SebastianP

2 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Regardless of your conclusions, this is all off topic to the comparison of the Macross Quarter and Macross Elysion based on their official setting info so let's leave it there please.

Is proving that the Quarter cannot have its stated hangar capacity off topic for a discussion about the Quarter's hangar capacity now? 

If you can't fit the main 36-fighter hangar on the Quarter at its given size, then what hope have you of fitting 60 mecha total

If the ship is not 472 meters long and has to be twice the size to fit the hangar we see in the show, how is it more space efficient than the Elysion? 

And if you try to rule out the officially licensed 3D model from the Frontier games (yes, this was the actual extracted model, not a conversion for 3D printing or anything) as "fanfic", then I will have to say the same for the Chronicle - it's equally worthless as a source of accurate information due to its contradictions. 

8 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

An internally consistent argument that does not depend on assumptions, unofficial sources, etc. is obviously the ideal.

Observation from the animation is of course very good.  The animation model sheets even better.  Descriptions from official media are also fine.  Authoritative official sources are in general preferred.

 

Based on the animator's model reference produced by Macross Quarter mechanical designer Junya Ishigaki which may be found in his personal artbook ROBO no Ishi as well as the Mechanic Sheet for the Macross Quarter in Macross Chronicle, this appears to be approximately 1/2 of ARMD-L's main hangar.  The bow end, based on the design of the back wall there and the lack of the large double airlock to the Super Parts installation are and elevators. 

The full length of the hangar as drawn is eleven of those segmented wall panels long (plus approximately one VF-25 length from the emergency shutters at the rear), and there are I think five sets shown in this shot, suggesting this is approximately the middle of the hangar facing toward the bow.  With thirteen planes fitting neatly into that space, the Macross Quarter's primary hangar should hold approximately 26 VF-25-sized aircraft, not counting the 2+ machine capacity of the Super Pack fitting area and the 7 machine capacity of the Battroid maintenance area at the rear.  That puts the interior capacity of the ARMD-L at 35 machines based on the animation and animator's model reference.

This does not account for the other maintenance areas that we see VF-25s being stored in in the series and movies.

To get a battroid maintenance area aft of the main hangar, the ship needs to be *ginormous* - there's simply not enough depth. At 472 meters overall, forget there being standing battroids *at all* on the ARMD-L,, the whole hull isn't tall enough.

Here I've scaled the ARMD-L up to 200%. The forward grey rectangle is the old hangar, extended lengthwise to 200% to match your estimate of how big the full hangar is. The smaller red rectangle is how much of the hull is left aft of the main hangar where there's enough depth for a Battroid to stand up. It is not very much. Aft of that is another grey rectangle showing how far you could extend the main hangar deck without breaking through the underside. (This is with the hangar deck 7 meters below the flight deck, which seems reasonable to me.)

The larger red rectangle shows where the hull is deep enough that there's standing room *under* the main hangar. I went with 22 meter height for the hangar ceiling - if you make this space narrower or less tall, you can extend it forward by a fair amount. That's the only space that works for a "battroid maintenance area" at this size. 

The more the ship is scaled up from here, the further forward the main hangar can be moved and the red section aft of it extended.

Taking into account that the hangar I drew originally was narrower than shown in the anime, I think we're looking at a thousand meters overall for the whole Quarter in order to fit Junya Ishigaki's hangar layout inside of the ARMD-L .

4 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Your theories, no matter how convincing you may believe them to be, are still just fan theories.  They're borderline off-topic in a discussion of what's said in official media, especially where they contradict the official material.

 

Yes, I know I was rude. That's why I changed my mind and edited it out. Apparently not fast enough. 

What constitutes proof? Physically building the interior and trying to fit them into the official model? Or will you claim that the model used in the game has the wrong shape? Do you have any conception of how "wrong" the shape would have to be in order to fit this quantity of stuff inside?

One of our best interior hangar shots, from Sayonara no Tsubasa. I count three visible portside vertical tails along the left side of the hangar, and three on the right. (Some of the other shots from early in the TV series indicate the hangar is *even bigger*, btw, but there was no nice replicable scene where I could prove it.)

An attempt at recreating this layout in 3D. Note that I've erred on the side of smallness throughout - the movie screencap shows that you can see between the fighters all the way down to the far end, which doesn't work for my scene because they're too close together (hangar is narrower than in the movie); and the two pairs of "ass-to-ass" fighters look especially weird like this. But they fit in this box, and the box can't be made too much smaller - certainly not narrower.

This is how much the hangar I built sticks out of the hull on the official Macross Quarter model from the video games, scaled to 472 meters overall for the Quarter.. If this model is not accurate, I don't know where we'd find a better one. Note how the the hangar is too wide for the hull the entire way, and too wide for the *flight deck* at the front end. 

Box in the same position, showing that it pokes through at the back too, and that there's no rear hull to the ARMD-L

This hangar does not fit in the ARMD-L, and a 6 meter tall hangar that does fit would be tiny and very narrow at the front end, barely big enough for a single row of fighters. I might be able to squeeze in eight VF-25s. 

Box is also wider than the whole leg, so it obviously doesn't fit there either.  

I physically can not fit twelve fighters on one deck anywhere on the Quarter at its official size. There's no volume big enough for that. 

Have we moved beyond "this is just a fan a theory" yet? I can't make the fighters fit. I invite  you to try for yourself, the models are available and Blender is free (even if that's not what I used). 

Bonus: The VF-25 sitting on the too-small elevator of the ARMD-L. None of the other elevators are any larger. (This is an orthographic picture, so there's no perspective distortion to make the elevator look smaller. And while the model of the VF-25 is not official, it's correctly scaled in all particulars). 

4 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Bearing in mind that 80 mecha is listed as the maximum capacity not the standard operating capacity and that that figure is inclusive of Valkyries, Ghosts, Battle Suits, and Destroids which may be stored in places other than ARMD-L... we don't actually know what the Macross Quarter's normal operating capacity is.  If it's anything like a normal aircraft carrier, it's probably around 1/2 of the maximum... so about 40 machines in total.  That's inclusive of Valkyries, Destroids, Battle Suits, and Ghosts, not all of which are stored in ARMD-L's main hangar space, so that doesn't seem like an unreasonable number to me.

Where would those hangars be? I showed above, there's no room for a hangar matching what we saw internally anywhere on this ship. No section is large enough to hold it, not at the canon size. The whole ARMD-L is is about as thick as a Queadluun is tall at its thickest point as well - and I think even the legs would have trouble finding standing room for a Queadluun. I certainly don't see anywhere to launch and recover one through. 

At this point, either the anime depiction is false, and all other visual depictions based on it are false, in order to satisfy the book stat line; or the book statline is false, It's very binary. And discarding the book statline, and reinterpreting the *two* scenes in the anime (Quarter alongside Battle Frontier for the Macross Cannon shot, and Quarter charging Battle Galaxy with a Macross Attack) that rely on the ship being 25% of the *length* of the Battle class is less damaging to the coherency of *everything* than discarding all visual depictions because they don't match the Chronicle statline. 

On 7/22/2025 at 9:22 AM, Seto Kaiba said:

One of the several reasons I privately suspect - in the absence of any hard statements either way - that the Elysion-type is an older generation of Macross than the Macross Quarter-class is that its greater size doesn't seem to afford it any significant advantage.  It has a few more beam turrets than the standard Macross Quarter-class, but is outclassed there by a variant Macross Quarter-class from the movies.  Neither its turrets nor its Macross Cannon seem to be particularly powerful either... and it flat-out lacks an equivalent to the Macross Quarter's gatling buster. 

Perhaps most tellingly, despite being twice as large it seems to have only about 1/2 the mecha capacity of its smaller counterpart.  The New UN Spacy's smallest standard carrier is home to around 40 aircraft in normal operating conditions.  The Macross Quarter-class supposedly holds around 60 mecha in total, counting emplaced unmanned destroids for air defense, Ghosts, Valkyries, and Battle Suits.  The Macross Elysion's only home to twenty Valkyries between its two support carriers Aether and Hemera, presumably having room for around 30 in total without Walkure's special equipment getting underfoot.  That's pretty darn small for such a large ship.  Doubly so considering that one ship is Xaos's only force covering multiple inhabited planets simultaneously whereas a single Macross Quarter-class is covering a single emigrant fleet.

On that basis, I don't think they really have enough firepower to take over the Brisingr cluster solo... I think they'd probably get taken out through sheer weight of numbers in a similar way that Windermere IV did once Heinz was out of action.  

 

I've told you, and I've shown you, there's no room on the Quarter for that kind of a mecha complement. Not a chance. The ARMD-L - the carrier section, where the fighters are supposed to go - is the size of an Essex-class carrier... with three quarters of the hull chopped off (the stern half to make room for the Quarter's arm, and the bottom half to slim it down) if you take the official 472 meter size as gospel. (Also a huge part of how large the air wings of the Essex class were was deck storage, and knockdown storage, where the whole air wing didn't physically fit on the hangar deck in ready-to-fly state). And the biggest interior hangar shot I've found (and I've been looking) shows 12 VFs, and I'm not sure as of right now whether I can fit a box containing that number inside the hull of the "canon-size" ARMD-L. Maybe in the legs, but that's not where the VFs go. 

The one possible solution is if you scale the ship up so that the *ARMD-L* is 472 meters - that makes a whole lot of things work much better, as now the elevators won't clip the noses and wings off of VF-25s, and the marked landing strip on the flight deck is wide enough to actually land on. And the catapult tracks are separated widely enough to use simultaneously. But at that point, the Quarter is not 1/4 the size of the Macross except maybe by displacement. 

On the other hand, the Elysion, without changing its size any, has at least 20 fighters per carrier, given that we can see and count sixteen VF-31As with super packs below deck in the ready hangar awaiting launch in the show, *on top* of the four Delta Squadron fighters that are in a separate part of the ship at that point. (And we know they're on the Aether because it says "Aether" on the fins).

I can even work out how to fit those fighters into the hull at the "canon" size, even if barely; and some of the other scenes where they have the Deltas five wide below deck are beyond iffy at that size.

And if you scale the Elysion up to the point where the model's features start to make practical sense (elevators being sufficiently large for VF-31s, bridge windows being big enough, the hangar capacity *explodes*, because things do that when you give them 800% of their original volume. I can fit 40 fighters on a single contiguous hangar deck when I do that, and there's potentially room for a second one below the first. 

This is what the "scaled by features" versions of the Elysion and Quarter look like, with the fighters on deck outlining the area where there's enough room for a hangar deck below. Keep in mind that at official scale the ARMD-L would also be half as thick, the outline for a possible hangar be substantially smaller relative to the size of the deck, while the fighters would be twice the size relative to the ship. 

I will at some point make comparable "official scale" versions so you can see the extent of where there's actual room for a hangar (and also, how big a VF-25 is relative to the marked landing strip and catapults on the ARMD-L showing how they can't be actually used at that scale)

I maintain that the only ships whose size I have no complaints about based on the scale of the features of the models, are the Battle class and the Uraga. Everything else feels like someone drew it at one size and then someone else decided that "nah, it's this other size instead" without spending any energy correcting the features for the new scale. Those two are big enough at their stated size to carry any mecha and launch them with a convincing amount of safety margins. The only complaint I have are the spurs on the backs of the legs on the Battle class because they're sticking up into the landing glidepath for the marked flight deck...

On 7/5/2025 at 1:00 AM, VF-1A Grunt said:

Hasegawa is re-releasing these two kits, just FYI:

1/72 VF-31A Kairos - Macross Delta

1/48 VF-1J Super/Strike Valkyrie SVF-41 Black Aces

The Black Aces is my favorite squadron scheme of the ones they’ve done, so I’m tempted, but I already have a couple I haven’t built yet.

Come on, Hasegawa..... quit sleeping on the VF-25A. You have all the parts for it, just need to mold the VF-25G in a neutral color and ship it with a standard gunpod. It'd sell like *dango*...

35 minutes ago, guyxxed said:

I actually agree with that sentiment, and it's what led me to start playing around with what a NUNS version of the VF-25 might look like.  I get the idea that a screen full of "hero" valks is visually confusing, but I think the way Delta handled it with differently colored versions for protagonists vs cannon fodder was more than adequate.  And, like you say, the original did just fine with everyone in the same plane.

One of my greatest peeves is that the only VF-25A available in physical form *at all* is the 1/60 DX toy, and the only way to make a 1/72 version is to start with a VF-25G, all of which are molded in blue to make them extra annoying to paint, and then raid another model for a gunpod (which is never spare). 

Hasegawa *please*, just repop the Super VF-25G in gray plastic and toss in a gatling gunpod. You don't even need to change the decals other than to add more numbers. Easiest rebox ever and they'd sell like *dango*... 

On 7/15/2025 at 7:34 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

Macross thankfully treats its prototypes in a more realistic manner.  The final prototype is usually identical to the initial mass production type, and the early prototypes for any given design are usually hacked-together and lower performance than the final model.

(There is that weird corner case that is Macross Plus, though the performance difference there is more because two incredibly talented pilots turned unstable systems unsuitable for production into a sort of Disability Superpower.)

Kind of late to the discussion here, but...

I'm actually kind of sad that we keep getting new VFs, introduced as "small-scale operational test machines" or "prototypes", and then we never get an unambiguously canon look at them in production again. SDF Macross and DYRL were really refreshing in that the main character was flying essentially the same hardware as everyone else (yeah, it had more head lasers and maybe the engines were a little hotter tuned, but a VF-1 was a VF-1), and the only "specials" were one-off upgrades (Full Armor and Booby Duck) that were eventually mass produced.

I'm fairly certain there's a large helping of corporate "the protagonist's machine must be visually distinct so we can sell model kits of it specifically" involved, but I feel like something was lost when the protagonist squad started flying weird specials that were substantially different from the "grunt" machines with the same excuses being reused to keep the old protagonist's stuff from being the new production units. 

On 6/25/2025 at 2:09 AM, Seto Kaiba said:

Alas, no... "bu" and "vu" are completely different kana.

 

Err...what? Really really confused by this, because... that doesn't make much sense. 

B and V are the second most infamous "Japanese does not make a distinction" pair of consonant sounds after R and L - and one of the first anime I ever watched in Japanese was Slayers, where Megumi Hayashibara's voice going "REBITEI-SHUN" and "DORAGON SUREIBU" are some of my stand-out memories. Especially since I just rewatched the the first episode the other day. 

When you said they have different kana, I tried to look them up, and not a single kana table - even the big ones, that cover Hiragana, Katakana, Dakuon, Handakuon and Yoon - have a "vu" sound listed. 

So I'm really most sincerly confused. What kana are they using in that name? 

Edit: OK, I googled the kana itself from your post, and found a wiktionary page. It's a real kana, used exclusively for transliteration, and it's noted to be a relatively recent addition, which is likely why it's not in my scanned-from-schoolbooks tables.   But... as mentioned, Japanese itself does not make a distinction, and we have plenty of examples of Japanese natives, even working professionally, being *really careless* with B/V and R/L because it doesn't come naturally. 

If you're really sure it's specfically meant to be a V sound, then Evna from Oz sounds like the best fit. 

On 6/22/2025 at 7:10 AM, Seto Kaiba said:

So... I have a weird bit of esoterica that's been vexing me and I'm wondering if one of the other contributors here might help.

In Macross the Ride, Ukyo Kodachi seems to have indulged himself in giving any reasonably plot-relevant ship or mecha a Meaningful Name.

Most of them are reasonably straightforward.  The YF-27-3/YF-27-5's name and the name of Wisla & Oder were a bit of a struggle because they're misspelled.  

The one that's still got me stumped is the Macross Galaxy fleet's Riviera-class resort ship... its name エヴナ is either Evna or Evuna.  I cannot find a satisfactory reference, either to a place or story, that fits this one, aside from the Town of Evna from L. Frank Baum's Oz series, which doesn't seem to have thematic relevance.  Can anyone think of any places or people (from fiction) named "Evna" or "Evuna"?

I'd suggest possibly expanding your search to less literal transcriptions, maybe? I'm pretty sure you can plausibly read those katakana as "Ebner". for example, which is a German surname. Not finding anyone immediately relevant with that name in particular though. 

1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

It can be a pain in the butt, but good quality secondhand copies of a lot of these books are surprisingly cheap... or at least not hideously painful.  Then again, after more than 20 years of importing books and magazines and DVDs and Blu-rays and so on from Japan I suspect I have become numb to the insane cost of physical media in Japan.  The short story collections are going to be one of the first subjects for my new book scanner, since unlike my absolutely ancient flatbed scanner it has built in OCR so I don't have to do all the transcribing by hand.  (The Windows Input Method Editor and I are the most bitter of enemies.)

It's not really the cost of the material itself that's giving me pause, it's the shipping.

Excuse the rant:

There's an ancient treaty from back when China was still an Empire, under which China, as a developing country, is exempt from having to charge their own customers for the entire delivery to overseas customers, because the wealthy paternalistic developed nations would shoulder the costs so the (then) poor Chinese public wouldn't have to.

This translated into Chinese companies being able to send absolutely colossal amounts of online shopping towards Europe, with free shipping - company wasn't being charged for it by the Chinese post office, so they weren't charging their customers for it, and when all this mail got to Europe, the European mail services had to pick up the entire tab for sorting and delivery.

They were understandably upset with this because of the sheer amount of online shopping, so they tried various methods to put brakes on it, after the deluge started in earnest during the pandemic.

*My* country decided that the best method would be to apply a 7 euro (ish, we don't use Euros) flat per parcel fee, to be collected by the Customs service on behalf of the post office, for *any* out-of-EU shipping. And since the Customs Service were the ones collecting the fee, they'd *also* automatically process it for import duties and sales tax while they were at it. This makes Chinese internet shopping about as expensive as within-EU mail order shopping.

But Japan Post already charges through the *nose* for shipping, because they lost their "developing nation" status under the postal treaty before WW2 I think. And the way the import duties and sales tax are levied, they're on the entire amount paid at the point of sale - so if I've paid 18 euro for a thing, they'll charge me 25 euro to ship it from Japan, 7 euro to handle the package, 20% of the 50 euro in import duties because I'm at 50 Euro or above, and then 25% in sales tax on the 60 euro up to that point, for a total of 75 euro for an item that - before this whole crapshoot started - would have been 18 euro for the item, 12 euro for the shipping, no processing fee, no import fee, and even odds on not being processed for sales tax, meaning on average 33-ish euro. (Actually, before the pandemic, some of those items could be bought straight off of Amazon with Prime Free Shipping for the Japanese prices if you were lucky). 

Same thing applies to packages from the US - insane shipping, and then I get our insane import duties and sales tax when it shows up.

37 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

There are a few references, but they're relatively low key compared to what's in the other media because the TV anime is meant to be maximally accessible with the bare minimum amount of continuity baggage.  It is mostly on the level of sneaky fanservice there.  Like Ernest Johnson and Grammier Neirich Windermere both having participated in the Second Unification Wars, though only Grammier's service is remarked on at any length.  Its most profound impacts are in how it shaped the setting itself, which is more in the realm of the creator commentary track than the series proper.

That tracks with what I was remembering.

38 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

It's much more blatant in the novelizations, manga, games, etc. which are marketed more towards fans.

The novelizations of Macross Frontier and Macross Delta practically have too many to name, like making Manfred Brando the sponsor of Mao Nome's expedition to Vajra space and the reason Ozma gets tossed out of the NUNS, Aegis Focker being Ozma's mentor and a student of Jeffrey Wilder, Manfred's Sound Jamming System using fold quartz, and an AI copy of Manfred's mind being an antagonist in its own right.  Macross the Ride's antagonist faction, Fasces, is a literal Latence splinter fleet still fighting for the same goal.  

I wish I could get my hands on those novels, but local amazon doesn't list them, and US amazon won't ship those books to my country. And anywhere else, I'm going to get hit with Japanpost's postage, plus a 7 euro handling fee, plus 20% import duties, and 25% sales tax on the entire amount including the postage. I don't shop from Japan anymore after I ended up paying 60 euros in shipping, handling and taxes on a 15 euro gunpla.

1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Macross 30 has a couple of 'em.  The game's antagonists, Havamal, are a New UN Spacy VF-X Special Forces unit like the Ravens (the 815th Independent Squadron).  Leon Sakaki's homeworld Sephira is the site of one of the Ravens missions in Macross VF-X2 as well.  Two VF-X2 fighters are also available in game: the initial type VF-22 and the VF-19A Ravens type.  

Oh, cool - I missed those. I did remember the Ravens paint job for the VF-19, at least...

4 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Not wishing to cause offense, but your results are not necessarily indicative of the outcomes that a professional animator would produce.

And yes, many transforming designs involve a certain amount of "anime magic".  It's just the cost of doing business.

 

No offense taken. I was an even more ignorant beginner at the time than I am now. But much better modelers than me have tried and they end up with similar results - either a fatter spaceship or a too skinny robot. 

Also - it is mark of Kawamori's skill that his designs require so little anime magic to actually work. The man is an actual wizard, creating so many designs that can actually be turned into toys and perfectly transform without any magic. 

10 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

The game's events have been referenced so often by so many different Macross works from Macross Frontier onward that I can only assume it did pretty well for itself back in 1999 and in that limited 2002 re-release.  Enough to justify Macross Frontier and Macross Delta and their spinoff works tying into it as heavily as they have.  It's been referenced in anime, other games, light novels, audio dramas, and even model kits.

I'm having a big empty head moment here, because as far as I remember, none of the anime actually *does* directly reference the events of the VF-X2 game in any obvious way. 

I haven't had time to check all of Frontier because there's so many different political discussions spread out across the show, but I don't remember Vindirance or Lactence, or the 2050 coup attempt, being brought up at all, anywhere in any anime. If you know that it happened, you can see its *effects* everywhere, but if you didn't know about it you'd just gloss over it entirely so it feels almost like sneaky fanservice. 

(I did verify the one instance in Delta where it was likely to have come up in discussion, which was Berger's exposition in episode 19, but he goes from Macross 7 to Macross Frontier and entirely skips the 2050 coup attempt). 

And the only things I remember relating to VF-X2 in Macross 30 is that there were skins for the Ravens in there, for the VF-11 and VF-19 if I recall correctly. There may have been something in the descriptions for those skins, but I never bothered pulling up my camera to read those. 

On 6/15/2025 at 9:09 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

I'd suspect they went with the more subdued palette for the Macross Gigasion because she's supposed to be a newer ship.

After all, when they reference older eras in Macross media they often keep the original paint jobs or reference them directly.  Such as the bright red VF-1X++ Ranka uses for her performance of "Love is a Dogfight" that hearkens back to Basara's Fire Valkyrie, or the fairly bright blue Max uses for his YF-29.  Macross the Ride is practically a master class when it comes to "how bright can we go?".  Macross 30, of course, faithfully preserves a lot of the older paintjobs.  Even Master File suggests that legacy units like Macross 7's Emerald Force faithfully preserved their brightly colored paintjobs into the 2060s.  Bogue's bright red Sv-262 in the second Delta movie is arguably the most recent case.

OK, so this whole post you're mostly making Watsonian, in-universe, arguments for why things were changed. I have been and will be making Doylist, out-of-universe ones. 

Both can be true at the same time.

To start off - I did point out that Gigasion *is* referencing Battle 7 directly. It's just the *original palette* version of Battle 7 from episodes 1 through 15, where the ship was still just a big ship.  

I can think of several Doylist reasons to do this. 

One is that the 3D-era ships across the board have been trying look more realistic, and the bright Gundam colors aren't especially realistic on a warship, especially when every other warship seen across two TV shows and four movies have been more subdued in color. Also, for a good long while, we had both Hollywood and video games going "the less saturated it is the more realistic it is", and this era overlaps with Frontier and Delta. 

One is that there is a concept called scale effect - a visual psychology trick that makes the brain more accepting of something being much larger based on the palette. Basically, the human brain doesn't want to accept that something that big can be that saturated in color, so you mix some white or gray into the color it's actually supposed to be to trick the brain. I learned of the concept from plastic modelling forums, where all the really advanced modelers swear by it, and I think because digital VFX evolved from physical VFX, the same trick may be taught in formal schooling for that, but I don't have any so I can't say for certain.

One is that a bright white giant robot would overshadow any scene it's in in the movie, even if it's far in the background. As animated, Gigasion is obviously bright enough to be the main character of the scenes where it's supposed to be, but with the even brighter colors from Macross 7, it would be hard to focus on the VFs because of the great big flashbang of white in the background. (I think this is the same reason why the Battle 7 was gray for the first 15 episodes - a lot of the time, we were mostly seeing Diamond Force launching from it, and if the ship had been white it would have been overpowering. I will have to look at later episodes of Macross 7 to see if they actually updated the launching scenes with the brighter palette later).

Also, in 3D it's much more difficult to change the palette between shots without people noticing, so pulling the trick of "gray up close, white from afar" is not as viable as it was in the cel animation days. 

As for the VFs - I can easily justify in a Doylist manner why very brightly colored Variable Fighters are still perfectly realistic, by pointing out that real life fighter aircraft since Manfred von Richthofen's Fokker Dreidecker, all the way to the JSDF's Itasha F-15s, have indeed been painted in basically every color imaginable, and even to this day, the US Navy's "Wing King" fighters fly combat missions painted up in high visibility throwback schemes when the carrier's command staff allows them. (VFs also aren't big enough to be affected by the Scale Effect, not by comparison, but they're also so large that they're going to be mostly out of frame or self-shadowing in any scene where you have a *character* needing the focus, so they also won't be as big of a visual flashbang as a bright white ship against a black background is). 

On 6/15/2025 at 9:09 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

One important thing to remember is that the animators working on a Macross series are not going to go back and analyze old animation in minute detail the way you have.  They're not going to bother with it at all, in all likelihood.  Even if they did, they would almost certainly not care at all about the kind of minor inconsistencies you've been analyzing because those kinds of minor errors just the cost of doing business to them.  Particularly back in the era of 100% hand-drawn animation.  Deadlines are tight, budgets are tighter, and "looks good" is often "good enough".

I can buy this for Macross 7, because unless the animators were super fans who owned the original show on physical media, or the physical media was provided to them by the production company for research, it would be really quite difficult in 1994 to find the original show to research. Not that it was even relevant because about the only thing reused from previous productions on a regular basis was Exsedol's character design. Basically no point to go back and rewatch the old show to see how things were supposed to work if you're not using anything from it.

For Macross Frontier, the situation is different. Aside from physical media being more available, by this point not only did you have digital distribution, but you could find whole episodes on Youtube, and I'm fairly certain there was a decent selection of clips on Nico-Nico as well. Could, did, or should the animators have done any research on Macross 7 this way? I have no idea. But it was a vastly simpler proposition to do so than when Macross 7 was made.

Also, in the 3D era, instead of "stock footage" where they just toss a ready made clip that was hand drawn with all sorts of wonky proportions every couple of minutes, what happens is that you use a scene script and then re-render it with relevant changes. This scene script will have the relative scales of all the models used available (just click on a fighter or ship to see what scale it is), and if the modelers are smart, everything will be in "true" scale all along so you don't have to worry about it. These scene files were kept around for a long, long time, because some of the ones from Frontier are re-used in Delta, with changes making it obvious that they're not just composited but actually re-rendered. 

As for 2D animation errors, I don't really bother thinking about most of them. It's only when they're so big that there's something in my brain that goes "that can't be right", like shooting fighters out of the torpedo tubes of a 250 meter ship...

To me, animation errors are wonky proportions or visual glitches that I can gloss over as unimportant. That one had an entire episode based around it... (but we were done with this particular conversation a week ago).

On 6/15/2025 at 9:09 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

What they would do is go straight to the animation model reference sheets - the line art and color keys intended as guidance for the animation staff - and use those to draw/model and color the design.  It's unlikely they would bother to consult any other source as those sheets are the primary guidance for animators.

OK. Here's the thing - I tried to do this, a long time ago. I tried to build a Macross 7 based on the animation reference drawings. It didn't go well, because there's a lot of parts that the drawings we have available do not cover (there's probably more drawings available to the actual animators though); but also because, as drawings, they turned out not to be completely proportional to each other. Notably, the ship form of Battle 7 is thinner than the robot form. Build the robot like the ship, and you get very skinny legs and arms. Build the ship like the robot, and you get something with proportions much more like Battle Frontier. This is why I was saying that I'm thinking they tried, and gave it up as impossible and started over, using only the transformation skeleton.

Note that even then, the Battle Frontier doesn't actually have a perfect transformation - the gun is too long, and even with the stock collapsed, it clips into the pelvis while in ship form. This may be one of the reasons why they've never made a ship-form Battle class model kit - it's fairly obvious if you flip it upside down that there's clipping going on. (This goes for the game model used in the Frontier games, but it's very obvious that the game studio had access to the shooting models because as mentioned, they repeat some of the weirder animator's choices verbatim, like the ship name "Maiduru" being hard-painted into the texture for the Guantanamo model)

(This is not a complaint or a demand that anyone fix the problem, just an observation that the model is not perfect).

On 6/15/2025 at 9:09 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

The 3D modeled Battle-class ships we see in more recent Macross stories like the Battle Frontier, Battle Galaxy, and Battle Astraea look different from the Battle 7 because they are part of a newer and more advanced generation of Battle-class ships.  That idea wasn't dreamed up for Macross Frontier, either.  That actually goes back to Macross VF-X2, around nine years before Macross Frontier came out.  The Battle-class Macross 13 (Battle 13) that is Latence's final weapon is said to be the first of a new generation of Battle-class ships with more advanced technology than those before it.  (This point is important enough that it's actually written directly on the line art itself as well as provided in-story.)  The Battle Frontier, Battle Galaxy, and Battle Astraea are even newer models than that, and all three of those have been heavily remodeled to suit the needs of their respective forces as well.  

This is an argument that makes a lot of sense from the Watsonian perspective, and from the perspective of a superfan who owns or at least has access to all the reference books. Remember that the Macross Chronicle did not exist at this time, so information relating to VF-X2 was *legally* available only to people who had the game and the reference book for it. 

Here in the West, information relevant to Macross 13 and VF-X2 was circulated by fans who bought the game and book, then translated the information, and shared it online. Because many of us western fans had no access to *any* of the books, we went to the fan-created indexes like M3 or Sketchley's, and absorbed this information along with everything else. 

But... did it work the same way in Japan? I'm thinking that it is way more common for the "average" western Macross fan to have found out about Macross 13, because there basically aren't any "casual" Macross fans due to what a PITA it is to get the anime; than it is for an average Japanese Macross fan, ca 2008, to know much about it. 

Honest question, by the way. I know there were obviously hardcore Macross fans in Japan that were at least as well informed as us (probably more, given that they can read the books without help), but there's something that gets me thinking that VF-X2 was paradoxically more obscure in Japan. 

My Doylist reasoning, to re-iterate, is that even if you wanted to make an accurate transforming 3D model of the Battle 7 you wouldn't be able to without just as much pixie dust as in Macross 7, and in textured 3D due to having textures on all the parts, the pixie dust would be more obvious. And the Battle Frontier looks a lot more like someone *tried* to do a Battle 7 first, than someone who started making a design evolved from Battle 7 through Battle 13. 

(Also, did we ever get a Watsonian explanation for the very obvious model reuse where Astrea is literally Galaxy with added parts? Someone explained that in one of the Another Century's Episode games, they basically flat out went "yeah, it's actually the same ship", but that's not Macross canon. The Doylist reason is obviously "crap, we forgot to make new textures!")

1 hour ago, pengbuzz said:

You threw a pic of your work up without much context other than asking "how far off" would it be; that invites people to tell you what they think of it in those terms. I decided it didn't make much difference in my opinion and replied as such. Maybe if you had included the other photos with the same explanation you included in your rebuttal to me, it would have given me more info to consider while deciding what I thought of it. Instead, it came across as "I gotcha!! Now stop picking on me!!", and I find that intellectually dishonest.

I honestly didn't think I'd need to prove my *color selection*, given that this is the palette used on the Gigasion (which is basically a stand-in for Battle 7 given who's captaining it) so I didn't think to put in a comparison screenshot from the anime until you complained. I wasn't planning on a gotcha. (honestly the full saturation/brightness color scheme looks weird and cartoony on big ships in 3D when put next to the more muted "realistic" colors of the ships in Frontier/Delta, so to me it was just obvious to use the more muted colors.)

But I guess what I was supposed to read out of that is that other than the color scheme, you think they would go for making the Battle 7 the same design as Battle Frontier?

7 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Should the second Battle 7 ever put in an appearance in a future animated Macross story, I kind of suspect they will reuse the Battle Frontier CG model for it the same way that they reused Battle Galaxy for the Battle Astraea but keep the more vibrant color scheme used in a lot of the line art.

It would be nice if they went back and made an accurate-to-the-90's-animation Battle 7 model, but that's probably more effort than they'd be willing to put in for what would surely be a cameo appearance at most.  The Macross 7 fleet has put in a minor cameo before, but only in the novelization of Macross Frontier.

As mentioned, the more vibrant colors from SDF-1 TV and Battle 7 look *strange* next to the more faded, muted ships of Frontier, Delta, and even DYRL. They're almost eye-searingly bright in a lineup. Which is why I think they went with the colors they did for Gigasion, to be honest. There's something about the shading style used in the 3D macross shows that does not particularly work well with large white objects that aren't meant to be the instant focus of the scene (like Alto's VF-25 or Delta squadron's VF-31s).

I've been thinking about making actual model edits to make the ship more like the Battle 7 - removing the shoulder turrets is easy. Building a new bridge foundation with room for the Diamond Force launchers instead of the turrets is more difficult, but not as bad as trying to make those fit on the model I have of the Battle 7 that's based on the overall lineart. (Also, if you want to talk "animation errors", holy heck the Battle 7 is probably the least consistently drawn ship in the setting. Never mind parts of it constantly changing colors, the proportions are different from basically every angle... Which is, I think, one of the reasons why the Battle 25 model is so different despite being based on the same concept. They couldn't *make* an accurate Battle 7 because the references don't match....)

2 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

I don't see how a desaturated paint job makes much difference, other than that several years later, someone forgot to repaint the ships.

Um....

In episode 1 of Macross 7, our first look at the exterior of Battle 7 looks like this:

Notice that the ship is gray, with pale yellow cheek pads, There's two or three different angles of this area, from when Diamond Force is launching. All of them show this muted palette. So, when I was making a "realistic", more warship-like palette for Battle 7,  I picked my colors right out of these scenes with a color picker tool. 

And then I noticed something strange as I was frame-by-framing my way through Zettai Live: the Gigasion had this exact color palette. Light gray, slightly desaturated reds and blues, and a quite pale yellow, even in the brightest lit scenes. 

So, kindly don't complain about the *colors*. What I was asking was, do you think they'd retcon the Battle 7 to be the same overall design as Battle Frontier? Or would they try to make an anime-accurate 3D model of the old ship instead?

Edit: I'm noticing now that this shot is strange, because it implies the bridge block of the Battle 7 has been slid all the way back down the leg of the ship in order for the end of the angled flight deck to be in the foreground with the bridge block behind it. 

11 minutes ago, JB0 said:

More to the point, they assumed that any possible war would be over territory and resources. These unknown aliens had no beef with humanity, they would be coming to reclaim their missing starship or to lay claim to the Solar System's resources. This makes sense if you are not specifically aware that the zentradi fleets are roving around looking for "the enemy" with no real strategic goals, like the planet eater in that one Star Trek episode.

No one expected "you are an existential threat that must be erased from existence", because there was no reason to expect it.

"An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilizations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop."

— Iain M. Banks, Excession

The Zentraedi were an Outside Context Problem for the Earths governments. It just so happened that Minmei turned out to be an Outside Context Problem for the Zentraedi. 

1 hour ago, pengbuzz said:

I think one important role the Destroids served in the story was to point out how the "battlefield of yesterday" doesn't necessarily prepare you for the battlefield of tomorrow. 

UN Spacy developed the Destroids on the assumption (as previously pointed out by @Seto Kaiba on several occasions) that whoever came looking for the ASS-1/ Macross would be conducting a traditional ground war that would deal in holding territory. It never crystalized in anyone's thinking that when they came, it would be largely space-based. I also think Seto pointed out that as the reason there wasn't more of a focus on the fuel capacity of the VF-1's in space, as it was assumed most action would be in atmosphere.

 All of that said: I think if UN Spacy had a better idea of the actual "playing field", we'd have seen more fighters with a larger fuel supply (maybe something more akin to the VF-4 out the gate), perhaps less of an emphasis on transforming fighters, and a far greater emphasis on planetary defenses like the orbital network in Macross Plus.

I'm not sure I accept this as written.

At the start of the project was very likely "let's develop alien-sized robots to fight the giant aliens", but you *also* have the Unification Wars going on at the same time, and it's kind of difficult to keep your development focus on equipment strictly to fight the *next* war while you're hip deep in an ongoing war already. It would rapidly have become "the enemy is developing giant robots, so we're developing giant robots to fight their giant robots!" among those not in the know about the aliens. 

Especially when the certainty that there will be a next war is kind of fading, because the aliens don't show for ten years.

So it's not even that the Destroids were developed for the battlefield of "yesterday", they were for the battlefield of "today", only midnight came out of nowhere.

Also note that the initial battle on South Ataria Island was exactly the kind of thing the destroids were supposed to fight - a ground invasion. The fold to Pluto and having to run the gauntlet to get back home was not in anyone's plans, the idea was to get to Lunar orbit and reinforce with more space units. 

Anyway, if the UN Spacy had convincing evidence of the actual playing field, I think so many bricks would have been shat that they could have constructed the whole grand cannon system out of them by 2005. Unification War? What Unification War? We have no time for wars, the ALIENS are coming, and there's billions of them!

Edit: Also, I've been playing around with a 3D model of Battle Frontier for a bit. We are unlikely to ever return anywhere near the Macross 7 fleet, but if there ever was anything set there in the future, how far off do you think I'd be with this interpretation of Battle 7?

A little something I've been working on:

In the background is the Minivalks 3D printable Battle 7 for comparison, in the foreground is my attempt at creating an "updated" Battle 7 by colorizing the Battle Frontier model from the game. I'm still missing a few panels and a couple of stripes compared to the Battle 25 flight deck textures, but I'm definitely able to have fun with this.. .:D

4 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

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

They did see plenty of use though - aside from standing around on the hull and potting battlepods that got close, as well as the Daedalus attack, they were also used in the city (both in the few fights that broke into the city, and for rubble cleaning and construction work. I distinctly remember it was a destroid that opened the way into the hull section where Minmei and Hikaru were sealed into.)

The only one of the original destroid designs I'd consider retiring without replacement is the Tomahawk, because it's a tank on legs that's supposed to fight other tanks on legs, and it never really had the mobility for what it needed to do.

The Defender was already upgraded into the Super Defender, filling a similar role to the Cheyenne.

The Phalanx, I could easily imagine having a use in the modern era, as missiles never go out of style. 

The Spartan I'd consider turning into a police mecha, Patlabor style, because mixed Macro/Miclone communities exist, as well as work destroids. Though I suppose the canon solution is Macronized Zentraedi cops. 

The Monster was also already upgraded to give it all the mobility the original lacked and then some. 

I would *consider*, maybe, tomahawking or phalanxing the Cheyenne chassis (i.e. giving it bigger, slower-firing guns, or large missile pods), 

Then again... given the vibe we see in the shows, it feels like only Zentraedi who crave the warrior lifestyle seem to sign up for ground combat duty and they'd be in Macro-scale mecha, which already have the mobility that the destroids lack. 

+9

1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

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

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

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

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

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

19 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

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

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

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...)

3 minutes ago, JB0 said:

I was already thinking "a glue Valkyrie's probably canon already", but you've got the receipts.

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). 

34 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

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

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

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

 

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

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

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. 

1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

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

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

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

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. 

1 minute ago, pengbuzz said:

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

They also did this for the "fortress mode" versions for both.

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

Overall though, unless it directly impacts a model I'm working on or a creation for the RPGs that I'm in, I really don't care too much about ship/ mecha scale.

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...)