SebastianP

Ernest Johnson's official bio on Macross.jp identifies him as the Macross Elysion's captain.

Not sure if spoilers are necessary given that it pertains to info from the website and previous episodes, but I'll keep them anyway.

the old kings jet's fold quartz array and the VF31s look similar!

1466348642366.jpg

Huh.

I looked through my stuff and I found a couple of sources you don't mention - not that either of them gives a name for the ship.

In "This is Animation 2", there are pictures of the ship on pages 96 and 98 - the former is the "overgrown" version, front and back view, plus a drawing of the hole it came out of; the latter is a picture of the ship with the jaws opened. The captions didn't yield any especially interesting information, though.

Also, I found an archive labeled "Memorial DVD Box" that had some pencil line art, but it only gave the "Medium-scale Gun Boat" kanji for a description. (The surrounding files inked line art of the other major Zentraedi ships, and all of those except the picket have full names written in Katakana, plus some captions for various features. Miyatake's handwriting sucks way too much for me to be able to decipher it though.)

Anyway, followup question: Where does the name "Oberth" come from for the Space Destroyer? Because that ("Space Destroyer") is the only name I can find for it in the official material.

Edit: Some of the art I've found is hilarious. One of them is a height chart. Hikaru is supposed to be 175 cm tall. Kakizaki? 206 cm. Roy? Two hundred and sixteen centimeters. That's not just seven feet, that's 7'1"...

Ah, didn't notice you'd asked this one in two different places... this is the answer I just finished composing from the other thread:

I don't think this one can be pinned on Palladium - I have very nearly all of the Palladium Robotech and Macross II books (I'm missing two that I know of, which deal with the Southern Cross/Mospaeda/Sentinels part of the timeline), and the ship in question does not appear in any of them. Not under the Quiltra-Quelamitz name, nor any other - it is completely and utterly missing from the Palladium material.

I'm going to go over the art books with a fine tooth comb at some point and see what I can find out about it. I can already feel the cramp I'll be getting in my hand from writing all those kanji on my Intuos...

Edit: Where does the line art come from, BTW? The ship wasn't in Perfect Memory or the Design Works books, and the only image of it in the DYRL Data Bank is the tiny profile from the size comparison pictures.

Also, I think Palladium only had Perfect Memory to work with when they made the original set of RPG books, which would explain some of the errors and missing bits.

Pretty sure they'll release standalone supers. Sure it'll be a pain to unassemble to install the suler specific parts but whatev

The VF-25 stand-alone supers used stickers for all the unit-specific colors, and there were quite a few of those... and I don't imagine the VF-31 will be much different. Would rather have them in color where possible, as I suck at both color-matching and painting.

Then again, unlike the VF-25, you don't absolutely need at least super parts to make a representative version of any of the VF-31s. We've only seen them twice so far in the show anyway, which is kind of the opposite of Frontier where they were used *all the time*...

I asked this in another thread, but this is probably the more appropriate place:

What is the origin of the "Quiltra-Quelamitz" name for the ship that Kamjin tries to ram into the SDF-1? The Macross Mecha Manual *used* to use it, but now says (without mentioning the exact name) that "fans invented their own name for it". It's still used widely in both English and Japanese works (I was transliterating the fake "Pip-Road/WaveSky" advertisements from what I believe is the back of a series of fanbooks published by Fanky, and found that the Japanese fandom also use the name), but those are essentially brand new (oldest is from 2014), and the name has been around since at least the 1990s.

Anyone have any idea where it actually came from? I assume it has to be from the Japanese fandom somewhere, because they would probably not use a "gaijin" fan invention...

Hoping this is the right place to ask, but...

What is the origin of the name "Quiltra-Quelamitz" for Medium Scale Gun Destroyer? The Macross Mecha Manual claims the ship has no official name and that fans invented one for it, but it seems to have become so entrenched that his site is one of the few that doesn't use it. And it's not *Western* fan-invention, given that it pops up in Japanese fan works.

Still no news about when the Super Siegfried is expected? I'm kind of holding out for that one, even if the regular version is what we see the most of in the series (unlike in Frontier where it was all Super Parts, all the time.)

gg_Macross_Delta_-_11_18119710.mkv_snapshot_23.32_2016.06.14_16.33.27.jpg

I counted 41 ships in this image:

11 Osaka-class cruisers (the "Stealth Cruiser", name comes from a doujin "warships of the galaxy" type book); 10 Uraga-class carriers, 12 Guantanamo-class carriers, and 8 Northampton-class frigates. A pretty decent sized fleet all things considered... though they're probably getting stomped off screen.

re: show length

27 or 30 episodes is vanishingly unlikely given how the schedule system works, we're getting either 25 or 26 episodes and that's basically that, because the TV networks won't want to make a mess of their regular season schedules. If the popularity of the show is anything like Frontier though - and it's looking good so far, given that the Blu-rays aren't available yet - we're probably getting another movie or two from this.

...Unless they troll us completely and this turns into a 2 x 25 episode show, which isn't completely impossible but still really unlikely.

Non-spoiler question: How many episodes do we believe this season will be?

Amazon listed nine discs for the series, same as for Macross Frontier, so I think most of us are guessing 25-26 episodes.

Well instead of the YF-25 I picked up the VF-25S Super Messiah Ozma Custom. Can I get some general advice since this is my first Macross kit. Especially the dos and don'ts in regards to using anything in the way of plastic cement?

Your image isn't showing up, but if that's a Bandai kit, forget the cement, you won't need it unless you break something; and most of the things that are prone to breakage on the kit, cement won't work on anyway.

Don't use the water decals unless you're planning on painting it, because the decals don't adhere well to bare plastic - better yet, find some aftermarket decals even if you do, because the Bandai decals are horrible in general, being thick and very fragile.

Also, the Super Parts have issues - notably, they don't have locking tabs to keep the legs in place in fighter mode, and the weight of the boosters on the wings makes it not hold up worth a damn in Gerwalk mode. This kit is best built either as a parked fighter (standing on its landing gear) or in Battroid mode,

For the Bandai kits in general, be very careful with the shoulders, they're kind of fragile and the parts that break easiest are ABS, which means plastic cement doesn't work.

Didn't I see an ad in one of the other Master File books for one on the VF-4?

(checks...)

Ah right, page 108 of the VF-1 Space Wings book has an ad for a book on the VF-4, VF-3000 and VF-5000, which is probably meant to be in-universe...

Morbid humor:

isn't it to soon to kill a character in this series? will there new character introduced later? let say the elysion crew who use the front console except the birdge bunny?

Also, SPOILER TAGS!!!

Which sadly rules out Macross

If you have a scanner for your pc and some OCR software you can scan the text and then bung it into google for a yoda style translation.

That said as Sebastian says most Hasegawa stuff is universal with its symbols, and paint conversions to Tamiya or Humbrol etc are easily done.

Meh, the only text in the instructions for a typical Hasegawa VF kit that isn't completely obvious what it means from context is the background blurb with the stat block on the front, and the stuff about where to order replacement parts, which doesn't apply outside Japan anyway. The rest of it is basically just writing out what symbols like "cut this part off", "drill hole here", "apply decal number XX in this spot" and "repeat on the other side" mean, and they're all really really obvious if you've ever built any plastic model from Japan before, or if you just look at the freely available instructions for any other Hasegawa kit online.

And as I said earlier, the names for the colors used in the paint guide, but the important part of the color guide is the numbers and those you can basically google with something like "Mr Color 33".

I actually really appreciate that they went to the trouble to (presumably) develop and test these color combinations to match the animation / line art / whatever research material they used. I will happily follow these formulas to save me the trouble of figuring them out myself!

I wish they'd just give up and bottle the finished mixes instead of forcing me to buy two bottles I'll never use for anything else, and which don't mix 50/50 so I can't just dump one in the other and have done with it... Or prevail on Kawamori to stick to colors that exist in their color range.

Still no word on the release date for the Super version? (or for that matter the Mecha Colle Elysion, which is my number one must have kit of the year...)

You don't actually have to *buy* a different kit to get a translation guide for the instructions - pretty much all Hasegawa kits except for anime ones come with English instructions, and they're available online from sites like Hobby Search (1999.co.jp/eng/). All the symbols are common between all kit instructions, it's just that with the Anime kits, they don't generally bother with printing out the English explanation or info boxes.

Most of the time, the instructions are fairly self-explanatory, as well.

Also, the most common problem people have is not knowing what the colors mean. Hasegawa kits *always* use Gunze Sangyo Mr Color in the instructions, and there are paint conversion tables available online from a few different places and to pretty much every other brand. The only irritating parts about that is that Macross kits in particular often need mixed colors - the blue gray used on VF-25 super parts for example does not exist as a bottled paint, it's a mix of something like four parts blue and one part gray if I remember correctly.

Having built Bandai Gundam kits including transformable Master Grades I understand that transforming kits are a little fragile. I'm getting a Bandai 1/72 scale YF-25 Prophecy and I'm still deciding on painted or OOB. What are some recommended paint brands and type I should go with if I do a painted build? General advice for dealing with seam lines on a VF/YF-25?

Last question first: There are no seamlines worth mentioning on the Bandai VF-25 kits, don't worry about them.

Paint? Enamels if you're hand painting. Buy a bottle of naphta for thinning, and a bottle of dish soap to clean your brushes in between colors.

Acrylics if you're airbrushing. Buy a bottle of 96% denatured ethanol for cleaning the airbrush, and for thinning certain (nowhere near all) brands of paint.

I can't really recommend brands, since I'm stuck without a lot of options myself. Humbrol and Testors make excellent enamel paints, with the latter having glass bottles with screw caps that are just superb. Problem is, my local source went bust.

Vallejo, Tamiya and Gunze make good acrylics, but I can only get Vallejo and Gunze once a year, when the local hobby show is on and everyone in northern europe who can pack a van full of kits and accessories shows up to sell them.

Thanks for the candor. Seeing the first pics of the SV-262 and VF-31 models did get me excited about the possibility getting only kits of those versus the DX versions, but the reality is that I do play with my toys. I also hand them to the little ones, so they need to stand up to some level of regular usage.

Related question, are the Hasegawa fighter-ony kits any more "durable"? I.e. how many times can you swoosh them around before they start to come apart?

The thing about durability is that it's kind of apples vs oranges.

Bandai kits are full of joints, and the reason they don't hold fighter mode very well is that they *have* all those joints, and they tend to bend under a little pressure, but they *generally* don't break. If a Bandai kit part breaks, you're kind of SOL, because many of the parts that *are* prone to breaking are made from plastic that normal glue doesn't work on, and superglue is too fragile for them.

Hasegawa fighter kits have no joints whatsoever, and won't bend at the slightest pressure - they won't budge at all, until they quit entirely and the part breaks. Unless the part is very thin, or glued on improperly (with paint on the mating surfaces, most commonly), this does tend to take a substantial amount of force though. If a part breaks off on a Hasegawa though, you glue it back on the model with as little cement as you can and paint the seam over.

Also note that while Bandai kits can swap the landing gear doors between opened and closed versions, Hasegawa kits you pick one or the other and you're stuck with it. Same with canopies. And building the kits with the landing gear doors closed is usually not the easy option, as the parts need to be modified and backing needs to be supplied to prevent the landing gear doors from collapsing into the gear wells.

I accidentally ordered a Bandai VF-25F Messiah Valkyrie Alto Custom Pro-Shop Special kit, when I had meant to order a DX Chogokin (not where I ordered mine, just one of the few examples I can find on the web):

http://unicorn-toys.com/macross/3073-1-72-vf-25f-messiah-valkyrie-alto-custom-pro-shop-ver-limited.html

I've never built one of these before. According to that, "comes with a snap-fit assembly, matching colored pieces, accessories and fully pictured contruction manual. you don't need paint or glue." Is that true? Looks like the instructions are all in Japanese... how hard are they to follow for an English speaker such as myself? What sort of time commitment are we talking for a total build time? Also, I assume that I'd have to pick a mode, and build to that (i.e. it's not dynamically transformable after the build is complete)?

Thanks in advance for any info.

Building it is pretty easy. Painting is not required, especially in this case since it's a clear kit and paint would ruin its uniqueness (unless you're painting the inner frame). You can paint the regular ones if you want, but either you're really good and make it look much better, or you're not very good and it'll look worse than unpainted. Decalling or stickering the kit and making whichever option you chose *stay on the model* is where the real difficulty is, since Bandai's decals are pretty poor, and their stickers not much better.

Also, any version except the Super VF-25 can be made to hold together in fighter mode pretty well, and they all look excellent in battroid mode. Gerwalk is problematic, but I don't like that anyway so it doesn't affect me much. Super VF-25s have no locking tabs to hold the legs in place in Fighter mode, which means the legs want to drop down under their own weight. There are three solutions: 1 is to glue the legs in place, 2 is to leave the kit standing on its landing gear, which works fine; and 3 is to keep it in Battroid mode. I went with the second option.

Finally, *MODEL KITS, NOT TOYS!*. These things are fragile, and will not only get loose in the joints if you play with them too much, you can outright break them from transforming them too many times. My Super VF-25 is stuck in fighter mode because I broke one of the ABS parts in on of its shoulders. Due to the nature of the part and the material, it's completely unfixable. Be really careful with them.

The Macross Elysion may be the only Mecha Colle kit I'm getting of the entire lot, unless they *really* throw us a bone and give us a Battle Frontier and/or Battle Galaxy. The others I can do entirely without, but with the ships I'm pretty sure that Mecha Colle is all we're ever going to get that'll be worth the asking price....

Let's see...

Not listed above (I assume you have some of these despite that):

Hasegawa 1/72:

VF-0 with Ghost (limited edition, long OOP, expensive as hell if you can find it for sale)

VF-0 Battroid with Reactive Armor (same as above)

VF-1 Super and Strike versions

VF-1 Battroid, with Super, Strike and Armored versions

VF-11B/C Super Thunderbolt

VF-22 Sturmvogel II

Bandai 1/72:

YF-25 Prophecy

VF-27 Lucifer

Garage kits 1/72:

VF-4 Lightning III (exists in both vinyl and resin, long OOP in both cases)

VF-9 Cutlass (*possible* garage kit displayed at Wonderfest, I've only found two pictures of it so I don't know if it was actually for sale at the time)

YF-27 prototype: I believe I saw a conversion kit to turn the Bandai VF-27 into the "fake prototype" from Macross: The Ride (it was a decoy sent to the open competition to mask how powerful the actual VF-27 was).

Looking at it more, I'm thinking that's just a bad machine translation of "Destroid" Monster.

Of course it is, but HLJ doesn't actually post straight machine translations and has a human checking them over, which is why the language sounds natural. Whoever they had doing it for this kit though is apparently not the greatest Macross fan, or he completely missed looking at the original text. Oh well, crap happens.

And I agree with Thom - we *need* a New Macross carrier in the same scale. The only New Macross model I've seen in any scale was a limited run resin kit that was more of a size with gaming miniatures, and there's an opportunity to make five distinct versions with only minor retooling. And at least two or three of them would sell big.