SebastianP

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. 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...)

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

You can't really scale by "small compartments" though, because in that case I could go "the Nimitz class has really a really small toilet, so it must be a really small ship". And the size of the bridge seems to vary quite a bit. Just for reference, the bridge window on the Elysion at "canon" scale is just over 11 meters wide at its widest point. I think this is a fair bit wider than 11 meters, personally,especially since the window needs to go over the sides of those grey pods too. I just don't have the skills to scale it properly. By single level, I meant that there's only one deck for the fighters, but there's more than that in the back because you also have the upper hangar just below the bridge. And back there there's enough volume for it to go deeper, as well. Not so much in the rest of the ship, since there's visible machinery.

The interior shots make the ship look *huge* if you know what you're actually looking at. To wit, the hangar where the VF-31s are lined up three wide, wings out, boosters attached, has to be able to fit inside the core hull of the Aether, because the ship is in space and the deck is flat. I took the fold-down flight deck extensions off the game model to see what the core hull looked like, and it is quite narrow. But it does have very distinct hangar bay side looking details right under the deck where you'd expect them to be. This is roughly the arrangement used in the hangar bay shot from Episode 12. I used the wrong fighters in more than one respect - since I used the printable models instead of game assets, my computer really doesn't like moving them all around, and since they're Siegfried instead of Kairos models, they're actually taking up less space. I'll see if I have a video game Kairos to use for more experimentation. This is with the Aether at 600 meters, which is *about* 50% larger than the "canon" scale, with Elysion being something like 1450 meters overall. Now imagine trying to fit that on the official size of the ship... As you can see, there's still issues - the ship is not quite wide enough, and VF-31As would stick out more, so I'm going to need to scale it up a bit further (10 to 20%) to make the fighters fit in that section of the hangar. Also, the hangar narrows forward, but there should be room for at least 20 more fighters two abreast in the forward section. And before you go "but you could put them further back where the hull is wider", the problem with that is that there's another shot where Delta lines up five wide below the deck, and that has to fit somewhere as well. And if you try it with the roughly 400 meter long Aether suggested by the Burj Kalifa statement, their wings will be clipping through the side of the hull. 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.

Yeah, the "TV" SDF-1 from Hasegawa was a major letdown. At least they put those scalloped cutouts on the inside of the gun booms on the Assault mode, on the Fortress version those were missing and the main gun booms were just rectangular. For myself, the whole issue basically stems from "Hey, I have all these neat 3D models of both the ships and the fighters and I want to make a diorama of ships with fighters on the decks, but... they don't fit when the ship is sized as in the book". From there, my conclusion is "book is wrong, I must find a better size". Seto Kaiba's conclusion is "Book is correct, it must be an animation error". (even when it means making large changes to the model to fix the issue...) The process of finding the "better size" is ongoing. I'm not married to 200% of Chronicle scale, or to using the same scale factor for every ship. I'm just looking for each individual ship type for "the size where it works". (And *then* we can make RPG stats for them, that I'll never use...)

Sort of. There *is* consistency in the actual animation, much of the time. It's just that except for the VFs, it's not consistent with the *chronicle*. Seto Kaiba and I have a difference of opinion about whether to throw out the animation that doesn't match the Chronicle specs as "animation error", or whether to throw out the Chronicle specs that don't match what we see on screen as "textual inaccuracies".

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. 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. 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. It's still never plot relevant what size the ship is, though. Scaling this ship up by the same factor as the Northampton does not meaningfully change what we know about it. The model is definitely larger than the official size says - there are similar issues with hangar bay opening widths as there are for Gefion, with wings clipping the sides of the walls at "official" scale. Not to mention the ginormous size of the ship from its establishing shot. This is our first overall shot of the Elysion. Note the fighters on the deck. Since we know their size, we can estimate fairly accurately the length of the Aether. It has to be pretty substantial. I didn't do the math myself, someone on reddit did a long time ago, but it worked out to around 900 meters give or take. This was supported by this shot, which has the fighters in the same parked configuration. The flight deck here is somewhere around 200 meters wide at the widest point. In episode 12, we have this interior hangar shot, showing fighters arranged in a configuration that's around 60 meters wide. There are 15 fighters shown in this sequence (five on the right, as there's a gap; four in the middle, and the six you can see on the left), we don't know how far the line extends backwards. At the official size of the ship, the hull is not wide enough for this below decks - if Elysion is 900 meters overall, then Aether's hull is around 40 meters wide at best. If the ship is the size indicated by the first two shots, then there's enough space for this to be only half the complement. 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. Also, at the "official" size, only *one* of the ten obvious flight deck access points for VFs are actually large enough for a VF-31 - the centerline tunnel from under the upper deck. The side tunnels are too narrow and the wings will clip; and both the four deck edge elevators and the three elevators up to the upper deck are too small. Also, forget the "tour bus" shuttle, it won't fit anywhere. Could the role the script gives to the Elysion have been handed to a smaller ship? Very likely. Was the Elysion intended to be small? No. There's enough evidence to the contrary in the first half of the show to put paid to that idea. (I don't know when the Burj Kalifa statement was made, but most of the evidence prior to the halfway point of the show suggests the larger size. I think there's an outlier in the form of the space episode, it's almost five in the morning and I'm not going digging). Edit: Having slept on it and had time to do the digging, Episode 6 definitely shows the fighters not clipping into each other's lanes during the launch sequence, which suggests a minimum size of around 1200 meters overall for Elysion in ship form, and 1500 is about the minimum for the fighters to fit on the elevators. I may try to replicate the parked fighters on the Aether's deck from Episode 2 at this size,. and the launch layout from episode 6, but at first glance, 1500 looks about right for Elysion as shown in the first half of the show. I am aware that later depictions, like the Delta movies, made the ship smaller, but as mentioned, at the smaller size there are problems just getting the fighters to the deck through the provided openings... Yeah. As I said, the New Macross class ships are some of the ones that don't really benefit from being scaled up other than keeping the animations the same. (Edit: Though.... the Diamond Force launch sequence suggests the bridge block of the Battle 7 is a fair bit larger than the overall views of the ship supports, if the ship is 1600 meters overall. The hatches and launch arms for that sequence are not small, and the best attempt I've seen at replicating the Battle 7 in 3D, has those hatches at around half the required size. It is not an official model so it won't count for anything, though. And swapping the base design to the Battle 25 version, which has a much bigger bridge block to begin with, and trading the turrets for launch bays? That would solve it even at the 1-mile scale). 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. 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.) 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.

I would pull the "animation error" card on the "Maizuru" model instead of the "Maiduru" model, yeah. We never see it very often (I can only remember the scene from Frontier 1, and Itsuwari no Utahime), whereas the Maiduru model shows up all the time. But here's the thing. 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. And now that we have a modern carrier version of the Northampton, we toss out the Stargazer animation, and declare "Stargazer was a Gefion-type all along". The script, aside from the VFX callouts, will work. From there, let's look at what scaling each ship up by the same factor does for us: 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. 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. The Quarter, I've complained about for years and years is too small to do what we see it doing in the show. The ARMD-L is too thin for a hangar, the elevators on the model are too small for the fighters, and at one point we see it flying in formation with *dozens* of SMS VF-25As who which had to come from somewhere, and there is no room inside that ship for them. Scaling it up to twice the size solves nearly everything. I would not bet 100% on the hangar capacity, but it's a lot less implausible at least. 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 Uraga... doesn't need a resize, that one was well thought through at its canon size, and it's almost a shame to change it. If I can't write off the size discrepancy as an animation error, well at least it now has an easier time handling large battroids like Queadluun-Rau/Rhea, or the VB-6 König Monster. The New Macross Class... also doesn't need a resize, other than for matching the animation. But at least scaling them up will also scale the cities up, and give four times more area and eight times the volume to play around with. And if we play a little with the "new design iterations supersede old versions of the same design", then City 7 is now Island-One sized, but double the canon, which means that scenes like Basara living in a slum miles from the city are more plausible, because there are actual miles to drive! If we want to go even further and bring up ships which never share a scene with any of the above? DYRL Macross would benefit greatly from being twice the size because there'd be room for a cityscape inside the ship, and I think I measured at one point that the ARMDs at their canon size would have trouble with the launch scene from the opening sequence because the ports are too small. I'll have to revisit that sometime. I don't remember if the DYRL Macross ever punched anything in the face that would need to be rescaled, but I'm willing to call "animation error" to avoid this becoming a problem. Megaroad-01 at double the size might actually have room for that racetrack from the M3 intro. 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. Edit: Illustration of what 2x size will do for certain ships Above: the Macross Chronicle sizes for everything. Notice the ludicrous size of VB-6 relative to the Quarter, and how the VF-25 does not fit the hangar pod on Gefion. VB-6 and VF-25 scaled down to 50%, which is the same as scaling up the ships to 200% except I don't have to move them around to maintain the formation. Notice how the VB-6 fits the elevator now (it completely fits if you fold the wingtips up), and how the VF-25 will fit on the landing side of the ship too.

Thanks! And I can agree that it's likely that the artists involved never double-checked with each other and this is why we ended up like this. I'm coming at this from both the Star Wars fandom, where "see that speck over there? It's a thing, with stats, and we have to figure them out" has been a thing since the 80s and where if the book doesn't match what's seen on screen we make a stink and sometimes get it changed; and the model building scene, where models in the same scale have to fit, and if they don't they're not the same scale and need correcting. In this case, the models did not fit at what was supposed to be the same scale, so obviously the scale on one of them was wrong. And.... it wasn't going to be the Variable Fighters. As mentioned, I think it's a little beyond "an" animation error, where every scene in the whole episode involving fighters relative to the ship show the ship to be much, much bigger than the book said it was. It was basicially the whole episode that was the animation error. And when this was the "hero" episode for that ship, the one episode which *focused* on the ship in question? I find it easier to throw the book out than the episode, as mentioned. And yeah, the point of showing the ships side by side was to show that only about a third of the total length of the Northampton at this scale is suitable for a hangar, as opposed to two thirds to three quarters of the carriers Seto Kaiba mentioned; and the real carrier has some *serious holes* in the side for the aircraft to leave the hangar through, which would need to go somewhere. I can make a "baby carrier" 250 meter Northampton. It would look like it came out of Star Wars, because of the side mounted hangar bays, and it would have to drop the forward torpedo tubes, but I can make it. But it would not be the Stargazer. And it wouldn't be the Gefion. Both of which are shown launching fighters in a way that make them much bigger than 250 meters... 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. 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. A Nimitz-class only has room for 34 jets and six helicopters below deck. It has a hangar that is nearly as big as the whole Northampton by footprint area, being a 206 x 33 meter almost-rectangle, and it still only fits that number of jets. On the Northampton, only the center third of it is even thick enough and wide enough for a hangar, because the ship tapers sharply both towards the ends and from the centerline. There isn't really room for more than one level of hangars either, because of the taper. 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. 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. 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.

Bandai? Do a grunt model in plastic for Macross? Has that ever happened? (well, aside from the VF-171 non-scale, I think)

And some people - demonstrably, because this is what happened in the other place I've been posting about it - go "okay, your argument is convincing, What does this mean for the other ships? Which ships can we do similar comparisons to?" because most of them are also Star Wars fans who remember when the Executor was changed from 8 km to 19 km because of determined fans fact-checking Lucasfilm until they gave up; Star Trek fans who remember when the Defiant would change size from episode to episode; Stargate fans who used screen evidence to prove the liner notes false years before the VFX people chimed in and said "yeah, we actually made it three times bigger and some dude in PR pulled a number out of his behind and since we no longer work for the rights holders we can't change it". It's said that during the middle ages, a learned man who was asked "how many teeth does a horse have", he'd go find his copy of Aristotle's textbook on the matter, and go "Aristotle says it has X teeth, therefore that is the answer." One of the hallmarks of the Renaissance was when the default option shifted to "I don't know, lets go to the stable and check". You, my friend... are being medieval in mindset, and trusting the Philosopher over your own senses.

You mean, no one else who frequents this site has the energy to argue with someone who refuses to budge on "the books are always right". It's not the length, it's the shape. An aircraft carrier is has an optimized shape for volume, and basically every carrier has a rectangular hangar that goes from the stern of the ship up to two third to three quarters if its full length, and the full width of the ship. The Northampton class can *at most* use *one* third of its length as a hangar, and the bit it can use is only marginally wider than normal carrier. The volume usable for a hangar is only big enough for about a dozen fighters, packed like sardines (i.e. not with the kind of walkaround space that you'd want on a real carrier). And no version of the ship has the kind of hangar access port which would be required in order to *use* this space - you'd need Star Wars Style side mounted hangar doors on both sides to turn this into anything close to an acceptable "baby carrier", and that's not what's been done for *any* of the three attempts at it. If the upper deck is just storage, the the capacity is just 29 fighters. But okay. The whole reason why I am even arguing this is because, if I want to use the Gefion design in a 3D scene, doing its thing, I need to make it 1000 meters long, to be visually consistent with what we see in the game (i.e. being able to walk a battroid in there.) My brain does not allow me to fudge things, things have to fit at true size, or my brain hurts. If the Gefion has to be 1000 meters long to support the best scale-able visuals, then I will also need to make the Northampton the same size, because it is the same ship. Again, my brain would hurt because of the inconistency if I didn't. Similarly, the Guantanamo-class, at least the one I have, also has features from the anime that my brain says "this has to be *this big* to work properly, So I sized the ship appropriately. If I had a model based on the *other* Guantanamo shooting model (the "Maizuru" model, instead of the "Maiduru"; I wouldn't have so much of a problem, but I *might* just go with "if there's two inconsistent models, they might be different ships". Which is a common trick in for example the Star Wars fandom. I also arrive at this from *several* fandoms where "if the number obviously doesn't fit, throw it out and calculate the actual one" is what we *do*. A building consistently shown with 30 floors is obviously not going to be 100 feet tall, it's going to be 100 meters tall. If a ship is obviously more than ten times the size of another ship, of course it's not going to be just 5 times the size even if the books have said so for 20 years. So what I'm doing is I'm using the official models to figure out what I think is the actual size implied by the VFX shots, just like fans have been doing in every other Sci Fi franchise since the dawn of DVD freeze frames, and checking how weird things looks if I use those sizes. The answer, so far, is "not very", despite the Uraga being unchanged size-wise. There just aren't all that many shots of the Uraga model dwarfing a Northampton that I'd need to ignore. And I will never really accept a book size figure if the very first instance where that size would have become relevant, flat out ignored it for plot reasons. It literally has the same vibe as the time the studio that animated all the VFX for Stargate SG-1 made the whole Daedalus ship at 650 meters long, down to the bridge and hangar interiors, and because someone corporate wrote "225 meters" in a DVD liner booklet, the ship is now officially so small that the fighters it launches out by the dozens will not actually fit through the hangar bay doors that are now a third of the size they were designed to be.

When the mistake has gotten to the point that a whole episode that would not make sense without the mistake has been made around it, it kind of stops being a mistake and has to start being counted as "real" - or a Munchhausen tale, which given the episode's relevance to the whole plot of the show, unravels Macross 7 as a credible source. You are looking at the length and widths of ships that are almost perfect boxes (by design, in order to maximize the internal volume usable to store aircraft), to justify that a ship where the usable volume where any hangar would be located, in the front two thirds of the ship, is an almost a perfect rhomboid pyramid with one sixth of the box volume - has enough volume to be a carrier. I *know* carriers. I build models of carriers. In the background, the first carrier model I had on hand that is around the right size - a model of the cancelled Soviet carrier Ulyanovsk that I made a couple of months ago. Notice first of all that it is mostly a box, with a pointy front end (below the flight deck). The hangar is about two thirds the length of the ship, stretching *all* the way back to the stern, and up to just in front of where the forward elevator is. It's not the most efficient carrier, it could have had a longer hangar, but Soviets would be Soviets and decided on a huge missile battery instead of more hangar space. Despite being so large and so boxy, the planned hangar capacity was 22 VF-sized fixed wing aircraft and 12 (relatively tiny) helicopters. The rest of the air wing would sit on the deck or be aloft. Juan Carlos, which I have drawings of, is even more of a box, with even more of its length devoted to a full width hangar. By contrast, in the foreground is the game model of the standard Northampton, at the official size of 252.5 meters. Now, there is room for a box capable of containing a handful of aircraft in there. But what is critically missing is any way of getting those aircraft out. The gill intake is not big enough for any VF - maybe an AIF-7S Ghost, but nothing larger, not even a VF-1. You could, possibly, add ARMD-style launch ports - big rectangular ones - but capacity will be very limited by the shape of the hull - it tapers in every direction, quite sharply, and is nowhere near as voluminous, especially for things that would like a flat deck to sit on, as you'd think. Maybe the black voids in the back of the arrowhead shape are holes into a hangar volume. But that's still not going to be a very large volume and not one animation source uses them as such. As for the FANKY illustration, I believe you are misremembering it, because I have it in front of me. The top half of the illustration was FANKY's own carrier conversion of the Northampton, where the artist did whatever it took to squeeze in the 37 participants of Operation Stargazer into a 250 meter, roughly Northampton shaped hull. And I say "roughly" because the result was wider in the whole middle section, considerably taller, and used three whole triple-height decks as a hangar, and *still* didn't launch the fighters like the Stargazer. And the bottom half of the FANKY drawing in question shows how they estimated thirteen VF-25s in the hangar of the ARMD-L, by assuming the hangar was nearly as wide as the flight deck to a depth of three decks (it's not, the hull narrows much more rapidly below the flight deck than FANKY account for); and puts the "humanoid maintenance hangar" in the back of the ship... where the actual ARMD-L has a huge void because that's where the arm and hand of the Macross Quarter goes. I stand by my conclusion: Either the Chronicle is wrong, and the ships are larger. By the "newest depiction is more accurate" rule, I can go as far as to posit that the Stargazer was *actually* a Gefion-type, that the fighters launched like they do in Macross 30 (because it makes the most sense in hindsight), and that all other depictions are the animation errors because none of those are plot-relevant. Or the Chronicle is correct on the size, which means that there can't be a carrier version of the Northampton (since neither animated version has enough volume for what we see launch off of them canonically, and we have to write off Macross 7 and Macross 30 as The tales of Baron Munchhausen. Or, the Chronicle is correct on the size, but neither the Gefion nor the Stargazer were actually Northamptons, but were instead actually Guantamamo-class carriers (which would be more appropriate anyway). Edit: I have made some measurements, and come to the conclusion that purely volume-wise, I can fit a hangar sized for about a dozen fighters in the hull of a Northampton 2059, with enough height to lift them out over each other. But the ship would need ARMD-like launch ports in the sides of the hull right around where the "gills" are. This is *not* what we see in Operation Stargazer or in Macross 30, but it's the closest I can get to a 250 meter ship with the Northampton hull profile and a hangar.

It stops being an "animation error" when it affects the plot, and neither Macross 30 nor Macross 7 episode 44 have plots that work if the ships aren't substantially larger than 250 meters. They just aren't capable of being carriers at that size. There are seriously only two solutions: Either the ships aren't 250 meters long, or they're not Northampton-class ships. But given that Stargazer is the *poster ship* for the Northampton class in Macross 7, and Gefion is 90% the same mesh as the standard Northampton-2059 model, the latter is obviously false. It is easier to write off all in-show size comparisons with other capital ships (there aren't actually very many that involve other capital ships whose lengths aren't *also* suspect) as animation errors, than it is to write of the whole plots of Macross 30 or M7:E44, especially the latter since if you write off Operation Stargazer as "it's fiction" then the whole show is worthless as a source. And, as mentioned, there are other errors in the Chronicle - like the height of the VF-0 battroid, which was off by at least two meters, which has been called out by Mr. March, Basically - the moment the director threw the guidebook out because rule of cool, and made it plot relevant, then we as viewers have to throw out either the guidebook or the plot. I'd rather throw out the guidebook than the plot. Interestingly, the one Macross 7-era escort that doesn't need a massive rescaling due to either the director throwing out his references or the VFX department not doing its homework, is the Uraga-class. It is a perfectly good carrier at its official size, and has no need to change anything. Which results in a fun comparison: And by the way, being able to do exactly this sort of comparison is trivial in basically any 3D animation suite - and I know this suite in particular was available to and used by the studio who made the show, because the software developers bragged about it being used in the show. There is no reason why they had to make a second model of the Guantanamo that needed to be *this size* to fit the fighters through their launch bay openings when they had a proper sized version.

The problem is that *aside from the official size statement* of 250 meters, the Northampton as depicted in the anime is decidedly not "small and unthreatening*. The actual animation shows that it's *ginormous*. The primary reference for the Northampton from the anime is Macross 7, episode 44, where we're treated to the spectacle of Operation Stargazer, where we're first shown bunch of scenes showing fighters being moved around inside the ship, five abreast with generous spacing in some cases. And then there's the launch sequence, which looks like this: That's a modified torpedo being launched out the side mounted torpedo tubes on the Stargazer. Note the relative size - the torpedo is much smaller than the opening it's coming out of. And here the torpedoes launched previously open up to reveal the fighters inside. The torpedoes have to be *at least* the diameter of the ship's wingspan. But this is the size of the Stargazer relative to a fighter if it is merely 250 meters long. If I want to fit a fighter through one of those torpedo tubes, the ship has to be much, much bigger. Like enormously so. (and before you say "this is just an fan made model", I made this by taking the turrets and outboard pod supports off of the game model for the 2059 Northampton, and checked it against the official lineart from the same angles, and it's got good enough proportions that I can at least use it for sanity checks like this.) Same thing really with the stern ramp launch of the VF-22 from the OVA segment. The ramp shown in the OVA is three times the size of the VF-22 that is launching from it. Where are you sticking that on the this frigate? To support the visuals in its debut anime, where it was a huge part of the focus of an entire episode, it would have to be almost the size of the Battle 7, maybe even larger. That torpedo tube launch sequence just *wrecks* the official size. Even the Gefion's 1000 meter size in game is smaller than the Stargazer has to be for the episode that it was the star of to work. Studio Nue very obviously changed their mind between making the animation reference where the Northampton was specified as 250 meters long; and the making of episode 44 where it was the featured ship; and then forgot that they had changed their mind afterwards. Or, they just didn't care what the size was as long as the scene looked cool. But anyway, the upshot is that Stargazer is flat out impossible without the ship being *substantially* larger than the official size statement. On the other hand... This scene shows that the Guantanamo works at its stated size of 350 meters. Shame that this is not the only, or even the most commonly used, 3D model of the ship though, because the one that *is* more commonly seen is this one: Which does *not* work at 350 meters, because someone didn't check the size of the hangar ports they were making. That small hangar opening where the launch lane indicators are coming from on the starboard side is about a third of the size required for a VF to launch out of if the ship is 350 meters (I know this because the game model is based very closely on this to the point of having the same textures, that opening is only 6.6 meters long and about 4 meters wide - not even big enough for a Ghost). Edit: Another SAN check for the design is the bridge line art: With a 250 meter long Northampton model, that bridge is only 2.3 meters wide *over the glass*, and only about four and a half meters tall. Certainly not tall enough for three decks worth of operators and a big ass sensor cluster underneath. Just the top platform has to be around four meters wide based on the standing figure's height relative to the width of the deck, which means the ship is at least double the size stated...