SebastianP

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

A VF-25 can get through the *front* gate, if folded up with the fins down. The rear landing strip is too narrow, even if the opening is as wide as the front one. To make both ends work, I need to go up to 150% of the modeled size, and at that point, I feel like I might as well make the nice bridge from the line art fit as well, and go up to 200%. And 40 fighters is just the maximum I think is feasible at this size, which is nice because it makes the size of Operation Stargazer feasible. Guantanamo, being scaled up similarly, will have other benefits over the Gefion - you can launch a König Monster out of the front maw; and the Gefion has no place to launch space-type Ghosts without landing gear out of, while the Guantanamo has plenty. Hmm. I would like to know what the other instances are if you can point me in a rough direction. Guantanamos are in the background everywhere, but they're pretty much always the "Maiduru" model. And if you're talking about Macross 7 or Macross Plus, I'm willing to call "animation error" or "model superseded" on those. It's still never plot relevant what size the ship is, though. Scaling this ship up by the same factor as the Northampton does not meaningfully change what we know about it. The model is definitely larger than the official size says - there are similar issues with hangar bay opening widths as there are for Gefion, with wings clipping the sides of the walls at "official" scale. Not to mention the ginormous size of the ship from its establishing shot. This is our first overall shot of the Elysion. Note the fighters on the deck. Since we know their size, we can estimate fairly accurately the length of the Aether. It has to be pretty substantial. I didn't do the math myself, someone on reddit did a long time ago, but it worked out to around 900 meters give or take. This was supported by this shot, which has the fighters in the same parked configuration. The flight deck here is somewhere around 200 meters wide at the widest point. In episode 12, we have this interior hangar shot, showing fighters arranged in a configuration that's around 60 meters wide. There are 15 fighters shown in this sequence (five on the right, as there's a gap; four in the middle, and the six you can see on the left), we don't know how far the line extends backwards. At the official size of the ship, the hull is not wide enough for this below decks - if Elysion is 900 meters overall, then Aether's hull is around 40 meters wide at best. If the ship is the size indicated by the first two shots, then there's enough space for this to be only half the complement. So, the first half of the show has a bunch of this stuff where it's obvious that this is not a small vessel... and then the script sends everyone off so that only Delta is on hand most of the time. Also, at the "official" size, only *one* of the ten obvious flight deck access points for VFs are actually large enough for a VF-31 - the centerline tunnel from under the upper deck. The side tunnels are too narrow and the wings will clip; and both the four deck edge elevators and the three elevators up to the upper deck are too small. Also, forget the "tour bus" shuttle, it won't fit anywhere. Could the role the script gives to the Elysion have been handed to a smaller ship? Very likely. Was the Elysion intended to be small? No. There's enough evidence to the contrary in the first half of the show to put paid to that idea. (I don't know when the Burj Kalifa statement was made, but most of the evidence prior to the halfway point of the show suggests the larger size. I think there's an outlier in the form of the space episode, it's almost five in the morning and I'm not going digging). Edit: Having slept on it and had time to do the digging, Episode 6 definitely shows the fighters not clipping into each other's lanes during the launch sequence, which suggests a minimum size of around 1200 meters overall for Elysion in ship form, and 1500 is about the minimum for the fighters to fit on the elevators. I may try to replicate the parked fighters on the Aether's deck from Episode 2 at this size,. and the launch layout from episode 6, but at first glance, 1500 looks about right for Elysion as shown in the first half of the show. I am aware that later depictions, like the Delta movies, made the ship smaller, but as mentioned, at the smaller size there are problems just getting the fighters to the deck through the provided openings... Yeah. As I said, the New Macross class ships are some of the ones that don't really benefit from being scaled up other than keeping the animations the same. (Edit: Though.... the Diamond Force launch sequence suggests the bridge block of the Battle 7 is a fair bit larger than the overall views of the ship supports, if the ship is 1600 meters overall. The hatches and launch arms for that sequence are not small, and the best attempt I've seen at replicating the Battle 7 in 3D, has those hatches at around half the required size. It is not an official model so it won't count for anything, though. And swapping the base design to the Battle 25 version, which has a much bigger bridge block to begin with, and trading the turrets for launch bays? That would solve it even at the 1-mile scale). The opening sequence goes "Miria is racing, Max and new daughter are playing pool in a building overlooking the race, Max gets an alert on his watch, Milia gets one in her helmet, leaves the race to join Max on the highway, cut to Max and Milia in their fighters with the daughter waving at them from the control booth, and the fighters pulling out of the Megaroad's side pod." My inference was that this was all on the ship, but since the ship is over a terrestrial planet, maybe they took a shuttle up so they could scramble their fighters....? Meh. Also, given that the Chronicle changed the number of colonists aboard the Megaroad from 80,000 to 25,000 according to Macross Mecha Manual, I'll withdraw my other reason for changing the size of it (namely, the sheer amount of space the colonists' living quarters will take up. Half the population of the original Macross in a volume that is already *ginormously* bigger is much more plausible.) The TV macross has next to nothing in common with the DYRL macross except for the transformation sequence itself, none of the components themselves are shared. If that's a rebuild, they tore her down to atoms and reconstituted them... But since DYRL macross never interacts with anything that my scale change has affected, it can stay at its official size.

I would pull the "animation error" card on the "Maizuru" model instead of the "Maiduru" model, yeah. We never see it very often (I can only remember the scene from Frontier 1, and Itsuwari no Utahime), whereas the Maiduru model shows up all the time. But here's the thing. The one thing I actually care about really is "make the Gefion work as a carrier without changing its model". It is a very very nice model, it is just too small. But it doesn't need to be *four times* the size to work - the hangar pods are wide and tall enough to work at just *twice* the size, if I throw out the "battroid walks in the back door" screenshot as an animation error. There's enough clearance - barely - to move fighters from the pods into the hull; and the hull would have enough volume to hold around 40 fighters. And now that we have a modern carrier version of the Northampton, we toss out the Stargazer animation, and declare "Stargazer was a Gefion-type all along". The script, aside from the VFX callouts, will work. From there, let's look at what scaling each ship up by the same factor does for us: Starting with the Maiduru model, the largest hangar access ports will now be large enough to squeeze a VF through, and the small ones are big enough for a Ghost. We're tossing the Maizuru model as an animation error, it is not plot relevant that the Guantanamo-class is a specific size beyond it being able to launch fighters. The Stealth Cruiser does not have a stated size in the first place, our estimates are based on the size of the Northamptons it shares the scene with anyway. Scaling it up to twice the size just means it's 2 x unknown. The Quarter, I've complained about for years and years is too small to do what we see it doing in the show. The ARMD-L is too thin for a hangar, the elevators on the model are too small for the fighters, and at one point we see it flying in formation with *dozens* of SMS VF-25As who which had to come from somewhere, and there is no room inside that ship for them. Scaling it up to twice the size solves nearly everything. I would not bet 100% on the hangar capacity, but it's a lot less implausible at least. The Elysion, as mentioned a few times already, looks like it was modeled by a VFX artist at one size, and then some time after episode 2 aired, someone outside the VFX department declared it was the height of Burj Kalifa and then the model was resized without any further work being done, resulting in a bunch of weirdness. Like the VF-31 not being able to fit through the hangar access ports between the main flight deck and the upper flight deck. Scaling it up to twice its "canon" size would basically restore it to where it was originally, and allow VFs to use the facilities, as it were. The Uraga... doesn't need a resize, that one was well thought through at its canon size, and it's almost a shame to change it. If I can't write off the size discrepancy as an animation error, well at least it now has an easier time handling large battroids like Queadluun-Rau/Rhea, or the VB-6 König Monster. The New Macross Class... also doesn't need a resize, other than for matching the animation. But at least scaling them up will also scale the cities up, and give four times more area and eight times the volume to play around with. And if we play a little with the "new design iterations supersede old versions of the same design", then City 7 is now Island-One sized, but double the canon, which means that scenes like Basara living in a slum miles from the city are more plausible, because there are actual miles to drive! If we want to go even further and bring up ships which never share a scene with any of the above? DYRL Macross would benefit greatly from being twice the size because there'd be room for a cityscape inside the ship, and I think I measured at one point that the ARMDs at their canon size would have trouble with the launch scene from the opening sequence because the ports are too small. I'll have to revisit that sometime. I don't remember if the DYRL Macross ever punched anything in the face that would need to be rescaled, but I'm willing to call "animation error" to avoid this becoming a problem. Megaroad-01 at double the size might actually have room for that racetrack from the M3 intro. TV Macross would not work, though, because Daedalus and Prometheus are already ridiculously large for surface ships. But TV Macross is technically not canon anyway because it was superseded by the DYRL version. Macross The First Macross would not work either, for the same reason as above. Edit: Illustration of what 2x size will do for certain ships Above: the Macross Chronicle sizes for everything. Notice the ludicrous size of VB-6 relative to the Quarter, and how the VF-25 does not fit the hangar pod on Gefion. VB-6 and VF-25 scaled down to 50%, which is the same as scaling up the ships to 200% except I don't have to move them around to maintain the formation. Notice how the VB-6 fits the elevator now (it completely fits if you fold the wingtips up), and how the VF-25 will fit on the landing side of the ship too.

Thanks! And I can agree that it's likely that the artists involved never double-checked with each other and this is why we ended up like this. I'm coming at this from both the Star Wars fandom, where "see that speck over there? It's a thing, with stats, and we have to figure them out" has been a thing since the 80s and where if the book doesn't match what's seen on screen we make a stink and sometimes get it changed; and the model building scene, where models in the same scale have to fit, and if they don't they're not the same scale and need correcting. In this case, the models did not fit at what was supposed to be the same scale, so obviously the scale on one of them was wrong. And.... it wasn't going to be the Variable Fighters. As mentioned, I think it's a little beyond "an" animation error, where every scene in the whole episode involving fighters relative to the ship show the ship to be much, much bigger than the book said it was. It was basicially the whole episode that was the animation error. And when this was the "hero" episode for that ship, the one episode which *focused* on the ship in question? I find it easier to throw the book out than the episode, as mentioned. And yeah, the point of showing the ships side by side was to show that only about a third of the total length of the Northampton at this scale is suitable for a hangar, as opposed to two thirds to three quarters of the carriers Seto Kaiba mentioned; and the real carrier has some *serious holes* in the side for the aircraft to leave the hangar through, which would need to go somewhere. I can make a "baby carrier" 250 meter Northampton. It would look like it came out of Star Wars, because of the side mounted hangar bays, and it would have to drop the forward torpedo tubes, but I can make it. But it would not be the Stargazer. And it wouldn't be the Gefion. Both of which are shown launching fighters in a way that make them much bigger than 250 meters... The full context was "it can't function as a carrier for the nearly 40 fighters launched out of the Stargazer", because there's not enough cubic volume in it suitable for a hangar of sufficient size. Even the FANKY version only managed 29 fighters total, and that was with the huge belly hangar/flight deck, which is not what we see in either Macross 7 or Macross 30. I repeat - even the FANKY version could not launch the 36 + 1 fighters called for in the episode script. Also, the problem with your examples of real world carriers is that 1 - all of them have two thirds to three quarters of their full length, and their full hull width, devoted to hangar floor space, in a triple-height deck; and 2 - basically every carrier's listed capacity has half the aircraft up on deck, because they won't fit in the hangar. A Nimitz-class only has room for 34 jets and six helicopters below deck. It has a hangar that is nearly as big as the whole Northampton by footprint area, being a 206 x 33 meter almost-rectangle, and it still only fits that number of jets. On the Northampton, only the center third of it is even thick enough and wide enough for a hangar, because the ship tapers sharply both towards the ends and from the centerline. There isn't really room for more than one level of hangars either, because of the taper. And as I said above, I can probably make a 250 meter Northampton into a carrier that can take some VFs without altering the profile, but it won't look like either the Gefion or the Stargazer, it most certainly would not be capable of launching a 36 fighter alpha strike as shown in Macross 7. And even with all that... I could not fit the official bridge design inside the conning tower, because it's at least two person-heights wide and the bridge window on the model (which is accurate proportionally to the old line art) is only 2.3 meters. Enough people involved in the production of Macross 7 and Macross 30 ignored the 250 meter length for their hero unit spaceship, to make that 250 meter figure irrelevant.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.)