Seto Kaiba
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Huh... I don't remember radiation having anything to do with it, but then I try to avoid thinking about Robotech whenever I can. Just for you, I checked the official Shadow Chronicles art book on this matter (and then bleached my hands), and it says they built the mounds to conceal the protoculture matrix and contain the spores of the flowers of life.
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Oh, my bad. Hell if I know...
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IIRC, in legit Southern Cross the three mounds were always that way... they were there to protect and conceal the secret stash of the protozor plants that the Zor Lords left there ages ago.
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QFT. Yeah, but one should never underestimate the Robotech fan base's propensity for making up their own bullsh*t answers and then treating them as unimpeachable fact. Robotech fans have invested so much time and energy into inventing their own answers so they can spackle over the show's many plot holes and continuity errors that most of them don't know what the truth is anymore. It's not surprising that the 3-mounds 3-ships theory is still doing the rounds, since somewhere along the way it ended up attributed to Carl Macek. It seems to have received an implicit acknowledgement from the current mook-in-charge tho. Great Scott! Usually when I say something trenchant about Robotech fans, they don't go and hand me a perfect example of what I was talking about right away. In a rare turn of events - well, rare for Robotech anyway - this theory is actually 100% provably false without having to rely on anything like "Word of God" from the cack-handed twits in charge. The canon reboot comics show those mounds under construction, circa 2015, showing that they contain massive chunks of wreckage:
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Actually, there are both Super Packs and Strike Packs for the DYRL/II-verse's VF-4 Siren... the former being a fairly traditional set of Super Packs that rest between the engine nacelles in fighter mode, and the latter being a similarly mounted set of packs which are different from the conventional "Strike" setup in that they contain funnels rather than a beam cannon.
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Yep... which is, in part, why the emigration fleets send advance forces ahead of the main body of the fleet to scout things out... IIRC, this is what the mass-produced Macross-class ships were originally used for. Yes, the Macross Chronicle technology sheet says as much... but vague qualitative measurements like "only a little" and "small" are not terribly helpful if you're trying to approximate how fast you're really going when you travel by space fold. (Technically, you wouldn't be moving at all, but you get my meaning.) The meaning of things like "only a little" and "small" vary from person to person, which is why I prefer to err on the side of caution and use the few specific, quantitative measurements from the series dialogue. I tried to favor both Misa's and Luca's numbers, but Luca's are skewed somewhat by the fold faults/dislocations that turn what Leon says would be an almost instantaneous trip into a day-long transit.
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's more or less a direct quotation from the Compendium, but yes... Eh... for the most part, Macross's creators have been relatively sparing with the details about the mechanics of fold travel. There's a decent bit about it in one of the technology sheets in Macross Chronicle, which did give a rough figure for the elapsed time for travel from Eden to Earth. As given, Eden is 11.7 light years from Earth... a trip that takes 18 to 24 hours real time and 1-2 jumps to make on average. Bear ye in mind, that's 18-24 hours of objective time in real space... since time passes slower in a fold jump, the ship and its crew would only actually experience a fraction of that time. Misa's formula from the series suggests that a crew traveling on the Earth-Eden run would only actually experience about five minutes of time during the 18 hour, 11.7ly flight. Macross Frontier puts forth a different, somewhat less severe fraction that would make the run into something more like a two-and-a-half hour commuter flight. This is by no means an absolute, however... fold travel seems to be affected by a number of factors, like the route taken and the spatial disruptions called fold faults, which can add time to the trip. Depiction of distance is usually too vague to come up with any alternative measures. Either way, fold travel is fast... it's virtually instantaneous over distances that, with modern space travel tech, would take months or years to cross, and fairly zippy on interstellar travel as well. (If you'll forgive my drawing on Star Trek for comparison purposes, it'd take a starship going at Warp 8 slightly over 100 hours to cover the same distance.) I worked out all of the math behind it a while ago, right down to the distances you're talking about, but I did it all on the premise of Misa's numbers, rather than the ones Luca and co. give in Macross Frontier, since their figures are skewed somewhat by the fold faults in the way. I'll hit you up with it via PM in just a second.
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's all a bit scattered and incomplete, to tell you the truth. We don't really have detailed information on more than the handful of those colony fleets that've put in appearances in various Macross titles. IIRC, Kawamori-sensei also said there were somewhere around 100 other, short-range expeditions kicking around as well. Other than the ones you've noted, Macross-9 was the chosen setting for an audio drama named Macross Generation, and the Macross Quarter-class ships from Macross-17 and Macross-23 put in a brief appearance in Macross Frontier: Sayonara no Tsubasa (at least, according to the movie's Official Complete Book and the coverage from Great Mechanics.DX 17). Macross-3 gets a brief mention via one of the characters in Macross VF-X2 who used to be a part of the local military there, and we briefly see Macross-1 (the shell-less one) in one of the pre-episode setting/continuity segments for the Macross 7 TV series. You can find a few minor details (like launch dates) for certain fleets in the timeline section of the Macross Compendium, and a few details like certain planets being discovered and/or settled by specific fleets. Most of it is just a fairly large blank canvas upon which stories have yet to be painted.
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Chill, man. I know. I wasn't getting on your case, I was just making the point that the problem isn't the Macross Compendium's fault either... like the Macross Mecha Manual, it got its information from "somewhere else". Like every English-language Macross site, its information isn't just from other sources, it has to be filtered through a translator first. Wording slips like this happen because what flows naturally and logically in one language doesn't necessarily do so in others, and restructuring a sentence to retain its meaning while making it flow clearly and naturally in another language is something some translators struggle with. (Incidentally, M3 isn't my site... I just provide the hosting and contribute the occasional bit of art stock or translation. It's Mr March's baby, I'm just the babysitter.) I'd love to go in any correct some of those unclear areas, and maybe flesh out some of the entries with new material from Macross Frontier movie 2, etc. Talos and I have a bit of a list going, and I've got 216 new pieces of fan-art waiting to go up... but I wanna get Mr March's approval before I start poking around. I'd welcome your input on potential changes, since you do a lot more with main timeline stuff than I do. IIRC, doesn't Global also use the "Mac-ross" pronunciation when he calls the Macross Attack in DYRL?
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Ah, lol... this is about ten years before Gundam SEED tho.
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's just a little bit of fan-service.
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Nah, it actually spanned the whole movie... but I had to throw out quite a few scenes just to make it small enough to load in a reasonable amount of time on a high-speed connection.
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Hell, I can't think of a better way of illustrating just how many fanservice shots there were in Shadow Chronicles than that collage I'd thrown together for a previous RT & HG thread. It was so large in the end that I couldn't upload it here as an attachment, it had to be hotlinked in from elsewhere. Unlikely, the original televised cut of Robotech was edited to remove the more gratuitous bits like that... the only thing that changed afterward was they reinserted all the stuff they cut for the "Remastered" edition. Southern Cross was pretty heavy on the fanservice, probably to compensate for its deficiencies in pretty much every other category.
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Yeah, so did the Macross Compendium. What's your point? Yep... in the Macross II continuity, the different order of events put forward by the movie and subsequent timeline pushed Komilia's date of birth back to 2019. So, at the time of her starring role as an adult in Macross 2036, she was 17 years old and not quite done with her pilot training course.
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You're thinkin' of the VF-9E's pilot, Nicolas Berthier.
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Well, the VF-X that we see in the original Macross series doesn't look all that different from a normal VF-1... y'know, the one we see in Claudia's little flashback sequence.
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You're doing it wrong... you have to say my name three times, like in Beetlejuice. Sadly, there don't appear to be any plan views of the VF-2JA out there. I assure you that if there were, I would've made sure of their inclusion in the Macross Mecha Manual's Macross II coverage. It's a minor background mecha, so it doesn't really get much in the way of coverage... whereas the Valkyrie II has plan views both with and without its Super Armed Pack. Yeah, the Valkyrie II's transformation is also set up such that it makes the battroid taller than the fighter mode is long, which is a bit unusual as well. I do think putting it next to the longest VF might do a bit to overstate its small size though. For those who care, the above-posted size comparison is from This is Animation Special #5: Macross II pg79. Admittedly, some of the toys and models don't do a great job of matching the official information... my personal (least) favorite is the 1/250 collection's VF-2SS, which lists the fighter mode length as 15.2m, a figure that doesn't match the animation materials. That size comparison shows a fighter-mode length (w/ Super Armed Pack) of 14m on the nose... which jives with the official data. The line art shows the fighter itself is slightly shorter than the length with the SAP barrel, and computes out to 13.505m when you work from the size comparison. Macross Chronicle declines to list a size for it in the stats block on its mechanic sheet, but its own size comparison shows the Valkyrie II at about the same size as a VF-1. (Admittedly, Macross Chronicle's coverage of Macross II was spotty and inaccurate to say the least...)
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Isn't "audacious" a bit strong for it? If I had to pick one word to describe the Auroran, it definitely wouldn't be "audacious"... it would be "esoteric". C'mon... it's a transforming Sikorsky X-Wing with a working rotor. As aerodynamic oddities go, that's well up there. More or less... it's certainly no stretch to call Shadow Chronicles Tommy's Sentinels fan-fiction.
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Good question... you'll get as many answers as there are people answering, but most of them boil down to some permutation on the theme of "because Kawamori wasn't involved" or, as VF5SS put it, "because it was only average". Macross is a series that has built itself up on a run of exceptional shows, so Macross II criticized more than a stand-alone show of the same quality because it isn't just the one average show in a run of excellence... it's an average show that's trying to follow on from DYRL, one of the most exceptional Macross titles. Nope, I believe it's Bin Shimada or Steve Blum all the way through for Nexx Gilbert. Hibiki ended up with Sylvie because, as they correspond to the original love triangle... Hibiki = Hikaru, Sylvie = Misa, Ishtar = Minmay.
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Eh... maybe, maybe not. Let me qualify that remark then in the interest of fairness. Even when measured against the yardstick of "transforming jet fighter giant robots in space!", Southern Cross mechanical designs like the space helicopter and the tank that provides no protection for its driver induce bouts of "What were they thinking?" among the fans... to say nothing of the casual viewers.
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Harmony Gold is "starting to" hemorrhage fans from the Robotech franchise? Now that is a generous assessment. Let's not kid ourselves here... Robotech's fanbase started hemorrhaging fans around the time "Dana's Story" first went to air way back in 1985. It wouldn't be a stretch to say that the two great constants in Robotech's failed attempts to revive itself have been a loss of fans and catastrophic failure. Each and every one of Robotech's failed attempt to "regrab" a spotlight it never had to begin with has ended up costing it fans. When the Macross Saga ended and the Masters Saga started airing, the viewers threw up their hands and said "What the heck is this?"... and then the bottom fell out of the ratings when they stopped watching. When that godawful Robotech movie had its test-showing, the viewers threw up their hands and said "This is wildly inappropriate stuff for kids, and it's tied into that Masters Saga mess!"... and then the movie was quietly shelved, leaving fans with nothing new, giving them incentive to look elsewhere. When Harmony Gold tried to salvage the forcibly-aborted Robotech II: the Sentinels series by releasing the existing footage as a "movie", some fans threw up their hands and said "This is fecking awful!"... and gave up on the show. When the comic books started coming out, plenty of the fans who looked into them said "This sh!t is awful!"... and then promptly stopped following them, leading to a high cancellation rate. When the McKinney novels first dropped, plenty of the fans who looked into them said "Whatever this is, it isn't Robotech!"... and started flame wars on the internet, driving the fans of the novels out of the fandom in droves. When Carl Macek's last, desperate gasp to revive the dead horse that is Robotech manifested itself as the squeaky wet fart we've come to know as Robotech 3000, the fans threw up their hands and said "What is this? You're betraying Robotech's roots!"... and gave up on the franchise. When Tommy Yune replaced Carl Macek and rebooted the continuity by throwing out 90% of it, the fans threw up their hands and screamed "Sacrilege! How dare you defile my childhood!"... causing many to leave the fandom in irritation. When the Shadow Chronicles movie dropped, the fans threw up their hands and said "What the hell, Tommy? Half of this movie looks like it was done by a high school animation class, and the other half by a softcore porn artist!"... and not only deserted the fandom, but were forcibly removed in droves for saying so. Now Harmony Gold is stuck in a no-win scenario... with the Shadow Chronicles sequel stalled while they wait on the live action movie, they're trying to keep fans from deserting them by endlessly repeating "It's coming soon! It'll be huge!" while avoiding the unpleasant fact that it wouldn't look a damn thing like the familiar designs the fans are so hung up on for fear that they'll scream "Sacrilege!" again and desert the fandom. Yeah, our boy Tommy hasn't exactly had a ton of luck or support in his ongoing quest to "lay down the law" about what's what to a fandom that spend more than a decade deciding that for itself. Nor has he won much favor with his ongoing attempt to make the Robotech setting more like the original three shows and making Mospeada more like Macross. There's that old axiom "Don't fix what isn't broken." There should be another one, or perhaps a corollary to that to the effect of "You can't fix what's already broken beyond repair, so don't bother trying." Meh... I have to agree with Zinjo on this one. Honestly, I can't imagine a circumstance in which removing Southern Cross from the "Robotech equation" wouldn't immeasurably improve the series as a whole AND its future prospects. True, it's the central axis on which Robotech's borderline-incoherent story spins... but in what way is having the weakest and least popular saga be the most important to the story a good thing? Pinning the entire series on a perpetual poor performer like Southern Cross is a wildly lousy move if you intend to keep people watching all the way to the end. A middle arc made up of 24 agony-inducing episodes starring unlikeable characters and mechanical designs running the gambit from unremarkable to nonsensical is no way to hold onto an audience.
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So There's This Robotech Poster With Alto On It...
Seto Kaiba replied to VF-15 Banshee's topic in Movies and TV Series
http://www.macrossworld.com/mwf/index.php?showtopic=35118&view=findpost&p=925913 You'll find it's already under discussion in the RT & HG thread... -
Sorry you had to endure that... the voice acting in the english dub of Macross II: Lovers Again is absolutely freaking terrible. There's really no denying that. Macross II's english dub track is a relic of the early days of (mostly) faithful dubbing, so it was passable back when it first came out but generally hasn't aged well. I strongly recommend you watch that one in subs with the original Japanese audio tracks... though I'd say the same for the ADV dub of the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross, which is somehow even worse for being godawful despite having an all-star english VA cast. Meh... IMO, subs are the way to go with that one too.
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Just a minute ago, I stumbled across a reference to the term "Grenade Box Protector" in reference to the Armored Valkyrie. It's in an issue of Animag from ~1987, in a short article by James Teal that discusses the Macross development history of the VF-1. Line art for the GBP-1S printed in the article is captioned "Shinnakasu GBP-1S (grenade box protector)".
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I remember seeing "Grenade Box Protector" somewhere before, can't remember where though... it might've been a Palladium-ism from the 1st Ed. Robotech RPG, or maybe from Protoculture Addicts magazine. Yeah, that's the version I've seen more commonly... Ground Battle Protector. I thought it might've been one of the VF-X or VF-X2 manuals or guidebooks where I first saw that one, but I just checked and couldn't find it there. Nah, the acronym BFG (for "Big F***ing Gun") was part of the original Doom design document by id Software co-founder Tom Hall, though they used less explicit variants in the manuals for Doom II and Quake II, where it was described as "Big Freaking Gun", in the latter case with a clear (and printed) hesitation to draw a line under their word substitution. A good (and slightly more closely related) example of a backronym like that coming into common use in a fandom is the backronym for "MOBILE SUIT" in Gundam ("Mobile Space Utility Instrument-Tactical).
