SebastianP

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...

And what I'm saying is that *Studio Nue* did not care about making anything in true scale. The whole issue goes back to the Stargazer, which *should never have been a Northampton*, because there already were two carriers that were very under-utilized in the show. The precedent of the Stargazer I think why anyone even looked at the Northampton as a basis for the Gefion in the first place. I can buy most of the rest of your arguments, except that "the larger carriers would have been too dominant" - a Guantanamo, especially the true size version that they used for the cool launch shots in the Frontier opening battle, would have been smaller by some significant margin than they ended up making the Gefion, and been visually less threatening because of the lack of big guns, and would have had room for Aisha's VF collection and any other cast members, *and* been justified in that a VF development project obviously needs a carrier of some sort if it's not going to be land-based.

I feel like it was forgivable back in the cel animation days, where getting a consistent scale all the time was more work, but I'm much less forgiving in the 3D animation era where you can model everything to an absolute scale and hard check that things will actually fit together consistently. But I'm pretty sure the animation size reference sheets are among the first things that the director will ignore... I also feel like the whole issue with the size of the Northampton - in all three cases, mind you - would have been avoidable if they'd just used one of the *actual carriers*, like the Uraga (which is sadly underfocused on), and the Guantanamo.

It's not just the game, it's *all of it*. The Northampton is consistently depicted relative to Variable Fighters, in every scene where this is relevant (Stargazer, the OVA scene where they launch VF-22s out of a rear ramp, and Macross 30's Gefion) as being substantially larger than 250 meters. Gefion is just the one where there's enough detail to really scale things out. The Guantanamo-class as shown in Frontier and Delta has two different models - the closeup model, which is somewhere around 400-450 meters long based on the relative size of the VF-171 to the sides of the deck: and the overall model, which is shown with fighter launch tracks coming out of holes that are too small by at least *half*... for a an AIF-7S Ghost. The overall model has to be something like a kilometer long to support VF-171s launching from any of its modeled hangar bay openings. (and this is the model that has the most screen time by far and is replicated 1-for-1 in the games. It's easily distinguished since it says "MAIDURU" on the sides of the hull on *every copy* of it. There were at least four of them with the name visible in Delta, and another two at least in Frontier...) The Quarter, to reiterate my findings on that, is not large enough for Rabbit 1 to fit anywhere aboard. Just... not possible at the official size. Nor is there room inside the ARMD-L carrier section - or anywhere else on the ship - for a hangar the size we see in the anime - heck, even the deck elevator, prominently used in the show, is not big enough for a VF-25, let alone a VB-6. It *can't* be 400 meters long overall. The Elysion's size visibly changed between episodes, and the features of the shooting model support the larger size. Whoever made the model created something that made sense at one scale - elevator outlines, launch track spacing, hangar volume - and then someone decided it was two thirds the size out of nowhere and never gave time to fix any of the scaling cues. Heck, even going way back to the originals - I know the official story is probably different, but it really feels like the Daedalus and Prometheus were tacked on late, and changed the size of the ship without the story team having time to re-scale the size of a city that was supposed to go in a much larger ship. (I should, at some point, double-check the relative size of the VF-1 and the openings in the sides of the DYRL ARMDs, to make sure that the opening sequence of that movie is even possible at the official size of the ships...) Basically... from all evidence, Macross ships are "whatever size looks coolest for a given scene", and the Chronicle numbers are useless because they contradict the physical requirements for the performance seen on screen with regards to "will this even fit aboard", and the people who do care about scale at all get overruled on a regular basis. Edit: as far as I can tell, every time a large ship interacts with VFs in the shows, you can see where the sizes don't match. In Macross 7, aside from everything else, you have the Diamond Force launch sequence with the hatches and the arms... which require the bridge block to be substantially larger relative to the ship than we're shown, so either the ship is bigger or the bridge block is as large as it was made on the Battle 25. Ironically, Battle 25's bridge block is large enough for the Diamond Force launch system but does not have an equivalent because of the turrets.)

Time for me to harp on the dumbness of the official sizes of Macross ships again... 1 - can we first agree that the Gefion is a variant of the Northampton-class frigate, and that the two ships are the same size? These are both official game models, stripped of their textures. When scaled to the same size, they overlap line by line *everywhere* except for the obvious bits (different armament and the flight deck pods), This includes the whole bridge section, the wing pods, the AA turrets, and the secondary turrets. (Curiously, the primary turret is slightly smaller on the Gefion). This is what an official scale VF-25 looks like on the flight deck of the 250 meter long Gefion. As you can see... this does not fit. You *may* be able to squeeze the thing through with some grease, but as we will see in a moment, no grease is needed in the game. And no amount of grease in the world would get that König Monster into that hangar aperture, that isn't happening. This is a screenshot I took in Macross 30 a few years back, when I first played it. That is a VF-0D standing on the rear flight deck, and while I didn't get close enough to the opening to really double down on it, it looks very much to me like the thing will walk comfortably through that arch. Now, how tall is a VF-0D? The official specs never said. And when there *were* official specs given (in Macross Chronicle, no less), the height given (14 meters) was too short for the official *length* of the beast to make any sense. according to Macross Mecha Manual. The calculated minimum height of the VF-0 is 16 meters, and M3 gives it as 16.25. How tall is the arch? Well, at the official 250 meter length of the ship, that arch, in the 3D model, is *just* shy of 4.75 meters tall, but we'll call it 4.75 because I don't want to deal with more decimals. *IF* the VF-0D is the "canon" height of 14 meters (which as mentioned makes no sense); then the ship has to be *at minimum* 3 times the size in order to fit the robot through the hole that we can see it can walk through. If it is the more reasonable 16.25 meters, it's at minimum 3.5 times the official length, and the robot would be scraping its head laser on the roof if it walked anywhere but the center of the arch. At four times the official size, we reach 19 meters arch height, at which point most non-Zentran, non-Monster battroids can walk through it. This is the Gefion scaled up to 400%, or 1000 meters overall. The König monster fits comfortably. Battroids can walk through the rear arch. I am basically convinced that this is the size the ship is presented as in the game itself even if it never states this outright. In summary: The Gefion, as shown in Macross 30, using all the scaling evidence available, is presented as being somewhere between 750 meters and 1000 meters in overall length, very likely on the larger end of that spectrum; and because the Northampton is basically the same model in too many details to discount, it too must be of a similar size. Which, by the way, makes Operation Stargazer a whole lot more reasonable as you could actually fit all those 43 fighters without gutting the whole ship. Edit: (Of course, changing the size of the Northampton would also result in dumb issues, because all the other ships would need to be scaled up to match, and that does not work for ships like the Elysion or the Battle 7/Battle 25. It *would* fix my issues with the Macross Quarter fairly handily since it would need to be scaled up to a mile long, though... but a 6.5 km Battle 7 is just too much. The flight decks are already almost too big to make sense. What I want to get at is that scaling in Macross is just *stupid* all around, and none of the figures being thrown around make sense and the ships relative sizes on the screen make no sense either...)

An Uraga! Yay! Now I just need to figure out how to get the thing to a format I can use...

I ended up sounding a bit harsh in my previous post now that I read it over, which wasn't my intention. I'm just trying to point out where stuff needs more work. That the work of piecing everything together is pretty much insanity inducing was something I already knew a bit about... I know about the extracted archives from Macross 30, the problem is the upload site used appears to require an account to use and a stand-alone app as well, which doesn't want to work for me. I am kind of wondering right now how well the armored parts from Mac30 would fit on the Uta Macross VF-25, once they're correctly scaled. I'll have to experiment with that at some point. Do none of the extracted games contain an Uraga-class? It's the one major NUNS combatant that I've never been able to get a model of and it's been a pretty major presence in all of the last three TV shows and their movies...

The VF-25 Tornado and Super Parts are kind of incomplete, they're missing their leg armor; and while the Armored Parts *are* complete, the jet itself is not in the correct configuration to mount them (all of the super/tornado/armored versions need to drop the leg some amount at the "gerwalk" joint and then go the same amount up at the knee). The models are also for some reason not in scale, they're almost 200% scale compared to the specs (think 1/72 scale compared to a 1/144). This is the easiest part to fix though. Thanks a bunch for posting them anyway though, because I did *not* have an Armored VF-25 of any shape before, so this helps a lot.

The RX-78, of which at least 5 examples were made according to the lore (though only one was in the anime); and the RX-178 of which at least three were made that *are* in the anime? *those* unique, OP machines, that could be bested by mass production units in one on one if the opponent was skilled enough? The "actually super" prototypes came with the Zeta itself and the Double Zeta, and later the Nu. But the RX-78 and RX-178 weren't outright super robots masquerading as real robots like the Psycommu units were, which are what I associate with super prototypes. If Basara had been loaded up with live ammo instead of speaker pods, he'd have wrecked at least a couple of waves worth of Varauta single handedly... And no one in the whole setting so much as touched his VF for a good long while, and they tried *very hard*, because he was making such a nuisance of himself. That was part skill, and part superior specs. Though I will admit Basara is the kind of person who'd be challenged to no-damage pacifist run the complete Touhou series with a Guitar Hero controller, only hear the word "guitar", and then do it. In one go. Without having heard of the game before. It's a nerf in the sense that there are maneuvers that the VF-19 and VF-22 cannot do, that the YF-19 and YF-21 could, due to feature removal, or added safety restrictions. Isamu in a stock VF-19A vs Isamu in the Alpha One would be in the Alpha One's favor, because production plane wouldn't let Isamu pull some of the stuff he did with the prototype. Yes, it wouldn't have been any good like that as a mass production unit, but that's.... basically how the first couple of Gundams worked too. Awesome but impractical for general issue. Which is similar to how switching to cheaper materials and stripping out some features made the Prototype RX-78 Gundam possible to mass produce in the form of the RGM-79 GM, And again; Guld could not have defeated the X-9 Ghost in a VF-22. He could defeat the X-9 in the YF-21 because it allowed him to control his VF past the point where his body was turning into mush. I will admit that this is not generally considered a thing you should be doing, but given the circumstances, he only won because of it and no other machine of its day or five years into the future would have let him do it. So. Nerfed. Watered-down. Feature-incomplete. The VF-19 and VF-22 were better general purpose machines. The YF-19 and YF-21 were super prototypes that could do things the production ones could not. The margin is not *as* large as the margin between the Gundam and the GM, but it's there.

I forgot to mention the actual ending for the non-original characters, plus a few more things. Blame it being like 4 in the morning when I hit post last time.

Depends on what level of super prototype shenanigans you're ascribing to Gundam... i.e. which part of the series you're looking at. If we're looking at the early Gundams (MSG and MSG-Z) they weren't hugely faster or more powerful than the grunt suits, and being in a Gundam was definitely not an "I Win" button for any of the early pilots. Not like, say, the Fire Valkyrie. Also, the VF-19 was nerfed by having the flight controls tuned down so normal pilots could fly - this doesn't translate to reduced engine power or anything that would show up in the usual stat block we get for model kits and the like, but it's still a performance hit. And the VF-22 had a bunch of stuff removed compared to the YF-21; that's technically another nerf, as no one could fly the VF-22 like Guld flew the YF-21.

Keep in mind that Master File is not official canon, though. Elements of them *have* apparently been re-used in the official setting material, though whether that's because Ukyo Kodachi read the books and was inspired, or came up with it themselves independently I couldn't possibly tell; but nothing in the books is canon unless it's corroborated in an anime or in the Chronicle... which hasn't been updated in ages. So, what we do have for official sources on the YF-29 is the Macross 30 game - which is definitely canon, as you said yourself; and possibly official licensed toys and model kits, and their descriptions. Macross 30, which was the original source for there even being an YF-29B, only has a single example - Rod Baltmer's YF-29B Perceval. The other *five* examples of the YF-29 in the game (Alto Saotome's, Ozma Lee's, Leon Sakaki's, Isamu Dyson's, and the 30th anniversary Itasha version) are all straight up labeled "YF-29 Durandal". The DX toy versions of all of the above are also labeled similarly - only Rod's machine from the game is an YF-29B Perceval, all of the others are YF-29 Durandal's; and the DX toys add the Roy Focker Custom and most recently the Max Jenius custom as YF-29 Durandals. The Bandai 1/100 model kits also refer to Max' ride as a YF-29 Durandal, and does not claim any downgrades over Alto's machine in the (conveniently officially translated) blurb on the model kit manual, which can be read for both models on Dalong.net. The model kit description for Max' machine even lists the "ultra high purity fold quarts amplifiers". The implication is that while extremely expensive to produce and thus only made in extremely limited quantities, the colonies can reproduce the YF-29 to the same spec as the first unit; though only a handful of special ace custom units are around. Aisha on Ouroboros may be able to produce them locally due to the natural resources available, but that's basically artisanal crafting, not mass production. The YF-29B is obviously the NUNS attempt at replicating the YF-29; it has a different name because it's not built by the same people. It may or may not have been discontinued after that one prototype due to the expense; this is not mentioned anywhere in the bio for the unit AFAICT. I don't remember what white text on Macross Mecha Manual indicates (green is for conjecture or calculated data, purple for Macross Chronicle info; and teal is for Master File stuff); so I don't know where exactly the "Philosopher's stone" stuff comes from given that the article isn't sourced. Is that novel info or from a toy manual? The gundam-type things infiltrated the franchise all the way back in Macross Plus/Macross 7; with the YF-19 being so good that the production version had to be nerfed; and Fire Bomber flying around in custom suits that outperformed the line machines.

There was a novelization, and someone did translate the whole thing. I'm not sure I'm allowed to tell you where I found it on account of piracy rules, though. Don't expect anything that wasn't an anime original to ever get the anime treatment in the Macross universe - Kawamori just doesn't work that way. All the stories are changed to suit whatever medium he's working with, which is why for example the Frontier TV series and Frontier Movies are mutually exclusive plot-wise. As for a plot summary:

Minivalks, linked above, has both the Megalord, Megaroad, and all known versions of VF-4, but only as untransformable, 3D-printable models. The ship models are *really* resource intensive, the Megaroad in particular has massive amounts of modeled in surface detail, They should at the very least be possible to trace over to make easier to use models for your game project.

Yeah, this is the Windermere ship, the Dulfim is much less rounded. Wonder if it's named Dulfim in the files, though, because it just might? It's based on the same general concept... Anyway, thanks a bunch for posting these, @reaper7092

A 3D model is "whatever scale you decide it is" when you have a 3D program that can be set to work in meters. I made the 3D model 1:1 scale according to the official chronicle size. And the video game model is quite possibly the same overall mesh as was used for the TV show, it certainly has the same texture, maybe at a lower resolution. Even the smudge pattern is the same. It's not like the shape is super complex or it was fetured as a "hero unit" at any point, so it never needed to be super high detail in the first place. The fanmade doujinshi only really needed to draw a triangle the size of the Northampton's forward hull, and a triangle the size of a folded up VF-11, and attempt to fit as many VF-11 triangles into the size of the Northampton triangle as possible. Which is what they did, except with silhouettes of the fighters. The liberties taken by FANKY involve *making the ship bigger and fold the fighters up tighter in order to make things fit*. They didn't shrink the ship any, or make the fighters bigger. And it's not like "bad official figures" is a new thing - Star Wars had the infamous Executor controversy, where the books were saying Vader's flagship was five times the length of its escorts and all the visual evidence in the movie said it was more like 11 or 12 times, and the fans got vocal enough that Lucasfilm actually changed their mind (and amusingly claimed the older figure was "Imperial disinformation" that had been reprinted without checking). Stargate SG-1 had its liner notes, where the fighters were 30 meters and the carriers were 195 and 225 meters, which meant the fighters wouldn't fit in the hangars (they were literally too wide); the VFX crew eventually leaked the models, which had been made 516 and 650 meters long in 1:1 scale which could be verified by the size of the bridge chairs; while the fighters were only 14 meters and could be comfortably parked three wide in the hangar just like they did in the interior shots in the show. Several points here. First of all - if the ship masses a mere 1,200 tons, it launched a third of its mass in fighters during Operation stargazer, as 28 nine-ton VF-11s, 4 twelve-ton VF-17s, and 4 eight-and-a-half ton VF-19s add up to 336 tons total, *without* super packs, fuel, or ammunition. Oh, and Max' VF-22S, that's another nine to nine and a half tons. This is easily in the 400 ton range just by allowing one ton each for super packs for the 32 fighters that had those, plus another ton in fuel for all fighters. That's absurd. Second - the Hindenburg was 245 meters and massed 200 tons. The Northampton would be having a density close to that of a Zeppelin. Third - you can tell what a decent mass for the ship would be by scaling the 7.77 million ton, 1510 meter Battle 7 down to 1/6 scale, which drops its mass to 36,000 tons at just over 250 meters. (While it would have 1/6th of the bulkheads and decks inside, those decks and bulkheads would be 6 times as thick relatively, so it's basically a wash). A Northampton is less blocky and less robust than a Battle class, so I'll allow it to be a third of that mass, so 12,000 tons. Mass controversy solved by means of shifting a decimal point. (same goes for the Guantanamo, which is the size of an aircraft carrier and should mass like an aircraft carrier, i.e. 90,000 tons rather than 9,000.) Basically, I'm more willing to believe that the numbers are wrong when they contradict everything else I can see, than I am willing to believe convoluted explanations for why the numbers are accurate. Occam's razor and whatnot. In this case, at 250 meters I'm more than willing to believe that someone forgot a zero in the mass of the ship; but if the 250 is wrong like I believe, then the 1200 tons even more wrong. Yet the length of the Northampton-class was revised from 250 to 252.5 meters. Databook authors don't care - you saw that with the Delta stuff. I'm the kind of person who'll go by the VFX over the databook when the databook figures don't work. (Hmm. At some point I should actually check how big the DYRL macross model becomes if I scale it by the conning tower. That might actually make some sense of the city interior.)

Thanks! Problem is it's another piece of evidence that the official length of the ship is bunk, tho... Here are the points I've found so far regarding that: 1 - the official line art of the bridge shows that it has three vertically stacked decks, with a sensor cluster underneath, all under the main windscreen. The middle deck is wide enough for three bridge operators abreast (though there's just a box in the the middle), which means the bridge has to be at least three meters wide. more likely four given that there are consoles to either side of the chair. The spacing of the seats and consoles of the back row of the second deck indicates that there's something like two meters in between the chairs, so I'll go with four meters. If each deck is three meters tall, which seems to be the minimum given how much headroom there looks to be, then the whole windscreen would need to be twelve meters. On the game 3D model, when the ship is scaled to 250 meters, that window is 2 meters wide at its absolute widest, by 6 meters tall. Ergo, in order to make the bridge fit, the ship needs to be 500 meters. (scaling up the bridge on the outside until the interior fits would make it look Super-Deformed...) 2 - the FANKY doujin did a "how do we stack the VF-11s to fit all 37 we see launch from the Stargazer" - the answer was, "gut the entire ship and leave no room for anything except the hangar". And they still had to use a "fat" version of the hull to do it. 3 - the Gefion's hangar pods in Macross 30 aren't tall enough for most of the fighters to fit through, and especially not the Koenig Monster. Some of the fighters have trouble fitting on the width of the flight deck, even. (Gefion appears to be rendered at the official 250 meter size...) 4 - there's somehow a sixty to eighty meter hatch on the aft belly of the Northampton-class (the VF-14 is just short of 20 meters, and the hatch is more than three times the length of the fighter and we don't see the forward edge of it) where the longest unbroken edge I can find at 250 meter scale is less than 20 meters unless on the actual bustle itself where the engines are. 5 - the fighters for Operation Stargazers were said to be fired out the missile launchers on the Stargazer... missile launchers which are less than 2 m in diameter on the model. (The 2059 model of the ship is actually remarkably proportional to the 2030 model, and there are a lot of features in common to the point where I've been able to almost entirely backdate it with only a few details left to do...) And finally, 6 - if the ship is 1,200 tons at 250 meters, it's basically made of styrofoam. It's literally the length of a Kirov-class cruiser by its official stats, much more voluminous due to its shape, and weighs 1/20th of what the Kirov does with full magazines and empty tanks. Whoever wrote the chronicle writeup went through all the papers and only looked for numbers and never analyzed the art, at all, and now we're stuck with numbers that make no sense.

So, I've been playing around a bit with the Northampton 3D model that someone extracted from the PS3 games some more, and a question kind of strikes me: How do people get on or off this ship without it being docked to either a bigger ship or a space station? (the docking tube arrangement is in the Mac7 lineart on MMM). It can't land (though we see ships hover indefinitely just fine, so not a huge deal); and the standard version most definitely does not have the room for a flight deck. And the "beam me up zone" under the Gefion in Macross 30 is game mechanics, plain and simple. In other words, the ship basically has to have a shuttlecraft somewhere, maybe two given how it's symmetrical. So where are they and how do they dock? Are they in the cavity in the back inboard of the weapons pods? Would there be a hidden hatch on the underside next to the Yamato-esque third bridge? Actually, do we even have any pictures of shuttles other than Sheryl's private transport, the König Monster and the Delta shuttle? Because none of those would even fit physically through anything that looks like an opening on the Northampton *or* the Stealth Cruiser....

You're missing something critical here. I don't expect the show air until 2025, with a teaser in December next year, for one important reason; We haven't heard a thing about auditions, yet. Frontier wasn't announced at all - we first heard about it when someone described auditions going on at Victor Entertainment for a "new big-budget anime" and someone said the pamphlets given to the hopefuls mentioned Macross. That was in February 2007. In April, auditions had concluded and Megumi Nakajima was presented as the winner at the 25th anniversary concert. There was the Deculture Edition episode 1 in December, and then the show aired properly starting in April 2008. Delta was given an "A new Macross TV show is in development" announcement in March 2014, and then we next heard about it in October 2014 when they announced that auditions would begin in December that year. Auditions ran until April 2015, and then there was silence until October, when Kawamori revealed more info; and then we got the first episode preview in December 2015, followed by the show proper in April 2016. We are at "A new Macross TV show is in development", and I haven't heard anything about auditions, which means we're at least one year out from today. More likely, we'll get an audition announcement somewhere this fall, and they'll be done by April next year, with the show airing in April 2025. (Unless I've been totally oblivious and there *has* been auditions that I missed hearing about. But IIRC all we know about Macross 40+ is that it's being animated by Sunrise.) Edit: The original thread discussing the existence of auditions for a new Macross show back in 2007 is absolute megacringe. The things people apparently wanted from the new show... thank the Hoary Froating Head we didn't get any of that.

Not really. I *like* that Macross has the balls to say "their story is done, let's look at someone else's story" and *doesn't* fall for the urge to go back and fill in the blanks (except for Zero, which was pretty, but weak, IMO. So many little things that make me go "but how?!?" on a rewatch with that.) It's nice to see some characters again *occasionally*, but Macross is much, much better at any other Space Opera I can name that it's a *vast* galaxy, too large to comfortably travel across. Once you start to deliberately follow one particular cast member around after the end of their initial story, it becomes about *them* instead of about the setting you've built. See Star Wars, which was "The adventures of Luke Skywalker and Friends" so hard that if you look at the official Legends chronology, there's only like one year total out of *thirty* starting with A New Hope when Luke is actually not out and about doing something. (one of the last novels written in the Legends continuity filled in the other gap in that thirty year stretch, so chances are that one year of vacation would have gone as well eventually). Disney pulling the plug on the Expanded Universe has only fixed the issue in that there's a lot of empty places to put new adventures in now, because every damned official media is still involving the Skywalkers or adjacent characters somehow. (Rebels had guest appearances from Leia and Vader. The Mandalorian guest starred Ashoka and Luke. Boba Fett wasn't a *friend* of Luke's per se, but he was an original trilogy character. Kenobi is Kenobi, and his show included Vader and Leia as well. I haven't actually seen Andor, but it's been touted as the best piece of Star Wars media since Disney took over, and that might be because of a lack of Skywalkers?) Meanwhile, Macross can and does have the balls to go "yeah, have a story about characters who've never met and are never going to meet anyone from any previous show, at least not on camera", like Macross Plus or Macross Frontier, *and* it has the balls to go "this is a dramatization, and may not be 100% historically accurate" so that people won't get hung up too hard on canon. Heck, given how the shows seems to actually alternate a bit? We got Plus, which had no prior characters involved; Seven, which had the Jenius clan; Zero, which had Roy; Frontier, which had no prior characters except for a *connection* to Zero; and Delta, which involved the Jenius clan again, I'm going to speculate and say "the next show might involve relatives of someone *else* in the original series bridge crew". Maybe a member of the Milliome family? (Shammy settled on Luna after Space War 1 and had eleven kids by 2045... and while her hubby was a rich heir type, Shammy was bridge crew on the ship that saved humanity, so maybe some of them took her name?)

I personally was hyped as heck for that scene, because it marked the point where the story was going "nope, downers are over, time for the cast to be awesome and holy crap is that a surfing robot? Just what the doctor ordered to cure the depressive fit!" Anyway, a drinking robot doesn't make much sense because why would you make a piloted robot with the ability to drink, that's inefficient. On the other hand, motor skills we know transfer, and have known since back in SDF Macross, where Max and Milia turn out to be just as good on foot as they are in the cockpit. And it's not like Captain Wilder is the only one showing off a skill learned normally while driving a robot. Alto does kabuki acting - while piloting his VF. Michael does sniping both in and out of his VF. I don't remember if Ozma actually uses a knife while on foot at any point, but do you doubt that he'd be able to? Hayate dances in his robot. The Windermere knights have swords, both for their uniforms and for their robots. (and later on, Max flies the Gigasion like it was a fighter jet...) All you need to be able to surf in a robot is for the robot to have three points of articulation per leg (hip, knee, ankle), and two per arm (shoulder and elbow) so it can adjust its pose and hold its balance; a good balancing system; and a surfboard and a wave to ride. And we had already seen that there was enough articulation and balance, given that Bobby does all sorts of flips and stuff, so all that was needed was a board and a wave. And a helmsman who would do it. Also, there's something called conservation of detail, aka Chekov's gun, which means that if I see a character perform a signature activity that is theoretically possible to do in a VF or other robot while on foot, I'm not going to be surprised to see them do it while piloting a VF.

I dunno, "ruthless will to power" kind of describes at least Bodolza (he decides to wipe humanity out because they're threatening his control) and Leon Mishima (who murders his way to the top in the TV series... so it can be him standing on the bridge of the Battle Frontier commanding the assault on Planet Vajra.). I'll agree we didn't see anything resembling the "earthnoids vs spacenoids" nonsense from Gundam in Macross, but we've gotten at least a couple of actual megalomaniacs. I think I'll direct you towards Alan Dean Foster's Humanx Commonwealth (a long, long series of novels that started back in the 70s about the alliance of the Humans and the Thranx, an insectoid species, after a very nearly botched first contact); Larry Niven's Known Space (another long series of novels started in the 60s, where the cat-like Kzinti nearly eradicated their warrior caste trying to defeat the humans, and the remaining castes were much less hostile afterwards, IIRC); and Star Trek's Klingons, who are allies as far as I remember in current "prime" timeline material, as well as in Star Trek Online. There's probably other examples, but these are the ones that spring to mind. (I've also not read a whole lot of either of the novel series, and the ones I did read were ages ago so I may be misremembering how things went with the Kzin after the war...) Oh, and then there's stuff like Dragonball Z, but you knew that, I think.