zentradi men and women are segregated, but not mutually hostile. Mutually hostile was only a thing in DYRL?.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    The official Macross timelines have always maintained that the Earth Unification Forces were originally created with four branches of service (Army, Air Force, Navy, Marines) in 2001 and that the Spacy was a late addition two years later. The biographical summary from Isamu's personnel file that Guld accesses in Macross Plus mentions that Isamu's (involuntary) reassignments took him to a UN Navy posting aboard the carrier Enterprise (in 2035) and a UN Air Force posting on planet Iota (in 2039) in addition to his service in various UN Spacy postings. Macross Plus's official artbooks also made explicit references to the existence of the UN Spacy Air Force and UN Spacy Marine Corps after the First Space War ended. So the only technically unaccounted-for ones would be the UN Army and UN Marine Corps, and it seems relatively safe to assume that the miclone infantry and tanks we've seen are probably the regular Army. Some of the technical write-ups of VFs also mention branch-specific variants of postwar VFs like the UN Navy's VF-4D and VF-4S. Macross's animation focuses overwhelmingly on the Spacy, so we haven't really gotten a chance to dig into the rest of the armed forces in detail. In Macross II, there definitely seem to still be five branches of the UN Forces c.2092. We know that two of the uniform variants explicitly belong to the Spacy (black) and Army (khaki), and there were a few other variants like blue and green. Given Isamu's experience of being shuffled around to different branches of service without loss of rank depending on where his latest fed-up CO could dump him, I would surmise that the branches of the New Unification Forces are likely not as separate as we Americans would be predisposed to think. The way Isamu does it, it almost sounds like the branch affiliation is more indicative of where you're assigned. EDIT: I mean this mainly in the physical location sense. If you're in space and they attach you to a fleet it's a Spacy assignment, where manning static defenses might be a Spacy Air Force job or being assigned to an orbit-to-surface assault unit would land you in the Spacy Marines. I would assume both are likely combatant commands under the Spacy, and that the non-Spacy forces probably aren't very large.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    It's not that much different from what was used in the Robotech TV series. If you recall, the little ditty that Robotech used to replace the classic love song "Ai wa nagareru" from the original Macross series was "We will win"... a song about winning the battle. It wouldn't exactly have evoked any foreign sentiments in the Zentradi. Also, the "hostility [with] Meltrans" thing doesn't exist in Robotech... only in Macross: Do You Remember Love?. Do you understand the mythos? He's really just Davey the Donut Boy, who blackmailed his way up the chain of command without having any actual skills. I feel like you might be confusing "understand" with "give a f*ck about". Whether they understand or not, it is clearly evident that they don't give a f*ck about it.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    That's an interesting line of thought as well... Besides introducing Zentradi into the organization, the one change that really stands out is that the old UN Spacy's focus on static and semi-static orbital defenses was deemphasized by the logistical necessities of supporting the Humankind Seeding Project. The New UN Spacy needed more flexibility and long-range endurance in its ship designs, since they would have to accompany and protect emigrant ships on their long journeys across the galaxy. They needed ships that were designed to function like ships, rather than ships that were just glorified orbital weapons platforms that occasionally conducted patrols, and probably benefited a lot from the experience the Zentradi brought and the analysis of Zentradi designs. (That might be why the New UN Spacy didn't end up a "space navy"... the Zentradi influence, since they wouldn't have been familiar with blue water navy concepts.) I'd imagine General Vrlitwhai Kridanik did a lot to influence the development of the NUNS's next generation of warship designs that came into service in the 2020s and 2030s. That's when we start seeing the carrier-escort paradigm becoming the dominant formation with a lot of emphasis on stealth. I wouldn't worry too much, this was already an exceedingly broad topic involving history, linguistics, and methods of translation, and so on... You'd have to ask the guys who did the subs for Macross Delta and Macross Delta: Passionate Walkure... they were, in all likelihood, the last ones to ask and they did go in for Army or Air Force-style ranks for both Xaos and the NUNS. (Somewhat oddly, the main characters in Xaos appear to belong to an Air Force-esque organization even though they operate from a carrier. The unit affiliation is often given, in English, as Xaos Ragna 3rd Fighter Wing Delta Flight.)
  19. Seto Kaiba
    The United States Air Force was only "relatively new" in its modern incarnation as a stand-alone branch of the armed forces. The original incarnation of what eventually evolved into the USAF - the US Army Signal Corps, Aeronautics Division - was founded and flying in 1907. That's three years before the US Navy first experimented with aviation in 1910, and 14 years before the Navy's Bureau of Aeronautics was founded as a formal organization for naval aviation. The Signal Corps Aeronautics Division ended up reorganized into the Aviation Division in 1914, and then into an independent branch of the war department as the US Air Service back in 1918 (three years before the Navy's Bureau of Aeronautics was founded, if we're still counting). It was rolled into the US Army as the US Army Air Service with the National Defense Act of 1920, and was renamed several times thereafter. Its name got changed to the US Army Air Corps in 1926, then the US Army Air Forces in 1941, and finally became the independent US Air Force branch in 1947 under the National Defense Act of 1947. So, if we're being historically accurate, technically the Air Force was flying planes before the Navy was and formalized its military aviation organization over a decade earlier than the Navy did. The Navy only looks like it has a longer aviation tradition becuase they were less impacted by congress's inability to decide who should have administrative control over military aviation until the military potential of aircraft became too big of a thing to ignore. (If you're wondering why I know this esoteric history, one of my part-time jobs as a callow youth was at the Greenfield Village history museum, where I occasionally pulled presenter duty in the Wright Brothers cycle shop. The Navy's first hesitant step towards naval aviation was observing a Wright brothers test flight in 1908 in Fort Myer, VA.)
  20. Seto Kaiba
    One thing it occurred to me to add, with respect to the UN Spacy having operational similarities to an Army Air Force, is that the UN Spacy fleet as it existed during the First Space War was developed and operated less as a fleet than as static orbital defenses. For instance, the ARMD-class space carriers were actually developed to be stationary space airbases situated in various orbits as part of Earth's planetary defenses. The idea to modify the design into a warship came after they'd already built at least one as the original design-intent space station: the L5 Frontline Station. The Oberth-class destroyers were designed as ships from the start, but the actual function of that basic, no-frills design is essentially a space-based ballistic missile silo. They park in orbit with the missile silos pointing outward and let rip if they're given a target. Is it, though? Most of its uses are kinda cringy these days. The only one that really gets taken seriously anymore is "Cyberpunk". Some terms like "cyberspace" are dated enough to be instantly associated with the 90's. (and I say that as a guy who has a degree in what used to be called "cybersecurity").
  21. Seto Kaiba
    As far as I know, it's just an attempt to make an intelligible English word out of the kanji for "Space Forces" (宇宙軍) following the same pattern used in the kanji for "Army" (陸軍) and "Navy" (海軍). The other two end in -y in English, so if the Ground Forces are the Army and the Sea Forces are the Navy, then the space forces would be the Spacy/Spacey. Macross's creators have come up with a couple terms like that which unintentionally sound a bit silly in English, like the name the Unification Government gave to the alien starship that crashed in 1999. They called it Alien StarShip One... or ASS-1 for short. "Cosmo" is one of those prefixes like "Cyber" that just feels incredibly dated these days.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    The Star Wars movie I want to see is the one where the Galactic Empire's human resources people try to send Darth Vader to take an anger management class in a vain hope that they can get him to stop using his space magic to murder his direct reports every time he's given bad news. I like to think the Imperial forces have their own version of the Peter Principle called the Vader Principle... that the most ambitious, least competent officers are systematically promoted to the place where they have the least opportunity to damage Imperial interests: the bridge of Lord Vader's flagship.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    If they weren't clearly trying to take this mess seriously, this would be a god-tier work of self-parody by the Robotech franchise.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    A lot of it is actually modeled on the United States Armed Forces... distinctly Japanese touches are surprisingly thin on the ground in the organization of the [New] UN Forces. The ability to transfer between branches without having to be discharged and reenlist is one of those distinctly Japanese touches, though the only officer we've seen do it is Isamu... and he doesn't appear to have been doing it voluntarily, being kicked around from the UN Spacy to the UN Navy, UN Air Force, and back to the UN Spacy over the course of a few years in the 2030s. So... the military ranks used in the Macross anime are the old school terms that were used by the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy until Japan's military was formally dissolved under Article 9 of the Japanese constitution, and are now only used to address foreign soldiers. Nowadays, the JSDF's three branches each have unique terms that incorporate the kanji for their operating regime ("Land", "Sea", and "Sky" respectively). The old system used the same words regardless of branch except where it was prefaced by the name of the branch as an additional word. If a pilot were to transfer from the Maritime Self-Defense Force to the Air Self-Defense Force, he wouldn't be demoted but the rank term used to refer to him would change. The Japanese Self-Defense Force's three branches are organized as distinct commands united at the highest levels. Each of the JSDF's three branches has its own Chief of Staff: Chief of the Ground Staff, the head of the Ground Self-Defense Force Chief of the Air Staff, the head of the Air Self-Defense Force Chief of the Maritime Staff, the head of the Maritime Self-Defense Force They collectively answer to the Chief of Staff of the Joint Staff and his deputies, the Vice-Chief of Staff of the Joint Staff, the Administrative Vice-Chief of Staff of the Joint Staff, and a senior enlisted adviser. The Chief of Staff of the Joint Staff in turn answers to the Defense Minister (and his deputies) and the Prime Minister who acts as Commander in Chief of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces. That said, there are a number of joint organizations in the JSDF that are staffed by a mixture of personnel from multiple branches administrated by the Joint Staff like the Regional Cooperation Headquarters, the SDF hospital network, and SDF Physical Education School. And f*cking proud of it.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, 宇宙軍 is what I was thinking of. There is a very slight etymological bias towards army in a stringently literal "Definition #1" rendering of the term itself, but "space army" sounds goofy as f*ck and I can't think of any translator who'd actually want to use that interpretation. An army is something intrinsically associated with land warfare, so to most a "space army" is a contradiction in terms. That kind of gels with the kanji actually used for "Army" (陸軍, literally "ground troops" or "ground forces") and "Navy" (海軍, literally "sea troops" or "sea forces"). The only reason that a "space navy" doesn't cause the same kind of cognitive dissonance as "space army" is because we've been conditioned to accept it by popular fiction's overwhelming bias toward the Navy organizational model for a space fleet. Write "space navy" in Japanese (宇宙海軍) and it looks every bit as wrong as it should sound in English. My personal preference has always been for the Navy organizational model. Because I was raised on Star Trek, that style has always felt more natural to me and it took a while to really get my head around the idea that a modern space fleet would fall under the administrative jurisdiction of the Air Force. With so much evidence that the ranks are meant to be translated as Army ones thanks to English text visible in the animation itself, info from liner notes, katakana spellings of ranks like the names of the Macross-class SDFNs, and official subtitles produced in Japan under the supervision of Macross's creative staff, my preferences have to take a back seat.
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