Seto Kaiba

1 hour ago, pengbuzz said:

After expending so much of its' resources and forces combating Zeon, you can hardly blame them if they took that position and just waited for them to collapse. The less organized and solvent they are, the weaker they would be for the Federation to have to take on the next time. It also gives Earth a chance to recover in some fashion (especially given the condition it's in at the start!).

Exactly.  If your enemy is in the middle of making a series of unforced errors, by all means let them finish.

We know that the Principality of Zeon's economy is swimming in wartime debt to the point that they were laying off career soldiers like Black Tri-Stars and selling off "war surplus" mobile suits to the Sides.  Now we've learned that...

Kycilia has done a lot of the Federation's work for them.  Her hostile stance towards her brother Gihren over suspicions that he assassinated their father kept Zeon's military divided along factional lines and working against itself for five years and helped push the fledgling nation's economy to the brink.  Now she has...

Kycilia (and Nyan) may have inflicted more damage on Zeon in the space of a single afternoon than the Federation did in the entire One Year War.  That's quite the achievement... bettered only by the sheer horror of what the Yomagn'tho is. 

6 hours ago, Hikaru Ichijo SL said:

I just wonder what the Earth federation has been doing all this time.  Did they give up completely.   Is there no resistance left.  It is not that Zeon itself is all that stable.    They focus on the useless clan battles which lead to nothing in the end.  

The Federation didn't give up completely, no.  They essentially voluntarily withdrew from space to rebuild their forces after successfully ousting Zeon's forces from Earth and then fighting Zeon to a stalemate in space without the technological superiority they had in the prime timeline.  They successfully defeated Dozle Zabi at Solomon and tried to wipe out Zeon's headquarters and logistical support center at Granada by dropping Solomon on it, but the zeknova foiled that plan and so they put the war on hold.

The Federation Forces withdrew to Earth, and have been focusing on rebuilding.  We know from earlier episodes that they've been covertly developing their own newtype corps at the Murasume Lab in Japan and field testing them in Clan Battles via the Twelve Olympians team and a shell company run by the Murasume Lab.  They've developed at least one working psycommu weapon (the Psycho Gundam), and they've also created this timeline's version of the Titans seemingly for a future offensive against Zeon.

Of course, the Federation may also be taking a "wait and see" approach to Zeon.  With the remaining Zabis fighting amongst themselves in the wake of Sovereign Degwin's death and Zeon's economy collapsing under the weight of its war debt, the Federation may have just been biding its time until Zeon implodes on its own.

5 hours ago, SebastianP said:

Yeah, Destroids make more sense in the "defending against other ground units" role, but since Plus combat has gone more towards the "lightning VF raids", I do wish we'd have seen more destroids in Delta since they're noted to be cheaper to produce than VFs and Brisingr Cluster isn't giving off "super rich" vibes. 

Then again, while watching the Aerial knights fly face first into a crossfire set up by a bunch of Super Defenders and Cheyenne IIs and get deleted would have been amusing, it would have made for a short show if the enemies ran out in episode 3. ;D

Even in the original Macross series, the Destroids weren't able to do the jobs they were designed for because they ended up in space aboard the Macross instead of planetside on Earth waiting for an invasion that wasn't coming.

Macross Plus, Macross 7, and later titles simply did the logical thing and replaced 'em with more compact and efficient point defense guns and launchers.

Destroids may be cheaper than a Valkyrie, but they're also far more limited.  They're either groundbound or stuck in specially designed bunkers on the outside of a handful of rare ship classes that actually support them like the Macross Quarter-class or the Macross Elysion-type.  With most of Macross Delta's combat taking place either in space away from ships or in the air over population centers and Protoculture ruins, working them into the story would be difficult.  And it would take a certain je ne sais quoi out of the story if their antagonists were shot to bits by a ground-based anti-aircraft machinegun during their flashy maneuvers.

2 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

Ix that the episode where a trio of old monster pilots accidentally blow up a building?

Yup, that's the one.

2 hours ago, Big s said:

I actually liked Thunderbolt, but I do have to say it has the worst soundtrack of just about anything ever. Reminds me of the Ed Edd n Eddy soundtrack, but if they got drunk and forgot the notes

I had no real use for it.

The animation is high quality, but the barely-there main story is not helped in the least by making every single character a maximally unlikeable total bastard.  It feels impossible to get invested in any of the cast or their fates when everything about who they are and what they do seems calculated to make them as easy to hate as possible.  It's all edge and no point, like a pizza cutter.

4 hours ago, TG Remix said:

You'd think they'd be mostly abandoned, but not only we have said modernizations (which seemed to be popular in their own right,) but they appear as the occasional enemies in VF-X2. Initially I thought they were only used by Vinderance, a resistance group that used what they can get their hands on, who may or may not got potential backing from Max himself (that's probably the reason why their fleet is made up of the same type of Meltran ships the UN uses in there.) But come Mission 10A, Defenders, Phalanxs, and Tomahawks acted as the main defense force of the under construction Ceres Base; and it wasn't a place in the middle of the boonies, Vinderance specifically target it as it was a front line base in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter against external threats, as its wide-range jamming capabilities can divert attention away from Earth.

Thus far, only two attempts to modernize existing Destroid lines have been mentioned across not quite 60 years of in-story time.  Only one of which was successful (the Cheyenne II).

No mentions of any new model development for the New UN Forces or PMCs in all that time either and we know the military's decommissioning and selling off the First Space War machines to civilian users for conversion into heavy construction equipment.

WRT Ceres Base, I'd assume there are old, possibly formerly mothballed, Destroids stationed there because the base is incomplete and it's one of the few spacecraft large enough to have Destroids maneuver inside of it safely.  Presumably once the base comes online, they'd replace the Destroids with static point defense guns and missile launchers like all of the other New UN Forces ships and rely on Valkyries for local area defense.

4 hours ago, TG Remix said:

My guess is that Destroids would be better suited as a economic solution to base and city defense compared to the more costly VFs since Frontier and Delta have them in those roles; though then again there were the VF-1s stationed at Apollo Base in Mars and the Diamond Fleet being relocated as City 7's defense, so who's to say?

Given what we know about tactics in Macross, there's not a lot of value in basing defenses on a planet's surface.

The thousands of remaining Zentradi main fleets are the main threat at large in the galaxy.  Their usual MO is to blast their way to orbital supremacy and then simply flatten enemy surface targets from orbit like they did to Earth in the First Space War or to Spica III in Variable Fighter Master File.  That's why the New UN Spacy's defenses are organized around avoidance first and foremost using active and passive stealth technology, and then around keeping enemy forces away from orbital space with various defensive fleets and orbital defense stations.  

Destroids on the ground aren't much use against an enemy that's never going to come down there to fight.

That's almost certainly why the Al Shahal NUNS is only able to muster token resistance to the Var-affected NUNS Marines on the surface.  Their defenses are mainly up in orbit, so what they had on hand while the space defenses were occupied by the Aerial Knights was the Valkyrie units that'd been rotated to surface postings and the handful of air defense destroids that'd probably been configured for remote operation in static emplacements until things went south.  Maybe that's why they struggle to hit anything in the episode... hasty switchover from unmanned to manned operation and/or out-of-practice pilots.

3 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

I also wonder if surplus destroids were purchased by several municipalities and modified for other purposes?

*Imagines a destroid plowing the road after a snowstorm in December*

We see a fair bit of that in Macross 7's 15th episode, "A Girl's Jealousy".

In that episode, the citizens of City 7 bring out their privately owned Valkyries and Destroids for a carnival that's a low-key recruitment drive for an ad hoc defense force.  There are a number of privately owned VF-1s in the crowd, but also several Destroids that have been disarmed and modified as various kinds of construction equipment.  There's a Spartan that has both hands replaced by drills, a Defender with a vertical drilling rig fitted, a Tomahawk with what appears to be a massive pair of dozer blades, a Phalanx with a massive cement mixing drum and trowel, etc.

Of course, some of the Destroids ended up being used as literal target practice as seen in Macross Plus.

2 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

I think they need to give the Gundam universe a rest for a bit before embarking on another new series. Take some time to really think about characters, potential storylines and series concepts, as they seem to be "running on fumes" at this point (trying to be more charitable than just writing them off as "lazy" and such).

Your take on this, Seto?

As much as I love Gundam, I've found the writing in the last few installments of Gundam to be pretty darn underwhelming.

I'm not one of those fans who enjoys those all flash and no substance titles like Thunderbolt or SEED Freedom.  I'd rather they take a few years between titles to come up with a really compelling story to tell instead of churning out a new series every year.

Telling amazing stories is something they're eminently capable of.  They've just been green-lighting a lot of mediocre nonsense lately.

3 hours ago, JB0 said:

They're probably supposed to be, in that no one thought much about the exact details of interstellar shipping and just put "normal shipping containers" in(it makes it very readable for the audience if you don't reinvent the wheel needlessly, after all). But that would actually be a little strange since ISO and the entire shipping industry was destroyed in Space War I.

 

Granted, when the industry was rebuilt the primary initial concern would be compatibility with the equipment aboard the Macross/Daedalus/Prometheus, so there's definitely room for ISO to reach out from beyond the grave. But it also creates room for new formats to establish themselves as the industry is rebuilt and expanded, so there may very well be two active container standards(to the consternation of dock workers everywhere).

Whether the ISO survived through the surviving engineers who formed all of the post-war companies or simply was reformed after the war ... 

I'm just going to leave this here because it's true either way. 

https://xkcd.com/927/

Sincerely, 

A guy who sits on like five standards committees at the SAE. (AKA "Part of the problem")

4 hours ago, SebastianP said:

Is there a source for it being *smaller*? M3 has no info on it at all (no Delta articles), and there's basically no info about the work destroid from Frontier either, so it's really difficult to tell how big the Frontier model is.

Just the liner notes and series glossary.

No hard specs or anything of that nature, just a few sentences of description about how it's a scaled-down work use Destroid that's popular among civilian operators and about basic design features like its roller-equipped feet, extendible arms, and more construction machinery-esque cabin.

Official coverage of the "Destroid Works" (or Work) from Macross Frontier describe it as an unarmed version of the military's Cheyenne II.  It's the same basic machine, the Works version simply omits the weaponry and weapons-related systems like the large radar in favor of high-precision manipulators, high-viz paint, and warning lights since it's meant to be used as general purpose heavy machinery.

4 hours ago, SebastianP said:

While it's obvious that they're related, and that both are related to the Cheyenne II, But drawing conclusions about scale due to shared components is kind of dangerous due to how many variants there are of the same mesh at different scale in other cases. (I'm looking at the beam turrets from the Northampton/Stealth Cruiser/Gefion, which exist at *at least* three different sizes, possibly as many as five...)

Indeed.

We can be confident the Cheyenne II and Destroid Works are the same size because we're told they're the same machine plus/minus combat systems, but all we know about the Workroid is that it's "smaller".

A shame... I know the goal was always to go for 5 seasons, but it's still disappointing to see this one end.  If any recent Star Trek series deserved seven seasons it was this one.

6 hours ago, Dynaman said:

Heck, it is far above Return of the Jedi, which is where the Rot really started.

Personally I have a hard time choosing between it or the original Star Wars as the number 2 film in the entire franchise. Star Wars has the benefit of being a phenomenon that really sucked me in to science fiction (*) but really doesn't hold up as an incredible movie. 

I'd rank it even higher than that, personally... but that's mostly a reflection of my own disinterest in the Jedi as a concept.

(I'll always find The Chosen Hero of Destiny far less interesting than The Guy Angry Enough To Do Something About It in the hero department, there's so much more agency in the latter character.)

2 hours ago, Big s said:

I especially hated Saw. That whole thing with him was a super drag.

One thing I did not appreciate when I first saw Rogue One, but came to understand after friends coerced me into watching The Clone Wars and Rebels...

Not liking Saw Gerrera is 100% the correct and intended reaction.

3 hours ago, Hikaru Ichijo SL said:

It is bad of me to hope that the end of the show wipes out this entire universe like it never existed.,  I really do not see the point of this show period.

Eh... whether it is or not is beyond me, and I'm not going to judge you for it regardless.

I've personally never cared for The Multiverse as a creative concept.  Too often, it's an excuse for lazy storytelling.  Creators can use The Multiverse to raise the stakes mindlessly without a care for the consequences and avoid having to properly develop new characters because they can just plug existing characters into these alternate reality stories.

I'd agree that GQuuuuuuX has not really made effective use of its Alternate Reality premise.  It feels like there wouldn't really be much to prevent this exact plot, minus the Rose of Sharon, from being ported to the main UC timeline as a post-Victory series after renaming some characters.

8 hours ago, SebastianP said:

There's a Destroid for everything. Shame we don't get to see them very often anymore....

Not s'much.

Destroids were practically abandoned as a concept after the First Space War.  The only "new" models we've seen are modernizations and retrofits of pre-war 03 or 04 Series units like the Cheyenne II or Super Defender.  The only commonplace one seems to be the Cheyenne II, partially (possibly mainly) via the unarmed Destroid Work model and the scaled-down Workroid.

8 hours ago, SebastianP said:

Speaking of, I decided to rewatch Delta ep 1 to check out Hayate's dance number, and his work destroid is really interesting. It's not the same model as the one from frontier, but it looks related; it should also be decently easy to scale since the containers look like they're just 20-foot ISO containers. 

Yeah, it's a smaller derivative of the Destroid Work that's not meant for hazardous conditions.

It's said to be quite popular as a piece of heavy industrial/construction machinery, though.

8 hours ago, SebastianP said:

I'm a little irritated by the container ship though. At first glance it looks like those could be ISO containers, but when you look closer they're not as tall as they're wide, unlike the real things. So trying to scale the ship's height by the number of containers doesn't work. What I *can* tell is that there's space for at least 20 (width) by 20 (length) by 12 (height) of the small containers we see from the front, though the bigger containers in the back are harder to calculate. If those *are* supposed to be ISO 20-foot containers, were looking at 4800 TEU worth of capacity, which is mid-sized for an ocean-going ship (those go up beyond 20,000 TEU, but also down to a few hundred). 

Given that Hayate starts the Macross Delta series as a dockworker handling freight at the Shahal City spaceport and he finds Freyja inside a shipping container that had just been offloaded by a ship coming from Windermere IV, that that those containers are meant to be the same containers Hayate is handling day in and day out seems certain.

3 minutes ago, Mommar said:

Least bad is not the same as good.

I wouldn't call Rogue One a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination.

I'd call it probably the single best movie outside of the original trilogy.

3 hours ago, Big s said:

Sorry, it’s hard to think of good Disney Star Wars movies.

Rogue One.

With the right people at the helm, LucasFilm is more than capable of making worthy additions to the Star Wars's storyline.

Their track record when it comes to picking the right people is more miss than hit, though.

11 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

Yeah; I really do think the pacing is way off here, and the story as a whole (what story there was) was not handled very well.

YMMV, but for me the most frustrating part of GQuuuuuuX has to be that the main trio really only just got involved in the plot.

We are ten episodes into what appears to be a one cour Gundam series and only now are the protagonists actually becoming relevant to what's actually going on in the story.  The rest is just faffing about.

Nearly as bad is all the subplots that the series wasted screen time teasing - the slow collapse of the Principality of Zeon after the war, the power struggle between Gihren and his sister Kycilia, everything to do with the Titans, and now Challia Bull's great revelation at Jupiter - are either being left hanging or hastily wrapped up in barely enough time to boil an egg.  That most of these subplots are a lot more interesting than the main story does not help.  We could've spent time on those instead of watching Machu and Shuji stomp on a string of jobbers in Clan Battles.

50 minutes ago, Hikaru Ichijo SL said:

I really can't see what the endgame for this show is. How they wrap it up that quickly is ridiculous.  

Seems a safe bet that...

3 minutes ago, pengbuzz said:

Yeah... just a nightmare for accuracy's sake though. O.o

Depends on the model, I guess... not so much of an issue for something like the VF-1 or Regult.

3 minutes ago, pengbuzz said:

*Imagines giant tube of glue being held by several valks as they position a new module in place*

I've got nothing for a Glue Valkyrie... but when it comes to welding, we've got you covered: https://www.macross2.net/m3/macross7/vt-1-battroidwork.htm

11 minutes ago, SebastianP said:

The interior shots make the ship look *huge* if you know what you're actually looking at.

I was thinking more of the crew spaces themselves, where most of the onboard shots take place.

The Elysion's bridge appears no bigger than the Macross Quarter's, for instance.  The briefing room where they hold several of their discussions with Berger and others is barely large enough to accommodate the main cast.  

To an extent, I suspect this is because of reused interior design from the Quarter.

11 minutes ago, SebastianP said:

Something to remember when comparing Aether to the other carriers is that:

1 - compared to all the others, Aether is really skinny, I mean seriously skinny. 

2 - Aether looks like it's designed with a single, normal-height hangar deck along the lines of a real carrier, or Prometheus or ARMD-L, rather than the high-volume hangars of the Guantanamo or Uraga

3 - the entire lower hull of the ship is the Macross Cannon. 

There are some shots in the TV series where the hangar appears to be a split-level affair to permit embarkation of VFs without ladders.

As to the size of the Macross Cannon and whether it's present on both ships or just one... that's not officially confirmed AFAIK.

1 hour ago, pengbuzz said:

Unfortunately, no one told that to Hasegawa when they issued their TV and DYRL? versions (DYRL was issued first, then TV Version); all they did was change a few parts; aside from that, they used the same basic kit:

Model kits and toy companies are gonna do stuff like that as much as they can to keep costs down even if it's not necessarily screen-accurate.

A lot of 'em are probably very happy that Macross is so friendly to parts-reuse with many variants of the same model that share most of their parts in common.

1 hour ago, pengbuzz said:

But to the point: if the DYRL version were the "reconstructed" TV version, they would probably have to had tore her down to the framework after Kamjin's kamikaze attack at the end of the TV series (given the catastrophic damage to her starboard shoulder and the booms).

Her hull's modular, they likely replaced or tore down and rebuilt entire modules where necessary.

With factories in orbit producing more Macross-class parts, it probably wasn't particularly difficult... except for doing it under gravity.  (Or maybe they just hauled the whole ship up.)

3 hours ago, JB0 said:

So the best-case here is "no one in the history of the franchise has ever cared about scale and it is wildly inconsistent"? 

Seems odd to take a firm stand about accurate numbers when that's the starting point. But what do I know?

The best case is to admit that the reality of animation is that it's never going to be perfect.

The official sizes of the ships are set by the designers who created them, as guidance for the animators.  The animators get "close enough" the vast majority of the time, and that's all they really need to do in order for the show to look right and look good.  100% fidelity is not, and never will be, a realistic expectation.  The animators aren't given that much time or anywhere near enough resources to deliver perfection. 

What we're looking at here is mostly those odd cases where the animators didn't get "close enough".  Most folks would write those moments off as animation errors and think no more about them.  Some devoted fans want to examine everything in minute detail.

11 hours ago, SebastianP said:

A VF-25 can get through the *front* gate, if folded up with the fins down. The rear landing strip is too narrow, even if the opening is as wide as the front one. To make both ends work, I need to go up to 150% of the modeled size, and at that point, I feel like I might as well make the nice bridge from the line art fit as well, and go up to 200%. And 40 fighters is just the maximum I think is feasible at this size, which is nice because it makes the size of Operation Stargazer feasible.

I'd just change the proportions of the rear gate and leave it at that, TBH.

That way it fits neatly with the handling of the Gefion both in-game and in the novel.  40 fighters is way too much for the Gefion in either version of the story.

11 hours ago, SebastianP said:

Guantanamo, being scaled up similarly, will have other benefits over the Gefion - you can launch a König Monster out of the front maw; and the Gefion has no place to launch space-type Ghosts without landing gear out of, while the Guantanamo has plenty.

Considering how rare Konig Monsters are and how they almost invariably operate from larger main force carriers like the Mother Raven-type or a Battle-class, I'm not sure that's necessarily a useful advantage.

The Gefion having no place to launch space-type Ghosts is a bit of a non-issue as it doesn't carry any, IIRC.  It wasn't designed as a carrier, it was converted into an ad hoc one, so missing or having less-than-optimal carrier functions is not only not a dealbreaker... it's expected.

11 hours ago, SebastianP said:

Hmm. I would like to know what the other instances are if you can point me in a rough direction. Guantanamos are in the background everywhere, but they're pretty much always the "Maiduru" model. And if you're talking about Macross 7 or Macross Plus, I'm willing to call "animation error" or "model superseded" on those. 

There's several cases in Macross 7 where VF-11s can be seen launching from the front bay of Guantanamo-class ships.

11 hours ago, SebastianP said:

So, the first half of the show has a bunch of this stuff where it's obvious that this is not a small vessel... and then the script sends everyone off so that only Delta is on hand most of the time. 

The disparity between the interior and exterior shots is quite something too.

The interior shots, for the most part, make the Elysion look on the small side.  Particularly given that there are only ~15 fighters in its carriers.

The exterior, yeah, is out of all proportion to the point that you have to question is the animation team understands how big 800m is.

11 hours ago, SebastianP said:

The opening sequence goes "Miria is racing, Max and new daughter are playing pool in a building overlooking the race, Max gets an alert on his watch, Milia gets one in her helmet, leaves the race to join Max on the highway, cut to Max and Milia in their fighters with the daughter waving at them from the control booth, and the fighters pulling out of the Megaroad's side pod." My inference was that this was all on the ship, but since the ship is over a terrestrial planet, maybe they took a shuttle up so they could scramble their fighters....? Meh.

It's an OP, random jump cuts are pretty standard.

But yeah, if we were assuming that racetrack is on the ship I would wholeheartedly agree something is clearly off. 

11 hours ago, SebastianP said:

Also, given that the Chronicle changed the number of colonists aboard the Megaroad from 80,000 to 25,000 according to Macross Mecha Manual, I'll withdraw my other reason for changing the size of it (namely, the sheer amount of space the colonists' living quarters will take up. Half the population of the original Macross in a volume that is already *ginormously* bigger is much more plausible.)

IIRC, they essentially clarified that the 80,000 is the population of the fleet not merely the one ship.

Of course, there's also some material about how the living conditions in a Megaroad-class ship were actually pretty awful to the point that riots were apparently a not-altogether-infrequent occurrance.  Enough so that, by 2040, the New UN Gov't had commissioned the Macross Concern to work on ways to help keep populations calmer... resulting in the Sharon Apple system in 2040.

11 hours ago, SebastianP said:

The TV macross has next to nothing in common with the DYRL macross except for the transformation sequence itself, none of the components themselves are shared. If that's a rebuild, they tore her down to atoms and reconstituted them...

But since DYRL macross never interacts with anything that my scale change has affected, it can stay at its official size. 

Bro... did you... forget... that Earth totally rebuilding the ship to the point that its external appearance was radically different from its original form was literally how this all started?

That sh*t is not only not beyond them, they've literally already done that once before.

Presumably easier the second time around, since they were mass-producing Macross-class ships in orbit and could just ship parts down to replace destroyed sections en masse.

GQuuuuuuX's tenth episode is probably the best episode to date, and certainly does the most to actually move the needle on the show's story.

It finally gets the main characters involved in the actual plot, brings the Zeon civil war arc into the foreground, and features the first actual battle of any consequential length in the series thus far.

That said, even with all that it's still not very good.

The writers are clearly, clearly rushing to tie up as many plot threads as they can as fast as they can.  It definitely seems like this series is ending in the next two or so episodes.

There is so much happening here, and none of it is really delivered as well as it could and indeed should have been.

They could've done this justice with another 13-26 episodes.  As it is, what's left on the table in terms of unexplored character arcs and subplots is vastly more interesting than a lot of what's going on in the main story.  Particularly Challia Bull's trip to Jupiter, which he implies broke him, sent him to the depths of utter despair, and then made him the man he is.

There's like, three or four episodes worth of stuff going on here all packed as densely as possible.  As a result, none of it feels as impactful or meaningful as it should.  

2 hours ago, SebastianP said:

The one thing I actually care about really is "make the Gefion work as a carrier without changing its model". It is a very very nice model, it is just too small. But it doesn't need to be *four times* the size to work - the hangar pods are wide and tall enough to work at just *twice* the size, if I throw out the "battroid walks in the back door" screenshot as an animation error. There's enough clearance - barely - to move fighters from the pods into the hull; and the hull would have enough volume to hold around 40 fighters. 

My read of your earlier images is that the Gefion's actually about the right size.

The game itself, of course, plays fast and loose with scale on all large objects for the same of gameplay and visual appeal as noted previously, but even corrected for scale you showed that the Gefion's scale in-game is not THAT far off.  A VF-25 can still get through the gate.  It doesn't need to be big enough to hold 40 fighters either, it's meant to be an extremely small ship that can only hold a couple fighters, so IMO it's pretty darn close as it is.  Making it big and capacious enough to rival a Guantanamo for capacity with even more firepower both defeats its purpose in the story and the purpose of the Guantanamo.

2 hours ago, SebastianP said:

Starting with the Maiduru model, the largest hangar access ports will now be large enough to squeeze a VF through, and the small ones are big enough for a Ghost. We're tossing the Maizuru model as an animation error, it is not plot relevant that the Guantanamo-class is a specific size beyond it being able to launch fighters.

Consider that Macross Frontier is not the only series to show the Guantanamo-class launching fighters.

It's much easier to assume that the texture used on the low-detail model for distance shots is simply inaccurate, or that the larger hangar gates have been closed with an armored door similar to what we briefly see in Macross Delta. 

2 hours ago, SebastianP said:

The Stealth Cruiser does not have a stated size in the first place, our estimates are based on the size of the Northamptons it shares the scene with anyway. Scaling it up to twice the size just means it's 2 x unknown. 

Eh... it does and it doesn't.  Macross Chronicle doesn't give an exact number, but multiple sources including Chronicle say it's roughly the same size as the Northampton-class stealth frigate, and/or that it's a derivative of the Northampton-class stealth frigate.

2 hours ago, SebastianP said:

The Elysion, as mentioned a few times already, looks like it was modeled by a VFX artist at one size, and then some time after episode 2 aired, someone outside the VFX department declared it was the height of Burj Kalifa and then the model was resized without any further work being done, resulting in a bunch of weirdness. Like the VF-31 not being able to fit through the hangar access ports between the main flight deck and the upper flight deck. Scaling it up to twice its "canon" size would basically restore it to where it was originally, and allow VFs to use the facilities, as it were. 

The Macross Elysion-type is probably the one ship in Macross where I am not happy with the official size.  

It feels like it was made to be MUCH smaller than it allegedly is.  Especially since its fighter complement, in total, is only like 20 planes despite having two carriers attached to it.  It feels like it was made to be the same size as the Macross Quarter officially is, not double that.

2 hours ago, SebastianP said:

[...] which means that scenes like Basara living in a slum miles from the city are more plausible, because there are actual miles to drive!

Looking back at it, I don't think they ever really present the Acshio district as being far away from everything.

It's abandoned because it's rundown as all get-out, but anytime Mylene has to get there she gets there within just a few minutes and it's basically walking distance from the parks that Basara's constantly performing in.

Half the time, people don't even bother to drive and just walk there which makes sense given that at one point IIRC we see Mylene has to drive her car down a staircase to get there.  It's basically just the Jeniuses who seem to take cars into that area.

2 hours ago, SebastianP said:

Megaroad-01 at double the size might actually have room for that racetrack from the M3 intro.

I don't think that racetrack is actually meant to be inside a Megaroad-class ship. 

Look at the sky in the OP, the Megaroad-class didn't have a seamless holographic skybox like the New Macross-class does and there's no sign of the structural members that you should be able to see from the ground.  I think that's just meant to be a jump cut to elsewhere (and elsewhen?).

2 hours ago, SebastianP said:

TV Macross would not work, though, because Daedalus and Prometheus are already ridiculously large for surface ships. But TV Macross is technically not canon anyway because it was superseded by the DYRL version. 

Macross The First Macross would not work either, for the same reason as above.

That's incorrect on several levels.

Officially, Macross runs on broad strokes continuity and there is no "canon".  No one version of any given story is "true".  The creators play Multiple Choice Past whenever they do a new series leading to some interesting mixing and matching, most blatantly in Macross Delta which devoted the better part of an episode to a history lesson that freely mixed bits from the TV and movie versions of previous titles.

The official setting treats both versions as equally valid, and generally regards the DYRL? designs as postwar improvements to the TV series designs.  The DYRL? VF-1 being a later production block of VF-1, the DYRL? Macross being a post-war repair/remodel of the ship and the design of the later mass production type using parts diverted from shipyards, etc.  If you look in Ernest Johnson's office in Macross Delta, he's a got a TV Macross model for decoration, so it clearly does exist.

3 hours ago, SebastianP said:

The full context was "it can't function as a carrier for the nearly 40 fighters launched out of the Stargazer", because there's not enough cubic volume in it suitable for a hangar of sufficient size. Even the FANKY version only managed 29 fighters total, and that was with the huge belly hangar/flight deck, which is not what we see in either Macross 7 or Macross 30. I repeat - even the FANKY version could not launch the 36 + 1 fighters called for in the episode script. 

Actually, the full context included the Gefion from Macross 30 if you go back the bit I quoted...

The Gefion is home to far, far fewer VFs than the animation error Stargazer from Macross 7.  Around ten when all is said and done, based on the game and novel, which I'm sure you'll agree is a vastly more plausible figure for a ship of its official size that has undergone extensive modification to serve as a light aircraft carrier.  Nothing about the Gefion's official complement of VFs requires it to be vastly larger than 250m.

(She is not, in story terms, actually carrying the huge array of unlockable VFs the game offers.)

3 hours ago, SebastianP said:

Also, the problem with your examples of real world carriers is that 1 - all of them have two thirds to three quarters of their full length, and their full hull width, devoted to hangar floor space, in a triple-height deck; and 2 - basically every carrier's listed capacity has half the aircraft up on deck, because they won't fit in the hangar.

That's not necessarily applicable to all of the examples I went for... several are listed purely with the hangar capacity.  Of course, the Northampton-class can (and per the Macross 30 novelization, does) cheat a bit by using multiple decks worth of converted cargo bays for VF storage.  It may not be one contiguous hangar deck, but its available space is not limited purely by the ship's length in a single run.

3 hours ago, SebastianP said:

And as I said above, I can probably make a 250 meter Northampton into a carrier that can take some VFs without altering the profile, but it won't look like either the Gefion or the Stargazer, it most certainly would not be capable of launching a 36 fighter alpha strike as shown in Macross 7.

We all agree that Macross 7's showrunners dropped the ball with Ep44 and the Stargazer.

I don't think there's anything wrong with the Gefion's design, though.  There's physically enough room to fit the Gefion's much smaller required number of VFs inside the ship without issue, and there are gates large enough to get them onto the catapult deck (though some may need to do so with their wings folded).  

Likewise, I don't think there's any particular issue with the Northampton-class's launch mechanism from Macross 7 PLUS either... the main sticking point is the exact physical location of the ramp, but there's a fair amount of real estate down there.

3 hours ago, SebastianP said:

And even with all that... I could not fit the official bridge design inside the conning tower, because it's at least two person-heights wide and the bridge window on the model (which is accurate proportionally to the old line art) is only 2.3 meters. 

It's an animation error... what more can we say?  They dun goofed.

3 hours ago, SebastianP said:

Enough people involved in the production of Macross 7 and Macross 30 ignored the 250 meter length for their hero unit spaceship, to make that 250 meter figure irrelevant.

I disagree with that conclusion, though.

Even if we didn't say that the fact that those handful of scenes in Macross 7's 44th episode being clearly off-model weren't enough to toss it as evidence, the preponderance of evidence WRT the Northampton's size skews very heavily towards the official number.  After all, this is a ship that appears in many dozens of shots throughout multiple series. 

Now, I'm sure you will not disagree that in those many dozens of fleet shots the Northampton-class is clearly drawn a good deal smaller than the Guantanamo-class.  You've also said previously that the detail shots of the Guantanamo-class closely match the ship's official size of approximately 352m, even if the smaller CG model used for distance shots is not quite accurate in terms of surface detail.

If we take your conclusion as accurate and enlarge the Northampton-class to three to four times its official size as you argue, then we either have to posit that LITERALLY EVERY fleet shot in multiple Macross titles is completely and utterly incorrect or we have to scale the other ships seen with the Northampton-class up by the same factor to match.  We immediately start to run into problems there.  The Guantanamo-class, for instance, is seen in close formation with Northampton-class frigates many times.  If we scale that up to match, then we either have to treat the oft-reused launch scenes in Macross 7 and Macross Frontier as animation errors as well... or we have to scale up the Valkyries that they're shown launching by the same amount.  If the VF-11 and VF-171 are also three times to four times larger than their official sizes to make the animation correct again, that means we've changed everything's sizes but fixed nothing because we're right back where we started with VFs too bit to fit into or out of the ship in Macross 7 Ep44.

And that's not counting all the knock-on implications of arbitrarily enlarging those designs 3-4x.  Like, for instance, the pilots having to also be enlarged by the same amount so scenes showing pilots getting into or out of their VFs work, or Alto's complaints about Island-1 no longer making sense because a 4x enlarged Island-1 would have a "ceiling" of 8,000m not 2,000m, meaning instead of kvetching about the sky being "too low" he'd be struggling to breathe or passing out (hypoxia starts setting in at about 5-6km, and the "death zone" is around 8).

My preference, of course, is for the simplest answer that requires the fewest assumptions.  That being, Macross 7 Ep44's Stargazer is just an animation error and the ship really is meant to be just 250m.

2 hours ago, aurance said:

The "same size" argument counting only the length is a little disingenuous though, I agree.

It didn't consider only length... but the point there was to illustrate how silly the idea that the Northampton-class can't function as a carrier being "only" 250m is.

There are several modern light or escort carriers that are very close in size to the Northampton-class, even if we're only considering the columnar center of the ship's design that's about 250m x 30m.

It's never going to be as capacious as a ship that's essentially just a gigantic box built for nothing but holding aircraft... but there's nothing conceptually wrong with the Gefion at its 252.5m size as a light carrier holding a platoon or two.

8 hours ago, Big s said:

Pretty sure horse shoes have to be fairly spot on so they don’t break their legs

The old saying refers to "horseshoes" the game, not the process of shoeing horses.

8 hours ago, Big s said:

I remember when 40k used to have a lot of absurd fun before it was just grim dark all the time 

Oh, it still does... the humor is in gallows humor and in being comically serious most of the time.

Star Wars, of course, has no such limitations and can (and should) have quite a bit more levity at times.  I do hope they continue to avoid "minstrel" characters like Jar-Jar Binks in the future, though.  There's comic relief and then there's that.

40 minutes ago, Big s said:

I don’t think everything needs to be another Andor. Skeleton Crew was almost a win. If it could’ve stuck the landing it would be in a category of better shows.

What's that old saying? 

"'Close' only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades."?

40 minutes ago, Big s said:

The problem isn’t that things need to be more serious , just that they need some more competent writers that can tell a story and not get bogged down by their usual bad choices in the stories.

Oh I'm not saying they have to be more serious.  Being grim all the time is no fun at all... unless you're Warhammer 40,000.

No, what I mean is that they have to focus on developing and telling compelling stories with interesting and well developed characters. They're not going to be able to squeak by with just a never-ending stream of fanservice references to past shows and movies like they're trying to do in Ahsoka.