cheemingwan1234

Okay, they gave us a swappable seat, but not a cover for the inside of the cockpit for battroid mode. Fun. I mean, if they want to they can do it with how the cockpit is designed.

So, there was mention of the Battroid initially being a non-transformable mech a la Gundam's MSes, what caused it to be merged into the VF-1 project?

1 minute ago, azrael said:

Because why not? Pilots were getting into hand-to-hand combat situations. Why not have a knife? Seeing that later VFs incorporated a combat knife, a bayonet wasn't a bad idea.

VF-11s did have wing hardpoints. They just didn't show it on-screen that much.

Okay, then why did they not try that way back during the time of the VF-0?

So. any ideas for why someone came up with the idea of a bayonet for the VF-11B gunpod? And whose idiotic idea was it to remove the wing store options for the VF-11 as well? 

So, yeah, wonder about something, are there EX-Gear regular infantry in the NUN Army?  EX-Gear could be useful as heavy weapom haulers.

Imagine someone in a EX-Gear going Predator with a handheld minigun.

4 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

Basically: suicide ego runs?

Close to it. Like Imperial Guardsmen but with smaller numbers....

Yeah, VFs save for the SV-51 would stink for dispersed basing with highways or short dirt strips as runways since the maneuver mentioned above to gerwalk the VF would be awkward to use.

4 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

As attached as Macross is to the pineapple gag, they probably evolved from pineapples.

Imagine the PTSD flashbacks if Roy met them.....Good thing by then that Roy is probably in the fossil record

Also, just something I noticed...do VFs need to half gerwalk to VTOL?  The SV-51 had a set of lift jets to enable it to VTOL in fighter mode but the others?

52 minutes ago, JB0 said:

The holy trinity of military equipment. B-52 bombers, M2 machine guns, VF-17(1) transforming fighterbots.

You forgot M1911s, M16s and AK pattern rifles.

And speaking of that story idea of a Macross set in the far future....wonder if that protagonist Protoculture descended race  get stumped over custom colour schemes for VFs.

"Hey, I wonder if those colour schemes give additional capabilities to those 'Variable Fighters'?"

"From our testing....no."

And I was thinking about our main protagonist accessing a recording  of various songs, ranging from Lyn Minmei, Fire Bomber and Walkure and being captivated by the music itself.

25 minutes ago, JB0 said:

The real moral of this story is the F-117 is the only plane you need.

Considering the Nightmare Plus is still running around during the events of Delta....yeah, when the age of man is over in the Macross universe, the testaments to it's existence would be warehouses of VF-171s waiting to be deployed once again.

Anyone thinks that the way General Galaxy does things is kinda similar to the often memetic design of how British WW2 AFVs were developed.

"The UN Spacy wants a special operations Variable Fighter."

"Make a transforming F-117 with high micro missile capability."

"Our YF-21 lost Project Super Nova to the YF-19!"

"Redesign the YF-21 as a high performance special operations VF!"

"Our rival's VF-19 is too uncontrollable for average pilots"

"DETUNE THAT TRANSFORMING F-117 AND REDESIGN IT TO BE EASILY PILOTED BY GRUNTS"

And of course the Frontier Fleet.

"The Varja are quite difficult to take down with coventional firepower."

"Shrink down some Dimension Eaters to be fired from our gunpods."

"They're proving difficult to kill with bullets!"

"Here's a VF-sized beam cannon with similar effects to a Dimension Eater!"

"We don't have enough VF-25s to go around!"

"UPGRADE SOME NIGHTMARE PLUSES WITH VF-19 ENGINES AND EX-GEAR."

1 hour ago, pengbuzz said:

You mean like this one:

  Hide contents

 

Pity Makima having to clean out what's left of Messer.

Okay, If I remember correctly, the reason for why the YF-19 and YF-21 FAST Packs were quite barebones in comparison to the previous FAST Packs were that they have much better propellant capacity and engines in comparison to the previous models, negating the need for boosters, so why the reasoning for boosters coming back from 7 onwards?

34 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

This is Macross not Warhammer 40,000 or Gundam... it doesn't get quite that dark here.

The Boddole Zer main fleet's bombardment of the Earth's surface was on the level of a global mass extinction event. Anyone who was on the surface was killed. Almost everyone would have been killed in the blast themselves as every population center was destroyed. A few unlucky souls living in particularly remote regions might have lasted long enough to be killed by secondary effects of the bombardment like tidal waves, earthquakes, or to suffocate on the dust, ash, and other pollutants saturating the atmosphere. It's unlikely that anyone on the surface lived long enough to have any concerns about where their next meal was going to come from.

The approximately 1 million survivors of the disaster were people who were not on Earth's surface at the time. People like the inhabitants of the Apollo base colony on Luna, the space colonies and factories at the Lagrange points, the civilians and crew aboard the recently resupplied Macross, and the regional command center bunkers located beneath each of the Grand Cannon systems. The survivors were either out in space in partially or fully self-sufficient space habitats, aboard recently resupplied warships, or in massive underground bunkers designed and provisioned to resist a prolonged alien invasion. It took a while for the environmental cleanup efforts to render the atmosphere breathable again, and extreme measures had to be taken to prevent runaway global warming and other catastrophes, and there was rationing in place for a while after that, but there's no evidence that anyone was in danger of starvation. Times were tough, but not insurmountably so.

I pity those poor sods...yeah that's gonna destroy what's left of Earth's biodiversity and not to mention, really restrict arable farmland........

Okay, when Earth got bombarded from orbit by the Zentraedi during Space War 1, were there any instances of famine (and the other nastier stuff such as cannibalism) for the first few months from the survivors  or did the bombardment spare some farmland by coincidence?

So, what does the UN Army use post Macross Plus with the retirement of most Destroids? Do they have their own Variable Fighters or something different like Marclones with powered suits like the Gers and Raus and battle pods?

8 hours ago, JB0 said:

"Okay, yeah. The pilot's brain is part of the computer system and if they were mentally unstable the plane would be wildly unpredictable. Good thing I'm not crazy!" *pops some pills*

Guld: *Sneakily hides more pills.

Meanwhile at Shinsei.

Yang: "Thia is the sixth crash that happened to the YF-19 prototype! And fatal too!"

Technician: "Maybe Shinsei should start a funeral home subsidy."

Yang: (grumbling) "I've heard that there is a new test pilot by the name of Isamu transfering here within this week. Hope he can control this thing..."

5 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Closer to "It's expensive and a hard to make, but it's going to let our new plane with ultrafast reaction times treat Newton's laws like polite suggestions... so why wouldn't we?"

 

Guld probably had a REALLY good feeling about it.  He was the lead system designer on the Brainwave Control System and the Inertia Vector Control System allowed the YF-21 to get even more maneuverability and more precise maneuverability1 control out of its existing systems.

Hmm 

Guld: "Well, if we can treat the laws of motion like suggestions, we can have a  near certainty of the YF-21 winning. After all, it's not like I'm going to square off against a suped up Ghost."

7 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Partly because the YF-21 program spun off from General Galaxy's efforts to reproduce and improve upon the Queadluun-Rau battle suit for the New UN Forces.

But mainly, it's because the Inertia Vector Control System is a stupidly useful thing to have if you can reproduce it.

It's the system that gives the Queadluun-Rau its incredible maneuverability.  It's a very precise application of Gravity and Inertia Control technology that can increase or decrease the magnitude (but not the directionality) of acceleration forces on the airframe.  The Queadluun-Rau uses it to improve propellant efficiency and the output power of its engines and its verniers, allowing it to accelerate far faster than it would be able to unassisted, to turn more sharply, to make sudden starts and stops that would otherwise be impossible, etc.  As a byproduct of its operation, it also protects the cockpit and airframe from the additional g-forces those impossible maneuvers would ordinarily incur.  It's incredibly complex and hard to manufacture, but it's such a boon to performance that there's no way General Galaxy was going to pass on it while the factory satellite to manufacture it was under their control.

So something like this in a nutshell..

"Well, it's a pain in the butt to manufacture and is expensive. But it's gonna protect our pilot from becoming mush and we have the factory satellite that makes the things, so we're gonna put it in that baby."

*slaps the YF-21.

Guld: "I have a bad feeling about this....."

Do Zentraedi use marching cadences when training or do they train in silence? Sure, they may be genetically engineered big boi/gurl warriors, but a song could be useful for raising morale and keeping their mind off their conditions and focused on their training ahead.

Would be also be logical for why they're stumped by Minmei since her introduction's to Earth songs are different from their marching songs/cadences.

Okay, so why the designers incorporated a inertia vector control system in the YF-21? Was there a reason?

So, about the SDF-1 Macross, do the Megaroad class ships after it have different internsls compared to the SDF-1 because they're built from scratch rathrr than from an alien ship.

19 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Well, nothing... that's kind of the problem.

Destroids ended up sidelined after the First Space War because the assumptions underpinning their development and deployment turned out to be wildly incorrect.

The Earth Unification Government and its newly-established Earth UN Forces believed that a future war with aliens would take the form of a classic "alien invasion" scenario.  They were expecting the hypothetical future enemy to focus on penetrating Earth's orbital defenses in order to land ground forces on the planet's surface and seize territory.  Earth's new space-based defenses were set up as static "space airbases" and guided missile destroyers intent on sinking enemy ships trying to land on the planet, while ground-based defense focused on regional defense forces and large seagoing mobile reaction forces that could redirect to respond to anywhere an invasion might land.  The Destroids were developed for that ground-centric defense plan as a next-generation overtechnology-based replacement for main battle tanks.

But the Earth UN Government couldn't have been more wrong.  The Zentradi had no interest in capturing and occupying territory or securing resources.  Their one and only mission was "Destroy the enemy" and did so on a scale that meant planetary destruction could be done relatively casually.  As land warfare weapons in a space war, the Destroids weren't exactly useful for much except as ad hoc air defense guns on the SDF-1 Macross.

After the war, the New UN Government and New UN Forces had a better idea of how space warfare actually worked, and with land warfare not really in the cards there wasn't any reason to keep developing Destroids.  Most New UN Forces warships weren't big enough to support them and the same air defense role could be done much more effectively by a static beam CIWS or anti-aircraft missile system.  Development of destroids basically stopped at that point because the concept itself was flawed.  The only Destroids that we're shown after the First Space War are original models from the early 2000s either being used as-is or with marginal upgrades for niche roles.  At the end of the day, they couldn't make them more viable... just slightly better in their already niche role.

 

 

TBH, this was one of the "niche roles" features mentioned above.

In Macross II, the rollers were intended to make it easier for the Destroids to reposition on the outside of the Spacy's warships... but those ships are MUCH bigger than the ships the main Macross timeline has.

In Macross Frontier, they were intended mainly to stop the Cheyenne II from ripping up the pavement inside of the emigrant ships.  That was their main functional advantage... not pissing off the road commission.

 

Not sure what that'd achieve, really... most of the Destroids in the original series already had a common/shared drivetrain (Series 04).  The only real exceptions were the Spartan (a Series 07 design) and the Monster (a Series 00 design).  The original Series 04 design, which became the Tomahawk, did have an ability to swap out certain weapons but it wasn't really that useful.  The ability was seemingly abandoned after the MBR-04-Mk.IV's option to exchange the particle beam cannons for a pair of rotary cannons.

 

EX-Gear doesn't help with aiming.  That's the Fire Control System's job.

It's designed to help with piloting, and specifically piloting a Variable Fighter, by making the interface more intuitive... which is occasionally described as creating the feeling that the pilot is wearing the Variable Fighter itself.

 

Energy conversion armor and pinpoint barriers are two of the three most energy-intensive systems a Valkyrie has.  (The third is active stealth.)

Energy conversion armor was a concession made for Valkyries to keep their weight down, beefing up the strength of relatively thin armor plating instead of layering on thick slabs of composite armor.  Destroids didn't need to fly, so they were able to keep costs down by using a much lower-output reactor that met the needs of the superconducting motors in the walking drivetrain and the few onboard beam weapons thanks to being able to achieve their defensive ability through making the armor itself thicker.  This meant that a Destroid could be manufactured for as little as 1/20th what a Valkyrie cost in the First Space War.

A Destroid would need more, and vastly more powerful, reactors to incorporate energy conversion armor and pinpoint barrier systems.  To the point that it wouldn't be a Destroid so much as a non-transformable, flightless Battroid... and at that point, why not just go the rest of the way to making a Valkyrie esp. since you'd already have two Valkyrie-grade reactors.

Darn! So that's why we don't see them running around that much by the time Frontier takes place.

Okay, Destroids have been relegated to the sidelines in Macross for Variable Fighters, so what type of upgrades can be done to Destroids to make them more relevant in a changing battlefield.

(And no, the Koing Monster does  not count as a Destroid. It's a Variable Bomber)

Ideas:

Rollers on feet a la Cheyenne II and Macross II Destroids. (and a must)

Modular chassis with interchangeable and easy to swap out weapons.

EX-Gear for better weapon aiming

Pin point barriers and Energy Conversion Armor incorporated into Destroids (I bet they can tank more than VFs since they don' t have to contend with a thing called flying)

15 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

He lost the arms blocking a number of incoming missiles.  He purged his remaining Super Pack parts before making reentry.

WRT reentry... we're all used to the idea of needing a ventral heat shield to make reentry because the structural materials of modern spacecraft would otherwise burn or melt under the heat of reentry.  Variable Fighters generally don't need to worry about that because the super-composites they're made from have incredible strength and heat resistance all on their own.  The same super-composites that are used in space warships that allow them to survive uncontrolled ballistic reentry both before and after the First Space War.

 

 

Given that most, if not all, probably came from the Laplamiz direct defense fleet after it allied with the UN Spacy... probably several hundred to maybe a few thousand.

 

Yeah, the VF-14 was deliberately designed with an oversized airframe to allow it to be easily upgraded or customized to meet the end user's needs... and also to carry the HUGE quantities of fuel it'd need for prolonged space operations with no Super Pack and regular thermonuclear reaction turbine engines.

 

 

You may want to consider that escape from the aircraft may not necessarily always be strictly vertical.

It does simplify manufacture though.....

So, I was trying to design a ejection mechanism for the SV-51, VF-4, and other VFs with similar fransformations and well, I think some explosive bolts can be used to blow off the upper torso to expose the cockpit.